Countdown to Mecca

by Michael Savage

  “Every three minutes,” Professor Peters said proudly. “Let’s see anyone record our conversation now! Can you imagine someone in a van trying to establish an audio baseline with that bass roar?” He chuckled. “It will blow out their ears and equipment on the first pass!”

  Jack grinned. “I like your style.”

  “Thanks,” the physicist replied. “Sometimes, simple solutions are the best.”

  It was quite the talk. Jack asked for everything he needed to know about making a nuclear bomb, and Peters was just the man who wanted to tell him.

  “Airport lights,” he said. “Why would the Kingdom need so many runway lights?”

  Even though a seemingly incongruous statement, Jack knew that there was method to the prof’s seeming madness. In addition to foiling any listening device, real or imaginary, the rendezvous point he chose had an additional meaning.

  “Because there’s a gas inside runway lights—decay energy 18.6 keV, also known as tritium, also known as hydrogen-3, which is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen—that can be used to increase the yield of nuclear devices.”

  Peters turned to smile at the runway lights in the distance. “The emitted electrons from the radioactive decay of small amounts of tritium cause phosphors to glow, so as to make self-powered lighting.”

  “What about nonnuclear explosives?” Jack asked. “What could it do for those? Biological agents, for example.”

  Peters thought for a moment. “If you were proficient in its application, an explosion involving tritium could alter the structure of any agent you’re delivering.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Let’s say you have a virus that affects the circulatory system,” Peters said pensively.

  “Like Ebola,” Jack said.

  Peters nodded. “What if it has been genetically manipulated into a pathogen that impacts the respiratory system.”

  “So that it’s airborne rather than carried in bodily fluids,” Jack said.

  “Exactly. The Russians, the Israelis, the Germans, the United States have all worked on creating mutated forms of such diseases to which normal methods of treatment would not apply.”

  “Okay, I’ve reported on all that. But the tritium? Where’s that come in?”

  “Suppose the virus isn’t weaponized until it’s irradiated? What if the tritium begins the mutagenic process? Or, worse—”

  “What could be worse?” Jack demanded.

  “What if the tritium does something else? What if it irradiates the environment around the new strain and destroys any incoming curative?”

  “Hold on,” Jack said. “I thought radiation kills disease germs. Hell, exposure to just ninety seconds of ultraviolet light stops Ebola from reproducing.”

  “That is true,” Peters agreed. “But you’re talking about the traditional form of the disease. A nation that has created a superbug would want a very special key to unlock its potential. Tritium could be it.”

  He kept talking but Jack didn’t hear because another jumbo jet appeared overhead. Once it was on its way, Peters turned back to Jack with an even wider smile, but troubled eyes.

  “The isotope is used in very high-tech runway lights,” the scientist went on. “But how many do you need? Check to see how many were delivered to Saudi Arabia in the last six months.”

  Jack held up his smartphone. “May I?”

  Peters nodded, then checked the skies. “Be quick.”

  Jack called Sol, who passed on the question to Boaz and said he would get back to Jack. Once Jack hung up, the next plane was there, seemingly close enough for Jack to reach up and scratch its belly. When it, too, was past, Peters took up his lecture.

  “Saudi Arabia has purchased a large number of perfectly legal items that could, under the proper circumstances, be taken apart and modified for something that could be used as part of a nuclear weapon. There are several ways the isotope could be used, depending on the exact type of bomb.” Peters checked his watch. “Bottom line: tritium could be used to make uranium far more dangerous. The material increased yields and made detonation simpler. As for its effects on other agents, that remains pure speculation … none of it good.”

  They waited through the next plane’s descent.

  “What about krytrons?” Jack asked.

  “You asked about those last time.”

  “Remind me,” Jack said, trying to keep everything straight.

  The professor sighed. “High speed switches—the kind used in bombs—are pretty rare. Only certain copy machines use krytrons any longer, and even those machines didn’t use the same ones that bombs used. You need someone who supplies 3D copy machines.”

  “Right,” Jack said.

  The next plane appeared, giving Jack time to think. He now had another trail to follow—one figuratively lit by runway lights.

  When the plane disappeared, Jack put his arm around Peters’s shoulder, and gently led him back toward the path. “Tell me, Professor,” he said. “If ever I was ever to come across these switches, these runway lights, or even a completed bomb, what’s the best thing to do?”

  “Duck and cover won’t work,” he said glibly.

  “I know,” Jack said.

  “If you’re asking how to defuse a bomb, remember what I said before? About simple solutions being the best?”

  “Yes?”

  The professor shrugged. “Pour a bottle of water on the device. Hose it down. Or pee on it.”

  It took a moment for Jack to realize that he was serious. “Can you elaborate?”

  “If you don’t happen to have a robotic bomb disposal unit and experienced technician, just wet the damn thing down and chances are pretty good you’ll short circuit something, anything.”

  “‘Pretty good,’ huh?” Jack muttered. “Can you be more specific? What are the odds of that working?”

  “A little better than fifty-fifty,” the scientist told him. “The good news is, if it doesn’t work you’ll never know.”

  Jack had hoped the physicist would come up with something a little more practical, a little more scientific. But as stopgaps went, he knew he would always have access to at least one of those options.…

  27

  U.S. Radar Station, Mt. Keren, Israel

  Colonel Tristan Q. Ashlock was not a lunatic by any means. He was not criminally insane or pathological in his views of the world. He was an ardent American patriot who had spent his entire adult life wearing the uniform of the United States Army. Every male member of his family on his mother’s side had worn that same uniform, dating back five generations to the Civil War, all of them graduating from the Virginia Military Institute near the tops of their classes. Not one of his line had ever graduated at the very top, however, until Tristan did so in 1977. His great-great-grandfather, William J. Smith, had been on the verge of doing so when the Commonwealth of Virginia voted to secede from the Union in the spring of 1861, but this was as close as anyone else with his blood had ever come to matching the achievement.

  Upon leaving VMI to fight for the Confederacy, the young Lieutenant William “Bill” Smith had served briefly under General Barnard E. Bee before both were killed in action on the 21st of July at First Manassas. In death, Bill Smith left behind a pair of infant twin daughters, Eleanor and Sarah. It was from Sarah’s line that Tristan Quentin Ashlock would emerge four generations later as the youngest of four sons, his older brothers all destined to give their lives either in the jungles of Vietnam or in clandestine military operations carried out during the Cold War. Their deaths, along with Tristan’s genetic infertility, had assured that he would be the last of Sarah’s line. Such were the laws of primogeniture.

  Today, Colonel Ashlock was fifty-seven years old with thick gray hair that he still wore closely cropped to his head. His penetrating eyes were the color of steel dust, and though his facial features had begun to sag a bit, he maintained the distinguished, chiseled visage of the handsome warrior he had once been. He was a veteran of both Gulf Wars, the ongoing
debacle in Afghanistan, and the recipient of the Distinguished Service Cross. Though his service career had been well distinguished as a commander of troops in the field, he had made some socially critical errors during his climb up the chain of command, errors in the form of failing to keep his mouth shut at the appropriate times and failing to kiss the butts of the appropriate generals when it would have been prudent to do so, thus giving offense in all of the wrong military circles at all of the worst times. As a result of these social blunders, he had never been able to attain a board selection to attend the prestigious United States Army War College, and would therefore, in all likelihood, never attain the coveted gold star of a brigadier general.

  To say that Ashlock was resentful of his circumstance, was to say the very least. He was a soldier, not a sycophant. His job was to close with and destroy the enemy, either bodily or through the extension of the men and matériel at his command, and he had done exactly that, with distinction, for the past thirty-five years. Now that he realized he was to be permanently passed over—left to ride out his final years of service either accepting minor commands or marching the halls of the Pentagon as a glorified dog robber for generals who had never been on a battlefield—he had decided to go forward with his retirement plans.

  The upper echelons of the United States Military, from the president down through the entire General Staff, had forgotten their collective duty. They had grown soft and indecisive in their misguided desire for peace at any cost, satisfied to let the tide of Islam slowly envelope the world. How many Middle Eastern governments would have to fall to Muslim extremists before America’s leaders woke up and realized the folly of their peaceful ambitions? First the Egyptian government had been overthrown and taken over by Hamas. Then Gaddafi was deposed with the help of American air support, only to see Al Qaeda move in and set up house. And now it looked as though Syria would be the next to fall. Ashlock believed that something bold and decisive had to be done to cauterize the growing malignancy of Islam, and since no one in the upper echelons of any Western government possessed the resolve to take this decisive action, it appeared that he would have to do it for them.

  Checking his watch and seeing that it was time to go, he got up from his chair and reluctantly left his air-conditioned trailer where was stationed atop Mt. Keren just five miles over the border from Egypt into Israel. He instantly felt the oven-like desert heat on his face as he gazed out over the Israeli terrain spread out far below him in all directions, reminding him briefly of the view from Masada. For the past year now, he had been the commander of a highly classified American-run radar installation with 120 American technicians and combat personnel under his command. The only foreign troops stationed on Israeli soil, their mission was to maintain a close radar watch on Tehran one thousand miles away to the northeast. The classified X-Band radar they used to perform this mission was so powerful that it could detect a soccer ball kicked into the air from nearly three thousand miles away.

  The two portable, school bus–size radar units were painted in desert khaki and discretely positioned behind protective concrete blast barriers on the far northern side of the base where they were monitored constantly by American technicians in bulky radiation suits worn to protect them from the extremely heavy radiation generated by the radar units.

  In the event the Iranian government ever made the fateful decision to launch one of their Shahab-3 missiles at Tel Aviv, this radar installation would detect it within seconds of launch, allowing for effective countermeasures to be taken before the missile ever reached Israeli air space. The Israelis’ own radar would not pick it up for a full seven minutes, far too late for an intercept. So this significant time difference in detection made the American early warning system an invaluable asset to the security of Tel Aviv, as well as a powerful bargaining tool for the United States to use in curbing the aggressive natures of many hard-line First Strike advocates within the Israeli government.

  Ashlock got into his car and drove across the small base to the gate were he was passed through by a pair of American soldiers armed with M4 carbines. He drove down the mountain and headed out into the desert. Within the hour, he pulled up to a large government garage used to house earth moving equipment, eleven miles south of the Negev Nuclear Research Center. He parked near three other civilian vehicles, all of them bearing either diplomatic or government license plates, and went inside.

  Standing around a battered contractor’s table near a dirty D10N Caterpillar track hoe were six pensive looking men, four Israelis and two Americans. Both of the Americans were CIA agents in their forties. Two of the Israelis were of the same age, both agents with the Israeli Mossad. But the other two Israelis were ten years younger than the rest, both of them nuclear physicists working for the Israeli government. They were also brothers, though this wasn’t immediately obvious to look at them with one of them being Orthodox while the other was clearly a Hasidic Jew with the curled sidelocks of hair hanging down in front of his ears. Both of them worked at the Negev nuclear plant where the entire world understood that Israel had probably manufactured close to two hundred nuclear weapons since the plant had first gone on line in the late 1950s. In a basement of the plant, several levels down, the Israelis also ran chemical and bacteriological weapons programs. These were launched in the middle 1960s when there was concern about the widespread destruction the high yield bombs would cause as well as decades of lingering radiation. Nerve agents, blood agents, and choking agents were produced here along with disease agents ranging from anthrax to Ebola. There was a secondary reason for producing these other weapons: in the event of an attack from any of its neighbors, the bomb runs would release these toxins and cause untold devastation in those border nations.

  “I take it we’re all here then,” Ashlock said, “because we’ve decided to go through with this?”

  One of the CIA men, a gruff looking fellow wearing a Yankees cap with gnarled hands and a sunburned face shook his head, jerking his thumb at the Hasid. “Curly here’s got cold feet.”

  “Watch your mouth!” said the Hasid’s older brother. “He has valid points!” The older brother was tall and thin, scholarly looking with a prominent nose and thick black hair. His name was Kolton.

  The CIA man chuckled. His name was Chevrier, a former Navy SEAL from the first Gulf War. He glanced at his partner, a thinner man with a hatchet face and dark sandy blond hair. “Hear that, Parks? He’s got valid points.”

  Parks smirked and shook his head, trying not to laugh. If Chevrier was the muscle in their little CIA team, Parks was definitely the brains.

  Kolton took a step around the table, but one of the Mossad men, another military looking man named Laidlaw with a shaved head and goatee, put a hand on his chest to stop him. “You’d better grow a thicker skin, boy, or you’re likely to get your neck broken.”

  Ashlock stared at Chevrier long enough to make sure the CIA man felt the weight of his gaze then turned to the younger brother who stood looking defiant on the far side of the table. “What’s on your mind, Isaiah?”

  Isaiah was the smartest man in the room at twenty-nine years of age. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and looked like the classic Jewish nerd. “The target is wrong,” he said simply.

  “Wrong how?” Ashlock asked, wondering if he had judged the younger man correctly.

  “Destroying Mecca will leave no center to the Muslim faith,” Isaiah said. “The war will never end because they’ll have no reason to ever quit. We’ll have to kill every last one of them.”

  “Ha!” Chevrier said with a sneer. “What’s wrong with that? Isn’t that the idea?”

  “No, it isn’t,” Isaiah said, mater-of-factly, pushing his glasses up onto his nose. “The idea is to eliminate the extremist threat to the civilized world, but by destroying Mecca you instantly turn every single one of the peaceful into another warrior extremist. You fill him with hatred and you force him to fight. It’s obvious if you take a moment to think about it. It’s a total war, a war of c
omplete annihilation.”

  “Which is exactly what we want,” Chevrier said.

  Isaiah looked around the room at the others. “I can’t agree to that,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s not a sound strategy. Look at it another way … if you want to control a man, do you murder his entire family? No. You murder one child and leave the rest alive, making sure he knows the lives of others depend on his cooperation. After that, he has no choice but to do as he’s told. You can only destroy Mecca one time, gentlemen. After that, there’s nothing left to threaten them with. You’ll have to kill them all, and I don’t think we can count on the Western powers to do that. There will be too much guilt. They’ll fight the war halfheartedly—just as they’re doing now—and it will drag on forever … just as it has for two thousand years.”

  Chevrier grumbled, mumbling something unintelligible under his breath.

  Colonel Ashlock stood watching the others, his arms crossed as he waited to see who would speak next. He had already decided what had to happen, but he was counting on one of the Israelis to do the actual dirty work for him.

  Laidlaw lit a cigarette, tossing the pack onto the table with a sigh. “Listen, I understand what you’re saying, Isaiah, but there are no compromises that work in this situation. None at all. When big guns are available, you don’t use peashooters. You of all people know this. Otherwise, why bother to use it? We have to hit their biggest target and kill as many as we can because after the war begins, the West will have to keep it conventional, and that means—”

  “Is that what you think?” Isaiah interrupted. “You honestly believe the already dangerously unstable Muslim government of Pakistan will sit on their own nuclear arsenal if Mecca is hit with a weapon of mass destruction? Allow me to remind you … after the remains are finally analyzed, the source of the components used to make the bomb will be traced right back here.”

  Ashlock held up a hand to caution him. “That’s not necessarily so. Only the U.S. has the requisite data to trace the source back to Israel, because nobody else even knows for sure you people have weapons of mass destruction, and the U.S. isn’t going release that kind of information to the Muslim world … for very obvious reasons.”