Damn, thought Vahid, another false alarm.
11
Iran
TURK WATCHED THE TRAIN OF TRIANGLES AS THEY flowed steadily from the northwest. They were two minutes from the target, traveling at nearly Mach 4, gliding with the momentum of the ship they’d launched from.
He looked up. Grease was sitting stone-faced next to him. The Israeli and the pilot in the front were silent, staring straight into the darkness. They were just over three hundred feet above the nearby slope, with the target area six miles away off the right wing.
“Keep the plane steady,” Turk said softly, picking up the small headset. “The words I say will have nothing to do with us, unless I address Grease directly. Grease, if you need me, tap on my leg. But don’t need me.”
He turned his attention back to the screen, hunching his head down to isolate himself from the others. He was used to distractions, used to splitting himself away from his immediate surroundings to concentrate, but this was a challenge even for him.
The small plane tucked up and down as it came across the mountain slope, buffeted by the wind and twitching with the pilot’s nervous hand. A light beep sounded in the headset.
“Ten seconds to acquisition range,” the computer told him.
A quick kick of doubt tweaked Turk’s stomach: You can’t do this. You haven’t trained properly. You will fail.
You are a failure.
Red letters flashed on the screen before him.
“Establish link,” Turk told the computer calmly.
Doubt and fear vanished with the words. The UAVs, still moving with the momentum of their initial launch and the gravity that pulled them to earth, came into his control in quick succession.
It wasn’t exactly control. It was more like strong influence. He could stop them or turn them away, goose them ahead or push them down, but for the most part now he was watching as the thirty-six aircraft, each the size of the sat phone sitting in his pocket, plummeted toward the air exchanger hidden in the cluster of rocks on the hillside.
Turk tapped his screen, bringing up the status window where he quickly checked the roster of aircraft. Two were flashing red—the monitors had detected problems. He tapped the names, opening windows with the details. The computer highlighted the difficulties. Both had abnormal heat sensors, suggesting their shields had failed. That would likely degrade the solid Teflon propellant, though with the engines not yet ignited, it was impossible to tell what the actual effect would be.
The most likely effect was incomplete propulsion—they’d lose power too soon to complete the full mission.
“Aircraft 8 and Aircraft 23 forward,” Turk said. “Eight and 23 to lead.”
“Calculating. Confirmed. Complying.”
Turk watched the Hydras shuffle. Moving the problematic aircraft to the front would give them the role of blowing through the grill in the air exchange; their engines wouldn’t matter, since they wouldn’t be used.
Until this moment the UAVs had been barely guided missiles, with steering vanes rather than wings. Now the computer popped the vanes into wings, extending them and banking the robot planes in a series of circles, separating them into mission clusters and slowing them to a more controllable and maneuverable speed.
More red on the screen. Aircraft 5 was not responding.
Lost. Turk mentally wrote it off. The UAV would dive into the hills, exploding on impact.
Tapping the target area on the sitmap, he looked at the image of the bunker provided by the NASA plane. A small flag appeared at the side; he tapped the flag, and was presented with a three-dimensional wire-frame drawing in the center of the screen. He enlarged it with his index finger.
“Compare infrastructure to known. State deviations,” he told the computer.
“Congruency, one hundred percent.”
Nothing had changed since the mission was drawn up. They were good to go.
The computer provided an assortment of data on the bunker. One set of numbers in particular caught his eye: there were 387 people in the facility.
Turk hadn’t expected that many; the briefing had indicated a skeleton crew of guards, at best, given the hour. The number seemed very high, but there was no time to double-check it.
The UAVs dropped in twos and threes from the oval path they’d been flying, diving for the air exchanger opening. They were subsonic but still moving incredibly fast, just over 550 knots on average. He saw them in his mind’s eye falling above his shoulder, shooting stars on a fateful mission.
“Proximity warning,” buzzed the computer. “Control unit moving out of range.”
Turk jerked his head up and yelled. “Pilot, get the plane back into the right parameters. Put us where I told you. Now!”
12
Iran, near Natanz
CAPTAIN VAHID CHECKED THE LONG DISTANCE RADAR scan on his MiG-29 a second time, making sure it was clean before contacting his controller.
“No contacts reported,” he said. “I am zero-two minutes from Natanz.”
“Copy, Shahin One. You have no contacts reported.”
It took a moment to process the controller’s simple acknowledgment. Obviously excited, his Farsi had a heavy southeastern accent, and the words jumbled together with the static in Vahid’s headset.
Natanz was under blackout conditions and the pilot couldn’t see the faintest shadow of the facility to his left as he approached. Nor could he see any sign of its several satellites, or the support facilities arrayed around the region. Shrouded in literal darkness, the vast infrastructure of the country’s nuclear arms program Vahid was tasked to protect was as much a mystery to him as it was to most Iranians.
Vahid didn’t think much of the program. To him, it was a needless waste of resources—the air force could be greatly expanded with a hundredth of the funds, the navy could gain more submarines, the army strengthened. All would provide Iran with weapons that could actually be used, as opposed to the bomb no one would dare unleash, lest the retaliation result in the country’s death sentence.
And there would be money left over for food and gasoline, in chronic short supply these past few years.
Vahid was careful not to share these opinions. Even Jalil Zandi, the legendary ace and great war hero, had been jailed twice for saying things that contradicted the ayatollahs.
The controller called back with further instructions, alerting Vahid that he was sending two of the other three MiGs that had scrambled after him farther north. The third would patrol around Natanz.
So it was definitely a wild-goose chase, Vahid thought. But at least he was flying. The MiG felt especially responsive tonight, as if anxious to prove her worth.
“You are to proceed east in the direction of the original sighting,” added the controller. “Other aircraft are being scrambled. Await further instructions.”
Acknowledging, Vahid shifted to the new course. The air force was using a lot of its monthly allotment of jet fuel tonight, he thought; they’d pay for it in the coming weeks.
Banking toward Nain, his long range radar picked up a contact. It appeared only momentarily, the radar confused by the scattered returns of the hills. Vahid changed modes but couldn’t get it back.
Still, there had to be something there: very possibly the light plane he had been scrambled to find. He altered course slightly and readjusted the MiG’s radar to wide search. Reaching for the mike button, he was about to tell the controller that he’d had a contact then thought better of it. Send out a false alarm and he would be quizzed for hours about why he failed to turn anything up. Better to wait until he had something more substantial than a momentary blip.