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Page 279
down, Anna. "Please go on, General," she said quietly.
"Since your plane went down, there have been a dozen deaths among the Inuit along that coastline where your aircraft was shot down," General Bolton said somberly. "The deaths have been investigated by officials of the Health Service and found to be radiation sickness fatalities, Mrs. Neville. There are several possibilities as to the cause of whatever is spewing plutonium into the environment. All but two have been ruled out. The first possibility is remotethat an unknown country wanted to dispose of the nuclear reactor from an old submarine and chose to dump it on the bottom of Hudson Bay. Don't look so shocked, Mrs. Neville. The Russians have been dumping their old subs and other nuclear waste into the Arctic Sea since about 1956."
He paused before continuing. "The second possibility is the worst, and the one I personally believe to be responsible for the plutonium. That the Russianssome Russians, I should sayhave deposited a nuclear weapon on the bottom of Hudson Bay. Possibly they were putting the weapon in place just as your pilot flew your plane over that area of the bay."
"That's absurd," Anna said angrily. "Your hypotheses are both absurd. That's the sort of thing that happened under Stalin. It simply couldn't happen under Aleksandr Cherny."
"Nothing is impossible, Mrs. Neville. You and I both know how many hard-liners, how many old Communists, are still in the government of Russia, how a good portion of the armed forces is disaffected. Russians have always had an inferiority complex about the West, and the U.S. in particular. They considered it an insult to be offered a chance to be part of the Marshall Plan. And didn't Khrushchev say that they'd bury us?"
"But he didn't mean that literally," Anna argued. "He meant it metaphorically."
"The Russian weapons designers took a terrible psychological beating, both in the war in Afghanistan and in the Gulf War, Mrs. Neville," Bolton said. "In the Gulf, our smart

 
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