Don Pendleton - Nuclear Reaction

Southwestern Pakistan

The open highway wasn’t safe, but it was all they had. They couldn’t fly, and even as they passed through wooded areas, Bolan knew they could not afford to hide and hope the storm would pass them by.

He didn’t spend much time watching network news broadcasts, but Bolan knew that a loss of thirty-odd soldiers in one firefight would rock Pakistan. Some would mourn the loss, others might cheer it, but the powers that be would most certainly seek to explain and avenge it.

This would be no minor gale. They were fleeing ahead of a full-fledged tornado, the kind of storm that could pluck them off the face of planet Earth and never let them go. The kind that could make them evaporate without a trace.

They have to find us first, Bolan thought.

After he had put two miles between them and the slaughter site, he asked Pahlavi, “So, where are we going?”

“To my village. It’s the only place we will be relatively safe.”

That “relatively” wasn’t very reassuring, but the Executioner would take what he could get, just now.

“How far?” he asked.

“About one hundred miles, due north,” Pahlavi answered.

Bolan checked his fuel gauge. They should make it with a bit of gas to spare, if there were no detours along the way, but any traveling beyond their destination would require a fill-up.

“Right,” he said. “Then we’ve got time to talk. You start, and take it from the top.”

“The top?”

“From the beginning,” Bolan translated.

“Of course. My sister is…she was a nuclear physicist. She made an honor and distinction for my family, not only graduating from the university, but second in her class. The government immediately offered her a post with their new laboratory, working on a program they call Project Future. It’s supposed to harness nuclear power for peaceful applications. Generation of electric power and the like. I don’t pretend to understand it all.”

“And then your sister—that’s Darice?” Bolan asked, reflecting on the meager intelligence he’d been given.

“It was.” A sadness there. Clearly, Pahlavi reckoned she was dead.

“And then Darice found something else,” Bolan suggested.

“Yes! She soon discovered that there was a plan within a plan, involving Sikh extremists. Project X. While some employees at the lab worked on the project everybody knows about, others were put to work behind the scenes, trying to build a compact weapon that would fit inside a piece of luggage. Darice was assigned to that division, banned from talking to the scientists working on Project Future. Banned from talking, period.”

“But she still talked to you,” Bolan suggested.

“Yes. We have been close since childhood, Mr. Cooper. Closer still, since we lost our parents seven years ago. Their bus collided with a train, and…”

Staring out his window into space, Pahlavi briefly lost his train of thought, then came back to it, waving off the lapse without comment.

“In any case,” he said, “she told me what was happening. Together, we decided something must be done to stop it, either halt production on the small bomb or prevent it being passed to other hands. You know the history of Pakistan and India?”

“I’ve just had a refresher course,” Bolan replied.

“Our leaders hate each other. I’m not sure they still remember how or why it started, but the hating has become a way of life for both countries. It’s unhealthy, but I don’t know how to change it. If it even can be changed. Our countries fight like children over lines drawn on a map, who claims this bit of land or that, as if the soil itself is somehow precious. Kashmir, for example, is a situation I will never understand.”

“How’s that?” Bolan asked.

Pahlavi shrugged. “Eighty percent of all the people living there are Muslim, like myself and my government, but it is ruled by Hindu leaders. It reminds me of South Africa, the white and black, or Protestant and Catholic in Belfast. Yes?”

Clearly, Darice Pahlavi hadn’t been the only member of her family to get an education. It was Bolan’s turn to shrug. “It happens. If we’re lucky, governments can work it out.”

“But these two only fight and threaten. Never really talking, never listening. For this, they’ve gone to war three times in forty years, but nothing is resolved. Why either country wants more mouths to feed remains a mystery to me.”

“So, that’s the rub,” Bolan said. “And you’re thinking there may be another war.”

“If Pakistan supplies a suitcase bomb to Sikh extremists and they use it against India?” Pahlavi’s smile was bitter as he shook his head. “The next war will destroy life as we know it here, and possibly throughout the world. There are alliances, support agreements. If one nation uses its atomic bombs against the other—”

Pahlavi shook his head again, slump-shouldered. At a glance, it seemed that he had aged ten years while he was talking, in the time it took Bolan to drive five miles.

“Let us assume,” Pahlavi said, “that the retaliations are confined to the subcontinent. Nearly two billion people live here. That’s about one-fourth of the whole planet’s population. Even if the fallout never drifts beyond our borders—an impossibility, all scientists agree—most of those people will be lost, either in bombings of the cities or through radiation poisoning, starvation and disease. Beyond that, if the fallout spreads…”

“I get it,” Bolan said.

“And don’t forget the various alliances, treaties and nonaggression pacts. Who knows what’s written down somewhere and hidden in some diplomatic vault? Will the Chinese move in? The Russians? Either way, it means reaction from the U.S.A. and Britain, probably the UN, too. Picture the world on fire.”

Bolan had been there in his head, a thousand times. He didn’t like the view.

“What was your plan, at first?” he asked.

“Darice would smuggle out proof of Project X, for distribution to the media. Once the conspiracy was public knowledge, those responsible would either have to stop or face the condemnation of a world united to oppose them.”

“But she never made it out,” Bolan observed.

Pahlavi’s eyes were misty now. “I still don’t know what happened, how they found her out. I’ve been in hiding since the day she…disappeared. The government wants me and everyone involved in our group, Ohm, to silence us. Even the politicians who might once have raised their voices against Project X show a united face against a threat to national security.”

“So,” Bolan asked him, “what’s your alternative plan?”

Pahlavi was quiet.

“What’s your alternative to going public in the media? You can’t do that without the evidence, so what’s up next? Why am I here?” Bolan asked.

Pahlavi swallowed hard. “We have no other choice,” he said. “We must destroy the roots of Project X.”

Although the thought had not been far from Pahlavi’s mind since the loss of his sister, it still intimidated him to speak the words aloud.

“All right,” Bolan said. “Spell it out. What have you got in mind?”

“Perhaps to penetrate the laboratory somehow,” Pahlavi replied. “Once inside, there should be some way to destroy the weapon and its plans.”

“Perhaps? Somehow? Some way?” Bolan glanced over at him, then back toward the road. “That’s not a plan. It’s wishful thinking.”

Embarrassed by the truth of the American’s words, Pahlavi said, “I grant you that I do not have full knowledge of the laboratory, how to get inside, or what to do there. I was counting on Darice to help us. She…we talked about the lab, of course. Security precautions, all the measures they employ to keep strangers out. I know where the lab is located, the best way to approach it, but I’m not a soldier. Until recently, I never thought that I would have to be.”