The Tenth Circle Read Online Free Page B

Revolutionary Guardsmen who checked the workers through security after scanning their badges and radiation wrist monitors. The badges, dangling from neck lanyards, were color-coded according to the various areas of the complex each worker was permitted to access. Based on what McCracken saw, he could safely estimate the facility likely employed from 750 to 1,000 workers in total. The men looked nervous and McCracken noticed they didn’t tote lunches or anything else along with them, since bringing anything in from the outside was strictly prohibited.
    From here, the vast bulk of the workers entered a changing area complete with banks of open lockers where they dressed into the proper radiation suits, some emerging with helmets outfitted with respirators as well. Attempting to enter an unauthorized area by any of them would automatically trigger an alarm. McCracken played director by instructing the soldiers accompanying him to aim the lights appropriately and shot the arrival scenes from several different angles, just as the Israeli filmmaker who was well acquainted with Najjar’s award-winning work, had taught him. Interesting how so much of his career had been about learning how to wield various weapons. For this mission, it was a camera instead.
    “Let’s move on,” Hosseini said, tightening his shoulders and starting to fidget impatiently when the process of shooting the parade of arriving workers drew on too long for him.
    “I’m not finished.”
    “This isn’t important.”
    McCracken kept shooting. “I’ll decide what’s important.”
    Hosseini covered the lens with his palm. “There are scheduling concerns you aren’t privy to. I’d ask you to respect that.”
    McCracken lowered the camera and then continued the process, as instructed, with shots of banks of offices manned by analysts and technicians busy monitoring and collating data from their respective departments. Again, McCracken could feel Hosseini getting antsy, impatient through Blaine’s painstaking process of capturing the more mundane areas of the facility that he explained could be edited out later. The minister led him past the huge pumping station lined with layer upon layer of piping connected to massive vats of constantly recycled water used in the cooling process so crucial to any nuclear facility.
    “The temperature of the gases contained in the centrifuges,” Hosseini explained, “could easily reach several thousand degrees, a recipe for explosion if the cooling mechanisms ever failed.”
    “You should consider doing the narration yourself, Minister,” said McCracken.
    Hosseini started to smile, then caught the sarcastic gleam in the filmmaker’s eyes, and did not bother to add that previous efforts to destroy or destabilize Natanz had targeted either the cooling systems or computer controls themselves, both via highly sophisticated computer viruses, including the infamous STUXNET. But the effects of those attempts had been negligible at best, as well as temporary. The facility was state of the art and then some, far beyond what the best intelligence reported, as if Iran had been laying low the whole time, wanting the world to think they were constructing something second rate. On the contrary, Iranian nuclear scientists and physicists had clearly borrowed, or stolen, the best nuclear technology available, a fact further confirmed at the next stop on the historical record.
    “Our crowning achievement,” the minister announced proudly. “The centrifuges. Truly a gift from Allah,” he added, almost reverently, as they reached a thick glass wall that looked down into a huge sunken space filled with an equally endless chain of finely polished centrifuges. “Behold what has allowed us to enrich more U-235 than the world could possibly realize.”
    McCracken could hardly estimate how many there were of the standing, interconnected cylindrical machines outfitted with thick spaghetti-like strands of hosing that joined up with a