Each attack was quick—launch on the move, no hovering in one place. The next two flights did the same, swooping in and destroying targets; then the first two waves came in again to kill any targets they’d missed on their first pass, followed by the second two flights making a second pass.
The attacks were fast and chillingly accurate. In just a few minutes, the attackers had claimed the prizes for which they had come looking: six Iranian HY-2 Silkworm and four SS-22 Sunburn antiship cruise-missile launch sites, several Rapier antiaircraft missile batteries, and a handful of antiaircraft artillery sites, plus their associated munitions storage and command-control buildings. All were either destroyed or severely damaged. The Silkworm and Sunburn missiles had been devastating long-range weapons, capable of destroying the largest supertankers or cargo vessels passing through the Persian Gulf—their presence on Abu Musa Island, close to the heavily traveled international sea lanes, had been protested by many nations for several years.
Other missile attacks had claimed a large portion of the island’s small port facilities, including the heavy-lift cranes, long-boat docks, and distillation and petroleum-handling facilities.
But the big prize, the real target, had also been destroyed: two Rodong surface-to-surface missile emplacements. The Rodong was a long-range missile that had been jointly developed by North Korea, China, and Iran, and could carry a high-explosive, chemical, biological, or even nuclear warhead. From Abu Musa Island, the missile had had sufficient range to strike and attack targets in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and most of the oil fields in eastern Saudi Arabia—about two-thirds of the oil fields in the Persian Gulf region.
The Hawk, Gazelle, and Super Puma crews were incredibly accurate, almost present. A building that supplied power to the communications and military base facilities was destroyed by two missiles, but a virtually identical building just a few yards away that supplied power to the housing units was left untouched. A semi-underground Silkworm missile bunker with a fully operational Silkworm inside got a Hellfire through its front door, yet an adjacent empty bunker undergoing refurbishment but identical in every other respect was left undamaged. Although nearly half a billion dollars of weapons, equipment, buildings, and other infrastructure were damaged or destroyed, out of the more than two thousand men stationed on the island, only five unlucky Pasdaran soldiers, plus the F-5E pilots and their crew chiefs, lost their lives, and only a handful more were injured.
From the nearby air defense base at Bandar Abbas on the mainland, just 100 miles to the northeast, Islamic Republic Air Force MiG-29 fighters were scrambled almost immediately, but the attackers had hit their targets and were retreating south toward the Trudal Coast and the United Arab Emirates long before the Iranian fighters arrived. The MiGs tried to pursue, but Omani and UAE air defense fighters quickly surrounded and outnumbered them and chased them out of UAE airspace.
As the surviving Pasdara’n troops scrambled out of their barracks and began to deal with the devastation of their island fortress, five black-suited two-man commando teams silently picked up their gear, made their way to the shoreline of the one-square-mile island, clicked a tiny wrist-mounted code transceiver, then slipped into the warm waters of the eastern Persian Gulf after their leader cleared them to withdraw.
Before departing, one member of the lead commando team took a last scan around the area, not toward the military structures this time but northeast, toward the Strait of Hormuz. Peering through the suitcase-sized telescopic device he and his partner had been operating, he soon found what he had been searching for. “Man, there’s that mutha,” he said half-aloud to his partner. “That’s what we should’ve laid a beam on.” He centered a set of crosshairs on the target, reached down, and simulated squeezing a trigger. “Blub blub blub, one carrier turned into a sub.
Bye-bye, Ayatollah baby.”
“Get your ass in gear, Leopard,” his partner growled under his breath. In seconds they had packed up and were out of sight under the calm waves of the Persian Gulf.
The object of the young commando’s attention was cruising six miles northeast of the island. It was an aircraft carrier, the largest warship in the entire Persian Gulf—and it was flying an Iranian flag. It was the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, flagship of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s new blue-water naval fleet. Once the Russian aircraft carrier Varyag, and now the joint property of Iran and the People’s Republic of China’s Liberation Army Navy, the carrier dwarfed all but the largest supertankers plying the Gulf. Not yet operational and used only for training, its officers and crew had only been able to look on helplessly as the missile batteries on Abu Musa Island exploded into the night.
Leopard and his partner, along with the rest of the commando teams, followed tiny wristwatch-sized locator beacons to small Swimmer Delivery Vehicles anchored to the muddy bottom, and four divers climbed aboard each SDV. There they changed air tanks for filled ones, and followed their watertight compasses south and west to the marshaling point, where all five SDVs rendezvoused.
They traveled southwest together, surfacing for a few seconds in random intervals to get a fix from their GPS satellite navigation receiver. An hour later, still submerged, air tanks just a few minutes from exhaustion, they motored up to the hull of a large vessel, and hammered a code onto it. A large section of the port center side of the hull opened, and one by one, the five SDVs motored inside, surfaced inside the chamber, then hooked onto cranes that hoisted them out of the water onto the deck, where the crewmen disembarked.
Each two-man team handed up their scuba gear and personal weapons to the deck crews, along with forty-pound, suitcase-sized devices.
These were their AN/PAQ-3 MULE (Modular Universal Laser Equipment) portable telescopic laser illuminators. Tuned to a predetermined frequency and set on a target up to a mile away using electronic low-light telescopes, each invisible laser beam had reflected off its target and then been received by an airborne sensor, thus “illuminating” the proper target and allowing the missiles to home in and destroy the target with pinpoint accuracy. Although each aircrewman had been well familiar with the area and could have found most of the targets without help, the commando teams had known precisely which buildings were important and which were not, and had made each shot fired by the attack aircraft count. Not one precious shot had been wasted—one missile, one kill.
A thin, non-military-looking gray-haired man in civilian clothes greeted the crewmen as they emerged from the SDV, shaking their hands and giving each of the exhausted, shivering men a cup of soup and a thick towel with which to warm up and dry off. Tired as they were, however, the commandos were still excited, chatting about the mission, congratulating one another. Finally, the last two men emerged from their SDVs, turned in their equipment, and met up with the civilian. One man was tall, white, and powerfully built, with cold, fiery blue eyes; the other was slightly shorter, black, and much leaner, his eyes dark and dancing. The tall man moved silently, with slow, easy grace, while the lean man was animated.
“Man, what a ride!” he exclaimed loudly. He quickly stepped down the line of commandos in the dock area, giving each of them a slap on the back or shoulder, then returned to do the same to his partner. The men quietly acknowledged his congratulations, but did not return the enthusiasm—in fact, they looked at him with wary, almost hostile expressions. The cold shoulders didn’t seem to dampen the young commander’s exuberance, though. “It was great, man, awesome!” he exclaimed. “How’d we do, Paul? We kick ass or what?”