The lid peeled back off the crate, and Ashraf began pulling out sheets of plastic packing material. Inside were two trunks, aluminum painted a dull olive drab, with numbers and Cyrillic lettering stenciled on the top and sides. He had to struggle to haul one out and lower it to the deck. It was heavy — at least thirty kilos — and it hit the deck with a thud. He froze for a moment, listening. Had the enemy heard?
Apparently not. He heard footsteps on the steel ladder in the next hold aft. He’d already dogged the watertight door leading into this hold, however, and jammed a length of pipe into the locking wheel to keep it shut.
He used a key on a chain around his neck to open the lock on the trunk.
Ashraf knew nothing about nuclear weapons, save that they were powerful enough to destroy cities, and that Allah had seen fit to allow several of them to come into the possession of the Army of Mohammad. The devices had been intended for use against the hated Jews, but that, unfortunately, was not to be. Rather than have the enemy take the weapons back, he would trigger this one, vaporizing ship, helicopters, and the black-clad attackers in a single, brilliant flash of God’s light …
The HH-60 helicopter off the
Dean held the descent rope in one gloved hand, gauging his chances of breaking an ankle. He’d fast-roped in his physical quals several months back, but that had been off a stable wooden tower in the pine forests of the Farm. The tower hadn’t been drifting on the hurricane blast of its own rotor wash there, and the ground had not been pitching up and down with the rolling sea.
He grinned at Akulinin, gave the Russian a thumbs-up, and stepped backward out of the helicopter as Akulinin tossed him a jaunty salute in reply.
Dean slid rapidly through thirty feet of emptiness and hit the deck with flexing knees, meeting it as it came up with the ocean swell. Rotor wash blasted the ship’s forward deck. As soon as Dean was down, the rope went up and the helicopter moved off, slowly circling. Akulinin would stay with the helo, in reserve as team liaison officer if something happened to Dean.
“I’m on the ship,” Dean said.
“Copy that,” Jeff Rockman said in his ear. “Watch yourself, Charlie.”
“Mr. Dean?” a Navy SEAL said, anonymous in his black balaclava. Dean was dressed the same — balaclava, black utilities, Kevlar vest, and combat harness, with an H&K submachine gun harnessed to his side. “This way.”
He looked around the ship’s forward deck. A small group of men, ship’s crew, most likely, lay facedown, hands zip-stripped at their backs, a watchful and heavily armed SEAL crouched nearby. Several bodies — and pieces of bodies — lay elsewhere, in front of the bridge house and near the wreckage of the foremast. There were no signs of fighting, no indication of any ongoing resistance whatsoever. Several SEALs stood or crouched at key spots, where they could command the vessel’s deck areas.
“Is the ship secure already?”
“We still have some holdouts below, sir. I’d keep my head down if I were you.”
Dean followed, moving aft toward the deckhouse.
In other special ops takedowns carried out on behalf of the Agency’s Deep Black programs, Dean had been in charge, at least technically. In the assault on the hijacked cruise liner
It was comforting to have the H&K nonetheless.
Syed Ashraf heard a bang at the hatch leading to the next hold aft and began working more quickly. It was fussy, complicated work, removing one sixty-centimeter cylinder from the heavy trunk and attaching it to a shorter, lighter cylinder, matching end to end, and screwing the connections tight with a small screwdriver. The only light in the hold came from a couple of small bulbs up high on the overhead and from emergency lighting panels at the bulkheads. It was hard to see what he was doing, almost like working in the dark.
Back at the training camp in northwestern Pakistan, he’d practiced the operation time after time until he could do it blindfolded. His trainers hadn’t told him much about how the assembly worked, but his understanding was that the shorter cylinder was packed with plastic explosives, and when those explosives detonated, they would slam one piece of a heavy gray metal down the length of the longer tube so that it smashed, with a lot of energy, into a second mass of gray metal at the other end. Something about having more than a certain amount of the gray metal all together in one place, he’d been told, would cause the device to explode with far more energy than would be liberated by the relatively small amount of C-4 packed into the shorter cylinder.
For the thing to work properly, the two cylinders had to be screwed tightly together
Ashraf felt an unpleasant queasiness in his stomach, but he continued working.
“Sir!” Marie Telach called. “We’re getting a gamma trace from the ship!”
That sent a cold prickle up Rubens’ spine. It meant that someone on board that ship had opened up one of the suitcase nukes.
“How much?”
She pointed at an indicator on her console. “Not much — but higher than background. The Geiger counter you had them put on board the UAV is picking it up.”
If alpha and beta particles could only be detected at close range, gamma rays penetrated most common substances, and they did so at the speed of light. While gamma rays would have been present on the truck bed and elsewhere during the Operation Haystack search — gamma radiation was released as part of the decay of alpha particles — they would have occurred in very small quantities, so small that they were lost in the overall count of background.
The radiation detector installed on board the circling Navy Fire Scout was getting a count now high enough to suggest that one of the suitcase nukes had been opened on board the
Led by the Navy SEAL, Dean had just joined Lieutenant Commander McCauley on the
Dean cut the officer off with a sharp wave of the hand as a warning squeal sounded over his comm implant. Someone in the Art Room needed to talk to him right now. “Go ahead,” he said.
“Charlie!” Rubens’ voice replied. “We’re getting a Geiger counter reading from somewhere on board that ship!
