Fires of War (4 page)

Most of whom would hate her.

Thera glanced at one of the security guards, then pushed herself forward, joining the others queuing to go into the administration building near the front gate. Their guides waited in front of the main door in their shirtsleeves, smiling stoically.

“Thera? Where are you?”

Though he had been born in Kenya, Dr. Jamari Norkelus spoke with a very proper English accent, direct from Cambridge, his alma mater. He also tended to be more than a little brusque and came off like everyone’s most annoying spinster aunt. Norkelus ran the inspection team as if it were a church group, with curfews and daily reminders to wear proper attire. He even checked on the junior staff people to make sure they were in their rooms at night. He claimed it was because the UN had issued a directive against bad publicity, but Thera suspected he was simply an uptight voyeur.

“You will need to record the director’s remarks,” Norkelus told her. “Please take notes.”

Thera reached into her bag for her pad as she made her way to Norkelus’s side.

“Just the gist,” added Norkelus in a stage whisper when she reached him. “To show we think he’s important.”

“OK.”

Thera had been surprised to see in Libya how much of the inspection visits were devoted to diplomacy and protocol. Much of this morning’s tour, for example, was completely unnecessary. Not only had the team members already studied the waste plant’s layout, but several had been consultants during its design. The scientists and engineers on the team knew the function of most of the machinery and instruments better than the people handling them, but simply rolling up their sleeves and going to work was considered rude. And besides, the inspections had to be carried out according to an elaborate and lengthy set of protocols hashed out over months by negotiators after the basic Korean nonproliferation treaty was signed.

The agreement called for reciprocal inspections of nuclear facilities on both sides of the Korean border and in Japan. For every North Korean facility inspected, a South Korean facility would be checked; inspections in Japan, which had considerably more sites, were to be conducted on a more complicated schedule, though roughly in proportion with those in Korea. Different teams of inspectors would look at everything from nuclear-energy plants to waste facilities; Thera’s team was concerned with the latter. The inspections in Japan and South Korea were formalities added to the treaty as a face-saving gesture for the North Koreans, but the team members would strictly observe all of the protocols nonetheless.

In this case, the inspection of the waste facilities was truly reciprocal: The Blessed Peak Waste Disposal and Holding Station happened to be an almost exact twin of the facility in North Korea’s P’yŏngan-puko, or northern P’yŏnpan Province, where the team would go next. Both had been designed and built by a French firm within the last two years; the funding for the North Korean plant had come from the earlier framework agreement that had set the stage for the final disarmament pact.

High-tech monitors and robot train cars played prominent roles at the facilities. All of the waste that arrived at the South Korean facility was sealed in an appropriate containment vessel; even so, no human came within fifty yards of it, at least not under normal circumstances.

Things in North Korea were not quite as automated nor as strict—the containment “vessels” in some cases amounted to simple metal barrels, moved from trucks by forklift to the train cars—but they were nonetheless a significant improvement over the procedures followed just a few years before, when waste was dumped into open pits by workers using shovels, rakes, and in some cases their bare hands.

Most of the waste that came to both plants was low-grade radioactive substances left from medical testing and industrial testing, or the byproducts of their production. But the plants also contained temporary storage facilities for spent nuclear fuel. These were the areas that the IAEA had come to look at. For only the fuel from nuclear reactors could be processed into weapons.

A typical nuclear reactor was fueled by uranium or plutonium pellets no larger than the average man’s thumb. The pellets were loaded and sealed into long metal tubes called rods, which were then inserted into the reactor. The controlled nuclear reaction that resulted generated electricity for a number of years, depending on the plant’s design.

As the reaction proceeded, the fuel became “spent,” changed by the reaction into material that could no longer fuel the reactor. But the spent fuel represented only about three percent of the pellet. Once removed through “reprocessing,” the unused material could be used in another reactor.

Reprocessing was not, however, an easy task. The rods were very hot and highly radioactive when first removed from the reactor. To prepare them for reprocessing, they had to be cooled, which in some circumstances could take as long as ten years. They were then encased in lead and steel-lined cement canisters that looked like large barbells. The containment vessels allowed the fuel to be safely transported without danger of leakage.

Like much else connected with the nuclear industry, the shipping and reprocessing of fuel was an expensive operation, performed only by special plants. It was also highly regulated, for it was relatively easy to extract weapons’-grade material during the process. This was especially true for rods from plutonium-fueled plants such as those built by North Korea.

At Blessed Peak, spent nuclear fuel was collected from two research reactors in the western part of the country and stored until it could be shipped with waste from other Korean and Japanese plants for reprocessing in Great Britain, something which generally happened every one or two years. In North Korea, the waste was collected from the country’s sole operating nuclear power plant for shipment to Russia for reprocessing every eighteen months.

Blessed Peak’s
wonjon nim,
or director, explained all this with the help of an elaborate PowerPoint presentation in the administration building’s small auditorium. At nearly six eight, he was the tallest Korean Thera had seen since she arrived. He was also the palest; his skin seemed almost translucent. But he was an energetic man, bouncing across the stage as his slides appeared, talking in both Korean and fluent English. His silver-and-black hair occasionally blended into the background of the slides, leaving his brown suit hurtling back and forth to the nuances of tracking shipments and protecting against catastrophe.

Thera took notes during the director’s presentation, but her mind was on her
real
job: planting miniature monitoring devices known as “tags” at the North Korean site. Because Blessed Peak was so similar, she would plant another set here to compare the North Korean results when the tags were collected again in three months.

Less than a half-inch square, the detectors were hidden inside fake radiation buttons, the warning indicators worn by the inspection team to detect accidental exposures to radiation. Thera had memorized a list of twenty-five possible spots to plant the devices; she was aiming to plant between six and eight at each site.

The tags were designed to detect radiation from plutonium-239. Exploiting recently developed nanotechnology, the tags were extremely sensitive gamma-ray spectrometers, or, in layman’s terms, they were “tuned” to detect radiation produced by the bomb material. Tests had shown they could reliably detect about .03 grams of the material at 10 meters, a vast improvement over the most commonly used sensors, which could detect perhaps a third of a gram at the same distance.

Besides providing a check on the IAEA’s tests, the First Team operation would show if materials from illegal reprocessing were being shunted into the secondary and low-level waste area, something the North was suspected of having done with its earlier extraction program.

The tags had gold-colored ends, which had to be upright. The gold turned red if the tag made a detection. While a full analysis of the tag would provide additional data about the exposure, the simple indicator would make it relatively easy to check on the site. Another IAEA inspection was tentatively scheduled in three months.

The director came to his last slide, and the scientists applauded politely before filing out of the room. They toured the monitoring station down the hall, where technicians controlled the machines that received and moved waste containers. The setup reminded Thera of an elaborate toy-train layout one of her cousins used to have in his basement that used a wireless remote to run the engines. The trains here were full sized, and they worked in conjunction with large cranes and automated lifting gear.

Radio devices permanently attached to the containment vessels showed where the recyclable power waste was at all times. No terrorist could steal the potentially dangerous waste, the director boasted, at least not without the entire world knowing.

Security around the perimeter of the plant and in the area where the recyclable fuel was kept was relatively strong; cameras with overlapping views covered a double fence, which was patrolled by guards at irregular intervals. But the security system left the rest of the facility relatively open, making Thera’s job simple, assuming she could drift away from the pack.

That part wasn’t going to be easy today, though. Norkelus kept prodding her to stay close to their host, reminding her in pantomime that she should be jotting things down.

The director led them into the reception building, a large shedlike structure whose ribbed walls were made of steel. Every truck or trainload of waste entering Blessed Peak came to the large building first, where it was recorded, classified, and then prepared for storage. A large overhead crane, similar to that used to load containers onto and off of ships, sat near the middle of the building. The crane could swivel 360 degrees, setting containment vessels and waste “casks”—essentially smaller vessels with less serious waste—onto the special railroad cars.

“No people,” said the director, waving his hand, “except the truck driver. All is controlled from the administration station, with the aid of the cameras.”

He pointed overhead, where a pair of video cameras in the ceiling observed everything in the building.

The cameras made it impractical to plant the tags inside, but Thera wouldn’t have to; the metal ribs that ran upward from the ground to the roof on the outside would make easy hiding places near the door.

As the group left the building, Thera pulled out a pack of Marlboros and broke off from the rest of the group. She lit up, then leaned against the side of the building.

It was a perfect cover: She could slide a sensor right into the metal seam while pretending to light a cigarette.

Why not do it now?

She slid her hand inside her pocket, flicking off the exterior casing of the tag and sliding the detector between her fingers.

One-two-three, easy as pie.

“Miss?”

Thera looked up in surprise. A man in a lab coat was staring at her a few feet away.

“Um, cigarette,” she said, holding the cigarette up guiltily.

“You will come with me,” said the man. “Come.”

“But I was just having a smoke.”

The man grabbed her arm. It took enormous willpower not to throw him down to the ground and even more not to flee.

~ * ~

5

DELAWARE COUNTY AIRPORT, INDIANA

Senator Gordon Tewilliger pulled himself into the limo and shut the door. The weather had turned nasty and his plane from Washington, D.C., had been delayed nearly an hour from landing at Delaware County Airport, just outside of Muncie, Indiana. That meant he was even further behind schedule than usual.

“State Elks dinner begins with cocktails at six.” Jack Long, his district coordinator, leaned back from the front seat. “Your speech is scheduled for about eight thirty. You can just blow in, do the speech, then skip out. Which will get you over to the hospital before ten.”

“That’s still not going to help us, Jack.”

“You cut the ribbon at the Senior Center at six. We go from there directly to the Delaware County reception. You spend fifteen minutes there, then we swing over to the Boy Scout assembly to give out the Eagle badges.”

The door to the limo opened, and Tewilliger’s deputy assistant, James Hannigan, slipped in. Though his title seemed to indicate that Hannigan was number three in the hierarchy of his aides, in actual fact he was the senator’s alter ego and had been with him since Gordon Tewilliger had first run for state assembly. Hannigan, a short, wiry man, put his head down and ran his fingers through his hair, trying to rub off some of the rain. Once the aide was inside, the driver locked the doors and put the car in gear. The windshield wipers slapped furiously, as if they were mad that the rain had the audacity to fall.