“Intel, what you seeing?” Major Johnson asked into his chin mike. Two compartments back from Johnson, a young Air Force officer, two noncommissioned officers in their late thirties, and a fortyyear-old National Security Agency civilian listened on headsets and watched on flat screens. The young officer, Lieutenant Judy Moore, answered for the section. “Concur with Sergeant White, sir. Quiet as a mouse on the Iranian side. On the west, the Islamyans have got some of their Patriot radars blinking on every once in a while. First time I’ve seen them up in a long time. But they don’t stay on for long. Must be having problems. And Troy’s right about the two birds circling up by Ar Ar on the Iraqi border. They’ve been ID’ing themselves as Air Islamyah checkout flights. I think they’re both four-engine jobs.” She swiveled in her chair and looked at another flat screen that was showing data relayed from the Global Hawk circling at 65,000 feet over the Straits of Hormuz. “Down south it’s mainly us making noise. Navy is beginning to head out to Bright Star and is really lighting the Straits area up as they go through.”
“Okay, gang. It’s the usual racetrack loop today,” the major confirmed to the crew over the intercom. “We’ll go into Kuwait, do some links down to the U.S. and Kuwait Patriot missile units, make a tight turn, and head back down to Qatar and then…do it again.”
Beyond the range of the AWACS radar, five SU-27 SMK Flanker aircraft took off from the Iranian air force base at Dezful. Each of the twin-engine interceptors carried a combination of eight heat-seeking and radar-guided air-to-air missiles. Two boys on their way to a high school on the edge of Dezful thrilled to see the powerful Russianbuilt fighters launching, even though they had often seen Flankers in the air around Dezful. Today, they agreed, was different. There were five together, instead of the usual two, and they did not do the near-vertical climb on takeoff. Instead, these Flankers clung low to the ground, their radar reflections lost in ground clutter, their ten engines laying down a thick black trail as they headed west. If the boys had looked through binoculars, they would have noticed something else different on this day. The paint scheme was new.
Flying west-southwest, the Flankers left Iranian airspace in a few minutes on a heading taking them into Iraq between Al Kut to the north and Al Amarah to the south. They spread out five abreast at one-mile intervals as they swept 2,000 feet over the Tigris River, still heading southwesterly. Their course took them between the Shi’a holy cities of Najaf to the north and Nasiriyah to the south, right over the Euphrates River. Near the riverbank, a man working atop a cell phone tower saw the unusual five-ship formation to his north and called a friend to see if he could see it, too.
The fertile land around the two rivers had been a battleground for as long as there had been governments on the planet. The land ahead of the aircraft now, however, was empty, vast sweeps of vacant desert. Into it, each aircraft dropped a depleted external centerline fuel tank, lightening its load. They were flying slower than normal now in these unpopulated stretches, trying to compensate for the heavy fuel consumption of low-level flight.
As they approached the border with Islamyah, the aircraft pulled into a close formation and descended lower toward the desert sands. The lead pilot was indicating to his wingmen with hand signals. Their radios, like their radars, were turned on but not emitting. Only the IRST, the infrared search and tracking system, scanned out ahead. At this low altitude it was limited to about a 40-kilometer forward view, but unlike radar, no one could detect it. The IRST showed a clear field of sky ahead.
They crossed the border north of Rafha and south of Ar Ar, with only dunes beneath them. The lead pilot waved his arm to his wingmen, indicating an approaching left bank. The aircraft rose slightly before executing the maneuver, then rolled gently around to a south-southeast heading. There were no surface features below to confirm to them that they were where they were supposed to be, but the Galileo global positioning satellite signal in their cockpits told them they were right on course. The desert town of Baqa was coming up off to their right, off to the south. That also meant that their lowest-level flying was coming up. After they passed Baqa on the right, the twin military complexes of Hafr al Batin and what had been known as KKMC, King Khalid Military City, would be miles off to the left of the aircraft. Both locations had been relatively moribund since the coup that had toppled the house of Saud.
Iranian Qods Force observers dressed as camel herders were near the two military bases. They confirmed for Tehran that nothing had taken off from either airstrip all morning. From their positions outside the fences, they could see the flight lines. No one was even preparing an aircraft. Each observer clicked his small satellite radio, firing off burst transmissions on frequencies being monitored by Qods Force. The signals indicated all clear. There was no need for Tehran to use the emergency satellite link to the Flankers.
From their lowest-level flight, the Flankers planned to climb quickly after they were south of KKMC and banking left, toward the Persian Gulf south of Kuwait. The lead pilot checked his fuel gauge. He had consumed a little more than he had planned for at this point in the mission, but only a little. His eyes went to the Russian Phazotron Zhuk coherent-pulse Doppler radar screen. It was warmed up, but not yet switched to emit. When he did flick that switch, it would give him a track-while-scan capability and a lookdown/shoot-down system linked to his missiles. It wouldn’t be long now before that would happen. As he looked at the radar screen, he caught the electronics intelligence screen to its left blinking an icon on. Then quickly it was gone. The lead pilot thought he had seen that happen a few minutes earlier as well. He had ignored it then. Now he tapped the button below the screen to call up a readout. The data showed that four times in the last sixteen minutes a signal had hit the Flanker, but too briefly to cause the automatic alarm to come on. He tapped the control again for a diagnostic of the signal.
“APY-2,” the screen read. That made no sense to him. The APY-2 was the signal he would home in on in a few minutes, the powerful, sweeping radar atop the U.S. AWACS aircraft. He looked at his watch: 0835. If the U.S. AWACS was on its usual, highly predictable schedule, it was coming up the Islamyah coast right now about fifteen minutes south of Khafji, about twenty minutes from Kuwaiti airspace. That would place the Americans to his east. Yet the ELINT screen placed the origin of the signal to the northwest. AWACS signals were also usually sustained, not quick little bursts. These readings made no sense. The Russian ELINT system was so unreliable.
Now his navigation system beeped. The flight of Flankers had come to the GPS coordinates where they were supposed to begin their climb. He signaled to his wingmen and then throttled back with pleasure, making the Flanker almost stand on its tail as it soared up from below 1,000 feet on a climb out to 40,000.
As the g-force pressed him back into his seat, the Iranian struggled to hit a digital tape machine jerry-rigged to his radio. The radio began to transmit the tape of several fighter pilots speaking in Arabic, coordinating their formation, headed toward a target. It would make the Iranian jets seem to be Islamyah fighter pilots, if anyone was listening.