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Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: Countdown
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Nothing would go wrong.
Ramstein Air Force Base was a huge installation covering thousands of acres of German countryside. Much of it was underground in the old Nazi labyrinth of tunnels and storage caverns. It was the largest depot for U.S. and NATO nuclear weapons anywhere outside of the continental United States. Yet security on the base was very lax, these days.
At the main gate he cranked down his window and showed the AP on duty his ID card, and the taxi was passed through to the Bachelor Officers Quarters across base.
He paid the driver and went inside, where he signed in with the Charge of Quarters, handing over a copy of his orders.
“Welcome to Germany, sir,” the young sergeant said. “Did you have a good trip?”
“Tiring,” Kurshin said. “What I need is a shower, a stiff drink, and a decent steak, in that order.”
The sergeant, whose name tag read LEVENSON, grinned. “Can do, Colonel, at least on the shower. You can get the drink and a good steak at the officers club just up the block.”
“Sounds good.”
“Have you signed in yet, sir?”
“No, I just got in.”
“If you'll give me four sets of your orders, I'll have a runner take them over to base HQ for you. The commander is off the base until Monday.”
Kurshin dug out the extra sets of orders and handed them over. “How about transportation?”
“I can get you a car and driver as well, soon as we get you signed in.”
Kurshin grinned. The security was incredibly lax. The sergeant mistook the meaning of his smile.
“No sweat, Colonel, we aim to please around here.”
“So far so good,” Kurshin said, his grin broadening. And he meant it.
HEAT SHIMMERED UP from the desolate floor of the desert as the gunmetal gray Mercedes 560SE sedan fitted with United Nations flags on its front fenders appeared in the distance. Above, an Israeli Army Cobra gunship helicopter hovered at one thousand feet.
Lev Potok, seated by the open door, lowered the powerful binoculars through which he'd watched the car and shook his head wryly. It had been only a little more than forty-eight hours since the incident and already the piranhas were gathering.
“We're in a delicate position here,” Dr. Moshe Ben Avral, the facility director, had told him yesterday. “We're operating what appears to the world to be nothing more than a research reactor, when in reality too many people know what is here.”
“They can only guess,” Potok argued. “And if they guess correctly they cannot know for certain that this is a storage depot.”
“A guess is less damaging than a certainty?” Dr. Avral asked.
“Of course,” Potok replied, his mind for just that moment elsewhere. Rothstein's background so far was coming up clean, as was Asher's. But there was no doubt that it was Rothstein who had crawled down through the intake air ducts and had let himself into the main vault. The blood on the louvered panel and inside on the floor of the air duct matched Rothstein's, and the man had received a severe dose of radiation.
So he had been to the vault and seen with his own eyes what it contained. The question was, had he had time to use the telephone in the gas station to call someone? His fingerprints were on the telephone. But had he had the time?
“We were right on his tail, Major,” the team leader had reported. “He wasn't in that gas station for more than twenty or thirty seconds.”
Time enough to make a call? Potok wondered.
The shock waves of the possibility had reached the prime minister, and were coming back on them now. The depot must be moved, even though it would be impossible in under a year's time without completely blowing security.
“Then so be it.”
And now the U.N.'s Non-Proliferation Treaty Team had come knocking at their front door again.
“Let's get back,” he shouted to the pilot, and the chopper peeled off to the south.
God help us all if the secret was out, Potok thought. It would probably mean war. A war in which the Soviets would almost certainly participate.
 
Dr. Lorraine Abbott sat in the backseat of the Mercedes with Scott Hayes whom she had joined in London. He was with the British arm of the NPT Inspection Service. They'd been together
now almost continuously for twenty-four hours. First the briefings and then the travel to Israel, and she decided that she didn't like him very much.
“A waste of time,” he grumbled from where he sat slouched against the door. “They're not going to tell us a bloody thing.”
Hayes was short, and dumpy-looking with long hair, a scraggly beard, and dull gray eyes. He was reputed to be a fair nuclear physicist and engineer and was a Greenpeacer, a combination Lorraine found oddly out of synch.
“At least they'll know that we're interested, and that we're keeping on top of things,” she replied.
Hayes looked at her with a little smirk. “Do you think they'll bloody well care?”
Lorraine, who held her Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Berkeley, presently worked at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories and was on call by the NPT Inspection Service as a field observer, a job which took her away from home half a dozen times each year. She was tall, slender, and attractive, with light California blond hair and wide green eyes. Her colleagues were always surprised by her chic appearance the first time they met her.
“You don't look like a physicist,” they would invariably say.
Her response, if she were feeling irascible, often would be: “You do.”
“They definitely care,” she answered Hayes, but she didn't bother pointing out the helicopter which had just turned to the south toward the En Gedi Nuclear Research Facility a few miles off.
“So what are you going to ask them: ‘Say, old chum, mind telling us where you're keeping the goodies these days?'”
Lorraine smiled. “Something like that,” she said.
“Bloody hell,” Hayes responded and looked out the window, a petulant set to his shoulders.
Lorraine opened her purse and with long, delicate fingers took out a cigarette and lit it, drawing the smoke deeply into her lungs. Her former fiance, a surgeon at the UCLA Medical Center, had always been on her back about her one vice. “You're too bright for that, Lor,” he'd said.
She hadn't minded, though, even if he was right; his one vice was his harping. No one was perfect after all.
The NPT had gotten its preliminary report that something might be amiss here at En Gedi from the National Security Agency at Ft. Meade. An unusual amount of activity had been observed from one of the KH-series flyby satellites. Photos had been sent over to the National Photographic Interpretation Center, where analysis suggested that some sort of an alarm might have been set off two and a half days ago, around three in the morning, local time.
There had been no apparent damage, no fire, and certainly no detectable radiation leaks. In addition, the Israelis had so far made no announcement about any trouble at their research reactor facility—though it would have been highly unusual for them to do so. They had been extremely tight-lipped about their involvement with nuclear energy.
Still, they had not seemed overly surprised to learn that an NPT team was being sent out to look over the situation.
Her instructions were simple, as they had been for each of her inspection trips: Keep your eyes and ears open for anything out of the ordinary.
Israel had the capacity to produce plutonium from her two research reactors, and presently she had operational one enrichment plant, one heavy water plant, and one reprocessing plant, so she also had the capability of producing weapons-grade material. The question was, of course, had Israel actually taken the next step? Had she constructed a nuclear weapon or weapons? The NPT wanted to know.
God only knew, she thought to herself as their driver brought them over the crest of a hill, the En Gedi plant off in the distance, they had the reason to build such weapons … their survival.
 
The En Gedi Nuclear Research Station was about average for a facility of its nature. The reactor itself was housed beneath a four-story fiberglass dome inside a slightly larger reinforced concrete containment building. To the east was a small venturi-shaped cooling tower. On the north side of the installation, which was enclosed behind a double line of tall electrified fences, were the various research laboratories and the main
administration center. To the west were a small dispensary, dining hall, and housing units for the science and technical staff and the squadron of military guards. Syria, after all, wasn't very far away. Security here was, of necessity, very tight.
They were met at the front gate by a husky, good-looking Army officer in a major's uniform, a hard hat on his head.
“Lev Potok,” he introduced himself. “I'm the Crises Management Team Supervisor. Welcome to En Gedi, Dr. Abbott, Mr. Hayes.”
They shook hands.
“We understand you had a little trouble the other night,” Lorraine said. There was no use beating around the bush. In that, at least, she agreed with Hayes.
Potok managed a tight smile. “It was nothing, actually. But I expect you'll want to see for yourself.”
“Naturally,” Hayes said sharply, and Lorraine shot him a warning glance which he ignored.
“If you will come along, then, our facility director and chief engineer are waiting to meet you,” Potok said.
They had gotten out of the Mercedes. The heat at this hour of the afternoon was intense. Potok gave them hard hats, radiation badges, and visitor tags, and they climbed into his waiting jeep and were whisked across the facility to the three-story administration building.
Inside they were ushered into a conference room where two men looked up from a set of blueprints they'd been studying. One was a much older man with longish white hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and the bemused look of a college professor. He was the facility's director, Dr. Moshe Ben Avral. Lorraine had heard of him. He'd done a number of papers on the development of nuclear power sources for the third world.
“Pleased to meet you, Dr. Avral,” she said, shaking hands.
The other, much stockier, much younger man, was Samuel Rosen, the facility's chief engineer. “A Brooklyn transplant,” he said with a smile and a thick New York accent.
“A report has been sent along to Washington, Dr. Abbott, so we're just a little surprised that you're here,” Dr. Avral said gently.
Although Israel had never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty of 1969 (of course at that time they had had no immediate plans for entering the nuclear race), they had come to an informal agreement with the United States to inform her ally what she was doing, and to submit to NPT inspections.
“I haven't seen that report,” Lorraine said.
“Nor have I,” Hayes added.
Dr. Avral nodded patiently. “No, of course you would not have seen the report. By the time it was sent, you were unfortunately already in transit.”
Rosen was looking at Lorraine, an odd, almost anxious expression on his face. He was hiding something, she decided. She turned to him.
“You didn't experience much of a problem, then?” she asked.
“Not really,” Rosen said. “It was a nonradioactive steam leak.”
“There was an alarm,” Hayes said.
“Yes. You can't believe the safety networks and backups we've got here. A valve chatters and a dozen alarms go off.”
“Your team was called in?” she asked Potok, who had so far maintained a stony silence.
“SOP,” Potok said. “We're dealing with nuclear energy here, Doctor. It scares a lot of people.”
“Me included,” she said.
There was an awkward silence, which Hayes finally filled by stepping forward and glancing down at the blueprints spread out on the conference table. “We might just as well take a look at this supposed leak, then, all right?”
Rosen and Potok exchanged a look, which Lorraine caught. Again she had the impression that they were hiding something. Perhaps something important.
“Yes, of course,” Dr. Avral said, and he stepped aside to let the engineer take over.
For the next fifteen minutes Rosen went over in detail exactly what had happened the night when a steam line valve had supposedly popped loose. Lorraine stood back and pretended to study the diagrams while in actuality she was watching Potok and Dr. Avral. There was more here than met the eye. Potok was concerned and Dr. Avral was frightened.
 
 
On the way back to Tel Aviv she told Hayes that she thought the Israelis were lying.
“I don't think so,” the Britisher said smugly. “That Rosen isn't bad, for a Jew. He knows his engineering.”
“There was more than a simple steam leak,” Lorraine said.
Hayes looked at her with renewed interest. “Are you going to put that in your report?”
“Yes.”
“On what basis?”
“I don't know,” she said softly. She looked up at him. “But I'm going to find out.”

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