David Bruns - Weapons of Mass Deception

Yusef was perhaps his greatest find of the entire program. When he’d come across the boy at the age of eighteen, he’d already graduated from the University of Tehran with a double major in aerospace engineering and astrophysics. His passion was missiles. He watched videos of test flights constantly, dissecting the details of the flights and sending long missives to flight engineers in other countries telling them how to correct their failures.

His parents had been killed in a car accident a few months prior to their meeting and Yusef had become a complete recluse, living in his university lab. Convincing him to join Hashem’s cause was easy: a state-of-the-art lab, freedom to build missiles to his heart’s content, and complete seclusion from the outside world.

Yusef didn’t realize he would never leave the secret cave alive, but Hashem would deal with that issue when it came up.

The “present” comment was their own private joke. Before Hashem had moved Yusef to the cave, he’d had the scientist draw up a shopping list of all the possible components and tools he might need. On each visit to the cave, Hashem always tried to bring some item from the list for his missile engineer. Behind the glass walls, Hashem could see the rows of machining equipment and 3-D printers.

Building a missile inventory had been surprisingly easy. Over the years, he’d put on the payroll a small group of quality assurance engineers who worked at Iranian missile factories. Using falsified documents, the QA engineers would pull Hashem’s shopping list items off the assembly line for quality control. Invariably, the parts never made it back into inventory. Labeled as “Substandard, destroy,” they eventually found their way into Yusef’s secret lab.

Given the length of time that had passed, the Iranian missile models would occasionally change as new updates came available, but that mattered little to Yusef. He took the parts and, using his machine shop, was able to modify or fabricate new replacements. He often gave Hashem revised engineering drawings to pass along to the Iranian government missile development teams; Hashem destroyed them.

Yusef rose, jittery with anticipation for his mentor to see his work. “Show me, Yusef. Show me your babies,” Hashem said.

Yusef’s wild locks swayed from side to side as he made his way through the lab to a cleanroom airlock. The two men donned white coats, hairnets, and covers for their mouths and beards. With all his bushy facial hair tucked away, Yusef looked like his face was surrounded by puffy clouds.

The three missile guidance sections lay gleaming white in the harsh theater lights of the cleanroom. The solid rocket boosters were housed in a separate part of the cave. About the size of a phone booth, the open guidance section was packed with electronics. Yusef pointed out various new components in an excited voice. Hashem let the words flow over him. He only cared that they flew where he programmed them, and he knew Yusef was as good as his word.

His eyes strayed to the next workbench over — the warhead section. The missile shells lay open and empty. “What is Valerie’s progress?” he interrupted Yusef.

Yusef blinked at him, his lazy eye making a slow survey of the room to Hashem’s right. He shrugged. “You’ll have to talk to the Russian about that,” he said.

The Russian. Yusef never used Valerie’s name.

“Good work, Yusef. Very good work.”

Yusef beamed from behind his facial coverings, his eye swiveling momentarily forward.

Hashem left the cleanroom, stripping off the sterile robe and dropping it into a basket for cleaning and reuse. He’d dismissed his driver, so he walked the fifty meters to Valerie’s lab.

The overhead gantries made shadows across his path as he passed the booster section of a missile. He shook his head. Stealing something the size of a tractor trailer was no easy task. He’d finally managed to pay off the general manager of the facility where they tested the boosters. The man had falsified the testing of one booster and sold it to Hashem’s man. The plan had worked — barely — but he’d ended up needing to have the general manager replaced with a more compliant choice when he went back to him for a second unit. These operations took time.

He pushed open the doors to Valerie’s lab, spying the man’s gray head hunched over his workbench. Valerie looked up at Hashem’s entrance and gave him a sad half-smile as he rose to meet him. Sad was the only adjective to describe Valerie. The bear of a man approached Hashem with a shambling gait, his belly straining against the belt on his uniform. He folded the Iranian into his massive arms, holding him so tightly that Hashem could hear the slow thud of the man’s heart in his chest. Even his heartbeat sounded mournful.

“Colonel,” he rumbled. “How good to see you.”

Not that Valerie didn’t have much to be sad about. Hashem had first met Valerie Aminev in Chechnya in 1994. Even then, in his late thirties, the man had made a name for himself as a nuclear weapons specialist. Of course, in those days, he was primarily concerned with dismantling them.

Hashem spied the 8 × 10 picture on Valerie’s desk. Raisa, his late wife, a smiling raven-haired beauty, and a Chechen Muslim of the minority Shia sect. Hashem had heard the story of Valerie’s love life dozens of times: the whirlwind romance, his conversion from Russian Orthodox to Islam, their beautiful children — Hashem’s eyes shifted to the photograph of the twins — and the slaughter of all three while Valerie attended a nuclear physics symposium in Japan when the Second Chechen War began in 1999.

When Hashem sought to recruit his Russian friend to his special team years later, he’d been shocked at the change in the man. Once a dark-haired, friendly giant whose booming laugh filled the room, Valerie had gone completely gray and silent. Only two things kept him going: vodka and hate. Hashem, despite his personal disapproval of alcohol, kept the vodka coming to Valerie by the case, and over the years, he carefully stoked the hatred for his own ends. The Russian’s hate had no direction, he simply hated the world that had taken his family from him.

“My friend,” Hashem said, pushing back from Valerie’s food-stained uniform. He smelled of stale vodka and sweat. “Give me some good news.”

Valerie’s half-smile spread slowly — another joke between Hashem and his team. When he’d first shown the Iraqi nuclear weapons to Valerie, the man had snorted angrily, called them “nuclear firecrackers.” For a long moment, Hashem’s stomach had dropped, until the Russian took another long pull of his vodka and said, “But I can make them better.”

And he’d been as good as his word. Hashem had learned more from Valerie about nuclear weapons than he’d cared to admit. The Iraqi weapons had been gun-type warheads, essentially a gun barrel that fired two subcritical masses of low-purity, weapons-grade plutonium at each other to cause a nuclear detonation. They were crude, but would have been effective in a small area.

Valerie had painstakingly harvested the material from the three Iraqi bombs and refashioned them into spherical warheads, increasing the yield tenfold and repackaging them for Yusef’s missiles. Delivered accurately and detonated at the right altitude, each warhead could now destroy an area kilometers in diameter, not to mention the nuclear fallout which would devastate a much larger area.

Valerie held Hashem by both shoulders, and his half-smile grew fractionally wider. “Come, I have much to show you.”

He led Hashem to a window at the back of his lab. On three metal tables inside the cleanroom laid three boxes, each the size of a filing cabinet drawer. The covers were removed, exposing a ball the size of a large melon, and covered with wires that led to a series of circuit boards.