Dale Brown - Shadows Of Steel

by Shadows Of Steel [lit]

  "I understand completely, sir," Freeman said. "And, yes, I think we can."

  "Good. Keep me advised, day or night, before any operation starts, but you've got the green light," the President said, straightening his tie and getting ready to head back to the reception following the Rose Garden bill-signing ceremony. "Get the forces moving, then brief me as soon as you can; I want to OK each mission before the B-2A crosses into hostile airspace.

  "This operation is to be quiet, deniable, and squeaky clean, General, but most of all, I want Iran to pay for shooting down our aircraft, the sons of bitches--attacking unarmed support aircraft is the lowest act any military man can do, and I want Buzhazi to feel it right in his damned groin. Get to it, Philip."

  General Philip Freeman was almost embarrassed by the enthusiasm he felt as he headed to the White House Situation Room to issue his orders to the Intelligence Support Agency. No more "disruptions," no more "screamers"--the President wanted Iran's war-making machine shut down, piece by piece, and that's exactly what was going to happen.

  ANDERSEN AIR FORCE BASE, GUAM 26 APRIL 1997, 1625 HOURS LOCAL

  Jon Masters didn't knock--he never knocked. He always burst into a room, day or night, and started talking as if the conversation had already started minutes before. This time, it was in the middle of a briefing being given by Colonel Dominguez on the maintenance status of the B-2A Spirit stealth bomber.

  "Okay, so we got them. What we did, General," Masters said breathlessly, "was simple: we launched two NIRTSat boosters, each carrying four Pacer Sky digital photo intelligence satellites, over Iran. We targeted each and every Iranian airfield, civilian or military, longer than forty-five hundred feet long and one hundred fifty feet wide, capable of handling something like a Tu-22M Backfire bomber. We took pictures of each airfield every sixty to ninety minutes. Of course, the Iranians didn't know we launched these satellites--heck, nobody knew we launched them except you and me. We hit pay dirt."

  Griffith and Dominguez leapt to their feet and followed Masters down the hall of the fourth floor of the Thirteenth Air Force headquarters building, which was now occupied by the members of the Air Intelligence Agency and Future Flight for the B-2A missions against Iran. When everyone was in place and the door closed and locked behind them, Masters clicked the button on his display controller. The large-screen computer monitor showed an overhead view of a very large airport. "They can run, but they couldn't hide," Masters said proudly. "Sky Masters comes through again."

  Jon Masters's NIRTSats (Need it Right This Second Satellites) were small devices, smaller than a washing machine, but capable of photographing a dog from 200 miles in space clearly enough to discern the breed. Four photo-reconnaissance NIRTSats, code-named Pacer Sky, could be loaded aboard a small two-stage scissor-winged rocket booster Masters called ALARM (for Air-Launched Alert Response Missile), and two such ALARM boosters could be loaded aboard Masters's specially designed DC-10 aircraft. The DC-10 would take the ALARM boosters up to 40,000 feet, then drop them one by one. The DC-10 acted as the boosters' first-stage engine--the booster's two stages would fly the missile up as high as 400 miles in space, where the satellites would be inserted in their proper orbit. In this way, Masters could give almost any battlefield commander a complete reconnaissance, surveillance, and communications satellite network in a matter of hours.

  Today, however, Masters wasn't under a government or commercial contract to launch NIRTSats over Iran--this he was doing for himself.

  "Beghin Airport, near Kerman, Iran, about two hundred fifty miles north of Bandar Abbas," Masters went on. "Two hours after the attack on the Lincoln carrier group, we photographed this." He directed a laser-beam pointer on the screen, then clicked another button, which zoomed the image down around the laser-beam point.

  Magnified in the image was the unmistakable outline of a B-1B Lancer-type aircraft, with a long, pointed nose, slender body, and thin wings swept back very close to its fuselage.

  "There's your Tupolev-22M bomber base, folks: Beghin Airport--at least it's one of them." Masters zoomed the image out until the entire airport could be seen. "With the wings folded, those hangars there can accommodate six Backfires, two per hangar, so we're still missing at least six more. I'm setting up round-the-clock surveillance on Beghin, and I'm still beating the bushes for the other six bombers."

  "Thank you, Jon," Major General Brien Griffith, Commander of the U.S. Air Force Air Intelligence Agency, said. "Good work."

  "My extreme friggin' pleasure, sir," Masters said acidly. "The data's been relayed to McLanahan and Jamieson via Sheila MacNichol was just returning from the ladies' room that afternoon--her sixth month of pregnancy seemed like one endless trip to the bathroom--and was returning to her desk in the 722nd Air Refueling Wing commander's office, where she was "flying a desk," grounded from her regular job as an Air Force Reserve KC-10 copilot and now acting as the wing executive officer, when she noticed the scared, almost panicked look on the face of the wing commander's civilian secretary. Instantly her throat turned dry, and the baby kicked, and she felt as if her knees were going to give way.

  Even before the secretary got to her feet and headed toward her; even before she saw the door to the wing commander's office open and the general emerge, his face ashen and drawn; even before she saw the base chaplain and the squadron commander recognize her and open their mouths in surprise and dread--she knew Scotty was dead.

  Sheila's husband Major Scott MacNichol was one of the best, most experienced KC-10 Extender tanker pilots in the U.S. Air Force, a veteran of over four hundred sorties, some over enemy territory, in the "tanker war" during Desert Shield and Desert Storm, a dedicated, knowledgeable flight commander and instructor pilot.

  No mission was too tough or impossible. The unspoken rule "never volunteer" was MILSTAR, fed right into their attack computers. They'll be over the target in ten hours."

  Such ferocity looked so out of place for a young-looking guy like Masters, Griffith thought, but he had undergone much in the last few days--including nearly losing his life at the hands of the Iranian navy. This young man had the technology, the money, and the desire to make Iran pay dearly for what they had done.

  RIVERSIDE, CALIFORNIA THAT SAME TIME First Lieutenant her sixth trip to unheard of in Scotty's lexicon--he volunteered for everything. He enjoyed, relished, rejoiced, in putting his 600,000pound tanker-transport plane in the tightest spots, the most difficult missions, the shortest runways, the most hazardous jobs.

  He had been awarded the Air Medal with two oak-leaf clusters for his service in Desert Storm--very, very unusual for an aircraft that was never supposed to be in enemy territory. Scotty would go in and get his receivers if there was the slightest hint of trouble. There were only forty KC-10 tankers in the world, but as a "force multiplier," able to refuel both Air Force, Navy, Marines, and many foreign aircraft, it was worth a hundred times its number--too valuable to risk over Indian country. But Scotty went there.

  Damn him, Sheila cursed silently, he did this on purpose! When the baby came, she thought, he knew he was going to be asked to give up all the TDY, all the long weeks of traveling to exotic foreign destinations, all the secret missions, the sudden midnight phone calls, the hastily packed mobility bags--packing cold-weather gear when it was ninety degrees out. She knew he wasn't going to have fun in Hawaii while she stayed home with the backaches and swollen feet and hemorrhoids. He wanted to get all his excitement, all his heroics in before he was asked to settle down and be a regular dad, a regular guy, for the first time in his life.

  The wing commander motioned her inside his office and helped her sit down. Sheila knew the chaplain and the squadron commander, of course, so she got right to it: "Scotty... is dead?"

  "His plane suffered an unknown, catastrophic failure of some kind over the Gulf of Oman," the wing commander said. "His plane was lost with all aboard. I'm so sorry, Lieutenant.

  Sheila tried not to cry, but the tears came unbidden, and then the sobbing. She d
idn't mean to do that, in front of the wing king and the squadron commander and the chaplain, but it was happening, and she couldn't stop it until she heard the wing commander ask his secretary to call for an ambulance to stand by out front, and Sheila decided she wasn't going to have any of that, so she stopped.

  "A... a catastrophic failure, sir? What kind? A bird strike?

  Compressor failure? Fuel-system malfunction?" Everyone in this room was an experienced KC-10 driver except for the chaplain, and even he had a couple hundred hours in one--why was he being so obtuse? Probably because the plane had crashed in the ocean--not much chance to do an accident investigation with the pieces scattered across the seabed. The wing king was in his "comfort the grieving survivors" mode, too, so maybe he wasn't trying to be so evasive--he wasn't accustomed to talking to widows about compressor stalls, center-of-gravity violations, or inflight emergencies.

  "We don't know yet, Lieutenant... Sheila," the general said.

  "An investigation is under way."

  "The Gulf of Oman? Why was Scotty out there?" Sheila asked. "I heard temporary flight restrictions were in effect for all airspace within five hundred miles of Iran. What was he doing over the Gulf of Oman?"

  The wing commander looked at the chaplain, who let go of Sheila's hand and stepped away. "Sheila, please, let's not focus on where Scotty's plane went down right now, all right? I just want you to know how sorry we are, and that we want to help you through this terrible tragedy."

  "This has to do with Iran, doesn't it?" Sheila asked, the hurt turning into stone-cold anger. "All the things the government has been saying about how great, how wonderful everything is over in the Middle East, it's not true, is it...?"

  "Lieutenant..

  "The Iranians shot him down, didn't they, sir?" Sheila asked hotly. "The Iranians shot down my Scotty, flying in an unarmed, vulnerable tanker."

  "Lieutenant, please, I know you're upset, and I'm sorry, truly sorry, but I'm asking you to keep your opinions to yourself, please!"

  "I hope we went in there to bomb the crap out of those rag-heads!" Sheila cried. The paramedics were rushing into the wing commander's office with a gurney, trying to get her to relax, but Sheila's heart felt as cold, as heavy, and as still as the child in her womb did right now, and the anger she was releasing felt good, felt right. "I hope my Scotty helped us get those damned Iranian terrorists, dammit. I hope they all burn in hell!"

  BEGHIN REGIONAL AIRPORT, KERMAN PROVINCE, IRAN 27 APRIL 1997, 0206 HOURS LOCAL

  According to law, all flights landing in Iran had to be on the ground and at their arrival gate by midnight; the last flight into Beghin Regional Airport in central Iran had arrived at ten P.m., and shortly thereafter the airport was all but shut down, leaving only maintenance crews at the airport until sunrise. By two A.M. the airport appeared totally deserted...

  ... except at the extreme southern end of the airport, south of the 11,000-foot-long, 150-foot-wide northwest-southeast running concrete runway that had been closed to commercial and civil traffic two years earlier. Three large and rather shabby-looking hangars and several smaller buildings sat near that closed runway, in front of a large, completely deserted aircraft parking ramp.

  Weeds growing up through the cracks on that parking ramp suggested that the ramp had not supported an aircraft in quite some time.

  This was the secret Iranian base for one squadron, six planes, of Iran's most deadly military aircraft, the Tupolev22M bomber, NATO code-named "Backfire." The Russian-made supersonic Backfire bomber could reach any target in the Middle East within an hour or, refueled from an Iranian C-707 aerial refueling tanker, could reach targets as far away as Italy or Germany in two hours. It carried a devastating 53,000-pound payload of gravity bombs, antiship missiles, or land or sea mines. The presence of Tu-22M Backfire bombers in the Islamic Republic of Iran's air force had been rumored since 1993, but had been constantly refuted because no Backfires had ever been spotted in Iran.

  "For a secret bomber base, this place looks like shit," Tony Jamieson muttered. He and Patrick McLanahan had been orbiting over the base for twenty minutes now, "shooting" the base with the synthetic aperture radar every few minutes and comparing the SAR images with past images, trying to piece together enough information to verify that the deadly Backfire bombers were really here. They had looked at every crack in the concrete, every skid mark, every vehicle on the airport grounds--nothing. No sign of one of the world's most advanced bombers. "We've only got twenty minutes left in our orbit."

  "Something will show," McLanahan said. "Jon Masters's NIRT-Sats never let us down before... well, maybe once before..."

  "Great," Jamieson groused. "And I'm getting tired of always carrying these so-called non-lethal weapons on board my plane, too, McLanahan. The ragheads want to fight--let's start carrying some weapons that have a little punch. At least a couple JSOWs with high-explosive warheads would be useful--that's not too much to ask..."

  "SAR coming on," McLanahan announced. "SAR shot, ready, ready...

  now... SAR in standby, antenna secure."

  "Well, hot damn, there they are--a regular 'baby elephant walk,' "Jamieson exclaimed as he studied the SAR image on McLanahan's supercockpit monitor. As clear as a black-and-white photograph, the long, thin body of a Tupolev-22M Backfire bomber had appeared from one of the hangars on the south side of the airport. Another bomber was exiting the same hangar, behind and slightly to one side of the first, while a third bomber had just poked its nose outside the doors of the middle hangar, obviously waiting its turn to taxi.

  By using cursor commands, McLanahan was able to electronically "twist" the SAR image until they were actually looking inside the hangars, as if they were standing right on the ramp, and they found all three large hangar doors open, with two Tu-22M bombers in each hangar. The rear of the hangar was open so the bombers could run their engines while inside, safely under cover.

  "Bingo," Jamieson said. "Shit, they are there!"

  "And it looks like they're going hunting again," McLanahan said.

  "We can take care of that." And just a few moments later six AGM-154 JSOW missiles were on their way toward Beghin Airport, their autopilots programmed to fly an attack course just fifty feet over the runway.

  As the JSOW missile flew toward the runway, an electronic low-light TV camera activated, sending real-time TV images back to McLanahan in the B-2A Spirit stealth bomber flying 45,000 feet overhead. McLanahan used his cursor to lock an aiming reticle on one of the bombers, and the JSOW's autopilot flew the missile to its quarry. As it passed overhead, two of its four bomb bays opened, and it ejected a sixty-pound blob of a thick, gooey substance that landed on the upper surface of the bomber. As the JSOW missile flew away, McLanahan programmed the missile to fly to a secondary target--in the first case, the airport's power-transformer substation--and drop the last two globs on that.

  The missile then automatically flew itself thirty miles farther west, where it crashed in the middle of the Bahlamabad Reservoir and sank quickly out of sight. One by one, each JSOW missile dropped one-half of its unidentifiable load on top of a Tu-22M bomber, then on top of another target somewhere else on the south side of the base--the regional air-traffic-control radar dome, a communications antenna farm, another power transformer farm, and three JSOWs dropped their gooey mass ion the south base's POL (petroleum, oil, and lubricant) tank farm.

  "Well, that was exciting," Jamieson muttered as McLanahan programmed the last of the JSOW missiles. He steered the B-2A bomber south along the Afghanistan and Pakistan borders and out over the Gulf of Oman once again.

  The air-traffic-control radar was the first to feel the effect.

  The two large blobs hit the thin reinforced Fiberglas radar dome and immediately burned through, then scattered on the rotating antenna and control cabin inside. Within minutes, the thin metal antenna began to twist out of shape because of the fast twelve-revolutions-per-minute speed, and the antenna quickly failed and collapsed.

 
; The metal-eating blobs of acid that struck the first Tu-22M bomber hit squarely on the upper fuselage and on the non-swiveling outboard portion of the left wing glove; on the second bomber, they hit on the fuselage just aft of the cockpit windows and on the very upper lip of the right engine intake, spattering across the guidance and warhead sections of the AS-4 cruise missile mounted under the right wing glove. As the first two bombers taxied out onto the active runway and picked up speed for takeoff, the globs spread across the airframe, eating away inside the left wing pivot section and spreading across the fuselage fuel tanks, the upper engine compartments, the vertical and horizontal stabilizers, and the rudder.

  When the acid ate through the Backfire's thin aluminum skin, the first bomber was already 3,000 feet above ground and passing through 300 miles per hour. Just as the pilot began sweeping the wings of his Backfire bomber from the twenty-degree takeoff setting to the thirty-degree cruise setting, the wing pivot mechanism failed, and the left wing uncontrollably folded all the way back to its aft-most sixty-degree setting. The bomber immediately snap-rolled to the left, quickly losing altitude.