The sum of all fears - Tom Clancy [233]
"Three what?"
"Shakes." Fromm allowed himself another of his rare smiles. "You know what a nanosecond is - that is one billionth of a second,;'a? In that span of time, a beam of light goes only thirty centimeters. The time it takes a beam of light to go from here to here." He held his hands out about a foot apart.
Qati nodded. Surely that was a very brief time indeed.
"Good. A "shake" is ten nanoseconds. The time for light to go three meters. The term was invented by the Americans in the 1940s. They mean the time for a shake of a lamb's tail - a technical joke, you see. In other words, three shakes, the time needed for a beam of light to go approximately nine meters, the bomb has begun and ended the detonation process. That is many thousands of times the time required for chemical explosives to do anything."
"I see," Qati said, speaking both the truth and a lie. He left the room, allowing Fromm to return to his ghastly reveries. Gunther was waiting out in the open air.
"Well?"
"I have the American side of the plan," Bock announced. He opened up a map and set it on the ground. "We will place the bomb here."
"What is this place?" Bock answered the question. "How many?" the Commander asked next.
"Over sixty thousand here. If the bomb's yield is as promised, the lethal radius will encompass all of this. Total dead will number between one and two hundred thousand."
"That is all? For a nuclear bomb, that is all?"
"Ismael, this is merely a large explosive device."
Qati closed his eyes and swore under his breath. Having only a minute before been told that it was something completely out of his experience, now he was being told the reverse. The Commander was bright enough to understand that both experts were correct.
"Why this place?" Bock explained that, too.
"It would be very gratifying indeed to kill their President."
"Gratifying, but not necessarily beneficial. We could take the bomb into Washington, but I evaluate the risks of detection as serious, far too serious. Commander, my plan must take into consideration the fact that we have only one device and only one chance. We must therefore minimize the risk of detonation and base our target-selection on convenience more than any other factor."
"And the German end of the operation?"
"That is more easily accomplished."
"Will it work?" Qati asked, staring off at the dusty hills of Lebanon.
"It should. I give it a sixty percent chance."
At the very least, we will punish the Americans and the Russians, the Commander told himself. The question came next: Is that enough? Qati's face became hard as he considered the answer to that.
But there was more than one question. Qati thought himself a dying man. The disease process had its ebbs and flows, like an inexorable tide, but a tide that never quite restored itself to where it had been a year or a month before. Though today he felt well, he knew that this was a relative thing. There was as much chance that his life would end in the next year as there was that Bock's plan would succeed. Could he allow himself to die and not do everything he could to see his mission accomplished?
No, and if his own death was likely, what importance should he give to the lives of others? Were they not all unbelievers?
Gunther is an unbeliever, a true infidel. Marvin Russell is another, a pagan. The people you propose to kill they are not unbelievers. They are People of the Book, misguided followers of Jesus the Prophet, but also people who believe in the one God.
Yet Jews were also people of the Book. The Koran proclaimed it. They were the spiritual ancestors of Islam, as much the children of Abraham as the Arabs. So much in their religion was the same as his. His war against Israel was not about religion. It was about his people, cast out of their own land, displaced by another people who also claimed to be motivated by a religious