The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred-Year-Old Man. Jonas Jonasson
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Название: The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred-Year-Old Man
Автор: Jonas Jonasson
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Приключения: прочее
isbn: 9780008275587
isbn:
The meek woman’s conclusion was that the uranium had left Madagascar by boat, but the size of the boat must be such that it could manage an ocean crossing. Either the Indian Ocean in one direction or the Atlantic in the other.
The arrogant man nodded, agreed, and made this line of reasoning his own in the subsequent report to Berlin, without protest from the meek woman.
The next step was to list all the cargo vessels that had recently called at and sailed from the harbour in Toamasina. When that didn’t turn up any obvious hits, A and B expanded their search to encompass potentially suspicious ships that had been anywhere near Madagascar during the period in question.
As a result, they were currently looking at a list of ships’ names. It consisted of one: the North Korean bulk carrier Honour and Strength.
On its way from Havana to Pyongyang.
It had passed immediately south of Madagascar fifteen days earlier.
The relationship between the Germans and the Americans wasn’t the best, ever since it had turned out that the Americans had bugged Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone, at which the chancellor picked up said phone and called President Obama to say she hoped the CIA was also listening to what she had to say now.
On the basis of his personality, as well as Germany’s strained relationship with the United States, the BND’s top central African representative had no problem lying through his teeth when explaining to his American colleague why he wanted help in determining the exact route and speed of the North Korean vessel Honour and Strength. As well as, of course, where the ship might currently be located.
The CIA, which was informed that it had to do with suspected industrial espionage on the car manufacturer Volkswagen in Brazil, told him what they knew. Without grumbling or delay, to boot. The blunder with the chancellor’s phone meant that they would be indebted to the Germans for quite some time.
The North Korean ship had followed a route a little closer to the southern coast of Madagascar than was optimal. The various time stamps, as calculated from the CIA’s satellite reports, also indicated that the ship had slowed down around there.
The German agents drew the conclusion that there was an immediate risk the uranium would soon wind up in North Korea, to be used for the nuclear weapons programme that Germany, and the world in general, had condemned.
They had to hurry!
Or, as it turned out, they didn’t.
Honour and Strength had, two hours earlier, reached North Korean waters and would arrive in the harbour at Nampo later that day.
Uranium or plutonium? Plutonium or uranium? Kim Jong-un wanted the answer to be plutonium, and it would have been, too, if the Russians had kept their centrifugal promise, or if the only person in the northern hemisphere who was a bigger screw-up than the director of the Institute of Nuclear Energy in Pyongyang wasn’t his colleague at the plutonium plant in Yongbyon. What they had accomplished, at great cost to the Democratic People’s Republic, was certainly enough to be a slight annoyance to the Americans and their puppets scattered throughout the area, but it was far from anything that could demonstrate real might.
Therefore the Supreme Leader had first removed the plutonium director north of the capital, citing his incompetence – that is, treason. It was, of course, a correct decision, as were all decisions made by the Supreme Leader, but in practice it had not led to anything but the removed director being replaced by a man who essentially deserved the same. And the one in Pyongyang mostly kept slinking around with his back to the wall, terrified, for some reason.
All these things a person had to do himself. The Supreme Leader gave the order to purchase enriched uranium on the free market. Just three or four kilos to start. The purveyor the Russians had mentioned had to prove himself, and the method of smuggling had to be run in before any meaningful deliveries could be fulfilled. It would never do to obtain uranium for maybe a hundred million dollars, only to see the load seized by the devil himself.
A few kilos (or even half a ton) were far from sufficient to win a large-scale war, but that was never the intent. Naturally, Kim Jong-un realized that an attack on South Korea or Japan could not end in anything but destruction for all. More so if he reached the United States, or even just Guam.
At the same time, four kilos (unlike half a ton) was too little for the true purpose, which was to prove themselves and make the dogs in Washington drop their ideas about doing what they’d already done in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. History showed that countries that couldn’t bite back were devoured. A happy side effect of the armament was that it allowed for an ever-brasher rhetoric, which in turn brought local fighting spirit to entirely new levels. In this way, the Supreme Leader became even more supreme.
Deep down, Kim Jong-un didn’t believe in anything but himself, his dad and his grandpa. Religion in the wider sense was forbidden in North Korea. Yet he was close to thinking that a higher power was involved, in that the one person on earth he needed more than any other, for his purposes, had been found floating in a basket at sea just days before. Only to be scooped up by the very ship that was on its way home with the trial cargo of uranium. If this person was who he claimed to be, of course. That was a detail that remained to be investigated.
Anyway, scooped up he had been. And by a captain who proved able to think for himself. For that, the captain would be awarded a medal. And scrutinized a bit more closely by the director of Domestic Security. To think for himself. From there, it was a slippery slope towards planning a coup.
There was plenty of uranium out there, if you only had the contacts. And nowadays they did. Furthermore, Kim Jong-un also loved the fact that the main distributor of the necessary uranium was the director of a plant in Congo that had been created by the Americans.
The dream, of course, would be a hydrogen bomb, but for that they would need, first, a functional production line of plutonium (which, again, the screw-ups hadn’t yet managed to create) and then something totally, uniquely complicated where deuterium and tritium melted together into helium atoms at the same time as … something. Kim Jong-un’s brain was too valuable to the nation for him to weigh it down with the sort of thing his researchers ought to be able to manage in an afternoon.
The advantage of a hydrogen bomb was that it would erase Japan and South Korea from the map in a single bang. The disadvantage was that the Democratic People’s Republic would cease to exist thirty seconds later. But as long as malevolent Americans, Japanese and South Koreans didn’t completely understand that Kim Jong-un realized this, it would fulfil its function. If only it were possible to build.
The hydrogen bomb would have to wait. The plutonium facilities could continue not to deliver. Kim Jong-un had uranium on the way now – and, possibly, the man who knew the best way to СКАЧАТЬ