Here the problem was the same. The truck would fit on the pier, but just barely. Unfortunately, the solution had to be different.
Vasilyev wasn’t going to go slowly and carefully. He was going to launch the truck into the Gulf as far out as he could.
Vasilyev grit his teeth and pressed his foot on the gas pedal, slowly building up speed as the first half of the pier disappeared behind him. He could feel the steering wheel fight him as he wrestled it straight, ignoring the pain in his shoulder pushing its way through whatever drugs Grishkov had used to keep him going this far.
The end of the pier was just ahead. Now, Vasilyev pressed the gas pedal all the way to the floor, and in seconds the truck was airborne, flying out into the Gulf.
Over his long career in Russian intelligence, Vasilyev had risked his life many times, and had been certain in several missions that he would not survive. In each case, he had been pleasantly surprised to find he had been wrong to be so pessimistic.
This would not be one of those times.
The truck hit the water with the full impact concentrated on the front of the vehicle, which crumpled backward into the truck’s cabin. There were no airbags inside the cabin, but it wouldn’t have mattered in the face of hundreds of pounds of steel occupying the space where the seats had been a second previously.
Vasilyev’s body had no time to feel pain before he was not only dead, but covered in water and on the way to the bottom of the Gulf.
Vasilyev had thought about trying to jump out of the speeding truck just before it reached the end of the pier, but had rated his survival chances as low, particularly because he saw no chance of successfully swimming to shore with an injured shoulder.
It would have pleased Vasilyev to know that his choice was correct because not only would he have drowned, but he would have done something much worse. He would have failed in his mission.
The few extra meters out into the Gulf gained by staying with the truck to the end were not so important in shielding the plant and its personnel from the weapon’s explosion. They were critical, though, to whether the device exploded at all.
First, the force of the vehicle’s impact broke the weapon free of its attachment to the truck bed.
Next, the weapon struck the truck’s metal gate before being ejected from the truck, cracking its metal case.
Finally, it settled on the bottom of the Gulf, about three meters deeper than it would have if Vasilyev had tried to jump. Those three meters made all the difference.
The extra pressure provided by that additional three meters meant that sea water was able to force its way through the cracks in the case with enough force to reach the weapons’ electronic components before its countdown was complete.
This would not have mattered for an operational, production nuclear weapon, since waterproofing its interior would have been a routine precaution. However, waterproofing had been considered an unnecessary waste of time for test devices that would be detonated on land.
Kazem had also designed this weapon personally, and would probably have been pleased to know that it would have detonated perfectly if Vasilyev and Grishkov had not intervened.
However, since Kazem had now been separated into his component atoms, he never would.
Chapter Eighteen
Steve Foster had only been working as a government contractor for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) for a few months, but he was already looking for other job options. Looking at satellite images had turned out to be a lot less interesting than it seemed in the movies.
Walking into the NRO’s headquarters building in Chantilly, Virginia at first seemed to confirm the movie image. The NRO had used its “black” budget status to hoard three hundred million dollars it used to build its headquarters building without any specific Congressional authorization.
Unlike most Federal buildings, the computer systems and network architecture in the NRO headquarters were everything Steve could want.
Plus, the offices were much better furnished and equipped than anything Steve had seen in his previous jobs, even in the cubicles where Steve knew he could expect to start.
That’s where the good news ended. First, Steve had been surprised to find that American satellites did not image every square inch of the planet every second of the day. Far from it. In fact, every image captured was in response to a specific tasking, and there was a highly classified waiting list of image capture requests that did not have a high enough priority — yet — to get a satellite to capture the requested image. The list shrunk whenever another NRO satellite was launched, but new requests seemed to appear almost immediately to take the waitlist to where it had been before.
So, every image Steve was given to review had someone at a US intelligence agency who was waiting for his assessment. Usually, it meant a series of images with a specific question to answer. This latest assignment had seemed pretty straightforward, but it had just turned into something Steve dreaded. One where he had to ask his boss for guidance.
Steve had a vague idea when he started working for his company as a contractor that he would be supervised by a government employee. In fact, almost no Federal employees worked at the NRO. That meant his boss was simply another contractor with more experience than Steve had, which he realized probably described everyone else in the building.
Mark Rhodes had seen plenty of employees like Steve come and go over his ten years with the company. Not many were cut out for the endless search for a needle in a haystack, but until you put a person in the job it was hard to predict whether they would be a good match. Steve had given the job his best, but Mark was expecting him to leave when he found work that was a better fit.
Steve had pulled up a series of images on his monitor to show Mark the problem.
”Someone at the CIA sent me a tasker to review these images to report on the movements of an Iranian armored force that had been deployed in Syria, but was now on its way home to Iran via Iraq. The tasking said that the Iranians had done this many times before, and I was to report back to the requester when the Iranians were back in Iran.”
Mark nodded. “Seems straightforward. What’s the problem?”
Steve pointed at the third, fourth and fifth images on the monitor. “They disappeared.”
Mark frowned. “How big is this Iranian armored force?”
“Couple hundred tanks and plenty of APCs and support vehicles,” Steve replied.
Mark shook his head. “This doesn’t make any sense. How broad was the image track you received to support this tasking?”
The “image track” was the area covered by satellite images generated to support a tasking. It could cover a few kilometers around a target, or a radius of hundreds of kilometers if multiple satellites provided coverage.
Steve shrugged. “Pretty narrow. Also, I couldn’t find any nearby images to review to support the ones for my specific tasking. And they just show the force exactly where they were expected to be — until they weren’t.”
Mark scowled. “Since all US troops were pulled out of Iraq again last year it’s a fairly low priority for image collection. I’m sure the tasking office expected the Iranians to drive straight down the highway in Iraq to the connecting highway in Iran, like they’ve done many times before. They just wanted to know when they got there.”
Steve cocked his head and spread his hands. “What’s to stop the tanks from leaving the highway? Don’t they have tracks?”
Mark smiled. “Good question. Yes, they do. But their support vehicles don’t. Without gas and ammo resupply, tanks aren’t very effective. And from where they were last seen, there’s not much but Iraqi desert for a long way in every direction.”