Vince Flynn - Protect And Defend

It took two months of back and forth as the experts debated the merits of Shoshan’s plan. The deciding factor ended up being the air force’s lack of confidence in their own ability to take out the facility with anything other than a nuclear strike. During those two months Shoshan furthered his plan, exploring the recesses of the third subfloor, locating and photographing as many steel I beams as he could. He passed everything along anticipating the questions before they came. During that time Shoshan also began construction on a false wall in the back of his storage room, foreseeing the necessity to hide the materials he would need to conduct his sabotage.

Shoshan spent countless hours alone with his thoughts trying to piece everything together. Simply striking at one or two points would not do the job. The plan would have to be comprehensive, and that meant it would take hours to carry out. Charges would need to be placed. He would be exposed the entire time, as would the explosives. Even the most witless guard would be likely to stumble upon the devices.

The solution came one afternoon when the facility suffered a brief power outage. Shoshan was cleaning a rest room on the second subfloor when it happened. The room went pitch black for a few seconds and then the emergency lights came on. Shoshan stared up at the square unit attached to the wall just below the ceiling. It consisted of two adjustable floodlights mounted near the top of a beige metal box approximately a foot and a half long by a foot and a half wide. Shoshan left the bathroom and looked down the long hallway. He counted four more emergency lighting units in this area alone. That night he photographed the lights and wrote down the make and model number. The next morning he informed Mossad that he had found a solution to their problem.

Five weeks later the first shipment of a dozen units left Haifa for Mumbai, India. After clearing customs the shipment was repackaged and sent up the coast to the Iranian free trade zone of Chabahar. From there it made its way inland to Isfahan. Two more shipments followed the same route. Each day Shoshan would pull up to the main gate of the facility on his motorbike, which had two saddlebags and an old plastic milk crate strapped to the back fender. The milk crate was almost always filled with parts. The guards had come to expect this. Inside each saddlebag, though, was a counterfeit emergency lighting unit. Not once in a month’s time did the guards ever ask him to open the bags.

Following the schematics Shoshan had been through countless dry rehearsals. The experts back in Israel had thought of everything. Instead of using C-4 plastic explosives they packed the devices with relatively new thermobaric explosives. The thermobaric explosives would work extremely well in the underground confines of the facility, literally sucking all oxygen from the air and creating an enormous vacuum effect. They weighed less than conventional explosives and packed nearly three times the punch. Having the devices detonate at precisely the same time created another problem. Running det cord between each of the two units was dismissed immediately. Detonating the devices remotely was also impractical. There was no way for a radio frequency to penetrate all the concrete and steel. The solution was to install a highly accurate clock within each device. Via a master remote Shoshan had the ability to set a designated time for all of the devices to detonate. He did this in his storage room before putting them in place.

Twenty-six devices weighing eight pounds apiece. Just 208 pounds of explosives. Demolition firms used far more explosives to bring down buildings in nice neat little piles. That, however, was not Shoshan’s objective. He was not trying to topple a building, and he certainly wasn’t worried about how they would haul the mess away. His objective was much simpler. He was going to blow out the main support columns between the fourth and second subfloors. The loss of structural integrity would set off a pancake effect, bringing the upper three floors crashing down on the roof of the final subfloor. All that weight, falling with such force, would snap the vertical steel beams at the bottom of the structure. The four floors would end up pressed together like a stack of pancakes. The entire centrifuge facility and reactor would be smashed into a radioactive mess.

Shoshan limped down the hallway and checked his watch. He had just under thirty minutes to clear the facility. Done placing the devices, all he had to do was put his cart back in his storage room and get topside. Once the explosions started, he would move for the gate and slip out in the ensuing confusion. He opened the door to his storage room and pulled the cart inside. The windowless room had been his refuge for much of the last year. In the evenings when the facility was mostly empty, he would close the door and drop the façade of Moshen Norwrasteh the Iranian. Slowly, Adam Shoshan the Israeli would assert himself. What Shoshan came to realize was that the two men were not all that different.

Those were the moments when he felt most conflicted. When he worried about the nice people he had met and what would happen to them when the attack came. Shoshan felt a pang of guilt over moving up the timetable. Headquarters had made it clear to him that they wanted the facility to be destroyed in the middle of the day. They wanted not only to obliterate the facility, they wanted to extinguish the scientific power behind Iran ’s nuclear program. The more people working down in the labs when the bombs went off, the better.

It was not a surprise to Shoshan when he received the order to create maximum damage. He was himself a hard man who had been forced to give orders that to some might seem heartless. Since receiving the directive, though, he had lain awake in bed nearly every night trying to figure out a way around it. He had met some very kind people during his time at the facility. There were a few hate-filled anti-Semites, to be sure, but most of the people were no different from his neighbors and colleagues back in Israel. It seemed wrong to him that they should have to die for following the orders of religious fanatics.

Seeing Imad Mukhtar, though, had caused most of those reservations to simply vanish. There was perhaps no more vile man in the modern history of Israel. Mukhtar was the purveyor of suicide bombers, rocket attacks on civilians, and countless kidnappings. He had the blood of thousands of Israelis on his hands. As one of the founders of Hezbollah, he was hell-bent on the absolute destruction of the state of Israel and nothing less. The mere fact that he was visiting the facility confirmed Israel ’s worst fears; that Iran would simply hand off one of their new bombs to a stateless terrorist group like Hezbollah. Catching the man at the facility so close to the appointed hour was simply too difficult to resist.

Shoshan took a brief look around the room, pondering if there was anything worth taking. Sanitizing the place was not a concern. What little he had left was well concealed and would be destroyed by the explosion. Shoshan backed out of the room and closed the door behind him. As he headed for the elevator his thoughts turned to his friend Ali Omidifar. He’d come up with a plan to distract his friend and make sure he was out of the building when the bombs went off. He pushed the call button for the elevator and thought that it was the one humane thing he could do to help assuage his guilt over all the other people who would die.

When the doors opened, he found himself standing face-to-face with Ali Farahani, the facility’s head of security. He looked frazzled and in a hurry. Shoshan guessed it had to do with the two men who were standing behind him. Shoshan quickly stepped out of the way and murmured a quiet apology. He kept his eyes averted as the three men got out of the elevator and started down the hall toward Farahani’s office. Shoshan stepped into the elevator and pushed the button for the ground floor. As the doors began to close, he looked down the hall at the back of Mukhtar’s head and his subservient expression gave way to a broad smile.