Free The Courier: A Ryan Kealey Thriller by Andrew Britton

start of the nuclear age to the present and came up dry. He expanded his search to NATO files and also found nothing.
    However, he did find an interesting footnote in the files of Bundesnachrichtendienst , the foreign intelligence service of the Federal Republic of Germany. It was a reference to an Office of Strategic Services file that mentioned “plutonium.” The OSS file was among the more than 35,000 documents declassified by its successor, the CIA, in 2008, and sent to the National Archives. Mason went to the NA website and looked up the document in question. It was the personnel file on an operative, Largo Kealey. The flag came up because Kealey was tested for radiation exposure due to “proximity to plutonium in Brest.”
    Why would there have been radioactive materials in the French port in 1944? Mason thought.
    There was nothing about that in any of the files he checked. He got in touch with Dr. Pearl who directed him to Sally Massina, DARPA historian.
    “Sally’s a living library of R&D,” he said. “She’s seventy-two and retired now . . . but there’s no one who can connect historical dots better than her.”
    Mason called but she insisted on Skyping.
    “I don’t get to see many faces these days,” she told him.
    “Why? Where are you?”
    “The Temecula Valley, California,” she said. “I’m on twenty-three acres of mountaintop. I’ve got golden eagles, rattlesnakes, scorpions, tarantulas, mountain lions, illegal immigrants—and a shotgun. But no neighbors.”
    Mason was happy to make the video call. Sally was not what the young man had expected. She had a long sun-bronzed face and long henna-red hair, both beneath the largest cowboy hat he had ever seen on a human being.
    “Here’s the connection,” Sally said without preamble. “In October 1941, Allied intelligence operatives working in Denmark eavesdropped on a meeting between a Danish physicist whose name they did not know and a German scientist whose name, unfortunately, they did know: Werner Heisenberg. This chat, in a park, I think, convinced MI6 in London that the Nazis were moving full-ahead to develop an atom bomb. At the same time, a heroic gent, Professor Leif Tronstad—who designed and helped construct cutting-edge power plants—had not fled Scandinavia like most of his colleagues when Hitler’s goons took over. He stayed to spy. At great personal risk, he sent coded telegrams to Sweden that made their way to MI6 about the Nazis using a plant in Norsk to produce heavy water—which, as you probably know, is necessary to produce nuclear weapon isotopes such as Plutonium-239. Brit commandos tried, and failed, to destroy the plant. It was called Operation Freshman and it was a disaster. The Allies tried again in Operation Gunner-side. This was pretty late in the game, mind you—1944. MI6 learned that the Germans were planning to ferry a butt load of heavy water across Lake Tinns for a rail trip to Germany. A second team of commandos used eighteen pounds of plastique to sink the ferry. Lotta passengers drowned along with most of the heavy water.”
    “Most.”
    “Most,” Sally said. She took a swallow of beer from a stein that sat on a pair of curled ram’s horns. “Brewed this myself,” she said proudly. “Anyway, the Nazis salvaged three canisters. The containers made their way to a materials testing laboratory at an air base in Anklam, a town in the Western Pomerania region of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany. The OSS learned about the transfer after bombing the crap out of Germany’s other R&D sites, notably the V-2 rocket facility at Peen-emünde. They dropped in paratroops and recovered documents that pointed them toward Anklam. This was a classic good-news, bad-news scenario: they got that new facility with bombs, plastered it flat, but aerial recon suggested that the contents had already been relocated.”
    “To Brest?” Mason asked.
    “No—don’t get ahead of me,” she said.
    “Sorry.”
    “It’s okay. I