Critical Mass

by Steve Martini

  When Gideon looked over his shoulder, he saw them. Emerging from the crowd like destroyers under full steam were three armed guards. They were soon joined by a fourth, one of them with his hand already on the handle of his holstered revolver.

  As they left the last cluster of wandering guests behind, Gideon and Joselyn stood out like two doughboys in no-man’s-land.

  Gideon broke into a full run. Joselyn followed him. They darted behind a temporary display in the center of the broad concourse and crossed over to the north side of the building.

  For a second, Gideon lost sight of the guards. When they popped out from the other side of the escalator, one of them was talking with his chin pressed down into a microphone clipped to the lapel of his uniform shirt. Gideon saw the guard pop the safety snap of the leather holster from across the hammer of his gun and draw the pistol, holding the muzzle toward the floor with both hands as he ran.

  He grabbed Joselyn and pushed her out in front of him, shielding her with his body, and propelling her down the concourse toward the Enola Gay. They ran between the last stairwell in the center of the building and past the final partition separating the displays.

  There in the gallery to the right was the gleaming fuselage of the B-29. Without its wings, which could not be assembled in the confines of the building, it looked like a mammoth silver cigar. The giant nose wheel was turned just a little as if the plane had just taxied to a stop on the runway. The bright overhead lights of the display reflected off the Plexiglas bubble of the bombardier’s station up front.

  Under the body of the Enola Gay, halfway back toward the tail section, was the ominous green cylinder with its bulbous nose and square tail fin—the paradigm of the atomic age, the full-sized replica of “Little Boy.”

  For an instant Joselyn and Gideon stood transfixed, knowing that what they were looking at was no mere model. Unable to speak, they looked at the bomb for what it was: two kilotons of radioactive death capable of rising in a death-head mushroom more than nine miles into the stratosphere above the nation’s capital.

  The clatter of feet on concrete, approaching from the main hall, brought them back to the moment.

  “What do we do?” said Joselyn.

  Gideon turned toward the hall behind them, the footfalls closing. “Quick. Get inside the railing, under the plane,” he told her.

  They ran across the deserted gallery and jumped the railing, then moved under the belly of the plane, careful not to jostle the bomb or its rectangular steel dolly.

  Gideon scanned the green metal casing, looking for a small covering panel with screws or an area of rivets, anything that would provide access to the device inside.

  Even if he found one, he had no idea how he would pry it off. He had no tools.

  The guards reached the corner of the partition leading into the gallery housing the Enola Gay. Joselyn saw one of them poking his head around the edge of the partition.

  Another guard sprinted across the opening into the gallery and took up a position on the other side. Both had their guns drawn.

  “Come out now, with your hands up,” said one of the guards.

  “We are not armed,” said Gideon. He was breathing heavily, winded from their run down the concourse.

  “Show your hands and come out,” said the guard.

  Gideon could hear movement in the shadows where the tail section of the huge bomber disappeared behind the walls of the exhibit. He knew that police or guards were moving in from that direction. In seconds, they would be on him. Anything he said would be lost in the din in a scuffle that would soon be over.

  They could hear the sound of the giant television as suddenly it was piped into the speaker system of the museum.

  Any moment now, the president will be announced by the sergeant at arms of the House. There we see Secretary of State Knowland coming in. He is followed by the attorney general…

  “Listen to me,” said Gideon. “The man who threw acid on the model of ‘Little Boy’ this morning. He was part of a terrorist group. This easing, the one under the plane, contains a nuclear device. It was substituted sometime during the day. Call Mr. Hirshberg, the president’s national security adviser. Tell him that Gideon van Ry is here at the museum. He will vouch for me.”

  “Put your hands up where we can see them, and come out now.”

  There was more shuffling and movement and now whispering in the shadows where the tail of the plane disappeared into darkness.

  You know, Tom, we do see the secretary of state. But you know who we don’t see is Sy Hirshberg, the president’s national security adviser. If he’s not here tonight, that will indeed fuel rumors that perhaps Mr. Hirshberg is on the outs with the administration. There have been rumors…

  Two uniformed guards rushed out of the shadows behind them. They flung the full force of their bodies into Gideon, one high and the other low. They sent him sprawling across the floor under the plane.

  A third guard emerged from the darkness and grabbed Joselyn before she could move, throwing her to the floor and placing his knee with the full weight of his body in the center of her back. It felt as if the man broke her spine, the pain nearly causing her to black out.

  As Gideon wrestled on the floor, the two guards rolled him so that he was facedown. As they held him, two more guards jumped the railing to help.

  With his face pressed to the floor and turned to one side, Gideon saw it. There was a small panel, roughly four-by-ten inches on the underside of the casing. It was held in place by six small screws. Looking from the top of the bomb as it rested on the dolly, the panel was impossible to see.

  He struggled to get free, but the guards only increased the pressure on his arms as they were forced up behind his back. Gideon was rangy and powerful. One of them applied a wrist-lock. Gideon closed his eyes in pain. They watered. He tried to focus on the metal panel under the bomb, as if by sheer force of mind he could will it open.

  “Get off of them.” It was a voice from out in the gallery, spoken with authority. “Did you hear me? Let them up now.”

  Gideon lifted his head and saw the lanky frame of Sy Hirshberg just beyond the railing. For an old man, Hirshberg was nothing if not agile. Balancing himself with a single hand on the railing he threw one leg over and then the other and within three seconds had his hand on the shoulder of one of the guards.

  They didn’t look at Hirshberg but at the man who was with him, tall, in formal attire.

  The museum director nodded, and the guards released their hold. The one kneeling on Joselyn’s back immediately got off of her. He reached for her arm and tried to help her up, but he had knocked the wind out of her.

  Gideon got up off the floor, feeling his wrist to make sure it wasn’t broken. He looked at Joselyn, but there was no time.

  “I need a screwdriver.” He scrambled over to the bomb and looked underneath. “Phillips head,” he said. Then got on his back as if he were getting ready to crawl under a car.

  The guards hesitated.

  “What are you waiting for?” said Hirshberg. “Now.”

  Two of the guards scrambled into the darkness.

  By now Joselyn had made it onto her knees. Holding her stomach with one hand and struggling to get air into her lungs, she crawled toward Gideon and the bomb casing.

  Hirshberg moved in and got down on one knee next to them.

  “How much time do we have?”

  “Where is the president?” said Gideon.

  “He’s getting ready to speak,” said Hirshberg.

  “That’s the key,” said Gideon. “If I am correct, it will be detonated by radio signal as soon as the president appears on the floor of the Congress.”

  Hirshberg turned to an assistant who was behind the railing. “Can we reach the president’s Secret Service detail on their radio frequency?”

  “No,” said the young man. “I don’t think so.”

  By now some of the guests had wandered down, drawn to the commotion at the other end of the
museum. They stood riveted as the tall slender man lay on his back looking up at the bomb.

  “If we can’t reach them by radio,” said Hirshberg, “call the White House detail. Tell them to keep the president off the floor of the House. I don’t care what they have to do. Hell. Tell them there’s a bomb about to go off near the Capitol.”

  With those words a ripple of panic started to move through the crowd beyond the portal to the gallery.

  “What did he say?”

  “He said there’s a bomb.”

  People started to move toward the lobby. The news traveled with them like a wave. Within less than a minute, it reached the front the doors and people started streaming out onto the street.

  Hirshberg’s assistant punched keys on a cell phone as Joselyn watched him.

  One of the guards came out of the shadows with a small toolbox. Hirshberg and Joselyn fished in it until they found a Phillips screwdriver.

  Considering the trauma to his wrist, Gideon worked with deft fingers to loosen the six screws on the metal cover. There was no time for finesse. He could only pray that Belden and his people had not taken the time to install a trip wire on the panel. Intuition and experience told him that this was unlikely. A trip wire trigger would make transport of the device more difficult, unless they had time to arm it after it was in place. In a public museum with staff watching, that was not likely.

  He held his breath as he pulled the last screw from its hole, then slowly slipped a fingernail under the edge of the panel. The panel cover was heavier than it looked. Without the last screw, it fell off in his hands. Gideon flinched and squeezed his eyes shut tight. When he opened them, he was still there.

  Joselyn could feel her heart thumping like a steam engine.

  He dropped the metal panel cover onto the floor and looked inside. It was a maze of wires, different colors going in every direction.

  Somebody handed him a small flashlight. He shot the beam inside and moved it around, looking for something.

  “Damn.”

  “What’s wrong?” said Joselyn.

  “I don’t see any receiver. There should be a small box. A battery power pack.” He traced the wires with his eyes. “There is no clock or timer switch that I can see.” He was now breathless.

  “It has to be remote detonation,” he told them. “They would want to be far enough away not to be caught up in it. That would require a good-sized receiver.” said Gideon. He was breathing hard, perspiration pouring down his forehead, as he flashed the light through the small opening in the casing, frantically searching for something that wasn’t there.

  He could see the spherical core of the nuclear device up near the nose of the bomb. It was only a fraction of the diameter of the bomb casing that disguised it, a twisted testament to the progress of man in the twenty years after the end of the war.

  The core rested in what appeared to be a cradle of molded Styrofoam, designed to buffer the device and its multiple detonators during transit.

  Something wasn’t right. Around the core, fastened to the inside of the casing, were a number of small metal tubes, the size of a fire extinguisher, the kind you might carry on a small boat. Gideon counted nine of these.

  Sweat was streaming down his forehead and into his eyes. He wiped them with the back of his hand and continued to flash the beam of light through the hole.

  For a second, he thought the device was thermonuclear. Instead of two kilotons, Gideon wondered if he was looking at five megatons. If it was, it would take out the entire District, part of Maryland, and the northern reaches of Virginia.

  Suddenly it settled on him as he looked at the wiring. It was not thermonuclear at all. The metal tubes were filled with radioactive cesium.

  “Get everybody out of here,” said Gideon.

  “It’s too late if it goes off now,” said Hirshberg.

  “It may be too late even if it doesn’t go off,” said Gideon. “Get them out now.”

  Hirshberg got to his feet. “Out. Everybody out,” he said.

  The guards began herding the few people who remained toward the main hallway and the exit.

  “You, too,” said Hirshberg.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” said Joselyn.

  “Take her out of here,” said Gideon.

  Joselyn fought with the guards and wrestled with Hirshberg. They dragged her toward the railing, out from under the Enola Gay, and finally Hirshberg managed to calm her. She looked at Gideon lying on his back, his face nearly under the bomb, shining the small flashlight inside.

  “I won’t go,” she said.

  “You must,” he told her.

  “No.” Tears streamed down her face.

  “Mr. Hirshberg.” It was Hirshberg’s assistant. “I can’t get through. The phone lines at the White House are jammed.”

  “What do you mean, they’re jammed?”

  “They’re all busy.”

  “There’s two hundred lines over there,” said Hirshberg.

  “The circuits are jammed.”

  It settled on her like ether, looking at Gideon lying on the floor. The cellular phone and the assistant. The jammed lines.

  “It’s not a radio receiver,” said Joselyn. She called to him, tried to run back to his side, but they stopped her. “It’s a cell phone.” Two of the guards lifted her over the railing as she fought them, struggled, using both hands.

  Gideon on his back shot a glance in her direction. She was hysterical, being carried away.

  “It’s a cellular phone,” she told him. “That was Belden’s business. Voice identification. Look for a cellular phone.” She pounded on the guard’s back but to no avail. He carried her slung over his shoulder toward the main hall.

  Almost as her lips said it, his eye caught it, not a phone, but a single wire, gray in color and oval, heavier than the others. It was ordinary telephone wire. It ran in one direction and disappeared under the core of the device, where it rested in the Styrofoam cradle. In the other direction, the wire passed through what appeared to be a white cloth shield that sealed off the tail of the bomb toward the square metal tail fin.

  Gideon looked at the metal covering plate resting on the floor. It was lined with lead. He flashed the light just inside the hole and scratched the inside surface of the casing with his fingernail. It was lead. The entire casing of Little Boy was lined with lead to shield anyone handling it from the deadly radiation of the cesium.

  He was now alone under the still and looming body of the B-29, the only sounds, the distant scream of Joselyn as they carried her toward the exit and the television feed from the giant screen.

  Gideon took a deep breath, then stuck his hand and his bare arm into the opening in the case of “Little Boy.” All the way to the shoulder. He felt the cloth shield that sealed off the tail section and the telephone cable that passed through. He pushed the shield with his fingers. There was resistance, but it was not solid. The shield was made of canvas surrounding a lead liner. He punched it with his clenched fist and the duct tape holding it to the inside of the case ripped. He hit it again harder, and the shield collapsed into the tail of the casing.

  When he pulled his arm out and flashed the light back inside, he saw it. Fastened to the inside of “Little Boy” with black electrical tape was a small cellular phone. Completing the circuit, the phone cable plugged into the bottom of it. It had been necessary to get the cell phone outside of the lead shield in order to ensure a signal, reception to the phone.

  Gideon guessed that at the other end of the phone cable, under the nuclear core, was a computer chip programmed with the verbal code. This would be attached to the principal detonator. From there, the current would fan out to multiple detonators planted in the high explosive surrounding the plutonium core.

  He looked at the containers of cesium, then without hesitation he put his arm back into the casing of the bomb, all the way to the shoulder. He reached for the cell phone taped to the side of the casing, but he couldn’t free it from the tape.
He needed a knife.

  He slid the toolbox closer and with his free hand he felt around inside. Something sharp. It was the flat blade of a screwdriver—not a knife, but it would have to do. Quickly he maneuvered it into the casing and tried to cut the tape with the metal end. Belden had secured it well.

  Suddenly he heard footsteps running toward him. It was Joselyn. Somehow she’d gotten away from the guard. She jumped the railing and ran to him, slid on the floor on her knees until her head and upper body landed gently on his chest.

  “You should be out of here. Please.” He pleaded with her.

  “I won’t go. I won’t leave you.”

  “You don’t understand,” said Gideon.

  “I don’t care. I’m not going,” she told him.

  They didn’t have time to argue. Gideon struggled with the tape on the phone and finally got an edge loose.

  He grabbed the phone as it dangled from the remnants of sticky tape and pulled until it came free.

  “Please don’t get close to me,” he told her. “Move away to the other side of the bomb.” If he couldn’t convince her to leave, he could at least put the shield of the casing between Joselyn and himself. His body was now heavily contaminated by radiation, and Gideon knew it.

  She looked at him with eyes that told him she would go that far, but no farther.

  Carefully he withdrew his arm until his hand, with the phone in it, slipped through the opening of the casing. It was still trailing the telephone cable connected to the detonator. He considered cutting the wire but wasn’t sure if this would set off the device. Even if Belden had used a verbal code to arm the device itself, Gideon couldn’t be sure whether he’d wired the cesium with a separate explosive in the event that someone tried to sever a circuit.

  Joselyn looked at the small phone, her gaze seeming mesmerized.

  Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States.

  The sound system in the museum erupted with applause, as the giant screen played to an empty room. The crowd of more than a thousand people, dressed in tuxedos and evening gowns, streamed out onto the street.