by Jeff Nesbit
Ulanov looked toward the committee chairman and nodded once, signaling that he would not object to the U.S. motion. The Costa Rican ambassador, who’d spoken to King prior to the meeting, made the motion quickly to refer the matter to the Security Council. The matter was referred moments later.
But, from the American perspective, the damage had already been done. Israel was now the bad actor—the nation that had first used nuclear weapons in the Middle East, which would trigger an immediate escalation on the part of Iran and its proxies. Forces would be unleashed.
From the Russian perspective, Andrei Rowan had gotten what he needed. Ulanov knew he would be pleased.
23
ABOARD THE USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN
THE GULF OF OMAN
“Get them here!” he barked. His voice echoed loudly in the command and control center, the nerve center of the Nimitz supercarrier. He didn’t care who knew that he was angry. He needed the ships in the vicinity, and he needed them here yesterday.
The executive officer of the USS Abraham Lincoln—the ship’s second-in-command—took a step forward to address his superior officer. “Sir, are you sure—”
Vice Admiral Asher Truxton turned abruptly. “Yes, I’m sure. We need all four of them here, and we need them now. We’re going to need everything we have.” Everyone else in the command and control center listened intently as the vice admiral spoke.
“Sir, we have our full complement of eight supporting ships, and we’re loaded to the gills with the aircraft we need,” the executive officer said. “We have four other carrier fleets ready to support us. We’ll be fine.”
“I know,” Truxton said sharply, “and we have eyes in the sky looking out two hundred miles, targeted EMP ready to shut down their systems, and the next-gen blue-green lasers looking for midget subs. Our Sea-RAM system is ready. I know! I’ve been briefed more times than you can imagine. But we still need those LCS ships—we need ten times the number we have.”
The crew on the Abe was universally perplexed about why Truxton was on their ship and running the show for the time being in place of their captain, Dewey Smith. But Truxton was not your typical vice admiral and fleet commander. He’d visited the USS Abraham Lincoln twice before during operations and maneuvers in the Persian Gulf region.
So it wasn’t unusual for Truxton to be on board. It was just odd, and out of place.
What none of them knew was how gravely concerned Truxton was at the moment. He had always paid close and special attention to Israel. And, right now, Israel was at the center of a storm that could shortly engulf the world.
Truxton was also plain mad at the way his own leadership wasn’t prepared. He’d fumed, cursed, and boiled over with rage at Washington, DC, and the procurement bureaucracy that had botched several key acquisitions. That ineptitude was about to see its consequences near the shallow waters of the narrow strait of water responsible for the passage of 40 percent of the world’s oil.
He was angry, too, that the leadership at the Pentagon was still mired hopelessly in the past, and the notion that a show of huge projected force with massive carrier fleets in the water would always get the job done. Times had changed, and Truxton was worried that they simply were not prepared for asymmetrical concepts that could confound even the best and biggest they had to offer.
Truxton knew precisely what he needed in the Persian Gulf—and specifically what he needed in the shallow, coastline waters south of Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. These were the most treacherous waters anywhere on the planet, and he wasn’t convinced they could handle a coordinated, all-out attack.
He knew this, in his bones, and it angered him to the depth of his long career in the Navy that they weren’t prepared right now, at a critical moment in time. There was a way for Iran to strike—and temporarily cripple—Western forces trying to keep the Strait of Hormuz open for the passage of oil.
Iran’s military was second-rate. There was no question of that. The Iranians lied through their teeth, bluffed, and pretended at every turn. They announced prototypes and make-believe weapons systems whenever possible. They projected force that simply did not exist. They had very little ability to build anything that could significantly threaten the U.S.—or Israeli—military. U.S. military forces crushed Iran in every war game scenario that had ever been conducted.
But Truxton knew this was not the full story—not by any means. Russia, China, and North Korea had been advising the leadership of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards for years now—and selling them weapons systems behind this advice. The Iranians had learned a great deal by watching and listening. They’d learned how to be smart about what they were buying with their vast oil wealth. Iran used its oil wealth to keep Russia interested and at the table.
And they were buying systems that could exploit vulnerabilities. Truxton and the Pentagon leadership knew that Iran had purchased dozens of SS-N-22 anti-ship cruise missiles—the so-called Sunburns—that had been developed in Russia and modified in China, and most probably the sister, Russian-made SS-NX-26 Yakhonts missiles that could nearly hit Mach 3 and had a range of 180 miles. Both the Sunburns and the Yakhonts could carry a nuclear payload, if need be.
The Sunburn was twice as fast as any comparable American anti-ship cruise missile. The Sea-RAM “just in time” system consistently knocked them down in drills, but Truxton knew that any sort of swarm attack was a different scenario entirely. What’s worse, China had developed an even more advanced cruise missile—the Anjan, or “Dark Sword”—and they weren’t sure how many had made their way yet to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.
For all they knew—and the Pentagon knew a lot—hundreds of Exocets, Sunburns, Yakhonts, and even Anjan Dark Swords could be tucked away in the mountains up and down Iran’s southern coast. Truxton drew some comfort in the knowledge that the U.S. had developed the ability to track, target, and shut down the individual guidance systems on all of these cruise missile systems. But a swarm attack, from many different directions, could still create problems for the American ships in the Gulf.
What worried Truxton just as much was their relative inability to track and fight in the shallow waters of the Persian Gulf if they had to close in on the waters just south of Bandar Abbas. They needed fast ships that could reach forty knots, draft in shallow water, and deal with coastline threats.
They had such a ship—the Littoral Combat Ship—that had been in development by both General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin for years. But the Pentagon had been forced to cancel both programs due to massive, almost inexplicable cost overruns at both defense contractors and then restart the procurement. As a result, they only had four LCS ships, when Truxton knew they needed ten or twenty times that number in the Persian Gulf region. But four LCS ships were better than none, he knew.
Truxton had ordered all four LCS ships there immediately, and they would arrive within a day or two. But, for now, the 5th Fleet stationed at Bahrain was responsible for the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, and they would simply have to deal with whatever happened in the region.
All the NSA traffic said something was imminent. Iran had chosen not to track the Israeli planes out over the sea, or over Turkey, immediately following the attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities. They’d chosen to retaliate with the lone Shahab 3 strike and to muster concerted forces elsewhere.
The Pentagon leadership now presumed that Iran’s next effort would be to close the Strait, as it had vowed. Truxton was not convinced that U.S. and Israeli forces were ready, and he had made the last-minute decision to run things from aboard the Abe. He was worried about the possibility of swarming threats—from midget and swimmer subs or speedboats deployed on suicide missions.
The USS Abraham Lincoln was a Nimitz-class supercarrier. It had been to the Gulf region several times. The officers on board knew what they were up against. They’d left the Naval Station in Everett, Washington, only two months ago for a seven-month deployment to the Persian Gulf.
Captain Smith opened
the door to the command control center and stepped in smartly. Whatever emotions he felt about the vice admiral showing up on his ship were hidden well. “Sir, the ships are in position,” Smith said. “The AWACs are up, satellites are real-time, eyes and ears are open, and the aircraft are ready to go.” An outstanding captain, Smith deserved his command of the supercarrier. But he also respected the chain-of-command. If Truxton felt he needed to be here, then Smith was apparently willing to accept his superior’s presence without question.
“So we can move in, if need be?” Truxton asked.
“At your command, yes,” Smith said. “We are 150 miles out from Bandar Abbas. We can move at any time. We can deploy whatever we need. We stand at ready.”
“Good.” Truxton nodded. “And the Aegis system?”
“Running. No threats observed,” Smith said.
“Sea-RAM?”
“Tested, and ready.”
“And the four LCS ships?”
“They will be here within the day,” Smith said.
“I wish we had more of them.” Truxton frowned.
“You and me both.”
“It’s a shame we botched the procurement so badly. We need as many of those ships as we can get our hands on, right now.”
“We’re ready, sir,” Smith said firmly.
“I believe you, Captain,” Truxton murmured. “I do. But we may yet be surprised by what we see.”
24
JASK, IRAN
The nondescript, twin prop jet landed without incident at the tiny airport on the outskirts of Jask. No other planes had landed at Jask that morning, so it made its way to the end of the single runway and turned into the flat, tin-roof hangar without much discussion on the airwaves.
Jask was a quiet, sleepy resort town on the coast of the Oman Sea, south of the Makran Coast mountain region. It was a tranquil, beautiful resort area, with a budget hotel, a lone gas station, a mosque, and a hospital. There was only one main road into the town. Jask’s historical site was on the western side of the coastal town, and its square ran alongside the eastern shore.
Iran’s leaders had long ago established a pretense for visiting the area. Several of them had purchased resort villas and regularly visited there with an entourage. The local Jask community had grown accustomed to visits from Tehran officials and their retinue over the years. It was not out of the ordinary to see a group from Tehran.
But twenty miles inland, at points where the mountains climbed up and away from the coastline, the Guards had systematically built a number of sites to launch the anti-ship Sunburns they’d acquired from Russia, through North Korea, and elsewhere.
They’d also managed to conceal hangars for dozens of attack helicopters and small planes that were prepared to join a firefight one hundred miles or so offshore at a moment’s notice. There was the risk, of course, that some of these planes and helicopters—which had been parked there, idle, for years in some cases—would be unable to take off and join a fight.
But it was a risk the Guards were willing to take. There had been no training exercises anywhere in the Jask area for years—merely visits from officials who were there to vacation and make regular trips up into the mountains a short distance away for sport and fun.
None of the local residents at Jask knew that, fewer than thirty miles away, the Guards had a full-fledged listening post capable of tracking movements of carrier fleets up to two hundred miles out to sea from that location. They had no knowledge of the cache of the Russian Sunburns or Dark Swords obtained from China that were armed, waiting for a launch order.
They couldn’t possibly realize that—within a sixty-mile radius—there were three separate hangars built into the side of the Makran Coast mountains, hiding secret runways roughly the length of a large naval carrier designed to allow small fighter jets and attack helicopters to take off quickly.
All of this had been built carefully and meticulously over the long history of the Guards’ control of the military in Iran for just this day, when they needed to exert temporary control of the Strait of Hormuz at a critical moment.
What the Americans, Israelis, and others failed to grasp about Iran’s theocracy and the Revolutionary Guards was that they took a very long view of their steady march to empire. They were content to rule, build, and grow over decades—not years. Though the Western press often had difficulty tracing their strategic intent, they weren’t hasty, crazy, or wild-eyed. Far from it.
No, in fact, they had exhibited patience around the region, allowing proxies in Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere to do their bidding. They were content to build and wait.
Hussein Bahadur had wasted no time getting from Gilan Qarb south to Jask. In fact, he’d left the moment the Shahab 3 had been fired at Israel. Zhubin wanted him to personally oversee the battery of anti-ship missiles, speedboats, attack helicopters, and small planes the military had strategically arranged up and down the southern coastline of Iran.
The more logical strategic headquarters for this mission, of course, was Bandar Abbas at the narrowest point of the Strait of Hormuz. But the entire world expected Iran to operate from there. So it did not operate from there.
Asymmetrical warfare dictated that one came at one’s enemy from many different, unexpected directions. Who in their right mind would attack an enemy’s greatest strengths head-on—especially when that enemy had the collective might and power of the United States and Israel?
The American Navy’s projected force was the greatest any navy had ever shown in the history of the world. Their Nimitz-class supercarriers were virtually indestructible. Short of a small nuclear explosion onboard one, the carriers that served at the core of their fleets were unsinkable.
But, Bahadur knew, they were also very big targets—ones that the Russians and Chinese had spent tens of thousands of man-hours studying and plotting against. Iran now possessed the fruits of that long study.
The entire world knew Iran had every intention of shutting down the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation to an Israeli first strike. Shutting the Strait down would effectively stop the flow of most of the world’s oil, bringing the entire global economy to the brink of collapse.
Iran, alone, held the key to control of the shallow waters and shipping lane through the Strait of Hormuz. It wasn’t as if the United Arab Emirates was going to stage counter-attacks from Dubai.
No, there was just one navy—the American Navy—that could prevent the closure of the Strait. And Bahadur had a plan to keep it out for weeks, and possibly months.
In truth, shutting down the Strait was not in Iran’s own national interest. It would hurt its own exports as well as others, but there was very little choice in the short term. The leadership of the Guards had won their argument. If they did not respond to the Israeli attack with some sort of military success in the region, their cause would be harmed for years, if not decades. They needed a critical, strategic success, and they needed it immediately. The Strait was their best hope.
Several of the Guards’ leaders were waiting for Bahadur in front of the budget hotel as his car turned left off the main road into Jask. They’d been there for the better part of a day.
“God grant you peace,” Bahadur said as he stepped from the car.
“Upon you be peace,” responded the senior-most official.
Bahadur wasted no time with pleasantries. “Have you visited the three hangars already? Are they prepared?”
“Yes, sir, they are,” the official answered.
“Our pilots? The submarine crews? They are all here?”
“All of them drove through the night to get here. They are all in place.”
“And the missiles? They are ready as well?”
“Armed,” the officer answered. “We will fire on your command.”
Bahadur nodded. All was well. It was almost time. There was only one other thing to check on, and it was something he wanted to do personally.
The Guards had also built a secret facility on the we
stern side of Jask, north of the old historical site, to allow midget submarines to set out to sea. There were a dozen speedboats secured there as well, underneath a tin roof that ostensibly had been built to protect luxury boats from the rain.
Every defense think tank in the world believed that Iran had only a handful—fewer than ten—of the essentially worthless midget and “swimmer” submarines. But the Guards had purchased every midget submarine that had ever become available, and had, in fact, built two dozen of their own over the years, modeled after North Korea’s Yugo sub. North Korea had given Iran four Yugos as repayment of debt, then had taught Iran how to manufacture more of them.
Most of them worked—thanks to the North Korean military leaders and scientists who’d helped them acquire much of their arsenal and hardware and showed them how to operate all of the various moving parts—and were now ready to be deployed on suicide missions. The old and new Yugos were parked near Jask.
The truth, which the world would learn very soon, was that North Korea had equipped and trained Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. The Iranians had learned—and learned quickly. They were excellent students and more than willing to take everything North Korea had been willing to give.
It was time to set the trap for the Americans. Bahadur needed the Americans to think that the Iranian navy was projecting a show of force south of Bandar Abbas. One of his lieutenants was in command of a small fleet of Corvettes and Tir class attack craft. They were waiting on Bahadur’s order to leave port at Bandar Abbas and head in the direction of the American supercarrier fleet two hundred miles away, in the deeper waters of the Gulf of Oman.
At the right moment, Bahadur would call his lieutenant from an unprotected phone, over an open satellite channel, and give the order to move the fleet of Corvettes and Tirs out to sea. The NSA would pick it up, relay the order instantly, and, most likely, act on the intelligence.
