Cold War - Jerome Preisler [25]
Morgan also had an idea that his favorite international corporation might add its credibility to the operation. Not that, strictly speaking, this was necessary, but there was a certain symmetry that made it all the more attractive—the Bordeaux that tweaked a neighbor’s nose.
“Await further instructions,” he thumbed in response to the message.
The rest of the notes were, thankfully, mere gibberish. He clicked the T, Z, and K together, then shut the device. As the programs in the servers ten thousand miles away went to work erasing the electronic path he had taken into the e-mail system, he went to the sink and washed his hands.
FIVE
ROSS ICE SHELF, ANTARCTICA (70°00’ S, 30°42’ W) MARCH 4, 2002
THE DOCUMENTS WERE SCRUPULOUSLY FABRICATED, which was how they were able to execute the whole unscrupulous and illegal operation without interference.
On paper the four shielded casks, essentially welded steel-and-lead sarcophagi, each contained ten fifty-five-gallon drums of spent fuel assemblages generated by the Turm nuclear power facility in Austria, a landlocked country dependent on foreign ports for its international marine transport.
The fact of the matter was that the radioactive waste had originated at Fels-Hauden, a state-run power plant in central Switzerland.
On paper the casks were brought by freight train to Trieste in northeastern Italy via the Österreichische Bundesbahn, or Austrian Federal Railway, which interlocked with the European Transfer Express Freight Train System, to be forwarded to the Port of Naples on the Mediterranean coast.
The fact was that the Swiss rail system, Schweizerische Bundesbahn, had picked up the casks at a departure station in Berne. In Naples, they cleared customs within hours for transshipment aboard the German-flagged tanker Valkyrie.
On paper the end point destination of the receptacles was specified as Rokkashi Village, Aomori Prefecture, Japan, where they would be stored for eventual reprocessing into plutonium-uranium mixed oxide—known as MOX—and utilized as fuel by the light-water reactors that provided the nation with a third of its energy demands. As plotted, the Valkyrie’s sea route was to take it through the Strait of Gibraltar, down along the Ivory Coast of Africa, then around South Africa into the Indian Ocean, through the Indonesian Archipelago to the Pacific Ocean, and finally to the Japanese shore for delivery.
The fact was that the cargo’s end point was nowhere near Aomori. The Swiss and Japanese had abruptly discontinued negotiations for the transfer after records of the clandestine talks were rumored to have been leaked to the American government, which, under exercise of the United States-Switzerland Nuclear Cooperation Agreement, had recently clamped down on the shipment of radioactive materials with a potential to yield the weapons-capable MOX extract. Executives at Fels-Hauden had later discreetly sought out another channel for the waste disposal. And found one.
Thus Valkyrie deviated from its charted course beyond the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa, and forged on into the Antarctic Ocean rather than heading east to the Pacific Rim.
In the open sea outside South Africa’s territorial waters, beneath a black and moonless night sky, the casks were moved by mechanized winch onto an ice-strengthened fishing trawler registered to an import/export firm based in Argentina.
Once aboard the trawler, they were placed in a special rad-insulated storage hold and ferried deeper into the southern latitudes, eventually crossing the Antarctic Convergence.
As it passed the subantarctic islands, the vessel encountered thin sea ice, which its riveted double-steel hull was able to nose through with