At 11:00 P.M., G. W. Hosein shook me awake. I had managed to doze off just a few minutes prior. “They’re going into the bunker,” he whispered, hoping not to awaken Davar, who was asleep inside her curtains ten feet away. “Ahmad has been keeping an eye on them. Limos arriving carrying whole families, it looks like.”
I rolled out and got dressed.
I was about ready to go when Davar came out of the curtains wearing trousers, a shirt and boots.
“You’re not going anywhere,” I said.
“This is my country,” she shot back and set off along the tunnel to where G. W. and the others were making coffee and heating MREs.
I followed her-and thought, What the heck. Who am I to tell her how to run her life? Maybe she’ll run into a couple of prison guards she recognizes.
Joe Mottaki was there with his two guys, decked out as Iranian soldiers, complete with AKs and sidearms. With their beards, they looked as Iranian as Ahmadinejad. I scratched my own stubble, four days’ growth, as I surveyed them. Joe was drinking coffee and looking sour.
“You going to try for a tank?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“We only need it in case things go bad. All we have to do is lay low until the bunker bombers do their thing.”
Mottaki gave me a look I couldn’t classify.
“Are you thinking about those people in the bunker?” I asked.
His lips curled into a sneer. “You ass! I’ve got a wife and kid in Israel, cousins, my parents, uncles and aunts, none of whom ever lifted a finger against Iran. All they want is to be left in peace. I’m thinking about them! These raghead jihad bastards would kill them all if they could and dance on their graves.” He leaned into my face and hissed, “I don’t give a bloody fuck about the people in that hole.”
Using binoculars, G. W., Davar, Larijani and I watched from beside a cluster of abandoned apartments as limo after limo arrived carrying whole families, who lugged suitcases and boxes and bundles into the mosque at the prayer grounds. Then the limos drove away. Some people arrived in their own cars, which they parked willy-nilly in the lot next door, after they had off-loaded their stuff. Kids wandered around; a few young mothers were carrying babies.
“I count two dozen soldiers down there,” G. W. said. “One big truck, which probably hauled them in.”
“See any armor anywhere?” I asked as I scanned the area.
“Nope.”
I wondered how the locals would feel if they knew their fearless leaders were taking cover. I glanced over at Davar, who was leaning against a wall to steady herself as she peered at the mosque with binoculars. Although no one had told her in so many words, I think she knew why G. W. and I were so interested in that bunker. I got out my satellite telephone and spent five minutes setting it up. Then I called the folks at Central Command and gave them the word. The guy I talked to merely grunted. No doubt he was getting information from a variety of different sources.
I broke the connection and sat watching the people arriving. Periodically I scanned the area behind us and to both sides for troops.
Behind me Larijani sat examining his feet and hands. He seemed totally uninterested in the proceedings around the bunker. He certainly had a load to carry for the rest of his life.
I tried not to think about the children I could see going into the bunker. If I were an Israeli like Mottaki, perhaps I would feel as he did. But I wasn’t.
The truth is we were all guilty, all of us: Ahmadinejad, the mullahs, Larijani, Grafton… me… and Joe Mottaki.
I lowered the binoculars and glanced at Davar, who was sitting beside the wall watching me with those deep, dark eyes, her binoculars on her lap.
Once again the ready room of VFA-196 aboard USS United States was packed, with an officer in every seat. At the podium, Commander Burgholzer surveyed his charges and summed up the information discussed during the previous two hours.
“Folks, I’m going to give it to you straight. We are going to have a war. With luck, it will be short, although it won’t be sweet. You know everything I know; you’ve read the Op Plan; you’ve got all the information you need to fly your missions. I want you people to be careful out there. Be safe, be professionals, and make sure you know what you’re shooting at. Any questions?”
One pilot spoke up. “Skipper, what’s going to happen if we put a ’winder into a nuke?”
The Fly scratched his head. “Either it’ll go down and you’ll fly on, or your next breath will be at the Pearly Gates.”
Nobody even smiled.
“If you get there before the rest of us, tell St. Peter we’ll all be along sooner or later and put a keg on ice.” He paused, then added, “Well, most of us will get there. I don’t know about the XO… or O’Hare…”
This time he got a chuckle from his pilots.
Since no one knew Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s timetable, the carrier was going to a five-minute alert at midnight. “When we know more, we’ll tell you more,” the wing intelligence officer told them in the televised, big-picture brief that had been piped to every ready room.
Four of the Savage Horde’s F/A-18 Hornets were loaded with missiles on the flight deck. The lucky four alert pilots donned their flight gear, arranged their kneeboard cards with frequencies and notes and trooped to the escalator for the ride up to the flight deck. Once there, they checked in with flight-deck control on the location of their aircraft, verified the predicted catapult weight and, using red lights, strolled out onto the crowded deck to look for their steeds. Pilots of another squadron were also manning four F/A-18s, and crews were manning two EA-6Bs, two KS-3 tankers, and an E-2 Hawkeye.
After careful preflights of the aircraft and weapons, the Hornet pilots manned up. The plane captains helped them strap in. Electrical power was applied to the plane and, the pilots fired off the computers and began typing in waypoints and checkpoints. They didn’t, however, start engines. Once the engines were started, fuel was being consumed, fuel they would need to reach their assigned patrol areas or engage enemy fighters. Ready to launch on five minutes’ notice, they would wait until the admiral gave the order before bringing their aircraft to life.
The E-2 Hawkeye, with its giant radar housing riding above the center of the wing, did start engines. Chicago O’Hare was in a Hornet cockpit, playing with her computer and generally killing time, when she felt the ship begin a turn into the wind. The yellow-shirted taxi directors worked the E-2 to Catapult Three on the waist. Chicago watched as the catapult crew readied the cat, put the plane on it, and sent it off into the night. The Hawkeye would carry its radar into the lower stratosphere, there to watch thousands of miles of sea, and Iran. The information it gathered would be data-linked to the ship to keep the decision-makers there informed, and if necessary data-linked to airborne Hornets. The buzzword was network-centric warfare; and it worked.
After the Hawkeye was launched, the ship came back to its original course, which was to the northwest.
The captain of United States and her sister carrier, USS Columbia, which was steaming ten miles northward with her escorts, had been told to place their ships as close to the mouth of the Gulf of Hormuz as possible while still maintaining the sea room they needed to come into the wind for launches and recoveries. Every sea mile closer to the mouth of the Gulf was a mile the airplanes didn’t have to fly. Yet every mile close to the Iranian coast decreased the task force’s reaction time to antiship missiles, if the Iranians launched any. Admiral Bryant and the captains had conferred. The admiral weighed the imponderables against the requirements of the mission and decided where he wanted the ships. As with every military decision, he and the people he was responsible for would have to live with the outcome, whatever it was.
Chicago sat in her cockpit looking at the other planes on the deck, the sailors, the night sky, savoring the gentle rise and fall of the ship as it rode the back of the sea and the smell of the night wind, rich with salt. She also thought she could detect a hint of the land on the wind, but
perhaps it was only her imagination.
Air Force One was somewhere over the North Atlantic when an aide woke Jake Grafton, who was napping in a seat near the rear of the cabin. The president wanted to see him.
Jake found the president in a thoughtful mood. He wanted to talk, and did so. Jake sat and listened as the president discussed the political forces that had molded modern Iran. Merely thinking aloud, he ruminated on Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the Iranian presidential candidate who apparently won the last presidential election and had been under loose house arrest ever since.
Jake sat silently listening. The president obviously realized the personal risk he was taking by going to Baghdad, and Jake admired him for it. Yet the president didn’t mention it. Nor did he mention the danger Grafton would face in Iran.
“Mousavi is the future of Iran,” the president remarked at one point, glancing at Grafton, “if he lives to see it.”
Jake nodded his agreement.
Finally, after nearly an hour, when the president had run dry on Iran, he changed the subject. “I personally owe you a debt of thanks, Admiral, for your efforts, regardless of how all this turns out. Wisdom is hard to find these days. I wanted to thank you to your face.”
Embarrassed, Jake Grafton merely nodded.
“Let’s both try to get some sleep,” the president said. “I suspect we’re going to need it.”
After Air Force One landed in Baghdad and the president had departed with the military brass that had been hastily summoned to meet him, Jake Grafton slipped away. Soon Grafton was in a helicopter on his way to As Sulaymaniyah, on the northeast border of Iraq.
At As Sulaymaniyah, the chopper circled the field, then landed beside a dilapidated hangar sheltered by trees on the side of the field away from the main parking ramp. Grafton got out with his warbag, and the helo departed.
He pounded on the personnel door, which was opened by a man in a rumpled army flight suit and dirty white socks, holding a 1911 automatic in his hand.
“John Pepper?”
“Yeah.”
“Jake Grafton. I want to go to Tehran.”
Pepper snapped on a light and looked Grafton over. The admiral was wearing jeans, a short-sleeve shirt, tennis shoes and no hat.
“Admiral Jake Grafton?”
“Yep. That’s me.” Jake passed Pepper his CIA ID card. Pepper scanned it, passed it back and tucked the pistol in its holster at his waist as he stiffened to attention.
“Relax, relax,” Grafton said. “I’m a civilian.” He held out his hand for a shake.
When they had shaken hands, Pepper led the way toward the only desk in the room. He had been sacked out on a couch that had seen better days. “I got a message today from Washington,” he said. “Seems the director of the CIA wants to personally talk to you, if you show up. The message was classified, so I sent it back to the command post for safekeeping.”
“I’ll call him when I can,” Grafton said. “In the meantime, how about a ride to Tehran in your Hind?”
“Terrible night for flying a chopper-lots of wind-and Tehran is a damn long way. Have to refuel at a clandestine fuel depot on the Khar River. Dangerous as hell to use it.”
“Right.”
“I hear they are about to have a war over there,” Pepper added cautiously, and glanced at his watch.
“Bad news travels fast,” Jake Grafton said and threw his bag on the couch. “If they’re gonna have a war, be a shame to miss it. So, when can we go and how long will it take to get there?”
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.
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