was born the fake copper mining operation to hide the removal of the uranium from the mountain. It also served to conceal the construction of four nuclear reactors. The deception included a large administration and support building at the mine head and a town site for the mineworkers and their families two kilometers away.
Sergey couldn’t believe the grader operator could take this long to move the damn snow.
“Holy Mother Russia, this man is taking a long time.”
Is he deliberately delaying Sergey’s entry into the building? Is something going on?
He rolled down his window to see if he could recognize the man. Should he get out of the car and see who this incredibly inefficient grader man was? If he did, how could he get the man’s attention once out of the car? The man surely wouldn’t hear Sergey yelling at him. Good god, how far from the world was this place?
He knew that getting in a flap wouldn’t help so he rolled the window back up and drifted back to reviewing the plant operation, a familiarity that was necessary to his survival. Although thousands of plants across the country were abandoned or struggling for funds, funding for regular maintenance here continued because it was an electrical plant but was identified only by a general expense number. Funds were dispensed routinely and automatically by the master computer. Since the subsequent demise of iron-fisted Soviet Union order behind the Iron Curtain, few people in the government knew of the isolated plant, and nobody outside of the tiny mountain community remembered the plant or cared about its survival.
Except someone in the FSB, successor to the disbanded KGB, did care. He was Sergey’s boss, General Dmitri Visokovich Samocherny, Director of the National Nuclear Security Division and head of two thousand security agents. People both hated and respected the General; not quite like they would a notorious criminal – maybe more like an abusive father, wanting his protection but very wary of his power. At the moment, one of Samocherny’s priorities was to deter assaults on Russia's nuclear facilities by criminals and terrorists.
Samocherny had given Sergey the operation, “Shut the enrichment plant down, Sergey. If there is no enrichment, there will be no attempt to sabotage, steal, or hold for ransom any of the nuclear components, be they reactors, weapons, or stockpiles. Just keep the power plant operating for the electricity for the valley, a minor operation. We’ll keep up the pretense that it is an operating copper mine, however. ”
Nuclear reactors and fissible material storage sites were becoming lucrative targets of opportunity that he was committed to protect.
“We don’t want the kids playing with matches, Sergey,” he had cautioned.
The master computer in his Moscow headquarters contained detailed lists of every nuclear facility in Russia and in the breakaway republics. Every warhead, every reactor, every waste dump, every storage site; all were documented. Extensive personnel dossiers, arming and launching codes, weapon status reports, maintenance schedules, readiness reports; all were accurately archived in the computer. General Samocherny did not share any of this information with anyone; not with MinAtom, not with other security branches, and certainly not with the politicians.
An alert signal was raised when the General's intelligence network picked up a single careless remark about "plutonium up the hill". That chance remark had been overheard in a seedy bar in Zhigansk. His network had also learned that earlier the same day, the Director of the Seytchan nuclear station had committed suicide. He had been found in his car with a bullet in his head. His gun lay on the seat beside him. The coincidence of those two events was enough for General Samocherny to dispatch his top agents, Sergey and Yuri, to the obscure nuclear plant at Seytchan. Their mission was clear and simple; “No more fireworks on the open Russian market.”
Sergey whistled a tune as he watched the grader operator, slowly, oh so slowly move the snow around, then back up and move the grader over the same patch, evening the little mounds. He could see the scenario of the grader-man’s wife asking him why he was so late.
“I was clearing the yard at the plant.”
“It doesn’t take that long to clear a yard.”
“It does,” he would protest.
And, of course, she wouldn’t believe him. Nobody believed anybody in Russia just as they hadn’t in the USSR. In school, growing up, you learned first never to reveal what the family did. To your friends, you lied; to your teachers, you lied; to your family, you lied. And parents lied to their kids, and then, of course, the kids lied. Paranoia was the normal - suspicion, fear – because you never knew who would be stripped of their dignity, their livelihood next by some mean-minded person spreading a rumor.
Whole generations had grown up perfecting the lie.
The snow had let up and, looking around, Sergey was once more impressed with the concept of the facility. He followed the railroad tracks that began in a shallow cave beside the main cave and curved through the inner compound to the perimeter guardhouse. The vehicle gate on one side of the guardhouse and the railway gate on the other were the only official ways in or out of the plant. The tracks ran to a small marshaling yard near the town, where ore- carrying trains were assembled. An eighty-ton electric locomotive, powered by overhead high-voltage lines, pulled loaded ore cars out of the cave and over to the marshaling yard. As soon as a twenty-car train was assembled, the yellow locomotive, decorated on the front with a big red star, guided the train down to the base of the mountain. There, a vintage steam locomotive took over.
To all outward appearances, the train transported copper ore from the Seytchan mine down to Zhigansk, then the ore was moved on barges to a processing plant at Yakutsk. The empty cars returned to Zhigansk and the red star engine pulled them back up the mountain to be reloaded. But the trains rolling down the mountain carried containers full of uranium ore, camouflaged with a shallow topping of copper bearing ore. On the return trip, the apparently empty ore cars were actually fitted with shielded containers full of enriched uranium, one of the processed isotopes of natural uranium ore. The industrial complex at Yakutsk contained a copper processor and smelter, a zinc plant, and a camouflaged uranium processing plant.
The uranium isotope, U238, was used to initiate the controlled chain reaction of four nuclear reactors concealed within the mountain.
Sergey had to admire how everything appeared to bear out the copper mining deception. Any other national would be convinced that this was just another ordinary mining operation and quit scanning the area altogether as the Americans had, relying on their obsessive trust in their high technology.
When the small uranium-ore pocket had been exhausted, the mining operation was stopped and the miners left the area. They either did not know of or did not want to know of the construction going on in the main cave. At the very beginning, it had been sealed off from the mining operation by a ten-foot thick concrete wall. All of the material and equipment needed for building the reactors and their containment chambers were brought up disguised as mining equipment.
To maintain secrecy, the team that built and operated the reactor avoided mixing with the miners and even had their own closed community in one quarter of the town. If by chance any of the miners did learn of the reactor construction, it was worth their freedom and their families' well-being to talk about it anywhere, not even in their kitchens.
They all understood the maxim, “Treachery, thy name is Russian.”
Finally, the grader operator gave a short blast of his horn to signal Sergey that he was finished and another little bleep-bleep to thank him for waiting. Sergey flung the brown butt of yet another cigarette out the top edge of the partly opened window into the snow and drove on into the yard.
He drove through the newly cleared parking area to the big steel vehicle door, got out of his warm vehicle, instantly feeling the needle sharp blast of cold outside air, and hurried over to the door. He swiped his access card past an electronic card reader mounted on the doorframe. Somewhere inside, an electric motor whined into action