Robert Doherty - The Citadel

"Who knows?" Vaughn said as he pried open the top to one. He froze when he saw what was inside.

"What the hell is that?"

Vaughn carefully pulled out one of the gray metal canisters. "Sarin nerve agent. The Nazis developed it during the war." He looked around. There were at least twenty similar crates. "God knows what other deadly stuff is in here, mixed with the treasure." He put the canister back in the crate.

"There's enough WMD stuff in here-" Tai began, then shook her head. "This is a cluster-fuck. Why would someone put all this here? And how did it get here? I think MacIntosh would have said something to us if he'd seen any of this coming in."

"These two newer nukes had to be put in here in the sixties or seventies," Vaughn said. "Lansale must have kept moving stuff down here over the years."

"But why?" Tai asked.

"Got me," Vaughn responded.

Logan seemed mesmerized by the cold gray steel of the nuclear weapon. "You said you knew quite a bit about nuclear weapons. Can that thing be detonated?"

Vaughn closed his eyes briefly, trying to remember. "There are a lot of safeties on a nuclear weapon. We used to have to pass a test every three months that required us to flawlessly complete forty-three separate steps to emplace and arm our nuke.

"On your standard nuclear weapon you've got an enable plug, ready/safe switch, separation timer, pulse thermal batteries, pulse battery actuator, time delay switch, and a whole bunch of other things that all have to be done correctly. Despite all that, though, if someone knows what they're doing, and they have enough time to tinker with it, I have no doubt that they could initiate it, except for one thing. You can't even begin without-" He stopped and blinked.

"What one thing?" Tai asked, finally looking up from the bomb.

Vaughn turned and headed out of the unit.

"Where are you going?" Logan yelled. When he didn't answer, they followed.

Vaughn made his way directly to the mess hall. Brothers looked up as he stormed in and grabbed the blue binder off the counter. He thumbed through, turning to the index. He had started reading it from the beginning when he'd found it earlier and only gotten halfway through. Now he ran his finger down the index as the others crowded around. It stopped at a section labeled: EMERGENCY PROCEDURES.

Vaughn rapidly flipped through until he found the section. There was a page that referred them to the operating manual for the reactor in the power room if there were any problems with it. The second page talked about getting the tractors out of the east ice storage room using the ramps. The third page was a handwritten note. Vaughn recognized the handwriting from the note that had been taped to the outside of the binder:

THE PALS AND ARMING INSTRUCTIONS ARE IN THE SAFE.

LANSALE.

Vaughn closed his eyes. "Oh fuck!"

"What does that mean?" Tai asked as she looked over his shoulder.

Vaughn opened his eyes and looked at her. "Let's go out in the hallway." He led Tai and Logan out, taking the binder with him. "As I was telling you-if someone knows what they're doing, they can get by all the safeties on those bombs but one. The first and most critical safety is the permissive access link, or PAL. That's the code that allows you to even begin to arm the bomb. The code and bomb are never kept together, for security reasons. The MK/B has a multiple code six-digit, coded switch with limited try followed by lockout. That means you get two shots at the right codes, and if you get it wrong both times, you don't get a third shot-the bomb shuts down."

Vaughn stabbed his finger down at the paper. "Except it appears that the PALs for those two newer bombs are here in the base." He turned back to the index and scanned. "Here." He turned to the correct page, where a diagram of a unit was displayed. "The safe with the PAL codes and arming instructions is located in Unit A2."

Antarctica

"Latest weather from McMurdo calls for at least another twenty-four to forty-eight hours of this storm," Brothers informed the group gathered around the mess table. "I took a look outside about ten minutes ago and couldn't see more than five feet from the door. The wind is howling out there."

The warm air from the overhead heaters blew gently across Tai as she looked about the room. They had discovered the base. They had discovered the four MK-17s and two, newer weapons. They'd found nerve agents and stolen treasure. Yet they still weren't any closer to knowing what or who exactly the Organization was. They'd tried the safe, but it was locked tight, and they didn't have the combination, which seemed to make Vaughn a bit calmer about the whole thing. Tai had her doubts about the viability of the nuclear weapons, but she had to trust that Vaughn had more experience in that area.

Everyone was exhausted, that was obvious. "I suggest we all get some sleep," Tai said. "When we get up, I'd like to dig out the west tunnel and completely open it up to Unit A1." Most of the group headed off to the quarters, but Vaughn remained behind, as Tai had expected.

"What do you think?" she asked.

"I think we got a problem," Vaughn said. "We didn't find out anything more about the Organization, and I'm getting the feeling this whole place was a setup by Lansale, an ace in the hole, almost literally. I'm worried about the bombs. They worry me a lot. Because we're the ones who are sitting on them now."

Tai sighed. "What should we do about them?"

"I don't know," Vaughn said. "It's weird, but the people who built this place and put those weapons down here are probably all retired or dead now. Why do you think no one has been down here in so long? Why do you think the batteries on the transponder were dead?"

"Do you really think those weapons could still work?"

"The MK-17s? Probably not. The MK/B, fifty-fifty. And even if they don't work, they still have their cores. A lot of people would love to get their hands on those."

"What kind of damage could those MK/Bs do?"

Vaughn shook his head. "That depends."

"On what?"

"On what they're set at. I think the MK/B has four settings for yield, ranging from ten to five hundred kilotons. So it depends on what it's set at."

"You mean you can change the power of the bomb by flipping a switch?"

Vaughn gave her a weak smile. "Pretty neat, huh? The theory is, the bomb is set for required yield prior to a mission depending on the target profile. I'm sure there's an access panel on the casing that opens to that control. I for one don't plan on messing with it."

"Well, say, what will a ten kiloton blast do?" Tai felt somewhat embarrassed to be asking since she felt she ought to know more about the subject, but the military branch she'd been in was more focused on the war on terror than on nuclear weapons.

"A kiloton is equal to a thousand tons of TNT. So 10K is ten thousand tons of TNT. If it blew here, ten kilotons would take this base out, but not much more than that as far as blast goes."

Vaughn leaned back in the chair as he went on. "There are five effects of a nuclear explosion. Most people only think of two-the blast and the radiation. The blast, which is the kinetic energy, uses about half the energy of the bomb. That's what blows things up. It's the shock wave of compressed air that radiates out from the bomb at supersonic speed. If the bomb goes off underground, that wave is muffled, but it takes out whatever it blows near, creating a crater. If it's an air burst or above the surface, then the blast does more damage. You not only have to worry about the original wave but also the high winds that are then generated by the overpressure. We're talking winds of over two hundred miles an hour, so it can be pretty destructive.