“What about security, Harry?” Paterson asked. “Your hurricane folks weren’t trying to escape.”
“No problem with security. The Air Force stored nukes there. Best security in the world. Triple razor wire fences all around, guard towers, the works. If it was good enough to keep terrorists out, it’s good enough to keep terrorists in. Right? So, what do you say?”
Gen. Paterson paused to think. Any place was better than the basketball stadium. Then he pictured the military base, coils of barbed wire. Old women, children inside. He looked at his assistant. The man’s eyes were closed. All color had left his face. Paterson knew why. He picked up the phone again.
“I can’t make a decision like this on my own, Harry.” He paused for an acknowledgement. Hearing nothing, he continued. “I don’t have to tell you that shipping Jewish refugees to a military detention camp surrounded by barbed wire has a pretty bad historical precedent for some people.”
“General, I’m well aware of historical precedents, but we live in the present. We have people in our custody, people who just happen to be Jews. We’re not holding them because they’re Jews, we’re holding them because we can’t do anything else with them. Which do you think would cause more of a fuss? Handing a bunch of Jews over to the Arabs or moving them into comfortable housing on Vacationland Cape Cod?”
“Agreed, Harry. I’ve gotta tell you, though, I get a sick feeling with the idea of me being in charge of a military detention camp filled with Jews. There are going to be photos of Jewish kids staring through barbed wire, American barbed wire. You know that. I don’t want to be America’s Adolph Eichmann.”
“You don’t want to be Jimmy Carter, either, General, wringing your hands and complaining that we’ve got a problem we can’t solve. This decision is in your hands because these people are in your hands. So, what’s your decision?”
“My decision is to run this by the president and let him decide. This is too big for me on my own.”
Gen. Paterson hung up and looked across the office at his assistant.
“So?” Paterson asked.
Harris Rosenberg turned and walked out, slamming the door, thinking of his grandfather, a sergeant in the US Army’s First Infantry Division, who was captured by the Germans two weeks after landing at Omaha Beach, held in the Berga slave labor camp for Jewish-American soldiers and haunted the rest of his life with dreams that left him screaming at night.
“What was that?” the assistant yelled at Rosenberg as he stormed past her. He turned his head without stopping and said as he continued down the hall, “That was my resignation.”
CHAPTER 28
The crew of the Wrangel made short work of refloating the Hinckley yawl with inflatable salvage bags. The sailboat was towed to the Coast Guard station at nearby Rockland. A Department of Homeland Security Gulfstream 550 jet landed at Owl’s Head Airport near Rockland within two hours. The four members of the Nuclear Emergency Support Team, a NEST team, hurried to the Coast Guard minivan waiting to drive them to the sailboat. The team members carried innocuous-looking backpacks, but when the Coast Guard driver offered to help the one female member of the team with her bag, she angrily pushed him aside, then reacted to his hurt expression.
“I’m sorry, sailor,” she said. “This isn’t feminism; it’s just that what’s in this bag is very expensive and very fragile. If anybody is going to drop it and get in trouble, I’d rather it be me.”
Chief among the devices was a ten-pound battery-powered instrument called a Cryo3. It looked like little more than a shiny brass coffee can with legs on the bottom and a handle on top. In reality, the device was a sensitive radiation monitor developed by scientists at the University of California at Berkeley’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The unit contained an extremely high-purity germanium crystal designed to absorb energetic photons emanating from radioactive isotopes. Germanium is sensitive to radiation only at extremely low temperatures. The scientists who designed the Cryo3 used a cooling system originally built for cell phone tower equipment to deep-freeze the germanium crystal. Analysis of the machine’s readout could pinpoint both the quantity and type of radioactive material present.
Arriving at the dock, the team leader climbed onto the sailboat carrying his Cryo3 and disappeared into the cabin for five minutes. When he emerged, his face was ashen. He sat in the boat’s cockpit and looked at the anxious faces of the NEST team members.
“What is it, boss?” the woman team member asked.
The team leader looked up and spoke quietly.
“U-235,” he said. “A clear, strong indication of U-235 and nothing else. This is it. The real thing.”
He stood.
“Get me the radio,” he said. “Things have to start happening, fast.”
As one team member handed the team leader a high frequency satellite phone, equipped with a sophisticated scrambler, the Coast Guard driver standing next to the woman turned to her with an inquisitive look on his face.
“What does that mean, U-235? Are we all hot or something, hair gonna fall out, or worse than that?” he asked with a worried tone.
“No, nothing like that. We’re not in any danger, at least not from radiation,” the woman answered. “U-235 is a radio isotope. That means it is a material that is radioactive, that emits radiation. But U-235 is a fairly low-level emitter, not all that dangerous to handle. It can be blocked by something as simple as aluminum foil.”
“Oh, so that’s a good thing,” the sailor said. “How come all the long faces, then, if this is the good radioactive stuff?”
“It isn’t all that good,” she answered. “Most radioisotopes have lots of different uses—for medical devices or scientific instruments, for example. U-235 is different. It has only one use. That’s the problem we have here.”
“Why,” he asked. “What the hell is the stuff used for?” The sailor laughed. “What, they make bombs from it or something?”
The woman looked at him with a deadpan expression. “You’ve hit it right on the nose, sailor,” she said. “The only thing U-235 is good for is making bombs, very powerful bombs. Think Hiroshima. What was on board that boat was either enough U-235 to make a bomb or, God forbid, an atomic bomb itself.”
“How can you tell whether it was a bomb or just some material?” the sailor asked.
“Easy. Either when we find it,” she answered, “or when it goes bang.”
NEST could call on four helicopters and three fixed-wing airplanes—a King Air B-200 twin turboprop, a Citation-II jet, and an ancient Convair 580T—all equipped with advanced radiological search systems. These aircraft could sweep a fifty-square-mile area in a matter of hours. Airborne detection of atomic radiation was a tricky business, however. U-235 was almost impossible to detect from the air unless the substance was lying on the ground in the open. Just a few inches of concrete or a solid substance like granite could totally block the radiation. Maine islands provided most of the granite used for centuries of public buildings across the United States.
The team leader had little expectation that the material, or the bomb containing it, would be found from an aerial search, but he had to try nonetheless.
More likely to be successful was an old-fashioned detective investigation. That began with tracing the history of the sailboat. The Coast Guard’s Vessel Documentation Office collected registration and home port information for every American boat about thirty feet. Documentation numbers were required to be engraved into a structural portion of the hull.