system activated. The moving arm selected the proper tool head, secured it on the rotating spindle, and maneuvered itself into place. The enclosed area was flooded with argon gas, and Freon began spraying on the plutonium to keep everything to the proper isothermal heat environment. Fromm touched the computer screen, selecting the initial program. The spindle started turning, reaching over a thousand RPM, and approached the plutonium mass with a motion that was neither human nor mechanistic, but something else entirely, like a caricature of a man's action. As they watched from behind the Lexan shield, the first shavings of the silvery metal thread peeled off the main mass.
“How much are we losing?” Ghosn asked.
“Oh, the total will be less than twenty grams,” Fromm estimated. “It's nothing to worry about.” Fromm looked at another gauge, the one that measured relative pressures. The machine tool was totally isolated from the rest of the room, with the pressure inside its enclosure marginally less than outside. The fact that argon gas was heavier than air would keep oxygen away from the plutonium. That prevented possible combustion. Combustion would generate plutonium dust, which was every bit as lethal as Fromm had told them. A toxic heavy metal, the additional hazard of radioactivity — mainly low-energy alphas — merely made death more rapid and marginally less pleasant. The machinists moved in to take over supervision of the process. They had worked out extremely well, Fromm thought. The skills they'd brought with them had grown with remarkable speed under his tutelage. They were nearly as good as the men he'd trained in Germany, despite their lack of formal education. There was much to be said for practical instead of theoretical work.
“How long?” Qati asked.
“How many times do I have to tell you? We are precisely on schedule. This phase of the project is the most time-consuming. The product we are now producing must be perfect. Absolutely perfect. If this part of the device fails to function, nothing else will.”
“That's true of everything we've done!” Ghosn pointed out.
“Correct, my young friend, but this is the easiest thing to get wrong. The metal is hard to work, and the metallic phase transformations make it all the more delicate. Now, let's see those explosive blocks.”
Ghosn was right. Everything had to work. The explosives had been almost entirely his problem after Fromm had set the design specifications. They'd taken normal TNT and added a stiffener, a plastic that made the material quite rigid, but without affecting its chemical properties. Normally explosives are plastic and easily malleable by their nature. That property had to be eliminated, since the shape of the blocks was crucial to the way in which their explosive energy was delivered. Ghosn had shaped six hundred such blocks, each a segment of a full ellipsoid. Seventy of them would nest together exactly, forming an explosive ring with an outside diameter of 35 centimeters. Each block had a squib fired from kryton switches. The wires leading from the power supply to the switches all had to be of exactly the same length. Fromm lifted one of the blocks.
“You say that these are all identical?” Fromm asked.
“Completely. I followed your directions exactly.”
“Pick seventy at random. I'll take one of the stainless-steel blanks, and we will test your work.”
The spot was already prepared, of course. It was, in fact, the eroded crater from an American-made Mark 84 bomb dropped by an Israeli F-4 Phantom some years before. Qati's men had erected a pre-fabricated structure of timber posts and beams whose roof was three layers of sandbags. Camouflage netting had been added to reduce the chance of notice. Test assembly took three hours, and an electronic strain-gauge was inserted in the steel blank and a wire run to the next crater down — two hundred meters away — where Fromm waited with an oscilloscope. They were finished just before dusk.
“Ready,” Ghosn said.
“Proceed,” Fromm replied, concentrating on his scope.
Ibrahim pressed the button. The structure disintegrated before their eyes. A few sandbags survived, flying through the air, but mainly there was a shower of dirt. On the O-scope, the peak pressure was frozen in place well before the crump of the blast wave passed over their heads. Bock and Qati were somewhat disappointed in the physical effects of the explosion, most of which had been attenuated by the sandbags. Was such a small detonation enough to ignite a nuclear device?
“Well?” Ghosn asked, as a man ran off to the newly-deepened crater.
“Ten percent off,” Fromm said, looking up. Then he smiled. “Ten percent too much.”
“What does that mean?” Qati demanded, suddenly worried that they'd done something wrong.
“It means that my young student has learned his lessons well.” Fifteen minutes later, they were sure. It took two men to find it, and half an hour to remove the tungsten casing from the core. What had been a nearly solid steel mass as big around as a man's fist was now a distorted cylinder no wider than a cigar. Had it been plutonium, a nuclear reaction would have taken place. Of that the German was sure. Fromm hefted it in his hand and presented it to Ibrahim.
“Herr Ghosn,” he said formally. “You have a gift with explosives. You are a fine engineer. In the DDR, it took us three attempts to get it right. You have done it in one.”
“How many more?”
Fromm nodded. “Very good. We shall do another tomorrow. We will test all the stainless-steel blanks, of course.”
“That is why we made them,” Ghosn agreed.
On the way back, Bock ran over his own calculations. According to Fromm the force of the final explosion would be more than four hundred fifty thousand tons of TNT. He therefore based his estimates on a mere four hundred thousand. Bock was always conservative on casualty estimates. The stadium and all in it would be vaporized. No, he corrected himself. That wasn't really true. There was nothing magical about this weapon. It was merely a large explosive device. The stadium and all in it would be totally destroyed, but there would be a great deal of rubble flung ballistically hundreds, perhaps thousands of meters. The ground nearest the device would be pulverized down to pieces of molecular size. Dust particles would then be sucked up into the fireball. Bits of the bomb-assembly residue would affix themselves to the rising, boiling dust. That's what fallout was, he'd learned, dirt with bomb-residue attached. The nature of the blast — being set off at ground level — would maximize the fallout, which would be borne downwind. The majority would fall within thirty kilometers of the blast site. The remainder would be a plaything of the winds, to fall over Chicago or St Louis or maybe even Washington. How many would die from that?
Good question. He estimated roughly two hundred thousand from the blast itself, certainly no more than that. Another fifty to one hundred thousand from secondary effects, that number including long-term deaths from cancers which would take years to manifest themselves. As Qati had noted earlier, the actual death count was somewhat disappointing. It was so easy to think of nuclear bombs as magical engines of destruction, but they were not. They were merely highly powerful bombs with some interesting secondary effects. It also made for the finest terrorist weapon yet conceived.
Terrorist! Bock asked himself. Is that what I am?
It was, of course, in the eye of the beholder. Bock had long since decided his measure of respect for the judgment of others. This event would be the best expression of it.
“John, I need an idea,” Ryan said.
“What's that?” Clark asked.
“I've drawn a blank. The Japanese prime minister is going to be in Mexico in February, then he's flying up here to see the President. We want to know what he's going to be saying on his airplane.”
“I don't have the legs to dress up as a stew, Doc. Besides, I've never learned to do the tea ceremony either.” The field officer turned SPO paused and became serious. “Bug an airplane…? That sounds like a real technical challenge.”
“What do you know about this?”
John examined his coffee. “I've placed intelligence-gathering devices before, but always on the ground. With an aircraft you have lots of ambient noise to worry about. You also have to sweat where your subject intends to sit. Finally, with a presidential aircraft you need to worry about security. The technical side is probably the hardest,” he decided. The greatest personal threat to the guy is probably at home — unless he's going to stopover at Detroit, right? Mexico City. Okay, people speak Spanish there, and my Spanish is pretty good. I'd take Ding down with me, of course… What sort of aircraft will he be using?'
“I checked. He'll be flying a JAL 747. The upper deck behind the cockpit is laid out as his conference room.
