behind, he removed her boots, then her slacks and underwear, and he gently touched her skin, softly exploring every inch of her body.
The room was cold, but his fingers felt as if they were on fire.
He did not squeeze her, just continued touching her here and there. It was like some sort of exotic torture technique—she longed, then ached, then begged to be grasped. But he didn’t stop. His fingers gently touched her buttocks, then her neck, then imperceptibly her nipples. She reached behind her, grasping for him and finding him erect and quite hard. “Stop this torture, Leopard,” she breathed. She reached up and looped her hands behind his neck, stretching her lean body up and pressing her buttocks into his groin. “Take me, Leopard, now, please.”
Briggs ran his fingers up along her sides, gently around her breasts, then down her arms to her hands. Goose pimples leapt across her brown skin, and she gasped in excitement. Kissing her neck, he clasped her hands in his, brought them down her back near his groin again … then, the scarf was pulled away from her shoulders and, before she knew it, her hands were secured behind her back with the scarf. “Yes,” she breathed. “I am yours now, Leopard …”
“Turn,” he ordered.
She slowly turned to face him, her face aching from her longing, her lips parted from her labored breathing. Riza Behrouzi was thin, but her arm and shoulder muscles were thick and heavily defined; her breasts were small, round, firm globes over a smoothly muscled chest; her stomach was flat; her buttocks were round and thin; and her legs were strong and powerfully muscled.
She had an athlete’s body, but it obviously had not been shaped in a gym or spa with weights or fancy machines—it had been chiseled out in the harsh highlands and deserts of the Middle East, exercised by carrying guns and cameras, and hardened by numerous confrontations with soldiers and interrogators and informants of many nationalities. Like his, her body was a weapon—but, at least not for the next few precious minutes, it was not going to be used to kill or to spy.
Slowly and deliberately, he began to remove his clothes before her. It was almost like a striptease, revealing one tantalizing feature of his hard, chiseled body after another in slow, agonizing bits. Her chest was rising and falling heavily, as if she had just run up six flights of stairs, well before he finally unfastened his belt, eased his trousers off, and revealed himself to her. Her eyes told him that she was at once both intimidated by him and eager to sample him.
“That was delicious, Leopard,” Behrouzi said breathlessly. “It is my turn to please you now.”
They made love quickly, wildly, explosively. Both knew what was out there waiting for them; both knew how much time they didn’t have, what was expected of them, what other governments and officials demanded of them. For now, right now, all they demanded of the rest of the world was each other, if only for a few brief, passionate minutes. His scars, and hers, were visible to each of them, but it didn’t matter.
Like a nighttime commando raid, it was over quickly; but, like combat, they were both filled with an intoxicating mixture of tingling excitement, adrenaline, and weariness when it was done.
They stayed tightly intertwined until their internal timers told them their time together was running out. He helped her to her feet, then embraced her once again as if this would be the last time. After she dressed, they were both on the phone again immediately, talking to their respective command centers, ordering all the charts, intelligence data, support personnel, and soldiers they might need.
Neither of them would ever forget the moment they had shared together … but now it was time to join the fight once again.
IN THE ARABIAN SEA, EAST OF THE GULF OF OMAN, 300 MILES SOUTHEAST OF CHAH BAHAR NAVAL BASE, IRAN 26 APRIL 1997, 0251 HOURS LOCAL TIME
“Aardvark-121 flight, Wallbanger, vector heading two-eight-five, take angels thirty, your bogey is bearing three-one-zero, three-zero-zero bull’s-eye.”
“121 flight copies,” Lieutenant Scott “Crow” Crowley, lead pilot of the two-ship F-14B Tomcat flight, responded. Perfect timing, he thought—he had just about taken on a full tank of gas, and his wingman, Lieutenant j.g. Eric “Shine” Matte had just tanked a few minutes earlier. “Lizard-520, disconnect.” Crowley hit the AP,/NWS/Disc button on his control stick and watched as the large cloth-covered basket-shaped refueling drogue popped off his refueling probe on the right side of his cockpit. The KA-6D tanker of VA-95 Green Lizards quickly reeled in the drogue and cleared the flight of two F-14B Tomcat fighters from VF-114 Aardvarks, from the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, to the bottom of the refueling block. Once level 2,000 feet below the tanker, the F-14s executed a tight left turn and headed northwest on their new vector.
“21 flight, check,” Crowley radioed as soon as he finished his post-air refueling checklist. He knew that Matte would be finishing his checklist as well, and then hurrying to catch up and stay in formation, which for them was loose fingertip formation.
“Two,” was Matte’s quick reply. That meant everything was OK—fuel feeding OK, full tanks or as nearly full as possible, instruments OK, systems OK, oxygen OK, GIB (Guy in Back, the radar intercept officer) OK. Crowley looked at his fuel and deducted about half an hour’s worth of his wingman and a bit more “for the wife and kids” and guessed he had about two hours’ worth of “play time” out here before they had to head back to the Lincoln, which was about 300 miles behind them right now.
Each F-14B Tomcat was similarly equipped for this medium-range Force CAP night patrol: two 1,110-liter external fuel tanks on the pylons under the engine air inlets; two radar-guided AIM-120A AMRAAMs (Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles) and two AIM-9M Sidewinder short-range heat-seeking missiles, on the wing glove pylons; and four huge AIM-54C Phoenix long-range radar-guided missiles on the fuselage stations. With the Lincoln battle group so far out in the Arabian Sea, the primary threat to be countered by the F-14 air patrols was from Iranian long-range fighter-bombers and long-range patrol aircraft, so these Tomcats carried two extra Phoenix missiles per fighter—the Phoenix missile had a range of over ninety miles, well within radar detection range but far enough out of the range of most of the Russian-made air-launched anti-ship cruise missiles that Iran had in its inventory.
A few minutes after receiving their vector from the E-2C Hawkeye radar plane, from VAW 117 Wallbangers, orbiting 200 miles northwest of the Lincoln carrier group, Crowley’s radar intercept officer had the bogey on radar: “Radar contact, one-seven-five miles, off the nose.”
“Aardvark flight, that’s your bogey,” the Hawkeye radar officer said, verifying the RIO’s report. The Tomcats now took over primary responsibility for the intercept.
It was a cat-and-mouse game that had been played every night for the past few nights. These were “ferret” flights, probes of the Lincoln’s air defense capability, by a wide variety of Iranian aircraft, from top-of-the-line MiG- 29 Fulcrum, MiG-25 Foxbat, and MiG-31 Foxhound supersonic fighters to giant lumbering P-3 Orion and EC-130 surveillance aircraft. The smaller Iranian combat aircraft—already at the limit of their fuel reserves, because the Lincoln was still very far offshore—would simply drive in as close as they dared toward the carrier group and watch to see what sort of response the Americans would make. With one E-2 Hawkeye orbiting over the carrier and one Hawkeye stationed between the carrier and the Iranian mainland, the carrier group had “eyes” out at least 200 miles around the ship, and a narrow corridor of radar coverage on a straight line from the carrier to Chah Bahar Naval Base, over 400 miles away.
Most times, the Iranian “ferret” planes would zoom in—probably recording all of the electronic signals generated by the Lincoln, its escorts, and its patrol aircraft—then, once it was “paired” with a Tomcat, it would turn around and head for home. The Iranians knew all about the F-14 Tomcat and the AIM-54 Phoenix missile—because they still employed both of them. In the mid-1970s, when the Shah had been in power, the United States had transferred 100 of the advanced fighters to Iran; the exact numbers were unknown, but Iran probably still had a dozen operational Tomcats and about 100 Phoenix missiles in good condition. The Iranians knew to give the Phoenix missile a lot of respect, so at the first squeak of the Tomcat’s AWG-9 radar, they usually turned tail.
But not this time Wallbanger picked this guy out at almost three hundred miles—that’s the limit of his radar,” Crowley observed, thinking aloud. “He’s gotta be a big guy. You got numbers on him, Sunrise?”
“Range one-five-zero miles, still closing fast,” Crowley’s RIO, Lieutenant Adam “Sunrise” Lavoyed, reported. “Altitude angels forty, speed … shit, speed seven hundred.”
“He’s not an Orion then,” Crowley said. Iran flew American-made P-3 Orion sub-chasers—another leftover from the Shah’s regime—which were capable of carrying Harpoon or Exocet antiship missiles, but Orions were big, lumbering turboprop-powered planes, max cruise speed about 380 knots—this one was going almost twice as fast. “What’s our bull’s-eye?”
