And Into the Fire Page 3

  Hasad drove the van into the MAK’s main parking lot. He had with him a crew of six bearded Pakistani men, five of them dressed as he was, in dark, conservatively cut business suits. The sixth man—and the only one who refused to wear Western attire—was Dr. Mahmud al-Tabari, the deputy director of the PAEC. A stern-looking man with a nut-brown complexion, grim eyes, deeply etched crow’s-feet, gray hair, and beard, he wore the long traditional white robe and keffiyeh. He shared the front seat with Hasad.

  Climbing down from the APC, Hasad led his team to a small cement-block office building painted the ubiquitous light green. Inside the office, a bearded man in a white thawb and eyeglasses sat in a room behind a Plexiglas window mounted on a four-foot-high wall. A plaque on his desk read GHUNAYN AL-GHAZI. Mahmud collected the documents from each of the men, then took Hasad with him into the back room.

  “These are my nuclear weapons lab inspectors, Ghunayn,” Mahmud explained, introducing his associates to the man. “We always come unannounced in order to check facilities for security breaches. Today, I am assisting them. Our activities are classified, and we report directly to the president of Pakistan. Any attempt to obstruct us or communicate details of our visit to the outside will constitute a violation of the country’s national security statutes. Such violations can carry sentences of up to thirty years in prison. You will help us in any and every way.”

  “Understood,” the man said, approving the doctored documents. He quickly filled out the facility’s IDs, which he inserted into clear plastic holders with safety pins attached.

  “Excellent,” Hasad whispered to Mahmud after they left his office. He quickly distributed the plant IDs to the men.

  From the Visitors Center, Hasad and Mahmud led them back into the parking lot and the APC. Hasad then drove them to the first ring of six fifteen-foot-high chain-link cyclone fences mounted with coiled barbwire. Three soldiers manned the gated checkpoint. Back at the Visitors Center, Mahmud had ordered Ghunayn to call them on their handheld Multiband Inter/Intra Team Transceivers and instruct the soldiers at all six checkpoints to stand down. Swinging open the fence gates, the sentries waved them through.

  When they reached the MAK’s main building, they turned right.

  Hamzi, who was sitting in the back, began identifying the buildings as if he were a tour guide and they were tourist attractions:

  “The High-Flux Isotope Reactor Building, now the Electron Linear Accelerator Site, followed by the particle accelerators. Those are the various bomb-assembling buildings—trigger assemblies, lenses, tampers, casings complexes. So that must be the Uranium Processing Facility? Followed by the National Enrichment Site, the HEU production plant.”

  “And finally, nuclear nirvana,” Hasad announced, “the Highly Enriched Uranium Storage Facility. It sits on a reinforced thirty-foot concrete mass attached to the bedrock with high-tensile steel rods, the same kind used to secure skyscrapers. Approximately three hundred by five hundred feet, designed to withstand flood, earthquake, tornados with up to 200 mph gusts, extra-high explosives, and airplane crashes.”

  “But can it withstand us?” Hamzi said.

  Hasad turned on his tactical communications equipment, inserted a molded earpiece into his right ear, and whispered into his wrist mike, “Tactical communications is online. All units, do you hear me?”

  Each member of the team whispered back their call signs into their wrist mikes:

  “Tact 1 here,” Hasad said.

  “Tact 2 here.”

  “Tact 3 here.”

  “Tact 4 here.”

  “Tact 5 here.”

  “Tact 6 here.”

  “Tact 7 here.”

  “Maa shaa Allah,” Hasad said. As Allah wills it.

  The seven men jogged up the cement steps to the big green cement-block building that was the HEU facility and opened the large glass front door.

  “This is probably the toughest glass door in the world,” Hasad said to Hamzi, who merely grunted.

  The lobby was fifty by seventy-five feet. The ceiling was at least twenty feet high, and when Hasad turned around, he saw that the room’s rear wall was covered with two dozen rack-mounted monitors. Overhead surveillance cameras were everywhere, recording the building’s activities both inside and around its exterior. Three horseshoe desks faced the front of the room. Bearded men in white coveralls studied the computer monitors set up before them.

  The plant supervisor, also in white coveralls and wire-rimmed glasses, came up to Mahmud.

  “Welcome to the MAK, Director. I understand you’re here for an impromptu inspection.”

  “Yes. As you know, this test has to be done without interference or outside influence. We don’t want anyone to say later you had time to conceal trouble spots and security breaches.”

  “That would never happen, Director.”

  “Just so you know, you are not to interfere. I know my way around. I can reach you on my cell if I need help.”

  The plant supervisor took Mahmud, Hasad, and the others to a locker room and handed each of the team white coveralls and white lab coats, which they quickly put on.

  Mahmud then took them to a maintenance room. For some reason, the MAK had never installed surveillance cams in their maintenance rooms and storage closets. They were almost the only rooms that had no surveillance cameras.

  In the far corner was a rusty two-hundred-liter drum. After prying the lid off with a crowbar, Hasad removed and handed each of them a Heckler & Koch MP7 Personal Defense Weapon with a forty-round magazine, chambered for the HK 4.6×30mm armor-piercing cartridge. Slipping the MP7’s sling-loop around a shoulder, they each put their loose-fitting lab coats back on, covering up their weapons. Hasad then handed each of them a 9mm Glock with a thirty-round magazine and clip-on holsters, which they attached inside their pants in the small of their backs under their white coats. He then gave them each shoulder bags containing additional equipment, including coils of rope.

  The seven men broke up into two groups, one led by Hamzi, the other Mahmud and Hasad. Hamzi’s group first went to the loading dock and the shipping room. Searching through boxes, shipping containers, and side rooms, they pretended to look for signs of smuggling operations.

  Hasad sent his men to cordon off the hallways leading to the storage vault area. When they reached the corridor in front of the vault, Hasad keyed his cell phone to the hallway surveillance camera. He then froze it. Using the stepladder, he mounted a spy-cam, then hooked it up to the vault’s security feed, where it would record and transmit footage of the hallway to the security monitors. After twenty minutes it would begin transmitting the prerecorded twenty-minute clip, which it had just recorded. The plant’s surveillance monitors would play that same twenty minutes of continuously looped footage, which Hasad’s spy-cam had shot, over and over and over again.

  Next Mahmud inserted the magnetic key into the storage vault’s lock and opened the HEU tubular storage vault. The vault’s surveillance cam was mounted in the near-ceiling corner. Once inside, Hasad positioned himself, Mahmud, and Hamzi directly underneath it, where they were out of the camera’s range. Hasad climbed up on Mahmud’s and Hamzi’s shoulders, eased himself up under the vault’s surveillance cam, and rigged the spy-cam next to it. Turning off the room’s surveillance camera, he hooked its digital transmission system up to his own spy-cams. He then pointed the camera away from the door so he could leave and reenter the vault unobserved. In twenty minutes or so, his camera would transmit a continuous loop of the clip, which it had just recorded, to the plant’s security monitors over and over and over again.

  Heading back to the maintenance room, Hasad entered and grabbed a stepladder. He placed it on the big steel dolly along with a dozen old five-gallon paint cans, each one of which contained a stainless steel drum. He covered everything on the dolly with a tarp, smeared with dried black paint and grease. He whispered into his wrist mike, “Tact 1 to Tact 2. Have the surrogates. Will meet you at home base.” He dragged the dolly do
wn the hall and toward the tubular nuclear storage vault.

  His men were already at the HEU vault, while the rest of them manned the rope cordons. Hamzi and Mahmud were among those waiting for him.

  Mahmud once more inserted a magnetic key into the lock slot and pulled it out, and the heavy ten-inch-thick stainless steel door opened.

  The interior of the vault was forty feet by forty feet with fourteen-foot-high ceilings. The walls and floor were thirty feet thick and composed of concrete. One hundred square holes—twenty-five feet deep and a foot on edge—were bored into the walls. Mahmud opened one of them up with the plastic magnetic key. Inside was a twenty-foot-long tray, holding twelve cylindrical drums, each a foot long and a foot in diameter. The trays rested on rollers. Hasad knew that each of the industrial canisters held a lead-lined steel tube that contained a hollow right-circle casting of 93 percent HEU. Each of these right-circle castings was nine and a half inches in diameter and had a hole, three and a half inches in diameter, through its approximate center. These steel tubes and their HEU castings were stored, one tube each, in the ten stainless steel canisters. Each canister and its contents weighed forty-four pounds. The entire vault—all one hundred tube-holes—contained fifty thousand pounds of HEU, enough for a thousand Hiroshima-style bombs. The bomb-fuel’s design life was over a hundred years.

  Mahmud pulled the steel tray out a full foot and the men began lifting the fake cans off the dollies and resting them on the floor. Then Hamzi took the cans of HEU out of the tray one by one and loaded them onto the now-empty dollies.

  Nine more would follow.

  They then began placing the counterfeit cans filled with forty-pound, lead-lined steel tubes on the pullout tray that had just held the HEU drums.

  “It’ll be years before anyone realizes the HEU bomb-fuel rings are gone,” Mahmud observed absently.

  6

  “Three years without petrodollars … Saudi Arabia would be Somalia.”

  —Jules Meredith

  The Big Apple Bar at 2:00 A.M. One of Jules’s favorites haunts, it was all dark wood, dark leather, and darkly lit. The cocktail-party-cum-banquet was thankfully over. Jules, Prewitt, Helen Myer, and John Jennings were sitting in the corner semi-circular booth having a last round.

  Jennings and Helen sat on the outside, Jules and Prewitt in the middle. Coat and black tie off, white shirtsleeves rolled up, Jennings looked around the room at the other bitter-enders—the drunken ad execs, corporate moguls, and, of course, newspaper people.

  “Fuck me dead,” Jennings said, staring around the bar.

  “What a dump,” Helen said.

  “What are we doing here at 2:00 A.M.?” Jennings asked.

  “Drinking,” Helen said.

  Jules nodded her agreement. “I personally think the whole world ought to be dark, drunk, and indoors.” With that she raised her hand and ordered another single malt.

  “Kid,” Helen said, “I don’t get you. You claim to hate the outdoors, but you’ve spent the last decade and a half in Mideast war zones, covering combat.”

  “Quite a bit of it was urban counterinsurgency warfare. I slept in Marriotts a lot of the time and drank in the lobby bars.”

  “Third World urban warfare?” Jennings asked. “Sounds like some nasty shit, you ask me.”

  “Speaking of nasty shit,” Helen said with a diabolical grin, “your latest column on the Saudi royals is generating some very unusual hate-tweets. Did our guests give you a lot of crap tonight?”

  “Till I thought I’d puke,” Jules said.

  Her three friends roared with laughter.

  Ignoring their derision, Jules surveyed the still-crowded bar and spotted Shaiq ibn Ishaq. “There he is,” she said, “the richest man on earth.”

  “In a premier Kito tux, no less,” Prewitt, their très chic fashion editor, observed. “The most expensive bespoke tuxedo made.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Jules said. “You can’t shine shit.”

  “Shhhhh,” Helen said, “he’s headed this way.”

  The tall, elegant, mustached tycoon approached their table. He bore an amazing resemblance to Omar Sharif, so much so that Jules’s private nickname for him was “Sharif.”

  “May I?” he said, indicating he’d like to sit.

  “Since you own half the paper’s stock, how can I say no?” Helen said, giving him her sweetest smile.

  “Sure you want to rub shoulders with the hoi polloi?” Jennings asked.

  “If the hoi polloi were as beautiful as Ms. Meredith here, I would consort with them eternally,” Shaiq said.

  “And that’s what brings you to our table?” Helen asked.

  “Yes, as well as Ms. Meredith’s piece on petrodollar terrorism.”

  “I wondered when we’d get to that,” Jennings muttered under his breath. He turned to Jules and smiled.

  “The article,” Shaiq said, “in which you say too many of the Mideast’s petrodollars—particularly those of our wealthy Saudis—end up in the pockets of terrorists.”

  “I was only quoting former government officials and other experts,” Jules said. “Brookings, for example, proved that Saudi oil money had also bankrolled and has continued to bankroll Pakistan’s atom bomb program. Hillary Clinton said in a Wikileaked memo that members of your royal family are the number-one financiers of the world’s major al Qaeda–style terrorist groups. As you know, that includes ISIS.”

  “It’s not that easy to get money out of our country,” Shaiq said.

  “Sure it is, Shaiq,” Jules countered. “Your relatives donate it to fake humanitarian charities, who then funnel it through Qatar to Kuwait, where the governments refuse to monitor such transactions, and into the coffers of ISIS.”

  “You believe that?” the ambassador asked.

  “Reporters have no beliefs,” Jennings interjected, “only sources.”

  “So you have no personal opinions at all on the subject?” the ambassador asked.

  Jules met his cold stare with studied calm. “General Sherman defeated the Plains Indians not on the battlefield, but by depriving them of their sustenance—in that case their bison. By 1900, North America had fewer than a thousand bison. I believe we should deprive Mideast terrorists of their buffalo—of their petrodollars.”

  “And if you did that, as you wrote in your piece, my country would turn into Somalia?” Shaiq asked.

  “I wrote: ‘After three years without petrodollars, Iran would be Afghanistan; Saudi Arabia would be Somalia; and Saddam, if he were still alive, would be invading his neighbors on a dromedary with a scimitar.’”

  “You don’t seem to have a very high regard for our Peaceable Kingdom, Ms. Meredith.”

  Jules was about to say, Quit stoning eight-year-old girls, and I’ll think about it, but Helen squeezed her knee under the table—hard enough to hurt.

  “You have to forgive our good friend,” Helen said to Shaiq. “Jules is brilliant but headstrong. How that piece got onto the op-ed page is beyond me. It should have been killed in the cradle. Let me take you up to the bar. They have a really good Paradis Cognac from the House of Hennessy. I think you’ll like it. It was Kim Jong Il’s favorite brand. He reputedly spent $1 million a year on it. I also want to talk to you about you personally doing an article for our Sunday magazine on the new Saudi Arabia.”

  “And your role in turning the Kingdom into a Brave New World of change and opportunity,” Jennings said.

  “Perhaps a special section—complete with investment opportunities and the revolutionary changes we have made in our culture and customs,” Shaiq said, warming to the concept.

  “A marvelous idea, Mr. Ambassador,” Helen said. “We could use you as a managing editor.”

  “You’d have everything shipshape, no time at all,” Jennings said.

  “Maybe I could even whip Jules into shape,” Shaiq said. “I’d certainly like to try.”

  He was smiling at them, but when he turned to Jules, she saw the smile did not reach the eyes.


  While Helen dragged the ambassador toward the bar, Jules rose from the booth while muttering to Jennings, “That sonofabitch isn’t getting away that easily.”

  Jennings grabbed her arm and pulled her back into her seat. “Sit down.”

  “Why should I? What are we—an investigative newspaper or a Saudi Der Stürmer?”

  “Wonderful,” Jennings said, shaking his head sadly. “We have more investigative reporters covering the world, including those endless Mideast conflicts, than any paper on earth. We cover the stories nobody has the balls to touch, then fight the lawsuits and prosecutions as a consequence. But in your eyes we’re nothing but Der Stürmer—an infamous Nazi shit rag.”

  “But we aren’t following the Saudi story all the way, and we never—ever—follow their money. We don’t want to know the financial facts.”

  “What do you want, Jules?” Jennings asked with a heavy sigh.

  “I got a guy on the inside in Pakistan—all the way on the inside. He’s into everything and everyone—ISI, ISIS, the Saudi royals. The top guys, terrorist leaders, the shot-callers. He knows where every body’s buried, where every nickel comes from, where it’s going, and how it’s going to be spent. This guy’s in the middle of everything.”

  “And you think you and this guy can bring down Shaiq?” Jennings asked.

  Jules nodded. “He can bury him. We can try the motherfucker on U.S. soil—right here on U.S soil.”

  “He owns half our paper,” Jennings said.

  Jules stared at him, mute.

  “Suppose you brought down the paper with your story,” Jennings said. “Is the story worth all of our jobs?”

  “My guy says these people are planning horrible assaults on the U.S.,” Jules said. “If we can stop that, it’s worth all our jobs.”

  “Maybe,” Jennings said, “but you have to get me the smoking-gun evidence first. You don’t have that, though, and you can’t get it, can you?”