The Czar Bomb

Prologue

October 30, 1961

A 50-50 chance of surviving. That was all Soviet Air Force Major Andrei Durnovtsev and his crew had of living through the thermonuclear blast from the superbomb slung beneath his TU-95V “Bear A” bomber. The nuclear scientists had warned that the airmen might be incinerated into charred corpses inside a flying crematorium. On the other hand, Durnovtsev knew that there was a 100-percent possibility that if the bomb failed to detonate, they would receive bullets to the brain. Their murder would ensure that a failure would not be made public to tarnish the Soviet Union’s reputation for nuclear success.

After all, Nikita Khrushchev and the other Soviet leaders saw detonating the largest man-made explosion in history as not only a technological achievement. It was to be a propaganda coup of the highest magnitude for the Soviet Communist Party.

But Durnovtsev was prepared to die, as a dutiful son of the Soviet Union. So, bundled in a thick leather jacket against the icy, gray dawn of Olenya airfield in northern Russia, he set about meticulously inspecting the 26-foot-long, silver-painted bomb.

He paid particular attention to the huge bundle attached to the bomb’s tail. It held the 1,800-pound parachute that he hoped would be the savior for him and his crew. The parachute canopy would deploy as the bomb was released, in hopes of slowing its descent to give time for the bomber and its accompanying TU-16 Badger observer plane to escape.

While the bomb was highly experimental, Durnovtsev had confidence in the plane and the skills of him and his crew. He had trained assiduously on the TU-95V, with its long, slim fuselage and swept-back wings.

The Bear A bomber with its 164-foot wingspan and 151-foot length was the only craft that could possibly carry the bomb, code-named Vanya. Even so, the engineers had made major modifications to strengthen its structure. Durnovtsev meticulously inspected those modifications—the reinforced suspension and release mechanisms, and the heavier bomb rack attached directly to the plane’s weight-bearing beams.

A major problem was that the bomb was so bulky that the engineers had removed the bomb bay doors and slung the bomb beneath the plane. So, besides the huge risk of just taking off with the 30-ton load, the protruding bomb spoiled the bomber’s aerodynamic shape.

The technicians had also taken steps to enable the plane to survive the hellish temperatures from the blast that was to come. They had sprayed its metal surface with white paint in hopes of reflecting at least some of the searing heat.

Even with such precautions, none of the engineers, technicians, scientists, or supervisors had the guts to be on the flight to witness first-hand their success or failure. They huddled in the command post with Major General Nikolai Pavlov, Chairman of the State Commission. They nervously drank coffee, smoked cigarettes, and monitored the test, as Durnovtsev and his crew would fly into history. Or to annihilation.

His external inspection complete, Durnovtsev and his crew climbed aboard the plane, settled into the cramped cockpit, strapped on their harnesses and oxygen masks, and ticked through their preflight checklist.

Durnovtsev then ended the early morning calm by starting the four 15,000-horsepower turboprop engines. They roared obediently to life making the plane deafeningly loud. He shoved the throttles forward and began the taxi.

The plane rumbled down the runway for a seemingly interminable distance before finally heaving itself into the overcast sky. Durnovtsev banked toward the northwest and set a course for the Mityushikha Bay Nuclear Testing Range 600 miles away.

During the flight, radio messages between his plane and the Badger were terse, as were communications with the ground. The crews immersed themselves in their mission, trying to ignore the potential consequences of the holocaust that was to come. Or the lethal consequences of failure.

Finally, the target slid slowly into sight 34,000 feet below—the snow-covered terrain of Novaya Zemlya Island. The next moments were beyond Durnovtsev’s control. The ground control transmitted the radio signal that automatically triggered the three bomber locks, releasing the bomb.

Freed of its load, the bomber lurched violently upward, and Durnovtsev slammed the plane’s controls into a banking turn desperately racing for a safe distance of at least 30 miles. Thankfully, he saw the parachute deploy.

At 11:32 am Moscow time, a blinding flash lit up the clouds, its ethereal light expanding, causing the clouds to glow and become transparent. An immense, fiery orange ball emerged from a gap in the clouds—a sun born on earth, expanding, expanding, expanding.

Eight seconds later, the blowtorch of a blast wave slammed into the plane, driving it into a plummeting uncontrolled dive of more than half a mile. Smoke filled the cockpit, as the plane’s electrical circuits sizzled and shorted out.

Durnovtsev strained at the controls, fighting for the craft’s, and the crew’s, survival. Finally, he managed to recover the plane, and in the distance, he could see a rising, roiling mushroom cloud the magnitude of which no human had ever witnessed. It thrust relentlessly upward, reaching forty miles into the stratosphere.

The blast ionized the atmosphere, blocking radio communication for forty minutes, so Durnovtsev could not report their survival or determine the fate of the Badger observer plane. Finally, to his relief, he heard a report from the Badger that it had survived, and he contacted the ebullient and relieved scientists, engineers, and party officials.

He eagerly anticipated what would come next: promotion to the rank of lieutenant colonel, being named Hero of the Soviet Union, and very, very large quantities of vodka.

*****

Although the bomb detonated at 13,000 feet, the thermonuclear inferno scorched the rock-strewn terrain of the island beneath it like a gargantuan blowtorch.

The blast completely destroyed the village of Severny 34 miles from the blast, even its brick houses leveled. More than 100 miles distant, wooden houses were flattened and stone dwellings lost roofs and doors. Witnesses 170 miles away felt the heat of the blast, and it shattered windows in Norway and Finland, hundreds of miles distant. The light flash was visible more than 600 miles away. The shock wave circled the Earth three times.

An American observation plane nearby, scorched by the blast, managed to measure its size, at the equivalent of 58 megatons—million tons of TNT.

Later, the Soviets would revise that figure to 50 megatons, making it by far the largest man-made explosion in history—1,500 times larger than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

 January 16, 1963

Still exulting in the successful thermonuclear detonation more than a year earlier, Nikita Khrushchev boasted with great fanfare that the Soviet Union had constructed an even more powerful 100-megaton bomb. He declared that it was hidden somewhere in East Germany. The Soviet people proclaimed their new superweapon, “Tsar Bomba,” the Czar Bomb.

 

 CHAPTER ONE

Khalid Rasul pushed his way warily through the thick brush shrouding the broad hill, clutching his Tabuk assault rifle, scanning the surrounding German woods. He didn’t like forests. He was used to the broad rocky expanse of the Middle Eastern desert, where he had so often stalked and killed an enemy. At least the forest was quiet, except for the dull thunk of picks and shovels, as his crew dug into the earth below. He had chosen where to dig by picking the most likely spot to reveal an entrance to what might be hidden beneath the suspicious hill the size of a warehouse.

Working from historical records, Rasul had located the hill and identified it as an artificial feature, possibly the resting place of their prize. The hill was distinctly different from its surroundings. Only brush grew on it, no trees, probably because some structure beneath the soil prevented their roots from taking hold.

The crew did not speak, as they had been so instructed. Voices would carry in the silent woods, and Rasul did not want visitors to their project. The crew was silent because they were loyal to Rasul and his friend and master, Iraqi shipping oligarch Saadallah bin Shadid. They were also quiet because they knew that Rasul was perfectly capable of instantly silencing any who disobeyed. Permanently.

Rasul knew he could not count on his disguise in the coveralls of a German railroad worker to allay any intruders’ suspicions. His swarthy features, thick beard and dark, curly hair marked him as not a German. And his muscular physique was distinctly different from the doughy form of so many Germans.

He had planned his response to an intruder. He would give him a friendly greeting, find out if he was alone, and slash his throat. Rasul knew how to do it cleanly, expertly, and silently, as he had done many times in the service of bin Shadid. It required a single vicious, arcing slash that severed both arteries and the voice box. And, he knew to give the victim a shove to launch him backward, so Rasul avoided any spatter from the gush of blood.

But he didn’t expect to need this skill during the crucial assignment with which his master had entrusted him. The nearest people to the dig site—the staff of the Stasi Bunker Museum half a mile away—had been warned to keep people away because the supposed railroad construction crew might be blasting to make improvements on the right-of-way. It was a very useful fiction.

Fortunately, it was a fiction Rasul did not have to sell to the railroad. He had bribed the middle-aged local stationmaster of the Leipzig-Dresden railway line to clear the way for him and his crew to do their work. It took only a satchel containing approximately ten times the stationmaster’s annual salary, and a subtle threat.

He moved to overlook the crew below, also disguised in railroad coveralls, as they hacked their way through the root-clogged earth into the side closest to the nearby railway line. The workers, smuggled from Iraq, had already chopped through decades of thick overgrowth.

Suddenly, rose the faint clank of metal against metal, followed by an excited, hushed babble from the men. Rasul climbed down from the hill, commanding them in Kurdish to concentrate their digging at that point. He curtly dispatched a guard to the top of the hill to take over the watch.

The workers redoubled their exertions, and in an hour, sweating and panting, they had excavated a section of what appeared to be a huge steel door.

Now mindless of the noise with the prize so close, Rasul summoned the backhoe from the flatbed truck out on the main road. The waiting men slumped against nearby trees, drinking water, devouring fat German meat loaf sandwiches from backpacks, and dozing.

After half an hour, its engine growling, the machine advanced ponderously through the brush, crushing bushes and flattening small trees. It began to claw large chunks of damp earth away from the hillside, revealing the full extent of two rusting steel doors. They were encrusted with soil from decades of being buried.

At Rasul’s command, the workers roused themselves and finished clearing the soil around the doors. They brushed away the final clods of dirt on the doors’ surface to reveal a thick chain wound around its handles, secured with a rusted lock.

One worker brought up a cutting torch taken from the backhoe. He donned a welding helmet and ignited its blue flame, applying it to the chain. With hissing and sputtering, the flame cut its way through the rusted metal. After only minutes, the chain parted, dangling from the door’s handles. The workers ran a thick steel cable from one of the door’s handles to the backhoe.

With a roar of its engine, the backhoe lurched back tightening the cable. With groaning metallic complaint, the door slowly gave way, opening up a crack.

Holding a flashlight, Rasul squeezed his way inside. He coughed at the musty, dust-filled air that likely had not seen ventilation for decades. The flashlight played about the chamber, revealing it to be a huge concrete bunker holding only a metal boxcar resting on rails.

Rasul circled the boxcar, playing the flashlight beam over its surface, inspecting it. At first glance, it resembled any other boxcar. But on closer inspection, it was unlike any other he had ever seen. Its doors were not really doors, but door-like panels welded to heavy metal walls designed to be lifted completely away. The boxcar had a multi-sectioned roof fastened by heavy latches, so they, too could be completely removed. He smiled in satisfaction when he saw that its sides were stenciled with Cyrillic characters. This was a Soviet boxcar!

He climbed a ladder at the end of the boxcar, peering across its curved roof. He could see no access hatch. He would have to lift one of the roof sections to see what was inside. He shone his flashlight upward to see mounted on the ceiling a hand-operated crane. It would allow him to lift a roof section. Things were looking promising!

Lowering himself back to the floor, he found a ladder in one corner of the chamber and climbed it to reach the top of one of the boxcar’s side walls. He was about to pull one of the roof latches open, but abruptly stopped, his brow knitted in suspicion. Any ordinary thief would not have hesitated to open the latch, lured by the prospect of stealing the gold or other valuables the thief would believe were locked in this elaborately hidden bunker. But Rasul was no ordinary thief. He had not survived on Baghdad streets mined with buried IEDs without an acute sense of danger.

Shining his flashlight at the latch, he could see that it was fitted with electrical contacts, as were the others. He smiled wryly at the cleverness of those who had hidden the boxcar.

He called two of his most trusted guards into the chamber, cautioning them about the electrical contacts and dispatching them to carefully scout the bunker. They moved off, their flashlight beams playing over the gray concrete walls and ceiling.

Rasul launched his own exploration and quickly discovered wires leading to the electrical contacts on the latches. The wires led down to the concrete floor of the bunker and ran along the inside of the steel rails on which the boxcar rested.

A call from one of the guards brought him to the other side of the bunker, his flashlight revealing a row of small black boxes spaced out along where the wall and floor met. The boxes ringed the bunker, each attached to wires connected to the ones Rasul had discovered.

He instructed the men to leave. He would be the only one to die if he made an error. Bin Shadid would want to know of the circumstances of his death.

He gently pried open the lid of one of the metal boxes to see it filled with blocks of black material labeled with “PVV-5A.” It was explosive. Each block had a wire running from it, all gathered into a sheaf connected to a battery. He gently traced the wiring, and his experience told him that opening a latch on the boxcar would complete a circuit and detonate the explosives. And he had no doubt that any one detonation would set off all the explosives in the bunker.

Even more worrisome was that the wires were corroded, and the battery was encrusted with white crystals, having deteriorated over decades entombed in the bunker. Thus, the circuit might be unstable, with even the slightest disturbance setting it off.

He took a deep breath, bracing himself for whatever was to come. His master badly wanted the device that was believed to rest in this bunker. He would get it for him, or die trying. He reached down and ever-so-gently pulled the lead off the battery.

Nothing!

He blew a sign of relief, sat down on the cold concrete floor, and whispered “Alhamdulillah,” the Muslim prayer of thanks. He proceeded from one metal box to the other, kneeling and detaching the battery leads. With each act, he braced himself for a blast and oblivion.

Finally, he had disarmed all the boxes. He hauled himself back up the ladder. He took a deep breath and unlatched the first latch holding one of the end roof segments to the boxcar wall. Again, no explosion!

He continued the process, one by one opening the latches holding down the roof. He called the guards back in and mounted the roof, directing them to crank down the crane’s cable and attach the cable’s hooks to the four rings on the roof segment. As the guards cranked the segment up, he shone his flashlight down into the boxcar’s depths. The light revealed a massive cylindrical object, shrouded in gray canvas, nearly filling the boxcar. He lowered himself into the boxcar and lifted back the canvas. He gasped and uttered once more “Alhamdulillah!”

He had found it! He had done his master and friend the great service of finding it! He quickly snapped photos with his cell phone, replaced the canvas, and climbed out of the boxcar. He had to make sure that none of the workers saw inside the boxcar. He directed the guards to replace the roof, instructing them to make sure that no worker entered the bunker. He tapped his assault rifle, an unspoken instruction about the consequences of such a transgression.

After taking more photos of the dimly lit chamber interior, he followed the rails on which the boxcar rested out of the chamber and into the afternoon sunlight, where they went underground. He directed the men to begin digging along the path outside the chamber. Again came the clank of metal shovels striking buried metal. They were the rails. The builders of the structure had laid the rails leading to the main line in a shallow depression, so they could be buried once the railroad car was in place. To hide the connection to the spur line, the builders had removed only the section of rails connecting at the main line.

So, it would be an easy task to reconnect the spur to the main line and remove the boxcar. He would post his trusted guards on the site overnight. Over the next days, the crew would dig out the rails and reconnect to the spur line.

The bribed stationmaster would be persuaded to route a freight engine along the spur line to connect the boxcar and route it to its destination. Rasul dispatched a guard to obtain the necessary paint and identifying information to disguise the boxcar as an ordinary German freight carrier. In a few months, the pudgy German stationmaster would be found murdered, amid evidence that he had been a drug smuggler.

 To further erase any sign of the operation, Rasul would then bring new batteries, reconnect the explosives and detonate them to bring down the structure. Should anyone figure out what the bunker had held, they would believe that it had been buried beneath tons of rubble.

As the crew dug their way along the rails to uncover their length, Rasul took out his cell phone and encrypted the images he had taken, transmitting them.

He sent with the images a text message in Kurdish that said simply, “We have found Vanya.” He found grim satisfaction that he had given his master the instrument of revenge for the soul-crushing horror he had suffered. Americans had killed his master’s family. Millions would pay the price.

*****

Wenzel Fischer slumped in the worn armchair sipping his tea, his bony hand trembling slightly, his walker beside him. He liked to take afternoon tea in the small German community center and watch the elderly ladies at their knitting. They sat at the long wooden table, their crafts piled before them, gossiping and making the baby booties, shawls, and other items to sell.

But today he was not at his ease. Today, the anxiety over the newspaper article gnawed at him. He had said too much to the reporter. He had showed the reporter his wooden box full of the yellowed pages from his time as a supply clerk for the East German Stasi.

He cursed his stupidity! True, he had asked the reporter not to put anything in the article about his role in the mysterious construction project in Machern. But the reporter did, anyway.

Frau Richter had noticed his worried expression and come over to comfort him. “You are all right, Wenzel?” she had asked, patting his stooped shoulder. “You look uncomfortable.”

He merely nodded, so she had asked him what was causing his worry. “The article. It had things in it. About my time back then. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want that.” Then he pointedly went back to his tea. She smiled and understood that he wished not to talk further, and went back to her knitting.

But he couldn’t forget that time. He sat and sipped his tea and remembered ordering the huge amount of cement and steel reinforcement for the project. And the explosives, the large amount of explosives. Since he worked for the Stasi, none of the suppliers ever questioned the orders.

He remembered particularly the massive steel doors he had been tasked to procure. As with the other suppliers, the owner of the foundry knew better than to question the order.

But Wenzel Fischer was curious, as young men foolishly are. He remembered going to the site during construction and telling the foreman he only wanted to check whether the materials were being delivered properly. He was ordered away with an ominous warning not to return. But he realized that things were not right when he heard the construction workers speaking Russian.

This was not a German crew, and he suspected that the guards were KGB. In fact, it was a Russian-accented guard with a Russian AK-47 assault rifle who had threatened him.

Still, he was so curious that when the supply orders had stopped, and he was sure the construction was complete, he had sneaked out to the site at night. He had made his way cautiously through the thick woods, until his flashlight revealed a massive mountain of new compacted soil. He had circled it, looking for some sign of a structure, but there was only the mountain. He had climbed to the top. He only realized that he was standing on a buried structure when he had picked up a stick to dig down in the dirt and it struck concrete.

He was making his way back through the woods, when another discovery revealed the horror of what had happened at the site. Taking another route back, he had come upon a clearing in the woods. His flashlight revealed an area of freshly turned earth maybe ten meters long and ten meters wide. He stood puzzled for only a moment when the realization struck him. It was a mass grave!

As he sat in his chair decades later, he still shuddered at the recollection. A voice brought him out of his reverie.

“You are the man in the newspaper article?” The questioner was a wiry man with a thin face in a hooded jacket, wearing a canvas knapsack. The man smiled, but his smile was as frightening as if he had pointed a gun at Fischer. And his eyes were dead, like those of a snake Fischer had once seen at the zoo.

Incongruously, the man held in his hand a rag doll that he had apparently bought from one of the ladies. Despite his ingratiating purchase, they were all glancing suspiciously at him.

“Uh. . . I don’t want to talk about it,” said Fischer, putting down his teacup. As the man loomed over him, the wolfish smile still on his face, Fischer took up his walker, beginning the arduous process of pulling himself up. He had to escape this man!

“But it was fascinating that you worked for the Stasi. . . ,” said the man. “. . . that you helped them with construction. Could I ask you more about it? About your records?”

“No, I have to leave. I need to take my medicine.” With a grunt, Fischer began to hobble away.

“Perhaps I could come to your apartment, and we could talk. Where do you live?”

“I need my medicine. I need to go.”

The man looked back at the women, who by now were staring at him with open suspicion. “Ah, well, perhaps later,” he said.

Wenzel Fischer fled as fast as his walker would allow. He had to get to his apartment. He had to get to the box that had rested under his floorboards for many decades. He had kept the box for so long because he had been haunted by that project and the mass grave. His conscience told him that he should keep those records to preserve the memory of whatever went on. He was only a minor player in that dark history, but no matter what happened to him, he felt a responsibility to preserve evidence of it.

And he knew how to do that.

*****

The thief had quickly left the community center under the glare of the old women. Those gossipy old women would likely tell the police if he showed up again. He didn’t want them to see him following the old German, so he had walked out the front door, but circled the quiet block to enter the courtyard behind the building. The old man was slow, so the thief arrived in time to see which apartment he had entered.

It was late afternoon, so the thief went to a nearby Brauhaus to drink beer and have dinner. He really didn’t like this particular job. He was a thief, not a murderer, he persuaded himself, although he had killed two men in the course of his career. But those kills were in furtherance of a job, making them a necessity. So also would be this kill. So he was still primarily a thief, not a murderer really. Besides, the pay was very, very good.

He continued to nurse a mild unease over the job, as well as several beers, until late in the evening. He checked that the community center was closed and the women gone. He picked up his knapsack and made his way back to the courtyard and up to the apartment door. All was quiet. Old people go to bed early.

He tried the door. It was locked, so he took his lock picks out of his knapsack and deftly picked the lock as he had done so many times before.

He stepped inside, waiting silently in the dark for any sign he had been detected. There was none. He reached into the knapsack and pulled out the small gas bottle and the attached face mask he had been given.

He stepped quietly into the small bedroom. The sound of rattled breathing told the thief the old man was asleep. In the dim light from the window, he could see the old man lying on his back on a little cot in the corner. He turned the valve on the gas bottle to start the flow of carbon dioxide.

Striding across the room, he straddled the old man, pinned his arms, pushed the mask over his face, and held it there.

He was surprised at the weakness of the response, as the old man writhed feebly beneath his weight. The old man grunted as he struggled, but fortunately, the sound was muffled by the mask.

The thief was also surprised how quickly that struggling ceased, as the old man died. A fetid odor arose from the body, causing him to gag, as the old man’s sphincter opened in death, and his bowels emptied. Enduring the stench, he held the mask on for another minute to make sure the old man was dead. Then, he climbed off the corpse, checking to make sure the thin blanket was arranged so as not to look like somebody had crouched on it.

Now he had all night to find the box. Over the next two hours, he searched every possible hiding place in the small apartment. He thought his search had ended when he discovered the loose floorboards in the corner by the small coal stove. But when he pried them up, the niche was empty.

Alter wichser! The thief spat, cursing the old man. The box was not there! He would not get the other half of his fee, even though he had done most of the work for this job in killing the old man. His employers were ruthless and powerful, so he might himself be in danger!

He decided he would do the only thing possible. He would have to watch and wait. Maybe somebody in the community center had the box.