Phoenix Sub Zero

Donchez had asked for the briefing in his own SCIF, but the NSA had insisted that they brief him here. The NSA had won the early joint-operations turf battles for control of interception and decoding of foreign communications, competing successfully with the Combined Intelligence Agency’s crypto division. The Dole Act’s reorganization of the CIA, the DIA, and NSA had left the NSA not only whole but bigger, until Cla’s crypto personnel found themselves working for NSA at Fort Meade. Donchez conceded the NSA folks were professional and good, but also a strange breed.

Donchez and his aide scanned into the front security entrance of the brick building 427, which could have passed for a recently constructed high school, the brick new, the architecture pleasing but ordinary, made unusual only by the absence of windows. A naval officer met them inside per Donchez’s instructions, since normal procedure would have the commander of the base meet Donchez personally and escort him in, but Donchez had ordered the ceremony skipped.

They were escorted to the electronic checkpoint and then deeper into the building, passing two more security checkpoints before they came to the entrance to the SCIF, the double lead-lined doors guarded by an armed sentry. The checkin process was much longer here.

Finally they were led into the SCIF room, the furnishings new and comfortable, the leather chairs and oak table and soft wall-coverings making the room appear to be a boardroom.

Donchez barely noticed, his impatience taking over.

The briefer, an Army colonel, came in an interior door with papers and videotapes. He looked young and fresh-faced to be a senior officer, rosy cheeks and round wire frame glasses, his mustache looking as if it belonged to a teenager.

“I’m Col. John Parker. I run the computer crypto detail. Pleased to meet you, sir.” Parker had a nasal high-pitched voice but spoke briskly. “These handouts are an abstract of the presentation. I know you’re pushed for time so I’ll get right to the point. You may not even want to see the raw data but I think the abstract may make you want to see it anyway.”

“Fine, Colonel. Give me the short version first.”

“Yes, sir. The intercepted computer data and files, as well as the debriefing of Muhammad Ibn al-Kabba, the UIF scientist we captured, all indicate the UIF has come up with a new kind of weapon. It’s technically called a dispersion adhesion explosive using plutonium for the poison. It’s nowhere near the destructive potential of a nuclear warhead, but with a small fraction of the plutonium, this weapon goes a very long way. I would compare it to a neutron bomb that achieves its death potential through radioactivity rather than blast effect. This does something similar, but instead of a single burst of neutron flux, it relies on exposure to the plutonium, the dust getting into ventilation systems and into the victims’ lungs, onto the victims’ skin, sticking to surface of streets and buildings. If you’re anywhere near ground zero you’ll die, even if you’re driving through at ninety miles per or in the basement of a building — that dust will get you. And it can’t be washed away — the cleanup crews would die. If this thing is dropped on a large city, the casualties would number in the millions. And it gets worse. With a neutron weapon or nuclear warhead, within a year you can clean up and rebuild. Not so here. The target city would be radioactive and uninhabitable for untold years to come.

Donchez sat through five minutes of an explanation of the glue bomb’s purpose and function. He interrupted the colonel. “How many do they have?”

“Two, maybe three.”

“Delivery system?”

“A warhead inserted onto the tip of a Hiroshima missile.

Range is only 1,900 nautical miles. A bit too small to be a long-range threat.”

“So they’d need to get close to launch it at us. Or deliver it by aircraft.”

“Or hand-carry it. But the Hiroshima missile is what the data says was the preferred method, since it’s a high-altitude supersonic vehicle with radar-evading electronics.”

“Aren’t there two versions of the Hiroshima?”

“Sea-launched and aircraft-launched, yes.”

“Same missile?”

“No, the sea-launched device is designed to be ejected from a submerged tube launcher on a sub, so it has a water proof capsule—that doesn’t change the characteristics of the missile, but this version must start its trip at zero velocity at sea level, so its booster rocket stage is much bigger.

The air-launched version’s solid rocket booster is tiny by comparison.”

“Warheads the same size?”

“No, the air-launched version has a bigger warhead capacity since it’s got the lighter rocket. Six thousand kilos for the air-launched, only 3,500 for the sea-launched version.”

“How heavy is this dirty dust-bomb’s warhead?”

“Let’s see …” The colonel searched his data. “We never added this up.” He scratched two columns on a pad, flipping through a large binder, adding up the second column of weights.