Shadows of steel pm-5 Page 30

  “I don’t feel as if we’re succeeding at all, Riza,” Briggs said.

  “The Iranians still have Colonel White, and now they’ve declared martial law and are trying to seal off the Persian Gulf. Most of America hardly knows what’s going on out here. They know oil prices are skyrocketing and Iran has been shooting off a few missiles at shadows, but no one in my country realizes how close we are to a global crisis. Hell, half of America couldn’t find Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, the Gulf of Oman, or the Strait of Hormuz on a map, even though half their oil passes through those places every day!”

  “You are beginning to sound like a tired, bitter old soldier, like the ones that sit out in the marketplace every day smoking their hookah pipes, fingering their worry beads, making up stories about fantasy exploits in battle, and complaining about everything and everybody, especially know-nothing civilians,” Behrouzi said with a heart-churning laugh. “We chose this life, Hal Briggs. Being a soldier means being a servant to the state, a servant of the people. Our training and experiences give us knowledge of the world that is foreign to our own people, and it can be frustrating. Do not give in to your frustrations. You have learned to fight well—you must learn how to live—and love-well, too.”

  Briggs smiled and nodded at Riza. He looked at the untouched beer on the table. Where Riza had found any alcoholic beverage, much less his favorite beer, here in the heart of Muslim Arabia, he had no idea. “I’ve got to be going …”

  “The briefing is not until twenty hundred,” Behrouzi said. “We have time.”

  “I should see to my troops.”

  “You have trained them, counseled them, and fed them today—let them enjoy a little rest, too,” Behrouzi said. “We start all over again tomorrow night. Tonight belongs to the living, to us—at least for the next forty-five minutes.” She rose, took his hands, and helped him to his feet. “For the next forty-five minutes, I am yours to do as you wish, Leopard,” Behrouzi said. She untied a pale yellow silk scarf from around her neck, letting it fall beside her breasts, and she followed his gaze as his eyes explored her body. “I am your prisoner.”

  Behrouzi turned her back to Hal Briggs, then removed her blouse, keeping the silk scarf across her neck. She then felt Briggs’s strong hands on her shoulders, massaging her shoulders, then her arms, then her breasts from behind. He slipped her brassiere off her shoulders, lightly touching her naked breasts, barely touching the skin. The almost imperceptible touch of a finger against her erect nipples was so exquisite that it made her gasp. Still from behind, he removed her boots, then her slacks and underwear, and he gently touched her skin, softly exploring every inch of her body.

  The room was cold, but his fingers felt as if they were on fire.

  He did not squeeze her, just continued touching her here and there. It was like some sort of exotic torture technique—she longed, then ached, then begged to be grasped. But he didn’t stop. His fingers gently touched her buttocks, then her neck, then imperceptibly her nipples. She reached behind her, grasping for him and finding him erect and quite hard. “Stop this torture, Leopard,” she breathed. She reached up and looped her hands behind his neck, stretching her lean body up and pressing her buttocks into his groin. “Take me, Leopard, now, please.”

  Briggs ran his fingers up along her sides, gently around her breasts, then down her arms to her hands. Goose pimples leapt across her brown skin, and she gasped in excitement. Kissing her neck, he clasped her hands in his, brought them down her back near his groin again … then, the scarf was pulled away from her shoulders and, before she knew it, her hands were secured behind her back with the scarf. “Yes,” she breathed. “I am yours now, Leopard …”

  “Turn,” he ordered.

  She slowly turned to face him, her face aching from her longing, her lips parted from her labored breathing. Riza Behrouzi was thin, but her arm and shoulder muscles were thick and heavily defined; her breasts were small, round, firm globes over a smoothly muscled chest; her stomach was flat; her buttocks were round and thin; and her legs were strong and powerfully muscled.

  She had an athlete’s body, but it obviously had not been shaped in a gym or spa with weights or fancy machines—it had been chiseled out in the harsh highlands and deserts of the Middle East, exercised by carrying guns and cameras, and hardened by numerous confrontations with soldiers and interrogators and informants of many nationalities. Like his, her body was a weapon—but, at least not for the next few precious minutes, it was not going to be used to kill or to spy.

  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 wingman, Lieutenant j.g. Eric “Shine” Matte had just tanked a few minutes earlier. “Lizard-520, disconnect.” Crowley hit the AP,/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 VF-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 Fo
rce CAP night patrol: two 1,110-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 Hawkeye 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 Lincoln’s 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 sub-chasers—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 throttles 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.”

  “Roger,” Crowley acknowledged. As he waited for Lavoyed to lock on to the Tomcat in front of him, he held out his right hand in front of his eyes—his hand was shaking. “Jesus, Shine,” he said on interphone, “the Iranians launched two missiles at the Lincoln.

  That was a close call!”

  “Those were Backfire bombers launching those things, too,” Lavoyed added. “Intelligence has been speculating that the Iranians bought Backfire bombers from the Russians for years—I guess it’s true,’cause they just used one to launch Kitchen missiles at our carrier.”

  It took twenty minutes for the two F-14 Tomcats to join up
and maneuver themselves behind a new KA-6D tanker. The radios were crazy with chatter. The Lincoln was launching three extra flights of F-14s, making six flights of two total; they were also in the process of launching a third E-2C Hawkeye radar plane to cover the airspace farther north of the group. The group was transitioning from a peacetime ForCAP, or Force Combat Air Patrol—which generally extended 100 to 200 miles from the carrier—to a BarCAP, or Barrier Combat Air Patrol, which would double that distance.

  Soon, almost anything that launched from Iran would be intercepted, and any aircraft that was large enough to carry an AS-4 Kitchen missile would surely be destroyed long before it got within range. Undoubtedly the battle-group commander was rearranging the sea-borne escorts as well, spreading his forces out a bit more to get air defense missiles out farther from the carrier, while keeping one or two guided-missile cruisers or destroyers in close to provide last-ditch protection for the carrier and its five thousand crew members.

  Crowley had just maneuvered his F-14 behind the KA-6D tanker and was setting up for the run in toward the lighted drogue when suddenly they heard, “All units, all units, pop-up bogeys bearing zero-two-zero, two-seven-five miles bull’s-eye, angels twenty, speed six-zero-zero-knots, all Aardvark units, say fuel status and stand by.”

  “121 flight’s on the hose, ten-point-one!” Crowley shouted as he rushed toward the drogue for at least a token on-load. But the harder he tried to plug the drogue, the worse he did. He finally got the tanker to fly straight and level for longer than normal so he could plug the drogue; he took a fast five thousand pounds and cycled off. “121’s clear.”

  “121, vector to intercept new bogey one, heading zero-five-zero, angels forty,” the combat controller aboard a different E-2C Hawkeye ordered. Crowley finally realized that the new voice was from the new Hawkeye just launched to cover north of the Lincoln carrier group—sure enough, another Tu-22M Backfire bomber had sneaked in and was now within 250 miles of the carrier! “Go single ship, 122 will follow in trail.”