The Inca Prophecy (31 page)

Advertencia – a warning
When the Eagle of the North and the Condor of the South fly together, the Earth will awaken.
Twelve thousand years ago, the last remnants of the ancient civilisations of Atlantis and Lemuria were destroyed. Their scientists had ignored the warnings from the Masters against experiments that upset the planet’s delicate balance. The Masters assembled the most precious of their sacred documents for safekeeping.
The Atlantean Golden Sun Disc, along with the most important documents, was secured in the Temple of the Sun in the Inca capital, Cusco. But when the Spaniards came, the Sun Disc and the documents were removed and taken to the Lost City of Paititi.

The file contained what appeared to be diarised notes initialled by a Msgr dL, and it was these private notes that were explosive. Having dealt once before with Vatican Intelligence, O’Connor knew immediately that none other than the head of intelligence, Monsignor Lorenzo de Luca, had worked on the file, and the monsignor’s notes went back several years. De Luca must have been very sure no one else had access to the combination for the vault, O’Connor mused. O’Connor perused a series of early dot points:

• Cardinal F. not happy with lack of progress – although had to explain difference between code and cipher.
  
• Cipher subjected to most powerful cracking software available, but no result (except gibberish!)
  
• Not convinced we have the whole story here. Cardinal F. refuses to allow sighting of crystal skull. Thorough search of secret archives not found – located at his villa Lake Como?
  
• Not convinced we have the whole prophecy either.
  
• Cardinal F. adamant that sec of state not be informed of investigation – have to watch – could cause difficulties. Resources to come from Cardinal F’s budget.
  

O’Connor smiled to himself. Lake Como was delightful at this time of year. He headed quietly back upstairs to where he had seen a photocopier on the ground floor. He turned the corner around a line of bookshelves to be confronted by two waiting Swiss Guards.

Chapter 38

The tall, distinguished-looking Professor Lapinski adjusted his round tortoiseshell glasses.

‘As you’ve requested, Mr President, this morning I’m going to cover the key issues we face if we’re attacked with nuclear weapons. What makes the Iranian pursuit of nuclear arms so dangerous is that neither the clerics nor the politicians in Iran have absolute control. The Pasdaran, the elite Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, was originally set up by Ayatollah Khomeini to guard the revolution.’ Lapinski flashed up a photograph of the elite special forces, identified by their ceremonial red cravats.

‘But since then they’ve become far more powerful. They’re involved in training organisations like Hezbollah for operations against Israel from across the southern border of Lebanon. In addition, the Guards have links with the black market and over a hundred engineering and construction companies with an
estimated capital in excess of ten billion dollars. One analyst has described them as the Communist Party, the KGB, and the Mafia all rolled into one. Why is this important?’

Howard Wiley fumed in his seat, intensely irritated that an academic was straying way outside his brief and on to the CIA’s turf.

‘The armed forces of Iran number around half a million, Mr President, but the Guards are a separate force of about 120 000 with their own navy, air force and ground forces, including the Quds or Jerusalem Force. And it’s the Guards who control Iran’s nuclear installations.’ Lapinski opened up a metal suitcase, not much larger than an ordinary briefcase. Inside was a gleaming silver cylinder, less than half a metre long, together with a battery, neutron generators and an arming switch.

‘This suitcase bomb is inert,’ Lapinski continued, ‘although I must say, Mr President, your Secret Service took some convincing.’ He smiled wryly. ‘It’s a good replica of what the best nuclear scientists are now capable of producing in terms of portable nuclear weapons. A cylinder like this would contain either plutonium-239 or uranium-235. The bad news, Mr President, is that plutonium has a half-life of 24 000 years, and weight for weight, produces a far more powerful bomb than uranium. A normal light-water reactor, such as the one the Russians are completing for the Iranians at Bushehr, does produce plutonium-239, but in order to extract it before it becomes contaminated, the reactor has to be shut down. That’s why, I suspect, the Iranians have built a heavy-water reactor at Arak. They don’t need it to produce electricity, but the advantage of using heavy water is that the spent fuel can be reprocessed using relatively straightforward chemistry to produce weapons-grade
plutonium without the reactor being shut down.’

‘Is there any good news?’ President McGovern asked.

‘If there is any, it’s that plutonium bombs aren’t easy to design. They have a nasty habit of pre-detonating, and for a long time our own scientists working on the Manhattan Project during the Second World War thought a plutonium bomb would be impossible to produce. To split a plutonium atom in what we call fission,’ Lapinski explained, ‘we have to hit it with a neutron.’ The President appeared to follow Lapinski’s explanations with ease. ‘And to create a nuclear explosion using either uranium-235 or plutonium-239, you need what we call a critical mass – enough of either material to ensure there’s sufficient for a neutron to hit and for the reaction to keep going. That might sound a bit strange, but most of an atom is made up of an electron cloud, and a neutron passes straight through. It’s the tiny nucleus we have to hit.’ Some of the President’s staff were looking puzzled, and the professor turned to an analogy. ‘It’s a bit like firing at a tree with a rifle. If you’re not a good shot, you’ll probably miss, but if there’s a whole forest of trees, even someone like me is going to hit a tree eventually.’

President McGovern smiled. He was beginning to like this no-nonsense scientist, and he made a mental note to bring him on to his staff as an advisor.

‘Once we have a critical mass, fission will occur, so our bomb designs generally either bring two halves of sub-critical masses together, or we compress the material until it’s so dense that fission is inevitable. As well as producing enormous energy,’ Lapinski continued, ‘a plutonium atom releases more neutrons as it’s blown apart, which starts a chain reaction, which, in a millionth of a second,
produces a nuclear blast, accompanied by radiation and temperatures that are initially in the millions of degrees. Temperatures like that will vaporise anything in the immediate vicinity.’

‘And that’s the good news?’ the President asked.

Lapinski smiled wanly. ‘Plutonium-239 from a reactor, Mr President, is contaminated with plutonium-240.’

‘Which has one extra neutron, right?’ President McGovern offered, a look of grim satisfaction on his face.

‘Absolutely. And it’s the extra neutron that makes plutonium-240 highly radioactive. It splits spontaneously, producing extra neutrons that can cause a plutonium bomb to pre-detonate before you can compress the rest of the plutonium into a critical mass. When the North Koreans conducted their first nuclear test in 2006 with a plutonium bomb, it yielded less than 1000 tonnes of TNT, compared to the 20 000-tonne yield of the Nagasaki bomb. We suspect the North Korean bomb blew itself apart before the chain reaction could be completed.’

‘Can the Iranians do better?’ the President asked.

‘My guess is they can, Mr President.’

‘We don’t deal in guesswork over here, Professor,’ Wiley interjected, but the President held up his hand and silenced the DDO.

‘Let me rephrase that, Mr President,’ Professor Lapinski replied urbanely. ‘It would be a mistake to underestimate the capabilities of the Iranian scientists. They’ve not only had a great deal of assistance from the AQ Khan Research Laboratories in Pakistan, but they’ve also had help from the Russians and the Chinese. And when you have your own heavy-water reactor, getting plutonium is easy. The hard part is compressing it into a critical mass in a uniform
implosion. Our scientists solved that with what they called an explosive lens, which focused the force of the explosion over the entire surface of the plutonium. The Iranians are well aware of that technology, and they’ll be working hard to perfect it. The real danger, Mr President, lies in such a small bomb or bombs falling into the hands of a terrorist organisation – either by accident or design.’

‘We have no intelligence to indicate Iran has these devices, Mr President,’ Wiley interjected. ‘Nor do we have any intelligence to indicate the Iranians would deliberately arm a terrorist group with a nuclear bomb.’ Again the President held up his hand for silence.

‘We may not have any intelligence yet, Mr President, but by the time we do, it may be too late,’ Professor Lapinski observed. ‘Border security is not my field, but I think terrorists have realised that while airports in the US are relatively secure, the actual borders, including the vast coastline, the docks and the borders with Canada and Mexico, offer an opportunity to smuggle one or more of these devices into the country. And while it may seem reasonable to think Iran would not deliberately arm a terrorist group, I think it’s important you be prepared for such an eventuality. There are undoubtedly some in the regime who would be quite happy for a terrorist group to attack the US without the blame being traced back to the Iranian Republic, particularly if such an attack were on the scale of another 9/11, or worse …’ Professor Lapinski’s voice trailed off, leaving the awful spectre of a nuclear attack hanging in the already tense atmosphere of the situation room.

‘What sort of damage would a suitcase bomb do to a major city like New York or Washington?’ the President asked.

‘It depends, of course, on the yield of the bomb. The world’s first
plutonium bomb, which we exploded over Nagasaki, yielded the equivalent of 20 000 tonnes of TNT, but we know that only one kilogram of the plutonium fissioned. Even so, it generated temperatures of 4000 degrees Celsius on the ground and winds of over 1000 kilometres an hour. Over 80 000 people were killed.’

An eerie silence descended as Professor Lapinski paused to allow the horrific figures to take effect.

‘Assuming that today’s improved technology produces just 50 per cent fissioning in a suitcase bomb containing 15 kilograms of plutonium, this would generate around 150 000 tonnes of TNT.’ The professor had anticipated the question, and he flicked a map of New York City on to the screen.

‘Let’s assume a terrorist is successful in detonating a bomb over Lower Manhattan, on Broadway, not far from Ground Zero. The inner circle indicates the area that would be totally destroyed by the blast,’ he said, pointing to a circle which took in the immediate financial district. ‘The outer circle extends all the way to Central Park, at which point windows will still be shattered. About half those in the inner circle will be killed by the blast. Most in a radius of about three kilometres will suffer second-degree burns, and beyond that a slower and more insidious suffering will be inflicted on those who receive lethal doses of gamma radiation, which will depend, at least in part, on the prevailing winds.’

Again, Professor Lapinski paused to allow those in the room to digest his remarks.

‘Finally, Mr President, there is the possibility of what we call a dirty bomb, which consists of normal explosive combined with radioactive material, both of which are relatively easy to obtain. In 1995,
Chechen rebels buried a bomb containing caesium-137 in Moscow’s Izmailovsky Park, and although it didn’t explode, the psychological panic that surrounded the crisis was devastating to national morale and security. A dirty bomb in Washington, Chicago or New York might require you to evacuate a large area, although there might not be many killed.’

‘So we don’t have so much to worry about from a dirty bomb?’ the President asked.

‘I don’t want to play this down too much, Mr President. Caesium-137, along with strontium-90, is one of the most carcinogenic substances known. Caesium-137 and strontium-90 have half-lives of thirty years. They cause bone cancer, and it takes a lot of effort to clean up a contaminated area. But I suspect, Mr President, your biggest problem in a city like New York would be controlling the hysteria generated by the threat.’

‘One final question, Professor. You mentioned the vulnerability of our coastline and ports. What did you base those remarks on?’

Howard Wiley bristled. ‘Coast and port security comes under the auspices of Homeland Security, Mr President. Both the coast guard and customs and border protection —’

‘I’m aware of that, Mr Wiley,’ the President said frostily, cutting him off.

‘My observations are based on open-source reporting, Mr President,’ said Lapinski, ‘and on information I gather from international conferences. There are over twelve million shipping containers on the world inventory, and it’s no secret there are more than 300 ports in the US alone, with thousands of terminals into which we import six million containers a year. It may not be my field, but it’s quite
widely known that only two per cent of those containers are ever inspected by customs, so the potential for terrorists to use the port system to bring in a device is, in my opinion, quite high.’

‘I seem to recall some intelligence on the Russians having nuclear suitcases back in the nineties?’ the President observed.

Wiley again interjected. ‘In 1997, Mr President, the former Russian security council secretary, Alexander Lebed, met with one of our congressional delegations. He claimed the KGB had ordered the development of suitcase bombs, and when the Soviet Union collapsed, eighty-two bombs went missing. We have found absolutely no evidence those bombs exist, and in fact,’ Wiley added, glowering at the Professor, ‘at the time Lebed made this claim, a spokesman for the Russian security service denied the USSR ever possessed that type of weapon.’