cruise missiles, with pinpoint precision. It could fly faster than the speed of sound up to sixty thousand feet, or at treetop level over any terrain, in any weather, day or night. Although only forty Blackjack bombers had been built, they represented the number one air-breathing military threat to the West.
But as deadly as the Tu-160 Blackjack was, there was one plane even deadlier: the Tupolev-160E. The stock Blackjack's large steel and titanium vertical stabilizer had been replaced by a low, slender V-tail made of composite materials, stronger but more lightweight and radar-absorbing than steel. Much of the skin not exposed to high levels of heat in supersonic flight was composed of radar-absorbent material, and the huge engine air inlets for the four Kuznetsov NK-32 afterburning engines had been redesigned so the engines' compressor blades wouldn't reflect radar energy. Even the jet's steeply raked cockpit windscreens had been specially shaped and coated to misdirect and absorb radar energy. All this helped to reduce the radar cross section of this giant bird to one-fourth of the stock aircraft's size.
The only thing that spoiled the Blackjack-E's sleek, stealthy needle-like appearance was a triangular fairing mounted under the forward bomb bay and a smaller fairing atop the fuselage that carried the aircraft's phase-array air and surface search radars. The multimode radar electronically scanned both the sky and the sea for aircraft and ships, and passed the information both to allied ground, surface, and airborne units, as well as automatically programming its attack and defensive weapons.
The Blackjack-E and its weaponry were the latest in Soviet military technology-but that meant little to a starving, nearly bankrupt nation on the verge of total collapse. The weapon system was far more useful to the Soviet Union as a commodity-and they found a willing buyer in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Still oil-rich-and, with the rise in oil prices because of the war, growing richer by the day-but with a badly shaved-back military following the devastating nine-year Iran-Iraq War, Iran needed to rebuild its arsenal quickly and effectively. Money was no object. The faster they could build an arsenal that could project power throughout the entire Middle East, the faster they could claim the title of the most powerful military force in the region, a force that had to be reckoned with in any dealings involving trade, commerce, land, religion, or legal rights in the Persian Gulf.
The Blackjack-E was the answer. The bomber was capable against air, ground, and surface targets; it was fast, it had the range to strike targets as far away as England without aerial refueling, and it carried a huge attack payload. After watching the Americans destroy nearly half of the vaunted Iraqi army with precision-guided weapons, the Iranians were positive they had spent their money wisely-any warplane they invested in had to be stealthy, had to be fast, had to have all-weather capability, and had to have precision-guided attack capability, or it was virtually useless over today's high-tech battlefield. The Russians were selling-not just the planes, but the weapons, the support equipment, and Russian instructors and technicians-and the Iranians were eagerly buying.
The USS
The test was a rousing success. The Blackjack-E's crew-an Iranian pilot as aircraft commander, a Russian instructor pilot in the copilot's seat, two Iranian officers as bombardier and defensive-systems officer, and one Russian systems instructor in a jump seat between the Iranian systems officers-launched their entire warload of six Kh-29 external missiles-painted and modified with Iraqi Air Force markings-from maximum range and medium altitude. The missiles dived to sea-skimming altitude, then popped up to five hundred meters when only five kilometers from their targets and then dived straight down at their target. Two of the missiles missed the cruiser by less than a half a kilometer; two made direct hits. The explosions could be seen and heard by observers twenty kilometers away. Although the
This time, however, the Blackjack-E would have a full weapons load. This would be the ultimate test. On this flight, the Blackjack-E was loaded for a multirole hunter-killer mission. In the aft bomb bay, it carried a rotary launcher with twelve Kh-15 solid-rocket attack missiles. Each missile had a top speed of Mach 5-five times the speed of sound-a range of almost ninety miles when launched from high altitude, and a three-hundred-and-fifty- pound high-explosive warhead. The missiles, covered with a rubbery skin that burned off while in flight, were targeted by the Blackjack's navigator by radar, or they would automatically attack large ships using its onboard radar, or home in on preprogrammed enemy radar emissions. Designed to destroy target defenses and attack targets well beyond surface-to-air missile range, the Kh-15s were unjammable, almost invisible to radar, and almost impossible to intercept or shoot down.
Externally, the Blackjack-E carried eight R-40 long-range air-to-air missiles, four under the attach point of each swiveling wing; two of the missiles on each wing were radar-guided missiles and two were heat-seeking missiles. It was the first Soviet heavy bomber to carry air-to-air missiles. Also under each wing were two Kh-29 multirole attack missiles, which had a range of sixteen miles, a top speed of just over Mach 2, and a massive six- hundred-pound high-explosive warhead. The Kh-29 was steered to its target by a TV datalink, giving it a precision- guided capability day or night or in poor weather, or it would home in on enemy radar emissions. Once locked on to its target, the Kh-29 would automatically fly an evasive sea-skimming or ballistic trajectory, depending on the target, followed by a steep dive into its target. The Kh-29 was designed to deliver a killing blow to almost any size target, even a large surface vessel, underground command post, bridges, and large industrial buildings and factories.
As predicted, the Americans erected an air umbrella around the stricken USS
If there was more time, or the need to get the crippled ship out of harm's way not so pressing, the Navy would have chosen another ship to protect the
The Blackjack-E, call sign Lechtvar ('Teacher'), launched from its secret base near Mashhad, about six hundred kilometers east of Tehran, using an Iran Air, the official Iranian government airline, flight number. It followed the commercial air-traffic route, overflying the Persian Gulf and central Saudi Arabia on its way to Jiddah, Saudi Arabia. In late February, with air superiority established over the entire region and no threat from Iraq's air force, the Coalition forces agreed to reopen commercial air routes from Iran and other Islamic countries to the east into Jiddah to accommodate pilgrims visiting the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina. As long as a flight plan was on file and the flight followed a strict navigation corridor, overflying Saudi Arabia was permitted during the conflict.
The flight was handed off from Riyadh Air Traffic Control Center to Jiddah Approach, just before coming within range of American naval radar systems operating in the Red Sea. As it descended over the Hijaz Mountains south of Jiddah, the Blackjack-E bomber crew activated their terrain-following radar system, deactivated its transponder radar tracking system, and descended below radar coverage in less than two minutes. The crew allowed a few seconds of a '7700' transponder signal-the international code for Emergency-before shutting off all radios and external lights completely and descending into the mountains. Within moments, the flight had completely disappeared from radar screens.
Saudi and Coalition rescue teams, both civilian and military, immediately started fanning out from Jiddah south to the suspected crash site. But by the time the rescuers launched, the Blackjack-E was already far to the east, speeding across the deserts of the central Arabian Peninsula.
