14: Chapter 14 The Underground City

Spring, 1977. It had been a year and a half since Reza's transmigration.

If anyone were to look down from high above at the desert in the southeast corner of Khuzestan Province, known as the "Land of Death," they would see only monotonous sand dunes and gravel—a place where even scorpions would not care to stay.

But six meters underground, it was another world. Fatima called it the "Cave." The guards called it "Hell's Kitchen." The codename Reza gave it in his notebook was "Cyrus Workshop"—taken from Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire.

The scale of this underground factory had far exceeded the scope of that initial "underground laboratory."

Over the past year and a half, Reza had invested more than four million dollars—almost all of the oil well's income—into expanding this underground facility.

Three Czech lathes smuggled from Kuwait had been repaired. Fatima had obtained two sets of obsolete Soviet welding equipment from the black market. Three tons of carbon steel and one ton of aluminum alloy bought from Pakistan were transported into the desert by truck, disguised as "construction materials."

The number of workers had expanded from the initial twenty to eighty. They were all personally selected by Fatima and Nasser from factories, universities, and technical schools across Iran—they needed to be both skilled and reliable. Before entering the factory, everyone had to undergo a security check by Hassan, with their family background investigated back three generations.

Once someone entered Cyrus Workshop, they could not leave for at least half a year. It was not imprisonment—it was a necessity for secrecy. The workers lived and ate entirely underground, their wages were three times higher than outside, and their families were taken care of by Reza's people. They were rotated every six months, and those who rotated out were arranged to work in enterprises controlled by Reza, binding their loyalty with economic interests.

This management model was copied by Reza from his past life's experience with China's "Third Front" construction—the method used in the 1960s to build military factories in China's southwestern mountains, which had been historically proven to strike the best balance between secrecy and efficiency.

In March 1977, the product list of Cyrus Workshop contained three items:

First, the Persia-1 Type unguided rocket.

Under Fatima's improvements, the circular error probable (CEP) of the second-generation Persia-1 Type was reduced from 4.7 kilometers to 2.8 kilometers. The missile body weight was reduced from 500 kilograms to 420 kilograms, while the range was maintained at over 190 kilometers. Monthly production: two units.

Two units sounded like very little, but for an underground arsenal starting from scratch, this number had already exceeded everyone's expectations.

Fatima was not satisfied. "The 2.8-kilometer deviation is still too large," she said, frowning during a briefing, "If we can get hold of a gyroscope, the deviation can be reduced to at least under 500 meters."

"I am working on the gyroscope issue," Reza said. He was indeed working on it. The memories of his past life told him that in the second half of 1977, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan of Pakistan—the man who would later be known as the "father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb"—was stealing centrifuge technology from the Dutch company URENCO. Besides nuclear technology, Qadeer Khan's smuggling network also involved a large number of black-market transactions for military electronic components. Through this network, it was not impossible to obtain a batch of medium-precision gyroscopes. But a middleman was needed. Reza had already asked Abdullah Al-Sabah to inquire about it.

Second, Anti-tank mines. This was the product Fatima looked down on the most—"zero technical content"—but it was the one Reza valued the most. The design was extremely simple: cast iron casing, 30 centimeters in diameter, loaded with 3 kilograms of TNT, and a pressure-sensitive fuse. The cost was less than ten dollars per unit. But this thing could blow over a 30-ton tank. Monthly production: 500 units. 500 Anti-tank mines, per month. That was 6,000 in a year. In the Iran-Iraq War of his past life, Iraq had deployed about 2,000 tanks at the beginning of the war. If 6,000 mines were densely laid on the essential routes of the border highways—Saddam Hussein's tank clusters wouldn't even be able to cross the border of Khuzestan. This was Reza's "asymmetric warfare" strategy: I won't compete with you on the number of tanks, nor will I compete with you on air force strength. I use a ten-dollar mine to blow up your one-million-dollar tank. If you trade one tank for one hundred of my mines, you can't afford the loss.

Third, and the one that most surprised Reza—Fatima had created something on her own.

"Come and take a look at this." One afternoon, Fatima called Reza into a small room deep inside the workshop that Reza had never entered before. The room was very small, about ten square meters, but it was exceptionally tidy. On a workbench sat a strange-looking device—a metal cylinder, about 40 centimeters in diameter, with several copper pipes and a set of circuit boards connected to the top. "What is this?" "A simple centrifuge."

Reza's footsteps stopped. "What did you say?" "A simple gas centrifuge." Fatima pushed up her glasses, her tone as flat as if she were talking about a new batch of screws arriving in the lab today, "I used the workshop's lathe to machine the rotor, used the aluminum alloy you got to make the end caps, and the motor was salvaged from a scrapped Soviet industrial centrifuge. The rotation speed is only 20,000 RPM, which is far worse than URENCO's, but—" She pressed a switch. The motor began to hum. The metal cylinder began to rotate, faster and faster. "Theoretically, it can achieve primary separation of UF6. Of course, the separation factor is extremely low, probably only around 1.01. But if we get a hundred of them in series—a cascade—the effect will be different."

Reza stared at the rotating metal cylinder, silent for ten seconds. Then he said one sentence: "Fatima. Turn it off." Fatima's hand paused on the switch. "Turn it off? Why?" "This thing is too dangerous." "I know uranium enrichment is a sensitive technology—" "I'm not talking about sensitive technology. I'm saying, if the existence of this machine is known to anyone—whether it's the Americans, the Israelis, or the Soviets—they won't send six agents to assassinate me. They will send a bomber squadron to bomb the entire Khuzestan Province to the ground."

Fatima's expression finally changed. She was a technical genius, but not a politician. Her way of thinking about problems was "can it be done," not "what will happen after it is done." "What do you think Israel did to Iraq's nuclear reactor?" Reza said, "1981—" He shut his mouth in time. It wasn't 1981 yet. The incident where Israel bombed Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor wouldn't happen until June 1981. He couldn't speak about future events that hadn't happened yet. "…Israel has always been closely monitoring nuclear activities in the Middle East." He changed his phrasing, "If any Middle Eastern country shows signs of nuclear enrichment, Israel's reaction will be very extreme. We don't have air defense capabilities yet; if the Israeli Air Force comes, we won't even have a chance to fight back."

Fatima was silent for a while. Then she turned off the centrifuge. "Then should I dismantle it?" "Don't dismantle it. Hide it. All blueprints, data, and calculation processes must be sealed. Do not mention it to anyone, including Nasser, including Hassan." "When can it be restarted?" "When we have air defense capabilities." Fatima nodded. She wrapped the simple centrifuge in a tarpaulin and stuffed it into an iron box in the corner of the room. When she turned to leave, she looked back at Reza. "Do you know? While building this machine, it was one of the happiest days I've had in Iran. I felt like I was finally doing something... meaningful." "Everything you do is meaningful." Fatima didn't speak and left. But Reza noticed that she pushed up her glasses one extra time compared to usual—that was her little habit when hiding emotional fluctuations. After she walked away, he took a deep breath. Nuclear technology.