by Shain Carter
“We’ll have to go tell the Alec and Burt. Then figure it out from there.”
“Now?”
“No. George or Derek could come back here any time. It makes more sense to do it after dinner, when George is talking to his men and Derek is putting the kids to bed.”
Chapter Twenty
Derek did not return to Building 12 that afternoon, nor was he at dinner that evening. When Alec asked about him, George casually said that Derek had decided to visit the excavation site were the fossil had been found.
“He suddenly became very interested in the fossil again. I mentioned that the archeologists were still digging at the site, and he was determined to visit it. As you know, it is not far from here. If I know Mr. Becker, he will want to stay there for several days, to show them how to excavate correctly.”
Alec laughed politely at George’s little joke, but Meredith, Dawson and Ted silently exchanged troubled glances. Nothing else was said about Derek’s absence.
As Dawson had predicted, George left soon after dinner. Alec, too, rose to go, but Dawson called him back. “You too,” he told Burt. He motioned them all to a table in the corner of the room, away from the door and windows, and turned off most of the lights.
Dawson began speaking as soon as everyone was seated. He quickly recounted his finding that the fossil collar was a forgery and Ted’s discovery that not only were they several hundred miles away from the real Anjawan, they were in fact deep in Iraqi territory. The others were silent for a moment, then Alec, with a look of skepticism, addressed Ted. “Are you sure about your calculations, lad?”
Ted opened his mouth to speak, but it was Burt who answered. “Oh yes, his calculations are quite correct. We’re 125 miles south of the Turkey-Iraq border, outside of the town of Al Attalie.”
Dawson turned to Burt and his jaw dropped in shock. Burt’s appearance had changed almost instantly. Gone were the wide eyes and gawky grin. Burt’s lips drew into tight lines, turning up slightly in a menacing smirk. His white teeth flashed unpleasantly and his eyes narrowed into slits.
And it wasn’t just his looks that changed; it was his whole manner, his personality. He rose smoothly to his feet, his chair never in danger of toppling over. His hands were steady and controlled. He confidently surveyed the room. He turned to Dawson and their eyes locked, Burt’s unflinching gaze so resolute that Dawson found himself turning away, towards the others. The expressions on their faces made clear that they were equally stunned by Burt’s transformation.
“How long have you known, Burt?” Dawson finally asked.
“I suspected the night we arrived, but I didn’t know for certain until the next morning when I could check my GPS.” Burt’s voice was powerful and self-confident, his words forceful.
Alec stirred in his chair. “Your GPS?” he asked.
“Yeah, my GPS. It stands for Global Positioning System. It’s a device that uses signals from a network of satellites to calculate exact location.”
“We all know what GPS is,” Dawson said sharply. “What we don’t know is why you thought to bring one, and why you didn’t think it necessary to tell us that we were in Iraq until now.”
“Because you didn’t need to know until now. You still shouldn’t need to know, but, thanks to your snooping, I suppose now is the time to let you in on a few of our secrets.” Burt’s mouth twisted into a smug smile, but his voice remained controlled and curt as he addressed the group. “Jones is right, the fossil is a fake. There’s no messenger probe, either. And, as far as I know, there were no intelligent dinosaurs, although they could have been right on that one.
“But let’s start at the beginning. Last fall, Montana Senator Peter Jackson gets a bizarre call from one of his constituents. Some guy with a crazy theory about dinosaur astronauts. Now, Jackson gets a lot of crazy calls from people, guys who think black helicopters are after them, or the trilateral commission is ruining their lives. But this call is different. Not because of what the guy says, but because of who the guy is - Derek Becker, a very rich man.
“The nice thing about being rich is that you get listened to. It’s more than just good politics on Jackson’s part; it’s good security. Because a poor crazy guy is pretty much harmless, but a rich crazy guy, with the money and power to do whatever he wants to do, is dangerous. So, Jackson listened closely to everything Becker told him, then sent all the information to the CIA for further action.”
“And you heard about it when the CIA forwarded the information to the EPA?” Dawson scoffed.
Burt looked at Dawson and laughed. “No, we kept the information to ourselves, thank you. Here’s a news flash for you, Jones - I wasn’t ever with the EPA. I joined the CIA right out of graduate school. The EPA job was a cover story so that I could get on a chemical weapons inspection team that went to Iran, where I could do a little snooping around for the Company. The CIA liked the information I got for them, and offered me positions of more and more responsibility. I liked it - they gave me direction and a sense of purpose, meaningful training - things I could never get from you. They changed me completely.”
“Anyway,” Burt continued, turning back to the others, “we’d already heard reports that Iraq had traded a bunch of oil to a Former Soviet Union country in exchange for eleven kilograms of weapons grade plutonium. Obviously we were very interested in retrieving that plutonium. We looked very hard for it - even lost a few friendlies in the process - but in the end we could never locate it. We could never even confirm that Iraq had it. Then out of the blue we heard about Becker’s desire to blast a plutonium reactor into space. It seemed like too much of a coincidence, so we took a quick look into just what Becker was up to and, bingo, we hit the jackpot. The first thing we find is that Becker is getting direction from a man missing one eyebrow.”
“George!” Ted and Meredith cried simultaneously.
Burt nodded. “Avi Mustafi himself cut the other brow off. George’s real name is Tanzi Muhammad. He was an Iraqi air ace, back when they had an air force. Now he’s one of the top operatives in Mustafi’s MSA - the Ministry of State Affairs. Mustafi created the MSA to terrorize his own citizens, the way the Gestapo did in Hitler’s Germany, but they’ve recently expanded beyond their borders. Over the last eighteen months they’ve carried out a number of actions against Iraq’s enemies. So far, though, they’ve been limiting their activity to the bordering countries - Iran, Turkey, Kuwait - but Mustafi recently ordered them to pull off something big against a Western nation.”
Alec stared blankly at Burt. “You must be mistaken. George can’t be an agent for the Iraqis!”
“George can’t be an agent for the Iraqis,” Burt mocked in a near perfect imitation of Alec’s thick accent. His face took on a look of contempt. “I swear, I’ll never cease to be amazed by scientists’ capacity for self-delusion. So proud of your ability to solve Nature’s riddles, yet so blind to what’s going on right around you. You were all so wrapped up in this big program and all the rewards it would bring - the accolades from your peers, the place in the history books, the big prizes. This was going to be your big score and you weren’t going to let anything get in the way of it, least of all a few facts. If you hadn’t been so blindly pursuing this pipe dream you would have heard warning bells going off a long ago.”
“Warning bells?” Ted echoed. “What warning bells? It’s a wild theory, yes, but it is credible. It’s exactly the stuff that scientific breakthroughs are made of.”
“Credible?” Burt laughed. “Maybe the science was credible, but what about the rest of it? Like how we got here. Didn’t you ever wonder why the Turkish air force would train a draftee to fly fighter jets? Only career pilots are worth that much investment.”
“Of course!” Meredith cried out. “At the time it seemed so convenient that George was able to fly us from Barcelona, but it must have been part of his plan all along.”
“That’s right. George needed to land us very near the Iraqi border, several hundred miles away from whe
re Metz was going to take us. So he gave Metz a mild poison in Barcelona, then flew us to the town of Kucurka, rather than to Siirt, where we were supposed to be going.”
Ted raised his hand. “But wouldn’t Metz have known something was wrong when he had to go to Kucurka, rather than Siirt, to retrieve the plane?”
“Sure, he would have, had he come for the plane. But George cabled him in Barcelona, telling him that other arrangements had been made for the plane and to take a commercial flight back home. George needed Becker’s plane to stay in Turkey because George had to give it to the Turkish Kurds in exchange for safe passage to the Iraqi border. It was a hefty price, but there’s centuries of bad blood out here, and the Turks aren’t going to let an Iraqi intelligence officer cruise through their territory just to be neighborly. Of course, George would have preferred flying here directly and keeping the plane himself, but the U. N. no-fly zone made that impossible.”
“But why?” asked Alec. “Why this elaborate scheme? What’s so important about the interceptor craft?”
“This isn’t about the interceptor, it’s about what was going into it - a critical mass of plutonium. That was the key. George had very big plans for that plutonium, but he couldn’t carry them out without help. He needed technical expertise that he couldn’t get in his country, and he needed an outside source of funding. He figured Becker could give him both. He pitched Becker a made-to-order story that was so enticing, so seductive, that he knew Becker wouldn’t pass it up. And George was right - Becker bought the story hook, line and sinker. George got nearly unlimited access to Becker’s money and got Becker to assemble for him a team of scientists that would race against the clock to blast his plutonium into outer space. It was pure genius.”
“But it still doesn’t make sense,” Alec insisted. “Why the hell would Mustafi want to send plutonium into space?”
“He doesn’t actually want to send it into space. He only wants to get it as far as the East Coast - Washington, D. C., to be exact. And he can’t do that with the scud missiles that he has, at least not without your modifications.”
Burt paused as his words sunk in. After a moment, Dawson shook his head. “A nuclear bomb? George must realize that even with a critical mass of plutonium he isn’t going to get much of a nuclear explosion, certainly not anything big enough to do real damage. Making an atomic bomb involves a lot more than just getting plutonium go critical. All that will do is heat the plutonium up and vaporize it, and that will be the end of the nuclear chain-reaction - no explosion, just a fizzle. He’d do much better with conventional explosives. Isn’t that right, Meredith?”
Meredith shook her head. "I don’t think he wants a nuclear explosion.” She turned to Burt. “He’s after a dirty bomb, isn’t he?"
Burt nodded, and Meredith turned back to the others and continued. “It’d be the dirtiest. Plutonium is the most toxic substance known to man. Inhale a particle too small to see, and that’s it for you. And George needed me for exactly the reason you gave, Dawson. He needs the plutonium to get very hot - hot enough to vaporize - without having it just melt away. That’s the only way to get it to disperse into the atmosphere. And he can’t vaporize it with conventional explosives or by just letting it go critical. He needs a container specifically designed to withstand heat, to contain the plutonium until it vaporizes, and that’s exactly what I’m designing for him. That’s precisely what makes my reactor different from other small reactors.”
Meredith’s words trailed off, and Burt took over. “George’s plan was to vaporize the plutonium high over Washington. Some would drop immediately, making D. C. off limits for literally tens of thousands of years. The rest would go wherever the wind took it. At this time of year, that means right up the coast - Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Boston.
“Air dispersal is hardly the most effective way to poison people, but our computer models predict that it will work. Ten million would die directly; over fifty million would be displaced. A third of the wealth of the nation and its entire federal government would be destroyed - off limits for fifty thousand years.
“Then, between the stresses of a hundred million refugees and the lack of a functioning government, the rest of the country would plunge into chaos. Three airplanes hitting a couple of buildings was enough to shut the entire country down for over a week. It would take us decades if not centuries to recovery from this. With America gone, there’d no superpower left to meddle in Iraq’s affairs. Mustafi would be free to annex his neighbors as he sees fits, plundering their resources and enslaving their populations.”
“Come on, Burt,” Ted protested, “surely Mustafi knows that this would be suicide. The world isn’t going to just stand by and let him get away with killing ten million people. Mustafi wouldn’t know what hit him. He’d go more quickly than the Taliban!”
Burt laughed, his teeth flashing unpleasantly in the dim light. “Do you really think so? Afghanistan is irrelevant. Retaliation against a Stone Age country whose only weapons are your own commercial airplanes is one thing, but Mustafi is betting that this will be completely different. Oh, sure, there’d be global outrage, but when it comes to actual reprisals, who would dare? To attack a man willing to murder millions, a man who possesses an unknown arsenal of dirty bombs, to put your own country at risk just for the sake of justice? Mustafi believes self-preservation would carry the day here. His model isn’t Afghanistan, it’s the early years of Nazi Germany, when no country would dare defy Hitler as he rolled through Europe. Mustafi wouldn’t have let us come here if he wasn’t absolutely convinced it would work out like this.”
“And where, exactly, is ‘here’?” Meredith asked.
“’Here’ is an abandoned bio-research station, where Mustafi was once hoping to develop a strain of anthrax that could be delivered by missile. We secretly destroyed the facility last year using cruise missiles. We demolished the complex before they had finished building it, and we don’t believe any bio-research was actually done here. Just to be sure nothing nasty got away, though, the cruise missiles were tipped with very high temperature incendiary bombs.”
Burt went on about the complex, but Dawson was only half listening. At the mention of bio-research he suddenly recalled the Russian glove box down the hall from his lab - the glove box with the curiously backwards valves. It dawned on him that the valves weren’t backwards at all; the box was designed to prevent the air inside from escaping out, rather than the air outside from coming in, as Dawson had assumed. He had been looking so hard for clues that he missed one literally a few short feet away. Dawson cursed under his breath, then instinctively pulled the flask from his back pocket and took a deep drink.
Dawson focused back on the conversation just as Burt was describing how he had been communicating with the CIA. “A spy plane flew over once a week, at night,” he told them. “I’d pre-record a message for them, then compress it to a thousandths its original length. Then I’d use a small radio to upload the data to the plane, at the same time download information from Langley. The whole data exchange took just a few seconds.”
“Then that was you we saw walking around last night!” Ted cried out.
Burt frowned. “You saw me? I’d hoped to be more careful than that.”
Ted nodded vigorously. “It wasn’t just us who saw you - one of George’s men was watching you as well. George must be on to you!”
“You think so?” Burt laughed. “Of course he’s on to me. We’ve never discussed the matter, but I’m sure he’s known from the beginning that I was with the CIA.”
“Then why’d he let you come out with us?”
“Because he had to. That’s all part of the game. He knows that I know he has the plutonium and that I’m trying to get it from him. I know that he’s developing the tools to vaporize it over D. C. We have our objectives, and we have our rules. My goal is to give our intelligence folks time to find the plutonium, and his goal is to use it before that happens. At any point either one of us could have shut t
he whole thing down, and we’d have had a stalemate - George would keep the plutonium but have no immediate way of using it, and I’d have saved the lives of ten million Americans but not have recovered the plutonium. We each let the charade go on because we each thought we could win.”
"That's why George was constantly giving us pep talks and trying to move the project forward, especially Alec’s work,” Meredith said. “He was racing against you."
"And to buy time,” Dawson added, “you were sabotaging our work."
Alec jumped to his feet. For the first time since Dawson had met him, there was color in his cheeks. "You bastard!" he shouted, pointing a shaking finger at Burt. "It wasn’t the children who erased, it was you, you bloody bastard. All that work I had to redo!"
Burt grinned. "You really ought to password protect your computer, McPherson. Forget about all the work you had to redo - look at this as a learning experience."
Alec's face reddened even more. He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. After several seconds he collapsed into his chair. Meredith laid her hand on his shoulder. "Are you OK?" she asked. Alec nodded feebly.
"Don't worry about him,” Burt told her. "He’ll feel a lot better once he gets home and back on his medicine."
Alec grabbed at his shirt pocket and pulled out a prescription bottle. He poured some tablets into his hand. "Sugar,” Burt told him as he brought the pills to his mouth. "If I had the real pills I'd give them to you now, but I threw them all out in Spain."
Alec flung the bottle at Burt, but it sailed wide of the mark, missing Burt completely and bouncing off the wall and onto the floor. Alec stared at the amber bottle as it rolled away, then put his elbows on the table and cradled his head in his hands.
“Temper, temper,” Burt chided, wagging his finger at Alec. “Remember, McPherson, you’re not a well man. And I need you to hold together for another 24 hours.” Alec lifted his head and stared at Burt, but before Burt could continue Dawson had a sudden revelation. He looked down at the flask in his hand, the flask filled with alcohol he had so conveniently found in the lab on their first day here. "You put those bottles in the lab next to mine. You knew I’d find them there."
