Eric van Lustbader - Nicholas Linnear 05, page 16
Continuing this covert dialogue with his DARPA pal was astonishingly easy for a man of Abramanov’s talents. Day and night the Arzamas-16 complex was emitting bursts of telemetry and carrier-wave transmissions, and Abramanov found it a relatively simple task to hide his private coded communications within these transmissions.
By and large, the subject of Abramanov’s clandestine communication with Serman had been the creation of transuranic isotopes heretofore believed to be only theoretical. And this growing passion had led him to develop the premier high-flux neutron facility in what had then been the Soviet Union. It was within this facility that 114m had been born.
The Tupolev gave another shudder and began a long, sweeping arc downward through the buffeting grit of the gathering storm. The sky, black and lethal looking, swung away, from Abramanov, who wished now to peer beyond the clouds at the face of God. Instead, he twisted in his seat, stared back down the long empty length of the aircraft to where he knew were stowed on either side of the cabin the two cases made of DU, depleted U-238. He could not keep his thoughts from their abruptly malevolent contents.
The transuranic isotope 114m had been born in the hot cell Abramanov had had built at Arzamas-16. This was a windowless cubicle with five-foot-thick concrete walls. The material had to be manipulated via stainless-steel robotic aims, controlled from outside the hot cell, at the panel of dials, gauges, and levers where an operator sat. The hot cell was equipped with the most extreme contamination control systems, including an inert atmosphere, and even the surrounding areas were fed by negative-pressure ventilation units in order to confine the highly toxic particles of plutonium and 114m from migrating out of the primary confinement zone.
For some years now, scientists had been trying to create transuranic isotopes - that is, substances with higher atomic numbers than uranium - without much success. Isotope 114m had been created by bombarding a brick of plutonium with a high-density field of neutrons in an argon atmosphere. This had been attempted before, but Abramanov’s brilliance had come in pulsing the neutrons at a frequency that overexcited the atoms of the plutonium, thus forcing a reaction.
A number of isotopes of element 114 had been observed forming, but they rapidly decayed because of their minuscule half-lives.
Only one isotope remained. Abramanov named it 114m because it was the fourteenth isotope created from the event. He estimated its half-life to be in the tens of thousands of years. Other surprises lay in store for Abramanov and his team. Because they found it possessed an inordinately high cross-section of thermal neutrons, 114m was an extremely potent fissile material. And because its critical mass was lower than both plutonium and uranium, its potential value skyrocketed. Abramanov calculated that what he had discovered just might be the most powerful and efficient nuclear energy source on the face of the earth.
The unique nuclear criticality displayed by 114m led Abramanov to continue his experiments on his own time, keeping his own counsel - and that of Douglas Serman in Virginia. What he found both elated and terrified him, so much so that he dared not make his findings public - even to the rest of his research team.
When it came to the human race, Abramanov was no optimist. He saw the potential danger should even one brick of 114m fall into the wrong hands. The sins of greed, avarice, ambition, and temptation paraded across the stage of his mind like tawdry whores vulgarly displaying their elemental wares. He could count from merely those around him the number who would be tempted to use 114m for personal ends.
It seemed to him then that he was in a hot box of his own making - trapped within a conundrum. He found it unthinkable to give over to his masters the terrible secret of this transuranic isotope. He would not even trust it to the minds of his colleagues in Arzamas-16; how could he deliver it into the hands of the Central Committee in the Kremlin? Besides, at that point there was no telling who was in power, and who would remain there for any meaningful length of time. There was no way to destroy the ingots of 114m he had already manufactured, and he could think of no place secure enough in his tremor-prone area of the country to bury them.
This was the trap he had so cleverly, if unwittingly, constructed for himself. Then, one night, he awoke from a dream that showed him how 114m was to be his savior rather than his doom. For months now he had been dreaming of getting out of the increasingly anarchic Soviet Union, but he lacked the nerve. Now he had the impetus because fleeing his homeland with the deadly ingots was his only logical egress from the hot box.
Working at night, he constructed two boxes of DU so that the ingots of 114m were shielded by three niches of the heavy metal. This was far from the ideal thickness, but Abramanov was driven by the constraints of time and portability. As it was, each container weighed nine hundred pounds, but he knew he must still maintain the two-foot physical space between the ingots of radioactive isotope. The consequences of bringing them in close proximity made him break out into a cold sweat.
The wild, dark sea was coming up from below, solid as a steel-clad door, and only now did he understand fully the extent of his folly.
He had enlisted the aid of a pilot friend of his, a colonel in the VVS, the Soviet Air Force, who, like Abramanov, had grown weary of and disillusioned with Communism, and together they had plotted their getaway. Then Abramanov contacted Douglas Sermans and told him he would shortly be on his way.
Fedorov was scheduled to take a MiG-29 UB two-seat jet trainer across the country from Moscow to the military airfield outside Vladivostok. For Abramanov, who wanted to get to Virginia in the east of America, it was the long way around, but his options were limited, and he had had no choice.
Fedorov’s main problem was how to avoid the Soviet and Vietnamese perimeter radar; Abramanov’s had been how to deal with the size and weight of the depleted U-238 cases within which lay like the children of Behemoth the deadly ingots of 114m.
Fedorov had been in the Soviet Air Force for more than twenty years, and he knew every flying trick in the book. At Vladivostok, he had logged in a refit flight on the Tupolev-10, an old long-distance military transport, had stayed within the radar fields, then, along the coast, had taken the aircraft to an altitude below effective radar range, putting out a spurious distress call that would lead Soviet search planes north while they headed steadily south.
The two four-by-five-by-eight-inch ingots had a total weight of just over three hundred pounds, and the DU cases themselves were each just under half a ton. Abramanov and Fedorov had replaced the guts of a pair of the MiG-29’s AA-10 Alamo laser-guided air-to-air missiles with the cases, using the automated gantry servos used to load bombs.
At the Vladivostok airfield, the military was already in such chaos that it was a relatively simple matter for the two of them to transfer the cargo to the Tupolev in utter secrecy.
Having felt firsthand the power of the MiG-29’s twin Tumanskii jet engines, Abramanov had wished to continue their flight in that swift aircraft. But this had proved impossible. Besides the fact mat he had to log the MiG-29 in with the field commander, Fedorov had pointed out that if the Chinese or Vietnamese radar picked up the configuration of a warbird outside Soviet airspace, they would initiate an international disaster of incalculable proportions.
Now, in the fierce grip of the subtropical storm, Abramanov wished for the 4,700-kph thrust such a plane would give them. At least they would have a chance to outrun the storm. In the wallowing Tupolev, they were completely at the sky’s mercy.
Too late, he thought of the consequences should the two 114m cases come in contact with each other or - just as terrifying - if their DU shielding should be damaged in the coming crash.
“I can’t hold it!” Fedorov shouted, giving life to Abramanov’s worst fears. “We’re going down!”
The colonel unstrapped, while Abramanov sat in his chair, paralyzed with dread. He was not thinking of himself, but of the 114m.
“Damn you, come on!” Fedorov grabbed Abramanov by the front of his flight suit, hauled him out of his seat.
The Tupolev was canted crazily, its nose dragged down as if by a lead weight. Rain pelted the cockpit cowling and the fuselage, setting up a fearful din. Great gusts of wind slammed the aircraft over and down.
“We have to jump now!” Fedorov shouted in Abramanov’s ear.
As if in a trance, Abramanov hesitated, reluctant to part with the cases of 114m. “Our cargo -“
“You idiot, fuck the cargo!” Fedorov screamed, hauling him toward the door. “The autopilot won’t hold us up for long. A moment more and we’ll be too low for the chutes to open in time!”
Fedorov leaned on the cargo door, sliding it open. Wind and rain flew in, bouncing around the cabin like ricocheting bullets. The elements plucked at them like a living thing, taking Abramanov’s breath away.
“Now!” shouted Fedorov at the edge of the doorway.
“I can’t leave! I -“
But Fedorov had already released his hold on the fuselage, his body sucked out of the aircraft. Abramanov watched with an almost detached curiosity as Fedorov’s dark form dwindled, tumbling over and over. Then the quiet bloom, startling is its paleness, as his parachute opened.
The Tupolev was shuddering and groaning as the storm, let loose inside it threatened to rip it apart. Abramanov’s teeth were chattering. As if in a dream, he watched his fingers give up their white-knuckled grip on the edge of the doorway. He felt a sudden burst of kinetic energy, as if the hands of a giant had slammed into the small of his back, and he was hurled into the heart of the black storm.
Upside down, the wind howling in his ears, drenched to the bone, he scrabbled for the rip cord. He saw the underside of the Tupolev yaw away from him and wondered that he could not discern the massive roar of its engines above the primal howling of the storm.
Disoriented, he could not find the rip cord, and he panicked, tasting bile in his mouth. He thought of the ocean, so far below him, rising up to slam him into oblivion. His belly turned to ice, and he almost lost a grip on his bowels when his hands closed around the plastic handles and he jerked them down. The abrupt break in his downward momentum felt like the intercession of God. As he righted, he gave a prayer.
Below him was the sea and, to his right, the top of Fedorov’s chute, a comforting flower in an inimical world, and Abramanov felt dissipate a measure of the tension that had racked him ever since they hit the leading edge of the storm.
In retrospect, it seemed as if he knew what would happen a split second before it actually took place. An eerie sense of immediate déjà vu gripped him as he saw Fedorov slice sideways, driven by a fierce gust of wind. Almost simultaneously, a rent in his main chute appeared, a dark, grinning mouth, widening madly until the chute collapsed into segments and Fedorov commenced to plunge downward at a terrifying rate.
Abramanov tried to shout a warning, but the sound was snatched from his lips, lost within the violent whorls and eddies of the storm.
He was close enough to the heaving ocean to see what happened to Fedorov as his friend struck it. It was as if the sea rose up to meet him. Abramanov could see approaching a gigantic wave, shot through with darkness, a demon with glass teeth, a beast out of a nightmare, trembling with feral fury. Fedorov’s head canted at an impossible angle as his body struck the leading edge of the wave and disappeared into that lost world. The passage of life into death was momentarily marked by the stain of the shredded parachute, before it, too, was sucked beneath the waves.
Abramanov felt an overwhelming urge to vomit. The sea was so high, so close now, that he could taste the salt and phosphorus it gave off as if it were radiation. Abramanov thought that perhaps his friend’s fate was the better of two evils. Instantaneous death must be preferable, he told himself, to drowning. A sudden squall of wind caught him as it had Fedorov, jerking him from side to side as if he were trapped on a ride in an amusement park, and Abramanov thought for a moment that God was going to grant his wish.
But his chute held, driven sideways over the ocean, propelled by the wind. Above him, he could see, like a leviathan descending toward the ocean’s floor, the Tupolev-10. The shadow of its passage was like an eclipse. Even the monstrous storm seemed to pause for an instant.
Then, like a celestial object thrown off course, the aircraft dove into the water nose first, and above the storm’s incessant roar, Abramanov heard the squeal of tortured metal, felt the shock wave as if it were a bomb blast.
He swung vertiginously just above the waves, then, as the storm resumed its fury, he was dashed into the bosom of the South China Sea, closer to the Tupolev-10 and its unnerving cargo than he wanted to be.
Something tore, splintering. Pain lanced through his body. Oh, God, my leg! he thought as the first, enervating torrent of water engulfed him.
Rock breathed deeply of the sea air, scenting phosphorus and brine, decomposing seagrape and barnacles, fish heads baking in the sun. The boat rolled deeply in the green and indigo swells.
“We’re almost there,” Abramanov said.
Rock looked up from his methodical cleaning of a black magic - an M16A1 army rifle - saw Abramanov hulking like a brown bear across the deck. Not so long a trip, he thought, but on the other hand, before they were finished, it might be longer than a journey to the end of the world.
Rock had been in Asia for so long it was the only home he knew. He remembered another one, dimly and with a combination of rage and fear. In nightmares he experienced again his father looming over him, drunk and out of work again.
C’mon, his father would say to him in his nightmare. Just you an’ me, Junior, without your mother to save your stinking, worthless ass. Then his father would strip the bedcovers off him, strike him beside his ear with such stunning force that Rock would almost pass out. Then again and again. Nightmare or remembered past?
Rock did remember the day he had faced his father down and - after years of beefing up at the gym, at army boot camp, and on the first and only leave he had used to return home - with one stunningly quick left hook, had set him down on the pavement in front of the Pittsburgh ghetto tenement in which Rock had been brought up.
His father’s only response had been to smile slyly as he spat blood. I been waiting a long fucking time, Junior, he had said. Just remember I made you what you are.
Now, as he stood upon the pitching deck of one of the many boats he owned, Rock watched the Russian crossing unsteadily toward him. That leg had been a mess when one of Rock’s patrol boats had scooped Abramanov out of these storm-dark waters six months ago. Rock, who had access to the best of everything in Southeast Asia, had had his people do their best. But even so, he lacked the facilities and the personnel of a Walter Reed Hospital. Bones had been reset, but nerve damage was irreversible, at least in this part of the world. Of course, he hadn’t told Abramanov that; the man had been grateful enough to be saved from drowning in an angry sea. Abramanov, like many people with thoroughly analytical minds, had an irrational fear. Rock supposed it was his good karma that Abramanov’s phobia was drowning. He wasn’t too crazy about sharks, either, which made him all the more grateful for the timely rescue.
Rock stood at the railing with Abramanov. He removed his sunglasses, squinted as the first line of nimbostratus occluded the sun. The light had abruptly turned leaden. “If the weather holds,” he said, “we’ll have the robot down to the plane within an hour.”
He stared down into the ocean, trying hard to imagine the Soviet aircraft lying on an outcropping at the edge of an abyss of unimaginable depth. But already the water was darkening to the color of pitch.
The storm had blown in while they were too far out to sea. The captain of Rock’s patrol boat was a small Vietnamese who knew these waters better than many men twenty years his senior. “The storm, when it comes, will be a bad one,” he said in his lilting voice. “But if we turn back now, we will be heading broadside into the brunt of it, and I don’t believe I want to do that.”
Rock nodded. “Good, neither do I. Hold your position, then, and we’ll go to work.” He turned to Abramanov. “How will the robot perform in this weather?”
To prove his gratitude, Abramanov had spent the months of his rehab constructing a submersible robot, a seven-foot titanium shell housing a network of laser-guided telemetry, mini-computers, navigation transducers, sonar, a complement of turbo thrusters, articulated arms with sophisticated fingerlike pincer ends, video cameras, tungsten spotlights, backup lithium batteries, and the like, all connected with the shipboard computer via a fiber-optic cable bundle.
The complex creation appeared to be child’s play for Abramanov, who cobbled most of the robot’s component parts from Rock’s vast storehouse of military ordnance. Part of the robot’s design was based on the specialized manipulator “hands” Abramanov had built for his high-flux neutron-field hot room in Arzamas-16.
“The robot will be fine,” Abramanov said. “It will be six hundred feet below the surface and won’t feel a thing. It’s us that will be the problem if the storm really kicks in. If we can’t hold our position and can’t get the robot up in time, the cable could be severed and we’d lose the robot.”
“Get it over the side,” Rock said.
“But -“
“Do you want the cargo to sit underwater until some undersea quake breaks open the DU casings?”
“God forbid! The consequences of such an event would be catastrophic.”
“So you’ve said. Is the robot on the ridge yet?”
“I am still suspended.”
Abramanov had a curious habit when connected with the camera eyes and claw hands of the robot to put himself in its place.
Rock pulled up the hood of his slicker, went out on deck. Seawater washed across his ankles as the deck canted, then righted itself, the water sluiced away.
He went back into the cabin, where Abramanov sat cabled to the descending robot. “Where are we?”
“Almost there,” Abramanov said, checking his bank of portable computers, “I’m twenty feet from the upper level of the ledge.”
