The Disciple

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 tu

In addition to the brass, there were two men from the president’s office standing here in the tu

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 tu

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 tu

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 ca

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?”