Act Of War

“Are you trying to tell me that somebody knows what triggered the nukes?” Brognola demanded, placing his briefcase on the polished floor.

“Of course not. But I do remember hearing something about an odd rumor from the cold war. The story was that some scientist in the Netherlands, Swedish maybe, or possibly Dutch, had invented some sort of device to stop a nuke from detonating, or something along those lines…different people told different versions, you know?”

“But the essence of the story,” Kurtzman added, “is that the KGB heard about the device, found it, killed the scientists involved and stole the blueprints.”

“Or so some of the rumors go,” Kissinger finished, resting a hand on the back of the wheelchair. “Other folks say the CIA stole it, but you know how that goes.”

Yes, Brognola did. Anything odd that happened in the world, some people immediately blamed the CIA.

“So, how old is this rumor?” Price asked, trying to see over the shoulders of the three people clustered around a console.

“About a decade or so.”

She started to scowl, then stopped. Just because something was old, didn’t mean it was harmless. There briefly flash in her mind the memory of how the French invention of the table fork had been introduced to England back in the Middle Ages. The French had been using forks for many years, but overnight the English discovered that the simple eating utensil fit perfectly through the eyeslots on a suit of armor. A fork that cost only pennies could easily kill a nobleman supposedly invulnerable inside a suit of highly expensive armor. The world of peasants versus knights was almost overturned until the helmets were quickly redesigned. Simple things could become very deadly in the right—or wrong—hands.

“Any truth behind the tale?” Brognola queried.

“Nothing yet, still checking,” Akira Tokaido said, rock music seeping from his earbuds.

“Let us know when you have anything,” Price added.

“No problem.” Unwrapping a fresh stick of chewing gum and popping it into his mouth, the handsome Japanese American was the youngest member of the cyberteam. It was joked that Akira had chips in his blood. The natural-born hacker could instinctively do things with computers that others took years to learn. Kissinger had taught the young genius how to shoot a gun on the Farm’s firing range, but in his official government profile, Tokaido’s weapon of choice was listed as a Cray Mark IV Supercomputer.

“Could this be another jump start?” Carmen Delahunt asked from behind a VR helmet. A wealth of glorious red hair cascaded from underneath the utilitarian device strapped around her head, and both hands were encased in VR gloves as she stroked open files and seized data from foreign computer banks.

“A jump start?” the big Fed prompted.

“Oh. During a past mission we cracked open a couple of NATO nukes to use the radioactive cores to kill the terrorists trying to steal them. Could something similar be happening now?”

“Possible, but unlikely,” Kurtzman said grimly, cracking his knuckles. “Besides, we had the access codes, these new folks do not.”

“True.”

“Perhaps only tactical nukes have been set off so far because of their compact electronics,” Brognola suggested, taking a chair and sitting. “Thermonuclear weapons have ten times the protective circuitry, right?”

“Absolutely true,” Professor Huntington Wethers stated, removing the cold pipe from his mouth only to place it back again. Since smoking was strictly forbidden on the premises, he was forced to merely chew the stem of his beloved briar while on duty. “However, all of the superpowers have different types of electromechanical protection for their nukes. Nobody knows how to set off every type of nuclear device. This must be a matter of preexciting a subcritical mass of U-235 to achieve threshold.”

Tall and lean with light touches of gray at his temples, the distinguished black man had formerly been a full professor at the University of California, Berkley, teaching advanced and theoretical cybernetics until the call came to help fight the criminals of the world.

“Threshold,” Kissinger stated, giving a sideways grin. “Why not just say explosion. It’s a perfectly good word.”

“But wildly inaccurate,” Wethers replied, then smiled. “Out of curiosity, does your automatic pistol use gunpowder, John?”

“Gunpowder?” The armorer arched an eyebrow. “What is this, 1920? Firearms haven’t used gunpowder since the invention of cordite! Well, we still call it gunpowder, but the technical name is propellant, that’s a form of stabilized fulminating guncotton…” He stopped, then grinned. “Point taken.”

“Would a neutrino bombardment work?” Delahunt asked.

“Not unless these people have a working neutron cannon,” Price declared. “And our Watchdog satellites are now keyed to detect the sort of induced magnetics needed to operate that weapon.”

“Plus, according to the videotapes I’ve seen, nobody near the nukes died before the explosions,” Brognola noted. “So this could not be caused by a beam of focused neutrinos.”

Going to the coffee station, Price poured herself a cup of coffee, adding a lot of cream and sugar. She took a sip and made a face. Good God Almighty, Kurtzman liked his brew strong enough to melt teeth. He seemed to have come pretty close with this batch, too.

“Maybe we’re looking in the wrong direction,” Price suggested. “Perhaps somebody has simply found a way to ignite the C-4 used inside a nuclear weapon. That would slam the uranium together and cause a nuclear blast.” Then she scowled. “No, we’ve seen videos of the guards near the attack sites. Several of them were carrying M-203 grenade launchers, and those 40 mm shells are armed with C-4. Damn!”

“Okay, do all nukes have anything in common, aside from C-4 and uranium?” Brognola asked, furrowing his brow.

“Tell you in a minute.” Kurtzman turned back to his console. Rolling the wheelchair into place, the big man locked the wheels and started quickly typing on the keyboard. Within moments the screen was scrolling with mathematical equations and complex molecular diagrams.

“And the answer is…Well, I’ll be damned. Thulium,” Kurtzman growled, poking a stiff finger at the rotating graphic of a molecule on the screen. “It seems that every nation uses some sort of thulium shield to protect—” the man grinned as he looked up at Price “—to protect the C-4 plastic explosives inside their nukes.”

“Do they now,” Price muttered, narrowing her gaze in concentration. Okay, the cyberteam had gotten hold of a very slender thread. The enemy was somehow exciting the thulium, which in turn triggered the C-4, causing an early explosion. They now knew what was happening, but not how, why or the much more important who.

“Akira, see if anybody has ever done theoretical work on the possible long-range stimulation of thulium,” Brognola ordered, leaning forward in his chair.

“No,” Kurtzman countered. “Pull up all of the files on thulium. Everything there is available, mining operations, common and military uses, research projects…everything!”

“Already have,” Tokaido said calmly, tapping a button.

Pulsating into life, the main wall monitor divided into four sections, each slowly scrolling with text and mathematics.

Biting a lip, the big Fed struggled to read all of the screens at the same time, when Price gave a hard grunt. “Wait a second!” she barked. “There on screen three! Go back a bit.”

Stroking a fingerpad, Tokaido did as requested, and everybody perused the text. It was a Pentagon document on foreign-weapons research. The file was ten years old and marked as abandoned.

Reaching for his ceramic mug, Kurtzman took a sip of the black coffee. “Code name Icarus,” he muttered. “That’s it, just the project name? No details?”

“Very little,” Tokaido admitted, accessing the file. “Less than a page. The Pentagon wasn’t interested in obtaining more since the project was a failure. Why, does the name mean something to you?”

Removing his pipe, Wethers answered. “In Greek mythology, Icarus was given wings of feathers and wax. He flew too close to the sun, the wax melted and he plummeted into the sea.”

Tokaido shrugged. It was as good as any place to start.

More data came onto the screen. “Okay, Project Icarus was a top-secret research project by the Finnish government conducted around 1989,” Kurtzman announced. “Believed to be some sort of electromagnetic shield designed to stop a nuclear blast. The project was abandoned a year after it started.”

“During the cold war,” Kissinger said in a low voice. “And Finland is sure as hell part of the Netherlands.”

The people in the room became galvanized at the simple pronouncement.

“So the rumors were correct. Sort of. But a nuclear shield?” Delahunt said. “That’s ridiculous! Scientifically impossible.”

“That could have simply been the cover story,” Brognola explained. “Lord knows I’ve had to spin some whoppers in my career to cover the work that goes on here.”

A dimple appeared on her cheeks. “Fair enough.”

“No way the Finns are behind this,” Price declared resolutely. “They are some of the staunchest supporters of world peace.”

“The Chinese invented gunpowder, but they still got shot by the Japanese in both of the Sino-Japanese wars,” Kurtzman retorted. “Somebody may have just have run across this research and finished the project, or simply stolen it outright. Are any of the Finnish scientists or politicians involved in the project still alive today? Anybody we can question for details?”