The wrench clatters across the smooth metal bed of the truck. I hear the shriek from Maricela as she tries to get past me and out the back. She is desperate to reach her father, sprawled on the pavement. From my knees I smother her in my arms and drive her back against the fiberglass wall of the truck.
As the helicopter peeled away out over the bay, Alim threw the assault rifle and the extra clip into some bushes, and ran toward Jamal, in the car down the street.
Afundi abandoned the two bags hed left on the sidewalk across the street. There was no time. Pikes computer and the newspaper from Castro were not worth dying for.
He closed the distance on the blue sedan. Breathless, he reached the drivers side and climbed in. Why didnt you pick me up? Alim looked at the ignition. Where are the keys? He saw a patch of blood on Jamals shirt and the fixed gaze of death in his eyes.
Liquida reached for Alim from the backseat and had the ether-soaked rag over his face before he could move. Alim fumbled for the pistol in his pocket, but it was too late.
With the sound of the shot that kills Nitikin, Herman jumps out from the opening in the side of the crate. He sees for the first time what has happened and within seconds he is over to help me with Maricela. He lifts her and carries her back into the darker interior of the sheltering truck.
I scramble across the floor to retrieve the six-inch crescent wrench that Maricelas father purchased with his life. Two seconds later, my head is in the opening at the side of the wooden crate. I feel for the metal plug at the breech of the gun, adjust the spanner wheel until the wrench fits snugly over the hex head on the plug. Then I pull. It wont budge. I pull again, this time harder. Then I realize Im turning it in the wrong direction. I push on the handle. It doesnt move. I jar the handle with my hand, giving it more muscle.
You want me to try? says Herman.
Nooo, I groan. But then the plug begins to move. A slow quarter turn at first, and then it loosens. I pull off the wrench and turn it with my fingers, twisting the two wires as I go. Suddenly the plug comes free in my hand.
Carefully I lift it straight out, away from the closed end of the barrel. I feel the heat from the radiation inside and quickly draw my hand with the plug away from the gun. The entire assembly comes free, the metal plug with the wires running through it. On one end of the wires is the electronic detonator. On the other is the small green circuit board with the timer.
I hold it gingerly in my hand as I get to my feet and walk toward the open door. I get down from the truck and throw the assembly as far as I can, out onto the street.
I yell at the top of my lungs, The detonator is out. The bomb is safe. Less than a minute later an explosion the size of an MD-80, a large cherry bomb some say is a quarter stick of dynamite, goes off in the street.
Within seconds a federal agent on a squad car PA system tells us to come out of the truck with our hands in the air. Men in tactical gear surround us with rifles as officers throw us to the ground.
Agents in black Kevlar storm the truck and huddle around the crate inside.
Police stand over us holding rifles as others search our pockets, pat us down, and cuff our hands.
Maricela struggles to get to her father. One of the cops kneels on her back, jamming her face into the pavement as two of his burly brethren grab her hands and manacle them behind her back.
Leave her alone, I say.
Shut up. I get the muzzle of a rifle jammed into my back.
Liquida turned the key in the ignition and started the car. With all the confusion around the truck two blocks away, who could blame them for not noticing the small blue sedan as it pulled away from the curb, did a U-turn, and headed south toward the Coronado bridge.
SIXTY-EIGHT
It took a few days for the dust to settle. By then federal authorities had hauled the device to a safe location where they could study it and dispose of the fissile materials when they were finished. The press and the media never got wind of exactly what had happened.
The president had delayed his televised warning by an additional half hour to provide more time for logistical planning. In the meantime, the device had been defused and the need for a warning evaporated. None of the more than ten thousand people on the naval base that day ever learned just how close they had come to Armageddon. Nor did the thousands who lived in Coronado or those in San Diego, across the bay.
Within days of the event, government analysts, physicists, and weapons-design experts assessed the potential yield of Nitikins device and crunched the numbers. They determined that the distance between the giant aircraft carrier moored at the dock and the epicenter of the blast where the truck was parked was just over half a mile, which placed the carrier squarely within the zone of total destruction.
Structures within a mile of the epicenter would have been totally destroyed, either by the blast effect or by heat from the fireball. Within that one-mile radius, virtually no living thing above the surface of the sea would have survived. Those who were not instantly incinerated would have suffocated as a result of oxygen deprivation, all oxygen having been consumed in the blast, or from the lethal dose of radiation poisoning.
Within a two-mile zone the vast majority of those in the open, with out shelter, would have been killed. Any wooden structures would have been, for the most part, ignited by the superheated air from the blast and destroyed by fire.
Beyond that, radiation poisoning would have devastated those who survived the initial blast, some of whom would die within days, others over longer periods.
Much of the city of Coronado would lie in ruins. The blast effect, unimpeded by any structures on the water, would reach across the bay to wreak havoc on buildings along the waterfront in San Diego, and the effects of radiation would drift across the harbor and contaminate large portions of the city as well as the suburbs beyond. To those with visions of the California dreambalmy beaches and bikinied blue-eyed blondesSouthern California would never look the same again.
But for Paul Madriani and Katia Solaz, the most important item may not have been the bomb. Their salvation was found farther down the street.
In some brush near a house a half block from the location of the rental truck, police found an abandoned weapon, a Chinese Kalashnikov rifle along with an extra clip of ammunition. Ballistics tests showed that the rifle in question was the weapon used to kill three federal agents and to wound two others, all of whom were hit from behind as they approached the truck.
Fingerprints lifted from the rifle were run through federal computers and a positive match identified. The prints belonged to a man named Alim Afundi, the same name given to the authorities by Maricela Solaz. Military records showed that Afundi was a noncombatant detainee whod been captured in Afghanistan and transported to the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He and several followers had escaped, disappeared, and were presumed dead somewhere in the swamps or sea surrounding the base.
Of more immediate importance were the contents of a small day pack found on the sidewalk across the street from where the rifle had been found. Inside the backpack was a laptop computer belonging to Emerson Pike, one of the victims in the double murder at Del Mar months earlier. Fingerprints on the computer also matched Afundis, as did digital images in photographs found on the computers hard drive when matched with mug shots taken at Guantanamo.
With Yakov Nitikin now dead and his device safely disposed of, federal authorities no longer had reason to withhold the coveted photographs. Faced with the fact that the laptop computer was known to be in the victims residence on the night of the murders, and the unassailable evidence of Afundis prints all over it, plus the fact that he had clearly committed further acts of violence, state prosecutors had no choice.
Ten days after the events in Coronado, Deputy District Attorney Lawrence Templeton unceremoniously slipped into the courtroom of Judge Plato Quinn and, without notice to the press or public, filed motions for dismissal
with prejudice regarding all charges against Katia Solaz and Paul Madriani in the double murders at Emerson Pikes house.
Katia and Maricela went back to Costa Rica to begin their lives anew. Katia continued to mend and was released from the hospital to be cared for by her mother. The reunion between the two was the perfect medicine for the woman whod lost her best friend in the carnage on the sheriffs bus. The chief regret was that Yakov Nitikin would never have the chance to know his granddaughter, nor she him. Though now at least she would have the chance to learn about him from the woman who loved him most, his daughter, Maricela.
As for Harry, he finally forgave me for some of the more stupid things Id done, including the failure to tell him about the catnip in my desk drawer or my second meeting with Katia at the Brigantine. As always, Harry was there to pick up the pieces, and Ill never forget that.
The case of Katia Solaz changed my life. The practice of law no longer held the same fascination or urgency it once did. It is difficult to know why. They say that those who have a near-death experience often use their second chance at life to redeem their earlier mistakes; some pursue the spiritual, and others search for meaning in what remains of their existence on this earth. Discovering what this is for me has now become a quest.
SIXTY-NINE
Tonight Liquida was back at the auto-body shop where he had melted the gold, the dingy chop shop owned by his friend. While he wasnt making gold bricks this time, to Liquida this task was something almost as enjoyable.
Like in an Aztec ceremony he had the Arab chained to the steel rafter on the ceiling, his feet dangling just off the floor. Except for his boxers Alim was naked, with his ankles taped together and strapped to an eighty-pound anvil. Liquida moved around him with a pair of pliers testing the flesh for thickness and durability as he poked and prodded for pockets of pain, those special little places that only intimacy with iron tongs can reveal.
With his mouth taped shut and his eyes wide open, Alim watched in horror as the Mexican flipped a switch and powered up the arc welder.
Liquida stepped over and sparked him a couple of times, then smiled as he watched him dance on the end of the chain. It was going to be a long night, and Liquida was determined to enjoy every minute of it. The only thing that could have made it better was if the lawyer and his partner were chained over the rafter as counterweights.
Madriani had saved the woman in San José and was probably responsible for the mess on the sheriffs bus. But most of all Liquidas anger at Madriani was reserved for the loss of the gold, a small fortune that could have seen Liquida through his retirement years. When John Waters didnt show up for the court hearing, the authorities had drilled into the safe-deposit box and found the gold ingots. It was in all the newspapers.
It took them a while, but after the shootout in Coronado they finally got around to weighing the gold bars. According to the news reports, the weight of the bricks matched almost precisely the records maintained by Emerson Pike showing the weight of the missing coins from his study. The authorities now had a lead on the identity of Pikes killer, one John Waters. Fortunately, they would have no film from the banks security cameras, as too much time had elapsed since the date he had opened the account, no thanks to the lawyers. Besides, Liquida had worn a good disguise, gray hair and makeup to age him considerably and Cuban heels to make him four inches taller than he actually was on the day he rented the safe-deposit box.
Still, he was having difficulty sleeping at night. He kept hearing the infernal beep-beep of the Road Runner cartoon. In his mind he kept seeing the big African American outside the house in San José that night, and the lawyer up at the corner, the man he couldnt find when he went looking.
As far as Liquida was concerned, all of them, Madriani; his partner, Harry Hinds; and the investigator, Herman Diggs, were now among the walking dead. He was already busy doing research on their habits and routines. He would have to squeeze them in between paying jobs since he was now a poor man once more. But it would be a labor of love. They were now on Liquidas short list, and the man known in Tijuana as the Mexecutioner had a very long memory.
AUTHORS NOTE
The Nuclear Warhead and the Cuban Backstory
The foundation of this story is constructed on historic fact.
The warhead used in this story is a fourteen-kiloton device for an obsolete Soviet FKR cruise missile. It possessed roughly the same destructive force as Little Boy, the bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in August 1945.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, President John F. Kennedy knew about the existence in Cuba of other warheads for the R-14 and R-12, intermediate and long-range ballistic missiles (1-and 2-megaton devices). However these remained on board the ship Aleksandrovsk and were never off-loaded or deployed in Cuba.
However, the deadly secretone that could easily have resulted in a global nuclear holocaustwas that there were also approximately one hundred battlefield nuclear weapons on the island, each one capable of destroying a good-size city. For thirty years the United States had not even the slightest clue that there were a large number of tactical nuclear weapons on the island in 1962. This was not made public until the early nineties following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In October 1962, Kennedy placed U.S. troops on alert, including marines at Camp Pendleton in California, for possible invasion of Cuba. Many of these troops had already been deployed to Florida for possible use in an invasion of the island. If he had ordered that invasion, we now know that because of limited intelligence regarding the lethal potential of Russian battlefield weapons on Cuba, any amphibious landing would have resulted in a nuclear nightmare.
Forty-four of the FKR warheads arrived at the port of La Isabela, Cuba, on the morning of October 25, 1962, shortly after President Kennedy declared a naval blockade of the island.
The FKRs were short-range battlefield tactical weapons. They were designed to be delivered by a type of cruise missile, a scaled-down version of the old Russian MiG with an effective range of about a hundred miles. Under the heightened tension of the time, the U.S. naval blockade, and the possibility of an invasion, the FKRs and their warheads were deployed immediately to Oriente Province for possible use against the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay and to protect the Cuban coastline from any U.S. invasion.
After the crisis, the world was told that all of the Russian nuclear weapons were removed from Cuba by Christmas Day, December 25, 1962. But we now know that that was not true because many of the tactical nuclear weapons remained, at least for a while. We also now know that these battlefield weapons were a major point of contention between Fidel Castro, the Cuban dictator, and Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier. Castro wanted the tactical nuclear weapons to remain on the island in hopes that they might ultimately be placed under Cuban control. Castro saw these as the ultimate guarantee that there would be no further attempts by the United States to invade Cuba. However, Khrushchev was concerned because during the missile crisis, Castro had urged the Russians to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against the United States, believing the winner would be the one who struck first. The Soviet premier was terrified that if Castro got his hands on the weapons and attacked the United States, Russia would be drawn into a full-scale nuclear war. At some point it is reported that Khrushchev removed all of the tactical nuclear weapons from the island, though the date of action is unclear.
At the conclusion of the crisis, Kennedy argued for on-site verification, a tour of the Russian nuclear storage facilities on Cuba by U.S. and international officials to assure themselves that the missiles and the warheads were gone. But because of continuing friction in U.S.-Soviet relations, this never happened. Instead the United States was forced to rely on aerial surveillance and reconnaissance photos to track the removal and return of the missiles and warheads to Russia.
However, U.S. officials never knew about the tactical battlefield weapons. So when the large long-range missiles and their
warheads, packed into nuclear storage vans, were identified on board ships on their way back to the Soviet Union, they assumed that all weapons of mass destruction were removed from the island. We know now that this was not true.
In November 1963, Kennedy was assassinated amid rumors that Soviet and Cuban intrigue may have played a role in his death. In 1964, Nikita Khrushchev was deposed and forced to step down as Soviet premier in large part because of his loss of face in the international community as a result of the missile crisis.
Tickling the Dragons Tail
The term tickling the dragons tail was in fact coined by physicist Richard Feynman at Los Alamos in the early days of experimentation following development of the first successful nuclear devices. At the time, physicists were involved in criticality testing to determine the precise mass of fissile materials (highly enriched uranium) required to reach near-critical levels in order to trigger a chain reaction. These tests (that were somewhat crude and later determined to be far too dangerous to continue in the same manner) involved the movement of two elements of highly enriched uranium in close proximity to each other to test the emission of radiation. Dr. Feynman referred to these experiments as tickling the tail of a sleeping dragon because of the risk that any slip of the hand could be fatal.
In fact during two incidents, one in August 1945 and the other in May 1946, two scientists, Harry Daghlian Jr. and Louis Slotin, were irradiated with lethal doses of radiation poisoning. In each of those cases the same core of 6.2 kilograms (roughly 14 pounds) of plutonium, later dubbed the demon core, was used in the experiments. All further testing of this kind was scrubbed as a result of these accidents.
The Slotin accident reports state that Slotin was engaged in testing the commencement of a fission reaction by bringing two metal hemispheres of highly reactive, beryllium-coated plutonium into close proximity without allowing them to touch. On the date in question, May 21, 1946, after successfully conducting the experiment on numerous occasions, the metal screwdriver used to separate the two hemispheres slipped and allowed contact. Observers reported a blue glow and a wave of heat that swept through the room as the air itself became ionized. The heat was unbearable, and the brilliant flash of blue was reported to be brighter than the sunshine of a spring day. A prickling metallic taste was experienced on the tongue of those in the room. Slotin is reputed to have shielded others with his own body. He died nine days later and was buried in Winnipeg, Canada.
Guardian of Lies: A Paul Madriani Novel Page 45
