Cloudburst (19 page)

The president left the trio of questions for a moment. “What does Delta think?”

“They’re in the early stages of planning,” Bud answered. “Andrew says they need more intelligence—how many hijackers, what weapons, etcetera. And they’re going to need to know what may be on there. If they go in, they’ll have more than the hijackers to deal with.”

The president went back to his desk and flipped open his gray schedule book. “Bud, you have overall authority for handling this situation. Any final decisions are mine, but your recommendations will carry weight. Get the ball rolling if you need to, then inform me. I want a report at two this afternoon on progress, and if anything major happens I want to know immediately. Herb, any chance the asset you spoke of can get some information for us about what’s on the plane?”

“Possibly,” Landau replied. “But it will almost certainly compromise him.”

“Which means?”

“We’ll have to extract him.”

There were ramifications to everything a president or high government official decided or authorized, this event being a good example. The president pondered the decision.
Reaction!
He was forced into reacting to the assassination and the hijacking. The thought irked him, and also reminded him to be prudent. “Go ahead. I’ll put it in writing. Is this going to fall under the covert operations reporting requirement?”

“The extraction, yes.” The DCI wanted to add a caution, “But…”

“We’ll report on that after the fact,” the president said. Landau smiled and nodded. “I’m going to get Gordy in here. He needs to know about this, but I want the nuke theory kept quiet. Only those that need to know get it. No leaks.”

There was no response. It was an order that needed none.

“Let’s get to it and hope for the best” The president looked hopeful and confident to Bud. That was good, he thought, but then remembered the president’s stone debating face. He brushed that thought aside, which was just as well, because if he had looked closer he might have seen the worry in the chief executive’s eyes.

Seven

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Washington DC

The D.C. morning rush was nearly over. Joe Anderson had barely arrived at his Department of Energy office when a phone call sent him scurrying out to a waiting government car. The driver, seemingly annoyed at his taxi driver status, directed Joe to sit in the front seat next to him. No more was said during the short drive to the White House. Joe had been there before, once, to receive a quiet thanks from the president. There was a citation of sorts, but it was all classified. That came with the territory. He wasn’t a war hero, after all.

This
was
a little odd, however. No warning at all. If there had been he might have dressed for the occasion. Maybe his blue three piece, the one his wife picked out to make sure he matched. “You didn’t marry me for my fashion sense,” he often joked with her. The Park Service guards at the Executive Avenue entrance looked as serious as one could be, and there were more of them. They waved the shiny black Ford through the cement planter barricades.

A few minutes later he entered the comfortable office on the ground floor of the White House. He recognized the two men right away.

“Captain Anderson.” Bud stood and walked around his desk, shaking the visitor’s hand. “I’m Bud DiContino, the president’s national security adviser.”

“Yes, I recognize you from the news.” Joe turned to the DCI.

“Herb Landau, Joe.” He stayed seated in a wing back chair. Joe walked over to greet him.

“Mr. Director.”

“Have a seat, Captain.” Bud touched the back of a chair. “Director Landau filled me in on your background—it’s very impressive. He recommended we contact you.”

Joe fidgeted visibly. “I hope I’m of some help.”

He looked like a cross between a college professor and a drill instructor. Passionless eyes and tight skin topped by silver-gray hair. He was forty-seven. The hair must have been a family trait, Bud thought. It looked too natural to be caused by aging. And the voice: deliberate and measured. Every word carried maximum impact and was spoken slowly.

“I understand you’re cleared for ‘Q’ material.”

Joe shifted in his seat again. “I’m cleared for everything nuclear.”

Bud smiled politely, realizing that he’d hit a nerve. “Captain Anderson, we need your expertise. We have a situation…a bad one. Potentially disastrous. First, let me ask you about Anatoly Vishkov. What’s so special about him?”

Vishkov?
“He designs nuclear weapons and offers the plans up for sale to terror groups and nutcakes. His real claim to fame goes back to his days with the SRF. He did a great deal of work on dirty bombs. Those are the old
atomic
bombs that are primarily fission weapons. He was trying to perfect area-denial weapons, ones that would make an area so hot nothing could enter it. It wasn’t anything new, just a routine R&D program to improve what they already had. Unfortunately for just about everyone but himself he stumbled onto something. Do you want the technical rundown or the abridged version?”

Bud figured a mix would be proper. “How about something up the middle.”

“Okay.” Joe slid forward in his chair. “A pad of paper?” The NSA handed him one. He spent a few seconds drawing as Bud leaned in to see. Landau strained through his bifocals to watch the diagram take shape. “This is roughly what Vishkov came up with.”

“Little Boy,” Bud said. He had seen the thing before, in what book he didn’t remember. It was very similar to the ‘Little Boy’ gun bomb weapon that fell on Hiroshima. Simpler than the implosion-type bomb dropped on Nagasaki, the gun bomb was basically a large gun barrel with a uranium target at one end and a smaller uranium ‘bullet’ at the opposite end. Upon detonation the bullet was fired into the target, compressing the uranium to a supercritical state and causing the nuclear explosion.

“Good call,” Joe said. He was getting a little irritated. So far this didn’t sound like any kind of ‘situation.’ It was sounding like a waste of time. Every so often some government official would want to know something related to his unique line of work. Since he was the senior member of NEST, DOE’s Nuclear Emergency Search Team, the PR and legislative appeasement duties usually fell to him. “He took the fairly easy to construct gun bomb design and made it easier to build, and increased the low-range relative yield twofold. Taking the reduction in size—compared to the Hiroshima weapon—into consideration, we have an extremely dangerous weapon when in the hands of terrorists. That’s his market.”

“How did he accomplish this?” Bud asked.

“This.” Joe’s finger touched the area of the uranium target. “The major problem with the gun bomb was the large amount of fissile material needed to make it work, and the fact that it had to be highly enriched material: usually uranium 235. That isotope occurs only in quantities of less than one percent of mined natural uranium, so you either have to enrich what you have or process enough to ‘make’ U235. Neither is cheap or easy. What Vishkov did was discover a way to aid the compression of a smaller amount of U235 by placing this uniform explosive band around the center section of the target. When the uranium bullet strikes the target there is usually some deformation of the fissile core as it tries to expand outward, like this.” Joe drew several arrows going out from the target. “This ‘explosive doughnut’ is triggered by the melding of the bullet into the target. The target itself is a section of a cylinder with a portion in the center coned out—that’s the bullet. When the bullet is fired and fills this conical hole, the doughnut around the cylinder blows and further compresses the target. Vishkov used a simpler aspect of the implosion method to increase the density of the target while the bullet pushed into it. He also used laser switches to time the firing. You see, all the firings have to be timed right on the money. The bullet has to impact the target perfectly and the compression of the cylinder must, absolutely must occur nanoseconds before impact.” Joe noticed the NSA go wide-eyed. “Look, basically what Vishkov did was take the best parts of the implosion and gun bombs and combine them, and somehow it’s easier to make than either of them separately.”

It was explained as asked. Bud expected that he should have gotten the full gist of it, but he didn’t. This nuclear netherworld stuff scared him, more so because he knew too little about the mechanics of weapons. His job had been developing aircraft that could get the bombs to their targets. What went in the bomb bays was someone else’s worry.

Anderson felt the silence. “Look, I’ve given this rigmarole twenty or thirty times to generals, secretaries, and anyone else who wanted a little ‘in’ knowledge. It’s my job to do this, but I also have other, more important things to do. I have a shipment of plutonium from France to Japan leaving in less than a week, and I am supposed to coordinate security with the Japanese. It may not seem like much to you, but there will be enough material on that freighter for a hundred bombs, so if you have no more—”

“Captain Anderson,” Bud cut him off, “what we have here is an immediate threat.” He was upset at the disregard Anderson was exhibiting and, for the first time in days, felt the stubbornness of his years surface. “Please watch.”

The recording was already queued up and began to play at the touch of the remote. The men watched a few minutes—Bud and the DCI for the third time in as many hours—as the boxes were loaded on the aircraft. Bud turned off the video player.

“Captain, that happened in Libya, at Benina International Airport. The aircraft is a 747 that was hijacked out of Athens early this morning. Just prior to what you watched, the aft cargo hold was emptied; just after that, the door opened and some probable unfriendlies boarded.” Bud took a folder from his desk top. The photos inside had arrived from Fort Belvoir just minutes before Anderson’s arrival. “Please take a look at these. They’re enhanced.”

Joe took the small stack. Fifteen photos. He looked through them quickly a first time, then more closely a second, discarding all but three of the eight-by-tens onto a side table. Two were good angle views of the boxes which could be useful for scale calculations. The third…

“I know you can’t tell much from these,” Bud said, “but we have to ask the obvious: Could the Libyans have constructed a weapon using Vishkov’s design?”

“If they had the design it might—”

“They do,” Bud interjected.

Joe was quiet for a few seconds. He searched both men’s eyes for the truth, not expecting to get it directly from their words. “How?”

“One set got by us,” Landau answered. “A few years ago in the Netherlands. The IRA bought it at auction for Qaddafi.”

“I don’t… Don’t you guys think I should know this stuff, that my team has a legitimate reason to be informed? For Christ’s sake… We don’t spend every damn day running around looking for friggin’ atom bombs in country. Ninety percent of our job is security—
nuclear
security.” The furrows on his forehead deepened, coming together just between his eyebrows. He scratched his brow with one finger. “So Qaddafi has a set of Vishkov’s designs. Is it the same design as the one we have?” At
least they showed me that one.

“We don’t know,” the DCI answered.

Bud gathered the discarded photos and put them in the folder, placing it back on his desk. “You said
if
they had the design…”

Joe swallowed hard. “Then things would be much simpler for them.”

“Could they build it?” Bud pressed.

“Not likely. Not with their resources.”

“They have access to the technology, don’t they?” Landau inquired.

“Except for the most important part: the fissile material. Or at least the right kind.” Joe was unsure, unsettled by this.
The picture
. “Weapons-grade material for this kind of device, like I explained before, would need to be either highly enriched uranium—around ninety percent U235—or plutonium 239. The Libyans have no plutonium.”

“None?”

“Absolutely none, Mr. DiContino. Your business may not allow you to make one hundred percent assured statements, but mine does. Plutonium is not found—it’s made. Processed. And damn tightly controlled. The Libyans do not have the capacity to ‘cultivate’ or refine P239.”

“What about uranium?”

Two sets of eyes bored into Joe. “As I said, they have none. Just highly enriched uranium for…”
The picture!

“What?” Bud saw doubt.

Anderson looked again at the third photo.
It is.

Bud slid his chair closer. It was the enhanced blowup of one of the officers around the plane.
Nice of him to look up.
“What is it?”

“His name is Ibrahim Sadr. Captain’s rank. He runs the Libyan research reactor at Tajoura. It’s a small ten-megawatt job. The Soviets built it in the late seventies, early eighties. It started up in eighty-one.”

Everyone was wondering the obvious. Bud did so aloud. “Could the reactor fuel be used for the weapon?”

“It’s not likely.”

It wasn’t convincing. “That’s not good enough. We have to know. Where’s the hundred percent assurance?”

Joe had to admit that had been a bad way to characterize the usual certainty with which he could do his job. “No one has ever tested Vishkov’s design. It’s only theoretical, but it should work. He figured that, and so do I. But it still needs highly enriched uranium.”

“You said—”

“—it needs ninety percent or higher concentrations to work.” Joe paused.
Could it?

“Your expression worries me,” Bud admitted.

“Me too,” the DCI agreed. “Could the weapon work with a lower percentage?”

“I don’t know.” The face stared up at Joe from the photo. “It shouldn’t. The only way to know without a doubt is to test it, and we can’t do that. I could make a million sets of calculations and there would always be a plus or minus four percent error, up or down, on either end of the performance scale. That four percent could be the range of error Vishkov made allowances for
if
he calculated for a lower percentage concentration of U235. The fuel for Tajoura is seventy to seventy-five percent enriched uranium. You’d need to implode that concentration to get it to the point of supercriticality, unless Vishkov’s bomb increases the artificial density enough. I wish I knew, but I don’t.”