“Bandits!” Hunter Noble shouted. At that moment the air raid sirens sounded. “Two formations of ten bombers, supersonic, just crossed the Turkey-Iraq border, headed this way, five minutes out!”
“Get the Osprey out of here!” Patrick shouted. He waved at Jon Masters and Kris Thompson to follow him. “Get him the hell away from the base!”
Wilhelm was shouting into his radio as welclass="underline" “Shelters, shelters, shelters!” he cried. “Everyone into air raid shelters, now!”
As they ran for open ground, they could still see the CV-22 as it took off and headed south. At first its flight path looked totally normal—standard climb-out, gradual acceleration, smooth transition from vertical to turboprop flight. But moments later the Osprey banked hard left and dove for the ground, and they could hear the engines whine in protest as the big transport changed from turboprop to helicopter mode. It dodged left and right and made a low approach to a group of buildings in Tall Kayf, hoping to hide in the radar ground clutter.
But it was too late—the Turkish missiles were already in the air. The Turkish F-15Es had already locked up the CV-22 over a hundred miles away and had launched two Turkish-modified AIM-54 missiles—ironically nicknamed “Phoenix”—at the Osprey. Formerly serving with the U.S. Navy to provide long-range defense of an aircraft carrier battle group, the AIM-54 had been the mainstay of the U.S. Navy’s carrier-based air wings, capable of destroying massive formations of Russian bombers before they could get within range to launch antiship cruise missiles. After it was retired in 2004, the U.S. military’s inventory of its longest-range, hardest-hitting air-to-air missiles was put up for auction, and the Turkish air force snapped them up.
After launch, the Phoenix missiles climbed to an altitude of eighty thousand feet at a speed of almost five times the speed of sound and then began a dive toward the target area, guided by the Turkish F-15E’s powerful radar. Within a few seconds of impact, the AIM-54 activated its own terminal guidance radar to close in for the kill. One missile malfunctioned and self-destructed, but the second missile hit the CV-22 Osprey’s right rotor disk as the aircraft was maneuvering to land in a parking lot. The right engine exploded, sending the aircraft into a violent left spin for a few seconds before crashing to the ground, then flipping upside down from the force of the explosion.
Back at Nahla, the scene was complete mayhem. With the Command and Control Center already destroyed, the main targets for the Turkish bombers were the flight line and barracks. Every hangar, including the XC-57 Loser’s storage hangar and the makeshift morgue containing the remains of the fallen American and Iraqi soldiers, was hit by at least one two-thousand-pound Joint Direct Attack Munitions bomb, a satellite-guided upgrade to a conventional radar-delivered gravity bomb. The parking ramps and taxiways that had not been hit before by the Turks in their initial invasion were hit this time.
The soldiers at Nahla were on edge and ready for anything following their battle the night before, so when the air-raid siren went off, the men were out the barracks doors immediately and headed to shelters. A few soldiers stayed behind too long to collect weapons or personal items and were killed by the bombs, and a few other soldiers helping the wounded evacuate the building were caught in the open. Overall, casualties were light.
But the devastation was complete. Within minutes, most of Allied Air Base Nahla was destroyed.
President Gardner hurried into the Situation Room, a high-tech conference room in the West Wing used for high-level national security meetings, and he took his place. “Take seats,” he said. “Someone talk to me, right now. What happened?”
“Turkey declared martial law and executed a number of air strikes throughout northern Iraq,” National Security Adviser Conrad Carlyle said. “The Turkish minister of defense, Cizek, says he was placed in charge of the military and ordered to launch a full-scale attack against the PKK and their supporters in Iraq and Turkey.” An electronic map of northern Iraq was displayed on the large wall-size computer monitor in the front of the room. “Twenty cities and towns were hit by fighter-bombers, including Kirkuk, Irbil, Dahuk, and Mosul. Three joint Iraqi-American military bases were struck in Irbil, Kirkuk, and near Mosul. Casualty reports are coming in now. The bases had just minutes of warning time.” He paused just long enough to draw the president’s attention to him fully, then added, “And the vice president’s aircraft is missing.”
“Missing?” the president shouted.
“The vice president took off for Baghdad just minutes before the attack took place,” Carlyle said. “The pilot was executing evasive maneuvers and looking for a place to make an emergency landing when they lost contact. The commander of Allied Air Base Nahla has organized a search and rescue team, but that base was hit hard and almost destroyed. It had already been hit last night by a Turkish air raid. An Air Force search and rescue team is being dispatched from Samarra but it’ll take a few hours to get there.”
“Good God,” the president breathed. “Get Hirsiz or Cizek or whoever’s really in charge in Ankara on the phone. I don’t want any more Turkish planes flying over Iraq—none! Where are the carriers? What can we get up there?”
“We have the Abraham Lincoln carrier battle group in the Persian Gulf,” chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Taylor Bain responded. “It’ll be a stretch because of the distance involved, but we can start setting up air patrols over Iraq with E-2 Hawkeye radar planes doing C4I and pairs of F/A-18 Hornet fighters in patrol orbits.”
“Do it,” the president ordered. “Keep them over Iraq unless they are attacked.” Secretary of Defense Miller Turner picked up his phone to issue the orders.
“Turkey has a very large air force, with a lot of surplus American warplanes and weapons,” Carlyle pointed out. “Some of them, like the F-15 Eagles, can be a match for the Hornet.”
“If Turkey wants to get into a shooting war with the United States, I’m ready to play,” Gardner said angrily. “What about land attack assets? Tomahawks?”
“The conventional sea-launched cruise missiles in the Persian Gulf are out of range,” Bain said. “We would have to move the ships and subs in the Mediterranean closer to get within range of the eastern Turkish air bases.”
“Any ships or subs in the Black Sea?”
“No submarines, per treaty,” Bain aid. “We have a single Surface Action Group on patrol in the Black Sea, also per treaty, and they do have T-LAMs, but they’re also the most vulnerable ships out there right now. We would have to assume that if the Turks want to fight, they’d attack that group first.”
“What else do we have?”
“We have some tactical air based in various places in Europe—Greece, Romania, Italy, Germany, and the U.K., but those wouldn’t be quick-strike options,” Bain said. “Our only other option is conventionally armed B-2 Spirit stealth bombers launched from Diego Garcia. We have six surviving planes ready to go.”
“Get them armed and ready,” the president said. “That’s all we have? Six?”
“Afraid so, Mr. President,” Bain said. “We have two XR-A9 Black Stallion space planes that can launch precision-guided weapons, and they can be armed and hitting targets within hours, and we also have a few conventionally armed intercontinental ballistic missiles that can hit targets in Turkey quickly.”