“How did it go at the border?” Fernando asked.
Rafael held his head up a little higher. “Javier and Esteban became martyrs today. God has welcomed them home with rich rewards. Many infidels died. It was a good day.”
Fernando nodded and climbed up onto a forklift to start unloading Rafael’s semitrailer truck.
The first thing they loaded into the front of the small cargo van was the generators and batteries that would produce the five kilovolts needed to charge a high-energy capacitor to fire the detonators. They had already assembled platforms to anchor the most valuable part of the load.
Next, they carefully pulled the two cases, each holding a pair of half spheres of plutonium-239, surrounded by tungsten carbide bricks and beryllium reflectors, from the semitrailer and placed them on the platforms in the cargo van and secured them down.
Over those cases they placed the steel shells for the outer casing. They would help protect the cases should they have any kind of accident.
When the time came, the two halves of the plutonium spheres would be assembled along with a polonium-beryllium neutron initiator placed in their hollow centers. Those initiators would help kick-start the chain reaction to prompt criticality. The pit would be placed inside a heavy lead tamper several inches thick. That in turn would be surrounded by explosive lenses made of Semtex.
The Semtex explosive lenses, fired with the EBW, would create a shock wave designed to collapse the lead tamper inward. The tamper’s inertia would spherically compress the plutonium-239 pit to critical mass.
Miguel’s team had been in place for a while now and had been forming the Semtex into precisely shaped geometric pieces that later would be assembled into a sphere to surround the lead tamper and the inner shell. They had established their operation in a deserted industrial area that had proven to be a perfect source of the nearly thousand pounds of lead they would need for each bomb.
Their Iranian shell company had bought the entire building as well as another smaller building and machining workroom with old but workable milling machines. Once finished with the machining at the smaller workspace, Miguel’s men would move to the larger building to begin working the lead into the spherical tamper that would surround the plutonium pit.
Miguel’s team had also machined the brass chimney sleeves that would hold the detonators. Conventional detonators didn’t have the precision needed to make all the explosive lenses go off simultaneously.
To make those explosions highly symmetrical, the detonators would need to be connected by exploding bridgewire that had already been delivered to Miguel’s team by courier. When the proper voltage hit the EBW, the high current would melt and vaporize the wire in microseconds. The resulting shock wave would fire all the detonators in the same instant.
While precise yields were very difficult to determine, calculations done by Iran’s nuclear engineers along with the help of North Korean scientists suggested a little over one hundred kilotons.
Once Rafael and his team reached Miguel and his men, they could begin the final assembly.
The test of Iran’s first atomic bomb would not be conducted in some remote desert location.
It would be conducted in America.
This would be the Great Satan’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
THIRTY-SIX
This particular Mossad operations facility had always reminded Jack of a mission control center for spacecraft launches. Like the seating in a mini amphitheater, rows of curved counters with workstations descended toward a small stage with a wall of monitors behind it displaying up-to-the-minute information. Those monitors were alive with everything from maps, to scrolling lists of information, to video feeds of demonstrations going on at different locations. One of the feeds showed a speech being given at the United Nations. Another was a live feed of an interrogation of a prisoner.
Dozens of controllers, managers, and coordinators tended monitors of their own, along with their own sets of switches, buttons, and knobs. Many of them were talking on headsets. These operators tracked, and were in communication with, agents in the field. When Jack had been in the United States and called in, he talked to Dvora in this very operations center.
As Jack made his way across the surprisingly quiet room, he immediately noticed that all the controllers seemed especially tense. Some of them pored over reams of paper readouts in their laps. Others were talking into headsets. The lighting in the room was muted, to make it easier to see all the information both at their own screens and on the large monitors against the wall. It gave the place a kind of foreboding atmosphere.
Jack spotted Dvora Artzi and stopped at her station. When she saw him she broke into a sudden smile as she pulled off her headset and then stood to squeeze him in a warm hug.
“How are you, Jack?” she asked, holding his shoulders as she looked up at him with a broad smile.
“I’m okay,” he said without much enthusiasm.
Ehud saw Jack stopped at Dvora’s station and rushed over to meet him.
“Jack!” he said as he extended a hand. “Where have you been? Didn’t you get my messages? I’ve been trying to reach you for weeks! It’s not like you to be out of communication.”
Jack shook hands with the man as he looked around.
“Sorry, Ehud,” he said, returning his attention to the man. “I just didn’t want to search for another subject right now.”
“It’s not your fault that Uziel was murdered.”
Jack flashed him a weak smile. “Nice try, Ehud. But if I wouldn’t have found him and convinced him to help us, he would be at home and safe right now.”
“Safe at home mourning his wife. You gave him a reason to care about living. You let him be part of something bigger than himself. You didn’t force him to help us. He wanted to do it.”
Jack sighed. “I suppose.” He didn’t want to debate it, so he didn’t. “But I’m thinking I may take a break from our work. I’m a little sick at heart of finding people who can recognize killers only to watch them be murdered.”
“Jack,” Dvora said, “these are special people. They are hunted by those who want to kill their kind. You save many of them by finding them first. You saved Kate. If not for you, she would have been slaughtered without ever knowing the reason. She never knew about her ability until you found her and helped her understand what she could do. If not for you, she would be dead. Not just her, but others as well.”
Jack smiled more sincerely. “True enough. I just wish I could find her. I taught her a little too well how to go off the grid and become a ghost to hide from those killers.”
“Anyway,” Ehud said, interrupting the conversation about Kate, “that’s not why I’ve been trying to reach you.”
Jack folded his arms and devoted his full attention to Ehud. “Okay, what’s up?”
“What’s up?” Ehud looked a little surprised. “Haven’t you been listening to the news?”
“No, I’ve had my phone off. I’m a bit sick of listening to all the problems in the world. I wanted to be left alone to do some background research on some of the super-predators I’ve been hunting. I’ve been thinking about taking some time away from all this to go do that for a while.”
Dvora frowned with concern. “You don’t know about the attacks?”
Jack looked between Dvora and Ehud. “Attacks? What attacks?”
“In America,” Ehud said, lifting his hands out in exasperation. “There were also some terrorist attacks in the UK, one stabbing at a nightclub in France, and a truck attack in Brussels. But there were a great many more in the US and they were much worse.”
“Worse?” Jack’s arms unfolded. “What happened in the US?”