37

In that Minnesota loft, Kady Jones felt like an explorer finally about to cast eyes on a mysterious animal species, often written about but never seen. To a scientist from Los Alamos, the suitcase nuke was as potent a myth as Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster, and just as irresistible a lure.

She climbed up the ladder in her inflatable plastic suit, looking like the mutant spawn of a human being and a bouncy castle, buzzing with anticipation and nervous tension. Despite her confident words to Tom Mulvagh, she was only too aware of all the things that could go wrong. If the device was genuine, it could be booby-trapped. Even if it wasn’t, an accidental detonation was not totally out of the question. The likelihood was infinitesimal, but it existed nonetheless, so the protocol was clear: Look but don’t touch. And stay as far away from the device as possible.

Her head poked through the hatch. The loft was illuminated by a single, bare bulb, whose harsh light revealed the case, lying by the far end wall, wide open, daring her to come and take a closer look. She clambered up onto the floor, dragging an air hose behind her. Then she leaned back down to grab a video camera, passed to her by one of the team. A tripod followed, and a bright orange metal box, with a black handle extending two thirds of its length. A cable ran from the box back down through the hatch.

She set up the video camera on the tripod, switched it on, and focused on the case. “Are you getting that?” she asked, speaking into the microphone mounted in the headpiece of her suit.

Her deputy, Henry Wong, was sitting in one of the vans outside, facing a rack of electronic equipment, dials, and screens.

“Yeah, and it sure looks real to me.”

“Only one way to find out,” said Kady.

Leaving the camera, she picked up the orange box. At one end of it were a numeric keypad and a small backlit screen. The box was a handheld gamma-ray spectrometer, an instrument designed to measure and analyze the radiation emitted by whatever objects it was investigating.

The various nuclear materials that can be used in bombs all decay at specific rates, giving off particular quantities of gamma rays. Some of them, like plutonium, emit enough radiation to be detectable over a considerable distance. Others, however, register only at very short range. Standing by the camera, Kady wasn’t getting a reading on her spectrometer. That immediately ruled out most of the possible suspects, but not all. That case could contain a dummy weapon, yet another false alarm. Or it could be armed with weapons-grade uranium. Kady had no choice. If she wanted to find out the truth, she was going to have to get up close and personal.

She crept across the floor toward the case, hardly daring to breathe, starting at every creaking board. As a little girl she had loved playing Grandmother’s Footsteps, sneaking up on her dad when his back was turned, her heart thumping as she dared herself to take just one more step before he sprang around and caught her. Now there was a bomb where her father had been, and one wrong move could make it spring into action, too. She was perspiring inside her plastic bubble, unable to wipe away the drop of sweat that was trickling down her forehead.

She could feel her pulse racing, her breath coming in short, shallow gasps. The spectrometer was quivering in her hand. The way she was now, she might easily trip on a loose floorboard, or drop her gear. If she knocked into the case, and it was booby-trapped… She didn’t finish the thought. She knew she had to calm down. She stood still, her eyes half shut, arms down by her side, trying to regulate her breathing and slow her heartbeat. Gradually the frenzied drumming of blood in her ears slowed to a more regular rhythm.

When she got near the case, she spoke to Henry Wong once again.

“Okay, here we go.”

“Be careful, Kady.”

“You think?”

She stepped right up to the open case, which was maybe thirty inches long, rectangular, with reinforced corners. The contents were nestled within a thick polystyrene base. The main unit was a metal pipe, which ran for most of the length of the case. One end was thicker than the other, as if ringed by an additional reinforcing band of metal. A wire extended from the other end, and ran to a black control unit, with a series of switches, a keypad, and a digital timer. There were no numbers showing on the timer, no dramatic countdown, just a bunch of controls with Russian markings. A single, small red bulb glowed, to indicate that the unit was receiving power from its electric cable.

Kady pointed the spectrometer at the unit. A series of digits and letters appeared on its display, and, via the cable, on a screen in front of Henry Wong. There was a low, awestruck whistle in her ear.

“Weapons-grade uranium-two thirty-five. You just found a genuine suitcase nuke, Kady. Man, that is cool.”

She smiled, the tension momentarily broken. “That’s not the word I’d have chosen. It looks to me like Alexander Lebed was telling the truth. The Soviets really did cache portable nukes all over the Western world. But if this is one of them, where are the rest?”

“Not our problem,” said Wong. “And nothing we can do till this one’s deactivated. Why don’t you get on down here, we can recheck those readings?”

“Sure. But not till I get a close-up of this thing on video. We need to have a record of exactly what we’re dealing with.”

She made her way back to the camera, still taking care over every step, but feeling a fraction more secure now, having faced the weapon once and survived. Now that she knew what she was dealing with, she felt as if she were more in control of the process. As she unscrewed the video from its tripod and carried it back toward the case, she told herself she’d worked on far more powerful warheads, both Russian and American, and never come to any harm. Why should this be any different?

She didn’t notice the loose nail protruding from the floor till the boots of her suit snagged against it. Her hands were gripping the camera, so she had no way of using her arms to regain her balance or break her fall as she tripped.

“Kady!” shouted Wong, as she fell on top of the case, becoming hopelessly entangled in her air tube as the light on the control unit began flashing and the bomb emitted a rapid series of high-pitched beeps.

Like a warning.

A booby trap activated.

The tension she had felt since she clambered up into the loft was blown away in an instant by a nauseating, heart-pounding, flop-sweating rush of pure terror. The fear seemed to blur her vision her as she thrashed her limbs, frantically trying to scramble away, as though that would do any good.

In her ears she could hear Wong’s voice, “Oh, shit…”

The beeping stopped.

There were no more words in her headphones.

She lay stock-still, unmoving, unable to breathe in the absolute silence of the loft.

From somewhere inside the case there came the noise of a feeble detonation, no louder or more powerful than a Christmas cracker. Then silence once again.

Kady scrambled back onto the floor, trying to get her breath back. Then she noticed the electric plug, sitting at the end of the cable that led from the case. It had been jerked from its socket by the impact of her fall. The flashing and beeping were simply a warning to the bomb’s users that its power had been cut. There was no booby trap.

But there were Soviet suitcase nukes loose in the world. And neither Kady nor anyone else in America had any idea where they were.

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