There would also be some who would not.
* * *
“Sir, one can’t just pick up a phone and dial Russian Air Defense Headquarters,” Bud explained. “Whoever cut Marshal Kurchatov off knew that.”
“But why, Bud?”
“We can’t be certain.” The NSA was standing. He had too much energy built up to sit. “But it cannot be good.”
“You would think they’d want someone watching our missiles at a time like this,” the President said. “I guess this means I wasn’t too convincing.”
“You were at a disadvantage.”
“And just how did Konovalenko know about Kneecap, and about Granger on board?”
Bud knew the question was not directed at him. It was simply asked in wonder. But he felt compelled to offer some sort of explanation, or a supposition of such. “Mr. President, when things happen as fast as they have been on this, things get said. Things are overheard. The press digs things up, just like the
Post
and ABC have today. Leaks happen, and all it would take is some ‘agricultural officer’ from the Russian embassy to be in the right place at an opportune time.”
“So I get waylaid by the Russians, and everything I tell them then sounds like an after-the-fact rebuttal to their concerns.” The President turned his chair left and right as he thought. “This is beginning to scare me, Bud. I thought when we figured that Castro’s target would be Moscow, we could breathe a little, but now I’m not so sure. If the Russians don’t believe us about this...”
“Sir, President Konovalenko would not do anything rash,” Bud said with confidence. “He is not a reactionary. But he is cautious. He did not walk into the modernization program without questions, and he did not proceed without answers that he found satisfactory. He is not who we have to be concerned about.”
The President scowled as he thought of the men his NSA was referring to. “Those people never see the writing on the wall, do they? They just keep looking to the past for some kind of salvation from the hardships of undoing the damage done over three-fourths of a century. I’ll tell you, Bud. I have more respect for Konovalenko each and every damn day he keeps pushing ahead, despite the polls and the threats from the hard-liners.”
“He may need you to cheerlead very soon, sir.”
The President wasn’t sure that would be the right thing to do. Or the timely thing. “No, Bud. We did that for him once before, but he didn’t have his defense minister over here incommunicado then. This is more serious, meaning we have to step further in if he needs and wants it.” He caught sight of the tan desk phone. “Maybe we can do something to reverse the situation.”
Bud saw the beginnings of a satisfied smile as the President picked up the phone.
“And this may be the way to do it,” the President said, twisting the receiver in his hand. “Bud, get the translator in here.”
* * *
Sean found Joe giving his equipment a final check in the privacy of an empty office off the hangar the Pave Hawk had been rolled into. For the work that lay ahead, and for any work involving the kind of shit that Anderson dealt with, for that matter, the major had expected to see the type of highly sophisticated, hideously expensive equipment that the physicist had used during the previous pairing of their talents. What he saw was quite the opposite.
“You ready for another run with us, Anderson?” Sean asked. It was an idle question, breaking the inherent seriousness of the moment. And a moment was about all they had for such luxuries. Delta and their special passenger would be departing very shortly.
Joe rolled his two pieces of electronic equipment into padded cloths and placed them carefully in the rigid black case, filling half its volume. The tools that would take the remainder of the space lay in a neat row before him. “I’d rather be fishin’.”
“Yeah, we all would,” Sean said honestly. His eyes studied the odd mix of hardware lying in front of the kneeling Anderson. “Pretty low tech.”
Joe looked up. “I don’t need lasers to do what I’ve gotta do.”
“I guess not, but a hammer? A handpick?”
“You forgot the pry bar,” Joe said. “Look, any physicist worth his salt could sit you down and go into the most excruciating detail on how to design and build a nuclear bomb. There is nothing magical about it. It’s just hard to do. But ask one of those same brainiacs what to do if the thing goes haywire and has to be defused, and you know what their reaction would be? They’d try and over engineer what needs to be done. Every damn gadget they had access to would somehow find its way into the process. But RSP ain’t that difficult.”
“RSP?” Sean inquired.
“That’s right. You mainly play with guns and little things that go boom. Render Safe Procedures. It’s EOD—that’s explosive ordnance detail—acrospeak. And RSP for the thing we’re going after does not need any fancy gadgets. I’ve got an ammeter to show me where the current is flowing, a high-speed saw to cut through anything getting in my way, and these babies.”
Sean snickered. “You look like you’re better set up for demolition than defusing.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Huh?”
Joe paused, thinking of what he was about to do very quickly. “I’m going to tell you something that I would definitely go to prison for, but then that would be a waste of space. I’ve already got a death sentence.”
Sean lowered himself to the floor.
“Nineteen Eighty-four, Francis E. Warren Air Force Base, Hotel Flight, Missile number ten.”
“This is the one you told me about on the plane last year,” Sean said.
“I didn’t tell you anything,” Joe corrected him. “You came to your own conclusions from some innocent remarks on my part. This is the real thing, from the old mare’s mouth.”
“ ‘Need to know,’ Anderson,” Sean said with a joking wariness. “The walls might have ears.”
“Then hear this, walls,” Joe said loudly, his tone coming down to continue. “We damn near had a Minuteman Three warhead go off. The LCC got a nonresponsive ‘launch enable’ report, then, before they could check the circuits, they received a ‘launch execute’ light. Now these blue suits were really starting to sweat. The commander of the Ninetieth Strategic Missile Wing called in one of his emergency response teams and sent them, in their APC, to the silo and had them park the damn thing on the lid. If a launch actually occurred, the APC would have fallen in when the blast door slid away and disabled the missile...or so they hoped.
“But there was no launch. The press reported it as a ‘computer malfunction.’ Believable enough, but not the truth.”
“What was?”
“The truth was that the arming package on one of the three warheads zapped out for some reason. Bad inspection and maintenance procedures, we figured out later. About a minute after the APC was parked on top of the silo, the LCC got a ‘missile away’ report. Talk about shitting your pants. Well, there was no missile away, but the computers wouldn’t believe that. You see, our ICBMs have a downlink-only telemetry package on them that transmits back to the LCC, and through them to the associated headquarters, a diagnostic on the warheads for two minutes after launch. By that time the thing should be armed. If it isn’t, then the boys who target the things have to scratch one set of MIRVs from their roster. Not that I ever thought it would matter. I mean, in a nuclear war, a few misses really don’t mean much except to the bean counters who keep track of the megatons.”
“Sustainable war,” Sean said.
“Exactly. They want to know if they have to retarget something if the thing doesn’t arm. Anyway, the computers kept saying that the thing was armed. Well, guess what? It was.”
“No shit, Anderson. You’re serious?”
Joe laughed, thinking back to it. “Those were my words when CINCSAC filled me in on the ‘problem.’ So, I had to go into the silo through an access tunnel and, well, use a little reverse engineering.” Joe spread his hands across the line of hand tools.
“You mean you just took it apart?”
“Took it apart?” Joe parroted, surprised at the question but knowing that he shouldn’t be. The major dealt with precision in his operating methods and was assuming that Joe did the same. “Hell, no. I tore the fucker apart. Cut the wires, broke the explosive lenses into little chunks. Man, I did a job on that thing. And CINCSAC wanted to know why I ‘messed up’ one of his three-hundred-and-thirty-five-KT bombs. Can you believe that? I told him to shove it. He thought he’d have my ass in a sling for destroying his warhead and talking to him like that, but I got a presidential citation—classified, of course—for it, and he got the boot for letting the maintenance schedule on his birds get so slipshod that this could happen.”
Sean laughed quietly, his head shaking and his arms wrapped around his knees where he sat. If anyone could talk to a CINC like that, there was no better candidate for it than Anderson. Only a civilian had a chance of surviving such an egregious breach of etiquette and decorum. Military men, particularly career officers like the major, hated the upper-echelon bullshit that frequently interfered in the execution of what was necessary, but few were willing to trade their uniforms for a few choice words with a bozo wearing brass.
“I would have loved to see that,” Sean said, the last bit of laughter trailing off. “So you figure this one will be armed.”
“It doesn’t matter one way or the other,” Joe answered. He began rolling the tools into the black cloth they lay on. “I’ve got to get to the pit in any case.”
“The pit?”
“The plutonium,” Joe explained, setting the remainder of his gear in the hard case and snapping the lid shut.
“Old Soviet warheads were what we called ‘sealed-pit’ designs. That means there’s no access to the sphere of Plutonium that’s the first-stage core of the thing. The explosive lenses that focus the implosion on it to compress it to supercriticality are sealed, meaning I have to cut or break through them to get the thing out.”
“Out?” Sean said warily.
“Yeah. What did you think, we’d just bring the whole warhead back with us? That thing weighs at least a ton and a half, and from what you’ve told me, I won’t have time to do a surgical removal of the whole thing. This is going to be a crude extraction with no anesthesia, Major.”
The reality of what to do with the thing once it had been neutralized hadn’t hit Sean completely until right then. “And it’s coming back with us.”
“You got it. Just think of it as a big nickel-plated basketball that weighs about as much as ten bowling balls,” Joe said. “The rest of the stuff we leave. It’s of little use without the first stage.”
“I guess I should have taken one of those physics lessons you mentioned,” Sean said.
Joe decided a quick one was in order. “Stage one is the plutonium bomb, in simple terms. Running from stage one is a rod of uranium surrounded by lithium-deuteride and an outer skin of more uranium. Neutrons released when stage one goes supercritical ignite the uranium rod and skin, causing a massive flood of neutrons into the lithium-deuteride assembly. Voila! Fusion. A thermonuclear explosion. That’s the basic course, so don’t go out and try to build your own without more instruction.”
“No problem there,” Sean said. “So you leave the second stage?”
“Right. One reason is that it’s too dangerous to get in to remove the uranium. You see, lithium deuteride is pyrophoric, which means it ignites spontaneously in contact with oxygen. Plutonium is also, but the pit is encased in another material, usually nickel, which isolates it from any pyrophoric reaction. To get to the uranium initiator rod, I’d have to go
through
the lithium deuteride, and unless you can get me and it into a vacuum chamber, then it ain’t gonna happen. We don’t need that stuff burning.”
Visions of Chernobyl came to Sean. “No, I guess we can do without the fallout.”
Joe chuckled at the dual meaning of the major’s observation. “A comedian and a killer. Man, you’re talented.”
“Maj, time to boogie,” Lieutenant Duc said as he walked through the slightly parted hangar doors.
“Need a hand with that?” Sean asked.
Joe gladly put the handle of the forty-pound case into the major’s outstretched hand. “You young ‘uns is so polite.”
“Gotta be nice to our elders,” Sean said with a smile.
Joe returned the expression and walked to the Pave Hawk with Delta’s XO. Ten minutes later, after loading and securing their gear, the nine Delta troopers and their civilian specialist joined the four crewmen aboard the MH-60K. With no reason for delay the black-and-green bird, which bore no external markings, lifted into the warm afternoon air and headed out over the rippling blue surface of the Atlantic Ocean. Ten miles out the Pave Hawk turned southeast. The first leg of its journey would take it north of the Bahamas before it turned due south to meet up with its tanker east of Cuba.
Once again, the real thing had begun.
* * *
“We are ready, General,” the Cuban lieutenant reported smartly, his hand jerking up and down in an overdone salute.
“How long now?” Asunción asked. Looking at the grotesque tangle of newly welded pipes, he would not have been surprised to hear a year as an estimate.
“Six hours,” the lieutenant answered. “Possibly slightly more, but I do not think so.”
The crack of several explosions reverberated from between the buildings. These did not come from across the bay, however. They were emanating from the north.
“Go ahead. And quickly. I want no more delays.”
The lieutenant waited for the general to walk away before summoning the crew of the pump-equipped tank truck. “You will see to the pumping of all the NTO. Is that clear?”
“Yes, Lieutenant,” the crewmen responded willingly, though why they had to be responsible for
every
driver’s load was beyond them.
“Come on,” the second crewman said as soon as their commander was out of earshot. “The sooner we start, the sooner we’ll be done.”
“You’re too much of an optimist.” He pulled the fueling hose over to the newly installed inflow valve and twisted to the locked position. After he did so, his eyes followed the length of pipe that left the tree and dived underground a few yards away. “Are we pumping that way?”