Stephen Coonts - The Disciple

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.

Then there was the assassination attempt on the president’s life in Indonesia. According to the whispers, it had been a close call for Ahmadinejad. Assassins were waiting in the hotel lobby to murder him. A 100 mm tank cannon shell had missed him by inches. The Mossad, of course-and no one on the planet thought that the Israelis wouldn’t try again.