Stephen Coonts - The Disciple

“You know what to do,” I replied.

Indeed he did. He would do nothing if the technical went on by. If it stopped, he would take out the vehicle and kill the men, and he would do it quickly.

I looked behind me. I could see the vehicle cruising slowly along the boulevard, the three or four guys in the back looking every which way. It was at least a hundred yards from where Davar and I sat with our backs against a tree, watching the mosque in the prayer grounds. I didn’t think there was a chance in the world that the people in the bunker would leave now; if they did, they were going to spoil the morning’s entertainment. I kinda suspected a few of them might be rethinking their presence there. Even so, I doubted that Ahmadinejad would let them leave, and he was the guy making the decisions.

“They’re stopping by the remains of that com shack.”

Terrific!

“Couple of them are out looking it over, what’s left of it… Uh-oh. They’re having an argument, pointing at the bunker. Looks like someone is advocating a look-around.”

I bent down and checked the safety on my AK, made sure the magazine was seated firmly. Davar watched me. She wasn’t wearing a headset, so I told her about the technical and nodded in that direction. She hunkered down behind the tree.

“They’re all out of the vehicle. Spreading out. Going to make a sweep toward the mosque, looks like. We’ll take ’em out when they are between us and you, Tommy. Keep your head down.”

I motioned to Davar with my hand-down-and stretched out with the AK pointed in their direction. Then I looked at her. Couldn’t see her features in the darkness, but I wondered what she was thinking. I pulled out my pistol and nudged her arm with it. Her head turned, then she reached for it.

I saw flashlights coming… six flashlights, flickering randomly about as their holders searched the area and checked the footing…

They were about twenty-five yards in from the boulevard amid the scattered trees when the guys let ’em have it. A roar of AK fire, strobing muzzle flashes, and the flashlights fell to the ground. Some of them went out. Two people were screaming.

The F-15E Strike Eagles were as complex an airborne weapons system as the United States possessed. Designed to give the pilot and a weapons system operator-WSO, or wizzo-multiple options in the complex, harrowing environment of ground attack, in any weather, day or night, while providing for its own electronic and fighter defense, the planes’ state-of-the art computers and avionics demanded a lot from its crewmen. As usual, the Strike Eagles that flew tonight against Iran’s nuclear missile launch sites contained some highly experienced crews, some with the green just worn off and some new people just rotated in from the states.

First Lieutenant JoAnne Rodgers was the WSO in one of them. Two months into her first tour in Iraq, she was being bounced around by turbulence in a night black as a whale’s tummy while voices on the radio overloaded the frequency. It seemed everyone on the freq had something vital to say to somebody-and what it became was merely distracting noise. To make matters worse, some of her gear wasn’t working. The INS velocities were too large or small, and that affected the computer’s calculations of the aircraft’s present position and the proper direction to the target, Tunnel November. In addition, the radar’s primary mode wasn’t working properly and she was forced to use it in a degraded mode. And, although she didn’t know it, her ALQ-199 wasn’t working at all, although it had passed its built-in tests on the ground and the little green light glowed comfortingly.

“This techno-magic is taking a shit,” JoAnne told her pilot on the ICS. Ladylike language was not one of her virtues.

“We can cancel or do the mission,” the pilot, Major Dick Hauer, growled. “Make up your mind.”

Rodgers didn’t reply. As she would put it, she was up to her ass in alligators, severely overloaded, and she had downed a system the day before yesterday. She didn’t need a reputation as a candy-ass who would only fly on VFR days with a perfect system.

Hauer didn’t appreciate her problems since he was nursing one of his own as he flew the aircraft, monitored the electronic warfare panel and tried to make sense of the radio chatter. Fighter attack was the toughest mission in the air force, where only the best were good enough, and to do it right you needed lots of testosterone, plus a quart. Here he was flying with a woman who didn’t have any. She was foul-mouthed, butt ugly, twenty pounds too heavy, obviously smarter than he was and yellow; in toto, the perfect person to push every one of his manly buttons. To be sure, words to this effect had never passed his lips and never would, not in today’s air force. A few cracks like that could kill a career.

At precisely the planned time, he lowered the aircraft’s nose and began a descent to attack altitude. He made sure the infrared sensors were working and put a ground avoidance display on one of his screens-and saw nothing. Dirt in the air degraded the infrared. Well, he would get a reading in just a moment, when he got a little lower.

That thought had no more than passed through his head when he realized he wasn’t seeing the target symbol on his nav screen. “You know where in hell we are?” he growled at Rodgers as the plane did the turbulence bump-and-grind.

“No,” she said. “I told you the velocities were running and the radar is in backup mode. I’m looking for something I can identify to get a position update.”

Automatically Hauer’s eyes flicked to the altimeter. The plane was descending through ten thousand feet-and there were peaks in this mountain range that reached well above eleven. Just then he saw a shape materializing on the infrared. Something damn solid. A mountain! Dead ahead. He pulled the stick back and jammed the throttles forward, and the F-15 pointed its nose at the sky.

JoAnne Rodgers jerked off her oxygen mask and vomited into her lap.

Three nuclear-armed cruise missiles were in the air, according to the AWACS people. They had launched from the predicted sites and were flying the predicted flight paths to three nuclear targets: Mosul and Al Asad in Iraq, and Al Jaber in Kuwait. As General Martin Lincoln listened to the AWACS controller direct F-22s onto these specific missiles, he wondered if there were any other nukes that had been misclassified. Or the intelligence wasn’t perfect. Or…

To be sure, Tomahawks were crash-diving Iranian missile sites, drones were beginning to pour in Hellfires, and Iranian missile launches had slowed to a trickle.

Only 142 cruise missiles were airborne. Only . He scanned the projected flight paths on the laptop computer on the desk in front of him.

Well, one or more missiles, regardless of warhead, were on the way to every Iranian target, except Tel Aviv. The F-22s were banging away, but missiles were getting through. Two cruise missiles with conventional warheads had already exploded on Tallil Air Force Base, one on Baghdad and two on Balad. Some might have missed the military bases and crashed in the desert or a city or town-no one knew for sure. So far, damage was minimal.

Being only human, Lincoln found his eyes drawn to the symbol of the cruise missile with the Jihad warhead flying toward Kuwait. It was only a hundred miles out, mere minutes away.

One of the colonels leaned down to whisper, “Sir, one of the plotters has asked if you plan to have the staff go to the bombproof.”

Lincoln looked at the colonel in disbelief. “The bombproof won’t withstand a nuke hit. You know that . Now tell these people that I’ll court-martial any son of a bitch who leaves this room.”

When General Lincoln looked again at the inbound missile, he saw that the AWACS was reporting it destroyed.