Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 05 (5 page)

 
          
“
Motashakkeram
,” Buzhazi said, bowing as
he gave thanks. “Your Holiness, I believe so strongly in this, that if you give
the command, I shall take full and complete responsibility for the
consequences. You may say that I was the mad dog, that I gave the order, and
you may disavow all knowledge of my actions. I know in my heart that it is
right, and I stand with Allah because I know he will stand with me....”

 
          
“Will
you stand with the thousands of our brothers who will be slaughtered by the
forces of Satan when the world declares war on Iran for what it has done?”

 
          
“Eminence,
war appears to be upon us already,” Buzhazi pointed out. “I believe we will
avert
further conflict by executing my
plan. The world will fear Iran once again. It will be hesitant to start a
conflict that might escalate into real death and destruction at our hands. Give
the command, Holiness. I stand ready to defend Islam and protect the Republic.
I have the strength to do it.”

 
          
Khamenei
hesitated, then turned his back on Buzhazi—so the general could not see the
look of concern on his face. But he said, “
Inshallah,
General. So by the will of Allah, let it be done.”

 
          
“ABC WORLD NEWS TONIGHT WITH PETER
JENNINGS
”

 
          
“Iran’s
Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Ali Hoseini Khamenei, blasted the
Gulf Cooperative Council, the union of six pro-West Persian Gulf nations, today
for what he claims was an attack on a, quote, ‘defensive security and safety
installation,’ unquote, on a small island in the Persian Gulf in the
early-morning hours, and has called on a ‘holy jihad’ against the GCC.

 
          
“Khamenei
claims the attack by what he terms ‘terrorists and saboteurs’ of the Gulf
Cooperative Council’s action group called Peninsula Shield killed several dozen
workers while they slept, and heavily damaged the island’s electricity, fresh
water, and living quarters.

 
          
“The
island, identified as Abu Musa, is one of three small islands that sit very
close to the oil transshipment lanes through the Persian Gulf. The islands were
claimed by Iran in 1971 but were under joint jurisdiction of both Iran and the
United Arab Emirates, one of the member nations of the Gulf Cooperative
Council, until 1992, when Iran claimed all of the islands for itself.

 
          
“Spokesmen
for the Gulf Cooperative Council in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, declined to comment,
except to say that the GCC has often been blamed for actions by anti-Iranian
government forces, notably the Mojahadin-i-Khalq, in an effort to stir up
resentment and fundamentalist fervor against Iran’s Arab neighbors in the
Persian Gulf region.

 
          
“A
U.S. State Department spokesman says he knows no details of the incident, but
says that Iran has heavily fortified Abu Musa Island over the past few years
with modern offensive anti-ship and antiaircraft weapons, and has resisted all
efforts by the United Nations International Court to mediate the dispute. The
State Department says no oil tankers or any American vessels or aircraft are in
danger and says the Martindale administration is looking into the matter.

 
          
“Back
in a moment.”

IN THE
GULF
OF
OMAN
,
124 MILES NORTHWEST OF
MUSCAT
,

OMAN
,
SOUTHEAST
ARABIAN
PENINSULA

15 APRIL 1997
,
0109 HRS. LOCAL (14 APRIL, 1639 ET)

 
          
The
U.S.-flagged rescue-and-salvage vessel
Valley
Mistress
was riding high and fast in the water these days; very few patrol
boats had bothered to stop her as she made her way from the Mediterranean
through the Suez Canal, down the Red Sea, and across the Gulf of Aden, Arabian
Sea, and the Gulf of Oman. Salvage-and-construction vessels were usually hard
to search, they rarely had anything fun for customs officials to look at—just a
bunch of cranes, tanks, chains, dirt, and nitrogen- and booze-soaked roustabout
crews—and U.S.- registered and -flagged vessels rarely carried exciting
contraband like drugs, weapons, or humans. In any case, with its U.S. Naval Ready
Reserve Fleet designation, the
Valley
Mistress
was rarely detained—it carried almost the same right-to-pass
exemption as a warship.

 
          
The
Mistress
was riding high right now
because its 55,000- pound CV-22 Pave Hammer tilt-rotor aircraft, normally
secretly stowed on the telescoping helicopter hangar on the aft deck, was off
on a mission with several of its commando teams, including Chris Wohl and Hal
Briggs; its current cargo was much, much lighter. The
Valley Mistress
was indeed a real salvage vessel, and it did many
contract jobs as such all over the world—but it was also a sophisticated spy
ship that conducted surveillance and special operations missions for the U.S.
government. All sorts of classified missions had been conducted from the
Mistress's
decks, from shadowing a port,
harbor, or vessel to reconnoitering a battlefield, rescue work, and all-out air
and land combat. Any job that needed doing, anytime, anyplace, the crew of the
Valley Mistress
could do it.

 
          
Retired
Air Force colonel Paul White stood on the aft deck of the
Valley Mistress,
arms crossed on his chest, watching the dark
shapes working all around him. In addition to leading Madcap Magician, White
was the senior officer in charge of the thirty-man “technical” crew of the
Valley Mistress,
which on this leg of
their voyage—White’s technical crews changed often, depending on the current
mission requirements—consisted of engineers, technicians, and sixteen U.S.
Marines, none in uniform.

 
          
All
of the concentrated planning and rehearsing had already taken place, so, like
Alfred Hitchcock, who had already meticulously plotted out each one of his
shots before setting foot on a new movie set, White’s job at this point was
simply to observe his team in action, silently monitor their progress via the
ship’s intercom through his headset, and stay out of their way. Paul White was
a thirty-two-year veteran, but had never been in combat except for brief stints
as a communications repairman in Vietnam. His specialty was electronics; he was
a “gadget guy,” designing and building sophisticated systems from spare
parts—the parts could be leftover transistors, old radios, or old aircraft.
White could take the oldest, most broken- down thing and make it better—and,
more important, he could teach others to do it, too.

 
          
White’s
intercom crackled to life: “Lightfoot, Plot.”

 
          
Without
alerting his stance or changing his scan of deck activities, White keyed the
talk switch on his headset cord: “Lightfoot, go.”

 
          
“T-minus-ten
radar sweep, no air activity, no surface activity within five miles,” the radar
operator aboard the
Mistress
reported.

 
          
“Copy,”
White responded. “Report every two minutes, report any surface activity within
ten miles, Lightfoot out.” White raised his head and watched as the retractable
mast carrying the ship’s SPS-69 X-band surface search radar began to extend.
The range of the SPS- 69 was limited to about six miles on a normal mast, but
could be extended to almost fifteen miles by hoisting the radar to 100
feet—which was done only at night or in an emergency, because it looked very
suspicious to have a search radar up so high on a noncombat vessel. Even more
suspicious-looking on a “rescue” craft was the radar that was normally
restricted into a housing just forward of the helicopter hangar—an SPS-40E
B-band two-dimensional air search radar, which could scan for aircraft from sea
level up to a 33,000 foot altitude and out to a 100-mile range. The
Valley Mistress
would probably not enjoy
the same relatively unfettered access to most nations’ territorial waters if
those countries knew the ship had enough electronic search and communications
equipment to control a surface or air battle at sea.

 
          
Over
the din of deck activities, White heard another familiar sound, and he turned
toward the starboard rail to see a young man wearing a headset leaning over the
rail
—way
over the rail. “Chumming for
sharks,” as the crew called it, was pretty rare on the stabilized
Valley Mistress
in good weather, but
this poor guy had had trouble ever since he’d joined the ship. White smiled and
keyed his intercom button: “You okay, Jon?”

 
          
The
man hurriedly wiped his mouth and face as if surprised someone noticed him,
although there were men and women all around him, and he straightened and
walked stiffly and unsteadily toward White. Jonathan Colin Masters was
thirty-eight years old, but he looked about fifteen. He had short brown hair
that looked as if someone—most likely himself—had cut it with hedge clippers;
normally a baseball cap worn backward hid his goofy-looking hair, but Masters
had lost that hat days ago in one of his frequent visits to the rail. He had
disarming green eyes and long, gangly legs and arms—but he also had one of the
worlds most finely tuned brains on the end of his thin pencil heck.

 
          
Masters,
a Dartmouth graduate at thirteen, an MIT doctor of science at twenty, was the
president of Sky Masters, Inc., an Arkansas-based research company that
designed, built, and deployed small specialty aircraft and spacecraft. SMI
products took the latest aerospace technologies and miniaturized them: he could
turn huge Delta space boosters into truck-mounted launch vehicles, or multi-ton
communications satellites into breadbasket-sized devices. He was aboard the
Valley Mistress
to supervise the
progress of his latest development.

 
          
“Feeling
okay, Jon?” White asked as the boyish-looking engineer stepped toward him. The
question was serious: repeated seasickness was just as debilitating as any
other serious illness or disease, bad enough to cause problems even for a
healthy, normally hydrated person; Masters was as skinny as a beanpole and the
temperature and humidity in this part of the world were often both in the mid-
to high nineties. “Why don’t you stay inside where it’s air-conditioned?”

 
          
“I
need windows, Paul,” Masters said weakly. “This damned ship of yours has no
windows. I need a horizon to get my bearings.”

 
          
“You
must have a few thousand hours’ flying time, Jon,” White said, adding a lighter
tone now that he could see that the young man was feeling okay, “but you’ve had
trouble every single day since we left Italy. Ever get airsick?”

 
          
“Never.”

 
          
“Are
you using the scopolamine patches like the doc said?”

 
          
“I’ve
worn enough of those damned patches to make me look like I’ve got a cauliflower
growing behind my ears,” Masters said, “and that stuff makes me drowsy and it
makes food taste like charcoal. I’d rather eat, then barf, thank you very
much.”

 
          
“Maybe
if you’d stop eating the burgers and fries like a pig, you wouldn’t upchuck so
easy.” Masters ate junk food and drank soft drinks like a teenager but never
gained the weight; it was always the supergeniuses, White thought, who were too
busy to worry about unimportant matters such as health and nutrition. All that
brain energy he generated must’ve kept him nice and slim.

 
          
“You
want to know about the mission preparations or critique my eating habits,
Colonel?” Masters asked impatiendy. White gave up on the lecturing and motioned
for the young scientist to show him the final preparations for the maiden
launch of his newest invention.

 
          
Assembled
on the aft helicopter deck was a sixty-five-foot-long track elevated about
twenty degrees, and aimed off the fantail. Sitting on the front end of the
track was an aircraft that greatly resembled a B-2A Spirit stealth bomber, its
wingspan a large forty-two feet. The High Endurance Autonomous Reconnaissance
System (HEARSE), nicknamed Skywalker, was a long-range, high-altitude
flying-wing drone, with long, thin swept-back wings and a bulbous center
section that was the aircraft’s only fuselage. Like the B-2A stealth bomber,
its engine section was on top of the fuselage, with a low, thin single air
intake on the front and a very thin exhaust section in back; it used a single
minijet engine, which was now running at idle power and had been for several
minutes as White’s technicians did its final checkout. Skywalker wasn’t wasting
gas sitting out there idling—it could probably run for three days at idle
power. Painted in black radar-absorbent material, the craft looked sinister and
unearthly, like a giant air-breathing manta ray. Unlike remotely piloted
vehicles steered from the ground, Skywalker was a semiautonomous drone—it would
carry out commands issued to it via satellite uplink by plotting its own best
track and speed.

 
          
Skywalker
carried 1,000 pounds of sophisticated communications and reconnaissance gear in
its fuselage section. The primary reconnaissance sensor was a side-looking
synthetic-aperture radar, which broadcast high-resolution digital radar images
via microwave datalinks back to the
Valley
Mistress.
The SAR radar, similar to the one in the B-2A stealth bomber but
optimized for reconnaissance versus attack and terrain avoidance, was powerful
enough to create photographic-like images in total darkness that were clear
enough to identify objects as small as a dog, and to electronically measure
objects down to a foot in size. It used the same LPI (Low Probability of
Intercept) technology as the B-2A as well: very short radar “looks,” the radar
imagery digitized so that it could be manipulated, enhanced, and viewed
off-line, with the radar turned off.

 
          
“Everything
looks like it’s going fine.”

 
          
“
Skywalker’s engine has been running fine for exactly ten-point- three minutes,
all uplink channels confirm connected and secure— she’s ready for a push
anytime,” Masters said confidendy, almost boastfully.

 
          
“Good,”
White said. Some people might get irritated about Masters’s cockiness, but
White enjoyed it. Left free to let his imagination soar, Masters was a true
idea machine, a man who could get the job done no matter what the
circumstances. “I’ve got about T minus eight. I’m heading to the recon
center—I’m sure you’ll want to stay out in the open air until your ship gets on
station.” Secredy he prayed that Masters wouldn’t blow lunch in the confines of
the reconnaissance control room—most of the air conditioning in that space was
reserved for the electronics, and it was stuffy and smelly enough without the
“chain reaction” scent of vomit.

 
          
Launch
time had arrived. After clearing the area on radar, White ordered Skywalker on
patrol. Masters throtded the turbofan engine up to full power; it would need
full throttle only for a few minutes, then throtde back to a miserly
twenty-liter-per-hour fuel-consumption rate, good for twelve hours of cruising.
Then he released the holdback bar, and the bird hurled itself down the launch
rail. It sailed into the darkness at deck level for less than a hundred feet
until it had built up climb speed, then, buoyed by its long, thin,
supercritical wings, Skywalker climbed rapidly into the darkness. In less than
five minutes, it was at 10,000 feet. It made a few orbits over the
Valley Mistress
as Masters and his
technicians checked out its systems, then headed north, toward the Iranian
coast.