Bunch had been friends with Sam’s grandfather since their first day together at the Special Operations Executive’s Camp X on the shores of Lake Ontario in Canada. Their friendship had been cemented during the training, and lasted through dozens of WWII drops into German-occupied Europe.
“Whatchya got in the bag?” Frank asked.
Sam set the contents out on the counter. “All the things your doctor tells you not to eat.”
“Atta boy! Come on, I’ll get the grill fired up.”
As usual, Frank grilled the steaks to perfection and roasted the potatos until the skin was golden brown and slightly crispy. He had chives for the sour cream and frosted mugs for the beer. It was the best meal Sam had eaten in a long time.
Comfortably stuffed, they sat on Frank’s back porch overlooking the courtyard garden. The sun was an hour away from setting and the garden was cast in hues of orange.
“So, tell me,” Frank said. “What’s new?”
“Same old thing,” Sam replied. As far as Frank knew, Sam had left government service to take a job as a private security consultant. “You know: meetings, airline food, bad hotels . . .”
Frank sipped his beer and glanced at Fisher over his glasses. “Up for a game?”
Sam smiled. Retired or not, Frank hadn’t lost a mental step. At eighty-four, he beat Sam at chess more often than he lost. “Sure. No money this time, though.”
“What’s the fun in that?”
“For you, none. For me, I get to eat next week.”
Frank gathered the chess set from inside, pushed aside the dishes, and laid out the board. By coin toss, Sam took black. Frank stared at the table for ten seconds, then moved a pawn.
Sam thought immediately, Queen’s Gambit. It was a favorite opening of Frank’s, but Sam knew better than to accept it at face value. As a man, Frank was without pretense; as a chess player, he was a shrewd and calculating opponent who gave no quarter. Sam had fallen too many times for his feints and ambushes; his rogue pawn charges that diverted Sam’s attention; his fake bishop attacks that shielded a flanking queen.
The game went on for forty minutes until finally Frank frowned and looked up. “I’d call that a draw.”
Sam’s eyes remained fixed on the board. His mind was whirling. Feints and false bishop attacks. . . When the movement of every piece on the board screams Queen’s Gambit, save for a lone pawn moving behind the scenes, do you ignore the Gambit and concentrate on the pawn? Of course not. The pawn is a mosquito—an aberation to be discounted. The queen, the deadliest piece on the board, is what you’re watching. The queen’s attack is what you try to counter. . . .
“Sam . . . Sam, are you here, son?”
Sam looked up. “What? Sorry?”
“I said, I think we’re at a draw.”
Sam chuckled. “Yeah, I guess we are. With you, I’ll take that any day.”
Frank moved to clear the pieces from the board, but Sam stopped him.
“Leave it for a little bit. I’m working on something.”
27
THIRD ECHELON
THIRTYminutes after receiving Lambert’s terse “Come in” call, Fisher swiped his card through the reader and pushed through the Situation Room’s door. Waiting for him at the conference table were Lambert, Grimsdottir, Redding, and a surprise guest: the CIA’s DDO, or Deputy Director of Operations, Tom Richards. Richards was in charge of one of the CIA’s two main arms: Operations, which put agents and case officers on the ground to collect intelligence. Intelligence then analyzed the collected data.
Richards’s presence wasn’t a good sign. As DDO, he knew about Third Echelon, but for the sake of compartmentalization, the CIA and Third Echelon generally remained distant cousins. Something significant had happened, and Fisher had a good idea what it was.
“Take a seat,” Lambert said. “Tom, this is my top field operative. For simplicity’s sake, let’s call him Fred.”
“Good to meet you, Fred.”
Fisher gave him a nod.
Lambert said to Fisher, “The other shoe has dropped. Tom has come over at the request of the President to brief us. For reasons that you’ll understand shortly, we’re going to be taking the lead on what comes next. Go ahead, Tom.”
Richards opened a folder lying on the table before him. “As you know, the predominant isotope we found in Slipstone’s water supply was cesium 137. It’s a natural byproduct of nuclear fission—whether from the detonation of nuclear weapons, or from the use of uranium fuel rods in nuclear power plants.
“The problem is, cesium 137 is too common. It’s everywhere: in the soil from nuclear weapon testing . . . in the air from power plant leaks. It’s the vanilla ice cream of nuclear waste—almost. In some cases, the cesium contains imperfections. For example, from where the uranium was mined, or in the case of fuel rods, from the chemical makeup of the water used to cool them.
“Since the 1950s the CIA has kept a database on isotopes—where and when it was found; its likely source . . . those sorts of things.
“It took a while, but we’ve identified the source of the cesium found at Slipstone. First of all, the material found aboard the Tregoand the traces we found at Slipstone are of identical makeup. No surprise there. In this case, the database came up with a hit from twenty-plus years ago.”
“When?” asked Grimsdottir.
“April 26th, 1986.”
Fisher knew the date. “Chernobyl.”
RICHARDSnodded. “You got it. On that date, following a systems test that got out of control, Chernobyl’s Reactor Number Four exploded and spewed tons of cesium 137 into the atmosphere.”
“How sure are you about this?” Lambert asked.
“That it’s Chernobyl cesium we found? Ninety percent.”
“And I assume we’re not talking about trace amounts here, are we?” asked Redding.
“No, it’s pure Chernobyl cesium. In the Trego’s forward ballast tank we found three hundred fifty pounds of debris that we’ve determined came from actual fuel rods.”
“From Chernobyl?” Grimsdottir repeated, incredulous. “ TheChernobyl?”
“Yes. We’ve estimated it took upwards of thirty pounds of material to produce the level of contamination we found in Slipstone’s water supply, so we’re talking about a total of almost four hundred pounds. There’s only one place you can get that much.”
“Ukraine or Russia can’t be behind this,” Lambert said.
“Not directly,” Richards replied, “but that’s where the Iranians got it. How we don’t know. That’s what we’re hoping you can answer. We need someone to go into Ukraine—into Chernobyl—and get a sample.”
Someone,Fisher thought. Good old Fred.
“And, if possible, do some sleuthing,” Richards added. “If this stuff is from Chernobyl, we need to know how and who. It had to leave there somehow. As far as we know, only about half of the undamaged fuel rods from Reactor Number Four are still inside the reactor core—in what the Russians call ‘the Sarcophagus.’ The other half were blown outward, into the surrounding country-side.”
Sarcophagus was an apt term, Fisher thought. The morning after the explosion, hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers and volunteers from all around the Soviet Union began converging on Pripyat, the town nearest the Chernobyl plant, which by then was in the middle of an evacuation that would eventually transport 135,000 residents from the area.
Working with no safety equipment except for goggles and paper masks, soldiers and civilians began shoveling debris back into the crater that had been Reactor Number Four. Radioactive dust and dirt swirled around the site, coating everything and everyone it touched with a layer of deadly cesium. Hastily formed construction brigades began mixing thousands of tons of concrete, which were then transported to the lip of the crater and dumped over the side and onto the shattered roof until finally the open maw was overflowing with concrete.