Pinnacle Event

19

“You were going to tell me when?” Bowman bellowed in the private breakfast room that Avidar had the hotel set up for them.

“I found out about the heist around the same time you did,” Mbali protested.

“The heist, yes, but how long have you known about Potgeiter’s tunnel at Cullinan and its secret, little research reactor still making fucking tritium”

“I wasn’t authorized to tell you. I asked for permission, but the President said no,” she said.

“Wonderful. Here I am running around, wasting time trying to confirm that there was a secret facility in South Africa where the extra bombs were stored in the nineties and where there was a tritium production facility and you already knew. Better yet, the fucking thing is still running, still making tritium. For who? For what?”

“It’s a secret contract with the Pakistanis,” she admitted. “That’s why I couldn’t tell you.”

“The Pakistanis, oh, joy. No wonder they’re cranking out H-bombs like sausages. They have a reliable supplier of tritium boosters,” Ray was yelling as Danny Avidar walked in. “Well, the poor Pakistanis are not getting their shipment this time, are they? Because some bunch of lunatics heisted it an hour outside of your goddamn capital city. And your people have not a clue where it went.”

“Where what went?” Avidar asked.

“Enough tritium to blow Israel to the moon,” Ray boomed. “Or to blow up the U.S. just before our election, which by the way, is two weeks from today.”

“We are looking everywhere. The tritium can’t get out of the country,” Mbali said. “Keep your voice down. People will hear.”

“He owns the damn hotel. It’s a Mossad proprietary. Everyone here is cleared,” Ray said, more quietly.

“Really?” Mbali asked, looking at Danny Avidar.

“Yes, of course,” Avidar said. “Who has tritium?”

Ray answered, “Whoever the hell has the bombs. Now we know what they were waiting for, the tritium to boost the yield by a factor of ten. Now they don’t have to wait anymore. Now their South African bombs have South African tritium. Boom.”

“I’m going to have to tell the Prime Minister,” Avidar said, moving back toward the door. “He’ll want to seal the borders.”

“Tell him he can’t do that. It won’t do any good and it will tip them off, they may go sooner,” Ray said.

“You tell him,” Avidar replied.

“Good, let’s go.” Ray looked at Mbali. “You, stay here. We’ll sort this out when we get back.”

Two hours into the twenty-sixth, the Boeing Business Jet took off to the northeast, resuming its flight plan to Dubai. It had been on the ground in the Comoros for less than fifteen minutes. Air Traffic Control and Customs had not recorded the arrival, or the departure. As far as the records showed, the BBJ had left South Africa on a nonstop to Dubai.

At the request of the South African government, the aircraft would be searched by Emirati customs officials in Dubai. All aircraft that left South Africa around the time of the tritium heist were being searched, but the BBJ would be cleared because the tritium had been off-loaded in Moroni, where a little money went a long way.

The tritium gas had been “bottled” for Pakistan by the South Africans at their secret “research” reactor. Pakistan had provided the containers, which were specially designed to fit into Islamabad’s missile warheads. They would, however, also fit into the larger cavity in the older South African missile warhead design. All five bottles would easily fit in one large suitcase, but in the villa on the hill above Moroni, they were carefully placed into five separate, appropriately lined, briefcases.

The next day they would be flown again, this time to where they would be mated with the five 1990s-era nuclear missile warheads. The tritium gas would act as steroids for the aging bombs, giving their relatively small amount of highly enriched uranium a destructive yield almost ten times what it would otherwise have been.

Almost three hundred miles north of Madagascar’s capital, an old Dauphin helicopter landed on a cleared space outside of the town. Marcus Stroh emerged from the backseat of the aircraft and stretched. It had been a bumpy ride. He grabbed his backpack from the helicopter and walked toward his waiting hosts from the Madagascar Central Intelligence Service, the CIS. They had a new, four-door, Hilux pickup. Not bad for the local CIS, Marcus thought, as he prepared to make his introductions.

“The boys in Antananarivo said to be sure to give you this package,” Stroh said after the handshakes. “It’s from my boss lady in Cape Town, Mbali Hlanganani. It’s her way of saying thank you for all of your help, from a brother African service.” Wrapped in newspaper and coarse rope, the five hundred 5 euro notes were clearly visible. Stroh had left ten times that in the CIS headquarters in the capital, Antananarivo.

The two local officials drove Stroh up the dirt main street of the town toward the mountain that dominated the horizon. The road quickly became rutted and then more or less disappeared into grasslands. The three-mile journey from the town took almost an hour of circumnavigating creeks and boulders and then, inexplicably, a dirt road appeared near the base of the mountain. In one direction it lead off down the east side of the hill. In the other, it led past several small, abandoned, cinder block buildings and, after a turn, to a gatehouse where they parked the Hilux.

Stroh could see the tunnel entrance ahead, sealed with a poured cement wall and, in the middle, two metal doors. Someone must protect that, Stroh thought, or that metal would be long gone for its scrap value. He also noticed an electrical line running in from the poles along the road.

His hosts, who spoke a version of French with some English thrown in, explained that there had once been thousands of fruit bats inside. Marcus took some comfort in their use of the past tense. The locals were taking in no special protective equipment. They did, however, produce three dim flashlights.

Marcus Stroh opened his large backpack and produced a strap-on headlamp, a camera, and then some sort of electronic device about the size of a large laptop. When he turned the device on, it buzzed and lights flashed, giving rise to nervous laughter in his hosts. Stroh went first into the tunnel, followed by his guides. Inside, it was cool, but dry. It was also lit by neon tubes every ten feet. They provided only a dim illumination, but Stroh thought, the point was that they were still working.

When they emerged twenty minutes later, the South African removed the last of his devices from the backpack, a satellite phone. With it, he beamed photographs and radioactive readings back to Cape Town. Then he called Mbali in Tel Aviv.

“Well, boss, you were spot on. There were five sort of shelve things, purpose built to store something. And each of them lit up the sensor,” Marcus explained. “Nobody around here today, but it looks like they may still be paying some locals to guard the place, otherwise it would have been stripped bare by now. I also spotted something interesting on the way up to the cave. There’s also a truck road, which my hosts either did not know about or didn’t want me to see.”

“And I suppose nobody in the town remembers seeing a bunch of trucks two months ago?” Mbali asked.

“No, of course, not,” Stroh laughed. “But I will see if the guys will ask around again. I’ll also see if we can drive back down the hill on the truck road and find out where it goes, but I’ve only got the chopper for a few more hours and I do not, repeat not, want to spend the night up here.”

“Is where you’re staying in Antananarivo that much better?” Mbali asked from her suite in the Clock.

“As Paris is to Soweto, boss,” Stroh said before he powered down the Satcom.