Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 05 (27 page)

 
          
“But
you’re a civilian,” Jamieson protested, though with less vehemence than before.
“I don’t report to a damned civilian.”

 
          
“My
boss is General Griffith; he reports directly to Philip Freeman, in regards to
this mission,” McLanahan added. “And Freeman reports to the President.”

 
          
Jamieson
still had not finally agreed, but McLanahan knew he had his man. He turned away
and nodded at General Samson. “Thank you for your help, sir. I’ll report to you
and General Wright on the progress of the work on AV-011 at our
noon
briefing. Colonel Jamieson, you’ve got
sixty minutes to clear your desk; then we meet back here at eleven hundred
hours for an overview on the mods to tail number AV-011. Bring your tech orders
and checklists; we’ll be updating them with lots of new stuff.” To Samson, he
asked, “Anything more for me, sir?”

 
          
“Just
one more thing, Patrick,” Samson said. “I’ve been fighting for exactly this
kind of role for our strategic bomber force for years. I never expected a group
like the Intelligence Support Agency to be the one sponsoring my program, but
it’s being done, and that’s the important thing. But I’ve built a career out of
seeing that this kind of mission succeeds, and I’ll still be fighting even
though it’s out of my hands once you sign for the plane. This will
not
turn into another Iran-contra
debacle, or—and I don’t mean this personally—another Brad Elliott operation.”

 
          
“I
do take that personally, General,” McLanahan said, his fiery blue eyes
narrowing in clear, immediate anger. “Brad Elliott is a good friend of mine. ”

 
          
“Then
I apologize,” Samson said quickly but, in McLanahan’s estimation, not
sincerely. “But I reemphasize my point: We go all out, we play to win, but we
do this by the book. Agreed?”

 
          
The
fair-haired, blue-eyed young man was silent for a moment. Samson was just
thinking that this was someone he could work with, a fellow crewdog who would
work on the “inside,” give a fresh perspective to the White House brain trust..
.

 
          
...
until McLanahan’s features suddenly turned dark, and his blue eyes narrowed
into dark cobalt pits, and he stepped closer to the big three-star general and
said in a low voice, “You’re right, General: we’ll do this by the book
—my
book. This is not an Air Force
operation, and this is not
your
operation, it’s
my
operation, is that
clear?” Samson was too stunned by the guy’s sudden change in demeanor to
respond.

 
          
“General
Samson, this team was picked for one reason only: to protect the lives of the
agents on the ground that are following the orders of their leaders in the
White House,” McLanahan went on. “If we fail, men and women die—some of them my
friends. If they die, they are not just forgotten—it will be as if they
never existed.
I was given this
opportunity to form a team to help them survive, and that’s exactly what I’ll
do.”

 
          
Jamieson
was watching General Samson as the big three-star tightened his jaw muscles,
but instead of exploding, he nodded, jabbed a finger in McLanahan’s direction,
and said calmly, “Fine,
Mr.
McLanahan.
You do your thing. When you need Eighth Air Force’s help to bail your ass out,
just call.” He nodded at Jamieson, turned, and walked away.

 
          
McLanahan’s
eyes followed Samson as he departed; then he turned to Jamieson and asked,
“Anything to add before we get started, Colonel?”

 
          
“Yes:
I think you’re an asshole,
Mr.
McLanahan,” Jamieson replied matter-of-factly.

 
          
“Thank
you, Colonel,” McLanahan said. “It’s nice to be working with you, too.”

In the
Gulf
of
Oman
,
Islamic
republic
of
Iran
19 April 1997
,
0612 hours local

 
          
It
was General Buzhazi’s first look at the aircraft carrier
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
since the thing had been towed into
port two years earlier, and frankly, it didn’t look that much better—the crews
had cleaned it up greatly, but now it seemed more cluttered, more disorganized.
Two years earlier it had been in mothballs in a Russian shipyard in
Nikolayev
,
Ukraine
, abandoned and heavily cannibalized for
scrap steel, wiring, even lightbulbs and screws—it had even been set on fire by
shipyard protesters. After being brought to Bandar Abbas, it had been towed
down to Chah Bahar and used briefly as a floating prison for work crews, where
it had been even further abused by the inmates during that construction
“jihad.” Then, it had been the biggest, ugliest ship Buzhazi had ever seen in
his life—and
Iran
was paying the People’s Republic of
China
$500,000 per
month
to use it!

 
          
Now
it had over three dozen combat aircraft on board and three thousand men working
on it.
Iran
was still paying only a half a million dollars a month to use it, but
now
China
was paying
Iran
millions per month for training, billeting,
and installing new, modern equipment.

 
          
“Welcome
aboard the pride of the Islamic Republic’s attack fleet, sir,” Pasdaran Major
Admiral Akbar Tufayli said effusively, as Buzhazi stepped off the Mil-8
helicopter that had flown Buzhazi from Bandar Abbas out to the carrier. Akbar
Tufayli was one of Buzhazi’s young, energetic “lions” in the
Pasdaran-i-Engelab. When the Pasdaran had been an independent, elite military
force during the War of Liberation with Iraq in the 1980s, Buzhazi expected
that Tufayli had had grand ideas about his future as a major commander, given
his political and family connections, but when the Pasdaran had been integrated
into the regular Iranian army, all of Tufayli’s chances for greatness had been
reduced. Because of this, Tufayli sought out the highest-visibility positions,
the ones no one else wanted to touch; then he would lie, cheat, steal, whine,
beg, and murder his way to success. He thought of himself as bold and fearless,
when in fact he was stupid, rash, and always looking for a scapegoat.

 
          
Well,
he’d certainly picked the biggest, most highly visible position now: commander
of the
Middle East
’s first aircraft carrier. With a new, fat
emergency budget following the GCC attack on
Abu
Musa
Island
, and lots of favorable attention from the
mullahs, Tufayli was in a pretty good position to move up the Pasdaran chain of
command. Being the first sometimes got men the glory, but most often it was a
no-win situation. Tufayli’s future, as they say, was his to destroy.

 
          
“Thank
you, Admiral,” Buzhazi said. “I wanted to see for myself if all is in
readiness—including the ‘special’ shipment...”

           
“It is indeed, sir—I have my best
men on it,” Tufayli said. “I will show you right away.” Dodging running men and
jet aircraft engine blast, Tufayli led the way across the steel non-slip deck,
over countless hoses, ropes, cables, chain, to the huge island superstructure
and the hatch that would take them below. Buzhazi noted with some amusement
that the huge white flag with the hammer and sickle of the Soviet navy was
still barely visible on the flat side of the superstructure just above the
hatch—Allah help us, he thought, if we don’t even have enough paint to cover
that
properly, what kind of shape can
this tub be in when it comes time to take it into combat?

 
          
The
aircraft hangar deck was so choked with planes, men, aircraft-moving equipment,
tools, spare engines and fabricated steel parts, and thousands of
unrecognizable odds and ends that the flag contingent could hardly pass
through. Here, Chinese maintenance officers worked side by side with Iranian
officers, but only Iranians worked on the planes themselves—the Chinese
maintenance workers crowded around and watched. All but two of the
Khomeinis
twenty-four fighters and all
but two of the ship’s sixteen helicopters were parked down here, all in various
stages of repair—none of them looked as though they could fly right now if
needed.

 
          
Security
was tightened considerably as they moved forward to the double-walled steel
bulkhead that separated the hangar from the missile bay forward. The next
compartment forward was just as high and wide as the hangar deck, and almost as
long, but unlike the hangar deck, there was plenty of room to move around, and
it was blissfully quiet, almost somber, as befitting the kind of weapons fitted
here. “Here we are, sir,” Tufayli announced proudly. “This compartment is the
reason that, even without its Sukhoi-33 fighters, the
Khomeini
would still be one of the most devastating warships on the
planet.”

 
          
There
before them, in two rows of six, stood the steel launch canisters of the
Khomeini
s P-700 Granit medium-range
attack missiles. Each canister was six feet in diameter and thirty-six feet
long, stretching far above, all the way to the flight deck. Cranes and hoisting
devices were strung everywhere on deck to move the 11,000- pound missiles in
the compartment. “We have no reloads now, sir,” Tufayli said, “but when we have
enough missiles to allow for reloads, they will be stored in a shielded
magazine in the area by the bulkheads fore and aft. All the carrier’s missiles,
including the P-700s, are transferred through the hatch on the portside—we have
the proper equipment to allow under-way missile transfers, although most
transfers will probably be at dockside. Missiles are transferred from the
magazine via the cranes to be loaded in the launch canisters.”

 
          
Tufayli
motioned to the weapons officer. A warning light began to flash, and one of the
launch canisters began to lower itself down to the deck, like a giant sequoia
slowly falling to the forest floor. Once on the deck, the top part of the
canister swiveled open toward the side of the ship, revealing the missile inside.

 
          
It
looked like a long, thin, winged needle, with a narrow cylindrical body, short,
narrow, steeply angled wings, and small aft wings. A small air intake could be
seen on top of the missile. On the aft end, two long cylindrical detachable
booster motors were mounted nearly flush with the engine exhaust tailpipe. The
missile was a spongy light gray color except for the nose cap, which was hard
red plastic, and a section near the front that was outlined in yellow and
black.

 
          
“The
P-700 Granit anti-ship missile, the largest and most powerful anti-ship weapon
in the world,” Tufayli said proudly. “It can fly over twice the speed of sound
to ranges in excess of six hundred kilometers. It is guided by its own inertial
navigation computer until within fifty kilometers of its target, when it
activates its own onboard radar, locks onto the largest radar target in its
line of sight, and guides itself precisely on target. The missile blasts out of
the launch canister on those two rocket motors to about Mach one, when the
turbojet engine takes over. It flies a powered ballistic path up to thirty
thousand meters’ altitude until very close to the target, when it executes a
high-speed dive—almost impossible to shoot down with any known antiaircraft
weapons. This rubbery coating burns off during its flight to protect the
guidance and warhead sections.”

           
“And the warhead?” Buzhazi asked.

 
          
Tufayli
turned to the weapons officer, who assured him that all nonessential personnel
were out of the compartment, then he nodded to Buzhazi. “Yes, sir,” he said,
“this is what you wanted to see— the NK-55 thermonuclear warhead”—and Tufayli
slapped his hand on the yellow-and-black bordered section. The sudden
slap!
sound made them all jump.
“Selectable yield from five-hundred-kilogram high explosive to
three-hundred-kiloton nuclear. Barometric and radar altimeter fusing,
detonating two to three thousand meters above the target, with impact backup.”