“I can imagine it would.”
The coffee arrived in an elegant silver coffee set and Morwood took his cup gratefully, adding cream and two lumps of sugar. He stirred and took a long, satisfying pull.
“Now that we’re fortified,” said Eastchester, “let’s have a look at this mysterious thing you brought.”
“Of course.” Morwood slipped on a pair of latex gloves, placed the box on the coffee table, and unlatched it. He took the object out with his gloved hands and laid it on the table.
A look of complete astonishment bloomed on Eastchester’s face, and he exhaled abruptly. “My, my,” he said. “Where did you get that?”
“You know what it is?”
“Would you mind turning it over, please?”
Morwood complied.
Eastchester looked at it carefully, then sat back, shaking his head. “If I’m not mistaken, it’s a highly classified component of the early H-bombs. Known as a ‘dial-a-yield.’”
“Which is?”
“That will take a little explaining. As you may know, a hydrogen bomb gets most of its energy from the fusing of hydrogen into helium. That reaction requires so much heat and pressure it must be initiated by an atomic explosion. The H-bomb is essentially a fission bomb that employs plutonium, which then triggers a fusion reaction in a mass of hydrogen right next to it.”
Morwood wasn’t sure he understood, but he let Eastchester go on without interruption.
“H-bombs don’t use normal hydrogen,” Eastchester continued. “They use an isotope called tritium, also written as 3H. You see that symbol, printed on the side? It’s a form of hydrogen that has two extra neutrons in its nucleus.”
“Right.”
“This device stores the tritium inside the bomb. You can change the yield of the bomb, in this case from one to twenty megatons, just by turning that dial. That device feeds either more or less tritium into the reaction chamber ahead of detonation. The more tritium, the bigger the explosion. Hence the name dial-a-yield. If you want to bomb Moscow, say, you might want to crank it up to twenty megatons to take out the entire city. If, on the other hand, you’re bombing an airfield or a factory, a measly one megaton would suffice.”
“Ghastly calculations,” said Morwood.
“Without doubt the Russians have had similar devices in their H-bombs.”
“It’s still classified?”
“Very.” He leaned forward. “Can I ask where the heck you got this?”
“It’s a rather strange story. And it has to remain confidential.”
“Of course.”
“There’s an eccentric billionaire, fellow named Lucas Tappan—”
“The satellite and green-energy fellow.”
“Right. He’s also into UFOs, and he’s leading an archaeological investigation of the Roswell site, where that UFO was supposed to have crashed in 1947.”
Eastchester’s bushy eyebrows shot up. “Digging up the Roswell site? How perverse.”
“During the initial survey, the archaeologist doing the fieldwork found a grave a few hundred yards from the site. Two bodies were buried in it—along with that device. They were a man and a woman, both homicide victims, bearing signs of torture—followed by execution.”
“Good lord! Have you identified them?”
“Not yet. For a moment, however, I thought they might be the two scientists who vanished from Los Alamos in 1947. Those spies, Headley and Warshinski, who some say defected to the Soviet Union. Others, including me, think they might have been murdered. Except one of these bodies belonged to a woman—so it clearly wasn’t them.”
“Los Alamos was a secret city back then,” Eastchester said. “Everyone leaving was thoroughly searched. I wonder how this device got smuggled out. That would be no easy thing. But, Hale, it makes me think: Could it be connected with that unsolved case you worked on as a rookie, the murder of our nuclear scientist in 1999?”
“Not possible. Those two bodies recently found at Roswell long predate the 1999 case.”
“Of course.” Eastchester frowned, his brow creasing in thought, lips pursed. A silence gathered in the room. He then said, “May I?” gesturing at the device.
“If you don’t mind slipping these on.” Morwood took a spare pair of gloves from his pocket and handed them over. Eastchester pulled them on, then picked up the device and examined it closely, turning it this way and that. “This is definitely of LANL making. Rather early one, I would think. What do you intend to do with it?”