by Tom Clancy
“You do not intend the bomb for Israel, then?” Qati asked. He was the one who would approve or disapprove the plan. He would, however, listen to his German friend. “Can you tell me of it yet?”
“Yes.” Bock did so.
“Interesting. What of security?”
“One problem is our friend Manfred—more properly, his wife. She knows his skills, and she knows he is away somewhere.”
“I would have thought that killing her carries more risks than rewards.”
“Ordinarily it would appear so, but all of Fromm’s fellow experts are also away—with their wives in most cases. Were she merely to disappear, it would be assumed by the neighbors that she’d joined her husband. His absence risks a comment by her, however casual it might be, that Manfred is off doing something. Someone might notice.”
“Does she actually know what his former job was?”
“Manfred is very security-conscious, but we must assume that she does. What woman does not?”
“Go on,” Qati said tiredly.
“Discovery of her body will force the police to search for her husband, and that is also a problem. She must disappear. Then it will seem that she has joined her husband.”
“Instead of the other way around,” Qati observed with a rare smile, “at the end of the project.”
“Quite so.”
“What sort of woman is she?”
“A shrew, a money-grabber, not a believer,” Bock, an atheist, said, somewhat to Qati’s amusement.
“How will you do it?”
Bock explained briefly. “It will also validate the reliability of our people for that part of the operation. I’ll leave the details to my friends.”
“Trickery? One cannot be overly careful in an enterprise like this one.”
“If you wish, a videotape of the elimination? Something unequivocal?” Bock had done that before.
“It is barbaric,” Qati said. “But regrettably necessary.”
“I will take care of that when I go to Cyprus.”
“You’ll need security for that trip, my friend.”
“Yes, thank you, I think I will.” Bock knew what that meant. If his capture looked imminent—well, he was in a profession that entailed serious risks, and Qati had to be careful. Günther’s own operational proposal made that all the more imperative.
“The tools all have levelers for the air plates,” Ghosn said in annoyance, fifteen meters away. “Very good ones—why all the trouble with the table?”
“My young friend, this is something we can only do one time. Do you wish to take any chances at all?”
Ghosn nodded. The man was right, even if he was a patronizing son of a bitch. “And the tritium?”
“In those batteries. I’ve kept them in a cool place. You release the tritium by heating them. The procedure for recovering the tritium is delicate but straightforward.”
“Ah, yes, I know how to do that.” Ghosn remembered such lab experiments from university.
Fromm handed him a copy of the manual for the first tool. “Now, we both have new things to learn so that we can teach the operators.”
Captain Dubinin sat in the office of the Master Shipwright of the yard. Known variously as Shipyard Number 199, Leninskaya Komsomola, or simply Komsomol’sk, it was the yard at which the Admiral Lunin had been built. Himself a former submarine commander, the man preferred the title Master Shipwright to Superintendent and had changed the title on his office door accordingly on taking the job two years earlier. He was a traditionalist, but also a brilliant engineer. Today he was a happy man.
“While you were gone, I got hold of something wonderful!”
“What might that be, Admiral?”
“The prototype for a new reactor feed pump. It’s big, cumbersome, and a cast-iron bastard to install and maintain, but it’s—”
“Quiet?”
“As a thief,” the Admiral said with a smile. “It reduces the radiated noise of your current pump by a factor of fifty.”
“Indeed? Who did we steal that from?”
The Master Shipwright laughed at that. “You don’t need to know, Valentin Borissovich. Now, I have a question for you: I have heard that you did something very clever ten days ago.”
Dubinin smiled. “Admiral, that is something which I cannot—”
“Yes, you can. I spoke with your squadron commander. Tell me, how close did you get to USS Nevada?”
“I think it was actually Maine, ” Dubinin said. The intelligence types disagreed, but he went with his instincts. “About eight thousand meters. We identified him from a mechanical transient made during an exercise, then I proceeded to stalk on the basis of a couple of wild guesses—”
“Rubbish! Humility can be overdone, Captain. Go on.”
“And after tracking what we thought was our target, he confirmed it with a hull transient. I think he came up to conduct a rocket-firing drill. At that point, given our operational schedule and the tactical situation, I elected to break contact while it was possible to do so without counterdetection.”
“That was your cleverest move of all,” the Master Shipwright said, pointing a finger at his guest. “You could not have decided better, because the next time you go out, you will be the most quiet submarine we’ve ever put to sea.”
“They still have the advantage over us,” Dubinin pointed out honestly.
“That is true, but for once the advantage will be less than the difference between one commander and another, which is as it should be. We both studied under Marko Ramius. If only he were here to see this!”
Dubinin nodded agreement. “Yes, given current political circumstances it is truly a game of skill, not one of malice anymore.”
“Would that I were young enough to play,” the Master Shipwright said.
“And the new sonar?”
“This is our design from the Severomorsk Laboratory, a large-aperture array, roughly a forty-percent improvement in sensitivity. On the whole, you will be the equal of an American Los Angeles class in nearly all regimes.”
Except crew, Dubinin didn’t say. It would be years before his country had the ability to train men as the Western navies did, and by that time Dubinin would no longer have command at sea—but! In three months time he’d have the best ship that his nation had ever given one of its captains. If he were able to cajole his squadron commander into giving him a larger officer complement, he could beach the more inept of his conscripts and begin a really effective training regimen for the rest. Training and leading the crew was his job. He was the commanding officer of Admiral Lunin. He took credit for what went well and blame for what went badly. Ramius had taught him that from the first day aboard the first submarine. His fate was in his own hands, and what man could ask for more than that?
Next year, USS Maine, when the bitterly cold storms of winter sweep across the North Pacific, we will meet again.
“Not a single contact,” Captain Ricks said in the wardroom.
“Except for Omaha.” LCDR Claggett looked over some paperwork. “And he was in too much of a hurry.”
“Ivan doesn’t even try anymore. Like he’s gone out of business.” It was almost a lament from the Navigator.
“Why even try to find us?” Ricks observed. “Hell, aside from that Akula that got lost ...”
“We did track the guy awhile back,” Nav pointed out.
“Maybe next time we’ll get some hull shots,” a lieutenant observed lightly from behind a magazine. There was general laughter. Some of the more extreme fast-attack skippers had on very rare occasions maneuvered close enough to some Soviet submarines to take flash photographs of their hulls. But that was a thing of the past. The Russians were a lot better at the submarine game than they’d been only ten years earlier. Being number two did make one try harder.
“Now, the next engineering drill,” Ricks said.
The Executive Officer noted that the faces around the table didn’t change. The officers were learning not to groan or rol
l their eyes. Ricks had a very limited sense of humor.
“Hello, Robby!” Joshua Painter got up from his swivel chair and walked over to shake hands with his visitor.
“Morning, sir.”
“Grab a seat.” A steward served coffee to both men. “How’s the wing look?”
“I think we’ll be ready on time, sir.”
Admiral Joshua Painter, USN, was Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic, Commander-in-Chief Atlantic, and Commander-in-Chief U.S. Atlantic Fleet—they paid him only one salary for the three jobs, though he did have three staffs to do his thinking for him. A career aviator—mainly fighters—he had reached the summit of his career. He would not be selected for Chief of Naval Operations. Someone with fewer politically rough edges would get that job, but Painter was content. Under the rather eccentric organization of the armed services, the CNO and other service chiefs merely advised the Secretary of Defense. The SecDef was the one who gave the orders to the area CINCs—commanders-in-chief. SACLANT-CINCLANT-CINCLANTFLT might have been an awkward, cumbersome, and generally bloated command, but it was a command. Painter owned real ships, real airplanes, and real Marines, had the authority to tell them where to go and what to do. Two complete fleets, 2nd and 6th, came under his authority: seven aircraft carriers, a battleship—though an aviator, Painter rather liked battleships; his grandfather had commanded one—over a hundred destroyers and cruisers, sixty submarines, a division and a half of Marines, thousands of combat aircraft. The fact of the matter was that only one country in the world had more combat power than Joshua Painter did, and that country was no longer a serious strategic threat in these days of international amity. He no longer had to look forward to the possibility of war. Painter was a happy man. A man who’d flown missions over Vietnam, he’d seen American power go from its post-World War II peak to its nadir in the 1970s, then bounce back again until America once more was the most powerful country on earth. He’d played his part in the best of times and the worst of times, and now the best of times were better still. Robby Jackson was one of the men to whom his Navy would be turned over.
“What’s this I heard about Soviet pilots in Libya again?” Jackson asked.
“Well, they never really left, did they?” Painter asked rhetorically. “Our friend wants their newest weapons, and he’s paying with hard cash. They need the cash. It’s business. That’s simple enough.”
“You’d think he’d learn,” Robby observed with a shake of the head.
“Well, maybe he will ... soon. It must be real lonely being the last of the hotheads. Maybe that’s why he’s loading up while he still can. That’s what the intel people say.”
“And the Russians?”
“Quite a lot of instructors and technical people there on contract, especially aviators and SAM types.”
“Nice to know. If our friend tries anything, he’s got some good stuff to hide behind.”
“Not good enough to stop you, Robby.”
“Good enough to make me write some letters.” Jackson had written enough of those. As a CAG, he could look forward on this cruise—as with every other he’d ever taken—to deaths in his air wing. To the best of his knowledge, no carrier had ever sailed for a deployment, whether in peace or war, without some fatalities, and as the “owner” of the air wing, the deaths were his responsibility. Wouldn’t it be nice to be the first, Jackson thought. Aside from the fact that it would look good on his record, not having to tell a wife or a set of parents that Johnny had lost his life in service of his country ... possible, but not likely, Robby told himself. Naval aviation was too dangerous. Past forty now, knowing that immortality was something between a myth and a joke, he had already found himself staring at the pilots in the squadron ready rooms and wondering which of the handsome, proud young faces would not be around when TR again made landfall at the Virginia Capes, whose pretty, pregnant wife would find a chaplain and another aviator on her doorstep just before lunch, along with a squadron wife to hold her hand when the world ended in distant fire and blood. A possible clash with Libyans was just one more threat in a universe where death was a permanent resident. He’d gotten too old for this life, Jackson admitted quietly to himself. Still as fine a fighter pilot as any—he was too mature to call himself the world’s best anymore, except over drinks—the sadder aspects of the life were catching up, and it would soon be time to move on, if he were lucky, to an admiral’s flag, just flying occasionally to show he still knew how and trying to make the good decisions that would minimize the unwanted visits.
“Problems?” Painter asked.
“Spares,” Captain Jackson replied. “It’s getting harder to keep all the birds up.”
“Doing the best we can.”
“Yes, sir, I know. Going to get worse, too, if I’m reading the papers right.” Like maybe three carriers would be retired, along with their air wings. Didn’t people ever learn?
“Every time we’ve won a war we’ve been punished for it,” CINCLANT said. “At least winning this one didn’t cost us a whole lot. Don’t worry, there’ll be a place for you when the time comes. You’re my best wing commander, Captain.”
“Thank you, sir. I don’t mind hearing things like that.”
Painter laughed. “Neither did I.”
“There is a saying in English,” Golovko observed. “ ‘With friends like these, who has need of enemies?’ What else do we know?”
“It would appear that they turned over their entire supply of plutonium,” the man said. A representative of the weapons research and design institute at Sarova, south of Gorkiy, he was less a weapons engineer than a scientist who kept track of what people outside the Soviet Union were up to. “I ran the calculations myself. It is theoretically possible that they developed more of the material, but what they turned over to us slightly exceeds our own production of plutonium from plants of similar design here in the Soviet Union. I think we got it all from them.”
“I have read all that. Why are you here now?”
“The original study overlooked something.”
“And what might that be?” the First Deputy Chairman of the Committee for State Security asked.
“Tritium.”
“And that is?” Golovko didn’t remember. He was not an expert on nuclear materials, being more grounded in diplomatic and intelligence operations.
The man from Sarova hadn’t taught basic physics in years. “Hydrogen is the simplest of materials. An atom of hydrogen contains a proton, which is positively charged, and an electron, which is negatively charged. If you add a neutron—that has no electrical charge—to the hydrogen atom, you get deuterium. Add another, and you get tritium. It has three times the atomic weight of hydrogen because of the additional neutrons. In simple terms, neutrons are the stuff of atomic weapons. When you liberate them from their host atoms, they radiate outward, bombarding other atomic nuclei, releasing more neutrons. That causes a chain reaction, releasing vast amounts of energy. Tritium is useful because the hydrogen atom is not supposed to contain any neutrons at all, much less two of them. It is unstable, and tends to break down at a fixed rate. The half-life of tritium is 12.3 years,” he explained. “Thus, if you insert tritium in a fission device, the additional neutrons it adds to the initial fission reaction accelerate or ‘boost’ the fission in the plutonium or uranium reaction mass by a factor of between five and forty, allowing a far more efficient use of the heavy fission materials like plutonium or enriched uranium. Secondly, additional amounts of tritium placed in the proper location nearby the fission device—called a ‘primary’ in this case—begin a fusion reaction. There are other ways of doing this, of course. The chemicals of choice are lithium-deuteride and lithium-hydride, which is more stable, but tritium is still extremely useful for certain weapons applications.”
“And how does one make tritium?”
“Essentially by placing large quantities of lithium-aluminum in a nuclear reactor and allowing the thermal neutron flux—that’s an engineering term for the back
-and-forth traffic of the particles—to irradiate and transform lithium to tritium by capture of some of the neutrons. It turns up as small, faceted bubbles inside the metal. I believe that the Germans also manufactured tritium at their Greifswald plant.”
“Why? What evidence do you have?”
“We analyzed the plutonium they sent us. Plutonium has two isotopes, Plutonium-239 and -240. From the relative proportions, you can determine the neutron flux in the reactor. The German sample has too little 240. Something was attenuating the neutron flux. That something was probably—almost certainly—tritium.”
“You are certain of that?”
“The physics involved here are complex but straightforward. In fact you can in many cases identify the plant that produced a plutonium sample by examining the ratio of various materials. My team and I are quite certain of our conclusions.”
“Those plants were under international inspection, yes? Are there no controls on the production of tritium?”
“The Germans managed to circumvent some of the plutonium inspections, and there are no international controls on tritium at all. Even if there were such controls, concealing tritium production would be child’s play.”
Golovko swore under his breath. “How much?”
The scientist shrugged. “Impossible to say. The plant is being completely shut down. We no longer have access to it.”
“Doesn’t tritium have other uses?”
“Oh, yes. It’s commercially very valuable. It’s phosphorescent—glows in the dark. People use it for watch dials, gun-sights, instrument faces, all manner of applications. It is commercially very valuable, on the order of fifty thousand American dollars per gram.”
Golovko was surprised at himself for the digression. “Back up for a moment, please. You tell me that our Fraternal Socialist Comrades in the German Democratic Republic were working not only to make their own atomic bombs, but also hydrogen bombs?”
“Yes, that is likely.”
