Countdown to Mecca (19 page)

“No, sir,” Ric replied with conviction. “You don't.”

“Good, then come on.” He motioned for Jack and Doc to follow him as well. As they all neared the secure room, Boaz broke off from what he was doing and joined them. Once they were all inside and Sol had locked the door, he turned, his expression grave.

“We have a phrase in Israel. ‘
Ziyun moach
,'” he told them, moving to the coffee machine. “That's what we're in now, so you can imagine what it means.”

“You were wise to point all the pitfalls out to Sammy,” Jack said to Sol. “Sorry, and thanks.”

“It's okay,” Sol said. “Actually, it was a decent gamble, kind of ballsy. And I'm sure we weren't followed. Anyone who saw what went down would be way more interested in the general than in us.”

“I've been thinking,” Doc said. “What
about
Sammy's idea? Interrogating the general, I mean.”

Sol shook his head. “It's one thing to interrogate one of our hostile neighbors, it's another to question an American. Even though we know what we know, and worse, fear what we fear, the Mossad cannot risk jeopardizing Israel's relationship with the American government no matter how correct we turn out to be. I may even have been taking too great a risk just talking with Morton in public. If anyone was to ever find out who I'm actually loyal to.…” His voice trailed off.

Doc and Jack shared a glance. “You feel like reaching out and touching someone?” Jack asked his old friend.

“I was just thinking that,” Jack said. “We don't have the same restrictions as these guys.”

Doc leaned back in a chair and put his cowboy-booted feet up on the table. “Brother, I don't have
any
restrictions.”

Jack asked Doc to give Boaz the items Sammy had retrieved. He handed them over.

“Why don't you and Ric get everything on those drives?” Jack asked. “And I mean everything. I don't care if the encryptions have encryptions, I want to know everything possible as soon as possible.”

It only took a glance from Sol before the two men were heading upstairs. Jack then turned his attention to the others. “If Riad al-Saud and Thomas Brooks are in the Middle East, it looks like we'll have to corner the tigers in their lairs.”

Doc shook his head with mock regret. “Too bad we couldn't just plug the guy and have done with it.”

Minsky yelled, “No. You don't just crush someone with a steamroller. I worked in Vegas and saw what happened when some lawyer said ‘get rid of him.' You make a lifetime of trouble for yourself.…”

The glint in Doc's eye when he looked over showed he was just kidding … sort of. “Unlikely Brooks'll be pulling the trigger himself.”

“Yeah, I figured the process is too far along by now, too,” Jack agreed. “I just think he wants to be there when his life's work blows sky high. So our job is to stop the bomb before it reaches him.” Jack shouted after Boaz. “Anything new on how the switches got to Saudi Arabia?”

The safe house manager came halfway back. “We were able to check the shipping manifests at DR Inc., which turned up a listing to the Middle East. One hundred and twenty copy machines are due to be delivered aboard the Malaysian-flagged
Flower of Asia,
scheduled to dock at Yanbu' al Bahr.”

Jack looked from Doc to Sol. “Any way we can beat it there?”

It was Sol and Doc's turn to exchange looks. “We can try,” said Doc, getting his boots back on the floor. “We'll need transport and translation, ground intel as well if that's possible.”

“It's possible,” Sol assured them. “Let's confab on transport, Doc. I think, between the two of us, we can come up with something fast and secure for all concerned.”

“What about translation and ground intel?” Jack asked.

“I got that covered,” Sol promised as he approached Doc. “Give me two hours.”

“Good,” said Jack, heading for the door.

“Hey!” said Doc. “Where are you going? While we're doing all this, what are you going to do?”

Jack stopped at the door, his hand on the latch. “Me? I'm going to find out everything there is to know about dismantling a bomb in two hours flat.”

 

26

Jack drove along the 101 toward the airport in the Ford C-Max to the gate at Coyote Point Park. He didn't have to stop, or even speak. No visitor had to. He gave the uniformed young ranger a wave, then turned right, drove past a gigantic playground that was dotted with laughing children, and parked at the far end of the huge lot beyond it.

Just as he was told, there was a run-down, rarely used path below it. Checking his watch, Jack started navigating the crumbling, decrepit, otherwise empty trail deep into the park—over and down to one of the most macabre beaches he'd ever seen. He walked carefully around the carcasses of dead crustaceans, bones, broken shells, crushed cans, stubbed cigarettes, and single shoes until he reached the man waiting for him.

Professor Peters smiled as Jack arrived at the very edge of the fetid water. Jack opened his mouth to speak, but Peters held his right forefinger up while checking his own watch.

“Fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine,” he counted. “Sixty.” And, at that moment, a jumbo jet at the end of its descent to the neighboring airport appeared overhead like a parade balloon, seemingly floating, as well as hovering, above them. Its roar was so loud it seemed to drown out even Jack's thoughts. A moment later, it was gone.

“Every three minutes,” Professor Peters said proudly. “Let's see anyone record our conversation now! Can you imagine someone in a van trying to establish an audio baseline with
that
bass roar?” He chuckled. “It will blow out their ears and equipment on the first pass!”

Jack grinned. “I like your style.”

“Thanks,” the physicist replied. “Sometimes, simple solutions are the best.”

It was quite the talk. Jack asked for everything he needed to know about making a nuclear bomb, and Peters was just the man who wanted to tell him.

“Airport lights,” he said. “Why would the Kingdom need so many runway lights?”

Even though a seemingly incongruous statement, Jack knew that there was method to the prof's seeming madness. In addition to foiling any listening device, real or imaginary, the rendezvous point he chose had an additional meaning.

“Because there's a gas inside runway lights—decay energy 18.6 keV, also known as tritium, also known as hydrogen-3, which is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen—that can be used to increase the yield of nuclear devices.”

Peters turned to smile at the runway lights in the distance. “The emitted electrons from the radioactive decay of small amounts of tritium cause phosphors to glow, so as to make self-powered lighting.”

“What about nonnuclear explosives?” Jack asked. “What could it do for those? Biological agents, for example.”

Peters thought for a moment. “If you were proficient in its application, an explosion involving tritium could alter the structure of any agent you're delivering.”

“Meaning?”

“Let's say you have a virus that affects the circulatory system,” Peters said pensively.

“Like Ebola,” Jack said.

Peters nodded. “What if it has been genetically manipulated into a pathogen that impacts the respiratory system.”

“So that it's airborne rather than carried in bodily fluids,” Jack said.

“Exactly. The Russians, the Israelis, the Germans, the United States have all worked on creating mutated forms of such diseases to which normal methods of treatment would not apply.”

“Okay, I've reported on all that. But the tritium? Where's that come in?”

“Suppose the virus isn't weaponized until it's irradiated? What if the tritium begins the mutagenic process? Or, worse—”

“What could be worse?” Jack demanded.

“What if the tritium does something else? What if it irradiates the environment around the new strain and destroys any incoming curative?”

“Hold on,” Jack said. “I thought radiation
kills
disease germs. Hell, exposure to just ninety seconds of ultraviolet light stops Ebola from reproducing.”

“That is true,” Peters agreed. “But you're talking about the traditional form of the disease. A nation that has created a superbug would want a very special key to unlock its potential. Tritium could be it.”

He kept talking but Jack didn't hear because another jumbo jet appeared overhead. Once it was on its way, Peters turned back to Jack with an even wider smile, but troubled eyes.

“The isotope is used in very high-tech runway lights,” the scientist went on. “But how many do you need? Check to see how many were delivered to Saudi Arabia in the last six months.”

Jack held up his smartphone. “May I?”

Peters nodded, then checked the skies. “Be quick.”

Jack called Sol, who passed on the question to Boaz and said he would get back to Jack. Once Jack hung up, the next plane was there, seemingly close enough for Jack to reach up and scratch its belly. When it, too, was past, Peters took up his lecture.

“Saudi Arabia has purchased a large number of perfectly legal items that could, under the proper circumstances, be taken apart and modified for something that could be used as part of a nuclear weapon. There are several ways the isotope could be used, depending on the exact type of bomb.” Peters checked his watch. “Bottom line: tritium could be used to make uranium far more dangerous. The material increased yields and made detonation simpler. As for its effects on other agents, that remains pure speculation … none of it good.”

They waited through the next plane's descent.

“What about krytrons?” Jack asked.

“You asked about those last time.”

“Remind me,” Jack said, trying to keep everything straight.

The professor sighed. “High speed switches—the kind used in bombs—are pretty rare. Only certain copy machines use krytrons any longer, and even those machines didn't use the same ones that bombs used. You need someone who supplies 3D copy machines.”

“Right,” Jack said.

The next plane appeared, giving Jack time to think. He now had another trail to follow—one figuratively lit by runway lights.

When the plane disappeared, Jack put his arm around Peters's shoulder, and gently led him back toward the path. “Tell me, Professor,” he said. “If ever I was ever to come across these switches, these runway lights, or even a completed bomb, what's the best thing to do?”

“Duck and cover won't work,” he said glibly.

“I know,” Jack said.

“If you're asking how to defuse a bomb, remember what I said before? About simple solutions being the best?”

“Yes?”

The professor shrugged. “Pour a bottle of water on the device. Hose it down. Or pee on it.”

It took a moment for Jack to realize that he was serious. “Can you elaborate?”

“If you don't happen to have a robotic bomb disposal unit and experienced technician, just wet the damn thing down and chances are pretty good you'll short circuit something, anything.”

“‘Pretty good,' huh?” Jack muttered. “Can you be more specific? What are the odds of that working?”

“A little better than fifty-fifty,” the scientist told him. “The good news is, if it doesn't work you'll never know.”

Jack had hoped the physicist would come up with something a little more practical, a little more scientific. But as stopgaps went, he knew he would always have access to at least one of those options.…

 

27

U.S. Radar Station, Mt. Keren, Israel

Colonel Tristan Q. Ashlock was not a lunatic by any means. He was not criminally insane or pathological in his views of the world. He was an ardent American patriot who had spent his entire adult life wearing the uniform of the United States Army. Every male member of his family on his mother's side had worn that same uniform, dating back five generations to the Civil War, all of them graduating from the Virginia Military Institute near the tops of their classes. Not one of his line had ever graduated at the very top, however, until Tristan did so in 1977. His great-great-grandfather, William J. Smith, had been on the verge of doing so when the Commonwealth of Virginia voted to secede from the Union in the spring of 1861, but this was as close as anyone else with his blood had ever come to matching the achievement.

Upon leaving VMI to fight for the Confederacy, the young Lieutenant William “Bill” Smith had served briefly under General Barnard E. Bee before both were killed in action on the 21st of July at First Manassas. In death, Bill Smith left behind a pair of infant twin daughters, Eleanor and Sarah. It was from Sarah's line that Tristan Quentin Ashlock would emerge four generations later as the youngest of four sons, his older brothers all destined to give their lives either in the jungles of Vietnam or in clandestine military operations carried out during the Cold War. Their deaths, along with Tristan's genetic infertility, had assured that he would be the last of Sarah's line. Such were the laws of primogeniture.

Today, Colonel Ashlock was fifty-seven years old with thick gray hair that he still wore closely cropped to his head. His penetrating eyes were the color of steel dust, and though his facial features had begun to sag a bit, he maintained the distinguished, chiseled visage of the handsome warrior he had once been. He was a veteran of both Gulf Wars, the ongoing debacle in Afghanistan, and the recipient of the Distinguished Service Cross. Though his service career had been well distinguished as a commander of troops in the field, he had made some socially critical errors during his climb up the chain of command, errors in the form of failing to keep his mouth shut at the appropriate times and failing to kiss the butts of the appropriate generals when it would have been prudent to do so, thus giving offense in all of the wrong military circles at all of the worst times. As a result of these social blunders, he had never been able to attain a board selection to attend the prestigious United States Army War College, and would therefore, in all likelihood, never attain the coveted gold star of a brigadier general.