"Sir… is there any evidence that the Iranians have initiated NBC warfare?"
"Not yet." Garrett's voice was grim. "We won't know for a while. But… that's why you must knock out White Scimitar as well. Before they move the weapons stored there. Before they decide to use them. Understood?"
"Yes, sir."
"Captain, carry out your orders."
"Aye aye, sir."
The control room remained silent for a long moment. Every man there had heard the orders and knew what was at stake.
"Weapons Officer," Stewart ordered. "Prepare T-LAMs for launch."
"Prepare T-LAMs for launch. Aye aye, sir." Commander Hawking, if he was still alive, would have to wait.
The SSGN Ohio had a war to fight.
Hawking had determined that he had about an hour left to live. He had that much air left in his reserve tank, which he was already breathing through his mask.
Damn it, Ohio should have realized he'd fallen behind. They'd made it past the Iranian ASW cordon. Why hadn't Ohio swung back to find him and pick him up?
One reason, he concluded, was the fact that he wasn't bobbing around on the surface right now in his cockpit module, broadcasting an emergency distress signal. And the Manta's designers had not included a sonar transponder to pinpoint the sunken fighter sub's position.
Well, he could remedy that. Reaching down, he pulled his survival knife from its sheath. With the rounded end of the handle, he began pounding on the canopy above his head. Thumpthumpthump. Thump-thump-thump. Thumpthumpthump.
Three fast, three slow, three fast. SOS.
He hoped someone was out there listening.
It had taken several minutes to download the targeting data from the TMPC, or Theater Mission Planning Center, at Norfolk, Virginia. Now, however, the missile tube hatches, aligned in two long rows behind the ASDS on Ohio's aft deck, were swinging open, two by two.
"Weapons Officer," Stewart said quietly. "Prosecute the attack."
"Prosecute attack, aye aye, sir."
The W.O. pressed a button on the BSY-1 Weapons System console.
The Tomahawk Land Attack Missile — TLAM — was Ohio's primary weapon, replacing the Trident nukes she'd originally been designed to carry. The first missile burst upward out of the water, rocket engine firing; Stewart and the entire control room crew watched through the periscope's link with the TV monitor.
For the first few seconds of flight the missile rose swiftly on its rocket booster. Then the booster fell away, the wings and tail deployed, the turbofan intake opened, and the weapon was converted in mid-flight into an air-breathing cruise missile. Skimming the wave tops at an altitude of just a hundred feet, the Tomahawk flew north at 500 knots.
Thirty seconds later the second missile left Ohio's number three launch tube.
Ohio's war against Iran had now truly begun.
Normally, a Tomahawk strike of this scale against a hostile country would have been carefully timed so that all missiles arrived over their respective targets at about the same time. The missiles would also be deployed in at least two successive waves, the first to destroy radars and communications centers, the second to hit the targets defended by those systems.
In this case, however, the coordination of the strike was less important than its urgency. Bahrain was under sustained ballistic missile attack. The Shahab launchers— and White Scimitar — had the highest attack priority.
Following Terrain Contour Mapping programming, or Tercom, the first T-LAM went feet-dry over the Iranian coast near Kuh-e Namak, homing on a cluster of GAZ launchers identified by the SEALs of Delta Two. The terminal phase of its flight was controlled by a relatively new guidance system called Digital Scene Matching, or DSMAC, matching elements of the terrain as viewed through a camera in the T-LAM's nose with images stored in memory. Missile launchers, their launch rails already elevated to the vertical, surrounded by fueling and logistical vehicles, were relatively easy to find and identify.
The first T-LAM was of the variant known as T-LAM-D. Rather than the half-ton high explosive warhead of the conventional T-LAM-C, it carried a dispenser holding 166 BLU-97/B submunitions. Panels on either side of the Tomahawk blew out, and as it streaked low across the valley sheltering the Iranian missile launchers, it released a cloud of high-explosive bomblets. These had been designed to take out aircraft on runways by shredding their thin skins and vulnerable fuel tanks with clouds of shrapnel blasting down out of the air overhead, but they worked equally well against ground vehicles, personnel, and other soft targets.
Ballistic missiles, with their need to keep structural weight low in favor of higher fuel and payload weights, have no armor to speak of and were particularly vulnerable to this type of attack. Fuel and liquid oxygen tanks ruptured, as did the tanks of nearby fuel trucks. Delicate electronics and navigational systems were damaged, and guidance stabilizers punctured. It took remarkably little to damage a missile enough to prevent its launch.
More and more submarine-launched T-LAMs were now in the air. Two minutes after the first strike over Kuh-e Narak, a second T-LAM arrived, and then a third. Radar vans parked on a nearby hilltop were destroyed, as was a convoy of fuel trucks.
And still the cruise missiles kept coming.
At White Scimitar, in the valley above Bandar-e Charak, a T-LAM flew up the valley from the east, bypassing the main base and zeroing in on the leftmost of the eight tunnel entrances. The first missile was carrying special penetrator munitions to rip open the steel doors. The second T-LAM, arriving thirty seconds after the penetrator round, flew through the smoking hole and into the garage-sized tunnel standing open beyond. Half a ton of conventional high explosives lifted a portion of the mountain from inside and brought it smashing down in a fury of destruction.
The main base was taken out later by a T-LAM-D. For thirty minutes, however, missile after missile slammed into the tunnel complex higher up the valley, first opening, then sealing, the tunnels into the face of the cliff.
Somewhere beneath the crumbled face of a mountain lay Iran's first five nuclear warheads.
For her first strike, Ohio launched eighty-two T-LAMs in various configurations, following the operational profile downloaded from the TMPC. Six of these failed in one way or another; two remained in their launch tubes, three lost guidance en route to their targets, and one was shot down by antiaircraft batteries outside of Bandar Abbas.
Within thirty minutes Iran's ballistic missile launch infrastructure throughout the southern district had been crippled, and much of their conventional military had been badly hurt as well.
As for Iran's attack on the Fifth Fleet, by the time the T-LAMs began falling on the launch vehicles, twelve more Shahab-2 missiles were airborne and heading south. The attack would have been more successful had the Iranians been able to launch a larger number of missiles simultaneously, but schedules were still dependent on too many variables — including both luck and simple delays in communications — and so Iran's missile salvo was somewhat ragged.
Of seventeen missiles put into the air, twelve were intercepted by PAC-3 counterstrikes and destroyed several miles out at sea. Another was hit by a salvo of Standard Missile launches from the Aegis Cruiser Antietam, operating off Manama.