Lincoln took a deep breath. And the president hoped there would only be a few missiles! “Where,” Lincoln asked, “are our drones?”
“We are getting those locations plotted as fast as we can, sir.”
He could see the locations of our cruise missiles. The AWACS and satellite sensors, plus information from the E-2 over the Persian Gulf, were posted as arrows heading toward the Iranian missile sites. Because he was a religious man, Lincoln decided the best thing he could do just now was to say a little prayer, and he did so.
He was just getting to the “Amen” when someone said loudly, “The Irani an interceptors are launching, sir.”
Staff Sergeant Jack Colby was looking through the telescope when he saw a streak come out of the sky and explode against the ballistic missile launcher. It was a small explosion. Hellfire, he thought. “There’s a Reaper or Predator drone up there,” he told his mates. “Just hit that big missile with a Hellfire.”
The drones were armed with AGM-114P Hellfire II laser-guided missiles. Designed for helicopters, the Hellfire had been adapted to the drones. The small Predator carried two of them, and the much larger Reaper carried six or eight, he wasn’t sure. Although Hellfire only carried a twenty-pound explosive warhead, it could certainly take out a cruise or ballistic missile sitting on its launcher-and apparently just had.
Colby was grinning when the second Hellfire smacked the cruise missile and apparently ignited its liquid fuel. The fireball was quite spectacular.
The Green Berets were congratulating each other when they heard the subtle sound of a jet engine. The sound silenced them.
They heard it, then they didn’t, then they did, a swelling sound, louder and louder. Four pairs of eyes were glued to the entrance of Tunnel Hotel and the wreckage of the two missile launchers in front of it when the first Tomahawk dove into the launching area and its five-hundred-pound warhead exploded.
“I think the Iranians are done for the evening,” Colby said gleefully. “Let’s grab our shit and get the fuck outta here.”
He and his men had covered two hundred yards of the rough, arid terrain when the second, third and fourth Tomahawks targeted for Tunnel Hotel exploded on the launch area in front of it. Five minutes later, they heard a dull thud. The small satchel charge around which they had piled the gear they didn’t want to carry had detonated.
The Tomahawks launched from the waters off Kuwait and the Gulf of Oman had struck the launch sites closest to the Persian Gulf first. As the missiles hit their targets, surveillance sensors captured the flashes and reported it to CENTCOM. The plotters decorated the map with little stars.
Unfortunately, Tomahawks cruised at about five hundred knots, so the northern sites all the way to Mahabad were going to take some time to reach. “How much time?” Lincoln asked his staff.
“Another hour and a few minutes to the last one, Tunnel Yankee.”
Lincoln grabbed his command phone and was soon talking to the drone control squadron in Iraq.
“Lots of turbulence and a head wind, sir, but we are starting to get Hellfires on target.”
“Tunnel Yankee, and those south of it. How soon?”
“Fifteen or twenty minutes, sir.”
“Keep me advised,” Lincoln said and rang off.
“The B-2s are airborne out of Balad, sir. ETA for Tehran is an hour from now.”
“Very well,” the general said and glanced at his watch. Dawn was still an hour away. “Tunnel Hotel had a ballistic missile targeted for Tehran. What’s its status?”
“Special Forces team on the ground said it was destroyed on the launcher by a Hellfire. Then four Tomahawks pulverized the area. The Iranians are in the tunnel and not coming out. The team leader is withdrawing. Reaper remains over the site.”
“November and Yankee?” Those sites had ballistic missiles targeted at Israel.
“They are launching cruise missiles, sir. Two from each site every fifteen minutes.”
“What’s the ETA for the Strike Eagles?”
“They should hit those targets within thirty minutes, sir.”
“Keep me advised.” Lincoln reached in his pocket for his roll of Rolaids as he stared at the nuclear missile chart. The Iranians still hadn’t launched any, and F-22s in Iraq and F/A-18 Hornets were expending missiles knocking down the conventional weapons. He told the staff to order a flight of F-22s to break off and return to base to refuel and rearm, then return to their stations.
“Joe’s here with a tank,” Larijani said. “On the ridge.”
I looked with naked eyes and saw nothing out there in the darkness. Using the infrared scope, I saw the tank creeping along the ridge, right on top of the bunker. It turned until its nose was pointed more or less at the entrance to the prayer grounds, then stopped amid the scrub. I could just make out its exhaust plume from the idling engine.
If we needed serious firepower, we had it.
“We have company.” G. W.’s voice sounded in my ear. We were wearing headsets with small radios clipped to our belts. G. W., Joe Mottaki and their men were stationed as perimeter guards. “Looks like young men in a technical,” he continued. A technical was a pickup truck mounting a machine gun. They were the rides of choice for young Islamic studs in the Middle East. “Basij, most likely,” he added.
“You know what to do,” I replied.
Indeed he did. He would do nothing if the technical went on by. If it stopped, he would take out the vehicle and kill the men, and he would do it quickly.
I looked behind me. I could see the vehicle cruising slowly along the boulevard, the three or four guys in the back looking every which way. It was at least a hundred yards from where Davar and I sat with our backs against a tree, watching the mosque in the prayer grounds. I didn’t think there was a chance in the world that the people in the bunker would leave now; if they did, they were going to spoil the morning’s entertainment. I kinda suspected a few of them might be rethinking their presence there. Even so, I doubted that Ahmadinejad would let them leave, and he was the guy making the decisions.
“They’re stopping by the remains of that com shack.”
Terrific!
“Couple of them are out looking it over, what’s left of it… Uh-oh. They’re having an argument, pointing at the bunker. Looks like someone is advocating a look-around.”
I bent down and checked the safety on my AK, made sure the magazine was seated firmly. Davar watched me. She wasn’t wearing a headset, so I told her about the technical and nodded in that direction. She hunkered down behind the tree.
“They’re all out of the vehicle. Spreading out. Going to make a sweep toward the mosque, looks like. We’ll take ’em out when they are between us and you, Tommy. Keep your head down.”
I motioned to Davar with my hand-down-and stretched out with the AK pointed in their direction. Then I looked at her. Couldn’t see her features in the darkness, but I wondered what she was thinking. I pulled out my pistol and nudged her arm with it. Her head turned, then she reached for it.
I saw flashlights coming… six flashlights, flickering randomly about as their holders searched the area and checked the footing…
They were about twenty-five yards in from the boulevard amid the scattered trees when the guys let ’em have it. A roar of AK fire, strobing muzzle flashes, and the flashlights fell to the ground. Some of them went out. Two people were screaming.
The F-15E Strike Eagles were as complex an airborne weapons system as the United States possessed. Designed to give the pilot and a weapons system operator-WSO, or wizzo-multiple options in the complex, harrowing environment of ground attack, in any weather, day or night, while providing for its own electronic and fighter defense, the planes’ state-of-the art computers and avionics demanded a lot from its crewmen. As usual, the Strike Eagles that flew tonight against Iran’s nuclear missile launch sites contained some highly experienced crews, some with the green just worn off and some new people just rotated in from the states.
F
irst Lieutenant JoAnne Rodgers was the WSO in one of them. Two months into her first tour in Iraq, she was being bounced around by turbulence in a night black as a whale’s tummy while voices on the radio overloaded the frequency. It seemed everyone on the freq had something vital to say to somebody-and what it became was merely distracting noise. To make matters worse, some of her gear wasn’t working. The INS velocities were too large or small, and that affected the computer’s calculations of the aircraft’s present position and the proper direction to the target, Tunnel November. In addition, the radar’s primary mode wasn’t working properly and she was forced to use it in a degraded mode. And, although she didn’t know it, her ALQ-199 wasn’t working at all, although it had passed its built-in tests on the ground and the little green light glowed comfortingly.
“This techno-magic is taking a shit,” JoAnne told her pilot on the ICS. Ladylike language was not one of her virtues.
“We can cancel or do the mission,” the pilot, Major Dick Hauer, growled. “Make up your mind.”
Rodgers didn’t reply. As she would put it, she was up to her ass in alligators, severely overloaded, and she had downed a system the day before yesterday. She didn’t need a reputation as a candy-ass who would only fly on VFR days with a perfect system.
Hauer didn’t appreciate her problems since he was nursing one of his own as he flew the aircraft, monitored the electronic warfare panel and tried to make sense of the radio chatter. Fighter attack was the toughest mission in the air force, where only the best were good enough, and to do it right you needed lots of testosterone, plus a quart. Here he was flying with a woman who didn’t have any. She was foul-mouthed, butt ugly, twenty pounds too heavy, obviously smarter than he was and yellow; in toto, the perfect person to push every one of his manly buttons. To be sure, words to this effect had never passed his lips and never would, not in today’s air force. A few cracks like that could kill a career.
At precisely the planned time, he lowered the aircraft’s nose and began a descent to attack altitude. He made sure the infrared sensors were working and put a ground avoidance display on one of his screens-and saw nothing. Dirt in the air degraded the infrared. Well, he would get a reading in just a moment, when he got a little lower.
That thought had no more than passed through his head when he realized he wasn’t seeing the target symbol on his nav screen. “You know where in hell we are?” he growled at Rodgers as the plane did the turbulence bump-and-grind.
“No,” she said. “I told you the velocities were running and the radar is in backup mode. I’m looking for something I can identify to get a position update.”
Automatically Hauer’s eyes flicked to the altimeter. The plane was descending through ten thousand feet-and there were peaks in this mountain range that reached well above eleven. Just then he saw a shape materializing on the infrared. Something damn solid. A mountain! Dead ahead. He pulled the stick back and jammed the throttles forward, and the F-15 pointed its nose at the sky.
JoAnne Rodgers jerked off her oxygen mask and vomited into her lap.
Three nuclear-armed cruise missiles were in the air, according to the AWACS people. They had launched from the predicted sites and were flying the predicted flight paths to three nuclear targets: Mosul and Al Asad in Iraq, and Al Jaber in Kuwait. As General Martin Lincoln listened to the AWACS controller direct F-22s onto these specific missiles, he wondered if there were any other nukes that had been misclassified. Or the intelligence wasn’t perfect. Or…
To be sure, Tomahawks were crash-diving Iranian missile sites, drones were beginning to pour in Hellfires, and Iranian missile launches had slowed to a trickle.
Only 142 cruise missiles were airborne. Only. He scanned the projected flight paths on the laptop computer on the desk in front of him.
Well, one or more missiles, regardless of warhead, were on the way to every Iranian target, except Tel Aviv. The F-22s were banging away, but missiles were getting through. Two cruise missiles with conventional warheads had already exploded on Tallil Air Force Base, one on Baghdad and two on Balad. Some might have missed the military bases and crashed in the desert or a city or town-no one knew for sure. So far, damage was minimal.
Being only human, Lincoln found his eyes drawn to the symbol of the cruise missile with the Jihad warhead flying toward Kuwait. It was only a hundred miles out, mere minutes away.
One of the colonels leaned down to whisper, “Sir, one of the plotters has asked if you plan to have the staff go to the bombproof.”
Lincoln looked at the colonel in disbelief. “The bombproof won’t withstand a nuke hit. You know that. Now tell these people that I’ll court-martial any son of a bitch who leaves this room.”
When General Lincoln looked again at the inbound missile, he saw that the AWACS was reporting it destroyed.
Captain Quereau sighed nervously. His Raptor was cruising along at Mach 1.6 without use of the afterburners-super-cruising, the public affairs people called it. He couldn’t decide if this airborne CAP, or combat air patrol, over northern Iran was a good deal or not. The other F-22s were shooting down missiles by the handful, and he wouldn’t even get to squeeze off an AMRAAM.
The short end of the stick again, he thought, just as he realized his leader, out to his right, was pulling back his power as briefed, slowing to max conserve to save fuel.
After five minutes of that his data-link began spewing targets. The AWACS controller’s artificially calm voice sounded in his ears. “You have bogeys out of the Tehran area headed west. They’re low.”
That was followed by the section leader’s truly calm voice. The man must be on drugs! “Q-man, do you have them?”
Quereau tried to make his voice matter-of-fact. “Affirm. F-14s, apparently.”
“They’re yours.”
“Breaking off.”
Quereau lowered his nose and turned to point his plane a little ahead of the bogeys, which were still at 150 miles distance. He was coming in from their right forward quarter, closing rapidly as his speed increased through Mach 1. His electronic warfare suite had analyzed the radiation from the bogeys and classified them as F-14s, then displayed that fact on one of his screens. He recalled that during the days of the shah, Iran had purchased several dozen of the swing-wing fighters from the United States. The Ira nians had kept a few flying for the thirty years since the revolution by cannibalizing parts from those too worn out to repair.
Quereau locked up both targets in sequence and shallowed his dive. Checked the electronic countermeasures. His plane was being painted by search radars-had been for the last twenty minutes-but it was doubtful the Iranian on the ground saw the stealthy fighter. Certainly the F-14s, with forty-year-old radars, did not. He reminded himself to make no violent maneuvers that would present his planform to any of the probing radars.
He armed two missiles and waited. Coming down through thirty-five thousand, descending gently, speed Mach 1.2, the range counting down…
At one hundred miles, David Quereau squeezed the first one off manually. He felt the weapons bay doors slam open and closed as the missile was ejected from the bay; then it ignited and shot forward. The target progression was automatic. He squeezed the trigger again. The doors opened and closed again, and the second missile followed the first. They looked like stars in the blackness, fading as they pulled away.
Quereau shallowed his dive-and stared at the symbols on his screen. Since he and the F-14s were on closing flight paths, the distance between the planes was decreasing quickly, and the missiles were leaping the gap at Mach 2.9. The missile symbols quickly merged with their targets.
In a few more seconds the bogey symbols vanished.
Death in twenty-first-century air combat sure isn’t glamorous, he thought as he began a slow turn to the heading that would take him to Tehran.
At least, he reflected, it’s quick.
Chicago O’Hare was flying an airplane several technical generations behind the F-22, and she had short-range heat-seeking
Sidewinders on her rails. Still, the largest challenge she faced was closing the five-hundred-knot missile in front of her and locking it up. In the darkness over the night sea, she would never see the cruise missile, of course; this interception was being conducted based on the symbology on her HUD, or heads-up display-symbols created and driven by her computer, which was fed data-link info from the E-2 and AWACS and raw data from the radar in the nose of her plane.
The Iranian missile was flying at five thousand feet above the sea, headed for Qatar. She was only dimly aware of that-it was an Iranian missile, according to the E-2, and that was enough.
The distinctive Sidewinder rattle sounded in her ears, and she squeezed the trigger on the stick. The missile shot forward off the rail in a gout of fire. Now, to see if it tracks. Sidewinders were very reliable, approaching a 90 percent effective rate, but that meant one in ten would go stupid or fail to explode. If the first missile didn’t bring down the target, she would fire a second. Unless the cruise missile has a nuclear warhead that detonates, she thought. If it does, then I’ll just be dead.
Through the HUD, she saw a flash, which blossomed as fuel spewing from the ruptured tank caught fire. The missile began descending toward the water.
Chicago didn’t watch. With the radio chatter of other pilots talking and the Hawkeye calling out targets for them as background noise, she turned left to intercept another missile. This would be a ninety-degree left-to-right shot, which was fully within the AIM-9X’s capabilities. With vectored thrust nozzles, the missile could almost fly a square corner. She got the lock, squeezed the trigger and watched the exhaust of the missile as it flew a high-speed curve to intercept. Another flash, then nothing.
She checked her radar scope as she turned left again to pass well behind the enemy missile, and saw that it was disintegrating into a cloud of small targets.
The radio chatter continued on. She paid only enough attention to catch her call sign, War Ace 307, if and when.
The Disciple Page 39