by Jack Du Brul
“Naturally,” Mercer smirked.
Ira gave him a wry smile. “He did say that they mined several tons of ore, the entire lode in fact.”
“So what happened to it?” Cali asked. She pursed her lips around her straw to sip some of her Coke. It was a sensual gesture that caught every man’s attention and delayed Ira’s answer for a beat.
“Ah, Greg told me they used up half of it before they began to enrich their own uranium in 1950.”
“So their early bombs were fueled by the plutonium,” Harry said.
“Appears that way.”
Mercer asked, “What about the half they didn’t use?”
“Thought you’d bring that up.” Ira reached into his briefcase again and tossed two airline tickets onto the coffee table. “You and Cali are going to go see it for yourselves. The Russians have it stored in an old mine in the Ural Mountains with a bunch of other artifacts left over from Department 7. I’ve already cleared it with your boss, Cali.”
Cali couldn’t believe it. “The Russians just left it sitting there?”
“You know better than most how poorly they secured their nuclear material during the Cold War. And when you think about it, until the last decade or so it didn’t matter. There wasn’t anyone interested in getting their hands on the stuff. Of course today is a different story, which has forced them to play catch-up. Our government has funneled billions to Russia and Ukraine to consolidate and better guard their stockpiles, but it takes time.”
“I know.” Cali shook her head. “It’s just frustrating. I’ve spent my career trying to prevent a nuclear attack and no matter how good I am, or the rest of NEST, it only takes one mistake by us and a city’s wiped off the face of the earth. Meanwhile you’ve got the Russians leaving nuclear material lying around in mines and warehouses or in the craters of old nuclear bomb tests they never bothered to clean up or even refill.
“And what happens if we do get hit? Sure we’ll condemn the terrorists and lob a few smart bombs, but then we’ll spend years investigating our own intelligence failures and never once address the real culprits, the assholes who made the material available in the first place. I agreed with taking out the Taliban after 9/11 but then we should have rolled right across Saudi Arabia. It’s their government that allowed bin Laden and his followers to fester; only the Saudis were smart enough in the beginning to ship them all to Pakistan and Afghanistan.”
“Course now they’re coming home to roost,” Ira added.
“And it’s only when bombs started going off in Riyadh that they took an interest in fighting terrorism, and even now their attitude is still pretty permissive. On the one hand they track down and execute a few extremists while on the other they continue to pump money into the Wahabi schools where future terrorists are trained, because if they stop, the whole movement will turn against them.”
“We know invading Saudi Arabia isn’t an option,” Mercer said. “So how do we get out of this mess?”
Again Cali shook her head. “The Saudis are actively exporting terror because they can afford to. It won’t stop until they’re broke. Take away their oil wealth and they’re just another backwater third world country that can’t feed its population. We stop them by finding other sources of oil and eventually finding an alternative to it altogether.”
“In other words,” Harry rasped, “we keep taking it on the chin for as long as it takes to pump the bastards dry.”
“And that’s just what’s going to continue to happen,” Cali agreed. “They’ll keep funding fanatics who will still try to fly airplanes into buildings or detonate a dirty bomb or simply strap on suicide vests and blow themselves up in malls and movie theaters.”
“This has turned grim,” Booker said, helping himself to a beer from Mercer’s retro fifties era lock-lever bar fridge.
“Unfortunately that’s the state of the world,” Ira replied. “I see more shit crossing my desk at the White House than you can imagine, but I do agree with Cali that fundamentalism is the single greatest danger today and there are no easy fixes either. We’re like the Russians playing catch-up with their nuclear materials. It will take us years to find a way to neutralize the Saudis’ influence by making oil obsolete.”
“In the meantime we have more pressing concerns,” Mercer said to get the conversation back on track. “What’s the plan once Cali and I get to Russia?”
“Grigori will meet you in Samara, an industrial city on the Volga River. From there you’ll take a military chopper to the mine. He’ll have a hazmat team on hand to make sure the plutonium ore is handled properly. They’re taking it to a weapons depot about a thousand miles from anywhere, in the middle of Siberia. Just so you know, that facility is the newest and best in the country, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayers. Once you verify that the plutonium is safely in the depot, your mission is done.”
“Not even close,” Mercer said sourly. “We still have Poli and the Janissaries running around, as well as the Alembic of Skenderbeg to deal with.” He turned to Booker Sykes. “Are you up for a little trip?”
“Depends,” the Delta commando drawled.
“Ira, I take it you’re still not having any luck getting the Pentagon to send a team to check out the stele?” Lasko nodded. “Then, Book, how’d you like an all-expense-paid trip to the worst hellhole I’ve ever seen?”
“To do what exactly?”
“There’s an obelisk in the village where Cali and I found the mine. It was placed there by order of Alexander the Great. Cali and I both remember there was writing on it. I need to know what it says. I’m hoping that it will give us some clue as to where the alembic was stashed.”
“You just want pictures or the whole damned thing?”
“A couple of Polaroids and you’re out of there. Two days on the ground tops.”
“I recommend a digital camera,” Ira suggested.
“Figure of speech,” Mercer replied. “Don’t forget I’m a Luddite. I got my first cell phone last year.”
Sykes said, “The two guys with me on the boat, Paul Rivers and Bernie Cieplicki, both have to rotate back to Fort Bragg tomorrow.” He grinned. “I’ll see they come down with a case of the creeping cruds and spring them for the trip.”
Samara, Russia
By the time the Lufthansa Airbus from Frankfurt touched down at Samara’s airport, Cali and Mercer had spent fifteen hours in the air, and thanks to Mercer’s upgrading of the tickets from the coach Ira had provided to first class, they had enjoyed their time together. Cali had teased as they ate petit filets and asparagus with sauce Bearnaise over the Atlantic that this didn’t count as their date and Mercer still owed her a meal. And when she grabbed his hand when a crosswind slewed the aircraft just before touchdown at Samara, Mercer felt his heart trip.
For him it was almost like the beginning of a high school romance where the tiniest gestures came loaded with significance but were also fraught with pitfalls. Was it too soon after losing Tisa? Was he even capable of giving himself again? Each step forward came at a price of self-doubt. He wanted to believe that his burgeoning feelings weren’t merely a physical reaction to a beautiful woman. Yet when he looked into himself to find the truth, he saw nothing but a hollow, an empty void where once there was confidence. He felt paralyzed by a guilt he was trying to convince himself he didn’t deserve.
Cali gave his hand a squeeze as the plane began to taxi to the long one-story terminal building, then she let go. Mercer’s palms retained her nervous warmth.
They were met at Customs by a pair of men. One was short and handsome, with blond cropped hair and the insignia of an army captain on his uniform collar. The other was older, stooped, with haunted blue eyes and a large skull covered in wisps of gray hair. His suit was wrinkled and his shirt had an ink stain at the bottom of the breast pocket. He had the look of a muddled academic.
“Captain Aleksandr Federov,” the soldier said by way of introduction. He spoke with just a trace of an accent and smiled brightly. “Please cal
l me Sasha. This is Professor Pavel Sapozhnik, of the Ministry of Defense. I will be leading your military escort. Professor Sapozhnik and his team are the disposal experts.”
“Mercer. And this is Cali Stowe of the Department of Energy.” They shook hands all around while the Customs inspector frowned. Federov said a few angry words to the inspector, then asked Cali and Mercer for their passports. They were quickly stamped and returned.
“Sorry about that,” Federov said as he led them to a closed-off section of the airport. “Samara was a closed city until the collapse. Customs still likes to give visitors a hard time. It’s not unusual for tourists to be denied entry for no reason, which makes it especially tough since Samara’s newest export is mail order brides. A lot of lonely German and American men have come here to meet the love of their life only to return more frustrated than before.”
Mercer chuckled, warming to the officer immediately.
“Of course, Ms. Stowe, you put all our brides to shame.”
She smiled at the compliment.
“I thought Grigori Popov would be here,” Mercer said.
Federov threw his hands up in a universal sign of annoyance. “Bureaucrats. He said he was detained in Moscow and will be here tomorrow or the next day. Most likely he will not come. Samara is not, how you say, a favorite destination. It is like your Pittsburgh without a good sports team.” He paused outside a restroom door. “We have another two-hour flight. You might want to avail yourselves.”
While Cali used the facilities, Mercer learned that Federov had studied languages during his military service and spoke French, German, and Ukrainian. He had been assigned to nuclear materials protection because so much of that work was carried out by foreign specialists. Professor Sapozhnik ignored them while they chatted, preferring to stare off into space rather than join in.
“Do you know anything about the mine Department 7 used as storage?”
“We did not know the facility existed until your superior’s call to Popov,” Sasha Federov answered candidly. “It is a sad state that we can misplace nuclear materials so easily but that is the fact we must deal with. The old system was so secretive that the right and left hands didn’t even know the other existed.
“It is like a story about an incident in the 1970s when one of our attack submarines almost fired a torpedo at a ballistic missile submarine returning to its port at Vladivostok. You see the two branches of the navy were in a bitter rivalry for additional funding and refused to divulge their patrol schedules. Catastrophe was avoided when the sonarman on the attack sub realized the computer was giving him a false reading on the boomer’s identity. He’d served on her a few years earlier and recognized her tonals.”
Professor Sapozhnik snapped at Federov in Russian. The younger man answered back just as hotly and an argument flared for a moment. Sapozhnik finally nodded and turned to Mercer. “Forgive me,” he said in a deep, mournful voice. “Old habits die hard. We have nothing to hide from our Western benefactors any longer.”
“No apology necessary,” Mercer said and smiled. He recognized Sapozhnik as from the old guard who believed the nation was better off under a Communist dictatorship. “No one likes to have their dirty laundry aired in public.”
“Anyway,” Sasha said smoothly, “it is an abandoned gypsum mine. There is a single road that leads to it as well as a railroad line. It was abandoned in 1957 because of flooding in the lowest levels. We now know that Department 7 commandeered it soon afterward to consolidate their warehouses of leftover war materiel.”
“Are the road and rail line still usable after all this time?”
“Yes. In fact we’re going to use a train to haul the, ah, ore to Siberia.” Even with no one around he was reluctant to use the word “plutonium.” “It’s much safer than the roads. The train has already left the main freight yard here in Samara but won’t reach the mine until tomorrow.”
Cali returned from the bathroom. Mercer dashed in quickly, urinated, and washed his hands and face. Rather than risk drinking the water, he dry swallowed a couple of painkillers. The swelling in his groin had gone down significantly and the pain was little more than the discomfort of sitting so long.
They reached an exterior door that Federov opened theatrically for Cali. On the tarmac loomed a military helicopter, a massive MI-8 transport chopper, perhaps the most successful rotary wing aircraft in history. At eighty-two feet long and eighteen high it dwarfed the men lounging next to the open door. They snapped to easy attention when they saw Federov approaching.
The Russian captain gestured for Mercer and Cali to take seats along the starboard wall and showed them how to fix their helmets. “Sorry they do not have radios, but they will protect your hearing.”
Seated along the flanks of the helicopter’s cargo deck were six soldiers kitted out for combat with AK-74s and a pair of RPG-7 rocket launchers. There were also five others aboard, and while they wore olive green jumpsuits, Mercer believed they were the civilian scientists under Sapozhnik. In the back of the utilitarian hold were crates for tents, food, water, and biohazard equipment.
Federov took his seat and jacked his helmet into the helo’s intercom. A moment later the onboard APU wound up and ignited one of the Klimov turboshafts. The second engine roared to life and the helicopter began to buck under the strain of her own power plants. The pilot engaged the transmission, and the five sagging rotor blades began to beat the polluted air. They vanished into a blur and the shaking increased so that Mercer had to clamp his jaw. He felt Cali’s hand find his. It nestled into his palm like a little creature seeking safety in its den.
The shaking suddenly eased as the pilot gently lifted the eleven-ton chopper from the crumbling apron.
Mercer peered out the yellowed Perspex window as the helicopter gained height. The city lay under an industrial pall from dozens of huge factory complexes as it clung to the shores where the Samara River dumped into the Volga, the largest river in Europe. Although the Volga was many times the size of the Ohio or Allegheny, Mercer had to admit the city of three million did look a bit like Pittsburgh.
The flight to the Samarsskaya Gypsum Mine was monotonous. The steppe slowly gave way to ugly hills of fractured granite, worn smooth by time so they looked bald, denuded. The valleys weren’t particularly deep and what timber had once grown in the region had long since been harvested, so the trees remaining were stunted and gnarled. The land was muted shades of gray and dun and the sky was particularly cheerless.
As Federov had predicted, it took two hours to reach the mine. For the last twenty minutes of the flight they flew directly over the rail spur that serviced the installation. The rails were shiny streaks in the otherwise murky landscape. The mine’s machinery and headgear, the crane that raised and lowered mine cars into the depths of the earth, were perched near the top of a long valley. The mine shaft itself was a black square in the gray stone that descended into the mountain at a shallow angle. About a quarter mile from the headgear was a clutch of small buildings, administrative offices and housing for the miners when the mine was in operation. Now they were abandoned and crumbling.
The facility had been a bleak, forlorn place even before the ravages of decades of neglect.
Near the valley floor was the rail depot with ore-loading hoppers straddling the tracks. A half-mile-long metal chute connected the two parts of the complex. A broad dirt road switchbacked down to the valley floor, occasionally passing below the ore chute. The train Federov had said wouldn’t be there until the following day was backed into the depot. There was a bright orange TEM16 diesel-electric locomotive from the Bryansk Works and a string of eight boxcars. Pale blue smoke vented from the engine’s exhaust and a few men milled around the locomotive. Several more worked near the open door of one of the boxcars.
Mercer glanced at Sasha Federov and didn’t like the puzzled look on his face. He looked back at the train, at Federov again, and quickly unbuckled his seat belt even though the chopper was making its landing approach i
n a large open area adjacent to the mine’s towering headgear.
“That’s not your train,” Mercer shouted at the Russian. “It’s a trap.”
Federov nodded grimly and yelled into his microphone at the pilot.
The missile came from behind, a perfect blind ambush. While a notoriously inaccurate weapon beyond two hundred yards, the RPG-7 lifted from its tube less than seventy yards behind the hovering MI-8 just as it reached its most vulnerable position. Covering the distance in less than a second, the five-pound warhead should have impacted squarely under the helo’s tail boom, but Mercer’s instincts and the pilot’s quick reaction heeled the chopper over just enough so the projectile slammed into the fixed landing gear. The explosion came a microsecond later.
Most of the detonative force blew away from the chopper, but enough blasted into the MI-8 to tear a sizable hole into her rear cargo compartment. Hot gas and molten aluminum from the helicopter’s skin ripped through the men and women inside the compartment, killing the two soldiers at the end of the bench seat outright and severely injuring three more. Something sheared the drive shaft to the aft rotor because suddenly its contra-rotating force was gone. The chopper began a dizzying spin through the sky.
Mercer had been tossed across the cabin when the pilot threw the MI-8 onto its side and now was pinned up against Professor Sapozhnik and two of his scientists. The world outside the small portholes whirled by as the chopper corkscrewed from the sky. Cockpit alarms blared over the roar of her engines and the cabin was quickly filling with smoke.
Over the din of screams and the lingering effects of the explosion that had partially deafened him, Mercer heard the ping of small arms fire against the helicopter. Whoever had sprung the trap wasn’t taking any chances. In the fleeting seconds before the big cargo chopper plowed into the earth Mercer’s mind turned to the perpetrator. He knew it was Poli who’d ordered the helicopter shot down. What he didn’t know, what had nagged at him repeatedly since first crossing the mercenary in Africa, was how he was always a step ahead.
