THREE MINUTES

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Chapter 3

04:30, 25 August 2000

Non-Aligned Terrorist Information Office (NATIO)

Federal Bureau of Investigation, Washington, D.C.

"Whose bomb was it?"

NATIO's chief, John Lionel, stood bent over at the head of the conference table. In front of him were several tiny balls of crumpled cellophane plastic; after quitting smoking, he had taken refuge in mint candy. At some point in the last five minutes, he had ingested another, and had reduced the plastic wrapper to a perfect pellet-sized sphere. He dropped it on the table next to the others, glaring at his staff.

They were composed of intelligence experts, software engineers, and weapons analysts, recruited (or "stolen") from other agencies over the years Lionel had run NATIO. As a group they represented the some of most innovative thinkers in the federal government, let alone the FBI; none of them were older than thirty-five.

"That's the weirdness," said Jorge Anzado, NATIO's Imagery Specialist. "We're not sure. The Nuclear Emergency Search Team isn't sure yet, either."

Less than a half hour earlier, everyone in the room had been at home, likely sleeping. Lionel had received the first call from the NRO, the National Reconnaissance Office, over his secure home line. Their orbital surveillance satellites had detected a nuclear detonation in the Atlantic.

Lionel had reached his office in a record 4 minutes. This was made all the more impressive considering he dialed no less than two dozen phone numbers during the drive.

Every member of his team broke their own personal records for driving in to work after that.

Anzado stood and walked to the map at the end of the dim room. Just off the Spanish coastline was a single red stickpin, surrounded by several white pins. "The red pin, obviously," he began, "is NEST's estimation of the center of the explosion. These," he continued, pointing to the white pins, "are NEST's sample areas. We should be able to tell you where the nuclear material was fabricated within the hour."

"Mike," Lionel said, looking at his historian, Michael Malling. "What's in the area?"

"You're going to love this," said Malling. "There's an old Broken Arrow down there."

Lionel scowled. "Broken Arrow" was what the old hands called an accident involving nuclear weapons. There was a whole lexicon, a different term for specific types of mishaps. Some were under the impression the codes were a rating system for the severity of the accident, but it was more a convenience for the General Accounting Office.

One term was "Faded Giant", which just meant an event that somehow involved a nuclear reactor or radiological accident. There was "Empty Quiver", meaning something in the nuclear arsenal had been lost, misplaced, or stolen. A "Bent Spear" was an accident that happened while the warhead was active. A "Dull Sword" was a damaged weapon accident.

Most people would be surprised that the Department of Defense had nearly as many words for "nuclear accident" as Eskimos did for snow; it had become sadly necessary. Ever since the 1950's there had been quite literally thousands of accidents around the U.S. nuclear arsenal; hundreds of bombs and rockets accidentally dropped during loading or assembly, aircraft carrying them had crashed, ground transportation crashes, launch pad or silo mishaps, weapons released from aircraft or ships by accident, even nuclear weapons being accidentally crushed and punctured by other equipment.

While official policy maintained that no nuclear weapon has ever been detonated by accident, those who know better said a special prayer of thanks for the Nuclear Emergency Search Team, or NEST, at least once before they went to bed at night. Lionel was among those who knew better.

He popped another mint into his mouth and began working on the wrapper with his free hand.

Malling flipped open a case and pulled out dossier copies, and began handing them out to everyone at the table. "The USS Scorpion. Skipjack class submarine, lost on 22 May, 1968 during 'routine' exercises. Which," he dipped his head and looked around the room, "as everyone here knows, at the time meant threading through Soviet sub nets."

Most heads in the room nodded. Malling continued. "She was carrying two Mark 45 ASTOR nuclear-tipped torpedoes, low-yield nukes with an underwater kill radius of about a cubic mile."

"So it was our bomb," said Lionel. "Detonated thirty-odd years later? Are we talking about simple sea water deterioration here?"

"No chance." Eli Holmes leaned forward in his chair. His ID card placed him in Weapons Analysis. "The type would have deteriorated after five years, and at that depth the material would have just spread relatively harmlessly on the sea floor." Holmes looked carefully around the table. "A few glowing shrimp, but nothing serious. And even back then, these things didn't detonate themselves. We used to run the warheads into brick walls at 300 miles per hour." Holmes raised his eyebrows. "The watchword for nuclear weapons has always been 'robust'."

"And this was no Mark 45 warhead sitting at the bottom of the ocean," added Anzado. "The spread suggests it detonated at the surface. Also, this was much bigger. I'll wait for NEST's numbers, but my best guess is the 10 to 20 kiloton range."

"Which wasn't standard issue for the ends of torpedoes in those days," said Malling.

Lionel rubbed his hands over his face. "O.K.," he breathed, "So this Scorpion submarine has nothing to do with the blast we monitored?"

The room was briefly quiet.

"I'm afraid that's the weirdness," said Anzado finally. "It's exactly centered on Navy's coordinates for the sub. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute took pictures of it on the ocean floor as recently as 1986, which tightened the location up to within inches. And," he added, "those pictures in '86 looked just like we thought it would. Broken up, spread out. Water samples were negative on contamination from the warheads. It was as clean a site as we could ever have hoped for."

"Ben," asked Lionel, turning in his chair, "Do we have any satellite data on this site?"

Ben Hackett was a 23-year old "data miner" Lionel had hired practically sight-unseen. Hackett had, Lionel discovered, some amazing memory abilities. He could read through thousands of pages of budget line-items, and come out of it with total recall. As impressive as this ability was, it paled next to the wizardry he could elicit from a computer terminal.

"We've got some," said Hackett. "Our own weather satellites, some spy birds, that sort of thing. Obviously we've taken care of securing the non-government satellite imagery that might have captured the explosion, so we can add that to the list."

"However," he continued, "there's something more interesting going on with satellites than just imagery. This--" He gestured toward the wall map, "-- is the area we're monitoring, where the blast took place." Hackett stood up, pulling several flimsy sheets from his briefcase, one of which he pinned next to the wall map. "This is a map I generated of NRO and NSA satellite passes over the past three months." He stuck another, and another. "This breaks it down by specific birds, you know, Backboard, Keyhole, whatever...here's NSA's fancy new one we don't know anything about," he said, tapping on that image irritably.

He pinned the last flimsy to the wall. "This," he said emphatically, "Is CIA's bird from the 1996 launch. The TRANSOM nuclear material detection and tracking satellite."

Anzado raised his eyebrows. "Four passes," he said quietly. "They passed over that section of ocean four times in two weeks, prior to the explosion."

Hackett nodded. It was a quick group.

"Ben," said Lionel, "Do we have TRANSOM data from those passes? Is there any indication about the condition of the nuclear material?"

"Yeah," said Hackett, smiling, "I asked for it, and got it myself while I was waiting. This TRANSOM data from the past two weeks was in the process of being analyzed, but had a pretty low priority. This site was being swept as part of the VIGILANT SEARCHLIGHT nuclear mishap monitoring program. Small, and probably rusted-out forty year-old nukes aren't the biggest threat we face today. But," he continued, "it shows we should have been more interested. The data from these passes indicates the nukes on that sub were much bigger than they were supposed to be."

Hackett pinned up a new flimsy, this one showing an arcane series of bar graphs.

Malling, the historian, was the first to interpret the chart. "That's way bigger than a sub-killing torpedo, especially back then."

"We're estimating from the satellite data enough material for two 20 kiloton warheads, which I expect will be consistent with NEST's information on the detonation we witnessed this morning."

Lionel walked to the wall map, feeling a sinking feeling. He tapped at the white pins. "Anzado," he said, "Tell me about the radioactive material spread."

Anzado had been keeping one ear to a mobile phone throughout the briefing. He flipped through his notes from what had been coming from the other end. "First estimates," he said somberly. "Nowhere near enough material to account for two warheads. This was a single detonation, with only the material from one bomb spread across the sea."

"Jesus." Lionel sat. "And the current TRANSOM data? Do we have that?"

Hackett shook his head. "We won't have another pass from TRANSOM for another eight hours. But I promise you, that material's gone." Hackett looked around the table. "We're light one nuclear device."

Lionel nodded. "Get me a packet together." He stood, and everyone else at the table did as well. "I'm going to have to brief the Secretary of Defense."

As his team left the room to assemble data for him, Lionel carefully set another wrapper pellet on the table in front of him.

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