Dark Zone by Stephen Coonts

from falling into the hands of the so-called mutineering generals.”
    Rubens glanced at Hadash. The revolt of the French generals was not well known outside of France and Africa, and even some of the histories that reported it confused basic information such as the dates and locations. Rubens and Hadash, however, knew it all very well: Fifteen years before, Hadash had devoted an entire week of his seminar at MIT talking about it. In his opinion, it not only represented Europe’s last attempt to hold on to African colonies; it also showed the futility of military insurrections in an industrialized democracy.
    That was Hadash’s view. Rubens had written a rather long paper arguing that it did not.
    He’d gotten an A-minus.
    “There was at least one other warhead close to completion at the time,” continued Rubens. “This was the so-called Chou weapon —chou as in the French word for cabbage or kale. It was also apparently a reference to the small size and shape of the bomb.”
    In this case, small was a relative term; the weapon weighed roughly several hundred pounds. At the time, American intelligence believe it was similar to the American W-9, which had been developed several years before as a warhead for artillery shells. Its yield was calculated at anywhere between forty and ninety kilotons. Little Boy, which was exploded over Hiroshima, had a calculated yield of “only” fifteen to sixteen kilotons, with some sources figuring it as low as thirteen.
    At the time, American officials—not to mention the French—feared that the unfinished warhead had been confiscated by the mutineers. That turned out not to be the case—it had in fact been spirited away by a junior officer and placed in a desert storage facility. After the mutiny, the unfinished bomb was moved to a nuclear storage facility that became an underground dump for radioactive materials. The weapon wasn’t forgotten, but the program that it had been part of received a low priority for a variety of reasons and it remained in storage.
    “Wasn’t its plutonium very valuable?” said Collins.
    Rubens frowned but answered her question. “Of course. But in the immediate aftermath of the mutiny there was a certain amount of slippage in information and priorities, and there is some question of whether the technology the French had would have been well suited to safely reworking the warhead. In any event, there was an entirely new regime in place with different aims for their weapons. Even at the highest estimate, this would have already begun to seem like a rather small yield, certainly compared to American and Soviet programs. The captain who had moved it happened to die in a car accident before the mutiny itself was fully suppressed, and so he wasn’t around to, shall we say, advocate for the warhead.”
    “And we know where it is?”
    “We’ve known since the mutiny, and tracked it since 1982,” said Hadash. “William did a paper on it for me.”
    The fact that Hadash remembered the paper pleased Rubens—though he feared that his former professor might share the fact that it had yielded another A-minus.
    Come to think of it, A-minus was the only grade Hadash had ever given him. He would point that out.
    “The NSA had a program called Seed Finder during the early Reagan years,” said Rubens. “By that time the French had misplaced the weapon—on paper only—at least twice and located it again. Their estimates of its size and bulk in the nineteen-eighties—well, their calculations were incorrect. They clearly underestimated its potency.”
    The NSA had “contracted” with the CIA’s Special Collection Service—in some ways the predecessor to Desk Three—to place sensors at the site to help evaluate the warhead and judge its potency. A CIA officer had lost his life in one of the operations, and two agents (foreign employees of the CIA) had also been killed before the sensors were successfully planted.
    “The sensors are regularly checked