No newspapers reported the explosion of a bomb in a remote corner of China.  Not even the Chinese mentioned it.  Wolverine bragged about it to me during an enjoyable walk in the Mark Twain National Forest.  Wolverine loved scurrying about any forest.  He was at his best then.

Because of his clearances, he had news of the explosion and its location from NGA.  He also knew that the Army CBRNE and Sappers had a considerable interest in this bomb.  If a sapper hates anything, it’s a bomb he has no idea of how to defuse.

Of course, NGA was concerned as was the Christians In Action (CIA) because nobody had any inkling of the bomb’s existence or location until it went off.  The Russians knew about it but, unlike Wolverine, were not bragging.  Wolverine told me that the result of the explosion astonished even the Russians.

The clueless Uighur who had put the bomb in the bus he was riding as a passenger to a remote area of Northwest China.  He got the bus because a scintillating blond Russian seduced him at his hotel.  She screwed him till he fainted, put a bomb in his baggage, and slathered messages of her love on him in the early morning.  It was his last coitus before death.

Wolverine took a swim whilst I watched. I’m not much for bathing, though my hygiene is excellent.  Once Wolverine emerged from a stream, he gloated about the impact of the bomb.  

Peregrine had gathered a small group of engineers about him near Redding.  Perhaps their morals weren’t much.  They would have worked for Hitler or Pol Pot if the money was right.  But this assemblage of talent was incomparable.  Drawing on the work of the great chemists/physicists/engineers Kurt Vonnegut and his quirky assistant Kilgore Trout, Team Peregrine had worked out a novel lethal idea.   They created Ice 10.  Like Ice 9, ice 10 has a high melting point, 60 C or 140 F.  

What Peregrine’s geniuses did was construct a bomb whose wave pattern created Ice 10 in bodies with temperatures between 36.5 and 37.5, the range for a healthy human body.  At that temperature range, the water in a human body converts to Ice 10.  It becomes, for all practical purposes, an ice.  Voila, a healthy human is dead.  

Unlike Ice 9, Ice 10 does not convert other water external to it to itself.  If you drop regular water on it, it simply remains regular pooling on a sheet of Ice 10.  Peregrine’s team had no desire to destroy their own water supply.

The scientists making Ice 10 were careful about the temperature necessary to create it.  They all loved cats.  Since healthy cats have a body temperature that ranges from 38.3 39.2 C, cats exposed to the bomb blast wave had nothing to worry about.  Well, almost nothing, as the bomb could force them to seek new servants.  

The Chinese had responded as Putin and Wolverine expected.  First, they rounded up and shot anybody with the same last name as the Uyghur on the bus.  The Chinese investigators made him when they found the tip of his finger.  Before shooting the rounded-up Uyghurs, investigators interrogated them and, after and only after a fair trial, did firing squads shoot them.  As expected, the Uyghurs were all found guilty. Getting them all shot dead took authorities almost a week.  The Chinese like efficiency. As Fielding might say, justice delayed is justice denied.

Once Uyghurs with the same family name as the so-called bomber were in their graves, Emperor Xi decided how harsh a pogrom against the remaining Uyghurs was appropriate.  He decided on a severe one. One must not be a paper tiger.

Of course, the Chinese are not so dim as to imagine that Uyghur scientists could make a bomb as extraordinary as the bomb that went off.  They had noted a 5-mile radius of frozen bodies.  Some people, all febrile, survived, as did, praise the gods, every cat.  There were others to blame.

And if you can’t blame only the Uyghurs, who else can you blame?  Wolverine had an answer.  Laughing, he explained the Chinese, per NGA and CIA contacts, had come across the remains of the bomber’s penis.  The poor guy didn’t get a shower before he got on that bus of doom.  Chinese scientists determined that the penis had DNA of non-Uighur and non-Chinese origin on it.  They had discovered the telltale DNA of a Russkaya.  You don’t have to be an expert to assume that your best hypotheses, in this case, are that (a) Emperor Xi was pissed and (b) in his secret heart, he was blaming the Russians.