Havoc

Novorossiysk, Russia

Originally founded as a colony of the Italian city-state Genoa in the thirteenth century, Novorossiysk was later an Ottoman fortress town, until its capture by Russia in 1808. Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, when many Black Sea ports were handed over to Ukraine and Georgia, Novorossiysk had become Russia’s largest warm-water export center, with visits by more than a thousand tankers, container ships, and freighters each year. Half of Russia’s grain exports left through Novorossiysk and one third of her oil. Surrounded on three sides by the Caucasus Mountains, the city of a quarter million sat nestled on the northern part of a deep-water bay that bore its name.

Ships weighing more than two thousand tons were required to report to the harbor master several days before entering the port, and a pilot was compulsory. With tankers of up to three hundred thousand dwt regularly visiting the oil terminal on the eastern side of the city, ocean-borne traffic was tightly monitored. This was why the eighty-foot commercial fisherman easing into the inner harbor just after dawn went unmolested by the maritime authorities. Only a few gulls paid it any attention at all, wheeling and diving above her stern deck, drawn to the smell of fish oil and scale but unable to find a meal.

The three men aboard the stolen fishing boat had trained on it for only as long as it took to get the vessel from Albania, through the Bosporus, and across the Black Sea, where the professional hijackers had taken their money and returned to their native country. The oldest of the three was a twenty-three-year-old Saudi, and while he headed the mission, a Syrian teen named Hasan was more adept at the controls.

They would have been incapable of taking the ship back out the Bosporus and around Turkey to the port of Ceyhan, as Al-Salibi had told Grigori Popov to convince him to help secure the plutonium. As it was they had a hard enough time covering the thirty miles across the sheltered bay of Novorossiysk.

Hasan’s thin, almost feminine, hands looked too delicate on the rough wheel, and he peered out on the world from behind long, curling lashes. His two comrades stood behind him in the cramped wheelhouse. One clutched a small Koran while the other’s fingers danced with the set of worry beads he’d been given by the leader of the madrassa religious school in Pakistan where he’d been recruited for this mission.

They’d been told that their martyrdom today would guarantee their place in heaven, where a har’em of virgins awaited them. Hasan had been especially teased about that because of his girlish good looks. They were also told they were striking such a blow against the crusaders that their names would be remembered forever and all the Muslim world would unite in a brotherhood of jihad against America.

Hasan had never met an American but he’d been taught to hate them with a consuming passion he could barely understand. His teachers and friends and the imams at the mosques all said that America wanted to destroy Islam, that they had caused the tsunami in Indonesia that killed hundreds of thousands of his brothers and sisters, that they had tried to spread diseases in Muslim countries in Africa, that they themselves had destroyed the World Trade Center as an excuse to attack the Arab world.

He was a bright boy, had done well in school, and yet he never questioned anything he’d been told about the United States, because none of his friends did and he didn’t want to be ridiculed. In fact they would often boast among themselves, creating ever grander lies in an attempt to show off how much they hated America. Most of what they said was puerile and ribald — Americans have sex with animals or they eat their own excrement — but it served to fuel their ardor until Hasan volunteered to help put a stop to America’s offenses against God. In a sense, he had been peer-pressured into blowing himself up.

As they sailed deeper into the harbor, they could see the massive oil tankers at their moorings. Some were more than a thousand feet long, more resembling steel islands than vessels meant to cross the oceans. Next to them was a container port with a spidery gantry crane for unloading the ships. In the yard behind it, the brightly colored boxes resembled a child’s set of building blocks stacked in neat ranks. Even at this early hour workers were loading containers onto the vessel from flatbed trucks that were lined along the quay.

Their orders had been specific. They were to bring the fishing boat as close as they could to the tanker terminal before detonating the five hundred tons of fuel oil and fertilizer crammed in her holds. The special barrels brought to them the night before by the one-eyed man were sitting on the deck.

Hasan tried to clear his mind as they approached the tanker facility’s outer buoy. When that failed he tried to picture paradise, but all he kept seeing was the tears on his little sister’s face when he left Damascus to join the Pakistani madrassa where he’d been recruited by the great Saudi caliph, Mohammad bin Al-Salidi. He recalled his father staring at him stonily, not understanding why his son would rather die than take over the family hardware store. His mother had wailed inconsolably that morning and locked herself in her bedroom.

The cell’s leader, the acne-scarred Saudi named Abdullah, spotted the trouble first and hit Hasan’s shoulder. A sleek harbor patrol craft had rounded the tall bow of a tanker awaiting its turn to be filled with crude piped to the facility from Kazakhstan.

So wrapped in his own memories and feeling the weight of dread in his stomach, Hasan was startled as soon as he saw the patrol boat. Its lights weren’t on and they had yet to cross the boundary reserved for the supertankers, but he panicked nevertheless. He rammed the throttles to their stops and spun the wheel to its starboard lock so fast the spindles blurred.

While the hull and upper works of the fishing boat were weather-worn and used, she had a new Volvo marine diesel in her engine room. Black exhaust jetted from the twin stacks as the engine responded to Hasan’s inexperienced command.

The boat heeled over as it accelerated, the angle increasing as Hasan kept the rudder buried. In moments her port rail was awash. The netting hanging from her stern derrick was caught by a swell and wrenched off the vessel.

“Hasan! The barrels!”

The two barrels sitting on the foredeck had fallen over and were rolling toward the rail.

Behind them the harbor patrol had noted the fishing boat’s erratic behavior. The security forces at the new facility were well trained and responded immediately. Red and blue lights mounted on a horizontal bar above the open cockpit snapped on. The siren started to scream as the swift vessel began chasing after the fishing boat.

Hasan saw that they were about to lose the precious barrels, though he didn’t know what made them so important. He spun the wheel to the opposite lock without easing back on the throttles. The big fishing boat leaned over to starboard, stopping the barrels’ headlong plunge. But then they started rolling the other way. For a giddy moment it reminded Hasan of a handheld plastic game he had as a boy where you had to maneuver tiny metal balls into little cups and keep them from falling from their slots until you had them all in.

Only this game he lost. He was too slow reacting to the barrels’ inexorable slide. The first five-hundred-pound drum smashed into the salt-weakened railing. The metal sagged, but held. Then the second barrel caromed into the first. The rail tore away and both steel casks rolled over the side and vanished under the black waters of the bay.

Hasan looked to Abdullah, his beautiful face a mask of confusion and shame. “What do we do?” he cried.

The patrol boat was a half mile away and closing fast. There were three uniformed men aboard, one cradling a shotgun. While another steered the speedboat, the third was shouting into a walkie-talkie.

Abdullah cursed. This wasn’t how he envisioned meeting Allah, running from a little Russian boat. “Turn us back,” he snarled.

Hasan spun the wheel once more, cutting across their own wake and driving the boat closer to the tanker terminal.

When the patrol boat was fifty yards from the fishing boat, one of the sailors called across with a megaphone, and when his hails were ignored the man with the shotgun fired a blast across the bigger boat’s bows.

“They’re shooting at us,” Hasan screamed. “We must stop. We are not close enough. We can surrender.”

“No.” Abdullah held the detonator that would blow a small charge of plastic explosives set amid the barrels of ammonia nitrate and fuel oil.

The fishing boat was still a mile from the nearest tanker when it erupted. The explosion blew a hole in the sea a half mile wide and eighty feet deep. The fisherman and the patrol craft were atomized instantly while the shock wave that raced from the epicenter at supersonic speeds blew out every pane of glass in the harbor. Flimsier structures along the quay were blown flat. The container crane withstood the blast but the containers behind it were strewn in haphazard heaps, many of them broken open, their contents littering the ground.

The explosion sent a tidal wave rearing up in all directions. Part of it went harmlessly out into the open sea, while massive walls of water pounded the port facility. Because the tanker was waiting to be loaded, she carried no ballast and rode high in the water. The wave smashed into its thousand-foot flank, rolling the ponderous vessel on its side. The titanic forces acting on it split the hull at the keel and she started to sink. The sub-sea pipelines that fed the floating terminal structure were sheared off and crude began to erupt through the surface of the bay in great reeking clots.

The fireball rising in the middle of the harbor seemed to rival the sun climbing over the Caucasus. It topped out at four thousand feet, a roiling column of fire and smoke that resembled a nuclear detonation. As the explosive force dissipated, the ocean surged back into the void the blast had gouged in the water. The torrent created by the backflow ripped floating docks from their moorings, swamping pleasure craft and small fishing smacks in the process. A bulk carrier leaving the port was dragged back a hundred yards by the surge and slammed into another big freighter entering the harbor. Both vessels were holed and started taking on water.

The echoing roar of the explosion faded, leaving in its wake the angry shriek of thousands of car alarms.

And under the surface of the churned waters of the bay two containers that had fallen from the deck of the fishing boat lay silent, their tough metal hides dented, as they’d been tossed like leaves in a maelstrom, but they had not been breached. They had come to rest close enough for the plutonium in one container to begin calling to the material in the other like a separated lover. It would take time, but the increasing exchange of charged particles would go critical and their bond would be consummated in a blast more deadly than the one that had just destroyed the harbor.

“What happened?” Mercer asked as Devrin and Ahmad continued to speak in rapid-fire Turkish.

“An explosion in Novorossiysk.”

“That’s the oil port you just mentioned,” Cali said.

“How bad?”

“Reports are just coming in now. They say the harbor was leveled. There are ships on fire and many buildings too. The media estimates the death toll in the thousands. Some eyewitnesses claim it was a small nuclear blast.”

“Poli couldn’t have refined the plutonium to make a bomb that quickly. If anything it’s a dirty bomb.”

“Which is just as bad,” Cali remarked. “And spreading plutonium dust over the sea will make cleanup virtually impossible. It will be decades before the area could be rendered safe, if it’s possible at all.”

“We have to tell the authorities about the plutonium,” Mercer said, thinking through the logical steps the Russians would be taking. The harbor would be jammed with rescue personnel, firefighters, and medical teams. They’d be running into an invisible cloud of highly charged plutonium atoms. Inhaling just a tiny amount of the radioactive dust would cause cancers of unspeakable intensity. “They have to evacuate the city as soon as possible.”

Ahmad said something to Devrin and the college student handed Mercer his satellite phone. “I do not know who to talk with to get the Russians to evacuate a city,” Ahmad added.

Mercer checked the phone, waiting a second for it to make a link with an orbiting satellite. He dialed Ira Lasko’s direct office number. Ira’s secretary answered.

“Carol, it’s Philip Mercer. I need to speak with Ira right away.”

“I’m sorry, he’s in a meeting with the President and the national security team. I assume you’ve heard what happened in Russia. Can I take a message?”

“I have some critical information about the explosion. You’ve got to get Ira for me.”

“They should be done in an hour or so. I can have him call you.”

“I’m on a satellite phone and I may lose the connection any second,” he said, keeping a tight rein on his exasperation. “I know you’re used to dealing with crises but unless you get him for me, thousands of people are going to die a horrible death.”

A few seconds passed, the phone buzzing in Mercer’s ear. “Give me a minute to transfer you to the situation room.”

She transferred Mercer to a Marine colonel stationed outside the situation room buried deep under the White House. Mercer had only to say the words “dirty bomb” for the colonel to step into the inner sanctum and bring Ira Lasko to the phone.

“What’s this, Mercer?” he asked gruffly.

“We’re too late. I stopped Feines from getting the bulk of the plutonium but he managed to make off with two barrels; I estimate about a thousand pounds’ worth of the ore. I believe it was in Novorossiysk.”

“Any proof?”

“Not a shred, but Feines steals two barrels of plutonium and twenty-four hours later a city within driving distance gets leveled. I don’t believe in coincidences.”

“We’ve already been in touch with the Russkies. My buddy Greg Popov is apoplectic that extremists would pull something like this but he says they’ve already swept the harbor with Geiger counters and gamma ray detectors. The site’s clean.”

That wasn’t what Mercer had expected. “It has to be there. Maybe the drums didn’t rupture or maybe their equipment’s bad but I know it was there.” He thought for a second. “How did they do it? The explosion I mean.”

“Greg tells me it was a fishing boat loaded with explosives, amfo most likely. Ammonium nitrate and fuel oil. They were approaching the tanker side of the harbor when they were spotted by harbor patrol. Last transmission from the patrol guys said the boat was turning away and throwing away contraband. A minute later it went up and leveled about two square miles.”

“Ira, the contraband was the barrels. I bet they rolled off the deck when they turned the boat. Go over Popov’s head if you have to.”

“I almost had to when I talked to him about the plutonium in the first place. I told you he’s a cagey operator.”

Something in the way he said it gave Mercer an idea. What was it Ahmad had suggested earlier, “Be more cynical than you usually are.” That cynicism had been born of grief but Mercer could use it. He spoke even as the idea coalesced in his mind. “The explosion happened this morning, right? It takes hours to begin any kind of relief operation and your guy Popov says they’ve already scanned for nuclear materials so fast. Is that standard operating procedure?”

“I really don’t know,” Ira replied warily. “What are you getting at?”

“You told me that the Russians didn’t even know they still had this plutonium until you called them on it. Then two days later Feines shows up just before we arrive. He’s got RPGs capable of bringing down a chopper and enough firepower to hold off an army. What if Popov tipped him?”

“And let Feines nuke one of Russia’s most important ports? The guy’s cagey, not insane.”

“Ira, I have it on good authority that a faction inside Saudi Arabia’s behind the whole thing in a bid to prevent Caspian oil from cutting into their bottom line. What if Popov was told they were going to hit the other big oil terminal in Turkey? He wouldn’t have cared less. It would actually help Russia by eliminating competition.”

“Only he was double-crossed?”

“I just remembered he was supposed to be coming to the mine today. What was he doing in Novorossiysk anyway?”

“He did mention he’d been there since yesterday.”

“Hold on a second.” Mercer strode across the camp to where Sasha Federov was chatting with the pilot. “Sasha, can you think of any reason Grigori Popov could have gone to Novorossiysk last night?”

The soldier looked confused by the question. “Novo? I don’t know why he would be there. He was supposed to land in Samara last night so he could follow the train. Which is late, by the way.”

Mercer thanked him and spoke to Ira once again. “Popov should have been in Samara, not on the Black Sea. Ask yourself, do you think he’s capable of helping Feines if he thought the plutonium would be used outside Russia?” Ira didn’t answer for a long moment, which told Mercer everything he needed to know. “Go over his head, Ira. He’s stalling so he can recover the drums, get them back up here, and sweep this whole thing under the rug.”

“I hate to say it, but it’s possible.”

“Remember Ibriham Ahmad, the Turkish professor I’ve been trying to reach. He’s here with me right now. Turns out he also heads the Janissaries, but the important thing is that we stop fundamentalists from taking credit for the blast and inspiring others in the region from taking up the fight. This shit feeds on itself. If we stop it now, it’s going to save us a whole lot of problems in the future.”

“What do you think we should do?”

“You have to convince the Russians not to disclose this was a terrorist act. Have them report it as an industrial accident, gas buildup in a tanker’s hull or something.” Ahmad mouthed something to Mercer. He clamped his hand over the phone and asked him to repeat himself.

“Some extremist group will claim the attack on the Internet. The authorities must be ready to discredit any such statement.”

“Good idea.”

Ahmad bobbed his head in acknowledgment. “I do this for a living.”

“Ira, you’ve also got to monitor Web sites and shut down anything having to do with terrorists taking credit for the blast.”

“What else?” Lasko asked, sounding like he was writing notes to himself.

“I don’t know. You’re the spinmeister not me. Hey, any word from Booker?”

“Nothing yet. Give me a phone number and I’ll call as soon as I have anything on either Book or the Russkies. And Mercer, don’t beat yourself up about this. You’ve done a hell of a job.”

Ira clicked off. Mercer’s friend’s last words were meant to cheer him. If anything, they made him feel worse.

Mercer handed the satellite phone to Federov. “Contact your superiors. The train’s not coming. They need to send another chopper because I think Grigori Popov has betrayed us.”

“What?”

“I think he tipped off Poli about the cache of plutonium here. At first I thought there might have been a security leak on my side, but it makes more sense that Popov betrayed my boss and his own country. What do you know about him?”

“Not much,” Sasha admitted. “He is a deputy minister, a former admiral. I have heard he favors Western sports cars and is how you say, a maverick, a cowboy. I would not be surprised if he’s had dealings with criminal elements because in Russia these days that is the only way to gain power.”

“Do you think he would sell black market nuclear material?”

Sasha’s eyes turned sad as he considered such a betrayal. “I do not know. In this world anything is possible.”

Ludmilla and her colleague trudged up the switchback road from the railhead. While she seemed as fresh and imperturbable as ever, the male scientist looked on the verge of a massive coronary. She spoke to Sasha for five minutes, answering a few questions before heading off to eat.

“What did she say?” Mercer asked. Cali joined them while Ibriham Ahmad and Devrin Egemen consulted privately.

“It appears none of the containers split open.”

“Thank Christ.”

“They were loaded into two of the boxcars. The rest were empty. She says there were sixty-eight barrels, bringing the total to seventy accounting for the two Feines stole. So far there is little heat buildup but she says we must get the barrels isolated from each other soon to prevent the plutonium from obtaining critical mass and exploding.”

“She’s right,” Mercer said, “but there’s not much the group of us can do for now.” He paused. “Maybe there is. Is there any kind of record of what was in the depot?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

Mercer looked to Cali. She spoke first. “I guess we’re going to play grocery clerk and take inventory.”

The rubberized contamination suit smelled of stale sweat and halitosis and what he was pretty sure was urine, a nauseating combination that churned the tinned borscht lying in Mercer’s stomach.

“How you doing?” he asked Cali as she sealed the hood over her head.

“Ugh. Smells like a locker room of a girls’ volleyball team.”

“I’ve got bad breath and pee in mine. Want to switch?”

“Pass.”

They were standing outside the entrance of the old mine with Ahmad, Devrin, and Ludmilla. The Russian scientist checked over their suits, using a roll of duct tape to seal their gloves and boots. She ran her hands over the suits to make sure there were no rips or tears from when she had examined the train wreckage. Mercer wasn’t sure whose backside she lingered over more, his or Cali’s, but the examination in that region had been more than thorough.

“Perhaps you should leave this for the Russians,” Professor Ahmad suggested for the second or third time. “Devrin and I plan to leave here before the helicopter that Captain Federov requested arrives. We can take you and Cali with us to the airport in Samara.”

“I told you, Ibriham.” Mercer had to raise his voice to be heard outside the yellow suit. “The man partially responsible for the theft will want to hide his culpability. He’s in Novorossiysk right now looking for those two missing barrels. When he finds them he’s going to return them to the train wreck and act like nothing happened.”

“It will be your word against his.”

“Trust me this won’t be going to any court of law.” Mercer checked his flashlight and the spare in the bag slung over his shoulder. He had no intention of being in the mine long enough to drain even one, but he’d spent half his lifetime underground and knew you could never be too prepared. “Ms. Stowe,” he said with a gallant sweep of his arms toward the small forklift Poli had brought and abandoned. “Our chariot awaits.”

They climbed onto the little machine, each sharing part of the single seat, their hips pressed tight though there was no feeling through the thick rubber. Mercer keyed the electric motor, which hummed to life. A foot pedal controlled the motor speed and a small wheel directed the agile rear wheels. He noted that there was plenty of juice left in the batteries when he flicked on the lights.

Mercer tossed the Turks and Ludmilla a wave over his shoulder and guided the forklift into the mine. As soon as they’d traveled just a dozen yards down the dark tunnel, he felt the temperature begin to drop, as if the stone was leaching the heat from his body. The shaft was at least forty feet wide and fifteen tall, much bigger than Mercer had expected, so the lift’s puny lights cast a feeble ring along the ceiling, walls, and floor that retreated just a few yards ahead of them as they drove downward. The triple set of tracks for hauling ore and waste rock from the mine were dulled from exposure and the mine’s constant dank humidity.

The main shaft shot arrow straight into the earth for nearly a mile before they came to their first cross tunnel. Mercer cut the power to the lift to conserve its batteries and jumped to the ground. Cali followed him as he entered the secondary tunnel. She carried a gamma detector and watched its readings intently.

After fifty yards they came to a chamber where the miners had employed what was called room-and-pillar mining. In essence they had excavated a broad cavern, but left thick columns of rock undisturbed to support the weight of the mountain above.

Mercer played his flashlight around some of the columns and whistled when something reflected the beam back at him. He felt like he’d stepped into a military museum. He recognized the sharklike snout of an ME-262, the extraordinary jet fighter the Germans introduced in the latter stages of the war. The aircraft’s wings had been removed and leaned against a pillar next to the deadly plane. A little farther on he came to another and another. Then he saw planes he didn’t recognize. They were advanced even for today. They were small and sleek one-man attack aircraft that looked capable of incredible speeds.

He said, “These must have been prototypes of planes the Nazis ran out of time developing.”

“Good thing too. Our prop jobs wouldn’t have stood a chance.”

“Anything on the gamma reader?”

“Background’s a tad high but nothing like what we found on the Wetherby.”

They spent another fifteen minutes exploring the cavity just to be sure. There were at least fifteen aircraft stored here, all in remarkable condition. They also found early rockets. Some were mounted on trailers to be launched as the world’s first surface-to-air missiles. Others were small enough to be carried aloft for direct aerial combat. All of them were far more advanced than anything the allies had at the time.

“Clever, weren’t they,” Mercer said, examining a multiple rocket pod intended to fire a deadly swarm of small unguided missiles.

“Just think what the world would be like if they’d turned their genius to helping humanity rather than destroying it.”

Satisfied that the plutonium had been stored deeper in the mine, they retreated back to the forklift and continued their descent down the gently sloping floor. The next cross tunnel revealed another chamber of captured German arms. On benches were man-portable weapons — machine-guns of a type Mercer didn’t know, a bazooka-like weapon that unspooled thin wires for guidance, a table littered with rifles with curved barrels, for shooting around corners presumably. Dominating the entrance to the chamber was the biggest battle tank Mercer had ever seen. It had to be three times the size of a modern M-1 Abrams. The tracks were three feet wide and instead of a single cannon mounted in the boxy turret, this behemoth sported two side by side.

“It’s a Maus,” Mercer said, awed. “My grandfather was a military modeler. He built one from scratch using a couple of old pictures. Hitler ordered the prototypes when someone suggested their tanks were vulnerable to attack from railroad guns. Never entered his mind the Allies didn’t have any railroad guns, of course. I didn’t know any of these survived the war.”

Cali looked at him askance. “Ever thought of going on Jeopardy?”

“Hey, don’t blame me. A photographic memory is both a blessing and a curse. Want me to tell you the tank’s specifications?” He tapped his helmet. “They’re in here too.”

“Another time, maybe. I got something.”

“Where?”

“That way.” She pointed deeper into the chamber.

Despite the mine’s chill Mercer was sweating in his suit, adding his own unwashed body to the stench permeating the rubber. Guided by the readings on the gamma ray detector they carefully made their way into a subchamber of the main excavation.

“Look.” Mercer shot a finger toward the stone floor. They could make out tracks cut through the dust by the forklift’s solid rubber tires.

“Great job of tracking there, Cochise,” Cali teased. “We could have just followed the trail.”

Mercer shrugged. As he stepped forward he felt something snag his ankle and for a microsecond he wished he could take back that fateful stride. He should have known Poli would have left behind a surprise. He threw himself onto Cali, knocking them both to the ground, his body shielding hers as best he could.

The booby trap was a simple trip wire attached to a couple of grenades with their pins already partially pulled. The wire ran around the room, where the grenades were hidden behind a massive timber balk supporting the entrance back to the main tunnel.

The suit prevented Mercer from hearing the pins pull free and the spoons flip up to activate the grenades, but he knew it was happening. “Open your mouth,” he shouted in the seconds before the bombs went off.

The trio of grenades exploded almost simultaneously. Confined by the surrounding stone, the overpressure wave shot across the room and slammed into Mercer and Cali, causing their suits to squeeze in on them painfully. Had Cali not heeded Mercer’s timely warning her eardrums would have ruptured.

He rolled off her as soon as the wave of compressed air had rolled over them. The cavern was filled with so much dust his light could not penetrate more than a couple of feet. He got to his knees, then shakily to his feet. He was dazed by the explosion, his head ringing and his balance shot by the brutal assault on his inner ears. He glanced down at Cali and ignored all the priorities of mine rescue he’d ever learned or taught.

Hobbling because he’d smashed his bad knee again, he approached the exit to the main shaft. He played his light over the portal. The grenades had blown the timber support from where it had stood for a half century, and the wooden lintel, as thick as a railroad tie, had fallen too. The stone above the opening had been fractured by the blast, and with nothing to support it, cracks appeared and widened as he watched. A chunk the size of an anvil crashed to the ground. Mercer took one last look to where he knew Cali lay stunned, perhaps injured or worse, and raced through to the main shaft, abandoning her behind an avalanche of rubble that buried her alive.