CHAPTER
89
ROBERT PULLER had been on standby at USDB for the last two hours on orders directly from the Secretary of Defense. Though the military had many experts in nuclear armaments, Puller had insisted that the only one he wanted or trusted was his older brother. That the man was serving a life sentence for treason made the choice problematic. But when Puller had held his ground against even the four stars, the Defense Secretary had intervened and approved his plan. And even the military men had to concede there were few people in the world who knew more about the science of nukes than Robert Puller.
Robert was alert and also anxious. His brother was sitting next to a nuclear bomb, after all. On an earlier phone call Puller had filled him in on everything that David Larrimore had told him.
“Describe the box to me,” said Robert.
“Four feet square. Stainless steel. Bolted to the floor.”
“Speak up. Can’t hear you clearly.”
“Sorry, I’m talking through a mask.” He repeated the information in a louder voice.
“Okay, implosion, not a gun device.”
“Right.”
“Talk to me about the barrels. The empty one was plutonium?”
“Right. At least that’s what it said.”
“This guy Larrimore have any idea how much plutonium was contained in each barrel?”
“If he did he didn’t say. I don’t think he ever believed they’d leave the shit behind. And I have to agree with him on that point.”
“I’m going to assume that this design is not super-sophisticated, so we’re talking at least six kilos and possibly more.”
“That barrel could hold a lot more than six kilos even with the lead liners.”
“I understand, but the size box you’re talking about clearly shows they didn’t put the equivalent of a fifty-gallon drum worth of plutonium in there. That would be overkill.”
“Maybe they’re nuts, you ever think about that?”
“Maybe they are, but I’m only concerned with the science of it.”
“Can I take the top off or will I get blasted by radiation from the plutonium?”
“How heavy is the top?”
Puller pulled on it and then tapped it. “Not that heavy.”
“So probably no lead lining or other shielding. The plutonium should be completely surrounded by the explosives and a tamper/pusher and maybe another layer or two that will shield you. And we know there’s a tungsten carbide neutron reflector in there. That thing is super-dense. You should be okay.”
“Should?”
“Best I can do, bro.”
Puller drew a long breath and motioned for Cole to step back. She did. He tugged. The lid came up. He was not hit with a blinding blue light.
“John?”
“I’m good. I’m not glowing. I take that as a positive sign.”
“Do you see a timer?”
Puller glanced up at Cole, who shrugged and managed a smile behind her mask.
Puller said, “Do they really use timers on this stuff?”
“It’s not for melodramatic effect like in the movies. It has a very real purpose. The conventional explosions have to go off exactly at the same time or a hole in the shock wave will be created and the pit will escape through that. Then you get that fizzle, like we talked about before, bro.”
Puller poked around the box. He uncovered a group of wires and saw it.
“Okay. Got it. That must be the light we saw come on earlier. This sucker must have an internal power source because there’s no juice in here.”
“What’s the timer at?”
“Sixty-two minutes and counting.”
“Okay,” said Robert. “Wires?”
Cole was holding a strong light over the box, illuminating it for Puller. His latest-generation goggles allowed him to see clearly even in lighted conditions.
“A bunch,” said Puller. “They were covering the timer. Should I try and cut some of them? Maybe it’ll stop the countdown.”
“No. Chances are excellent that they’re booby-trapped. If you’re looking at twenty wires, only three of them mean anything. That’s a common ruse in conventional bombmaking, and the same rule, we can assume, holds true for pseudo-nukers. You cut any of the fakes it’ll probably accelerate the timer to zero and you can kiss your ass goodbye.”
“Okay, will not cut wires,” said Puller firmly. It was oppressively hot in here to begin with and the hazmat suit made it hotter still. His mask kept fogging up and he would use his forehead to clear it, which didn’t work so well, since that was the primary source of the sweat. He finally just ripped the mask off, wiped his eyes with his hands, and put his goggles back on.
“The initiator will be in the dead center of the sphere,” said Robert. “That floods the pit with neutrons during detonation. The gold foil that was found at the crime scene was probably used as a layer between the beryllium and polonium as we postulated before. The plutonium will be shaped like a ball around that. The tamper/pusher will be around the plutonium. The pusher increases the shock wave hitting the pit. And the tamper helps hold the pit from blowing apart too quickly to maximize your yield.”
“Okay, Bobby, I don’t need a lecture on every little thing.”
“I guess I’m just trying to make sure I still know what I’m talking about,” said his brother slowly.
“Don’t second-guess yourself. You know this stuff. You’re a genius. Always have been.”
“Okay, the explosive lenses form the outside layer. You should be able to see the lenses. Like faces on a soccer ball. They’re carefully shaped explosive charges. Almost like a work of geometric art. Do you see them?”
“I see them.”
“How many?”
“A lot.”
“How are they arranged?”
“Pretty seamlessly.”
“No gaps?”
“None that I can see.”
Puller heard his brother let out a breath. “Somebody knew what they were doing.”
“What the hell does that mean for me?”
“If they manage to compress the chain reaction long enough, the bomb yield will rise exponentially, like we discussed. And from your description it looks like they were pretty sophisticated in their design.”
Puller checked the timer. It was at fifty-nine minutes, twenty-seven seconds.
“How do I turn this thing off, Bobby?”
“John, you can’t actually turn it off.”
“Then what the hell am I doing here?” Puller barked so loudly that Cole jumped and almost dropped her light.
“There’s really only one way to do it,” Robert said in a calm tone. “We have to screw up the detonation. The lenses are seamless now, but if we throw off the timing of the detonation we can cause a fizzle.”
“So how do I do that?”
“We throw off the detonation sequence by adding one of our own.”
Puller looked up at Cole in dismay. “So you’re telling me that in order to beat this thing we have to detonate it? Is that what the hell you’re telling me?”
“Pretty much, yeah,” said Robert.
“Shit,” muttered Puller. “That’s really the only way?”
“If there was another, I’d tell you.”
“How about if I just start whacking stuff?”
“Odds are real good you’re dead and a mushroom cloud probably goes up over West Virginia.”
“I should have let the cavalry come in here, chopper this thing out, and drop it in the ocean.”
“They couldn’t have done that in an hour. And hindsight is twenty-twenty.”
“Maybe they could have gotten in here before it engaged. Stopped the timer from commencing or dropped it in some deep hole.”
“Again, hindsight.”
“If this thing goes off it’s my fault, Bobby.”
“Two points, John. If that thing goes off, you won’t be around to care. Second point, the person or persons who built that thing are the responsible parties, not you! Now how much time left?”
“Fifty-seven and a half till doomsday.”
Puller looked up at Cole and pointed to the way they’d come in. He mouthed two words: Go. Now.
She shook her head and gave him a stubborn expression when he pointed to the way out again. When he did it a third time she flipped him off.
“John, you there? What’s going on?” asked his brother.
“Nothing. Just a tactical issue that has been resolved. Now when you say fizzle, what exactly are we talking about?”
“Maybe half a kiloton yield, but that’s just an educated guess on my part. The concrete dome should help contain most of the blast.”
“Half a kiloton?” said Puller. “That’s equal to five hundred tons of TNT. You call that a fizzle?”
“Hiroshima got hit with a thirteen-kiloton yield and they only used sixty kilograms of uranium and of that only six hundred milligrams actually reacted; that’s about the weight of a dime. I have no idea how much plutonium they’ve got in this sucker, but we have to plan for the worst-case scenario. There’s no way it’s as small a yield as with Hiroshima. We’re talking gun versus implosion method, uranium versus plutonium. To be safe let’s assume it’s millions of tons of TNT equivalent. That’ll send that concrete dome into orbit and spread radiation over six states or more. And you can pretty much kiss West Virginia goodbye.”
Fresh sweat sprouted on Puller’s face. “Okay, half a kiloton doesn’t sound so bad now. So tell me how to make a fizzle.”
“We have to make a premature detonation happen.”
“Yeah, that I get. How?”
“Did you bring the stuff I told you to?”
Cole looked at Puller as she dug in his knapsack and pulled out one stick of dynamite, wire, blasting cap, and a timer. She had gotten these for him. She handed them to him while he cradled the phone against his shoulder.
“I thought I was going to use this to blow a hole in something. But if you’d told me then that I’d have to use this to detonate the nuke I might not be here.”
“Yes you would,” said Robert. “I know my brother.” This was said in a joking manner, but Puller knew the man wasn’t smiling. He was in fact probably trying hard to keep his little brother calm. Trying, if it was possible, to take his mind off the fact that he might be sitting on the equivalent of millions of tons of TNT with a radiation kicker.
“Where do I put it?”
“If you’re looking at the bomb head-on, place the stick five degrees to the left.”
“Why five degrees?”
“I like the number five, John, always have.”
Puller placed the stick in that spot and confirmed that with his brother.
Robert said, “Good. Now you obviously have to set the timer for the stick to go off before the bomb timer. With a nuclear weapon even a millisecond difference in the timing of the explosions is sufficient. Stick detonates, punches a hole in the lenses, causing a series of staggered explosions. The sequential detonations will destroy the sphere along with the compression phase. The pit will squeeze through the created holes and critical and supercritical stages will never be reached. With no pit the plutonium can’t be compressed and the entire thing collapses.”
“And that’s real good?” asked Puller.
“Let me give you the three scenarios as I see them. If we’re real lucky we go low-end. That means you just have a dirty bomb with nothing nuclear in the detonation. The most we have is a small boom with some radiation exposure, which three feet of concrete should be able to contain. That would be as good as it gets. The second or medium outcome is the half-kiloton fizzle. It obviously helps that you’re in the middle of nowhere covered by three feet of concrete. Collateral damage should be manageable.”
“This county is full of a lot of people, actually,” said Puller, as Cole stared at him from behind the light she held. “And they’re basically having a real shitty life right now. So the last thing they need is a mushroom cloud popping into their misery.”
“I’m sorry, John, I didn’t know.”
“No reason you should.” Puller drew a long breath. “And the third scenario?”
“My plan works, but it doesn’t work that well, and we still go nuclear.”
“And that means?”
Robert didn’t say anything for a few moments. “I’ve never lied to you, John, and I won’t start tonight. That means that a large chunk of where you are will be completely vaporized. Like a hundred hurricanes hitting all at once. There won’t be anything left for miles. That’s just how it works.”
“Okay.” Puller thought of something. “Give me a few minutes,” he said.
“What?” asked his brother.
“This thing is going to go boom under any scenario, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then give me a few minutes.”
He set the phone down, jumped up, and ran off. Cole rushed after him.
“Puller, what are you doing?”
He reached the barrels, sized them up, eyed where he would be taking them, and decided on the best way.
“Mineshaft is over there. I’m going to roll these barrels into the shaft as far as I can. When the boom hits, if we’re lucky, the concussive force will send these suckers deep into the rock and then bury them under tons of crap. It’s our only option at this point.”
“Better than into the West Virginia air,” said Cole.
His muscles straining, Puller tipped the first barrel onto its side and quickly rolled it into the mineshaft. There was a slight downward slope and the barrel rolled on its own down into the darkness. Puller ran back to the other barrels and found that Cole was trying to topple one over too, but her strength was not enough.
“Just hold the light on it,” he said. “I’ll supply the muscle.”
A few minutes later all of the barrels were in the mineshaft. Puller and Cole ran back to the nuke and he picked up the phone.
“I’m back.”
“What the hell were you doing?” demanded his brother.
“Putting barrels of nuclear shit in a safer place.”
“Oh, right. Good idea. Okay, you ready?”
Puller said, “Do you feel lucky?”
His brother replied, “More to the point, do you feel lucky?”
Puller licked his lips and glanced at Cole. She stood there as though marbleized.
He set the timer on the dynamite stick to thirty minutes. That would give them plenty of time to get out of the blast area.
They heard a groan.
Cole said, “Roger is waking up.”
Her brother-in-law was indeed stirring.
Puller said, “Go untie him and make him understand that we need to get out—”
“Puller,” Cole shrieked. “Look.”
Robert apparently heard this. He said, “What’s going on?’
Puller didn’t answer. He was too busy staring at the nuke bomb timer.
It had just gone from forty-seven minutes and eight seconds to five minutes flat.
Another booby-trap that they had engaged, perhaps by removing the cover.
Puller reset his detonator for the only time he could.
Less than five minutes.
He closed the lid on the bomb and he and Cole raced over to Roger Trent. Puller used his KA-BAR knife to cut the bindings and they got him to his feet and then ran like hell to the filtration shaft.
“John!” screamed Robert Puller’s voice from the phone.
His brother didn’t answer. He’d dropped the phone next to the nuke.
Now all that mattered was getting out of the Bunker.
But even as he ran next to Cole, both of them propping up Trent beside them, Puller knew one thing for certain.
We’re dead.