The Gambit

VIII

“CAG, come on in,” announced Captain Noel Roberts, CO of the George Washington, to his commander, Air Group.

“Sir, what do we have?” replied the CAG.

“We have just been advised by the Pentagon that the Israelis will be taking out several of Iran’s nuclear sites. They’ll actually be launching in about eight hours; that’s about 6:00 a.m. their time in Jerusalem.”

“Nice of them to give us some warning,” the CAG remarked acidly. “So, where does that place us? Did the Stennis get the same warning?”

“Are you familiar with the term ‘Like shooting fish in a barrel’? Well, we’re the fish and this lake we’re in is the barrel. We’re too far north to make a run for the strait to try and get out of here. We’ll head to a little pocket between Doha and Abu Dhabi. Russia supposedly has supplied the Iranians with a pretty good supply of Sunburn missiles. However, by the time everything kicks off, we should be out of their range — if they haven’t modified those things. If they have, well we’ll have your Hornets out there to knock down anything that flies as well as anything that even looks like it might be ready to fire at us. The Stennis received the same warning as we did; they’ll remain in the Arabian Sea. Their Hornets will need to pair up with buddy stores to help us out should we need it. In addition, the Roosevelt is on its way as well and should be transiting the Suez Canal as we speak and, at full speed, could be here in a little more than three days.”

“I’ll keep two Hawkeyes up and double the CAP,” referring to the Hornet’s combat air patrol over the fleet. “I don’t want to do too much to tip off our friends for tomorrow morning but I want to get as much up and still not raise too much suspicion. The Israelis will be launching at six, figure it will take them three hours to get to their targets, so we’ll start launching everything we have about eight thirty, or two and a half hours after they’ve launched.”

“Once they’re airborne, I want them on station north and east of us. Any plane that gets past the Iranian coast line needs to be warned to back off immediately. I don’t want any unidentified aircraft within 150 miles of us so if they don’t back off, shoot’em down. If by chance they have some Sunburn missiles from the Russians, we’ll need to keep them at least one hundred miles from the fleet; I don’t want to take the chance that they might have modified these and extended their range.”

“Do we have any other assets in the region?” asked the CAG.

“Not as much as we did just a few years ago. There’s a squadron of Eagles at Al Udeid as well as a couple squadrons of Wraiths and Reapers. The Eagles will be guarding our back door as we head south. The Wraiths and Reapers will be airborne over several of Iran’s nuclear sites so when the Israelis hit them, we’ll know about it right away. A few years ago, the Iranians actually hacked into one of the Wraiths and brought it down so if they happen to see one snooping around, it shouldn’t raise too much suspicion.”

The following morning, twenty-five F-15I Eagles and seventy-five F-16I Vipers took off for Iran. Each of the F-15’s were loaded with two GBU-28 five thousand pound bombs while the F-16’s each carried two GBU-27 two thousand pound bombs. In addition, each of the fighters carried their own complement of air-to-air missiles: the Eagles each carried four missiles while the Vipers carried two each. Jim Carmichael had been right in that the Israelis had not been idle on the diplomatic front. The pilots were going to need to refuel in flight and both Turkey and Azerbaijan had granted the Israelis permission to base their tankers and other support craft out of their respective air fields; in Turkey, the Diyarbakir airfield practically sat astride the route the Israelis were flying so the tankers would fly out of here. In addition, the Azerbaijanis had granted use of the Baku airbase as Jackson had noticed, and the Israelis would base their G-550 EW “Eitam” craft out of here. The Eitams would meet up in flight as the strike fighters made the turn to enter Iranian airspace.

The Israeli G-550 EW, that is, electronic warfare, aircraft first made a name for themselves when the Israelis took out the Syrian nuclear plant at Dayr az-Zawr. The Israelis managed to crash Syria’s entire air defense system allowing its fighters unfettered access to their target. It seems that some enterprising graduate student at MIT had caught on to the notion that a significant part of any radar system is to receive data. He figured that if a way could be designed to capture the signal frequency of the radar unit and, instead of simply jamming that frequency, actually hijack the frequency and send data back along the frequency — that is any data — you could literally do anything you wanted to the enemy’s radar and, potentially, their entire air defense network. In the case of the Israeli raid on the Syrian nuclear facility at Dayr az-Zawr, the Israelis had actually shut down Syria’s air defense network — for the entire country!

As soon as the raiders met up with the G-550’s they split up into three main groups: ten of the F-16’s and one of the G-550’s headed to the heavy water nuclear reactor at Arak and ten more Vipers and an additional Eitam headed towards the Esfahan Nuclear Research Center. The remaining two Eitams accompanied the fifty-five F-16’s and the twenty-five F-15’s that headed towards the Natanz and Qom/Fordow uranium enrichment facilities. One of the Eitams, thirty of the Vipers and fifteen of the Eagles ultimately veered off towards Qom/Fordow leaving the remaining Eitam, twenty-five of the Vipers and the ten Eagles for Natanz. It was a brilliantly coordinated attack: At both Natanz and Qom, for over twenty minutes, every thirty seconds another two tons of high explosive projectiles penetrated the earth. In each case, the Eagles went in first with their heavier bunker buster GBU-28’s softening up the targets for the lighter GBU-27’s carried by the Vipers. At both Qom and Natanz, the Eitams earned their pay as the Iranian SAM search radars were non-existent. However, the Iranian Air Force had obviously been alerted. The Eagles, having been the first ones in were now free of their heavy ordnance, reverted to their original purpose — an air superiority fighter. In the forty year history of the F-15, not a single plane had been lost in aerial combat — and this day would pose no exception. Every one of the Iranian defenders that rose to challenge the raiders went down in flames. As in the Dayr az-Zawr raid, the destruction was complete — by the time the raiders had left, the Iranian nuclear program had received a blow the likes of which no one in Iran had dared contemplate: its nuclear program was in tatters and its Air Force had been ravaged.

Ever since the 2008 US presidential election, the Iranians had been boasting of their ability to close the vital Strait of Hormuz should they be attacked by either the Israelis or the United States. The subject of the Iranian nuclear program had gained more and more headlines in the US elections with each presidential candidate promising that they would never allow a nuclear Iran. Said Jalili knew that Iran needed a response and literally everyone expected a response in the strait — after all, the strait was the doorway to the Persian Gulf—their gulf! However, America presented Jalili with a huge problem: the Great Satan was the most powerful empire the world had ever known. They based their Fifth Fleet in Qatar, and while no ships were permanently assigned to the Fifth Fleet, the US maintained a constant presence in the gulf with either an Amphibious Ready Group, a Carrier Battle Group — usually the case — or both. Even if the Israelis were to attack on their own, Iran would still have to contend with that American fleet. He knew that any attempt to close the gulf would be a gamble. Iran had a stockpile of Russian made "Sunburn" anti-ship missiles, but they had never been used in combat and he’d only seen them tested on a stationary target. In addition, once they fired their first salvo, the Americans would have at least a couple airborne warning aircraft up — probably an Air Force AWACS or, more likely, a Navy Hawkeye, or maybe even some of their new Predators, Wraiths, or Reapers, each of the latter three could also be armed — watching for any activity that could even be mistaken for preparations for a missile launch. Once detected, attack aircraft from Al Udeid or a Navy carrier would be on them in seconds leaving little chance to launch a second salvo. Obviously, then, their first shot would possibly be the only one they were going to get, so it needed to be a good one.

However, if these missiles worked as advertised, they could certainly give the US Navy a black eye, and maybe a little bit more. Jalili still remembered the USS Stark incident back in 1987 when an Iraqi fighter fired a couple French made Exocet missiles into the Stark. The frigate did not sink but it was badly damaged and thirty-seven sailors were killed. The Sunburn missile far surpassed the capabilities of the Exocet so just maybe, they could at least make the Americans pay for playing in their pond. One thing was certain: they would not want for targets as the US Navy had both an Amphibious Ready Group and a Carrier Battle Group in the gulf. It would be a gamble but it was one worth taking and, perhaps, they just might get lucky.

Jalili’s real plan, though, used the expected attack in the strait merely as a diversion. His real plan had been in the development stage since clear back in 2008 and Colonel Rafsanjani had advanced this to the point that it could be implemented immediately. Jalili believed that as mighty as the United States was, it had its vulnerabilities. Al Qaeda’s attack on September 11, 2001, demonstrated that the United States was not invulnerable; indeed, those attacks actually exposed a vulnerable side of the United States that was not expected, and many still did not fully recognize. What he needed, Jalili reasoned, was to present to the United States a response they expected to see, and then hit them hard with something totally unexpected. Many a commander had been lulled into a false sense of security by seeing his opponent do exactly as expected, only to find out that his enemy was actually delivering a devastating blow somewhere else that was totally unexpected — and Jalili knew just where to strike, and he would strike with all the force of a mailed fist. First, he would strike — as expected — in the Strait of Hormuz — it would be a gamble, a gambit really, as he fully expected to be sacrificing the best of Iran’s naval and air forces in this, his opening move, but it could pay huge dividends, and, after all, he intended this to be a diversion anyway! The vaunted Quds Force, commanded by Major General Suleimani, would actually deliver the decisive blow with Colonel Ashkan Rafsanjani in the van.