Mark frowned. “If you are, I am too. Something’s producing all that dust, and Iranian armor is the obvious candidate. But I don’t see how they could hide from cameras of the quality mounted on the Triton. Anyway, I’m calling it. Until someone comes up with a better explanation for a dust cloud headed south from the Iraqi border, it looks to me like an Iranian armored force is on its way to Riyadh."
Just as Mark reached for his phone, it rang. Again all Steve heard was a series of “Yes” and “No” responses, but this time followed by a "Is that confirmed?", followed by silence.
“OK, we’re not crazy. They’ve been looking at the same images at the CIA, and have reached the same conclusion we did. It makes just as much sense to them as it does to us.”
Steve raised his eyebrows. “You mean none.”
Mark nodded. “Exactly.”
Steve asked, "What were you asking about confirmation for?"
Mark hesitated, and then shrugged. "It will be on the news soon enough. A nuclear bomb took out a desalination plant on Saudi Arabia's Gulf coast.
Nobody has yet claimed responsibility."
Steve frowned. "Couldn't this have something to do with the Iranians moving armor south into Saudi Arabia, if that's what's happening?"
Mark shrugged, and replied, "Maybe. But if it was the Iranians, why not just use the bomb to attack Riyadh? I think there's still a lot here we don't understand."
Steve nodded, and said nothing. On that point, they were in complete agreement.
Prince Khaled bin Fahd was furious, and he knew he had to get his temper in check. First, the Crown Prince had tried to forbid him from flying this mission, even after the Americans had sent their alert and after the armored patrol from King Khalid Military City had failed to report in. Only after he had threatened to resign as Commander of the Air Force would the Crown Prince relent, but then only after making Khaled promise that he would do nothing but observe and report.
Khaled had no intention of keeping that promise.
The Houthis had crossed into Saudi territory many times, but there was little near the Yemeni border but desert. Still, they were doing everything possible to punish the Houthis for their arrogance. Khaled was not one of the spineless who cried over dead Yemeni women and children. Children grew up quickly to take the place of their dead fathers. Women gave birth to more fighters.
As long as the Houthis aimed missiles at his capital and invaded his country, as far as Khaled was concerned they all deserved death.
But none of that compared to the Iranians daring to launch an armored assault at the heart of the Kingdom. How could even the Iranians do something so outrageous, and so suicidal?
Khaled took a deep breath, drawing in the fragrance of the rich leather covering the seat of his Eurofighter Typhoon. Of course, the other Typhoons in the RSAF were not so equipped. Khaled had the seat on this particular Typhoon, on which he had trained in the UK, covered with the same leather used on the seats of a top-end Rolls Royce. To their credit, the British hadn’t even blinked when he made the request.
This was one of the many things he liked about the British. They knew how things were supposed to be done in a monarchy.
Khaled had been forced to leave Yemen alone in order to avoid disrupting already planned operations. This meant that the three other planes flying with him today did not have men from his squadron, and were flying F-15s rather than Typhoons. Here too, Khaled had been forced to bow to the Crown Prince, since he would have preferred to fly this mission alone.
Still, there was nothing on his radar return, and his threat warnings were all completely silent. Wait, on the horizon, was that the dust cloud the Americans were talking about?
Suddenly, his cockpit was filled with warning lights and alarms, including ones telling him that the enemy below had not only locked on to his aircraft, but had fired missiles at all four planes in their patrol. The other three fighters did exactly what their American training told them to do. Don’t wait for orders — evade, deploy countermeasures, and then if successful in avoiding damage either reform and attack or retreat depending on orders.
Well, the truth was that’s what Khaled’s British training said he should do, too.
Khaled was damned if he was going to let a foreign invader attack him without an immediate response. Where before there had been nothing on his radar, he now had a faint return that was just barely good enough for his Brimstone 2 missile to get a lock. Exultantly, Khaled pressed his finger on the trigger, sending the missile on its way.
The Brimstone 2 was one of the most successful independently developed items of military technology developed by the British in years. Its range had been tripled to sixty kilometers from the Brimstone 1, and it was rated as three times more likely than an AGM-65G Maverick missile to destroy a modern tank.
Outside Europe, Saudi Arabia was the Brimstone 2’s only buyer.
In part this was because not many countries outside Europe flew the Typhoon, and even the British had just finished fitting their Typhoons for the Brimstone 2, followed by the Saudis with the help of British contractors in a project that was still underway. The other part was that though the American military was interested in buying the Brimstone 2, its defense lobby had fought hard against importing such a widely used munition.
Khaled had plenty of experience evading surface to air missiles in Yemen, including the SA-75s the Houthis had modified into surface to surface missiles when they weren’t firing them at RSAF planes. Many of those missiles had been fired far closer to his Typhoon, and he was still here to tell the tale.
Khaled knew he could do it again. Though he was surprised to see that the invaders had what his instruments said was an S-300, he knew what missiles it could fire, and he knew he had time.
He yanked his joystick to begin evasive maneuvers, but his Typhoon had run out of time much more quickly than Khaled had thought. The Russian-made missile hit the Typhoon with enough force that ejection would probably have been impossible. Hitting the wing that held the other Brimstone 2 and detonating it meant that Khaled literally didn’t know what hit him.
Khaled’s death was not in vain, though. The Brimstone 2 was a true “fire-and-forget” missile, and it used its 94 GHz millimeters wave active radar homing capability to avenge the pilot who had launched it. Effective against tanks, it made short work of the S-300, which took a nearby armored personnel carrier with it when it exploded.
In a way Khaled was not to blame for his failure to survive the mission.
Two of the three F-15s did not survive either. None of the Saudi pilots knew that they were up against a variant of the Kh-47M2 Kinzhal hypersonic missile recently adapted for surface to air launch. Instead of the SA-75’s top speed of Mach 3.5, the Kinzhal’s speed was… Mach 10.
The only surviving F-15 pilot had escaped by pointing his plane’s nose straight down and pulling up at the last possible second. The Kinzhal’s speed had worked against it and the missile had slammed into the ground, close enough to the F-15 for the shrapnel from its explosion to damage it severely.
Not badly enough, though, that the pilot couldn’t nurse it back to base in Riyadh to give his report on the very real threat advancing on the capital.
Chapter Nineteen
Colonel Hamid Mazdaki frowned and shook his head at the report from the S-300 radar operator. Well, there was their answer. That cursed M1A2 tank had obviously managed to get off a report, because now they had company.
The only good news was that they didn’t yet know just how large the force was, or they would have sent more than a four-plane patrol.