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Page 61.

Crane and Tim sat in the rear, sheltered by a carpeted half-wall. Crane said: “We’re going to send you back to London, Tim, and you’ll be promoted a grade in the Navy. That’s your life as Timothy Nordhall. At the same time, secretly, you’ll be Major Robert Malone. That’s part of the plan. We’ll be watching you while you’ll trade secrets with a man we tell you to watch. No strong-arm stuff, nothing dangerous. Brains over brawn.”

“No gunplay?”

“None,” Crane said with sureness. “It’s a game. We feed you misinformation to pass along to him. He thinks it’s valuable intel. He’ll give you equally worthless information, thinking you’ll believe it’s real. We follow him, map out his network, and eventually clean out a whole nest of Stalinist spies. The man’s code name is Jaguar. He is an ice-cold killer, but it won’t do for him to leave bodies all over London, which he is quite capable of doing.”

They set down on a jungle strip on the edge of Élisabethville, capital of Katanga Province. The surrounding countryside was lush, with plenty of activity showing agricultural wealth. Mines and refineries belched forth smoke as men from the region found work. In particular, copper and diamonds from Katanga were prized. But Crane had something quite different to show Tim.

They rode in a private car owned by a local black official, whose female chauffeur drove. They rode along narrow asphalt roads, following a railroad line into the highlands. There, among the low mountain ranges, entire hillsides were being gouged out. “The mineral wealth of this area is staggering,” Crane said. “The Belgians have been sitting on a strategic goldmine, and it’s more valuable than ever now that uranium is about to get a new boost.”

“You mean that stuff that makes watch dial numbers glow at night?”

Crane grinned darkly. “It makes more than watch dials glow.” He drew a circle in pencil on a napkin on the little dinner tray that folded out from the seat back before Tim. He drew a mass of dots in the circle. “You can read this in any good newspaper, but it’s little more than fantasy as yet.” Crane tapped his pencil on the paper. “This is a uranium atom. It’s a very heavy element, with lots of protons and neutrons in the nucleus. In fact, we are interested in two kinds of uranium—U235 and U239. Those are isotopes.” He drew a plus sign and a minus sign. “Basic physics. Protons live in the nucleus of an atom and have a plus charge. Electrons whiz around the outside of the nucleus and have a minus charge. Every atom has exactly the same number of protons and electrons, starting with hydrogen, which has one of each, and helium, which has two of each.” He drew several circles around the first one. “Know anything about quantum mechanics?”

“Just a little bit from my general physics and chemistry classes. Niels Bohr has lately dreamed up the idea that electrons aren’t exactly just particles, but packets of energy that zoom around at certain predictable levels or orbits.”

“Close,” Crane said, pausing over his rough sketch. “Or quantum jackets, or orbitals. Whatever you want to call them. Then there are those electrically neutral particles called neutrons, which sit in the nucleus. They look a lot like protons, except the neutrons have no charge. If you add up the number of protons, electrons, and neutrons, you get the mass number of a given isotope. Uranium-235 has a total of 235 of these major subatomic particles. Uranium-239 has 239. And so forth.” He paused for a moment, trying to succinctly capture the next step. “These very huge atoms don’t stick together long. They decay. They give off those extra isotope neutrons, which whiz away. That’s called radioactivity, and it’s measurable with a Geiger counter. If you get exposed to too much radioactivity, you get sick and possibly die.” He drew an arrow pointing away from an atom. “When you put a lot of uranium together in one place, the atoms smash into each other and lose their neutrons. If you get a whole lot of uranium in one pile, doing that, it’s called critical mass. When you have critical mass, the chain reaction multiplies in split seconds, so the mass explodes. That’s the theory, anyway. It explodes with a big bang, so it would make a dandy super-bomb.” He put the pencil down. “The world’s best uranium is right here in Katanga.”

“Ah!” Tim said. “And gives the place new strategic value.”

“Right. When the Krauts invaded Belgium, the Brussels government transferred its stocks of uranium to the Americans. The Germans, however, captured some of the Belgian stocks and took them inside Germany. That tells you, my friend, they are working on the same thing we are. The Japanese, the Soviets, the British—they all have research going. We all have the same problem: it’s not hard to understand how the critical mass leads to the explosion. What’s devilishly hard, Tim, is figuring out how to filter the raw oxide so you get 98% of better near-pure uranium-235. One of the things we’re going to need you to do in London is help us find out how far along the Germans are, and British for that matter. There are no friends in international politics—only alliances of convenience.”

Toward nightfall, they arrived at a smaller lake, tributary to Lake Tanganyika in the east. They drove along deserted hilly roads above jungle level, until they arrived at a sheltered cove. There, they drove about a mile down into the shore area. A narrow gauge railway ran to the lake shore, where Congolese men were busy loading piles of uraninite, or uranium oxide, into small cars for transport to a main rail line and thence mysteriously to Europe or America.

Crane lit a cigarette and stood with one foot up on a boulder, smoking quietly in the evening air. The men below sang as they worked. “I can practically see that stuff glowing from here,” he said softly. “We’ll never need to touch the stuff. Poor bastards, they’ll all die of radiation sickness. Nobody will warn them, neither we nor these Belgian bastards. They’ll never know what made them sick. Just bad ju-ju. And do you know they’ll be right about that.