As one might suspect, he readily agreed to do what they asked. With the proviso that if he ever betrayed them, he would die.
“So you became their slave,” Grafton said.
“You sit here in America and say that so easily,” Azari shot back. “What other choice did I have?”
“When you got to England, you could have called New Scotland Yard. You spent years there and never called. When you got to America, you could have looked up the FBI’s telephone number in any telephone book. You didn’t bother. No, Professor, you may have been pushed into this, but you sorta like it. Screwing the infidels is fun, isn’t it?”
Azari remained silent, so Grafton roared, “Answer me!”
“Yes,” he admitted.
“So which of your options do you like? Prison or cooperation?”
“I’ll cooperate.”
They talked for several hours. Azari got a restroom break midway through, and they talked on. When they finished, Grafton said, “You are going to be watched day and night. Everywhere you go, someone will be watching. Your telephones are tapped. We listen to your cell calls. We will see who you talk to and hear what you say.”
Grafton came around the desk and pulled up a chair. He leaned forward so that his face was inches from Azari’s. “Iran may be building nuclear weapons. If they use them on anyone, we will nuke Iran. We will turn your country into a radioactive wasteland. You are a very small chip in a very big, very dangerous game. A lot of lives are at risk, so what happens to you won’t even be a footnote.”
Azari was perspiring again. “I don’t want to go to prison,” he said.
“If you warn your case officer, by word or deed, the tiniest hint, the FBI will arrest you for espionage. I want you to believe that.”
Azari’s eyes widened, and he stared.
“This I promise,” Jake said. “If you betray us, you’ll spend the rest of your life in a cell.”
After Azari was gone, Grafton and Myron Emerick listened to some of the recording of the interview. It was well after two in the morning when they shut it off.
“I hope he believed you,” Emerick said.
“I hope he got the message.” Jake clucked his tongue. “How many men do you have to put on him?”
“Six. And if this goes on more than a couple of weeks, it will be maybe four. You know how thin we’re spread.”
“Umm,” Jake Grafton said. “I want you to talk to them. Someone may well ice Professor Azari.”
“You think?”
“That’s one of the moves on the board. If the Iranians murder him, it would appear that the stories he has been telling are true.”
“Okay,” Emerick said slowly.
“Remind your agents that they are not bodyguards; they are observers.”
“What they are is law enforcement officers,” Emerick said curtly. “If a crime happens in front of them, they will try to apprehend the perps-and prevent anyone else from being hurt.”
“Fine. Just tell them not to stop a bullet to save Azari’s worthless hide.”
Myron Emerick stared at the admiral, then said, “Okay.” Changing the subject, he asked, “How will you know if Azari squeals to his case officer?”
“The Iranians will put Davar Ghobadi against a wall and shoot her,” Jake said. “They won’t need her anymore.”
***
I saw the helicopter long before I heard it. It was running without lights, but I picked it up right away with the night vision goggles while it was still ten miles or so away, several thousand feet below where I sat.
He was making big, slow oblongs. As I watched I realized he was working closer. Coming this way.
The realization that he was probably keeping a car under surveillance crystallized in my nervous mind.
Finally I saw the car, still three miles or so away, crawling up that dirt road toward the pass.
The chopper was higher now, almost at my elevation. I wondered if he could hover at this altitude.
Even if he couldn’t, if he thought Davar was meeting someone up here, he could call for help, blockade the road. The road leading off the mountain to the north, too. We would be trapped up here, sure as shootin’.
Once I realized what he was up to, I got behind a tree and braced the AK against it. Selected automatic fire.
I didn’t have long to wait. Within a minute, while the car was still a couple of miles down the grade, he came scooting for the pass, no doubt looking it over.
I watched him come, found that aiming the damned rifle with goggles on was difficult, to say the least. Now I could hear his engine and the rotor whop, faintly at first, but getting steadily louder as he approached. I jerked the goggles off and dropped them.
Now I saw him, a darker shape in the dark night.
He was only fifty or so yards away, right over the road, and I could see the glow of his cockpit lights when I squeezed the trigger. Holding the rifle on the cockpit as best I could and tracking the chopper as it flew from my right to left, I gave him a long burst, sprayed him good.
When I released the trigger, the machine was in a gentle descent on the north side of the ridge and the sounds of my shots were echoing around me. The helicopter kept going down, the sound fading. I was having trouble following it with my eyes-it seemed to be veering right… straight into a steep slope, where it crashed. I saw a flash and heard the crunch, and the engine fell silent. Flame flickered, then became brighter. I thought the chopper might explode, but several moments passed and it didn’t. Just burned steadily.
I put on the night vision goggles and took a squint. The crash was at least a mile away, and the flame made it impossible to see anything near it.
I checked in the other direction. The car grinding up the hill was still a good distance away.
I gathered my stuff and began working down the steep slope to the road. I was walking south toward the edge of the cut when the car came up the hill and stopped beside me. Davar was in the passenger seat, wearing her boy’s outfit.
After I took off the goggles, I opened the rear passenger door and climbed in.
“Did you people see the helicopter that was keeping an eye on you?”
“What helicopter?” Davar said, obviously shocked.
“I shot it down. It’s over there on that slope, about a mile away. Someone will miss it soon, so we better do our talking and get the hell off this mountain. Why in the name of God did you pick this damn place for a meet?”
She ignored the question. The driver was looking me over, checking the AK. He was about thirty-it was hard to tell with just the panel lights illuminating them. A head of unruly hair, a nice shirt and a short beard, which was more of a fashion statement than a religious one.
“My cousin Ghasem.”
“Hey,” I said, reluctant to take my hand off the pistol grip of the rifle.
“He wants you to send a manuscript to America.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“A manuscript,” she repeated. She held up the package for my inspection.
I was underwhelmed. I had just shot down a helicopter and killed a planeload of men for a fucking manuscript?
“I can do that,” I agreed, trying to keep the anger out of my voice. “Then what?”
They obviously hadn’t thought that far ahead. Confusion reigned for ten or fifteen seconds. “Pass it to Azari,” Davar said.
“That jerk may be a shill for the mullahs,” I said roughly. “Someone is feeding him information he isn’t getting from you. Whatever this manuscript is, you want it to see the light of day, better come up with another plan.”
They started to discuss it, but I cut them off. “I’ll send it to my boss-he’ll figure it out. Ghasem, pull down the road a hundred meters or so and turn around. My car is there. Anything else?”
Ghasem got the car in motion.
“You wanted to see a bomb factory,” Davar said. “If you deliver the manuscript to safety, Ghasem will take you there.”
Oooh. Thi
ngs were looking up, which always made me suspicious. I am getting so damned cynical. A friggin’ manuscript, and now an offer of help! Who is running the universe this week, anyway?
Ghasem found the spot where I’d stashed my ride and began turning. Far below, coming up the grade from the north, I saw a set of headlights.
It took him three back-and-forths to get the car turned. I was sure he was going to get it stuck, but he didn’t. When he had the car pointed back toward Tehran, I opened the door and got out. Held the door open and asked, “Where and when?”
He named a restaurant. Three days from now.
Davar passed me the manuscript, which was wrapped in paper and held with a string.
“See you then,” I said and slammed the door.
The car drove off.
I didn’t waste a minute. Got in my car and backed out. Left the headlights off and began following them down the grade. After a few hundred yards, I put the night vision goggles back on.
If they got stopped on the way down or on the road into town, I intended to bail out and abandon the car.
With each turn of the road the tension increased, if that was possible. I was sweating, my hands were so wet they were slippery, and I had on too many clothes. I didn’t stop to take anything off, but I rolled down the window several inches, and the fresh air helped.
There is nothing worse than waiting for the ax to fall… and it doesn’t. Not in this minute, or the next. Or the next. Had I been a praying man, I would have wrestled with the Lord that night.
Finally we got low enough to pass shacks and huts beside the road. Some old trucks sat in the yards. Now there were occasional vehicles on the road, more as we entered the suburbs.
With one corner of my mind I wondered about the manuscript: What could it be? Plans for a weapon, an account of Ahmadinejad’s perverted love life, or perhaps the dirt on secret negotiations with the Russians?
Two hours after we left the pass, I was in the embassy looking at the manuscript. It was handwritten in Farsi by a person with tiny, crabbed handwriting, and I couldn’t read a word of it.
Ten minutes later I was on the encrypted satellite phone talking to Jake Grafton.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Brigadier General Dr. Seyyed Hosseini-Tash was a nervous man, Ghasem thought. Today, at the long-awaited test of the neutron generator, he exuded everything but confidence. His uniform was rumpled, and, despite the pleasant temperature inside the tunnel in which they stood, the brigadier was visibly perspiring. Although he was a major general, Ghasem’s uncle Habib Sultani never wore a uniform, preferring civilian clothes instead. In contrast to Hosseini-Tash, who was in charge of the weapons of mass destruction program, which of course included the manufacturing of neutron generators, Sultani appeared collected and in control.
In addition to the brass, there were two men from the president’s office standing here in the tunnel, along with the MOIS enforcer, Major Larijani.
This was the official party, which stood off to one side, out of the way, while a dozen technicians in white coats, wearing radiation detectors on strings around their necks, worried and fretted over various instruments. The instruments were arranged on tables in the center of the tunnel, which ran forward about two hundred feet and ended in a rock wall. Actually the tunnel turned ninety degrees, but that opening was hidden from where the official party stood. Wires from the instruments ran along the ground to the rock face and around the corner.
Down the hidden gallery about three hundred feet was a wall. It had been hastily constructed of material that absorbed radiation. On the other side of the wall, on the tunnel floor, lay the neutron generator, surrounded by a layer of high-quality chemical explosives. The explosives were decorated with six detonators. This whole device weighed but ten pounds.
The instruments the technicians were fretting over were radiation detectors. Finally, after several hours of nail-biting tension while the technicians checked wires and voltages, the senior technician approached a still-perspiring Dr. Hosseini-Tash and told him all was ready.
“Very well,” the brigadier said, glancing at Sultani and the men from the president’s office. “Proceed with your test.”
So this was it, Ghasem knew. The neutron generator would either produce enough radiation to trigger a nuclear explosion, or it wouldn’t. The thing was made of beryllium and polonium-210. Refining the beryllium had required a huge industrial effort; yet even more money, billions, actually, had been spent enriching uranium sufficiently to get usable quantities of polonium and plutonium.
Ghasem took a deep breath and waited until his uncle glanced at him. His uncle raised one eyebrow, then looked away. So he was feeling the tension, too.
The whole thing was anticlimactic. One of the technicians flipped a switch, needles jumped on the dials in front of them, and other needles squiggled black ink lines on a continuous roll of paper. After a few minutes huddled with the technicians studying the lines on the paper, Hosseini-Tash turned to Sultani with a smile of relief on his face.
Ghasem thought he would hear a small pop when the conventional explosive went off, but he didn’t-the thing was too well isolated under and behind millions of tons of rock.
Watching the uniformed brigadier and his uncle, who also looked relieved and proud, confer in low tones, Ghasem was well aware that this test had taken Iran one step closer to the bomb, a weapon the mullahs apparently wanted but, as Ghasem was well aware, the average poor Iranian thought was a grotesque waste of money.
Regardless of the wishes of the man in the street, the bomb was coming: The mullahs were going to get precisely what they wanted. Ghasem thought about that. Well, at least Ahmadinejad was getting what he wanted.
“I got your message,” Sal Molina said to Jake Grafton, who was standing in the doorway to Molina’s cubbyhole White House office. “Come in and sit.”
Molina gestured to a chair, then realized both of his chairs were stacked with files. He grabbed a handful. Lacking anywhere else to place them, he stacked them in one corner of the room. Jake put the rest of them on top of the heap and sat.
“You’re leaving for the Middle East in a few hours, aren’t you?” Molina asked.
“Yes,” the admiral said. “Before I left, I wanted to bring you up to date. Apparently the Iranians tested their first neutron generator ten hours ago. It’ll be in tomorrow’s intel summary.”
“So they have enriched uranium, workable detonators and missiles to deliver warheads,” Molina summarized.
Grafton nodded. “The only thing remaining is to assemble weapons, test them and mount them on missiles.”
“How long?”
Grafton shrugged.
“How did you learn of this test?”
“Rostram’s cousin called our man on Rostram’s cell phone.”
“How did he learn about it?”
“He was there, he said.”
“Is Rostram going to send this news to Azari?”
“Probably.”
“So how do you and Azari stand?”
“He is working for me now, and he knew he was feeding us information supplied by the Ahmadinejad administration. Rostram and the code and all of that are there as window dressing for the NSA.”
“He confessed?”
Jake Grafton simply nodded.
“Is he going to write any more op-ed pieces for the newspapers?”
“I haven’t decided.”
Sal started to say something, then changed his mind. He leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head. “There will be no preemptive military strike on Iran.”
Jake Grafton smiled as if he were amused. “Did you give a copy of that memo to the Israelis?”
“They’re with us on this,” Molina said. “The latest adventures with Hamas in Gaza have convinced them that they will lose the war in the court of public opinion if they strike first at Iran. Israel cannot afford to be seen as the aggressor.”
Jake Grafton blinked. “Not even
to save the lives of every man, woman and child in the country?” he asked.
“No preemptive strike,” Molina said. He unlaced his fingers and sat up in his chair.
“Was this our idea or Israel’s?”
“I don’t think a postmortem on how we got here will be productive.”
Grafton didn’t say anything.
“After the Iranians fire their missiles, however, we will need to take out their missile manufacturing and warhead production facilities, the reactors and all the rest of it. Today the Joint Chiefs will be tasked for coming up with a plan. They’re going to need all the information you can give them.”
“Sal, I can’t believe this. The president is actually going to let Iran fire missiles armed with nuclear warheads at Israel, or wherever in hell Ahmadinejad aims them, and only then are we going to kick Iran’s butt?”
“That’s about the size of it. Politically, that’s the only option, and the Israelis understand that. If we attack Iran first, we will have World War III on our hands. It will be the Western world versus the Muslim world in the kind of dogfight that breeds hatred and violence that may last for centuries. We simply must let Iran fire the first shot.”
“I think it was Khamenei who noted that only one missile has to get through,” Jake said, “to wipe Israel and the Zionist problem off the face of the earth.”
“The president promised Israel that none would get through.”
“Or what? He’ll publicly apologize?”
Sal Molina set his jaw.
Jake Grafton stood and nodded his head as he processed it. “You’d better tell the military to make it snappy,” he muttered. “I have this feeling that the curtain is going to rise sooner rather than later.”
Although he had felt calm and in complete control at the test of the neutron generator, Habib Sultani certainly didn’t feel that way as he prepared himself for his first appointment with the president after he returned from his Southeast Asian diplomatic mission. Sultani felt like the world was spinning faster and faster. The successful test of the neutron generator was only a small part. The arrest and subsequent death of his father-in-law meant that someone somewhere in power had serious doubts about the Sultani family religious orthodoxy, which went hand in hand with political orthodoxy. Political and religious correctness was the only way to survive in Islamic Iran, and Sultani well knew it.
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