The technicians were engrossed in their work. The reactor had been down for a month for maintenance, and they were engaged in the prestart checks. They were almost finished. Just now they were pulling the rods from the pile one at a time, then reinserting each one, checking to ensure that they had complete control of every rod. So far, everything was working just as it should, praise Allah, but Dr. Qureshi was a demanding taskmaster who insisted on no shortcuts. Intently focused, they continued their work.

A man from the ministry in Damascus was watching and taking notes. He spoke to no one, asked no questions. Even though this was his very first visit to the reactor, he acted as if he knew everything, so there was nothing to ask; most of the people in the room suspected that he asked no questions because he was afraid to reveal the depths of his ignorance. In their experience, political people rarely knew anything about the reactor or how it worked. This one, they had concluded hours earlier, was like all the others.

Seventeen people, all of whom had only seconds more to live as the bombs fell toward the earth, toward the reactor, toward them.

An F-15 and two F-16s banked into a lazy right-hand circle around the reactor, twenty-two thousand feet above the ground, still well under the cirrus layer.

The reactor off their right wings had been constructed under a large pitched roof, which resembled that of a barn, or even an old factory. The roof was there to hide the reactor from satellites and aerial reconnaissance. A half mile to the northeast of the building was the Euphrates River, a broad, brown, placid, meandering highway that stretched to the horizon. The reactor had been under construction for six years, so the disturbed area above the ditches in which the water pipes were buried that carried river water to and from the reactor were no longer discernible from this altitude.