Vince Flynn: Protect And Defend

He blended in and did his job. He cleaned toilets, washed floors, and kept his eyes and ears open. At first he had been extremely cautious. Surprise inspections were not unusual and the security people were unusually hard on the newcomers. The small room where he kept his cleaning supplies was tossed twice in the first month. This caused the already cautious Shoshan to be even more careful. After the second month he learned that the guards inspected his closet not to look for evidence of espionage, but to pilfer supplies. In the passing months Shoshan got to know them better and their suspicion of the newcomer dissipated. In a breakthrough that no one could have predicted, it was Shoshan’s lifelong hobby of tinkering with all things mechanical and electric that would prove to make the difference.

Shoshan was cleaning the guards’ break room one day when he happened to overhear the men complain about the poor reception of the television. He asked them if he could take a look at it, and they consented. After a quick inspection Shoshan located the problem and fixed it with a few turns of his screwdriver. In the eyes of the guards this elevated him to near-godlike status. In no time at all he was fixing broken TVs, microwaves, radios, and pretty much anything with a circuit board. Word spread quickly that the new janitor was a very handy man to have around. Even Ali Farahani, the head of security, came calling. The hot summer months were upon them, and Farahani’s air conditioner was not working.

Shoshan went to Farahani’s house and located the problem. He ordered a part and the following weekend installed it free of charge. Farahani was very grateful and asked Shoshan if there was anything he could do for him. Shoshan said there was, and showed the head of security his storage closet at work. In addition to the cleaning supplies, brooms, mops, and buckets, the room now contained haphazard stacks of household appliances that were waiting to be fixed. Farahani was at first enraged, thinking that the janitor was being taken advantage of by the other employees. Shoshan assured him that was not the case. He had no family to go home to. They had all been lost in the earthquake. The work helped him pass the lonely hours in the evening. What Shoshan wanted from Farahani was permission to stay after his shift was over so he could work on the appliances. Not only did Farahani give him permission, he found the janitor a much larger, unused storage room on the third sublevel where he could set up his makeshift repair shop. At the time, Shoshan knew he had reached a critical breakthrough, but he had could have never dreamed just how advantageous this single move would turn out to be.

In the months that followed, Shoshan spent many evenings and weekends at the facility. He explored the corridors by day while pushing his cleaning cart from one room to the next. The guards now paid him only a passing glance as he came and went with boxes of tools, circuit boards, batteries, tubes and all of the other stuff he needed to stock his repair shop. It was during this time that Shoshan got to know Cyrus Omidifar. Omidifar was the chief engineer for the entire facility. He was the man who made sure everything worked properly. The power plant, the elevators, the ventilation systems, the plumbing, the guts of the place, it all fell under the purview of Omidifar. Like Shoshan, he loved to tinker with things.

At first Shoshan did not grasp the importance of Omidifar and all that he oversaw. Shoshan was too busy focusing on the scientists and nuclear program to stop and think about the actual bricks and mortar, or in this case steel and concrete. That all changed one evening when he went to visit Omidifar in his aboveground office. There on the table was a set of blueprints for the entire facility. Shoshan remembered the request from the air force targeting specialist and immediately cursed himself for not having his tiny digital camera with him. He stood over the prints, trying to grasp as many details as possible while his friend finished up a phone call.

When Omidifar was done he joined Shoshan at the table and announced, “An impressive feat of engineering…isn’t it?”

Shoshan agreed.

“It is designed to act as a series of nets.” Omidifar flipped the top page over and revealed a side elevation of the ground floor. “The top floor is two meters thick with six interlaced layers of rebar. If the Americans drop their bunker-buster bombs, we are very confident this first line of defense will stop them.”

Shoshan wasn’t so sure. Before going in country he’d been told that the Americans had their best military minds developing a new series of bunker-buster bombs that would get the job done. Shoshan looked at his friend. “And if it doesn’t?”

Omidifar shrugged. “There are three more floors the bombs would need to penetrate. They are not as thick as the first floor, but they don’t need to be. The first floor will stop or slow even their heaviest bomb. If one happens to get through, it still has to penetrate three more floors. Each of them one meter thick with interlaced rebar. The only way the Americans could destroy this facility would be to use a nuclear weapon, and they would never be so reckless.”

“What about the Jews?” Shoshan asked. He’d learned to take a perverse joy in playing role of Jew hater.

The question made Omidifar pause. He was a practical man not prone to spewing anti-Semitic remarks. “I am not so sure about the Jews. I advocated conducting this entire operation in secret, but our fearless president likes to taunt our enemies. Now we have made ourselves a ripe target.”

Shoshan smiled and nodded. His eyes returned to the print and his inquisitive mind went to work, not as a spy, but as someone who was endlessly fascinated by how things worked. “How did you support all this weight?”

Omidifar flipped several pages to a new sheet that showed a different cross-section of the facility. “We basically built an underground skyscraper. There is a steel skeleton that supports the entire structure.”

That was when it hit Shoshan. He had never been allowed access to the fourth sublevel where the reactor and the centrifuges were located. He had assumed it was built into or under the bedrock. From the air the facility was impervious to all but a nuclear strike and despite the hawkish attitude of some, Shoshan felt that neither the Americans nor Israel would play that card. Isfahan was a city of over a million people. There was no way either country would drop a nuclear weapon in the vicinity of so many civilians. If Shoshan’s instincts were right, however, no air strike would be needed. Something far simpler could cripple the entire facility. As Shoshan looked at the prints on that afternoon he paid particular attention to the size and gauge of the steel that had been used. By the time he left Omidifar’s office a new course of action was forming in his mind. Shoshan was ready to make the transition from spy to saboteur.

Months later Shoshan was struck by the irony that the destruction of the Twin Towers was what opened his eyes to the facility’s central weakness. He did not think of the towers in their pre-9/11 form and the way they dominated the southern tip of Manhattan. He didn’t think of them as piles of rubble and twisted steel. His mind fixated on a five-second clip of each building as it collapsed under its own weight.

After leaving work that night Shoshan did not sleep. He played the clip of the towers imploding on themselves over and over in his mind. He knew he had stumbled across the bare underbelly of the dragon. His mind raced ahead, making a list of what he would need, and how he would sneak it into the facility. On that night nearly a half year ago the whole thing seemed crazy, but what bold action didn’t at its inception. The next morning he put everything in an encoded report and left it at his dead drop. While he waited for an answer from Tel Aviv, he found an excuse to go back to Omidifar’s office and this time he brought his camera.