Countdown: H Hour (8 page)

Having somewhat skirted Rule Four, insofar as he lacked the legal authority to reduce Hallinan’s rank—and didn’t want to anyway; Warrington was on Rule Five at the moment: “
And
an oral reprimand.”

Warrington began conversationally. “Just out of curiosity, Sergeant Hallinan, were you sleeping during the classes at SWC”—that was the U.S. Army’s Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, NC—“when they lectured you on the delicate nature of dealing with local forces and their chains of command?”

“Ummm, nosir,” answered Hallinan, normally somewhat light skinned and now gone positively pale in anticipation of what was coming.

“Ah.” That was still conversational. But then Warrington’s voice rose a notch. “So you were too fucking stupid to pay attention? Or was it that in your incarnate ignorance and arrogance you figured that applied to everybody but you? Did you figure that your ever-so-fucking precious ego was so important that the mission didn’t matter?”

“Sir, I—”

“Shut the fuck up,” Warrington snarled. “If I ever thought your opinion was worth listening to, I don’t think so right now.” Elbows on desk, he began massaging his temples as if suffering from a terrible migraine.
Yes, boss, I remember that a commander is always on stage.

“Now let me tell you what you’ve done,” he continued, and proceeded to do just that in an echo of the problems he’d previously listed for Stocker and Pierantoni. He embellished as seemed fit.

When he was pretty sure all the color that could disappear from Hallinan’s face was gone, Warrington added, “Maybe you don’t think it’s a such big deal, compromising the mission and such. Certainly nothing to match the bruise to your poor widdle ego. So what if over a hundred million dollars gets paid to terrorists to do Satan knows what with? Small change, right? No big fucking deal?”

Warrington stood then and sneered. “You stupid piece of dog shit. I ought to just have them weight your feet and toss you over the side. Maybe the frigging fish will get more use out of you then we’re likely to.”

He began pounding the desk. “What”—bang—“the”—bang—“fuck”—bang—“were”—bang—“you”—bang—“thinking? Oh, silly of me; you weren’t thinking. You’re too goddamned stupid for thought. You’re a six-foot assemblage of
shit
masquerading as a soldier.”

Warrington stopped the ass-chewing then, just glaring at Hallinan with feigned disgust. Then, turning to Pierantoni, he asked, “Recommendations., Sergeant Major?”

“Despite current appearances,” the sergeant major answered, “he hasn’t always been the worthless pile of used tampons he currently appears, sir. They say suffering is good for the soul. I’d recommend three days bread and water.”

Again glaring at Hallinan, Warrington announced, “So be it. Sergeant Hallinan, commencing at—”

Whatever Warrington had been about to say was cut off by Pearson’s voice, coming over the ship’s intercom. “All hands and passengers, this is the captain speaking. Assembly on the mess deck in twenty minutes. Commanders of the ground force to my cabin immediately.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

A world without nuclear weapons would be

less stable and more dangerous for all of us.

—Margaret Thatcher

Yacht
Resurrection
, between the coast of Kudat

and the island of Pulau Banggi, South China Sea

The corporal poured tea for Janail and Mahmood. Valentin Prokopchenko had set his scotch aside and would not, for politeness’ sake, drink it while the Moslems were in his presence. Daoud al Helma had been left above, guarding Mahmood’s testing equipment and the more personal baggage.

“You can do an exterior test of both devices now,” said Prokopchenko. Here, too, English was the only common tongue. “Upon deposit of half the agreed sum, in the escrow account I have given you, you may partially disassemble and evaluate
one
device, of your choosing. Upon full deposit, you may take delivery. I trust this is acceptable to you.”

Janail looked at Mahmood for confirmation. He knew nothing about such things.

The scientist nodded. “It’s all right, Janail. I can tell—to a better than ninety-five percent certainty—with the testing materials I have brought.”

Turning back to Valentin, he asked, “Where and how did you come upon not one but
two
such warheads?”

“I had them built,” answered the Russian. “More specifically, as the warheads on what the West calls the SS-27 rockets were changed out from single to MIRV—”

“MIRV?” Janail interrupted.

“Multiple Independently-targeted Reentry Vehicles,” Mahmood supplied, patiently. In his own sphere, Janail was something of a master, but that sphere didn’t include strategic weapons. “A warhead of separate warheads, each of which goes its own way after a certain point.”

“Like a shotgun?” asked Janail.

“Yes,” agreed Mahmood, “if you can imagine that each pellet from a shotgun targets—and hits—a separate organ, one for the left eye, one for the right, one for the heart, one for each lung, two for the kidneys . . . ”

Valentin chuckled softly. The analogy was rather apt, in its way. “Quite. We—the Russian Federation; as if we could actually afford it—are switching out our older warheads for newer ones, MIRV’s, mostly out of fear of the Chinese. The older warheads were broken down to their components and mostly sent for reprocessing.

“The inert casings, tritium reservoirs, and sparkplug tubes, I bought for scrap. The conventional explosives I had cast anew. The tritium, deuterium, and plutonium-239 were . . . harder. Note that the tritium cartridges are almost brand new.

“It’s fortunate that our security procedures have not improved noticeably since Lebed first discovered we were missing over one hundred devices. And security over the components is even worse. For example, the gold around the plutonium had been stripped off and disappeared before I got to it. How whoever did that managed it, no one seemed to know. That, I had to have newly plated on.

“Oddly, the really hard parts were the krytron switches. Fortunately, in a country that has not really fully overcome socialist principles of accounting, shoddy workmanship to meet an imposed plan, unpaid work days to overproduce, and which further accepts the need to write off a certain percentage of what is produced because it is junk, it was possible to obtain enough. I fear that, someday, one of my country’s warheads will not work because it got the junk while I obtained the good material.

“Yes, of course a fair amount of money changed hands for each step and piece. Hence my price.”
Actually, remarkably little money, in the big scheme of things, and what I spent has very little to do with my price.

“What about the permissive action link?” Mahmood asked.

“There are none,” Prokopchenko answered. “Since these are privately produced, I saw no need to add any. Moreover, the world being the way it is, how could any buyer be certain I gave the proper PAL codes?”

Never mind that I really
do
want you to have and to use these things. I don’t want you to know that for a certainty.

The
Resurrection
had an elevator running right from Prokopchenko ’s office down to an indoor pool, on the next to lowest deck. It only made sense to have had it placed there, Prokopchenko, spending as much time as he did in less than sunny climes. Now the pool was hidden by its mechanical covering, strong enough, in itself, to serve as a dance floor. An oval section of lead shielding had been thrown up around it. More lead plates covered the ceiling, as well as the floor where the water of the pool didn’t provide its own considerable degree of shielding.

Prokopchenko’s mistress, an extraordinary, utterly stunning, indeed breathtaking, six foot tall Ukrainian girl named Daria, was
most
put out by the loss of the pool. Worse, the guards wouldn’t even let her off the elevator anymore, not at the pool deck. And all the hatches to the pool area were locked.
Inconsiderate bastard. I’d fuck a couple of the guards in revenge, but the religious fanatics would just as likely report me.

Daria’s mood wasn’t improved by being locked in her quarters, with the guards bringing her her meals, since the day prior. “There are things about my business you are better off not knowing,” Valentin had explained.
As if
that’s
an explanation!

The elevator bearing Valentin, Janail, Mahmood, and his assistant into the bowels of the ship opened its door upon three leveled muzzles, from three submachine guns, in the hands on three
very
serious looking guards. At the guards’ sighting of their leader, the muzzles were raised, even as the men snapped to attention. The acoustics of the pool deck, which had often enough in the past served as a party room, were excellent; the motions made barely a sound.

Past the guards, bent over one of the bags, Daoud removed a couple of dark jumpsuits of an odd material, thick and slightly stiff. Various other implements were already unpacked and set up near the sole entrance to the lead oval.

Mahmood walked to one of the panels and felt it with bare fingertips.
Lead, and not thin,
was his judgment.
It would be an unusually elaborate hoax to set this up just to fool us.
He glanced around at the guards and saw one chewing his lip nervously. The others looked anything but calm. Prokopchenko, himself, likewise seemed a tad unsettled.
No, no hoax. This may or may not be a pair of functional bombs. But, if they’re not, then more than likely the Russian himself was fooled and believes they are.

Daoud walked over, bearing two of the jumpsuits and two masks.

Though much of Mahmood’s testing equipment was old and obsolescent, he and Daoud helped each other into the very latest antiradiation suits—made of demron, a liquid metal—from Radiation Shield Technologies, in the United States. Since these had no offensive use, they were not on anyone’s proscribed technologies list. In point of fact, even if those charged with developing such lists had foreseen this particular use, it would have made no difference. The oldest of old-fashioned lead suits would have worked as well; they’d just not have been as comfortable.

Suited up, they then loaded upon their bodies an Ortec Detective-EX, a portable X-ray digital imaging system from Scanna, the laptop that went with the Scanna machine, a Dewar’s flask filled with liquid nitrogen, a handheld “pager”—which was a low-tech device for measuring gamma radiation, another handheld explosive sniffer, plus a couple of small bags not much larger than a laptop carrier. Under one arm Daoud tucked a flat screen, about two feet by four.

So laden, the pair more or less waddled to the exterior door, their equipment clanking. The door was mounted in a projection, an irregularity, from the main oval. Throwing a bolt and then turning a knob, Mahmood pulled the thing—
ugh, yes, real lead and no hoax
—then waddled through, followed by his assistant. The latter then closed the door, before Mahmood opened the interior one.

Il hamdu l’illah!
was the scientist’s immediate thought. He felt a wave of reverence wash over him at the Almighty’s beneficence in providing this means to avenge the many wrongs done to his people, which included all the people of the
Ummah
, the entire community of Muslims in the world, to include the majority who probably had no interest in nuking anybody.

The devices, two cylinders of about two feet in diameter by four and a half in length, sat on wheeled cradles atop the pool cover. They shone a dull silver compared to the cover’s matte black. The Russian hadn’t bothered with painting them. Still, paint or no paint, they seemed to the Pakistani ripe with menace. The two unloaded most of their equipment on the floor.

Before wasting his time with the more elaborate tests, Mahmood held up the “pager.” No sense in going further if there was
no
radiation, after all. That dutifully beeped.
Ah, good.

He placed the pager on the floor, taking up the Ortec Detective-EX. This he repositioned on the floor, pointed at the nearer of the two devices. He checked that its internal nitrogen tank was full, and that the thing was fully powered. Then, pressing buttons until “ID Mode” showed on the upper left corner of the small screen, he set the timer for sixty seconds and hit the search button. He watched for the full minute, as the device listed nuclides positively identified.

All consistent with plutonium-239. Now for the next step
.

While Mahmood fiddled with buttons, Daoud set up the Scanna, connecting X-ray generator and digital imaging plate to the laptop, and mounting the emitter to a tripod. After marking certain points on the bomb casing with an X-ray blocking tape, to give common points of reference, Daoud took his first shot, giving the laptop time to fully digitalize the image. He then immediately began repositioning emitter and screen. Mahmood wanted eight good shots of each device, as they lay, then another three from underneath and one from above. At a bit over a ton, each, there wasn’t going to be any rotating of the bombs along their long axes for better scans.

Ignoring Daoud, for the moment—
he knows his job
—Mahmood turned his attention back to the screen on the Detective-EX. It showed: “Classify Mode.” Mahmood set that to running. It wasn’t long before the screen added: “Found nuclear plutonium” followed shortly by “Count for >5 minutes for Weapons/Reactor grade.”

By the time Daoud had finished his first half dozen scans, the screen showed, unmistakably: “Pu” followed by “Weapons grade Pu.”

Now let’s check for tritium.

The technique was called “computed tomography,” and, it wasn’t, in principle, all that different from the medical version. Indeed, used at a precision fixed site, it was quite similar. Daoud didn’t have that fixed site, of course, nor anything like the usual degree of precision. Instead, he had to rely on the X-ray blocking tape to make common reference points, plus manual identification of known similars within the device.

That coiled wire on number three
is
the same coiled wire in number five. Yes! We have a match. Now . . . let’s match detonators . . .

It took a fair amount of processing power, plus ScanView software, to turn those matches, from a dozen distinct X-ray scans of a complex device, into a reliable, digital, three-dimensional model of that device. Daoud’s laptop didn’t have it. Another computer in the baggage, however, did. That was currently humming away, building, connecting, discarding . . .

“So you’re certain they’re real?” Janail asked, when Mahmood came to report in his decadently plush stateroom aboard the
Resurrection
.

“As certain as I or anyone but the Russian can be,” the scientist replied. “I know the core of each is weapons grade Plutonium 239. I know that they’re of a proper size and mass, for both the primary and the sparkplug. I know the ‘hohlraum’ is present for each. I know that the test set says the detonators are functional. I know that the tritium reservoirs are full. I know that the thirty-two blocks of explosive, for each, to implode the plutonium are solid—no cracks or defects—and the detonators are properly positioned within them. I know that the sixty-four detonators and wires for each are the right number. I know that the wires
appear
to be of a uniform length, but I can’t be certain because some are coiled. The test set says they’re the same, but it could lie.

“Still, I think they’re real.”