“Shiraz, Specter Five. Repeat status.”
“Alert three. This is not a drill. Confirm.”
The pilot, a veteran of over 4,000 hours in the single seat of the MiG-29, felt his face flush. This status meant war. “Specter Five. Alert three. No drill. Target eagles?” He was asking if Iran was at war with America.
“Negative. Assume defensive posture. Cleared to engage any penetration.”
“Request vector,” the pilot stated to his ground controller.
There was a pause as the ground controller communicated with the nearby radar station at Siraf. “Vector one-nine-zero for bogey in civil lanes at angels three-four on course two-seven-five. Distance one-twenty. One-two-zero. Speed seven-three-eight. Confirm.”
“One-nine-zero to angels three-four at one-two-zero. Cleared to engage?”
“Negative. Visual escort. Await further orders.”
“Specter Five, on seek.” The pilot turned his nose to the south and pushed his throttles forward through military power until his afterburners kicked in. Within seconds his speed was approaching 600 knots and his plane was climbing to 35,000 feet. Once at altitude, he throttled off his afterburners. He kept his search radar off until he closed the range. He only wanted to turn on the radar if the bogey he was chasing had no navigation lights on.
At its speed, the MiG closed the distance to the Boeing in under seven minutes. The night was crystal clear and the pilot easily spotted the blinking red navigation lights of the Boeing against the forest of stars from thirty kilometers away. The target was exactly where he expected. The Iranian pilot came in behind the Boeing and slowly descended until he was about a hundred feet above his target and trailing about a quarter mile behind and to the north of it. He turned on his forward-looking infrared and locked the target finder onto the Boeing jet flying in front of him.
The pilot’s mind was racing as he thought through what was happening. He was now shadowing a cargo plane on a standard commercial flight while somewhere over Iran war was underway. He was frustrated. “Positive bogey identification,” he reported to his ground controller. “Civil aviation. Boeing seven-three-seven or Airbus three-twenty class.”
“Hold position,” came the reply.
The MiG continued behind the Boeing for another two minutes. The pilot was antsy, sure that he was missing the chance to defend his country — his skills and training going to waste following a civilian plane high over the Persian Gulf. “Request alternate vector,” he finally asked.
His timing was prescient. His ground controller at Shiraz was about to contact him. “We have lost contact with Kilo station.” The controller was referring to the early warning radar at Kish Island. “We need visual fly by. Alter to course one-one-zero. Cleared to deck on VFR. Distance three-eight-five kilometers. Confirm.”
The pilot was ecstatic. If Kish Island was under attack, he would be headed into the fray. “Course one-ten to deck. Specter Five disengaging.” The pilot turned off his forward-looking infrared sensor. He pulled his joystick to the left, eager to turn around and head back to the southeast toward Kish Island, but careful to keep his plane clear of the vortices created by the Boeing’s two large engines. As the nose of the MiG turned to the south, the pilot looked back at the cargo plane one last time to make sure he was clear of the bigger plane’s turbulence. As he looked at the Boeing, its bottom navigation beacon flashed. The flash of red light reflected off something that caught the pilot’s eye. He was certain he had seen something fall away from the plane.
“Turning back on bogey. Heavy G,” said the pilot instinctively into his radio. He began his anti-G straining maneuver as he rotated his stick back to the right and applied power to quickly close the distance to several hundred meters. He turned on his infrared sensor and locked it on the cargo plane. What he saw shocked him. On the flat panel display he could see a door open underneath the Boeing. He watched as two Spice 1000 bombs slid out the doorway, their wings immediately deploying. The pilot got on his radio. “Bogey is hostile, not civil. Repeat hostile. Engaging target.”
The pilot did not wait for authorization. He had found the war. He flipped a switch on the left side of the cockpit that activated his GSh-30-1 cannon in his left wing mount. “Cannon hot,” he said into the radio. He raised the nose of his warplane and squeezed the trigger. Twenty rounds fired toward the Boeing’s fuselage; each round held a small incendiary explosive charge. Every third projectile fired was a tracer round, its path clearly illuminated in the dark sky. The first six rounds were below the Boeing’s fuselage and the pilot pulled back just slightly on the joystick to adjust his fire. The next rounds cut into the fuselage of the Boeing, penetrating its thin aluminum skin effortlessly and detonating just inside the fuselage. The third round that entered the plane collided with a MSOV and caused one of its runway munitions to detonate. Within a fraction of a second, the remaining submunitions inside the MSOV detonated and the explosions caused the remaining Spice 1000 bombs to detonate. The MiG pilot reflexively pushed his stick down and right as he prayed to survive the rapidly expanding fireball in front of him. He opened his eyes after a few seconds and realized that he was still flying, the disintegrating Boeing now behind him. Allah had been with him.
“Splash one. Splash one. Turning to Kilo.” His voice was calm, the years of training paying off.
64 — Through Point Delta
By the time the attack aircraft of the IAF were passing over Point Delta — the airspace above the Dehloran radar site — Fordow and Natanz were in already in ruins. Esther’s Sling had worked as Amit Margolis had envisioned it years before. But three pilots who had each been personally recruited by Margolis were now dead.
Now Block G turned to the conventional firepower of the Israeli Air Force. In the lead through Point Delta were the F-16 and F-15 aircraft operating in the SEAD configuration. The planes split into three main groups, one heading north toward the key targets in and around Arak and Tehran, one heading straight in for targets in and around Isfahan and the other turning toward the south for military targets between Isfahan and the Persian Gulf.
Inside the Iranian air defense network, software code written by programmers of Unit 8200 was busy issuing commands that were certainly not authorized. The software sought out the computer chips inside the command computers of the 29 Iranian Tor M-1E missile batteries that were the primary concern of the Olympus planners. The integrated circuit chips were receptive to the command — they were the same chips that Amit Margolis had exchanged in a hotel room next to the Shanghai Airport years earlier. The long code word — a series of digits and letters — activated an embedded command that caused the mobile target acquisition radars of each battery to broadcast a constant signal at 4.85 gigahertz. Nothing inside the radar control vehicles alerted the operators to the broadcast.
As planes reached designated spots that were an average range of forty miles from the primary targets of the IAF, SEAD aircraft launched AGM-88D HARM anti-radar missiles. In addition to their standard search protocols, each missile was programmed to find the 4.85 gigahertz signal being broadcast by the Tor M-1 batteries and home in on it. The radars that controlled the Tor batteries were among the first targets destroyed by the wave of Israeli aircraft now flying over Iran.
Behind the SEAD aircraft, fifty-two F-16I and twenty-four F-15I fighter-bombers followed. These aircraft had all refueled over the Saudi desert before forming in echelon for the entry into Iran through Point Delta. The leading F-15I was flown by Gadget, who, along with four other F-15Is, six F-16Is and four F-15Cs, had the longest to fly to strike their target this night. The group of fifteen warplanes were headed for the military complex known at Parchin that was about 24 miles southeast of downtown Tehran. Parchin was the center of Iranian research and development of both nuclear reaction initiators and high explosive lens for implosion weapons.