“What? What are we doing?”
“Sir, for the next two weeks the war will be fought without you. I have already raised Generals lhaffe, Ramadan, and Ben Abbas. They all reported they had explicit instructions from you on the conduct of the campaigns in North Africa, the Sinai, and southern Iran. I told them that the primary objective is not to counterattack but to hold on for the seven to ten days it will take us to assemble the Scorpion missile and deliver it to its target.”
“You told them about the Scorpion on a radio circuit, Ahmed?”
“No, Khalib. I only told them to hold on and give us the time. They do not need to know about the Scorpion, not yet. The fewer who know, the less chance of compromising the surprise of this operation. I do not want the Americans waiting for us.”
“The generals are smart and good fighters, but they are not coordinated without me. Rakish. I must return to the field for our defense. I need to—”
“Sir, wherever you are, the eyes of our enemies are watching, and they will continue to send their squads to kill you. If you believe that the armies are lost without you for fourteen days, imagine the war without you forever. This is how they think. General, and they are not stupid. The attack on the main bunker was not just a missile attack.”
Ahmed felt he had to say the next part, not out of pride but to convince the Khalib that the Coalition was after his head. “There were troops, dozens of them, dropped by parachute, probably from the airplane that we detected. We found their mobile vehicles in the desert. They penetrated the bunker perimeter and murdered our security troops. If the missiles didn’t kill you, the assassins would. There is nowhere that you are safe. General, not until the Scorpions are on their way. Until then you will do best by going aboard the Hegira and waiting. And while you wait you will get your strength back and recover from your wounds.”
Ahmed waited for Sihoud to digest his words, worried that the Khalib would veto the plan — for that matter, so would he had he sat in Sihoud’s place.
But there was no answer from the aft seat.
Lt. Joe Galvin flipped through the tactical attack plan binder, a stenopad-sized flip chart strapped to his thigh, and searched through the alphanumeric codes, knowing that he’d just been screwed.
The letters sierra delta foxtrot had been transmitted by the air boss just a few seconds before, and Galvin knew the code transmission meant their mission was being changed. For the tenth time in this war, Galvin had felt like turning off the radio after his F-14 Tomcat fighter lifted off the deck of the Reagan; at least that way the brass would not be able to redirect his missions in flight. But as soon as the thought had formed Galvin stifled it. What good was a fighter if it couldn’t be redirected in mid-flight — little better than a mindless bullet. And if fighter pilots wanted to be replaced by robotic cruise missiles, they could all keep thinking like Galvin had been before.
Finally the letters sdf stared up at him from the tactical plan page, large block letters defining the code as close on BOGEY, ESTABLISH CONTACT, AND FORCE TO LAND. WEAPON RELEASE PROHIBITED EXCEPT IN RESPONSE TO HOSTILE FIRE.
“Well, Giraffe, looks like a small change in our rules of engagement,” Galvin called.
“Let me guess,” the radar intercept officer called on Galvin’s headset. “Return to the ship and forget about it.”
Galvin was almost able to see the sour look on his RIO’s face. Eugene Fredericks, radio handle Giraffe, was a sarcastic, witty soul, tall and gawky, earning him his less-than-macho moniker; it seemed even worse in contrast to Galvin’s own handle, tailback, taken from his days on the 1988 Army-kicking Annapolis team.
“Worse,” Galvin replied. “We’re ordered to close on the guy and force him to land.”
“Yeah, right. I see what you mean. What keeps the SOB from shooting at us?”
“Absolute fear of the United States Navy?”
“We’re dead.”
“Give me an intercept vector and call it out to Vinny.”
“Roger. We’ll take his seven o’clock, Vinny his five.”
Ahmed looked to the east, knowing dawn was coming, minutes away. The rendezvous point was less than twenty minutes ahead. He had started to think about the message to the Hegira, wondering if the young airman had gotten the transmission through, and if he did, if the submarine’s captain received it and believed it.
The alarm indicator sounded sudden and shrill in the whisper-quiet cockpit. The central video screen dropped the images of the navigation display and flashed up a tactical view of the Firestar in screen-center with two approaching hostile aircraft astern.
Four flashing screen annunciators proclaimed rear facing N16 missiles armed. The range to the incoming aircraft was fifty kilometers, close but in range of the N16 radar-homing antiair missiles. The computer was seconds away from firing the missiles when Ahmed overrode the command.
There were times when computers were much too simple and linear, he thought.
The tactical screen had analyzed the incoming radars and shown them to be coming from F-14s, the American fighters called Tomcats. Tomcats were old, the first models designed in the 1970s. The Shah of Iran had bought several dozen for the modernization of his squadrons, and Ahmed, then a captain, had flown the jet for a year before the revolution. It was big and heavy, designed for the demanding duties of carrier landings for the U.S. Navy. As an air force jet it was at best a compromise. Against a computer-controlled Firestar, it was barely a threat — at least against a healthy well-maintained Firestar that didn’t throw turbine blades in the middle of an encounter, blowing itself out of the air before an enemy missile got anywhere close.
The critical fact was that these jets were navy aircraft, not air force Eagles flying out of Cyprus but carrier-based fighters, and the only carrier in the Mediterranean at the moment was the Reagan off Libya, over 2,000 kilometers west. And that made no sense. Ahmed expected the jets to have fired their medium-range air-to-air missiles by now, and the ships of the carrier task force should have fired long-range surface-to-air missiles long ago. Further, the F-14s should have approached from ahead, or from the north or south. For them to come in from behind him was not a missile-attack tactic but a dogfighting tactic. They had wasted valuable time in this maneuver, time they would not have taken if they were intent on downing the Firestar.
Ahmed overrode the computer’s impulse to fire the rear-facing N16 missiles. In the moment before he reached a conclusion he felt a gnawing annoyance that the Firestar had been detected at all by the Americans.
The electronic stealth systems had failed, or the Americans had developed a countermeasure.
But he was certain that there was no countermeasure for the electronic-warfare pod slung under the Firestar’s nose.
The tactical display updated, basing its guesses on intercepted radar signals from the F-14s. The jets were closing steadily, edging forward cautiously instead of screaming in at him. Ahmed considered one last time the idea of attacking the fighters, then dismissed it. More jets would come from the carrier, as well as a score of missiles, and if the Firestar’s detection-avoidance systems had failed, the Americans could find him and blow him out of the sky by the application of overwhelming force and numbers — he and Sihoud were only one jet against an entire carrier full of F-14s. And this close to the rendezvous point, he had no time for taking on the Americans.
The F-14s were now thirty kilometers astern. Ahmed’s engines were throttled down to sixty percent power, his speed lowered from the maximum to time their arrival at the rendezvous point. He could spool up the turbines and outrun the fighters, but that would only delay the confrontation. Delay would help if he could get to the rendezvous point with the F-14s far behind.