The Natanz Directive (25 page)

Charlie broke open the envelope and handed me nearly fifty photos. Qom was ninety or so miles southwest of Tehran down Highway 7, a stretch of asphalt through flat and arid desert dotted with neat, two-story farmhouses amid groves of olives and pistachios. Seyfabad was eight miles closer.

“It's good you're going in as a researcher,” Jeri said as I studied the photos. “Anyone with an interest in Shia studies is considered, well, I was going to say a friend, but that's a bit of an exaggeration.”

“Less of an enemy?” I suggested.

Jeri shrugged. “Close enough.”

We drove in silence after that. I placed the photos on the seat next to me and tried to match them up with the blueprint of the school's interior. We were halfway to Seyfabad when we spotted a convoy of panel trucks heading in the same direction. From a distance, the trucks looked damn similar to ones I had seen in Professor Fouraz's photos—trucks he suspected were carrying yellow cake uranium.

“Ease back,” I said to Jeri. The trucks had an escort of unmarked Nissan SUVs, and it would not have surprised me at all if they were filled with men in National Security uniforms. “We know where they're going.”

Jeri was not happy about slowing down, but she only had ten minutes to fume before reaching Seyfabad. It was a dumpy commercial hamlet that showed only mild signs of life at this time in the morning. Charlie's warehouse was one of ten or twelve served by a railroad. His stood out from the rest because there was a small helicopter moored on a concrete pad out back, a pen with guard dogs, and a man patrolling the roof.

Charlie Amadi ran a very tight criminal operation that moved everything from electronics to gourmet food, but he was also a serious businessman. One look at his warehouse and the store of legitimate and illegitimate wares inside—everything from athletic shoes to gas barbecues—told you that he could probably stay afloat for real even if the drugs, liquor, and arms went south. Which they never would, of course.

There were pallets stacked to the ceiling—I didn't ask what they contained—three forklifts, and a shipping office. That's where we huddled. That's where the crate from the Russian mafia had been stored. It looked pretty innocuous from the outside. Jeri and I used crowbars to crack it open. Inside it were two very ordinary-looking metal suitcases banded with leather straps and brass buckles. The buckles may have looked ordinary, but without the appropriate codes, they couldn't be opened without rendering the device inside useless. Good thing Mr. Elliot had provided me with the codes.

“What do we got here, Jake?” Charlie's voice had a resigned and fatalistic edge to it. “You gonna tell us what we helped you smuggle into the country?”

“The Russians call them suitcase bombs. One-kiloton nukes, Charlie. Every intelligence agency's worst nightmare.” Might as well spell it out.

“No way,” Jeri said. She stepped up and ran a hand over the cases. “These things are just … just what? Propaganda, right? Legend?”

“Do these look like legends to you?” I said.

“And you're taking one of these inside Qom with you, aren't you?” Charlie said. Not even close to a question.

“It's just a backup, Charlie,” I said. “Failure's not an option. If I don't get out, I take the place down with me.”

“You're crazy,” he whispered.

“No, not crazy. Brilliant,” Jeri said. “I like it. Let's do this.”

My kind of girl. I grabbed one of the suitcases by the handle. Hefted it. “Legend” had it that there were a hundred more of these in existence. Fifty-pound nightmares.

We spent the rest of the day finalizing my plan and talking about our communications pattern once I was on the move. Jeri equipped each of us with a prepaid phone straight from Charlie's inventory.

“Text messages only,” I said. I thought about that for a moment and added, “Unless all hell breaks, of course.”

At 7:00
P.M.
, Jeri and I packed the suitcase in the back of the Cherokee, and she drove me into town. She dropped me in the market district, which every tourist crazy enough to come to Qom was obliged to visit. Qom was the religious center of Shai Islam. The city was renowned for its architecture. The horizon in every direction was spiced with mosques and golden minarets, shrines and tombs, religious schools and government buildings. The city made little pretense of modernity the way Tehran did. It was the home of fifty thousand religious scholars from all over the world, including France. That was my cover: Richard Moreau, researcher extraordinaire, specializing in religious anthropology. I hoped I wouldn't have to lean on it too heavily.

I stopped in a market café to orient myself, set the suitcase on the floor next to me, and hooked my backpack over the back of my chair. I ordered a dish of rice with spiced chicken. I washed it down with a bottle of sparking water. Then I ordered coffee with cream, opened a day-old newspaper, and watched the sun begin to set.

Everyone knew there was a uranium enrichment facility in Qom. Three years earlier, French and English sources had picked up signs that someone was tunneling into the side of a mountain in the desert outside the holy city. And yes, there was a facility there. The debate was whether or not it was being used for peaceful purposes, as The Twelver wanted us to believe. But the size and configuration of this new find, disguised by the Vocational School of Engineering and Science, was completely inconsistent with a peaceful program. My job was to confirm the inconsistency.

I went into my iPhone and opened the photo files of the school and the processing facility, the one file from the NSA, and the one Jeri had provided me. I memorized the layout. The major heat plume recorded by satellite imagery pinpointed a source from inside—or under—the school's main building. A long, hot streak connected this building to an adjacent one, a student center according to the photos, and a very big student center at that. This was the building, according to Professor Fouraz, where the yellow cake uranium had been delivered. For all we really knew, the trucks were making a delivery of cheese pizzas to the school cafeteria.
Right, Jake.

I was willing to bet my house that the long, hot streak revealed a tunnel connecting the two buildings.

The Agency forwarded what they had on the facility. The Iranian Ministry of Education promoted the place as a vocational school for young men and women. Though the school had been in operation for three years, there was no record of anyone who had yet graduated.

By this time, the market was attracting families out for the evening. Tots on bikes, men smoking, women in baggy abayas pushing strollers. It was a scene of urban tranquility, though I wondered about the scruples of a government that constructed a nuclear weapons plant practically under the feet of so many innocent people. Actually, there wasn't much to wonder about: evil was evil.

The crowd thinned out and night's darkness thickened.

At 9:15
P.M.
, I closed my paper, hailed a cab, and placed the suitcase on the backseat next to me. I gave the driver an address a quarter of a mile from the school, at the edge of a residential neighborhood. Simple logic: if you see a man carrying a suitcase, you assume he lives nearby and is on the way home from the bus stop. I hiked north in the direction of the school, my iPhone feeding me directions.

Considering the secrecy surrounding the uranium processing plant, the Iranians couldn't be obvious in providing security. If the place was meant to be a school, it had to look like a school. Couldn't be surrounded by a cordon of heavily armed guards. Security systems had to be discreet.

The school complex sat on the edge of the city, on the banks of the Qom River, the desert and low-lying hills forming a backdrop to the north. It was bordered on the south—my left—by a cramped neighborhood of typical lower-income homes. Flat roofs, tiny windows, and mud-stucco walls. A wide dirt road separated the neighborhood from a chain-link fence surrounding the schoolyard, and I paused three hundred feet away. I set the suitcase down next to the trunk of an olive tree. I took my Zeiss digital telescope from my jacket pocket and connected it to my iPhone to survey the area.

The meager illumination came from light sneaking past the curtains of the houses and from the distant security lamps above a guardhouse along the front of the schoolyard.

On the other side of the fence stretched two soccer fields of scraggly grass. Two massive single-story buildings sat two hundred yards inside the fence. Both were constructed from cinder blocks and coated with reflective paint that gave them a reddish brown tint in the light of a new moon.

By my calculations, the school and all the acreage inside the fence—or what lay beneath it all—was probably large enough to conceal a facility whose sole intent was the enrichment of uranium, and not for the wholesome, peaceful purposes that Iran's government would have liked the world to believe.

I studied the fence. It was woven from top to bottom with innocuous-looking electrical wires that could only have one purpose: conduits for electric current. Probably not strong enough to harm either man or animal, but sensitive enough to set off alarms at police and security outposts both inside the facility and out.

From this vantage I could see an entrance adjacent to the nearest guardhouse. Parked just beyond the guardhouse and well inside the fence was a collection of excavators, trucks, and buses: not an assortment of vehicles you saw at every school in America, and probably not here in Iran, either. I spotted two other guardhouses, one on either side of the schoolyard.

The farthermost of these protected an entrance and road that curved away from the city in the direction of Highway 7. The road from this entrance seemed to fork at a point less than a quarter of a mile from the school. The left fork sloped into a tunnel, which disappeared under ground, away from the prying eyes of satellites hovering 150 miles out in space.

I was still staring at the images brought to life by my telescope when a low rumble shook the earth. I froze.

 

CHAPTER 18

QOM, IRAN—DAY 8

The rumble grew in volume and I felt the earth quiver under my shoes. From the east, a line of semi-tractors pulling flatbed trailers materialized along the dirt road separating me from the school grounds. Their huge tires tossed clouds of dust that shimmered in the darkness. Each trailer was laden with a massive amount of building supplies. I stepped deep into the shadows and counted pyramids of cement sacks, pallets of plywood, spools of cable, and stacks of concrete pipes. I counted seven trucks and trailers. Two hauled huge generators. One shouldered a mammoth earthmover.

The trucks rounded the corner and turned toward the first entrance. The lead truck stopped at the guardhouse.

A waiting guard checked the driver's paperwork. Another guard walked along the bed of the truck and waved it forward. The truck rolled toward the excavators. The parade of trucks moved up one truck, and the second truck stopped for inspection, this one heavy with plywood. This was obviously old hat for both the guards and the drivers. Their interplay had all the makings of a bunch of guys who saw one another on a regular basis and maybe even shared a beer after work. Hell, the beer probably came from Charlie's illegal stocks.

The guards weren't exactly cavalier about inspecting the wares, but they were certainly casual.

I stared at the last trailer in line. It was stacked high with concrete pipes twenty-five feet long and probably three feet in diameter. A long shadow fell across the back of the trailer as it inched forward and created a momentary blind spot between the driver and guards.

Sometimes an opportunity slaps you in the face, and either you recognize it for what it is or you pass it off as too good to be true. I opted for the former.

I shoved the digital telescope and iPhone into my jacket pocket, hoisted the suitcase, and started running. It wasn't the weight of the suitcase that hindered my progress as much as the awkward shape, but I still managed a decent pace and rambled up behind the trailer. I took the suitcase in both hands and hoisted it onto the bed. I grasped a handgrip protruding from the rear of the trailer and vaulted onboard. I grabbed the suitcase and ducked inside the center pipe in the middle stack. Eleven seconds. A lot of time. In the old days, it would have taken me nine.

I kicked the suitcase into a pocket of gloom halfway down the pipe and settled in beside it, as flat as a man could get in a concrete pipe. I readied my Walther, just in case. If a guard discovered me, the last thing he would see was the muzzle of my silencer. All well and good, except that the odds of surviving the ensuing gun battle would not be great.

The truck advanced. Jerked to a halt. Advanced and halted. Advanced and halted once again, this time directly alongside the guardhouse. Light from the overhead lamps fell in bright stripes between the pipes. I fingered the pistol's trigger and held my breath.

I heard the guards banter with the driver and suppressed the urge to shout,
Just keep talking, boys. Maybe we'll all live through the night.
A flashlight beam splashed along the pipes from the rear. I held my breath and prepared for a firefight, but then realized the guard would have to mount the trailer to see into my pipe. This guy didn't sound like the mountain-goat type.

Two very long seconds passed before he extinguished the beam and ordered the driver through. I let out a slow breath.

I heard the ugly sound of the driver grinding the gears and then the truck continued inside. I pictured the convoy of trucks crossing the open ground between the gate and the complex. Exactly fifteen seconds later, I heard the hiss of a hydraulic engine kicking in and the sound of a reinforced steel door rising. The truck inched forward. I could tell by the sudden hollowness of the sounds and a change in the light that we had passed through the door. We hit a downward incline and seemed to follow a tunnel a number of feet before we leveled off. The truck slowed, and I pictured the driver parking next to the other rigs. I expected him to shut down the truck's six-hundred-plus-horsepower engine, but he didn't. I heard his cab door open. Then I heard his feet hitting the ground as he jumped down. The next sound I heard was the grinding of metal and the
whoosh
of hydraulic release. And then it hit me: the drivers were helping one another unhitch their trailers. I couldn't understand a word they were saying, but I understood when they all climbed back into their cabs and drove off.