by Bob Mayer
“What do you mean?” Sammy asked as she looked up at him.
“That’s a nuclear bomb.”
“Bullshit.” Devlin was staring into the crate with wide eyes. “How can you know that?”
Riley felt a surge of irritation break through his shock. He pointed his flashlight at the bomb. “I was on a nuke team when I first arrived in a Special Forces Group. A nuke team’s mission is to emplace a tactical ADM—that’s atomic demolitions munition. We were supposed to infiltrate behind enemy lines, put the bomb in the right spot, arm it, and then get the hell out before it blew. That mission was phased out several years ago when they decided cruise missiles could do the job just as well with no chance of compromise.”
Riley glanced at Devlin. “I know you believe that all government workers are idiots, but we were very well trained on nuclear weapons. They take a little more brain power to properly employ than it does to shoot a gun.
“Each nuclear weapon has a special serial number—and this one has the proper designator for a nuclear weapon. If I remember correctly, this looks like an MK/B61, which is a pretty standard nuclear payload for planes.” He looked back at Devlin in the dim light cast by their flashlights. “You may know something about nuclear reactors, but I know about nuclear weapons, and that’s a goddamn nuclear weapon.”
“What about the other box?” Sammy asked.
Riley used the bayonet on that one, levering up the lid. It opened to reveal a similar bomb. Riley checked the serial number. “Another one.”
Sammy seemed mesmerized by the cold gray steel. “You said you know about nuclear weapons. Can that thing be detonated?”
Riley closed his eyes briefly, trying to remember. “There are a lot of safety devices on a nuclear weapon. We had to pass a test every three months that required us to flawlessly complete forty-three separate steps to emplace and arm our nuke.
“A standard nuclear weapon has an enable plug, a ready/safe switch, a separation-timer, pulse thermal batteries, a pulse battery actuator, a time delay switch, and a whole bunch of other things that all have to be operated correctly and in the right sequence. But if someone knows what he’s doing, and has enough time to tinker with it, I have no doubt that he could initiate it—except for one thing. You can’t even begin without—” Riley stopped and blinked.
“What one thing?” Sammy asked, finally looking up from the bomb.
Riley turned and headed out of the unit.
“Where are you going?” Conner yelled after him. When he didn’t answer, they followed.
Riley made his way directly to the mess hall. Swenson looked up as Riley stormed in and grabbed the blue binder off the counter. He thumbed through, turning to the index. He had started reading the material from the beginning but had gotten only halfway through. Now he ran his finger down the index as the others crowded around. He stopped at Emergency Procedures.
Riley rapidly flipped through the binder until he got to the appropriate section. The first page referred them to the operating manual for the reactor in the power room if there were any problems with that. The second page was about getting the tractors out of the east ice storage room using the ramps. The third page consisted of a hand written note. Riley recognized the handwriting from the note that had been taped to the outside of the binder.
The PALs and arming instructions are in the safe.
Glaston
Riley closed his eyes. “Oh, fuck!”
“What does that mean?” Sammy asked as she peered over his shoulder.
Riley opened his eyes and looked at her. “Let’s go out in the hallway.” He led Sammy, Conner, and Devlin out, taking the binder with him. He spoke quietly. “As I was telling you, if someone knows what he’s doing, he can get by all the safeties on those bombs but one. The first and most critical safety is the permissive access link, or PAL. That’s the code that allows you to even begin to arm the bomb. The code and bomb are never kept together for security reasons. The MK/B has a multiple-code six-digit switch with limited try followed by lockout. That means you get two shots at the right code; if you get it wrong both times, you don’t get a third shot—the bomb shuts down.”
Riley stabbed his finger down at the paper. “Except it appears that the PALs for those two bombs are here in the base.” He turned back to the index and scanned. “Here.” He turned to the page displaying a diagram of a unit. “The safe with the PAL codes and arming instructions is located in unit A2.”
Chapter 15
COLORADO SPRINGS, COLORADO
Peter hit the speaker button on the phone as he continued to peruse the computer printout in front of him. “Peter here.”
“It’s me,” a woman’s voice said.
Peter smiled as he recognized the person. “Yes. What can I do for you?”
“My man failed. They found the base and the packages.”
The computer printout was forgotten as Peter sat back in his seat. “Are they going to release the story?”
“Not right away. It’s still being kept in tight. The plan is to wait until a support team gets down there and they can go live.”
“Then we have some time?”
“Yes.”
Peter nodded. “All right. Release the information about the bombs to the other party as you did the initial information. Let’s see how they handle it. They are already interested, and this should whet their appetite. In fact, I’ll send you some additional information over secure modem. I’ll make the other arrangements.”
For the first time the voice sounded uncertain. “Are you sure I should—”
“Do as I say,” Peter ordered. “I will take care of everything else.”
SNN HEADQUARTERS, ATLANTA, GEORGIA
Stu Fernandez stared at the computer screen in confusion. There was a SATCOM message from Conner logged in only ten minutes ago, yet he couldn’t access it. Not only wasn’t the message addressed to him, he couldn’t even get the computer to show him a copy of the message—it was keyed only for the password of the person to whom it was addressed. He looked at the ID code number and frowned. Who was 634822?
Stu went to the directory and punched up the code. “What the heck?” he exclaimed as the screen cleared and the identification came up:
ID Code 634822: J. Russell Parker
Stu had never had a reporter send a message past him. Why was Conner addressing a message directly to the CEO? What was so important that he didn’t have a need to know? Who was the producer of her special anyway? Did it have anything to do with the destruction of the satellite radio? All those questions raced through Stu’s mind and then he sighed. He sure wasn’t going to ask J. Russell. He’d find out when the time came.
UNITED NATIONS EMBASSY, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
The ambassador’s aide frowned as the secretary entered the meeting room and hurried over to his chair. “Mister Kang, there is an urgent message for you,” she whispered in his ear.
Kang made his excuses to the delegation of trade bureaucrats from Poland, then walked swiftly to his office. The encoded message sat on the center of his desk, only the word URGENT readable, the rest in unintelligible seven-letter groups. He unlocked the safe behind his desk and pulled out the one-time pad.
Writing out the letters in long hand, he deciphered the message on a single sheet of paper with a hard plastic board beneath it in order not to leave an impression copy. As the words coalesced into meaning, Kang felt both excited and confused.
News team has discovered Eternity Base.
Inert nuclear reactor found at base. No evidence of rods ever being emplaced, but reactor core could not be reached.
Appears to be a base designed for select personnel to survive a nuclear war or similar disaster.
Weapons found in armory.
Two U.S.-manufactured nuclear weapons, serial numbers NTB-486929-350-98 and NTB-486929-350-56; both suspected model type MK/B 61 included in armory.
Arming codes and instructions for nuclear weapons also contained in safe at b
ase.
Information being held here at highest level—eyes only J. Russell Parker. U.S. authorities currently not being notified.
News team is weathered in. Extent or duration of storm unknown.
Uncertain what reaction will be here. Expect they will hold information in attempt to have exclusive story.
Will continue to monitor and relay information as soon as possible. Have more detailed information on situation that I am in process of encoding.
Loki. 291435Z NOV 96.
Kang didn’t even try to sort out the various pieces of the puzzle. He immediately pulled out another one-time pad and transcribed the letters of the message verbatim as quickly as his hand could write.
Done, he rapidly walked up the stairs to the fourth floor of the brownstone that served as his country’s U.N. embassy. A stone-faced guard in an ill-cut three-piece suit stood before a heavy steel door. Despite Kang’s rank of full colonel in the army and having worked in this building for three years, the guard still demanded to see his identification card. Kang didn’t mind. If the guard had not asked, Kang would have minded very much, because his secondary role at the embassy was security chief.
Satisfied, the guard opened the door and Kang stepped into a small foyer, the door shutting behind him. There was a peephole in the next steel door; an oversized eye appeared and then the door opened.
“Yes, sir?” The technician on duty showed more proper respect for Kang’s position.
Kang thrust the encoded message into the man’s hand. “Send this immediately. Urgent priority.”
ETERNITY BASE, ANTARCTICA
“Latest weather from McMurdo calls for at least another twenty-four to forty-eight hours of this storm,” Conner informed the group gathered around the mess table.
Swenson nodded. “Aye. I took a look about twenty minutes ago and couldn’t see more than ten feet from the door. The wind is howling. I hope my plane is all right.”
The warm air from the electric heater overhead blew gently across Conner as she looked around the room. So far, the only ones who knew about the nuclear weapons were her sister, Devlin, and Riley. She’d sent the information in a coded message to Atlanta forty- five minutes ago on the radio Riley had put together, and the reply had been encoded along with the weather report that Riley had just picked up.
Parker’s orders were to sit tight. He was rushing a larger support team from Atlanta down to their location. They ought to be in Antarctica as soon as the weather cleared. Upon their arrival, Parker wanted Conner to go live on regular SATCOM feed with the story.
Until then there was little her team could do. She herself had a lot of work to do, preparing what she would say. “I suggest we all get some sleep. When we get up I’d like to dig out the west tunnel and completely open up the way to unit Al. Until then there’s really nothing that needs to be done.”
She could tell that her team took that information with relief. They were all exhausted and immediately headed off to B3 to go to bed. Sammy and Riley waited for everyone else to leave. Conner eyed her sister and the security man warily.
When they were alone, Sammy got up and moved to the seat next to Conner. “What’s the plan from Atlanta?”
Conner acted surprised. “What do you mean?”
“Come on, Constance. You’ve been tied to the SATCOM shoestring ever since we got down here. I have to assume that you’ve already sent word to your superiors about the nukes. You’ve been up and down those stairs almost nonstop for the last couple of hours. I want to know what the plan is.”
“I do too,” Riley added. “You need to tell us what’s in those coded messages.”
“You really don’t have a need to know.” As soon as she said it, Conner realized she’d made a mistake. She hadn’t meant to be abrupt, but she was tired and excited at the same time and not thinking straight.
“Listen, lady.” Riley’s face was taut. “This isn’t a fucking game anymore. Those are nuclear weapons in there, not toys. Those things are supposed to be under strict control, yet here we have two abandoned in the middle of Antarctica. That worries me. It worries me a lot. Because we’re the ones who are sitting on them now.”
Conner gave a little ground. “They’re sending another news team down from the States. It’ll have the capability to do high-quality transmissions straight from here. When they arrive, we go live with the story.”
“Then what?” Sammy asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean what do you think is going to happen then?”
Conner hadn’t really thought that through. “Then I suppose the government takes its bombs back and we return to Atlanta, and this is a hot story for about a week, or until some other crisis knocks it out of the headlines.”
Riley leaned forward. “Has it occurred to you that you’re going to be doing quite a bit of damage to the United States by airing this story?”
Conner choked back a laugh. “Hey, they put those things down here. Not me. I just report the news.”
“Has it occurred to you,” Riley persisted, “that the people who built this place and put those weapons down here are probably all retired or dead by now? Why do you think no one has been down here in so long? Why do you think the batteries on the transponder were dead?”
Conner shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. We just report it.”
“We just report it,” Sammy said. “Is that it? What about these bombs?”
“Let’s take it easy,” Riley interceded. “We still don’t know who was behind the building of this base. We need to stay focused on that as far as the story goes. As far as reality goes, Sammy is right—we need to be concerned about those two bombs.”
“Who knows about the bombs in Atlanta?” Sammy asked.
“Only one person,” Conner said firmly. “Mister Parker, who runs SNN.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. I coded the message for his eyes only, and the only one who can uncode it is Mister Parker.” Conner turned to Riley and asked a question of her own. “What kind of damage could those bombs do if one of them went off?”
Riley shook his head. “That depends.”
“On what?”
“On what they’re set at. I think the MK/B has four settings for yields ranging from ten to five hundred kilotons. So it depends on the setting.”
“You mean you can change the power of the bomb by flipping a switch?”
Riley gave her a weak smile. “Pretty neat, huh? The theory is the bomb is set for required yield prior to a mission, depending on the target profile. I’m sure there’s an access panel on the casing that opens to that control. I for one don’t plan on messing with it.”
“Well, for instance, what will a ten-kiloton blast do?” Conner felt somewhat embarrassed to be asking this. Somehow, she felt she ought to know more about the subject.
“A kiloton is equal to a thousand tons of TNT. So ten kilotons is ten thousand tons of TNT. If it blew here, it would take out this base but not much more than that.
“There are five effects of a nuclear explosion. Most people think of only two—the blast and the radiation. The blast, which is the kinetic energy, uses about half the energy of the bomb. That’s what blows things up: it’s the shock wave of compressed air that radiates from the bomb at supersonic speed. If the bomb goes off underground, that wave is muffled, but it takes out whatever it blows near, creating a crater. If it’s an airburst or above surface, then the blast does more damage. You have to worry about not only the original wave but also the high winds that are generated by the overpressure. We’re talking winds of more than two hundred miles an hour, so it can be pretty destructive.
“There are two types of radiation: prompt and delayed. Prompt is what is immediately generated by the explosion and uses about five percent of the energy of the bomb. It’s in the form of gamma rays, neutrons, and beta particles. We measure those in rads. Six hundred rads and you have a ninety percent chance of dying in three to four weeks.”
“How many rads would these bombs put out?” Conner asked.
Riley shrugged. “I can’t answer that. It depends on the strength of the blast, whether it goes off in the air or underground, your relative location to ground zero, and how well shielded you are. Usually you’ll die of blast or thermal before you have to worry about prompt radiation.
“If you survive the initial effects, then you have to worry about delayed radiation—also known as fallout. However, with the strong winds down here, the fallout would get dispersed over a large area. And there aren’t many folks here to be affected by it. In a more populated and less windy area, fallout can be devastating.
“The other two effects are thermal and electromagnetic pulse. Thermal causes damage in built-up areas because it starts fires. If you’re exposed to it, the flash will blind and burn you even before the blast wave reaches you. Thermal uses up about one-third of the energy of the bomb.
“Electromagnetic pulse, known as EMP, is the one effect that few people know about. When the bomb goes off, it sends out electromagnetic waves, just like radio except thousands of times stronger. Those waves will destroy most electronics in their path for a long distance.”
Riley was depressed. He’d buried all those facts deep inside his head and had refused to dig them out for a long time. “The bottom line is that no one really knows exactly what impact nuclear weapons will have on people. There are too many variables. The only times they’ve ever been used against people—at Hiroshima and Nagasaki—were so long ago, and those bombs were so different from what we have now, that the data is not very valid.
“I think Nikita Khrushchev, surprisingly enough, summed up nuclear war quite well. He said the survivors would envy the dead.”
Conner and Sammy were silent for a few minutes as the implications of what Riley had said sank in.
Riley was lost in his dark thoughts. He remembered the debates in the team room about their nuclear mission. Most had been worried about simple and more personal things such as whether there was actually a firing delay in their ADMs, as they had been told. Many believed that once the bombs were emplaced and initiated, they’d go off immediately. Why would the powers-that-be risk an hour’s delay to get the team to safety? Riley had spent his time worrying about more global effects. He’d read all that was available about nuclear weapons, mesmerized and repelled by the destructive power he could carry on his back.
