“Sir, I’m Colonel Nelson Winget.” The man in the uniform slid a business card down the table toward Thorpe.

“You can call me Thorpe, Zeb, anything but sir,” said Thorpe. “That one’s reserved for my five-year-old grandson and only when he knows he’s been really bad.” He looked at the business card: ASSISTANT COMMANDER, AIR FORCE SYSTEMS COMMAND, WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE. “Who wants to start?”

Zink jumped into the void. “The plane in the file photo is Russian made, an IL-76, registered in the Georgian Republic. As to who owns it, it’s anybody’s guess. Title seems to be a bit cloudy. The aircrew is a mixed bag, three of them out of Belarus, and one Chechen. They were flying out of North Korea. The plane was forced down by mechanical problems and landed at Don Muang airport in Bangkok two days ago. Thai authorities found thirty-five tons of arms and munitions on board, all of it in violation of the UN Security Council ban on exports from North Korea.”

“And who says serendipity never works for our side?” said Thorpe.

“We did tip off Thai customs as to what we thought was on board,” said Sanchez.

“You don’t have to explain to me,” said Thorpe. “As long as they land outside the country and it doesn’t start a war, you got my vote. So far it sounds like an issue for the State Department or Defense, not us.” He started to close the cover on the file in front of him.

“We don’t know the intended final destination,” said Zink. “You can probably draw a big circle around the Middle East and throw darts at it.”

“But there appears to be a problem,” said Sanchez, “and if we’re right, it’s gonna likely fall in your court sooner or later.”

“Go on,” said Thorpe.

“Yesterday we intercepted telephonic communications between an individual in Pyongyang, North Korea, and someone in the area of the northern Caribbean,” said Sanchez. “They were using a satellite link we don’t control, part of the old Soviet system. And the receiving end in the Caribbean wasn’t using a cell phone. It was an old analog landline.”

“Cuba,” said Thorpe.

Sanchez nodded. “It gave us some problems with transcription since our computers and our software are weighted toward digital signals. So we didn’t get the entire conversation.”

“Was it encrypted?” said Thorpe.

“No. It was clear and in English,” said Sanchez. This meant it probably wasn’t the North Korean military or its government talking to their counterparts in Cuba.

“It appears to have been a private-party conversation. The transcript is in your file, the parts that we were able to pick up.”

Thorpe had the file open again and was turning pages until he found the transcript and started to read.

“The scanning software at one of our stations picked up the phone call because of the location from which the call originated, in North Korea. It became a full intercept when key words were recognized,” said Sanchez. “You’ll see those words highlighted in the transcript.”

“The man calling in from Pyongyang was reporting to his friend in Cuba that a certain cargo plane was forced down in the ‘land of smiles.’”

“Thailand,” said Thorpe.

“It was clear there was something on board they were interested in. The man at the Cuban end of the conversation seemed to be in charge. He was worried that the communication might be intercepted. They beat around the bush for a while and finally out came the words ‘big guy’ and ‘little kid,’” said Sanchez.

“And that’s when all the lights and buzzers on your computer went off.” Thorpe had already keyed on the highlighted words in the transcript.

“It’s not just words or phrases, but usage,” said Sanchez. “The way these words are employed in a conversation that triggers the computer to recognize them. They were among a number of similar words or phrases designed to capture a particular reference.”

“Fat Man and Little Boy,” said Thorpe.

“Yes,” said Sanchez. These were the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan to end World War II.

“We lost bits and pieces of the conversation. But it appears that the subject in the Caribbean asked the man in Pyongyang which of the two was on board the plane. And the man in North Korea said ‘the big guy.’”

“I see it.” Thorpe sits up straight in his chair. “Do we know what was on that plane?” He looks at Zink.

“We sent two agents over from the embassy in Bangkok late yesterday, before we knew about the telephone intercepts,” said Zink. “But Thai customs wasn’t sure how much they could cooperate until they had approval from a higher authority.”

“So we still don’t know what’s on that plane?” said Thorpe.

“We do now,” said Sanchez. “When the phone intercept came in, we alerted the military. The navy dispatched one of their nuclear weapons officers from Subic, in the Philippines. When the Thai military saw the guy in a Hazmat suit with a yellow Geiger counter the size of your mama’s kitchen stove, they stepped aside and set a world speed record for deplaning.”

“And?” said Thorpe.

“Good news and bad news,” said Sanchez. “Good news is, there was nothing nuclear on board.”

Thorpe issued a deep sigh of relief and settled back into his chair.

“The plane contained a bandit’s bazaar, everything the well-armed terrorist wants for Christmas,” said Zink. “RPGs, rocket launchers, missile tubes and the missiles to go with them, shoulder-fired surface-to-air stuff, enough Kalashnikovs to restart the Russian Revolution. All of it crated up in wood and labeled as tools. Thai customs is still doing an inventory.

“Don’t get too comfortable,” said Zink, “’cause we’re not off the hook yet. There was one big surprise, a wooden crate about half the size of a small house, marked ‘oil drilling equipment.’ It took us a while, but we finally convinced the Thais to let us take a peek. At first nobody knew what it was. It looked like a very large, oversize hot water heater.”

“Go on,” said Thorpe.

“They tested it for radiation but it wasn’t hot. Well, maybe I shouldn’t say that yet.”

“Why not?”

The air force colonel leaned forward at the table. “Because according to our ordnance people, it’s thermobaric, and it’s the biggest damn thing they’ve ever seen,” said Winget.

“You mean like McVeigh’s truck bomb in Oklahoma City?” said Thorpe.

“Similar principle,” said Winget, “but on a much higher order of technology, and far more destructive. It is a fuel-air device and considerably larger than anything we have in our own arsenal. We don’t know the exact magnitude. So far our experts have only seen pictures of it. We have two of them on a plane now, on their way to Thailand to examine it. But based on the photos they’ve seen, they’re telling us it looks like a Russian design.”

“Why would the Russians-”

“We don’t think the Russians built it. It probably has ‘Made in North Korea’ stamped on the bottom of it, part of the technology transfer from back in the eighties. The Russians got a big jump start on us in the field of thermobaric weapons before the Soviet empire went down. We had to play catch-up when we first went to war in Afghanistan. You remember the mountain caves at Tora Bora?”

Thorpe nodded. “I remember seeing pictures.”

“We used B-52s and bunker-busting thermobaric bombs in an effort to penetrate the caves and incinerate whoever was inside. We believed it was Bin Laden. If it was, he slipped away.

“Based on the size of the device in the photographs, if its power is true to scale and if you could set it off in the right spot under the right conditions, you could boil a fair amount of the water in the Chesapeake.”

“You’re kidding,” said Thorpe.

“I wish I was,” said Winget. “It’s only half a step to a step down from a nuclear device. There’s no fallout from radiation and the blast effect is more confined. That’s the good news. The bad news is that once you master the technology and perfect the design, which isn’t that difficult, the weapon is easily replicated, and the technical know-how is readily transferable to others. We know that terrorist groups have been experimenting with fuel-air designs for some time. The bombing in Bali a few years ago showed signs of fuel-air design.”