The big milling machine was working on the final large beryllium component, a large metallic hyperboloid about fifty centimeters in length, with a maximum width of twenty. The eccentric shape made for difficult machining, even with computer-assisted tools, but that could not be helped.
“As you see, the initial neutron flux will be a simple spherical expansion from the Primary, but it will be trapped by the beryllium,” Fromm explained to Qati. “These metallic elements actually reflect neutrons. They are gyrating about at approximately twenty percent of the speed of light, and we will leave them with only this exit into the core. Inside the hyperboloid will be this cylinder of tritium-enriched lithium deuteride.”
“It happens so fast?” the Commander asked. “The explosives will be destroying everything.”
“It requires a new way of thinking. As fast as the actions of the explosives are, you must remember that we require only three shakes for the bomb to complete the detonation process.”
“Three what?”
“Shakes.” Fromm allowed himself another of his rare smiles. “You know what a nanosecond is — that is one billionth of a second, ja? In that span of time, a beam of light goes only thirty centimeters. The time it takes a beam of light to go from here to here.” He held his hands out about a foot apart.
Qati nodded. Surely that was a very brief time indeed.
“Good. A 'shake' is ten nanoseconds. The time for light to go three meters. The term was invented by the Americans in the 1940s. They mean the time for a shake of a lamb's tail — a technical joke, you see. In other words, three shakes, the time needed for a beam of light to go approximately nine meters, the bomb has begun and ended the detonation process. That is many thousands of times the time required for chemical explosives to do anything.”
“I see,” Qati said, speaking both the truth and a lie. He left the room, allowing Fromm to return to his ghastly reveries. Gunther was waiting out in the open air.
“Well?”
“I have the American side of the plan,” Bock announced. He opened up a map and set it on the ground. “We will place the bomb here.”
“What is this place?” Bock answered the question. “How many?” the Commander asked next.
“Over sixty thousand here. If the bomb's yield is as promised, the lethal radius will encompass all of this. Total dead will number between one and two hundred thousand.”
“That is all? For a nuclear bomb, that is all?”
“Ismael, this is merely a large explosive device.”
Qati closed his eyes and swore under his breath. Having only a minute before been told that it was something completely out of his experience, now he was being told the reverse. The Commander was bright enough to understand that both experts were correct.
“Why this place?” Bock explained that, too.
“It would be very gratifying indeed to kill their President.”
“Gratifying, but not necessarily beneficial. We could take the bomb into Washington, but I evaluate the risks of detection as serious, far too serious. Commander, my plan must take into consideration the fact that we have only one device and only one chance. We must therefore minimize the risk of detonation and base our target- selection on convenience more than any other factor.”
“And the German end of the operation?”
“That is more easily accomplished.”
“Will it work?” Qati asked, staring off at the dusty hills of Lebanon.
“It should. I give it a sixty percent chance.”
At the very least, we will punish the Americans and the Russians, the Commander told himself. The question came next: Is that enough? Qati's face became hard as he considered the answer to that.
But there was more than one question. Qati thought himself a dying man. The disease process had its ebbs and flows, like an inexorable tide, but a tide that never quite restored itself to where it had been a year or a month before. Though today he felt well, he knew that this was a relative thing. There was as much chance that his life would end in the next year as there was that Bock's plan would succeed. Could he allow himself to die and not do everything he could to see his mission accomplished?
No, and if his own death was likely, what importance should he give to the lives of others? Were they not all unbelievers?
Gunther is an unbeliever, a true infidel. Marvin Russell is another, a pagan. The people you propose to kill… they are not unbelievers. They are People of the Book, misguided followers of Jesus the Prophet, but also people who believe in the one God.
Yet Jews were also people of the Book. The Koran proclaimed it. They were the spiritual ancestors of Islam, as much the children of Abraham as the Arabs. So much in their religion was the same as his. His war against Israel was not about religion. It was about his people, cast out of their own land, displaced by another people who also claimed to be motivated by a religious imperative when it was really something else.
Qati faced his own beliefs in all their contradictions. Israel was his enemy. The Americans were his enemy. The Russians were his enemy. That was his personal theology, and though he might claim to be a Muslim, what ruled his life had precious little to do with God, however much he might proclaim the opposite to his followers.
“Proceed with your planning, Gunther.”
20
COMPETITION
At the halfway point of the NFL season, the Vikings and Chargers were still the class of the league. Shrugging off their overtime loss to Minnesota, San Diego took their revenge the next week at home against doormat Indianapolis, whom they buried 45-3, while the Vikings had to struggle against the Giants in a Monday Night game, emerging on the sweet side of a 21–17 score. Tony Wills passed a thousand rushing yards in the third quarter of the season's eighth game, and was already consensus rookie of the year, plus becoming the official NFL spokesman for the President's Campaign Against Substance Abuse (CASA). The Vikings stumbled against the Forty-Niners, losing 24–16, which evened their record with San Diego's 7–1, but their nearest competition in the NFL Central—“Black and Blue”—division was the Bears at 4–3. Parity in the National Football League had come and gone. The only serious challenge in the American Conference came, as always, from the Dolphins and Raiders, both of which were on the Chargers' dance card for the tail end of the season.
None of this was the least comfort to Ryan. Sleep came hard, despite the enveloping fatigue that seemed to define what his life had become. Before when thoughts had plagued his night, he'd come to the windows facing the Chesapeake Bay and stood, watching the ships and boats pass a few miles away. Now he sat and stared. His legs were weary and weak, always tired, until standing took a conscious effort. His stomach rebelled at the acid produced by stress and augmented by caffeine and alcohol. He needed sleep, slumber to relax his muscles, dreamless oblivion to loosen his mind from the day-today decisions. He needed exercise. He needed many things. He needed to be a man again. Instead he got wakefulness, a mind that would not stop turning over the thoughts of the day and the failures of the night.
Jack knew that Liz Elliot hated him. He even thought he knew why, that first meeting a few years before in Chicago where she'd been in a bad mood and he'd been in one also, and their introduction had been one of harsh words. The difference was that he tended to forget slights — most of them, anyway — and she did not; and she had the ear of the President. Because of her, his role in the Vatican Treaty would never be known. The one thing he had done that was untainted by his work at the Agency — Ryan was proud of what he'd done in CIA, but knew that it was narrowly political or strategic, aimed at the betterment of his own country, while the Vatican Treaty had been for the betterment of the whole world. That one proud insight. Gone, credited to others. Jack didn't want sole credit. It had not been exclusively his work, but he did want fair mention as one of the players. Was that asking too much? Fourteen-hour days, much of them spent in cars, the three times he'd risked his life for his country — for what? So that some political bitch from Bennington could tear up his evaluations.
Liz, you wouldn't even be there except for me and what I did, and neither would your boss, the Iceman, Jonathan Robert Fowler of Ohio!
