Of the remaining four, three missed their CEP of six hundred yards by a wide — in two cases a very wide— margin, two coming down in the sea, and the third in the Saudi desert fifty miles to the southwest.
The final Shahab missile survived a near miss by two Patriot PAC-3s, breaking into pieces that sprayed down across northern Bahrain. The warhead, as it happened, remained intact, striking a dock in Juffair. The detonation of a ton of high explosives leveled three warehouses and a number of smaller buildings. Fragments struck the USS Carl Vinson, a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier in the process of getting under way several hundred yards from the blast. Damage to the carrier was light, and there were no casualties.
Luck — or perhaps the divine protection of Allah— were riding this time with the U.S. Navy.
His arm was beyond tired, but Hawking kept hammering out his SOS. He was very nearly out of air anyway. It wouldn't be much longer now.
He was startled, then, when he heard a loud and urgent thumping on the Manta's canopy. Opening his eyes and looking up, he saw the face of a diver, encased in a swim mask, looking down at him.
Saved…
Using emergency manual controls on the exterior of the Manta, the two SEALs cracked his canopy, allowing the cockpit to flood. Hawking gulped down a last, thin breath and held it, fighting against panic as the water swiftly rose. Seconds later the canopy opened wide and one of the SEALs pressed a mask against his face. He gulped down a sweet lungful of air. The SEALs helped him unhook his harness and swim free, an emergency air bottle clutched at his side.
On the last of his air, and with the SEALs on either side, he swam twenty yards, not to the Ohio, as he'd expected, but the ASDS, hovering a few feet off the muddy bottom. Hawking wouldn't learn until later that Captain Stewart, during a pause in the T-LAM launch series, had dispatched Mayhew and Tangretti on board the ASDS, using the craft's side-looking sonar to locate the sunken Manta.
What the media would later dub the War of the Missiles, meanwhile, continued.
The pause in the launch process had been to allow satellite reconnaissance of the various targets, and to give Ohio a chance to update the targeting data through her Command and Control System — CCS Tac Mark 2. Initial imaging showed a high degree of success in the first strikes, and also revealed new possible targets.
The second wave of launches began at just past 0815 hours, with Ohio releasing the rest of her T-LAM missiles. She was joined in the attack by the USS Pittsburgh, then on station in the Gulf of Oman outside the Straits of Hormuz. The Pittsburgh, a Flight II boat, carried fifteen T-LAMs in her VLS — Vertical Launch System — tubes, and twelve more that could be fired through her torpedo tubes. Where Ohio's targets were predominantly the launch platforms for the Shahab-2 missiles, Pittsburgh's attentions were directed primarily against naval facilities around Bandar Abbas, and to opening several keyholes within the peirmeter of Iran's air defense radar network. This last was important because U.S. military aircraft were already on the way with their own weapons, including F-117 strike fighters based in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and B-2 long-range bombers en route from Whitman Air Force Base in Missouri.
By the time the first U.S. aircraft arrived in Iranian airspace, there would be little left of her air defense radar or SAM systems.
Four of the first-wave Tomahawks launched from the Ohio remained in the air, en route to their targets. The T-LAM-C had a range of over seven hundred nautical miles. Flying complex paths designed to avoid the Iranian radar net, and hugging the rugged terrain as they crossed the Zagros Mountains, they were aimed at two different targets, which, by a straight-line path, lay 470 and 650 miles to the north. The nearer was an underground site at Esfahan, known to be a center for uranium enrichment.
The farther of the two was a site in downtown Tehran….
Admiral Mehdi Baba-Janzadeh was thinking about messages.
He was sitting in his office on the sixth floor of the Defense Ministry building in downtown Tehran, leaning back in his padded chair and sipping strong tea. What messages, he wondered, had this debacle delivered to the world?
Operation Bold Fire had been intended to deliver a very specific message to the Islamic world in particular. Iran is strong. Iran can defy the hated West. Iran is the new leader of militant world Islam. Iran carries the banner that will unite Islam and bring the West to its knees.
Reports from Bandar Abbas were fragmentary at best, but the mere fact that almost all communications with the south had been interrupted alone delivered a message to Tehran. The strike against the Fifth Fleet had not gone according to plan… and the Americans were striking back. Hard.
Minutes before, Baba-Janzadeh had completed a difficult phone conversation with the Supreme Leader. Surrender now. Minimize the damage, and save what you can. Perhaps you can still head off this nightmare….
The Americans had a longer reach than any of Iran's military leadership had been willing to credit.
The first of the last two T-LAMs, its fuel nearly spent, smashed into the Defense Ministry's eighth floor. The half-ton warhead detonated an instant later, blowing out the entire floor and bringing down the upper half of the structure in a shower of debris.
The second T-LAM struck thirty seconds later, as the avalanche continued, plunging into the crumbling structure at street level and completing the destruction.
Message delivered…
EPILOGUE
ST2 Roger Caswell walked into the TGI Friday's, an attractive young woman on his arm. "Kettering party?" he asked the hostess.
"Ah!" she said. "The noisy ones! This way, please."
It was Doc Kettering's birthday, and a number of the members of Ohio's crew had gotten together to take him out to dinner. Plans included dinner here, followed by the requisite bar-crawling afterward into the wee hours.
Ohio had returned from her Gulf deployment three weeks earlier, her missile stores expended, to a tumultuous welcome at Bremerton Navy Yard. Over the next week, crew transition had taken place. It had been decided that the old Blue and Gold submarine crew system employed on board U.S. boomers would be retained in Ohio's new incarnation. Caswell and his shipmates were part of the Blue Crew. Gold Crew had now taken over, and was busily outfitting her for her next deployment.
Which didn't mean Blue Crew was off the hook, of course. As always for submarine crews, there was training. And practice. And more training. And more practice.
But the five of them — Caswell, Kettering, Moone, Jakowiac, and Dobbs — had weekend liberty, beginning at 1700 hours that afternoon. There would be no studies tonight.
A big table had been set aside for the Kettering party. Moonie and Jak both had girlfriends along, and Dobbs had brought his wife. A special guest had come along as well, his officer's rank set aside for the evening. Everyone was in civilian clothing, so what did it matter? Gary Hawking — honorary submariner — had been enthusiastically welcomed when he'd asked if he could join them.