Still, the commander was nervous. Theoretically, the incoming ICBMs should be within the SM-3’s capabilities. Yet the angle wasn’t ideal. In fact, head-on was the worst possible angle of approach to the target; the slightest angular error in the missile’s radar and computer would result in a miss. Consequently, he and the captain had decided to shoot three Standard-3 missiles at each incoming ICBM, all they had. If they missed, the accompanying cruiser, USS Stone’s River, would launch her SM-2 missiles at them.
General Lincoln said the Iranians had only launched two ICBMs, but certainty in war isn’t possible. Besides, they could launch another in a few hours. Or two or three. Yet rather than wait for the blow that might not fall, the TAO and captain had decided a few minutes ago to give these first two their knockout punch. And pray.
The clock hands in Combat swept mercilessly on as the ICBMs raced downhill toward their target. Actually, the lead one was slightly off course. It appeared to be headed for Gaza. The angle differential might actually help, the commander thought as he watched the blips that were the missiles race toward the center of his presentation, which was this ship.
When the ICBMs were two hundred miles away, the SM-3s came out of their vertical launchers riding a plume of fire. Their exhaust blasts shook the ship. Away they blazed into the lingering night, until they became stars racing away into the brightening eastern sky. One by one they departed, six of them, and when they were gone the sea was dark and silent again.
A Flash message was immediately sent to General Lincoln. “SM-3s launched.”
The ship was in shallow water, actually too close to the coast for comfort, but the captain dared not turn her. The best radar reception was in the forward quadrant. He ordered the ship slowed to two knots and heard the bells as the engine room responded. Ten knots would be better-the ship more stable-but it wasn’t possible.
The captain wondered if he should tell the crew to prepare for a nuclear blast. He reached for the 1-MC mike, then changed his mind. No.
He was sitting there, staring at the lights of Tel Aviv on the horizon, when the squawk box came to life. “TAO, sir. First missile missed.”
The captain didn’t acknowledge.
When the squawk box spluttered again, he jumped. “TAO, sir. Direct hit on the first enemy missile.”
Automatically his eyes rose and probed the darkness to the east. The sky was cloudless; he saw all those stars… but no explosion. Too far away.
He waited, feeling every thud of his heart. Scratched his forehead, wondered if there was something he should have done but failed to do.
“Captain, TAO. Fourth missile, a direct hit.”
As relief washed over the captain, he said to the OOD, “Right full rudder. Five knots through the turn. Steady on course two-seven-zero and work up to twenty knots. I want to get away from this coast.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
As the giant warship slowly heeled into the turn, he picked up the 1-MC microphone and spoke to the entire ship’s crew. “This is the captain speaking. We have just destroyed two ICBMs targeted at Israel. Well done, shipmates.”
He hung the mike in its bracket. For some reason he felt a vibration. And heard a noise. What was that? Several seconds passed before he realized that every man and woman on the ship was stomping their feet and cheering, even the bridge crew.
The captain put one hand over his forehead and wiped his eyes.
Five minutes later he was down in Combat looking at a map. The locations of the two missile kills were plotted on it. Both were destroyed over Jordan. He wondered whether the warheads had broken up in the air or when they hit the ground. Either way, radioactivity was going to be released.
The captain sent a Flash message to Washington with the coordinates of the kills.
David Quereau was at fifty thousand feet, flying at just above Mach 1, in a slow turn, letting his radar sweep the sky over and around Tehran. He shouldn’t be this slow-he well knew that in combat speed is life-but the silent sky had seduced him into this gas-saving measure.
The stealth B-2s at thirty thousand feet were giving him their position by encrypted data-link, so they were on his tactical screen, as was his lead, who was at thirty-five thousand feet over the city, providing close top cover. He watched the bombers in trail make their turns and begin their bomb runs.
He was thinking about death, about the two pilots and two back-seaters he had shot down earlier in the evening, just a few minutes ago. He wondered if any of the four men had gotten out of their planes. Since he was a young cynic, he thought probably not. AMRAAM warheads do horrible things to fighter planes.
He had killed them. Oh, they would have killed him if given the chance, but the aircraft designers and technical wizards in the States had given him a superior airplane, so he lived and the other fellows died for their country. Just like that.
Now he had to live with it.
Quereau was thinking about that, about living after killing, when his peripheral vision picked up something on his left. Something moving… He looked. A fighter, coming in on a bounce! Now a missile streaked from under a wing.
He slammed the left wing down and lit the burners at the same time. He manually triggered his chaff dispenser, which included flares to attract heat-seekers, which is probably what this guy launched.
He watched the missile as he turned a five-G corner. The incoming heat-seeker went behind the F-22, perhaps decoyed by a flare, perhaps because it couldn’t hack the turn.
He kept the turn in. The other fighter was creeping forward on the canopy, so he was out-turning him. He could see vapor trails off the other fighter’s wingtips.
He was canopy to canopy with the other fellow now, who was about a mile away. He was looking at its planform. MiG-29.
The F-22’s vectored thrust made this a lopsided contest. As maneuverable as the MiG was, the F-22 was even more so. The MiG was in his forward quadrant now. He was winning, getting behind the guy.
It would have to be a gunshot. He had only AMRAAMs aboard, and the MiG was too close for them to arm. Yet his thumb didn’t move to the gun button on the stick.
Turning, turning, the MiG pilot knew he was dead if he tried to dive away. The G was bleeding off the MiG’s airspeed, so the F-22 appeared to be closing. Quereau pulled the throttles back out of maximum burner, so he wouldn’t overshoot, kept the G on.
He also stole glances at his threat indicator and tactical screen. If this guy had a wingman, Quereau couldn’t afford to play. Apparently he didn’t. Or if he did, Quereau hadn’t seen him yet.
Now the MiG pilot reversed his turn, half a roll, and jammed the stick forward, going into serious negative G, the classic escape maneuver. He had waited too long-Quereau was directly behind him and followed his every move.
Normally, in fighters of roughly equal performance, the lead fighter could escape with this gambit. But the fighters weren’t equal. The F-22’s superior roll rate and responsiveness more than made up for the lag due to the pilot’s reaction time.
Quereau couldn’t believe this encounter was happening. The F-22 was an artifact left over from the Cold War, or so the politicians said. And every living expert had solemnly pronounced the dogfight dead as dollar gas, yet here he was in one.
The MiG pulled positive and negative G, turned and rolled and climbed and did a Split-S. Quereau stuck to him like glue, even closing on him a little; less than fifty yards separated them now.
This guy doesn’t have a wingman. He’s out here solo looking for a fight. The realization hit like a hammer. Even if there were another Iranian fighter up here stooging around, the guy would never get a weapons solution on a target maneuvering this wildly or risk a missile shot with his victim this close to an Iranian fighter.
Quereau grinned under his oxygen mask. The ride was vicious, but the experience was sublime.
“Uh-oh! We got company,” G. W. said on the tactical net.
I looked behind us. Dawn was here, and I could see fairly well. Tw
o vehicles were coming down the access road toward the mosque. The lead vehicle looked like a limo. For sure, it was a long, low car. Behind it was an army truck with an open bed. I could see helmets in the bed. Troops.
“Can the door to the upper elevator chamber be opened from the outside?” I asked Davar, who was hunched down beside me.
“No,” she said, “but there is a telephone by the door, a direct line to the bunker command center. They can talk to the people inside, and they can take the elevator up and open the door.”
I thought about that as the vehicles drove toward the mosque. What if the B-2s didn’t drop their bombs, or the bombs missed the elevator shaft? What if Ahmadinejad came out?
One thing I knew for certain-Jake Grafton didn’t want that to happen, and he had told me to prevent it.
I glanced at the infrared designator lying in the grass beside me. A Hell-fire or two on the mosque would lock Ahmadinejad in, but there wasn’t time.
“Haddad,” I said on my tactical radio, “we gotta take these people down.”
The vehicles stopped in front of the mosque. As the rear passenger door closest to the mosque opened and someone got out, troops came pouring out of the truck and raced away in all directions to set up a perimeter.
Nouri and Qajar opened up with the machine gun, cutting them down. Still, some of the troops escaped the kill zone. At least four of them ran into the mosque behind the limo passenger. Our guys concentrated on taking down the exposed troopers.
I keyed the tac net radio again. “Joe, take out the vehicles. Don’t let them escape.”
“Okay,” he said.
The limo blew up, literally disintegrated right before my eyes, with pieces going everywhere. Then the booming report of the 100 mm tank gun reached me.
The truck driver wasn’t waiting to see what happened next. He popped the clutch and floored the accelerator. He managed to get the truck turned and pointed toward the access road before the second shell from the tank blew the cab clear off the truck. The carcass rolled forward for about fifty feet, then came to rest with the fuel tank ablaze. Smoke boiled up.
“Get those soldiers,” I roared into the mike and grabbed the satchel charge.
“No,” Davar screamed and grabbed my arm. “No. Don’t go down there. Wait for the bombers!”
“They might miss,” I told her, shrugging out of her grasp. I put my hand on Larijani’s shoulder. “Give me cover.”
Then I started running, bobbing and weaving, trying to keep low, carrying that satchel charge in my left hand. My AK was on a strap over my shoulder, flopping around. I had the pistol grip and trigger with my right, and the strap was so loose I might even be able to shoot the thing one-handed.
I lengthened my stride and ran like the wind toward the mosque. Bullets snapped in the air around me. The machine gun was vomiting bursts, I could hear several AKs going… I was going to get it any second.
For some reason I didn’t care. I had reached the combat plateau and no longer gave a damn.
I quit jinking and just flat-out sprinted. I went through the door with the AK going. One soldier was inside, maybe one of the guys who had sat outside the door for hours. He was just a mite too slow, and I gave him a burst right in the chest.
I slammed my back against the wall and waited for my eyes to adjust. The entrance to the bunker was in the basement, Davar had said-but where were the stairs down?
I heard running feet and turned just in time to see Larijani come flying through the door. He landed on his face. I rolled him over and saw he had been hit twice.
“You don’t run fast enough,” I said.
In the basement of the mosque, General Aqazadeh grabbed the telephone on the wall adjacent to the entrance to the bunker, which was sealed with a steel bombproof door. “The president,” he shouted at the man who answered. “This is General Aqazadeh.”
In two seconds Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came on the line.
Against the background noise of machine-gun bursts and random bursts from AK-47s, the general tried to tell the president how the war was going. “We couldn’t communicate with you,” he said, “and thought you might not be aware of events. The Americans have attacked all the sites. The American president is in Baghdad, on television, making political propaganda of our efforts. We have two missiles on the way to Israel. You must come out of the bunker and talk to believers worldwide.”
“What is that noise I hear?”
“A firefight,” Aqazadeh replied. “Commandos have surrounded the bunker. I have a radio in my automobile. You must summon troops back to the city to kill them.” Aqazadeh didn’t realize that his limousine had been destroyed.
Of course that is what he would say, Ahmadinejad reflected. The military is staging a coup, and the loyal troops are being attacked by the traitorous ones. Aqazadeh is part of the plot to kill me. If we open the bunker door, we will be murdered by these traitors to Allah.
“You are Zionist swine,” the president of Iran told his general. “If you are alive after the war, we will execute you as the traitor you are.”
Then Ahmadinejad hung up the telephone.
“Bombs away.”
The words sounded in Quereau’s earphones. In front of him the MiG was flying straight and level-and slowing rapidly. This jock’s a real sport! He’s going to see if he can fly slower than I can.
Quereau grinned inside his oxygen mask, retarded his throttles and deployed his speed brakes. He let his fighter creep up onto the MiG’s right wing, where he could look over into the cockpit.
“Number Two, bombs away. And we’re RTB.” Return to base.
“Roger.” That was Quereau’s lead. “Outlaw Two, you copy?”
“Roger that,” Quereau responded. “I’ll watch the back door and be along shortly.”
The MiG-29 and F-22 were in close formation now, each pilot looking at the other, the throttles at idle. The guy who flies the slowest in this kind of game gets a free guns shot when his opponent moves into the lead. Quereau knew that, and knew that with his vectored thrust and a partial flap deployment, his fighter could fly level at a sixty-degree angle of attack. He doubted the MiG-29 could match it.
Gonna find out, by golly!
***
I left Larijani and went around the corner. Found the stairs down. Somebody fired a shot up the stairs, which spanged into the wall beside me.
I didn’t know what those guys were doing down there, didn’t know how much time we had before the bunker-busters landed, and I couldn’t afford the time to study my watch.
I pulled the igniter on the satchel charge and tossed it down the stairs. Then I ran around the wall back toward the entrance. I was pulling Larijani over against the wall when the floor turned to jelly, sweeping me off my feet. The trip-hammer concussions of the four five-thousand-pounders jackhammering their way into the earth demolished the mosque; the walls came apart and the ceiling fell in.
Davar was lying down, shooting at an Iranian near the mosque, when the bombs hit. The bombs were falling too fast to register on her retinas, and she never saw them.
As the first shock wave punched her, she scrunched her eyes shut and grabbed the shaking earth with both hands. The four bombs took about two seconds to detonate, from first to last, four vicious impacts that set the earth shaking. Davar held on tightly to the earth as dirt and rock rained around her. The small rocks hitting her were painful, and she knew that if a big one hit her she would be instantly dead, yet she couldn’t move. Only when the earth stopped moving and things stopped falling did she slowly, carefully, open her eyes and raise her head.
Although she didn’t know it, the entire first elevator shaft down to the intermediate chamber, and that chamber, had been destroyed and filled with rock. The lower elevators had been torn from their mountings by the vibrating earth and had fallen to the bottom of the partially collapsed shaft. It would take months with heavy excavation equipment to dig down to the bunker entrance.
Davar stood and wiped the
dirt from her face.
She walked down the slope toward the smoking crater in the parking lot. The hole was almost a hundred feet in diameter, and it was surrounded by a debris field of loose dirt and stone that had been ejected from the hole. In places, the debris was over two feet thick.
She was almost to the edge of where the asphalt had been when she came across the first body. It was a dead Iranian soldier. Trickles of blood had come out his ears. He was lying on his side, half buried, staring lifelessly.
She walked on, past bodies that had been machine-gunned and bodies that had been crushed by falling stones and were now almost buried. She tried to see into the gigantic hole. The bottom of the crater was still smoking, giving off fumes and atomized dirt. She could see nothing.
She walked on across the debris field toward the pile of rubble that had been the mosque. Saw a head sticking out of the rubble. Carmellini, lying motionless.
“No,” she screamed and attacked the rubble with her bare hands. She threw rocks, pieces of masonry, dug through piles of plaster, trying to free him. “No,” she said, “no, no, no.”
Tommy stirred, looked into her face. Tears were streaking the dirt.
She saw his lips move. She couldn’t hear him. The concussions had temporarily deafened her. She bent down, kissed him, worked on getting the dirt out of his hair.
G. W. Hosein roared up in a technical. He leaped out and helped her pull Carmellini from the crumbled bricks and mortar.
“Larijani’s in there,” Carmellini whispered. “Get him out.”
Haddad Nouri and Ahmad Qajar were also there now. A stone had broken Qajar’s right arm, which he held with his left. G. W. told him to sit in the pickup’s passenger seat. Together, the other three burrowed into the rubble with their bare hands while Tommy crawled out.
The Disciple Page 42