Authors: Robert Doherty
South Pacific
"Why have you kept me alive?" Araki demanded of Fatima.
They were alone in the freighter's small galley, trying to get some food down as the ship lurched through the waves, pounding its way south. Fatima had a cup of coffee cradled in her thin hands, as much to keep them warm as to drink.
"So you can tell your superiors the truth," Fatima said. "You were tracking Nishin for a reason. To learn more, correct?"
"Yes."
"Are you learning?"
"Yes."
"Then that is why you are still alive." Fatima took a sip of her coffee. "The world is at war, yet no one really seems to know what the sides are or who is fighting who. The more information everyone has, the clearer things will become."
Indonesia
"I have prepared the plane to fly 9,700 kilometers, sir." Captain Hyun stood underneath the massive nose of his plane.
"How?" No congratulations. Min didn't believe in them.
"Normal range is 6,500 kilometers. If we also use the one-hour reserve fuel supply, our possible range is extended to 7,125 kilometers. We will make the additional 2,575 kilometers using three of the fuel bladders here at the airfield. I have loaded them on board, and we will hand pump the fuel from the bladders to the main tanks as we progress."
Min nodded. His narrow eyes watched his team members loading their gear on board the aircraft. They'd been instructed only to gather their equipment. Min wanted to wait until they were in the air before fully briefing the team.
"May I inquire where we are going, sir?" Hyun held up his flight charts. "I need to plan a route."
"South," Min answered.
Hyun frowned. "South, sir? To Australia? New Zealand?"
"No. Straight south. Over the ocean."
"But, with all due respect, sir, there's nothing to the south."
Min turned his coal black eyes on the pilot, cutting him off. "You fly the plane, Captain. Let me worry about everything else. We take off in ten minutes."
Hyun stiffly saluted and retreated into the belly of his plane. Min stepped back and ran his eyes along the silhouette of the Soviet-made IL-18. It was an old plane, built in the late fifties. Four large propeller engines mounted on its wings reminded him of an old style airliner. With the plane many years obsolete, the Russians had dumped it on their so-called North Korean allies in exchange for desperately needed hard currency. The plane was the way Min and his fellow commandos had traveled to the small dirt runway on this island, and it was their only way out and back to North Korea.
Kim snapped to attention before him. "All loaded, sir!"
Min nodded. "Let us board then and take off."
Antarctica
Tai worked the small tractor's plow, carefully scraping away slivers of ice from the blockage. She wished the corridors were large enough to bring the bulldozer out from storage. She was sure that would have punched through in no time. As it was, the small tractor was very difficult to maneuver in the narrow confines of the west tunnel. She enjoyed doing work that didn't require thinking. As long as she concentrated on the task at hand she could keep the dark thoughts at bay. Despite her protestations to Vaughn, she felt like she was flying blind here, not sure who or what to believe.
The other members of the party—minus Brothers, who was seated in the mess hall reading a book—were standing in back of her, shovels in hand and waiting. Easing down on the accelerator, Tai pushed the corner of the plow blade into the ice. She'd been at it now for fifteen minutes and had worked through almost five feet of ice and snow. Of course, she reminded herself, they might not find anything on the other side. The ice also might have crushed everything behind the cave-in.
After scraping off another six inches, she dropped the blade, drew back the debris and piled it against the wall of Unit B1. She rolled forward again and dug in the blade. The tractor suddenly lurched, and Tai had to slam on the brakes as the blade broke through. She backed off and shut down the engine.
Vaughn came forward with a flashlight and shined the light through the hole. They could see wood planking on the other side—the continuation of the west corridor.
"Shovel time," Vaughn said. The others came forward, and they carefully began enlarging the hole Tai had punched.
When it was large enough for a person to go through, Vaughn gestured for Tai to lead the way. She slid through, followed by Vaughn, Logan, Smithers, and Burke. They moved up to where the west corridor met a north one. Vaughn went to the door of Unit A1 and swung it open. The five stepped inside. The glow of their flashlights lit up a well-equipped arms room.
Vaughn tried the light switch on the off chance a power cable from the rest of the base might still be functioning, but got nothing. He walked along the racks, noting the weapons. Two dozen M-1 rifles in mint condition. Some old .30 caliber machine guns and .45 caliber pistols. The walls of the unit were stacked with ammunition for the weapons. It was a gun collector's dream. Vaughn noted several cases of explosives.
"Why did they need all this down here?" Logan asked as he picked up a pistol.
"To prepare for anything," Vaughn said, picking up an M-1 rifle.
Vaughn put the rifle down as he spotted a door on the side of the unit facing to the west. None of the other units had had such a door. He went to it and tried the handle. It was locked.
Tai came up. "What do you think?" she asked, nodding toward the door.
"We haven't found them yet," Vaughn said. He grabbed one of the .45 pistols and loaded it. Then he went to the door and fired three rounds through the lock, startling the others.
"Damn, what's wrong with you?" Logan demanded.
Vaughn ignored them as he shoved the door open. He shined his flashlight through, revealing a large ice chamber, about one hundred feet wide by two hundred long. He immediately saw six crates, four of them very large, two of them somewhat smaller. Stenciled on the outside were the words: MACHINED GOODS. Beyond those six crates were numerous smaller crates, stacked on top of each other, filling the entire space.
Pure bullshit, Vaughn thought as he walked up to one of the large crates. He turned and grabbed a bayonet off one of the shelves. He pulled the blade free and went up to the nearest large crate, placed the point under it and, putting his body weight on it, levered up. With a loud screech the top moved a half an inch.
"What did you find?" Logan asked as he and Tai came in and watched.
"I don't know," Vaughn grunted as he pushed again. He slid the blade around and carefully applied pressure every foot or so. Slowly the top lifted. Vaughn put his fingers under the lid and pulled up. The top popped off, and he pushed it to the side. A large, gray, cylindrical object, rounded at one end and with fins at the other, was inside, resting on a wood cradle.
"They put a fucking bomb in here?" Logan exclaimed.
Vaughn bent over to examine it with a growing feeling of coldness in his stomach. Lansale's papers had indicated this would be what they found, but he hadn't truly believed it. A serial number was stamped on a small metal plate, halfway down the casing. Vaughn read the ID and then slowly straightened.
"It's an MK-17 thermonuclear weapon," he said. He pointed with the bayonet at the other three large cases. "Four altogether."
"Fuck," Logan said.
"What's in the smaller two cases marked 'Heavy Equipment'?" Tai asked. "And the rest?"
"Probably not party supplies," Vaughn said as he went over to one. He pried it open. Another, smaller, bomb. He checked the serial number. "Each nuclear weapon has a special serial number—this one also has the proper designator for a nuclear weapon. If I remember rightly, this looks like an MK/B 61, which is a pretty standard nuclear payload for planes back in the fifties." He looked back at Logan in the dim light cast by their flashlights. "You may know something about nuclear reactors, but I know about nuclear weapons, and that's a goddamn nuclear weapon."
"How do you know so much about nuclear weapons?" Logan asked as he came over and looked into the crate.
Vaughn pointed his flashlight at the bomb. "I was on a nuke team for a little while when I first arrived in the 10th Special Forces Group. A nuke team had the mission to emplace a tactical ADM—that's atomic demolitions munitions. We were supposed to infiltrate behind enemy lines, put the bomb in the right spot, arm it and then get the hell out before it blew."
"What about the rest of the crates?" Tai asked.
Vaughn walked to the stacks of crates past the bombs. There were at least a thousand of these of varying sizes and shapes. He opened one and saw three paintings, carefully wrapped inside. He glanced at Tai. "The Golden Lily. Or at least part of it."
Logan whistled as he broke open a small crate and pulled out a bar of gold. "There must be millions of dollars worth of stuff here."
"Yo!" Burke called out. He was farther in the cavern and pointing at a stack of crates. They had swastikas stenciled on the sides. "How the hell did these get here?"
"Who knows?" Vaughn said as he pried open the top to one. He froze when he saw what was inside.
"What the hell is that?"
Vaughn carefully pulled out one of the gray metal canisters. "Sarin nerve agent. The Nazis developed it during the war." He looked around. There were at least twenty similar crates. "God knows what other deadly stuff is in here, mixed with the treasure." He put the canister back in the crate.
"There's enough WMD stuff in here—" Tai began, then shook her head. "This is a cluster-fuck. Why would someone put all this here? And how did it get here? I think MacIntosh would have said something to us if he'd seen any of this coming in."
"These two newer nukes had to be put in here in the sixties or seventies," Vaughn said. "Lansale must have kept moving stuff down here over the years."
"But why?" Tai asked.
"Got me," Vaughn responded.
Logan seemed mesmerized by the cold gray steel of the nuclear weapon. "You said you knew quite a bit about nuclear weapons. Can that thing be detonated?"
Vaughn closed his eyes briefly, trying to remember. "There are a lot of safeties on a nuclear weapon. We used to have to pass a test every three months that required us to flawlessly complete forty-three separate steps to emplace and arm our nuke.
"On your standard nuclear weapon you've got an enable plug, ready/safe switch, separation timer, pulse thermal batteries, pulse battery actuator, time delay switch, and a whole bunch of other things that all have to be done correctly. Despite all that, though, if someone knows what they're doing, and they have enough time to tinker with it, I have no doubt that they could initiate it, except for one thing. You can't even begin without—" He stopped and blinked.
"What one thing?" Tai asked, finally looking up from the bomb.
Vaughn turned and headed out of the unit.
"Where are you going?" Logan yelled. When he didn't answer, they followed.
Vaughn made his way directly to the mess hall. Brothers looked up as he stormed in and grabbed the blue binder off the counter. He thumbed through, turning to the index. He had started reading it from the beginning when he'd found it earlier and only gotten halfway through. Now he ran his finger down the index as the others crowded around. It stopped at a section labeled: EMERGENCY PROCEDURES.
Vaughn rapidly flipped through until he found the section. There was a page that referred them to the operating manual for the reactor in the power room if there were any problems with it. The second page talked about getting the tractors out of the east ice storage room using the ramps. The third page was a handwritten note. Vaughn recognized the handwriting from the note that had been taped to the outside of the binder:
THE PALS AND ARMING INSTRUCTIONS ARE IN THE SAFE.
LANSALE.
Vaughn closed his eyes. "Oh fuck!"
"What does that mean?" Tai asked as she looked over his shoulder.
Vaughn opened his eyes and looked at her. "Let's go out in the hallway." He led Tai and Logan out, taking the binder with him. "As I was telling you—if someone knows what they're doing, they can get by all the safeties on those bombs but one. The first and most critical safety is the permissive access link, or PAL. That's the code that allows you to even begin to arm the bomb. The code and bomb are never kept together, for security reasons. The MK/B has a multiple code six-digit, coded switch with limited try followed by lockout. That means you get two shots at the right codes, and if you get it wrong both times, you don't get a third shot—the bomb shuts down."
Vaughn stabbed his finger down at the paper. "Except it appears that the PALs for those two newer bombs are here in the base." He turned back to the index and scanned. "Here." He turned to the correct page, where a diagram of a unit was displayed. "The safe with the PAL codes and arming instructions is located in Unit A2."
CHAPTER 10
Antarctica
"Latest weather from McMurdo calls for at least another twenty-four to forty-eight hours of this storm," Brothers informed the group gathered around the mess table. "I took a look outside about ten minutes ago and couldn't see more than five feet from the door. The wind is howling out there."
The warm air from the overhead heaters blew gently across Tai as she looked about the room. They had discovered the base. They had discovered the four MK-17s and two, newer weapons. They'd found nerve agents and stolen treasure. Yet they still weren't any closer to knowing what or who exactly the Organization was. They'd tried the safe, but it was locked tight, and they didn't have the combination, which seemed to make Vaughn a bit calmer about the whole thing. Tai had her doubts about the viability of the nuclear weapons, but she had to trust that Vaughn had more experience in that area.
Everyone was exhausted, that was obvious. "I suggest we all get some sleep," Tai said. "When we get up, I'd like to dig out the west tunnel and completely open it up to Unit A1." Most of the group headed off to the quarters, but Vaughn remained behind, as Tai had expected.
"What do you think?" she asked.
"I think we got a problem," Vaughn said. "We didn't find out anything more about the Organization, and I'm getting the feeling this whole place was a setup by Lansale, an ace in the hole, almost literally. I'm worried about the bombs. They worry me a lot. Because we're the ones who are sitting on them now."
Tai sighed. "What should we do about them?"
"I don't know," Vaughn said. "It's weird, but the people who built this place and put those weapons down here are probably all retired or dead now. Why do you think no one has been down here in so long? Why do you think the batteries on the transponder were dead?"
"Do you really think those weapons could still work?"
"The MK-17s? Probably not. The MK/B, fifty-fifty. And even if they don't work, they still have their cores. A lot of people would love to get their hands on those."
"What kind of damage could those MK/Bs do?"
Vaughn shook his head. "That depends."
"On what?"
"On what they're set at. I think the MK/B has four settings for yield, ranging from ten to five hundred kilotons. So it depends on what it's set at."
"You mean you can change the power of the bomb by flipping a switch?"
Vaughn gave her a weak smile. "Pretty neat, huh? The theory is, the bomb is set for required yield prior to a mission depending on the target profile. I'm sure there's an access panel on the casing that opens to that control. I for one don't plan on messing with it."
"Well, say, what will a ten kiloton blast do?" Tai felt somewhat embarrassed to be asking since she felt she ought to know more about the subject, but the military branch she'd been in was more focused on the war on terror than on nuclear weapons.
"A kiloton is equal to a thousand tons of TNT. So 10K is ten thousand tons of TNT. If it blew here, ten kilotons would take this base out, but not much more than that as far as blast goes."
Vaughn leaned back in the chair as he went on. "There are five effects of a nuclear explosion. Most people only think of two—the blast and the radiation. The blast, which is the kinetic energy, uses about half the energy of the bomb. That's what blows things up. It's the shock wave of compressed air that radiates out from the bomb at supersonic speed. If the bomb goes off underground, that wave is muffled, but it takes out whatever it blows near, creating a crater. If it's an air burst or above the surface, then the blast does more damage. You not only have to worry about the original wave but also the high winds that are then generated by the overpressure. We're talking winds of over two hundred miles an hour, so it can be pretty destructive.
"There are two types of radiation: prompt and delayed. Prompt is that which is immediately generated by the explosion, and it uses about five percent of the energy of the bomb. It's in the form of gamma rays, neutrons, and beta particles. We measure those in rads. Six hundred rads and you have a ninety percent chance of dying in three to four weeks."
"How many rads would these bombs put out?" Tai asked.
Vaughn shrugged. "I can't answer that. It depends on the strength of the blast, whether it goes off in the air or underground, and your relative location to ground zero. Plus how well shielded you are. Usually, you'll die of blast or thermal before you have to worry about prompt radiation
"If you survive the initial effects, the real one you usually have to worry about is delayed—also known as fallout. However, with the strong winds down here, the fallout will get dispersed over quite a large area. The other good side of that is that there isn't anybody down here to be affected by it. In a more populated and less windy area, fallout can be devastating.
"The other two effects are thermal and electromagnetic pulse. Thermal causes quite a bit of damage in built-up areas because it starts fires. The flash will blind and burn you even before the blast wave reaches, if you're exposed to it. Thermal uses up about one-third of the energy of the bomb.
"Electro-magnetic pulse, known as EMP, is the one effect that few people know about. When the bomb goes off, it sends out electromagnetic waves, just like radio, except thousands of times stronger. That wave will destroy most electronics in its path for quite a long distance."
Vaughn continued, even though it was obvious he was depressed dredging all this information up. "The bottom line is that no one really knows exactly what effect nuclear weapons will have on people. There are too many variables. The only times they've ever been used against people—at Hiroshima and Nagasaki—were so long ago, and those bombs were so different from the MK/B and even the MK-17 thermonuclear ones, that the data is not very valid.
"I think Nikita Khrushchev, surprisingly enough, summed up the effect of nuclear war quite well. He said the survivors would envy the dead."
Tai and Vaughn were silent for a few moments. Then Vaughn tried to smile. "We used to have debates in the team room about our nuclear mission. Most guys were worried about simple and more personal things like whether the firing delay we had been told was in our ADMs was actually there. Most of the team believed that once we emplaced and initiated our bombs, they'd go off immediately. The figuring was that if the team managed to successfully emplace the bomb and arm it, the powers-that-be wouldn't take the chance on an hour delay to let the team get to safety."
"What about if there's a fire down here?" Tai asked. "Would those bombs go off?"
"The MK/B has thermal safety devices that would prevent accidental detonation due to fire," Vaughn replied.
"Do you think we should open the safe?" Tai asked.
Vaughn shook his head. "I looked at it. It's set in the ground and requires a combination. We don't have that. I recommend we don't mess with it. We've got the bombs. You don't need the codes."