Koenig unscrewed its cap, pulled off its airtight nozzle seal, then ran the nozzle slowly over the motor’s exposed wiring and components, pinching the tube between his thumb and forefinger to dispense a spare, smooth coating of its glutinous contents. Within seconds he’d moved on to the connector valve.

Although Gabriel Morgan had never said where he’d procured the incendiary material, Burkhart’s independent sources had rumored that it was engineered in a now-defunct Canadian laboratory operated by El Tio, the head of a transnational underworld combine who was alternately rumored to be dead or in hiding. Wherever it came from, Burkhart knew the pyrotechnic solgel nanocomposite was a product of far-boundary chemical technologies.

Standard military-grade thermate—or TH3—was a fine granular mixture of iron oxide, aluminum, and barium that generated temperatures of between 5,500° and 7000° Fahrenheit when ignited, sufficient heat to melt through a one-half-inch-thick steel sheet, its combustive reaction producing a molten iron slag that could do further, extensive damage to metal surfaces and equipment. There were, however, quantitative and qualitative limitations to its precision usage. It required slightly over twenty-five ounces of TH3 powder to generate a forty-second burn of significant destructive yield, and conventional mixing processes resulted in somewhat heterogeneous and volatile compounds that could have inconsistent results. Because the distribution of ordinary thermate’s constituents was uneven, a small amount was less reliable than a larger amount—much as a pinch of mixed salt and pepper might be noticeably short one or the other ingredient, while chances were an entire shakerful would not.

The solgel process synthesized—in essence, grew—thermate’s molecular chemical components within a matrix of crystallized silica gel, encasing them in beadlike particles a thousandth of a meter in size. So uniform and energetic were the beads that each was like a microscopic incendiary grenade. For Burkhart’s purposes, they had been implanted within a pH-neutral material that resembled soft putty and contained an ethylene glycol additive to lower its freezing point to minus-30°F, allowing it to retain its malleable consistency in ECW conditions.

Burkhart wondered how many infinitesimal thermatic particles were contained in a single drop of the material. Thousands, by fast estimate. Perhaps tens of thousands. The desalinization plant was going down, and even returning it to partial functionality would be no small feat.

Now he stood quietly as Langern climbed onto the platform and got a spool of timed initiator cord and clippers from one of his packs. When he finished applying the thermate putty, Koening helped him set the lengths of cord, snapped the plate back over the pump’s motor, then looked over his shoulder at Burkhart.

“Fertig,” he said in German. “We’re ready to ignite the material.”

Burkhart looked at him, nodded.

“Do it,” he said.

Zurich, Switzerland