Nucflash (17 page)

For a nightmare moment, Pelso seemed pinned upright by the bullets slashing into his body, as radio equipment around him exploded in a shower of sparks and the thunder of gunfire and the crash and ping of bullets smashing delicate equipment drowned out his gurgled shriek. When he collapsed onto the deck, the front of his shirt was sodden and stained bright red, his face was an unrecognizable pulp of blood and skin tatters and shockingly naked bone, and a very great deal of blood was pooling on the linoleum beneath his body.

Scott was still lunging for the gunman, a scream of protest in his throat, when the butt of an assault rifle slammed into the back of his head, tumbling him forward onto the deck across a clattering spill of brass casings from the commando leader's submachine gun. In the distance, he could hear other sounds of nightmare chaos—shouts and wailing curses from the bridge and, farther off still, the rattle of automatic gunfire.

A heavy boot nudged him in the side, rolling him onto his back. Stunned, his head throbbing from the blow, he blinked up at the black, pain-blurred form of his captor, silhouetted against the lights in the passageway's overhead.

“Captain Scott,” the man said, and his voice, while still accented, no longer carried the bumbling and somehow disarming clumsiness of someone who knew only a little English. “I am Heinrich Adler of the Army of the People's Revolutionary Front. Your ship is mine, and you and your crew, what is left of them, are my prisoners.” He shifted position, so that the ugly black muzzle of his weapon was pointed directly at Scott's face. “Most of your people are expendable, and I will not hesitate for an instant to shoot some of them in order to force the compliance of the rest. Do you understand me?”

Scott blinked, not sure whether a response was called for.

The man's boot swung back, then shot forward, hard, cracking into Scott's ribs and sending a blinding pain shooting through his body.
“I said do you understand me?”

“Y-yes!” Scott gasped, trying to capture the breath driven from his lungs. “God . . . what . . . what is it you want?”

“For the moment, Captain, we have what we want, but I assure you that when I require more of you, you will be the first to know.” He looked up at the other two soldiers, snapped something that sounded German to Scott, and jerked his head. Rough hands reached down and grabbed Scott's arms and shoulders, and started dragging him across the deck back onto the bridge.

Kathy was standing at the wheel between two of the invaders, but she pushed past them as Scott was dropped onto the deck.

“Easy, Moskowiec,” Scott said, rising. His head hurt like hell, but he didn't think there was any serious damage. “Just do what they say, okay?”

“But who
are
they?”

“I'm not sure,” he said, eyeing the commando leader, who was now talking rapidly and unintelligibly to someone on a small radio attached to the shoulder of his load-bearing vest. “But somehow I don't think they're really members of the Royal Dutch Marines.”

The
Rosa
was typical of the small independent trawlers that made their living off the shoals and fishing banks that ringed the North Sea, from the Frisian Banks off the Netherlands to the Viking Banks between Norway and the Shetland Islands. Originally part of the Norwegian trawler fleet, she'd been appropriated by the Germans early in World War II, ended up in Poland as part of the reshuffling of the German border at the end of the war, and finally been sold to a fishing cooperative back in East Germany. Thirty years later, aging, so rusty in spots that her owners insisted that only the rust was holding her together, the
Rosa
was ready for the breakers' yard.

Before she could be transformed into 210 tons of scrap, however, money quietly changed hands, a certificate was forged, and the
Rosa
was quietly moved from her port at Warnemünde through the Kiel Canal to an out-of-the-way pier on the Hamburg waterfront.

There, she was repainted and her engines refurbished. There was still some question about her seaworthiness, but after all, it was only necessary that she make one final voyage. One week after departing Hamburg, she could sink forever beneath the waves of the North Sea, and it would no longer matter.

She'd already been at sea for three days, having departed the German port early on Sunday. That was a day earlier than originally planned, but a certain amount of flexibility had been built into the operation, just in case there were last-moment complications. On Tuesday morning the
Rosa
was loitering at an otherwise undefined spot in the North Sea fifty miles east of Flamborough Head when a thirty-foot cabin cruiser out of the English port of Great Yarmouth approached. Signs and countersigns were exchanged, first by carefully worded radio exchanges until they were within visual range, then by flashing lights. After some preliminary maneuvers to bring the cabin cruiser in under the lee of the larger vessel, three men—Major Pak and two RAF gunmen—clambered up a cargo net and onto the ancient trawler.

Pak's first question as soon as he stepped onto the
Rosa's
main deck and faced the vessel's captain was sharp and to the point. “Where is it?”

“Main hold forward,” the captain replied. “Under our nets, for camouflage.”

“Take me there.”

The forward hold stank of fish, but Pak ignored the stench as a couple of
Rosa's
crewmen pulled the nets off the massive wooden crate, which rested on wooden supports and was still fitted with the straps and snap-swivels used to hoist it aboard. “Compressor, Air” and the name of a well-known industrial manufacturer were stenciled on the crate's side, along with the usual shipping information and serial numbers.

Actually, there were two large crates in the
Rosa's
hold, the second much larger than the one Pak was examining now, but that other piece of cargo had been Hyon Hee's special charge, and Pak doubted that it would serve any purpose now. He ignored it, concentrating instead on the “air compressor.” Using a pry bar, he popped open the top and looked inside at the dull, lead-gray cylinder a meter and a half long and nearly a meter thick resting inside. Then, with the crewmen and
Rosa's
captain standing nearby, Pak unlocked a hinged access plate on one end of the cylinder and swung it open, revealing a clotted tangle of wires, cables, and electrical connections inside. The rough handling the device had endured so far didn't seem to have harmed it. A thorough manual check of its power supply, arming circuits, and antitamper mechanisms suggested that everything was in working order.

There was, in fact, little that could go wrong with the thing, for its design was almost idiot-proof. Pak couldn't even see the real guts of the bomb, for those were sealed away in the front half of the device, behind massive lead shielding. Inside that shielding, however, a hollow sphere shaped from roughly two kilograms of plutonium was surrounded by nearly fifty kilos of plastic explosives, in which were embedded scores of electrically fired detonators. Most of the rest of the bomb consisted of the battery, a complex arming device that Pak himself had had a hand in designing, and the outer casing, which was little more than a shell two meters long. Dozens of wires penetrated the inner shielding, passing through rubber-plugged openings. The entire device weighed just under a ton, most of that from the lead shielding.

Those openings in that shielding for the detonator wires were a serious weak point in the bomb's design, Pak knew, and one that had been responsible for unfortunate levels of radioactive contamination already both in North Korea and in Germany. If the
Rosa's
captain knew just how hot the exterior of the device and the crate carrying it were, he would never have volunteered himself and his crew for this operation; certainly, he never would have come this close to the thing while Pak had it open!

Pak knew the risks since he'd worked with the assembly team back in Yongbyon in the first place. He suspected that he was dead already, though it might take a few more years for that death to manifest itself. He'd been exposed to the low levels of radioactivity trickling through the rubber-sealed holes drilled in the shielding for hundreds of hours. Exposure was insidiously cumulative.

But that, of course, was of no importance, since Pak didn't expect to survive long enough to develop cancer or radiation sickness. Even if the mission succeeded perfectly in every detail, even if he was able to make good his escape afterward, he knew well that an unknown but large number of the world's governments would never permit him to live, not when the degree of his participation in this operation became clear. It was distinctly possible that even Pyongyang would join in the hunt, if only to convince the rest of a very angry world that North Korea's government had not actively participated in Operation Saebyok, that Pak and a number of others had done what they'd done independently.

Pak was more than willing to accept that. He preferred a quick and sudden death at the hands of comrades to the lingering agonies of leukemia. Besides, the prize to be won in this game was so much vaster than any one man's life.

“Is it safe to be this close?” the captain asked, peering a little nervously over Pak's shoulder.

“Of course,” Pak lied. He patted the dull surface of the shielding. “This is lead, five centimeters thick. It is perfectly safe.”

“That thing's not armed, is it?” one of the crewmen said.

“Of course not. That will be taken care of tomorrow, once we're at the objective.”

Following a carefully memorized routine, Pak began an electronic check of the device, examining each of twenty-four electrical circuits and the battery itself using a small voltmeter with silver probes that he touched to various connections, one after the other. The
Rosa's
crewmen watched him with a morbid fascination, and so intently that Pak could practically hear the sweat dripping from their faces.

The materials used in the construction of the device had come from widely different sources. Most important, of course, had been the plutonium, part of a much larger cache purchased from an ex-Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces colonel who'd needed enough gold to set up himself and his harem in comfort somewhere in Argentina. The story of how the plutonium had been smuggled from Chelyabinsk to Vladivostok to Yongbyon, despite the efforts of the Russian government, the Chinese, and the Russian mafia, was a small epic in itself.

The electronics had come from Japan—specifically from one of Japan's larger industrial corporations, one that had been in trouble more than once selling restricted materials to the Soviets. The plastic explosives, on the other hand, were of American manufacture; there was a company that did a lot of ordnance work for the U.S. government but was more than willing to deal with anyone who offered their CEO enough money. It was incredible, Pak thought, just how eagerly individuals from the various Western nations would participate in their own cultures' destruction. The West will hang itself, Lenin had once prophesied, and we will sell them the rope to do it.

Just as it was incredible how easy it was to manufacture such power as this. A surge of electric current, and the detonators would set off the plastic explosives. The resulting explosion, expanding in all directions but tamped by the lead shielding, would crush the plutonium sphere, initiating critical mass. The nuclear scientists who'd worked on the device estimated a potential yield of somewhere between fifty and one hundred kilotons.

More than enough for what had to be done.

Pak checked the final set of connections, watching the swing of the needle on his voltmeter. Everything was working, ready for him to throw the switches in the proper order. Another series of checks proved the pressure sensor and timer were operating as well. Carefully then, he closed up the trunk and locked it, then replaced the lid on the transport crate.

“It is ready,” he said.

And this time he told the truth.

 

The Royal Air Force base at Lakenheath is located in East Anglia, the thumb-shaped extrusion of low hills and quaint villages, of farms and cattle-raising country extending into the North Sea between the Thames River and the gulf known locally as the Wash. The first thing a visitor sees as he enters the base's main gate is a replica of the Statue of Liberty, dedicated in 1981 to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the base and of the 48th Tactical Fighter Wing, known—after its insignia—as the “Statue of Liberty Wing.” The replica is impressive, though not so big as the one overlooking Upper New York Bay; it was cast in bronze from one of F. A. Bartholdi's first-step models for the original Statue of Liberty.

When Mineman Second Class Greg Johnson had first seen the statue it had made him homesick, and he hadn't even been out of the United States for twenty-four hours yet. Well . . . perhaps
homesick
was the wrong word. But he did wonder what he was doing here . . . wondered if he'd made a mistake in becoming a Navy SEAL.

The C-130 had rumbled in to Lakenheath's Number One runway half an hour earlier and was standing now in an out-of-the-way corner of the base while an Air Force working party emptied the transport's capacious hold. The SEALs were on hand to take charge of their gear as soon as it had been off-loaded, but for the moment they were standing at ease in formation, watching the airedales unload their gear.

Johnson stood a little apart from the other SEALs of the First Platoon, still uncertain of his standing with them. Twenty-six weeks of grueling BUD/S training had failed to completely erase the awe he'd felt for the Navy SEALs ever since he'd first heard about the unit. But in fact he'd never given more than a passing thought to actually
becoming
one, not until he'd already signed up and reported for duty with BUD/S Class 23.