Primary Threat

by Jack Mars

  “I think you better get going,” Murphy said.

  He started to do something underneath the pillar. He made a squirming, snakelike movement. He was undulating madly, violently. Luke watched him in a sort of dream. Murphy could move. He whipsawed, faster and faster.

  Swann, screaming:

  “GET OUT! STONE!”

  “Go!” Murphy said. “Listen to the man!” He didn’t even look at Luke. He was doing some sort of crazy desperate dance under there, rhythmic, insane.

  “STONE!”

  Luke turned and ran for the front doors.

  Outside, the headlights of the van were approaching.

  Luke was forced to run toward them. He blew through the doors, leapt down the steps, and ran for the chopper. He turned and trained his gun on the van as he ran.

  “Dud-duh-duh-duh-duh!”

  The windshield shattered. The driver’s side window shattered.

  A line of explosions rained down from the sky. Drone strike.

  The earth shook. The van was on fire, still hurtling toward the mosque. The driver was on fire. It didn’t matter. Those guys wedged bricks on the gas pedal.

  Luke ran for the chopper. It hovered three feet above the ground. Luke dove, hit the bottom rails, and hung on as the chopper lifted off. He clambered up and into the cabin. Ed was strapping the scientist into a seat. The man was covered in blood and crying.

  Luke looked back. They were already a hundred feet in the air and climbing fast.

  The van was like a flaming skull. It hit the stairs at the front, went airborne and flew like a rocket into the mosque. The explosion was immense, a giant fireball launched into the dark night.

  Luke grabbed his head.

  Murphy!

  “Hang on!” Rachel shouted from the cockpit.

  The shockwave hit the chopper and Luke was knocked off his feet. He hit the floor at the same time as Ed. The helicopter shuddered, whipsawed, and rode along on its side. The turbulence pushed it along.

  For a split second, it seemed like the chopper would flip upside down. Then it found some calm air, leveled out, and surged forward. Luke felt it gaining more altitude.

  He looked back.

  They were already over the ocean. Behind the high rises of the Beirut beachfront, on a hillside overlooking the city, an enormous fire burned.

  Ed put a big hand on his shoulder.

  “I’m sorry, man.”

  Luke nodded. It was too horrible to think about at this moment.

  “Yeah. Me, too.”

  He looked up at the scientist, strapped into his seat. The guy was a bloody mess. Luke couldn’t remember his name. He gestured at him with his head.

  “That guy gonna live?”

  Ed nodded. “Yeah.”

  The image of that doomsday clock flashed through Luke’s mind. The bomb was deployed, and there was less than eight hours until it exploded.

  “What’s your name again?” Luke shouted.

  A window was shattered, and wind howled through the cabin.

  The man stared at Luke. He was frowning so hard he almost seemed like a circus clown. His eyes were watering, as if he might cry. He looked unutterably sad.

  “Trutnev,” he shouted.

  “Well Trutnev, do you know how to turn off the bomb that you made?”

  “Very difficult,” Trutnev said. “It would require you to go beneath the ice. The mechanism is in a steel box that must be cut open. There is a sequence. I must probably be there to oversee, but I am not a diver.”

  “But it is technically possible to do it, and you know how.”

  Trutnev stared at him. Outside, the dark night raced by. For the first time, Luke noticed that the helicopter had been shot full of holes.

  “Yes,” Trutnev said. “I know how.”

  Luke looked at Ed. Ed’s face was smeared with blood. It looked like war paint.

  “Then we’ve got more to do.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY SIX

  07:04:58 until detonation

  Royal Air Force Station Akrotiri

  Akrotiri, British Overseas Territory

  Cyprus

  “May I try to contact my family?” Yakov Trutnev said.

  “Yes, you may,” Big Daddy Cronin said. “As soon as you tell us everything you know, and answer every question we have.”

  Images of Murphy scrolled through Luke’s mind. He tried to focus on Trutnev instead.

  The scientist had gone back to looking resigned. He was wearing a T-shirt, and his right arm was bandaged where a bullet had gone clean through it. His right cheek was bandaged where a flying chunk of debris had carved a deep, bloody scar. There was another, smaller bandage on top of balding head.

  “Of course,” he said. “I am accustomed to the inhumanity of dealing with government and its soldiers.”

  “This ain’t about you,” Ed Newsam said. “Or what you’re accustomed to.”

  Trutnev nodded, but the nod didn’t seem like agreement.

  “Talk,” Luke said.

  They were in a drab office inside a one-story building on the British Royal Air Force base. Big Daddy knew these people and had some arrangement with them. The office itself had brown paneling, with fading landscape paintings in glass frames on the walls. The place looked like it hadn’t been updated since the 1970s. There was no telling how many listening devices were in here.

  Luke didn’t even bother asking Big Daddy if this room was secure.

  He, Ed and Big Daddy stood in various corners of the room. They were big men, and the office was small. Trutnev sat in a rolling desk chair at a table. On the table was another one of those spider-like speaker phone gadgets. Don Morris, Trudy, and Swann were at the other end.

  Luke had no idea what time it was in Washington, DC. The time on the clock didn’t matter anymore. All that mattered was the countdown.

  “The bomb,” Trutnev said. “As I indicated to you earlier, it is likely the most powerful nuclear weapon ever devised. It was the subject of decades of research during the time of the Soviet Union, the results of which were resurrected in recent years. I will describe it as simply as I can, in layman’s terms. It is what you Americans sometimes refer to as a layer-cake. The Russians are great bakers, as you know.”

  Luke resisted the urge to punch the man in the mouth.

  “There is a large sealed compartment embedded within the device. This compartment is the detonator. It is under great pressure, and contains a fissile mass of uranium and plutonium surrounded by a layer of lithium deuteride. Wires run from a battery pack to the detonator, and at the appointed time, a brief, high-power electrical charge will be delivered. The energy from the charge will cause the compressed fissile material to detonate. That small, but very intense, explosion will then be accelerated by the presence of the lithium. The accelerated explosion will, in turn, cause the nuclear material in the bomb itself to detonate. This is known as a chain reaction.”

  He paused.

  “The layer-cake was first designed because it can create a devastating explosion from a small amount of enriched materials. At one time, a great deal of thought was put into the idea of fitting atomic weapons in suitcases, or the trunks of cars. The innovation here—one of several—is to use that same basic arrangement to detonate a much larger weapon.”

  Trutnev sighed heavily. He put his head in one hand.

  “I cannot believe I participated in this.”

  His body began to shake.

  “How do we stop it?” Luke said.

  Trutnev looked at his wrist. When the bomb was initiated, he had synchronized the timer on his watch to the countdown. Since they had arrived here in Cyprus, Luke and Ed had done the same thing on their watches.

  “Less than seven hours to go. The base where it is deployed is in the Arctic. It is almost certainly well defended by Russian troops. I do not know their numbers, or their training, but I would imagine they are among the elite.”

  He looked at Luke with baleful eyes.

  “Pr
obably, you cannot stop the explosion.”

  The speakerphone squawked.

  “Can we bomb it?” Don Morris said. “Could we just fly over the base with overwhelming force and drop bombs on it? I know you can bomb ICBMs in missile silos, and unless the missiles are already activated…”

  Trutnev shook his head. “Unfortunately, this is what you call comparing apples and oranges. This bomb is always activated. Nuclear keys are not necessary. Yes, I know this does not conform to the laws of war, but you are not dealing with rational men. The purpose of this weapon was never deterrence. It was designed to be used. If a bomb hits the detonator on this weapon, the most likely result is it will cause the compressed fissile material to detonate. It is a clever self-defense mechanism.”

  He took another breath. A tear rolled down his cheek.

  “Even if a bomb dropped did not detonate the weapon, please understand that the weapon is deployed beneath the ice sheet, clinging to it from the underside, and held in place by a carriage and scaffolding. The second most likely result of any bombing from above is that the scaffolding will be damaged or destroyed, and the bomb will be dislodged. Then it will simply sink to the bottom of the ocean. The Arctic Ocean is approximately three hundred meters deep at that location.

  “The weapon is designed to withstand the high pressures of deep ocean water—another innovation, I’m afraid. Obviously, it takes proper equipment, and weeks or months of planning to retrieve items from that depth. Meanwhile, the countdown will continue, and the weapon will detonate at the appointed time. I have not seen the results of any modeling done about a detonation at the seafloor, but I imagine it would still be quite bad.”

  “In layman’s terms,” Don said, “don’t bomb it.”

  Trutnev nodded. “Yes. Don’t bomb it.”

  “How do we stop this?” Trudy Wellington said over the squawkbox. “Assume that a way exists, and describe that.”

  Trutnev looked positively despondent.

  “The only way that I know of is to disable the detonator itself. This will require diving under the ice, locating the detonator along the side of the weapon, and cutting into the steel box around it with some cutting rod or other underwater welding device. Once open, it will reveal a small numeric pad. A code must be input.”

  “The code turns off the detonator?” Luke said.

  “No,” Trutnev said. “It disables the electrical field created when the wiring from the battery pack to the detonator is cut. In an underwater environment, the field will fatally electrocute any person or animal within… 30 meters, let’s say. Once the electrical field is disabled, you may cut the wiring.”

  He raised his hands as if to say, “See? Simple enough.”

  “Does the countdown stop when the code is input?”

  Trutnev shook his head. “No,” he said, a little too emphatically. “The countdown stops when the time runs out. When time runs out, if the wires are cut, the batteries cannot deliver the charge that initiates the chain reaction. That’s all. The bomb is still operational. The charge was just never delivered.”

  “It sounds like a tall order,” Swann said over the speaker.

  Luke thought about it. He knew welding. He could cut and weld underwater. He could imagine a scenario where he cut open the box. Ed could input the numbers. Then either one of them could cut the wires—likely Ed, whose hands would be free.

  It would require that they get to the location in the next six hours or so.

  It would require someone who knew their stuff to operate the power supply from on top of dry land.

  It would also require that they overcome the resistance of the troops guarding the place, then find the exact spot where the bomb was deployed, suit up and dive down.

  Okay, first things first.

  “Do you know where the bomb is?”

  Trutnev nodded. “There is a dome on the base. It creates a somewhat hospitable environment. A large hole was cut through the ice inside the dome. The bomb was lowered through the hole and deployed on the underside of the ice near that spot. The hole may have frozen over again, or it may still be open. I don’t know. But once inside the dome, it should be easy enough to see.”

  “How thick is the ice there?” Luke said.

  Trutnev shrugged. “Twelve meters, maybe fifteen.”

  “So about forty or fifty feet?”

  Now Trutnev smirked. “Americans with their feet. No one uses this system. But yes, maybe forty or fifty feet deep.”

  “And the code?” Ed Newsam said. “Do you know it?”

  Ed saw where Luke was going. And he was going to the same place.

  “It is the easiest thing about this,” Trutnev said. “18-12-18-78. It is a shorthand for December 18, 1878. Josef Stalin’s birth date. The weapon is nicknamed Uncle Joe. You see, even scientists are not without humor.”

  * * *

  “We’ve got nothing,” Luke said. “Is that what you’re telling me?”

  It was getting late. He checked his watch.

  06:37:19.

  Some British MPs had removed Trutnev from the room. Where they planned to put him was anyone’s guess. Luke didn’t care if they covered him in syrup and tied him to an anthill.

  Everyone else was still here.

  Don Morris was talking. “The entire SRT is under suspension. The accounts are frozen. I told them you had captured a Russian scientist with knowledge of a secret nuclear weapon, and they were irate that I still had agents operating in the field. I didn’t even mention that we lost Murphy—that’s going to have to wait. I did tell them the nuclear weapon was in a terminal countdown, and you know what they said? They said bring the scientist in and they’d interview him.

  “I called a friend of mine at Joint Special Operations Command, looking to see if he could lend me some resources under the table. He told me the word is out that I have leprosy. Nobody who wants to keep their career better touch me. It’s frustrating, son. I understand that.”

  “It’s a little more than frustrating, Don.”

  Luke felt like a teenager throwing a hissy fit. He needed to get some control over this situation. To do so, he was going to need to keep his emotions in check. Murphy was dead. It was a complicated issue. They had no resources. They were all about to lose their jobs. And the largest bomb in history was about to go off.

  “You’ve got Bill Cronin standing there, son. You’ve got the resources he can give you. That’s a lot more than nothing.”

  Luke nodded. “I know. I know that.”

  It was more than nothing. Big Daddy was a smooth operator, and he always had access to things. But he was under suspension, too. Why was everybody around here always under suspension?

  A few of the things they didn’t have: advanced fighter planes, supersonic passenger planes, active Navy SEALs or Delta Force or any elite force at all, the logistical support of the vast United States military, NSA, DIA, and CIA surveillance and data collection, open communication with the Russian government (who might suddenly see the error in their ways), state-of-the-art weaponry and equipment, access to the know-how and experience of Arctic allies like Norway and Sweden…

  The list could go on and on.

  Luke looked at Big Daddy. “What do we got, Bill?”

  Big Daddy shrugged. “I pulled together ten guys. They’re all guys I’ve worked with in the past, all of them former military special operators, all of them combat vets, all of them rock stars. They’re nihilists like your buddy Murphy, so…”

  Luke’s patience was gone. He took a step closer.

  “What are you trying to say, Bill? Do you know something about Murphy that you want to share, or are you just trying to push my buttons? Because I can promise you that now is not the time to push my buttons.”

  Ed Newsam casually stepped between them. “All right, man.”

  Big Daddy nodded. “You’re right. Now’s not the time. All I meant was they’re stone killers, very experienced, and in it for the money and the thrills. I promised the
m all a big payout if they live. I’m hoping either they all die, or the SRT somehow comes back to life after a successful mission. Because my job is hanging by a thread at the moment, and I don’t have a budget for this.”

  “What else?” Ed said. He glanced at his watch.

  “We’ve got a jump plane and two pilots the English gave me. The plane can land on that ice runway we saw in the pictures, or if things are too hot, everybody can jump. The plane is fast. It’ll get to the destination in under six hours. I’ve got weapons galore, a stockpile, the kind of stuff I know you like. I have scuba gear and underwater welding gear. I’ve got someone experienced to set up the equipment and operate the console topside.”

  Luke nodded. It was bare bones as hell, but it didn’t sound… terrible.

  “Who’s the operator?” he said.

  “You’re looking at him,” Big Daddy said.

  “Bill, you’re coming on this mission? Look, that’s a nice offer, but the last thing I need is to…”

  Big Daddy glared at him. “Kid, I was flying combat missions when you were still trying to peak up the girls’ skirts in the fifth grade. Also, here’s a little-known fact. Before I went airborne, I worked the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. I have a lot of experience with underwater cutting and welding.”

  They stared at each other from either side of big Ed Newsam.

  “These are my guys, my plane, my weapons, my equipment. So get used to the idea. I’m coming.”

  Luke glanced at his watch again.

  06:29:04.

  Everything was going too fast. There was too much talking going on, and too much planning. The flight to the Arctic was going to take nearly six hours. They were already cutting it close.

  “If that’s what you want,” Luke said, “fine. But in that case, we better leave right now. We’re running out of time.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN

  05:43:22 until detonation

  Premier Suite

  The Ritz-Carlton Moscow

  Tverskaya Street