Nucflash by Keith Douglass Page A

tens of thousands of people, ruin a fair-sized city, and be extremely hard to track.”
    It was, Murdock reflected, not exactly light dinner conversation, but it was a topic he was keenly interested in. “Everybody said the world would be a safer place with the collapse of Soviet Communism, that we could enjoy a ‘peace dividend’ with all the money we’d save cutting back on our military expenditures. Stupid idea that, fit only for liberal, anti-military politicians and other assorted half-wits. I certainly don’t want the Soviets back—never did—but at least they kept pretty good track of their nukes.”
    â€œYou believe the current owners of the warheads do not?” Murdock shrugged and kept cutting the steak on the plate in front of him. “There are just too damned many nukes, and too many people with reasons to sell them or steal them.”
    Inge nodded thoughtfully. “It sounds as though the—what is the expression? The nuclear genie has escaped its bottle.”
    â€œThat’s putting it mildly.”
    â€œSo,” Inge said. “What is the answer? How can we stop the proliferation? What will happen if we don’t?”
    Murdock didn’t reply right away. Looking past Inge’s shoulder, he spotted MacKenzie, seated at a table across the restaurant with Lieutenant Hopke, and caught his eye. Mac nodded slightly but gave no other sign of having noticed Murdock. There was at least one other BKA team in the room too, Murdock knew, but they were good, and he hadn’t been able to spot them.
    Good backup, just in case. Chances were, though, now that they were ready for them, the RAF wouldn’t try again, not in the same way, at least. The other patrons of the restaurant were going on with their meals, talking about weather or opera, the latest scandal in parliament or love, unaware of the topic being discussed at at least one of the tables.
    â€œI really don’t know, Inge,” Murdock said. “Used to be, I thought the old nuclear balance of power would be enough. You know, they won’t nuke us because then we’ll nuke them. How do you nuke a terrorist group, though? You can’t. You can’t even nuke the country that sponsored the terrorists, because it’s their government that’s bad, not the people. Hell, most of the population of North Korea is one step removed from outright slavery.
    â€œLater I thought SDI was the answer. You know, what the press called ‘Star Wars’? But then the Russians folded and it was peace-dividend time, and everyone in Congress was scrambling for the easy kills, looking for money for welfare and free health insurance. Hell, even if we had a perfect ballistic missile defense, chances are those terrorist nukes would come by way of freighter or submarine or even a moving van coming across the border from Mexico, not in the warhead of an SS-19.
    â€œI’m very, very much afraid that things have simply gone too far. One of these days pretty soon now, we’re going to lose a city.”
    â€œI never took you for the fatalistic sort, Blake.”
    â€œI’m hardly that. I’ll fight as long as I can, I’ll fight whoever I’m told to fight to stop the holocaust. But I’m also a realist. In my line of work, you have to be.”
    â€œI know what you mean. Working with Komissar, you can often begin assembling a larger picture in your own mind while you are still feeding the machine with the snippets and fragments. For a long time now, there have been, well, hints of something very large, some operation involving many of the old terror groups, and it has left me with a dreadful foreboding. Like knowing that something terrible is about to happen, and being unable to do a thing about it.”
    Even with much of their conversation centering on what was for both of them shop talk, their relationship, their mutual feelings of camaraderie and comfortable closeness