Jon Masters was mad enough to chew on a bulkhead door. “They got Skywalker, dammit!”
“Well, we’re out of the recon business—and the Iranians will be gunning for us next,” Paul White said. On shipwide intercom, he radioed, “Attention all hands, this is Lightfoot. Our reconnaissance aircraft was shot down by hostile action. We can expect a visit from Iranian patrols any minute now. All stations, begin a code-red scrub, repeat, begin code-red scrub procedures immediately. Initiate Buddy Time profile procedures. Helm, steer a direct course for Omani territorial waters, best speed. All section team leaders, meet me on the bridge. Lightfoot out.”
“Hey, wait a minute, Colonel!” Masters said. The technicians in the reconnaissance section had immediately begun deactivating their equipment—not by using the checklist, but instead by yanking cables and pulling plugs. It didn’t matter if yanking a hot plug caused a computer subsystem to lock up or suffer damage, because they were going to fit hundreds of pounds of explosives to all of it, drop it over the side, then set off the explosives.
All paper records went into red plastic “burn bags” for shredding and burning; software disks went into “smash bags” for magnetic erasure and destruction. “You called for a code red without even consulting me’? It’s my gear, you know!”
“Jon, buddy, stop thinking with your nuts or your pocketbook for one damned second,” White said as he helped prepare the equipment for disposal. The control units were mounted in large suitcase like enclosures, all of which had spaces built into the frames for cooling and access—those same access spaces made it easy to slip half-pound bars of C-4 plastic explosives into the equipment cases.
Fitted with simple timers activated by seawater, the explosives would sink several feet before automatically detonating. The pieces would be very, very difficult to find.
Yes, they were now in international waters, and soon they would be in Omani territorial waters, but White had no doubt in his mind that Iran would try to recover any evidence that the Valley Mistress was a spy ship. They would violate a stack of international maritime laws to get what they wanted.
“It’ll take one of those Iranian fighters just five minutes to shoot an anti-ship missile into us and disable the ship,” White went on, helping carry the first of several dozen containers out to the rail. “Ten minutes after that we could have an Iranian helicopter assault team dropping on deck. Sixty minutes after that, we could have an Iranian frigate pull up alongside. Now if they find any of this gear on board, we’ll be hauled away as spies, and we’ll never see the United States again—if they let us live.”
Masters wasn’t listening. “But at least let me transmit some of the data, save some of the records,” Masters protested. “This is supposed to be an operational evaluation—I’m still trying to collect performance data.”
“It’s all going to be fish food in about ten minutes,” White said.
“Jon, we can’t have any signs of anything on this ship except stuff that shows we’re a legitimate rescue vessel. We’ve already got stuff that we can’t hide, like the air search radar system and the-“
“It’ll just take me a minute to do a system dump,” Masters said, pushing past a technician and furiously typing on a keypad. “I’ll burst it out on the satellite, and we’ll be done with it.”
“Jon, forget it.”
“Lightfoot, bridge,” the intercom cut in. “WLR reports inbound sea surveillance signal contact, possible heliborne search radar, approximate range forty miles, bearing zero-two-zero and closing, speed one hundred knots.” The WLR-I and WLR-II systems aboard the Valley Mistress were passive radar-detection systems—they did not require the use of radar to pick up an enemy presence.
“We’ve just about run out of time, folks,” White shouted in the reconnaissance center—he forgot about Masters, who was still typing away on his terminal. “We’ve got about ten minutes to get this stuff overboard before they get within visual range. After that, it all has to go out the SDV access hatch.” The same chamber in the bottom of the ship that allowed Swimmer Delivery Vehicles to dock with the ship without surfacing could be used to dump some of the classified equipment while the Iranians were topside—that could give White’s crew an extra few minutes.
In less than three minutes, the reconnaissance compartment was cleared out—all except Masters. White wasn’t going to wait any longer: “Jon, dammit, pack it up, now!”
“I’m ready, it’s going,” Masters said. “Couple more seconds, and I’ll be done.”
White was about to yank the plug himself, when he noticed a blinking UAV SYNC light on the computer control panel, with a SYNC ERROR light underneath. “Jon, what in hell is that?”
Jon saw the blinking light at the exact same moment and hit a key—the light went out. “I don’t know,” Masters replied. “The computer is trying to sync with Skywalker—”
“Except Skywalker was destroyed,” White said. But then what was the computer talking to? “Shit, Jon, shut that thing off! That Iranian helicopter might have an electronic warfare suite that can send satellite transponder interrogate codes. Your computer was sending sync codes to the Iranians, trying to lock on to it!”
“I didn’t know … I didn’t realize it was still active!”
Masters cried, yanking cables and practically overturning the terminal to shut it down. “Skywalker was off the air, shot down … I didn’t think to shut down the up-link channel!”
“The Iranians must be reading our satellite transponder data signals,” White said. “No way those signals can be mistaken for communication or navigation signals. And if they picked up Skywalker’s up-link signals and matched them with our transponder signals … shit, the Iranians will know we were talking to Skywalker. We just gave ourselves away to the bad guys.”
ABOARD THE IRANIAN AIRCRAFT CARRIER KHOMEINI “Message from Patrol Helicopter Three,” General Badi reported to Commanding Admiral Tufayli. “The crew reports non-directional microwave signals emanating from the salvage ship. They report the signals are identical to the signals transmitted by the unidentified aircraft.”
“Excellent! We have them!” Admiral Tufayli shouted. “And that unidentified aircraft definitely constituted a hostile aircraft overlying my fleet without proper identification or communications. That is an act of war, and I am permitted to defend my men and vessels by any means at my command. General Badi, what anti-ship strike aircraft do we have ready at this time?”
“One fighter is airborne over checkpoint four, carrying two AS-18 radar-guided missiles and two AA-10 air-to-air missiles,” the air operations officer reported. “It is scheduled to return to base in eleven minutes. Its replacement will be ready for launch in five minutes.”
The patrol point for that fighter was only five kilometers east of the American warship—perfect! “Divert the fighter over checkpoint four, issue vector instructions to that American spy ship,” Tufayli ordered. “As soon as the replacement fighter comes up on deck, launch it as a second strike and air cover; if the spy ship is still afloat, have the second fighter divert as well. We must attempt to keep that vessel out of Omani waters until we can reach it with a boarding party. Divert the destroyer Medina and Pasdaran Boghammar patrol boats to the spy ship’s location to capture and detain any survivors and to search the wreckage for evidence; have Patrol Helicopter Four and the Medina’s helicopter keep visual contact on the spy ship until the Medina arrives on station. We will teach the Americans a lesson for spying on my ships!
S.S. VALLEY MISTRESS Jon Masters had that equipment packed up, last terminal and all the rest of the rigged, and thrown overboard in record time, and he even helped move several of the cargo boxes into the reconnaissance room, as the crew furiously tried to make the room look more like a cargo container and less like a control room.