Without Warning (48 page)

“Are you mad?”

Ritchie stared at the man, who had the good grace to look embarrassed.

“My government did not expect to receive a positive response to this request, but instructed me to make it anyway.”

“Mr. Ambassador …” Ritchie faltered, forgetting that Warat had not been formally received and confirmed as ambassador. “Mr. Warat, I am afraid I cannot allow this plan to go ahead. Your government must call its planes back.”

“I am afraid they will not do that, Admiral. Under any circumstances. My government is convinced that we face annihilation as a people if we do not act immediately.”

“You will be annihilated if you
do,”
protested Ritchie.

Warat nodded glumly.

“Anything is possible these days, Admiral.”

Ritchie’s heart was still thundering in his chest, but his head was at last clearing of the shock and disorientation. He took a deep breath and leaned back in his chair.

“Sir, I am afraid I must inform you that I will direct U.S. forces in theater to interdict this strike and stop it by any means possible. I will further contact our coalition partners and request any and all cooperation they might provide. And, I will immediately inform the governments of the targeted nations that your strike is inbound, and I will assist them in whatever way possible to repel it.”

Warat received the rebuke with stoic reserve. Behind him, through the wide glass windows, life went on. Not normally. But it did go on. Some traffic moved through the streets. Children would be playing in suburban backyards as parents did their best to insulate them from the horror of a world collapsing in on itself. High above the idyllic panorama Ritchie saw the sun glint on the wings of a commercial airliner, outbound. For where, he had no
idea, but it was undoubtedly full. The Israeli envoy sighed and quickly recovered his composure.

“My government expected that you might react in this fashion, Admiral. It would be the honorable thing for you. However, I must point out that your own forces have degraded the air defense nets of Iran and Iraq to the point where they cannot deny our air forces. And the IAF has done the same to the Syrian air force over the last week of fighting. By warning them, you will do no more than condemn millions to spend their last hours in abject fear.”

Ritchie slammed an open hand down on the desk, with a thunderous crash.

“Goddamn you, will you
listen
? You cannot do this and you
must
not. I am ordering my theater commanders to interdict your sorties with deadly force. We
will
shoot you down!”

Warat’s chin moved up and down like a bobble-headed doll on a dashboard. His shoulders twitched, and when he spoke he did not look Ritchie in the eye.

“My government has prepared for such an eventuality, Admiral. The weapon packages will be delivered with an escort of IAF fighters. They will engage
any
hostile force that tries to prevent them from accomplishing their mission. Any. Hostile. Force.”

“My God,” breathed Ritchie. “You’ll kill us all. If you do this how long do you imagine it will be before some maniac in New Delhi or Islamabad decides that they need to get the drop on their nemesis? How long will it be before Russia and China decide that things will be a lot simpler with us, here in Hawaii, out of the picture?”

“I cannot answer these questions, Admiral, as you well know. But I
can
tell you that if we do not act, the Jewish people and their state will be wiped out in a second Holocaust. And
you
know that I speak the truth.”

Ritchie dropped his head into his hands and rubbed at eyes that burned with a lack of sleep.

“Get out,” he said quietly.

The envoy had lied. Or rather, he had not told the whole truth, because he did not know it. The targeting list Warat provided to Ritchie was incomplete, as were other details of the attack, including the fact that many of the warheads would be delivered by Jericho II missiles, not piloted aircraft. In addition to the cities and military facilities on the list, the Israeli cabinet had added a further thirty-eight sites. Suspected Iranian nuclear centers in Natanz, Ardakan, Saghand, Gashin, Bushehr, Aral, and Lashkar Abad were all slated for destruction, along with the cities of Tabriz, Qazvin, Shiraz, Yazd, Kerman, Qom, Ahwaz, and Kermanshah. Five of the nuclear-tipped missiles were inbound on Libya as the ambassador sat down with Admiral Ritchie, while another three were headed for military bases near heavily populated Egyptian cities. But one mission, the last to depart, had a very different target. The Aswan High Dam.

Colonel Rudi Molenz sat quietly in the cockpit of his F-15I Ra’am at the end of the main runway of Hatzerim Air Base in the Negev Desert. Tel Aviv and his family lay fifty miles to the north, but the bejeweled cluster of lights would be dimmed tonight, as the city hid itself in the dark. He would not be able to glance back over his shoulder after takeoff and smile at the thought of
his two little children safely abed, somewhere in that mass of glowing pearls, surrounded by soft toys and dreaming of Daddy’s return. Because there was no guarantee that Daddy would ever be coming home. And worse than that, no certainty that home itself would survive the night or the next day. Behind him, his weapons system officer, Lieutenant Ephron, hummed tunelessly, irritating Molenz, who said nothing. Ephron was nervous, and the flat, atonal droning was his release valve. It was the same before all of their missions. When they finally had a release from the tower, the little putz would shut the fuck up and do his job flawlessly. He always had before.

A brief crackle in the earphones of his bulbous DASH helmet.

“Attention Reach One Ninety, please stand by …”

Molenz felt his balls shrivel, and became acutely aware of silence in the back of the cockpit.

The voice crackled in his display and sight helmet again.

“You have clearance to execute Plan Magenta. Preliminary release codes Echo Kilo Four Niner Three Niner Foxtrot.”

Molenz had burned the one-use code into his memory but checked the mission pad Velcroed to his leg anyway.

“Release confirmed. Reach One Ninety away.”

The enormous power of the aircraft’s two F-150 Pratt & Whitney engines came roaring up like an angry leviathan as the pilot’s head-up display blinked into life. The caged fury of the jet fighter completely enfolded him, and as always he felt the deep-body thrill of having so much potential power in his hands. Beneath the old familiar sensation, however, lay a dread that ran deeper than anything he had experienced in all the years he had been flying combat missions. It was not the fear of his own death, but of becoming Death itself, because attached to the underside of his Strike Eagle was a thirty-kiloton nuclear warhead in a specially hardened penetrator casing. It was designed to slam into the base of the Aswan High Dam and drill down through ten meters of concrete before birthing a small supernova to atomize much of the dam’s solid mass, releasing the superheated waters behind to roar down the Nile Valley like a megatsunami toward Cairo.

Part of him could not believe that he was doing this, that it was even happening. But the two aircraft ripping down the tarmac right after his were real. As were the dozen flights he’d watched leaving earlier for much farther-flung locations. He’d known many of those pilots. Commanded some of them. Trained others. Their good-byes were restrained but heartfelt. Unlike Molenz they were flying single-engine F-16s with modified drop tanks to get them all the way to Iran while flying low and fast through the wastes of northern Iraq. They would traverse the edge of the Kurdish regions, where
years of British and American enforcement of the no-fly zone had denuded Iraq of air-defense assets. Even with drop tanks, however, there would not be enough fuel for them to return. Extraction teams were standing by to evac anyone who made it to the preset rendezvous points. But Molenz knew from looking into the men’s eyes as they shook hands, and in some cases hugged, that they were going to their deaths.

The Israeli air force flights left in groups of three. One F-15 carried the warhead, while the two escorts carried air-to-air load outs. Those headed for targets in Iran and Iraq did not expect to encounter any significant resistance en route. The top-secret electronic-warfare suites installed for this mission were designed to maximize the escorts’ effectiveness against any allied aircraft they might encounter. It was possible that coalition aircraft might try to stop them, but Molenz and his peers figured they had enough on their plate as it was. They were no threat.

Molenz pulled back on the stick, and the Strike Eagle clawed its way up into the stars. At twenty thousand feet he performed his usual contortionist feat anyway, straining to catch a glimpse of the capital off on the northern horizon. It was definitely dimmer, but not completely blacked out. What would be the point? Modern sensors meant that pilots no longer had to feel their way through darkened enemy airspace, seeking out targets to bomb. Iraqi Scuds had been landing in Israel for days, despite the best efforts of the Patriot batteries and the promises of General Franks that coalition special forces would own the western deserts from where the missile threat originated. The promises meant nothing. The threats issuing from the Iraqi dictator in hiding, however, had to be taken seriously, and since the flooding of Baghdad those threats had become increasingly shrill and apocalyptic. It almost seemed as though Hussein and the Iranian president were racing each other toward a rhetorical abyss.

And now,
thought Molenz,
the abyss races toward them.

Behind him, Ephron ran through another check of the Elisra SPS-2110/A Modified Electronic Warfare System and the LANTIRN pods while Molenz checked the APG-70 terrain-mapping radar. Even in the foulest weather, in the darkest hours of night, the radar provided him with a picture-perfect return from the ground, making it possible to pick out even small targets like mobile batteries tucked away in a dry wadi. The dam was just under four thousand meters in length, and a hundred and eleven meters tall, containing forty-three million cubic meters of concrete and fill; there wasn’t much chance of him missing the dam.

Molenz edged their nose around to the south, to skirt Beersheba and trace the length of the border with Jordan, on a course for the headwaters of the
Gulf of Aqaba. The three jets flew low and fast, operating up near the edge of full military power, shrieking over the ghostly blue-black desert at Mach 2.5. They maintained radio silence, each man alone with his own thoughts as the demands of the mission allowed. A few minutes before they would overfly the resort city of Eilat, he pushed the stick over and sent them rocketing toward the Egyptian border. Beyond lay the Sinai Peninsula and the rocky wastes of the biblical Wilderness where Moses and the Israelites wandered for so many years. Mountains lay ahead, a jagged-edged void of darkness blotting out the stars corresponding to the image scrolling down the APG-70 screen, bathing him in the softest of glows. During a brief interlude, they traversed a particularly desolate and empty stretch of mountainous wasteland, and the pilot became aware of the beating of his heart. For one perverse second he couldn’t help thinking of the millions of hearts he was about to still forever. Pushing the thought away like a fearful specter, he concentrated on the return from the radar and the threat boards. Nothing untoward. The Egyptian air force was steadfastly refusing to offer even the slightest provocation to its neighbor, for fear of unleashing exactly the sort of hellfire that Molenz now carried with him.

They didn’t seem to know that he was even in their airspace.

Whatever moral qualms Molenz had suffered before accepting this mission—and they had been many—he had nonetheless volunteered for it. They all had. He would destroy the dam, and doom millions tonight, none of whom had raised a hand against him or his country. But there were millions more who would, who wanted to, and who, even now, were battling with the Egyptian government’s security forces on the streets of a dozen cities, attempting to overthrow the Mubarak regime because of its supine response to what they called Zionist aggression. And they were winning. That was the hell of it. They were winning, and very soon they would sit in the presidential palace and turn their blood-dimmed eyes on his home and his family, and it was wrong and it was tragic, and he might well burn for the sin he was about to commit. But Rudi Molenz was convinced that if Israel did not reach out now, at this very moment, and hammer its mortal enemies into the dust, then the Jewish state and people would surely perish.

He shook his head, a quick constrained movement inside the helmet. They were coming up on the Gulf of Suez, one of the trip points in the flight, where they would be exposed to the radar and weapons of the Western naval forces operating in the area. They had no IFF codes for this flight, and as lead planner for the squadron he knew that an envoy had been dispatched to Hawaii to inform the Americans at the last possible minute what was about to happen. But they would not know just yet. He checked the mission clock.