keys were turned and the fire control computers took over.
That all sounded deceptively simple, but Marino knew the reality was fiendishly complex. It had taken Navy planners days working around the clock to lay out and punch in each missile’s flight path. Even with the space- based global positioning system GPS to help guide the weapons, landmarks had to be found, defences plotted, and search plans determined, so that each Tomahawk had a near-perfect chance of reaching its target.
He glanced at the nearest clock. Precise timing had been as critical for this operation as it was for a space shuttle launch or an amphibious invasion. To make sure the missiles’ GPS receivers could pull down enough data to get good navigational fixes, there had to be a certain minimum number of GPS satellites overhead. To guarantee the Pentagon and the White House near-instantaneous damage assessments, the missiles would strike right before a slated midmorning pass by U.S. recon satellites. That way the low morning sun would provide the contrast and shadows so useful for accurate imagery interpretation. Finally, the Tomahawk strike had to arrive between prayers. Devout Muslims prayed five times a day, and if missiles hit home during any of those periods, it would be seen as a blasphemous slap at all Islam not just at Iran.
Helena shuddered one last time.
Marino had been counting silently to himself. He and Walsh straightened up at the same moment.
“Last bird’s gone, sir,” the chief reported formally.
Marino thought he heard a little relief creep into the older man’s voice. He shook his head, half to himself Helena, several of her sister boats, and the ships of a Navy surface task group had just fired what he hoped would be the first and last shots in a war. All in just minutes. Times had certainly changed.
He barked out a string of new orders. “Make your depth three hundred feet. Right standard rudder, steady on course zero four zero.”
It was time to get out of here, back into deep water.
By the time Walsh reported and Marino issued his helm orders, their last Tomahawk was twenty nautical miles downrange.
The eighteen-foot-long cruise missile skimmed the sea surface, first steering west around the radar station on Lavan Island, then turning a little east to dodge another radar at Asaleyeh airfield. There were several paths through the Iranian radar net, and the missiles salvoed by the Helens’ and the other attacking ships were splitting up to use them all at staggered intervals.
Flying at nearly five hundred knots, Tomahawk number 12 made its landfall just ten minutes after launch, flashing low over a desolate, barren landscape. It climbed steadily, threading its way through the rugged Zagros Mountains littering the southern half of Iran. Tehran lay far to the north almost at the outer limit of its range.
The weapon flew on, inhuman in the steadiness of its flight, the precision of its turns. Periodically, it would turn on its GPS receiver and fix its position. A conventional inertial guidance system could drift as much as half a mile over the flight time of a Tomahawk missile. The GPS unit would keep Tomahawk 12 accurate to within a few meters.
Six hundred seventy miles and seventy-five minutes after leaving the USS Helena, the missile crossed the Qom-Tehran Highway and came within sight of the Iranian capital.
Tehran’s skyline was already marred by thick, billowing columns of smoke. Even in broad daylight, a burning oil refinery lit the inside of one black cloud with an ugly or angered glow. The first wave of American cruise missiles had arrived only minutes before.
Although civil defense alarms were still sounding, the missile didn’t hear the sirens. It was busy making another navigational fix. With four satellites above its horizon, the Tomahawk’s GPS receiver established its position to within three meters just half its own length. Still flying with impersonal, inhuman precision, it skimmed over the city, ignoring the few antiaircraft bursts beginning to pepper the air around it. The gunners were too late. Helena’s Tomahawk 12 was the trailing edge of the American attack.
It passed over the Iranian Parliament building, already a shattered, burning ruin, and suddenly, matter-of- factly, dove down aiming for the old Exxon building.
After being abandoned by its American owners following the Shah’s fall, the ten-story concrete and steel structure had been taken over as headquarters for the Revolutionary Guards, the Pasdaran. Under their aegis, it also served as a center for planning terrorist raids. Members of the Pasdaran command staff routinely coordinated operations with the HizbAllah, provided its leaders with intelligence information, and supplied it with weapons and explosives.
Now the Pasdaran was paying for their actions.
Tomahawk 12 was the last of six cruise missiles targeted on the headquarters building. One missile’s guidance unit failed in flight, sending it crashing into the side of a mountain near the southern Iranian city of Shiraz. But all four of the others screamed straight in on target, gutting the structure with thousand-pound warheads. Ripped apart by the repeated bomb blasts, the Exxon building’s upper floors teetered and then collapsed into the street. Now this last missile dispensed tiny, HE-laden bomblets over the ruined Revolutionary Guards headquarters. Their rapid-fire detonations shredded steel and glass and flesh and anything else over a fifty-meter square area.
“At 3:00 A.M. eastern standard time, elements of the United States Navy launched approximately one hundred Tomahawk missiles at Iran. Their targets were the military installations, economic facilities, and official ministries used by the Iranian government to plan or facilitate terrorist attacks against the United States, most recently the murderous and unprovoked bombing on the Golden Gate Bridge. Based on initial assessments, we believe this retaliatory strike inflicted heavy damage on all intended targets. Our own forces involved in the operation suffered no losses.
“Though we regret any loss of life, the government of the United States earnestly hopes the Islamic Republic of Iran will draw the appropriate conclusions from this action and immediately and unconditionally abandon its support for international terrorism.”
CHAPTER 1
MANEWERS
A cold, bitter wind whipped across Iran’s barren central plain, whirling sand, dust, and charred bits of paper and clothing across a scene of utter devastation.
General Amir Taleh picked his way carefully through the rubble and uncertain footing, favoring his right leg. He stopped momentarily to get his bearings. Bearings on what? he asked himself angrily. Taleh fought the urge to pick up a piece of shattered concrete and throw it.
A slender, physically fit man, with a neatly trimmed black mustache and beard, Taleh wore a heavy winter coat over his light olivegreen fatigue uniform. The only adornments on his clothing were the stars on his collar tabs indicating his rank in Iran’s Regular Army. Nothing else showed his status as Chief of Staff of the armed forces. Even now, the self appointed guardians of his nation’s Islamic Revolution were not fond of rank and class distinctions.
He was standing amid the burned-out wreckage of what had been the most sophisticated electronics facility in Iran. Only a ragged outline of the exterior walls remained, showing its original size. Ten thousand square meters of factory space and sophisticated equipment lay jumbled inside with no more value now than a slum’s rubbish heap. Explosives experts picked their way carefully through the rubble, looking for unexploded bomblets, while in one corner two men with Green Crescent armbands wrestled with a body still partly buried in the debris. Police and Pasdaran guards kept civilians out, but just beyond the barrier a large knot of silent men and women waited for word of those still missing.
Almost nothing was left of the electronics plant one of Iran’s precious-few facilities able to fabricate and repair integrated circuits and other high-tech electronic components.
