Pa'an
Fishin’ for Fission

Senator Sax Hornsby flipped though the tickets and itinerary handed him by his assistant. Maxine. The route had been an odyssey of airports, a bus and two car rentals. It would have been difficult to determine his destination from his original departure, in case someone was looking. He suspected they were. It was dusk in Waxahatchie, the overcast dimming his vision of a nearly empty enormous parking lot, and it hardly seemed worth all that trouble. His long raincoat whipped about his knees in the stiff Texas wind.

Another figure came out of a Ford Truck at the far end of the oversized parking lot. A pair of figures from a black SUV joined them. The trio merged on Sax’s space. One of them he recognized. The other two he did not recognize. “They had better be who they are supposed to be.”

Sax started with “White queen to….”

“Bullshit, Sax, they already know about us. Let’s get this started. Meet Dr. Leonard Goodjoy, from B & W Nuclear Engineering. He has clearance but he no longer works for any government agency.” Sax had already cleared Dr. Goodjoy, a former nuclear weapons engineer.

“Senator! I used to work for Dr. Hapgood at D.O.E. Now I’m on the design of the nuclear power plants for the new British subs. We’re civilian contractors.” He shook hands with Sax. Sax gave him a practiced look-over. He was a mild-looking guy of middle age with crew-cut blond hair. Someone you would pass in a crowd and never notice unless you looked in his eyes. There was definitely a lot going on in there, not all of it happy.

He wore an open white dress shirt under a plaid sweater and carried a large, aluminum packing case on a strap over his shoulder.

“And here is the poor fellow we rousted out of a sound sleep this morning. He was the maintenance guy for the new owners of this facility.”

“Al, please. Just call me Al. Retired now, but I bet nothing much has changed in the last few months. I still have the keys and combinations, but the whole facility is empty, so who cares?”

“Al, we wish it were still empty. Are you all with us for this? Al? Dr. Goodjoy?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Just Lenny, please. I’d rather not be announced to anyone. You know they keep all former weapons techs under surveillance.”

“Jag, where are the rest of your ops?”

“They’re here, Sax. Best if you can’t see them.” He nodded to a few 18-wheelers parked in a row near the entrance, engines running, drivers not visible.

Al led them to a concrete and steel building with some of the windows boarded up. The main entrance was locked and taped. He led them to a smaller door labeled, ”Personnel Only” and pulled out a bunch of keys. “Let’s see if they still work. Yep, this one does it.”

Jag wedged the door open with a piece of wood and waved. Five men on wheeled vehicles rolled off the back of one of the trucks and came quickly to the door. “Hey, Boss, here’s your Segways.” Sorry Sam stayed there with the electric vehicles and Sal, Marco, Devan and Giorgio double timed back to the truck and disappeared. Each Segway had a light strapped to the basket in front. Sorry Sam’s Segway hauled a small trailer.

“Do we really need these?”

“Ever ride a Segway before, Sax? We’ve got 27 kilometers of tunnel here. This was supposed to be the Superconducting Super Collider, the most powerful particle accelerator in the world…”

“..that never got built. I’m on the NRC, Jag. I know. Another case of money, politics and ignorance.” Sax got on one of the Segways and ran it up and down the corridor. “I could get used to this.”

“Al, lead the way, please.” Jag followed Al and Sorry Sam brought up the rear. Al opened a panel and turned a big power switch. The expedition rolled down the corridor to a huge elevator in a bay marked “Detector One” and a scrawled legend, “Big Mama.”

The elevator held all of them with room to spare. Al inserted a key and pushed the only button on the panel. The elevator moved at a geriatric pace. “She’s slow, but who’s to complain? She’s still working.”

Sax nodded to a gadget pinned to Jag’s shoulder. “Still got a connection down here?”

Aura’s voice sounded tinny, “Did you miss me, Sax? Say you did!”

Sax chuckled. “I do miss you, girl. Good place to hide fissionables. No one would be surprised to find radiation levels a bit high down here.”

“We still have Fermilab in the US and five more overseas. All I found were those seven. I hope that’s it.”

“Aura, how are those ops going?”

“Too early to say, but they are all on schedule except for Kabul. It’s still heavily guarded.”

“How much do you expect there?”

“No way to know. It’s another one located near a big city.”

The elevator whined down and stopped. Al punched OPEN and an expanse of tunnel curved away in the distance. A lot of lights were broken or burned out. There were color coded pipes everywhere, but a fat yellow pipe with radiation symbols on it dominated the center of the arrangement. Coils of wire, obviously magnet arrays, surrounded the pipe at frequent intervals. They were insulated, but there was no frost on them.

“Not cooled to superconducting temperatures any more,” Al mentioned, with a note of regret.

Sorry Sam got in front of Jag, blocking the way. “Sorry” he said, as he set out the first radio repeater and showed them how to turn on their lights. They trundled down the echoing tunnel, a hundred feet underground.

Not far away was a bay that stretched up into a high dim alcove. It was full of electronics surrounding a tank studded with short tubes like a giant electronic porcupine. “THAT was supposed to detect the Higgs boson!” Lenny said. “Congress thought that was science fiction,” replied Sax. Lenny smiled, “It wasn’t my Nobel prize, anyway. I’m just a nuke engineer.”

“No readings here.” Jag bent his head over his shoulder gadget. They rolled on for what seemed like an hour.

“Spooky place.” Sorry Sam still brought up the rear.

Static crackled from Lenny’s handheld radiation counter. “We got radiation. 10 millijoules on this meter. Climbing fast. Gamma, some alpha.”

“Roll on by it. Watch your dosimeters.’

“Dropping off now.”

“Going back. Peak is here. Sax, Al, stay back. Lenny, how much time do we have?”

Lenny glanced at his dosimeter reading. “Hours at this level.” Lenny’s voice quavered, though. Could a nuke engineer be afraid of radiation? On the other hand, thought Sax, who would know better?

“Sam, unlimber the bot.” Sorry Sam took the cover off the small crawler robot and nearly tripped over it setting up the robot. That caused him to emit another “Sorry.” It turned out that Sam was an expert at remote guidance. The little robot, “Betsy,” was desert tan and had lights, a long, flexible arm, several cameras and was studded with instruments. Sam guided it along the corridor to the hot spot while the rest stood back ten yards. There was a hatch in the wall. The arm plucked at the hatch and it fell open. Inside was a lever. The arm pulled on the lever and a large panel of nearby wall rolled up into the ceiling. It was pitch dark inside.

“Over 200 millijoules and steady,” Lenny called.

Sam turned on Betsy’s lights. The space was the size of a large warehouse. It was stacked with small plastic crates with the three yellow triangles of radiation symbols. Benches bearing electronics and machinery lined one wall. All of them could clearly see into the room from their position in the tunnel, and those closest to Sam could see his remote display. “Jackpot,” Jag said, but Lenny was sweating and pale.

“We need to see what’s in those crates and get a count.” There was no playfulness in Aura’s voice.

The little robot found a lone crate on the floor and pried the lid off. Inside was an array of silvery vials, each with the radiation logo and this symbol inscribed in it:

94Pu239

“Shit, shit, shit!” Lenny cringed.

“We have to open one of those vials, Jag,” Aura squawked from her speaker.

“Not a good idea. Not a good idea at all,” Lenny answered.

“Have you seen these vials before?”

“Maybe. They could be plutonium hexafluoride, or pellets, or rods.”

“Al, give me a rough count of the crates you can see. Lenny, watch the screen. Sam, open a vial.”

The robot’s arm reached into the packing case, slowly and carefully, and extracted a tube. It looked like an aluminum cigar tube. The lid was an aluminum screw cap.

“Guys, do you know what this is?” Lenny’s voice was shaky and sweat was pouring down his face. “This is weapons grade plutonium. Enough to make Hiroshima look like a firecracker. You don’t get any warning with this stuff. Your eyes see the flash but your brain is vaporized before the message gets to it.”

“We have to know what form it’s in. It may be just reactor fuel.”

Under Sam’s guidance, the robot began to unscrew the cap. “If it’s liquid and you spill it, we’re all dead. Keep it right side up.” Very slowly the cap unscrewed. It came off. The robot arm lowered the tube and the light spilled inside. “Solid. Packed in something. What now?”

Lenny said nothing. “Lenny, do you recognize this or not?”

“This is top, top secret. I’m not allowed to say.”

“Lenny, if you’re right, we have enough here to obliterate Dallas, Fort Worth and several miles of suburbs. This is no time to pull out the secrets act. I’m an elected senator on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and I have clearance.”

“Not for this you don’t.”

“Dr. Goodjoy, without your input I can’t estimate how much plutonium we have here or how much more we need to find. Don’t you know? This cache was not put here by any legal agency of the United States. The people who put this here are planning to kill billions of humans.”

“I don’t know anything about that. All I know is that this AI may be connected to aliens that could be listening in to me right now.”

Jag sighed. “If you’re referring to Ambassador Zovoarcnor, you damn well should know that the Chinese tried to blow him up with a nuke. He never retaliated. I assure you that the Pa’an, who have had a few million years head start on our science, have nothing new to learn from our puny fission weapons. If they were going to kill us we’d already be extinct.”

“They nuked him? Can’t be. I saw that last announcement on the Web.”

Aura piped up, “Hey, Dr. Nuke, Zovo has a neutronium shell and he’s the size of a tennis ball. You know how to engineer that? Don’t be stupid. It’s us down here that the Order is going to kill if we don’t get all their fissionables.”

Lenny was shaking. “I – I can’t.”

“See if you can get at what’s inside the vials, Sam.” At Jag’s direction, Sam got the cap completely unscrewed. “Eight hundred millijoules, alpha particles detected,” Lenny announced. “The alpha’s are the dangerous emissions. Plutonium 239 decays to uranium, which is a neutron emitter. Neutrons are going right through all of us now.”

A tapered rod the size of a thick pencil came out of the tube. It was hexagonal, like a pencil. There was some kind of a silvery coating and a glass coating over that.

“Well, Dr. Nuke, what have we got? Reactor rods? Metal billets? Time to fess up!” Even through the tiny speaker, Aura sounded exasperated.

There was a long silence. Lenny stared at the screen, sweated, shook, walked away, came back. “Those are finished segments for a plutonium bomb. The segments fit into slots in a spherical form. Shaped charges blow the segments together and they go into fission cascade. Blooey! Plutonium is a weird metal, you can’t machine it pure. It changes into something dense and brittle when you put pressure on it from a tool. Allotrope five. And it’s chemically unstable. It burns in the air like phosphorus, spewing radioactive stuff everywhere. Those are one hundred grams each, alloyed with aluminum so they hold together longer, and coated with boron silicate glass to be double sure. But if you scratch it or drop it….”

“Go on,” urged Jag.

“This whole warehouse is a bomb assembly area. All this gear is for assembling bombs and triggering them off. At this level underground a nuke of that size would vaporize the earth over it and the fallout would be – would be … you don’t want to know.”

“Al, have you got a rough count?”

“Yes, I wrote it on my hand here.” Jag relayed it to Aura.

“One hundred four metric tons, it the count is right and they are really a tenth of a kilo each.”

“Yield in the thousands of megatons,” muttered Lenny.

“Aura, how much did we find in other operations?”

“We have a total of just over three hundred tons. Qingdao, Karachi, Chicago, and Dallas were four of the big targets.”

“Lenny, how much plutonium is there?”

“It’s not a natural element. All of it is produced in fission reactors, so we figured it to be no more than five hundred tons, worldwide. It only takes about five kilos to make a good bomb. A lot is in stockpiled weapons owned by the nuclear powers or in reactor cores. I can’t understand where this lot came from.”

“We’re missing enough to blow the world to radioactive hell. And that doesn’t count the weapons grade uranium.”

“My turn,” Sax had his notes and pictures. “I need to make a call to Hapgood and get this cleaned up and secured.”

“Let’s get out of here!”

“Sam, call Leathers and the squad and have them fill the ends of the tunnel with rubble and cement. The good guys in the government can finish the job later.”

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