The Disciple

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Jack Colby and his three Special Forces colleagues were sitting in a hide two miles from the entrance to Tunnel Hotel, one of the twenty-five Iranian missile launch sites identified by the Americans. Just now Colby was examining the troops around the tunnel area with an infrared telescope mounted on a tripod. He and his three colleagues had parachuted in two nights ago and worked all night on their hide, which was under a cliff and concealed in front by brush. They were ninety miles and a chain of mountains from the Iraq border.

The soldiers used the satellite network to talk hourly with the CENT-COM controller for Special Forces on the ground in Iran. The controller relayed the message from headquarters, which was that the general and staff believed that tonight was the night, but Jack Colby was already convinced.

Yesterday, during the daylight hours, three army patrols had searched the area with the aid of dogs, no doubt looking for any Special Forces team that might be in the area.

Fortunately the chemicals the team sprinkled around the hide masked their scent from the dogs. Two searchers had actually stood ten feet from the entrance to the hide and pissed on the rocks, but the American team remained undetected.

One team, at another tunnel, had been flushed yesterday and got into a shooting scrape. A helicopter had plucked them out after they had run for twelve miles and twice ambushed their pursuers. This news Colby learned from the CENTCOM controller.

Colby turned the telescope over to one of his mates while he crawled outside for a look around. The wind had definitely eased up, but the air still contained a lot of dust, which made the image in the telescope fuzzy and indistinct.

Maybe the Iranians will postpone their launch, Colby thought. Man, why can’t we have a war in a nice place, with good weather?

When he crawled back into the hide, the man at the binoculars said, “Better take a look, Jack. They’re rolling out a missile.”

Colby glued his eye to the telescope. Adjusted the focus knob a tad… and there it was, big as life: a truck pulling a trailer with a big missile on it. As Colby watched, the truck crept perhaps a hundred yards away from the tunnel entrance and turned ninety degrees, so that the tip of the missile faced southeast and the exhaust was directed well away from the entrance. When the truck came to a halt, half a dozen men who had been following along on foot began lowering mechanical feet on the sides of the bed, to stabilize it.

While this was going on, another truck pulling a missile crept from the tunnel.

It quickly became apparent that only two missiles were going to be launched. “How many missiles do you think are in that tunnel?” one of the soldiers asked Colby.

“I don’t know. Pick a number.”

“Well, at two at a time, these guys are going to be at it a while.”

“Call CENTCOM,” Colby said. “The bastards are really going to do it.”

At the CENTCOM Operations Center in Kuwait, General Martin Lincoln was monitoring reports from his Special Forces teams in Iran and from air force units operating MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper drones over Iran. These unmanned aircraft carried sophisticated sensors, including high-tech video and infrared cameras, the data from which was data-linked via satellite back to the control sites, which saw the data in real time. He was also getting data-linked information from AWACS aircraft aloft over Iraq, the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, and summaries of satellite surveillance, although that data was sometimes hours old.

Unfortunately, the storm in central Iran had played havoc with the drones. The wind had kept all of the ScanEagles, the smallest, unarmed drones, on the ground. Only now were the Predators and Reapers airborne and getting back into position. Still, airborne dirt would degrade their capabilities. General Lincoln also suspected that, at dawn, with clearing weather, the Iranian air force would launch fighters to hunt for and shoot down the larger drones. Ground control interception (GCI) frequencies were being monitored, so he would know if and when the fighters launched.

Finally, he was keeping track of four flights of four F-15E Strike Eagles that had just launched from Balad. These planes were carrying GPS and laser-guided bombs, and they were going to attack northern Iranian missile sites. Their tactical electronic warfare system had been expanded to include the ALQ-199 black boxes, the mystery boxes that Jake Grafton hoped would fool the Iranian antiaircraft missile systems. The men in the planes would soon find out how successful Grafton’s deception operation had been, although they knew nothing about it. General Lincoln, however, did know, and he had his fingers crossed.

Inevitably, the Iranians would get some nukes in the air, and then Lincoln’s forces had to intercept them. The cruise missiles armed with conventional explosives were essentially decoys, since they weren’t very accurate, didn’t pack much of a punch and couldn’t do strategically significant damage even if they hit the military bases where they were aimed. Their purpose, as Grafton had pointed out, was to overload the American defensive system and mask the nukes. The key to a successful defense was to get ordnance on those missile sites as soon as possible after Iran had fired the first shot-and, if possible, to prevent the Iranians from launching a second wave.

Just now Lincoln sat wondering how many nukes would be in the first wave. All of them? One or two? Another unknown in the equation…

Now, as Lincoln received reports from Special Forces teams on the ground and the drone control room in Iraq that missiles were being rolled out and positioned for firing, he used the encrypted voice link to the National Command Center to call the president.

“They are rolling them out,” General Lincoln said. “I expect first launch within minutes.”

The activity at the entrance to the executive bunker in Tehran was frantic. Cars continued to arrive in front of the mosque in the Mosalla Prayer Grounds and disgorge their passengers, who each grabbed a suitcase or bag or child and rushed off toward the entrance, where a knot of soldiers apparently consulted a list and waved them through.

“Looks like folks fighting for lifeboats on the Titanic,” G. W. said.

I looked at my watch. It was pushing two thirty in the morning. Dawn would come about five, and the sun a short time later. I wondered when the bunker was going to be locked down.

“Do you know anything about the executive survival plan?” I asked Davar, who was glued to a set of binoculars. Probably watching for her father and brother, Khurram, to arrive, I figured, although I didn’t ask.

“No,” she said curtly.

“Like how many kids are going in there?” I instantly regretted that remark, but once it was out there was nothing I could do about it.

“I don’t know.” Her voice was flat, unemotional, which irritated me a little, which, I suppose, is why I changed my mind.

“Seen your father?”

She didn’t take her eyes from the binoculars. “Some people arrived. He might have been one of them. I could not be sure.”

“Khurram?”

“No.”

At about three in the morning a motorcade arrived at the entrance to the executive bunker. Four limos, with police escorts with flashing lights. The distance was too great and the light too dim for me to identify him, but I thought this had to be President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with family and kids and favored household staff, those the great one chose to save from the nuclear furnace.

With the staff pushing their stuff on a cart behind them, it took about four minutes for the honchos to get into the mosque. Then the police cars led the limos away.

I got on the sat phone again, gave CENTCOM the word. When I hung up, the army troops were driving away in their trucks. Precisely two soldiers were left standing around in front of the prayer factory, presumably to tell late arrivals, if there were any, that the gate to the bunker had been closed and locked.

“Let the party begin,” I said to G. W., very softly, so Davar couldn’t hear.

Joe Mottaki went about getting the tank the same way he had acquired the self-propelled howitzer. He and his men drove to the army base and waited for a tank to come out. Since the army was leaving Tehran for a rendezvous in the desert, he didn’t have to wait long.

A column of old Russian-made T-54s soon came out of the gate and took the road to the south. Mottaki had driven captured T-54s in Israel and knew every lever and bolt.

He waited a few minutes, then told the man at the wheel to drive along the column. When Joe thought he’d found a tank that was the last in a group, the driver slowed to match the tank’s speed. Mottaki, leaning out the passenger window, shouted to the tank commander, who was standing in the turret hatch, to pull out of the column and stop. Since Mottaki was wearing an Irani an army captain’s uniform, the commander spoke into his mouthpiece, telling the driver to do so.

Mottaki climbed from the truck and strode behind the stationary tank. He went up over the right tread fender and walked along it until he was adjacent to the turret, on the side away from the passing column. Since the tank’s diesel engine was idling loudly, he leaned toward the commander to be heard. As he did, the tank commander pried one earpiece away from his head to hear what Mottaki had to say.

The Mossad agent grabbed the man’s shirt as he drew his pistol. In one fluid motion he jammed the gun into the man’s chest, against his heart, and pulled the trigger. Scrambling onto the turret, he shoved the body down into the tank, then leaned in and shot two of the crewmen as fast as he could pull the trigger. He went into the tank feet first; the driver turned and shouted something. As the man tried to get his pistol out, Mottaki shot him twice.

With the driver’s foot off the brake, the tank lurched forward.

Joe Mottaki jerked the dying driver from his seat and sat down. He let the tank continue forward, then fed it some fuel with the accelerator. The truck was already ahead of him.

Looking through the driver’s slit, he followed the truck when it turned from the highway and went up a side street. There he and his men passed the bodies up through the turret hatch, put them in the bed of the truck, climbed back into the tank and headed for the Mosalla Prayer Grounds.

When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stepped out of the elevator at the bunker level, armed soldiers escorted him to his suite. His military aide was already there, taking telephone reports from the various commands around the country and updating a status board. American planes were aloft over Iraq and the Persian Gulf, as usual. Well, perhaps a few more than usual, but all in all, tonight looked fairly typical. Within minutes, Hosseini-Tash and the other military commanders entered, picked up telephones and spoke to their commands. Everything, they agreed, was ready. Nothing remained to be done except for the president to give the Execute order.

Satisfied, Ahmadinejad went next door to see the small knot of mullahs who made up the brain trust of the Party of God, the fundamentalist Islamic political movement that had ruled Iran since the fall of the shah, over thirty years ago.

“All is in readiness,” Ahmadinejad said. “We are ready to take the final glorious step to national martyrdom, to launch our jihad against Zionism and the Great Satan, and, incidentally, get revenge for the murder of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, may he rest in peace.”

The senior mullah led them in a short prayer; then the president went back to the command center to order the doors of the bunker sealed and give the Execute order. He also ordered Iranian national television to broadcast a prerecorded message in which he called for the Muslims of the world to join the Iranian faithful in jihad.

It was a sublime moment, the zenith of his life. A thousand years from now, when all the people of the earth prayed to Allah, they would remember his name and call him holy.

Staff Sergeant Jack Colby was on the satellite telephone talking to CENTCOM when the solid-fuel booster of the first cruise missile lit with a roar and the missile shot forward off its launcher into the air, its rocket booster spewing fire. A minute later, the second missile followed the first.

When both launchers were empty and the noise of the last missile had faded from the night sky, men ran from the tunnel and jumped into the trucks, which they drove for a quarter mile, then parked. Through his infrared telescope, Jack Colby watched another truck pulling a missile on its launcher ease its way out of the tunnel.

Five large surface combatants of the U.S. Navy, which were cruising slowly in line astern formation five miles off the harbor entrances of Kuwait, turned to an easterly heading and began working up to ten knots. The squadron consisted of two guided missile cruisers and three Arleigh Burke-class destroyers. The crews had been at general quarters-battle stations-for over an hour.

Within four minutes of the launch of the Iranian cruise missiles from Tunnel Hotel-and six other Iranian missile sites-the first of a hundred Tomahawk cruise missiles leaped from their launchers. The ships were firing at a careful, deliberate rate, so it would take almost ten minutes to get the entire hundred in the air.

The fiery booster plumes ripped the night apart. People on shore and aboard oil tankers and service vessels watched in silent awe and amazement as the missiles vomited forth like fireworks into the dark heavens. Finally, after all the missiles were airborne, the moan of receding turbojet engines echoed across the area. After a long moment that sound also faded and the night sea was again silent.

In the Gulf of Oman, surface combatants were also launching Tomahawks against the missile sites on Iran’s southern coast. Twenty missiles rippled off the ships, hurled aloft by their solid-fuel boosters; then the cruise missiles’ turbojet engines took over and they flew away, guided by their internal computers.

The yellow-shirted taxi director used illuminated wands to taxi Chicago O’Hare onto USS United States’ Number Three Catapult. She ran through the familiar checks and, on the director’s signal, shoved the throttles forward to the stops. The engines spooled up with a howl. She cycled her controls, then glanced at the launching officer, who was signaling burner. She moved the throttles sideways and forward, igniting the afterburners.

One more sweep of the engines’ temperatures and pressures; then she put her head back into the headrest and used her left thumb to snap on the Hornet’s exterior lights.

One potato, two… and the catapult fired. The G pressed her straight aft as the plane roared forward, accelerating violently. Two heartbeats later her wheels ran off the deck into the night air and she was flying, the stick alive in her hand. Establish climb attitude, check instruments, gear up…

Soon the four Savage Horde Hornets were spread out in a loose night formation, every plane with its exterior lights on, heading for Oman, then into the Persian Gulf. Ten miles astern, four more Hornets from VFA-196’s sister squadron were following along. All eight planes carried a max load of AIM-9X Sidewinders.

Like all the pilots, Chicago was extremely busy changing radio channels, keeping track of the navigation problem and making sure her computer was receiving data-link updates from the E-2 Hawkeye, the eye in the sky.

Sure enough, within ten minutes or so, the first blips of airborne cruise missiles, heading from Iran to Qatar, appeared on the tactical screen.

Gonna be an interesting night, Chicago thought.

David Quereau was the pilot of one of the F-22 Raptors aloft over Iraq. He had been in the air for four hours, had refueled twice and was damn tired of flying circles in the sky on autopilot waiting for something-anything-to happen. Obviously, whatever it was hadn’t happened on his watch, and probably wouldn’t, which is about the way things go for a junior captain in the U.S. Air Force.

Good stuff always happens to the majors and colonels, which is why they get the medals and walk around like their balls weigh ten pounds each. On the other hand, as all the world knows, captains don’t have any balls, or if they do, they must keep that fact carefully hidden in the new American air force… and good stuff never happens for them. Just bad. Like a tour in Iraq, for God’s sake!

Last week, just another week in the life, and wham, bam, thank you ma’am, you guys are ferrying a dozen F-22s across the pond to Iraq. You get to go, Quereau, because you’re junior. A little time in Iraq will look good on your record.

What a ball-buster that was, twelve hours at a stretch in the cockpit, arrive yesterday, and now, sitting here droning circles in the sky. Big whoop.

The truth was, using the F-22 Raptor to support troops in Iraq and Afghan i stan was like using a Stradivarius as a doorbell chime. The plane was the über-fighter, the absolute best dogfighting airplane ever constructed, capable of supersonic cruise in basic engine, without afterburner, with vectored thrust that made it the most maneuverable airplane that had ever left the ground, able to make a sustained 5-G turn at sixty thousand feet, for Christ’s sake, higher than most fighters can even fly. Yet it was also an electronic marvel that could detect enemy airplanes at extraordinary distances while remaining stealthy, receive data-links from other fighters and share its information with them and, finally, shoot down enemy airplanes with its missiles at distances of up to one hundred miles. After the pilot ran out of missiles, it even had a gun. It was a bomber, too, capable of dropping GPS-guided bombs from forty to fifty thousand feet with pickle-barrel accuracy.

No bombs aboard tonight, though. Quereau was carrying six AIM-120D AMRAAMs (advanced medium-range antiaircraft missiles) internally. As usual, his 20 mm Vulcan cannon in the right wing root was fully loaded, 480 rounds, enough for five seconds of squirting.

A turkey shoot, his section leader said. Tonight they were going to a turkey shoot.

Well, so far, no turkeys. Only one very sore butt.

Then, without a word on the radio, the section leader straightened out and added power for the climb. The wait was over. These two Raptors were going to Tehran.

The second missile the ground crews at Tunnel Hotel pulled from the tunnel for their second salvo was different from the others. It was larger, and the only fins were in the back. “That’s one of those Ghadars,” Colby told his mates. “It’s an ICBM.”

“Could be the nuke. They told us these clowns might launch one out of this tunnel.”

Colby watched through the telescope as the launching crew slowly raised it into an erect position on its launcher. There it stood, pointing skyward like the finger of God, about two miles away.

Colby made his decision and announced it. “Gimme that fifty. I’m gonna take a poke at it. You guys get ready to boogie. Bill, tell CENTCOM.”

“Just a thought,” said Bill nervously, clearing his throat. “Say you actually get a bullet in it-it might go Hiroshima on us. Thought about that?”

Staff Sergeant Jack Colby thought about that now. About instant self-cremation. He glanced at the three faces of his mates. “You never thought you were going to live forever, did ya?”

They stared at him for a second, then swung into action. One of them passed Colby the.50 caliber sniper’s rifle they had brought along. Fortunately it had the starlight scope on it, so he should be able to see the missile through it.

As Bill talked to CENTCOM, Colby got the bipod positioned and found a solid rest, then aimed the rifle. Yes! He could see the missile-still a country mile away, but if he aimed at the top of it, the big half-inch slug should strike somewhere down on the missile body. Might even have enough energy left to penetrate the skin of the thing. On the other hand, the slug might just bounce off. If it did penetrate the skin, it wasn’t going to cause the missile to detonate right there in front of his eyes. Of course not! Wouldn’t do the missile any good, though. If only he could dope the wind…

Well, Colby’s best guess was that the wind was out of the southeast, maybe ten knots gusting to fifteen or sixteen occasionally.

He shoved a shell into the rifle, closed the bolt and snuggled in behind the butt. “Here goes nothing,” he muttered and began taking up slack in the trigger.

The recoil and report came as a surprise. Yeah. He looked through the scope to see if he could spot the bullet striking. Might make a little spark. Nope.

One of the guys, Buddy, was looking through the telescope. “Guys around the missile are looking around. You woke them up.”

Colby worked the bolt and inserted another round.

After the fifth shot, Buddy said, “I don’t know if you’re hitting that garbage can, but you got the ground crew all worked up. They’re running for cover.”

Colby stopped shooting. “Maybe they won’t launch it,” he suggested.

“Maybe they’ll come looking for us,” was the reply.

“Or maybe they won’t,” Colby mused. The men who had been tending the missiles had vanished into the tunnel, and they had not come out again. Just a few shots from the sniper rifle scattered them like quail. Why? Perhaps, he thought, they expect the Americans to counterattack against this site, and they don’t want to die.

Behind him Bill said, “What I want to know is where the hell are our guys?”

G. W. Hosein took a truck with him when he went looking for the place where the bunker’s communications cables came out of the ground. He saw no army in the streets, no police, no paramilitary militia. However, he did see vehicles piled with baggage and people, careening dangerously, presumably heading out of town. Only a few now, but G. W. suspected the exodus would soon become a flood.

One wonders precisely how many people were awake to personally watch or listen to Ahmadinejad’s exhortation on television and radio, but no doubt those who heard it spread the word. After twenty years of listening to the regime’s nuclear power arguments, the urban population well knew what its fate would be if Iran traded nuclear warheads with its enemies. The rumor that the political and religious elites had taken cover in the bunker would galvanize them into action. Those who could were leaving.

G. W. rolled right up to the com junction. It was housed in a little hut with padlocks and warning labels. While his men stood guard with AK-47s at the ready, G. W. used a set of bolt cutters on the padlocks. He shined a flashlight on the works. The cables came out of a pipe and were spliced into junctions of some kind. He wasn’t an electrician, and it all looked like spaghetti to him.

“Oh well,” he said to no one in particular and pulled the pin on an e-grenade. He set it like an egg on top of one of the junction boxes, closed the door and climbed back in the truck.

“Around the block, boys, and make it snappy.”

The e-grenade was actually a small bomb. When it detonated, it would convert the chemical energy of the explosion into one large spike of electromagnetic energy, which would glom onto any wires it found and race along them, destroying any electronic circuits it came across that were not properly protected. Circuits such as truck electrical systems, two-way radios, satellite radios… and, down in the bunker, computers, television cameras and so on.

The minor explosion of the e-grenade also knocked out some of the nearby streetlights. “Back to the box,” G. W. told Ahmad, who was at the wheel. This time when he went into the small building, G. W. armed and left a satchel charge of C-4 lying against the pipe that contained the wires, right where it came out of the ground.

Hosein and his men were two blocks away when the satchel charge exploded.

“There are ninety-two cruise missiles in the air, General,” a colonel told General Lincoln, who was trying to make sense of the presentation on the large map that covered the wall in front of him. Symbols showed the missiles’ locations… as of a few minutes ago. Their tracks were depicted, where they had come from and a computer prediction of where they were heading. Yet the chart of nuclear missile tracks was still blank.

“Where are the nukes?” Lincoln asked.

“We don’t believe they’ve launched yet, sir. The AWACS is trying to sort them out.”

“People, all these conventional missiles are just decoys. They want us to tie ourselves in knots chasing them, and then they will slip the nuke missiles through. I don’t want our interceptors to go Winchester shooting down conventional missiles when we may have a nuke in the air we will need them on.” Winchester was a code word that meant the plane was out of ammunition.

“The Strike Eagles are en route to their targets, sir. One plane had to abort for mechanical problems.”

Lincoln took a deep breath. And the president hoped there would only be a few missiles! “Where,” Lincoln asked, “are our drones?”

“We are getting those locations plotted as fast as we can, sir.”

He could see the locations of our cruise missiles. The AWACS and satellite sensors, plus information from the E-2 over the Persian Gulf, were posted as arrows heading toward the Iranian missile sites. Because he was a religious man, Lincoln decided the best thing he could do just now was to say a little prayer, and he did so.

He was just getting to the “Amen” when someone said loudly, “The Irani an interceptors are launching, sir.”

Staff Sergeant Jack Colby was looking through the telescope when he saw a streak come out of the sky and explode against the ballistic missile launcher. It was a small explosion. Hellfire, he thought. “There’s a Reaper or Predator drone up there,” he told his mates. “Just hit that big missile with a Hellfire.”

The drones were armed with AGM-114P Hellfire II laser-guided missiles. Designed for helicopters, the Hellfire had been adapted to the drones. The small Predator carried two of them, and the much larger Reaper carried six or eight, he wasn’t sure. Although Hellfire only carried a twenty-pound explosive warhead, it could certainly take out a cruise or ballistic missile sitting on its launcher-and apparently just had.

Colby was grinning when the second Hellfire smacked the cruise missile and apparently ignited its liquid fuel. The fireball was quite spectacular.

The Green Berets were congratulating each other when they heard the subtle sound of a jet engine. The sound silenced them.

They heard it, then they didn’t, then they did, a swelling sound, louder and louder. Four pairs of eyes were glued to the entrance of Tunnel Hotel and the wreckage of the two missile launchers in front of it when the first Tomahawk dove into the launching area and its five-hundred-pound warhead exploded.

“I think the Iranians are done for the evening,” Colby said gleefully. “Let’s grab our shit and get the fuck outta here.”

He and his men had covered two hundred yards of the rough, arid terrain when the second, third and fourth Tomahawks targeted for Tunnel Hotel exploded on the launch area in front of it. Five minutes later, they heard a dull thud. The small satchel charge around which they had piled the gear they didn’t want to carry had detonated.

The Tomahawks launched from the waters off Kuwait and the Gulf of Oman had struck the launch sites closest to the Persian Gulf first. As the missiles hit their targets, surveillance sensors captured the flashes and reported it to CENTCOM. The plotters decorated the map with little stars.

Unfortunately, Tomahawks cruised at about five hundred knots, so the northern sites all the way to Mahabad were going to take some time to reach. “How much time?” Lincoln asked his staff.

“Another hour and a few minutes to the last one, Tunnel Yankee.”

Lincoln grabbed his command phone and was soon talking to the drone control squadron in Iraq.

“Lots of turbulence and a head wind, sir, but we are starting to get Hellfires on target.”

“Tunnel Yankee, and those south of it. How soon?”

“Fifteen or twenty minutes, sir.”

“Keep me advised,” Lincoln said and rang off.

“The B-2s are airborne out of Balad, sir. ETA for Tehran is an hour from now.”

“Very well,” the general said and glanced at his watch. Dawn was still an hour away. “Tunnel Hotel had a ballistic missile targeted for Tehran. What’s its status?”

“Special Forces team on the ground said it was destroyed on the launcher by a Hellfire. Then four Tomahawks pulverized the area. The Iranians are in the tunnel and not coming out. The team leader is withdrawing. Reaper remains over the site.”

“November and Yankee?” Those sites had ballistic missiles targeted at Israel.

“They are launching cruise missiles, sir. Two from each site every fifteen minutes.”

“What’s the ETA for the Strike Eagles?”

“They should hit those targets within thirty minutes, sir.”

“Keep me advised.” Lincoln reached in his pocket for his roll of Rolaids as he stared at the nuclear missile chart. The Iranians still hadn’t launched any, and F-22s in Iraq and F/A-18 Hornets were expending missiles knocking down the conventional weapons. He told the staff to order a flight of F-22s to break off and return to base to refuel and rearm, then return to their stations.

“Joe’s here with a tank,” Larijani said. “On the ridge.”

I looked with naked eyes and saw nothing out there in the darkness. Using the infrared scope, I saw the tank creeping along the ridge, right on top of the bunker. It turned until its nose was pointed more or less at the entrance to the prayer grounds, then stopped amid the scrub. I could just make out its exhaust plume from the idling engine.

If we needed serious firepower, we had it.

“We have company.” G. W.’s voice sounded in my ear. We were wearing headsets with small radios clipped to our belts. G. W., Joe Mottaki and their men were stationed as perimeter guards. “Looks like young men in a technical,” he continued. A technical was a pickup truck mounting a machine gun. They were the rides of choice for young Islamic studs in the Middle East. “Basij, most likely,” he added.

“You know what to do,” I replied.

Indeed he did. He would do nothing if the technical went on by. If it stopped, he would take out the vehicle and kill the men, and he would do it quickly.

I looked behind me. I could see the vehicle cruising slowly along the boulevard, the three or four guys in the back looking every which way. It was at least a hundred yards from where Davar and I sat with our backs against a tree, watching the mosque in the prayer grounds. I didn’t think there was a chance in the world that the people in the bunker would leave now; if they did, they were going to spoil the morning’s entertainment. I kinda suspected a few of them might be rethinking their presence there. Even so, I doubted that Ahmadinejad would let them leave, and he was the guy making the decisions.

“They’re stopping by the remains of that com shack.”

Terrific!

“Couple of them are out looking it over, what’s left of it… Uh-oh. They’re having an argument, pointing at the bunker. Looks like someone is advocating a look-around.”

I bent down and checked the safety on my AK, made sure the magazine was seated firmly. Davar watched me. She wasn’t wearing a headset, so I told her about the technical and nodded in that direction. She hunkered down behind the tree.

“They’re all out of the vehicle. Spreading out. Going to make a sweep toward the mosque, looks like. We’ll take ’em out when they are between us and you, Tommy. Keep your head down.”

I motioned to Davar with my hand-down-and stretched out with the AK pointed in their direction. Then I looked at her. Couldn’t see her features in the darkness, but I wondered what she was thinking. I pulled out my pistol and nudged her arm with it. Her head turned, then she reached for it.

I saw flashlights coming… six flashlights, flickering randomly about as their holders searched the area and checked the footing…

They were about twenty-five yards in from the boulevard amid the scattered trees when the guys let ’em have it. A roar of AK fire, strobing muzzle flashes, and the flashlights fell to the ground. Some of them went out. Two people were screaming.

The F-15E Strike Eagles were as complex an airborne weapons system as the United States possessed. Designed to give the pilot and a weapons system operator-WSO, or wizzo-multiple options in the complex, harrowing environment of ground attack, in any weather, day or night, while providing for its own electronic and fighter defense, the planes’ state-of-the art computers and avionics demanded a lot from its crewmen. As usual, the Strike Eagles that flew tonight against Iran’s nuclear missile launch sites contained some highly experienced crews, some with the green just worn off and some new people just rotated in from the states.

First Lieutenant JoAnne Rodgers was the WSO in one of them. Two months into her first tour in Iraq, she was being bounced around by turbulence in a night black as a whale’s tummy while voices on the radio overloaded the frequency. It seemed everyone on the freq had something vital to say to somebody-and what it became was merely distracting noise. To make matters worse, some of her gear wasn’t working. The INS velocities were too large or small, and that affected the computer’s calculations of the aircraft’s present position and the proper direction to the target, Tunnel November. In addition, the radar’s primary mode wasn’t working properly and she was forced to use it in a degraded mode. And, although she didn’t know it, her ALQ-199 wasn’t working at all, although it had passed its built-in tests on the ground and the little green light glowed comfortingly.

“This techno-magic is taking a shit,” JoAnne told her pilot on the ICS. Ladylike language was not one of her virtues.

“We can cancel or do the mission,” the pilot, Major Dick Hauer, growled. “Make up your mind.”

Rodgers didn’t reply. As she would put it, she was up to her ass in alligators, severely overloaded, and she had downed a system the day before yesterday. She didn’t need a reputation as a candy-ass who would only fly on VFR days with a perfect system.

Hauer didn’t appreciate her problems since he was nursing one of his own as he flew the aircraft, monitored the electronic warfare panel and tried to make sense of the radio chatter. Fighter attack was the toughest mission in the air force, where only the best were good enough, and to do it right you needed lots of testosterone, plus a quart. Here he was flying with a woman who didn’t have any. She was foul-mouthed, butt ugly, twenty pounds too heavy, obviously smarter than he was and yellow; in toto, the perfect person to push every one of his manly buttons. To be sure, words to this effect had never passed his lips and never would, not in today’s air force. A few cracks like that could kill a career.

At precisely the planned time, he lowered the aircraft’s nose and began a descent to attack altitude. He made sure the infrared sensors were working and put a ground avoidance display on one of his screens-and saw nothing. Dirt in the air degraded the infrared. Well, he would get a reading in just a moment, when he got a little lower.

That thought had no more than passed through his head when he realized he wasn’t seeing the target symbol on his nav screen. “You know where in hell we are?” he growled at Rodgers as the plane did the turbulence bump-and-grind.

“No,” she said. “I told you the velocities were running and the radar is in backup mode. I’m looking for something I can identify to get a position update.”

Automatically Hauer’s eyes flicked to the altimeter. The plane was descending through ten thousand feet-and there were peaks in this mountain range that reached well above eleven. Just then he saw a shape materializing on the infrared. Something damn solid. A mountain! Dead ahead. He pulled the stick back and jammed the throttles forward, and the F-15 pointed its nose at the sky.

JoAnne Rodgers jerked off her oxygen mask and vomited into her lap.

Three nuclear-armed cruise missiles were in the air, according to the AWACS people. They had launched from the predicted sites and were flying the predicted flight paths to three nuclear targets: Mosul and Al Asad in Iraq, and Al Jaber in Kuwait. As General Martin Lincoln listened to the AWACS controller direct F-22s onto these specific missiles, he wondered if there were any other nukes that had been misclassified. Or the intelligence wasn’t perfect. Or…

To be sure, Tomahawks were crash-diving Iranian missile sites, drones were beginning to pour in Hellfires, and Iranian missile launches had slowed to a trickle.

Only 142 cruise missiles were airborne. Only. He scanned the projected flight paths on the laptop computer on the desk in front of him.

Well, one or more missiles, regardless of warhead, were on the way to every Iranian target, except Tel Aviv. The F-22s were banging away, but missiles were getting through. Two cruise missiles with conventional warheads had already exploded on Tallil Air Force Base, one on Baghdad and two on Balad. Some might have missed the military bases and crashed in the desert or a city or town-no one knew for sure. So far, damage was minimal.

Being only human, Lincoln found his eyes drawn to the symbol of the cruise missile with the Jihad warhead flying toward Kuwait. It was only a hundred miles out, mere minutes away.

One of the colonels leaned down to whisper, “Sir, one of the plotters has asked if you plan to have the staff go to the bombproof.”

Lincoln looked at the colonel in disbelief. “The bombproof won’t withstand a nuke hit. You know that. Now tell these people that I’ll court-martial any son of a bitch who leaves this room.”

When General Lincoln looked again at the inbound missile, he saw that the AWACS was reporting it destroyed.

Captain Quereau sighed nervously. His Raptor was cruising along at Mach 1.6 without use of the afterburners-super-cruising, the public affairs people called it. He couldn’t decide if this airborne CAP, or combat air patrol, over northern Iran was a good deal or not. The other F-22s were shooting down missiles by the handful, and he wouldn’t even get to squeeze off an AMRAAM.

The short end of the stick again, he thought, just as he realized his leader, out to his right, was pulling back his power as briefed, slowing to max conserve to save fuel.

After five minutes of that his data-link began spewing targets. The AWACS controller’s artificially calm voice sounded in his ears. “You have bogeys out of the Tehran area headed west. They’re low.”

That was followed by the section leader’s truly calm voice. The man must be on drugs! “Q-man, do you have them?”

Quereau tried to make his voice matter-of-fact. “Affirm. F-14s, apparently.”

“They’re yours.”

“Breaking off.”

Quereau lowered his nose and turned to point his plane a little ahead of the bogeys, which were still at 150 miles distance. He was coming in from their right forward quarter, closing rapidly as his speed increased through Mach 1. His electronic warfare suite had analyzed the radiation from the bogeys and classified them as F-14s, then displayed that fact on one of his screens. He recalled that during the days of the shah, Iran had purchased several dozen of the swing-wing fighters from the United States. The Ira nians had kept a few flying for the thirty years since the revolution by cannibalizing parts from those too worn out to repair.

Quereau locked up both targets in sequence and shallowed his dive. Checked the electronic countermeasures. His plane was being painted by search radars-had been for the last twenty minutes-but it was doubtful the Iranian on the ground saw the stealthy fighter. Certainly the F-14s, with forty-year-old radars, did not. He reminded himself to make no violent maneuvers that would present his planform to any of the probing radars.

He armed two missiles and waited. Coming down through thirty-five thousand, descending gently, speed Mach 1.2, the range counting down…

At one hundred miles, David Quereau squeezed the first one off manually. He felt the weapons bay doors slam open and closed as the missile was ejected from the bay; then it ignited and shot forward. The target progression was automatic. He squeezed the trigger again. The doors opened and closed again, and the second missile followed the first. They looked like stars in the blackness, fading as they pulled away.

Quereau shallowed his dive-and stared at the symbols on his screen. Since he and the F-14s were on closing flight paths, the distance between the planes was decreasing quickly, and the missiles were leaping the gap at Mach 2.9. The missile symbols quickly merged with their targets.

In a few more seconds the bogey symbols vanished.

Death in twenty-first-century air combat sure isn’t glamorous, he thought as he began a slow turn to the heading that would take him to Tehran.

At least, he reflected, it’s quick.

Chicago O’Hare was flying an airplane several technical generations behind the F-22, and she had short-range heat-seeking Sidewinders on her rails. Still, the largest challenge she faced was closing the five-hundred-knot missile in front of her and locking it up. In the darkness over the night sea, she would never see the cruise missile, of course; this interception was being conducted based on the symbology on her HUD, or heads-up display-symbols created and driven by her computer, which was fed data-link info from the E-2 and AWACS and raw data from the radar in the nose of her plane.

The Iranian missile was flying at five thousand feet above the sea, headed for Qatar. She was only dimly aware of that-it was an Iranian missile, according to the E-2, and that was enough.

The distinctive Sidewinder rattle sounded in her ears, and she squeezed the trigger on the stick. The missile shot forward off the rail in a gout of fire. Now, to see if it tracks. Sidewinders were very reliable, approaching a 90 percent effective rate, but that meant one in ten would go stupid or fail to explode. If the first missile didn’t bring down the target, she would fire a second. Unless the cruise missile has a nuclear warhead that detonates, she thought. If it does, then I’ll just be dead.

Through the HUD, she saw a flash, which blossomed as fuel spewing from the ruptured tank caught fire. The missile began descending toward the water.

Chicago didn’t watch. With the radio chatter of other pilots talking and the Hawkeye calling out targets for them as background noise, she turned left to intercept another missile. This would be a ninety-degree left-to-right shot, which was fully within the AIM-9X’s capabilities. With vectored thrust nozzles, the missile could almost fly a square corner. She got the lock, squeezed the trigger and watched the exhaust of the missile as it flew a high-speed curve to intercept. Another flash, then nothing.

She checked her radar scope as she turned left again to pass well behind the enemy missile, and saw that it was disintegrating into a cloud of small targets.

The radio chatter continued on. She paid only enough attention to catch her call sign, War Ace 307, if and when.

Ten minutes later she picked up another cruise missile coming at her head-on. The Sidewinder might be able to hack the angle, but why waste one? She turned right into a four-G pull and let the cruise missile pass her. When she rolled out pointing toward it, it was tracking at a thirty-degree angle to her left, an angle that was increasing. The Sidewinder went after it like a starving wolf.

What am I going to do when I run out of Sidewinders?

Captain Fereydoon Abassi of the Iranian navy stood on the pass overlooking the Gulf of Oman and listened. He could hear jet engines, not too far above. “American,” he said, then swore.

He was here to launch five antiship missiles, which the Iranians had purchased from Russia. SS-NX-26 Yakhonts, the finest antiship missiles in the world. The Russians had, of course, loudly advertised that fact, and even though they were Russians, infidels and users of alcohol to excess, Abassi believed them, because he had seen a demonstration of the Yakhont with his own eyes.

Even listening to the American planes overhead, looking for him, he felt privileged. The admiral had personally chosen him to deliver this mighty blow to the American navy. This was, he well knew, the zenith of his career. No honor he would ever receive in this life or the next could compare with the pride he felt at this moment.

There were, he knew, two American aircraft carriers in the Gulf of Oman. With a little luck, he would hit them both and do massive damage. With just a smidgen more luck, he might even sink one, which would be a feat that would be remembered for many generations. However it worked out, the American navy would be taught a bloody lesson, one that would humble its pride, one it would never forget. He mouthed a prayer to Allah that He might make it so.

The missiles were fire-and-forget; they carried their own radar, the latest Russian design, and they were extraordinarily fast, between Mach 2.0 and 2.5. They also flew low, jinking flight paths to their targets, so they would be extremely difficult to knock down with defensive weapons. In short, the Yakhont antiship missile was the U.S. Navy’s worst nightmare.

Although they were capable of carrying a one-hundred-kiloton warhead, the Supreme Leader had refused to release one or two for these missiles, so tonight they carried conventional 750-pound warheads, which could still punch deep into an unarmored ship and do massive, perhaps fatal, damage.

All Fereydoon Abassi had to do was ensure the American carriers were within range and launch the missiles properly.

He went from launcher to launcher, checking everything. The semitrailer launchers were stabilized with hydraulic feet; the missiles themselves were housed inside closed-end containers, which had been properly elevated; a course was set into their computers. The diesel engines in the launchers were running, providing electrical power.

He looked at his watch. It would soon be dawn, and he and his men must be off this ridge by then-and the missiles must be in the air.

He sent his launcher crews marching away north, down the road out of the pass. Then he walked a hundred feet south, past the launchers, along the road to the mobile radar van. One man, the operator, was manning it. The diesel engine was snoring nicely; the lights on the panel were on.

“Are you ready?” he asked the sailor, who stood at attention.

“Yes, Captain.”

“Let us proceed. A very short look. I want the distance and azimuths to the two carriers, and the instant I get it, I will tell you to cease radiating. You must stop radiating immediately, shut down the diesel engine and run after the others.”

“We will abandon the equipment?”

“If the Americans do not destroy it, it will still be here tomorrow.”

“Yes, sir.”

Abassi straightened his uniform as the operator threw switches. Over the man’s shoulder Abassi could see the scope, which glowed. Even as he watched, blips appeared.

“Over a dozen ships,” the operator said, staring at the scope as he manually moved the azimuth cursor.

“The largest ones,” Abassi said, “in the center of the formations.” The Americans were so predictable.

“Range ninety kilometers, bearing one-seven-two degrees”-the operator turned the knob-“and range ninety-five kilometers, one-six-five degrees.”

“Cease radiating. Shut down the engine and run.”

The operator quickly did as directed. The diesel abruptly died, leaving only the faint sound of the diesel engines in the launchers.

In an EA-6B Prowler, the radiation from the Russian-built mobile radar was detected and recognized for what it was. These radars, the U.S. Navy intelligence officers believed, were often used by the Iranians to aim cruise or antiship missiles.

The EA-6B operator informed the E-2 Hawkeye circling over United States and her sister ship, USS Columbia, even as he flipped a switch to jam the radar. However, the few seconds it took for the jammer to go to that frequency proved to be too much. The Iranian radar had ceased radiating.

In the flag combat control spaces aboard United States, Admiral Stan Bryant gave the order. “Possible missiles inbound. Code red. Notify all ships.”

The warning would merely sharpen the troops already at battle stations. Bryant had ordered battle stations, and the closure of all watertight doors, throughout the task force prior to the first launch earlier this morning. Buttoned up tightly, all internal air circulation in the ships was now secured. In the red-lit passageways the damage control parties stared at the bulkheads and each other.

Captain Abassi walked quickly-he refused to run-toward the first launcher, which still had its prime mover attached. The lid for the control panel was already open. He checked the switches and settings one more time, then manually tuned the azimuth control to one-seven-two and range control to ninety kilometers. Satisfied, he raised the covers of the two fire buttons and simultaneously pushed them both. Then he jumped into the cab of the fireproof prime mover, pulled the door closed and jammed his fingers into his ears.

Ten seconds later the missile’s solid-fuel booster engine ignited in a stupendous roar and a blast of white-hot flame that illuminated the area as the missile shot forward off the launcher. It raced away toward the dark ocean, accelerating quickly so that the liquid-fueled ramjet engine could ignite when the booster burned out. It rapidly became a receding star.

Abassi fought the temptation to watch it and climbed out of the cab. He ran to the next launcher and repeated the process. One-seven-two degrees, ninety kilometers. Pushed the buttons and climbed back into the cab. This missile followed the first.

On the third, fourth and fifth missiles, he dialed in one-six-five degrees, ninety-five kilometers. In less than three minutes, they had followed the others on their way to glory.

Fereydoon Abassi jumped from the cab of the last prime mover and raced off down the road after his men, as fast as his feet would carry him.

“Missile launch!” The sensor operators in the EA-6B were the first to detect the distinctive radiation from the radar in the nose of the Yakhont missile. “Missile in the air.”

A moment later, an F/A-18 Hornet pilot flying above the coast of Iran, invisible to antiaircraft radar thanks to its ALQ-199, spotted the brilliant plume of a Yakhont coming off the launcher and shouted to the E-2 controller, “Missile in the air. Headed south. We are attacking the launch site.”

He jerked his plane around, stuffed the nose down and pushed the throttle forward. His wingman, well out to his left, followed him down. As he descended and flipped switches on the stick with his thumb to select the proper ordnance, he saw the last of the Iranian ship-killers lift off and go streaking southeast. He already had the master arm switch on and the crosshairs of his bombsight pointed at more or less that spot, so now he sweetened his aim and designated that spot as the target.

Within seconds his computer began giving him steering to his release point. His eyes flicked to the panel. He was going to salvo all his ordnance, six five-hundred-pound cluster bombs, two at a time, at minimum intervals. The clamshell housing on the bombs would open well above the ground and scatter a cloud of bomblets, each of which would detonate and spray shrapnel when it hit something solid.

Heart pounding, he concentrated on following the computer’s steering commands. Passing four hundred knots, six thousand feet, the computer released the bombs with a short series of trip-hammer thuds.

He pulled up and left, out to sea, to clear the area for his wingman while he watched the ground. He saw multiple flashes as the bomblets scattered over the empty launch vehicles and mobile radar van. There were no explosions on the ground since all the missiles were in the air.

Running down the road, Captain Abassi heard the swelling noise of jet engines at full throttle, and the whip-cracks of the cluster-bomb containers opening. The noise of the jet peaked when the bomblets went off, so he didn’t hear them. He did hear the second plane roll in, and he heard the containers open. This jet had dropped a little long-and several of the bomblets hit the hard road around him and exploded with white flashes. Shrapnel cut into his legs and body, scything him down.

He was lying in the road, bleeding and laughing, when the sound of the jet engines finally faded. He had done it!

Yessss! For the glory of Allah, and Iran!