“I am very pleased to hear this,” Martin said. “Shahram, I travel a great deal, and I won’t always be available in London. John, here, will take my place in my absence.”
Shahram nodded toward John, and they exchanged telephone numbers.
“John, please arrange for the goods to get to the warehouse. Take George to help you. Now, Shahram, we still need to train your people. How do you propose we go about it?”
“Our head of instruction will be at your service. If you can train him, he will pass on what he learned to others in Tehran in the best possible way.”
While John made the necessary arrangements with Shahram, Martin was busy preparing for the return visit to Mauritania. He called Mahmoud Ould Salah.
“Hello there, Mr. Ould Salah. It’s Martin Cooper from London. How are you?”
“Ah, yes, Mr. Martin,” Ould Salah answered. “How can I be of service?”
“Do you remember the generator you showed us? I was wondering whether it was operational now.”
“Indeed it is, Mr. Martin. I began working on it the day after you left, as I said I would. Two days later it was purring like a kitten.”
“I hope none of my cats purr like that,” Martin laughed. “Listen, Mr. Ould Salah, I would like to take you up on your offer of using your generator. Of course, I expect you to sell it to me at the special price you talked about.”
“No problem. It’s yours.” Ould Salah sounded very pleased. “When will you arrive?”
“In three or four days. Please have it fully fueled.”
“It will look like new, my friend. Fuel in the tank, air in the tires, and a fresh coat of paint. All okay?”
“All okay, Mr. Ould Salah. À bientôt.”
When the board decided to continue with the Mauritania experiment, Martin had forgotten to give Anne the GPS coordinates of the mine’s entrance. Anne was then to deliver them to Boulanger. Martin could not call Anne now—there was still a strict restriction on calling her directly.
He called the admiral.
“Admiral, I am texting you the coordinates of the mine. I will need a table of all the days until the end of next week with the precise times the satellite will be over the mine for each day. And please, ask Boulanger to be ready with a twelve hours’ advance notice to ‘press the button.’ I also think that Sir Cedric would like to be informed of the proceedings in real time.”
“Call me back before you leave,” the admiral said. “I’ll update you on the situation.”
Martin worked on completing the preparations for the trip. The movie gear and satellite phone were tested and packed. So was a toolbox, in order to remove parts of the generator. Bernard Webb was to join Philip and him on this trip as the second ‘actor’ for the movie.
They were fortunate that so far no one had ever questioned their presence anywhere. But this might not always be the case, and they needed to have effective cover stories. It was very likely that if the word got out that a movie was being shot near Zouérat, a horde of busybodies would converge on them. This could possibly be the first occasion in which anyone in that region had ever been close to a film crew, and it would definitely prevent them from carrying out their experiment. The questions were no problem. “We’re doing a couple of action and scenery shots here, and we’ll handle the rest back at the studio,” would be the usual answer. No, what was really needed was a way to keep the inquisitive crowds far back. With that in mind, Martin packed a few hundred meters of rope and red ribbon, intending to cordon off the mine area from prying onlookers.
SIXTY-FIVE
By the time Martin, Philip, and Bernard got to Zouérat, they were pretty much dead on their feet. Carrying all the extra gear took its toll, and they all needed a well-earned rest after a sleepless night, before resuming their mission. They stumbled into their rooms at the hotel and roused themselves around noon.
After lunch, they walked to Ould Salah’s garage. Their arrival was a major event by Ould Salah’s standards, and after the welcomes and Bernard’s introduction, they were invited inside for tea.
“Thank you for the warm welcome,” Martin said. “We would like to start work early tomorrow morning. Therefore, we’d like to tow the generator to the mine today. May we see it, please?”
Ould Salah smiled and beckoned them to the open window. Outside stood a shiny generator that looked as if it had just left the shop.
“Does it—” Bernard began.
“Salim!” Ould Salah yelled through the window. The boy dashed to the generator and pressed the starter button. The machine roared into life, and a pilot light shone brightly.
They watched the generator operate for a while. Ould Salah made a gesture, and Salim cut the engine. Ould Salah turned to his guests, beaming.
“How much do you want for it?” Martin smiled.
“Twenty thousand ouguiyas,” Ould Salah grinned. “That’s five hundred dollars.”
Martin counted out the banknotes, and they shook hands to close the deal. He also asked Ould Salah for stakes or metal poles to cordon off the “filming area.”
Ould Salah was a very efficient man. Everything they wanted was available. The generator was hitched to the back of the jeep, and Salim gathered stakes from around the yard and placed them in the jeep.
“Actually, Mr. Ould Salah,” Martin said as diplomatically as he could, “we won’t be depriving you of Salim tomorrow. We can drive the jeep to the mine ourselves.”
The garage owner shook his head.
“Now is the time you’ll need him most,” he said. “He’ll help with the generator, put up the stakes, and perform any task you ask him to do. And tomorrow you have the jeep for the entire day.”
“We are truly grateful. But this time we’re talking business. I shall pay for the boy’s work and for renting the jeep. That’s for today’s work and for tomorrow. And perhaps we’ll need an extra day as well.”
Ould Salah gave him a paternal smile.
“We have settled on an agreement,” he said. “So be it. You shall pay me a hundred dollars for every day you use the jeep. That includes the boy’s work today.”
Salim drove them to the mine’s entrance. The three Englishmen got off and watched as the boy skillfully backed the generator into the mine. They applauded his driving abilities, and Martin handed him a ten-dollar bill. Salim froze for a moment, then bowed low and kissed Martin’s hand.
While Salim was busy pounding in the stakes with a large mallet he had brought along, Philip asked Martin:
“Do you think Salim is a slave?”
“I suppose he is. But we’ll never know for sure unless we ask Ould Salah, and I, for one, don’t intend to.”
The site was ready an hour later. They drove back to the garage, and left Salim there. Martin asked Ould Salah whether they could take the jeep to the hotel, as they needed to get up very early the next day.
“You rented it,” Ould Salah said. “It’s yours to do with as you please.”
Back at the hotel, Martin consulted the chart Boulanger had supplied. They could begin the tests at five seventeen in the morning. After that, every one hundred and thirty two minutes would provide another opportunity for a test. He picked up the satellite phone and called the admiral.
“Everything is ready,” Martin said. “We begin filming tomorrow at zero-five-seventeen.”
After lunch, they bought a couple of fire extinguishers at a nearby hardware store. They decided to retire early, in anticipation of a hard day’s work on the morrow. Martin requested the receptionist for a wake-up call at four a.m., but just to be sure, they all set their alarm watches to that time, too.
At their meeting earlier that morning, John and Shahram had agreed how they would get prepared for their training program. Accordingly, John had rented a commercial van in which the goods and equipment were to be delivered to the Iranians. He and George had just loaded the last carton into the van and now went over their checklist.
“Fertilizer and gravel?” George c
alled.
“Three sacks each,” John answered.
“Conditioner fluid for the gravel?”
“One carton containing a dozen cans labeled ‘conditioner.’”
“Fertilizer activation fluid?”
“Three twenty-liter jerry cans labeled ‘flower-bed fertilizer.’”
“Fuel pellets?”
“One carton containing fifty bags of pellets labeled ‘dehydrated peas.’”
“Paganini?”
“One carton containing twenty miniaturized acoustic disruptors disguised as electric shavers.” These had arrived just the day before from Italy.
“That’s it, then,” George said, as he closed the van’s back door. “Off you go.”
John drove the van to Daisy Lane, just off Hurlingham Park, where he met Shahram. John got out of the van and Shahram replaced him in the driver’s seat.
“It’s a nice day,” John said. “I’ll take a stroll in the park until you return.”
“You can take my car for the next hour, until I return,” Shahram said.
“That’s all right, Shahram. Thanks, anyway.”
“Okay. I’ll give you a buzz on your cellphone as I approach.”
John enjoyed his walk. Teams were playing football and basketball amid a lot of yelling and laughter. He knew that Shahram was driving the van to the Iranian secret warehouse, where all the goods were to be unloaded.
Forty-five minutes later John’s phone rang.
“I’m ten minutes away from where we met,” Shahram said. “Meet you there.”
Shahram arrived very punctually.
“Did everything go smoothly?” John asked as he and Shahram switched places again.
“Oh, quite,” the Iranian responded. “Now we have to wait until Mr. Martin returns so we can commence training.”
“I’ll let you know,” John promised, and drove off to return the van.
Press Summary
There are clear indications that Western democracy leaders, diplomats, and even the press, seem to say one thing (probably for public consumption), while their actions indicate the opposite. The United States is a prime example—their rhetoric of a tough stand against Iran’s nuclear program is contradicted by the relaxing of the sanctions against Iran. The Turkish president has even declared that Iran had the right to develop nuclear capabilities for peaceful purposes.
The president of North Korea has announced the festivities to take place soon, in which the country’s military power will be exposed for the world to see. Political sources state that he desperately needs such an imposing fete in order to raise the morale of his own people, which had been sorely deflated since he agreed (at least publicly) to curb his country’s nuclear weaponry development, and began to dismantle nuclear installations. There is no doubt that the rally that he plans will show off his pièce de résistance—the long-range ballistic missiles.
Worldwide press reports indicate that for the past two years the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has known that Iran had finalized designs for manufacturing nuclear warheads. During a routine visit at that time, these sketches were shown but were concealed immediately thereafter. Since then, Iran has adamantly refused to reveal these documents again. Now that international pressure to substantially increase sanctions is rising, Iran has submitted these plans to the IAEA in Vienna. They ‘explained’ that they had obtained these designs ‘by accident’ together with other goods they had bought on the ‘free market’. The Iranians were thereby hoping to tone down the demands for increased sanctions against them. They were supported by Russia and China, who oppose sanctions against Iran. As a result, the Iranian president issued a demand for an American apology to the Iranian people for libeling them. The latest Iranian move is seen as a blatant ploy to gain the time they need in order to achieve their goal of nuclear weaponry with the least interference possible.
Martin and his companions left for the mine at half past four in the morning. It was still dark. They had laden the jeep with the movie gear, lighting equipment, work tools, and gloves, flashlights, a jerry can of petrol, the satellite telephone, sandwiches, soft drinks, and a thermos of coffee. Twenty minutes later, they arrived at the mine.
They shone their flashlights on the generator. It was in exactly the same condition it was when they left it—nothing had been stolen. It fired up on their third attempt and ran smoothly.
“Philip,” Martin directed, “string up the rope on those stakes, please. Bernard, put the movie equipment into position facing the mine entrance.” He himself began placing the red ribbons along the roped-off perimeter of their site. He then uncoiled a cable from the generator and plugged it into a lamp, just for appearance sake, in case anyone inquisitive enough—perhaps even Ould Salah himself—wanted to pay a visit.
As five a.m. grew near, they drove the jeep to a distance of about fifty meters from the mine. As dawn broke, it began to get brighter. They settled down with their sandwiches and drinks and watched the mine entrance closely. Their tension mounted. Five seventeen a.m. came and passed—nothing happened. The only sound was the distant clatter of the generator.
Suddenly they heard a sharp crack! The sound of a pistol shot in the open air. Nothing changed in the mine entrance, and they heard the generator chugging along merrily.
“There!” Philip shouted, and pointed to the right of the mine. A small puff of dust rose some twenty meters from the entrance. When the trio got there, they saw a little crater, about forty centimeters across and thirty centimeters deep. A tiny depression at the bottom of the crater indicated that the hole had gone much deeper, but had apparently collapsed on itself. There was no doubt that the laser beam had hit here!
There was an obvious discrepancy in calibration! The experiment had to be repeated, and the discrepancy accounted for and corrected.
“Bernard, turn off the generator!” Martin yelled as he ran back to the jeep. “Philip, get the GPS coordinates of that hole in the ground.”
Martin quickly dialed the admiral’s number.
“Yes, hello?” The admiral’s voice was groggy. He had evidently been sleeping. The time in London was the same as in Zouérat.
“Good morning, admiral,” Martin said cheerily. “Is everything okay over there?” If the experiment had been a success, he would have said “Good to hear your voice.”
The admiral knew at once that Martin wanted to tell him more.
“Oh, fine, fine,” he said. “You didn’t call me at this unholy hour to ask me how I was, did you?”
“No, of course not. My apologies, admiral. We’ve found a wonderful spot for an angle shot.”
“Oh, really?” The admiral sat on the edge of his bed and turned on his reading lamp. He groped in the drawer for a notebook and a pencil. “Do you have the coordinates?”
Philip was racing back to the jeep with the GPS system in his hand.
“Right here, admiral.” Martin took the device from Philip. He added twenty degrees to the latitude and longitude and rattled off the numbers into the phone. The resulting coordinates fell somewhere in the Mediterranean west of Sardinia, but he knew the admiral would subtract twenty degrees before alerting Boulanger via Anne.
“Got it,” the admiral said. “Was the timing accurate?”
“Just a few seconds off,” Martin answered. “Nothing to worry about.”
“When are you going to resume filming?”
Martin did some quick mental calculation. The admiral needed to call Anne from somewhere outside his office. Then Anne had to find a different phone to call Boulanger. These could all involve traveling, at least for a short distance. Five hours should do it.
“We’ll skip two scenes and prepare for the third on the agenda. Shouldn’t take long.”
“Good luck,” the admiral said, and hung up. Martin would wait for two more passes of the satellite and be ready for the test on the third. Boulanger had just over six hours to press the activation button again—in fact, he was waiting for instructio
ns. The admiral left the office to phone Anne.
According to Boulanger’s chart, the third satellite pass would occur at eleven fifty-three a.m. Five minutes before that time Bernard started the generator again. It ran smoothly at the first attempt, which the team took as a good omen. Once again, they took up their watchful position by the jeep.
At twelve seconds past eleven fifty-three they saw flames darting out of the mine’s entrance followed immediately by a loud explosion. Rocks and dust burst out of the mine, obscuring visibility for several minutes. The generator was silent.
The trio approached the mine’s entrance cautiously, Philip and Bernard holding the fire extinguishers at the ready. They could feel the heat emanating from the generator, though the flames had died down. They noticed a small perforation in the cowling of the generator, and that its edges showed evidence of melting.
Martin grinned at the other two.
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