Just as it was incredible how easy it was to manufacture such power as this. A surge of electric current, and the detonators would set off the plastic explosives. The resulting explosion, expanding in all directions but tamped by the lead shielding, would crush the plutonium sphere, initiating critical mass. The nuclear scientists who’d worked on the device estimated a potential yield of somewhere between fifty and one hundred kilotons.
More than enough for what had to be done.
Pak checked the final set of connections, watching the swing of the needle on his voltmeter. Everything was working, ready for him to throw the switches in the proper order. Another series of checks proved the pressure sensor and timer were operating as well. Carefully then, he closed up the trunk and locked it, then replaced the lid on the transport crate.
“It is ready,” he said.
And this time he told the truth.
The Royal Air Force base at Lakenheath is located in East Anglia, the thumb-shaped extrusion of low hills and quaint villages, of farms and cattle-raising country extending into the North Sea between the Thames River and the gulf known locally as the Wash. The first thing a visitor sees as he enters the base’s main gate is a replica of the Statue of Liberty, dedicated in 1981 to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the base and of the 48th Tactical Fighter Wing, known — after its insignia — as the “Statue of Liberty Wing.” The replica is impressive, though not so big as the one overlooking Upper New York Bay; it was cast in bronze from one of F. A. Bartholdi’s first-step models for the original Statue of Liberty.
When Mineman Second Class Greg Johnson had first seen the statue it had made him homesick, and he hadn’t even been out of the United States for twenty-four hours yet. Well… perhaps homesick was the wrong word. But he did wonder what he was doing here… wondered if he’d made a mistake in becoming a Navy SEAL.
The C-130 had rumbled in to Lakenheath’s Number One runway half an hour earlier and was standing now in an out-of-the-way corner of the base while an Air Force working party emptied the transport’s capacious hold. The SEALs were on hand to take charge of their gear as soon as it had been off-loaded, but for the moment they were standing at ease in formation, watching the airedales unload their gear.
Johnson stood a little apart from the other SEALs of the First Platoon, still uncertain of his standing with them. Twenty-six weeks of grueling BUD/S training had failed to completely erase the awe he’d felt for the Navy SEALs ever since he’d first heard about the unit. But in fact he’d never given more than a passing thought to actually becoming one, not until he’d already signed up and reported for duty with BUD/S Class 23.
By then, of course, it was too late to back out without looking like a wimp—pussy was the vulgarity used by the other men — and that was something Johnson refused to accept from anyone.
“So what do you think, Skeeter?” Jaybird Sterling asked him, jolting his thoughts.
“Huh? About what?”
Fernandez, standing next to Jaybird, nodded toward the C-130. “About the bus, man. We were just wondering if she was gonna be of any use over here.”
“You said you just got out of bus driver’s school,” Sterling added. “We were just wondering if you’d logged any hours on that thing.”
“Not many,” Johnson admitted.
“Hell, I still don’t know why they shipped the thing over here,” Brown said. “Without a mother sub, we can’t go very far in that thing.” SDVs were generally carried on the deck of specially modified Navy subs. Without a big sub to piggyback a ride with, the SDV would be sharply limited in range and usefulness.
“You know the Navy.” Fernandez laughed. “Always prepared.”
“That’s the Boy Scouts.”
“A bunch of amateurs. I bet they don’t pack Mark VIII SDVs with them when they go on a hike.”
“I wish it was one of the new babies,” Johnson said. “One of the real hot deep-divers.”
Gregory Lawrence Johnson had long been fascinated by the sea and by the various means that man had employed to explore it. He’d first heard about Navy frogmen as a boy of ten or eleven when he’d read an account of the Navy Underwater Demolition Teams of World War II… and of how they’d pioneered SCUBA and cold-water dry-suit research in the late forties and into the fifties.
Born and raised in southern California, not far from Malibu, he’d already been an experienced swimmer and an expert with SCUBA gear when he’d joined the Navy at the age of eighteen. More than anything else, Johnson had seen the SEALs as a chance to continue his love affair with diving. It had sounded like a real adventure, for the Navy was doing things with deep-diving submersibles and underwater breathing gear still totally unknown in the civilian world.
Skeeter Johnson possessed a determined singlemindedness of purpose that his buddies often laughed about. He’d enlisted in the Navy wanting to be a diver, and his recruiter had suggested that he choose one of two possible routes… through EOD school — that was Explosive Ordnance Disposal — or as a SEAL. In fact, he’d originally put down EOD school as his first choice, and SEALs second. EOD divers, he’d been told, spent a lot of time practicing their trade in and under the water, and they had to learn to use some pretty exotic gear while they were about it. His interest in the SEALs stemmed mostly from the fact that his recruiter had told him that the men who drove the Navy’s small submersibles were SEALs first. After Navy boot camp, he’d gone to Mineman School simply because that rating would open a direct route to advanced EOD training.
Unfortunately, the continuing military cutbacks that had begun with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War had cut sharply into the Explosive Ordnance Disposal program. Not even the problems the Navy had faced from enemy mines in both the Tanker War in the eighties and the brief but spectacular Gulf War with Iraq in 1991 had convinced a shortsighted budget oversight committee that EOD needed more ships, equipment, and personnel. Minesweeping and disposal, after all, had always been the tediously boring part of modern warfare; Harpoons and Tomahawks, Sea Wolf submarines and Stealth aircraft were all a lot more sexy, and even some of those programs were all in serious trouble. There’d been no openings at all for new EOD personnel when Johnson completed his basic mineman training.
SEAL recruits, however, were still much in demand… not so much because the Navy felt it needed them for war, but because there was such a high attrition rate among the SEAL candidates. The dropout rate for would-be SEALs averaged something like sixty percent; only five percent of all recruits actually finished with the class they started with, and the SEAL program aggressively sought volunteers for BUD/S training… fresh meat for the grinder. Though the demand rose and fell according to the vagaries of politics and the world situation, it had happened that SEAL recruits were needed when Johnson was in Mineman School, and his application had been granted.
Johnson had been disappointed but game. He knew enough about the SEALs to know they didn’t like quitters, and there was always the possibility of learning those new SCUBA techniques, maybe even of becoming an SDV driver.
But he wasn’t a SEAL yet, wouldn’t be until he’d completed his probationary training and received the coveted Budweiser. To tell the truth, Johnson wasn’t sure he wanted that gaudy, heavy gold pin since his request for additional, more advanced training with the SDVs had been turned down and he’d been assigned instead to SEAL Seven.