Blood Covenent, page 2
He knew Arzamas-16’s ten square kilometers very well. He knew the roads, the drab brownish red and gray structures, and the trees along those roads. He played a game memorizing each soldier’s name, and hair and eye colors. He was permitted conversation only with other scholars. While no one tore his Torah from his hands, YAHWEH seemed as dead to him as his family.
The robbery of his youth, and now middle age, where his eyesight wavered and breathing seemed harder, angered him. There was no one with whom to share these years. No one to raise children; but who would want to bring children to a place where they considered blowing the world to atomized particles? David turned into himself, delving deeper and deeper into the technical realm. His genius became his curse—a Prometheus chain binding him to this world where he considered the unthinkable every day.
He set the caliper next to the cylinder and examined the KGB major. “Yevgeny, is that it?” He pointed to the black case.
Yevgeny shrugged, not even knowing whatit was. “I suppose. They tell me it is what you requested.” He puffed his chest, “It came all the way from California.”
David nodded distractedly. California did not exist. Nothing existed except Arzamas-16’s ten square kilometers. California and the burgeoning Silicon Valley area might as well be on the far side of the moon for all he cared. He did not even truly understand who the Americans were. He simply understood they were evil, because his jailers told him they were evil.Could they be as evil as his jailers?
“Well, bring it here.” He waved his hand and walked to one of the less cluttered workbenches.
He eyed the case rolling through his lab. He turned to the notebook opened on the desk and pulled out a list. There were red check marks next to a long list of items. He said idly, “You have the RAM chips?”
“Whatever those are. I understand I have two hundred 4K-DRAM chips and one hundred SRAM chips. I have no idea what they all are,” replied Yevgeny.
David chuckled, “They are the future, Major.”
“If you say so.”
He knelt down and flipped the side latches on the case. The heavy lid lifted up on a pair of simple hydraulic pumps. It hissed quietly.
David squatted next to the KGB man. He looked like a child next to a Christmas tree and all the presents were for him. He pulled out the first static bag and unwrapped the heavy black plastic. Inside the bag, gently pressed into a white half-inch Styrofoam board, were rows of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips. They looked like an army of angry ants. He could make out the silk-screen printing identifying the chip number and Motorola’s logo. He reached out next to the plastic static wrap and touched it gently with his fingertips. He set the bag on the bench.
“I’ve never seen anything like these things,” muttered Yevgeny.
David nodded agreement. “Just some computer hobbyist in the United States.” He laughed to himself, “I wonder if the fools understand what they have created.” He turned, his eyes dancing. “Imagine, Yevgeny! A computer smaller than this case and more powerful than anything anyone has.”
“It’s not possible,” protested Yevgeny. “I’ve seen our computers. They are as big as this building. The disk drives alone are almost as large as your workbenches.”
David reached up, pulled a small Japanese transistor radio from a shelf, and handed to the Major. “This is how. They’ve abandoned tube technology almost completely, and they are moving towards the chip! The chip is getting smaller and smaller. Each generation has more capability in a smaller footprint. You can’t do that with tubes. Tubes get hot and take up space, and space requires a bigger footprint.”
“But we make the best tubes in the world,” protested Yevgeny.
David shrugged. “There used to be buggy whip makers too.”
He pulled out a larger bag and opened it reverently. There—each in their open bubble wrap and static bags, were 8080 microprocessors. Stickers indicated that there were stringent import/export control laws to be obeyed. International Business Machines and a second company called Intel were listed on the chips. David shrugged. Intel must be some minor manufacturer.
“These are the brains. According to my studies this chip can address up to one megabyte of memory.” He spread his hands wide and explained, “The memory board would have to be this large.”
“How much would that cost?”
“Thousands of rubles, I am sure. No one has done it.”
He found the PROM burner and a set of PROM chips next to them.
Yevgeny shook his head, “RAM, PROM, DRAM, CPU—an alphabet soup you’re brewing here.”
“Programmable Read Only Memory—we’ll burn the software onto these chips.”
Yevgeny pointed at the PROM chips asking, “On this you’ll build the program for the trigger mechanism?”
“Nothing quite so crude. It will all be logic gates and buffers. I’ll use machine code to make it work. Then, Major, you shall have your portable weapon.”
“How heavy?” he asked eagerly. Details were always important when talking to his masters.
David looked into the air. “I’d guess around seventy kilograms. The plutonium bomb should take about twenty-two kilos, and the lead shielding probably another twenty kilos. Then we’ll need some sort of steel housing and the computer trigger. I think we’ll need some batteries as well.” He stood and rustled through his notebook drawings. “I’m setting it up to use a dry cell in the event the lithium batteries fail. A capacitor should maintain all information in the non-volatile RAM.” He nodded confidently. “It’ll be quite a bomb.” He looked down at the Major and leered evilly. “You could carry it in a suitcase Yevgeny! But that’s the entire idea isn’t it? A man portable nuclear weapon.”
A cold finger traveled down Yevgeny’s spine. TheJew was supposed to be brilliant. Perhaps, he was going quite mad as well.
David rubbed his hands together before stooping down to retrieve the precious PROM burner. He looked at the burner’s plug, saying, “I’ll need another step-down transformer to handle the load for this device.”
Yevgeny nodded. “Give me a list.”
David patted his pockets and produced a list. He gave it to the KGB man as casually as a grocery list. “I’ll need some breadboards, LED display crystals, numeric key pads and these button lithium batteries.” He flipped one between his thumb and forefinger before catching it again in midair.
The Major looked over the list. “What’s an LED?”
David stared past him. “A light emitting diode. They are generally red or green these days. We’ll need enough to display twenty characters of data. Oh, and Major, considering we stole this stuff from the West; I doubt we’ll be able to easily display Cyrillic letters. Western alphabet only.”
“A training issue,” said Yevgeny dismissing the issue. Training was not his problem. Keeping David productive was his problem. “Where should I get this stuff?”
“America, naturally. And Major, make sure the breadboards have the finest gold contacts. Copper and silver will probably oxidize over time—gold and only the finest. Make sure the boards are four-layer wafers at a minimum. I’d prefer six-layer boards, but you might arouse some attention.”
Yevgeny jotted down the additional information on David’s shopping list. He had no idea what a wafer was or that the breadboards were flat green silicon where components were plugged in.
“Sakarov built his demonstration bomb in ‘61.” David shook his head ignoring Yevgeny. “He built a fifty megaton bomb and detonated it—just to say it could be done. He could have made it a hundred megatons. But what use is such a large weapon?” He spun and pointed to his workbench holding the components for his computerized trigger and proclaimed, “These have a far more practical effect.These, Major, shall change the world.”
“Whatever you say.” He looked up from his list. “Is there anything else?”
David focused back on the Major. “Yes, I wish to see my sister.”
Yevgeny sighed, “You know the rules. I can’t—”
“My sister. I need to see my sister!” He snapped, then softened, “Surely, you can understand. It’s been so long.” He spread his hands.
“I’ll see what I can do, but no promises. It’s not up to me.”
“Yes, of course.” He turned away from the KGB and shuffled over to another bench.
The audience was over. Yevgeny had his shopping list. He would have to send someone out to find this stuff. It was probably available in New York. The Americans seemed to have everything in New York. How foolish of them to place the United Nations building in such a populous and convenient place. He turned and walked out.
David watched the door close and looked back down at his notebook. He had written in large Hebrew letters:SAMSON . Yes, he would call the weaponSAMSON —a suitable name. He pulled the manual on Assembler across the bench and flipped to a section. He checked on the commands needed to display a string—a message.
Samson delivered a message to the Philistines in his final act of defiance. Blinded and chained, Samson stood before the Philistines, a joke for their amusement. The Philistines were jailers like David’s own jailers. Jailers who forgot how dangerous their prisoner could be. They never noticed Samson’s hair had grown back, the symbol and source of his strength. He killed three thousand with his last breath—Samson killed more Philistines in death than during his life.
David glanced across the room to the 8080 microprocessors and decided they were the source of his strength. Yes, he was certain it would work.
CHAPTER 2
Arzamas-16, USSR
February 5, 1979
David estimated the bomb would produce an explosion somewhere between two and three kilotons. It was well beyond the estimates of .1 to .3 kilotons everyone expected him to produce. He did not bother to correct his critics. After all, he was theJew , not to be trusted, only exploited.
He pushed his spectacles up his nose and snapped open the locks on the front of the bomb’s case. He had borrowed the idea of the hydraulic pumps to open the case lid from Yevgeny’s case. He thought the pumps made his weapon slightly more mysterious. The lid revealed a stainless steel oblong capsule surrounded by rigid Styrofoam, mounted with a keypad and an LED display.
The stainless steel capsule was burnished to a satin finish and all the seams were gone. The bomb was designed to last twenty-five years without maintenance. Naturally, the explosive force twenty-five years hence would degrade somewhat, but it would still leave a sizeable crater.
Nuclear weapons were classified in terms of a five-layer kill zone. Each zone was a concentric circle, and David estimated his bomb would hit each zone in three hundred meter increments. He drew a diagram on the board estimating the effect on his own world—Arzamas-16—using a ground-burst scenario.
Ground zero, the point where the bomb exploded, would vaporize everything. Matter converted instantly to energy! The overpressure would produce wind speeds upwards of five hundred kilometers per hour. Should anyone survive the initial explosion, life expectancy could safely be measured in minutes. The human body simply is not equipped to handle the violent atom.
The second ring contained total destruction of all above ground structures. Perhaps the foundations would remain as evidence of their one time existence. Wind speeds would dissipate to four hundred sixty kilometers per hour. What did not vaporize would now be picked up by the angry wind and hurtled across the sky. One in ten might survive, severely burned and broken for a few extra moments. Rescue and paramilitary services would be incapable of providing any meaningful assistance.
Severe blast damage would follow in the third ring knocking down everything but the sturdiest buildings. Bridges would be ripped away by the howling wind, and rivers would flow backwards from the severe overpressure. Thirty percent of those this close might survive, although they would almost certainly be deaf and blind. The very last things they would see or hear would be the hellish whine and the heart of a new star.
The expanding fireball would set afire everything and everyone in the fourth ring. Anyone living through the concussive shock of the initial blast would probably suffocate. The flash fire would consume any available oxygen and the concussive blast would wash the rest away. The wind speed would be reduced to something comparable to a level five hurricane. People would remember fires everywhere. Anything that can burnwill burn.
Finally, deadly fire and wind damage would cause residential homes to collapse into heaps on their lots. People would be tossed around like a child’s toys during an angry tantrum. Everyone still alive would suffer second and third degree burns. Their clothes would be consumed by the firestorm. The winds would subside to survivable levels.
Properly placed, a bomb could cripple Arzamas-16 forever. Arzamas-16, however, was not his true target. Certainly, he would love to see the pompous fools, his colleagues, grasp for explanations, but David focused on his jailers. They would pay someday for their folly.
The atom’s terror was locked quietly in the case before him. A plutonium heartbeat locked inside a soccer-style warhead. The warhead consisted of thirty-two pie-shaped slices connected on precise sixty-degree angles. At the center of the plutonium ball was a mixture consisting of beryllium and polonium. Everything must compress within one ten-millionth of a second to achieve supercritical mass and produce a history-making explosion. David worked his magic, playing with the composition to realize unheard of yields.
Instead of using conventional TNT to fashion the explosive trigger, David chose a more stable plastic explosive, allowing him to shape the trigger mechanism to his precise specifications.
The stainless steel case was completely sealed. To connect the LED display and numeric keypad, David fashioned gold connectors as part of the steel case. The keypad and LED modules could be unplugged and replaced should something fail. The case mold provided mounting brackets to hold the modules. These were the only connections exposing access to the inner case.
David insisted that a special tamper-proof alloy be used. He justified his reasoning to the KGB, suggesting the weapons should be impervious to disarmament teams.They never understood that once the bombs were built, David had deployed the weapons . Nor did they understand the significance of the name attached to the weapon.
Conventional nuclear weapons provide for the removal of the trigger device. This is to prevent accidental ignition of the weapon during transport. The fuse is the explosive charge that collapses the fissile material together to create the supercritical mass and begin the terminal chain reaction. To provide simplicity, the fuse was part of the basic bomb design.
The fuse was connected to a long-life battery set and a capacitor harness. The batteries were a series of lithium-based cells roughly the size of a half dollar and maybe twice as thick. David fashioned a charging system to maintain battery life for a quarter of a century. It was a maintenance free weapon. Again, his critics scoffed at the idea—after all, the West had not achieved such a marvel.
They were silent now. David had batteries running under a similar configuration for over eight years showing little more than a three-percent degradation. Over those eight years, he considered the problem and developed a more efficient charging system. They forgot his specialty was originally plasma physics.
SAMSON’Ssecret was the printed circuit board—a computer brain based on the Intel 8080 microprocessor with a mind of its own—David’s mind. The instruction set for his programming was written in Assembler and burned onto the PROM chips. Such designs were subject to peer review, and everyone wanted to see his code.
Actually, they wanted to understand what he had done and probably steal the idea for their own systems. Academic larceny was nothing new. Each time he broke into a new realm of design, the initial reaction was to scoff, then bet against his success before they grudgingly accepted his accomplishment.
Arzamas-16’s masters thought they understood theJew . They gave him everything he asked for, because in this very communist country a Western style competition was necessary to achieve the military wonder-weapons required for the Soviet Red Army. The political officers were fond of reminding anyone who still listened that the West would sell them the rope to make its own noose. They had unwittingly given theJew the means to exact a very expensive revenge.
No one understood that David had written two programs. He had burned two master PROM chips. He produced the printout for only one program, and permitted testing on only one PROM chip. His gamble rested with the fact that once the bombs were sealed, they were beyond maintenance, investigation, or tampering.
There were only four differences between the two programs. In a day and age where he had a paltry sixteen thousand bytes available for program and bootstrap—comments were an extraordinary luxury. Memory required segmentation to maintain the simple operating system—a code segment and data segment. The inefficiencies of the assembler and the 8080’s backward method for addressing memory sacrificed readability and explanation.
David used all the tricks he had read about in the procured computer journals and programming manuals. One of those techniques involved trimming the century designation from the date. Some fourteen years later in an obscure publication, someone would theorize there might be a problem with the eighteen billion PROM chips regarding dates. It became known as the year 2000 problem and was shortened to Y2K. David was ahead of his time.
The code was divided into two sections. The major section dealt with the process control aspects of the bomb. David ensured the countdown date was safely stored in non-volatile memory. These were the static random access memory (SRAM) chips Yevgeny delivered six months ago. During final assembly prior to sealing the case, David suggested running a test to ensure the bomb’s brain was working. If something went wrong, assembly could be reversed and the failing components replaced.
