by Tom Clancy
Am I helping or hurting? she asked herself. Is part of it my fault?
Cathy walked into the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. Okay, she wasn’t a pink-cheeked kid anymore. There were worry lines around her mouth and squint lines around her eyes. She should have her spectacle prescription looked at. She was starting to get headaches during procedures, and she knew it could be a problem with her eyes—she was, after all, an ophthalmic surgeon—but like everyone else she was short of time and was putting off having her eyes looked at by another member of The Wilmer Eye Institute staff. Which was pretty dumb, she admitted to herself. She still had rather pretty eyes. At least the color didn’t change, even though their refractive error might suffer from all the close work that her job mandated.
She was still quite slim. Wouldn’t hurt to sweat off three or four pounds—better yet, to transfer that weight into her breasts. She was a small-breasted woman from a small-breasted family in a world that rewarded women for having udders to rival Elsie the Borden cow. Her usual joke that bust size was inversely proportional to brain size was a defense mechanism. She craved larger ones as a man always wanted a larger penis, but God or the gene pool had not chosen to give her those, and she would not submit to the vain ignominy of surgery—besides which she didn’t like the numbers on that kind of surgery. Too many silicone-implant cases developed complications.
The rest of her ... her hair, of course, was always a mess, but surgical discipline absolutely prevented her from paying great attention to that. It was still blond and short and very fine, and when Jack took the time to notice, he liked her hair. Her face was still pretty, despite the squint lines and worry lines. Her legs had always been pretty nice, and with all the walking she did at Hopkins/Wilmer, they had actually firmed up slightly. Cathy concluded that her looks were not the sort to make dogs bark when she passed. She was, in fact, still rather attractive. At least the other docs at the hospital thought so. Some of her senior medical students positively swooned over her, she liked to think. Certainly no one fought to escape her rounds.
She was also a good mother. Though Sally and Little Jack were still asleep, she never failed to look after them. Especially with Jack gone so much, Cathy filled in, even to the point of playing catch with her son during T-ball season (that was something that made her husband uncomfortably guilty whenever he learned of it). She cooked good meals when she had the time. Whatever the house needed, she either did herself or “contracted out”—Jack’s phrase—to others.
She still loved her husband, and she let him know it. She had a good sense of humor, Cathy thought. She didn’t let most things bother her. She never failed to touch Jack whenever the opportunity presented itself; she was a doctor, with a delicate touch. She talked to him, asked what he thought of something or other, let him know that she cared about him, cared about his opinions on things. There could be no doubt in his mind that he was still her man in every way. In fact, she loved him in every way a wife could. Cathy concluded that she wasn’t doing anything wrong.
So why didn’t he—couldn’t he ... ?
The face in the mirror was more puzzled than hurt, she thought. What else can I do? she asked it.
Nothing.
Cathy tried to set that aside. A new day was beginning. She had to get the kids ready for school. That meant setting breakfast up before they awoke. This part of life wasn’t fair, of course. She was a surgeon, a professor of surgery, as a matter of fact, but the simple facts of life also said she was a mother, with mother’s duties that her husband did not share, at least not on the early morning of a workday. So much for women’s lib. She got into her robe and walked down to the kitchen. It could have been worse. Both kids liked oatmeal, and actually preferred the flavored instant kind. She boiled the water for it, then turned the range to low heat while she walked back to wake the little ones up. Ten minutes later Sally and Little Jack were washed and dressed on their way to the kitchen. Sally arrived first, setting the TV to the Disney Channel in time for Mousercise. Cathy took her ten minutes of peace to look at the morning paper and drink her coffee.
On the bottom right-hand side of the front page was an article about Russia. Well, maybe that’s one of the things that’s bothering Jack. She decided to read it. Maybe she could talk to him, find out why he was so ... distracted? Was it just that, maybe?
“... disappointed with the ability of CIA to deliver data on the problem. There are further rumors of an underway investigation. An administration official confirms the rumors that a senior CIA official is suspected of financial misconduct and also of sexual improprieties. The name of this official has not been revealed, but he is reportedly very senior and responsible for coordinating information for the administration....”
Sexual improprieties? What did that mean? Who was it?
He.
Very senior and responsible for ...
That was Jack. That was her husband. That was the phrase they used for someone at his level. In a quiet moment of total clarity, she knew that it had to be.
Jack ... playing around? My Jack?
It wasn’t possible.
Was it?
His inability to perform, his tiredness, the drinking, the distractions? Was it possible that the reason he didn’t ... someone else was exciting him?
It wasn’t possible. Not Jack. Not her Jack.
But why else ... ? She was still attractive—everyone thought so. She was still a good wife—there was no doubt of that. Jack wasn’t ill. She would have caught any gross symptoms; she was a doctor, and a good one, and she knew she would not have missed anything important. She went out of her way to be nice to Jack, to talk to him, to let him know that she loved him, and...
Perhaps it wasn’t likely, but was it possible?
Yes.
No. Cathy set the paper down and sipped at her coffee. Not possible. Not her Jack.
It was the last hour of the last leg in the manufacturing process. Ghosn and Fromm watched the lathe with what looked like detachment, but was in both cases barely controlled excitement. The Freon liquid being sprayed on the rotating metal prevented their seeing the product whose final manufacture was under way. That didn’t help, even though both knew that seeing would not have helped in the least. The part of the plutonium mass being machined was hidden from their sight by other metal, and even if that had been otherwise, they both knew that their eyes were too coarse an instrument to detect imperfections. Both watched the machine readout of the computer systems. Tolerances indicated by the machine were well within the twelve angstroms specified by Herr Doktor Fromm. They had to believe the computer, didn’t they?
“Just a few more centimeters,” Ghosn said as Bock and Qati joined them.
“You’ve never explained the Secondary part of the unit,” the Commander said. He’d taken to calling the bomb “the unit.”
Fromm turned, not really grateful for the distraction, though he knew he should be. “What do you wish to know?”
“I understand how the Primary works, but not the Secondary,” Qati said simply and reasonably.
“Very well. The theoretical side of this is quite straightforward once you understand the principle. That was the difficult part, you see, discovering the principle. It was thought at first that making the Secondary work was simply a matter of temperature—that is what distinguishes the center of a star, ja? Actually it is not, the first theoreticians overlooked the matter of pressure. That is rather strange in retrospect, but pioneering work is often that way. The key to making the Secondary work is managing the energy in such a way as to convert energy into pressure at the same time you use its vast heat, and also to change its direction by ninety degrees. That is no small task when you are talking about redirecting seventy kilotons of energy,” Fromm said smugly. “However, the belief that to make the Secondary function is a matter of great theoretical difficulty, that is a fiction. The real insight Ulam and Teller had was a simple one, as most great insights are. Pressure is temperature. What t
hey discovered—the secret—is that there is no secret. Once you understand the principles involved, what remains is just a question of engineering. Making the bomb work is computationally, not technically, demanding. The difficult part is to make the weapon portable. That is pure engineering,” Fromm said again.
“Soda straws?” Bock asked, knowing that his countryman wanted to be asked about that. He was a smug bastard.
“I cannot know for sure, but I believe this to be my personal innovation. The material is perfect. It is light, it is hollow, and it is easily twisted into the proper configuration.” Fromm walked over to the assembly table and returned with one. “The base material is polyethylene, and as you see, we have coated the outside with copper and the inside with rhodium. The length of the ‘straw’ is sixty centimeters, and the inside diameter is just under three millimeters. Many thousands of them surround the Secondary, in bundles twisted one hundred eighty degrees into a geometric shape called a helix. A helix is a useful shape. It can direct energy while retaining its ability to radiate heat in all directions.”
Inside every engineer, Qati thought, was a frustrated teacher. “But what do they do?”
“Also ... the first emission off the Primary is massive gamma radiation. Just behind that are the X-rays. In both cases we are talking about high-energy photons, quantum particles which carry energy but which have no mass—”
“Light waves,” Bock said, remembering his Gymnasium physics. Fromm nodded.
“Correct. Extremely energetic light waves of a different—higher—frequency. Now, we have this vast amount of energy radiating from the Primary. Some we can reflect or warp toward the Secondary by use of the channels we have built. Most is lost, of course, but the fact is that we will have so much energy at our fingertips that we need only a small fraction of it. The X-rays sweep down the straws. Much of their energy is absorbed by the metallic coatings, while the oblique surfaces reflect some further down, allowing further energy absorption. The polyethylene also absorbs a good deal of energy. And what do you suppose happens?”
“Absorb that much energy, and it must explode, of course,” Bock said before Qati could.
“Very good, Herr Bock. When the straws explode—actually they convert into plasma, but having split straws, we will not split hairs, eh?—the plasma expands radially to their axes, thus converting the axial energy from the Primary into radial energy imploding on the Secondary.”
The light bulb went on in Qati’s head. “Brilliant—but you lose half of the energy, that part expanding outward.”
“Yes and no. It still makes an energy barrier, and that is what we need. Next, the uranium fins around the body of the Secondary are also converted to plasma—from the same energy flux, but more slowly than the straws due to their mass. This plasma has far greater density, and is pressed inward. Within the actual Secondary casing, there is two centimeters of vacuum, since that space will be evacuated. So we have a ‘running start’ for the plasma that is racing inward.”
“So you use the energy from the Primary, redirected into a right-angle turn to perform the same function on the Secondary that is first done by chemical explosives?” Qati saw.
“Excellent, Commander!” Fromm replied, just patronizingly enough to be noticed. “We now have a relatively heavy mass of plasma pressing inward. The vacuum gap gives it room to accelerate before slamming into the Secondary. This compresses the Secondary. The secondary assembly is lithium-deuteride and lithium-hydride, both doped with tritium, surrounded by uranium 238. This assembly is crushed violently by the imploding plasma. It is also being bombarded by neutrons from the Primary, of course. The combination of heat, pressure, and neutron bombardment causes the lithium to fission into tritium. The tritium immediately begins the fusion process, generating vast quantities of high-energy neutrons along with the liberated energy. The neutrons attack the U-238, causing a fast-fission reaction, adding to the overall Secondary yield.”
“The key, as Herr Fromm said,” Ghosn explained, “is managing the energy.”
“Straws,” Bock noted.
“Yes, I said the same thing,” Ghosn said. “It is truly brilliant. Like building a bridge from paper.”
“And the yield from the Secondary?” Qati asked. He didn’t really understand the physics, but he did understand the final number.
“The Primary will generate approximately seventy kilotons. The Secondary will generate roughly four hundred sixty-five kilotons. The numbers are approximate because of possible irregularities within the weapon, and also because we cannot test to measure actual effects.”
“How confident are you in the performance of the weapon?”
“Totally,” Fromm said.
“But without testing, you said ...”
“Commander, I knew from the beginning that a proper test program was not possible. That is the same problem we had in the DDR. For that reason the design is overengineered, in some cases by a factor of forty percent, in others by a factor of more than one hundred. You must understand that an American, British, French, or even Soviet weapon of the same yield would not be a fifth the size of our ‘unit.’ Such refinements of size and efficiency can come only from extensive testing. The physics of the device are entirely straightforward. Engineering refinements come only from practice. As Herr Ghosn said, building a bridge. The Roman bridges of antiquity were very inefficient structures. By modern standards they use far too much stone, and as a result far too much labor to build them, ja? Over the years we have learned to build bridges more efficiently, using fewer materials and less labor to perform the same task. But do not forget that some Roman bridges still stand. They are still bridges, even if they are inefficient. This bomb design, though inefficient and wasteful of materials, is still a bomb, and it will work as I say.”
Heads turned as the beeper on the lathe went off. An indicator light blinked green. The task was finished. Fromm walked over, telling the technicians to flush the Freon out of the system. Five minutes later the object of so much loving care was visible. The manipulator arm brought it into view. It was finished.
“Excellent,” Fromm said. “We will carefully examine the plutonium, and then we will commence assembly. Meine Herren, the difficult part is behind us.” He thought that called for a beer, and made another mental note that he hadn’t gotten the palladium yet. Details, details. But that’s what engineering was.
“What gives, Dan?” Ryan asked over his secure phone. He had missed the morning paper at home only to find the offending article waiting on his desk as part of The Bird.
“It sure as hell didn’t come from here, Jack. It must be in your house.”
“Well, I just tore our security director a brand-new asshole. He says he doesn’t have anything going. What the hell does a ‘very senior’ official mean?”
“It means that this Holtzman guy got carried away with his adjectives. Look, Jack, I’ve already gone too far. I’m not supposed to discuss ongoing investigations, remember?”
“I’m not concerned about that. Somebody just leaked material that comes from a closely held source. If the world made any sense, we’d bring Holtzman in for questioning!” Ryan snarled into the phone.
“You want to rein in a little, boy?”
The DDCI looked up from the phone and commanded himself to take a deep breath. It wasn’t Holtzman’s fault, was it? “Okay, I just simmered down.”
“Whatever investigation is under way, it isn’t the Bureau running it.”
“No shit?”
“You have my word on it,” Murray said.
“That’s fair enough, Dan.” Ryan calmed down further. If it wasn’t the FBI and it wasn’t his own in-house security arm, then that part of the story was probably fiction.
“Who could have leaked it?”
Jack barked out a laugh. “Could have? Ten or fifteen people on the Hill. Maybe five in the White House, twenty—maybe forty here.”
“So the other part could just be camouflage, or somebody who wants a
score settled.” Murray did not make it a question. He figured at least a third of all press leaks were aimed at settling grudges in one way or another. “The source is sensitive?”
“This phone isn’t all that secure, remember?”
“Gotcha. Look, I can approach Holtzman quietly and informally. He’s a good guy, responsible, a pro. We can talk to him off the record and let him know that he may be endangering people and methods.”
“I have to go to Marcus for that.”
“And I have to talk to Bill, but Bill will play ball.”
“Okay, I’ll talk to my Director. I’ll be back.” Ryan hung up and walked again to the Director’s office.
“I’ve seen it,” Director Cabot said. “The Bureau doesn’t know about this investigation, and neither do our people. From that we can surmise that the scandal part of the story is pure bull, but somebody’s been leaking the take from SPINNAKER, and that sort of thing gets agents killed.”
“What do you suggest?” the DCI asked.
“Dan Murray and I approach Holtzman informally and let him know that he’s stepping on sensitive toes. We ask him to back off.”
“Ask?”
“Ask. You don’t give orders to reporters. Not unless you sign their paychecks, anyway,” Jack corrected himself. “I’ve never actually done this, but Dan has. It was his idea.”
