images began coming in. The first one was crisp and clean, with shades of purple and orange providing some contrast and depth. The sensor operators filled the two thirty-inch monitors with a large warship steaming northward; data blocks under the sensor image displayed the target’s speed, size, direction of travel, and other characteristics. “Beeaauuu-t-ful!” Jon Masters exclaimed.
Paul White agreed. It was the joint Chinese-Iranian aircraft carrier Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, fully loaded and with a full complement of escorts, leaving its port at Chah Bahar and heading into the Gulf of Oman. White had never thought he’d see anything like it in his life—Iran sailing an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf region. “I’ll get the report out on the satellite,” he said, almost breathlessly. “NSA will want to know details.”
Although it was not as big as the American supercarriers, it was still a very impressive-looking warship. It had so many anti-ship missile mounts on its decks that it looked like a battleship or guided-missile cruiser welded beside an aircraft carrier. It was a little intimidating to think that the, Khomeini could bring an awesome array of surface-warfare weapons to bear on a target, and then launch attack aircraft to finish the job. The Khomeini looked similar to American aircraft carriers from the rear, with its slanted landing section, lighted edges, and four arresting wires; the main difference was in the huge array of armament set up in the aft section—the cruise-missile canisters and defensive missile and gun emplacements on both sides. The “island” superstructure looked like any other, with huge arrays of antennas seemingly piled atop one another on the superstructure and on a separate antenna structure aft; there was one aircraft elevator in front and behind the superstructure. Again, anti-ship cruise-missile emplacements were everywhere. The really unusual feature of the Khomeini was the bow section—instead of continuing the large, long flat profile of a “flat-top,” the Khomeini’s bow rapidly sloped upward at the bow, forming an aircraft “ski jump.”
White returned as Skywalker was focused on the carrier’s forward flight deck. “NSA’s got the word,” he said. “No other instructions for us, so we continue to monitor the battle group.
We should hear something soon.”
“Man, look at the planes that thing is carrying,” Masters exclaimed. He started poking the screen, counting aircraft.
“They got at least ten fighters lined up on deck.”
“They what?” White asked. He counted along with Masters, then said, “That’s weird. They got their attack group up on deck,” “What’s weird about that?”
“The Khomeini is a former Russian carrier, and the Russians usually wouldn’t park any of their aircraft up on deck, like the Americans do,” White explained. “They’d keep all the fixed-wing aircraft below-decks and leave only a few fling-wings on the roof for rescue and shuttle service between other ships in the group. That’s why they carry only two dozen fixed-wing jets.
An American flat-top carries three times that many—but one-third of them can be stowed below-decks at one time.
“See this? The deck is so small, they line the helicopters up just forward of the forward elevator, and all the fixed-wings on the fantail behind the aft elevator,” White continued. “They need all that room because the Khomeini doesn’t, use catapults like other carriers. The Russians originally designed the ski jump for short-takeoff-and-landing jets, like the Yak-38 Forger and the Yak-41 Freestyle, which they canceled, but it works OK—in a manner of speaking—for conventional jets.” He pointed at the monitor toward the aft section of the Iranian carrier. “The fighters start way back here, about six hundred feet from the bow.
The fighters are secured with a holdback bar, the pilots turn on the afterburners, and they let them go. When they leave the ski jump, they get flung about a hundred feet in the sky—but they fall almost seventy feet toward the water as they build up enough speed to start flying”
“You’re kidding!” Masters exclaimed.
“No, I’m not,” White assured him. “The jets drop so low that they had to build this little platform here on the bow so that someone with a radio can tell the air boss and skipper whether or not the jet made it, because no one can see the fighter from the ‘crow’s nest’ for about fifteen to twenty seconds after takeoff, and if it crashed the ship would run right over it. The Sukhoi-33s apparently have a special ejection system wired into the radar altimeter that will automatically eject the pilot if there’s no weight on the landing gear and the jet sinks below twenty feet.
The auto-ejection system is manually activated, and apparently a lot of planes have been lost in training because newbie pilots forget to turn the system off just before landing. They make a successful carrier approach, swoop over the fantail, then fivoosh—they’re gone, punched out a split second before they catch the wire.” Masters laughed out loud like a little kid—for the moment, his seasickness was all but forgotten.
“The deck gets very dangerous in operations like this. There’s probably only thirty feet of clearance between a wingtip and a rotor tip when a jet’s heading for the ski jump,” White went on.
“Plus, nobody can land because aircraft are lined up on the fantail in the landing zone, which means if a jet has an emergency right after takeoff it’ll take them a long time to clear the deck to recover it “What’s on your mind, boss?” It was Paul White’s deputy commander, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Carl Knowlton.
White shook his head. “Ah, nothin’. It’s just weird for all those planes to be on deck at night.” He studied the monitor a bit more. “And they’ve got the ski jump clear. If they were just emptying out the hangar deck to clean it or set up for a party or reception or basketball game or something, like they do on American carriers, you’d think they’d just tow airplanes out of the way across the entire deck.”
“You think they’re going flying tonight?”
“Who the hell knows?” White responded. “The Russians never flew carrier ops at night, and the Khomeini’s only been operational for about a year, so I’d think night flights would be the last thing on their minds. The Iranians would have to be real stupid in a narrow channel, not facing into the wind, with a foul deck for emergency landing. Of course, I’d never accuse the Iranian military brain-trust of a lot of smarts anyway.” He paused, lost in thought. “Could be trouble tonight. I’m real glad we got Skywalker up there right now.”
They zoomed out Skywalker’s sensor to take pictures of the entire carrier, then zoomed in to maximum magnification to take detail pictures of every section of the ship. Occasionally Skywalker’s threat warning system would beep, indicating that it was being scanned by a nearby radar, but there was never any indication that anyone had locked on to it, and no aircraft ever flew nearby to chase it away. There was an outside possibility that Skywalker’s satellite up-link back to the Valley Mistress had been detected and even intercepted, but no one in the Khomeini group ever attempted to jam or shut down the signal; White and Masters hoped that Iran didn’t yet possess the sophisticated computers needed to unscramble the up-link signals.
“Here’s the other stuff I wanted to look at,” White said excitedly as the Skywalker drone moved northward again, after orbiting over the Khomeini for nearly an hour. The drone had locked its sensor on a ship almost as large as the aircraft carrier, its center superstructure higher and clustered with twice the antenna arrays.
“The Chinese destroyer Zhanjiang, the pride of the Chinese navy,” White said. “Supposedly out here to House the Chinese officers and troops training on the Khomeini, but I think it’s out here to protect the carrier and to add a little extra firepower to Iran’s carrier escort fleet. It’s got a full complement of non-nuclear weapons—long-range anti-ship and antiaircraft missiles, cruise missiles, rocket-powered torpedoes, big dual-purpose guns, three sub- hunter helicopters, the works. This one ship has more firepower than the entire Iranian air force, before they started buying up surplus Russian planes.”
“So basically the Chinese are escorting an Iranian aircraft carrier battle group,” Masters observed. “If anyone takes a shot at them, China gets involved in the fight.”
“No one knows what China would do if the group was attacked—or, more likely, what the Chinese would do if the Iranians attacked someone,” White said. “But Iran and China are pretty closely allied, economically if not ideologically—China’s been pumping billions of dollars’ worth of military hardware into Iran every year at bargain- basement prices, in exchange for cheap oil. It’s a win-win deal for both of them, and I’d think they’d try very hard to maintain their relationship.”
“But what for?” Masters asked. “What does Iran need with an aircraft carrier and a guided-missile destroyer?”
“They’re the big boys on the block now, Jon,” White replied. “You got a carrier, or a nuke, and you’re the top dog. Iran maneuvers itself as the leader of the Muslim world by sailing five billion dollars’ worth of warships around the Gulf, daring anyone to take a shot at them.”
“Who’d be stupid enough to do that?
“I’m not saying that’s their strategy,” White said, “but it’s a pretty big threat, and they’ve got a lot of firepower to back it up.”
