THE FIRST IRANIAN fighters to head into the sky that day were two aged F-14 Tomcats from Shiraz. The Shah had purchased about eighty of the fighters from Grumman in the 1970s. Ten could still fly, with parts cannibalized from all the others or procured on the world’s lively black market in combat-aircraft components. These flew southeast, overland to Bandar Abbas, then they increased speed and darted south to Abu Musa, passing just north of it, with the pilots driving and the backseaters scanning the surface with binoculars. The sun was plainly visible at twenty thousand feet, but on the surface there was still the semidarkness of nautical twilight.
One doesn’t see ships from aloft, a fact often lost on both sailors and airmen. In most cases, ships are too small, and the surface of the sea too vast. What one sees, whether from a satellite photo or the unaided human eye, is the wake, a disturbance in the water much like an arrow with an oversized head—the bow and stern waves generated by the ship’s passage through the water—and the foaming a straight line caused by the propellers is the arrow’s shaft. The eye is drawn to such shapes as naturally as to the body of a woman, and at the apex of the V-shape, there one finds the ship. Or, in this case, many ships. They spotted the decoy group first, from forty miles away. The main body of COMEDY was identified a minute later.
THE PROBLEM FOR the ships was positive identification. Kemper couldn’t risk killing an airliner, as USS Vincennes had once done. The four F-16s had already turned toward them when the radio call went out. He didn’t have anyone aboard who spoke the language well enough to catch what they’d just said.
“Tally-ho,” the F-16 flight leader called. “Looks like F- 14s.” And he knew the Navy didn’t have any of those around.
“Anzio to STARFIGHTER, weapons free, splash ’em.”
“Roger that.”
“FLIGHT, LEAD, GO Slammer.” They were too busy looking down instead of looking around. Recon flight, Starfighter Lead figured. Tough. He selected AIM-120 and fired, a fraction before the other three aircraft in his formation did the same. “Fox-One, Fox-One!” And the Battle of Qatar was under way.
THE UIR TOMCATS were just a little too busy for their own good. Their radar-warning receivers were reporting all manner of emitters at the moment, and the air-to-air radar on the Vipers was just one of many. The leader of the two was trying to get a count of the warships below and talking on his radio at the same time, when a pair of AMRAAM missiles exploded twenty meters in front of his aging fighter. The second pilot at least looked up in time to see death coming.
“ANZIO, STARFIGHTER, SPLASH two, no ’chutes, say again, splash two.”
“Roger that.”
“What a nice way to start the day,” commented a USAF major who’d just spent sixteen months playing against the Israeli air force in the Negev. “Returning to station. Out.”
“I’M NOT SURE that’s a good idea,” van Damm said. The radar picture from John Paul Jones had been uplinked from the new ship via satellite to Washington. They were seeing things less than half a second after they really happened.
“Those ships cannot be stopped, sir,” Robby Jackson told the chief of staff. “We can’t take chances.”
“But they can say we shot first and—”
“Wrong, sir. Their missile boat shot first five hours ago,” the J-3 reminded him.
“But they won’t say that.”
“Save it, Arnie,” Ryan said. “My order, remember. The rules of engagement are in place. What now, Robby?”
“Depends on whether the Iranians got the word out. That first kill was easy. The first one usually is,” Jackson said, remembering the ones he’d made in his career, nothing at all like what he’d trained for at Top Gun, but there were no fair-play rules in real combat, were there?
The narrowest part of the passage was just over a hundred miles between Qatar and the Iranian town of Basatin. There was an air base there, and satellite coverage said there were fighters sitting on the ramp.
“HI, JEFF.”
“What’s happening, Andrea?” Raman asked, adding, “Glad you remembered that you left me up here.”
“It’s pretty busy with all this fever stuff. We need you back here. Got a car?”
“I think I can steal one from the local office.” In fact, he had an official car already.
“Okay,” she told him, “come on down. I don’t suppose we really need the advance work up there. Your ID will get you through the roadblocks on I-70. Quick as you can. Things are happening here.”
“Give me four hours.”
“You have a change of clothes?”
“Yeah, why?”
“You’re going to need it. We’ve set up decontamination procedures here. Everybody has to scrub down before getting into the West Wing. You’ll see when you get here,” the chief of the Detail told him.
“Fine with me.”
ALAHAD WASN’T DOING anything. Bugs planted in his house had determined that he was watching TV, flipping channels from one cable station to another in search of a movie he hadn’t seen before, and before going to bed he’d listened to CNN Headline News. After that, nothing. The lights were all out, and even the thermal-viewing cameras couldn’t see through the curtained windows of his bedroom. The agents doing surveillance drank their coffee from plastic cups and looked on, at nothing, while discussing their worries about the epidemic, just like everyone else in America. The media continued to devote virtually all of its airtime to the story. There was little else. Sports had stopped. Weather continued, but few were outside to notice. Everything else rotated around the Ebola crisis. There were science segments explaining what the virus was and how it spread—actually, how it might be spreading, as there was still diverse opinion on that—and the agents with the headphones had listened to the latest installment over Alahad’s own TV. It was all nature’s revenge, one environmental advocate was preaching. Man had gone into the jungle, cut down trees, killed animals, upset the ecosystem, and now the ecosystem was getting even. Or something like that.
There was legal analysis of the court case Edward Kealty had brought, but there simply was no enthusiasm for lifting the travel ban. Stories showed airplanes at airports, buses in terminals, trains at stations, and a lot of empty roads. Stories showed people in hotels, and how they were coping. Stories showed how to reuse surgical masks, and told people that this simple safety measure worked almost flawlessly; most people seemed to believe that. But to counter that, most of the stories showed hospitals and, now, body bags. Reports on how the bodies of the dead were being burned ran without showing the flames; that was by mutual consent. The raw data was distasteful enough without the image of its reality. Reporters and medical consultants were starting to comment on the lack of data on the number of cases—which was alarming to many—but hinting that the space in hospitals to deal with the Ebola cases had not expanded—which was comforting to some. The extreme doom-and-gloom-sayers were still distributing their cant, but others said quietly that the data didn’t support that view, that the situation might be stabilizing, though in every case they added that it was much too soon to tell.
They were starting to say that people were coping, that some states were totally clean, that many regions within those states that had cases were similarly healthy. And, finally, some people were coming forward to say with some authority that the epidemic had definitely not been a natural event. There was no public opinion on the issue that the media could really measure. People didn’t interact enough, share thoughts enough to make informed judgments, but with the beginnings of confidence that the world was not going to end came the big question: How had this begun?
SECRETARY OF STATE Adler was back in his airplane, flying west to the People’s Republic. While aloft, and in the Beijing embassy, he had access to the latest news. It had caused rage and, perversely, some degree of satisfaction. It was Zhang who was leading his government in this direction. That was fairly certain, now that they knew India had been involved—again—this time duped by Iran and China
. The real question was whether or not the Prime Minister would let her partners know that she’d reneged on her part of the deal. Probably not, Adler thought. She’d outmaneuvered herself again. She seemed able to do that standing still.
But the rage kept coming back. His country had been attacked, and by someone he’d met only a few days before. Diplomacy had failed. He had failed to stop a conflict—and wasn’t that his job? Worse than that, he and his country had been duped. China had maneuvered him and a vital naval force out of position. The PRC was now stringing out a crisis they’d made themselves, for the purpose of hurting American interests, and probably for the ultimate purpose of reshaping the world into their own design. They were being clever about it. China had not directly done anything to anyone, except a few air passengers, but had let others take the lead, and the risks that went with them. However this turned out, they would still have their trade, they would still have the respect duc a superpower, and influence over American policy, and they planned to maintain all of those things until such time as they made the changes they desired. They’d killed Americans on the Airbus. Through their maneuvers they were helping to kill others, to do real and permanent harm to his country, and doing so entirely without risk, SecState thought quietly, gazing out the window as his aircraft made landfall.
But they didn’t know that he knew these things, did they?
THE NEXT ATTACK would be a little more serious. The UIR had a large supply of C-802 missiles, so intelligence said. Made by China Precision Machine Import and Export Corporation, these were similar in type and capabilities to the French Exocet, with a range of about seventy miles. However, again the problem was targeting. There were just too many ships in the Gulf. To get the right destination for their missiles, the Iranians would have to get close enough for the look-down radars on their fighters to brush the edge of COMEDY’S missile envelope.
Well, Kemper decided, he’d have to see about that. John Paul Jones increased speed to thirty-two knots and moved north. The new destroyer was stealthy—on a radar set she looked rather like a medium-sized fishing boat—and to accentuate it she turned off all her radars. COMEDY had shown them one look. Now they would show them another. He also radioed Riyadh and screamed for AWACS support. The three cruisers, Anzio, Normandy, and Yorktown, maintained position close to the cargo ships, and it was now pretty clear to the civilian crews on the Bob Hopes that the warships were not there merely for missile defense. Any inbound vampire would have to go through a cruiser to get to them. But there was nothing to be done about that. The civilian seamen were all at their duty stations. Firefighting gear was deployed throughout the cargo decks. Their diesels were pounding out all the continuous power that the manuals allowed.
Aloft, the dawn patrol of F-16s was replaced by another. Weapons were free, and word was getting out now to the civilian traffic that the air over the Persian Gulf was not a good place to be. It would make everyone’s task a lot easier. It was no secret that they were there. Iranian radar had to have them, but there was no helping that at the moment.
“IT APPEARS THAT there are two naval forces in the Gulf,” Intelligence told him. “We are not sure of their composition, but it is possible that they are military transport ships.”
“And?”
“And two of our fighters have been shot down approaching them,” Air Force went on.
“The American ships—some of them are warships of a very modern type. The report from our aircraft said that there are others as well, looking like merchant ships. It is likely that these are tank transports from Diego Garcia—”
“The ones the Indians were supposed to stop!” “That is probably correct.”
What a fool I was to trust that woman! “Sink them!” he ordered, thinking that his wish could become a fact.
RAMAN LIKED TO drive fast. The nearly clear interstate, the dark night, and the powerful Service car allowed him to indulge that pastime, as he tore down Interstate 70 toward Maryland. The number of trucks on the road surprised him. He hadn’t known that there were so many vehicles dedicated to moving food and medical supplies. His rotating red light told them to keep out of his way, and also allowed his passage at speeds approaching a hundred miles per hour without interference from the Pennsylvania State Police.
It also gave him time to think. It would have been better for everyone if he’d known beforehand about all the things that were happening. Certainly it would have been better for him. The attack on SANDBOX had not pleased him. She was a child, too young, too innocent to be an enemy—he knew her by face and name and sound—and the shock of it had disturbed him, briefly. He didn’t quite understand why it had been ordered ... unless to draw the protective circle even more tightly around POTUS, and so make his own mission easier. But that hadn’t been necessary, not really. America was not Iraq, which Mahmoud Haji probably didn’t fully understand.
The disease attack, that was something else. The manner of its spread was a matter of God’s Will. It was distasteful, but that was life. He remembered the burning of the theater in Tehran. People had died there, too, ordinary people whose mistake had been to watch a movie instead of attending to their devotions. The world was hard, and the only thing that made its burden easier to bear was faith in something larger than oneself. Raman had that faith. The world didn’t change its shape by accident. Great events had to be cruel ones, for the most part. The Faith had spread with the help of the sword, despite the Prophet’s own admonition that the sword could not make one faithful... a dichotomy he did not fully understand, but that, too, was the nature of the world. One man could hardly comprehend it all. For so many things, one had to depend on the guidance of those wiser than oneself, to tell one what had to be done, what was acceptable to Allah, what served His purpose.
That he had not been told things that would have been useful—well, he had to admit, that was a reasonable security measure... if one accepted the fact that one was not supposed to survive. The realization did not bring a chill along with it. He had accepted that possibility a long time before, and if his distant brother could have fulfilled his mission in Baghdad, then he could fulfill his own in Washington. But he would try to survive if the chance offered itself. There wasn’t anything wrong with that, was there?
CLEARLY, THEY WERE still figuring this operation out, Kemper told himself. In 1990-91 there had been the luxury of time to decide things, to allocate assets, to set up communications links and all the rest. But not this time. When he’d called for the AWACS, some Air Force puke had replied, “What, you don’t have one? Why didn’t you ask?” The commanding officer of USS Anzio and Task Force 61.1 hadn’t vented his temper at the man. It probably wasn’t his fault anyway, and the good news was that they had one now. The timing was good enough, too. Four fighter aircraft, type unknown, were just rotating off the ground at Basatin, ninety miles away.
“COMEDY, this is Sky-Two, we show four inbounds.” The data link came up on one of the Aegis screens. His own radar couldn’t see that far, because it was well under the horizon. The AWACS showed four blips in two pairs.
“Sky, COMEDY, they’re yours. Splash ’em.”
“Roger—stand by, four more coming up.”
“HERE’S WHERE IT gets interesting,” Jackson told them in the Sit Room. “Kemper has a missile trap set up outboard of the main formation. If anybody gets past the -16s, we’ll see if it works.”
A THIRD GROUP of four lifted off a minute later. The twelve fighter aircraft climbed to ten thousand feet, then turned south at high speed.
The flight of F-16s couldn’t risk straying too far from COMEDY, but moved to meet the threat in the center of the Gulf under direction from the AWACS. Both sides switched on their targeting radars, the UIR force controlled by ground-based sets, and the USAF teams guided by the E-3B circling a hundred miles behind them. It wasn’t elegant. The -16s, with their longer-ranging missiles, shot first, and turned away as the southbound Iranian interceptors loosed their own and tried to evade. Then the
first group of four dived down for the water. Jamming pods went on, aided by powerful shore-based interference, which the Americans hadn’t expected. Three UIR fighters, still heading in, fell to the missile volley, while the Americans outran the return volley, then turned back to reengage. The American flight split into two-plane elements, racing east, then turned again to conduct an anvil attack. But the speeds involved were high, and one Iranian flight was now within fifty miles of COMEDY. That was when they appeared on Anzio’s radar.
“Cap’n,” the chief on the ESM board said into his microphone, “I am getting acquisition radar signals, bearing three-five-five. These are detection values, sir. They may have us.”
“Very well.” Kemper reached to turn his key. On Yorktown and Normandy the same thing happened. The former was an older version of the cruiser. In her case, four white-painted SM-2 MR came out of the fore and aft magazines onto the launch rails. For Anzio and Normandy nothing changed visually. Their missiles were in vertical launch cells. The SPY radars were now pumping out six million watts of RF energy, and dwelling almost continuously on the inbound fighter-bombers, which were just out of range of the cruisers.
But not out of range for John Paul Jones, ten miles to the north of the main body. In the space of three seconds, her main radar went active, and then the first of eight missiles erupted from her launch cells, rocketing skyward on columns of smoke and flame, then changing direction in skidding turns to level out and burn north.
The fighters hadn’t seen Jones. Her stealthy profile had not shown as a real target on their scopes, and neither had they noticed the fact that a fourth SPY radar was now tracking them. The series of white smoke trails came as an unpleasant surprise when the pilots looked up from their own radar scopes. But two of them triggered off their C- 802s just in time.
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