like to let Fischer and Admiral Ramsey, the commanding officer of the Fifth Fleet, conduct operations inside Iran if they even get a hint of possible action against them. If they have to wait until a threat extends beyond Iran’s territorial waters, their options will be seriously restricted.”
“Mr. President,” Andrea Johnson interrupted, “if we invade Iran’s air space, we will have lost all deniability on the world stage, and it will look as though we were actually behind this attack. I’m sorry but we cannot allow the Navy to attack Iran. This is an Israeli operation and we should have no part of it. If the Navy stays by Doha they should be out of range of Iran’s capabilities and be perfectly safe.”
“Mr. President,” Axelsson interjected, “we do not know the extent, or range, of Iran’s capabilities. Andrea’s notion that the fleet should be safe at Doha could be right – but we missed on their nuclear ambitions. I wouldn’t want to bet the safety of our fleet on our intel on the exact ranges of their defense capabilities in the gulf. The fleet needs to be able to defend itself. Furthermore, if they launch on our ships – and at this point, I am assuming that they will – we should have every right to defend ourselves – and that should include taking out any threat before it materializes. Remember, we did not start this.”
“Tom,” President Barre said, turning to his chief of staff, “set up a meeting with the Speaker and the rest of the Congressional leaders for seven tonight. Jim, you said the Israelis would be taking off in what, about ten hours?”
“That’s right; it’s now about twelve thirty in the afternoon here so that makes it about 7:30 p.m. in Israel. Colonel Jackson thought they’d be launching around six in the morning, local time.”
“Okay, six tomorrow morning over there would be 11:00 p.m. our time. By seven tonight – that’ll be just four hours before they launch – we should know if anything else has developed. At that point, I’ll let the Speaker, the Senate Majority Leader and the rest of the Congressional leaders know that Israel will be launching their attack and that we expect hostilities with Iran in the gulf and that if that arises as expected, the Fifth Fleet will have authorization to take out any naval and air threat they deem necessary – including operations within Iranian territory. However, actual offensive operations will not be authorized at this point. Is that understood Eric?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What about the Strait of Hormuz?” General Kaufman quickly added. “Tehran has long boasted that they would close the strait should something like this happen.”
“The same goes for the strait. It is a vital interest to this country – and we will defend it as such. Let Admirals Fischer and Ramsey know that both the fleet and the strait are to be defended, and that includes operations within Iranian territory, though again, no offensive operations.”
“Very good, sir. I’ll let them know.”
VIII
USS George Washington
“CAG, come on in,” announced Captain Noel Roberts, CO of the George Washington, to his commander, Air Group.
“Sir, what do we have?” replied the CAG.
“We have just been advised by the Pentagon that the Israelis will be taking out several of Iran’s nuclear sites. They’ll actually be launching in about eight hours; that’s about 6:00 a.m. their time in Jerusalem.”
“Nice of them to give us some warning,” the CAG remarked acidly. “So, where does that place us? Did the Stennis get the same warning?”
“Are you familiar with the term ‘Like shooting fish in a barrel’? Well, we’re the fish and this lake we’re in is the barrel. We’re too far north to make a run for the strait to try and get out of here. We’ll head to a little pocket between Doha and Abu Dhabi. Russia supposedly has supplied the Iranians with a pretty good supply of Sunburn missiles. However, by the time everything kicks off, we should be out of their range – if they haven’t modified those things. If they have, well we’ll have your Hornets out there to knock down anything that flies as well as anything that even looks like it might be ready to fire at us. The Stennis received the same warning as we did; they’ll remain in the Arabian Sea. Their Hornets will need to pair up with buddy stores to help us out should we need it. In addition, the Roosevelt is on its way as well and should be transiting the Suez Canal as we speak and, at full speed, could be here in a little more than three days.”
“I’ll keep two Hawkeyes up and double the CAP,” referring to the Hornet’s combat air patrol over the fleet. “I don’t want to do too much to tip off our friends for tomorrow morning but I want to get as much up and still not raise too much suspicion. The Israelis will be launching at six, figure it will take them three hours to get to their targets, so we’ll start launching everything we have about eight thirty, or two and a half hours after they’ve launched.”
“Once they’re airborne, I want them on station north and east of us. Any plane that gets past the Iranian coast line needs to be warned to back off immediately. I don’t want any unidentified aircraft within 150 miles of us so if they don’t back off, shoot’em down. If by chance they have some Sunburn missiles from the Russians, we’ll need to keep them at least one hundred miles from the fleet; I don’t want to take the chance that they might have modified these and extended their range.”
“Do we have any other assets in the region?” asked the CAG.
“Not as much as we did just a few years ago. There’s a squadron of Eagles at Al Udeid as well as a couple squadrons of Wraiths and Reapers. The Eagles will be guarding our back door as we head south. The Wraiths and Reapers will be airborne over several of Iran’s nuclear sites so when the Israelis hit them, we’ll know about it right away. A few years ago, the Iranians actually hacked into one of the Wraiths and brought it down so if they happen to see one snooping around, it shouldn’t raise too much suspicion.”
The following morning, twenty-five F-15I Eagles and seventy-five F-16I Vipers took off for Iran. Each of the F-15’s were loaded with two GBU-28 five thousand pound bombs while the F-16’s each carried two GBU-27 two thousand pound bombs. In addition, each of the fighters carried their own complement of air-to-air missiles: the Eagles each carried four missiles while the Vipers carried two each. Jim Carmichael had been right in that the Israelis had not been idle on the diplomatic front. The pilots were going to need to refuel in flight and both Turkey and Azerbaijan had granted the Israelis permission to base their tankers and other support craft out of their respective air fields; in Turkey, the Diyarbakir airfield practically sat astride the route the Israelis were flying so the tankers would fly out of here. In addition, the Azerbaijanis had granted use of the Baku airbase as Jackson had noticed, and the Israelis would base their G-550 EW “Eitam” craft out of here. The Eitams would meet up in flight as the strike fighters made the turn to enter Iranian airspace.
The Israeli G-550 EW, that is, electronic warfare, aircraft first made a name for themselves when the Israelis took out the Syrian nuclear plant at Dayr az-Zawr. The Israelis managed to crash Syria’s entire air defense system allowing its fighters unfettered access to their target. It seems that some enterprising graduate student at MIT had caught on to the notion that a significant part of any radar system is to receive data. He figured that if a way could be designed to capture the signal frequency of the radar unit and, instead of simply jamming that frequency, actually hijack the frequency and send data back along the frequency – that is any data – you could literally do anything you wanted to the
