Hammer of God

CHAPTER 1

Major Jack Hammerson stared at his computer screen with a clinical, military interest. It showed an aerial shot of the small Iraqi city — former city.

Data windows beside the images displayed wind direction, rad-count, and drew colored lines suggesting wind dispersal patterns. Body count and survivor numbers were also displayed — the first number was over 130,000, and the second number, showing the survivors, was expected to be only in the hundreds — a maximum kill rate, Hammerson thought.

Already, the VELA satellites had tasted the composition of the blast and supplied their findings: High-grade fission blast delivered by a single twenty-kiloton nuclear device. The bomb that destroyed the city of Hiroshima was only around fifteen kilotons.

Hammerson leaned forward, fingers steepled. He knew this was a tactical weapon designed purely for asset destruction — people and property — it was a city killer. And it was packaged at ground level. This accounted for the high radioactive fallout, and significant cratering of the landscape.

Hammerson exhaled and opened the eyes-only folder and read from the first page. The suspects ranged from the obvious to the far-fetched. No group of the dozens making a mess of Iraq right now had this sort of technology, or the means to develop it. He rubbed at his chin. But there were a few certainly wealthy enough to buy a weapon like this, and a few sellers with a corrupt enough ideology to supply one.

Due to the chaos in the Middle East, they had various orbiting birds watching most parts of the landscape. Hammerson called up the orbit log of the VELA satellites and selected one that had eyes on Northern Iraq. He then tracked the data feed back a month, looking for any high energy particle traces. Most bombs of that size will shed, giving off minute traces of enriched uranium, plutonium, deuterium, tritium, or dozens of other elements used in thermonuclear explosive devices, all tidily collected under the heading of Highly Radioactive Elements, or HREs.

Leaning forward to stare at the screen, Jack Hammerson started with the fireball, and then moved back in time, by seconds at first, then minutes — there, there it was, the hotspot, the trace within the boundaries of the city. He reversed back more minutes. The hotspot was moving, but so slowly, at approximately four miles per hour — walking speed.

Hammerson sat back and folded his arms. He knew tactical nukes could be packed down to suitcase size, but even the smallest would weigh several hundred pounds. And the smaller you made the device the smaller the detonation. But the blast at Soran was twenty kilotons, and for something with that much punch, it would mean the initiation and storage technology had to be between five hundred and a thousand pounds, at least — way too big for any normal man.

Hammerson ran a hand through his iron-gray crew cut, and then reversed the time back more hours, watching the trace continue its slow march. The weapon had traveled west, across the desert, to its ground zero point. He moved it back days, and still it was there, plodding forward. Whoever or whatever it was, was either in the world’s slowest vehicle, or it was on foot, carrying an impossibly heavy nuke.

Hammerson drew the dates back further, and saw that the trace signature was still on a direct path from the east, until it finally stopped. Its genesis point was one of the worst places on earth — Mosul — the viper’s nest of terrorism, and one of the declared state capitals for Hezar-Jihadi, the Party of a Thousand Martyrs.

He lifted his coffee mug, sipping, staring at the screen. “Could you assholes really get access to that sort of weapons tech?”

Hammerson went back another day, then another week, then a month. The trace was gone, vanished. It didn’t exist one day, and then the next, it just shows up in Mosul.

“Well now, who dropped that gift into your laps?”

Hammerson was in luck; the satellite had been directly over Mosul, making drill-down possible. He selected and amplified, diving down to the city blocks and then to the roofs, until he came to a single dwelling — a large flat structure that could be a small warehouse or factory.

“Love to get a look in there.” Hammerson read the Case Activity Section of the classified report — the situation was currently under the jurisdiction of the CIA, who was coordinating with the local Iraqi police and armed forces.

So, a nuke goes off in the Middle East and we let the suits and sunglasses go front and center, he thought. Might as well close the file now. He grunted, drumming his fingers. He knew he couldn’t push his nose into everything, but something about this incident made the hair on his neck prickle. He had the feeling it was like a test run — a prelude to something bigger.

Hammerson turned in his seat to look out of his large office window. He doubted the Israelis would be treating a thermonuclear explosion in their backyard with as much indifference.