and added a second phase to his original operation.
“We go. See for yourself. All so his pizda wife’s neck be beautiful. Crazy, nyet?” Khmelnitsky said, getting up and pulling his Hawaiian shirt over the gun in his belt.
They left the restaurant and walked by a park with souvenir vendors on the tree-lined path selling Matryoshka dolls and cheap watercolor prints. They got into Khmelnitsky’s Mercedes and drove past tall apartment blocks to the Central Railroad Station, with its old-fashioned clock tower, and out toward the train yard.
On a hill in the distance the Palestinian could see an unbelievably huge statue of a woman with her upraised arm holding a sword. Someone had told him she was Mother Russia and that she was bigger than the Statue of Liberty in New York. It all had something to do with World War Two. During the Communist times, the concierge at the hotel had said, Volgograd had been called Stalingrad and was the scene of a great battle. But the Palestinian was from the Middle East, knew little of European history and believed even less. If there had ever been a battle here, unlike Gaza or Lebanon, he could see no sign of it, and in any case it didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was what was waiting for him in the railroad container car, and if he could pull it off, like World War Two itself, no one would ever forget it, he thought as they pulled into the train yard parking area and got out.
Khmelnitsky took out two railroad badges and handed him one. They pinned them on and showed them to a guard at a gate in the chicken wire fence around the railroad yard. The guard, who was sitting and reading a Russian comic book of Russian Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles led by a balalaika machine-gun-toting bear, didn’t bother to look at their badges. They walked into the yard and over to a section of freight, ore, and container railroad cars. Three of Khmelnitsky’s men, all in Hawaiian shirts and leather jackets, were squatting near one of the freight cars, smoking and sharing vodka from a bottle.
“Is okay, da?” Khmelnitsky said.
“I’ll let you know after I’ve had a look,” the Palestinian said.
Khmelnitsky gestured, and one of his men got up and opened the freight car door. The car was filled with steel drums, with ALUMINUM INGOTS painted on the sides in Russian Cyrillic lettering and seals from the VOLGOGRAD ALUMINUM FACTORY.
The Palestinian climbed up and approached one of the two drums marked SPECIAL ORDER 101 in Russian and removed the top, which hadn’t been welded shut yet. He turned on his handheld Geiger counter and it immediately began clicking, the needle spiking, but well within safe limits for alpha, beta, and gamma radiation levels. If it had been Cesium-137 or Plutonium-239, it would’ve been too radioactive to safely approach, not to mention the difficulty of handling something so radioactive, and which would burst into intense flames at the drop of a hat, like plutonium. He picked up the small beer-can-sized ingot of Uranium-235 and held it in the palm of his hand. It was a dull gray, cool and dry to the touch and very heavy for its size. That was the beauty of U-235, he thought. It was easy to work with, the radiation level safe enough so you could sleep with it under your pillow, and if it was pure enough, it would change the world. He put it back, opened the second drum and measured the second ingot.
“What you think?” Khmelnitsky said. “Uranium-235. Twenty-one kilos. High enriched. Yuri say seventy-six percent, but who knows. Not make nuclear bomb,” he cautioned, “but you do nothing in Russia, I don’t care govno shit what you do. No bomb in Russia, FSB don’t care govno shit what you do.”
The Palestinian finished his measurements and looked up. Without converting a microscopic amount to uranium hexafluoride by mixing it with fluorine gas-tricky enough because it was poisonous-and then testing for U- 235, there was no way of accurately determining the exact enrichment level, but he knew it had to be more than seventy-six percent. It was just too easy to go from seventy-six percent to over ninety. Why would you stop?
“What about the RDX?”
“Here. One hundred eighty kilos,” Khmelnitsky said, taking the top off another steel drum marked SPECIAL ORDER 102.
The Palestinian moved aside a layer of aluminum pellets, there to disguise it as an aluminum shipment, and opened a wooden box still marked with the Russian Army seal and markings and filled with a white crystalline solid. He cut off a small piece with his pocketknife and took out a set of vials that he mixed it with. He would be using RDX as the powerful secondary and tertiary explosives, and exploding bridge-wire blasting caps with PETN as the primary to set it off. It was all so elegant, he thought. So perfect and easy to work with and mathematical. He liked the neatness.
He inspected the remaining steel drums and indicated to Khmelnitsky to seal them up. As Khmelnitsky’s men worked, the Palestinian stood outside on the ground beside the freight car. Khmelnitsky smoked a cigarette beside him.
“Is kharasho, good, da?” Khmelnitsky said. “Fifteen million U.S. dollar. Very nice.”
“We agreed ten,” the Palestinian said, tensing. He’d expected this. They had discussed it in Damascus, what to do if the Russians made trouble. This was one of the danger points.
“Kanyeshna.” We agree. “Was ten. Now fifteen,” Khmelnitsky said, squinting through the smoke from the cigarette dangling from his lips.
“Suppose I don’t agree?”
“We kill you. Keep down payment.” Khmelnitsky shrugged. “You die. Next one pays.”
“That would be a mistake,” the Palestinian said quietly. “You want a war?”
“Listen, druk. One time people come to Ekaterinburg for tourism; see Urals, see house where Bolshiviki kill tsar and family. Chto zahuy! Now people come see cemetery for Uralmash mafia. Big stones for graves with big fatagrafira picture of mafia guy, life size, with Mercedes behind him, guy in nice suit. Some graves with laser, kill enemy after you dead. No kidding. Is big tourism. So what you do? Kill me? What I give fuck? My fatagrafira all ready. I am still young guy. Look good forever on stone. This good business. You get bomb, fuck your enemy. Fifteen million and you, me, we stay druks. Get drunk. Everything kharasho.”
The Palestinian looked at the railroad cars and the flat sky, the color of stones. A Russian at his hotel had said millions died right where he stood, although he never believed the Russians about anything, except that they knew how to die.
“After the shipment is on board the ship,” he said.
“Sure.” Khmelnitsky smiled. “We go, you and me, drink Dovgan vodka, go to Ukraina, Donbas oblast region. We go Donetsk city. Put on truck. First make payment. Five million U.S. dollar now. Ten million when this govno shit on ship.”
The Palestinian nodded. He turned on his laptop and made the electronic bank transfer.
“Check your account now,” he said.
“Sure thing.” Khmelnitsky grinned. “I come back. Money kharasho, we go. If not, we kill you.”
T hey took the Aeroflot flight to Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, a coal mining and industrial city on the Kalmius River. They flew over the vast steppes, one city and town merging into the forests, grasslands, and suburbs of another. Khmelnitsky got drunk on the flight, and every time the blond airline hostess walked by, he would slide his hand up her skirt between her legs.
“Piristan!” stop it, she’d say, pushing his hand away and almost running toward the cockpit.
“Come sit here. I give you something instead of hand,” Khmelnitsky laughed, grabbing himself. “She’s nice, da?” he said to the Palestinian. “Nice ones,” molding his hands like breasts.
“What if she tells someone?” the Palestinian said. “We don’t want trouble now.”
“No trouble. They see this,” touching his Hawaiian shirt, “they know is Uralmash. They say nothing.”
The next time the hostess came down the aisle, she handed him a glass of vodka. “Compliments of the captain,” she said, smiling but with frightened eyes. She let Khmelnitsky fondle her breasts as she bent over to serve the drinks, her smile like the smile on a doll’s face.
“See, druk. I say she nice girl,” Khmelnitsky smiled. “No trouble.”
They landed in Donetsk and were met by four tough-looking Ukrainian men in suits with open shirts and no ties.
“Dobryaky mafia,” Khmelnitsky explained as they walked toward them. “They get percents from me. You pay nothing.”
The Ukrainians drove them to the railroad yard. They watched a gantry crane load the railroad container with the steel drums onto the bed of a long haul container truck. One of the Ukrainians passed money to an inspector as it was loaded and watched as he stamped and initialed the shipping manifest. Once the rig was loaded and checked through the gate, they drove Khmelnitsky and the Palestinian back to the airport, where, after a vodka toast, the
