September 11, 2001: Two engineers lose loved ones in the World Trade Center and travel together down a road of unthinkable revenge and mass murder. Exploiting gaps in international nuclear safeguards, they design and build a backyard atomic bomb. Taking advantage of loopholes in international shipping regulations, they smuggle their bomb into Saudi Arabia and detonate it, murdering a million innocent people in the City of Mecca. Meticulously researched, this work of fiction outlines the science and engineering of the simplest of nuclear weapons and underscores why nuclear proliferation is an issue of fundamental importance not just for the West, but for the whole world.
Several decades after the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York and the Kaaba in Mecca, a manuscript is found outlining the plot to nuke Islam's most holy pilgrimage site. Discovered in the town of Grass Valley, California, the newly found manuscript outlines the engineering, construction, disguise and smuggling of the simple atomic bomb used in the worst act of terrorism the world has ever seen. Crossing the globe through the USA, Peru, Jordan, Japan and Saudi Arabia, Nuking Mecca tracks an unholy partnership between two engineers who wreck an unthinkable act of revenge for the death of loved ones on 9/11.
Excerpt
I needed thorium so I began to investigate where I could get some without being noticed. I knew that thorium was used for mantles inside Coleman lanterns. Then I found out that Coleman had stopped using thorium and had replaced it with a mix of 3:100 cerium-yttrium several years ago. Several other lantern brands, however, still used thorium in their mantles.
When I went to buy some lantern mantles, the guy at the checkout told me it was now illegal to buy more than a few mantles at a time. It was news to me but in light of what that Boy Scout did in Michigan a few years back, I wasn't too surprised. It's really a stupid regulation if you think about it - just another case of our government slamming the barn door shut after the horses are gone. All this regulation did was to keep the honest people honest and annoy the crap out of campers. For someone really focused on getting a large quantity of mantles all at once, all you had to do was go to Canada or Mexico and buy them there.
I bought a package of mantles for the Aladdin brand of lanterns and took them into my little rock prep lab behind my shop. There I weighed them and planned to extract the thorium. I actually never progressed to full-scale extraction because I realized this avenue of attack was too expensive. The thorium in each mantle weighed about a quarter of a gram. Four mantles would yield a gram of thorium. Four thousand mantles would yield a kilogram. I would need about 16 kilograms (35.2 pounds) of Th-232 to convert into U-233 to get a critical mass. Accumulating 16 kilograms of thorium would mean acquiring 64,000 mantles. A package of mantles cost a couple of bucks. You can see just how expensive this would get. Lantern mantles were not a practical source of thorium for a bomb builder on a budget.
Book 2 of The Commander and the Chief series finds the Chief "on the warpath" and "counting coup" with her enemies on both sides of the ocean. Meanwhile, she fights an indictment and risks losing her latest love, the Commander, as well as unleashing
