Pinnacle Event (15 page)

“Toda raba,”
Rachel whispered.

 

17

MONDAY, OCTOBER 24

POLICY EVALUATION GROUP

NAVY HILL, FOGGY BOTTOM

WASHINGTON, DC

“Even a five-kiloton nuclear detonation devastates Manhattan,” Dugout said into the modified iPad to Bowman. “I pulled up a model that Homeland uses, developed by Oak Ridge nuclear lab.” He described to Ray what he saw on his desktop monitor. “Detonate it on the south end of the island at Battery Park and the blast is felt as far north as Canal Street.

“It's a smaller bomb than Hiroshima and the buildings are now built much better, so only knocking over buildings within a couple of blocks of the blast, but setting fires and sending glass flying for many more blocks.

“The electromagnetic pulse fries all circuitry in Lower Manhattan and over in Jersey City so cars don't work, ambulances, fire trucks, phones, any computer, any engine.”

“Does the computer model give you casualty figures?” Ray asked.

“Detonated at midday during the week and you get twenty-five to forty thousand prompt deaths from incineration, burns, building collapses, flying debris,” Dugout read off the chart. “An equal number of nonprompt deaths from burns and radiation poisoning over the following thirty days.”

“And if the tritium gas had not decayed, what would happen?” Bowman asked.

“Exponentially worse,” Dugout said, switching screens. “The explosion is ten times as big, so more buildings collapse, buildings up to Central Park are damaged, the EMP fries equipment in every hospital on the island, first responders all over Manhattan and into Brooklyn could not communicate or likely even get their vehicles to start. And the long-term radioactivity makes most of the city uninhabitable for a century or more.”

“Even if that weren't the case, nobody would want to live anywhere near New York, or any other big city after that,” Ray added.

Dugout paged down through the Homeland department's model. “Listen to this: ‘At fifty kilotons, first responders should not attempt to go within at least two miles of the blast site. Those still alive within the hot zone will perish within hours or days even with medical care and by entering the area first responders will only become fatalities themselves by exposure to high doses of lethal radiation. Establish a perimeter and prevent anyone from going into the hot zone.' It means there will be thousands of people dying in great pain, but no one should go to ease their pain. What a horror.

“Fewer deaths in Washington because the concentration of people is less, fewer high-rises, but it still takes out all the government buildings and makes the place too hot to ever use again. Fifty kilotons at the Washington Monument turns the Potomac into steam.”

They sat in silence for a moment, thinking about what would happen if they failed. “How is the election campaign going?” Ray said, breaking the quiet.

“Well, the debates are finally over, but the ads are all over the TV. It's going to be close,” Dugout said.

“What about what Reuven said about Madagascar. Any leads there?” Ray asked.

“Well, there we have a bit of good news, potentially. Seems like land ownership is a big problem there, knowing who owns what. Leads to a lot of conflict and also makes it hard to sell land, which hurts the economy. So USAID gave the government in Antananarivo a grant to bring in Oracle and create a digital database, going back thirty years, of land sales. That gave Minerva a lead and data to trace.

“In 1989, the Springbok Mining company of London, England, bought a tract in the north, including a big hill. Springbok Mining dug a diamond mine into the hill, according to an old mining magazine from the time, but came up dry. Want to guess who one of the principal stockholders of Springbok was?” Dugout asked.

“The late Karl Potgeiter?” Ray asked.

“Along with the late Mr. Merwe and the now-departed Marius Pleiss, all of them Trustees,” Dugout replied. “Sloppy in covering their tracks.”

“Well it was in 1989, before they actually started the Trustees, so they probably bought the land with ARMSCOR money they could not repatriate from weapon sales to Singapore or wherever. I will bet Springbok no longer owns it,” Ray guessed.

“You win the teddy bear,” Dugout said. “They sold it in 1991 to Gazelle Trading of Sydney, which, of course, had the same address in Sydney as Mr. Merwe. As far as I can tell, Gazelle still owns it, but it looks abandoned and largely overgrown on the satellite imagery I pulled up. Want me to send you the photo?”

Bowman was walking along the Tel Aviv corniche, carrying the iPad, using headphones and a mouthpiece to chat with Dugout, hoping that even Mossad and the Shin Beth could not hear the conversation. “No, just tell me the date on it.”

“Shit, it's two years old. Guess we don't have much need to do strip photography of Madagascar.”

“Get NGIA to target it for a close-up right away. If the cave looks like it's been opened up in the last few months, then we will need Winston to talk to the Pentagon,” Ray told Dugout. “It may be time for JSOC to drop a little team into northern Madagascar for a look around, complete with Geiger counters.”

He stopped and watched the sun sinking into the Mediterranean. For the first time in eight days since he had started this goose chase, he felt he was getting closer to an answer. At least, he might now know where the bombs had been. He had six days to find out where they went, before the President ordered Operation Rock Wall to look everywhere for a nuke. And fourteen days to the election.

Winston Burrell had assumed the bombs would go off just before voting day.

The last ray of the setting sun refracted through the sea and for an instant, Raymond Bowman thought he saw a green flash. He wondered if, when it happened, he would see the nuclear flash.

 

18

MONDAY, OCTOBER 24

CULLINAN, GAUTENG

SOUTH AFRICA

Unusually for a back country road, there were streetlights on the telephone poles every hundred meters as the road meandered from an abandoned mine near Cullinan, east toward Mamelodi. Just before the Bedford step van turned at the bend, the streetlights went out.

“What was that noise?” the guard in the truck asked.

“We ran over something,” the driver said.

The truck made a flapping sound and slowed.

“I've got a flat,” the driver said.

“You've got more than one, my man,” the guard said, and drew his Beretta from its holster. As he did, the bullets came through the window, two in his head, two in the driver's.

The three men in the Range Rover escorting the truck did not hear the shots, since the shooters used silencers. The Range Rover hit the same set of spikes on the road, but the driver did not stop. He swung the wagon into reverse, but not in time. The bullets that sprayed the Ranger Rover came from three automatic weapons, also with sound suppressors. The Range Rover kept backing up and fell off the road into a ditch. The shooters shot out its lights. Then they moved quickly, in two teams of two, to give each of the five men in the two vehicles a coup de grâce in the head. A third team, of three men, blew open the back door of the Bedford van with a small charge. Then they took one small black case, containing five special bottles. They left two other cases with similar content. They only needed five bottles.

It had taken four minutes and then they were gone. The cars that had been blocking the road up ahead and behind, left quietly without ever seeing another vehicle. The Mercedes S-Class and the ambulance carrying the heisted material drove south to the N4 and then on to the airport at Midrand, where a medevac flight was waiting. The chartered Boeing Business Jet, a modified 737-800, took off with a “patient,” his family, his aides, and one small black case.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 24

POLICY EVALUATION GROUP

NAVY HILL, FOGGY BOTTOM

WASHINGTON, DC

The speakers on the server began playing the opening stanza of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. It was a sound that Dugout did not want to hear. He had programmed that music to play when one of a handful of unwelcome events were observed by the scanners he had set up looking for key words in the flood of raw intelligence that the United States vacuumed up around the world, all day, every day.

He walked to the monitor connected to that set of servers and woke up the screen. There were reports from South Africa: the police, security service, the Interior Minister's office, the Prime Minister's office. They all seemed to be about a hijacking or a robbery from a truck east of Pretoria. What had triggered the alert was the phone call to the Prime Minister's office in which the Interior Minister had said the word “tritium.”

Dugout picked up his Bowman-paired iPad and tapped a red app with a white exclamation point in the middle. The app was labeled
ALERT
. It was after midnight in the Clock hotel near Jaffa in Tel Aviv, when Ray's iPad made a noise he had never heard from it before. It woke him from the first deep REM sleep he had enjoyed in a week. When he woke, he knew neither where he was nor what the awful buzzing sound was. In a minute after talking with Dugout, he knew both. In five minutes, he knew that a different clock had just started ticking.

 

19

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25

CLOCK HOTEL

JAFFA/TEL AVIV, ISRAEL

“You were going to tell me when?” Bowman bellowed in the private breakfast room that Avidar had the hotel set up for them.

“I found out about the heist around the same time you did,” Mbali protested.

“The heist, yes, but how long have you known about Potgeiter's tunnel at Cullinan and its secret, little research reactor still making fucking tritium”

“I wasn't authorized to tell you. I asked for permission, but the President said no,” she said.

“Wonderful. Here I am running around, wasting time trying to confirm that there was a secret facility in South Africa where the extra bombs were stored in the nineties and where there was a tritium production facility and you already knew. Better yet, the fucking thing is still running, still making tritium. For who? For what?”

“It's a secret contract with the Pakistanis,” she admitted. “That's why I couldn't tell you.”

“The Pakistanis, oh, joy. No wonder they're cranking out H-bombs like sausages. They have a reliable supplier of tritium boosters,” Ray was yelling as Danny Avidar walked in. “Well, the poor Pakistanis are not getting their shipment this time, are they? Because some bunch of lunatics heisted it an hour outside of your goddamn capital city. And your people have not a clue where it went.”

“Where what went?” Avidar asked.

“Enough tritium to blow Israel to the moon,” Ray boomed. “Or to blow up the U.S. just before our election, which by the way, is two weeks from today.”

“We are looking everywhere. The tritium can't get out of the country,” Mbali said. “Keep your voice down. People will hear.”

“He owns the damn hotel. It's a Mossad proprietary. Everyone here is cleared,” Ray said, more quietly.

“Really?” Mbali asked, looking at Danny Avidar.

“Yes, of course,” Avidar said. “Who has tritium?”

Ray answered, “Whoever the hell has the bombs. Now we know what they were waiting for, the tritium to boost the yield by a factor of ten. Now they don't have to wait anymore. Now their South African bombs have South African tritium.
Boom
.”

“I'm going to have to tell the Prime Minister,” Avidar said, moving back toward the door. “He'll want to seal the borders.”

“Tell him he can't do that. It won't do any good and it will tip them off, they may go sooner,” Ray said.

“You tell him,” Avidar replied.

“Good, let's go.” Ray looked at Mbali. “You, stay here. We'll sort this out when we get back.”

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 26

MORONI, COMOROS ISLANDS

Two hours into the twenty-sixth, the Boeing Business Jet took off to the northeast, resuming its flight plan to Dubai. It had been on the ground in the Comoros for less than fifteen minutes. Air Traffic Control and Customs had not recorded the arrival, or the departure. As far as the records showed, the BBJ had left South Africa on a nonstop to Dubai.

At the request of the South African government, the aircraft would be searched by Emirati customs officials in Dubai. All aircraft that left South Africa around the time of the tritium heist were being searched, but the BBJ would be cleared because the tritium had been off-loaded in Moroni, where a little money went a long way.

The tritium gas had been “bottled” for Pakistan by the South Africans at their secret “research” reactor. Pakistan had provided the containers, which were specially designed to fit into Islamabad's missile warheads. They would, however, also fit into the larger cavity in the older South African missile warhead design. All five bottles would easily fit in one large suitcase, but in the villa on the hill above Moroni, they were carefully placed into five separate, appropriately lined, briefcases.

The next day they would be flown again, this time to where they would be mated with the five 1990s-era nuclear missile warheads. The tritium gas would act as steroids for the aging bombs, giving their relatively small amount of highly enriched uranium a destructive yield almost ten times what it would otherwise have been.

ANTSAKABARY, MADAGASCAR

Almost three hundred miles north of Madagascar's capital, an old Dauphin helicopter landed on a cleared space outside of the town. Marcus Stroh emerged from the backseat of the aircraft and stretched. It had been a bumpy ride. He grabbed his backpack from the helicopter and walked toward his waiting hosts from the Madagascar Central Intelligence Service, the CIS. They had a new, four-door, Hilux pickup. Not bad for the local CIS, Marcus thought, as he prepared to make his introductions.