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 Trudal 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 Pasdara’n 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.
“Ten divers out, ten divers back, and this rust bucket is still afloat,” Chris Wohl, the tall man, said in a low, slow Voice. “That’s a success.”
“Damn straight!” Hal Briggs crowed. “So let’s celebrate! Let’s-“
Just then, another of the commandos walked up to the three Americans. Briggs stopped abruptly, and his face went limp and dazed, as if he had just been shot full of painkillers. The commando was much shorter than Briggs, but was just as wiry and powerful—and she filled out a Mustang suit much better than he.
Her name was Riza Behrouzi, and she was the commander of the Peninsula Shield security team. A Peninsula Shield commando had gone along with every Madcap Magician commando to assist and to secure the area while the targets were lazed. “All Peninsula Shield operatives present and well,” Behrouzi reported. “On behalf of the nations of the Gulf Cooperative Council, I wish to thank you all for your help.”
White was about to accept her thanks, but Briggs interjected: “It was our pleasure, Major Behrouzi …”
“Riza, please,” Behrouzi said to Briggs. Wohl and White got the impression they had instantly been forgotten. “I know it is against your rules to give us your real names, but I have no such restrictions—about names, or about this.” She stepped closer to Briggs and gave him a full kiss on the lips. “Thank you.”
“it was nothing … Riza,” Briggs said, apparently having difficulty catching his breath.
“Okay, Leopard,” Wohl said irritably. “You want to celebrate, go ahead—after you clean and stow your gear, conduct the post-mission briefing, see to it that your men are fed, and prepare your reports for the National Security Agency and the Director of Central Intelligence. And I believe you have the morning watch, so you better get some sleep. And since you’re within eight hours of your watch, You’re off the sauce. Other than that, you can celebrate all you want.”
“Gee, Mondo, thanks,” Briggs said dejectedly. “You’re a real party animal.”
“I would be happy to assist you, Leopard,” Behrouzi said. “We shall conduct the briefing and see to our men together.”
“I like the sound of that,” Briggs said, instantly perking up. “I tell ya, Riza,” he said as they headed out, “I had that Iranian carrier in my sights for a sec out there. It might’ve taken the entire UAE air force full of Hellfires,
