The 14th Colony: A Novel by Steve Berry Page A

Lunev?”
    Absolutely. A former Soviet military officer and the highest-ranking intelligence operative to ever defect to the United States. He turned in 1992 and remained to this day hidden away. He did, though, write a memoir. Through the Eyes of the Enemy. She’d read it several times. One comment from the book always stayed with her. The best spy will be everyone’s best friend, not a shadowy figure in the corner.
    “Lunev’s claims are true,” Osin said.
    She knew what he meant. In his memoir Lunev had revealed something shocking. He wrote about a Soviet weapon identified as RA-115. In the United States they called them suitcase nukes. Each weighed about fifty pounds and delivered six kilotons of firepower, which by Hiroshima and Nagaski standards was small. Those bombs had packed punches of sixteen and twenty kilotons. Still, at short range six kilotons could do extreme damage. Congress outlawed the weapon in 1994, but that provision was repealed in 2004. To her knowledge, though, the U.S. did not have any in its nuclear arsenal. The old Soviet Union and the new Russia were another matter. She recalled the concerns from 1997 when a Russian national security adviser claimed on 60 Minutes that more than a hundred RA-115s remained unaccounted for. No one knew if they had been destroyed or stolen. Congress held hearings, where experts differed on whether the weapon even existed.
    “Are you saying RA-115s are real?”
    He nodded. “The Soviets produced 250. They are about so big.” He used his hands to describe a package about twenty-four inches long, sixteen inches wide, and eight inches tall.
    “They were distributed to military intelligence units of the KGB and the GRU, tagged for special operations. After the Soviet collapse, they fell under the jurisdiction of the SVR. There they have remained.”
    She wondered about his frankness. This was not the type of information nations shared with one another. Warnings about poor security over Russia’s nuclear weapons dated back to 1990. A congressional act in 1991 provided American technical aid to help eliminate Russian warheads and account for their nuclear material. Thankfully, to date, no rogue bombs had ever surfaced. Eventually, the furor over any potential problems faded and suitcase nukes entered the realm of movies and television. None was ever seen in real life. Now she was being told that 250 of them existed.
    “Our counterintelligence units worked hard to downplay any threat and discredit press attention to the potential containment problem,” he said. “We diffused all of that publicity.”
    That they had. She remembered the shadow cast across the 60 Minutes story when it was revealed that, at the time of the broadcast, its producer had written and was promoting a book on the dangers of nuclear terrorism. That same producer had been involved with a just-released movie called The Peacemaker, which involved a missing Soviet nuclear weapon used for terrorism. Talk about casting doubt on credibility.
    “You people do stay busy,” she said. “Always up to something.”
    He smiled. “I could say the same for you.”
    “What does this have to do with Vadim Belchenko?”
    “Eighty-four of those RA-115s remain unaccounted for.”
    That was startling information, but she kept her cool and simply said, “And you’re just now mentioning this?”
    “There is good and bad to this reality. The good is that those weapons are hidden away, in places only a handful of people know. The bad is that one of the people who know is Vadim Belchenko.”
    Now she caught the urgency. “And you think Aleksandr Zorin is after one of those suitcase nukes?”
    “It’s a possibility.”
    They were still driving through Washington’s deserted streets, cruising past closed buildings and empty sidewalks. She’d thought something was seriously wrong from the moment Osin had first called. A second call from Osin had alerted her to the fact that a woman was in the United States,