“An atomic bomb?” Bock asked.
“So it would seem,” Qati replied.
“Who else knows?”
“Ghosn is the one who discovered it. Only he.”
“Can it be used?” the German asked. And why have you told me?
“It was severely damaged and must be repaired. Ibrahim is now assembling the necessary information for evaluating the task. He thinks it possible.”
Günther leaned back. “This is not some elaborate ruse? An Israeli trick, perhaps an American one?”
“If so, it is a very clever one,” Qati said, then explained the circumstances of the discovery.
“Nineteen seventy-three ... it does fit. I remember how close the Syrians came to destroying the Israelis....” Bock was silent for a moment. He shook his head briefly. “How to use such a thing....”
“That is the question, Günther.”
“Too early to ask such a question. First, you must determine if the weapon can be repaired. Second, you must determine its explosive yield—no, before that you must determine its size, weight, and portability. That is the most important consideration. After that comes the yield—I will assume that—” He fell silent. “Assume? I know little of such weapons. They cannot be too heavy. They can be fired from artillery shells of less than twenty-centimeter diameter. I know that much.”
“This one is much larger than that, my friend.”
“You should not have told me this, Ismael. In a matter like this one, security is everything. You cannot trust anyone with knowledge such as this. People talk, people boast. There could be penetration agents in your organization.”
“It was necessary. Ghosn knows that he will need some help. What contacts do you have in the DDR?”
“What sort?” Qati told him. “I know a few engineers, people who worked in the DDR nuclear program ... it’s a dead program, you know.”
“How so?”
“Honecker was planning to build several reactors of the Russian sort. When Germany reunited, their environmental activists took one look at the design and—well, you can imagine. The Russian designs do not have a sterling reputation, do they?” Bock grunted. “As I keep telling you, the Russians are a backward people. Their reactor designs, one fellow told me, were mainly for production of nuclear material for weapons ...”
“And ...”
“And it is likely that there was a nuclear-weapons program within the DDR. Interesting, I never thought that through, did I?” Bock asked himself quietly. “What exactly do you want me to do?”
“I need you to travel to Germany and find some people—we would prefer merely one, for obvious reasons—to assist us.”
Back to Germany? Bock asked himself. “I’ll need—”
Qati tossed an envelope into his friend’s lap. “Beirut has been a crossroads for centuries. Those travel documents are better than the real ones.”
“You will need to move your location immediately,” Bock said. “If I am caught, you will have to assume that they will get every bit of information I have. They broke Petra. They can break me or anyone else they wish.”
“I will pray for your safety. In that envelope is a telephone number. When you return, we will be elsewhere.”
“When do I leave?”
“Tomorrow.”
12
TINSMITHS
“And I’ll raise you a dime,” Ryan said after taking his draw.
“You’re bluffing,” Chavez said after a sip of beer.
“I never bluff,” Jack replied.
“Out.” Clark tossed in his cards.
“They all say that,” the Air Force sergeant observed. “See your dime and bump you a quarter.”
“Call,” Chavez said.
“Three jacks.”
“Beats my eights,” the sergeant groused.
“But not a straight, doc.” Ding finished off his beer. “Gee, that puts me five bucks ahead.”
“Never count your winnings at the table, son,” Clark advised soberly.
“I never did like that song.” Chavez grinned. “But I like this game.”
“I thought soldiers were lousy gamblers,” the Air Force sergeant observed sourly. He was three bucks down, and he was a real poker player. He got to practice against politicians all the time on long flights when they needed a good dealer.
“One of the first things they teach you at CIA is how to mark cards,” Clark announced as he went for the next round of drinks.
“Always knew I should have taken the course at the Farm,” Ryan said. He was about even, but every time he’d had a good hand, Chavez had held a better one. “Next time I’ll let you play with my wife.”
“She good?” Chavez asked.
“She’s a surgeon. She deals seconds so smooth she can fool a professional mechanic. She plays with cards as a kind of dexterity exercise,” Ryan explained with a grin. “I never let her deal.”
“Mrs. Ryan would never do anything like that,” Clark said when he sat back down.
“Your turn to deal,” Ding said.
Clark started shuffling, something he also did fairly well. “So what you think, doc?”
“Jerusalem? Better than I hoped. How about you?”
“Last time I was there—’84,1 I think—God, it was like Olongapo in the P.I. You could smell it—the trouble, I mean. You couldn’t actually see it, but, man, it was there. You could feel people watching you. Now? It’s sure chilled out some. How about some five-card stud?” Clark asked.
“Dealer’s choice,” the sergeant agreed.
Clark dealt the hole cards, then the first set of up cards. “Nine of spades to the Air Force. Five of diamonds to our Latino friend. Queen of clubs to the doc, and the dealer gets—how about that? Dealer gets an ace. Ace bets a quarter.”
“Well, John?” Ryan asked after the first round of bets.
“You do put a lot of faith in my powers of observation, Jack. We’ll know for sure in a couple of months, but I’d say it looks all right.” He dealt four more cards. “Possible straight—possible straight flush to the Air Force. Your bet, sir.”
“Another quarter.” The Air Force sergeant felt lucky. “The Israeli security guys have mellowed out some, too.”
“How so?”
“Dr. Ryan, the Israelis really know about security. Every time we fly over here, they put a wall up around the bird, y‘know? This time the wall wasn’t so high. I talked to a couple of ’em and they say they’re more relaxed—not officially, but personal, y’know? Used to be they hardly talked at all. Looked like a big difference to me, anyway.”
Ryan smiled as he decided to fold. His eight, queen, and deuce weren’t going anywhere. It never failed. You always got better data from sergeants than generals.
“What we have here,” Ghosn said, flipping his book to the right page, “is essentially an Israeli copy of an American Mark-12 fission bomb. It’s a boosted-fission design.”
“What does that mean?” Qati asked.
“It means that tritium is squirted into the core just as the act of firing begins. That generates more neutrons and greatly increases the efficiency of the reaction. As a result, you need only a small amount of fissionable material ...”
“But?” Qati heard the “but” coming.
Ghosn leaned back and stared at the core of the device. “But the mechanism to insert the boost material was destroyed by the impact. The kryton switches for the conventional explosives are no longer reliable and must be replaced. We have enough intact explosive blocks to determine their proper configuration, but manufacturing new ones will be very difficult. Unfortunately I cannot depend on simply reverse-engineering the entire weapon. I must duplicate the original design theoretically first, determine what it can and cannot do, then re-invent the processes for fabrication. Do you have any idea what the original cost for that was?”
“No,” Qati admitted, sure that he was about to learn.
“More than what it cost to land people on the moon. The most bri
lliant minds in human history were part of this process: Einstein, Fermi, Bohr, Oppenheimer, Teller, Alvarez, von Neumann, Lawrence—a hundred others! The giants of physics in this century. Giants.”
“You’re telling me you cannot do it?”
Ghosn smiled. “No, Commander, I am telling you that I can. What is the work of genius the first time is the work of a tinsmith soon thereafter. It required genius the first time because it was the first time, and also because technology was so primitive. All the calculations had to be done manually at first, on big mechanical calculators. All the work on the first hydrogen bomb was done on the first primitive computers—Eniac, I think it was called. But today?” Ghosn laughed. It really was absurd. “A videogame has more computing power than Eniac ever did. I can run the calculations on a high-end personal computer in seconds and duplicate what took Einstein months. But the most important thing is that they did not really know if it was possible. It is, and I know that! Next, they made records of how they proceeded. Finally, I have a template, and though I cannot reverse-engineer it entirely, I can use this as a theoretical model.
“You know, given two or three years, I could do it all myself.”
“Do you think we have two or three years?”
Ghosn shook his head. He’d already reported on what he saw in Jerusalem. “No, Commander. We surely do not.”
Qati explained what he had ordered their German friend to do.
“That is good. Where do we move to?”
Berlin was once more the capital of Germany. It had been Bock’s plan that this should be so, of course, but not that it should be this sort of Germany. He’d flown in from Italy—via Greece, and, before that, Syria—and cleared passport control with scarcely a wave. From that point, he’d simply rented a car and driven out of Berlin on highway E-74 north toward Greifswald.
Günther had rented a Mercedes-Benz. He rationalized this by telling himself that his cover was that of a businessman, and besides he hadn’t rented the biggest one available. There were times when he thought he might as well have rented a bicycle. This road had been neglected by the DDR government, and now that the Federal Republic was fully in place, the highway was little more than a linear repair gang. It went without saying that the other side of the road was already fixed. His peripheral vision caught hundreds of big, powerful Benzes and BMWs streaking south toward Berlin as the capitalists from the West blazed about to reconquer economically what had collapsed under political betrayal.
Bock took his exit outside Greifswald, driving east through the town of Kemnitz. The attempts at road repair had not yet reached the secondary roads. After hitting half a dozen pot-holes Günther had to pull over and consult his map. He proceeded three kilometers, then made a series of turns, ending up on what had once been an upscale neighborhood of professionals. In the driveway of the house he sought was a Trabant. The grass was still neatly trimmed, of course, and the house was neatly arranged, down to the even curtains in the windows—this was Germany, after all—but there was an air of disrepair and depression not so much seen as felt. Bock parked his car a block away and walked an indirect route back to the house.
“I am here to see Herr Doktor Fromm,” he told the woman, Frau Fromm, probably, who answered the door.
“Who may I say is calling?” she asked formally. She was in her middle forties, her skin tight over severe cheeks, with too many lines radiating from her dull blue eyes and tight, colorless lips. She examined the man on her front step with interest, and perhaps a little hope. Though Bock had no idea why this should be so, he took the chance to make use of it.
“An old friend.” Bock smiled to reinforce the image. “May I surprise him?”
She wavered for a moment, then her face changed and good manners took hold. “Please come in.”
Bock waited in the sitting room, and he realized that his impression was right—but why it was right struck him hard. The interior of the house reminded him of his own apartment in Berlin. The same specially made furniture that had once looked so good in contrast to what was available for ordinary citizens in the German Democratic Republic did not impress as it once had. Perhaps it was the Mercedes he’d driven up, Bock told himself as he heard footsteps approaching. But no. It was dust. Frau Fromm was not cleaning the house as a good German Hausfrau did. A sure sign that something was badly wrong.
“Yes?” Dr. Manfred Fromm said as a question before his eyes widened in delayed recognition. “Ah, so good to see you!”
“I wondered if you’d remember your old friend Hans,” Bock said with a chuckle, stretching out his hand. “A long time, Manfred.”
“A very long time indeed, Junge! Come to my study.” The two men walked off under the inquisitive eyes of Frau Fromm. Dr. Fromm closed the door behind himself before speaking.
“I am sorry about your wife. It was unspeakable what happened.”
“That is past. How are you doing?”
“You haven’t heard? The Greens have attacked us. We’re about to shut down.”
Doktor Manfred Fromm was, on paper, the deputy assistant director of the Lubmin/Nord Nuclear Power Station. The station had been built twenty years earlier from the Soviet WER Model 230 design, which, primitive as it was, had been adequate with an expert German operations team. Like all Soviet designs of the period, the reactor was a plutonium producer. But unlike Chernobyl it had a containment dome. It was neither terribly efficient nor especially unsafe, but did carry the benefit of producing weapons-grade nuclear material in addition to 816 megawatts of electrical power from its two functioning reactors.
“The Greens,” Bock repeated quietly. “Them.” The Green Party was a natural consequence of the German national spirit, which venerated all growing things on one hand, while trying very hard to kill them on the other. Formed from the extreme—or the consistent—elements of the environmental movement, it had fought against many things equally upsetting to the Communist Bloc. But where it had failed to prevent the deployment of theater nuclear weapons—and after their successful deployment had resulted in the INF Treaty, which had eliminated all such weapons on both sides of the line—it was now successfully raising the purest form of political hell in what had once been the German Democratic Republic. The nightmare of pollution in the East was now the obsession of the Greens, and number one on their hit list was the nuclear-power industry, which they called hideously unsafe. Bock reminded himself that the Greens had never truly been under proper political control. The party would never be a major power in German politics, and now it was being exploited by the same government that it had once annoyed. Whereas once the Greens had shrieked about the pollution of the Ruhr and the Rhein from Krupp, and howled about the deployment of NATO nuclear arms, now they were crusading in the East more fervently than Barbarossa had ever attempted in the Holy Land. Their incessant carping on the mess in the East was ensuring that socialism would not soon return to Germany. It was enough to make both men wonder if the Greens had not been a subtle capitalist ploy from the very beginning.
Fromm and the Bocks had met five years earlier. The Red Army Faction had come up with a plan to sabotage a West German reactor and wanted technical advice on how to do so most efficiently. Though never revealed to the public, their plan had been thwarted only at the last minute. Publicity on the BND’s intelligence success would conversely have threatened Germany’s own nuclear industry.
“Less than a year until they shut us down for good. I only go in to work three days a week now. I’ve been replaced by a ‘technical expert’ from the West. He lets me ‘advise’ him, of course,” Fromm reported.
“There must be more, Manfred,” Bock observed. Fromm had also been the chief engineer in Erich Honecker’s most cherished military project. Though allies within the World Socialist Brotherhood, the Russians and the Germans could never have been true friends. The bad blood between the nations stretched back a thousand years, and while Germany had at least made a go of socialism, the Russians had failed completely. As a result
, the East German military had never been anything like the much larger force in the West. To the last, the Russians had feared Germans, even those on their own side, before incomprehensibly allowing the country to be unified. Erich Honecker had decided that such distrust might have strategic ramifications, and had drawn plans to keep some of the plutonium produced at Greifswald and elsewhere. Manfred Fromm knew as much about nuclear bomb design as any Russian or American, even if he’d never quite been able to put his expertise into play. The plutonium stockpile secretly accumulated over ten years had been turned over to the Russians as a final gesture of Marxist fealty, lest the Federal German government get it. That last honorable act had resulted in angry recriminations—angry enough that one other cache of material had never been turned over. What connections Fromm and his colleagues had once had with the Soviets were completely gone.
“Oh, I have a fine offer.” Fromm lifted a manila envelope on his cluttered desk. “They want me to go to Argentina. My counterparts in the West have been there for years, along with most of the chaps I worked with.”
“What do they offer?”
Fromm snorted. “One million D-Mark per year until the project is completed. No difficulties with taxes, numbered account, all the normal enticements,” Fromm said with an emotionless voice. And that, of course, was quite impossible. Fromm could no more work for fascists than he could breathe water. His grandfather, one of the original Spartacists, had died in one of the first labor camps soon after Hitler’s accession to power. His father had been part of the communist underground and a player in a spy ring, had somehow survived the war despite the systematic hunting of the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst, and been an honored local Party member to the day of his death. Fromm had learned Marxism-Leninism while he’d learned to walk, and the elimination of his profession had not enamored him of the new political system which he’d been educated to despise. He’d lost his job, had never fulfilled his prime ambition, and was now being treated like an office boy by some pink-cheeked engineer’s assistant from Göttingen. Worst of all, his wife wanted him to take the job in Argentina and was making a further hell of his life so long as he refused to consider it. Finally he had to ask his question. “Why are you here, Günther? The entire country is looking for you, and despite that fine disguise, you are in danger here.”