Sanchez nodded. “It gave us some problems with transcription since our computers and our software are weighted toward digital signals. So we didn’t get the entire conversation.”
“Was it encrypted?” said Thorpe.
“No. It was clear and in English,” said Sanchez. This meant it probably wasn’t the North Korean military or its government talking to their counterparts in Cuba.
“It appears to have been a private-party conversation. The transcript is in your file, the parts that we were able to pick up.”
Thorpe had the file open again and was turning pages until he found the transcript and started to read.
“The scanning software at one of our stations picked up the phone call because of the location from which the call originated, in North Korea. It became a full intercept when key words were recognized,” said Sanchez. “You’ll see those words highlighted in the transcript.”
“The man calling in from Pyongyang was reporting to his friend in Cuba that a certain cargo plane was forced down in the ‘land of smiles.’”
“Thailand,” said Thorpe.
“It was clear there was something on board they were interested in. The man at the Cuban end of the conversation seemed to be in charge. He was worried that the communication might be intercepted. They beat around the bush for a while and finally out came the words ‘big guy’ and ‘little kid,’” said Sanchez.
“And that’s when all the lights and buzzers on your computer went off.” Thorpe had already keyed on the highlighted words in the transcript.
“It’s not just words or phrases, but usage,” said Sanchez. “The way these words are employed in a conversation that triggers the computer to recognize them. They were among a number of similar words or phrases designed to capture a particular reference.”
“Fat Man and Little Boy,” said Thorpe.
“Yes,” said Sanchez. These were the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan to end World War II.
“We lost bits and pieces of the conversation. But it appears that the subject in the Caribbean asked the man in Pyongyang which of the two was on board the plane. And the man in North Korea said ‘the big guy.’”
“I see it.” Thorpe sits up straight in his chair. “Do we know what was on that plane?” He looks at Zink.
“We sent two agents over from the embassy in Bangkok late yesterday, before we knew about the telephone intercepts,” said Zink. “But Thai customs wasn’t sure how much they could cooperate until they had approval from a higher authority.”
“So we still don’t know what’s on that plane?” said Thorpe.
“We do now,” said Sanchez. “When the phone intercept came in, we alerted the military. The navy dispatched one of their nuclear weapons officers from Subic, in the Philippines. When the Thai military saw the guy in a Hazmat suit with a yellow Geiger counter the size of your mama’s kitchen stove, they stepped aside and set a world speed record for deplaning.”
“And?” said Thorpe.
“Good news and bad news,” said Sanchez. “Good news is, there was nothing nuclear on board.”
Thorpe issued a deep sigh of relief and settled back into his chair.
“The plane contained a bandit’s bazaar, everything the well-armed terrorist wants for Christmas,” said Zink. “RPGs, rocket launchers, missile tubes and the missiles to go with them, shoulder-fired surface-to-air stuff, enough Kalashnikovs to restart the Russian Revolution. All of it crated up in wood and labeled as tools. Thai customs is still doing an inventory.
“Don’t get too comfortable,” said Zink, “’cause we’re not off the hook yet. There was one big surprise, a wooden crate about half the size of a small house, marked ‘oil drilling equipment.’ It took us a while, but we finally convinced the Thais to let us take a peek. At first nobody knew what it was. It looked like a very large, oversize hot water heater.”
“Go on,” said Thorpe.
“They tested it for radiation but it wasn’t hot. Well, maybe I shouldn’t say that yet.”
“Why not?”
The air force colonel leaned forward at the table. “Because according to our ordnance people, it’s thermobaric, and it’s the biggest damn thing they’ve ever seen,” said Winget.
“You mean like McVeigh’s truck bomb in Oklahoma City?” said Thorpe.
“Similar principle,” said Winget, “but on a much higher order of technology, and far more destructive. It is a fuel-air device and considerably larger than anything we have in our own arsenal. We don’t know the exact magnitude. So far our experts have only seen pictures of it. We have two of them on a plane now, on their way to Thailand to examine it. But based on the photos they’ve seen, they’re telling us it looks like a Russian design.”
“Why would the Russians-”
“We don’t think the Russians built it. It probably has ‘Made in North Korea’ stamped on the bottom of it, part of the technology transfer from back in the eighties. The Russians got a big jump start on us in the field of thermobaric weapons before the Soviet empire went down. We had to play catch-up when we first went to war in Afghanistan. You remember the mountain caves at Tora Bora?”
Thorpe nodded. “I remember seeing pictures.”
“We used B-52s and bunker-busting thermobaric bombs in an effort to penetrate the caves and incinerate whoever was inside. We believed it was Bin Laden. If it was, he slipped away.
“Based on the size of the device in the photographs, if its power is true to scale and if you could set it off in the right spot under the right conditions, you could boil a fair amount of the water in the Chesapeake.”
“You’re kidding,” said Thorpe.
“I wish I was,” said Winget. “It’s only half a step to a step down from a nuclear device. There’s no fallout from radiation and the blast effect is more confined. That’s the good news. The bad news is that once you master the technology and perfect the design, which isn’t that difficult, the weapon is easily replicated, and the technical know-how is readily transferable to others. We know that terrorist groups have been experimenting with fuel-air designs for some time. The bombing in Bali a few years ago showed signs of fuel-air design.”
“It stands to reason that this is the cargo the man in Cuba was talking about with his friend in Pyongyang,” said Sanchez. “The big kid.”
“What you’re saying is that somewhere there’s a smaller one still floating around,” said Thorpe.
“Worse than that,” said Winget. “Look at the rest of the telephone transcript.”
Thorpe turned back to the file and read to the end of the transcript. “The North Koreans have a replacement for the one on the plane.”
“It looks like it,” said Winget. “We’re talking a very serious problem here. Grounding that plane may have slowed them down but it didn’t stop them.”
“It appears the North Koreans are selling this stuff to private contractors,” said Sanchez. “There’s a lesson to be learned here, if you ever get a chance to testify and they ask your opinion.”
Thorpe looked at him.
“Before the embargo the North Koreans were shipping their military wares mostly to other friendly regimes in return for hard currency,” said Sanchez. “As we push the UN to tighten the screws on the embargo, all indications are that more of this stuff is going underground. Major weapons systems finding their way onto the black market and into the hands of people who don’t own territory or possess national flags. You want my opinion, embargos are not only weak because they’re hard to enforce. When you do enforce them, the result can turn out to be even more dangerous.”
“Unfortunately, we can’t resolve that one here,” said Thorpe. “It’s above our pay grade. For the moment let’s stick to the problem at hand. What are we dealing with? The device itself. How does it work? And what type of targets are most vulnerable? Let’s start with how it works.” He looked at Winget.
“In a nutshell?” said the officer.
Thorpe nodded.
“They use liquid high explosives in a vaporized form, mixed with delayed accelerants, in most cases aluminum powder or other flammable metal dust, magnesium, titanium, any of these will do. The bomb doesn’t kill or destroy in the conventional manner of most high-explosive ordnance, through fragmentation or shrapnel. It uses intense heat and massive concussion. It’s a two-stage process. On ignition the device will deploy a large volume of powdered flammable metal dust into the air. This is followed by the detonation of a superheated high explosive that
