The Natanz Directive

by Wayne Simmons

  I used the third code to ready the self-destruct mechanism.

  I closed the lid of the suitcase, pocketed my iPhone, and crawled to the end of the concrete pipe. I studied the warehouse and spotted two swivel cameras positioned along the ceiling. Rudimentary. There was a stairwell against the near wall and no more than a thirty-yard sprint away. I timed my jump with the panning of the cameras and hit the floor running. I stopped inside the stairwell, threw myself against a wall made of damp concrete, and held my breath for five seconds, waiting for an alarm to sound. When nothing happened, I took the stairs two at a time to a pair of swinging doors.

  I peeked through a head-high window into a hallway lined with lockers. School lockers. There was also a stream of people marching down the hall, but they weren’t students. Some wore the casual clothes of office workers. Most were dressed like ordinary laborers. Clearly, the night shift.

  When the procession ended, I ducked inside. It was a school all right. Classrooms, offices, labs, restrooms—and dosimeters hanging from the walls. What kind of school worried about radioactive contamination?

  There was a bank of elevators farther down the hall, and that’s where everyone was headed; the building was a single story high, so I didn’t imagine the elevators went anywhere but down. There were two guards stationed at the elevators. They were checking ID badges.

  I had to make a decision. There were doors on either side of the hall. The one to my right had a cutout of stairs on the front rising upward, which suggested a roof access. I made a quick turn through the door on my left, went down a wide hallway, and ran head-on into a man in a white lab coat coming out of a steel-framed door directly ahead. The door snapped closed behind him. I heard the magnetic lock engaging.

  He stared at my face, and I stared at the ID card dangling from his neck lanyard. He did a double take and barked a question in Farsi. His gaze flickered across my chest in search of an ID badge.

  Then his eyes went to the emergency alarm attached to the wall. He was reaching for it when I slashed an open hand across his throat. His cry ended in a gurgle. I punched him in the temple with a closed fist, and he crumpled to the floor.

  I unclipped his ID badge and ran it through the magnetic card reader. The door clicked open. I dragged the unconscious man through the door with me. The door opened onto the landing of a staircase; I left the man there after deciding that another blow to the head wasn’t necessary.

  The staircase traveled down four flights to a second magnetically locked doorway and a sign that indicated an emergency exit. I used the ID badge a second time. The door accessed a narrow platform high above a cavernous room that was convex, like an airplane hangar only twice as large. My eyes widened in astonishment.

  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 hear
t 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.

  Time to improvise.

  The copter came straight at me. 500 meters and closing. A Bell Jet Ranger. I dropped to one knee. I hit the Activate button on my iPhone. I had 30 seconds. Might as well do some damage before the fat lady sang.

  I sighted down the barrel of the AK-47. One shot each for the pilot and the co-pilot. I could picture the chopper crashing into the school and exploding in flames. One hell of a distraction. But not from this range, Jake. Be patient.

  I counted off the seconds and calculated the distance: 400 yards. 350. The landing light under the chopper’s nose began to flicker. The hell?

  The Jet Ranger banked to the right, then orbited the building, the co-pilot in the left seat facing me. The cargo door was open. If the Ranger was armed—and every Ranger was—there would be a crewman hanging out the door with a machine gun. But the back seat was empty.

  I glanced down at the iPhone’s screen: 15, 14, 13 …

  Decision time. 250 yards. Wait! I eased off the trigger. I’d seen the helicopter before, and now I knew where. On the landing pad outside Charlie’s warehouse in Seyfabad. I lowered the rifle.

  The co-pilot braced himself against the chopper’s doorframe and leaned out. He raised his sunglasses and pushed a boom mike down from in front of his face. There was no mistaking the mustache and broad cheeks. Charlie Amadi. He signaled me to stay down and stay put. Yeah, as if I were going somewhere without him.

  I dropped the rifle and reached for my phone.

  Now it was down to 5, 4, 3 … I hit the Disarm trigger. The countdown froze.

  The helicopter banked hard and swooped toward me. Now I recognized the pilot. It was Jeri. I was liking the girl better and better all the time. I pressed against the shed door and prayed that the guards in the stairway would hold off for three or four more seconds.

  At the last second, the Jet Ranger flared upward to bleed off airspeed. A cloud of dust lifted from the roof. Jeri leveled the copter and raked her landing skids close to me, turbine engine screeching, rotor blades churning the air.

  “What are you waiting for?” she shouted.

  I dived onto the backseat. The helicopter accelerated upward. The roar was deafening. I rolled into a sitting position and snapped the seat harness over my shoulders and waist. I gripped my iPhone, stared down at the screen, and activated the self-destruct mechanism on the suitcase bomb. Thank God.

  Wind whipped through the open cabin. I leaned to the left and glanced out the door. Security guards burst out of the hatchway on the school roof and began firing. Bullets sprayed us from the adjacent roof, wild shots that couldn’t keep up with the forward motion of the Jet Ranger at full throttle.

  I watched until we were well out of range. When I turned around, Charlie was holding out a headset for me. I slipped it over my ears.

  “So?” I heard him say.

  First, I held out the iPhone. He read the screen, and his eyes doubled in size. Then I pulled the phone away.

  “Pay dirt,” I answered, as we disappeared over the hills west of Qom and the first hint of dawn peeked above the horizon.

  An hour later. Charlie handed me hot tea, Iranian style, in a short glass with one sugar cube. My hair was still wet from a hot shower and my face tingled from a welcome shave. He, Jeri, and I had just finished a late lunch of fried spinach and eggplant with yogurt, onions, and garlic. I was dying for a cheeseburger.

  We hadn’t gone back to Seyfabad, and we hadn’t returned to Tehran. We’d gone south from Qom seventy or eighty miles to Kashan. Jeri had ditched the chopper at a private airport a mile from the city. The safe house was in an old neighborhood populated by painters and sculptors and papermakers, as Charlie described it.

  He was expounding on Kashan’s history. “Like everything in Iran, it’s been overrun and pillaged by the best of them. Arabs, Mongols, Persians, and who knows all. That’s what happens when you’ve been around for five thousand years.”

  Jeri wore the same tank top she’d been wearing during my rescue. It showed miles of skin the color of burnished walnut; I could have stared at her all day. She said, “If you had the time, you could walk into town and find a silk scarf for your wife unlike anything you could find anywhere else in the world. But you better get it quick before the mullahs make the arts a footnote in Iranian history.”

  “What’s really special about Kashan is that Natanz is only forty miles away,” Charlie said. He knew that was my next destination. “I assume that’s the plan.”

  “Strike while the iron’s hot, my friend. The Revolutionary Guards will know their security has been breached. I figure I have twenty-four hours max before everything within five hundred miles of Qom is battened down tighter than a drum,” I said. I looked across at Charlie. He had chosen a hardback chair and a stiff posture. His cup and saucer were balanced in his hands like an artist with his brush and palette. “But you’ve done enough, Charlie. You and Jeri risked your necks for me back there. I won’t forget. We’re square.”

  Charlie looked over at Jeri. He was grinning. She looked like she was ready to take my head off. “He’s no Persian, is he?” he said.

  “No, but I like his style anyway,” she said unexpectedly.

  “In our country, as fucked up as it may be, it’s the debtor who decides when a debt is paid. You’ve still got work to do, and we’ve still got a traitor to find,” he said. “I’m in for the long haul.”

  “And I’m just beginning to enjoy myself,” Jeri said. “But it’s up to you, Abu.”

  Abu? What the hell? Abu meant “father” in Arabic. My eyes swept the room. Charlie must have seen it on my face. But he didn’t say anything. Instead, he pulled a laptop from a case on the floor and set it up on the table.

  While he was powering it up, he said, “I heard from Bagheri. You lit a fire under his ass. He’s got people searching high and low fo
r his mole.”

  I shook my head. “Bad move. All he’s going to do is make it harder for us to find the bastard.”

  “Don’t I know it. But there might be an upside. He raises enough hell, it might keep Security out of our hair for a while. My guys are narrowing things down. They’re tracking twenty-six known MEK operatives who seem to have hidden agendas.”

  “Moradi?” For some reason, I didn’t want it to be Moradi. He’d been chumming for the MEK in Amsterdam for thirty years. We’d partnered enough times to know we were on the same side. Or so I thought.

  “Not Moradi. But Karimi and Drago keep coming to the surface,” Charlie said.

  “Okay. We have to flush our guy out,” I said. “We have to set a lure for the twenty-six possibilities on our list. We have to use the communication links your guys have established to hint at various rendezvous sights around Tehran. See who bites.”

  “I’m on that,” Jeri said, rising from her chair with the grace of gymnast on a balance beam. “I’ll set up a video conference with Amur.” She glanced at me. “Amur. The guy with the bow tie. We’ll have something out on the wire in an hour.”

  “Keep it subtle, Jeri,” I said. “This guy’s smart. We don’t want to spook him.”

  She nodded briskly—the soldier replacing the gymnast in the blink of an eye—and hustled out.

  “Consider it done,” Charlie said, as if I might have misgivings about a twenty-six-year-old screwing up our counterintelligence op. Nope, not this twenty-six-year-old. I’d share a foxhole with her any day of the week. Charlie turned the computer screen my way. “Professor Fouraz came through again. He sent another batch of photographs from Natanz and a couple of audio links.”