The Knesset
Ben had churned through a number of departments delivering the simple message ‘you don’t have sixty days, you have twelve’. All had argued it was impossible. Ben had ignored them all.
“Enter!” he shouted as the tap on the door alerted him to his next meeting.
As he looked up, expecting to see a representative from the medical team, he saw a face he did not recognize. He looked again at his diary. His secretary had inserted a name he did not recognize and added ‘five minutes only’ as a note.
“Good afternoon,” said a rather strange little man, checking his watch. “ Mr Meir, it is an honor to meet you.”
“Sorry, have we met?” asked Ben, gesturing for the man to be seated. Ben could not take his eyes off the man’s face. He was wearing the most ridiculous looking glasses Ben had ever seen. That, combined with his small but rotund stature, gave him the look of a mole.
“No, I can’t say we have,” he answered, offering nothing else.
After a moment of awkward silence, Ben spoke.
“Sorry, why are you here?”
“Because of this.” The man reached down and rather clumsily produced a photo from his briefcase and laid it in front of Ben.
Ben looked at the photo and saw little more than a grainy picture from a high angle looking down on what he recognized to be the Rafah border-crossing from Gaza to Egypt.
“Where are you from?” asked Ben, still trying to assess why the little mole was in his office.
“Intelligence Group, IAF,” replied the mole succinctly.
The mention of the non-Arab Affairs Department caught him off-guard, particularly as he was looking at a picture of the Rafah crossing. With everything else on his plate, the last thing he needed was something unconnected to the Arabs.
Ben was beginning to lose it. He did not have time for some emotional retard to waste his time and addressed him as evenly as he could.
“Would you mind telling me, what exactly it is I’m looking at?”
“Well, you see,” the mole replied, pulling another photo from his case. “This was just,” he took back the first photo from Ben’s desk. “To pinpoint the location.” And replaced it with the new one. “This one is a much greater resolution.”
Ben rubbed his forehead as he tried to stay calm. The mole had stopped talking as he lay the second photo down. All Ben could see were a number of blurred faces. He still did not know what the hell he was supposed to be looking at.
Ben looked up from the pointless photo and stared at the mole.
The mole just stared back at him somewhat vacantly. A knock at the door and the entrance of the Commander of the IAF (Israeli Air Force) interrupted the awkward stand-off.
The Air Chief knew Ben well and could see the anger and frustration in his face. He looked at the mole who smiled back at him.
“I see you’ve met Harry?” he said with a smile.
“Kind of,” replied Ben as evenly as his temper would allow. It was the busiest day he had had in years and he had no time to waste.
The Chief turned to Harry. “Harry, I told you to make the appointment but you were to wait for me before going in.”
Harry just smiled back at his Chief.
Ben shook his head. “I’m sorry but what the hell is going on? Is he some kind of re…”
“I should explain,” the Chief interrupted. “Harry is an analyst in one of our photo surveillance departments. And is an autistic savant.”
Ben began to calm down. There was something wrong with ‘Harry’. He understood the term ‘autistic’ but not ‘savant’.
“Savant?”
“They have a special skill. They can be musical, scientific, artistic or any number of things. Harry here, has a photographic memory and remembers every face he has ever seen and any detail about that person that we know. Address, phone number, date of birth, anything.”
Ben began to understand. He looked down at the photo again.
“So who are we looking at?”
Harry leaned forward and pointed to a face in the foreground. It was slightly blurred but revealed a middle-aged man with pale skin, something which did help single him out.
“Professor Ilya Keilson, graduate of the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute. Hero of Socialist Labor, Order of Lenin and winner of the Stalin Prize. Born November 16th 1960. He worked until 1992 in Kremlyov which changed its name to Sarov in 1995 and is the center for Russia’s nuclear research program. His particular specialty is maximizing yield potential and detonation. His father was Klaus Fuchs born 29 December 1911…”
Ben held his hand up to stop Harry who was reciting all of the detail from memory.
“What use is he in Gaza?” asked Ben. “The weapons were moved to Israel months ago.”.
The Air Chief looked at Ben.
“This photo was amongst a number taken some time ago. It was only by accident that Harry here spotted it. Harry’s a Russian specialist and as such, doesn’t cover Gaza or the West bank. He only spotted it as he walked past a desk this morning and instantly recognized the face. I’m afraid this photo is about nine months old.”
Ben’s mouth went dry. Nine months ago was almost exactly when they believed the Palestinians had been given the bombs.
“So this guy, Keilsen, can take a bomb and improve its yield?”
“Yep,” replied Harry confidently.
“But only by so much. The mass material is key. There is a maximum. So for example, a 75kt device may be able to improve by say 20–30 %, it’s unlikely you could get higher than that.”
Ben relaxed a little. Was a 100kt nuclear weapon really that much worse than a 75kt?
“He also specializes in trigger and detonation systems,” added Harry.
“And that means?”
“He can take a device and reconfigure the trigger or design an entirely new one.”
Ben’s heart almost stopped.
“Ben? Ben?!” The Air Chief rushed around the desk, as Ben’s face turned sheet white.
Ben held his hand up, he was still alive.
“If you wouldn’t mind excusing me, I have some calls to make,” he whispered in a tremble.