Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 05 (2 page)

           
... The possibility of such legal
Iranian harassment of
U.S.
battle groups concerns several analysts,
who observe that because of the
Vincennes
's
(CG 49) shoot-down of an Iranian airliner
in 1988,
U.S.
forces would be reluctant to attack in the face of Iranian
provocations.

 
          
At
press time, U.S. Central Command officials had not responded to Navy News’
requests for comment on the MiG-29 development.

 
          
B-2 BOMBER FIGHT BREWING ON CAPITOL HILL,
PHILLIPS BUSINESS INFORMATION
01/19/95
. BY KERRY GILDEA
—...Rep. Ron Dellums (D-Calif.), ranking
member on the House National Security Committee who has staunchly opposed
additional B-2s, attended a closed National Security Committee briefing on
military intelligence operations yesterday, said he learned of no changes in
the world threat situation that would demand additional weapons systems or
increased defense spending.

 
          
“I
absolutely do not think there is anything we see presently in the world that
would justify 20 more B-2s,” Dellums remarked. “Where are you going to fly
them? Where is the threat?”

Contents

Prologue

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

 
 
         
Over the Persian Gulf near Abu Musa Island,
Iran

12 February 1997
,
0314 local time

 
          
The
attackers were first spotted on radar only twenty miles from
Abu
Musa
Island
; by the time the chief of the air defense
radar unit issued the air defense alert notification, they were seventeen miles
out. Because this was the morning of Revolution Day in Iran, only a skeleton
crew was on duty at the Islamic Republic Pasdaran-i-Engelab Revolutionary
Guards air squadron base, and the pre-Revolution Day celebrations had ended
only a few hours earlier—response time, therefore, was very slow, and the
attackers were within missile range long before the Islamic Republic Air Force
F-5E Tiger II fighter crews could reach their planes. The order to commit the
Pasdaran’s British-built Rapier antiaircraft missiles and ZSU-23/4 antiaircraft
artillery units was issued far too late.

           
Four three-ship flights of British
Aerospace Hawk light attack jets streaked in at treetop level, launched
laser-guided Hellfire missiles on the six known Iranian air defense sites, then
dropped laser- guided incendiary bombs and cluster munitions on the islands
small airfield. One unknown Rapier site launched a missile and destroyed one
Hawk, but two trailing Hawks flying in the “cleanup” spot scoured the area with
cluster bombs where they saw the Rapier lift off, receiving a very satisfying
secondary explosion as one of the unlaunched missiles exploded in its launcher.
The cluster bombs also hit the U.S.-built F-5E fighters on the ramp, destroying
both and damaging two hangars where another F-5E was parked, the control tower,
and some sections of taxiways. One adjacent empty hangar was left untouched.

 
          
The
second punch arrived just a few moments later. Four flights of four SA-342
Gazelle and SA-332 Super Puma attack helicopters swooped over the island,
firing laser-guided Hellfire missiles and AS-12 wire-guided missiles from as
far away as two miles—well out of range of the few Pasdaran soldiers who were
firing blindly into the sky with handguns and rifles at any aircraft noise they
heard. Each attack was quick—launch on the move, no hovering in one place. The
next two flights did the same, swooping in and destroying targets; then the
first two waves came in again to kill any targets they’d missed on their first
pass, followed by the second two flights making a second pass.

 
          
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
desalinization 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 prescient.
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 semiunderground 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
Trucial
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 Pasdaran 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.