Chapter 17
Terry Martin landed at San Francisco International Airport just after three P.M. local time the following day, to be met by his host, Professor Paul Maslowski, genial and welcoming in the American academic's uniform of tweed jacket and leather patches, and at once felt himself enveloped by the warm embrace of all-American hospitality.
"Betty and I figured a hotel would be kind of impersonal and wondered whether you'd prefer to stay with us?" said Maslowski as he steered his compact out of the airport complex and onto the highway.
"Thank you, that would be wonderful," said Martin, and he meant it. "The students are looking forward to hearing you, Terry. There aren't many of us, of course--our Arab department must be smaller than yours at SOAS, but they're really enthusiastic."
"Great. I look forward to meeting them."
The pair chatted contentedly about their shared passion, medieval Mesopotamia, until they arrived at Professor Maslowski's frame house in a suburban development in Menlo Park. There he met Paul's wife, Betty, and was shown to a warm and comfortable guest room. He glanced at his watch: a quarter before five.
"Could I use the phone?" he asked as he came downstairs.
"Absolutely," said Maslowski. "Do you want to phone home?"
"No, locally. Do you have a directory?" The professor gave him the telephone book and left. It was under Livermore: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in Alameda County. He was just in time.
"Could you put me through to Department Z?" he asked, pronouncing it Zed, when the receptionist answered. "Who?" asked the girl.
"Department Zee," Martin corrected himself. "Director's office."
"Hold on, please." Another female voice came on the line. "Director's office. Can I help you?"
The British accent probably helped. Martin explained he was Dr. Martin, an academic over from England on a brief visit, and would be grateful to speak with the Director.
A male voice took the phone. "Dr. Martin?" "Yes." "I'm Jim Jacobs, Deputy Director. How can I help you?"
"Look, I know it's terribly short notice. But I am over here on a quick visit to give a lecture to the Near Eastern studies department at Berkeley. Then I have to fly back. Fact is, I was wondering whether I might come out to Livermore to see you."
The sense of puzzlement came right over the telephone wire. "Could you give me some indication what this is about, Dr. Martin?"
"Well, not easily. I am a member of the British end of the Medusa Committee. Does that ring a bell?" "Sure does. We're about to close down right now. Would tomorrow suit you?"
"Perfectly. I have to lecture in the afternoon. Would the morning be all right?"
"Say ten o'clock?" asked Dr. Jacobs.
The appointment was made. Martin had adroitly avoided mentioning that he was not a nuclear physicist at all, but an Arabist. No need to complicate matters.
That night, across the world in Vienna, Karim took Edith Hardenberg to bed. His seduction was neither hurried nor clumsy but seemed to follow an evening of concert music and dinner with perfect naturalness.
Even as she drove him back from the city center to her apartment in Grinzing, Edith tried to convince herself it would just be for a coffee and a good-night kiss, though deep inside she knew she was pretending.
When he took her in his arms and kissed her gently but persuasively, she just allowed him to; her earlier conviction that she would protest seemed to melt away, and she could not prevent it. Nor, deep inside, did she want to anymore.
When he swept her up and carried her through to her tiny bedroom, she just turned her face into his shoulder and let it happen. She hardly felt her severe little dress slip to the floor. His fingers had a deftness that Horst had never possessed--no pushing and shoving and snagging of zips and buttons.
She was still in her slip when he joined her beneath the Bettkissen, the big soft Viennese duvet, and the heat from his hard young body was like a great comfort on a bitter winter's night. She did not know what to do, so she closed her eyes tight and let it happen.
Strange, awful, sinful sensations began to run through her
unaccustomed nerves beneath the attentions of his lips and softly searching fingers. Horst had never been like this.
She began to panic when his lips strayed from her own and from her breasts and went to other places, bad, forbidden places, what her mother had always referred to as "down there."
She tried to push him away, protesting feebly, knowing the waves beginning to run through her lower body were not proper and decent, but he was eager as a spaniel puppy on a downed partridge.
He took no notice of her repeated "Nein, Karim, das sollst du nicht," and the waves became a tidal flow and she was a lost rowboat on a crazy ocean until the last great wave crashed over her and she drowned in a sensation with which she had never once in her thirty-nine years needed to burden the ears of her father confessor at the Votivkirche. Then she took his head in her arms and pressed his face to her thin little breasts and rocked him in silence.
Twice more during the night he made love to her, once just after midnight and again in the blackness before dawn, and each time he was so gentle and strong that her pent-up love came pouring to meet his in a way she had never envisaged could be possible. Only after the second time could she bring herself to run her hands over his body while he slept and wonder at the sheen of the skin and the love that she felt for every inch of it.
Although he had no idea his guest had any interest in the world other than Arab studies, Dr. Maslowski insisted that he drive Terry Martin out to Livermore in the morning rather than go to the expense of a cab.
"I guess I have a more important guy in my house than I thought I had," he suggested on the drive. But though Martin expostulated that this was not so, the California scholar knew enough about the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory to know that not everyone blew in there on a phone call. Dr. Maslowski, with masterly discretion, refrained from asking any more questions.
At the main security gate uniformed guards checked a list, examined Martin's passport, made a phone call, and directed them to a parking area. "I'll wait here," said Maslowski.
Considering the work it does, the Laboratory is an odd-looking collection of buildings on Vasco Road, some of them modern, but many dating back to the days when it was an old military base. To add to the conglomeration of styles, "temporary" buildings that have somehow become permanent are slotted between the old barracks.
Martin was led to a group of offices on the East Avenue side of the complex. It does not look like much, but it is out of this cluster of buildings that a group of scientists monitor the spread of nuclear technology across the Third World.
Jim Jacobs turned out to be little older than Terry Martin, just under forty, a Ph.D., and a nuclear physicist. He welcomed Martin into his paper-strewn office.
"Cold morning. Bet you thought California was going to be hot. Everyone does. Not up here, though. Coffee?"
"Love some."
"Sugar, cream?"
"No, black, please."
Dr. Jacobs pressed an intercom button. "Sandy, could we have two coffees? Mine you know. And one black."
He smiled across the desk at his visitor. He did not bother to mention that he had talked with Washington to confirm the English visitor's name and that he really was a member of the Medusa Committee. Someone on the American end of the committee, whom he knew, had checked a list and confirmed the claim.
Jacobs was impressed. The visitor might look young, but he must be pretty high-powered over in England. The Deputy Director knew all about Medusa because he and his colleagues had been consulted for weeks about Iraq and had handed over everything they had, every detail of the story of foolishness and neglect on the part of the West that had damn nearly given Saddam Hussein a nuclear option.
"So how can I help?" he asked.
"I know it's a long shot," said Martin, reaching into his attach?case. "But I suppose you have seen this already?"
He laid a copy of one of the dozen pictures of the Tarmiya factory on the desk, the one Paxman had disobediently given him.
Jacobs glanced at it and nodded. "Sure, had a dozen of them through from Washington three, four days ago. What can I say? They don't mean a thing. Can't say more to you than I said to Washington. Never seen anything like them."
Sandy came in with a tray of coffee, a bright blond California woman full of self-assurance. "Hi, there," she said to Martin."Oh, er, hallo. Did the Director see these?"
Jacobs frowned. The implication was that he himself might not be senior enough. "The Director's skiing in Colorado. But I ran them past some of the best brains we have here, and believe me, they are very, very good."
"Oh, I'm sure," said Martin. Another blank wall. Well, it had only been a long shot.
Sandy placed the cups of coffee on the desk. Her eye fell on the photograph. "Oh, them again," she said.
"Yes, them again," said Jacobs, and smiled teasingly. "Dr. Martin here thinks maybe someone ... older should have a look at them."
"Well," she said, "show 'em to Daddy Lomax." With that she was gone. "Who's Daddy Lomax?" asked Martin.
"Oh, take no notice. Used to work here. Retired now, lives alone up in the mountains. Pops in now and then for old times' sake. The girls adore him, he brings them mountain flowers. Funny old guy." They drank their coffee, but there was little more to say. Jacobs had work to do. He apologized once again for not being able to help. Then he showed his visitor out, returned to his sanctum, and closed the door.
Martin waited in the corridor a few seconds, then put his head around the door. "Where would I find Daddy Lomax?" he asked Sandy.
"I don't know. Lives way up in the hills. Nobody's ever been there."
"He has a phone?"
"No, no lines go up there. But I think he has a cellular. The insurance company insisted. I mean, he's terribly old." Her face was creased with that genuine concern that only California youth can show for anyone over sixty.
She rifled through a Rolodex and came up with a number. Martin noted it, thanked her, and left.
Ten time zones away, it was evening in Baghdad. Mike Martin was on his bicycle, pedaling northwest up Port Said Street. He had just passed the old British Club at what used to be called Southgate, and because he recalled it from his boyhood, he turned to stare back at it. His lack of attention nearly caused an accident.
He had reached the edge of Nafura Square and without thinking pedaled forward. There was a big limousine coming from his left and although technically it did not have right of way, its two motorcycle escorts were clearly not going to stop. One of them swerved violently to avoid the clumsy fellagha with the vegetable basket attached to his pillion, the motorcycle's front wheel clipping the smaller bicycle and sending it crashing to the tarmac.
Martin went down with his bicycle, sprawling on the road, his vegetables spilling out. The limousine braked, paused, and swerved around him before accelerating away. On his knees, Martin looked up as the car passed.
The face of the rear seat passenger stared out the window at the oaf who had dared to delay him by a fraction of a second. It was a cold face in the uniform of a brigadier general, thin and acerbic, channels running down either side of the nose to frame the bitter mouth. In that half-second, what Martin noticed were the eyes. Not cold or angry eyes, not bloodshot red or shrewd or even cruel. Blank eyes, utterly and completely blank, the eyes of death long gone. Then the face behind the window had passed by.
He did not need the whisperings of the two working men who pulled him to his feet and helped gather up his vegetables. He had seen the face before, but dimly, blurred, taken on a saluting base, in a photograph on a table in Riyadh weeks before.
He had just seen the most feared man in Iraq after the Rais, perhaps including the Rais. It was the one they called Al-Mu'azib, the Tormentor, the extractor of confessions, head of the AMAM, Omar Khatib.
Terry Martin tried the number he had been given during the lunch hour. There was no reply, just the honeyed tones of the recorded voice advising him: "The party you have called is not available or is out of range. Please try your call later."
Paul Maslowski had taken Martin to lunch with his faculty colleagues on the campus. The conversation was lively and academic. Over the meal Martin thanked his hosts again for their invitation and repeated his appreciation of the endowment that had funded his visit.
He tried the number again after lunch on his way to Barrows Hall, guided by Near Eastern Studies Director Kathlene Keller, but again there was no reply.
The lecture went across well. There were twenty-seven graduate students, all heading for their doctorates, and Martin was impressed at the level and depth of their understanding of the papers he had written on the subject of the Caliphate that ruled central Mesopotamia in what the Europeans call the Middle Ages. When one of the students rose to thank him for coming all that way to talk to them and the rest had applauded, Terry Martin went pink and bobbed his thanks to them.
Afterward, he spotted a pay phone on the wall in the lobby. This time there was an answer, and a gruff voice said: "Yeah."
"Excuse me, is that Dr. Lomax?" "There's only one, friend. That's me." "I know this sounds crazy, but I've come from England. I'd like to see you. My name's Terry Martin." "England, eh? Long ways away. What would you want with an old coot like me, Mr. Martin?"
"Want to tap a long memory. Show you something. People at Livermore say you've been around longer than most, seen just about everything. I want to show you something. Difficult to explain on the phone. Could I come up and see you?"
"It ain't a tax form?"
"No."
"Or a Playboy centerfold?"
" 'Fraid not."
"Now you got me curious. Do you know the way?"
"No. I have pencil and paper. Can you describe it?"
Daddy Lomax told him how to get to where he lived. It took some time. Martin wrote it all down.
"Tomorrow morning," said the retired physicist. "Too late now, you'll get lost in the dark. And you'll need a four-wheel drive."
It was one of the only two E-8A J-STARs in the Gulf War that caught the signal that morning of January 27. The J-STARs had been still experimental aircraft and were flying with largely civilian technicians on board when they were rushed in early January from their base at the Grumman Melbourne plant in Florida halfway across the world to Arabia.
That morning, one of the two flying out of Riyadh military air base was high over the Iraqi border, still inside Saudi air space, peering with its Norden down-and-sideways radar more than a hundred miles into the western desert of Iraq. The plink was faint, but it indicated metal, moving slowly, far into Iraq, a convoy no longer than two, maybe three trucks. Still, that was what the J-STAR was there for, so the mission commander told one of the AWACS circling over the northern end of the Red Sea, giving the AWACS the exact position of the small Iraqi convoy.
Inside the hull of the AWACS the mission commander logged the precise spot and looked around for an airborne element that might be available to give the convoy an unfriendly visit.
All the western desert operations were still keyed toward Scud-hunting at that time, apart from the attention being given to the two huge Iraqi air bases called H2 and H3 that were situated in those deserts. The J-STAR might have picked up a mobile Scud-launcher, even though it would be unusual in daylight. The AWACS came up with an element of two F-15E Strike Eagles coming south from Scud Alley North.
Don Walker was riding south at twenty thousand feet after a mission to the outskirts of Al Qaim, where he and his wingman, Randy Roberts, had just destroyed a fixed missile base protecting one of the poison gas factories targeted for later destruction.
Walker took the call and checked his fuel. It was low. Worse, with his laser-guided bombs gone, his underwing pylons contained only two Sidewinders and two Sparrows. But these were air-to-air missiles in case they ran into Iraqi jets. Somewhere south of the border his assigned refueling tanker was patiently waiting, and he would need every drop to get back to Al Kharz. Still, the convoy location was only fifty miles away and just fifteen off his intended track. Even though he had no ordnance left, there was no harm in having a look.
His wingman had heard everything, so Walker gestured through the canopy to the flier half a mile away through the clear air, and the two Eagles rolled into a dive to their right.
At eight thousand feet, he could see the source of the plink that had showed up on the screen of the J-STAR. It was not a Scud-launcher,
but two trucks and two BRDM-2s, Soviet-made light armored vehicles on wheels, not tracks. From his perch, he could see much more than the J-STAR could.
Down in a deep wadi beneath him was a single Land-Rover. At five thousand feet, he could see the four British SAS men around it, tiny ants on the brown cloth of the desert. What they could not see were the four Iraqi vehicles forming a horseshoe around them, nor the Iraqi soldiers pouring down from the tailboards of the two trucks to encircle the wadi.
Don Walker had met the SAS down in Oman. He knew they were operating in the western deserts against Scud-launchers, and several of his squadron had already been in radio contact with these strangesounding English voices from the ground when the SAS men had tagged a target they could not handle themselves.
At three thousand feet, he could see the four Britishers looking up curiously. So, half a mile away, were the Iraqis. Walker pressed his transmit button. "Line astern, take the trucks." "You got it."
Though he had neither bombs nor rockets left, tucked in the glove of his right wing, just outside the gaping air intake, was an M-61-A1 Vulcan 20-min. cannon, six rotating barrels capable of spewing out its entire magazine of 450 shells with impressive speed. The 20-mm. cannon shell is the size of a small banana and explodes on impact. For those caught in a truck or running in the open, they can spoil everything.
Walker flicked the Aim and Arm switches, and his Head-Up Display--his HUD--showed him the two armored cars straight through his screen, plus an aiming cross, whose position had already taken account of drift and aim-off.
The first BRDM took a hundred cannon shells and blew apart. Raising his nose slightly, he put the swimming cross on the Plexiglas of the HUD onto the rear of the second vehicle. He saw the gas tank ignite. Then he was up and over it, climbing and rolling until the brown desert appeared above his head. Keeping the roll going, Walker brought the Eagle back down again. The horizon of blue and brown turned back to its usual position, with the brown desert at the bottom and the blue sky at the top. Both BRDMs were flaming, one truck was on its side, the other shredded. Small figures ran frantically for the cover of the rocks.
Inside the wadi the four SAS men had gotten the message. They were aboard and rolling down the dry watercourse and away from the ambush. Just who had spotted them--wandering shepherds, probably--and given their position away, they would never know, but they knew who had just saved their backsides. The Eagles lifted away, waggled their wings, and climbed toward the border and the waiting tanker.
The NCO commanding the SAS patrol was one Sergeant Peter Stephenson. He raised a hand at the departing fighters and said: "Dunno who you are, mate, but I owe you one."
As it happened, Mrs. Maslowski had a Suzuki Jeep as a runabout, and though she had never driven it in four-wheel mode, she insisted Terry Martin borrow it. His flight to London was not until five that afternoon, and he set off early because he did not know how long he would be. He told her he intended to be back by two at the latest. Dr. Maslowski had to return to his office but gave Martin a map so he would not get lost.
The road to the valley of the Mocho River took him right back past Livermore, where he found Mines Road running off Tesla. Mile by mile, the last houses of the suburb of Livermore dropped away, and the ground rose. He was lucky in the weather. Winter in these parts is never very cold, but the proximity of the sea gives rise to thick dense clouds and sudden banks of swirling fog.
That January 27 the sky was blue and crisp, the air calm and cold. Through the windshield he could see the icy tip of Cedar Mountain far away. Ten miles after the turnoff, he left Mines Road and turned onto a dirt road, clinging to the side of a precipitous hill. Down in the valley far below, the Mocho glittered in the sun as it tumbled between its rocks. The grass on either side gave way to a mix of sagebrush and she-oak; high above, a pair of kites wheeled against the blue, and the road ran on, along the edge of Cedar Mountain Ridge into the wilderness.
He passed a single green farmhouse, but Lomax had told him to go to the end of the road. After another three miles he found the cabin, roughhewn with a raw stone chimney and a plume of blue woodsmoke drifting up to the sky. He stopped in the yard and got out. From a barn, a single Jersey cow surveyed him with velvet eyes. Rhythmic sounds came from the other side of the cabin, so he walked around to the front to find Daddy Lomax on a bluff looking out over the valley and the river far below.
He must have been seventy-five, but despite Sandy's concern, he looked as if he beat up grizzly bears for a hobby. An inch over six feet, in soiled jeans and a plaid shirt, the old scientist was splitting logs with the ease of one slicing bread. Snow-white hair hung to his shoulders, and a stubble of ivory whiskers rimmed his chin. More white curls spilled from the V of his shirt, and he seemed to feel no cold, although Terry Martin was glad for his quilted parka.
"Found it then? Heard you coming," said Lomax, and split one last log with a single swing. Then he laid down the ax and came over to his visitor. They shook hands; Lomax gestured to a nearby log and sat down on one himself.
"Dr. Martin, is it?" "Er, yes." "From England?" "Yes." Lomax reached into his top pocket, withdrew a pouch of tobacco and some rice paper, and began to roll a cigarette.
"Not politically correct, are you?" Lomax asked. "No, I don't think so." Lomax grunted in apparent approval. "Had a politically correct doctor. Always yellin' at me to stop smoking." Martin noted the past tense. "I suppose you left him?" "Nope, he left me. Died last week. Fifty-six. Stress. What brings you up here?"
Martin fumbled in his attach?case. "I ought to apologize at the outset. It's probably a waste of your time and mine. I just wondered if you'd glance at this."
Lomax took the proffered photograph and stared at it. "You really from England?" "Yes." "Helluva long way to come to show me this."
"You recognize it?" "Ought to. Spent five years of my life working there." Martin's mouth dropped open in shock. "You've actually been there?" "Lived there for five years." "At Tarmiya?" "Where the hell's that? This is Oak Ridge."
Martin swallowed several times. "Dr. Lomax. That photograph was taken six days ago by a U.S. Navy fighter overflying a bombed factory in Iraq." Lomax glanced up, bright blue eyes under shaggy white brows, then looked back at the photo. "Sonofabitch," he said at last. "I warned the bastards. Three years ago. Wrote a paper warning that this was the sort of technology the Third World would be likely to use."
"What happened to it?" "Oh, they trashed it, I guess." "Who?" "You know, the pointy-heads." "Those disks--the Frisbees inside the factory--you know what they are?" "Sure. Calutrons. This is a replica of the old Oak Ridge facility." "Calu-what?" Lomax glanced up again. "You're not a doctor of science? Not a physicist?" "No. My subject is Arabic studies." Lomax grunted again, as if not being a physicist were a hard burden for a man to carry through life. "Calutrons. California cyclotrons. Calutrons, for short."
"What do they do?" "EMIS. Electromagnetic isotope separation. In your language, they refine crude uranium-238 to filter out the bomb-grade uranium-235. You say this place is in Iraq?"
"Yes. It was bombed by accident a week ago. This picture was taken the next day. No one seems to know what it means."
Lomax gazed across the valley, sucked on his butt, and let a plume of azure smoke trickle away. "Sonofabitch," he said again. "Mister, I live up here because I want to. Away from all that smog and traffic--had enough of that years ago. Don't have a TV, but I have a radio. This is about that man Saddam Hussein, ain't it?"
"Yes, it is. Would you tell me about calutrons?" The old man stubbed out his butt and stared now, not just across the valley but back across many years.
"Nineteen forty-three. Long time ago, eh? Nearly fifty years. Before you were born, before most people were born nowadays. There was a bunch of us then, trying to do the impossible. We were young, eager, and ingenious, and we didn't know it was impossible. So we did it.
"There was Fermi from Italy, and Pontecorvo; Fuchs from Germany, Nils Bohr from Denmark, Nunn May from England, and others. And us Yankees: Urey and Oppie and Ernest. I was very junior. Just twentyseven.
"Most of the time, we were feeling our way, doing things that had never been tried, testing out things they said couldn't be done. We had a budget that nowadays wouldn't buy squat, so we worked all day and all night and took shortcuts. Had to--the deadline was as tight as the money. And somehow we did it, in three years. We cracked the codes and made the bomb. Little Boy and Fat Man.
"Then the Air Force dropped them on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the world said we shouldn't have done it after all. Trouble was, if we hadn't, somebody else would. Nazi Germany, Stalin's Russia--"
"Calutrons ...," suggested Martin.
"Yeah. You've heard of the Manhattan Project?" "Of course." "Well, we had many geniuses in Manhattan, two in particular. Robert J. Oppenheimer and Ernest O. Lawrence. Heard of them?" "Yes." "Thought they were colleagues, partners, right?" "I suppose so."
"Wrong. They were rivals. See, we all knew the key was uranium, the world's heaviest element. And we knew by 1941 that only the lighter isotope, 235, would create the chain reaction we needed. The trick was to separate the point seven percent of the 235 hiding somewhere in the mass of uranium-238.
"When America entered the war, we got a big leg up. After years of neglect, the brass wanted results yesterday. Same old story. So we tried every which way to separate those isotopes.
"Oppenheimer went for gas diffusion--reduce the uranium to a fluid and then a gas, uranium hexafluoride, poisonous and corrosive, difficult to work. The centrifuge came later, invented by an Austrian captured by the Russians and put to work at Sukhumi. Before the centrifuge, gas diffusion was slow and hard.
"Lawrence went for the other route--electromagnetic separation by particle acceleration. Know what that means?"
"I'm afraid not."
"Basically, you speed the atoms up to a hell of a velocity, then use giant magnets to throw them into a curve. Two racing cars enter a curve at speed, a heavy car and a light car. Which one ends up on the outside track?"
"The heavy one," said Martin.
"Right. That's the principle. The calutrons depend on giant magnets about twenty feet across. These"--he tapped the Frisbees in the photograph--"are the magnets. The layout is a replica of my old baby at Oak Ridge, Tennessee."
"If they worked, why were they discontinued?" asked Martin.
"Speed," said Lomax. "Oppenheimer won out. His way was faster. The calutrons were extremely slow and very expensive. After 1945, and even more when that Austrian was released by the Russians and came over here to show us his centrifuge invention, the calutron technology was abandoned. Declassified. You can get all the details, and the plans, from the Library of Congress. That's probably what the Iraqis have done."
The two men sat in silence for several minutes. "What you are saying," suggested Martin, "is that Iraq decided to use Model-T Ford technology, and because everyone assumed they'd go for Grand Prix racers, no one noticed."
"You got it, son. People forget--the old Model-T Ford may be old, but it worked. It got you there. It carried you from A to B. And it hardly ever broke down."
"Dr. Lomax, the scientists my government and yours have been consulting know that Iraq has got one cascade of gas diffusion centrifuges working, and it has been for the past year. Another one is about to come on stream, but probably is not operating yet. On that basis, they calculate Iraq cannot possibly have refined enough pure uranium--say, thirty-five kilograms--to have enough for a bomb."
"Quite right," nodded Lomax. "Need five years with one cascade, maybe more. Minimum three years with two cascades."
"But supposing they've been using calutrons in tandem. If you were head of Iraq's bomb program, how would you play it?"
"Not that way," said the old physicist, and began to roll another cigarette. "Did they tell you, back in London, that you start with yellowcake, which is called zero-percent pure, and you have to refine it to ninety-three-percent pure to get bomb-grade quality?"
Martin thought of Dr. Hipwell, with his bonfire of a pipe, in a room under Whitehall saying just that. "Yes, they did."
"But they didn't bother to say that purifying the stuff from zero to twenty takes up most of the time? They didn't say that as the stuff gets purer, the process gets faster?" "No."
"Well, it does. If I had calutrons and centrifuges, I wouldn't use them in tandem. I'd use them in sequence. I'd run the base uranium through the calutrons to get it from zero to twenty, maybe twenty-five-percent pure; then use that as the feedstock for the new cascades." "Why?" "It would cut your refining time in the cascades by a factor of ten."
Martin thought it over while Daddy Lomax puffed. "Then when would you calculate Iraq could have those thirty-five kilograms of pure uranium?"
"Depends when they started with the calutrons." Martin thought. After the Israeli jets destroyed the Iraqi reactor at Osirak, Baghdad operated on two policies: dispersal and duplication, scattering the laboratories all over the country so they could never all be bombed again; and using a cover-all-angles technique in purchasing and experimentation. Osirak had been bombed in 1981.
"Say they bought the components on the open market in 1982 and assembled them by 1983." Lomax took a stick from the ground near his feet and began to doodle in the dust. "These guys got any problem with supplies of yellowcake, the basic feedstock?" he asked.
"No, plenty of feedstock."
"Suppose so," grunted Lomax. "Buy the damn stuff in K-mart nowadays.
After a while he tapped the photo with his stick. "This photo shows about twenty calutrons. That all they had?"
"Maybe more. We don't know. Let's assume that's all they had working." "Since 1983, right?"
"Basic assumption." Lomax kept scratching in the dust. "Mr. Hussein got any shortage of electric power?"
Martin thought of the 150-megawatt power station across the sand From Tarmiya, and the suggestion from the Black Hole that the cable ran underground into Tarmiya. "No, no shortage of power."
"We did," said Lomax. "Calutrons take an amazing amount of electrical power to function. At Oak Ridge we built the biggest coalfired power station ever made. Even then we had to tap into the public grid. Each time we turned 'em on, there was a brown-out right across Tennessee--soggy fries and brown light bulbs--we were using so much."
He went on doodling with his stick, making a calculation, then scratching it out and starting another in the same patch of dust.
"They got a shortage of copper wire?"
"No, they could buy that on the open market too."
"These giant magnets have to be wrapped in thousands of miles of copper wire," said Lomax. "Back in the war, we couldn't get any. Needed for war production, every ounce. Know what old Lawrence did?"
"No idea." "Borrowed all the silver bars in Fort Knox and melted it into wire. Worked just as well. End of the war, we had to hand it all back to Fort Knox." He chuckled. "He was a character."
Finally he finished and straightened up. "If they assembled twenty calutrons in 1983 and ran the yellowcake through them till '89 ... and then took thirty-percent-pure uranium and fed it into the centrifuge cascade for one year, they'd have their thirtyfive keys of ninety-three percent bomb-grade uranium ... November."
"Next November," said Martin. Lomax rose, stretched, reached down, and pulled his guest to his feet. "No, son, last November." * * *
Martin drove back down the mountain and glanced at his watch. Midday. Eight P.M. in London. Paxman would have left his desk and gone home. Martin did not have his home number. He could wait twelve hours in San Francisco to telephone, or he could fly. He decided to fly.
Martin landed at Heathrow at eleven on the morning of January 28 and was with Paxman at twelve-thirty. By two P.M., Steve Laing was talking urgently to Harry Sinclair at the embassy in Grosvenor Square and an hour later the CIA's London Station Head was on a direct and very secure line to Deputy Director (Operations)
Bill Stewart. It was not until the morning of January 30 that Bill Stewart was able to produce a full report for the DCI, William Webster.
"It checks out," he told the former Kansas judge. "I've had men down at that cabin near Cedar Mountain, and the old man, Lomax, confirmed it all. We've traced his original paper.--it was filed. The records from Oak Ridge confirm that these disks are calutrons."
"How on earth did it happen?" asked the DCI. "How come we never noticed?"
"Well, the idea probably came from Jaafar Al-Jaafar, the Iraqi boss of their program. Apart from Harwell in England, he also trained at CERN, outside Geneva. It's a giant particle accelerator."
"So?"
"Calutrons are particle accelerators. Anyway, all calutron technology was declassified in 1949. It's been available on request ever since."
"And the calutrons--where were they bought?"
"In bits, mainly from Austria and France. The purchases raised no eyebrows because of the antiquated nature of the technology. The plant was built by Yugoslavs under contract. They said they wanted plans to build on, so the Iraqis simply gave them the plans of Oak Ridge--that's why Tarmiya is a replica."
"When was all this?" asked the DCI. "Nineteen eighty-two."
"So what this agent, what's his name--"
"Jericho," said Stewart.
"What he said was not a lie?"
"Jericho only reported what he claims he heard Saddam Hussein say at a closed conference. I'm afraid we can no longer exclude the conclusion that this time the man was actually telling the truth."
"And we have kicked Jericho out of play?"
"He was demanding a million dollars for his information. We have never paid that amount, and at the time--" "For God's sake, Bill, it's cheap at the price!" The DCI rose and went over to the picture windows. The aspens were bare now, not as they had been in August, and in the valley the Potomac swept past on its way to the sea.
"Bill, I want you to get Chip Barber back into Riyadh. See if there is any way of reestablishing contact with this Jericho."
"There is a conduit, sir. A British agent inside Baghdad. He passes for an Arab. But we suggested that the Century people pull him out of there."
"Just pray they haven't, Bill. We need Jericho back. Never mind the funds--I'll authorize them. Wherever this device is secreted, we have to find it and bomb it into oblivion before it is too late."
"Yes. Er--who is going to tell the generals?"
The Director sighed. "I'm seeing Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft in two hours."
Rather you than me, thought Stewart as he left.