The Disciple

by Stephen Coonts

  Nearby sat a portable radar control van, or trailer, since it was usually pulled behind a truck. Sultani backed away from the binoculars and glanced at the white van festooned with antennas. On the other side of the van sat the dish, which was mounted on a large trailer that was still attached to the tractor that pulled it. Beyond it two diesel-powered generators snored steadily. Cables connecting all this gear together ran everywhere, seemingly hopelessly tangled.

  “General,” Sultani said to the uniformed man beside him as he gestured to the binoculars. Everyone wanted to look; it was only human.

  He was walking toward the van when the door opened and his nephew Ghasem came out and strode quickly toward him. “There are twelve planes aloft over the carrier,” Ghasem reported, “which is one hundred ten nautical miles away.”

  Habib Sultani nodded his understanding. The Americans were doing military exercises, practicing, dropping bombs on floating objects, just as they often did.

  Sultani led the way back to the van and through the door, with Ghasem at his heels.

  The U.S. Navy F/A-18s were spread out in loose tactical formation, in two sections, flying at 12,000 feet. The lead’s wingman was a hundred feet out to his right and stepped slightly down and aft. Number Three was a thousand feet away to the leader’s left and three or four hundred feet aft. Her wingman was stepped out to her left and back slightly. This formation allowed each pilot to scan his instruments occasionally and stay updated on the nav problem without worrying about running into a comrade.

  Lieutenant Commander Harry Lampert was the leader. He had his plane on autopilot as he studied the radar display of the strait ahead. The ships there showed up nicely on the radar screen. He played with several displays, then checked his ECM gear. In his ears was the bass tone of a search radar, which the tactical display showed was ahead and to his right, in Iran.

  He glanced around, checking the position of his wingman, Sidney “Goose” Inglehart, and the other section, led by Lieutenant Betsy “Chicago” O’Hare. The pilots were all veterans. All except Number Four, Betsy’s wingman, Lieutenant (junior grade) Jackson L. “Hillbilly” Jones, the nautical pride of Wildcat, West Virginia. “Billy” Jones-predictably, his nickname was often shortened-was on his first cruise, and this was only his second flight into the strait.

  As Lampert adjusted his fanny in his ejection seat, he got a call on the encrypted radio. “War Ace Leader, this is Black Eagle. We had some Iranian gunboat activity earlier this morning, then again about an hour ago.”

  “Roger that,” Lampert replied. “We were briefed.” Black Eagle was an E-2 Hawkeye that was high above and well behind him. The Hawkeye, a twin-engine turboprop, carried a very capable area search radar and more ECM gear than could be packed into a tactical aircraft. The tactical coordinator in the Hawkeye would keep him informed.

  I just hope the Iranians aren’t up to something nasty today, Lampert thought to himself.

  Ahh… nothing will happen.

  Sultani looked over the shoulder of the radar operator at the screen. He saw the blips that were Lampert’s four Hornets began to separate from the single spot of light as they came up the gulf. “Send the boats,” he told the military aide at his elbow. The man, a colonel, picked up the telephone. The wire had been run to this site just two days ago.

  At the airbase at Bandar-e Abbas, one hundred nautical miles away, two SU-30 fighters were on five-minute alert, with the pilots in the cockpits, ready to start engines. Sultani looked at his watch. They could be here within twenty minutes. Their arrival should be a nice surprise for the Americans, if the Sukhoi pilots obeyed orders and left their radars turned off. The F-18s’ fuel state should be down significantly by then.

  This might work, Sultani told himself. He found his nephew Ghasem looking at him. He made eye contact, nodded affirmatively and stepped outside. Nestled in the shade of a tree was a table that contained a computer. Wires led away in all directions to antennas spotted up and down the coast and at four sites inland. Two men were there, monitoring the signals coming in from the various sites.

  The senior man, a Russian in a white shirt and dark trousers, turned toward Sultani when he saw him approach.

  “Is your equipment working properly?” the Iranian asked.

  “Yes. Quite satisfactory,” the Russian replied and glanced at Ghasem, who was two paces behind his uncle.

  “A flight of four American fighters is coming up the Gulf,” Sultani said. “Our fighters are thirty minutes away. After the American planes pass us, I am going to have the gunboats sortie. They can make a run on that tanker there.” He pointed to a tanker far away, just visible against the haze that obscured the horizon.

  The Russian looked in the indicated direction, held his hand to shade his eyes, then turned back to Sultani. “This may be interesting,” he said with a grin.

  In the cockpit of his F/A-18 Hornet, Harry Lampert could see mountain peaks to his right poking up through the haze. They were about a hundred miles away, he guessed, in Iran. To his left, on the Arabian Peninsula, he saw several lower peaks, probably six thousand feet in elevation, but they were far away, indistinct, barely visible in the yellow sky. Yes, the sky over Arabia was yellow… Perhaps the sun reflecting from the sand and rock and packed earth of that desert hellhole upon the dust and dirt suspended in the atmosphere. Whatever, the yellowish tint to the sky extended up, up, up. Lampert thought the air over Arabia must be laden with dust well into the stratosphere.

  He turned back to the business at hand, checked his radar, then his wingmen, listened to that steady beep as the Iranian radar beam swept him every few seconds, turned the plane slightly to stay in the center of the channel through the Strait of Hormuz. Causing an international incident by violating foreign airspace would not be career-enhancing.

  In the Number Four plane in Lampert’s flight, Hillbilly Jones was also looking at the yellow sky over Arabia. Dirt in the air, he thought. He wondered what that dirt was doing to the engines as they sucked it in. Nothing good, that’s for sure.

  Hillbilly wasn’t worried about navigation or even paying much attention to the location of the flight. The senior guys could worry about that. All he had to do was follow Number Three, Chicago O’Hare, wherever she went. In the unlikely event Chicago got lost, he would be, too, but probably she would stay found, and so would he. All in all, being a junior officer was pretty simple.

  Ol’ Chicago’s plane was suspended in this goo, as were the other two away to the right. They looked sort of like fish lying there motionless in the sky. They were all moving, of course, but only the relative motion could be seen, and with good formation pilots, there was damn little of that. They looked, he thought, as if they were painted upon that featureless, hazy backdrop.

  Hillbilly Jones made a mental note to say that when he wrote a letter to his girlfriend this evening. She was studying for a master’s in English lit and liked it when he described how stuff looked.

  He sighed and tried to rearrange his testicles so the parachute harness didn’t cut him so much.

  The undecked open gunboats were about fifty feet long and were driven by two powerful V8 engines; they were capable of forty knots in relatively calm water. Amidships, three men stood by the 37 mm, one to optically aim and fire, the other two to load magazines as necessary. Eight other men armed with AK-47s rode forward. Their job, if the captain ordered action, was to sweep people from the decks of the victim ship while the 37 mm tore at her guts. The gunboats were cheap and effective patrol boats. Or pirate boats, depending on one’s political persuasion.

  Out of the harbor, the three boats set up in a left echelon formation. Soon they had worked up to twenty-five knots and were on course to intercept the tanker that Sultani had pointed out to the Russian technician, a tanker that was barely visible on the horizon to the men in the gunboat.

  The captain of the lead boat, whose name was Omar, kept increasing speed as he found his boat was manageable in the swell. He got to thirty knots, de
cided the ride was rough enough, then backed off a few hundred RPMs on his engines. The boat pounded the swells, and the unmuffled engines sang loudly behind him. Standing at the helm with his knees bent, the sea wind streaming his hair and filling his nostrils with that clean salt smell, Omar felt as if he had died and entered Paradise. He concentrated on holding the tanker on a constant angle of bearing, not letting it drift toward the bow or stern.

  “The boats are out,” the Black Eagle controller told Harry Lampert. “They are behind you about sixty miles, three of them, apparently on their way to intercept a tanker. Your orders are to provide cover for the tanker.”

  The standing rules of engagement under which the U.S. Navy operated said that the Iranians would not be allowed to stop shipping in international waters. On the other hand, the rules also said not to fire at an Iranian boat, ship or airplane unless fired upon. The rules went on for six pages and read as if they had been written by lawyers, which was the truth of it. Like policemen who had only seconds to make life-or-death decisions, the naval officers who had to deal with these confrontations knew that their superiors would scrutinize their actions at their leisure. Fitness reports would be written and, if necessary, courts-martial convened.

  Harry Lampert wasn’t thinking about any of that right now. He had the tanker headed south and the nearby destroyer on radar and began descending and accelerating. When he was twenty-five miles out, he saw the tanker’s wake, then the destroyer’s. The tanker was a leviathan, making about twelve knots, carrying every gallon of crude oil the captain could get in her. Even as he watched, he saw the destroyer turn to cross the tanker’s wake to the east side, and he saw her wake grow longer. She was accelerating.

  Lampert stopped his descent at five thousand feet and motored on inbound, doing about four hundred knots. The wakes of the gunboats came into view at ten miles.

  Harry concentrated on the gunboats as he closed and flew directly over them. He extended out and set his planes up in a loose circle around the tanker. All the while the gunboats came steadily on.

  Lampert’s radio was ominously silent. The radar operator could see everything Lampert could see, so there was no need for chatter. The radar picture was data-linked to the carrier, where the battle group commander, Rear Admiral Stanley Bryant, and his staff could also see it. The admiral was in radio contact with Black Eagle and the destroyer that was now on the east, or gunboat, side of the tanker, whose wake was straight as a string as she plowed her way southward.

  The admiral was the man on the spot. Did Iran want a confrontation, or did they want war? How far was the Iranian commander willing to go? How many chances could the admiral take with the action right beside a tanker loaded with crude oil?

  The minutes passed as the gunboats crossed the twenty miles of ocean between the shore and the ships. The Hornets made more leisurely turns around the ships. The pilots had their engines throttled back to maximum endurance airspeed to save fuel.

  Going round and round, watching the boats closing on the tanker… Harry Lampert felt helpless and frustrated. What were the Iranians up to?

  In the radar van on the bluff, Habib Sultani glanced at the radar screen, then his watch, and said to the general sitting beside the telephone that connected directly to the airbase, “Launch the fighters.” The general picked up the telephone.

  When they were about four miles from the ships, well into international waters, two of the gunboats changed course. The lead kept going toward the laden tanker, but number three turned south for the empty tanker coming up the strait. The second gunboat altered course to intercept the destroyer.

  A half minute later the Black Eagle controller said, “War Ace Leader, remind the gunboats of your presence.”

  “Roger that,” Harry Lampert said. He continued, “Betsy, stay high as cover. Goose, come with me.”

  Goose was Lampert’s wingman, and he gave his lead a mike click in response. Unsaid was the implicit order for Hillbilly Jones, Chicago’s wingman, to stay with his lead.

  Lampert reduced throttle and lowered his nose as he completed his turn. This time he would go right over the lead gunboat at fifty feet.

  In the lead gunboat, Omar saw the two F/A-18s out of the corner of his eye. They looked funny, so he turned his head to see. They were very low and moving extremely fast. A cone of gray light seemed to trail each airplane. Although he didn’t know it, the Hornets were supersonic, and the gray cone was vapor condensing in the visible shock wave behind each plane.

  In only a heartbeat the lead plane went over Omar’s boat, and the shock wave nearly ruptured his eardrums. The shock wave of the second plane, which passed fifty yards in front of his boat, so closely followed the first that it was difficult to distinguish the two. The booms of the Hornets’ passing were the loudest things Omar and his crewmen had ever heard, and they were followed by the howl of four jet engines in afterburner, a howl that rapidly dropped in volume as the two fighters raced away at nearly a thousand feet per second.

  Omar had his orders. He stayed on course for the tanker, now about a mile and a half away. Considering the tanker’s speed, he would be alongside in about two minutes. In front of him, the men were shouting at each other and pointing at the fighters. One of them turned and pumped his fist at Omar. He shouted something, something lost on the wind. Then Omar realized what he had said. “God is Great!”

  Ah, yes.

  Harry Lampert came out of burner and did a four-G, 180-degree turn, then headed back toward the gunboats, which were rapidly closing with the tanker.

  Worried that he might panic the tanker’s captain with a masthead pass, he elected to pass the tanker on a parallel heading about a half mile away, which proved to be outside the gunboats. Lampert got on the radio to Black Eagle, which was patching his comments straight through to the admiral in the TFCC, the Tactical Flag Command Center.

  The second gunboat was charging directly toward the destroyer, which was doing about half the speed of the boat, on a collision course. Even as Harry looked that way, the gunboat turned at the last possible instant and went roaring down the side of the gray warship into her wake.

  The third gunboat was still on course for the tanker to the south, and was still several miles away.

  On the bluff overlooking the strait, Habib Sultani watched the action through his binoculars. He saw the low pass by the Hornets, saw the boat charging the destroyer, and he heard the buzzsaw sound of encrypted chatter on the radio. The Americans were getting excited.

  “Where are the Sukhois?” he asked.

  “They are airborne. Estimated arrival in ten minutes,” was the answer.

  “Radio the gunboat leader and tell him to get in against the tanker and shout for it to stop. Have him shoot into the water ahead of it.”

  ***

  The Hawkeye radar operator picked up the skinpaints of the Sukhoi fighters coming south along the coast from Bandar-e Abbas. They had been running low, partially masked by the peaks of the coastal mountains, but the Black Eagle controller had them now. He informed War Ace Leader of the closing fighters.

  Harry Lampert was face-to-face with the tiger, and the news in his headset that Iranian fighters were just minutes away didn’t improve the situation. Suddenly he wanted to be upstairs, facing the fighters. The destroyer could deal with the gunboats near it.

  “Chicago, come on down and fly around these boats. If they shoot at the tanker, sink them. We’re coming back upstairs.”

  “Wilco,” said Chicago O’Hare and dropped her nose.

  Out on her wing, Hillbilly Jones was in an information-overload condition. The radio chatter was coming thick and fast, enemy fighters were inbound, he got only glimpses of the tanker and gunboats below, and Chicago was diving toward the sea. He eased closer to her, now only fifty feet away, and concentrated on staying on her wing; someone else was going to have to run the war.

  O’Hare and Jones were descending through two thousand feet when their ECM threat indicators lit up. The inbou
nd Sukhois had turned on their radar and were probing for them.

  Oh man, what now? Jones thought.

  Harry Lampert couldn’t enter the twelve-mile exclusion zone of Iran’s territorial waters. He was checking his location, Black Eagle was relaying the admiral’s reminder, and his threat indicator was lighting up like a Christmas tree. If all that wasn’t enough, when he glanced down, he saw two waterspouts ahead of the tanker. Hell, that gunboat was firing warning shots!

  Harry keyed the mike and relayed that information to Black Eagle, then asked for and received permission to fire a warning shot of his own. O’Hare had heard the transmissions, of course, but to make sure she understood, he said on the radio, “Chicago, put a burst in front of the lead boat.”

  “Wilco,” said Betsy O’Hare. She was one tough fighter pilot, a Naval Academy grad, and she didn’t dither. She flipped on her master armament switch, selected guns, then adjusted her flight path so the rounds would impact a hundred yards or so in front of the leading gunboat, which was paralleling the tanker’s course, about a hundred yards to port. The gunboat had throttled back and seemed to be roughly matching the speed of the tanker. She would come in off the gunboat’s port beam, at enough of an angle that her 20 mm cannon shells wouldn’t hit the tanker if they ricocheted off the water.

  Being human, she wondered what the Iranians manning those 37 mm guns were going to think about cannon shells in front of them. Since that was an unknown, she kept her speed fairly high, almost four hundred knots, as she closed, still descending. A short burst would be good enough. Let them see the muzzle blast.

  Her wingman, Hillbilly Jones, was listening to all of the radio chatter-the Sukhois were coming in supersonic-and the audio from the ECM threat indicator, which was giving him audible cues on every Iranian radar out there, while the blue ocean and hazy sky changed places as Chicago maneuvered. His flying was getting ragged; he was behind the curve. It was all he could do to hang on to his flight lead. The thought that a safe course might be to break off so that he could fly his own airplane while observing this goat rope from a comfortable altitude never even crossed his mind.