Hammerson leaned forward, fingers steepled. He knew this was a tactical weapon designed purely for asset destruction – people and property – it was a city killer. And it was packaged at ground level. This accounted for the high radioactive fallout, and significant cratering of the landscape.

Hammerson exhaled and opened the eyes-only folder and read from the first page. The suspects ranged from the obvious to the far-fetched. No group of the dozens making a mess of Iraq right now had this sort of technology, or the means to develop it. He rubbed at his chin. But there were a few certainly wealthy enough to buy a weapon like this, and a few sellers with a corrupt enough ideology to supply one.

Due to the chaos in the Middle East, they had various orbiting birds watching most parts of the landscape. Hammerson called up the orbit log of the VELA satellites and selected one that had eyes on Northern Iraq. He then tracked the data feed back a month, looking for any high energy particle traces. Most bombs of that size will shed, giving off minute traces of enriched uranium, plutonium, deuterium, tritium, or dozens of other elements used in thermonuclear explosive devices, all tidily collected under the heading of Highly Radioactive Elements, or HREs.

Leaning forward to stare at the screen, Jack Hammerson started with the fireball, and then moved back in time, by seconds at first, then minutes – there, there it was, the hotspot, the trace within the boundaries of the city. He reversed back more minutes. The hotspot was moving, but so slowly, at approximately four miles per hour – walking speed.

Hammerson sat back and folded his arms. He knew tactical nukes could be packed down to suitcase size, but even the smallest would weigh several hundred pounds. And the smaller you made the device the smaller the detonation. But the blast at Soran was twenty kilotons, and for something with that much punch, it would mean the initiation and storage technology had to be between five hundred and a thousand pounds, at least – way too big for any normal man.

Hammerson ran a hand through his iron-gray crew cut, and then reversed the time back more hours, watching the trace continue its slow march. The weapon had traveled west, across the desert, to its ground zero point. He moved it back days, and still it was there, plodding forward. Whoever or whatever it was, was either in the world’s slowest vehicle, or it was on foot, carrying an impossibly heavy nuke.

Hammerson drew the dates back further, and saw that the trace signature was still on a direct path from the east, until it finally stopped. Its genesis point was one of the worst places on earth – Mosul – the viper’s nest of terrorism, and one of the declared state capitals for Hezar-Jihadi, the Party of a Thousand Martyrs.