At the same time, the explosion produced a massive shock wave that traveled at almost a thousand miles an hour, faster than the speed of sound. In other words, the blast hit before its victims could hear it coming. The wave was far stronger than the biggest tornado or hurricane, leveling buildings and tearing people to shreds. For the first half-mile from the epicenter of the blast, no human being or animal, no matter how well protected, could survive.
Along with the shock wave and the fireball came a blast of radiation. The splitting of the uranium atoms released gamma rays, high-energy particles that ricocheted through the body like tiny bullets, killing cells and damaging DNA. The rays attacked the entire body, but they were especially damaging to soft tissue and marrow. The most heavily dosed victims suffered acute radiation sickness and bled out, hemorrhaging through their skin. Other victims seemed fine for the first few weeks after the explosion. Then their hair fell out, their skin sloughed off as if they were rattlesnakes molting, their stomachs turned into bloody sinkholes. Unable to eat or drink, they starved to death. And even at relatively low doses, the radiation could kill years later by causing leukemia and lymphoma.
Bashir wasn’t afraid of bloody viscera or broken bones, of puncture wounds or charred flesh. He’d been a surgeon for seven years, long enough to see all manner of horrors. An old man whose glasses had melted to his face because he’d tried to save a few dollars fixing his hot water heater himself, instead of hiring a mechanic. A motorcyclist who’d had both legs and his pelvis crushed by an SUV. Worst of all, an eleven-year-old boy who’d fallen off the roof of his house during a Fourth of July barbecue and had the terrible luck to puncture his stomach and chest on a wrought-iron fence. The firefighters and EMTs worried that the kid would bleed out if they pulled him off the spikes, so they cut the fence and brought him to the hospital with the iron still in him. He was wearing a Transformers T-shirt, Bashir remembered, and with the spikes sticking out, the shirt looked like a novelty gift gone wrong. The medics hadn’t wanted to give the boy painkillers for fear of putting him into shock. When he arrived in the operating room, he was too frightened or in too much pain or both to talk. He just nodded when Bashir told him they were going to fix him, but they’d have to hold him down to get him free of the spikes. They’d put a mouth-guard in to protect his teeth and his tongue and started to pull. But the iron in his abdomen was in deeper than they’d imagined, into the muscle behind the stomach, and the kid screamed until his eyes rolled up and he fell unconscious, foam flecked at the corner of his mouth. The boy had lived, but Bashir would never forget the way he screamed. Or that when they finally wormed out the spike, bits of partially digested corn kernels were stuck to its prongs.
In his years as a surgeon, he’d saved a few lives. But this bomb would undo the good he’d done a thousand times over. The deaths would come by the hundreds of thousands, a poet’s nightmare vision of the apocalypse. Only this inferno existed outside the pages of the Quran or the Bible. This jerry-rigged monster they were building from a few pieces of uranium and steel,
it was real.
No matter that they were in a hundred-year-old stable instead of a laboratory surrounded by guards and barbed wire. The physics of a nuclear explosion were the same here as in Los Alamos. They didn’t need security guards, or thousands of engineers and scientists, or a billion-dollar budget. If they had enough uranium, and they pushed it together into a critical mass quickly enough, they would get a nuclear explosion. Full stop.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki had shocked the world so much that for two generations nations had come together to prevent another nuclear blast. They’d built tens of thousands of bombs. But they’d never again used one, not against civilians, not even on enemy armies. Not the Americans, not the Russians, not the Indians or the Pakistanis. Not even the Jews. They’d all kept the genie inside the bottle.
Now Bashir and Nasiji and Yusuf, and a few other men whose names he didn’t even know, were going to break the taboo. Who were they to cast the world’s wisdom aside? They weren’t presidents or kings or prime ministers. They weren’t imams whose names were known by pious Muslims around the world. They weren’t even famous generals. They were a few men who’d gotten their hands on a few precious kilograms of highly enriched uranium. Now they were going to use it. They weren’t going to declare war, or warn anyone what was coming. And though they had only one bomb, Nasiji was hoping to use it to start a much bigger conflict, Bashir knew.
Yet . . . why should they hold themselves to a higher standard than the United States, which hadn’t warned civilians out of Hiroshima or Nagasaki before it vaporized those cities? And why shouldn’t America pay for its crimes?
They’re at war with us. They kill us in ones and twos and sometimes by the hundreds. Shouldn’t we be at war with them?
And the struggle long predated the invasion of Iraq. Since the first Crusade, Christians had tried to destroy Islam.
Bashir knew he was running in circles now. He’d been arguing with himself for three days, the same words and phrases chasing each other through his head.
Hiroshima. Abu Ghraib. Radiation poisoning. Crusaders. Leukemia. Hiroshima
—again, but this time as an argument for giving the Americans a taste of their own medicine.
More than anything, Bashir wished he could talk to his uncle Ayman’s friends in the Muslim Brotherhood. They were wise men, honest and pious, not prone to excess, and deeply knowledgeable about the Quran and the sayings of the Prophet. If even one of them approved this mission Bashir wouldn’t have worried. But he couldn’t ask them what they thought. And he couldn’t raise any of his doubts with Nasiji or Yusuf. Whatever had happened to Nasiji’s family in Iraq, and Bashir knew only the outlines of the story, it had erased any reservations Nasiji might once have had. As for Yusuf . . . Yusuf was a perfect jihadi. He would kill until he was killed and expect heaven as his reward.
No, talking about this with Nasiji and Yusuf wouldn’t be wise. That left him with Thalia, but Thalia was a child. He would have to figure this out for himself. In the meantime, he saw no alternative but to keep working on the bomb.
“BASHIR!” NASIJI SAID SHARPLY.
“It was ready five minutes ago. How much longer are you planning to stir it?”
Bashir pulled himself from Hiroshima and focused on the forge. Distracted by his thoughts, he’d been stirring the steel with a tungsten carbide pole to improve its consistency. Now it was ready to be poured.
“Of course, Sayyid.”
Bashir set aside the pole and grabbed a set of tungsten tongs. He reached down into the furnace and squeezed the tongs tightly around the pot. Waves of heat blasted under his face shield and gloves.
Nasiji wrapped a second set of tongs around the pot. “Careful, Doctor. No spills. One hundred kilos”—220 pounds—“of this stuff might itch a bit.”
“Yes,” Bashir said, thinking of the charred skin he’d seen on the Hiroshima burn victims. “On three. One. Two. Three.”
They lifted the pot and took three steps to a spherical mold eighteen inches in diameter, made of high-purity ceramic. A second, smaller mold fit inside the first, to create the space for the artillery tube and the uranium plug. Bashir had sintered the molds—fused them from a powder of ceramic particles—in the vacuum furnace the day before.
“We pour on three. One. Two. Three.”
Slowly they poured the steel into the mold, their fourth pour so far. When they were done the mold was about half full. The tamper would be finished by late that afternoon. Once it had cooled, Bashir would cast the two pieces of the explosive pit—the narrow cylinder that fit inside the tamper and the larger piece, shaped like a pipe, that they fired at the cylinder and slid over it. The two shapes were relatively simple, but making sure they fit together smoothly was crucial. Before he cast the pit out of uranium, he planned to take a practice run using a steel ingot. Once he’d finished the pieces of the dummy steel pit, they would weld the steel cylinder into the tamper, then weld the muzzle of the recoilless rifle into the hole at the top of the sphere.
Once the muzzle had been attached, probably no later than tomorrow afternoon, they would fire a water glass at the plug, a test to make sure the two pieces fit together properly and that the barrel of the rifle wouldn’t explode from the stress. Nasiji had insisted on the practice test. They could make another tamper easily, he said. And Bashir hadn’t objected. Anything to give him more time.
THAT NIGHT NASIJI AND YUSUF
left to check their e-mail accounts, something they’d done every couple of days since they arrived, never going to the same Internet café, or even the same town, twice. When they came home, Nasiji was smiling.
“I need you to put together a second mold, Bashir,” he said. “One that has space for a beryllium reflector. It’s easy: it fits between the uranium pit and the tamper. I’ll show you the design.”
“We’re getting the beryllium, then?”
“No guarantees. But it’s promising. Our contact says he’s received ten kilos of it and thinks the rest will come soon.”
“When will we know?”
“You’ll know when I tell you.”
TWO DAYS LATER,
while Bashir tinkered with the design of the molds, Nasiji and Yusuf drove to Rochester and came back with a Sony digital video camera, a tripod, and even a spotlight. Then they disappeared into the basement. Bashir asked them what they were doing, but Nasiji was oddly coy. “My second career,” he said. “With Yusuf as the producer.”
The next morning, Nasiji called Bashir downstairs. The camera and spotlight were set in front of an Iraqi flag.
“I didn’t want to tell you beforehand,” he said. “I wanted you to see it with fresh eyes.” With a theatrical flourish, he flipped open the laptop and started the media player.
The video opened with Nasiji, sitting cross-legged in front of an Iraqi flag, red and white and green. He was dressed in Western clothes—jeans and a blue button-down shirt. He sat on the floor, a dagger sheathed on his hip, a beatific smile on his face, looking like a yoga instructor from hell.
“My name is Sayyid Nasiji. I was born in Baghdad, Iraq. With my own eyes, I have seen the destruction the Americans have brought to Iraq. With my own eyes, I have seen the bodies of my father and mother and sister and brothers. I represent the Army of the Believers,” he said in Arabic. “For many years we have waited for this day. We and all true Muslims. Now we have brought the wrath of Allah on the
kaffirs.
The shortest path to freedom is the path that sheds blood far and wide. And we are not afraid of blood.”
Nasiji drew the dagger that was on his hip and scraped the blade across a cutting stone.
Scrape. Scrape.
Tiny sparks flew off the edge of the knife.
“America thought we could only use knives and guns. America thought we could not make the special weapon, that we hadn’t the technology. And I cannot lie. Anyone who tries to build such a weapon faces great difficulties. So you may ask, where did this bomb come from?”
A new image filled the screen: Grigory, sitting on a couch, a black sheet as background. The video that Yusuf had filmed in Russia, two nights before he killed Grigory and Tajid.
“My name is Grigory Farzadov,” he said in Russian. “I am an engineer at the Mayak nuclear weapons plant in Ozersk, Russia.” Grigory held up his plant security identification and his Russian passport. As he spoke, the camera’s focus tightened on his identification. “Several months ago I was approached by a group of men who told me that they wanted to steal a nuclear bomb and asked for my help. Naturally, I reported this action to my supervisor, Garry Pliakov. He is deputy manager of operations at Mayak. A week later, Garry told me that he wanted me to help the smugglers steal the bomb. He told me I was to provide the smugglers the codes to activate the weapon. I asked him why we should take this action. He told me that President Medvedev himself had made the decision and I was not to question it. He told me that if I did not do as I was told, I would be tried for treason. Naturally, I did not argue. I still do not understand why, but we have given the men the bomb.”
“Do you think Grigory is lying?” Nasiji said.
Then an image of the warhead, lying on its side on the dirt floor of the stable. The camera focused on the Cyrillic lettering atop the warhead.
“There is your answer,” Nasiji said. “This bomb comes from Russia. The Russian government gave it to us. Could we have broken into the Mayak plant ourselves? Could we have discovered the codes ourselves? Of course not. We were given this bomb. And the Russians, they knew where we planned to use it. Remember this, America, when you are deciding what to do next. Now, I do not know why the Russians gave us this weapon. Probably they intend to attack you for themselves and are using us as a mask. Probably they didn’t expect that we would expose them this way.
“But we want you to understand what’s happened, America. We want you to know that it isn’t just Muslims who are finished with you. It’s Russians, Chinese, everyone. Everyone sees how you rule the world. Everyone wants you to pull back your armies and let us live in peace. This explosion is divine retribution for all the evil that you have committed. Do not forget your sins, America. Remember that we Muslims want to live in peace with you. We have blown up this bomb because you’ve given us no choice. You must decide what action to take next. But do not retaliate. Understand this lesson and make peace with the world.”
Nasiji stood and raised the dagger, holding the tip to his neck.
“You can never stop us, America. For a thousand years, we have died for Islam. If we must, we will die for a thousand more. Nothing frightens us. Now, please, take this moment to change your path.”