“Tomorrow morning.”
“Very well, General, thank you for your time.”
Golovko shook the man’s hand and remained standing until the door closed. He had ten minutes until his next appointment.
“Damn,” he said to his desk top.
“More delays?”
Fromm did not quite manage to hide his disgust. “We are saving time! The material we will be working on has machining characteristics similar to stainless steel. We must also manufacture blanks for the casting process. Here.”
Fromm unfolded his working drawings.
“We have here a folded cylinder of plutonium. Around the plutonium is a cylinder of beryllium, which is a godsend for our purposes. It is very light, very stiff, an X-ray window, and a neutron reflector. Unfortunately, it is also rather difficult to machine. We must use cubic boron-nitride tools, essentially an analog to industrial diamond. Steel or carbon tools would have results you do not wish to contemplate. We also have health considerations.”
“Beryllium is not toxic,” Ghosn said. “I checked.”
“True, but the dust resulting from the matching process converts to beryllium oxide, which when inspired converts again to beryllium hydroxide, and that causes berylliosis, which is uniformly fatal.” Fromm paused, staring at Ghosn like a schoolmaster before going on.
“Now, around the beryllium is a cylinder of tungsten-rhenium, which we need for its density. We will purchase twelve kilograms in powder form, which we will sinter into cylindrical segments. You know sintering? That is heating it just hot enough to form. Melting and casting is too difficult, and not necessary for our purposes. Around that goes the explosive-lens assembly. And this is just the primary, Ghosn, not even a quarter of our total energy budget.”
“And the precision required ...”
“Exactly. Think of this as the world’s largest ring or necklace. What we produce must be as finely finished as the most beautiful piece of jewelry you have ever seen—or perhaps a precision optical instrument.”
“The tungsten-rhenium?”
“Available from any major electrical concern. It’s used in special filaments for vacuum tubes, numerous other applications, and it’s far easier to work than pure tungsten.”
“Beryllium—oh, yes, it’s used in gyroscopes and other instruments ... thirty kilograms.”
“Twenty-five ... yes, get thirty. You have no idea how lucky we are.”
“How so?”
“The Israeli plutonium is gallium-stabilized. Plutonium has four phase-transformations below melting point, and has the curious habit, in certain temperature regimes, of changing its density by a factor of over twenty percent. It is a multistate metal.”
“In other words, a subcritical mass can—”
“Exactly,” Fromm said. “What appears to be a subcritical mass can under certain circumstances convert itself into criticality. It will not explode, but the gamma- and neutron-flux would be lethal within a radius of ... oh, anywhere from ten to thirty meters, depending on circumstances. That was discovered during the Manhattan Project. They were—no, not lucky. They were brilliant scientists, and as soon as they had a gram or so of plutonium, it was decided to investigate its properties. Had they waited, or simply assumed that they knew more than they did—well ...”
“I had no idea,” Ghosn admitted. Merciful God ...
“Not everything is in books, my young friend, or should I say, not all the books have all the information. In any case, with the addition of gallium, the plutonium is a stable mass. It is actually quite safe to work, as long as we take the proper precautions.”
“So we start by machining out stainless-steel blanks to these specifications, then make our casting-molds-investment casting, of course.”
Fromm nodded. “Correct. Very good, mein Junge.”
“Then when the casting is done, we will machine the bomb material.... I see. Well, we seem to have good machinists.”
They’d “drafted”—that was the term they used—ten men, all Palestinians, from local optical shops, and trained them on the use of the machine tools.
The tools were all that Fromm had said they were. Two years earlier they’d been totally state-of-the-art, identical to the equipment used in the American Y-12 fabrication plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Tolerances were measured by laser interferometry, and the rotating tool heads were computer-controlled in three dimensions through five axes of movement. Instructions were passed to the computers via touch-screens. The design itself had been done on a minicomputer and drawn out on an expensive drafting machine.
Ghosn and Fromm brought the machinists in and set them to work on their first task, making the stainless-steel blank for the plutonium primary that would ignite the thermonuclear fire.
“Now,” Fromm said, “for the explosive lenses....”
“I’ve heard much about you,” Bock said.
“I hope it was good,” Marvin Russell replied with a guarded smile.
My first Indian, Bock thought quickly. He was oddly disappointed. Except for the cheekbones, he might have easily been mistaken for any Caucasian, and even those could seem like a Slav with perhaps a taste of Tatar in his background.... What color there was had come mainly from the sun. The rest of the man was formidable enough, the size and obvious strength.
“I hear you killed a police officer in Greece by snapping his neck.”
“I don’t know why people make a big deal about that,” Russell said with weary honesty. “He was a scrawny little fuck, and I know how to take care of myself.”
Bock smiled and nodded. “I understand how you feel, but your method was impressive in any case. I have heard good things about you, Mr. Russell, and—”
“Just call me Marvin. Everybody else does.”
Bock smiled. “As you wish, Marvin. I am Günther. Particularly your skill with weapons.”
“It’s no big deal,” Russell said, genuinely puzzled. “Anybody can learn to shoot.”
“How do you like it here?”
“I like it a lot. These people—I mean, they have heart, y’know? They ain’t quitters. They work real hard at what they do. I admire that. And what they done for me, Günther, it’s like family, man.”
“We are a family, Marvin. We share everything, good and bad. We all have the same enemies.”
“Yeah, I seen that.”
“We may need your help for something, Marvin. It’s for something fairly important.”
“Okay,” Russell replied simply.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean ‘yes,’ Günther.”
“You haven’t even asked what it is,” the German pointed out.
“Okay.” Marvin smiled. “So tell me.”
“We need you to go back to America in a few months. How dangerous is that for you?”
“Depends. I’ve done time—in prison, I mean. You know that. My fingerprints are on file with the cops, but they don’t have a picture of me—I mean, the one they have is pretty old. I’ve changed since then. They’re looking for me up in the Dakotas, probably. If you send me there, it might be a little tricky.”
“Nowhere near there, Marvin.”
“Then it shouldn’t be much of a problem, dependin’ on what you need me to do.”
“How do you feel about killing people—Americans, I mean.” Bock watched his face for a reaction.
“Americans.” Marvin snorted. “Hey, man, I’m a fuckin’ American, okay? My country ain’t what you think. They stole my country from me, just like what happened to these guys here, okay? It ain’t just here shit like that happened, okay? You want me to do some people for you, yeah, I can do that, if you got a reason. I mean, I don’t kill for fun, I ain’t no psycho, but you got a reason, sure, I can do it.”
“Maybe more than one—”
“I heard you when you said ‘people,’ Günther. I ain’t so stupid that I think ‘people’ means one guy. You just make sure some cops, maybe even some FBI guys are in there, yeah, I’ll
help kill all you want. One thing you need to know, though.”
“What’s that?”
“The other side ain’t dumb. They got my brother, remember. They’re serious dudes.”
“We also are serious,” Bock assured him.
“I seen that, man. What can you tell me about the job?”
“What do you mean, Marvin?” Bock asked as casually as he could.
“I mean I grew up there, man, remember? I know stuff that maybe you don’t. Okay, you got security and all that, and you ain’t gonna tell me anything now. Fine, that’s no problem. But you might need my help later on. These guys here are okay, they’re smart and all, but they don’t know dick about America—I mean, not what you need to get around and stuff. You go huntin’, you gotta know the ground. I know the ground.”
“That is why we want your help,” Bock assured him, as though he’d already thought that part all the way through. Actually he had not, and now he was wondering just how useful this man might be.
Andrey Il’ych Narmonov saw himself as the captain of the world’s largest ship of state. That was the good news. The bad news was that the ship had a leaky bottom, a broken rudder, and uncertain engines. Not to mention a mutinous crew. His office in the Kremlin was large, with room to pace about, something he found himself doing all too much of late. That, he thought, was a sign of an uncertain man, and the President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics could not afford that, especially when he had an important guest.
Union of Sovereign Soviet Republics, he thought. Though the official name-change had not yet been approved, that was how his people were starting to think. That’s the problem.
The ship of state was breaking up. There was no precedent for it. The dissolution of the British Empire was the example that many liked to use, but that wasn’t quite right, was it? Nor was any other example. The Soviet Union of old had been a unique political creation. What was now happening in the Soviet Union was also entirely without precedent. What had once been exhilarating to him was now more than frightening. He was the one who had to make the hard decisions, and he had no historical model to follow. He was completely on his own, as alone as any man had ever been, with a task larger than any man had ever faced. Lauded in the West as a consummate political tactician, he thought of it himself as an endless succession of crises. Wasn’t it Gladstone? he thought. Wasn’t it he who described his job as being the man on a raft in the rapids, fending off rocks with a pole? How apt, how apt indeed. Narmonov and his country were being swept along by overwhelming forces of history, somewhere down that river was an immense cataract, a falls that could destroy everything ... but he was too busy with the pole and the rocks to look so far ahead. That was what being a political tactician meant. He devoted all his creative energy to day-to-day survival, and was losing sight of the next week ... even the day after tomorrow....
“Andrey Il’ych, you are growing thin,” Oleg Kirilovich Kadishev observed from his leather seat.
“The walking is good for my heart,” the President replied wryly.
“Then perhaps you will join our Olympic team?”
Narmonov stopped for a moment. “It would be nice indeed to compete merely against foreigners. They think I am brilliant. Alas, our own people know better.”
“What can I do to help my President?”
“I need your help, the help of those on the right.”
It was Kadishev’s turn to smile. The press—Western as well as Soviet—never got that straight. The left wing in the Soviet Union was that of the communist hard-liners. For over eighty years, reform in that country had always come from the right. All the men executed by Stalin for wanting to allow the merest bit of personal freedom had always been denounced as Right-Deviationists. But self-styled progressives in the West were always on the political left, and they called their reactionary enemies “conservatives” and generally identified them as being on the political right. It seemed too great a stretch of imagination for Western journalists to adjust their ideological polarity to a different political reality. The newly liberated Soviet journalists had merely aped their Western colleagues and used the foreign descriptions to muddle what was already a chaotic political scene. The same was true of “progressive” Western politicians, of course, who were championing so many of the experiments of the Soviet Union in their own countries—all the experiments which had been taken to the limit and proven to be something worse than mere failures. Perhaps the blackest humor available in all the world was the carping from leftist elements in the West, some of whom were already observing that the backward Russians had failed because they had proven unable to convert socialism into a humanistic government—whereas advanced Western governments could accomplish just that (of course, Karl Marx himself had said that, hadn’t he?). Such people were, Kadishev thought with a bemused shake of his head, no less idealistic than the members of the first Revolutionary Soviets, and just as addlebrained. The Russians had merely taken the revolutionary ideals to their logical limits, and found there only emptiness and disaster. Now that they were turning back—a move that called for political and moral courage such as the world had rarely seen—the West still didn’t understand what was happening! Khrushchev was right all along, the parliamentarian thought. Politicians are the same all over the world.
Mostly idiots.
“Andrey Il’ych, we do not always agree on methods, but we have always agreed on goals. I know you are having trouble with our friends on the other side.”
“And with your side,” President Narmonov pointed out more sharply than he should have.
“And with my side, it is true,” Kadishev admitted casually. “Andrey Il’ych, do you say that we must agree with you on everything?”
Narmonov turned, his eyes momentarily angry and wide. “Please, not that, not today.”
“How may we help you?” Losing control of your emotions, Comrade President? A bad sign, my friend....
“I need your support on the ethnic issue. We cannot have the entire Union break apart.”
Kadishev shook his head forcefully. “That is inevitable. Letting the Baits and the Azeris go eliminates many problems.”
“We need the Azerbaijani oil. If we let that go, our economic situation worsens. If we let the Baits go, the momentum will strip away half of our country.”
“Half our population, true, but scarcely twenty percent of our land. And most of our problems,” Kadishev said again.
“And what of the people who leave? We throw them into chaos and civil war. How many will die, how many deaths on our conscience, eh?” the President demanded.
“Which is a normal consequence of decolonization. We cannot prevent it. By attempting to, we merely keep the civil war within our own borders. That forces us to place too much power into the hands of the security forces, and that is too dangerous. I don’t trust the Army any more than you do.”
“The Army will not launch a coup. There are no Bonapartists in the Red Army.”
“You have greater confidence in their fealty than I do. I think they see a unique historical opportunity. The Party has held the military down since the Tukhachevskiy business. Soldiers have long memories, and they may be thinking that this is their chance.”
“Those people are all dead! And their children with them,” Narmonov countered angrily. It had been over fifty years, after all. Those few with direct memory of the purges were in wheelchairs or living on pensions.
“But not their grandchildren, and there is institutional memory to consider as well.” Kadishev leaned back and considered a new thought that had sprung almost fully formed into his head. Might that be possible ... ?
“They have concerns, yes, and those concerns are little different from my own. We differ on how to deal with the problem, not on the issue of control. While I am not sure of their judgment, I am sure of their loyalty.”
“Perhaps you are correct, but I am not so sanguine.”
“With your help we can present a united fron
t to the forces of early dissolution. That will discourage them. That will allow us to get through a few years of normalization, and then we can consider an orderly departure for the republics with a genuine commonwealth—association, whatever you wish to call it—to keep us associated economically while being separate politically.”
The man is desperate, Kadishev saw. He really is collapsing under the strain. The man who moves about the political arena like a Central Army hockey forward is showing signs of fatigue ... will he survive without my help?
Probably, Kadishev judged. Probably. That was too bad, the younger man thought. Kadishev was the de facto leader of the forces on the “left,” the forces that wanted to break up the entire country and the government that went with it, yanking the remaining nation—based on the Russian Federation—into the 21st century by its throat. If Narmonov fell ... if he found himself unable to continue, then who ...
Why, me, of course.
Would the Americans support him?
How could they fail to support Agent SPINNAKER of their own Central Intelligence Agency?
Kadishev had been working for the Americans since his recruitment by Mary Patricia Foley some six years before. He didn’t think of it as treason. He was working for the betterment of his country, and saw himself as succeeding. He’d fed the Americans information on the internal workings of the Soviet government, some of it highly valuable, some material they could as easily have gotten from their own reporters. He knew that they regarded him as their most valuable source of political intelligence in the Soviet Union, especially now that he controlled fully forty percent of the votes in the country’s bumptious new parliament, the Congress of People’s Deputies. Thirty-nine percent, he told himself. One must be honest. Perhaps another eight percent could be his if he made the proper move. There were many shades of political loyalty among the twenty-five hundred members. Genuine democrats, Russian nationalists of both democratic and socialist stripe, radicals of both left and right. There was also a cautious middle of politicians, some genuinely concerned about what course their country might take, others merely seeking to conserve their personal political status. How many could he appeal to? How many could he win over?