The door snuck into a narrow walkway. I dumped the corporal’s rifle here, but not his jacket or cap.
The walkway merged almost at once with a concrete stairwell; I counted eighteen steps as I went down. The stairs accessed a tunnel a good thirty meters in length. Rows of dim yellow lamps on the ceiling illuminated the interior. The air had a diesel odor on top of the harsh chemical smell. A steel handrail separated a walkway from the vehicle concourse to my left. Rubber marks from extremely large tires marred the concrete. The whine of electric motors and the squeal of hydraulic machinery echoed from a cavernous room at the far end of the tunnel.
The walkway made a sharp right turn up ahead, and there was a door standing ajar at the far corner. I walked toward it at a brisk pace, my Walther palmed against my right side.
I was three strides away when the door popped open. A man in blue overalls with a device that looked a lot like an iPad in his hands emerged. His gaze flicked across me. My hope was that he would see a facility guard on the prowl, but it was not to be. Well, I wouldn’t have believed, either. All he seemed to see was the muzzle of pistol and the silencer attached to the end. His eyes flared, and it wasn’t anger; it was panic. I had to keep him quiet, but he didn’t need to die. It was pure bad luck on his part that he’d stumbled onto me. Less an ill-advised act of heroism or stupidity, he might just live.
I pushed him back through the door. It turned out to be a generator room, and the noise was fierce. I closed the door and pantomimed the removal of his overalls. He got it. He stripped to his T-shirt and shorts. I used the tip of the Walther to suggest he get to his knees. He got that, too, though his hands were trembling, as if this might be his last moment. He shut his eyes tight and dipped his head.
I smacked him with the butt of the Walther, aiming for the hollow below his earlobe, the Kyusho Jitsu Dokko pressure point. Safe, but effective. He crumpled face-first to the floor. I touched his throat and felt a steady pulse. He’d wake up later with a gruesome headache, but at least he’d wake up.
I bound him with a section of generator wire and used a clean shop rag to gag him. I zipped on his overalls and made sure his ID badge dangled in front. I carried his electronic clipboard in my hand, walked out of the room, and locked the door behind me. So far, so good.
I rounded the corner, and things changed. The tunnel dropped even farther underground, and a room the size of two football fields gobbled it up. The walkway turned into a catwalk that traveled the circumference of the room and followed the tunnel. Placards warning of possible radioactivity decorated the walls. Cameras monitored the room from the ceilings, and I wondered briefly if any of these belonged to the UN inspection teams.
Pipes and ventilation ductwork crisscrossed the ceiling. The floor was crowded with some of the largest pieces of machinery I’d ever seen. Pallets were stacked high with metalworks, spools of cable, tubing, and steel drums as big as a man. The room stretched on and on for meters. It was hard to tell how far because of the dazzle of lights and a brown haze in the air. Men in blue overalls just like mine tended to the machinery. Others in exactly the kind of white smocks you’d expect to see in a lab moved like automatons. The activity was just as fierce as the noise. I was standing inside one of the most notorious nuclear facilities on the planet, but the intel wasn’t right.
I needed to find the centrifuge plant, and this wasn’t it. I needed to find the rocket assembly.
I followed the catwalk farther into the room, tracking the tunnel in the direction of a vehicle door large enough for a semi.
Twice, the vehicle door hummed and scrolled open. The first time, two forklifts loaded down with water-cooling equipment charged into the room. The second time, the bright headlights of a truck lit the tunnel and reflected off the catwalk. I faced an electrical junction box and feigned a workman’s interest.
The truck rumbled through the tunnel and down the ramp into the room. It was a Russian military cargo carrier with drums lashed to the bed. A soldier sat in the back, a G-3 rifle slung across his chest. A worker in blue overalls guided the truck through a door to another room below.
I continued along the catwalk and found a niche between two vertical air ducts. I dug out my iPhone and surreptitiously engaged the recording app. I’d let the experts back home decipher the results.
I checked my watch. It had been nearly an hour since my arrival. I needed a way deeper into the complex. The catwalk farther on circled the room I was in, which made it a dead end. Trying to navigate the factory floor below would have been suicidal. There were maintenance ladders every hundred meters or so that traveled into the maze of ductwork along the ceiling, and I chanced a look through my digital telescope. I followed the nearest ladder up — the room’s ceiling towered 150 feet into the air at least — and then traced the connecting skywalk to the far wall and a closed door.
Worth the risk.
It took thirty seconds to scale the ladder to the maintenance skywalk along the ceiling and another forty seconds to scurry along the skywalk to the door. I used the maintenance man’s ID badge on the magnetic lock. It opened onto a second room, the convex shape of an airplane hangar only twice as large.
For the second time in two days, I’d struck gold.
Another centrifuge plant at least as large as the one in Qom. The tall, silver cylinders with their silver coils spiraling toward the ceiling looked like an army of clones awaiting their marching orders.
This was a place of serious business. The men and women monitoring the enrichment process looked like accountants and schoolteachers, not mad scientists with a mission of mass destruction. Everyone moved with purpose and calm, and, from what I could tell, I might have been the only one in this particular room with a weapon.
I ran my iPhone camera again on full zoom and stepped lightly along the skywalk. I knew I was already in way over my head, but intel was only as good as the pieces you put together into a cohesive whole. It might have been obvious to me what the hell was going on, but obvious wasn’t what the politicians wanted. They wanted the entire picture. And since the guys I had to convince were politicians, that’s what they were going to get. To hell with it.
I traveled through two more chambers before I found it. At first, I thought it was just another cavernous space laced with conveyor belts and roads and filled with cranes and trucks. But the security in this part of the plant was serious: guards in black uniforms with submachine guns stood at regular intervals.
I tracked the room grid by grid with the camera and froze when I saw the long, olive-green cylinders resting on the backs of seven flatbed trailers. Workers in blue overalls and technicians in white smocks climbed around the seven cylinders, busy as nursery ants tending their queen. In terms of size and shape, the cylinders mirrored those in the photos James Fouraz had shown me of Sejil-2 missiles, and I zoomed in to record as much detail as possible. The cap had been taken off the front end of each cylinder, exposing a concave circular plate with cable connectors and pipe fittings. I knew enough to understand that this was where the warhead and guidance system mated to the rocket.
All for nothing, right? After all, I had destroyed Morshed’s circuit boards, and without them the Iranians were wasting their time. Well, I wasn’t really convinced. That was far too easy and they could always buy more from the Chinese.
I crept farther along the catwalk. A twenty-foot-high white partition bisected the room, and the activity on the other side mirrored what I had just seen. There were workers and technicians fussing around seven more missiles.