If outsiders had known of these meetings, they would have assumed China had the upper hand. Yet it was Li who flew to Tehran, not Ahmadinejad to Beijing. The men who ran Iran took such eagerness as a sign of China’s weakness. Li didn’t try to change their minds. He had his own reason for wanting these meetings in Tehran instead of Beijing. This way, only he and his closest aides knew exactly what he was telling Ahmadinejad. Of course, he reported back to his fellow ministers on the Standing Committee after each meeting. But he didn’t report everything.
As they tried to build a bomb, the Iranians needed engineering help, lots of it. Even for a sovereign country with a multibillion-dollar budget, building a nuclear weapon was harder than it looked.
Nuclear weapons are both complicated and very simple. Conventional explosives get energy from breaking chemical bonds between atoms. Nuclear bombs release the energy bound up inside individual atoms, a far bigger source of power. The difference in power is staggering. Fat Man, the bomb that the United States dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, used fourteen pounds of plutonium to produce a blast with the energy produced by 42 million pounds of conventional explosive. The bomb killed 70,000 people immediately and tens of thousands more over the next generation. Yet by modern standards, the Fat Man bomb is puny.
Fortunately for humanity’s survival, most types of atoms can’t be used in nuclear weapons. The exceptions are plutonium and a certain kind of uranium, called U-235, so-called fissile materials. The United States and other major nuclear powers prefer plutonium for their bombs, because plutonium is even more potent than uranium. But plutonium is also harder to handle, and it doesn’t exist naturally. Making it requires nuclear reactors, big buildings that are prime targets for guided missiles or bombs. So uranium is the nuclear material of choice for countries like Iran, which need to make bombs in secret.
Still, uranium can’t simply be pulled out of the ground and plugged into a nuclear weapon. In its natural state, uranium ore consists of two different isotopes, U-235 and U-238. They look the same, a heavy silver-gray metal. But they have different atomic structures. U-235 can be used to make a bomb. U-238 can’t.
In its natural state, uranium is made up of 99.3 percent U-238, the useless kind, with just 0.7 percent U-235 mixed in. To separate the valuable U-235 from U-238, weapons builders used centrifuges, enclosed chambers that spin very fast, enabling them to pull the lighter U-235 out of the U-238.
In theory, the centrifuge procedure is relatively straightforward. But as the Iranians had found out, bridging the gap between theory and reality could be difficult. Even under the best of circumstances, it required a small army of well-trained engineers and physicists. The Iranians had an added challenge. Because of the threat of the Israeli air force, they were working in labs buried seventy feet underground.
UNTIL THIS MEETING, Ahmadinejad hadn’t told Li exactly what problems the Iranians were having. In part, his reticence was a matter of national pride. The Iranians hated to admit that they had failed where North Korea had succeeded. At the same time, Tehran worried that Beijing might be cozying up to them just to betray them to the United States.
To overcome that suspicion, Li had gone to great lengths. Not even the other members of the Politburo Standing Committee knew the steps he had taken. Now, finally, his efforts were paying off. This time around, Ahmadinejad and his scientific advisers had made very specific requests, asking if China could lend Iran electrical engineers, metallurgists, and physicists — a hiveful of highly trained worker bees to build a very large stinger. In return, Ahmadinejad offered to name China as Iran’s preferred partner for oil and natural gas development, and to give China first call on Iranian crude in case of a worldwide shortage.
Li hadn’t tried to hide his excitement at the offer. An alliance between China and Iran would be a giant shift in world politics. For the first time since the end of the Cold War, major nations would align in open defiance of America.
Naturally, Li agreed. The approval of the Standing Committee would be a formality, he said. And why would the Iranians doubt him? He’d given them reason to believe that China hated the United States as much as they did.
Li knew this alliance was risky. He didn’t fully trust the Iranians. But he needed their help, needed it now. He was setting China on a collision course with the United States. Without Iran’s support, his plan couldn’t succeed. And despite what he’d told the Iranians, the plan was his, his alone. The other eight members on the Politburo Committee didn’t know what he was doing. They would never have supported him.
Li believed he had sound reasons for taking this path. The others on the committee were cowards and thieves. He needed to act, and quickly. One day, the full truth would come out, and the world would judge his actions. By then he’d be dead, though not forgotten. Never forgotten. In the meantime, though, he needed to keep his scheme secret. For if the Standing Committee learned exactly what he’d done, his future would be short and bleak.
LI TURNED HIS CHAIR to face Cao Se. Technically, Cao was only the seventh-ranking officer in the PLA, but in reality he was closer to Li than anyone else. Li and Cao had served together in China’s three-week war in Vietnam in 1979. Li had come out unscathed, but not Cao. A mine had taken off his left leg below the knee. Sometimes Li wondered whether Cao was marked to take the misfortune for both of them. Perhaps in a previous life he had served Cao. Now the roles were reversed. Where Li was tall and handsome, Cao was small, his face pockmarked. His wife had died in childbirth in 1986 at a Shanghai hospital, and he had never remarried.
A few years before, Li had caught Cao staring at him. The look wasn’t sexual, more like the devotion that a child lavished on a distant father. Sometimes Li wondered if a more independent adviser would have served him better. Yet loyalty like Cao’s was rare, and Li needed at least one man he could trust completely.
Cao knew more about Li’s plan than anyone else. Even so, Li hadn’t told Cao exactly what he was doing. As much as he trusted Cao, he couldn’t take that chance. Not yet.
“General.” Cao was drawing intently in a spiral notebook, his lips pursed tight, his face rapt. At the sound of Li’s voice, Cao snapped the notebook shut.
“Keeping secrets, Cao?”
“You know I have no secrets.”
“Let’s see.” Li reached out for the notebook.
“It’s nothing to do with anything, General.” Nonetheless, Cao handed it over.
The book’s pages were filled with sketches of buildings in thick black ink, skyscrapers and highways and apartment complexes. Long flowing strokes that caught the motion and vitality of city life. Li recognized the giant Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai, the Empire State Building. Other buildings seemed to be of Cao’s own creation, narrow towers that stretched to the sky, stadiums with cantilevered roofs.
“Cao. These are excellent.”
“A way to pass the time.”
“No. Truly. You could have been an architect. You have a talent.” At this, Cao smiled. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t think you’d be interested, General.”
Li handed back the book. And wondered, What other secrets have you been keeping from me all these years, little Cao?
“So what did you think of Ahmadinejad today?” This conversation would necessarily be limited. Li and Cao knew that the A340 had a dozen bugs scattered through its cabin. As defense minister, Li controlled most of them. But not all.