Just to be on the safe side, Chicago ran her radar scope out to max range and began a slow 360-degree turn.
She was pointed toward Iran when she saw them, two blips heading south. Low. Making about five hundred knots.
She didn’t even pause to think about her fuel; she advanced the throttles, lowered the nose and turned to intercept. Using her thumb on the stick, she selected gun.
Dear God, don’t let these two be nukes.
Now the Hawkeye controller called these targets out to her. “Tally,” she replied.
O’Hare came in on the nearest one in a classic high-side bounce. She wanted to get behind it, so she could see the glow of its exhaust pipe. Without that she would have to fire on radar, would probably use more ammo, and she needed to stretch her supply to ensure she got them both.
As she approached, she realized she could see the missile through the HUD, cruising at about three thousand feet, a dark little cigar shape against a darker ocean. The sky was just light enough. It was a while before dawn, but with the sliver of moon in the east and the brightening sky, she could see it.
She didn’t bother to slacken her speed-just closed, put the gunsight pipper on it, waited until the last possible moment, then waited another second and squeezed off a tiny burst. As she went over the missile she saw it begin to tumble. Must have hit the autopilot.
The next enemy missile was already well ahead and above her at five thousand, so she had to use the afterburner to catch it.
As she closed she was aware of the fuel pouring into her exhausts to give her extra power. Well, she had a little extra; she could make Qatar.
Somehow she missed with her first burst. Fired too soon, she thought and kept closing. This time she waited until she was way too close before she pulled the trigger. The missile exploded, and she yanked on the stick to go through the top of the fireball. Whump, and she was through.
Checked the engine instruments and came out of burner. Everything seemed okay. She pulled the nose into a max range climb and told the Hawkeye dude she had splashed these two.
“War Ace Three Oh Seven, roger that.” His voice sounded tight. “We think we have a nuke headed toward Al Udeid. We want you to go to max conserve and intercept it.”
Uh-oh. The low fuel light was already illuminated.
“How far out is it?” she asked.
“It’s still over land, and we don’t yet have it on the display. Wait.”
She had only a few minutes to stooge around if she planned on bringing back the navy’s jet. She told the controller that and got no answer. She throttled back anyway and turned slowly right, inscribing a circle in the sky.
A minute passed, then another.
“Hey, man, War Ace Three Oh Seven. I am about outta gas. Don’t you have anybody else?”
“War Ace, the tactical commander requests that you intercept.”
As she honked the plane around, she said, “I go in the drink, buddy, and you’re going to be buying me beer until you retire.”
So she flew northward, away from Qatar, at max conserve. After a couple of minutes, she decided to just wait until the nuke came to her. She pushed the stick over, and the autopilot held it there. She began circling again. At least after I drop it, she thought, I won’t have so far to swim.
“War Ace Three Oh Seven, Black Eagle. Bogey will be along in ten minutes if you hold your position.”
It was only then that she realized most of the other planes she had launched with were no longer on the frequency. The silence was broken only occasionally by pilots telling Black Eagle that they were switching to Al Udeid Approach.
Each of the minutes seemed to take an hour to pass. Desperately thirsty, Chicago took a baby bottle full of water, now warm, from her survival vest and chugged it. When it was all gone, she recapped the bottle and replaced it in the vest.
The fuel gauge told the story. She wasn’t going to make dry land. No way, José!
Chicago wondered how many cannon shells remained. Not many, that’s for sure. Maybe one good squirt. She was going to have to be right behind this guy, sticking her nose up his tailpipe, when she pulled the trigger. Every shell had to count.
What if it goes nuclear when I shoot it?
Well, she would be dead before she realized the warhead had detonated, even if she gunned it from half a mile away. She took a ragged breath and exhaled explosively. Took off her oxygen mask and swabbed her face, then replaced it.
What if a bullet punctures the warhead and it squirts out a cloud of radioactive plutonium, and I fly through it?
Hell, it won’t explode. I won’t get slimed. The missile will go into the water, and a few minutes later, so will I. I’m probably going to drown.
“War Ace Three Oh Seven, Black Eagle. Say your fuel state.”
She told him.
In a few seconds the controller said, “Qatar is launching a rescue chopper your way. After engagement, look for him and try to rendezvous.”
She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Roger,” she managed.
General Martin Lincoln called the president. As he was waiting for the call to go through, someone turned on the television mounted high in the corner of the Ops Room. Lincoln caught the picture out of the corner of his eye. The face he saw was the president’s, talking to an interviewer! Christ, he was on CNN. He watched, mesmerized, with the phone against his ear. CNN was broadcasting from Baghdad! The president was in Baghdad!
Now someone off-camera spoke to the president, and he took off his mike. The camera followed him as he walked to a table to the camera’s left and picked up a telephone. The president’s voice sounded in Lincoln’s ear. “Yes, General.”
“Mr. President,” the general began. “The Iranians launched two ICBMs, which probably have nuclear warheads. They are apparently on their way to Israel. We’re tracking them.”
“All right,” was the president’s response. Looking at his back on television, Lincoln could see that he had taken the punch well. His posture didn’t change. The man had ice water in his veins.
“Another nuke is on its way to Qatar aboard a cruise missile. We’ve shot three down. Those six seem to be all they launched. About a hundred and seventy cruise missiles total. We think we have taken out all the launch sites. There haven’t been any more launches in the last five minutes. Our two carriers in the Gulf of Oman have been hit by conventional antiship missiles-they are fighting fires.”
The president didn’t ask a single question. “Thank you, General,” he said, and the connection broke.
Lincoln slowly replaced the telephone on its cradle as he watched the president walk back to his stool beside the interviewer and someone pin his mike back on.
Unable to look away, Lincoln listened as the president talked about the future of Iraq and Iran. These countries had to join the international community, he said, and build their nations as members of the world family. They owed that to all their citizens.
***
Another general was mesmerized by the CNN broadcast and the sight of the president of the United States talking to a CNN reporter in Baghdad as a handful of cruise missiles assaulted the town. As General Aqazadeh, the Iranian chief of staff, watched from the Ops Room of the Defense Ministry, a room untouched by the recent assault by Zionist terrorists with a howitzer, an aide told him that two of the six missiles that had reached Baghdad had been shot down by American forces, one had hit a runway at Baghdad International, and the other three had crashed into the city’s suburbs.
An ineffectual assault, Aqazadeh thought dejectedly. And now the American president is in Baghdad, making political hay of the Iranians’ best efforts.
He turned from the television and studied the reports. Apparently all twenty-five of the missile sites had been the targets of U.S. Navy Tomahawk cruise missiles. While many cruise missiles and a few Ghadar ICBMs remained in the tunnels, the crews refused to push them out onto the launch areas for launching, according to those people who had reported. Som
e of the missile sites could not be raised on landline or by radio. Whether the communications had been destroyed or the crews had panicked and refused to answer HQ’s calls, Aqazadeh didn’t know. Not that it mattered, he thought. Regardless, the result was the same.
Nor could he contact the president in the executive bunker. His staff had tried repeatedly. That was certainly odd. The president and other national leaders had taken shelter in the bunker in case the Americans retaliated after a nuclear burst. They hadn’t yet done it, even though at least two Ghadars with nuclear warheads were in the air heading toward Israel. Aqazadeh didn’t know that one of his own nukes was targeted on Tehran; Ahmadinejad hadn’t shared that tidbit with him.
Aqazadeh realized that Iran had probably lost the shooting war and was in danger of losing the political war, even if the Jihad missiles obliterated Israel. The president should know of this, he thought, so that he can make a statement to counter American propaganda efforts. He decided to personally go to the bunker and appeal to the president to come out and lead his nation.
The blip blossomed on Chicago O’Hare’s radar scope. Hell, it was still almost a hundred miles away, over the Gulf, and would pass ten miles to her left. She glanced at her fuel gauge. Five hundred pounds remaining. There was water in her immediate future.
She turned west on a course to intercept, resisted the temptation to advance the throttle now. She would have to wait until the very last moment to increase her speed to match the missile’s.
“Black Eagle, War Ace Three Oh Seven has the target and is intercepting. Hope you have that chopper on the way.”
“It’s airborne and crossing the coast.”
“Roger that.”
She checked her switches, then eyed the radar as the target marched down the scope, coming closer. She had to accelerate and turn before she got to the missile so she wouldn’t end up in a tail-chase. Not enough fuel for that happy crap.
Finally she advanced the throttle. Her speed began to build. O’Hare timed her turn well and ended up closing from the missile’s port side. Looking for the missile through the HUD and not seeing it, she realized she had made a mistake. Couldn’t find it against its background. She was almost on top of the thing. She popped her speed brakes and pulled up in a yo-yo, then lowered her nose and checked her radar as she dropped into trail behind it. There, at a half mile.
Closing deliberately from astern, Chicago crept up until she saw the exhaust glow and centered that in the gunsight. Her breath was coming in quick gasps, as if she were running. This was it!
She checked the range. Less than a hundred yards. Pulled the trigger. Felt the cannon vibrating… and the missile’s engine glow disappeared. She kept the trigger down, but the cannon stopped abruptly. Out of ammo.
She yanked hard on the stick to avoid a collision. Found herself going almost forty degrees nose up. Stuffed the nose and turned so that she could again acquire it on the scope. Halfway through the turn she saw a little plume of fire, then a splash.
Amen.
When she was again heading to Qatar and climbing, she called the E-2. “Splash one nuke. Give me a heading to intercept the chopper.”
“One-seven-five. It’s twenty-five miles from you.”
“Have a nice life,” she said.
She sat staring at her fuel gauge, which read zero. Maybe the gauge is wrong. Maybe there is more juice in there than you think. Even she didn’t believe that. She pushed the button on the IFF to squawk 7700, Mayday.
The altimeter read six thousand feet. She was still doing five hundred knots. She pulled the throttle back to max conserve, and the airspeed bled off.
Oddly, her next thought was about the skipper, Fly Burgholzer. He is going to be so pissed.
Then her right engine died. She had arrived at the end of her rope.
“War Ace Three Oh Seven is flaming out. Ejecting.” Even as she said it the left engine died and the cockpit went dark and silent.
Sitting in that black coffin that the cockpit had become as the plane decelerated, O’Hare took a deep breath and pulled the ejection handle over her head. She yanked the face curtain all the way down and the seat smacked her in the ass and whoom! she was out and tumbling through the black night sky.
The opening of her chute almost split her pelvis.
She fumbled with her oxygen mask bayonet fittings, got it off, then threw it away as she drifted down toward the black ocean. She could see the surface now. The first traces of dawn were arriving. Just another navy day, she thought as the water rushed up toward her boots.
Betsy “Chicago” O’Hare was sitting in the little one-man raft that had been in her seatpan waving a flare when the chopper found her.
My handheld radio squawked to life. “Tommy Carmellini?” a tinny voice asked.
“Yes. This is Carmellini.”
“We’re fifteen minutes from drop.”
I looked at my watch, which I could see quite plainly in the early dawn. “Got it,” I said. “Make some bull’s-eyes.”
“Oh, we will, we will. You can bet on it.”
That was the problem. I was betting on it. Betting my ass and the ass of everyone here with me. I didn’t tell him that, though.
“Thanks,” I said.
He didn’t reply.
As I put the radio back in my pocket, I looked around. Joe Mottaki and his tank were sitting on the ridge to the left, on top of the bunker. G. W. was behind us, across the access road, nearer the gate to the prayer grounds. Larijani, Davar and I were still at the base of the trees, where we could see the boulevard behind us. Haddad Nouri and Ahmad Qajar had a machine gun set up on our right. They had gone back to the boulevard, then crawled forward until they found a slight depression where an old tree had been. They set up the gun there, about a hundred yards from the entrance to the mosque, where the two Iranian soldiers stood a sloppy guard. One was sitting in the dirt, his weapon across his knees; the other was smoking at the corner of the building. Obviously, there were no officers or NCOs about to check on them.
Behind us, civilian traffic packed the boulevard, all of it going one way-out of town. The military was already gone, and the civilians were doing their best to get gone, too.
“Gonna be over soon,” I whispered to Davar and Larijani, neither of whom replied.
The kids in that bunker were still on my mind. I lowered my forehead onto the cold steel of the rifle receiver and tried to think of something else. Like going home. I didn’t give a damn what Grafton wanted; first chance I got, I was going home.
Deep in the bunker, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was a worried man.
After the computers, telephones, televisions and camera equipment for television broadcasts went dead, instantly, all at the same instant, he had sat in his command room in silence, watching the three technicians attempt to figure out what was wrong and restore communications. After about ten minutes, one had brought a computer that he had taken apart over to him. “Excellency, we have no electrical power on the circuits, and the computers have been destroyed.” He pointed to the circuit board, which was black in places. “The whole thing is burned up from a voltage overload.”
Ahmadinejad walked out, went to his private office. That was several hours ago.
He had waited there for the jolt of the nuclear burst over Tehran, which hadn’t happened. Waited and waited and waited.
Now he wondered who had severed the communications line with the bunker. Zionists? Or his political enemies? The possibility that his political enemies had staged a coup after he went into the bunker could not be overlooked or discounted. The entire leadership of the Party of God was in the bunker, all the prominent clerics and leading citizens.
His enemies couldn’t get into the bunker, of course; all the bombproof doors were sealed from this side. What if they were up there now, patiently waiting for him to emerge… to assassinate him? Of course, if they decided not to wait, they could call him on the telephone beside the entrance door in the basement of the mosque. Thus f
ar, no one had called.
So he sat by himself in his office, very much alone, waiting for the airburst that would flatten Tehran, wondering if the Jihad missiles had destroyed their targets and pondering the venality of his enemies, of whom he had many.
***
The B-2s were already over Tehran, thirty thousand feet up, making practice runs on their targets. Painted repeatedly by search radars that never locked on them, the stealth bombers cruised back and forth undetected in the sky as it lightened to the east. The pilot of the lead bomber was certain that the Iranians didn’t even know they were there.
Since the mission resembled a training exercise, they did a complete practice run and a simulated drop, then circled back to do it again for real.
The bomber was on autopilot, which was slaved to the computer, which the copilot was monitoring. The pilot didn’t have to do anything except turn on the master armament switch at the proper moment and be ready to take over if the autopilot refused to obey the computer.
This is like flying the simulator, the pilot thought, without all the failures the sim operator likes to create.
The two ICBMs launched at Israel had reached apogee and were now hurling downward toward their target. Steaming slowly toward the Israeli coast, just offshore of Tel Aviv, USS Guilford Courthouse was at battle stations, and had been for hours. She picked up the two small missiles on her radar while they were still almost five hundred miles away. This technical feat was only possible because the missiles were so high above the earth.
The tactical action officer, a commander, was in charge of the ship’s weapons systems. He telephoned the bridge. “Two targets inbound, sir. One behind the other.”
“You are cleared to engage according to plan, Commander,” the captain told his TAO.
The ship was equipped with six SM-3 antisatellite missiles. Using one, a Super Aegis cruiser had successfully destroyed a failed satellite in orbit 110 miles above the earth. Hitting a target that high traveling at eighteen thousand miles an hour was a stupendous technical feat, one that many scientists and physicists said couldn’t be done. Yet it had been done, just a few years before.
The Disciple Page 41