care. Ricardo simply lowered her electromagnetic rail gun to her hip, locked the millimeter-wave aiming emitter in with her helmet’s aiming cue, and fired one round at each TEL. She didn’t wait to see if her shots had any effect because she knew there were a lot to attack in a short space of time, but she didn’t need to wait — shortly after leaping off, she heard four satisfyingly loud explosions behind her as each TEL detonated, ripped apart by the two- pound hypervelocity tungsten slugs she pumped into them.
“Got some too,” Charlie reported. “Two Shahab-3 TELs. Look like they’re fueled but not yet elevated.” She fired one armor-piercing grenade at each launcher, then a high-explosive round at the maintenance and fueling vehicles still nearby. She could feel machine-gun bullets pinging off the CID’s armored shell, but she ignored them. “Moving on. One, how’s it going?”
“I feel like some fucking mythical avenging angel, that’s how it’s going, Three,” Hal Briggs responded. He had come across another group of three Shahab-2s, also in firing position. He fired armor-piercing grenades at two of the launchers, causing their missiles to topple over and explode on the ground. “I’ll show ’em how it’s done now!” he cried out through the flaming wreckage around him. Hal ran over to the third TEL, put his spare backpacks down beside them, then stooped down, grasped the TEL, and lifted. The entire launcher and missile flopped over on its side, crumpled as if it was made out of cardboard, ruptured, and caught on fire. Hal picked up his spare backpacks and ran off before they exploded. “Come and get me, you bastards!” he shouted over the radio. He stopped, turned toward the Iranian Revolutionary Guards soldiers pursuing him, and raised the backpacks triumphantly. “Come and get me, assholes, because I’m coming to get you!”
“Condor, exfil point Bravo loks like it’s compromised,” Kai Raydon radioed from Armstrong Space Station. “We’re sending Dasher to point Foxtrot. Dasher” was the MV-32 PAVE DASHER tilt-jet transport aircraft that would come in to pick up the four Condor commandos. The jet variant of the MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor transport, the MV-32 was larger, faster, more heavily armed, and could carry more troops or equipment. It had been deployed secretly to Iraq to assist the Air Battle Force ground ops team, but now that the Condor aircraft were going to be abandoned the MV-32 was now tasked with picking up the commandos after their mission.
The four commandos all reported successful raids and clean kills so far…but about three-quarters of the way through their circuits, they saw Shahab missiles rising through the sky. “Faster, guys,” Hal ordered. “We’re letting some get away!”
“You can’t get them all, One,” Patrick radioed from the White House Situation Room. “Do the best you can. I want all of you back in one piece. Remember you’ve got an extra three miles to go to reach Foxtrot. Watch your ammo and batteries.”
A tone sounded and a blinking icon appeared on the mission commander’s supercockpit display. “Missiles airborne,” Air Force Reserve Brigadier-General Daren Mace announced. Mace was the operations officer and second in command of the Air Battle Force at Battle Mountain Air Reserve Base. The twenty-four-year veteran Air Force navigator-bombardier leaned forward in his ejection seat excitedly. “Looks like Four-Zero picked up some missile launches.” He quickly designated the missiles, identified as Shahab-3 ballistic missiles, on the screen. “There’s your steering, Margaret. Go get ’em!”
“Got it, General,” Air Force Reserve Captain Margaret “Mugs” Lewis responded. She was more than twenty years younger than her mission commander, flying her first operational mission with the Air Battle Force, but she was a veteran B-1B Lancer aircraft commander and knew how to make the big supersonic bomber dance. But every minute aboard this variant of her beloved B-1 known as the EB-1C Vampire was a delight for her.
The sleek, supersonic Vampire bomber’s three bomb bays were completely loaded for this cover mission. The forward and middle bomb bays were combined into one and contained a rotary launcher with eight ABM-3 Lancelot air-launched anti-ballistic missiles. Resembling the Patriot anti-aircraft missile, the Lancelot was designed to destroy ballistic missiles in the boost, mid-course, or terminal phase. It had a range of almost one hundred miles, a top speed of Mach six, and a precision terminal seeker radar as well as guidance from the Vampire bomber’s powerful attack radar.
The Vampire’s aft bomb bay was loaded with four AGM-177 Wolverine cruise missiles. The 2,000-pound weapons had a small turbojet engine, a maximum speed of just 300 knots, and a maximum range of only 50 miles. But the cruise missile was special because of its three weapons bays, each containing a different type of submunition — anti-armor, anti-personnel, and area-denial cluster bombs — and its millimeter-wave and imaging infrared seekers that could locate, identify, track, attack, assess, and even re-attack its own targets. Finally, the little Wolverine cruise missile could attack one last target before its fuel ran out by kamikaziing into it and detonating its 50-pound warhead.
The laser-projection heads-up display in front of Lewis depicted a sequence of squares angling off to the right, and so she steered the EB-1C Vampire until the aircraft icon was right inside the squares. The squares represented a “highway in the sky” route computed by the attack computers to get the bomber into perfect attack position, and a graphical bar chart told her what power to set to reach the optimal launch point on time, so she pushed the throttles up until the bars matched. “Excellent, Captain,” Daren said. “About ten seconds for a LADAR launch fix.”
At the proper time the Vampire’s LADAR, or laser radar, automatically activated. The LADAR used high- speed electronically scanned laser beams to “draw” a picture of everything in the sky, on the ground, or even in space for two hundred miles quickly and with very high precision, presenting it on their supercockpit displays in incredible detail. “LADAR down,” Daren said. “Lancelot missiles counting down…ten seconds…doors coming open…missile one away…missile two away…doors closed. Okay, we’re shifting targets to the launchers.”
The heads-up display shifted, and Lewis turned the bomber to follow. She could have easily let the computer fly the attack runs, but this was actual combat, not a test flight, and she was really enjoying herself. “Coming on release point…fifteen seconds…ten seconds, doors coming open…missile one away…missile two away, doors coming closed. Okay, Mugs, left turn back to the patrol orbit and I’ll take a look at the Wolverine’s target area. We’ll check our fuel state once we’re out of Iran.”
The Lancelot missiles, similar to Patriot PAC-3 ground-launched anti-aircraft missiles, steered themselves to an intercept “basket” using course and altitude information uploaded from the Vampire bomber moments before launch. The missile received course updates during its flight from brief bursts of the Vampire’s LADAR and from datalinks received from satellites and other attackers tracking the Shahab-3 missiles. Two seconds before reaching the intercept “basket,” a Ka-band pulse-Doppler radar in the nose of the Lancelot missile activated, immediately detected the Shahab-3s, and steered itself to a precision kill.
The Wolverine cruise missiles similarly steered themselves to their patrol area by navigation information from the Vampire bomber. Once in its patrol orbit, the missile activated its millimeter-wave radars and imaging infrared sensors and started transmitting detailed images of the target area. The millimeter-wave radars detected, evaluated, then precisely measured any hard metallic objects in the target area and compared the objects to a catalog of objects in its internal memory.
When it found an object it thought was a Shahab rocket launcher, it reported it to the Vampire crew. “We got a couple launchers,” Daren announced. He switched his supercockpit display to the imaging infrared picture. Sure enough, it was a transporter-erector-launcher, with the rocket erector cradle just being lowered and a reload vehicle maneuvering beside it, ready to load another rocket. On the other side of the launcher was a fuel truck, ready to refuel it. “Committing the Wolverine to attack.”
Daren entered commands into the missile control computers, and the Wolverine missile departed its patrol orbit and headed toward the launcher. It took about six minutes for the missile to reach the spot. As it overflew the launch site, it ejected several small canisters from one of its bomb bays, stabilized by a parachute. Each canister had an infrared sensor that detected and locked onto the heat from the launcher and service vehicles. At a pre- determined altitude above the ground the canisters detonated, releasing white-hot slugs of molten copper flying at the speed of sound that easily pierced the engine compartments of each vehicle, causing explosions and fires that quickly destroyed them. The Wolverine missile then turned and headed back to its patrol orbit to wait for more attack instructions.
Back in their patrol orbit over Iraq east of Kirkuk, Mace and Lewis checked their systems and fuel status. “AC’s in the green,” Margaret said. She was still hand-flying the aircraft, and Daren had to admit she was good — she was able to check her switches, her oxygen, and all of her instruments and still keep the Vampire flying rock-
