Pinnacle Event

46

The SEAL team had dropped out of the sky at night and landed one by one on the Coast Guard cutter Healy. Most had managed to hit the big helipad deck. No one wanted to land in the icy water, and none of them did. Then the Healy set a course for the last known location of the MV Rothera and MV Nunatak, which had rendezvoused and were at anchor together a few hours away. Healy would get there a few hours after dawn and then the SEALs would board them.

At dawn the C-17s came out of the rising sun. They were less than five hundred feet above the ice. Fifty men jumped into each of the five drilling sites on the East Antarctic glaciers. They had been in the aircraft a long time, as they flew through multiple in-flight refuelings. Hitting the ground, they unbuckled their chutes and then began running across the ice toward the round white igloo-like buildings on stilts above the snow. Most of the staff at each base were still waking up when they looked up to see armed American soldiers in their rooms.

The gunfire was limited and brief. At two sites there was no resistance at all. Olympus had few shooters at the sites, hoping to obtain security by maintaining the image of scientific research facilities. No one knew anything about nuclear weapons and some of the research staff joked nervously that maybe the American troops got the wrong continent. The researchers were predominantly Russian, but there were also Americans, Brits, Canadians, Japanese.

The nuclear bomb specialists from Delta began spreading out and at each of the five Purpose Fund research sites quickly located the radioactive signatures. All five weapons were located in drill houses, the little super structures above what were to become drill holes into the ice. Quickly they looked for radio or Internet connections to the cases in which they knew there were nuclear bombs. There were no signs of connectivity to the outside world. The Delta nuclear explosive ordnance disposal teams set up electronics to image inside the containers. They popped up their own satellite dishes and began streaming images and readings back to nuclear bomb specialist teams standing by in Washington. This was going to be like remote surgery carried out by an EMT with a doctor watching on video giving directions from a hospital hundreds of miles away. In this case, it was nuclear physics PhDs who were thousands of miles away at the Department of Energy facilities in Maryland. They had been flown in the day before from three nuclear labs across the country. Handpicked, these scientists had worked for years with the Delta team in exercises and drills. This was the first time it was for real.

Together, they went by the book that, together, they had written. First, look for booby traps, hidden triggers that will set off the bomb or some explosive package protecting it. Even a small explosion designed to protect the package might ignite the weapon by mistake. It would certainly spread radioactive material and, of course, it would kill the Delta nuclear explosive ordnance disposal team.

In each of the five sites, the Delta operators were working with a separate group of advisors back in Maryland. No one was making assumptions that all five devices were identical. A supervisory team in Maryland listened to all five conversations and tried to make sure data from one team was shared with the others, but all five teams went ahead at the same time. No one knew when the bombs were programmed to detonate, if indeed they were, but not knowing meant that there might be no time to waste. For most steps, they would not do one weapon at a time, but proceed in parallel.

While they were in the air flying to Antarctica, the Delta teams had received crude diagrams of what the original South African weapons looked like inside. Mbali had her people extract that information from Roosmeer. She had also asked Danny Avidar for help from Avraham Reuven. From what the teams could see, there were tritium gas bottles in all five weapons. That meant that the blasts would be high yield.

After they determined that the travel case in which each weapon sat appeared to be safe, with no booby traps, the teams opened the outer packaging. This they did in sequence, with Able team calling out that it was complete, before Baker team began. Finally, Easy team had opened its package. Now all five teams were looking at nuclear bombs. They began to try to unscrew the fasteners on the metal casing of the bombs themselves. The screws were hard to turn. Small drills were carefully used to remove the screws.

The external acoustic and electronic sensors had detected some electrical activity inside the bombs. In other words, something was alive and running on battery power. It wasn’t clear what the battery was running. Very carefully, the outer casings were removed on each weapon. The experts in Maryland debated what the next step should be and agreed that the tritium gas bottles should gently be removed. One by one, they were, and the containers taken from the rooms.

In the movies, there was always a clock with numbers visibly running down to zero. But here, there was no clock visible. There were, however, at least two battery packs, of different designs and in locations well separated from each other, in each bomb. The experts wondered whether disconnecting one battery would cause a detonation. They advised the Delta teams to simultaneously pull out both battery packs.

They agreed to do the extractions in sequence, beginning with Able Team. The two operators counted down and on zero, they each both pulled out a battery pack. Nothing happened.

As they were exhaling and about to announce that they had extracted the batteries, they heard the rumble, then felt the ground shake, the ice move. They knew, one of the devices had detonated. There had been a clock.

Outside the Delta operators turned away from the flash to prevent damage to their eyes. Behind them, the column of churning gases shot up, up into the bright blue Antarctic sky. One of them ran into the room to tell the bomb team that they had seen the mushroom cloud to the west, where Easy team was working, about 120 miles away. In the heavens above the Vela package registered a Pinnacle Event and notified operations centers on the Earth below.

The explosion had fried their electronics by sending out a wave of electromagnetic pulses. They were cut off from communicating with the experts in Maryland, and from the other teams. Able Team waited, wondering what the other teams would do, knowing that they should pull the batteries.

At the other sites, Baker, Charlie, and Dog, the bomb technicians had waited after the explosion to determine where it had happened. If it happened at Able team, they knew to not pull the batteries. When they determined that Able team had not detonated, each of the remaining teams extracted the battery packs. Then, without communicating with each other or their rear area experts, each of the remaining four teams extracted the high-energy explosive initiators and removed them from the buildings. They then removed the enriched uranium cores and placed them in protective cases for safe transport out.

At each of the four remaining sites, the Delta nuclear explosive ordnance disposal team members stepped outside into the cold. Some prayed. Some lit cigarettes. Some downed shots of whiskey or vodka. A few just wandered off alone into the ice for a time. They all looked up at the mushroom cloud that was still swirling in the distance. Eventually, they knew, somehow there would be helicopters, helicopters to get them and the Rangers and the Airborne guys, to take them home.

The crew of the Healy saw the mushroom cloud in the distance before they saw the research ships. When they heard another explosion and then another, they at first thought there were more nuclear detonations. It was only when they saw the fires on the horizon that they realized that the second and third blasts were ships blowing up, the ships that they were going to board and seize. As the Healy approached the two burning hulks, the Coast Guardsmen leaped into action to do what they are trained to do, rescue mariners in distress. They were able to save thirty-four. The others, estimated at almost 150 scientists and crew, died in the explosions and subsequent fires and sinkings.

At Easy site, the Rangers, Delta special forces team, and the Purpose Fund researchers were all incinerated before they knew what had happened. The resulting hole in the ice, almost a mile across, went through to the rock core below and after the steam cloud dispatched, a circular waterfall sent melted ice plummeting down into the hole, pooling below the glacier, creating a subterranean lake of hot water spreading out under the ice.