suffer radiological effects, but that doesn’t matter. The mere mention of radioactive contamination would be enough to cause nationwide panic. Remember the anthrax attacks and how many people were hoarding Cipro?”
“Unfortunately,” Ira interrupted, “competition in the media has forced them into using scare tactics in order to sell ad space. A story like a dirty bomb attack would turn the media into a feeding frenzy of doom and gloom that would actually help the terrorists in spreading fear. You have to know that our press is no longer free. And it’s not some vast right wing, or even left wing, conspiracy that’s destroyed its objectivity. It’s our own consumerism that has allowed the media to be co-opted by Madison Avenue in order to sell lingerie and cheaper computers. You just know there are editors and news directors out there who are anxiously awaiting a terrorist attack or a plane crash or a celebrity murder so they can pump their circulation and raise their ad rates. So long as advertisers subsidize the media, the press will always find the negative. It’s human nature.”
“What’s the alternative?” Harry asked. “In countries where the state supplies the news, you get nothing but propaganda.”
“I don’t know,” Ira admitted. “But it pisses me off that when there’s no real news to report they go out and find some horror to exploit. Thousands of teenagers die every year but it’s only during a lull in the news cycle that one death gets turned into a national tragedy. And this happens not because we value that teen over any other but because the constant exposure to the details creates a feedback loop of interest.”
“Pretty cynical,” Harry remarked. “And I can’t deny it.”
“Sad, huh?” Ira said tiredly.
Mercer leaned forward. “We’re getting off topic.”
“Sorry.” Ira scratched at his bald head. “I spent the morning with our media consultants building the cover story around the attack. Leaves a bad taste in your mouth.”
“We’ve secured the bulk of the plutonium Chester Bowie mined,” Mercer stated. “I’m not even going to worry about the little bit that was in the safe. That still leaves the Alembic of Skenderbeg, which we’re still trying to hunt down, and what the Russians mined after Bowie left Africa. Have you gotten anywhere with them?”
“Actually I have.” Ira opened the briefcase at his feet and withdrew a folder. “That’s how I spent my afternoon. I got this from Grigori Popov, a guy whose career mirrors mine. He was a sub driver in the Pacific Fleet who moved to naval intelligence. He’s now a deputy in the Ministry of Defense. I’ve known him for years, and while I don’t trust him as far as I can throw him, we’ve been dealing with each other long enough to know when it’s time to put all our cards on the table.”
Ira glanced at his notes. “We were pretty much right when we spoke in my office a few days ago. The Russians had stolen the designs for our atomic bomb but knew they wouldn’t have the resources to enrich uranium for at least a decade, and plutonium production would take even longer. As World War Two came to a close the KGB created something called Scientific Operations headed by a shrewd cookie named Boris Ulinev.”
Mercer sat bolt upright, color draining from his face. “Jesus. Department 7.”
“You’ve heard of it?”
“Don’t you remember me telling you about my involvement when Hawaii almost seceded and the whole plot to blow up the Alaska Pipeline?” Lasko nodded. “Both of those were old Department 7 operations.”
“That’s right!” Ira exclaimed. “I knew it sounded familiar when Greg was telling me about it.”
“You know their last director is still on the loose out there,” Mercer said with ill-disguised anger. “Ivan Kerikov’s his name. I wonder if he’s mixed up in all of this.”
“I doubt it,” Ira told him.
“Ah, guys?” Cali interjected. “Little help for those of us who don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Mercer explained. “Department 7 was created during World War Two as the Russians were advancing into German-occupied Eastern Europe and then into Germany herself. Their sole mission was to assimilate captured technology. The Nazis had some pretty advanced stuff on their drawing boards at war’s end and the Soviets stole as much as they could get their hands on. Plans for jet aircraft, powerful radar systems, next-generation missiles, even the world’s first infrared scopes. It was Department 7’s job to take this technology back to the Soviet Union and integrate it into their military. That’s how they were able to produce jet fighters so quickly after the war. The MiG- 15 was basically a copy of a German aircraft.” He looked back to Ira. “It makes sense they’d be involved with this if Bowie was right and it was German agents after him.”
“He was and they were,” Ira said. “When Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, learned about the Alembic of Skenderbeg, he personally dispatched a team to search for its power source. Two of them were killed, we know now by Janissaries, while a third returned to Germany with a sketchy report about Chester Bowie and his crates. The Germans didn’t send another team back to Africa, believing they could enrich uranium themselves, and the whole affair was shoved into an archive.”
“And in waltzes Department 7,” Booker said from the bar, a plug of tobacco shoved against his right cheek.
“Exactly. While the Nazis shipped a lot of their nuclear program to Japan at the close of the war, there was enough left in Germany for Department 7 to figure out there might be a natural source of nuclear fuel. Unlike the Germans the Soviets scoured parts of Africa until they found the cache in the Central African Republic in 1947, which was a French Colony at the time. Oh, and Greg Popov denies any massacre took place.”
“Naturally,” Mercer smirked.
Ira gave him a wry smile. “He did say that they mined several tons of ore, the entire lode in fact.”
“So what happened to it?” Cali asked. She pursed her lips around her straw to sip some of her Coke. It was a sensual gesture that caught every man’s attention and delayed Ira’s answer for a beat.
“Ah, Greg told me they used up half of it before they began to enrich their own uranium in 1950.”
“So their early bombs were fueled by the plutonium,” Harry said.
“Appears that way.”
Mercer asked, “What about the half they didn’t use?”
“Thought you’d bring that up.” Ira reached into his briefcase again and tossed two airline tickets onto the coffee table. “You and Cali are going to go see it for yourselves. The Russians have it stored in an old mine in the Ural Mountains with a bunch of other artifacts left over from Department 7. I’ve already cleared it with your boss, Cali.”
Cali couldn’t believe it. “The Russians just left it sitting there?”
“You know better than most how poorly they secured their nuclear material during the Cold War. And when you think about it, until the last decade or so it didn’t matter. There wasn’t anyone interested in getting their hands on the stuff. Of course today is a different story, which has forced them to play catch-up. Our government has funneled billions to Russia and Ukraine to consolidate and better guard their stockpiles, but it takes time.”
“I know.” Cali shook her head. “It’s just frustrating. I’ve spent my career trying to prevent a nuclear attack and no matter how good I am, or the rest of NEST, it only takes one mistake by us and a city’s wiped off the face of the earth. Meanwhile you’ve got the Russians leaving nuclear material lying around in mines and warehouses or in the craters of old nuclear bomb tests they never bothered to clean up or even refill.
“And what happens if we do get hit? Sure we’ll condemn the terrorists and lob a few smart bombs, but then we’ll spend years investigating our own intelligence failures and never once address the real culprits, the assholes who made the material available in the first place. I agreed with taking out the Taliban after 9/11 but then we should have rolled right across Saudi Arabia. It’s their government that allowed bin Laden and his followers to fester; only the Saudis were smart enough in the beginning to ship them all to Pakistan and Afghanistan.”
“Course now they’re coming home to roost,” Ira added.
“And it’s only when bombs started going off in Riyadh that they took an interest in fighting terrorism, and even now their attitude is still pretty permissive. On the one hand they track down and execute a few extremists while on the other they continue to pump money into the Wahabi schools where future terrorists are trained, because if they stop, the whole movement will turn against them.”
“We know invading Saudi Arabia isn’t an option,” Mercer said. “So how do we get out of this mess?”
Again Cali shook her head. “The Saudis are actively exporting terror because they can afford to. It won’t stop until they’re broke. Take away their oil wealth and they’re just another backwater third world country that can’t feed its population. We stop them by finding other sources of oil and eventually finding an alternative to it altogether.”
“In other words,” Harry rasped, “we keep taking it on the chin for as long as it takes to pump the bastards dry.”
