‘The W80s are stored here,’ said Challis. ‘They’re more compact than B61s; about the size and shape of one of those bulk milk cans folks in the country sometimes use as mailboxes. A few of these milk cans strategically placed and set to a variable yield of a hundred and fifty kilotons and you could probably blow California into the Pacific.’
The colonel looked at me, unsmiling. My nose was very big in those reflective sunglasses lenses. I didn’t like it, almost as much as I didn’t like that I couldn’t tell what he was thinking behind them. We turned right and cruised by a parking area full of weapons trolleys, and then past another partially vacant lot where containers were stacked in neat rows. I glanced behind us. The Explorer with the extra security was bringing up the rear.
Shortly after another right-hand turn, which brought us back onto the road we drove in on, the colonel pulled into an area dominated by three low concrete bunkers and parked beside a collection of Air Force vehicles.
‘This is a C-structure,’ said Challis. ‘Maintenance. Like the igloos, these structures are hardened. Their walls are twelve feet thick, and reinforced with reactive armor plating. They’re secure against all comers, except perhaps a direct hit from a bunker buster with a megaton yield.’
‘How about from someone with a front-door key, sir?’ I said.
‘Unlikely, Mr Cooper.’
We got out of the Lexus, Sailor and Nagel joining us. Challis led the way to the door, which was a solid heavy steel number with no handles, windows, visible hinges or even keyholes. The colonel punched a code into a keypad recessed into the concrete, swiped a card, then stood back to be examined by an array of surveillance cameras. A green light appeared over one of the cameras and the colonel punched in another code.
‘Entry to this facility is managed not by the people inside it but by Munitions Control, which is in another part of the facility entirely. Swipe your cards, please.’
Petinski and I stepped forward and swiped, followed by Sailor and Nagel.
A red light above the door illuminated and began to revolve. A pneumatic hiss followed and the massively thick door, which resembled something from a bank vault, opened. The colonel motioned at Petinski and me to go inside. I followed the investigator into a chamber occupied by two armed senior airmen from 99th Security Forces Squadron, their hands resting on their side arms, which were slightly bigger pistols than the standard issue Beretta M9. Hard to see for sure, but they looked like old-school Colt .45s – my preferred handgun – and still in inventory for when you shot folks you wanted to stay shot.
‘Good afternoon,’ said the colonel.
‘Afternoon, sir,’ both airmen replied.
One of them stepped forward, tall and black, name of Arthurs according to his tag. ‘Please remove the contents of all your pockets,’ he said to Petinski and me. ‘Remove any belts, jewelry, watches and so forth and place all of it in the trays provided. Also, remove your shoes and keep hold of them.’
The colonel didn’t need to be told this and was already turning out his pockets and taking off his wristwatch. Sailor and Nagel withdrew a little to the wall behind us and rested their hands on their weapons – overwatch, in case I stepped out of line and maybe told the one about the chicken that crossed the road.
Arthurs’s senior airman buddy, a young white guy with pallid sunken cheeks, wanded Petinski and got no reaction from the device. He gestured her to one side and gave me the treatment. No reaction. The colonel was up next and the wand picked up a paperclip in his breast pocket.
‘Apologies,’ he said, dropping it in a tray.
‘Happens to the best of us, sir,’ said Arthurs, straight-faced.
More code entering, card swiping and red flashing lights and another heavy door opened into a large garage-style area occupied by various machinery I couldn’t identify on benchtops, a bomb trolley, and several large black Kevlar containers side by side on the concrete floor. Overhead was a medium-weight gantry crane. This could have been a machine shop for a high-end engineering firm.
The colonel led the way to a steel wall in which there was a line of slots at head height. ‘Take a look,’ he told us.
Petinski and I took a slot each. Through thick green-tinged glass I could see four people dressed in heavy coveralls working on what reminded me of that bulk milk can the colonel mentioned. It was secured on its side on a rig. The access hatch of the can had been removed, and one of the figures in coveralls reached inside the opening and extracted a sealed black box assembly attached to a wiring harness. The walls and ceiling of the room held more security cameras than the gaming pit at Caesars.
‘What are they doing, sir?’ asked Petinski.
‘These W80s are part of a block which have already been refurbished. The technicians are checking that the weapons meet mandated standards upon receipt from the depot. From memory, the components to be verified on this particular warhead will be its signal generator and gas transfer system.’
‘Right,’ I said knowingly, only in truth I now had some sympathy for the woman I’d heard had been told by a motor mechanic that the halogen fluid in her headlights needed topping up. I went back to the nuke porn going on in my peep slot. The W80 really was small, maybe thirty inches in length with a diameter of around twelve inches. Yeah, a country mailbox-sized bulk milk can.
‘How much does it weigh?’ I asked the colonel.
‘Two hundred and ninety pounds. It’s a two-stage radiation implosion thermonuclear weapon. The bomb you see there was once loaded into a BGM-109 Tomahawk air-launched cruise missile. It would’ve been carried by a Buff.’
A Buff – short for big ugly fat fucker – was the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress bomber, the backbone of our nuclear detterence since its introduction to service in 1955 and still on the frontlines of freedom. The aircraft had all the beauty of a bull shark in a plastic wading pool.
‘The Buff on the ramp got anything to do with Area Two?’ I asked.
‘No, there are Red Flag exercises starting here in a couple of days time. I’d say it has something to do with that,’ said Challis.
‘Presumably, sir, B-52s have crashed while carrying nuclear weapons over the years?’ my partner asked.
‘There have been plenty of B-52 incidents, but none involving the W80.’
‘What about accidental detonation?’ I asked.
‘It’s never happened. The W80 is as stable as they come. Loaded onto Tomahawks, unless you have the launch and release codes – that’s four sets of codes changed on a daily basis, entered simultaneously by two different people into the launch console, which is only attached moments before launch – nothing will happen.’
‘What about the high explosives that crush the plutonium core and detonate the bomb? Couldn’t a fire set them off? Could one of those bombs be loaded, say, into an aircraft and used 9/11-style?’
‘Hmm, imaginative, Mr Cooper,’ said Challis. ‘But the scenario you suggest wouldn’t –
couldn’t
– work. Let me give you a bit of background . . . The W80 is a Teller–Ulam design, named for Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, who developed it for the United States back in ’51. They created an infallible, elegant design where high-explosive lenses merely initiate the chain reaction in a first stage, which is itself really just the primer for the secondary stage. More specifically, the high-explosive lenses detonate and compress a core comprised of uranium-238, tritium gas and a hollow sphere of plutonium and uranium-235, so that a fission reaction results. It’s this fission reaction that triggers the fusion reaction in the second stage – basically a plutonium sparkplug encased in lithium-6 deuteride and uranium-238 – by a process called radiation implosion.’
There was that word – trigger. I wondered whether I should be taking notes and whether I could ask him to start again at ‘Hmm, imaginative . . .’
‘In other words, the W80 is probably the safest bomb in our arsenal,’ he continued. ‘Getting back to those lenses around the first-stage core. They utilize IHE, or insensitive high explosives, which are highly resistant to cooking off in a fire, or detonation due to mechanical shock. They’ll melt or burn before they explode. Only one person on earth can cause launch and detonation of that weapon, and that’s the President of the United States.’
Ten minutes later, we were back in the colonel’s SUV being tailed by Sailor and Nagel. And not long after that, after more code entering, card swiping and wanding, we were standing in another hardened bunker, Munitions Control – the ‘nerve center’, according to Challis – looking at enlisted folk at consoles quietly watching technicians maintaining weapons, or viewing the interiors of empty igloos where, as the colonel had correctly said, there was nothing to see. The order of the day seemed to be everyone watching everyone else, even though both the watchers and the watched had been especially verified loyal to the core.
After the quiet vigilance of Munitions Control, Colonel Challis drove Petinski and me back to the HQ building, wished us the best of luck in our new roles at Air Force Materiel Command, and turned us over to Jones for out-processing. After signing documents swearing never to reveal anything to anyone, anywhere, under any circumstances, unless we wanted to be sat on by the full weight of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, our red badges were collected and Jones turned us over to Sergeant Burton, who escorted us in silence to our rental with Sailor and Nagel in tow.
Burton motioned Sailor into the back of our vehicle, and bid us good day. He then nodded at Nagel, and she tailed us back to the guard shack. After another search of our persons and the vehicle, which had been sitting outside the MUNS building all this time, we were free to leave, and a technical sergeant armed with an M4 carbine waved us through the shack and out into the main base area.
Leaving Area Two, I felt like I’d just come from a high-security prison where the world’s most dangerous criminals had been doped to the eyeballs but could at any moment break through their torpor and erupt into unspeakable and unstoppable violence.
I shivered involuntarily even though the AC had yet to bring the car’s interior temperature much below broil. ‘Too early for a drink?’ I asked Petinski.
‘That was probably the creepiest experience of my life,’ she said. ‘The hair is still up on the back of my neck.’
‘At least we know who our prime suspect is,’ I said.
‘Challis?’ she asked.
‘No, the President of the United States.’
*
‘There’s this little bar I know,’ I said after driving a few moments in silence.
‘If you mean Olds Bar, I don’t think it’s a good idea.’ Petinski massaged the back of her neck. ‘We need somewhere we can talk.’
The bar at Nellis was named for Robin Olds, a triple ace with sixteen kills collected during World War II and the Vietnam War. If the Air Force fighter jocks had a Mecca, Olds Bar was probably it. The place also had two other things going for it: they poured single malt there, and it was closer than any other bar. But maybe she was right – privacy was paramount. ‘I know another place.’
‘Is it a place we can talk?’
‘As long as it doesn’t get in the way.’
‘Of what?’
‘Of drinking.’
‘You’re in the driver’s seat, Cooper.’ Petinski rolled her head from side to side and repositioned the AC vent on her face.
This Area Two tour was all about making me realize fast that we were dealing with a conspiracy. The theft couldn’t have been the work of a lone nutbag. It was a long-term operation that must have involved – among others – bomb handlers, maintenance personnel, munitions controllers, base security, squadron HQ, and people who could recode military grade software. We’d been cored from the inside out, not unlike the way termites work their way through a house. They leave it looking sturdy enough until you walk in one day, carrying a couple of cases of beer, and suddenly you’re through the floorboards.
‘Our problem is,’ Petinski continued, ‘given all the checks, procedures and security, what’s happened is impossible.’
‘Maybe believing it’s impossible is what made it possible,’ I said, thinking on the run.
‘You care to explain that?’
I was afraid she’d say that. ‘Well, it has to start with the loyalty tests. Those will definitely have right and wrong answers.’ Actually, the more I thought about this, the more I thought I might have stumbled onto something.
‘So?’
‘You don’t think candidates could be schooled to score high?’
‘It’s not just the tests. What about their family, next of kin, former employers? The background checks run deep.’
‘When there are millions of dollars at stake, arrangements can’t be made? Nothing’s impossible, especially if the stakes are worth it.’
Petinski let the cool air continue to work on her face and neck. Eventually she said, ‘If you’re right and people have been schooled, it’s possible that consistencies in test answers might flag potential conspirators . . . I’ll pass it on.’
Did I just get a pat on the head?
Security at the main gate ignored us, checking only what came in. I turned onto East Craig Road and picked up the signs to the Las Vegas freeway.
‘Oh, I forgot to mention we’re on a red-eye at ten o’clock tonight,’ Petinski said.
‘Where are we going?’
By the calculations of my superiors, we’ve got nine days left.
Now that I had some idea of what was to be delivered and triggered, nine days didn’t seem like a whole lot of time.
‘Rio. Benicio von Weiss is under a watch order.’
‘Who’s doing the watching?’
‘Local authorities, CIA and MI6.’
‘The Brits? He steal a nuke from them, too?’
‘No, they want him for passport violations.’
I snorted. ‘The guy forget to collect a stamp?’
Petinski shrugged. ‘Al Capone went down for tax evasion.’
‘Hitting von Weiss with passport violations is like putting Jeffrey Dahmer away for unpaid parking fines. Here’s a suggestion, why don’t we just send in the Marines if we know where he is?’
‘Brazil’s not our country.’
‘It’s not?’
‘O Magnifico is a cool customer. We’ll get nothing—’