For the first part of the flight, Gadget had little to do other than fly his proscribed route, which took his aircraft through known radar gaps and around air defense nodes such as Natanz and Isfahan. But in the rear seat, Pacer was busy enough to be sweating inside his flight suit. The Electronic Warfare Officer was monitoring all of the electronic equipment on board the F-15I that sniffed the airwaves for threats. All of the pilots and EWOs on this mission had been briefed about the viruses inserted into the Iranian defense network and the expected impact. If all went according to plan, the potent Iranian network would be severely degraded. However, everyone knew that operations as large as Block G rarely went according to plan. So Pacer never lifted his eyes off of the two key flat panel displays that summarized what the instruments on the plane were detecting. They had 33 minutes of flying from Point Delta until they could start their initial attack run, along with two other F-15Is, against three tunnel entrances in the hills just to the northwest of the Jajrud River valley that ran through the middle of Parchin.
As they flew over Iran, Pacer picked up radar frequencies being emitted from all directions surrounding the plane. Most of the signals were weak, indicating that the source was off in the distance — too far away to pose a threat to his plane. The signals would come alive for ten to twenty seconds and then go silent, only to be replaced by signals generated by different radar transmitters. This was the networked search pattern that had been developed around the world as a defensive measure against the type of sophisticated anti-radar missiles now being used by the IAF.
In the distance, Gadget could see the tracers of anti-aircraft artillery — most being the 23 millimeter rounds of dozens of ZU-23 gun emplacements — arcing through the dark sky. The Iranian air defenses were no longer sleeping. Pacer noticed that the number of radar emissions he was picking up seemed to be declining as they progressed. He was not sure if this was because they were moving away from the big defense nodes at Arak, Natanz and Isfahan or if radar transmitters were being destroyed by IAF action.
What Pacer didn’t know was that the Block protocol now inside the Iranian air defense network was effectively neutering the ability of Iran’s network of radars to do their job. Radars located in the northern defense sector — those along the coast line north of Tehran and along the borders of Azerbaijan — were left intact and operating normally. Those radars were sending information about aircraft attacking from the Caspian Sea to their operators. But the radars operating in the central and southern defense sectors — the radars protecting the heart of the Iranian nuclear program — had been compromised. These radars were now programmed to ignore any target that was emitting a specific code, and every IAF warplane now over Iran was emitting that coded signal. Worse, blips were showing up on the screens of the Iranian operators that showed aircraft flying from north to south. These were manufactured blips — simply lines of software code — that resulted in surface to air missiles shooting at ghost images and fighters being vectored toward Tehran and the airspace north of the city.
Around the center part of the nation, IAF aircraft struck electrical substations and major power lines. The lights were going out in central Iran.
But there were many Iranian officers who didn’t believe the information being fed to them. They maintained their discipline and kept their defense assets close to home, avoiding the temptation to send fighters to the north. The smarter officers powered up mobile radar units and ordered their operators not to connect to the central defense network. Even though the Tor radar units had been destroyed, the major defense points had other mobile radar units, perhaps not as sophisticated as the Tor units, but still powerful enough to locate and track aircraft. These units allowed smart officers to order “snapshots,” or surface to air missile launches toward an area of the sky where they had enough reason to believe that an enemy plane was passing through. This was the attack they had been preparing for over many years and there was no point in husbanding available missiles.
Gadget and Pacer continued on. In the distance they could occasionally see the track of a surface to air missile headed skyward. These were far away, but every missile track headed skyward still caused Gadget’s heart rate to elevate slightly. About forty kilometers away from the target, the planes broke radio silence and began to coordinate their approaches. Flying ahead of Gadget’s plane, the four F-15Cs each fired a single AGM-88E HARM missile and dropped a single Spice 1000 flying bomb. The Spice bombs had fixed targets pre-programmed, which included two communication and command nodes, the local electrical sub-station and an IRGC command bunker. The model E HARMs, the most advanced version of the missile, each began a search pattern, their internal computers set up with a hierarchy of targets. One missile homed in on the target acquisition radar of a Tor M-1 that was broadcasting at 4.85 gigahertz. The four F-15Cs then turned away from the target area to assume a Combat Air Patrol pattern, their recently upgraded APG-63v3 AESA radars taking turns searching for enemy aircraft.
Along with two other F-15Is, Gadget maneuvered to set himself up for his assigned bomb run on one of the three north-facing tunnel doors. His Tunnel Defeat system was now communicating with the two other F-15I Ra’ams. Pacer armed the first of two BLU-121B bombs underneath the fuselage. Over the Parchin site, “golden BBs” crisscrossed the valley. Gadget swallowed, using all his willpower to concentrate on the mission at hand. I will not fail now. Not now. The countless training missions were for this moment. The instinct to flee in the face of danger never disappears, but it can be made to assume a subservient role, the mind focusing on known tasks instead of unknown danger.
The approach was perfect and Gadget’s ordnance released on the fourth and final tone he heard in his ear. The bomb flew horizontally through the concrete and steel blast door protecting the tunnel and penetrated 52 meters into the tunnel when it detonated at the same moment as two other BLU-121Bs that had been delivered into the other two tunnel entrances. The three blast waves converged to destroy an underground chamber that contained a factory for building high-explosive lenses — the lenses that are the key to imploding nuclear weapons.
Gadget pulled his nose around to the left and applied power to egress from the tunnel attack. Around him, F-16I Sufas were delivering their ordnance, including several Delilah missiles, on the facilities making up the Parchin base. Gadget looked to his right. He finally saw what he was expecting: the blinking infrared beacon of another F-15I, one of his partners in the tunnel attack. That plane formed up on his wing. The third F-15I that had just attacked the tunnel climbed and turned away from Parchin. Its role at this target was over and it now had two Spice 2000 bombs — the larger cousins of the Spice 1000 — left to send on their way toward the Chinese-occupied cyber warfare center at Tehran University. One of the F-15Cs joined up with that Ra’am to accompany it as it dropped its two bombs and then headed home.
Gadget and his new wingman flew in a wide circle and came back around to line up on the Jajrud River heading due north. Twelve kilometers in front of them was the face of the Mamlo Dam. The Mamlo was a massive earthen dam across the Jajrud that formed a large lake.
The Mamlo was one of the large number of dams in Iran that collectively generate about five percent of the electrical power consumed by the country. This particular dam provided all of the electricity used by the researchers at Parchin and for that reason it had made the target list for Block G. Both Gadget and his wingman had a single BLU-121B left hanging beneath their planes. This would not be a difficult run, the main skill being that the backseat EWO in each plane needed to illuminate the right spot on the dam’s face with their targeting laser. With that accomplished, each of the two thermobaric bombs would detonate at the precise spot inside the dam that physicists and engineers had calculated would cause catastrophic failure.