The Disciple

“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 ru

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 co

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 tu