been this cold. A front had blown in from Canada and encased the entire Northeast in frigid polar air. He and Nasiji and Yusuf needed heavy gloves and thick jackets for the half-minute walk between the Repard house and the stable.
But inside, the stable was as hot as Iraq in July. The gas-fired furnace at its center roared as Bashir melted steel in a thick-walled tungsten carbide pot. The steel glowed as red as the devil’s own soup. Bashir stood four feet from the furnace, but even so the flames scorched his hands.
“Are we close?” Nasiji said.
“A few minutes. No wonder hell is supposed to be hot. Imagine spending eternity in those flames.”
“We won’t be the ones in them.”
Bashir wished he could be so sure. As they moved close to finishing the bomb, his doubts were growing. Two nights before, with Thalia asleep, he’d crept to his laptop and read about nuclear explosions, looked at photographs of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The violence these bombs unleashed was unimaginable, though it didn’t have to be imagined. It had already happened.
Most civilians assumed that the lethality of a nuclear bomb resulted from the radiation it produced, the gamma rays and neutrons that caused leukemia and other cancers. But radiation, though terrifying, was not the deadliest part of the blast. Even a small bomb — like the ones dropped on Japan, like the one they were making — created a fireball hundreds of feet around, with a temperature of seven thousand degrees Celsius, hotter than the surface of the sun. The fireball could burn the skin of people standing two miles away. The most horrifying pictures from Hiroshima came from the triage tents where the burn victims had gathered to die, their skin torn off, their clothes melted to their bodies.
At the same time, the explosion produced a massive shock wave that traveled at almost a thousand miles an hour, faster than the speed of sound. In other words, the blast hit before its victims could hear it coming. The wave was far stronger than the biggest tornado or hurricane, leveling buildings and tearing people to shreds. For the first half-mile from the epicenter of the blast, no human being or animal, no matter how well protected, could survive.
Along with the shock wave and the fireball came a blast of radiation. The splitting of the uranium atoms released gamma rays, high-energy particles that ricocheted through the body like tiny bullets, killing cells and damaging DNA. The rays attacked the entire body, but they were especially damaging to soft tissue and marrow. The most heavily dosed victims suffered acute radiation sickness and bled out, hemorrhaging through their skin. Other victims seemed fine for the first few weeks after the explosion. Then their hair fell out, their skin sloughed off as if they were rattlesnakes molting, their stomachs turned into bloody sinkholes. Unable to eat or drink, they starved to death. And even at relatively low doses, the radiation could kill years later by causing leukemia and lymphoma.
Bashir wasn’t afraid of bloody viscera or broken bones, of puncture wounds or charred flesh. He’d been a surgeon for seven years, long enough to see all manner of horrors. An old man whose glasses had melted to his face because he’d tried to save a few dollars fixing his hot water heater himself, instead of hiring a mechanic. A motorcyclist who’d had both legs and his pelvis crushed by an SUV. Worst of all, an eleven-year-old boy who’d fallen off the roof of his house during a Fourth of July barbecue and had the terrible luck to puncture his stomach and chest on a wrought-iron fence. The firefighters and EMTs worried that the kid would bleed out if they pulled him off the spikes, so they cut the fence and brought him to the hospital with the iron still in him. He was wearing a Transformers T-shirt, Bashir remembered, and with the spikes sticking out, the shirt looked like a novelty gift gone wrong. The medics hadn’t wanted to give the boy painkillers for fear of putting him into shock. When he arrived in the operating room, he was too frightened or in too much pain or both to talk. He just nodded when Bashir told him they were going to fix him, but they’d have to hold him down to get him free of the spikes. They’d put a mouth- guard in to protect his teeth and his tongue and started to pull. But the iron in his abdomen was in deeper than they’d imagined, into the muscle behind the stomach, and the kid screamed until his eyes rolled up and he fell unconscious, foam flecked at the corner of his mouth. The boy had lived, but Bashir would never forget the way he screamed. Or that when they finally wormed out the spike, bits of partially digested corn kernels were stuck to its prongs.
In his years as a surgeon, he’d saved a few lives. But this bomb would undo the good he’d done a thousand times over. The deaths would come by the hundreds of thousands, a poet’s nightmare vision of the apocalypse. Only this inferno existed outside the pages of the Quran or the Bible. This jerry-rigged monster they were building from a few pieces of uranium and steel,
Hiroshima and Nagasaki had shocked the world so much that for two generations nations had come together to prevent another nuclear blast. They’d built tens of thousands of bombs. But they’d never again used one, not against civilians, not even on enemy armies. Not the Americans, not the Russians, not the Indians or the Pakistanis. Not even the Jews. They’d all kept the genie inside the bottle.
Now Bashir and Nasiji and Yusuf, and a few other men whose names he didn’t even know, were going to break the taboo. Who were they to cast the world’s wisdom aside? They weren’t presidents or kings or prime ministers. They weren’t imams whose names were known by pious Muslims around the world. They weren’t even famous generals. They were a few men who’d gotten their hands on a few precious kilograms of highly enriched uranium. Now they were going to use it. They weren’t going to declare war, or warn anyone what was coming. And though they had only one bomb, Nasiji was hoping to use it to start a much bigger conflict, Bashir knew.
Yet. why should they hold themselves to a higher standard than the United States, which hadn’t warned civilians out of Hiroshima or Nagasaki before it vaporized those cities? And why shouldn’t America pay for its crimes?
Bashir knew he was running in circles now. He’d been arguing with himself for three days, the same words and phrases chasing each other through his head.
More than anything, Bashir wished he could talk to his uncle Ayman’s friends in the Muslim Brotherhood. They were wise men, honest and pious, not prone to excess, and deeply knowledgeable about the Quran and the sayings of the Prophet. If even one of them approved this mission Bashir wouldn’t have worried. But he couldn’t ask them what they thought. And he couldn’t raise any of his doubts with Nasiji or Yusuf. Whatever had happened to Nasiji’s family in Iraq, and Bashir knew only the outlines of the story, it had erased any reservations Nasiji might once have had. As for Yusuf. Yusuf was a perfect jihadi. He would kill until he was killed and expect heaven as his reward.
No, talking about this with Nasiji and Yusuf wouldn’t be wise. That left him with Thalia, but Thalia was a child. He would have to figure this out for himself. In the meantime, he saw no alternative but to keep working on the bomb.
“BASHIR!” NASIJI SAID SHARPLY. “It was ready five minutes ago. How much longer are you planning to stir it?”
Bashir pulled himself from Hiroshima and focused on the forge. Distracted by his thoughts, he’d been stirring the steel with a tungsten carbide pole to improve its consistency. Now it was ready to be poured.
“Of course, Sayyid.”
Bashir set aside the pole and grabbed a set of tungsten tongs. He reached down into the furnace and squeezed the tongs tightly around the pot. Waves of heat blasted under his face shield and gloves.
Nasiji wrapped a second set of tongs around the pot. “Careful, Doctor. No spills. One hundred kilos”—220 pounds—“of this stuff might itch a bit.”
“Yes,” Bashir said, thinking of the charred skin he’d seen on the Hiroshima burn victims. “On three. One. Two. Three.”
They lifted the pot and took three steps to a spherical mold eighteen inches in diameter, made of high-purity
