“ Jerusalem? Better than I hoped. How about you?”
“Last time I was there—'84, I think — God, it was like Olongapo in the P.I. You could smell it — the trouble, I mean. You couldn't actually see it, but, man, it was there. You could feel people watching you. Now? It's sure chilled out some. How about some five-card stud?” Clark asked.
“Dealer's choice,” the sergeant agreed.
Clark dealt the hole cards, then the first set of up cards. “Nine of spades to the Air Force. Five of diamonds to our Latino friend. Queen of clubs to the doc, and the dealer gets — how about that? Dealer gets an ace. Ace bets a quarter.”
“Well, John?” Ryan asked after the first round of bets.
“You do put a lot of faith in my powers of observation, Jack. We'll know for sure in a couple of months, but I'd say it looks all right.” He dealt four more cards. “Possible straight — possible straight flush to the Air Force. Your bet, sir.”
“Another quarter.” The Air Force sergeant felt lucky. The Israeli security guys have mellowed out some, too.'
“How so?”
“Dr. Ryan, the Israelis really know about security. Every time we fly over here, they put a wall up around the bird, y'know? This time the wall wasn't so high. I talked to a couple of 'em, and they're more relaxed — not officially, but personal, y'know? Used to be they hardly talked at all. Looked like a big difference to me, anyway.”
Ryan smiled as he decided to fold. His eight, queen, and deuce weren't going anywhere. It never failed. You always got better data from sergeants than generals.
“What we have here,” Ghosn said, flipping his book to the right page, “is essentially an Israeli copy of an American Mark-12 fission bomb. It's a boosted-fission design.”
“What does that mean?” Qati asked.
“It means that tritium is squirted into the core just as the act of firing begins. That generates more neutrons and greatly increases the efficiency of the reaction. As a result, you need only a small amount of fissionable material…”
“But?” Qati heard the “but” coming.
Ghosn leaned back and stared at the core of the device. “But the mechanism to insert the boost material was destroyed by the impact. The kryton switches for the conventional explosives are no longer reliable and must be replaced. We have enough intact explosive blocks to determine their proper configuration, but manufacturing new ones will be very difficult. Unfortunately, I cannot depend on simply reverse-engineering the entire weapon. I must duplicate the original design theoretically first, determine what it can and cannot do, then re-invent the processes for fabrication. Do you have any idea what the original cost for that was?”
“No,” Qati admitted, sure that he was about to learn.
“More than what it cost to land people on the moon. The most brilliant minds in human history were part of this process: Einstein, Fermi, Bohr, Oppenheimer, Teller, Alvarez, von Neumann, Lawrence — a hundred others! The giants of physics in this century. Giants.”
“You're telling me you cannot do it?”
Ghosn smiled. “No, Commander, I am telling you that I can. What is the work of genius the first time is the work of a tinsmith soon thereafter. It required genius the first time because it was the first time, and also because technology was so primitive. All the calculations had to be done manually at first, on big mechanical calculators. All the work on the first hydrogen bomb was done on the first primitive computers — Eniac, I think it was called. But today?” Ghosn laughed. It really was absurd. 'A videogame has more computing power than Eniac ever did. I can run the calculations on a high-end personal computer in seconds and duplicate what took Einstein months. But the most important thing is that they did not really know if it was possible. It is, and I know that! Next, they made records of how they proceeded. Finally, I have a template, and though I cannot reverse-engineer it entirely, I can use this as a theoretical model.
“You know, given two or three years, I could do it all myself.”
“Do you think we have two or three years?”
Ghosn shook his head. He'd already reported on what he saw in Jerusalem. “No, Commander. We surely do not.”
Qati explained what he had ordered their German friend to do.
“That is good. Where do we move to?”
Berlin was once more the capital of Germany. It had been Bock's plan that this should be so, of course, but not that it should be this sort of Germany. He'd flown in from Italy — via Greece, and, before that, Syria — and cleared passport control with scarcely a wave. From that point, he'd simply rented a car and driven out of Berlin on highway E-74 north towards Greifswald.
Gunther had rented a Mercedes Benz. He rationalized this by telling himself that his cover was that of a businessman, and besides he hadn't rented the biggest one available. There were times when he thought he might as well have rented a bicycle. This road had been neglected by the DDR. government, and now that the Federal Republic was fully in place, the highway was little more than a linear repair gang. It went without saying that the other side of the road was already fixed. His peripheral vision caught hundreds of big, powerful Benzes and BMWs streaking south towards Berlin as the capitalists from the West blazed about to reconquer economically what had collapsed under political betrayal.
Bock took his exit outside Greifswald, driving east through the town of Kemnitz. The attempts at road repair had not yet reached the secondary roads. After hitting half a dozen potholes Gunther had to pull over and consult his map. He proceeded three kilometers, then made a series of turns, ending up on what had once been an upscale neighborhood of professionals. In the driveway of the house he sought was a Trabant. The grass was still neatly trimmed, of course, and the house was neatly arranged, down to the even curtains in the windows — this was Germany, after all — but there was an air of disrepair and depression not so much seen as felt. Bock parked his car a block away and walked an indirect route back to the house.
“I am here to see Herr Doktor Fromm,” he told the woman, Frau Fromm, probably, who answered the door.
“Who may I say is calling?” she asked formally. She was in her middle forties, her skin tight over severe cheeks, with too many lines radiating from her dull blue eyes and tight, colorless lips. She examined the man on her front step with interest, and perhaps a little hope. Though Bock had no idea why this should be so, he took the chance to make use of it.
“An old friend,” Bock smiled to reinforce the image. “May I surprise him?”
She wavered for a moment, then her face changed and good manners took hold. “Please come in.”
Bock waited in the sitting room, and he realized that his impression was right — but why it was right struck him hard. The interior of the house reminded him of his own apartment in Berlin. The same specially made furniture that had once looked so good in contrast to what was available for ordinary citizens in the German Democratic Republic did not impress as it once had. Perhaps it was the Mercedes he'd driven up, Bock told himself, as he heard footsteps approaching. But no. It was dust. Frau Fromm was not cleaning the house as a good German Hausfrau did. A sure sign that something was badly wrong.
“Yes?” Dr. Manfred Fromm said, as a question before his eyes widened in delayed recognition. “Ah, so good to see you!”
“I wondered if you'd remember your old friend Hans,” Bock said with a chuckle, stretching out his hand. “A long time, Manfred.”
“A very long time indeed, Junge! Come to my study.” The two men walked off under the inquisitive eyes of Frau Fromm. Dr. Fromm closed the door behind himself before speaking.
“I am sorry about your wife. It was unspeakable what happened.”
“That is past. How are you doing?”
“You haven't heard? The Greens have attacked us. We're about to shut down.”
Doktor Manfred Fromm was, on paper, the deputy assistant director of the Lubmin/Nord Nuclear Power Station. The station had been built twenty years earlier from the Soviet VVER Model 230 design, which, primitive as it was, had been adequate with an expert German operations team. Like all Soviet designs of the period, the reactor was a plutonium producer. But unlike Chernobyl it had a containment dome. It was neither terribly efficient nor
