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Rapp considered what he was seeing for a moment. Was it possible that Umar Shirani was smarter that they gave him credit for? That he was circulating decoys along with live nukes to keep the endless list of Pakistani terrorist groups off-balance?
“So this is a fake?”
“No. This is a working bomb. But the canister that should contain its nuclear fuel is empty.”
“Empty,” Rapp repeated quietly. “So the Pakistani army removed the fissile material before they moved them? They’re shipping it separately?”
Bailer’s face transformed into something that was between a frown and a wince. “That was my initial thought, too. But it doesn’t add up.”
“Explain.”
“The empty canister is a really good fake, but it isn’t made from the same steel as the other parts.”
“So? It makes sense that they wouldn’t have been manufactured at the same time as the device. That useless prick Shirani could have had them produced later as an additional security precaution.”
“Two problems with that theory. One, my gut says that the canister wasn’t made in Pakistan.”
“And two?”
“That’s the bigger problem: how the original canister was removed. Whoever did it knew what they were doing and had the right tools, but I can tell you they were in a hurry. There are some pretty deep gouges, a disconnected wire, and a cracked switch.”
Rapp thought about the warehouse where the terrorists had pulled the nuke from the truck and opened the crate. “What are we talking about, Craig? How much time?”
“With a little training, you could change out the original canister with a fake in as little as four minutes.”
“How big and heavy is it?”
“Call it a fifty-pound hatbox.”
“Shit,” Rapp said.
“My thought exactly.”
Rapp turned and walked a few paces, staring out over the activity below as he dialed his phone.
“Hello,” Irene Kennedy said. By the sound of her voice, she hadn’t been asleep.
“We have a problem.”
“Yes?”
“The canister holding the fissile material has been replaced with a fake.”
“So the Pakistani army decoupled it?”
“Craig says no. My guess is that the people in that warehouse got out with it. We were watching for them to move the entire unit and we didn’t have the manpower to track them all.”
There was a long silence over the phone. “It doesn’t make sense to me, Mitch. I can understand them taking it but replacing it with a decoy? Why would they go through the trouble? And how would they have built it? Was it a convincing fake?”
“Yeah, but Craig’s betting that it wasn’t made in Pakistan.”
“That’s even less believable, then. I’d be skeptical if this was al Qaeda or ISIS. But al Badr is—”
“The minor leagues,” Rapp said, finishing her thought.
“Exactly. The fact that they were even going after a nuke was surprising. Now you’re telling me they figured out how to not only remove the fissile material container but manufacture a convincing replacement? That strains credulity to the breaking point.”
“Al Badr or not, someone’s got the critical piece for building a nuke, and I’m guessing it’s not one of our friends.”