[As a decades-long working stiff, now retired and “every-recovering” reporter here in Israel, I’ve occcasionally dropped a few sparse, offhand FB posts over the past couple of years of wry fantasy cinematic storytelling whenever a nuclear or weapons-related facility in Iran “mysteriously” imploded.
While there was usually an open or hinted nod to Mossad involvement, in my stabs at creative fiction, these two unlikely imaginary characters were often the behind-the-scenes protaganists. After writing, editing, analyzing, and reporting hard news from this area for several decades, I’d like to give the dynamic, destructive duo some creative breathing room to do some of the narrative heavy-lifting in covering the region.
Additionally, after thrilling to three seasons of the exploits of Mossad agent and uber-hacker, Tamar Rabinyan in “Tehran,” I decided her daring, impulsive young character needed to lead the team as their handler:
And so, finally opting to take a deep dive and flesh out their identities, here’s a first draft, created with the aid of ChatGPT, Google Gemini as writing gremlins to outline the main ideas, and NotebookLM for the NPR-like narration. I don’t sound like this—but could if you kindly help support my hard news, and fiction writing—like this attempt—with a PayPal tip jar donation. - Thx, DB]
Narrator intro: They wear matching white sharkskin suits over "wifebeater" tees, Brylcreamed hair, dark Wayfarer sunglasses, and travel in a cherry red metalflake 1963 Ford Thunderbird Sports Roadster - naively thinking they're traveling "undercover." They’re somewhat inept—but still lethally dangerous—like a cross between the team in “Inglorious Basterds” and “Lenny and Squiggy” of the Laverne and Shirley TV show, exuding a Goodfellas’ Joe Pesci-like ignorant menace and swagger.
“The only way to prevent the Islamic Republic from building a nuclear weapon is to dismantle “all the infrastructure of Iran’s nuclear program,” Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu told the JNS International Policy Summit on Sunday, adding, “That is the deal.”
“Israel, he continued, ‘cannot live with anything short of that—anything short of that could bring you the opposite result, because Iran will say, all right, I won’t enrich, wait, run out the clock, wait for another president, do it again.’ This, he said, was ‘unacceptable.’
“According to the prime minister, ‘a bad deal is worse than no deal.’
“‘And the only good deal that works is a deal like the one that was made with Libya, that removed all the infrastructure,’ he declared, echoing remarks he made during an April 7 meeting at the White House.
“He emphasized that while it is ‘important’ that Jerusalem and Washington share the same goals, ‘We have to make sure that Iran does not get nuclear weapons.’”
Narrator:
If you spotted them rumbling through downtown Tehran in their red metalflake 1963 Ford Thunderbird Sports Roadster, you wouldn't think "covert operatives."
You'd think 'those guys are either here to rob a bakery or burn down the palace.'
You wouldn't be wrong.
They were dumb — no two ways about it. But dumb in the way a pit bull is dumb. Simple. Direct. Dangerous the second you stop paying attention.
They had a knack for violence, a pure, unfiltered instinct for it, the way some men are born good with numbers, or music.
And behind them — unseen, unsung — was the real machinery: Tamar Rabinyan and her web of Mossad ghosts, weaving a tapestry of mayhem from the shadows.
"Fordow or Fallout: Lil’ Vinnie, Big Moishe, and Tamar’s Last Gamble"
It was 2:00 AM in the desert outside Qom. The kind of black night that soaked into your bones, where even the moon had the sense to mind its own business.
Tamar stood by the side of a battered Toyota Hilux, chain-smoking nervously, her eyes darting over the empty road. Any minute now, her wrecking balls would arrive.
She checked her burner phone for the fifth time. Still no signal.
"Where the hell are you, you schmucks?" she muttered in Hebrew, flicking the cigarette into the dust.
Then, with a screech of old brakes and an engine coughing up death, a dust-covered Thunderbird convertible bounced into view, its sharkskin-clad pilots oblivious to the noise they were making.
Lil’ Vinnie and Big Moishe.
Fresh outta the Bronx. Fresh outta their minds.
Vinnie leapt out first, sunglasses still on despite the pitch dark, a stubby MAC-10 tucked casually into the waistband of his trousers like a guy holding a hoagie.
Big Moishe followed, hefting a duffel bag that probably weighed more than Tamar. She prayed it was full of the right gear. She doubted it.
"Eh, you da’ lady we supposed to meet?" Vinnie asked, grinning like he'd just won a meat raffle.
Tamar stared at them both for a long, despairing second.
"You're late," she said coldly, tossing a manila envelope onto the hood of the Thunderbird.
Big Moishe picked it up, sniffed it, and muttered, "Smells official."
Inside the envelope was gold. Real gold. Schematics. Entry codes. Shift schedules. Security weaknesses.
All of it stolen in the heist that made history — the one where Mossad agents broke into a heavily guarded Tehran warehouse, spent hours cracking safes, and walked out with half a ton of Iran’s nuclear secrets while the ayatollahs and the IRGC chased shadows for months.
Nobody in the world had believed it until they saw the footage. Nobody in Iran had slept right since.
And now, some of that same intel—polished, updated, and bloody hard—won was being dropped into the calloused hands of these two idiots.
It was almost poetic.
"You understand what you're hitting tonight?" Tamar said, voice low, urgent."This isn’t a warehouse or a drone lab. This is Fordow. It’s buried under a f***ing mountain. If you screw this up, you don’t just die — you start a war."
Big Moishe looked serious for a second. Vinnie picked his teeth thoughtfully.
"Eh, war’s already happenin’, lady," Vinnie said finally. "We just... showin’ up early."
He wasn’t wrong. Iranian rockets had been raining down on Israelis from Haifa to Eilat for over a year and a half. Despite Israeli airstrikes in the heart of their headquarters in Beirut, Hezbollah was still trying to stockpile missiles. Despite weeks of massive, sustained American and allied pummeling, the Houthis were still providing early morning wake-up calls for millions of Israelis, when they weren’t sinking oil tankers in the Red Sea. And shadow wars — assassinations, car bombs, drone strikes — flickered across the Middle East like brushfires nobody could quite stamp out.
Jews and Israel supporters worldwide had been warned: Watch your backs. Synagogues fortified. Security doubled. And Iran just kept smiling that dead-eyed smile on Al Jazeera, promising rivers of blood.
This wasn’t espionage. This was survival.
"Alright," Tamar snapped, dragging them back to the moment. "Listen carefully."
She unrolled a hand-drawn map, her finger stabbing the paper.
"You’re going in through this maintenance shaft, about 500 meters east of the main entrance. Iranian engineers use it to bypass security when they're too lazy to walk the checkpoints. It’s old. Cracked. You can blow it easy."
She handed Big Moishe a small black device.
"Plasma cutter. Israeli tech. One minute, max."
Big Moishe whistled low.
"Sweet."
"You'll hit the backup generators first," Tamar continued. "Take them offline. That gives our cyber unit ten minutes to fry the primary controls from outside. Then you plant these—" she tossed Vinnie a heavy sack of plastic explosives—"on the centrifuge cascades. Light show."
Vinnie weighed the bag appreciatively, like a kid checking out a birthday present.
"No boom-boom before we’re done, right?" he said.
Tamar gave him a withering look.
"Right," she said through gritted teeth.
"Got it," Moishe said. Then grinned."And if we get caught?"
Tamar lit another cigarette with barely shaking hands.
"If you get caught..." she said slowly, "...you don’t get caught. You fight. You kill. You die. No prisoners."
Lil' Vinnie and Big Moishe nodded with a kind of dumb, cheerful finality that made her stomach twist.
It wasn’t that they were brave. It wasn’t that they were loyal. It was worse: they just didn’t get scared the way normal people did.
Somewhere out there, under a mountain, Iran’s most precious secret buzzed and whirred, refining uranium toward a future Holocaust.
And barreling toward it at 80 mph in a T-bird convertible smelling of sweat, cigars, and blood were two Bronx lunatics armed with Israeli tech and pure, stupid violence.
Tamar looked up at the stars and muttered a prayer.
Not for them.
For Iran.
"Fordow or Fallout: Lil’ Vinnie and Big Moish, Part II"
The Thunderbird chewed up the desert road, coughing black smoke into the endless night. Big Moishe manhandled the wheel, squinting through his knockoff Wayfarers. Vinnie perched on the passenger side like a coiled spring, cradling the sack of explosives between his boots.
"Yo, Moishe," Vinnie said, tapping a stubby finger against the window."You realize we probably ain't coming back from this, right?"
Big Moishe shrugged, rolling a toothpick between his lips.
"Better than dyin' of gout back in the Bronx."
Vinnie laughed — a short, ugly bark. In the glovebox, a photo fluttered: a snapshot of a family barbecue in Riverdale. Kids, beer, folding chairs, cheap smiles. It felt a million years away.
Half a mile from Fordow, they ditched the Thunderbird under a slab of broken concrete. The Iranian night patrols weren’t idiots; they'd notice a classic convertible belching oil fumes pretty quick.
Vinnie double-checked the explosives. Moishe slung the plasma cutter over his shoulder like a baseball bat.
They moved through the scrub brush like bulls in a china shop — snapping twigs, kicking rocks — but somehow nobody noticed. Somewhere, Tamar's cyber team was slicing into Fordow’s camera feeds, blanking security screens for a precious few minutes.
God willing, Tamar thought grimly, sitting in her command truck miles away, staring at a blank monitor and chain-smoking like it was an Olympic event.
The maintenance shaft was right where the stolen maps said it would be: half-buried under a fake irrigation system, rusted and humming with faint electrical static.
Vinnie crouched, squinting.
"Yo, Moishe — you sure this ain't, like, booby-trapped or nuthin'?"
Moishe shrugged again. He wasn't the kind of guy who worried about things he couldn't punch.
The plasma cutter came alive with a low, angry hiss, spitting blue fire. Moishe sliced through the old Iranian steel.
They dropped into the darkness.
Inside, it stank of oil, sweat, and burnt metal. The shaft sloped downward — steep, slick with condensation — leading straight into the guts of Fordow.
Voices echoed faintly ahead: bored security guards, maybe a technician or two.
Vinnie and Moishe moved with the casual malevolence of men who had no backup and no exit strategy.
At the bottom, the tunnel split — left toward the generators, right toward the centrifuges. They separated without a word.
Vinnie hit the generator room first.
It was dimly lit, humming with the kind of low mechanical growl that sets your teeth on edge. A lone technician sat on a stool, reading a dog-eared comic book.
Vinnie didn’t waste time.
He shot the guy twice in the face with a suppressed pistol, blood blooming like a cartoon flower. The body toppled over with a soft thud. Vinnie popped a stick of C4 onto the generator's cooling coils, set the timer for five minutes, and walked out whistling "Mack the Knife."
Moishe wasn't so lucky.
A security team — two IRGC goons in body armor — was patrolling near the centrifuge cascade.
Moishe caught them by surprise, which meant the first guy didn’t even get a scream out before Moishe buried a claw hammer in his temple.
The second guard managed a garbled shout — just enough to alert the facility.
Alarms began to wail, distant but growing.
Moishe shrugged again (he was a big believer in acceptance) and started laying C4 charges like party favors.
In the command truck, Tamar swore.
"They tripped it early," her second-in-command said, pale and sweating.
"No shit," Tamar snapped."Tell the air team we might need Plan B."
Plan B was airstrikes. Plan B was scorched earth. Plan B meant war.
Back inside Fordow, chaos blossomed like a mushroom cloud. Sirens howled .Guards swarmed like ants.
Vinnie and Moishe barreled through corridors, blasting anything in their way.
Vinnie kicked open a security door and found himself face-to-face with an Iranian colonel screaming into a walkie-talkie.
Without hesitation, Vinnie emptied his MAC-10 into the colonel’s chest and head, the rounds chewing him into red mist.
"Bang, zoom, to the moon!" he cackled, quoting Jackie Gleason.
Big Moishe grabbed him by the collar and hauled him toward the exit.
"Time's up, ya freak!"
They made it back to the maintenance shaft just as the first backup lights flickered on. The C4 timers were down to thirty seconds.
Vinnie shoved Moishe up the shaft like a sack of flour, then scrambled up after him.
They hit open desert, sprinting blindly, sucking in the cold, sandy air.
Behind them, Fordow's generators died with a shriek.
Then the world ended in fire.
A blossom of dirty orange light lifted the night, brighter than any sunrise.
The ground rumbled under their boots, the shockwave chasing them across the wasteland.
From the command truck, Tamar watched the mushroom cloud rise on infrared screens, her mouth dry, her fingers white-knuckling the table.
Somewhere, a Mossad field operative whispered, "Holy shit."
And somewhere in Tehran, a dozen generals woke up screaming.
In the aftermath, Iranian news outlets scrambled to spin the disaster.
A "routine industrial accident," they claimed. No sabotage. No Israeli fingerprints. No reason to panic.
But anyone with a brain—or a grudge—knew the truth.
Fordow was gone. Set back years. Maybe decades.
And somewhere, barreling west in a battered cherry red metalflake Thunderbird, two sharkskin-suited maniacs laughed until they cried, the desert wind carrying their cackles into the endless black.
Substack’s Stripe payment system isn’t available in Israel, so I’ve arranged an alternative for you to support my work. If you’re feeling generous, you can donate via PayPal - Thx, DB]
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