Authors: James Barrington
It had been, by any standards, a good result.
They stood up, and Jackson walked away towards the stairs that led to the ground floor and the check-in desks. Richter watched her retreating figure, wondering if they would ever meet again,
waved as she turned back to look at him at the top of the staircase, then sat down again. He still had over an hour to wait before he could check in for his own flight.
Seventy minutes later, Richter retrieved his passport from the unsmiling female Immigration Officer sitting at her desk wearing traditional garb. He walked the short distance
to the final security checkpoint, slid his briefcase onto the conveyor belt and strode through the portal scanner. Two minutes later, he stepped into the departure hall, which was something of a
revelation.
It was enormous. It looked to Richter as if it was probably about a quarter of a mile from end to end, a long and wide two-storey building lined with both an extraordinary variety of shops and
the numerous departure gates. Futuristic light fittings decorated the ceiling high above, and huge palm trees marched in a double row down the ground floor. It made every other airport he’d
ever visited look positively shabby and boring.
As he stared around him, he noticed a group of Arabs in traditional dress standing watching him. They had an indefinable look that suggested they were government employees, or at least some kind
of officials, and Richter assumed they’d come to see him safely off their patch.
And they had, but there was a little more to it than that.
‘Mr Richter, the government of Dubai wishes once again to offer you its heartfelt thanks for helping us resolve our recent difficulties,’ the spokesman began.
‘That’s my job,’ Richter said simply.
‘I know, but we are very grateful to you. Now, we’re aware that your salary is paid by your government.’
‘That’s true, such as it is.’
‘Quite,’ the Arab nodded. ‘We’re also aware that offering you any kind of financial reward for your service here in Dubai would be wholly inappropriate. But we did wonder
if you’d like to buy a ticket in one of our prize draws? Perhaps for the Ford car? We can arrange its delivery and registration in the United Kingdom, or any other country, at no
charge.’
‘Thanks, but I’m not a gambler,’ Richter said, shaking his head, ‘and I don’t really like Fords.’
‘But the odds in this draw are very good,’ the Arab insisted, ‘and the car is quite special – you might call it a limited edition.’ He pointed down the hall to a
raised plinth perhaps thirty yards away on which a brand new Ford GT was displayed.
Richter stared at it with a kind of longing. The original version, the GT40, was arguably the greatest sports-racing car of all time, built for one purpose only – to win the Le Mans 24
Hour race and defeat Ferrari, a task it had achieved with consummate ease on several occasions. The current model, built to the most exacting standards and in extremely small numbers, shared that
impeccable pedigree. It was low, sleek, beautiful, expensive, indescribably quick and hopelessly impractical, and Richter would have just loved to own it, but he reluctantly shook his head.
‘I’m sorry, but I don’t gamble,’ he repeated.
‘At these odds, there’s very little gambling involved.’
‘OK,’ Richter demanded, ‘how many tickets are there in this raffle? A thousand, two thousand?’
‘Usually there are a thousand, but we’ve amended the rules slightly. In this draw there are only ten tickets,’ the man smiled, ‘and we’ve decided to offer you a
discount on the price as well. Normally our vehicle raffle tickets are priced at about five hundred dirhams, but we’ve reduced the price of these to just one American dollar each. You can of
course buy all ten tickets, if you wish. So are you still certain you don’t want to try your luck?’
Richter looked again at the Ford GT, back at the Arab’s smiling face, and without the slightest hesitation pulled out his wallet. He selected a ten-pound note and handed it over. For a
moment, the Arab looked confused – he’d been expecting dollars.
Richter filled in his contact details, took a last lingering look at his new ten-dollar Ford, tucked the raffle tickets into his wallet, and finally headed for his departure gate. He glanced
back to see the Arab still holding the ten-pound note.
‘Thanks very much indeed,’ he called out. ‘You can keep the change.’
This book touches briefly on some topics that might be considered to lie outside the normal realm of the mainstream thriller writer, particularly precognition, premonition and
what is often termed remote viewing.
However, it’s worth pointing out that during the Cold War the Soviet Union allocated the second largest section of its strategic defence budget to psychotronics – the development and
use of electronic mind-control weapons and devices – and research into paranormal phenomena. And it wasn’t just the Russians. The CIA ran numerous programmes of a similar nature, and
admitted to spending in excess of twenty million dollars in research in this field.
Between them, the Russians and the Americans spent an absolute minimum of a quarter of a billion dollars over a ten-year period on investigations into these exotic and unlikely studies. And to
paraphrase Richter’s remark early in the book – you just can’t ignore that kind of money.
The three Defense Intelligence Agency files referred to in the book are genuine, and can be read in their entirety on various Internet sites, or in Tim Rifat’s most informative book
Remote Viewing
published in 1999 (Century – ISBN 0 7126 7908 1). The Russian ‘Woodpecker’ programme was also real, as were the analyses of its possible effects on the
target populations.
ZATOs
Brief mention is made in this book of ZATOs or ‘closed cities’ in the former USSR. Initially one of the most highly classified of state secrets, the first were
established in the 1940s by Lavrenty Beria, one of Stalin’s closest friends and then the sadistic and psychopathic head of the NKVD –
Narodnyi Kommissariat Vnutrennikh Del
–
the forerunner of the
Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopastnosti
, the KGB, and administered by Minatom, the Ministry of Atomic Energy, and Minoborona, the Ministry of Defence.
In fact, the term ‘city’ is somewhat misleading, as the majority were actually quite small towns, and even the biggest of them, Zheleznogorsk, had only about a quarter of a million
inhabitants. Most ZATOs were established around nuclear power plants, atomic bomb fabrication factories, weapon storage complexes and the like and, although the location of most of them is now
known, the restrictions imposed on the cities and their inhabitants haven’t changed greatly since they were created.
Originally, national and international news media had no access to the cities, and what little information seeped in or out via local papers and radio and television broadcasts was highly
selective and invariably censored. The resident population could not leave, other than in exceptional circumstances, and immigrants, whether from within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or
foreigners, were not usually allowed to enter. Within the cities, local rules and customs over-rode national and international legislation, and the KGB and the other security organs of the state
exercised more power, and generated more fear, than elsewhere. One Russian commentator, who lived for some years in the closed city of Ozersk, has presciently described a ZATO as a small-scale
Soviet Union.
The closed city described in this novel – Penza-19, now known as Zarechnyy – was founded in 1954 and was one of the smaller closed cities with a population of about 65,000. It was
the location of the Start Production Association or PO Start, one of four Minatom atomic warhead assembly and disassembly facilities, the others being located at Lesnoy, Trekhgomyy and
Sarov’s Avangard plant. PO Start also manufactured trigger and detonation systems, and produced sub-assemblies of nuclear munitions and related electronic components.
Paradoxically, many of the residents of the closed cities saw themselves as ‘special’, as the custodians of the might of Russia, the guardians of the terrible power hidden in the
nuclear warheads that their factories produced. They also pointed to the tax advantages and other financial assistance only available to residents of the ZATOs as evidence of their exalted status
in the eyes of the Soviet government.
Since the collapse of the USSR, the closed cities are slowly being opened, most as part of the Cooperative Threat Reduction programme, also known as the Nunn-Lugar Program. Working under the
auspices of the Defense Special Weapons Agency, and with a budget of nearly forty million dollars, American firms are trying to work with Russian entities to convert the weapons-production
facilities to more mundane, and certainly safer, manufacturing processes.
The aims and intentions of the CTR programme are laudable, but the reality of its implementation has been rather less successful.
Perhaps the most embarrassing incident involved Mashinostroyenia, a high-technology facility which had been responsible for the manufacture of cruise missiles, intercontinental ballistic
missiles, and manoeuvrable satellites. With a contract budget of just over five million dollars, and apparently without local consultation, the Nunn-Lugar team attempted to convert the factory into
a cola bottling plant. Not entirely surprisingly, the Mashinostroyenia management refused point-blank to agree to the conversion of their leading-edge establishment into such a mundane, prosaic
– and, above all,
American
– operation.
Some other projects were more successful. The Istok plant, for example, which had previously manufactured vacuum tubes, electro-optical and microwave devices, carbon-dioxide lasers, klystrons,
magnetrons, batteries and various types of solid-state electronic components, was successfully switched, with an investment of just under six million dollars, to the production of hearing aids.
Suitcase nuclear weapons
The existence of suitcase bombs has been hotly disputed ever since September 1997 when General Aleksandr Lebed, the former Russian National Security Advisor, claimed in an
interview on the American CBS network that, not only had the Russians manufactured two hundred and fifty of them, but that they had ‘lost’ over one hundred of them. When asked to
clarify this alarming assertion, Lebed stated that the missing weapons were ‘not under the control of the armed forces of Russia’.
The official response from the Russians was to deny that such weapons had ever existed, and the American government – at least in public – accepted that denial at face value. But
Lebed’s information was to some extent confirmed by the Russian scientist Alexei Yablokov, who had formerly been employed as an environmental adviser by President Yeltsin.
Yablokov stated that he was personally acquainted with people who had actually fabricated such weapons in the 1970s following the orders of the KGB. He also stated that the devices were intended
for use as terrorist weapons, presumably to be positioned by Russian sleepers or
Spetsnaz
forces in a target country ahead of the commencement of hostilities, to decapitate the regime or
attack important local targets.
Yablokov also claimed that the first Russian suitcase bombs had been manufactured in a town – he almost certainly meant a closed city – lying in the south of the Urals, and the most
obvious candidate was Trekhgomyy, formerly known as Zlatoust-36. If the weapons had then been dispersed for secure storage, then the other Minatom plants, including the PO Start facility at
Penza-19, would have been likely choices to accommodate several of them.
The explosion of a one-kiloton weapon would destroy everything within about half a mile of the point of detonation, and the possible death toll could be up to about 250,000 people if the device
were positioned in a well-populated area.
A spherical critical mass of plutonium weighs ten and a half kilograms and is just over ten centimetres in diameter, but will not of itself create a nuclear detonation as it cannot cause fission
multiplication. To initiate the chain reaction, greater than a critical mass is required, but only a comparatively small amount. Adding 10 per cent will cause an explosion equal to about twenty
tons of TNT, and a 40 per cent increase will escalate the equivalence of the detonation to somewhat in excess of three hundred tons.
To generate a one-kiloton yield, the likelihood is that the Russian scientists employed a thin beryllium neutron reflector around the plutonium core and an array of conventional explosive
charges. These measures would have served both to initiate the detonation sequence and simultaneously compress the plutonium to a greater than normal density, thus materially increasing the yield
of the weapon.
Whatever the truth of Lebed’s and Yablokov’s assertions, there’s not the slightest doubt that suitcase-sized nuclear weapons do exist. The Americans have released video clips
showing the deployment of their Special Atomic Demolition Munition (SADM), a weapon weighing only about one hundred pounds but with a one-kiloton yield and intended for use in sabotage missions
against large and solid targets such as airfields and dams. The Americans also built the W-54, a tiny nuclear weapon with a yield of only around twenty tons and designed to be fired from the Davy
Crockett recoilless rifle.
PAYBACK
James Barrington is a trained military pilot who has worked in covert operations and espionage. He now lives in Andorra and this is his fifth novel. His previous novels,
Overkill
,
Pandemic
,
Foxbat
and
Timebomb
, also featured Paul Richter.
Also by James Barrington
OVERKILL
PANDEMIC
FOXBAT
TIMEBOMB
To Sally – thanks for always being there