“Based in Tehran and at Bandar Abbas until the transfer is complete,” Vice Admiral Qu Zhenmou, commander of the East China Sea Fleet, added. “Compliments of the Ayatollah Khamenei. This will coincide with the signing of a new friendship and cooperation treaty between China and Iran, including logistics and basing rights.”
“You . .. you will allow Chinese troops to be stationed on Iranian soil?” Buzhazi asked incredulously. “It... it is impossible!”
“Our two countries have grown together greatly over the years,” the Ayatollah Khamenei said. “We both desire expansion beyond our local regions, increased trade, fewer trading barriers, and greater technology transfer and development. Along with Afghanistan and Pakistan, China’s other two allies in the Middle East, this shall be attained.” He paused, fixing Buzhazi with a deadly stare, and added, “And it should prove to be a strong stabilizing force against foreign or domestic intrigue, wouldn’t you agree, General Buzhazi?”
Buzhazi’s mouth went dry. He knew exactly what Khamenei meant— the Chinese troops were there to back Khamenei’s government against the threat of a military coup d’etat.
“We have summoned General Hosein Esmail Akhundi to assist us in completing the transfer of the carrier and cruiser to the Chinese navy, and to help establish the People’s Liberation Army’s liaison offices, headquarters, and barracks in the capital,” Khamenei said.
Akhundi was the already-chosen replacement. Damn, Buzhazi thought, I should have had him executed when I had the chance! “I believe we have no further need of your services, General. There are guards outside who will escort you to your quarters.” Khamenei said the word escort like a guillotine sliding down on its rails. “You are dismissed.”
Several Basij paramilitary guards—Buzhazi noticed that the Pasdaran guards normally assigned to the Council chambers were already missing!—appeared out of side doors and stood ready to escort Buzhazi out. He was relieved to see that none of them were armed with rifles, only side arms—good. If he had to kill them to make his escape, he would have no trouble. “I prefer to be alone, Your Eminence,” Buzhazi said. Khamenei dismissed him with a wave of his hand, and Buzhazi departed.
The hallways outside the Council chambers were empty; none of the Basij guards had followed him out. One of Buzhazi’s Pasdaran bodyguards had changed positions over to the elevator down the hallway. When he saw his superior officer, the guard immediately raised his radio to his lips to alert the general’s driver and other bodyguards that he was on his way downstairs. Buzhazi trotted toward the elevator, an action which only seemed to agitate the guard more. “Where is General Sattari?” Buzhazi asked.
“Waiting in your car, sir ...”
“Good,” Buzhazi said. Sattari, his air forces commander and close friend, would be vital in helping to restructure and build his opposition force—he was one of the few military commanders he could totally trust. “Radio ahead,” Buzhazi told the Pasdaran guard. “Have my helicopter waiting at Doshan Tappeh ready for immediate departure. You stay here and do not allow anyone to use this elevator until you are notified that I am airborne.” The guard nodded and made his radio call.
The elevator was set in “express” mode, which would take it all the way to the secure parking garage on the second subfloor of the Council building and direcdy to his waiting armored limousine. Finally, inside the express elevator, Buzhazi felt safe. Damn Khamenei! Buzhazi cursed. Damn his unexpected backbone. The only thing that would save him from the power and wrath of the Pasdaran was a bold, innovative move, and inviting the Chinese to establish bases in Iran was such a move. What else had Khamenei had to promise Jiang Zemin and his powerful military warlords? If it worked, Iran, its Islamic partners, and China would make a powerful Asian union, strong enough even to take on the West and its overwhelming military superiority.
Well, this fight was not over, Buzhazi decided. Khamenei was not bulletproof, and the relations he now seemed to enjoy with China might turn sour very quickly. Both Jiang and Khamenei were ideologues, obsessed with fantasies of global domination and leadership—one Communist, the other Islamist. Buzhazi was more pragmatic. There might be others in China much like himself. The chief of the People’s Liberation Army Air Force, for example: General Cao Shuang-ming, young, brash, opportunistic, and eager to ascend the ranks of the world’s largest military force in the world’s most populous state.
The elevator stopped and the doors swung open—but it had not stopped on the second subfloor security level, but on the first subfloor. There, standing before him, was a woman, dressed completely in traditional black robes and a black veil—and aiming a small submachine gun at him.
Buzhazi screamed, raised his arms to his head to cover his face, and lunged at the woman. The gun fired, spraying bullets across Buzhazi’s head and left shoulder, but his sudden charge and the recoil of the weapon caused most of her bullets to pass up and over Buzhazi’s left shoulder. At that same moment, General Sattari and a guard burst through the stairwell adjacent to the elevator door— they’d seen the elevator unexpectedly stop one floor above and known it had to be a setup for an assassination.
The woman whirled toward Sattari and the Pasdaran guards and fired again, but she was too late. Several guns opened up on her at once, cutting her down.
Sattari ran over to Buzhazi. His face, neck, and shoulders were masses of blood and bone, but somehow the general was still alive— the small-caliber gun of the assassin had been chosen for its small size and not necessarily for its dependable killing power. “The general is still alive,” Sattari said as he began to apply pressure to the larger neck and head wounds. “Get his car up here immediately! Get a first-aid kid, and notify the headquarters doctor and emergency medical team to meet us at the generals helicopter. Move!” Several guards took Sattari’s place, giving Buzhazi CPR and tending to his wounds, so Sattari went over to examine the assassin. An Arab woman, young and beautiful. Her robe and veil would have assured her almost complete anonymity, and thus virtual invisibility, on the streets of the Islamic Republic’s capital. Somehow she had made her way down two secure subfloors of a major government building to attempt to assassinate the chief of staff. “I want this person identified,” Sattari said, “and I want it done secretly. No one must know of this assassination attempt.”
Seconds later, Buzhazi was taken away by Sattari and his Pasdaran guards, leaving two guards to watch over the body of Riza Behrouzi until another car could come to take her away.
Coronado, California
1 MAY 1997, 1737 HOURS, LOCAL
From the east-side patio of the high-rise condominium, Patrick McLanahan could see the beautiful skyline of San Diego, the glass towers illuminated by the first orange rays of the setting sun. He put down the phone and walked through the eleventh-floor three- bedroom condo to the west-side patio, where Wendy was waiting. He sat beside her, and they locked hands and let the sun’s rays wash over them with delightful splendor.
“How is Hal?” Wendy asked quietly.
“Devastated,” Patrick said. “Angry. Just what you’d expect. But he’ll be all right, I think.” He gazed off to the city. “You know what he told me? When ISA told him just how Riza had died, he thought. . . good for her. That’s how she would have wanted it.” He shook his head. “Hell of a woman.”
“Hell of a warrior,” said Wendy.
Patrick gave Wendy’s hand a squeeze, then looked around. “I just realized: eleventh floor, unit eleven—Air Vehicle Eleven.”
“Jon Masters must be psychic—or he’s got a better sense of humor than we give him credit for,” Wendy said. She squeezed his hand. “I’m sure we can move if it bothers you.”
“Bother me? No,” Patrick said, smiling. “That thing brought me back from the brink twice. I think we’ll be linked forever. Why try to fight it?” He paused for a moment, then asked, “Where is Jon, anyway?”
“He was deployed on the Lincoln to help keep an eye on the Khomeini and the Zhanjiang as they withdraw from the ar
ea,” Wendy said. “The Navy seems very interested in his stealth drone stuff. God, I’m glad this is over. I wish Iran never had that carrier in the first place.”
“Unfortunately, now we’ll have to contend with it over in the East China Sea,” Patrick said. “China says it’s committed to refurbishing it. They’re pretty angry we beat it up ... of course, we’re denying it, and it does look like an aircraft accident all the way ...”
“A Chinese aircraft carrier,” Wendy said. “Almost as ominous- sounding as an Iranian carrier. Think you might be targeting some JSOWs on that same ship in a few months?”
“God, I hope not,” Patrick said. “I hope not.”
Over the Gulf of Oman, sixty miles north of Muscat, Oman
2 MAY 1997, 0817 HOURS LOCAL
“Well, there she goes,” Jon Masters exclaimed happily. He was watching the damaged aircraft carrier Mao Zedong, formerly known as the Khomeini, as it cruised eastward through the middle of the Gulf of Oman. It was being towed by the Chinese destroyer Zhanjiang, like a daughter giving her crippled and aging mother assistance in walking home. “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”
Masters was watching the progress of the warships from the comfort of the Combat Information Center on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, stationed 200 miles east in the Arabian Sea. Masters had been allowed to deploy one of his new HEARSE stealth reconnaissance drones to the Lincoln to run more tests. There had been talk about deploying a number of HEARSE drones on board every American carrier and even on some smaller warships such as cruisers or destroyers.
Masters’s spy plane was running perfectly after eight full hours on station—it was not programmed to be recalled for another eight hours—and the Lincolns CIC was crowded with personnel wanting to get a close look at the photographic-quality real-time radar pictures coming back from the drone. Masters caught the eye of a very pretty young female fighter pilot, pointed at the screen, and said to her: “Look, Lieutenant, here are the steel barricades the ragheads— I mean, the Iranians”—a conspiratorial chuckle all around the compartment—“put up to show that they were not going to deploy any aircraft on the carrier or launch any more Shipwreck missiles.” The damaged forward part of the deck had been strewn with steel girders to show anyone who was watching that the Khomeini was out of action.
“See? There’s where the Shipwreck missile cooked off—blew a hole big enough for four Greyhound buses to fit in,” Masters went on. “The PRC kicked all the Iranians off the carrier—they have about three hundred men on board now to take it back to China. Pretty good picture, huh? I came up with this technology before I turned thirty.” The lady pilot was suitably impressed, and she rested her right forearm on Masters’s shoulder to admire his work, as she leaned against him for a better look. Crew members drifted in and out, looking at the images; Masters and the pilot stayed.
“So, what squadron are you with, Lieutenant?” Masters asked.
“VF-103 Sluggers,” she replied. “F-14A-Plus Tomcat. I’m number two tailhooker in my squadron. I’m gunning for number one— probably get it this week, too”—she smiled mischievously—“if a certain someone would get his big toy off our deck so we can do some real flying. ”
“Now, now, Lieutenant,” Masters said, “be nice. This is progress! This is the future of reconnaissance, maybe even of aerial combat! I’ll bet you still do TARPS reconnaissance runs in your Tomcat.”
“I’m not TARPS qualified yet, but I will be soon.”
“God, what a waste!” Masters said with mock exasperation. “With my drones and satellites, I can get you detailed real-time pictures a hundred times better than TARPS. Check this out.” Masters pointed again to the monitor as a large cargo helicopter approached the carrier. “We can even watch this helicopter come in, watch to see what they bring aboard the carrier, even count how many crew members they load or unload. Try doing that with TARPS. I can even ...”
“Looks like you can’t get anything,” the lady pilot said. Masters looked back at the monitor—it was blank. As she left the CIC, she added with a smile, “Show’s over, huh, Doc?”
“What’s going on?” Masters said quickly, trying unsuccessfully to get her attention once more. “Must be a satellite relay glitch— sunspots, Martians.” In his head, he was running through several dozen real possibilities why the picture had gone off the air. He reached for his intercom headset to his technical crew, adding, “Don’t worry, it’ll come back. It’s very reliable ...”
But he really wasn’t that sure: on the intercom, he asked, “Engineering, this is Ops . . . dammit, Tasker, what’s going on? It looks like the uplink’s being jammed. Tell the carrier radar officer or whoever that their radars are jamming my microwave uplink.... Yes, you tell them. We can’t see a damned thing until they turn off that interference . . . it’s gotta be from the Lincoln, Tasker. Who in hell else is going to be doing it?”
Aboard the aircraft carrier Khomeini
“The microwave jammers are operational,” the operations officer verified. “All communications are down.”
“Very well,” responded Vice Admiral Qu Zhenmou, commander of the East China Sea Fleet. Admiral Qu had taken personal command of the ex-jKhomeini, now renamed the Mao Zedong for its two-month trip back to China. “Will the jammers shut down all transmissions from that American spy aircraft?”
“We believe so,” said General Fu Qanyou, Chief of General Logistics, the senior officer in charge of that night’s secret operation. “The Iranians gave us the data. The digital data relay between the spy aircraft and its mother ship is vulnerable to broadband microwave noise interference. If that spy plane is operating overhead tonight, it will be blind for short periods of time, until it can rechannel to another frequency. That should be long enough.”
“Very well,” Admiral Qu said. “We shall proceed with the transfer.”
With incredible speed and precision, two dozen Chinese soldiers, sailors, and technicians streamed off the rear cargo ramp of the large Zhi-8 transport helicopter. They were followed immediately by low carts carrying several missile canisters. A section of the torn-up flight deck was removed, and several dozen sailors emerged from the hole, carried the missile canisters belowdecks, and the hole was closed. In less than three minutes, barely long enough for the rotor blades to stop turning, four carts carrying four missile canisters each had been unloaded and brought below.
“Excellent work,” General Fu said. “How many does that make now, Admiral?”
“We now have a half complement, about one hundred, 9M-330 Kinzhal antiaircraft missiles aboard,” Admiral Qu replied. “In ten days’ time, we will rendezvous with a supply vessel to transfer the replacement P-700 Granit missiles.” Admiral Qu smiled. “The carrier will have developed a serious ‘trim problem’ that will require the Beiyun large resupply vessel to assist us. The missiles will be brought aboard then.”
“But how will the Beiyun be able to carry the missiles past customs inspectors in Singapore and Indonesia?” Fu asked. “With all the commotion, the ship is bound to be inspected.”
“Six missiles will be carried by the submarine Wuhan, sir,” Admiral Qu replied with another smile. “The Wuhan can bypass all unfriendly ports of call with ease—it can stay at sea for up to two months and if necessary can stay submerged for up to nine continuous days. The transfer can take place whenever the threat of a surprise inspection is over.”
“Excellent, Admiral, excellent,” General Fu said. “Barring any unforeseen problems, it appears that we can fully repair this carrier by the time it reaches Victoria, and perhaps even be fully operational by the time it enters the East China Sea.”
“If all goes well, sir, we shall have this carrier operational before it reaches Hong Kong,” Admiral Qu said proudly. “In the meantime, we shall continue the masquerade of making the world think this is just a useless hulk.”
“And in just a few short months, we will have one of the most powerful navies in the world,” said Fu.
Admiral Qu could n
ot remember when he had seen the young, powerful commander so pleased, or for that matter, the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese government, and the Chinese military so closely allied, its senior officers so motivated and energetic. Something was stirring, he decided, and it had to do with a lot more than just an aircraft carrier, much more than acquiring overseas bases. “And then, General... ?”
“And then, Admiral,” General Fu Qanyou responded, “China will no longer be the sleeping dragon it has been for the past two thousand years. And any who might oppose us will feel the might of our two hundred million teeth....”
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