thick-sided plastic tub that sat next to the warhead. They tipped the dewar over the tub, pouring until the liquid came nearly to the brim. The nitrogen, cooled to seventy-seven degrees above absolute zero, bubbled madly as it evaporated.
“Into the bucket.”
Bashir and Nasiji picked up the warhead and lowered it into the bucket. There was no guarantee, but cooling the cylinder might make an accidental explosion less likely. Bashir felt as though he were in the operating room in Corning, about to make the day’s first cut, the patient prepped and unconscious on the operating table beneath him.
As the cylinder cooled, the only sound in the stable was the nitrogen’s bubbling. Then Bashir breathed deep and picked up a circular saw, its blades diamond-tipped to cut through concrete. He flicked it on, feeling it vibrate in his gloved hands. As gently as he could, Bashir touched the saw to the top of the cylinder, avoiding the locked panel. The saw screeched and jumped back as it touched the steel. Bashir pushed down harder, hard enough that the blades bit into the steel and began to grind through it. Bashir held the saw in place for a few seconds, then pulled it up as Nasiji stepped forward with a fire extinguisher and sprayed the top of the warhead.
Bashir turned off the saw, put it down, and ran a finger over the hole he poked into the steel. It was barely a quarter-inch deep and two inches long and revealed nothing at all.
“Again,” Nasiji said.
Bashir flicked on the saw and felt it come to life. He lined it up with the groove he’d just cut. He sliced in slowly, controlling the saw through the steel, until it broke through and slipped forward—
Then, without warning, compressed air began to whoosh out of the cylinder, filling Bashir’s nostrils with a strong sour smell—
Bashir pulled back the saw as Nasiji stepped forward and sprayed the casing with a fire extinguisher—
Bashir coughed wildly and twisted sideways, nearly cutting Nasiji in half. Nasiji jumped back as Yusuf reached to unplug the saw—
And then it was over. The compressed air stopped coming. Bashir counted one, two, three, four, five, waiting for the explosion. But nothing happened and Bashir put down the saw and shined a flashlight into the hole and touched the groove with his gloved fingers.
“What was that?” Yusuf said.
Bashir shook his head. He was still coughing, but the gas, whatever it was, didn’t seem to be toxic. He leaned against the workbench and tried not to laugh as his fear faded. “I don’t know. Some kind of gas to keep the parts from corroding. It was under pressure inside and once we broke through the sidewall, it burst.”
“Most likely argon or neon, a noble gas, to keep the electronics inside the weapon stable,” Nasiji said. “It’s probably not dangerous, but give it a minute to air. You almost took my head off with that saw, you know.”
“I wasn’t expecting it,” Bashir said sheepishly.
“It’s a lesson for all of us,” Nasiji said. “Take it a centimeter at a time. We really don’t know what’s inside.”
“The look on your face,” Yusuf said to Bashir. He opened his mouth, an exaggerated gasp of fear.
“Easy to be bold from across the room,” Bashir said.
INCH BY INCH, they opened the warhead. They weren’t trying to preserve the components as a functioning weapon, so they didn’t have to make perfect cuts. Even so, the work was slow and nerve-racking. As they widened the hole and exposed the inside of the shell, they poured liquid nitrogen inside, trying to freeze the bomb’s circuitry.
By late in the day, they’d cut away the arming panel and exposed two flat green boards loaded with primitive electronic circuitry, capacitators and black transistors as big as quarters. They looked like they belonged in an old radio, not a nuclear warhead.
“Not like what they show in the movies,” Bashir said.
“Remember, they probably designed this in the mid-1980s, and they were far behind the United States in computers even then. And besides, for something like this, cutting-edge technology doesn’t matter. Only reliability.”
“It’s all going to get vaporized anyway,” Yusuf said.
“Yes,” Nasiji said. “See, they have duplicates of everything. Two circuit boards, two altimeters, four batteries — and probably just one needed to set off the primary.”
The batteries were the size of cigarette packs, sealed in plastic and attached to the inside of the steel casing. They fed two pairs of red and black wires that snaked through a steel shield into the heart of the cylinder, the bottom half where the primary was placed. “They want to be sure it will work even if part of the arming mechanism fails. Probably they expect ninety-eight or ninety-nine percent reliability.”
“Not one hundred?”
“Remember, they have thousands of these warheads. They can still blow up the world if a few don’t work.”
“Yes, well. I’ll bet they wish they had this one back.”
Nasiji yawned. “Let’s get a good night’s sleep and start fresh in the morning.”
THAT NIGHT BASHIR DREAMED of sawing through the metal inch by inch. When he woke up, his fingers were inside his wife. Even before he was fully conscious, he’d slipped up her nightgown and spread her legs apart and pushed himself inside her. She was asleep when he started, but she woke up fast. The thought of the bomb drove him and he didn’t last long, but he didn’t mind and neither did she. She covered her mouth with her palm so Nasiji and Yusuf wouldn’t hear her moans. When he was done, he fell back to sleep and didn’t wake until Nasiji knocked on the bedroom door at nine a.m.
A half-hour later, he and Nasiji and Yusuf were in the stable, examining the naked guts of the warhead, trying to decide their next step. Nasiji favored cutting the battery wires before they sawed any further into the guts of the bomb. Bashir thought they might be better off leaving the wires alone.
“Didn’t you say we didn’t have to touch the primary at all?” he asked Nasiji.
“That was before we had a look. Now I see that the secondary won’t come out easily and I’d rather be sure the detonators are asleep.”
“If there’s any kind of trap, it’s going to blow when we take out the batteries.”
Nasiji shook his head, and Bashir saw that he wasn’t going to win this argument. “It must have a positive action,” Nasiji said.
“How do you mean?”
“I mean, it’s possible to design the plastic so that it will go off unless there’s a constant flow of power from the batteries. In other words, if the power is cut, the plastic explodes. A negative action. But then what if the batteries go dead? Much too dangerous. So it must have a positive action. Goes off only if the batteries fire. And that means the safest course is to cut the power—”
Nasiji was the engineer, and Nasiji had stolen the bombs. This decision was his. So Bashir reached into the toolbox at his feet and handed Nasiji a pair of wire cutters. Then he picked up a second pair, feeling their smooth plastic handles in his hand.
“Both pairs of wires, the same time.”
“On three.” They stood next to each other and slipped the cutters’ blades around the wires. “One. Two. Three.”
The wire was brittle after being dosed with liquid nitrogen the night before. Bashir squeezed the handles together, feeling the tension — and then the plastic outer casing of the wires shattered into a hundred tiny pieces, and he tore smoothly through the copper underneath. Beside him Nasiji cut through his own wire. They waited for the bomb to sputter. Or for an explosion they would never see. But the seconds ticked by, and then a minute and then another, and the bomb sat inert.
“It’s done,” Nasiji said, not triumphantly, just a statement of fact, an acknowledgment that they’d passed another way station on a very long race.
They put aside the clippers and Bashir picked up the saw and they got back to work sawing around the cylinder, trying to remove the entire top half and expose the shell of U-235 that formed the rim of the secondary.
