The Disciple

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Three days after the F/A-18 Hornet crashed in Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced at a news conference that Iranian fighters had destroyed an American navy fighter over Iran. While print reporters scribbled furiously and cameras rolled, Ahmadinejad motioned to two men behind him. They whisked away a large cloth, revealing what appeared to be a panel from an airplane wearing the U.S. Navy’s low-viz paint scheme. On the panel were the words, uss united states, and a squadron number, VFA-196. The panel, irregular in shape, was dented, and one side appeared to be torn, as if a piece had been ripped off.

Ahmadinejad entertained his audience with an account of how this airplane had illegally and provocatively penetrated Iranian airspace and been intercepted. After a short air battle, he said, it was shot down.

“Where is the pilot?” one of the international reporters shouted, and was ignored.

Other pieces of the plane were produced, a half dozen, with the largest being the tail hook. It took four men to carry it into the room. The shank of the hook was slightly bent, and the whole thing was dirty.

The president regaled the reporters for another twenty minutes with some aerial fiction, and then he turned serious. “This airplane was obviously in Iranian airspace to spy upon the Islamic Republic.” He continued in this vein. Its presence was a serious breach of international law, and the government of Iran expected an abject and humble apology from the Great Satan.

The story shot around the world at the speed of light. In Washington a Pentagon spokesperson told the press that the matter was under investigation. She added, “If there has been an inadvertent penetration of Iranian airspace, of course we will apologize. However, until the investigation is complete, I am unable to say what the facts are. I seriously doubt that anyone intended to violate the sovereignty of Iran. We are querying the USS United States battle group commander. We will have an announcement in due course.”

At Naval Air Station Oceana, the home of VFA-196, the pilots’ spouses and significant others had already been notified that the squadron had lost a plane and the pilot was safe. Press inquiries were rebuffed by the Oceana public affairs office.

In Tehran, the chargé, Eliza Marie Ortiz, trooped over to the Foreign Ministry and offered an official apology for the inadvertent violation of Irani an airspace and requested that the wreckage of the U.S. Navy plane found in Iran be returned to the U.S. authorities. The request, which was in writing, was taken under advisement.

The Iranian government showed the document to the press, but the story died anyway. The Iranians had some airplane pieces and a far-fetched tale of how they got them. No living pilot or dead body was produced. The U.S. Navy wasn’t talking. The public went on to other things. After all, the news from the Middle East was always bad.

Two days later Janos Ilin, of the Russian SVR, stood in the desert looking at the Hornet’s wreckage from a distance of about fifty feet. He was certainly no expert on airplane crashes, but this one looked remarkably intact. It seemed to have struck the ground in a flat attitude, skipped and plowed along shedding bits and pieces, then went up a little hill and got airborne again. On the other side of the hill the nose hit hard, almost crushing it; then the thing turned ninety degrees and skidded sideways to a stop. The remains of the crushed belly tank could just be seen about two hundred yards away.

Two of the men Ilin had brought with him did indeed specialize in the examination of crashed planes, and they began poking and prodding the wreck as the Iranians conducted their own examination. There were a dozen or more Iranian air force technicians, armed with a variety of tools and test equipment. The workers were supervised by at least a half dozen officers, who conferred, moved to another portion of the wreck and conferred again.

Habib Sultani and his nephew Ghasem stood beside Ilin, watching the entire evolution.

The most obvious thing about the plane was the shattered canopy and the missing ejection seat. The next thing Ilin noticed was that there were no bullet or cannon holes in it that he could see. Or holes made by shrapnel.

He turned so he could look back up the path the airplane had plowed as it decelerated, a path that pointed almost straight east. Not a trace of fire.

The airplane didn’t burn.

He looked at the wings. One of them had been nearly wrenched away from the fuselage and was bent at an angle.

There was no fuel in the plane when it crashed.

Ilin sighed and got out his cigarettes. He lit one and took a deep drag. The smoke from the cigarette zipped away on the stiff breeze.

“Would you like to inspect more closely?” Ghasem asked.

“No, thank you. This is close enough. Where is the pilot?”

“Not here,” Ghasem said abruptly.

“Obviously. The ejection seat is missing. Is he still running around out here in this desert, or do you people have him in custody?”

Ghasem said nothing.

“How far are we from the ocean?” Ilin asked.

Ghasem knew the answer to this one. “One hundred and sixty kilometers.”

Ilin nodded and puffed on his cigarette. He was on his third one when the two Russian experts came over to him. “No fuel in the plane. The engines were only windmilling when it struck. They are essentially intact.”

“Why did the plane crash?”

“The pilot ejected. Without a pilot…”

Ilin frowned at the man. “Why did the pilot eject?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to have any battle damage, no sign of fire, no airframe failure that might have occurred in the air. Perhaps the pilot got lost and ran out of fuel. Perhaps he had a total electrical failure, although we saw no obvious damage to the electrical system in our quick inspection. The ejection seat may have malfunctioned and simply blew him out of the plane. There are a lot of possibilities, including an oxygen system failure. If we had a hangar and a couple of months, we could probably eliminate many of them.”

“How about the box?”

“It’s still in there. Should we take it out?”

Ilin deferred to Sultani, who of course said yes. The Russians went back with an assortment of hand tools. Meanwhile, the Iranian technicians began working to remove one of the Sidewinder missiles, the one nearest Ilin, from the tip of the twisted wing.

Ilin turned and strolled away from the plane. He was standing at a comfortable hundred feet when the rocket motor of the Sidewinder ignited and it shot out across the desert floor like a snake with its tail on fire.

The men around the wingtip were screaming in agony when the missile struck a rock some distance away and exploded. After a long moment dirt and shrapnel began raining down, gently.

One of the technicians seemed to have been burned to death, Ilin gathered, and several were badly injured. Ilin’s Russian techs, who were working adjacent to the fuselage equipment bay, were unhurt.

Janos Ilin lit another cigarette.

It was after lunch, and the wounded and dead had been taken away in a truck, when the technicians came over to where Ilin sat on a folding chair. One of them was carrying a black box in his hands, one about six inches on each side, with a variety of wires protruding from it.

“We will need several days to identify where all the wires that were connected to this box led to.”

Ilin handed the box to Sultani.

“By all means,” Sultani said, cradling the box in his hands. He looked pleased. “By all means.”

As Sultani stood examining his prize, the technician lit a cigarette and paused beside Ilin, who was still contemplating the plane.

“Too bad about the radar,” the technician said. The nose cone was crushed and the radar inside severely smashed. “Still,” he added, “it would be nice to have the waveguides, the navigation/attack computer and some of the other bits.”

Without even glancing at the Iranians, Ilin said, “Take off anything you want.”

Ghasem supervised the loading of the dead man and the wounded after the Sidewinder missile ignited as the technicians attempted to remove it from the wingtip. The crashed airplane was interesting, but he had other things on his mind. Even the agony of the burned didn’t engage him intellectually.

The fact that his cousin was passing Top Secret data about the weapons program to a former professor of hers who was now in America had come as a shock. Yet he had always known Davar had a mind of her own. They had discussed her choice for hours the other evening on their way to and from the meet with the American spy, Carmellini. Conflicted as he was about his government’s decision to spend billions of precious oil dollars on nuclear weapons, Ghasem found he was unable to condemn her. She wanted the world to know what the mullahs were doing, and that seemed logical. These mullahs with their secrets…

And their fears and hatreds, one of which had killed Grandfather. Today in the desert, Ghasem found himself thinking about Grandfather’s manuscript, about the grace of the ideas it contained and about the kind, gentle man who was murdered by the secret police.

He also found himself surreptitiously watching his uncle Habib Sultani. What did he think? In his heart of hearts, did he believe Ahmadinejad’s diatribes about the glory of martyrdom? Did he really believe Iran, this poor third-world country, needed nuclear weapons?

Ghasem’s plan to get Tommy Carmellini into the warhead manufacturing facility was simplicity itself, which convinced him he could probably get away with it. He was going to disguise Carmellini as an official visitor and squire him around.

Contrary to what one might think, the facility did indeed have official visitors, and in the past Ghasem had indeed played tour guide for them. The visitors were from North Korea, China and Germany. The Koreans and Chinese were the experts, having built bombs of their own, and were there with the knowledge and consent of their governments. While the Federal Republic of Germany certainly didn’t condone nuclear warhead manufacturing, some enterprising Germans had built a nice business evading the ban on machine-tool sales to Iran.

In fact, next month a Venezuelean official was coming to look over the whole operation. President Ahmadinejad took his political allies where he found them.

Thinking it over, Ghasem decided that Carmellini would do best as a German. He would be an employee of the last company that had sent a man to take measurements and offer expert advice.

“You’ll be Herr Reinicke,” Ghasem told me at a restaurant in one of the blue-collar districts in the southern part of the city. “Tomorrow.”

“Let me see if I have this right. We are just going to walk in, you’ll give me the tour, and we’ll walk out?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, man.” My chosen field is burglary, and there are plenty of reasons for that, not the least of which is that it fits my twisted personality. This proposal was about as far from burglary as a man could get: We were going to go onstage and do it in plain sight.

“I was followed this evening,” I told Ghasem. “There were at least four of them, maybe more. I had a devil of a time getting loose. Seems as if they sent the best they had, this time.”

Ghasem said nothing.

“Are they following you?” I asked. I had checked the outside of the restaurant carefully for watchers before I entered-now was certainly not the hour for me to be seen by the Islamic Gestapo hanging around with Ghasem, the aide to the minister of defense. I saw no one, but that meant little. If they were really working at it, I had little hope of detecting a passive surveillance. And, of course, there was Ghasem, who I doubted was knowledgeable enough to spot a good tail, and way too ignorant to ditch one.

“What will happen to you if they catch us?” I asked.

Ghasem shrugged. “I’ll be spared the indignities of old age.”

I tried to keep a straight face, but it was difficult.

He looked at me through narrowed eyes. “Are you trying to back out?”

“Believe me,” I said, “if I could get out of this, I would. Now walk me through the day. How will it go?”

When I left the restaurant two hours later, I had a new respect for Ghasem. He was either an extremely with-it, competent young man with a king-sized set of gonads, or he was setting me up big-time. One thing was certain: He knew more about nuclear warhead design than anyone I had ever met. According to him, the plant we were visiting, in the Hormuz tunnel complex in the foothills of the Alborz Mountains, northeast of Tehran, had sufficient plutonium on hand to construct twelve warheads. This was four times more warheads than Azari said they were making. Also, they weren’t months from having warheads, they were “almost finished.” Two or three weeks, he said. Ahmadinejad had ordered the warheads into production. In two or three weeks Iran would have operational nuclear-armed missiles.

I went straight to the embassy, set up the portable telephone booth and called Jake Grafton on the satellite phone.

The secret police pounded on the door at two in the morning. Ghasem opened it, and six of them came storming in. MOIS officers took Ghasem and his roommate, Mustafa Abtahi, to separate cars in the front of the building to question them while two officers remained behind to search every square inch of the apartment.

“The manuscript. We want it. Where is it?”

“What manuscript?”

“Don’t take us for fools. The manuscript that Professor Murad wrote. We know you have it. Where have you hidden it?”

And so it went. Ghasem stuck to his story. He knew nothing about a manuscript, had never seen it, had talked to no one about it.

While he was telling the officers these lies, Ghasem was wondering what Mustafa Abtahi was saying. After all, the manuscript had been in the apartment and Abtahi had probably seen it. He might not have known what it was, but he had probably seen the bundle of paper tied up with strings.

So it went. After forty minutes of this, the officers who had been questioning Ghasem went to question Mustafa, and the officers who had been grilling Mustafa came to question Ghasem. Fortunately they didn’t start pounding on the two men. That would come some night in the future.

Then, suddenly, the interrogation was over. The men upstairs came down, the officers shoved the suspects out of the cars, and the six of them drove away.

Ghasem and Mustafa watched the cars disappear, stood for a moment trying to calm down, then went back upstairs. Their apartment was trashed. Everything movable was piled in the middle of the floor.

They worked for an hour putting things back together, then lay down on their mattresses and tried to sleep. Ghasem didn’t mention the manuscript. Nor did Mustafa. Both men knew that if either had acknowledged the past presence of a manuscript, they would right now be on their way to prison. Neither of them had, so no discussion was needed.

Ghasem picked me up on a street corner in downtown Tehran. I had been followed from the hotel and worked hard getting clean. Went to the bazaar, went into and out of four buildings, caught a taxi, abandoned it at a light and caught another. There had been at least four of them on foot with two cars carrying backup guys.

They were really serious about following me, and I was worried. Why now? Did they know that I was talking to Ghasem?

Lots of questions, and no answers. Every day I spent with Ghasem and managed to telephone Jake Grafton was gold. I was convinced he was telling me the truth, yet so far I didn’t have anything that would convince the skeptics back in the States, who had been burned once too often.

As I dodged Iranian agents, I wondered why everyone had decided to lie to the CIA. Seemed like a good idea to me, but still… everyone?

Pollution this morning was terrible, so bad I couldn’t even see the Alborz Mountains to the north. Ghasem glided by in an older BMW, right on time. He circled the block while I watched to see if anyone was following him. Apparently not. Of course, if they had a beacon on his car they wouldn’t need to follow him.

The second time he stopped, and I climbed in. We were on our way. He started to speak, and I held up my hand. From my backpack I removed a radio receiver. I used it to carefully pace through all the possible frequencies I thought a beacon might be on. Then I tried to check to see if there were bugs in the car transmitting.

Again, apparently not.

“Okay,” I told Ghasem. “We’re clean, I think.”

Ghasem nodded and checked his rearview mirror again. He, too, was worried. When you turn spy, you have a lot to worry about. “Ahmadinejad gave the order a couple of days ago to put warheads in production,” he said. “Today you will see them being manufactured.”

My mouth made a little round O.

“Ahmadinejad had two goals for the nuclear program,” Ghasem continued as we rode along, “and they have both been met. He wanted to put it underground, and he wanted it under military control. Nuclear weapons production is housed in the Hormuz Tunnel, which we will visit today. Missile manufacture occurs at the Parchin complex, the largest tunnel system in Iran, which is under the Khojir region in the mountains just east of Tehran.”

“How about testing one, just to see if it’ll go bang?”

He shrugged. “Ahmadinejad elected not to test a warhead, so the warheads will go into the missiles, which have been programmed and are ready to launch.”

We talked about missiles for a bit, and when we had exhausted that subject, Ghasem said, “The leadership has also constructed a hardened city for themselves under the Abbas Abad district of Tehran. The entrance is through a religious center, the Mosalla Prayer Grounds. The chosen can get to it quickly from Parliament and the government ministries. This bunker is built to withstand a direct hit from a nuclear device.”

Fortunately I had photographed the blueprints of all of these bunkers and sent them by burst transmission to a satellite, which re-sent them to NSA.

“I always wondered,” I mused aloud, “who the fortunate souls will be: those aboveground who die immediately, or the bunker rats who crawl out, eventually, into a nuclear wasteland?”

“That is a question,” Ghasem acknowledged.

“Where are the operational missiles kept?”

Ghasem grinned. “You are a spy, aren’t you?”

“You thought I might not be?”

“The regime has some very clever officers.”

“I was wondering if you were one,” I said, eyeing him.

Ghasem flashed that grin again. “The missiles are spotted all over western and southern Iran. They occasionally move during the night by transport, going from one hardened storage site to another. There are twenty-five sites. Unfortunately, to launch one, it must be pulled from its storage site, which is like a railroad tunnel, and placed in the open. The launcher is placed in launching position, the missile is unstrapped from the launcher, power is applied, the gyros and other systems are started and checked, then the missile is fired. All this can be done rather quickly.”

“How quickly is rather quickly?”

“Twenty to thirty minutes.”

“How many operational missiles are there?”

“Hundreds. Perhaps as many as nine hundred-I do not know the exact number. It changes weekly.”

“But the regime will have only a dozen warheads?”

“At first. Over time that number will increase to at least a hundred. The technicians will go to the various storage sites throughout the country to install the new warheads. The missiles will not be moved.”

“Targeting for the missiles-how does that work? Are they preprogrammed, and how long does it take to change a target?”

“The guidance systems are preprogrammed on the ballistic missiles, the Ghadars. Those programs are complex and changing them involves computers. The task requires technical experts and takes hours. The cruise missiles are also preprogrammed, but a good technician can change the target in perhaps half an hour, if he has all the correct targeting data, such as its position and distance and so forth. Still, the easiest way to target the nuclear warheads is to simply install them on preprogrammed missiles, all of which have been checked by the ministry’s experts. That way we don’t have to rely on technicians in the field, who might make errors.”

My mouth was dry, yet my palms were sweating. We were in the suburbs when I had Ghasem pull over and stop. I heaved my breakfast, then climbed back into the car. Amazingly, I felt better.

“Have you seen a target list?” I asked. “Or a list of missiles that will get the warheads?”

“No.”

Ghasem was looking at me, cool as snow in January. “Are you okay?” he said.

“Little touch of something,” I told him. “Let’s go and get this over with.”

He put the car in motion again. “You sure I won’t be searched?”

“Neither of us will.”

“That’s good. I have a couple of cameras on me, and I’ll be taking photos.”

“Not obviously, I hope.”

“Nope. I’m a sneaky bastard.”

We stopped talking then and rode silently toward our doom. I worked on getting control of my stomach and my game face in place. When you are wall-climbing, cracking a safe or picking a lock, you don’t have to worry about your face, so all this was relatively new to me. One thing I knew for sure-I didn’t like it. Still, I figured I could get through this unless someone who had seen me in the president’s office recognized me. Then I would be in a world of hurt.

So there we were, two spies in the house of love, when we pulled up to the gate in a chain-link fence. Squads of armed soldiers lolled about, here and there, all clad in sloppy green uniforms and sporting AK-47s. Ghasem spouted Farsi at the guard-I got most of it-and displayed his pass, which I later learned bore the signature of his uncle, the minister of defense.

The card did the trick. The guard gave Ghasem a sloppy, kiss-my-ass salute and we were on our way. A quarter of a mile later we arrived at the entrance to the underground complex. Ghasem parked, and we walked over to the entrance.

I snapped some photos with the camera in my lapel. Digital photography has advanced so far that every person in the developed world has a tiny camera embedded in their cell phone. This was the same technology, without the phone.

This being the third world, there were no plastic IDs with photographs and embedded magnetic strips, nor were there any computers to read them. Security consisted of four soldiers-officers, I assumed-who sat around a folding table at the entrance. They, too, looked at Ghasem’s card and listened to him introduce me. Herr Reinicke. One of the soldiers was eyeing me, so I met his eyes, rolled the dice and asked, “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”

He gave me a blank look.

We walked into the tunnel and boarded an electric trolley, which set off on a journey into the mountain. Ghasem gave our destination to the trolley operator. The caverns were huge, at least twenty-five feet high. I asked Ghasem about that, and he said they had to be large to get the rock-drilling and earth-moving machinery in and out.

We rode for at least eight minutes. As we approached an intersection, the trolleyman pointed left or right, and a man stationed there threw a manual switch, changing the track.

Arranged here and there were large curtains hanging from the ceiling, radiation curtains. There was just room in the curtains for the trolley to get by. Due to the constant change of direction, I assumed the curtains were reasonably effective in trapping radiation.

When we got to the end of the trolley line, we went into a dressing room, where we donned one piece antiradiation suits, complete with gloves, helmets and radiation-absorbent badges. Ghasem knew the guards, who didn’t even ask to see his pass. Nor did they ask him about me. On the overhead were four surveillance cameras, silent sentinels. I wondered where the camera control room was.

As I dressed, I took some photos with the camera in my Dick Tracy watch. We were just about ready to go when an officer I had seen before walked in. He knew Ghasem, who addressed him as Major Larijani. I remembered him, a glowering, bearded asshole. This guy had been in the president’s office when Ahmadinejad did his rant. I half turned, so Larijani didn’t get a full face of me, and didn’t waste any time pulling on the head covering. Larijani talked to Ghasem about a manuscript. Being smarter than the average bunny, I immediately jumped to the conclusion that the manuscript in question was the one Ghasem and Davar had given to me. And baby, it was gone, on its way to America.

Ghasem told Larijani he knew nothing about it, and after a minute or so, Larijani let it go.

After passage through an air dam, Ghasem and I found ourselves on the personnel side of the manufacturing facility. A radioactivity barrier stood between us and the plutonium. Over a dozen people in suits were working at control stations, manipulating large machine tools and conveyor systems. Monitors mounted all over the place allowed them to see precisely what the tools were doing. As Ghasem and I watched, they maneuvered plutonium into a press.

“In the press,” Ghasem whispered, “the plutonium will be shaped into half of a warhead. Ultimately the halves will be assembled around a neutron generator trigger and control unit and pressed together. Then the warhead is coated in beryllium, which has the unique property of reflecting neutrons back into the warhead, helping the plutonium go critical and enhancing the explosion. In short, the beryllium coating allows us to build a warhead with less plutonium. Finally, the entire warhead is coated in lead to prevent radiation leakage.”

Some people were taking notice of their visitors, so Ghasem began an earnest discussion of how the computer remotely controlled the various tools. I inspected everything and tried to act as if I knew something about all this. Our conversation was conducted in English, of course. Ghasem knew no German, and I suspected none of the Iranians did either. I knew just enough to order a beer in Munich and ask for a kiss. Other than casual interest, no one paid us much attention. No one, that is, except the surveillance cameras.

After a thorough inspection of the remote controls, Ghasem led me along the partition to where I could see into the bay. Eight warheads completely assembled and coated in beryllium and lead lay on pallets under the hydraulic arms that moved them about. I peeled back the cuff of my glove and took a photo with my watch.

“Only four more to go,” Ghasem said.

“I’ve seen enough,” I said. “Let’s get the hell outta here.”

So we did. Larijani was nowhere in sight as we took off our radiation coveralls and turned in our radiation badges.

He was sitting in the front of the tunnel when we got off the trolley, though. He motioned to Ghasem that he wanted to talk, so Ghasem wandered over. I took a few more steps and stood looking over the parking area and the distant mountains while Ghasem and Larijani chewed the fat. I couldn’t hear the conversation.

This whole visit had been too easy, which worried me. The conviction grew and grew that they knew who I was, that they were making it possible for me to get information to pass on to Washington. Yet what could I do about it?

The tension mounted with every passing second. Several people came and went, and every one of them glanced into my face. No beard, pale skin, taller than average, I was going to attract attention. I didn’t smile. Tried to not look stressed either. Bored was my game this morning, and I worked at it.

Finally Ghasem came walking over and we strolled to the car. When I glanced back, Larijani was talking to the soldiers at the desk.

I was so relieved to get out of there that I almost went to sleep on the way back to town. I came fully alert when we ran across a demonstration that blocked one of the main thoroughfares. Hundreds of people were chanting and waving signs while at least fifty heavily armed security troops watched. It was difficult to see much from our vantage point, but when I saw another busload of troops arrive, I pointed them out to Ghasem, who began backing our ride into a small park, where he turned around and drove around trees and over the grass and dirt until we got to a street going the other way. We passed a bus full of young men going the other way.

“Basij,” Ghasem said. “Thugs. They will attack the demonstrators.”

“Great country,” I remarked.

“Isn’t it?” he shot back.