Steve Martini - Critical mass

Critical Mass

By: Steve Martini.

Information WANTS to be free. And the information inside this book longs for freedom with

a peculiar intensity. I genuinely believe that the natural habitat for any book is inside an

electronic network...

This electronic book is now literary freeware. It now belongs to the emergent realm of alternative information economics. You have no right to make this electronic book part of

the conventional flow of commerce. Let it be part of the flow of knowledge: there's a difference...

You can copy this electronic book. Copy the heck out of it, be my guest, and give those

copies to anybody who wants them. The nascent world of cyberspace is full of sysadmins,

teachers, trainers, cybrarians, netgurus, and various species of cybernetic activist...

Books of today cost to mush money, and this is the only way for someone to get to it!

So

Please upload it to your message boards, and mail it to your friends! Information WANTS to

be free...

This Book is made for Ms-Reader by E.C.L.A - Ice-T

Ice-T

Electronic Civil Liberties Activist

Synopsis:

Frought with tension and suspense, Critical Mass is Steve Martini at his electrifying best. It is the story of what can happen in a world where private hate and public apathy combine to uncork the sleeping but deadly genie of nuclear terror.

Joss Cole, a burned-out public defender from L.A. , has opted for a quieter life in theSan Juan Islandsof Washington State . Her first client is an independent businessman named Dean Belden, subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury. But days into the trial, he dies in fiery explosion. Gideon Ban Ry is a nuclear fission expert troubled by the failure to account for two small tactical nuclear devices missing from a storage facility in the formerSoviet Union. The two weapons were last seen in crates being shipped to the American company called Belden Electronics. His only lead is Joss Cole.

G. P. PUTNAN'S SONS NEW YORK

This is a work of fiction. The events described are imaginary, and the characters are fictitious and not intended to represent specific living persons.

Even when settings are referred to by their true names, the incidents portrayed as taking place there are entirely fictitious; the reader should not infer that the events set there ever happened.

G. P. PUTNAN'S SONS Publishers Since 1838 a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.375 Hudson Street New York , NY 10014

Copyright1998 by Steven Paul Martini, Inc.

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission. Published simultaneously inCanada Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Martini, Steve, date.

Critical mass / Steve Martini.

ISBN 0-399-14362-9

I. Title.

PS3563.A73358C7 1998 98-24327 CIP 81Y.54--dc21

Printed in theUnited States of America

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

This book is dedicated to the selfless men and women of science who work to combat the dangers of nuclear proliferation, and in particular the people of the Russian Republic who have managed against impossible odds to keep the deadly genie in its bottle.

There were people in Hiroshima whose shadows were printed by the blast on the concrete walls of buildings and pavement. These shadows can still be seen. Some of the bodies that made them were never found. It was as if they never existed. There are those who have seen these shadows scorched on the hard ground, to whom they are mere curiosities of historyimages of a time that has passed. If that is all they have come to be, then they are indeed the angels of apathy.

WEST OF CAPE FLATTERY AND STRAIT OF JUAN DE FUCA The Dancing Lady was not a thing of beauty. She was sixty-three feet of welded steel, much of it dripping rust down her sides like dried blood. Her raised forecastle deck and flaring prow were plowing the dark waters west of Vancouver Island at seven knots. She climbed the swells and plunged into the deepening troughs, straining to make headway in weather that was quickly turning foul. Her usual crew of five was down to three the skipper, Nordquist; his son; and one other crewman who was like family, and like the family was now working for nothing. The boat was a durable stern trawler with twin diesels designed for deep water. On her aft deck was a massive reel, and wrapped around it was a half mile of open mesh netting, window dressing for this cruise. The Lady was a bottom fisher, a work boat as common as tenpenny nails in these waters. It was the reason they used her. She wouldn't be noticed even by overhead surveillance. She rolled in the swells and wallowed in the troughs.

Hydraulic fluid seeped from the hoses that drove her massive boom, and one of her engines was a thousand hours past a needed overhaul, but Nordquist didn't have the money for the repairs. Working eighteen-hour days in bone-numbing cold water and ice-covered riggings, Nordquist was going broke. His wife was doing her shopping at the food bank, and loans were overdue on the boat. And still, the federal government did nothing to stop the Canadians from overfishing the areas west of Vancouver Island. They had killed the northwest salmon runs and were now busy taking everything they could find off the bottom. Nordquist and his compatriots couldn't afford the campaign contributions necessary to bribe their own government into action. He looked out over the prow from the raised wheelhouse. She kept losing R.PM on the starboard engine.

Nordquist had to fight to hold her steady in the increasing swells. They rose up in front of him like ominous mountains, there one instant, and gone the next. The Lady was starting to pound. The weather was getting worse. His son was straining to find a horizon through the fifty-power binoculars, eyes fixed to the west. "Oh, shit." The boy didn't have to say more. Nordquist looked over his shoulder and saw it: a thirty-foot wall of water rushing down on them, on their starboard beam. He spun the wheel to the right, and thirty years of hands-on experience brought the bow of his boat like a knife toward the mountainous wall of water. It cascaded around the wheelhouse and shuddered the Lady's steel to her keel. She plowed through and came out, plunging down the back side of the wave.

The wave had knocked the kid to the deck. He sat there in amazement, looking at his old man and marveling at his power to focus, even in the face of death.

The Isvania was a rusted-out hulk, a remnant of the once powerful Soviet fishing fleet. She'd been condemned for scrap the year before, but like everything else in the new Russia, even this was behind schedule.

Heading for the boneyard, she was on her last voyage. She crossed the Bering Sea, threading her way through the Aleutians and the Gulf of Alaska, then down the Canadian coast. Her holds, fore and aft, were empty except for a light load of scrap metal. In the captain's safe were papers transferring the ship's title to a scrap yard outside of Bangkok.

She ran with a skeleton crew of seven and made only one brief stop at Prince Rupert on the Canadian coast to pick up a small load of lumber, which now rested, stacked on her decks. This was a cover in case she was stopped and boarded by coastal authorities, her justification for crossing the Bering Sea and hugging the American coast. Bills of lading showed the lumber to be delivered to Oakland, California, though her captain had no intention of going there. The lumber would be thrown overboard once Isvania dropped its real cargo. Then the ship would head west and south, toward the Indian Ocean and its final resting place. The helmsman brought her five degrees to port as her captain, Yuri Valentok, strained his eyes through binoculars for anything on the horizon. The Isvania was taking on water in the forward hold and getting sluggish in the deepening troughs. The bilge pumps were handling it for now, but Valentok wasn't sure how long they would hold up. He couldn't see a damn thing through the binoculars. Drops of rain, driven by the wind, pelted the windows on the bridge like bullets. Only one of the wipers was working, and that was useless. The wind-whipped mist and froth from the waves created an impenetrable haze. Valentok could scarcely see the prow of his own ship. To make things worse, his radar was out. It hadn't worked since the ship left Vladivostok. Twice they'd had to come to a dead stop in shipping lanes for fear of hitting other vessels. They laid on their foghorn and hoped the other ships could see them on their own radar. Isvania was like everything else in their crumbling country: coming apart with no money for repairs. Valentok carried onboard one other waybill for an additional piece of cargo, but it was only to be used in the event of an extreme emergency, if his ship was forced into port. This particular waybill was forged. If the item was discovered, the captain would argue that he didn't know the nature of the cargo.