Shadows of Steel Read online

  The attacks were fast and chillingly accurate. In just a few minutes, the attackers had claimed the prizes for which they had come looking: six Iranian HY-2 Silkworm and four SS-22 Sunburn antiship cruise-missile launch sites, several Rapier antiaircraft missile batteries, and a handful of antiaircraft artillery sites, plus their associated munitions storage and command-control buildings. All were either destroyed or severely damaged. The Silkworm and Sunburn missiles had been devastating long-range weapons, capable of destroying the largest supertankers or cargo vessels passing through the Persian Gulf—their presence on Abu Musa Island, close to the heavily traveled international sea lanes, had been protested by many nations for several years. Other missile attacks had claimed a large portion of the island’s small port facilities, including the heavy-lift cranes, long-boat docks, and distillation and petroleum-handling facilities.

  But the big prize, the real target, had also been destroyed: two Rodong surface-to-surface missile emplacements. The Rodong was a long-range missile that had been jointly developed by North Korea, China, and Iran, and could carry a high-explosive, chemical, biological, or even nuclear warhead. From Abu Musa Island, the missile had had sufficient range to strike and attack targets in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and most of the oil fields in eastern Saudi Arabia—about two-thirds of the oil fields in the Persian Gulf region.

  The Hawk, Gazelle, and Super Puma crews were incredibly accurate, almost present. A building that supplied power to the communications and military base facilities was destroyed by two missiles, but a virtually identical building just a few yards away that supplied power to the housing units was left untouched. A semi-underground Silkworm missile bunker with a fully operational Silkworm inside got a Hellfire through its front door, yet an adjacent empty bunker undergoing refurbishment but identical in every other respect was left undamaged. Although nearly half a billion dollars of weapons, equipment, buildings, and other infrastructure were damaged or destroyed, out of the more than two thousand men stationed on the island, only five unlucky Pasdaran soldiers, plus the F-5E pilots and their crew chiefs, lost their lives, and only a handful more were injured.

  From the nearby air defense base at Bandar Abbas on the mainland, just 100 miles to the northeast, Islamic Republic Air Force MiG-29 fighters were scrambled almost immediately, but the attackers had hit their targets and were retreating south toward the Trudal Coast and the United Arab Emirates long before the Iranian fighters arrived. The MiGs tried to pursue, but Omani and UAE air defense fighters quickly surrounded and outnumbered them and chased them out of UAE airspace.

  As the surviving Pasdara’n troops scrambled out of their barracks and began to deal with the devastation of their island fortress, five black-suited two-man commando teams silently picked up their gear, made their way to the shoreline of the one-square-mile island, clicked a tiny wrist-mounted code transceiver, then slipped into the warm waters of the eastern Persian Gulf after their leader cleared them to withdraw.

  Before departing, one member of the lead commando team took a last scan around the area, not toward the military structures this time but northeast, toward the Strait of Hormuz. Peering through the suitcase-sized telescopic device he and his partner had been operating, he soon found what he had been searching for. “Man, there’s that mutha,” he said half-aloud to his partner. “That’s what we should’ve laid a beam on.” He centered a set of crosshairs on the target, reached down, and simulated squeezing a trigger. “Blub blub blub, one carrier turned into a sub. Bye-bye, Ayatollah baby.”

  “Get your ass in gear, Leopard,” his partner growled under his breath. In seconds they had packed up and were out of sight under the calm waves of the Persian Gulf.

  The object of the young commando’s attention was cruising six miles northeast of the island. It was an aircraft carrier, the largest warship in the entire Persian Gulf—and it was flying an Iranian flag. It was the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, flagship of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s new blue-water naval fleet. Once the Russian aircraft carrier Varyag, and now the joint property of Iran and the People’s Republic of China’s Liberation Army Navy, the carrier dwarfed all but the largest supertankers plying the Gulf. Not yet operational and used only for training, its officers and crew had only been able to look on helplessly as the missile batteries on Abu Musa Island exploded into the night.

  Leopard and his partner, along with the rest of the commando teams, followed tiny wristwatch-sized locator beacons to small Swimmer Delivery Vehicles anchored to the muddy bottom, and four divers climbed aboard each SDV. There they changed air tanks for filled ones, and followed their watertight compasses south and west to the marshaling point, where all five SDVs rendezvoused. They traveled southwest together, surfacing for a few seconds in random intervals to get a fix from their GPS satellite navigation receiver. An hour later, still submerged, air tanks just a few minutes from exhaustion, they motored up to the hull of a large vessel, and hammered a code onto it. A large section of the port center side of the hull opened, and one by one, the five SDVs motored inside, surfaced inside the chamber, then hooked onto cranes that hoisted them out of the water onto the deck, where the crewmen disembarked.

  Each two-man team handed up their scuba gear and personal weapons to the deck crews, along with forty-pound, suitcase-sized devices. These were their AN/PAQ-3 MULE (Modular Universal Laser Equipment) portable telescopic laser illuminators. Tuned to a predetermined frequency and set on a target up to a mile away using electronic low-light telescopes, each invisible laser beam had reflected off its target and then been received by an airborne sensor, thus “illuminating” the proper target and allowing the missiles to home in and destroy the target with pinpoint accuracy. Although each aircrewman had been well familiar with the area and could have found most of the targets without help, the commando teams had known precisely which buildings were important and which were not, and had made each shot fired by the attack aircraft count. Not one precious shot had been wasted—one missile, one kill.

  A thin, non-military-looking gray-haired man in civilian clothes greeted the crewmen as they emerged from the SDV, shaking their hands and giving each of the exhausted, shivering men a cup of soup and a thick towel with which to warm up and dry off. Tired as they were, however, the commandos were still excited, chatting about the mission, congratulating one another. Finally, the last two men emerged from their SDVs, turned in their equipment, and met up with the civilian. One man was tall, white, and powerfully built, with cold, fiery blue eyes; the other was slightly shorter, black, and much leaner, his eyes dark and dancing. The tall man moved silently, with slow, easy grace, while the lean man was animated.

  “Man, what a ride!” he exclaimed loudly. He quickly stepped down the line of commandos in the dock area, giving each of them a slap on the back or shoulder, then returned to do the same to his partner. The men quietly acknowledged his congratulations, but did not return the enthusiasm—in fact, they looked at him with wary, almost hostile expressions. The cold shoulders didn’t seem to dampen the young commander’s exuberance, though. “It was great, man, awesome!” he exclaimed. “How’d we do, Paul? We kick ass or what?”

  Retired Air Force colonel Paul White, operations commander of the top-secret U.S. Intelligence Support Agency team code-named Madcap Magician, nodded reluctantly. Both he and the tall commando had noticed the looks from the men, but did not mention it. “You kicked ass, all right, Hal,” he replied.

  And he was right, they had. In an unprecedented act of regional military cooperation, the Intelligence Support Agency, a cover-action organization of the CIA, had just teamed up with the seven Arab member nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council’s military arm, called Peninsula Shield, to attack a disputed Iranian military position in the Persian Gulf. It was the first time in White’s memory that the CIA had actively supported an Arab military mission, albeit secretly. Sure, these guys were happy—their mission had gone off without a hitch, a potential enemy had been crippled, and the good-will they had built by joining with their Arab friends might last for many years.

  White’s team had been the spearhead of the attack. Most Arab countries had little or no air-combat experience, especially at night. White’s job had been to guide the Arab pilots and gunners to their targets accurately enough so that key targets could be destroyed quickly and efficiently, with minimum loss of life on either side. It had been important for Peninsula Shield to score a major victory in its first military mission, especially against one of the very nations that it and the Gulf Cooperation Council had been formed to defend against—the Islamic Republic of Iran. Of course, White’s other mission had been to see to the safe return of his commandos and the security of his vessel.

  “Ten divers out, ten divers back, and this rust bucket is still afloat,” Chris Wohl, the tall man, said in a low, slow Voice. “That’s a success.”

  “Damn straight!” Hal Briggs crowed. “So let’s celebrate! Let’s—”

  Just then, another of the commandos walked up to the three Americans. Briggs stopped abruptly, and his face went limp and dazed, as if he had just been shot full of painkillers. The commando was much shorter than Briggs, but was just as wiry and powerful—and she filled out a Mustang suit much better than he. Her name was Riza Behrouzi, and she was the commander of the Peninsula Shield security team. A Peninsula Shield commando had gone along with every Madcap Magician commando to assist and to secure the area while the targets were lazed. “All Peninsula Shield operatives present and well,” Behrouzi reported. “On behalf of the nations of the Gulf Cooperative Council, I wish to thank you all for your help.”

  White was about to accept her thanks, but Briggs interjected: “It was our pleasure, Major Behrouzi …”

  “Riz
a, please,” Behrouzi said to Briggs. Wohl and White got the impression they had instantly been forgotten. “I know it is against your rules to give us your real names, but I have no such restrictions—about names, or about this.” She stepped closer to Briggs and gave him a full kiss on the lips. “Thank you.”

  “It was nothing … Riza,” Briggs said, apparently having difficulty catching his breath.

  “Okay, Leopard,” Wohl said irritably. “You want to celebrate, go ahead—after you clean and stow your gear, conduct the post-mission briefing, see to it that your men are fed, and prepare your reports for the National Security Agency and the Director of Central Intelligence. And I believe you have the morning watch, so you better get some sleep. And since you’re within eight hours of your watch, You’re off the sauce. Other than that, you can celebrate all you want.”

  “Gee, Mondo, thanks,” Briggs said dejectedly. “You’re a real party animal.”

  “I would be happy to assist you, Leopard,” Behrouzi said. “We shall conduct the briefing and see to our men together.”

  “I like the sound of that,” Briggs said, instantly perking up. “I tell ya, Riza,” he said as they headed out, “I had that Iranian carrier in my sights for a sec out there. It might’ve taken the entire UAE air force full of Hellfires, but I would loved to see that big bad boy roll over and die.” He may have just returned from two hours of scuba diving and six hours of crawling on his belly, but he sounded as hyper is before the day started.

  “Leave it to Briggs,” Wohl said. “Ten thousand miles from home, in the middle of the Persian Gulf, and he still manages to find the pretty girls.” Catching no response, he looked at White.

  “Everything OK, sir?”

  “Yeah, fine,” White replied noncommittally. “Ah … Briggs didn’t really laze that Iranian carrier, did he?”

  “No. He’s cocky and a smart-ass, but he’s a good troop,” Wohl said. “He’s not stupid enough to ignore orders, no matter how easy the target of opportunity might be. The carrier’s safe. It launched a few choppers, but none of its fighters and no missiles. Intel was right—the fighters and weapon systems aren’t operational on that thing yet. Still can’t believe Iran has got an aircraft carrier. We’re gonna hear from that thing one of these days, I know it.”

  “The guys don’t exactly seem enthusiastic about Hal,” White observed. “In fact, they’re pretty much ignoring him.”

  “It’s tough for a team that’s been together for so long to accept a brand-new commanding officer right away,” Wohl said. “This is Briggs’s first mission with the team—”

  “Second—you’re forgetting the Luger rescue mission in Lithuania …”

  “On which Briggs just happened to be one of the passengers, along with McLanahan and Ormack,” Wohl said. “it turned out that Briggs was better prepared, very close to our standards. But he wasn’t one of us, and he sure as hell wasn’t our leader …”

  “But he is now.”

  Wohl stopped and glared at White, then shrugged. “Hey, I was never the real commander of the ops group of Madcap Magician,” he said. “You asked me to be reassigned to you because you needed a commanding officer, and I accepted because I was tired of pushing papers at Parris Island. It was only a temporary billet—”

  “That lasted three years,” White said. “The men bonded to you right away. You brought them together like no one else could.”

  “Because I knew all these guys—I trained them all, even Briggs,” Wohl said. “We’re all Marines first—except Briggs, of course—then ISA operatives …”

  “So Briggs being ex-Army and ex-Air Force, he’s not going to fit in…?”

  “Depends on him,” Wohl replied. “He’s got a much different style than me—emotional, energetic, touchy-feely. Briggs rewards guys for good performance and ‘counsels’ them when it’s poor—I expect good performance and loudly kick ass if I get anything but. And he’s an officer, too, a young field-grade officer at that—younger than some of the guys on the team—and after all the years I’ve spent bad-mouthing officers in general and field-grade officers in particular, he’s got a tough road ahead.

  “He’s a good troop, but a good commanding officer …? Too early to tell. The guys aren’t sure how to respond to him yet, that’s all. Whether he succeeds is totally up to him. They’re the best—whether or not he can lead them is the question only he can answer.”

  White nodded absently. Wohl studied him for a moment, then asked, “If everything’s so OK, Colonel, why the hangdog look?”

  “Because I’ve had some reservations about this operation from the start,” White said. “We just kicked over a big hornet’s nest out there tonight, Chris—and we did it on Iran’s Revolution Day, their Fourth of July.”

  “Shit, I didn’t know that,” Wohl said. “I thought it was in November sometime, when they took over the embassy in ‘79.”

  “No, it’s today—and I should’ve known that. I never would’ve recommended executing this mission on that date,” White said.

  “Obviously the GCC knew what day it was.”

  “Which you know will make this attack sting even more in Tehran,” White said. “And it’ll be the U.S. that takes the brunt of Iran’s anger. We keep on saying this was a GCC action, but you know damn well that Peninsula Shield isn’t going to be leading the fight when the Iranians retaliate for this.”

  “How do you know they’re going to retaliate?”

  White looked at him grimly. “Because Iran has been preparing for exactly this attack for years, ever since the end of the Iran-Iraq War. We just justified all the billions of dollars they’ve been spending on modern weapons for the past six years. They aren’t going to rest until someone—until everyone—is punished for what happened today…”

  TEHRAN, IRAN

  THIRTY MINUTES AFTER THE ATTACK ON ABU MUSA ISLAND

  General Hesarak all-Kan Buzhazi was supreme commander of the Islamic Republic’s Armed Forces and commander of the Revolutionary Guards—and this was the first time in his career that he had ever been admitted to the residence of the leader of the Islamic Revolution, the Ayatollah Ali Hoseini Khamenei. And to tell the truth, he was scared. But as scared as he was to be in the presence of a man who, like Ruhollah Khomeini before him, could by a single word muster the lives and souls of a quarter of a billion Shiite Muslims to his side, it was even more exciting to consider the simultaneous disaster and opportunity that had befallen him that morning. This was one opportunity that could not be missed.

  Buzhazi bowed deeply when shown into his presence, and kept his head bowed until the Faqih spoke. The door was closed behind them. “Your Eminence, thank you for this audience.”

  “Some disturbing news has reached me this morning, General,” Khamenei said quietly. “Allah has told me of a great threat to the Republic. Tell me what has happened.”

  Buzhazi raised his head and stood solemnly, his hands respectfully clasped in front of him as if standing at an altar or at prayers. Khamenei was in his late sixties. While his predecessor, the Imam Khomeini, had been tall, gaunt, and ethereal, Khamenei was short, with a round face, a short, bushy dark beard, and large horn-rimmed glasses, which gave him a scholarly, professional, quick-witted appearance. This man before him was the nominal Faqih, the font of jurisprudence of the Islamic Republic and the ultimate lawmaker, whose word could overrule the Parliament and any cleric, any lawyer, any scholar in the Twelver House; he was also the named Marja Ala, the Supreme Leader and spiritual head of the Shiite Muslim sect and the keeper of the will of the twelfth Imam, who was hidden from the world and would soon return to call the faithful to Allah’s bosom for all time.

  But for all that, he was a man, not a saint or a prophet. Buzhazi had known Ali Hoseini Khamenei when he had been nothing but an ambitious, back-stabbing know-nothing firebrand from a wealthy pro-Shah cargo shipping family from Bandar-Anzalt on Iran’s Caspian coast. Little more than a spoiled rich kid back then, Khamenei had wanted to impress his friends and rebel against his parents by joining up with the wild, shrill-voiced fundamentalist Shiite cleric named Ruhollah Khomeini. He had joined the Khomeini revolution because it was cool and tough to do so, not because he’d had any particular holy vision like Khomeini, but as time went on, he became deeply committed to Khomeini’s theocratic ideas. Khamenei held many high positions in government service—soldier, first commander of the Revolutionary Guards, even president of the republic. Now he was the Supreme Leader. But he was still just a man. Buzhazi had seen this holy man angry, and sad, and drunk, and just plain stupid.