Dark Zone

He’d gotten an A-minus.

“There was at least one other warhead close to completion at the time,” continued Rubens. “This was the so-called Chou weapon—chou as in the French word for cabbage or kale. It was also apparently a reference to the small size and shape of the bomb.”

In this case, small was a relative term; the weapon weighed roughly several hundred pounds. At the time, American intelligence believe it was similar to the American W-9, which had been developed several years before as a warhead for artillery shells. Its yield was calculated at anywhere between forty and ninety kilotons. Little Boy, which was exploded over Hiroshima, had a calculated yield of “only” fifteen to sixteen kilotons, with some sources figuring it as low as thirteen.

At the time, American officials — not to mention the French — feared that the unfinished warhead had been confiscated by the mutineers. That turned out not to be the case — it had in fact been spirited away by a junior officer and placed in a desert storage facility. After the mutiny, the unfinished bomb was moved to a nuclear storage facility that became an underground dump for radioactive materials. The weapon wasn’t forgotten, but the program that it had been part of received a low priority for a variety of reasons and it remained in storage.

“Wasn’t its plutonium very valuable?” said Collins.

Rubens frowned but answered her question. “Of course. But in the immediate aftermath of the mutiny there was a certain amount of slippage in information and priorities, and there is some question of whether the technology the French had would have been well suited to safely reworking the warhead. In any event, there was an entirely new regime in place with different aims for their weapons. Even at the highest estimate, this would have already begun to seem like a rather small yield, certainly compared to American and Soviet programs. The captain who had moved it happened to die in a car accident before the mutiny itself was fully suppressed, and so he wasn’t around to, shall we say, advocate for the warhead.”

“And we know where it is?”

“We’ve known since the mutiny, and tracked it since 1982,” said Hadash. “William did a paper on it for me.”

The fact that Hadash remembered the paper pleased Rubens — though he feared that his former professor might share the fact that it had yielded another A-minus.

Come to think of it, A-minus was the only grade Hadash had ever given him. He would point that out.

“The NSA had a program called Seed Finder during the early Reagan years,” said Rubens. “By that time the French had misplaced the weapon — on paper only — at least twice and located it again. Their estimates of its size and bulk in the nineteen-eighties — well, their calculations were incorrect. They clearly underestimated its potency.”

The NSA had “contracted” with the CIA’s Special Collection Service — in some ways the predecessor to Desk Three — to place sensors at the site to help evaluate the warhead and judge its potency. A CIA officer had lost his life in one of the operations, and two agents (foreign employees of the CIA) had also been killed before the sensors were successfully planted.

“The sensors are regularly checked and updated,” said Rubens. “Two weeks ago, a change was detected.”

“The warhead is gone?” asked Collins.

“Part of it,” said Rubens. “Although a portion of the bomb structure remains.”

The unfinished bomb’s nuclear “kernel” consisted of several disks of refined plutonium, which were designed to be compressed by a special girdle of high explosives to create a nuclear explosion. At least one of the disks was still in place, because the French monitoring system had not detected the change.

“How could they miss it?” asked Lincoln.

Rubens was tempted to say it was because the French were arrogant and pompous imbeciles who couldn’t see past their noses — but he merely shook his head.

“Their technology is not particularly effective. And they have underestimated the size of the material from the beginning. The error is compounded greatly over time,” Rubens pointed out. “I must say, our technology frankly has some drawbacks as well — the units in place must be checked in person, and it may have been moved at any point over about six weeks between inspections.”

“I think what you need to address,” said the President, “is how the material is likely to be used.”

Rubens nodded. “There are two possibilities. One is as a bomb. There would be enough material to construct a weapon with a yield of sixty kilotons, more likely less, possibly more, depending on the state of the plutonium and of course the design of the bomb. The material could be inserted into a properly prepared bomb; anyone with access to the plans from the time should be able to construct a high-explosive shell to set it off. Anyone without access to that could engineer a solution. In neither case is it easy, but it’s certainly do-able. More likely, in our opinion, the plutonium could be used in conjunction with other radioactive materials to create a number of dirty bombs.”

Rubens turned to his theory that the material had been stolen by a private criminal organization with the idea of selling it on the open market. It did not appear to have been sold already — or at least the NSA detection net had not spotted it in the Middle East.

“Our best guess is that it is still somewhere in Algeria. Alternatively, it may be in France.”

“France?” asked Collins.

Rubens didn’t think so himself, but a radiation counter on a ship to Marseilles had some anomalies that were still being investigated. The ship had docked in Bilbao, Spain, after visiting the French port — and there the anomalies had disappeared.

“Either there was a problem with the device, which is not unheard of, or the material was carried into France. As you know, it can be somewhat easier to move things into Europe than the Middle East,” added Rubens. This was because the Arab and northern African countries were covered by a network of American, Israeli, and NATO sensors. Scrutiny at European ports was not nearly as intense.

“We have some additional information from an eavesdropping source in Morocco,” added Rubens. “It ties the ship to a charity used by different terrorist groups. It’s circumstantial, however.”

“Which means you have no real information,” said Collins. She was angry because Rubens hadn’t shared the information about the missing material privately before the meeting. The fact that Hadash had ordered him not to — a fact that neither Rubens nor Hadash would volunteer anyway — was beside the point.

“That’s true,” said Rubens. “It’s merely a suggestion, not hard data.”

“Are you pursuing that source?”

“We’re working on it,” said Rubens.

The “source” was actually an eavesdropping device in Morocco. As luck would have it, the battery that powered the device had died twenty-four hours before; Rubens was scrambling to plan a mission to replace it.

“We want to locate the bomb and raise the issue with the French,” said Hadash. “The difficulty is how to do it. We don’t want to give away our intelligence-gathering methods.”

Or embarrass the French too severely, thought Rubens, given their recent trend of cooperation with America. The French had only recently woken up to the fact that Islamic fundamentalism posed at least as great a threat to Europe as it did to America. Now that they were finally cooperating, they had to be handled delicately.

“How long would it take to make this into a bomb?” asked Namath.

“Impossible to know for certain,” said Rubens. “Weeks rather than days. Months most likely. But it could even be years.”

“So it could have already been constructed?”

“Very possible,” said Rubens. “As I said, the most likely use is as a dirty bomb, and that could be put together relatively quickly.”

“The French have to be notified,” said Hadash. “We need their help tracking it down.”

“I believe they’ll help us,” said Lincoln. “But they’ll ask us to share information. And if we want help, we’ll have to do so.”

“The NSA concurs,” said Brown. “My suggestion is that we indicate we came by the information via an intercept.”

“What if they want more?” said Lincoln.