Ohio Class

17

Delta One had reached their objective.

With the ASDS remaining submerged a mile offshore, eight of the sixteen SEALs had egressed through the upper hatch, inflated a pair of rubber ducks — slang for their CRRCs — with silenced electric motors, and slipped ashore within the dune-choked estuary east of the town. Leaving the CRRCs buried on the beach, the site marked by handheld GPS units, Delta One had made the long passage up the nameless river, slipping silently and unseen past the drowsing fishing village of Bandar-e Charak. For the first mile the stream had been deep and clear; they'd followed it easily, swimming along through the shallows, and at times wading. After that, however, the river branched rapidly, fed by three streams that in turn drained a large and marshy area extending in a broad fan shape another three or four miles inland. For another two miles, the SEALs waded through brackish, knee-deep water, and at times were forced to crawl through the noisome muck of salt marsh and swamp, dragging their satchels of equipment behind them.

By the time they left the streambed, at a point determined by GPS, they'd all acquired camouflage more effective than the combat black utilities they all wore — a heavy coating of viscous mud. It made them effectively invisible.

It was also heavy, and slowed them down considerably.

Tangretti was forcibly reminded of his BUD/S training — crawling for hours through mud this thick and this fetid in a field at Coronado until every muscle in his body was one sharp, throbbing ache. At last, however, they emerged from the marsh, crossed a road coming down from the north, and began climbing the flank of Kuh-e Gab, the mountain ridge rising sharply behind the port village of Bandar-e Charak.

Now, four and a half hours after exiting the ASDS, Tangretti lay flat on his belly, studying the objective spread out below him through his night vision goggles. The landscape, shrouded in midnight, was revealed through the NVG in eerie shades of green that presented an image that, if monochromatic, still yielded nearly as much detail as daylight. The Darya-ye complex — the target designated White Scimitar — was huge, much larger than he'd imagined it from the sat photos he'd studied, or even from the images transmitted by Black Stallion's

UAVs.

His hide was 750 feet above sea level, on the top of a barren ridge looking down into a valley cleaving the mountain of Kuh-e Gab above Bandar-e Charak. A dirt road wound up the valley from the southeast; when the valley twisted to the southwest, the road continued straight, vanishing into the canyon wall. No fewer than eight tunnel mouths were visible in that cliffside, massively reinforced with concrete. Tangretti had been in Afghanistan, where tunneling into mountains had been a way of life, first to hide from the Soviets, and then to seek shelter from the Americans and their smart bombs.

The excavated area visible in the planning photographs was actually separate from the tunnel complex area, a large, bulldozed area embracing the mouth of the valley about three-tenths of a mile away, on the desert plain between the mountain and the marshes through which the SEALs had come. The area was enclosed by a high steel-mesh fence topped by razor wire. A number of buildings were still under construction there. The trick was to figure out what those buildings were for.

The entire complex, clearly, was a fortress, guarding access to the valley and to the tunnels in the mountain. There were at least a dozen massive bunkers scattered over fifty acres, along with what looked like mounts for antiaircraft guns and surface-to-air missiles. Tangretti counted thirty-seven heavy army trucks, and a number of civilian rigs as well, including five tractor-trailers. There were soldiers everywhere, in front of the main gate, patrolling the fence inside and out, moving about inside the fenced compound, and coming and going up the half-mile canyon road to those enigmatic tunnel entrances into the mountain's interior.

Illumination was provided by several streetlights— dazzlingly bright through his night vision optics — and a searchlight in a tower that swept the sand and gravel outside the fence perimeter. The Iranians even had a tank — an old Russian T-72, squatting in one corner of the compound like some drowsing, prehistoric beast.

Tangretti's experienced eye checked the logistical side of the complex. Water… there was a huge, steel water tank rising on three legs above the main compound. At the bottom were a pair of tank trucks. They probably hauled all of their water in from Bandar Abbas, where the closest desalinization plant was located.

Power. That was a tougher question to answer. One or more of those fortresslike bunkers might house generators, and there were a couple of big, squat POL tanks inside the fenced compound. There was no sign of power lines. Those might all be underground, however. Did the tunnel complex get power from generators in the base at the mouth of the valley? Or did they have underground generators up there?

At his side, Lieutenant Mayhew used his own NVGs to scope out the objective. "Well, Chief," he said after a long moment, "it beats the hell out of me. What do you think the damned thing is?"

"With that kind of security? There're only four options, and it may be some combination of the four, or it may even be all of the above — N, B, C, or a base to launch them from."

"Agreed. Washington's worst nightmare, all wrapped up in one tidy package."

Nuclear, biological, or chemical warfare. The great equalizers when it came to disparities in conventional military forces.

"But we'll need confirmation," Tangretti said. "And for that, we'll have to go down there."

"Like they say, Chief. The only easy day—"

"Was yesterday," Tangretti said, finishing the old SEAL joke. There was no way around it. The SEALs were going to have to penetrate that fortress.

And from the look of things, getting into the place in one piece was going to be a hell of a lot easier than getting out.

The Sultanate of Oman is one of the more enlightened of the nations sharing the Arabian peninsula, a desert kingdom with a middle-income economy, possessing considerable oil and gas reserves but without the wildly excessive lifestyle of their Saudi neighbors. Formerly a British colony, the Sultanate has preserved its longstanding good relations with Great Britain, both politically and militarily. Moderate in both politics and religion, the nation has historically attempted to maintain good relations with all of the Islamic states in the region, including the non-Arab Iranians across the narrow straits.

With just twelve-hundredths of one percent of the land arable, the vast majority of Oman is desert. Nor is all of the country's territory contiguous. The northern tip, the Musand'am peninsula, is separated from the rest of Oman by the federation of seven desert principalities known as the United Arab Emirates. The Omani portion measures just fifty-five miles north to south, and less than twenty-five miles east to west at its widest point. In addition, a tiny Omani enclave, Al Madhah, exists midway between the Musand'am peninsula and Oman proper.

This entire peninsula has long been cherished by other nation-states in the region desiring to control the vital straits through to the Persian Gulf, Iran chief among them. It forms the southern coast of the Straits of Hormuz, and so assumes an exaggerated strategic importance, an importance wildly out of proportion to the actual character of this barren and sandstorm-scoured strip of land.

To defend its territory, the Sultanate of Oman possesses a 36,000-man army — the Royal Armed Forces, or RAF — a 3,000-man Royal Omani Navy, with six warships; and a 3,500-man Royal Omani Air Force flying forty-four combat aircraft, including two squadrons of British-made Jaguars. The RAF itself is well-trained and professional, and includes 6,000 household troops; the 4,500-man Royal Guard of Oman; two Special Forces regiments trained by the British SAS, totaling about 700 men; the 20,000-man Royal Omani Land Forces; and about 3,700 foreign troops, including British advisors. Two tank squadrons are outfitted with U.S. M60 tanks and British Chieftains — a total of perhaps 150 tanks. In addition, the Musand'am peninsula is patrolled by a rifle company of tribal militia — the Musand'am Security Force.

The seven emirates of the UAE are also British-trained and equipped, with an army numbering about 46,000 men, with 335 tanks, 800 APCs, 425 pieces of artillery, 55 aircraft, and 22 ships.

Across the straits, Iran possesses two side-by-side military establishments, the regular army and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC — the infamous Pasdaran. Of the two, the regular military is by far the stronger and better equipped, possessing some 400,000 active-duty personnel. The IRGC, however, had assumed a key importance within Tehran's theocracy as guardians of the Revolution and caretakers of the military's Islamic purity. In addition, the IRGC was responsible for selecting and indoctrinating officers for the regular army as well as the Pasdaran.

Both the regular military and the IRGC combined army, navy, and air force units. The IRGC numbered about 120,000 men in all. Its navy included ten brand-new Chinese Huodong fast-attack craft armed with antiship missiles, perhaps a hundred smaller boats, shore-based antiship missiles, and a large combat swimmer force.

The Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s had largely gutted Iran's military. Much of their equipment — in particular combat aircraft and warships — had been provided by the United States during the reign of the Shah, and with Washington's embargo against Revolutionary Iran, most planes and ships were soon rendered useless by the lack of spares and trained personnel. Over the next two decades, Tehran had aggressively sought to rebuild her military through arms purchases from other nations, including 104 T-72 tanks from Poland; 422 T-72s from Russia; 413 BMP-2 Infantry Fighting Vehicles from Russia; SA-2, SA-5, and SDA-6 surface-to-air missiles from Russia and China; 106 artillery pieces from China; MI-17 helicopters, SU-24 strike aircraft, and MiG-29 fighters from Russia; and older F-7 fighters from China. By the early years of the twenty-first century, Iran's combined military arms included 1,500 tanks, 1,500 APCs, 2,000 pieces of artillery, 220 aircraft, and 30 warships.

Although impressive on paper, a side-by-side assessment of Iran's military with those of its neighbors didn't tell the whole story. Most observers agreed that Iran's offensive military capabilities were weak to the point of impotence. Iran could close the straits temporarily, at least — using a combination of antiship missiles, small attack boats, mines, and her submarine force. More to the point, however, was the key question: why? Closing the straits would hurt Iran at least as much as it hurt other nations dependent on the flow of petroleum from the Gulf. After two decades of war and international isolation, Iran's economy was all but bankrupt, and she depended on the world oil market for survival. Besides, the United States — in particular the U.S. Fifth Fleet based at Manama — could be counted on to apply whatever force was necessary to reopen the straits. Large as Iran's armed forces were, the country could not stand up to a direct conventional military confrontation with the United States.

And so many observers worldwide had discounted the latest round of posturing and saber-rattling coming out of Tehran. Iran had threatened to close the straits before, and nothing had come of it, and so the simultaneous naval landings at Kumsar, al-Khasab, and Bukha, down the western coast of the Musand'am peninsula, caught the international community totally by surprise.

Iranian strike fighters hit first, screaming across the Straits of Hormuz at wave-skimming altitude from marshaling circles off Bandar Abbas, targeting the tiny Omani military base at al-Khasab, and also swinging out over the Gulf of Oman to hit larger bases within Oman proper, at Suhar, al-Khabura, and the capital at Muscat. Their targets were radar installations, SAM sites, and aircraft parked on the ground.

While the bombs and missiles were still falling, a fleet of Iranian CH-47 Chinook helicopters — relics of days when the Americans had poured military arms and equipment into the Shah's Iran as a bulwark against the Soviets — lifted off from Bandar Abbas and Qeshm Island and turned south, clattering low across the straits. Iranian Special Forces commandos swarmed down the lowered cargo ramps at Kumsar, a tiny fishing port at the very northern tip of the peninsula. The rest touched down at the only airfield on Omani Musand'am, at the principle city of al-Khasab. Farther down the western coast, at Bukha, naval troops emerged from a freighter that had arrived at the dockside late the evening before, seizing the port and holding it until reinforcements could arrive.

The first ultimatum was issued from Tehran an hour later.

In Ohio's Combat Center, Stewart and the two SEAL officers were gathered around the electronic plot table that took up much of the compartment's space. At the moment, the plot displayed a highly detailed satellite image of Objective White Scimitar, overlaid by lines and geometric shapes rendered in colored markers that showed the position of Delta One, and of various features of the Iranian military base as relayed back by the SEALs. On the forward bulkhead, a large TV monitor currently showed a low-light-optics view of the tunnel mouths. The SEALs had a camera trained on the tunnel entrance, and were transmitting back to the Ohio in real-time.

A radioman entered the Combat Center. "Flash urgent, Captain," he said, handing him the sheet. Stewart read it through twice, as if to wring every possible drop of information from the sparse, almost cryptic words.

Stewart passed the sheet to Drake. "Iran has invaded Oman," he told the others as Drake read. He kept his voice emotionless, masking the bounding excitement he felt. "Less than an hour ago. Started with an all-out air strike. Caught most of the Omani planes on the ground. Then they sent in their Special Forces on helicopters."

Wolfe's brow creased. "They can't invade the whole country by helicopter," he said. "They don't have the logistical base for something that ambitious."

"Apparently, their first target was al-Khasab Airport." He turned to the satellite map displayed on the plot table, keyed in a set of coordinates on the console, and brought up another satellite map, this one showing the Straits of Hormuz and the north-thrusting spike of the Musand'am peninsula. "Here. Apparently there was a sharp firefight with the militia security troops stationed there, but once they had the airstrip, they could start ferrying troops across on C-130s."

The others studied the map. The Musand'am peninsula resembled a left hand with mangled fingers, held palm up. The fingers were represented by a tangle of four smaller peninsulas, all rugged, mountainous desert, twisting north into the Straits of Hormuz from the end of a single, narrow, S-shaped causeway less than a mile wide; the thumb was blunt and straight. The port of al-Khasab was located at the base of the thumb and fingers, with the single-strip, 2,500-yard runway inland.

"There're only two main roads on the whole peninsula," Drake observed. "Along here, down the middle… and over here on the coast." He pointed them out, one a twisting, looping line running south from al-Khasab along ridgetops and crests for over thirty miles before turning west to enter the UAE near Ra's al-Khaymah, and the second hugging the coast counterclockwise from al-Khasab, south through Bukha, and on into the United Arab Emirates at Ash Sha'm. "And that's damned rugged terrain in there. It won't be hard to contain the bastards. All the UAE needs to do is block those two roads."

"Works both ways, sir," Wolfe pointed out. "If they secure the main towns along the Musand'am coastline, it'll be easy for them to keep others from coming in."

"Have they hit the UAE yet?" Drake wanted to know.

"Apparently not," Stewart replied. He nodded at the paper in Drake's hand. "That's all we have so far.

Maybe all they want is the Musand'am peninsula. They might figure that if they have that, they have all they need to completely control the straits."

"They've got to know Washington's not just going to let this pass," Drake said. "Fifth Fleet and CENTCOM are going to come down on them like Desert fucking Storm."

"Maybe. For right now, we need to plan for contingencies. We're less than fifty miles from the Iranian naval air base on Qeshm, and a hundred from Bandar Abbas. If we thought the straits were busy over the past couple of days, it's nothing compared to what it's going to be like now. The whole Iranian navy is going to be concentrated in this area — mostly supporting their invasion, but also looking for us."

"What are you proposing?"

"Every submariner's first line of defense, Commander. We go deep, and we hide."

Knowing that they could not hope to achieve a permanent conventional superiority over either the neighboring Gulf states or the hated American military presence in the area, the Tehran regime had for years focused heavily on nonconventional solutions to their problem — the disparity in reach and in destructive potential between Iran's military forces and those of the West. To that end, and for almost two decades now, they'd made their NBC warfare programs their top priority.

Nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons were truly the great equalizers of modern warfare. Because of their sensitive nature politically, all nonconventional warfare efforts came under the direction of the IRGC — the Revolutionary Guard — and, therefore of the Council of Guardians and the Supreme Leader.

Despite appalling economic conditions, exacerbated by two and a half decades of trade sanctions imposed by the West, Iran had managed to stockpile several hundred tons of chemical weapons, including nerve, blister, choking, and blood agents. Weaponry included artillery rounds and bombs, as well as short- to medium-range missiles capable of striking targets across the Persian Gulf. Iran had signed and ratified the UN's Chemical Weapons Convention of 1992, a pact that obligated Tehran to destroy its chemical weapons stocks within ten years. Signatory to the treaty or not, Tehran was not about to surrender its strategic deterrent when its old enemy, Iraq, had chemical weapons, and in the 1980s had demonstrated their willingness to use them.

Iran also possessed biological weapons — in particular anthrax and botulin toxin. As with other nation-states that had pursued this research, they faced serious problems in disseminating biological agents. Their options, essentially, were through terrorist saboteurs, through sprays directed from ships or aircraft, or in missile warheads. The technical problems in delivering such warheads, however, were considerable, and no one — including the Iranian military — knew how successful such an attack would be. Despite this, some within the Iranian military felt bacteriological warfare was Iran's best hope if things came to war with the West, a cheap and effective means of potentially inflicting the same kind of casualties as a low-yield nuclear strike, and with no means of protecting against it.

The key ingredient in Iran's deterrent stockpile, of course, was her potential nuclear capability, and the promise of acquiring a workable nuclear device. Most observers believed that Iran was within two years of producing such a weapon, once she acquired the necessary fissionable material.

For some time now Iran had attempted to acquire that material, or the means of producing it. Tehran was also signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and had repeatedly pledged that its interest in developing nuclear power was solely to support its efforts to generate electricity for its population and civilian industry.

With its civilian nuclear power program still in a rudimentary state, however, Iran had repeatedly attempted to gain access to the technology that would enable them to build power plants, but which would also give them the ability to build nuclear weapons. During the past decade, Iran had diverted enriched uranium from a poorly guarded facility in Kazakhstan; research reactors from Argentina, India, China, and Russia; full-scale nuclear power plants from Russia and China; gas centrifuge equipment and technology from Germany and Switzerland; a gas centrifuge enrichment plant from Russia; uranium conversion plants from Russia and from China; and a laser enrichment plant from Russia.

All of these attempts were discovered by the West, and all were thwarted by a combination of U.S. diplomatic efforts and political pressure… all known attempts, at any rate. Covert efforts had continued worldwide, and most outside observers believed that Iran had managed to acquire at least small amounts of both plutonium and enriched uranium, enough to build a handful of devices, at least. As far back as 1999 an Iranian student in Sweden had been caught trying to smuggle thyratrons to Iran — complex bits of technology that could have applications to civilian research… but were also vital in the manufacture of nuclear triggers.

So far, Pakistan was the world's only nuclear Islamic state, and they were ostensibly, if not publicly, in America's pocket. Iran was determined, at any cost, to develop nuclear weapons technology, and they were very, very close.

They were so close, in fact, that they already had five warheads, though no one outside of a handful of military and government leaders and the technicians themselves knew about it. They'd not advertised the fact, nor had they exploded a device to demonstrate their capability, for several important reasons.

First, when the West became convinced that Iran possessed nukes, they would act. On that, Tehran had no doubt. And they might act before Iran had the chance to develop the other vital component of a nuclear weapon besides the warhead itself — a means to deliver it.

Iran possessed a number of potential delivery systems. The background of her missile force consisted of some three hundred Shahab-1 and one hundred Shahab-2 missiles purchased from North Korea; about two hundred CSS-8 missiles from China; and a precious handful of Shahab-3 systems, which had been manufactured in Iran. All of these save the last were short-range missiles similar to the infamous Iraqi Scuds. The Shahab-1 had a range of two hundred miles, the Shahab-2 of just over three hundred, just barely enough to reach across the Gulf at most points. The Chinese missiles had a range of less than a hundred miles, which made them useless for anything but attacks against Iraq or the very closest parts of Oman and the UAE; with a sufficiently powerful warhead, though, the CSS-8 could be used to close the Straits of Hormuz, or to destroy concentrations of U.S. warships off the Iranian coast. The Shahab-3 had a more respectable range of eight hundred miles, which put Israel, eastern Turkey, and most of Saudi Arabia within reach.

In 2004, Iran had successfully tested the Shahab-4, a home-grown intermediate-range ballistic missile with a declared range of 1,200 miles, far enough to strike Israel, most of Turkey, or any part of the Arabian peninsula, and with far greater accuracy than the Shahab-3. Reportedly, they were having technical difficulties with the Shahab-5, which was expected to be an intermediate-range missile capable of hitting targets over 6,200 miles distant; if launched from the northernmost portions of Iran, the Shahab-5 might just reach much of the U.S. eastern seaboard, possibly even Washington, D.C. At the very least, the Shahab-5 could strike any city in Europe… which might mean that the United States would stand alone in any future confrontation with Iran.

Throughout the past decade, however, Iran remained dependent on foreign technology — from Russia, China, and especially on North Korea, which alone could supply the actual rocket motor assembly for the Shahab series. That made her vulnerable in the event of war: to blockade, and to being unable to replenish her means of delivery.

Both the planners for Operation Bold Fire and the senior officials within the Tehran government had been divided on the question of whether to wait on the invasion of the Musand'am peninsula until the facility at Darya-ye was complete. If they did wait, Defense Minister Admiral Mehdi Baba-Janzadeh and his supporters had argued, Iran would be in an ideal position to hold the Americans at bay simply by the threat of nuclear, chemical, or bacteriological attack. The Ayatollah

Khamenei and his supporters, however, had pointed out — accurately — that Iraq's perceived NBC capabilities had not deterred either Desert Storm or the American invasion in 2003. Iran's nuclear force could not be expected, therefore, to deter an American invasion of Iran.

In fact, the closer Iran got to being able to deploy weapons of mass destruction, the more likely was a preemptive strike by either the United States or, conceivably, by Israel. All remembered well Israel's air strike against the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981.

In the end Khamenei and his people had won the argument… in large part because of the failed American penetration of the Darya-ye complex just a few weeks before. Clearly, the Americans suspected the nature of the facility beneath Kuh-e Gab, and they would continue to try to learn its secrets. If Iran actually dared use the weapons stored and assembled there, the Americans would retaliate in kind — of that there could be no doubt — and that would be an economic and political disaster for the nation, one which the Tehran government knew it would not survive.

Better, they argued, to launch Bold Fire while relying purely on conventional weapons. If America could be goaded into appearing to be the aggressor, Iran would have a political victory without needing to fire another shot; in fact, there was a better-than-even chance that the Americans would back down entirely. It was an election year in the United States, after all, and the voters were wary of another long and bloody engagement, such as the long-running insurrection by Iraqi Sunni fundamentalists. Give them a bloody nose, and they might pull out. If they fought back, Iran could hold out long enough for the Islamic world to rally to her side.

And there were those five warheads at Kuh-e Gab, to use as an absolute last-ditch resort. Constructed of plutonium acquired from former Soviet military personnel in Kazakhstan and Ukraine, using triggers smuggled in from North Korea and from Pakistan, the mere suspicion that they existed served as some measure of deterrence against a U.S. invasion, the warning message of Iraq notwithstanding. And attacking before the special weapons facility was completed gave them a measure of surprise. If the Americans suspected what was under Kuh-e Gab, they would expect Iran to hold its plans until the facility was fully operational.

In fact, Darya-ye was functional, though some of the defensive systems were still being assembled; functional enough that the IRGC could begin the final assembly of at least five weapons delivery systems there.

What they didn't know was that the U.S. Navy SEALs were in the hills three hundred feet above the tunnel entrances to the complex, watching with considerable interest, and reporting everything by satellite to the USGN Ohio and to Washington.

Things were coming to a head faster than anyone had realized.