There was no panic, no running back to the truck. The alarm was off.

“She is good.” Elnur Isayev pointed to the monitor, then lit the cigarette dangling from his mouth. It smelled of the strong, harsh tobacco that filled the coffee shops he’d visited in Turkey, and Nir held his breath for a moment.

I wonder how many years of smoke are trapped in that oversized mustache. His wife must have no sense of smell.

As the last of the men ran in with the equipment, the rear gate to the truck was closed, and it pulled away. According to the plan, the driver would park in a lot four blocks away to await the time for pickup.

Once again, Nir checked his watch. It had taken only four minutes to get the team inside. That was good, because this group of Persian-hating Azerbaijanis had only six hours and 29 minutes before they had to be loaded up and on the road.

The time 6:29 had become completely familiar to everyone who was part of this operation. It was drilled into the operators as they worked their dry runs, and every meeting had ended with each person present calling it out. Six hours and 30 minutes? Too dangerous. The team would be in danger of being caught. Six hours and 28 minutes? That would be a minute wasted when more materials could have been removed. As it was, they’d already determined that emptying all 32 vaults wouldn’t happen in one night.

At 4:59 a.m. Tehran time, the trucks had to be rolling out of the gates. That would allow them two hours to get away, two hours’ worth of highway to help disappear into anonymity. When the guards arrived back at the warehouse at 7:00 a.m., discovered the damaged front doors, and sounded the alarm, this Mossad version of Danny Ocean’s team had to be well into the wind.

Now the team approached the doors to a long narrow room. The intel said the entrance to this structure within the structure had no separate alarm, a fact that once again amazed Nir. These are your nuclear secrets! You might as well have left the front doors open with a plate of falafel next to a guest book and a sign reading “Feel free to help yourselves.”

One of the operatives tried to force the door open, but it didn’t move. A second man worked on it while the first man checked the hinges. After a couple minutes of struggle, both men stepped back.

“The door is reinforced,” came a voice speaking heavily accented English through the com system.

“Can you remove the hinges?” asked Tzadik.

The two men looked directly into the security camera mounted above the warehouse entrance. “Negative,” one of them said. “They’re fully enclosed in steel. We can torch it open, but it will cost us much time.”

Tzadik cursed. The existence of a reinforced door had not been included in the intel.