“Very well.” The sector commander terminated the connection with an angry stab. “Is Ankara on the line yet?” he thundered.
“Standing by, sir.”
“This is Mat,” a voice responded. The sector commander knew that Mat, Turkish for “checkmate,” was the operations officer for the military chief of staff. “We are monitoring your radar contact, and the liaison officer at Nahla has messaged us saying that you contacted them for coordination and identification and they say it is not one of theirs. Recommendation?”
“Engage immediately, sir.”
“Stand by.” Those two damned dreaded words…but moments later: “We concur, Kamyan. Engage as directed. Out.”
“Kamyan copies, engaged as directed. Kamyan out.” The sector commander changed to his tactical channeclass="underline" “Ustura, this is Kamyan, engage as directed.”
“Ustura copies, engage as directed. Ustura out.” The tactical director hung up the phone. “We’ve been ordered to engage as directed,” he announced. “Any change in target path or altitude? Any response to our broadcasts?”
“No, sir.”
“Very well. Engage.”
“I copy ‘engage.’” The tactical control officer reached up, lifted a red-colored cover, and pressed a large red button, which activated a Klaxon throughout the four Patriot line batteries spread throughout southeastern Turkey. Each line battery consisted of four Patriot platoons, each with one Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) launcher with sixteen missiles, plus another sixteen missiles ready to load. “Engage.”
“I copy ‘engage,’” the Tactical Control Assistant repeated. He checked the target’s location with the battalion’s deployed Patriot batteries, picked the closest one to the hostile, and punched the communications button to that battery. “Ustura Two, Ustura Two, this is Ustura, operate, operate, operate.”
“Two copies ‘operate.’” There was a brief pause, and then the second firing battery’s status report changed from “standby” to “operate,” meaning the battery’s missiles were ready to fire. “Second Battery reports status is ‘operate,’ ready to engage.”
“Acknowledged.” The tactical control officer kept on mashing the warning horn as he watched his computer readouts. The attack was all controlled by computer from here on out—the humans could do nothing but shut it off if they desired. Moments later, the Engagement Control Computer reported that it had designated one of the platoons located west of the mountain town of Beytussebap to engage. “Fifth Platoon has been activated…missile one away.” Four seconds later: “Missile two away. Radar is active.”
Traveling at over three thousand miles per hour, the Patriot missiles needed less than six seconds to reach their prey. “Missile one direct hit, sir,” the Tactical Control Assistant reported. Moments later: “Missile two engaging a second target, sir!”
“A second target?”
“Yes, sir. Same altitude, rapidly decreasing airspeed…direct hit on second hostile, sir!”
“There were two aircraft out there?” the tactical director mused aloud. “Could they have been flying in formation?”
“Possible, sir,” the tactical control officer responded. “But why?”
The tactical director shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense, but whatever they were, we got them. It could have been debris from the first hit.”
“It looked very large, sir, like a second aircraft.”
“Well, whatever it was, we got the merde nonetheless. Good work, everyone. Those two targets were south of the border but in the security buffer, yes?”
“Actually, sir, for a brief moment it was in Turkish airspace, no more than a few miles, but definitely north of the border.”
“A good kill, then.” The tactical director picked up another phone linked to the Jandarma headquarters in Diyarbakir, where someone would be responsible for organizing a search party for wreckage, casualties, and evidence. “Curuk, this is Ustura, we have engaged and destroyed a hostile aircraft. Transmitting target intercept coordinates now.”
“That sure didn’t take them long,” Jon Masters said. He was in the Tank’s observation room on the second floor, watching the engagement on his laptop. “Two minutes from when we changed the target altitude to shoot-down. That’s fast.”
“We might not have brought the false target down fast enough…they might have seen the target even after the first Patriot ‘hit,’” Patrick McLanahan said.
“I was trying to simulate debris by keeping the image up for another few seconds,” Jon said. “I slowed it way down.”
“Let’s hope they think they hit them both,” Patrick said. “Okay, so we know that the Turks moved their Patriots closer to the Iraqi border, and we know they mean business—they won’t hesitate to open fire, even on something as small as a Predator or Flight-Hawk.”
“Or a netrusion false target,” Jon Masters said happily. “We were easily able to hack into the Patriot system’s engagement control system and plant a UAV-size target into their system. As soon as we adjusted the false target’s altitude up high enough, they reacted as if it was a real hostile.”
“When they go out there and don’t find any debris, they’ll be curious and on guard next time,” Patrick said. “What else do we know from this engagement?”
“We also know that they can see and engage as close as one thousand feet aboveground,” Jon said. “That’s pretty good in fairly rough terrain. They may have modified the Patriot’s radar to give it a better de-clutter and low-altitude detection ability.”
“Let’s hope that’s all they’ve done,” Patrick said. He touched an intercom button: “Did you see the engagement, Colonel?”
“Affirmative,” Wilhelm replied. “So the Turks did move their Patriots west. I’ll notify division. But I still don’t think Turkey will invade Iraq. We should be passing them all the intel we have on PKK movements, reassure them that our troops and the Iraqis aren’t going to hit back, and let the crisis level cool down.”
The squad of eight Iraqi Kurd guerrilla fighters had used sniper team tactics—self-taught by reading books, using the Internet, and learning information passed down to them by veterans—to make their way to their target: crawling for dozens of miles sometimes inches at a time, never rising up past knee height for any reason; changing camouflage on their clothing every time the terrain changed; being careful to erase any signs of their presence as they dragged heavy packs and rocket-propelled grenade launcher tubes behind them.
One of the fighters, a former police officer from Irbil named Sadoon Salih, broke off a piece of a fig candy bar, tapped the boot of the person ahead of him, and held it out. “Last piece, Commander,” he whispered. The person made a “quiet” motion back at him—not with her left hand, but with a rakelike appliance attached to her wrist where a hand would normally be. Then the rake averted, open-handed, and the fighter dropped the candy into it. She nodded her thanks and kept moving.
They had brought food and water for only five days on this reconnaissance patrol, but with all the activity in the area she had decided to stay out. The food they brought ran out three days ago. They had cut back their daily rations to absurdly low levels and had begun subsisting on food they found in the field—berries, roots, and insects, with an occasional handout from a sympathetic farmer or herdsman they dared approach—and sipping stream water filtered through dirty kerchiefs.