“The Gulf of Oman? Why was Scotty out there?” Sheila asked. “I heard temporary flight restrictions were in effect for all airspace within five hundred miles of Iran. What was he doing over the Gulf of Oman?”
The wing commander looked at the chaplain, who let go of Sheila’s hand and stepped away. “Sheila, please, let’s not focus on where Scotty’s plane went down right now, all right? I just want you to know how sorry we are, and that we want to help you through this terrible tragedy.”
“This has to do with Iran, doesn’t it?” Sheila asked, the hurt turning into stone-cold anger. “All the things the government has been saying about how great, how wonderful everything is over in the Middle East, it’s not true, is it... ?”
“Lieutenant...”
“The Iranians shot him down, didn’t they, sir?” Sheila asked hotly. “The Iranians shot down my Scotty, flying in an unarmed, vulnerable tanker.”
“Lieutenant, please, I know you’re upset, and I’m sorry, truly sorry, but I’m asking you to keep your opinions to yourself, please!”
“I hope we went in there to bomb the crap out of those ragheads!” Sheila cried. The paramedics were rushing into the wing commander’s office with a gurney, trying to get her to relax, but Sheila’s heart felt as cold, as heavy, and as still as the child in her womb did right now, and the anger she was releasing felt good, felt right. “I hope my Scotty helped us get those damned Iranian terrorists, dammit. I hope they all burn in hell!n
CHAPTER FIVE
BEGHIN REGIONAL AIRPORT, KERMAN PROVINCE, IRAN
27 APRIL 1997, 0206 HOURS LOCAL
According to law, all flights landing in Iran had to be on the ground and at their arrival gate by midnight; the last flight into Beghin Regional Airport in central Iran had arrived at ten P.M., and shortly thereafter the airport was all but shut down, leaving only maintenance crews at the airport until sunrise. By two A.M. the airport appeared totally deserted ...
... except at the extreme southern end of the airport, south of the 11,000-foot-long, 150-foot-wide northwest-southeast running concrete runway that had been closed to commercial and civil traffic two years earlier. Three large and rather shabby-looking hangars and several smaller buildings sat near that closed runway, in front of a large, completely deserted aircraft parking ramp. Weeds growing up through the cracks on that parking ramp suggested that the ramp had not supported an aircraft in quite some time.
This was the secret Iranian base for one squadron, six planes, of Iran’s most deadly military aircraft, the Tupolev-22M bomber, NATO code-named “Backfire.” The Russian-made supersonic Backfire bomber could reach any target in the Middle East within an hour or, refueled from an Iranian C-707 aerial refueling tanker, could reach targets as far away as Italy or Germany in two hours. It carried a devastating 53,000-pound payload of gravity bombs, antiship missiles, or land or sea mines. The presence of Tu-22M Backfire bombers in the Islamic Republic of Iran’s air force had been rumored since 1993, but had been constantly refuted because no Backfires had ever been spotted in Iran.
“For a secret bomber base, this place looks like shit,” Tony Jamieson muttered. He and Patrick McLanahan had been orbiting over the base for twenty minutes now, “shooting” the base with the synthetic aperture radar every few minutes and comparing the SAR images with past images, trying to piece together enough information to verify that the deadly Backfire bombers were really here. They had looked at every crack in the concrete, every skid mark, every vehicle on the airport grounds—nothing. No sign of one of the world’s most advanced bombers. “We’ve only got twenty minutes left in our orbit.”
“Something will show,” McLanahan said. “Jon Masters’s NIRTSats never let us down before ... well, maybe once before ...”
“Great,” Jamieson groused. “And I’m getting tired of always carrying these so-called non-lethal weapons on board my plane, too, McLanahan. The ragheads want to fight—let’s start carrying some weapons that have a little punch. At least a couple JSOWs with high- explosive warheads would be useful—that’s not too much to ask ...”
“SAR coming on,” McLanahan announced. “SAR shot, ready, ready... now ... SAR in standby, antenna secure.”
“Well, hot damn, there they are—a regular ‘baby elephant walk,’” Jamieson exclaimed as he studied the SAR image on McLanahan’s supercockpit monitor. As clear as a black-and-white photograph, the long, thin body of a Tupolev-22M Backfire bomber had appeared from one of the hangars on the south side of the airport. Another bomber was exiting the same hangar, behind and slighdy to one side of the first, while a third bomber had just poked its nose outside the doors of the middle hangar, obviously waiting its turn to taxi. By using cursor commands, McLanahan was able to electronically “twist” the SAR image until they were actually looking inside the hangars, as if they were standing right on the ramp, and they found all three large hangar doors open, with two Tu-22M bombers in each hangar. The rear of the hangar was open so the bombers could run their engines while inside, safely under cover. “Bingo,” Jamieson said. “Shit, they are there! ”
“And it looks like they’re going hunting again,” McLanahan said. “We can take care of that.” And just a few moments later six AGM-154 JSOW missiles were on their way toward Beghin Airport, their autopilots programmed to fly an attack course just fifty feet over the runway.
As the JSOW missile flew toward the runway, an electronic low- light TV camera activated, sending real-time TV images back to McLanahan in the B-2 A Spirit stealth bomber flying 45,000 feet overhead. McLanahan used his cursor to lock an aiming reticle on one of the bombers, and the JSOW’s autopilot flew the missile to its quarry. As it passed overhead, two of its four bomb bays opened, and it ejected a sixty-pound blob of a thick, gooey substance that landed on the upper surface of the bomber. As the JSOW missile flew away, McLanahan programmed the missile to fly to a secondary target—in the first case, the airport’s power-transformer substation—and drop the last two globs on that. The missile then automatically flew itself thirty miles farther west, where it crashed in the middle of the Bahlamabad Reservoir and sank quickly out of sight. One by one, each JSOW missile dropped one-half of its unidentifiable load on top of a Tu-22M bomber, then on top of another target somewhere else on the south side of the base—the regional air-traffic-control radar dome, a communications antenna farm, another power transformer farm, and three JSOWs dropped their gooey mass on the south base’s POL (petroleum, oil, and lubricant) tank farm.
“Well, that was exciting,” Jamieson muttered as McLanahan programmed the last of the JSOW missiles. He steered the B-2 A bomber south along the Afghanistan and Pakistan borders and out over the Gulf of Oman once again.
The air-traffic-control radar was the first to feel the effect. The two large blobs hit the thin reinforced Fiberglas radar dome and immediately burned through, then scattered on the rotating antenna and control cabin inside. Within minutes, the thin metal antenna began to twist out of shape because of the fast twelve-revolutions- per-minute speed, and the antenna quickly failed and collapsed.
The metal-eating blobs of acid that struck the first Tu-22M bomber hit squarely on the upper fuselage and on the non-swiveling outboard portion of the left wing glove; on the second bomber, they hit on the fuselage just aft of the cockpit windows and on the very upper lip of the right engine intake, spattering across the guidance and warhead sections of the AS-4 cruise missile mounted under the right wing glove. As the first two bombers taxied out onto the active runway and picked up speed for takeoff, the globs spread across the airframe, eating away inside the left wing pivot section and spreading across the fuselage fuel tanks, the upper engine compartments, the vertical and horizontal stabilizers, and the rudder.
When the acid ate through the Backfire’s thin aluminum skin, the first bomber was already 3,000 feet above ground and passing through 300 miles per hour. Just as the pilot began sweeping the wings of his Backfire bomber from the twenty-degree takeoff setting to the thirty-degre
e cruise setting, the wing pivot mechanism failed, and the left wing uncontrollably folded all the way back to its aft-most sixty-degree setting. The bomber immediately snap-rolled to the left, quickly losing altitude.
The pilot applied hard right rudder to keep the bomber upright, and with the copilot’s help he was able to keep the bomber level at 500 feet above ground and accelerate to a safe emergency cruise speed—until the acid blob finally ate through the thicker, stronger titanium lining the leading edge of the vertical stabilizer. The bomber began an uncontrolled left roll, immediately lost all lift, and plowed into the Iranian countryside just south of the city of Kerman.
The second Backfire bomber’s fate was decided much quicker. The Tu-22M had just rotated and its main landing gear had just left the runway when the entire cockpit canopy failed, ripping a thirty- foot section of the fuselage directly over the crew compartment off the fuselage like an orange peel. At the same time, the electronics section of the right AS-4 Kitchen anti-ship missile sparked, ignited the acid, and detonated the missile’s 2,200-pound warhead, blowing the 300,000-pound warplane into bits with a spectacular cloud of fire that illuminated the entire airport.
Luckily for the third and fourth Backfire bomber’s crews, they had not yet left the runway, and the damage to their planes was localized and not so dramatic. Blobs of caustic acid burned through into fuselage fuel tanks and flight controls, starting fuselage and engine fires. Both four-man crews safely evacuated their planes and watched helplessly as their $200 million bombers burned. Soon, the lights of burning Backfire bombers were the only ones on the entire airport, for the JSOWs’ deadly cargos had destroyed the main power grids . . . but those lights were soon followed by the brilliant mushroom of fire that erupted as the POL farm exploded, sending sheets of flame a thousand feet into the sky.
In minutes, one entire squadron of Iranian heavy bombers had been effectively destroyed, and their base rendered heavily damaged and unusable.
As they got closer and closer to the Gulf of Oman, the B-2A
Spirit stealth bomber’s threat scope became littered with dozens of Iranian threats, mostly MiG-29 and F-14 fighters—McLanahan was so concerned that he enlarged the threat display to cover almost the entire supercockpit display. The threat scope graphically depicted the position of each fighter and estimated range of each fighter’s search radar; green, yellow, or red colors showed whether or not the radar was in a search, target-tracking, or missile-guidance mode. A few of the Iranian fighters’ radar beams swept across the B-2A bomber, depicted in the center of the threat display, but the color of the radar cone never changed, indicating that the radar never locked on. Along with the extensive fighter patrols, there were two Iranian A-10 Mainstay airborne warning radar aircraft in the area, plus the normal array of ground-based radars and radar-guided antiaircraft sites.
“Jesus, there’s got to be a half dozen flights of fighters up tonight, just over this one section of Iran,” McLanahan said. “Guess they’re pretty upset about what we did to Chah Bahar the other night, huh?”
“Hey, they deserved to get their asses kicked,” Jamieson said, “and I was glad that it was us who helped ’em. How long till feet- wet?”
“Fifteen minutes,” McLanahan replied uneasily.
He fell silent again; Jamieson could tell that something was bugging McLanahan. “Problem, MC?”
“Nah .. . well, it’s just the arrangement of these Iranian aircraft .. . it’s changed since we went feet-dry on the bomb run,” McLanahan said, pointing at the supercockpit screen. He expanded the ratio on the threat display until the entire region, from Bandar Abbas to the extreme eastern part of the Gulf of Oman, could be seen. The radar range circles from Chah Bahar, from the carrier Khomeini, and from the two Iranian A-10 airborne radar planes could be seen, forming a “basket” all along the southern and southwestern portions of Iran—and they were headed right for that basket. “Two AWACS radar planes practically side by side across the Gulf of Oman—that’s weird. Everybody’s clustered around each other. Not a very efficient use of their air defense assets.”
“Whoever gave the ragheads a lot of credit for smarts?” Jamieson said. “Just keep an eye out for yellow or red—we’re clean as long as the threats stay green, right?”
Something was still nagging at McLanahan’s head. This looked too strange. The Iranians had showed much better deployment of their forces before—even four hours earlier, as they were heading into the target area, they had set up their defenses very effectively. Now they were bunching up, with many more fighters aimlessly buzzing around. Was it a bit of confusion following the attack on Beghin Airport? Were they a little disorganized, trying to catch a shadow and screwing their valuable assets up even further in the process? Maybe . . .
“And look,” he went on. “When the threat symbol comes up on the screen? It’s not one by one—it’s a flash. Look .. . bam, they all come up at once.”
“So?”
“So, I’ve never seen that before,” McLanahan explained. “We usually see one guy pop up, then another, then another, because their radars are different frequencies and different rpms and different timing and all that. Now, it’s like all their radars are coming up exactly the same.”
“That’s impossible,” Jamieson said. “You can’t match a ground radar and an airborne radar up so they match everything like that. It’s just the way the signal processor is displaying the threats, that’s all. No big deal.”
Yeah, no big deal. Yes, it was impossible, or at least very highly unlikely, that all of the Iranians’ radars were synced up that tight...
... or maybe it wasn’t. “Let’s take a detour,” McLanahan said. “Let’s overfly Pakistan on our way out of here.”
“Say what?”
“I know we’re supposed to take pictures of Chah Bahar and the
Khomeini, to find out how many extra fighters and ground-based air defense systems they’ve deployed—but I’ve got a bad feeling about this. It’s like the Iranian air defenses are hanging around right in our flight path, daring us to drive through them. And their waves are all the same, they’re too . . . similar. I wonder what they’re up to.”
“Well, whatever it is, they’re doing it deaf, dumb, and blind,” Jamieson remarked, with a satisfied smile. “They can’t see us up here, MC—we’ve proven that without a doubt now. All they’re doing is just microwaving birds and bugs. Besides, we don’t have clearance to overfly Pakistan yet, and if Mr. Murphy kicks us in the butt and we’re forced down over the Paks, we’re really screwed. I say we follow the ‘blue line’ and see what happens.”
McLanahan triple-checked that they were in COMBAT mode and that all of their defensive systems were in full operation. Maybe he was being too cautious, too defensive, a little paranoid. Was it because Wendy was back on Guam, waiting for him? Probably. . . “Okay, we continue,” he said. But as they flew south into the midst of the cluster of Iranian radars, he ordered the defensive systems to perform a fast self-test—no problems, everything fully functional. McLanahan then began formulating an escape plan, just in case, a .. .
But things were looking worse and worse every second.
They had been within Chah Bahar’s long-range radar coverage for several minutes now, but there was absolutely no hint that they were an item of interest. As they neared the coast, flying at 50,000 feet fifty miles west of Chah Bahar, they entered the aircraft carrier Khomeini s long-range radar coverage. There was still no sign of detection—both Chah Bahar and the Khomeinis, radars stayed in twodimensional search mode, blindly sweeping the skies in azimuth and range. The signal delta-threshold showed that the signal strength was not enough to create a return—the difference in the signal received by the threat-detection gear compared to the signal reflected back to the same source was too great. If they had been detected, one of those radars—probably the Khomeinis—would switch to targettracking mode, introducing a height-finder radar that would show up immediately. Nothing had changed . . . except.. .
“The fighters,” McLanahan muttered. “The fighters disappeared.”
“Say again?”
“Two fighters were right here, now they’re gone,” McLanahan said. “They stopped transmitting their attack radars.”
“What was their range to us?”
“About sixty miles,” McLanahan said. “Too far away for a missile shot...”
“Damned right,” Jamieson said. “The AA-11 can fly for over a hundred miles, but it homes on radar, and we’re not transmitting anything . . . are we ... ?”
“No,” McLanahan said—but they both quickly double-checked their switches. They were in COMBAT mode, all right—all radio transmitters were off, no synthetic aperture radars on, no Doppler radars on, no missile warning and tracking radars on, and the “cloaking device” was on—no electronic energy could leave the bomber with the electronic field activated. They were running silent. “Man, I still have a bad feeling.”
“Then let’s hurry up, take the SAR shot on the carrier, and let’s get the hell outta Dodge,” Jamieson said.
They were within SAR range of the carrier now, just sixty miles off the nose. “Okay, stand by, SAR coming on.”
But just before he activated the system, which would automatically control the radar exposure as necessary to get a good picture of the carrier, McLanahan also activated the AN/ALQ-199 HAVE GLANCE system—as soon as the BEADS “cloaking device” went down, HAVE GLANCE would scan the sky all around the bomber with radar to search for nearby threats. “What’s that for?”
“Precautionary,” McLanahan said. “SAR exposure routine active ... in five .. . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . SAR radiating . ..”
And at the same instant, they heard a high-pitched, fast Deedledeedledeedle! warning tone, and a “bat-wing” fighter symbol appeared on the threat scope, just a few miles off their right rear quadrant! “Fighter, four o’clock, four miles, same altitude!” McLanahan screamed. “Descend! Accelerate! SAR down! Break, Tiger, break right!”
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