of horseshit. Nobody has ever tracked me. Nobody ever will, and I'm prepared to prove that.”
This interview had not gone the way Mancuso had expected at all. Ricks was talking like a real submarine- driver. It was the kind of talk Mancuso liked to hear.
“You're sure you're comfortable with this? It's really going to light a fire up the line. You're going to take some heat.”
“So are you.”
“I'm the squadron commander. I'm supposed to take heat.”
“I'll take my chances, Bart. Okay, I'm going to have to drill the hell out of my people, especially the sonar troops, tracking party, like that. I have the time, and I have a pretty good crew.”
“Okay. You write up the proposal. I'll give it a favorable endorsement and send it up.”
“See how easy it is?” Ricks grinned. If you want to be number one in a squadron of good skippers, he thought, you have to stand out from the crowd. OP-o2 in the Pentagon would get excited about this, but they'd see that it was Harry Ricks who'd made the suggestion, and they knew his reputation as a smart, careful operator. On that basis, plus Mancuso's endorsement, it would be approved after some hemming and hawing. Harry Ricks: the best submarine engineer in the Navy, and a man willing to back up his expertise with deeds. Not a bad image. Certainly an image that would be noted and remembered.
“So, how was Hawaii?” Mancuso asked, surprised and very pleased with the Commanding Officer (Gold) of USS Maine.
“This is very interesting. The Karl Marx Astrophysical Institute.” The KGB colonel handed the black-and- whites over to Golovko.
The First Deputy Chairman looked over the photos and set them down. “Empty building?”
“Nearly so. Inside, we found this. It's a delivery manifest for five American machine tools. Very good ones, extremely expensive.”
“Used for?”
“Used for many things, like the fabrication of telescope mirrors, which fits very nicely with the institute's cover. The same instruments, our friends at Sarova tell us, are used to shape components for nuclear weapons.”
“Tell me about the institute.”
“Much of it appears to be entirely legitimate. Its head was to have been the DDR's leading cosmologist. It's been absorbed by the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. They're planning to build a large telescope complex in Chile, and are designing an X-ray observation satellite with the European Space Agency. It is noteworthy that X-ray telescopes have a rather close relationship with nuclear-weapons research.”
“How does one tell the difference between scientific research and—”
“You can't,” the colonel admitted. “I've done some checking. We have leaked information on this ourselves.”
“What? How?”
“There have been a number of articles published in various professional journals about stellar physics. One begins, 'Imagine the center of a star with an X-ray flux of such and such,' except for one small thing: the star the author described has a flux much higher than the center of any star — by fourteen orders of magnitude.”
“I don't understand.” Golovko was having trouble with all this scientific gibberish.
“He described a physical environment in which the activity was one hundred thousand billion times the intensity inside any star. He was, in fact, describing the interior of a thermonuclear bomb at the moment of detonation.”
“And how the hell did that get past censors!” Golovko demanded in amazement.
“General, how scientifically literate do you think our censors are? As soon as that one saw 'imagine the center of a star,' he decided that it was not a matter of state security at all. That article was published fifteen years ago. There are others. In the past week I've discovered just how useless our secrecy measures are. You can imagine what it's like from the Americans. Fortunately, it requires a very clever chap to assimilate all the data. But it is by no means impossible. I've talked to a team of young engineers at Kyshtym. With a little push from here, we can initiate an in-depth study of how extensive the open scientific literature is. That will take five to six months. It does not directly affect this particular project, but I think it would be a most useful study to undertake. I think it likely that we have systematically underestimated the danger of third-world nuclear weapons.”
“But that's not true,” Golovko objected. “We know that—”
“General, I helped write that study three years ago. I am telling you that I was grossly optimistic in my assessments.”
The First Deputy Chairman thought about that for a few seconds. “Poor Ivan'ch, you are an honest man.”
“I am a frightened man,” the colonel replied.
“Back to Germany.”
“Yes. Of the people we suspect were part of the DDR bomb project, three are unaccounted for. All three men and their families are gone. The rest have found other work. Two could possibly be involved in nuclear research with weapons applications, but again, how does one tell? Where is the dividing line between peaceful physics and weapons-related activity? I do not know.”
“The three missing ones?”
“One is definitely in South America. The other two are merely missing. I am recommending that we launch a major operation to examine what's happening in Argentina.”
“What about the Americans…” Golovko mused.
“Nothing definite. I expect they're as much in the dark as we are.” The colonel paused. “It is difficult to see how they would have an interest in wider proliferation of nuclear weapons. It's contrary to their government policy.”
“Explain Israel, then.”
“The Israelis obtained nuclear material from the Americans over twenty years ago, plutonium from their Savannah River plant, and enriched uranium from a depot in Pennsylvania. In both cases the transfers were apparently illegal. The Americans themselves launched an investigation. They believe that the Israeli Mossad pulled off one of the greatest operations in history, aided by Jewish American citizens in sensitive positions. There was no prosecution. What evidence they had came from sources that could not be revealed in court, and it was deemed politically inadvisable to reveal security leaks in so sensitive a government activity. Everything was handled quietly. The Americans and Europeans have been lax in selling nuclear technology to various countries — capitalism at work, there is a huge amount of money involved — but we made the same mistake with China and Germany, did we not? No,” the colonel concluded. “I do not believe the Americans have any more interest in seeing German-made nuclear weapons than we do.”
“Next step?”
“I don't know, General. We've run all our leads down as well as we can without risk of detection. I think we need to look at activity in South America. Next, some careful inquiries within the German military establishment to see if there is any indication of a nuclear program there.”
“If there were, we'd have known by now.” Golovko frowned. “Good Lord, did I really say that? What delivery systems are likely?”
“Aircraft. There is no need for ballistic launchers. From Eastern Germany to Moscow is not all that far. They know our air-defense capabilities, don't they? We left enough of our equipment behind.”
“Pyotr, just how much more good news will you leave me this afternoon?”
The colonel smiled very grimly indeed. “Nu, and all those Western fools are rhapsodizing about how safe the world has become.”
The sintering process for the tungsten-rhenium was simplicity itself. They used a radio-frequency furnace much like a microwave oven. The metallic powder was poured into a mold and slid into the furnace for heating. After it became dazzlingly white hot — unfortunately not hot enough actually to melt the tungsten, which had a very high thermal tolerance — pressure was applied, and the combination of heat and pressure formed it into a mass that while not quite metallically solid was firm enough to treat as such. A total of twelve curved sections were made one after the other. They required machining to modest tolerances of shape and smoothness, and were set aside on their own section of shelving installed in the fabrication plant.
