The single-piloted F-16s were merely escorts for the F-15, which had a two-man crew. The man in the rear seat of the F-15 Eagle centered his handheld camera on the roof of the reactor. Fortunately, the visibility was excellent today. The camera was a digital one with a long lens, one designed to take five photos a second automatically if the shutter button was depressed and held down. The pilot in the front seat was counting down the seconds. “Six… five… four…”

At four, the cameraman depressed the shutter button and held it down. He concentrated on holding the camera steady and keeping the reactor centered in the viewfinder.

In the antiaircraft defense control center, Mikhail Toporov was still baffled. Something was wrong-he had heard jet engines, and there should be no aircraft in the prohibited zone, none whatsoever. He reached down beside the man at the scope and pushed the red alert button on his console. Instantly a siren sounded in the control room.

A siren also sounded in the reactor administration building. Startled, Dr. Qureshi looked up, just in time to see his secretary walking into his office. That was the last thing he saw as the first bomb penetrated the roof of the building, plunged through all five floors and detonated in the basement of the structure. The floors heaved before they buckled. The desk on which he had been working was flung upward and struck Dr. Qureshi in the head, knocking him unconscious. He was killed when the building collapsed around him.

In the reactor control room, a siren also went off. Shocked, the technicians stared at the gauges in front of them, trying to understand. The reactor was cold, so this couldn’t be the nuclear alarm.

Even as they realized it was an air raid alert alarm, the bombs smashed into the roof of the reactor and penetrated deeply, one at a time, two-tenths of a second apart.