Pay dirt!
I was staring down at the Qom centrifuge plant.
A centrifuge machine looks like a tall silver cylinder the height of a tall man with silver coils spiraling toward the ceiling. I saw thousands standing like proud soldiers in perfectly straight rows that went on forever. I saw men in powder-blue smocks with handheld computers moving in and around the machines, but no soldiers.
I could climb down the ladders leading into the room, or I could use the digital scope. I figured that if I went down, I might never get out again, so I attached the Zeiss as quickly as I could to my iPhone.
I ran the iPhone camera for ten seconds on full zoom and then moved farther into the complex. I stopped when I saw a raised platform that housed what had to be the facility’s control room. Beyond it, the room opened onto a cascade of smokestack-looking centrifuge machines that rose forty or fifty feet in the air; fewer in number, they looked many times more powerful.
I ran the camera again, thinking about what I was looking at. I got the process, more or less. Nuclear power began and ended with uranium. But the trick was separating the “useful” isotopes in the uranium from the “useless” ones. That took some serious machinery and engineering know-how. Nuclear reactors didn’t need a ton of the good stuff, somewhere between 4 percent and 40 percent. A nuclear bomb, on the other hand, required 80 percent or more of the good stuff. Not easy. The first step was to turn the uranium into a gas. Then you spun the gas through the centrifuge tubes. The tubes siphoned off the “useful” uranium, tube after tube after tube.
I tried to do the math in my head, multiplying fifty rows deep of cylinders by at least four times that number long. Ten thousand centrifuges. Ten thousand!
No one on God’s green earth needed ten thousand centrifuge machines for the kind of peaceful program that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wanted the world to believe his country was engaged in.
I was looking through the iPhone’s viewfinder when three men and two women walked into the picture. When one of the women looked up, the telescopic lens caught her scream even before the sound reached my ears. I was disengaging the Zeiss and jamming the phone into my pocket when the rest of them began shouting.
I didn’t see which one of them pushed the alarm, but red lights along the ceiling began flashing even before I had my Walther out. Alarms wailed.
Get your ass moving, Jake!
I spun on my heels, used the ID badge to unlock the magnetic door, and dashed into the stairwell. I took the stairs two at a time to the first level. I didn’t even look down at the unconscious body of the lab tech.
I crashed through the door. A guard with an AK-47 rounded the corner into the corridor. An AK-47 is an assault rifle. It’s nearly three feet long and weighs more than ten pounds fully loaded. It’s not meant for close-quarters combat. A Walther PPK/S is. He looked surprised at the encounter. I couldn’t imagine why. He was trying to bring the rifle to bear when I leveled the silencer at his chest and fired off two rounds. His surprise turned to astonishment and then he was face-first on the floor.
I grabbed his AK-47, cracked the door leading to the main hallway, and peeked around the corner. A trio of armed guards swarmed the entrance, and a metal gate slammed across the front doors.
I curled back inside the corridor, scooped the iPhone from my pocket, and hit the Send button on the emergency text Charlie and I had agreed upon earlier: Shit hit the fan. Pretty straightforward.
His came back to me five seconds later: Roof.
Rooftops are never a good idea. Rooftops are dead ends. I needed to get out, not up. I’d asked Charlie for one thing three days ago: trust. Now it was my turn. The stairs accessing the roof were across the hall. I could picture the stair motif printed on the door. The hall was four strides wide, by my estimate. The guards at the door also carried AK-47s, and a straight shot from a distance of, say, forty feet was exactly what they were designed for. Target practice.
I had to risk it. My heart rate had settled in at seventy-two beats per minute. Breathing steady and calm. I opened the door very carefully and used the body of the dead guard to prop it open. I took two steps back and set the butt of the AK-47 against my hip. Go!
I sprinted for the door. Between my first and second stride, I cut loose with two short bursts to keep the guards at the entrance at bay. Two more strides, and I had the door on the other side of the hall open. I lunged through and bounded up the stairs. The heavy metal hatch to the roof was secured with a padlock. One bullet from the AK-47 blew it apart, and I heaved the hatch open.
I climbed outside and into the light of the moon a day away from being full. I kicked the hatch closed and swung the handle to the locked position. I swept my gaze past the flat rooftop. Qom lay to the southeast. The spines of ragged hills to the west. Nothing but open ground to the north. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. No Charlie. I was toast.
The roof hummed with the echo of the alarms. Bullets thumped against the inside of the hatch. I had maybe fifteen rounds left in the AK-47 plus my Walther. The scene was about to degenerate into a very ugly shoot-out that I had absolutely no chance of winning, and me with a camera full of very damaging intel.
I scanned the landscape and the skies. I thought about the suitcase bomb two floors below. My heart jackhammered in desperation.
Charlie, where the hell are you? Don’t make me activate that sucker.
CHAPTER 19
Alarms screamed around me in all directions and seemed to steal every ounce of energy from the air. I wanted to tell whoever happened to be in charge that everyone who needed to be alerted probably had been, so maybe he could hit the Off button.
Security guards rustled beneath the roof hatch. They were no doubt planning to rush me, but I also imagined that there was some debate about who was going to come through first.
There was a maintenance shed and three heating units near the center of the roof, and I ran in that direction. I pressed against the shed, circling it in a low crouch. More security guards scrambled onto the roof of an adjacent building to the south and started my way.
I flicked the safety from full auto to semiauto on the AK-47. No sense wasting bullets when I had to make every shot count. I brought the rifle to my shoulder, drew a bead on the leading guard — an easy hundred-yard shot — and squeezed off one round. He clutched his shoulder and crumbled onto the roof. It wasn’t my best shot. The rifle obviously needed a site adjustment, but at least now I had it figured: four inches left, two down.
The guard’s buddies saw him go down and sprayed the air with bullets that came nowhere close to hitting me. They grabbed their fallen comrade by the shirt collar and fell back. I had to give them credit. They might not have been very experienced, but they weren’t stupid.
All well and good, but chasing them away was nothing to celebrate. Every minute I remained on the roof was another minute for the facility’s security forces to gain strength and coordinate their attack. Soon, they’d have the numbers and the balls to come for me.
My pulse ticked upward. Eighty beats per minute. Okay Charlie, where the hell are you? I yanked the iPhone from my pocket. I stared at the triggering device: Activate or Disarm. Decision time.
The rotor blades of an approaching helicopter thrummed the air and drew my eyes away from the screen. Air cover. Now I was seriously screwed. A maintenance shed wasn’t going to do me much good against a chopper with any sort of firepower.