Strike Force

by Dale Brown

  “Major, no,” she said softly. “Pasdaran.”

  Najar’s eyes darted around the crowd and soon spotted the very same subjects. He looked accusingly at Fattah, then let his body relax and opened his palms. “I wonder what the Turkmeni government would think about Iran bringing in Revolutionary Guard assassins into their country,” Najar said.

  “They probably wouldn’t like it very much,” Fattah admitted, “but by the time they found out about him they’d be long gone, and you’d still be dead. Now come along quietly, please.”

  CHAPTER 6

  HIGH TECHNOLOGY AEROSPACE WEAPONS

  CENTER, ELLIOTT AFB, NEVADA

  A SHORT TIME LATER

  “Here’s the latest update, ladies and gentlemen,” Brigadier-General David Luger said in the Dreamland battle staff room. He was standing before Patrick McLanahan; Brigadier-General Rebecca Furness, commander of the Air Battle Force based at Battle Mountain Air Reserve Base, and Brigadier-General Hal Briggs, commander of the Air Battle Force’s ground forces; and Captain Hunter Noble and First Lieutenant Dorothea Benneton, representing the XR-A9 Black Stallion spaceplane crews.

  “Armstrong Space Station will take another day and a half to get settled into its new orbit to start detailed reconnaissance and surveillance of Iran,” Luger went on. “We’re getting a few oblique images but nothing tactically useful yet. We’ve increased NIRTSat overflights and we’ve narrowed the search for Iran’s mobile medium- and long-range missiles to a dozen different sites.”

  “One dozen? Doesn’t sound too narrow to me, Dave,” Hal commented.

  “Once the station gets in place, it’ll be able to discriminate between real missiles and decoys and even look inside bunkers and storage buildings,” Dave said. “We’ve got the best eyes out there on it now.”

  “Anything on Buzhazi’s whereabouts?” Patrick asked.

  “Negative,” Dave replied. “He’s hiding deep. No recent attacks except for very low-level insurgent activities. He might be gearing up for some big operation—the attacks lately have been small raids, collecting nothing more than uniforms and small-arms ammunition, but this could be a prelude to something much bigger.”

  “The White House won’t even consider our plan to attack the Iranian missile sites until we’ve narrowed the field down,” Patrick said, “so we’re on hold until then.” He turned to the Air Battle Force commander. “Rebecca, status of your forces?”

  “Same—three EB-52 Megafortresses, all manned; four EB-1C Vampires, two unmanned; and one AL-52 Dragon anti-missile aircraft,” Furness replied. One of the first female combat pilots in the U.S. Air Force, Furness was also the first woman in charge of a tactical bombing wing. Her Air Force Reserve B-1B Lancer bomber wing was selected by Patrick McLanahan to be converted to strategic flying battleships, capable of carrying an extensive array of weaponry. Most of her aircraft had been destroyed by the Russians at Yakutsk—her little force of bombers represented virtually all of America’s air-breathing long-range strike aircraft. “I think we have access to one or two B-2A bombers and six KC-10 tankers as well.”

  Rebecca’s EB-1C Vampire bombers, EB-52 Megafortress battleships, and AL-52 Dragon anti-missile aircraft were the most sophisticated attack planes in the world. The EB-1C Vampire was a modified version of the Air Force’s B-1B Lancer, with the addition of stealth technology, advanced computers, avionics, aircraft systems, and flight controls. But the real power of the Vampire bomber was its weapons. Every air-launched weapon in the American military arsenal could be utilized on the Vampire, and most weapons others in the American military had never heard of.

  The EB-52 Megafortress was a highly modified version of the venerable B-52 Stratofortress bomber, so much so that it could hardly be called a B-52 any more at all. Instead of five or six crewmembers, it had just two pilots—all other functions and crew positions were automated. The skin and structure of the original B-52 had been changed, using composite fibersteel, radar-absorbing materials, and unconventional mission-adaptive flight controls, to turn it into a real stealth bomber. The avionics and systems on board had all been changed to make the aircraft more precise, more connected, lighter, faster, and more efficient. Only a handful of EB-52s and its other even more highly modified brothers and sisters still existed after the American Holocaust, but the remaining few planes were the cutting-edge of long-range air attack.

  “Updates on Iran’s defenses?”

  “The Revolutionary Guards and Iranian air defense forces are on full alert,” Rebecca replied, “and we’re seeing every kind of Russian, French, Chinese, and even some American air defense weapons from the seventies to the present operating out there. Tehran, the Turkish border, and the Persian Gulf, Gulf of Oman, and Arabian Sea coastlines are the heaviest defended, with multiple layers of very sophisticated surface-to-air missiles sites—many of them mobile and harder to pinpoint. They’ve obviously learned some lessons from their last encounter with you guys. Very few fighter patrols. We’re looking at possible missile launch sites but so far all of them have similar numbers of defensive batteries installed around them. So far we can’t tell which are decoys, so it’s hard to tell which are real.

  “We’ve had to modify our original plan to reflect the denser and more sophisticated order of battle,” she went on. “We’ll need to use a lot of resources to punch through both their outer as well as terminal defenses. Once our bombers get through the outer defenses they can roam over the countryside fairly freely until they get within fifty miles of the target area, and then they run the gauntlet again. Each plane may have just a couple big precision-guided munitions left to attack by the time they make it through.” She looked at Hal. “Our attacks need to be finely coordinated both for ingress and egress, and even if everything works perfectly our guys will be in for a very rough ride at best.”

  “But it’s still doable?”

  Rebecca hesitated just long enough for many of their throats to go dry, then replied, “Yes, we can do it. We’ll need as much intel as we can scrape together, better than average aircraft and weapon reliability, perfect timing, perfect aiming, and a lot of luck…but yes, sir, we can do it.”

  “Thanks, Rebecca.” Patrick knew that Rebecca Furness’s assessment was as brutally honest as possible—she wouldn’t hesitate to tell them if she didn’t think her bombers could make it. “Boomer?”

  “We’ve got two Black Stallion spaceplanes ready to go,” Hunter Noble replied. “Both can be configured for attack, satellite launch, or passengers. The third spaceplane hasn’t gone into orbit or carried any cargo but we can use it if necessary—we’ll be testing as we go. Nano?”

  “I wanted to bring up the new gear General Briggs mentioned we might be bringing along, Nano” Benneton said, smiling enticingly at Hal just as she had been since returning from Las Vegas. “I took a look at some of that new gear we acquired. The problem is not with weight, but volume. The unit itself folds up fairly small, but we need to remove two crew seats to accommodate it. That means we can carry one unit, two or three mission backpacks, two spare power cells, and three passengers in the module. It’s impressive technology, but my question for you is: is it worth losing two Tin Man commandos?”

  “Can we fit two units in the passenger module, Lieutenant?” Dave Luger asked.

  “Yes, sir, but with spare power cells only, not with any of those mission backpacks,” Nano replied. “Again, it’s volume, not weight. Obviously those units can carry a big load, and they were designed to be carried into battle aboard large cargo-sized aircraft or those cool Humvees we got, so there was never any attempt to miniaturize the mission backpacks. Once they’re redesigned, they’ll be much more useful.”

  “We’ll adjust the mix depending on the mission and the tactical situation,” Patrick said, “but for now I want to be able to bring one unit with as many mission backpacks as possible together with two Tin Men.”

  “Yes, sir. We can do that.”

  “Good,” Patrick said. “All right, folk
s: the plan still stands, and we’re just awaiting approval and a warning order. The primary objective is to locate, track, and destroy Iran’s tactical and strategic missiles, so whoever’s in charge out there won’t destroy half a city again like they did with Arān. It’ll take Ann and Raydon another day or so to reposition Silver Tower so we can do a detailed ISAR search on the spots we’ve identified so far with the NIRTSats. With thirty-six suspected storage, garrison, and launch sites, we’re going to need every person and every weapon system pulling together to make it work.”

  “I’m hoping at least half of those are decoys that Silver Tower can identify—otherwise we’re going to need a lot more boots on the ground,” Dave said.

  “We need to start getting the boots over there now,” Patrick said. “As soon as we locate those missile sites we need to take them down.” He looked up and spoke, “Duty Officer, conference Colonel Raydon in for me.” The computerized “Duty Officer” made the connection just moments later. “How’s it going up there, Colonel?” Patrick McLanahan asked on the secure video communications datalink from his command center at Dreamland. “Ready to come home yet?”

  “Not on your life, sir,” Kai Raydon responded. “I feel like a kid again. I might just retire up here. Glad you called. I have something for you. Got a minute?”

  “Sure, Kai,” Patrick replied. “What do you have?”

  “As you know, sir, we’re repositioning the station to cover Iran better,” Raydon said. “It’ll take another day or two to complete the orbit change. But as we’re moving I decided to poke around eastern Iran and its neighbors with the sensors and electromagnetic sniffers Ann’s got up here to see if anyone else is getting as worried as the Iranians over this insurgency. I’ve been picking up an awful lot of uncoded chatter between Turkmeni border patrols and Iranian Revolutionary Guard units right around Ashkhabad, Turkmenistan. It doesn’t appear to be routine—something’s going down.”

  Patrick’s stomach tightened at the double mention of both the Iranians and Turkmenistan—his experiences with both had mostly been very unpleasant. Moreover, he considered the president of Turkmenistan, Jalaluddin Turabi, a friend, and if the Iranians were becoming active again in that country, his life was definitely in jeopardy. “Moving border security units in response to what happened in Qom?”

  “Maybe, but there’s something else,” Raydon said. “We ran a lot of the uncoded chatter through our translators, and we keep on picking up the word ‘princess.’ There’s only two of us up here, and Ann is pretty much working on setting up the station and placing us in our new orbit, so we don’t have time to check the intelligence dispatches on anything pertaining to ‘princess.’

  “At first I thought it was a glitch in the decoder, and then I thought it was a code-name for a weapon or vehicle, but I think they’re talking about a person. Can you look around and see what you can find?”

  “Sure. Did you send me the intercepts you’re referring to?”

  “Should be sitting in your in-box already, sir.”

  “I’ll call you back as soon as I find anything.”

  “I’m standing by.” Patrick gave the information he had to his Plans and Intelligence office, who had access to all classified reports submitted to various agencies in the U.S. government, including the State Department and Pentagon.

  Less than an hour later, Dave Luger read over the report. “It’s not a code-name as far as we can tell, Muck,” he said. “We can’t detect any attempts to use code-words in any of the transmissions Raydon pulled down—the Iranians and Turkmenis are both chatting away in the clear. We think they’re talking about a real princess they may have captured. What do you suspect up there, Kai? What are you seeing out there in Ashkhabad?”

  “Nothing specific,” Raydon replied. “But we can track and triangulate the transmissions, coded and uncoded, and we traced activity to a big bazaar outside Ashkhabad.”

  “The Tolkuchka bazaar. I’ve been there,” Patrick said. “One of the biggest in Central Asia.”

  “We can’t pick out faces or anything like that, but we did get ultra-wideband synthetic aperture pictures of a confrontation between some Turkmeni military units and the source of some of the uncoded transmissions—namely, a car in which radio transmissions were being sent and received in Farsi.”

  “Not unusual. The border area is pretty heavily traveled, and the Iranians have a significant presence there.”

  Patrick was indeed very familiar with the country. After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, some fleeing Taliban forces crossed the border into Turkmenistan. The insurgent force had grown as it moved westward into a fighting force big enough to threaten the pro-Russian Turkmeni government, and the Russians moved in to crush the rebellion. Patrick McLanahan’s fledgling Air Battle Force was ordered into Turkmenistan to covertly monitor the situation, and a low-scale but fierce shooting conflict erupted between American and Russian air and ground forces to prevent a slaughter in that oil-rich but underdeveloped country.

  Patrick had been severely reprimanded for his actions against the Russians, but his Air Battle Force ground teams did succeed in rescuing the ex-Taliban fighter turned Turkmeni armed forces commander Jalaluddin Turabi from the Russians. Turabi returned to his adopted country and later became president of Turkmenistan. Although protected by the United Nations and slowly transforming into an Islamic republic similar to Turkey, most of the educated, elites, petroleum industries, urban areas, and government were heavily Russian or Russian-sympathetic, and Turabi was under constant pressure to return Turkmenistan to the Russian sphere of influence.

  “Well, maybe so,” Raydon replied, “but it looks like the military guys and the ones in the Iranian vehicle were confronting a group of three persons sitting near a horse pen or corral.”

  “Three persons, you say?” Dave Luger asked.

  “You got something on that?”

  “The State Department put out a bulletin a few days ago that said that a group of three political refugees under their protection had fled the country by stealing a jet and flying it to Canada, presumably heading toward Iran,” Dave said. “They were accompanied by two guards apparently assigned to assist, but there were three in protective custody. Can you send me some of those images?”

  Raydon already had his finger poised on the button. “Done,” he said. “The timing works out correct if they traveled from Canada to Central Asia by air.” There was no response. “Genesis, how do you copy Armstrong?”

  “Sorry, Kai, I was reading here,” Patrick said, paging through more of the dispatches presented in his search. “There’s another report uploaded from the Minnesota Civil Air Patrol to the Air Force and copied to Air National Guard headquarters and the U.S. Department of State. Seems that a unit commander reports that one of his cadets was taken by an Air National Guard unit, claiming that he was supporting a State Department mission to recover the cadet who is purported to be a female descendant of Iranian royalty…”

  “In other words, a ‘princess,’” Raydon interjected.

  “The Air National Guard crew had two persons that the unit commander recognized as the cadet’s parents but apparently were in reality the cadet’s bodyguards, along with two more individuals who were security forces accompanying the bodyguards.”

  “No shit!” Raydon exclaimed. “You don’t suppose…?”

  “It’s quite a stretch from here on out, Kai,” Patrick said. “The State Department can give us more information.”

  “Now that you mention them, it’s way above my pay grade,” Raydon said. “I’ll leave it up to you from here on out, sir. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do.”

  “One question: can you track the three subjects?”

  “Sure—for now,” Raydon replied. “Armstrong is tied into several other surveillance satellites, and we can pull information from them. Now if they transfer them to another car or if they stay off the air I’ll probably lose them, but they’re not practicing any COMSEC or OPSEC at all.
I think I can track them no sweat.”

  “Great, Kai. Keep me posted.”

  “Roger that. Armstrong clear.”

  Patrick dismissed everyone from the meeting except Dave Luger, then sat back to think. It wasn’t just a stretch to link the persons apparently being apprehended in Ashkhabad with three political refugees from Minnesota…it was almost science fiction. But what if it was true? He wasn’t going to just sit on the information.

  Patrick phoned the Secretary of State’s office. No one was available to speak with him—no surprise there—until he drilled all the way down the hierarchy to the assistant undersecretary of state for Central Asian affairs, Norman Moller. “Mr. Moller, good morning, this is General McLanahan, calling from Elliott Air Force Base in Nevada, secure.”

  “Norman Moller, assistant undersecretary for Central Asian affairs, secure,” Moller recited for the benefit of the dozens of overt and covert listening and recording systems monitoring all government calls these days.

  “How are you today, sir?”

  “The Patrick McLanahan? The guy who bombed Russia after the Holocaust?”

  “Yes, sir. I have a question I’m hoping you can answer.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “I received information from my intelligence sources that indicate that three foreign persons under the State Department’s protection, ones who recently left Minnesota, were spotted in Ashkhabad, Turkmenistan, and may have been picked up by the Iranians. Can you confirm this for me?”

  There was a considerable silence on the phone, long enough to confirm in Patrick’s mind that his and Raydon’s guesses were correct. Finally: “I’ll have to call you back to confirm your identity, General,” Moller said. “I’ll be in touch shortly. Good-bye. Moller clear.”

  In Washington-speak “shortly” could means five minutes or five days, Patrick knew. He let out a breath…loud enough to get everyone’s attention. “You stirring up more shit, Muck?” he asked. “What are you thinking about?”