Six minutes began to seem an eternity.
As exposed as McWhorter and Roycc felt two thousand feet above the surface, Commander Mark Marino felt even more so a hundred feet under it. USS Helena, a Los Angeles class attack submarine, lived by stealth, and the explosions of water and spray above him sounded like a combination brass band and steam calliope. And in order to fire its salvo of Tomahawk cruise missiles, his boat had to steer a straight course at periscope depth at creep speed, ghosting north at no more than four or five knots. The noise also blinded many of his own sonar arrays. Not that they were much good anyway in the warm, shallow waters of the Persian Gulf.
If any of the ultra-quiet diesel subs the Iranians had bought from the Russians were lurking close by, Marino and his whole crew could be dead before they even knew they were under attack.
Duckling that unprofitable and unnerving thought, he scanned Helena’s control room.
Chief Walsh, the boat’s senior fire control technician, hovered over his board, making sure that if the automated sequence went wrong, it didn’t get any worse. Not far away, Master Chief Richards, chief of the boat, manned the diving panel, working hard to keep the boat level. Each Tomahawk weighed almost two tons. With that much weight leaving the submarine’s bow every thirty seconds, Richards was kept busy trying to compensate for the rapid changes in Helena’s trim. The other officers and ratings packed into the control room were equally attentive to their duties.
Marino allowed himself to relax minutely. Except for a slightly greater air of concentration and a tendency to speak even more softly than usual, his crew might almost have been conducting a routine peacetime drill.
In a way, that wasn’t surprising. Once started, the launch process was virtually automatic. The sub’s navigation system gave the Tomahawks their starting point. Preloaded data packs fed in their destinations. Launch keys were turned and the fire control computers took over.
That all sounded deceptively simple, but Marino knew the reality was fiendishly complex. It had taken Navy planners days working around the clock to lay out and punch in each missile’s flight path. Even with the space-based global positioning system GPS to help guide the weapons, landmarks had to be found, defences plotted, and search plans determined, so that each Tomahawk had a near-perfect chance of reaching its target.
He glanced at the nearest clock. Precise timing had been as critical for this operation as it was for a space shuttle launch or an amphibious invasion. To make sure the missiles’ GPS receivers could pull down enough data to get good navigational fixes, there had to be a certain minimum number of GPS satellites overhead. To guarantee the Pentagon and the White House near-instantaneous damage assessments, the missiles would strike right before a slated midmorning pass by U.S. recon satellites. That way the low morning sun would provide the contrast and shadows so useful for accurate imagery interpretation. Finally, the Tomahawk strike had to arrive between prayers. Devout Muslims prayed five times a day, and if missiles hit home during any of those periods, it would be seen as a blasphemous slap at all Islam not just at Iran.
Helena shuddered one last time.
Marino had been counting silently to himself. He and Walsh straightened up at the same moment.
“Last bird’s gone, sir,” the chief reported formally.
Marino thought he heard a little relief creep into the older man’s voice. He shook his head, half to himself Helena, several of her sister boats, and the ships of a Navy surface task group had just fired what he hoped would be the first and last shots in a war. All in just minutes. Times had certainly changed.
He barked out a string of new orders. “Make your depth three hundred feet. Right standard rudder, steady on course zero four zero.”
It was time to get out of here, back into deep water.
By the time Walsh reported and Marino issued his helm orders, their last Tomahawk was twenty nautical miles downrange.
The eighteen-foot-long cruise missile skimmed the sea surface, first steering west around the radar station on Lavan Island, then turning a little east to dodge another radar at Asaleyeh airfield. There were several paths through the Iranian radar net, and the missiles salvoed by the Helens’ and the other attacking ships were splitting up to use them all at staggered intervals.
Flying at nearly five hundred knots, Tomahawk number 12 made its landfall just ten minutes after launch, flashing low over a desolate, barren landscape. It climbed steadily, threading its way through the rugged Zagros Mountains littering the southern half of Iran. Tehran lay far to the north almost at the outer limit of its range.
The weapon flew on, inhuman in the steadiness of its flight, the precision of its turns. Periodically, it would turn on its GPS receiver and fix its position. A conventional inertial guidance system could drift as much as half a mile over the flight time of a Tomahawk missile. The GPS unit would keep Tomahawk 12 accurate to within a few meters.
Six hundred seventy miles and seventy-five minutes after leaving the USS Helena, the missile crossed the Qom-Tehran Highway and came within sight of the Iranian capital.
Tehran’s skyline was already marred by thick, billowing columns of smoke. Even in broad daylight, a burning oil refinery lit the inside of one black cloud with an ugly or angered glow. The first wave of American cruise missiles had arrived only minutes before.
Although civil defense alarms were still sounding, the missile didn’t hear the sirens. It was busy making another navigational fix. With four satellites above its horizon, the Tomahawk’s GPS receiver established its position to within three meters just half its own length. Still flying with impersonal, inhuman precision, it skimmed over the city, ignoring the few antiaircraft bursts beginning to pepper the air around it. The gunners were too late. Helena’s Tomahawk 12 was the trailing edge of the American attack.
It passed over the Iranian Parliament building, already a shattered, burning ruin, and suddenly, matter-of-factly, dove down aiming for the old Exxon building.
After being abandoned by its American owners following the Shah’s fall, the ten-story concrete and steel structure had been taken over as headquarters for the Revolutionary Guards, the Pasdaran. Under their aegis, it also served as a center for planning terrorist raids. Members of the Pasdaran command staff routinely coordinated operations with the HizbAllah, provided its leaders with intelligence information, and supplied it with weapons and explosives.
Now the Pasdaran was paying for their actions.
Tomahawk 12 was the last of six cruise missiles targeted on the headquarters building. One missile’s guidance unit failed in flight, sending it crashing into the side of a mountain near the southern Iranian city of Shiraz. But all four of the others screamed straight in on target, gutting the structure with thousand-pound warheads. Ripped apart by the repeated bomb blasts, the Exxon building’s upper floors teetered and then collapsed into the street. Now this last missile dispensed tiny, HE-laden bomblets over the ruined Revolutionary Guards headquarters. Their rapid-fire detonations shredded steel and glass and flesh and anything else over a fifty-meter square area.
“At 3:00 A.M. eastern standard time, elements of the United States Navy launched approximately one hundred Tomahawk missiles at Iran. Their targets were the military installations, economic facilities, and official ministries used by the Iranian government to plan or facilitate terrorist attacks against the United States, most recently the murderous and unprovoked bombing on the Golden Gate Bridge. Based on initial assessments, we believe this retaliatory strike inflicted heavy damage on all intended targets. Our own forces involved in the operation suffered no losses.