Floating City (20 page)

The sky was pale green. Birds in their bamboo cages twittered and cleaned themselves. Palm fronds clattered as the city awoke. The delicious scent of freshly baked baguettes filled the air, mixing with the incense wafting from inside the pagoda where the carved jackwood statues of Buddha in all his incarnations rose, surrounded by images of solemn judges and the fierce guardians of hell. For this moment, at least, when the late-night traffic had ended and the early-morning crush had not yet begun in earnest, the air possessed the peculiar sweetness that must have attracted the original Viet to this once paradisiacal land.

A chanting arose from the depths of the pagoda as the monks’ morning prayers began. The young boy smacked his lips loudly as he greedily jammed pieces of his sticky rice cake into his mouth.

“They are reciting Buddha’s Four Noble Truths,” Seiko said. “Existence is unhappiness; unhappiness is caused by selfishness; unhappiness ends when selfishness ends; selfishness can only end by devoting oneself to the eightfold path.”

“Yes. Understanding, purpose, speech, conduct, vocation, effort, alertness, and concentration in a manner mindful of the Four Truths. Do you believe any of that?”

Seiko smiled. “It doesn’t leave much room for joy, does it? Life is already severe enough without that kind of mental shackle.”

“Is it a shackle if it leads to enlightenment?”

“Now you sound more like a holy man than a businessman.”

“I’m as much simply a businessman as you are simply my assistant. We all hide behind masks, Seiko, even from ourselves. Why is that, do you think? Are our true natures that difficult to face?”

The boy, perhaps bored because he had finished his
banh chung,
was playing peekaboo with them from behind the
bo de
tree.

“Here he comes,” Seiko said.

Nicholas turned, saw a tall, lanky man clad in a light jacket, gauze shirt, and bush trousers. His sandy hair was overlong, tousled by the wind. The skin of his lean, almost vulpine face appeared to have been scoured rough and red from a life among the elements.

“You sure this is him?”

Seiko nodded. “Positive.”

“Okay then, this is what I want you to do—”

But at that moment, Nicholas became aware of a movement in the periphery of his vision. The young boy behind the
bo de
tree hadn’t finished his sweet after all because he was tossing it toward them.

There was an instant when, with the help of his
tanjian
eye, Nicholas became aware of it all: the black square sailing toward them; Delacroix, stopped in the quiet street, legs planted apart as in a marksman’s stance.

In among the sensations of intense peril were the mundane sounds and smells of the early city morning: the incense burning more heavily, the monks chanting their right-minded sutras, the clattering cough of a
cyclo
starting up, the rumble underfoot of a convoy of trucks on the nearby avenue, the shouts of children, the calls of merchants as they opened their shops, the harsh screech of a bird, alarmed.

Then the object—not the boy’s half-eaten sweet at all, but a square of shiny black plastic—hit the pavement near them. Delacroix’s right hand appeared from within his jacket. In it was a small oblong device with a short rubber antenna, not unlike a mobile phone. Nicholas leaped at Seiko, away from the black square, which lay shining on the pavement like a rune.

His shoulder hit her, and they both went down.

Delacroix’s finger depressed a button on his device.

The world exploded into ten thousand shards; the blast wave hit them and everything went white.

The god is absent;
His dead leaves are piling,
And all is deserted.

—Basho

Abramanov was ready to die. The Tupolev-10 shuddered like a beast that had been shot, and the green sky canted over, making Abramanov’s stomach heave. Dirty gray clouds blew past the Perspex canopy, and rain, hard as buckshot, slammed against the plane’s fuselage.

“Prepare yourself,” said Fedorov, the pilot, from just behind him. “I have lost partial control. If I can’t regain it, we’ll be going down hard.”

Into the high, curling swells of the storm-battered South China Sea. A long way down. Too long. Abramanov squeezed his eyes shut, the sight of the thin, red finger of land—Vietnam, Fedorov had told him—far closer in his mind than it was out the right side of the aircraft.

He began to pray.

Abramanov had been ready to die for more than a decade, the amount of time he had worked in utter secrecy and isolation in Arzamas-16, a city of atomic commerce found on no map in the world.

Less than two hundred miles east of Moscow, Arzamas-16 was, although the nation’s collapse appeared near, still the site of the central nuclear-weapons laboratories for what was left of the Soviet Union. Abramanov, despite being a Jew, had held a top post in Moscow’s Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, where he was viewed by his fellow theorists with equal amounts of awe and suspicion, mainly because he was a genius not only in atomic theory but in theoretical-language design. His contention was that it wasn’t enough to develop new forms of atomic energy if one didn’t have the means to harness and deliver them. Computer technology, he had argued, was the only viable method of doing this with such forms of energy that were potentially lethal to human beings.

“The Jew is brilliant,” it was often said of him by his colleagues. “Too brilliant for his own good,” said V. I. Pavlov, who had been dispatched to head Kurchatov by the Central Committee during the spring of 1981 after a particularly nasty purge.
It is my opinion that the State is in jeopardy from such Jews,
he wrote in his report of his subsequent shake-up.

Apparently the Central Committee did not disagree with him, because in the summer of 1981, Abramanov had been demoted to Arzamas-16 by this vindictive superior, a notorious anti-Semite, purportedly as a means of quashing Abramanov’s budding love affair with a beautiful assistant at Kurchatov. No official mention was made of nipping his career in the bud.

While V. I. Pavlov chuckled at the Jew’s exile, Abramanov, until that time a brilliant but servile apparatchik of the Soviet regime, arrived at Arzamas-16 with a plan of his own. He was not only a genius in his own field of advanced nuclear theory and cybernetics, but was also the kind of visionary on a macro scale rarely seen among humankind.

Almost a decade before it would happen, he had already envisioned the death throes of Soviet Communism, the rabid divisiveness of ethnic strife, and the economic collapse of a world superpower whose leader, only some years before, had promised the West, “We will bury you.”

But it was the Soviet Union, Abramanov was convinced, that was to be buried, and he was determined to be one of the first to place a wreath on its grave. All he had wanted was to be a scion of the State, but the State, grown dense and wanton with corruption, had at last beaten him down.

Also, it had changed him, and it was only now, at the point of death, that Abramanov could look at the past objectively and be grateful.

On his arrival at Arzamas-16 he began to de-emphasize the arms development and evaluation programs at the labs. In addition, he commenced a sub-rosa communication with Douglas Serman, a brother-in-arms working at the DARPA laboratory for experimental nucleonics in the American state of Virginia. DARPA was an acronym for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which meant nothing at all to Abramanov, except that his American counterpart had as much money as he needed for his project while Abramanov increasingly had less and less.

Abramanov had met Serman, an American nuclear theorist, at one of the few international conferences he had been allowed to attend when he had been at Kurchatov. He had been able to strike up a friendship with Serman only because his KGB watchdogs had been intent on keeping him from being “contaminated” by the Israeli contingent.

Continuing this covert dialogue with his DARPA pal was astonishingly easy for a man of Abramanov’s talents. Day and night the Arzamas-16 complex was emitting bursts of telemetry and carrier-wave transmissions, and Abramanov found it a relatively simple task to hide his private coded communications within these transmissions.

By and large, the subject of Abramanov’s clandestine communication with Serman had been the creation of transuranic isotopes heretofore believed to be only theoretical. And this growing passion had led him to develop the premier high-flux neutron facility in what had then been the Soviet Union. It was within this facility that 114m had been born.

The Tupolev gave another shudder and began a long, sweeping arc downward through the buffeting grit of the gathering storm. The sky, black and lethal looking, swung away from Abramanov, who wished now to peer beyond the clouds at the face of God. Instead, he twisted in his seat, stared back down the long empty length of the aircraft to where he knew were stowed on either side of the cabin the two cases made of DU, depleted U-238. He could not keep his thoughts from their abruptly malevolent contents.

The transuranic isotope 114m had been born in the hot cell Abramanov had had built at Arzamas-16. This was a windowless cubicle with five-foot-thick concrete walls. The material had to be manipulated via stainless-steel robotic arms, controlled from outside the hot cell, at the panel of dials, gauges, and levers where an operator sat. The hot cell was equipped with the most extreme contamination, control systems, including an inert atmosphere, and even the surrounding areas were fed by negative-pressure ventilation units in order to confine the highly toxic particles of plutonium and 114m from migrating out of the primary confinement zone.

For some years now, scientists had been trying to create transuranic isotopes—that is, substances with higher atomic numbers than uranium—without much success. Isotope 114m had been created by bombarding a brick of plutonium with a high-density field of neutrons in an argon atmosphere. This had been attempted before, but Abramanov’s brilliance had come in pulsing the neutrons at a frequency that overexcited the atoms of the plutonium, thus forcing a reaction.

A number of isotopes of element 114 had been observed forming, but they rapidly decayed because of their minuscule half-lives.

Only one isotope remained. Abramanov named it 114m because it was the fourteenth isotope created from the event. He estimated its half-life to be in the tens of thousands of years. Other surprises lay in store for Abramanov and his team. Because they found it possessed an inordinately high cross-section of thermal neutrons, 114m was an extremely potent fissile material. And because its critical mass was lower than both plutonium and uranium, its potential value skyrocketed. Abramanov calculated that what he had discovered just might be the most powerful and efficient nuclear energy source on the face of the earth.

The unique nuclear criticality displayed by 114m led Abramanov to continue his experiments on his own time, keeping his own counsel—and that of Douglas Serman in Virginia. What he found both elated and terrified him, so much so that he dared not make his findings public—even to the rest of his research team.

When it came to the human race, Abramanov was no optimist. He saw the potential danger should even one brick of 114m fall into the wrong hands. The sins of greed, avarice, ambition, and temptation paraded across the stage of his mind like tawdry whores vulgarly displaying their elemental wares. He could count from merely those around him the number who would be tempted to use 114m for personal ends.

It seemed to him then that he was in a hot box of his own making—trapped within a conundrum. He found it unthinkable to give over to his masters the terrible secret of this transuranic isotope. He would not even trust it to the minds of his colleagues in Arzamas-16; how could he deliver it into the hands of the Central Committee in the Kremlin? Besides, at that point there was no telling who was in power, and who would remain there for any meaningful length of time. There was no way to destroy the ingots of 114m he had already manufactured, and he could think of no place secure enough in his tremor-prone area of the country to bury them.

This was the trap he had so cleverly, if unwittingly, constructed for himself. Then, one night, he awoke from a dream that showed him how 114m was to be his savior rather than his doom. For months now he had been dreaming of getting out of the increasingly anarchic Soviet Union, but he lacked the nerve. Now he had the impetus because fleeing his homeland with the deadly ingots was his only logical egress from the hot box.

Working at night, he constructed two boxes of DU so that the ingots of 114m were shielded by three inches of the heavy metal. This was far from the ideal thickness, but Abramanov was driven by the constraints of time and portability. As it was, each container weighed nine hundred pounds, but he knew he must still maintain the two-foot physical space between the ingots of radioactive isotope. The consequences of bringing them in close proximity made him break out into a cold sweat.

The wild, dark sea was coming up from below, solid as a steel-clad door, and only now did he understand fully the extent of his folly.

He had enlisted the aid of a pilot friend of his, a colonel in the VVS, the Soviet Air Force, who, like Abramanov, had grown weary of and disillusioned with Communism, and together they had plotted their getaway. Then Abramanov contacted Douglas Serman and told him he would shortly be on his way.

Fedorov was scheduled to take a MiG-29 UB two-seat jet trainer across the country from Moscow to the military airfield outside Vladivostok. For Abramanov, who wanted to get to Virginia in the east of America, it was the long way around, but his options were limited, and he had had no choice.

Fedorov’s main problem was how to avoid the Soviet and Vietnamese perimeter radar; Abramanov’s had been how to deal with the size and weight of the depleted U-238 cases within which lay like the children of Behemoth the deadly ingots of 114m.