The Saudi-Iranian War

by Ted Halstead

  We’re the FSB, and we’ve reformed!”

  Grishkov shook his head and his smile faded. “Don’t be fooled by how you’re feeling now. I’ve injected you with a combination of painkillers and stimulants that the doctor on the Admiral Kuznetsov was very unhappy to give me. We came up with it in the field in Chechnya, for situations where long-term effects took a back seat to surviving the next half hour. I think this is one of those. Now, try sitting up, but do it slowly.”

  Vasilyev felt a little dizzy once he was sitting upright, but the feeling passed after a few seconds.

  “I think I can go on. It sounds like the gunfire is tapering off.”

  Grishkov nodded. “Yes, the only movement I see is around the truck. Did I see flashbang grenades in that case?”

  Vasilyev smiled weakly. “I insisted on packing some. At some point I was hoping we could capture the vehicle with the weapon, and I think throwing regular grenades at it would be a bad idea. Simply strolling up to the men guarding the weapon would probably be just as bad.”

  Grishkov grunted. “Yes, especially for us. These look odd to me, so please pull out the ones you know are flashbangs from the case.”

  Vasilyev picked up two grenades. The first had a metal rod with the arming pin, attached to a plastic ball containing the charge covered on top with short spikes. The second had a shorter metal rod with the arming pin, attached to a smooth oblong plastic body. He held the first one up before slipping it into his pocket.

  “The first one is the Zarya-3, and the second the RGK-60SZ. Both should be effective at incapacitating the remaining gunmen until we can reach the truck. I suggest we work our way through the parking lot using the cars for cover until we are close enough to be sure of an effective throw. Fortunately, I was not hit in my throwing shoulder,” Vasilyev said.

  Grishkov sighed and shook his head as he picked up one of the grenades, and pulled the strap of a submachine gun across his neck. Putting his arm around Vasilyev for support, he asked “Why bother telling me the grenade models? Doesn’t every second count?”

  Vasilyev shrugged as he bent and picked up a submachine gun as well.

  “Well, yes. I just wanted to reassure you that these really are flashbangs. I understand mistakes can happen in combat.”

  With a sharp nod Grishkov said, “Fair enough. Let’s work our way to the corner of the building, where we’ll have some cover when we throw.”

  Vasilyev hunched low as he shuffled forward with Grishkov, moving carefully forward from car to car. Fortunately, the men around the truck had their attention focused on the guards firing at them from inside the plant’s second and third story windows. Since the attackers’ car had made its mad dash towards them and hit Vasilyev, he and Grishkov had ceased firing in the direction of the gate, so the attackers assumed they were dead.

  In just a few minutes they had reached the corner of the main desalination plant building, and Grishkov took a quick look around it.

  “There are still at least three men around the truck, maybe four. We’ll have to move fast once we throw these grenades. Are you ready?”

  Vasilyev nodded.

  “Good. On three. One, two…”

  As Grishkov said “three” both of them threw their grenades, and then ducked back behind the building’s corner. Even from there, and with their eyes closed and hands over their ears, they had no doubt that the grenades had detonated successfully.

  They ran towards the truck as fast as they could, knowing that the attackers would start to recover from the effect of the grenades in less than a minute.

  When they got there, they found that all of the four remaining gunmen were still stunned, disoriented and unable to defend themselves.

  Grishkov and Vasilyev shot them all without mercy. With a nuclear weapon still to deal with, there was no time to waste and no useful information to be gained by taking prisoners.

  One of the men had been Farhad Mokri, who became the first of the Iranians who had plotted the attack on Saudi Arabia to die that day.

  Grishkov and Vasilyev had been worried that the guards firing from the plant’s windows wouldn’t take the time to distinguish them from the attackers, but apparently the grenades had helped to establish that they were on the guards' side. Still, they were just as happy that their current position next to the truck’s cargo bed happened to shield them from view.

  Grishkov shook his head as he saw the size of the device. “It would have been tough to move that thing even if you were uninjured. But with that wound in your shoulder, I don’t see how we’re going to get it out of the truck and into the water. Think we should take a closer look at it to see how much time we’ve got left?”

  Vasilyev shrugged. “Why waste time, when we know the answer is ‘not much’? As to getting the weapon out of the truck and into the water, I’d say let’s get it to the pier before the guards decide to join the party and make us waste even more time.”

  Grishkov was starting to nod agreement when both of them turned involuntarily towards a brilliant dot that had appeared on the northern horizon. In the following seconds it was crowned by a small mushroom cloud.

  “The other plant…” Grishkov said, as he felt an arm close around his throat.

  “Sorry, my friend,” were the last words Grishkov heard as he lost consciousness. He didn’t clearly hear Vasilyev’s next words, “I made a promise to Arisha.”

  Vasilyev checked Grishkov’s pulse and breathing and nodded with satisfaction. He would be out for a matter of minutes, but it would be long enough for what he needed to do.

  Vasilyev pulled Grishkov into the shade of a nearby car, and propped his head up. There was a chance he would still be unconscious when the guards finally emerged from the plant, but Vasilyev was optimistic, especially since he was sure the guards had seen the other desalination plant disappear in a nuclear fireball.

  No, Vasilyev thought they would probably consider it a good day to stay indoors, at least for a while.

  Wincing, Vasilyev pulled himself up into the truck’s driver's seat.

  Thankfully, the keys were in the ignition.

  At first, he had to drive with care around bodies, debris and wrecked cars.

  Then Vasilyev had to weave the large truck through the parking lot, until he finally reached the exit to the narrow service road leading to the maintenance pier. The road was obviously intended for a smaller vehicle, but he drove carefully and soon was at the entrance to the pier.

  Here the problem was the same. The truck would fit on the pier, but just barely. Unfortunately, the solution had to be different.

  Vasilyev wasn’t going to go slowly and carefully. He was going to launch the truck into the Gulf as far out as he could.

  Vasilyev grit his teeth and pressed his foot on the gas pedal, slowly building up speed as the first half of the pier disappeared behind him. He could feel the steering wheel fight him as he wrestled it straight, ignoring the pain in his shoulder pushing its way through whatever drugs Grishkov had used to keep him going this far.

  The end of the pier was just ahead. Now, Vasilyev pressed the gas pedal all the way to the floor, and in seconds the truck was airborne, flying out into the Gulf.

  Over his long career in Russian intelligence, Vasilyev had risked his life many times, and had been certain in several missions that he would not survive. In each case, he had been pleasantly surprised to find he had been wrong to be so pessimistic.

  This would not be one of those times.

  The truck hit the water with the full impact concentrated on the front of the vehicle, which crumpled backward into the truck’s cabin. There were no airbags inside the cabin, but it wouldn’t have mattered in the face of hundreds of pounds of steel occupying the space where the seats had been a second previously.

  Vasilyev’s body had no time to feel pain before he was not only dead, but covered in water and on the way to the bottom of the Gulf.

  Vasilyev had thought about trying to jump out of the speeding truck
just before it reached the end of the pier, but had rated his survival chances as low, particularly because he saw no chance of successfully swimming to shore with an injured shoulder.

  It would have pleased Vasilyev to know that his choice was correct because not only would he have drowned, but he would have done something much worse. He would have failed in his mission.

  The few extra meters out into the Gulf gained by staying with the truck to the end were not so important in shielding the plant and its personnel from the weapon’s explosion. They were critical, though, to whether the device exploded at all.

  First, the force of the vehicle’s impact broke the weapon free of its attachment to the truck bed.

  Next, the weapon struck the truck’s metal gate before being ejected from the truck, cracking its metal case.

  Finally, it settled on the bottom of the Gulf, about three meters deeper than it would have if Vasilyev had tried to jump. Those three meters made all the difference.

  The extra pressure provided by that additional three meters meant that sea water was able to force its way through the cracks in the case with enough force to reach the weapons’ electronic components before its countdown was complete.

  This would not have mattered for an operational, production nuclear weapon, since waterproofing its interior would have been a routine precaution. However, waterproofing had been considered an unnecessary waste of time for test devices that would be detonated on land.

  Kazem had also designed this weapon personally, and would probably have been pleased to know that it would have detonated perfectly if Vasilyev and Grishkov had not intervened.

  However, since Kazem had now been separated into his component atoms, he never would.

  Chapter Eighteen

  National Reconnaissance Office, Chantilly, Virginia

  Steve Foster had only been working as a government contractor for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) for a few months, but he was already looking for other job options. Looking at satellite images had turned out to be a lot less interesting than it seemed in the movies.

  Walking into the NRO’s headquarters building in Chantilly, Virginia at first seemed to confirm the movie image. The NRO had used its “black” budget status to hoard three hundred million dollars it used to build its headquarters building without any specific Congressional authorization.

  Unlike most Federal buildings, the computer systems and network architecture in the NRO headquarters were everything Steve could want.

  Plus, the offices were much better furnished and equipped than anything Steve had seen in his previous jobs, even in the cubicles where Steve knew he could expect to start.

  That’s where the good news ended. First, Steve had been surprised to find that American satellites did not image every square inch of the planet every second of the day. Far from it. In fact, every image captured was in response to a specific tasking, and there was a highly classified waiting list of image capture requests that did not have a high enough priority — yet — to get a satellite to capture the requested image. The list shrunk whenever another NRO satellite was launched, but new requests seemed to appear almost immediately to take the waitlist to where it had been before.

  So, every image Steve was given to review had someone at a US intelligence agency who was waiting for his assessment. Usually, it meant a series of images with a specific question to answer. This latest assignment had seemed pretty straightforward, but it had just turned into something Steve dreaded. One where he had to ask his boss for guidance.

  Steve had a vague idea when he started working for his company as a contractor that he would be supervised by a government employee. In fact, almost no Federal employees worked at the NRO. That meant his boss was simply another contractor with more experience than Steve had, which he realized probably described everyone else in the building.

  Mark Rhodes had seen plenty of employees like Steve come and go over his ten years with the company. Not many were cut out for the endless search for a needle in a haystack, but until you put a person in the job it was hard to predict whether they would be a good match. Steve had given the job his best, but Mark was expecting him to leave when he found work that was a better fit.

  Steve had pulled up a series of images on his monitor to show Mark the problem.

  ”Someone at the CIA sent me a tasker to review these images to report on the movements of an Iranian armored force that had been deployed in Syria, but was now on its way home to Iran via Iraq. The tasking said that the Iranians had done this many times before, and I was to report back to the requester when the Iranians were back in Iran.”

  Mark nodded. “Seems straightforward. What’s the problem?”

  Steve pointed at the third, fourth and fifth images on the monitor. “They disappeared.”

  Mark frowned. “How big is this Iranian armored force?”

  “Couple hundred tanks and plenty of APCs and support vehicles,” Steve replied.

  Mark shook his head. “This doesn’t make any sense. How broad was the image track you received to support this tasking?”

  The “image track” was the area covered by satellite images generated to support a tasking. It could cover a few kilometers around a target, or a radius of hundreds of kilometers if multiple satellites provided coverage.

  Steve shrugged. “Pretty narrow. Also, I couldn’t find any nearby images to review to support the ones for my specific tasking. And they just show the force exactly where they were expected to be — until they weren’t.”

  Mark scowled. “Since all US troops were pulled out of Iraq again last year it’s a fairly low priority for image collection. I’m sure the tasking office expected the Iranians to drive straight down the highway in Iraq to the connecting highway in Iran, like they’ve done many times before. They just wanted to know when they got there.”

  Steve cocked his head and spread his hands. “What’s to stop the tanks from leaving the highway? Don’t they have tracks?”

  Mark smiled. “Good question. Yes, they do. But their support vehicles don’t. Without gas and ammo resupply, tanks aren’t very effective. And from where they were last seen, there’s not much but Iraqi desert for a long way in every direction.”

  Steve nodded. “OK, so what should I do now?”

  Mark frowned. “You’ve done everything you can for now. I’ll go back to the office that put out the original tasker and ask them how badly they want to find this task force. It’ll be up to them to decide the priority on this, and where to look.”

  National Reconnaissance Office, Chantilly, Virginia

  Mark Rhode stuck his head in Steve Foster’s cubicle, and chuckled when he saw his surprise.

  “That was pretty fast, huh? It turns out the CIA requestor and several levels above him were very interested to hear that Iranian armored force went missing. We’ve got a dedicated MA-4C Triton mission out of NAS Sigonella to help us find it, with the feed being sent both to us and directly to the requestor.”

  Mark had never seen Steve at a loss for words, but he was actually pleased to see that Steve understood just how unusual this response was for an intelligence tasking. Tritons could stay aloft for over thirty hours at an altitude of fifty-five thousand feet, outside the range of many but not all anti-aircraft systems. They cost over two hundred million dollars each, and as Navy drones were usually tasked for maritime or coastal missions. Their most impressive capability was combining what ships, planes, and land-based combat vehicles were seeing and broadcasting to create a common battlefield picture, which they could then rebroadcast.

  “Your reaction is a lot like mine. I had trouble believing it too. The Triton should be on station soon, so I’m going to run through how this will work.

  The CIA thinks the Iranians were probably sent north to Iraqi Kurdistan, maybe around Kirkuk, to pressure the Kurds to share their oil revenue with the central government in Baghdad more fairly. The Iraqi central government did that before in 2017 using its own troops. If now
they’re using an Iranian armored force, it says a lot of bad things about just how much influence Iran has over the Iraqis. So, the CIA will check out images from northern Iraq that would support that theory.”

  Steve nodded. “OK, so what are we doing?”

  Mark shrugged. “Their next idea is that the Iranians doubled back, and are either on their way to the Syrian border or already back in Syria. The CIA has asked us to check out that possibility.”

  Steve stared at Mark incredulously. “That’s ridiculous, and they know it.

  The Iranians were already in Syria longer than they’ve ever been, and their replacement force has just crossed the Iraqi border. They’ll be in Syria within a day or so. Yes, it’s a little smaller. But there’s nothing going on in the Syrian conflict that would support the Iranians needing to send their first armored group back to Syria after crossing more than half of Iraq.”

  Mark nodded. “I agree. But think about the alternatives. The Iranians headed south to Saudi Arabia. Yes, the Saudis have a lot of their forces tied up in Yemen. But I think they’d have noticed dozens of Iranian tanks crossing their border.”

  Steve said nothing, and just shrugged agreement.

  Mark hesitated, then added, “There’s only one other direction left. Back across the border to Iran, where they were supposed to go in the first place.”

  Steve had never lost his temper in the office before, but Mark could see it was about to happen, so he quickly added, “Look, when the CIA told me they were going to task a Triton I reviewed the images you saw myself and didn’t see anything either. So, if the Iranians did go home and we just missed them, I’ll have my butt in a sling right beside yours.”

  Steve visibly reined in his temper, and even managed to smile. “Dozens of tanks should be pretty hard to miss.”

  Mark was relieved, and grinned back at Steve. “Right. We should start getting images from the Triton any minute. Let’s find those tanks.”

  National Reconnaissance Office, Chantilly, Virginia

  Mark Rhode and Steve Foster were sitting side by side in the cubicle, and had each been looking at the images provided by the Triton on separate monitors for hours. Mark’s secure cell phone rang, and after a quick look at the caller ID he answered.