Ohio Class

24

It had taken time for the orders to reach their respective destinations, time to prepare the weapons, to fuel them, to double-check their navigational programming. At 0715 hours, however, the first Iranian missile, a Shahab-2, rose along its vertical launch rail at the back of a Russian-made GAZ truck hidden in a ravine in the Kuh-e Namak, on the coast southeast of Bandar-e Charak, and climbed steadily and with rapidly increasing speed into the brilliant early morning light. The second missile launched seconds later from a trailer outside of Khonz, deep in the fastnesses of the Zagros Mountains.

The launches were duly noted by a U.S. military reconnaissance satellite some 350 miles above the Indian Ocean, and the information flashed back to a processing center in northern Virginia, then to the Pentagon.

The launches were also detected by U.S. assets in the Persian Gulf theater of operations, by two Aegis missile cruisers in the Gulf, and by an Air Force AWACS orbiting above it on sentry duty. Before the missiles reached apogee above the Gulf, the alert had been flashed to commands throughout the Fifth Fleet.

And throughout the region, personnel already on high alert scrambled for their stations.

"I think, gentlemen, that we've made it." This time, he let them cheer. When Shea started to say something, he touched his exec's shoulder. "Let them."

"Yes, sir."

For almost an hour they'd crept southward, hugging the sea bottom as Hawking and his infernal device— the nickname had caught hold and spread among Ohio's crew — had zigzagged back and forth between Ohio and her pursuers, blasting away with M.C. Hammer's nineties hit at full volume. Ohio's sonar department could no longer pick out individual Iranian ships… but if that was so, the Iranians could no longer pick up the Ohio.

You can't touch this!

For the past thirty minutes the Manta had been moving more and more sluggishly, its power almost completely depleted. Hawking had managed to switch off most of the alarms — there was nothing more he could do about any of them — and reconciled himself to the fact that he was not going to be able to get back on board the Ohio. He did not have the power, nor did he have the control. It would be like trying to bring an F/A-18 Hornet in for a trap on a carrier, engine gone and hydraulics frozen — a sure recipe for disaster on the flight deck.

God he was sick of that song! His ears were ringing, and he was beginning to think that if he got out of this, he was going to have permanent hearing damage. But he would keep it going, cranked up to full, for as long as he could.

It seemed to be working. The Iranians hadn't closed with them, apparently hadn't been able to fire at them. The blaring noise from "You Can't Touch This" had created a huge dead zone within which Iranian sonar simply couldn't get a lock.

With a dwindling whine behind the thumping beat of the music, the Manta's engine dead, the fighter sub began drifting toward the sea floor.

It was time to punch out. Lifting a safety cap, he pressed the button beneath, arming the cockpit jettison.

Then he grabbed the red-and-white-striped ejection lever on the deck between his feet — a fair analogue for the eject handle in a fighter cockpit, and pulled. Nothing happened.

He pulled again, worried now. And still no response.

Hawking checked the constellation of warning lights on his console, hit a reset, and checked again. Damn it, what was the problem with this thing?

There it was. He hadn't noticed it with all the other damage and malfunction warnings. The cockpit jettison failure light was lit. Somehow — probably during that first near-miss north of Forur Island — the mechanism had been jammed.

He was stuck.

He settled to the sea bed relatively gently. It was dark — the depth here was 135 feet — but he could make out mud swirling up from the bottom.

For a long moment Hawking tried to control the pounding in his chest, the rasp of his breathing. Panic hammered at him from some dark corner of his mind— terror of close spaces, of being helpless, of being in the dark.

The last thing to go was electrical power for his cockpit. The lights faded away and M.C. Hammer's voice drawled to an uncertain halt. In silence and in darkness, the Manta rested on the sea bottom, its pilot now encased in a water-shrouded tomb.

Trapped.

Over the past five minutes three more Shahab-2 ballistic missiles had roared into the early morning skies above Iran, rising to a height of several miles, then pitching over on trajectories ranging from south to almost due west, depending on their launch point. There were now five missiles in the air, and more were nearing readiness on the ground.

Target analyses conducted both in Washington and in the Gulf all drew conclusions based on the evidence of the contrails now scratching their way across the sky over the Gulf. The incoming missiles all were targeting a relatively small area within the Gulf of Bahrain.

The local missile defenses were already on full alert.

For some time now the United States and Israel had worked on joint exercises against just this sort of attack. Code-named Juniper Arrow, they were designed to train personnel and test equipment in antimissile defenses against an adversary to the east that, though identified only as "Red," just happened to speak Farsi. Those exercises had linked Israel's Arrow-2 system, which was designed to intercept incoming missiles at high altitudes in order to reduce the fallout danger from nuclear warheads, and U.S. Patriot missile batteries, designed to intercept missiles at lower altitudes, a second line of defense. Coordination was handled by a U.S. Aegis missile cruiser in the Gulf, which also possessed antimissile systems.

Juniper Arrow had also served as a political weapon, a means of announcing to other nations in the region the fact that America and Israel possessed antiballistic missile capability, and that attacks using such weapons, even missiles carrying nuclear warheads, were by no means assured of success.

That uncertainty was, itself, an important weapon in modern warfare; if the other fellow might be able to survive the initial attack, that fact in itself was a strong deterrent.

And in warfare nothing is certain.

Unfortunately, people being people, deterrence at times breaks down. As the missiles streaked toward Bahrain, members of Iran's religious leadership were on live television, announcing the fact that America's unwanted presence was now being cleansed from the Persian Gulf, that Iran was standing against the Great Satan, that Shi'ite Iran was prepared to carry the green banner of Islam in the name of all who honored the Prophet.

"We've lost all contact with Commander Hawking, sir," Caswell reported. "He's stopped transmitting, and we're not getting anything on active."

"Can you pinpoint where you lost him?"

"Approximately, sir. But only very approximately."

"Keep on it. I want him found."

"Aye, sir."

"What do you think happened?" Shea asked.

"I don't know. We're clear of Iranian ASW activity. But I suppose a helicopter or something could have spotted him."

"No explosions."

"No." Stewart thought for a moment. "He might have suffered damage earlier. Or just pushed the sub-fighter beyond its limits. This was its first use in combat. Combat, real combat, always pushes new systems to their absolute limits… and beyond."

"People, too."

"Yes. People, too."

"Doesn't that thing have an escape pod, or something?"

"It's designed to release the cockpit module and let it float to the surface. It has an automatic distress beacon. We'll find it. Diving Officer! Bring us to periscope depth."

"Come to periscope depth, aye aye."

Stewart walked to the periscope dais. "We'll stick our mast up for a quick listen, see if we can pick up his beacon. He can't be more than a mile or so away."

During the first Gulf War, Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, fired seventy-seven ballistic missiles at Saudi Arabia and at Israel during the space of fifty-six days. The weapon he used was a modification of the Russian Scud, renamed the al-Hussein, which despite design changes remained a primitive device little changed from the V-2 terror weapons launched by the Nazis against Great Britain during WWII.

During that conflict, a great deal of notoriety descended on the U.S. Patriot missile system. Initially, that notoriety was positive in tone, and the system was hailed as "the defender of U.S. troops in the Gulf." Later, however, that image changed.

The Patriot missile had originally been designed in the 1970s strictly as an antiaircraft weapon. In the 1980s it was modified to also provide limited defense against short-range ballistic missiles, such as the Scud. It was not actually tested in combat until the first Gulf War in 1991.

A Patriot missile is 7.4 feet long and propelled by a single-stage solid fuel motor that accelerates it to speeds of around Mach 3 and out to a range of forty-three miles. The missile itself weighs 2,200 pounds, which includes a two-hundred-pound high-explosive warhead triggered by a proximity fuse. When the warhead detonates, shrapnel tears through the target like a blast from a shotgun, shredding guidance and other delicate systems. Guidance was carried out entirely from the ground, through a system called TVM, or Track Via Missile. Radar and high-speed computers tracked the missile and redirected it in flight to intercept the target.

Initially, the U.S. Army claimed a success rate against Saddam's missiles of eighty percent over Saudi Arabia and fifty percent over Israel. Later, however, as data from the conflict was reviewed, those claims were scaled back to seventy and forty percent.

In fact, the system probably didn't even perform that well.

Much of the problem was due to the fact that Iraq's redesign of the original Russian Scud design, which had increased the weapon's speed, had also weakened its structure. Al-Hussein missiles tended to break up as they reentered the atmosphere in the descent phase of their trajectory, which provided Patriot tracking radars with not a single target, but many, tumbling out of control. In some cases the detonation of Patriot warheads had helped break up the Iraqi missiles and push the fragments off-course.

Scuds, however, were already extremely limited in terms of their precise targeting ability. Guided by a primitive gyroscopic navigation system, they had a CEP of three kilometers. The CEP defined the radius of the area within which an incoming missile had a fifty-percent chance of striking. This made them effective as terror weapons aimed at cities, but virtually useless against small targets such as airfields or ships. Being blown off-course by a Patriot missile had little effect on whether they hit a specific target, since their fall was almost totally random in the first place. Some critics claimed that the Patriot defenses actually made the damage inflicted against Israel worse.

By the beginning of the new millennium, however, things were changing rapidly in the field. Iran's missile program, aided by technology provided by China, North Korea, and Russia, had reduced the CEP of the Shahab series of ballistic missiles to something less than one kilometer. This was still too large an area to allow pinpoint targeting of something like an individual ship, but it did encourage Iran's military planners to think in terms of a barrage of such missiles, all falling within a single, small area. One missile had a fifty-fifty chance of hitting a target a mile across. With ten missiles falling in that area, or twenty, or a hundred, the odds were that something important was going to be hit.

But Patriot technology had improved in the past decade as well. Stung by criticism of the Patriot's performance in 1991, the Army and its two Patriot subcontractors, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, began working to improve the system's accuracy and its reliability.

The PAC-2, the acronym standing for Patriot Advanced Capability, was a far more accurate missile, with a flight speed of Mach 5 and much greater range.

By 2001, however, PAC-3 was beginning to come online. PAC-3 was a much smaller missile — a canister containing four could be loaded into the launch tube of a single PAC-2—weighing about seven hundred pounds. It had a velocity of Mach 5, and a special attitude-control maneuvering system allowing in-flight guidance, coupled with an on-board inertial/active millimeter-wave radar for its terminal homing phase. Unlike earlier Patriots, the PAC-3 was designed with hit-to-kill capability, though it also possessed proximity fusing in case it missed. The warhead consisted of 160 pounds of high explosives as a "lethality enhancer," but the kinetic energy of a missile hitting the target directly at Mach 5 would, it was hoped, detonate the incoming missile or, at the least, so completely fragment it that its warhead would be neutralized.

As five Iranian missiles descended on the northern end of the island of Bahrain, PAC-3 batteries surrounding the grounds of the U.S. CENTCOM headquarters at Juffair, five miles southeast of the Bahrain capital of Manama, came to life, the launch tubes swiveling automatically to face the incoming threat.

A dozen missiles streaked into the sky.

"Control Room, Comm."

"Control Room," Stewart said, pulling his face back from the periscope eyepiece. "Go ahead."

"Sir, we're not picking up Commander Hawking's beacon. There's nothing on the emergency frequencies."

Damn…

"But a priority flash is coming in by satellite. Urgent, and it's flagged 'new orders.' There's a live visual component, sir."

"Patch it through."

"Aye aye, sir."

The main bridge television monitor was showing the view through Ohio's periscope, but it changed now to show the craggy face of Captain Thomas Garrett.

"Good evening, Captain," Garrett said. "Or… I guess for you, it's good morning."

"Good morning, sir."

"We've been receiving your intel packages. Good work… and congratulations on a mission well done."

"Thank you, sir." But Stewart knew that Garrett wouldn't be using satellite communications for a realtime conversation just to congratulate him.

"Captain, you are being assigned an urgent new mission, one of the absolute highest priority. Several minutes ago one of our satellites and an AWACS over the Gulf detected a mass launch of ballistic missiles from southern Iran. Those missiles are falling on Fifth Fleet headquarters as we speak."

"Jesus… "

"Our Patriot batteries are engaging them. We don't yet know how that will go.

"Your orders are to launch an immediate retaliation against Iran. Your principle targets will be identified missile batteries and mobile launchers… including, I might add, the mobile launchers some of your SEALs observed last night.

"Your targets also include Iranian radar and air defense assets along the coast, their port facilities in Bandar Abbas, several other military targets in the Bandar

Abbas region, and certain other targets of strategic importance.

"However, your primary target, with absolute top priority, is the facility code-named White Scimitar, near Bandar-e Charak, which your SEALs also investigated last night.

"We've been going over all of the data, from satellites and from your SEAL reconnaissance. We are uploading GPS coordinates and targeting data to your weapons system computer now, along with all necessary launch codes and authorizations. Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir."

"We will be putting together an appropriate military response using other assets in the region, but for now, you, Captain, are the sharp end of the sword. Our antimissile capabilities are limited simply in the number of PAC-3 assets we've been able to deploy to Bahrain. The more Iranian missile launchers you can knock out in the next few minutes, the more of our forces will survive in order to retaliate."

"Sir… is there any evidence that the Iranians have initiated NBC warfare?"

"Not yet." Garrett's voice was grim. "We won't know for a while. But… that's why you must knock out White Scimitar as well. Before they move the weapons stored there. Before they decide to use them. Understood?"

"Yes, sir."

"Captain, carry out your orders."

"Aye aye, sir."

The control room remained silent for a long moment. Every man there had heard the orders and knew what was at stake.

"Weapons Officer," Stewart ordered. "Prepare T-LAMs for launch."

"Prepare T-LAMs for launch. Aye aye, sir." Commander Hawking, if he was still alive, would have to wait.

The SSGN Ohio had a war to fight.

Hawking had determined that he had about an hour left to live. He had that much air left in his reserve tank, which he was already breathing through his mask.

Damn it, Ohio should have realized he'd fallen behind. They'd made it past the Iranian ASW cordon. Why hadn't Ohio swung back to find him and pick him up?

One reason, he concluded, was the fact that he wasn't bobbing around on the surface right now in his cockpit module, broadcasting an emergency distress signal. And the Manta's designers had not included a sonar transponder to pinpoint the sunken fighter sub's position.

Well, he could remedy that. Reaching down, he pulled his survival knife from its sheath. With the rounded end of the handle, he began pounding on the canopy above his head. Thumpthumpthump. Thump-thump-thump. Thumpthumpthump.

Three fast, three slow, three fast. SOS.

He hoped someone was out there listening.

It had taken several minutes to download the targeting data from the TMPC, or Theater Mission Planning Center, at Norfolk, Virginia. Now, however, the missile tube hatches, aligned in two long rows behind the ASDS on Ohio's aft deck, were swinging open, two by two.

"Weapons Officer," Stewart said quietly. "Prosecute the attack."

"Prosecute attack, aye aye, sir."

The W.O. pressed a button on the BSY-1 Weapons System console.

The Tomahawk Land Attack Missile — TLAM — was Ohio's primary weapon, replacing the Trident nukes she'd originally been designed to carry. The first missile burst upward out of the water, rocket engine firing; Stewart and the entire control room crew watched through the periscope's link with the TV monitor.

For the first few seconds of flight the missile rose swiftly on its rocket booster. Then the booster fell away, the wings and tail deployed, the turbofan intake opened, and the weapon was converted in mid-flight into an air-breathing cruise missile. Skimming the wave tops at an altitude of just a hundred feet, the Tomahawk flew north at 500 knots.

Thirty seconds later the second missile left Ohio's number three launch tube.

Ohio's war against Iran had now truly begun.

Normally, a Tomahawk strike of this scale against a hostile country would have been carefully timed so that all missiles arrived over their respective targets at about the same time. The missiles would also be deployed in at least two successive waves, the first to destroy radars and communications centers, the second to hit the targets defended by those systems.

In this case, however, the coordination of the strike was less important than its urgency. Bahrain was under sustained ballistic missile attack. The Shahab launchers— and White Scimitar — had the highest attack priority.

Following Terrain Contour Mapping programming, or Tercom, the first T-LAM went feet-dry over the Iranian coast near Kuh-e Namak, homing on a cluster of GAZ launchers identified by the SEALs of Delta Two. The terminal phase of its flight was controlled by a relatively new guidance system called Digital Scene Matching, or DSMAC, matching elements of the terrain as viewed through a camera in the T-LAM's nose with images stored in memory. Missile launchers, their launch rails already elevated to the vertical, surrounded by fueling and logistical vehicles, were relatively easy to find and identify.

The first T-LAM was of the variant known as T-LAM-D. Rather than the half-ton high explosive warhead of the conventional T-LAM-C, it carried a dispenser holding 166 BLU-97/B submunitions. Panels on either side of the Tomahawk blew out, and as it streaked low across the valley sheltering the Iranian missile launchers, it released a cloud of high-explosive bomblets. These had been designed to take out aircraft on runways by shredding their thin skins and vulnerable fuel tanks with clouds of shrapnel blasting down out of the air overhead, but they worked equally well against ground vehicles, personnel, and other soft targets.

Ballistic missiles, with their need to keep structural weight low in favor of higher fuel and payload weights, have no armor to speak of and were particularly vulnerable to this type of attack. Fuel and liquid oxygen tanks ruptured, as did the tanks of nearby fuel trucks. Delicate electronics and navigational systems were damaged, and guidance stabilizers punctured. It took remarkably little to damage a missile enough to prevent its launch.

More and more submarine-launched T-LAMs were now in the air. Two minutes after the first strike over Kuh-e Narak, a second T-LAM arrived, and then a third. Radar vans parked on a nearby hilltop were destroyed, as was a convoy of fuel trucks.

And still the cruise missiles kept coming.

At White Scimitar, in the valley above Bandar-e Charak, a T-LAM flew up the valley from the east, bypassing the main base and zeroing in on the leftmost of the eight tunnel entrances. The first missile was carrying special penetrator munitions to rip open the steel doors. The second T-LAM, arriving thirty seconds after the penetrator round, flew through the smoking hole and into the garage-sized tunnel standing open beyond. Half a ton of conventional high explosives lifted a portion of the mountain from inside and brought it smashing down in a fury of destruction.

The main base was taken out later by a T-LAM-D. For thirty minutes, however, missile after missile slammed into the tunnel complex higher up the valley, first opening, then sealing, the tunnels into the face of the cliff.

Somewhere beneath the crumbled face of a mountain lay Iran's first five nuclear warheads.

For her first strike, Ohio launched eighty-two T-LAMs in various configurations, following the operational profile downloaded from the TMPC. Six of these failed in one way or another; two remained in their launch tubes, three lost guidance en route to their targets, and one was shot down by antiaircraft batteries outside of Bandar Abbas.

Within thirty minutes Iran's ballistic missile launch infrastructure throughout the southern district had been crippled, and much of their conventional military had been badly hurt as well.

As for Iran's attack on the Fifth Fleet, by the time the T-LAMs began falling on the launch vehicles, twelve more Shahab-2 missiles were airborne and heading south. The attack would have been more successful had the Iranians been able to launch a larger number of missiles simultaneously, but schedules were still dependent on too many variables — including both luck and simple delays in communications — and so Iran's missile salvo was somewhat ragged.

Of seventeen missiles put into the air, twelve were intercepted by PAC-3 counterstrikes and destroyed several miles out at sea. Another was hit by a salvo of Standard Missile launches from the Aegis Cruiser Antietam, operating off Manama.

Of the remaining four, three missed their CEP of six hundred yards by a wide — in two cases a very wide— margin, two coming down in the sea, and the third in the Saudi desert fifty miles to the southwest.

The final Shahab missile survived a near miss by two Patriot PAC-3s, breaking into pieces that sprayed down across northern Bahrain. The warhead, as it happened, remained intact, striking a dock in Juffair. The detonation of a ton of high explosives leveled three warehouses and a number of smaller buildings. Fragments struck the USS Carl Vinson, a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier in the process of getting under way several hundred yards from the blast. Damage to the carrier was light, and there were no casualties.

Luck — or perhaps the divine protection of Allah— were riding this time with the U.S. Navy.

His arm was beyond tired, but Hawking kept hammering out his SOS. He was very nearly out of air anyway. It wouldn't be much longer now.

He was startled, then, when he heard a loud and urgent thumping on the Manta's canopy. Opening his eyes and looking up, he saw the face of a diver, encased in a swim mask, looking down at him.

Saved…

Using emergency manual controls on the exterior of the Manta, the two SEALs cracked his canopy, allowing the cockpit to flood. Hawking gulped down a last, thin breath and held it, fighting against panic as the water swiftly rose. Seconds later the canopy opened wide and one of the SEALs pressed a mask against his face. He gulped down a sweet lungful of air. The SEALs helped him unhook his harness and swim free, an emergency air bottle clutched at his side.

On the last of his air, and with the SEALs on either side, he swam twenty yards, not to the Ohio, as he'd expected, but the ASDS, hovering a few feet off the muddy bottom. Hawking wouldn't learn until later that Captain Stewart, during a pause in the T-LAM launch series, had dispatched Mayhew and Tangretti on board the ASDS, using the craft's side-looking sonar to locate the sunken Manta.

What the media would later dub the War of the Missiles, meanwhile, continued.

The pause in the launch process had been to allow satellite reconnaissance of the various targets, and to give Ohio a chance to update the targeting data through her Command and Control System — CCS Tac Mark 2. Initial imaging showed a high degree of success in the first strikes, and also revealed new possible targets.

The second wave of launches began at just past 0815 hours, with Ohio releasing the rest of her T-LAM missiles. She was joined in the attack by the USS Pittsburgh, then on station in the Gulf of Oman outside the Straits of Hormuz. The Pittsburgh, a Flight II boat, carried fifteen T-LAMs in her VLS — Vertical Launch System — tubes, and twelve more that could be fired through her torpedo tubes. Where Ohio's targets were predominantly the launch platforms for the Shahab-2 missiles, Pittsburgh's attentions were directed primarily against naval facilities around Bandar Abbas, and to opening several keyholes within the peirmeter of Iran's air defense radar network. This last was important because U.S. military aircraft were already on the way with their own weapons, including F-117 strike fighters based in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and B-2 long-range bombers en route from Whitman Air Force Base in Missouri.

By the time the first U.S. aircraft arrived in Iranian airspace, there would be little left of her air defense radar or SAM systems.

Four of the first-wave Tomahawks launched from the Ohio remained in the air, en route to their targets. The T-LAM-C had a range of over seven hundred nautical miles. Flying complex paths designed to avoid the Iranian radar net, and hugging the rugged terrain as they crossed the Zagros Mountains, they were aimed at two different targets, which, by a straight-line path, lay 470 and 650 miles to the north. The nearer was an underground site at Esfahan, known to be a center for uranium enrichment.

The farther of the two was a site in downtown Tehran….

Admiral Mehdi Baba-Janzadeh was thinking about messages.

He was sitting in his office on the sixth floor of the Defense Ministry building in downtown Tehran, leaning back in his padded chair and sipping strong tea. What messages, he wondered, had this debacle delivered to the world?

Operation Bold Fire had been intended to deliver a very specific message to the Islamic world in particular. Iran is strong. Iran can defy the hated West. Iran is the new leader of militant world Islam. Iran carries the banner that will unite Islam and bring the West to its knees.

Reports from Bandar Abbas were fragmentary at best, but the mere fact that almost all communications with the south had been interrupted alone delivered a message to Tehran. The strike against the Fifth Fleet had not gone according to plan… and the Americans were striking back. Hard.

Minutes before, Baba-Janzadeh had completed a difficult phone conversation with the Supreme Leader. Surrender now. Minimize the damage, and save what you can. Perhaps you can still head off this nightmare….

The Americans had a longer reach than any of Iran's military leadership had been willing to credit.

The first of the last two T-LAMs, its fuel nearly spent, smashed into the Defense Ministry's eighth floor. The half-ton warhead detonated an instant later, blowing out the entire floor and bringing down the upper half of the structure in a shower of debris.

The second T-LAM struck thirty seconds later, as the avalanche continued, plunging into the crumbling structure at street level and completing the destruction.

Message delivered…