“It is,” said Vassiliev. “Finally, one handheld fire extinguisher, unusually heavy, and one pair car headlights, also very heavy.”
“Check.”
“Well, that’s it, then. If you’ve got the rest of the innocent commercial purchases, I’ll start assembling in the morning.”
“Why not now?”
“Look, young man. First of all, the sawing and drilling is hardly going to please the neighbors at this hour. Second, I’m tired. With this kind of toy you don’t make mistakes. I’ll start fresh tomorrow and be finished by sundown.”
Petrofsky nodded. “Take the back bedroom. I’ll run you to Heathrow on Wednesday in time for the morning flight.”
Chapter 20
Vassiliev elected to work in the sitting room, with the curtains closed and by electric light. First he asked for the nine consignments to be assembled.
“We’ll need a garbage bag,” he said. Petrofsky fetched him one from the kitchen.
“Pass the items to me as I ask for them,” said the assembler. “First, the cigar box.”
He broke open the seals and lifted the lid. The box contained two layers of cigars, thirteen on the top and twelve below; each cigar was wrapped in an aluminum tube.
“It should be third from the left, bottom row.”
It was. He emptied the cigar from its tube and slit it open with a razor. From the sliced tobacco inside he withdrew a slim glass phial with a crimped end and two twisted wires sticking out. An electrical detonator. The waste went into the bag.
“Plaster cast.”
The cast had been made in two layers, the first allowed to harden before the second was applied. Between the two layers a sheet of gray, puttylike substance had been rolled flat, encased in polyethylene to prevent adhesion, and wrapped around the arm. Vassiliev prized the two layers of plaster of paris apart, peeled the gray substance from its cavity, pulled away the polyethylene protector sheets, and rolled it back into a ball. Half a pound of plastic explosive.
Given Lichka’s shoes, he cut away the heels of both. From one came a steel disk two inches in diameter and one inch thick. Its rim was threaded to turn it into a broad, flat screw, and one surface had a deep cut to take a wide-headed screwdriver. From the other heel came a flatter, two-inch-wide disk of gray metal; it was lithium, an inert metal that, when bonded during the explosion to the polonium, would form the initiator and cause the atomic reaction to reach its full force.
The complementary disk of polonium came from the electric shaver that had so worried Karel Wosniak, and replaced the one lost in Glasgow. There were five of the smuggled consignments left.
The heat-resistant cladding on the exhaust pipe from the Hanomag truck was stripped away to reveal an eighteen-inch-long steel tube weighing twenty kilograms. It had an internal diameter of two inches, external four inches, for the metal’s thickness was one inch and it was of hardened steel. One end was flanged and threaded internally, the other capped with steel. The capping had a small hole in the center, capable of allowing the electrical detonator to be passed through it.
From First Ofiïcer Romanov’s transistor radio Vassiliev extracted the timer device; a flat, sealed steel box, the size of two cigarette packs placed end to end. On one face it had two large round buttons, one red and one yellow; from the other side protruded two colored wires, negative and positive. Each corner had an earlike lug with a hole, for bolting to the outside of the steel cabinet that would contain the bomb.
Taking the fire extinguisher that had arrived in Lundqvist’s Saab, the assembler unscrewed the base, which the preparation team had cut open, reassembled, and repainted to hide the seam. Out of the interior came not fire-damping foam but wadding, and last of all a heavy rod of leadlike metal, five inches long and two inches in diameter. Small though it was, it still weighed four and a half kilograms. Vassiliev pulled on the heavy gloves to handle it. It was pure uranium-235.
“Isn’t that stuff radioactive?” asked Petrofsky, who was watching in fascination.
“Yes, but not dangerously so. People think that all radioactive materials are dangerous to the same degree. Not so. Luminous watches are radioactive, but we wear them. Uranium is an alpha emitter, low-level. Now, plutonium—that’s really lethal. So is this stuff when it goes critical, as it will just before detonation—but not yet.”
The pair of headlights from the Mini took a lot of stripping. Vassiliev took out the glass lamps, the filament inside, and the inner reflector bowl. What he was left with was a pair of extremely heavy semispherical bowls, each of one-inch-thick hardened steel. Each bowl had a flange around its rim, drilled with sixteen holes to take the nuts and bolts. Joined together, they would form a perfect globe.
One of the bowls had at its base a two-inch-wide hole, threaded inside to accept the steel plug from Lichka’s left shoe. The other had a short stump of tube sticking out from its base; internally it was two inches wide, and it was flanged and threaded on its outer side to screw into the steel “gun” tube from the Hanomag’s exhaust system.
The last item was the child’s ball, brought in by the camper van. Vassiliev cut away the bright rubberized skin. A ball of metal gleamed in the light.
“That’s lead wrapping,” he said. “The ball of uranium, the fissionable core of the nuke, is inside. I’ll get it out later. It’s also radioactive, like that piece over there.”
Having satisfied himself he had his nine components, he started work on the steel cabinet. Turning it on its back, he lifted the lid and with the wooden laths and rods prepared an inner frame in the form of a low cradle, which rested on the floor of the cabinet. This he covered with a thick layer of shock-absorbent foam rubber.
“I’ll pack more around the sides and over the top when the bomb’s inside,” he explained.
Taking the four batteries, he wired them up, terminal to terminal, then lashed them into a block with masking tape. Finally he bored four small holes in the lid of the cabinet and wired the block of batteries inside. It was now midday.
“Right,” he said. “Let’s put the device together. By the way, have you ever seen a nuke?”