Dale Brown - Edge of Battle

The vans were observed traveling west on FM 293 until it intersected Highway 136, where remote monitoring from the Pantex facility was terminated. The Potter County Sheriff’s Department was notified that the vans were now in their jurisdiction, and dispatchers put out a message on their units’ data terminals to be on the lookout for the vans and do a traffic stop and search if possible. But as soon as the request was handed off to multiple agencies, concern over the vans quickly waned. The vans hadn’t stopped or done anything suspicious; no laws had been broken. If Carson County hadn’t had probable cause to stop and search the vehicle, Potter County certainly didn’t. The request to stop the vans was relayed but largely ignored by the graveyard shift on patrol.

But the assault was already underway.

It took less than seventy seconds for the Cybernetic Infantry Device to carry two of Yegor Zakharov’s commandos and their backpacks full of weapons and gear the six tenths of a mile between FM 293 and the access road to Sheridan Drive west of the north end of the Pantex facility. The land was cleared and furrowed dirt, a simple buffer zone between the explosive incineration pits and the public road that looked like normal farmland—but the area was covered by a network of laser “fences,” covering everything from one to ten feet aboveground, that would alert plant security if any of the beams were broken. But it was easy enough for the CID unit’s infrared sensor to see the laser beams, and even easier for the robot to jump over the fences, even loaded up with all of its “passengers” and their gear. The robot dropped off the men and their equipment at the intersection of Sheridan Drive and North Eleventh Street and ran off into the darkness.

North Eleventh Street between the incineration pits and the weapon storage area was unlighted. They proceeded quickly down the road about a half-mile until they came to a single twelve-foot-high fence running eastward, with a security vehicle access road just outside the fence. At the end of the fence was a dirt and stone berm twenty feet high and a hundred and twenty feet thick, topped with another twelve-foot-high fence. There was a five-story guard tower at the corner of the berm. Floodlights erected every five hundred feet illuminated the top of the berm and the entire area beyond as brightly as daytime.

Called Technical Zone Delta, or TZ-D, this was the weapons storage area. TZ-D had two main purposes: storage of plutonium “pits”—the hollow sphere of nuclear material that was the heart of a nuclear device, for eventual reuse or destruction—and storage of nuclear warheads, from the United States military as well as Russia and other nuclear nations, awaiting dismantling. TZ-D was divided into four Technical Areas, or TAs. TA-1 was the security, inspection, and classification area at the single entrance to the storage facility; TA-2 was the eleven igloos, or storage bunkers, set aside for nuclear weapon electronic components and triggers; TA-3 was the forty-two-pit storage igloos, each housing anywhere from two to four hundred pits; and TA-4 was the eight igloos set aside for storing warheads awaiting dismantling.

TA-4 was the target.

The two vans seen earlier on FM 293 were now spotted by Pantex security monitors heading east on Farm to Market Road 245. They had apparently left Highway 136 and were now approaching the weapons storage area at high speed. The tall guillotine gate at the entrance was closed, and the security detail on duty around the entire facility was placed on its highest state of alert.

Both vans swung off FM 245 onto the access road to the weapons storage area. Two commandos got out of the first van, carrying shoulder-fired rockets, and they made quick work of the relatively weak antitrespassing guillotine gate. Two hundred feet beyond the first gate was the outer entrapment area gate. The security detail had already deployed a massive solid steel barrier just in front of the outer entrapment gate that rose up from the ground and completely blocked the entrance. But the commandos didn’t even try to blast away the barrier. After discarding the spent missile canisters and retrieving fresh ones along with automatic assault rifles and satchel charges, the van veered off the road, crashed into the fence to the right of the barrier…

…and a thousand pounds of high explosives detonated, completely demolishing the fence and destroying the pass and ID guard shack inside.

At that moment, the Cybernetic Infantry Device emerged from the second van, rushed at the breach in the outer gate, and cleared away the flaming, twisted debris enough for four commandos to get inside. Two commandos rushed inside the TA-1 security building, blasting the doors open and throwing flash-bang grenades inside to disable any security personnel inside without damaging or destroying any records. They then retracted the steel vehicle barrier, opened the gates, brought the second van inside the compound, and then closed and secured the entryway. The CID unit picked up two commandos and their equipment and rushed inside the weapons storage area.

When the assault on the front gate commenced, the two commandos in the northwest corner of the facility prepared for their attack. A single shot from a Dragunov sniper rifle dispatched the security guard that had come out of the tower to take up his sniper position, and moments later a TOW antitank missile round destroyed the tower. Two satchel charges destroyed the fence at the top of the berm, and several more shots took out the few remaining security patrols inside the compound.

“Two, report,” Yegor Zakharov ordered on his portable transceiver.

“Moving inside,” the leader of the commando team that had performed the frontal assault radioed back. “No resistance.”

“I will need the igloo number immediately, Three.”

“Three copies.” The two commandos inside the TA-1 building were hurriedly looking through the office, searching charts and records on the contents of the dozens of igloos inside the weapons storage area. Finally they found what they were looking for in the fire marshal’s office: a wall chart with symbology written in grease pencil over each igloo in the compound. “One, this is Three,” the leader radioed, “according to the fire hazard chart I found, Igloos Alpha Four-Four and Four-Five contain weapons that each have thirty-seven kilos of insensitive high explosives.”

“Keep looking for more specific records, Three,” Zakharov responded. “Two, meet me at those igloos.”

“Two.”

While two commandos took up security positions at the entrance to the weapons storage area, the CID unit carrying several satchels and backpacks ran through TZ-Delta directly to the igloos where the warheads awaiting disassembly were stored. He set the equipment down…and as he did, the head of the commando traveling with Zakharov exploded. The CID unit immediately turned to the east. “Sniper on the northeast tower!” he radioed.

“Shield me,” Zakharov said. As heavy-caliber bullets pinged off the CID’s composite armor behind him, the Russian picked up a backpack and began placing shaped explosive charges on the steel doors to the first igloo. The entire front of each igloo was a thick steel plate wall, with a single man-sized steel entry door secured with a heavy steel bar with two palm-sized padlocks locking it in place. It was easy to blow the locks apart with plastic explosives and enter the igloo.

Zakharov found what he was looking for within moments. He recognized them immediately—because he had once commanded Russian Red Army units that employed similar weapons. These were 15A18A warheads from active R-36M2 intercontinental ballistic missiles. The R-36M2, appropriately called “Satan” by the West, was Russia’s biggest, longest-range, and most accurate ballistic missile, capable of raining 10 independently targeted warheads on targets more than eleven thousand kilometers away with unprecedented accuracy. The missile was so accurate that the warheads could be made smaller, so the R-36M2 carried 10 of these warheads, each with a yield of over seven hundred and fifty thousand tons of TNT.