Take Feodor Nikolin down at the opposite end of the table. On the front of the sheet, Nikolin was an advisor to the elected governor of Russia’s Baltic oil and gas pipeline region. Back of the sheet? The election and his civilian appointment had been fixed by the new ultranationalist boss at the Kremlin, President Arkady Pedachenko, whose Honor and Soil Party had crested a populist wave to power… Nikolin by no coincidence being Pedachenko’s nephew by marriage, and a former colonel from the military’s Raketnye voiska strategicheskogonaznacheniya, or Strategic Rocket Forces, which oversaw Russia’s nuclear arsenals.
Take Azzone Spero, the Italian Treasury and Economic Planning Minister. King of the kickback, he’d violated a slew of legal bidding procedures to award government waste-collection licenses to front companies run by the LaCana crime syndicate, known to earn billions annually from the illegal dumping of hazardous wastes throughout Europe.
Or take Sebastian Alcala, the squat, dark man seated opposite Nikolin. His open résumé showed him to be a mid-level administrator with the Argentinian mining exploration secretariat. But Morgan’s secret file tied him to everything from embezzlement of state funds to facilitation of illegal arms traffic for the black marketeer and narco-terrorist El Tio, who’d recently slipped into limbo like a vanishing ghost.
The book was similar for the rest. There was Jonas Papp from Hungary, an entrepreneur in the transitional market economy with several legitimate upstart software firms and a flourishing underground income stream from his money-laundering enterprises. There was Constance Burns, Morgan’s UKAE inchworm. And there was the South African foreign trade deputy with a perpetually outheld palm, Jak Selebi…
“I’m wondering if you can explain the incident to everyone, Jak?” Morgan said at length. His eyes had come to rest on Selebi. “I realize this Bouvetoya thing was long before your government’s time, but maybe it’d be best that way.”
Selebi looked back at him. “In a sense you’ve answered your own question,” he replied, speaking with a mannered British accent. “When the change came, our predecessors took much of the information about their relinquished nuclear weapons program with them. They did not want it available to us. We may assume they judged that the development of such capabilities was to be exclusively reserved for civilized races.” He paused a moment, his brown face expressionless, devoid of the cutting irony in his voice. “I can tell you this. Throughout the nineteen-sixties, America launched a dozen orbital satellites for the detection of atmospheric nuclear explosions. This program was named Vela. A Spanish word, I believe…”
“Meaning ‘Watchmen,’ ” said Alcala.
“Thank you.” Selebi exchanged glances with him. “The crude optical sensors on the Velas could not fix locations with anything close to the exactitude of modern satellites. Otherwise, their reliability was unchallenged… until one of them, Vela 6911, registered a double flash scientists associated with an atomic blast of between three and four kilotons.”
“These matched other signals the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory picked up here on earth,” Morgan said. “Acoustic waves around the Scotia Ridge, a chain of mountains between Antarctica and Africa that’s mostly underwater. Except where it isn’t underwater and the mountaintops poking out above the ocean’s surface form islands. Bouvetoya’s one of them.” Another smile. “Sorry to break in after asking you to tell the tale, but I felt it was important for everyone to be aware of that little nugget.”
Selebi’s nod showed flat acceptance.
“The consensus of military, intelligence, and government nuclear research scientists responsible for analyzing the Vela evidence was that an atomic detonation had occurred at or below sea level,” he continued. “But when these findings were presented to the Carter Administration, it ordered a second panel of academics from outside the government to conduct a separate review. Their assessment refuted the original determination. It stated the indications were unverifiable and may have been based on false signals caused by sensor malfunction or a meteor collision. The dispute it sparked between the two panels led to animosities that I understand linger to this day.” He looked at Morgan. “That is the extent of what I can say about the affair with confidence.”
“Then let me put in some footnotes,” Morgan said. “One of the scientists in that first group was a top-notch man with the Los Alamos think tank. Knew his stuff inside out, helped develop the Vela program. When their report got the presidential blow-off, he made some testy comments, said they were all zoo animals coming out with idiotic theories to discredit his panel’s conclusions. Talk is that the White House was gun-shy about a confrontation with the South Africans, whom it damn well knew were manufacturing atomics, and maybe doing it with Israeli participation.”
He shrugged. “You got to sympathize with Jimmy’s predicament. With the gas crunch fresh in people’s minds, and Khomeini swift-kicking the Shah out of Iran, the poor guy was deep in the moat. Sharks closing in around him. Another domestic or foreign affairs boondoggle and any chance he had of swimming his way out was finished. The press, political opponents, average citizens, everybody wanted a pound of his flesh. Jimmy, well, the last thing he would’ve wanted was to out two long-standing allies for their complicity in banned nuclear-bomb testing. What was he supposed to do? Impose trade embargoes? Ask the U.N. Security Council to censure them? Neither option would’ve been to America’s advantage. So the sats, Navy, CIA, and Defense Intelligence Agency people became wrong, and the ivory-tower professors became right. In my opinion, Jimmy managed to convince himself of their rightness, and the nuke turned into an unexplained occurrence. Better for everyone that way.”
Constance Burns was nodding her head.
“A zoo event,” she said.
The affirmative smile Morgan directed at her was as gentle as a pat on the back.
“There you go,” he said. “Now, as our good friend Jak more or less implied, there’s a dash of supposition in what we’ve been talking about. Over the past couple of decades South African officials have admitted to the test, then backed off their admissions, then acknowledged them again, then qualified their acknowledgments, then shut up altogether. Same with the Israelis. Their newspapers printed articles quoting Knesset members about their government’s exchange of nuclear weapons blueprints for uranium from South Africa’s mines, then got those quotes retracted on them. But I believe the story of the zoo event’s been written. A nuclear detonation took place near Bouvetoya Island in September 1977. Low yield, about a third of a Hiroshima. Maybe subsurface, maybe an air-burst. It took place. And the leader of the Western world covered his ears, and closed his eyes, and claimed to be deaf and blind to the incident. Because dealing with it wasn’t advantageous to him. And for one other major reason.”
Langkafel looked at him. “Which would be…?”
“It happened within the Antarctic Circle.” Morgan swiveled around to face the Norwegian and pushed his glasses lower down his nose with his finger, perching them on his nose’s tip. “Where else on earth would it have been so easy to chalk the whole thing up to a quirk of nature? Where else does every country that’s got a flag-pole stuck in the ice want to pretend it’s given up strategic interests for some high-flown scientific principle? They all want to tap the continent’s resources. They all want bases where they can deploy armed forces. But they keep skating around each other, none of them wanting to make the first move. If the time ever comes when one of them does, their loops, spins, and figure-eights will stop, the blades will come off, and they’ll have to use their edges to carve out real territorial borderlines. This is my wedge of the snow pie. This is yours. You say no? Well, we got ourselves a scrap here. Power replaces principles. The coldest spot on the planet becomes its biggest geopolitical hot spot. That’s the reality nobody’s set to confront. For now they’d rather leave it to the polies and penguins.”