SOAR: A Black Ops Novel

She hadn’t seen this kind of timing device before, although it was similar to some of the timers they’d found on the special atomic demolition munitions, or SADMs, that Soviet covert operatives had prepositioned during the Cold War. Which scared her a little bit. Wei-Liu had learned to respect Soviet design, because although it was less complex than U.S. product, it was much more cold-blooded. The Soviets were more concerned with winning a war than they were with preserving the lives of their troops or their scientists. They’d willingly absorbed more than twenty million casualties during the Second World War. Fifty million in a war with the U.S. was not unthinkable. So the lives of a couple of thousand nuclear scientists or Spetsnaz Special Forces troops didn’t matter worth a damn.

She examined the bundles of wiring, all of it colored black and all neatly ganged together in bunches of six wires, which she’d sliced out of four pliable rubberized conduits. Not what you saw in Hollywood. All of Hollywood’s atomic devices, every one, from James Bond to The Peacemaker, had neatly colored wires. Yeah—right.

Oh, if the filmgoing public ever knew the truth, Wei-Liu thought, they’d be scared out of their wits. Real bombs weren’t built with colored wires. All the wires were black. Or white. Or red, green — whatever. You tagged your wires during construction with strips of colored tape so you knew what went where. And then, when it was all finished, you pulled the color strips off and voilà: instant confusion. Not that the tactic would stop a good EOD{Explosives Ordnance Disposal.} team. But it would give them pause — and keep them busy for a few hours.

Then there were timing devices. All the timers she’d ever seen in movies either ticked off the seconds analog or blinked them digitally. In real life, it didn’t quite work that way. The timers on small and medium-sized U.S. atomic demolition munitions — SADMs and MADMs — had no clocks. You armed the weapon using a highly complicated arming sequence, then set the detonator timer by punching numbers on a keypad that resembled a touch tone telephone. There was no readout.

The Soviets had much more sinister timers on their pocket nukes. They were analog jobbies, which could be set at one, three, six, nine, or twelve hours. But in point of fact, it didn’t matter. Whichever selection you made, the device was actually designed to detonate the instant you moved the switch itself. The Sovs, after all, didn’t trust their people to make individual decisions. And so the state took care of things for them.

She ran a voltmeter over the wire bundles, then gingerly separated each strand and tested them one by one. When she’d examined all thirty-six and was confident about what she’d found, she quickly snipped all but twelve. These she examined once more, using a second device. Then she separated the twelve wires into two groups of six and labeled them with red-and green-colored tape. She moved quickly now, still working carefully so as not to disturb the explosive layer that surrounded the plutonium core of the weapon. When she’d isolated the capacitor wiring and run a new ground wire from the MADM to the antistatic pad, she rose off her knees, walked to the tailgate, swung off the rear end of the truck, and searched until she located the big sergeant major. “Rowdy, I’m ready.”

0832. X-Man looked over the inventory. It was pretty sparse. He had four two-and-a-half-kilo blocks of Semtex, a hundred yards of firing wire, three blasting caps, and a single Chinese firing device. Blowing the truck was no problem. The truck had been pulled off the road to camouflage it. It sat slightly askew, its nose and right front wheel elevated. All he and Kaz had to do was fashion a shaped charge. Then they’d set the charge under the uphill side of the truck positioned between the front axle and the motor. The upward force generated by the Semtex — X-Man figured on using more than six pounds of the Czech explosive — would be more than enough to flip the vehicle. Flip it, hell. They’d blow it into next week.

But Ritzik and Yates also wanted shaped charges — which was going to be tough. It wasn’t that X-Man couldn’t build an improvised charge. Unlike Kaz, a computer-science wonk who’d reluctantly taken the one-week basic dynamite and crimp-the-blasting-cap-without-losing-a-finger course because it was required of all technical personnel, X-Man had requested every one of the explosives programs the Agency offered at ISOLATION TROPIC, which was the code-name designator for the Agency’s boom-boom school at Harvey Point, North Carolina, just outside the small town of Hertford. He was fascinated by the subject.