Excerpt from Cold Fusion

Katamay asked for a tool set and someone ran out to get it. The old man climbed the stage to where the generator stood on a stainless steel table. He disconnected a heavy cable from the outlet built into the side of the device. The generator itself was a twin of the one I had found under the hood of the Hummer, two days ago. We surrounded the trunk-size machine.
Ford looked pretty calm considering the risk he was taking. In front of the entire nation and the world, he had stopped this demonstration and evacuated the auditorium. If this turned out to be a bust, he would be made permanent gopher at the Dunghole, North Dakota FBI office—for life.
"They tampered with it. There's no doubt," Katamay said.
"How do you know?" Ford asked.
"An end cap has been added to give it more room. They put something in there."
Now a lab technician appeared wheeling a Craftsman toolbox, the kind auto mechanics use, but so clean it was probably sterilized. Katamay opened a drawer, took out a small ratchet kit and began removing small fasteners recessed in the surface. Ford took another tool and helped him. Moments later Katamay jiggled the metal and the end section of the generator came off. We all leaned forward to get a look at the insides.
The generator looked like nothing I had ever seen. It was so strange, it seemed unreal. It reminded me of some sort of Science Fiction movie set depicting a graphic artist's view of what alien machinery would look like. At the end where Katamay had removed the cover, a thick cylinder the size and shape of a large fire extinguisher, occupied the space. It was the only thing that had even a vague resemblance to anything I was familiar with. Solid state circuitry connected it to the rest of the generator. Three digital readout gauges were imbedded in the center of the cylinder. One gauge read 44, the one next to it was 03 and dropped one number each second and the last one must be timing tenths of a second because the numbers blurred incomprehensibly as they changed. The middle gauge hit 0 and restarted at 60. The gauge on the left dropped to 43. Whatever this thing was it counted down toward zero.
Katamay reached over and ran his hand over the cylinder. A mixture of shock and anger ran across his face. He said something in Russian that sounded like a nasty curse.
"These vicious, vicious fools," he continued in English. "They deserve to burn in hell for this."
"What is that Doctor?" Ford asked. "It's an explosive device of some kind isn't it?"
"Oh yes, it most certainly is an explosive device, the most dangerous kind in the world. What you would commonly call an atomic bomb."
Katamay's words hung in the air, grabbing us like a malignancy. We looked at him and no one said anything. Some things are so outrageous they stunt your reactions as if dealing with the most banal of affairs. It was Anthony who broke the silence first.
"You gotta be kidding me, doc. Aren't nuclear bombs supposed to be big?"
"That's what they work on in that building in Brookhaven Lab, out on Long Island. Miniaturization of nuclear weapons. You've heard of suitcase bombs?"
We nodded yes. No one spoke and Katamay continued.
"This thing is the next generation of weapons, probably somewhere between twenty and forty kilotons. A bit larger than the Hiroshima bomb."
"Wait a minute," Ford said. "Aren't you supposed to have a certain amount of Plutonium to reach critical mass? That thing is too small to hold all that plutonium plus the triggering devices, right?"
"Wrong. It's a common misconception. Gathering a critical mass of plutonium is not necessary to make an atom bomb. You can take a much smaller piece and subject it to a neutron density equivalent to that found at the temperatures and pressure inside plutonium at critical mass. When I worked there, they were very close to making a condensed type of plutonium called PL-9. With the advent of supercomputers to do calculations that were previously impossible and metallurgical and chemical advances, we can reach critical mass with small amounts of PL-9 using new alloys and explosives."
Now I understood what went on, what all this had been about. I didn't know exactly who, but I understood the why of it.
'Don't you see?" I said. "First they tried to suppress it, but too many people got involved and it was all going to come out. Now they're going to discredit it. That's the Tinian Protocol they're talking about in those dispatches we intercepted. Look, Chernobyl was a pretty deadly incident. It scared the American public, but they attributed it to Russian incompetence. Sorry Doctor."
"You're quite right."
"Then Three Mile Island came along, and although only a couple of technicians lost their lives, it scared the hell out of the American public and killed the nuclear industry. There hasn't been a new nuclear plant built in over thirty years. Now picture this: Right in the middle of a cold fusion demonstration, with the whole world watching, the generator goes up in a mushroom cloud and vaporizes a million people. That's the end of cold fusion research forever."
No one said anything. As we watched, the minutes gauge dropped to 42.
"We'll get a bomb squad here fast. You can help us, doctor."
"No."
"No?"
"I will help you, but you cannot disarm it. This is not some movie where a bomb squad person comes in and cuts a wire and everything is good. This is cutting-edge, solid state circuitry. If you tamper with it, it goes off. There's a seismic sensor attached to it. If you jar it too heavily it goes off. When that timer reaches zero, it will detonate. That is its purpose and nothing can stop it."
Agent Ford pulled out his cell phone. His hand shook, almost imperceptibly, but it shook. Shirley's complexion had paled a few degrees and I was as scared as I'd ever been in my life.
Ford hit a button on his cell phone, identified himself and spoke.
"Red Zone One Alert. Imminent nuclear detonation within the continental United States." Some squawking came through the phone and he severed the connection.
"I have a Blackhawk on standby at the Milton office. They'll be here in twenty minutes. We'll load it on there and…"
"And do what?" Anthony cut in. "I know the Blackhawk: top speed 165 miles per hour. The bomb will go off twenty miles from here. It might as well go off right here. Population density in either direction is the same."
"We'll fly it to Dover Air Force base."
"You'll get there just when it's about to go off. If you have a few minutes to spare, you'll have to find a suicide jockey with a ready jet, and you got to do it in under forty two minutes. It'll never happen."
Ford looked sick, until Anthony spoke again.
"But I have a way to do it."
The digital read out dropped another number. 41 minutes to detonation.