He was the ghost who had slipped through the chaos, unknown, undetected.
All the other jihadist groups who carried out the other attacks around America also believed this was the big attack. Not even they knew the truth.
That secrecy was necessary to prevent anyone involved with the other attacks, if captured, from disclosing anything about Rafael’s group. They had never even heard rumors of Rafael and his group. They couldn’t reveal what they didn’t know.
Rafael kept his speed in check to match the other trucks leaving the scene. He didn’t want to give nervous, trigger-happy police officers any excuse to notice him or stop him for questioning. With all the traffic they were mingling into, the risk of discovery was continually melting away.
The big worry was that they would be stopped to have their load inspected. It would be a very bad thing if any of the authorities looked in the trailer he was hauling. That was the whole reason behind the destruction at the Oeste Mesa border crossing. There they had X-ray equipment, neutron detectors, gamma ray detectors, as well as very savvy border agents. Rafael and his group had just nullified all of those safety measures and the entire system behind them.
Although it was highly unlikely anymore that they would be stopped, it was always possible that Cassiel could handle them, but it was also much more possible that he couldn’t. Cassiel was an assassin, a killer, to be sure, but he was not a commando or soldier. It wasn’t his specialty. If the police started shooting, it took only one bullet for Rafael to be killed or disabled. That would end their entire mission.
They had to rely on their years of careful planning, not on Cassiel. As far as Rafael was concerned, Cassiel was just excess baggage he had to drag along.
Rafael took the first exit to the westbound connector into San Diego. Before long they merged into masses of heavy late-day traffic. In a little over an hour they reached the industrial area where the rest of the team would be waiting and they could at last ditch the truck that had been through the border crossing.
Rafael phoned Fernando as they turned off the main road into the maze of small office parks and warehouses. Streets lined with palm trees reminded him a little of home. As he pulled up to the building they owned through a shell company, the big overhead door rolled open. Rafael drove the truck right inside and parked at the far end of the building.
He sat for a moment after he shut down the engine, relieved to at last be hidden in a safe place.
Forklifts were standing by to begin transferring the material they were carrying to the smaller cargo van. Behind the important materials they would load into the van, they would place some household furniture to hide what they were carrying on the off chance a police officer opened the rear door. From a professional truck driver, Rafael was now to become a new immigrant with a used van, driving cross-country with a friend and their furniture to settle in another state.
The other members of the team would be in cars escorting them in a loose convoy. Alejandro, Rafael’s second-in-command, would ride in a car that would always be right behind him. The other team members would take a variety of other vehicles. No one would be able to tell, but it would be a convoy that would always protect the cargo van Rafael was driving.
Rafael had told Cassiel that he was to ride in the van with him. Rafael thought it best if he kept an eye on the man.
Members of their team broke the seal and opened the big swinging doors at the back of the semitrailer. Men climbed up into the truck to assist in off-loading the critical parts Rafael had been carrying.
“How did it go at the border?” Fernando asked.
Rafael held his head up a little higher. “Javier and Esteban became martyrs today. God has welcomed them home with rich rewards. Many infidels died. It was a good day.”
Fernando nodded and climbed up onto a forklift to start unloading Rafael’s semitrailer truck.
The first thing they loaded into the front of the small cargo van was the generators and batteries that would produce the five kilovolts needed to charge a high-energy capacitor to fire the detonators. They had already assembled platforms to anchor the most valuable part of the load.
Next, they carefully pulled the two cases, each holding a pair of half spheres of plutonium-239, surrounded by tungsten carbide bricks and beryllium reflectors, from the semitrailer and placed them on the platforms in the cargo van and secured them down.
Over those cases they placed the steel shells for the outer casing. They would help protect the cases should they have any kind of accident.
When the time came, the two halves of the plutonium spheres would be assembled along with a polonium-beryllium neutron initiator placed in their hollow centers. Those initiators would help kick-start the chain reaction to prompt criticality. The pit would be placed inside a heavy lead tamper several inches thick. That in turn would be surrounded by explosive lenses made of Semtex.
The Semtex explosive lenses, fired with the EBW, would create a shock wave designed to collapse the lead tamper inward. The tamper’s inertia would spherically compress the plutonium-239 pit to critical mass.
Miguel’s team had been in place for a while now and had been forming the Semtex into precisely shaped geometric pieces that later would be assembled into a sphere to surround the lead tamper and the inner shell. They had established their operation in a deserted industrial area that had proven to be a perfect source of the nearly thousand pounds of lead they would need for each bomb.
Their Iranian shell company had bought the entire building as well as another smaller building and machining workroom with old but workable milling machines. Once finished with the machining at the smaller workspace, Miguel’s men would move to the larger building to begin working the lead into the spherical tamper that would surround the plutonium pit.
Miguel’s team had also machined the brass chimney sleeves that would hold the detonators. Conventional detonators didn’t have the precision needed to make all the explosive lenses go off simultaneously.
To make those explosions highly symmetrical, the detonators would need to be connected by exploding bridgewire that had already been delivered to Miguel’s team by courier. When the proper voltage hit the EBW, the high current would melt and vaporize the wire in microseconds. The resulting shock wave would fire all the detonators in the same instant.
While precise yields were very difficult to determine, calculations done by Iran’s nuclear engineers along with the help of North Korean scientists suggested a little over one hundred kilotons.
Once Rafael and his team reached Miguel and his men, they could begin the final assembly.
The test of Iran’s first atomic bomb would not be conducted in some remote desert location.
It would be conducted in America.
This would be the Great Satan’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
THIRTY-SIX
This particular Mossad operations facility had always reminded Jack of a mission control center for spacecraft launches. Like the seating in a mini amphitheater, rows of curved counters with workstations descended toward a small stage with a wall of monitors behind it displaying up-to-the-minute information. Those monitors were alive with everything from maps, to scrolling lists of information, to video feeds of demonstrations going on at different locations. One of the feeds showed a speech being given at the United Nations. Another was a live feed of an interrogation of a prisoner.
Dozens of controllers, managers, and coordinators tended monitors of their own, along with their own sets of switches, buttons, and knobs. Many of them were talking on headsets. These operators tracked, and were in communication with, agents in the field. When Jack had been in the United States and called in, he talked to Dvora in this very operations center.
As Jack made his way across the surprisingly quiet room, he immediately noticed that all the controllers seemed especially tense. Some of them pored over reams of paper readouts in their laps. Others were talking into headsets. The lighting in the room was muted, to make it e
asier to see all the information both at their own screens and on the large monitors against the wall. It gave the place a kind of foreboding atmosphere.
Jack spotted Dvora Artzi and stopped at her station. When she saw him she broke into a sudden smile as she pulled off her headset and then stood to squeeze him in a warm hug.
“How are you, Jack?” she asked, holding his shoulders as she looked up at him with a broad smile.
“I’m okay,” he said without much enthusiasm.
Ehud saw Jack stopped at Dvora’s station and rushed over to meet him.
“Jack!” he said as he extended a hand. “Where have you been? Didn’t you get my messages? I’ve been trying to reach you for weeks! It’s not like you to be out of communication.”
Jack shook hands with the man as he looked around.
“Sorry, Ehud,” he said, returning his attention to the man. “I just didn’t want to search for another subject right now.”
“It’s not your fault that Uziel was murdered.”
Jack flashed him a weak smile. “Nice try, Ehud. But if I wouldn’t have found him and convinced him to help us, he would be at home and safe right now.”
“Safe at home mourning his wife. You gave him a reason to care about living. You let him be part of something bigger than himself. You didn’t force him to help us. He wanted to do it.”
Jack sighed. “I suppose.” He didn’t want to debate it, so he didn’t. “But I’m thinking I may take a break from our work. I’m a little sick at heart of finding people who can recognize killers only to watch them be murdered.”
“Jack,” Dvora said, “these are special people. They are hunted by those who want to kill their kind. You save many of them by finding them first. You saved Kate. If not for you, she would have been slaughtered without ever knowing the reason. She never knew about her ability until you found her and helped her understand what she could do. If not for you, she would be dead. Not just her, but others as well.”
Jack smiled more sincerely. “True enough. I just wish I could find her. I taught her a little too well how to go off the grid and become a ghost to hide from those killers.”
“Anyway,” Ehud said, interrupting the conversation about Kate, “that’s not why I’ve been trying to reach you.”
Jack folded his arms and devoted his full attention to Ehud. “Okay, what’s up?”
“What’s up?” Ehud looked a little surprised. “Haven’t you been listening to the news?”
“No, I’ve had my phone off. I’m a bit sick of listening to all the problems in the world. I wanted to be left alone to do some background research on some of the super-predators I’ve been hunting. I’ve been thinking about taking some time away from all this to go do that for a while.”
Dvora frowned with concern. “You don’t know about the attacks?”
Jack looked between Dvora and Ehud. “Attacks? What attacks?”
“In America,” Ehud said, lifting his hands out in exasperation. “There were also some terrorist attacks in the UK, one stabbing at a nightclub in France, and a truck attack in Brussels. But there were a great many more in the US and they were much worse.”
“Worse?” Jack’s arms unfolded. “What happened in the US?”
Dvora sat down at her station and pulled up video of a massive hotel fire. Ehud gestured to the monitor.
“That’s a hotel in Las Vegas. They still don’t know the death toll. Right now it’s thirty or so, but it’s expected to climb over a hundred. It could even go much higher. It was started by a large incendiary device that probably contained jellied gasoline. It went off on a lower floor, taking out elevators and trapping people on higher floors. The stairs were destroyed by explosive devices so that people couldn’t escape as the fire climbed up inside the building.”
Dvora switched to another scene. “This is the airport in Tampa.” The surveillance video showed people walking along, then debris and smoke exploding out, leaving bodies littering the terminal. She pulled up another video showing rescue personnel with gas masks carrying people out of a subway station in New York City. Another video showed the aftermath of a car bomb in a big United States city, but it could have been a scene from Baghdad.
“Who claimed credit for all the attacks?” Jack asked as Dvora kept pulling up different videos, different scenes of destruction and victims.
“Each attack was claimed by a different group,” Ehud said.
Astonished, Jack glanced down at the monitor. “Has that ever happened before? A series of attacks all carried out at once with different groups claiming credit?”
Ehud clasped his hands behind his back. “No, not like this. To tell you the truth, we don’t know what’s going on, but it’s obviously very troubling.”
“Here’s one of the worst,” Dvora said as she pulled up what looked like a war zone in Syria. Shells of burned-out trucks littered the scene. “This is Oeste Mesa, the big commercial border crossing between Mexico and California.”
“This attack was accompanied by a cyber attack that took down the entire US network for their border stations,” Ehud said. “Besides this attack, here, there was also a mass shooting—several people with machine guns—at a crossing into America from Canada. The terrorists killed five agents and almost two dozen civilians before they were shot dead. This attack at Oeste Mesa was much worse.”
“There are several terrorist groups that have been working on that kind of cyber warfare,” Jack said. “Sounds like they chose this time to strike.”
“There were also cyber attacks on air traffic control, as well as power plants and other infrastructure.” Ehud glanced at Dvora before looking back at Jack. “US intelligence services leaked to the press that the cyber attacks were Russian.”
“The Russians!” Jack put one hand on a hip as he swept his hair back with the other. He held the hand against the back of his head as he paced a few feet away and then returned. “That doesn’t make any sense at all. The Russians doing something like that—especially in coordination with terrorists groups—would cause the Americans to jump to a war footing.”
Ehud arched an eyebrow. “They did.”
Jack cast about for some answer that made sense. “You have to know that it’s possible to make a cyber attack look like it was done by anyone—Russia, China, even Israel. All it takes is a team inside Russia to set up servers using Russian credit cards to pay for hosting services and then use a VPN to remote into those servers from access machines inside the country. That would make it look to all the world like the hack had been done by Russia. The evidence would seem irrefutable—unless you really understand how it can be done.”
Ehud waited until Jack had paced back. “The problem is, US intel leaked information to the press saying that the Russians carried out the cyber attack. People are used to things like this on a smaller scale from Russia or China. Ransomware attacks have crippled large companies, hospitals, and government agencies for some time now, so this being done by the Russians makes perfect sense to many in the American intel community. Of course, the news media and thus the public are absolutely convinced it was the Russians, so they’re up in arms. They’re demanding action. Some are even demanding a strike at Russia.”
“But it doesn’t make sense. It’s most likely not true.”
“Perception is reality,” Dvora said.
Jack paced off again, thinking, looking at the wall of monitors. Many of the scenes of destruction and panic were the attacks in America. Something was bothering him.
“The Mexican bomber you captured in Jerusalem,” he said when he realized what was nagging at him. “That has to be connected to these attacks.” He pointed at Dvora’s monitor showing the carnage at the Oeste Mesa border crossing from Mexico into the United States. “That’s too much of a coincidence. Your Mexican bomber isn’t really Mexican, is he?”
“He says he’s from Santiago de Querétaro, Mexico. He doesn’t speak any language except Spanish—we’re sure of that much. We questioned him a
bout Santiago de Querétaro and growing up in Mexico. Once we got into the details, he knew a lot of the basic information, but he wasn’t convincing. When pressed, he came up with the name of a street where he says he grew up. He described a pretty standard Mexican slum, but we don’t believe the street exists. There were other things as well that lead us to believe he’s lying.”
“What do you think he’s covering up?”
Ehud pinched his lower lip as he glanced around the room and lowered his voice. “We found something on one of his boots.”
“Okay …” Jack said. “What did you find?”
“A speck of plutonium-239 stuck in the lugs of the sole.”
Jack stared at the man for a long moment. “He certainly didn’t pick that up walking around in Santiago de Querétaro.”
“Nor did he get his suicide vest there, either. The materials that were used in it are common throughout the Middle East, but not Mexico.”
“Any suspicions where he picked up plutonium?” Jack asked.
Ehud shrugged unhappily. “Pakistan? Iran? A terrorist group bringing material out of Russia? Hard to tell.”
“Were you able to get anything useful out of him?”
“We told him that we found nuclear material in the sole of his boot. We pressed him about where he could have picked it up. We pressed him hard. He seemed confused about everything, including how to answer our questions.
“He seemed lost and disoriented. He started to cry. He cried for hours and hours as we continued to ask him questions in Spanish. It seemed like being captured was something that had never crossed his mind before and now that he was away from the people he knew, he didn’t know what to do or how to answer. He knew, though, that he wasn’t supposed to cooperate.
“We put him back in a cell to let him think about it and get a little sleep before we questioned him again. Captives expect torture. Letting them get some sleep instead often helps soften them up so they will begin answering a few questions. A few answers eventually lead to a few more, and so it goes.
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