The Fist of God (59 page)

He stopped in the yard and got out. From a barn, a single Jersey cow surveyed him with velvet eyes. Rhythmic sounds came from the other side of the cabin, so he walked around to the front to find Daddy Lomax on a bluff looking out over the valley and the river far below.

He must have been seventy-five, but despite Sandy’s concern, he looked as if he beat up grizzly bears for a hobby. An inch over six feet, in soiled jeans and a plaid shirt, the old scientist was splitting logs with the ease of one slicing bread.

Snow-white hair hung to his shoulders, and a stubble of ivory whiskers The Fist of God

rimmed his chin. More white curls spilled from the V of his shirt, and he seemed to feel no cold, although Terry Martin was glad for his quilted parka.

“Found it then? Heard you coming,” said Lomax, and split one last log with a single swing. Then he laid down the ax and came over to his visitor. They shook hands; Lomax gestured to a nearby log and sat down on one himself.

“Dr. Martin, is it?”

“Er, yes.”

“From England?”

“Yes.”

Lomax reached into his top pocket, withdrew a pouch of tobacco and some rice paper, and began to roll a cigarette.

“Not politically correct, are you?” Lomax asked.

“No, I don’t think so.”

Lomax grunted in apparent approval.

“Had a politically correct doctor. Always yellin’ at me to stop smoking.”

Martin noted the past tense.

“I suppose you left him?”

“Nope, he left me. Died last week. Fifty-six. Stress. What brings you up here?”

Martin fumbled in his attaché case.

“I ought to apologize at the outset. It’s probably a waste of your time and mine. I just wondered if you’d glance at this.”

Lomax took the proffered photograph and stared at it.

“You really from England?”

“Yes.”

“Helluva long way to come to show me this.”

The Fist of God

“You recognize it?”

“Ought to. Spent five years of my life working there.”

Martin’s mouth dropped open in shock.

“You’ve actually been there?”

“Lived there for five years.”

“At Tarmiya?”

“Where the hell’s that? This is Oak Ridge.”

Martin swallowed several times.

“Dr. Lomax. That photograph was taken six days ago by a U.S. Navy fighter overflying a bombed factory in Iraq.”

Lomax glanced up, bright blue eyes under shaggy white brows, then looked back at the photo.

“Sonofabitch,” he said at last. “I warned the bastards. Three years ago.

Wrote a paper warning that this was the sort of technology the Third World would be likely to use.”

“What happened to it?”

“Oh, they trashed it, I guess.”

“Who?”

“You know, the pointy-heads.”

“Those disks—the Frisbees inside the factory—you know what they are?”

“Sure. Calutrons. This is a replica of the old Oak Ridge facility.”

“Calu-what?”

Lomax glanced up again.

“You’re not a doctor of science? Not a physicist?”

“No. My subject is Arabic studies.”

Lomax grunted again, as if not being a physicist were a hard burden for a man to carry through life.

“Calutrons. California cyclotrons. Calutrons, for short.”

The Fist of God

“What do they do?”

“EMIS. Electromagnetic isotope separation. In your language, they refine crude uranium-238 to filter out the bomb-grade uranium-235.

You say this place is in Iraq?”

“Yes. It was bombed by accident a week ago. This picture was taken the next day. No one seems to know what it means.”

Lomax gazed across the valley, sucked on his butt, and let a plume of azure smoke trickle away.

“Sonofabitch,” he said again. “Mister, I live up here because I want to.

Away from all that smog and traffic—had enough of that years ago.

Don’t have a TV, but I have a radio. This is about that man Saddam Hussein, ain’t it?”

“Yes, it is. Would you tell me about calutrons?”

The old man stubbed out his butt and stared now, not just across the valley but back across many years.

“Nineteen forty-three. Long time ago, eh? Nearly fifty years. Before you were born, before most people were born nowadays. There was a bunch of us then, trying to do the impossible. We were young, eager, and ingenious, and we didn’t know it was impossible. So we did it.

“There was Fermi from Italy, and Pontecorvo; Fuchs from Germany, Nils Bohr from Denmark, Nunn May from England, and others. And us Yankees: Urey and Oppie and Ernest. I was very junior. Just twenty-seven.

“Most of the time, we were feeling our way, doing things that had never been tried, testing out things they said couldn’t be done. We had a budget that nowadays wouldn’t buy squat, so we worked all day and all night and took shortcuts. Had to—the deadline was as tight as the money. And somehow we did it, in three years. We cracked the codes and made the bomb. Little Boy and Fat Man.

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“Then the Air Force dropped them on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the world said we shouldn’t have done it after all. Trouble was, if we hadn’t, somebody else would. Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia—”

“Calutrons ...,” suggested Martin.

“Yeah. You’ve heard of the Manhattan Project?”

“Of course.”

“Well, we had many geniuses in Manhattan, two in particular. Robert J. Oppenheimer and Ernest O. Lawrence. Heard of them?”

“Yes.”

“Thought they were colleagues, partners, right?”

“I suppose so.”

“Wrong. They were rivals. See, we all knew the key was uranium, the world’s heaviest element. And we knew by 1941 that only the lighter isotope, 235, would create the chain reaction we needed. The trick was to separate the point seven percent of the 235 hiding somewhere in the mass of uranium-238.

“When America entered the war, we got a big leg up. After years of neglect, the brass wanted results yesterday. Same old story. So we tried every which way to separate those isotopes.

“Oppenheimer went for gas diffusion—reduce the uranium to a fluid and then a gas, uranium hexafluoride, poisonous and corrosive, difficult to work. The centrifuge came later, invented by an Austrian captured by the Russians and put to work at Sukhumi. Before the centrifuge, gas diffusion was slow and hard.

“Lawrence went for the other route—electromagnetic separation by particle acceleration. Know what that means?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Basically, you speed the atoms up to a hell of a velocity, then use giant magnets to throw them into a curve. Two racing cars enter a The Fist of God

curve at speed, a heavy car and a light car. Which one ends up on the outside track?”

“The heavy one,” said Martin.

“Right. That’s the principle. The calutrons depend on giant magnets about twenty feet across. These”—he tapped the Frisbees in the photograph—“are the magnets. The layout is a replica of my old baby at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.”

“If they worked, why were they discontinued?” asked Martin.

“Speed,” said Lomax. “Oppenheimer won out. His way was faster.

The calutrons were extremely slow and very expensive. After 1945, and even more when that Austrian was released by the Russians and came over here to show us his centrifuge invention, the calutron technology was abandoned. Declassified. You can get all the details, and the plans, from the Library of Congress. That’s probably what the Iraqis have done.”

The two men sat in silence for several minutes.

“What you are saying,” suggested Martin, “is that Iraq decided to use Model-T Ford technology, and because everyone assumed they’d go for Grand Prix racers, no one noticed.”

“You got it, son. People forget—the old Model-T Ford may be old,
but
it worked
. It got you there. It carried you from A to B. And it hardly ever broke down.”

“Dr. Lomax, the scientists my government and yours have been consulting know that Iraq has got one cascade of gas diffusion centrifuges working, and it has been for the past year. Another one is about to come on stream, but probably is not operating yet. On that basis, they calculate Iraq cannot possibly have refined enough pure uranium—say, thirty-five kilograms—to have enough for a bomb.”

“Quite right,” nodded Lomax. “Need five years with one cascade, The Fist of God

maybe more. Minimum three years with two cascades.”

“But supposing they’ve been using calutrons in tandem. If you were head of Iraq’s bomb program, how would you play it?”

“Not that way,” said the old physicist, and began to roll another cigarette. “Did they tell you, back in London, that you start with yellowcake, which is called zero-percent pure, and you have to refine it to ninety-three-percent pure to get bomb-grade quality?”

Martin thought of Dr. Hipwell, with his bonfire of a pipe, in a room under Whitehall saying just that.

“Yes, they did.”

“But they didn’t bother to say that purifying the stuff from zero to twenty takes up most of the time? They didn’t say that as the stuff gets purer, the process gets faster?”

“No.”

“Well, it does. If I had calutrons and centrifuges, I wouldn’t use them in tandem. I’d use them in sequence. I’d run the base uranium through the calutrons to get it from zero to twenty, maybe twenty-five-percent pure; then use that as the feedstock for the new cascades.”

“Why?”

“It would cut your refining time in the cascades by a factor of ten.”

Martin thought it over while Daddy Lomax puffed.

“Then when would you calculate Iraq could have those thirty-five kilograms of pure uranium?”

“Depends when they started with the calutrons.”

Martin thought. After the Israeli jets destroyed the Iraqi reactor at Osirak, Baghdad operated on two policies: dispersal and duplication, scattering the laboratories all over the country so they could never all be bombed again; and using a cover-all-angles technique in purchasing and experimentation. Osirak had been bombed in 1981.

The Fist of God

“Say they bought the components on the open market in 1982 and assembled them by 1983.”

Lomax took a stick from the ground near his feet and began to doodle in the dust.

“These guys got any problem with supplies of yellowcake, the basic feedstock?” he asked.

“No, plenty of feedstock.”

“Suppose so,” grunted Lomax. “Buy the damn stuff in K-mart nowadays.

After a while he tapped the photo with his stick.

“This photo shows about twenty calutrons. That all they had?”

“Maybe more. We don’t know. Let’s assume that’s all they had working.”

“Since 1983, right?”

“Basic assumption.”

Lomax kept scratching in the dust.

“Mr. Hussein got any shortage of electric power?”

Martin thought of the 150-megawatt power station across the sand From Tarmiya, and the suggestion from the Black Hole that the cable ran underground into Tarmiya.

“No, no shortage of power.”

“We did,” said Lomax. “Calutrons take an amazing amount of electrical power to function. At Oak Ridge we built the biggest coal-fired power station ever made. Even then we had to tap into the public grid. Each time we turned ’em on, there was a brown-out right across Tennessee—soggy fries and brown light bulbs—we were using so much.”

He went on doodling with his stick, making a calculation, then scratching it out and starting another in the same patch of dust.

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“They got a shortage of copper wire?”

“No, they could buy that on the open market too.”

“These giant magnets have to be wrapped in thousands of miles of copper wire,” said Lomax. “Back in the war, we couldn’t get any.

Needed for war production, every ounce. Know what old Lawrence did?”

“No idea.”

“Borrowed all the silver bars in Fort Knox and melted it into wire.

Worked just as well. End of the war, we had to hand it all back to Fort Knox.” He chuckled. “He was a character.”

Finally he finished and straightened up.

“If they assembled twenty calutrons in 1983 and ran the yellowcake through them till ’89 ... and then took thirty-percent-pure uranium and fed it into the centrifuge cascade for one year, they’d have their thirty-five keys of ninety-three percent bomb-grade uranium ... November.”

“Next November,” said Martin.

Lomax rose, stretched, reached down, and pulled his guest to his feet.

“No, son, last November.”

* * *

Midday. Eight P.M. in London. Paxman would have left his desk and gone home. Martin did not have his home number.

He could wait twelve hours in San Francisco to telephone, or he could fly. He decided to fly. Martin landed at Heathrow at eleven on the morning of January 28 and was with Paxman at twelve-thirty. By two P.M., Steve Laing was talking urgently to Harry Sinclair at the embassy in Grosvenor Square and an hour later the CIA’s London Station Head was on a direct and very secure line to Deputy Director (Operations) The Fist of God

Bill Stewart.

It was not until the morning of January 30 that Bill Stewart was able to produce a full report for the DCI, William Webster.

“It checks out,” he told the former Kansas judge. “I’ve had men down at that cabin near Cedar Mountain, and the old man, Lomax, confirmed it all. We’ve traced his original paper.—it was filed. The records from Oak Ridge confirm that these disks are calutrons.”

“How on earth did it happen?” asked the DCI. “How come we never noticed?”

“Well, the idea probably came from Jaafar Al-Jaafar, the Iraqi boss of their program. Apart from Harwell in England, he also trained at CERN, outside Geneva. It’s a giant particle accelerator.”

“So?”

“Calutrons are particle accelerators. Anyway, all calutron technology was declassified in 1949. It’s been available on request ever since.”

“And the calutrons—where were they bought?”

“In bits, mainly from Austria and France. The purchases raised no eyebrows because of the antiquated nature of the technology. The plant was built by Yugoslavs under contract. They said they wanted plans to build on, so the Iraqis simply gave them the plans of Oak Ridge—that’s why Tarmiya is a replica.”