The Dreadful Renegade: A Thrilling Espionage Novel (Techno thriller, Mystery & Suspense)

by Charles Z David

  ***

  Alia turned on the car radio and tuned in to a news station. She was near East Los Angeles when she heard the "breaking news" jingle and announcement interrupting the regular program. The announcer sounded very distressed and after saying "This just in…" remained silent for a moment before continuing "we have just heard that a large explosion took place at Costa Mesa mall. There are several casualties and emergency forces are on their way to the scene. We don't have any details as to the cause of the explosion, whether it was an accident or an act of terror." Alia continued driving noticing the shocked looks on the faces of the drivers and passengers in the cars near her. A few minutes later, when she was near Glendale, the radio station continued with its "breaking news", saying "First responders estimate that a small bomb went off in the women's rest rooms on the first floor of the Costa Mesa mall. Initial estimates are that the size of the bomb was quite small, only a few pounds of high explosives. The death toll so far is just over two dozen but there are at least five times as many people that were injured and several more are in shock. Wait a minute, I am being handed a note saying that the first responders have detected an elevated level of radiation and suspect that the bomb included radioactive materials. All people are strongly advised to leave the area and keep their distance. The police are pushing the crowd of spectators back using loudspeakers to announce that the area may be contaminated with radioactive materials. Our correspondent at the scene, Diane Sacks, says that the crowd has now dispersed – apparently the warning worked."

  Alia turned pale – this was not supposed to happen - she expected to hear about a nuclear detonation, a mushroom cloud, tens of thousands of casualties, vast destruction, a national state of emergency, statements from the White House, threats of retaliation against the perpetrators… This sounded more like a small "dirty bomb" that spread a little radioactivity.

  September 2nd, Lusky Suites Hotel, Tel Aviv, Israel

  Nagib wheeled his suitcase into Lusky Suites Hotel in the early evening. He had reserved a room in that hotel with his American credit card. He reckoned that by the time someone could track the transaction he would be far away and knew that his Pakistani passport would get him into trouble instantly. He had selected this hotel because of its central location on Yarkon Street, just across the road from the American embassy. It was also very close to the lovely beachfront promenade with its restaurants, pubs and thousands of fun seeking Israelis and tourists. He set the timer to go off at exactly 10 pm and left his room. On his way out he chatted with the concierge, actually a fancy title for the girl who sat at the front desk, and asked her if she could recommend a good restaurant. The girl, Nava Pullman, was in fact a Mossad agent who took over the place of the regular concierge, and she asked him what kind of food he fancied and what would he like to spend on the meal because the selection was huge. Before Nagib could answer he was knocked down by two large security operatives of the Israel Security Agency and trussed like a turkey. David Avivi and "The Fish" went up to his room, followed by the top bomb expert of the Israeli police, and saw the suitcase. The bomb expert examined the suitcase without touching it and then produced a portable X-ray machine and imaged the contents of the suitcase. He was a bit surprised by the fuzzy image and when he mentioned this David quickly figured out that this must be due to spontaneous radiation emitted from the contents of the suitcase. A portable radiation detector confirmed this. The bomb expert said that there were no booby traps, sophisticated triggering or tamper proof devices and as far as he could tell from the image the explosives charge was to be set off by a crude timer. He asked David if he wanted to remove the suitcase and dismantle it elsewhere or to do it on the spot and David said that there was no telling for when the timer was set so it would be best to it then and there. The bomb expert didn't even perspire when he neutralized the timer and carefully removed the conventional explosives that were placed on both edges of the metal tube. When David told him that the metal tube contained a few kilograms of plutonium the bomb expert started trembling and sweat burst out of every pore. "The Fish" showed how he earned his reputation and started laughing saying that dying of a nuclear explosion made you just as dead as dying from a simple detonation. David added that the law of conservation of mass didn't deal with the number of particles into which you disintegrated. The bomb expert said he didn't appreciate this kind of humor and swore silently under his breath.

  David called the director of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) and asked for assistance in appraising the device that was packed inside the suitcase. The director said that this would be given top priority and instructed a couple scientists to attend to the matter urgently. Despite the late hour, it was getting close to midnight, two of the top physicists arrived at the hotel. They studied the suitcase and the device and suggested that it should be taken to the laboratories of the IAEC at the Soreq Nuclear Research Center. David said that he knew the place quite well because his mother had worked there until her retirement a couple of years earlier, and that as a youth he had spent his summer vacation in a science camp there. The neutralized bomb and suitcase were loaded into a police car and delivered to Soreq, accompanied by the two physicists who couldn't wait to get a closer look at the device.

  Meanwhile reports of the failed nuclear bomb in California were the hottest items on all news services. David immediately saw the connection between the two incidents. He called his boss, Haim Shimony the Mossad chief, and asked him to convene a meeting early the next morning to discuss the two incidents.

  Part 6. Getting even

  Chapter 18

  September 3rd, Mossad Headquarters, Tel Aviv

  All Mossad department heads, as well as a representative of the Prime Minister's office, the head of the anti-terror section of the Israeli police and "The Fish" from the ISA, were gathered in Shimony's office waiting excitedly to hear David's report. David started by giving them all the background on Dr. Nagib Jaber and his disappearance with stolen sensitive data from Los Alamos National Laboratory. He told them that Nagib had been suspected of being a rogue agent but was cleared after a polygraph interrogation. He briefly summarized the route that Nagib and his wife, Alia, had taken from New Mexico to Canada and then to Germany and Belgium before getting to Pakistan. He added that the Americans never officially released the details of the information that Nagib had downloaded but he had surmised that it included schematics and blueprints of America's most advanced nuclear weapons. He stopped for a moment to allow everyone to absorb the ramifications of this type of information in wrong hands, and then continued to state that the information itself was worthless without the possession of enough fissile material. David said that the Americans were now trying to analyze the reason for the failure of the nuclear device that was detonated in Costa Mesa and the Soreq scientists were studying the device that had been seized in Tel Aviv, believed to be identical to the other one. He started to say that he believed the device was an improved American version of the suitcase bombs that were allegedly developed by the Soviet Union. As he was speaking there was a knock on the door and Shimony's adjutant handed him a note and after glancing at it he passed it on to David. David stopped his briefing, read the note and said that preliminary analysis of the device confirmed his hypothesis. The note contained the results of the isotope analysis carried out by the US forensic scientists of plutonium bearing debris and indicated that the fissile plutonium was of inferior weapon grade, just like the type the Pakistanis had used in their 1998 underground tests. He explained that it was possible to use "the football" design to obtain a large yield from a small, lightweight device if high-grade plutonium was used, but using low-grade plutonium could result in a fizzle as indeed happened in Costa Mesa. Another knock on the door interrupted his narration and this time the director of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission entered accompanied by his chief scientist, Professor Eli Halevy. The IAEC director apologized for the interruption while the professor inserted a memory stick into the computer
and turned on the overhead projector. He showed a series of photographs depicting the suitcase, the tubular pipe and the blocks of conventional explosives on both ends. He then showed a series of photos in which the device was disassembled and two cone shaped masses of a shiny metal that together looked like a football. He said that judging from the mass of these two pieces a nuclear detonation could have wiped out every structure and human being in a radius of 500 meters and the radioactive fallout would have been carried for tens of kilometers inland and contaminated an area in which more than one quarter of the population of Israel lived. David asked the professor if he thought that the device would fizzle or deliver its full yield and the professor said that he believed that there was a fifty-fifty chance. He added that the plutonium core would be further analyzed in order to determine its origin, but based on the preliminary measurements he was quite certain that it was a product of Pakistan.

  The Mossad chief said that he would have to adjourn the meeting and present the information to the Prime Minister and his cabinet. He said that a great disaster was averted thanks to the efforts of the ISA and Mossad operatives, but the fact that a lone terrorist could almost single handed endanger the security, and perhaps the very existence of Israel was a warning sign to them all. He added that Israel had already received an official request from the United States to extradite Nagib and that the Israeli government had agreed in principle but first wanted to interrogate Nagib and find out more about the route he used to infiltrate into Israel with his suitcase bomb. "The Fish" intervened and commented that the ISA was leading the investigation and Nagib's spirit is completely broken down because of his failure and Alia's partial failure and he is cooperating fully. He believed that there would be no more useful information coming from Nagib and therefore no reason to hold him in an Israeli prison any longer. Furthermore, he said, in the United States he would probably receive capital punishment as an accomplice for mass murder of shoppers in Costa Mesa mall while in Israel he would merely get an extended prison sentence and would probably become a hero of the Palestinian people in prison.

  September 8th, Los Alamos National Laboratory

  The new Head of the Security Office, Commander (Ret.) George W. Haggard, who replaced Colonel (Ret.) Dick Groovey after the fiasco last June, had just completed a major revision of the security procedures at the Lab. He was quite satisfied with the improvements implemented to secure electronic data and files and made sure that they were enforced in spite of the protests by the scientists and engineers that constantly complained that it made their work almost impossible. In addition to installing hardware that physically prevented the insertion of any removable data storage media he had purchased from a company that was founded by veterans of the NSA a sophisticated software package that kept a record of every file that was in use and of every change that was made. The Commander, as everybody referred to him, was especially pleased that the Security Office budget was quadrupled and the personnel doubled. Dr. Eugene Powers who flew down from Washington, DC to carry out an inspection of the Lab's security, was not convinced that these new measures would prevent the next Dr. Nagib Jaber from getting away with top secret documents. However, he knew that no system was completely foolproof, especially if it was supervised by fools.

  The assessment of the death toll and damage to property resulting from the explosion in the Costa Mesa mall had been completed. The estimates of the amount of conventional explosives contained in the device were between 2 and 5 kilograms – not a very large amount compared to the amount carried by human suicide bombers not to mention booby-trapped trucks driven by suicide bombers. Fortunately the ceiling of the restrooms in the mall was built from very light construction materials so most of the force from the explosion was released skyward. Furthermore, thanks to the fact that the toilet area in the mall, where the suitcase was left, was built of concrete and not flimsy materials, most of the force of the explosion was contained within that area or found its way out through the ceiling. Structural damage was limited to the restrooms and the surrounding stores on all sides of the toilets and to the restroom area on the lower floor below the explosion center. Only a small part of the plutonium contained in the metal pipe was dispersed by the explosion, mainly in quite large chunks, so the amount of aerosolized highly toxic plutonium was very small and decontamination was expected to be costly but relatively easy to do. The number of people killed by the explosion was surprisingly low – only two dozen or so died instantly, mainly women in the restroom and men in the adjoining toilet. About three times as many were wounded by flying debris or by the shock wave from the explosion. Several people were contaminated by the dispersal of the radioactive material, but probably none were exposed to lethal doses of radiation. Eugene and other NNSA staff members received the report of the damage. In the post-detonation analysis there was consensus among the scientists that a true "dirty bomb" with the same amount of explosives but made with powdered radioactive material, rather than solid metallic plutonium, would have caused much more contamination and many more casualties. The bottom line was that the fizzle of the device was very fortunate, and some would go as far as to say that it was the result of divine intervention.

  Eugene had another reason for his visit to the Lab and that was to get the report of the nuclear forensics analysis. The report summarized all the findings of the chemical and physical analysis of the debris collected from the site of the bombing. The conclusions were clearly stated, something that he found refreshing in view of the scientists tendency to include several caveats in their reports. Based on the forensic evidence there was no doubt that the plutonium was produced in Pakistan (they even pinpointed the reactor) and that the construction of the device was carried out at PINSTECH. Chemical analysis of the remaining traces of the conventional explosives also pointed to the Pakistani military industry and the remains of the metal pipe contained a clear signature of a composition made only in China. Therefore the Pakistani attempt to blame the theft of plutonium as the source of the core of the bomb was laughable. Eugene met with the scientists from the Lab and from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and was convinced that there was no room for uncertainty. Furthermore, the Israelis sent samples from the intact suitcase bomb that they had seized in Tel Aviv, courtesy of David Avivi of course, and these conclusions were unequivocally verified.

  September 9th, Islamabad, Pakistan

  The US insisted that all copies of the advanced designs of nuclear weapons would be returned to the US or destroyed and threatened that any violation of this would be severely reprimanded. The Pakistani government was aware of the fact that a real nuclear detonation with tens of thousands of casualties would have led to a punitive counter-strike. After all, the dominant global power, not to say the only global power, could not tolerate a nuclear attack on its homeland without a suitable response. The President of the United States, who was more of a politician than a history scholar, knew that the Roman Empire survived for five centuries by prosecuting and bringing to justice, Roman style of course, anyone who harmed a Roman citizen.

  Under persistent pressure by the United States and intimidation of retaliation for the unconventional terror act that was supported by Pakistan, a major change in the Pakistani intelligence services was underway. The senior members of the anti-American faction were sent to prison or placed under house arrest and intermediate level officials were transferred to remote posts where they couldn't do any harm. General Masood was the most prominent figure among those arrested and was now awaiting trial for treason and probable execution. Rahman Chenna was demoted and with his newly wedded wife, Junaid, was banished to Mingora in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province where he was put in charge of a field office that included no underlings. The scientists at PINSTECH that were involved in the construction of the devices were banned from attending conferences in the West and were not allowed to participate in joint projects. This more or less curtailed the scientific career of Dr. Anwar Usman but his consolation prize was his
vibrant wife, Alma.