Dead or Alive - Tom Clancy [210]
“Dumb coincidence. I had a hunch he was going to do something like that, but beyond that …” Clark shrugged. “I’d say that about takes care of your CID problem, wouldn’t you?”
“How do you figure?”
“Ryan’s running for President, Sam, and he just bitch-slapped Kealty on national television. He can either let this bullshit prosecution eat up a few weeks of news cycle or he can dump it and hope people forget about it. As of right now, Kealty’s shit pile of worry just got a lot bigger, and you’ve become small potatoes.”
“I’ll be damned. Thanks, John.”
“Didn’t do anything.”
“My chances of getting Jack Ryan or General Diggs on the phone are pretty slim, so you’ll have to do.”
“I’ll pass it along. Think about my offer. We’ll keep it open till you’re back on your feet, then bring you up for a meet and greet. What do you say?”
“Sounds good.”
Forty-three hours after Adnan opened the seacocks on Salychev’s Halmadic trawler and sunk it along with his three comrades beneath the surface of the Barents Sea 700 feet below, the second package arrived at the Dubai warehouse.
Since Musa’s arrival, the engineer had been hard at work, setting up the lead-lined containment tent on the warehouse’s floor and checking his inventory list of component parts. Like the tent itself, which had been manufactured in Malaysia based on specifications stolen from the online curriculum for Fort Leonard Wood’s Operational Radiation Safety (OPRAD) course, the component parts had been laser-milled and lathed in Morocco-based Ukrainian schematics.
The beauty of simplicity, Musa thought.
Each of the device’s components was born either from benign dual-use technology or from plans that had long ago been discontinued, considered obsolete according to modern standards.
The component he and his team had recovered existed only because of what most environmental groups considered Russia’s lax attitude toward nuclear material, but Musa knew that was only part of the equation, the others being the Russian government’s love affair with innovative nuclear-power programs and its tendency toward circumspection when it came to telling the world about those programs.
Spread along Russia’s northern shipping routes were some 380 RTG—radioisotope thermoelectric generator—lighthouses, the vast majority of which were powered by strontium 90 cores, a low-level, heat-producing radioisotope with a half-life of twenty-nine years and an output capacity ranging from a few watts to eighty watts. Distributed among the four RTG models— Beta-M, Efir-MA, Gorn, and Gong—were a handful designed to use a core of a wholly different sort: plutonium-238, a material that, unlike strontium, which could at worst be used in the construction of a dirty bomb, was of fissionable quality. However, the amount of salvageable core material alone would not be sufficient for their purposes. A second source was required. This had been Adnan’s task. One for which he and his men had given their lives. The prize they’d recovered from the abandoned icebreaking ship on that godforsaken island had been the final piece of the puzzle: an OK-900A pressurized water reactor core containing 150 kilograms, or some 330 pounds, of enriched uranium-235.
Both elements free for the taking, Musa thought. Nominal security and virtually nonexistent record-keeping. Would the fools even notice the loss, and if so, how long would it take them? he wondered. In any case, it would be too late.
However complex the processes and theories behind the device’s actual function, the construction of it was no more complex than building a four-cylinder automobile engine from scratch, the engineer had told him. The fittings had to, of course, be of exacting standards, down to the micrometer scale, which made the assembly process painstaking, but Musa’s choice of the Dubai warehouse would assure them of privacy and anonymity. The Emir’s timetable would assure them ample time to allow proper assembly.
The engineer emerged from the zippered door of the tent’s work area, stripped off his protective gear in the