The Omega scroll

BOOK FIVE
2004
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Langley, Virginia

M ike McKinnon scanned the latest intelligence reports on al-Qaeda’s nuclear capability. The first came from one of the CIA’s agents operating out of Kabul in Afghanistan. McKinnon skipped over the background summary. He was already depressingly familiar with the contents, including the discovery of papers that proved Osama bin Laden’s nuclear intentions. After the United States had invaded Afghanistan, a group of journalists had found some chilling documents in a house in Wazir Akbar Khan, one of Kabul’s more fashionable areas. The documents had included diagrams of the compression of plutonium into the critical mass required for a nuclear explosion.

The next section was headed ‘Subject of interest – Dr Hussein Tretyakov’. McKinnon recognised the photograph immediately. He had met Tretyakov at a Nuclear Disarmament Conference in London. Hussein Tretyakov was short, with spiky grey hair and broad shoulders. He had a square rugged face, with a high forehead and expressionless pale blue eyes. The teeth below his thick black moustache, McKinnon recalled, were stained from years of smoking unfiltered cigarettes. Dr Tretyakov had been one of the Soviet Union’s most brilliant nuclear physicists. Had been. Now he was on the Kremlin and the CIA’s ‘most wanted’ list. McKinnon skimmed over the biographical notes. He knew Tretyakov’s background well. Born in Grozny, Chechnya, in 1946. Two doctorates, one on the production of weapons-grade plutonium and the other on controlled nuclear fusion in tactical devices. A career that included stints at the quaintly named Research Institute of Experimental Physics at Chelyabinsk in the Urals, as well as at the plutonium reactor Chelyabinsk-65 at Lake Kyzltask and at Novaya Zemla, the central test site in the north of the Arctic Circle. It had never appeared on his official biography, but McKinnon and the CIA were also well aware that Dr Tretyakov had spent a considerable amount of time in the top-secret warhead production facility near Zlatoust, perfecting nuclear suitcase bombs.

Mike McKinnon stared at the colour photograph and he reflected on what had driven a man of Tretyakov’s ability to the darkest side of his profession. Mike knew that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Dr Tretyakov, along with hundreds of other Soviet scientists, had been thrown out of work. More ominously still, in 1994 Boris Yeltsin had begun to brutally suppress Chechen President Jokhar Dudayev’s claim for Chechnya to become an independent state. Grozny had been bombed on New Year’s Eve, but the Chechen separatist fighters had fought back tenaciously, inflicting heavy losses on the Russian tanks, armoured personnel carriers, self-propelled guns and thousands of troops. In the backlash that followed, Hussein Tretyakov had lost his wife and their three small daughters. They had been a devout and devoted Muslim family, but now that family – as an orphan, the only one Hussein had ever known – was gone. President Dudayev’s threat to place the nuclear suitcase bombs on the market after the United States had ignored Chechnya’s call for independence was supported by Dr Tretyakov. He had nothing else to lose.

Tretyakov’s reckless actions couldn’t be condoned, but unlike some of those in the corridors of power in the Pentagon, for McKinnon it was important to understand the reason for his behaviour. President Vladimir Putin, Mike thought ruefully, had taken up the persecution of the Chechens where his predecessor had left off and Dr Hussein Tretyakov had been pushed into the arms of al-Qaeda. The report was chillingly inconclusive. Dr Tretyakov’s present whereabouts are unknown. The last sighting of him was in Peshawar, in the north-west frontier of Pakistan. There are unconfirmed reports that he has linked up with Abdul Musa Basheer and other al-Qaeda leaders who have been seeking to purchase several of the nuclear suitcase bombs Tretyakov is known to have in his possession.

Mike McKinnon’s face reflected his concern, his jaw set determinedly. Earlier that evening he had read an unclassified report on the Omega Scroll and the Islamic nuclear factor by Professor Yossi Kaufmann. Was this coincidence or connection? he wondered.