Drone Strike: A Dreamland Thriller (Dale Brown's Dreamland) (11 page)

10

Omidiyeh, Iran

C
APTAIN
P
ARSA
V
AHID TOOK HIS HELMET IN THE CROOK
of his arm as he got out of the Khodro pickup truck, balancing the rest of his gear in his right hand as he reached for his briefcase with his left. Then he spun and kicked the door closed, walking toward the front of the ready hangar. The nose of his MiG-29 sat just inside the open archway. The aircraft was armed and fueled, sitting on ready-standby in the special hangar.

The pilot who’d been on watch until now was standing on the tarmac outside the building. He shook his head as Vahid approached.

“You’re late, Parsa,” said the pilot.

“Five minutes,” insisted Vahid. “I needed to eat.”

“You’re so busy in the day that you couldn’t eat earlier?”

Vahid shrugged. “If there had been a call before now, it would have been yours.”

“Phhhh. A call. The dead will rise before we fly in combat,” said the other pilot disgustedly, starting for the pickup truck. “The Israelis are cowards.”

“And the Americans, too?”

“Worse.”

“Good evening, Captain,” said Sergeant Hami, the night crew chief. “We are ready to fly tonight?”

“Ready, Chief. My plane?”

“Ho-ho,” said Hami, his jowls shaking back and forth. “We are in top shape and ready to fly when the signal comes.”

“So it’s tonight, then?”

“With God’s will.”

Vahid walked over and put his gear down on a table at the side of the hangar. A pair of metal chairs flanked the table; he and Hami would customarily play cards there for most of the watch. But first he would inspect the aircraft.

“A nice night to fly,” said Sergeant Hami, waiting as he set down his helmet and personal gear. His accent was thick with Tehran, reminding Vahid of the city’s many charms. “You will shoot down some Americans, yes?”

“If I have the chance.”

The nights were always like this: bravado and enthusiasm at first, then dull boredom as the hours dragged on. The first night, Vahid had sat in the cockpit, waiting to take off in an instant. Even the base commander now realized that was foolish. The U.S. forces in the Gulf were paper ghosts, strong in theory but never present. They kept well away from Iranian borders.

Of course, the same might be said of the Iranian air force, even Vahid’s squadron. The four MiG-29s, the most advanced in the Iranian air force, had been moved to Omidiyeh air base six weeks before. The base had been largely abandoned in the years following the Iran-Iraq war; while still theoretically open for commercial traffic, the only civilians Vahid had seen were the members of a glider club, who inspected but did not fly their planes the first week of the squadron’s arrival. Since then the base had been empty, except for military personnel.

He began his walk-around at the MiG’s nose, touching her chin for good luck—a superstition handed down to him by his first flight instructor. The instructor had flown in the Iran-Iraq war, where he had served briefly as a wingman to Jalil Zandi, the legendary ace of the Iranian air force.

Even without the connection to greatness, Vahid would have venerated the instructor, Colonel One Eye. (The nickname was not literally accurate, but came from his habit of closing one eye while shooting on a rifle range.) The colonel could fly everything the Iranian air force possessed, from F-86 Sabres, now long retired, to MiG-29s. Like Zandi, One Eye had flown Tomcats during the war against Iraq, recording a kill against an Iraqi Mirage.

Vahid stopped to admire the plane. The curved cowl at the wing root gave it a sleek, athletic look; for the pilot, it evoked the look of a tiger, springing to the kill. The export-version MiG was one of thirty acquired by Iran in the mid-1990s; the air force now had just over a dozen in flying condition.

A siren sounded in the distance. Vahid froze.

A fire?

No.

No!

“The alert!” yelled Sergeant Hami. “The alert!”

Vahid grabbed his helmet from the table, then ran to the ladder at the side of the plane. As he climbed upward, a van with the rest of the ground crew raced across the concrete apron, jerking to a stop in front of the hangar. Hami helped Vahid into the cockpit, while the arriving crewmen began pulling the stops away from the plane and opening the rear door of the hangar.

Two nights before, a false alert had gotten Vahid out of the hangar, but he was called back before reaching the runway, some 1,000 meters away: the radars had picked up an Iranian passenger flight in the Gulf and, briefly, mistaken it for an American spy plane. He expected this was something along the same lines. Still expecting the flashing light at the top of the hangar to snap off, he powered up the MiG, turning over one engine and then quickly ramping the other. Hami, back on the ground, shook his fist at him, giving him a thumbs-up.

Vahid began rolling forward. The tower barked at him, demanding he get airborne. Ignoring them for a moment, he took stock of his controls. Then, at the signal from Sergeant Hami, he went heavy on his engines. The plane strained against her brakes. The gauges pegged with perfect reads. The MiG wanted to fly.

“Shahin One to Tower, request permission to move to runway,” said Vahid calmly.

“Go! Go!” answered the controller.

The MiG jerked forward, overanxious. At the other end of the base three pilots were running from the ready room. Their planes would be a few minutes behind. It was Vahid’s job to sort things out before they were committed to the battle.

“Cleared for immediate takeoff,” said the controller.

Vahid didn’t bother to pause as he came to the end of the runway—there were no other flights here, and it was clear he was under orders to get airborne immediately. Selecting full military power, he started the MiG down the runway. The screech of the engines built to a fierce whine. He felt himself starting to lift.

Airborne, he made a quick check of his readouts, then cleaned his landing gear into the aircraft. The MiG leapt forward, rocketing into the night.

Moments later the local air commander came over the radio, giving him his instructions directly.

“You are to fly north by northeast,” said the general, “in the direction of Natanz. There are reports of a low-flying airplane near the Naeen train station. We will turn you over to Major Javadpour for a vector.”

“Acknowledged.”

Vahid had to look at his paper map to find Naeen. It was a dot in the mountains north of the city of Nain, a small town camped at the intersection of several highways that transcribed the Iranian wilderness. He was some five hundred kilometers away.

Major Javadpour directed Vahid to the west of the sighting—he wanted him to fly close to Natanz, one of the country’s main nuclear research sites.

Gravity pushed Vahid against the seat as he goosed his afterburners. At full speed he was just over ten minutes away.

“We have no radar contacts at this time,” said Javadpour.

“No contacts?”

“We have two eyewitnesses who saw and heard planes. But no radar.”

“What sort of aircraft did they see?” asked Vahid.

The controller didn’t answer right away, apparently gathering information. Vahid pictured a flight of American B-2 Stealth Bombers, flying low over the terrain. They would pop up before the attack.

He might be too late to stop them. But he would surely destroy them. He had two R-27 air-to-air medium-range missiles and six R-73s, all Russian made, under his wings. The R-27s were radar missiles; he had been told they would have trouble finding B-2s unless he was relatively close, but this didn’t bother him at all. The B-2 was slower than his plane, and far less maneuverable. As for the R-73s, they were heat-seekers, very dependable when fired in a rear-quarter attack.

They might have escorts. If so, he would ignore them—the bombers were the far more important target.

Vahid continued to climb and accelerate.

“We still have no contacts at this time. Negative,” said Javadpour, coming back on the line. “The eyewitnesses describe a small plane, possibly a drone, very low to the ground.”

“A
small
plane?”

“Single engine. It may be civilian. That’s all the information I have at this time,” added the controller. “Maintain your course. I show you reaching the area in six minutes.”

Damn, thought Vahid, another false alarm.

11

Iran

T
URK WATCHED TH
E TRAIN OF TRIANGLES
AS THEY
flowed steadily from the northwest. They were two minutes from the target, traveling at nearly Mach 4, gliding with the momentum of the ship they’d launched from.

He looked up. Grease was sitting stone-faced next to him. The Israeli and the pilot in the front were silent, staring straight into the darkness. They were just over three hundred feet above the nearby slope, with the target area six miles away off the right wing.

“Keep the plane steady,” Turk said softly, picking up the small headset. “The words I say will have nothing to do with us, unless I address Grease directly. Grease, if you need me, tap on my leg. But don’t need me.”

He turned his attention back to the screen, hunching his head down to isolate himself from the others. He was used to distractions, used to splitting himself away from his immediate surroundings to concentrate, but this was a challenge even for him.

The small plane tucked up and down as it came across the mountain slope, buffeted by the wind and twitching with the pilot’s nervous hand. A light beep sounded in the headset.

“Ten seconds to acquisition range,” the computer told him.

A quick kick of doubt tweaked Turk’s stomach:
You can’t do this. You haven’t trained properly. You will fail.

You are a failure.

Red letters flashed on the screen before him.

“Establish link,” Turk told the computer calmly.

Doubt and fear vanished with the words. The UAVs, still moving with the momentum of their initial launch and the gravity that pulled them to earth, came into his control in quick succession.

It wasn’t exactly control. It was more like strong influence. He could stop them or turn them away, goose them ahead or push them down, but for the most part now he was watching as the thirty-six aircraft, each the size of the sat phone sitting in his pocket, plummeted toward the air exchanger hidden in the cluster of rocks on the hillside.

Turk tapped his screen, bringing up the status window where he quickly checked the roster of aircraft. Two were flashing red—the monitors had detected problems. He tapped the names, opening windows with the details. The computer highlighted the difficulties. Both had abnormal heat sensors, suggesting their shields had failed. That would likely degrade the solid Teflon propellant, though with the engines not yet ignited, it was impossible to tell what the actual effect would be.

The most likely effect was incomplete propulsion—they’d lose power too soon to complete the full mission.

“Aircraft 8 and Aircraft 23 forward,” Turk said. “Eight and 23 to lead.”

“Calculating. Confirmed. Complying.”

Turk watched the Hydras shuffle. Moving the problematic aircraft to the front would give them the role of blowing through the grill in the air exchange; their engines wouldn’t matter, since they wouldn’t be used.

Until this moment the UAVs had been barely guided missiles, with steering vanes rather than wings. Now the computer popped the vanes into wings, extending them and banking the robot planes in a series of circles, separating them into mission clusters and slowing them to a more controllable and maneuverable speed.

More red on the screen. Aircraft 5 was not responding.

Lost. Turk mentally wrote it off. The UAV would dive into the hills, exploding on impact.

Tapping the target area on the sitmap, he looked at the image of the bunker provided by the NASA plane. A small flag appeared at the side; he tapped the flag, and was presented with a three-dimensional wire-frame drawing in the center of the screen. He enlarged it with his index finger.

“Compare infrastructure to known. State deviations,” he told the computer.

“Congruency, one hundred percent.”

Nothing had changed since the mission was drawn up. They were good to go.

The computer provided an assortment of data on the bunker. One set of numbers in particular caught his eye: there were 387 people in the facility.

Turk hadn’t expected that many; the briefing had indicated a skeleton crew of guards, at best, given the hour. The number seemed very high, but there was no time to double-check it.

The UAVs dropped in twos and threes from the oval path they’d been flying, diving for the air exchanger opening. They were subsonic but still moving incredibly fast, just over 550 knots on average. He saw them in his mind’s eye falling above his shoulder, shooting stars on a fateful mission.

“Proximity warning,” buzzed the computer. “Control unit moving out of range.”

Turk jerked his head up and yelled. “Pilot, get the plane back into the right parameters. Put us where I told you. Now!”

12

Iran, near Natanz

C
APTA
IN
V
AHID CHECKED THE LONG DISTANCE RADAR
scan on his MiG-29 a second time, making sure it was clean before contacting his controller.

“No contacts reported,” he said. “I am zero-two minutes from Natanz.”

“Copy, Shahin One. You have no contacts reported.”

It took a moment to process the controller’s simple acknowledgment. Obviously excited, his Farsi had a heavy southeastern accent, and the words jumbled together with the static in Vahid’s headset.

Natanz was under blackout conditions and the pilot couldn’t see the faintest shadow of the facility to his left as he approached. Nor could he see any sign of its several satellites, or the support facilities arrayed around the region. Shrouded in literal darkness, the vast infrastructure of the country’s nuclear arms program Vahid was tasked to protect was as much a mystery to him as it was to most Iranians.

Vahid didn’t think much of the program. To him, it was a needless waste of resources—the air force could be greatly expanded with a hundredth of the funds, the navy could gain more submarines, the army strengthened. All would provide Iran with weapons that could actually be used, as opposed to the bomb no one would dare unleash, lest the retaliation result in the country’s death sentence.

And there would be money left over for food and gasoline, in chronic short supply these past few years.

Vahid was careful not to share these opinions. Even Jalil Zandi, the legendary ace and great war hero, had been jailed twice for saying things that contradicted the ayatollahs.

The controller called back with further instructions, alerting Vahid that he was sending two of the other three MiGs that had scrambled after him farther north. The third would patrol around Natanz.

So it was definitely a wild-goose chase, Vahid thought. But at least he was flying. The MiG felt especially responsive tonight, as if anxious to prove her worth.

“You are to proceed east in the direction of the original sighting,” added the controller. “Other aircraft are being scrambled. Await further instructions.”

Acknowledging, Vahid shifted to the new course. The air force was using a lot of its monthly allotment of jet fuel tonight, he thought; they’d pay for it in the coming weeks.

Banking toward Nain, his long range radar picked up a contact. It appeared only momentarily, the radar confused by the scattered returns of the hills. Vahid changed modes but couldn’t get it back.

Still, there had to be something there: very possibly the light plane he had been scrambled to find. He altered course slightly and readjusted the MiG’s radar to wide search. Reaching for the mike button, he was about to tell the controller that he’d had a contact then thought better of it. Send out a false alarm and he would be quizzed for hours about why he failed to turn anything up. Better to wait until he had something more substantial than a momentary blip.