The Silent Man

“Sayyid, you promised.”

“Where do you want me to start?”

“How do we blow them up, Sayyid? We don’t have the codes.”

“Strange,” Nasiji said. “Everyone’s obsessed with the codes. Not just you. The Russians would have told the whole world what we’d done if they thought we had them. Every police, every customs agent, every soldier from Moscow to Washington would be looking for us. Instead they’re keeping quiet. It’s our biggest advantage.”

“So do we have the codes?”

“We don’t have the codes. We have something more important.”

“What could be more important than the codes?”

“The bombs. What’s the hardest part of building a nuclear weapon, Yusuf?”

Yusuf paused, seeming to wonder if Nasiji was asking a trick question. Finally he said, “Getting the stuff, the nuclear material.”

“Correct. The design is easy. The uranium is the hard part. But these bombs have all the uranium we need.”

“So we put our own explosives around the bombs and set them off?”

“Unfortunately, it’s not that easy.” Now that Yusuf had made him open up, Nasiji was enjoying the chance to explain what he’d worked out for himself and kept secret for so long. “You understand the basics of how these bombs work?”

“Not really, no.”

“Inside, they have uranium and plutonium. Those are atoms, heavy ones, and unstable. If they break up, they release little particles called neutrons. Then those neutrons hit other atoms and split them up, too. That releases more neutrons. It’s a chain reaction. And all along, the splitting up of the atoms is releasing energy, too. That makes the explosion.”

Yusuf looked at the crates. “But they don’t go off on their own?”

“No. To start the chain reaction, you need to smash the bomb together.”

“Why?”

“It’s complicated, but when you push the bomb together you increase the chances that the neutrons will crash into atoms and split them apart. Everything happens very quickly. After just a few cycles of splitting, so many neutrons are loose that the reaction is uncontrollable. It doesn’t stop until the power of the explosion tears apart the uranium at the core and the bomb destroys itself.”

“And this takes a few seconds?”

“No, much faster. More quickly than you can imagine, a fraction of a second. But in that time we release tremendous energy and radiation. The equivalent of thousands of tons of explosive, millions of kilograms, much bigger than any conventional bomb.”

“Millions of kilograms?”

“Just so. Imagine one truck filled with regular bombs. One of these bombs is like a thousand of those. And that would be a small one.”

Yusuf’s head swiveled between Nasiji and the crates in the corner. “And we have the material. So we can make our own bomb.”

“Correct. There should be more than enough uranium in these two bombs to make one of our own.”

“But I thought you said these are hard to make.”

“Some bombs are easier than others. These bombs, it’s complicated and I’ll explain more to you when it’s time to disassemble them, they actually each have two bombs inside. Conventional explosive, plastic, sets off the first bomb. Then the first bomb sets off the second. It’s very elegant, this design, and efficient. All the bombs today use it. But the explosive charges on the first bomb have to be placed perfectly and blown up in precise order. Or else the nuclear explosion won’t happen. The bomb will fizzle.” Nasiji said the last word in English.

“Fizzle?”

“The pieces don’t come together quickly enough. And then it splits apart before the chain reaction can really take off. It still blows up, but with much less power. Our bomb will be a different design, what’s called a gun type. Instead of a single ball of uranium surrounded by explosives, we split uranium into two pieces—”

“In half?”

“Not exactly. The two sides have different shapes. One is a hollow cylinder, like a piston in a car engine. The other is the right size to fill the cylinder exactly.”

Yusuf smirked. “Male and female.”

“Sure. We put the two sides about two meters apart. We fire one side at the other with the Spear. They smash together. The chain reaction takes over. And—boom.”

“No fizzle.”

“No fizzle. The one the United States used to blow up Hiroshima, the Little Boy, was this kind. The Americans were so confident in the design, they never tested it. They just dropped it. And it worked.”

Yusuf was silent. He rubbed his fingers on his temples like a student grappling with algebra for the first time. “Hmm. ” he finally said. “So we’ll take all the uranium in these two warheads, the four bombs inside, and put it together into one of our own.”

“Yes, my friend. Just so. Our bomb won’t be as big as either of these bombs, but it will still be big enough.”

“How big?”

“Inshallah, as big as the one in Hiroshima. Fifteen kilotons or so. That bomb killed one hundred thousand people, vaporized a square kilometer.”

“But. I still don’t get one part. We’re going to take these bombs apart, saw them open, to get to the uranium inside. What if they have, you know, traps?”

“They might. We won’t know until we get them open. Nobody’s ever done this before. But remember, these bombs have been designed so they don’t go off even if they’re damaged in a fire or a plane crash. They’re very stable. And even if there are traps, I think I have a way to deal with them.”

“What’s that?”

“You’ll have to win another chess game.”

Yusuf reached for the board, but Nasiji waved him off. “Not now. Let’s get to the wheelhouse.”

NASIJI DIDN’T KNOW MUCH about ships, but even he could see that the Juno was a well-run vessel. It was twenty years old, but it looked newer. Its crew washed down its corridors and communal areas every morning. Even so, ever since the coast of Britain had disappeared behind them the previous week, Nasiji hadn’t felt comfortable. He could never quite forget the water that surrounded them.

“Can you believe anyone would do this for pleasure?” he said to Yusuf as they climbed the stairs that led to the wheelhouse. “Sail, I mean?”

“Why not? All those big yachts floating around. Someone must like it.”

“Not me.”

“I figured that out by now.” Nasiji could hear the smirk in Yusuf’s voice.

The wheelhouse was empty when they arrived, except for the captain, Haxhi. He was Albanian, and of course Muslim, a squat man with wide legs and a thick chest. A low center of gravity came in handy on these waves, Nasiji thought.

“Gentlemen, how are you? A bit green.”

“Fine.” Nasiji found himself irritated that his seasickness had become a shipwide joke. “Where is everyone?”

“Sometimes I like to be up here alone.” Haxhi showed them a map of the North Atlantic mounted on the back wall of the wheelhouse. “I have good news and bad news. First, the good news. We’re on schedule for tonight. Our current location—”

Haxhi pointed to a spot east-southeast of Newfoundland, an L-shaped Canadian province that jutted into the Atlantic. They planned to bring the crates ashore in a cove on the southeastern coast of Newfoundland, near Trepassey, a village of nine hundred, really not much more than a few dozen houses clustered against the ocean