Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 05 (47 page)

 
          
Slowly
and deliberately, he began to remove his clothes before her. It was almost like
a striptease, revealing one tantalizing feature of his hard, chiseled body
after another in slow, agonizing bits. Her chest was rising and falling
heavily, as if she had just run up six flights of stairs, well before he
finally unfastened his belt, eased his trousers off, and revealed himself to
her. Her eyes told him that she was at once both intimidated by him and eager
to sample him.

 
          
“That
was delicious, Leopard,” Behrouzi said breathlessly. “It is my turn to please
you now.”

 
          
They
made love quickly, wildly, explosively. Both knew what was out there waiting
for them; both knew how much time they didn’t have, what was expected of them, what
other governments and officials demanded of them. For now, right now, all they
demanded of the rest of the world was each other, if only for a few brief,
passionate minutes. His scars, and hers, were visible to each of them, but it
didn’t matter.

 
          
Like
a nighttime commando raid, it was over quickly; but, like combat, they were
both filled with an intoxicating mixture of tingling excitement, adrenaline,
and weariness when it was done. They stayed tightly intertwined until their
internal timers told them their time together was running out. He helped her to
her feet, then embraced her once again as if this would be the last time. After
she dressed, they were both on the phone again immediately, talking to their
respective command centers, ordering all the charts, intelligence data, support
personnel, and soldiers they might need.

 
          
Neither
of them would ever forget the moment they had shared together . .. but now it
was time to join the fight once again.

In the
Arabian
Sea
, east of the
Gulf
of
Oman
,

300 MILES SOUTHEAST OF CHAH
BAHAR NAVAL BASE,
IRAN

26 APRIL 1997
,
0251 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

 
          
“Aardvark-121
flight, Wallbanger, vector heading two-eight-five, take angels thirty, your
bogey is bearing three-one-zero, three-zero- zero bull’s-eye.”

 
          
“121
flight copies,” Lieutenant Scott “Crow” Crowley, lead pilot of the two-ship
F-14B Tomcat flight, responded. Perfect timing, he thought—he had just about
taken on a full tank of gas, and his wing- man, Lieutenant (j.g.) Eric “Shine”
Matte had just tanked a few minutes earlier. “Lizard-520, disconnect.” Crowley
hit the AR/NWS/DISC button on his control stick and watched as the large
cloth-covered basket-shaped refueling drogue popped off his refueling probe on
the right side of his cockpit. The KA-6D tanker of VA-95 Green Lizards quickly
reeled in the drogue and cleared the flight of two F-14B Tomcat fighters from
FG-114 Aardvarks, from the U.S.S.
Abraham
Lincoln,
to the bottom of the refueling block. Once level 2,000 feet below
the tanker, the F-14s executed a tight left turn and headed northwest on their
new vector.

 
          
“21
flight, check,” Crowley radioed as soon as he finished his post-air refueling
checklist. He knew that Matte would be finishing his checklist as well, and
then hurrying to catch up and stay in formation, which for them was loose
fingertip formation.

 
          
“Two,”
was Matte’s quick reply. That meant everything was OK—fuel feeding OK, full
tanks or as nearly full as possible, instruments OK, systems OK, oxygen OK, GIB
(Guy in Back, the radar intercept officer) OK. Crowley looked at his fuel and
deducted about half an hour’s worth of his wingman and a bit more “for the wife
and kids” and guessed he had about two hours’ worth of “play time” out here
before they had to head back to the
Lincoln,
which was about 300 miles behind them right now.

 
          
Each
F-14B Tomcat was similarly equipped for this medium- range Force CAP night
patrol: two 1,000-liter external fuel tanks on the pylons under the engine air
inlets; two radar-guided AIM-120A AMRAAMs (Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air
Missiles) and two AIM-9M Sidewinder short-range heat-seeking missiles on the
wing glove pylons; and four huge AIM-54C Phoenix long-range radar- guided
missiles on the fuselage stations. With the
Lincoln
battle group so far out in the Arabian Sea, the primary threat to be countered
by the F-14 air patrols was from Iranian long-range fighter- bombers and
long-range patrol aircraft, so these Tomcats carried two extra Phoenix missiles
per fighter—the Phoenix missile had a range of over ninety miles, well within
radar detection range but far enough out of the range of most of the
Russian-made air-launched anti-ship cruise missiles that Iran had in its
inventory.

 
          
A
few minutes after receiving their vector from the E-2C Hawk- eye radar plane,
from VAW-117 Wallbangers, orbiting 200 miles northwest of the
Lincoln
carrier group,
Crowley
’s radar intercept officer had the bogey on
radar: “Radar contact, one-seven-five miles, off the nose.”

 
          
“Aardvark
flight, that’s your bogey,” the Hawkeye radar officer said, verifying the RIO’s
report. The Tomcats now took over primary responsibility for the intercept.

 
          
It
was a cat-and-mouse game that had been played every night for the past few
nights. These were “ferret” flights, probes of the
Lincolns
air defense capability, by a wide variety of Iranian
aircraft, from top-of-the-line MiG-29 Fulcrum, MiG-25 Foxbat, and MiG-31
Foxhound supersonic fighters to giant lumbering P-3 Orion and EC- 130
surveillance aircraft. The smaller Iranian combat aircraft—already at the limit
of their fuel reserves, because the
Lincoln
was still very far offshore—would simply drive in as close as they dared toward
the carrier group and watch to see what sort of response the Americans would
make. With one E-2 Hawkeye orbiting over the carrier and one Hawkeye stationed
between the carrier and the Iranian mainland, the carrier group had “eyes” out
at least 200 miles around the ship, and a narrow corridor of radar coverage on
a straight line from the carrier to Chah Bahar Naval Base, over 400 miles away.

 
          
Most
times, the Iranian “ferret” planes would zoom in—probably recording all of the
electronic signals generated by the
Lincoln,
its escorts, and its patrol aircraft—then, once it was “paired” with a
Tomcat, it would turn around and head for home. The Iranians knew all about the
F-14 Tomcat and the AIM-54 Phoenix missile— because they still employed both of
them. In the mid-1970s, when the Shah had been in power, the United States had
transferred 100 of the advanced fighters to Iran; the exact numbers were
unknown, but Iran probably still had a dozen operational Tomcats and about 100
Phoenix missiles in good condition. The Iranians knew to give the Phoenix missile
a lot of respect, so at the first squeak of the Tomcat’s AWG-9 radar, they
usually turned tail.

 
          
But
not this time.... “Wallbanger picked this guy out at almost three hundred
miles—that’s the limit of his radar,”
Crowley
observed, thinking aloud. “He’s gotta be a
big guy. You got numbers on him, Sunrise?”

 
          
“Range
one-five-zero miles, still closing fast,” Crowley’s RIO, Lieutenant Adam
“Sunrise” Lavoyed, reported. “Altitude angels forty, speed . .. shit, speed
seven hundred.
”

 
          
“He’s
not an Orion then,” Crowley said. Iran flew American- made P-3 Orion
subchasers—another leftover from the Shah’s regime—which were capable of
carrying Harpoon or Exocet antiship missiles, but Orions were big, lumbering
turboprop-powered planes, max cruise speed about 380 knots—this one was going
almost twice as fast.

 
          
“What’s
our bull’s-eye?”

 
          
“Coming
up on three hundred bull’s-eye,” Lavoyed responded, giving range back to the
carrier.

 
          
“What
are we up to tonight, asshole?” Crowley muttered on interphone to the unknown
aircraft. “Who are you? What are you?”

           
Just then, Lavoyed shouted, “I’m
picking up a second bogey ... shit, Crow, second bogey climbing through angels
forty. . . angels fifty, speed twelve hundred ... I’m picking up a third bogey,
right behind the second, passing through angels forty, speed eleven hundred
knots ... bandit one turning northwest and accelerating!”

           
“Kitchens,”
Crowley
shouted, jamming his throtdes to max
afterburner and raising the nose to pursue. On interplane frequency, he yelled,
“Home plate, Kitchen, Kitchen, I am tracking two fast- movers passing angels
fifty, speed Mach two. ...”

           
“Go weapons hot, go weapons hot,”
came the reply. The call “Kitchen” was an all-inclusive call warning of the
launch of a large anti-ship missile. For years the standard Soviet
bomber-launched anti-ship missile, the AS-4 Kitchen, was a 14,000-pound liquid-
fueled cruise missile that could fly at over three times the speed of sound for
more than 200 miles—and the Tu-22M Backfire bomber could carry as many as three
of these huge weapons. The AS-4 was armed with a 2,200-pound conventional
high-explosive warhead, big enough to sink a small warship with one missile . .
.

 
          
...
or, in Cold War days, a 350-kiloton nuclear warhead, big enough to destroy an
entire carrier battle group.

 
          
“Shine,
you got the second Kitchen, I got the first,” Crowley shouted on interplane
frequency.

 
          
“Two!
” came the strained reply—Matte’s heart was in his throat right now, just like
Crowley’s—you could hear it in his voice.

 
          
In
the blink of an eye, Crowley was in range, and he fired his first Phoenix
missile—the first time in his career he had launched the big P. He squinted
against the glare as the Phoenix raced off its rail and arced to the right and
skyward, the huge blast of the Phoenix rattling his Tomcat’s wings and shaking
the canopy. Crowley had to pull his Tomcat in a hard right turn to keep the
AWG-9 radar locked onto the Kitchen missiles long enough to guide the Phoenix
until its own radar could lock on. When he was sure he was locked on, he fired
a second Phoenix, now on a tail chase. Crowley considered firing his third and
possibly even his fourth Phoenix, but by then the Kitchen missiles were out of
range—they were flying well over Mach two, twice the speed of sound and faster
than the Phoenix missile itself!

 
          
Crowley
watched the rest of the incredible chase in complete fascination. He saw a
bright flash, then another, far off in the distance. “Clean misses,” Crowley’s
RIO reported. “Bandit two heading straight for home plate at Mach
two-point-four, angels sixty and still climbing.” Crowley could see that
Lavoyed still had the AWG-9 radar locked on to the first Kitchen missile, but
they were well outside Phoenix range. It was up to any other fighters airborne and
the
Lincoln's
air defense screen to
stop the first Kitchen now.

 
          
Matte
was more successful: “Splash one Kitchen!” he shouted happily. “Got it!”

 
          
“I
missed,” Crowley admitted on interplane frequency. “C’mon,
Lincoln,
nail that bastard!”

 
          
Far
off in the distance,
Crowley
could see a few flashes of light, and he could even see a faint streak
of light shoot up in the sky—it was the
Lincoln
’s escorts, the outer air defense screen
ships, launching missiles. A split second later, they saw a huge lightbulb
POP!
of brilliant white light very high
in the dark sky. “Splash one Kitchen,” the combat officer aboard the E-2C
Hawkeye reported.
“Lake Erie
got it.”
The U.S.S.
Lake Erie
was one of
Lincoln's
AEGIS guided- missile escort
cruisers. “Aardvark-121, bandit one is retreating, fly heading one-one-zero,
maintain angels thirty, this’ll be vectors back to your tanker. Aardvark-122,
squawk normal. . . 122, radar contact at angels three-five, 121, your wingman
is at your two o’clock, thirty miles, above you.”