The amount of VX in the Khorramshahr 2 missile’s warhead was enough to ensure it would not only kill most of the bases’ military personnel and the quarter-million residents of Al Kharj, it would also contaminate much of the Saudi food supply, and literally kill its dairy industry.
Even worse, VX was specially designed as a persistent nerve agent. That meant that days or even weeks after it was dispersed, it could still kill. As an area denial weapon, that meant not only would the pilots at Prince Sultan Air Base be dead, their planes could not be flown prior to decontamination by suited technicians who would need days to do the work properly.
Decontamination of the soil to allow crops to grow again would take much longer.
So, the stakes were very high for the crew at the Patriot missile battery covering the capital region, even if they had no way of knowing just how high.
The notice provided by the sole surviving tank in Jawad’s platoon had been helpful to the Patriot’s crew. It gave them the time to establish that the Khorramshahr 2 missile was not merely off-course for Riyadh, but was actually targeted at Prince Sultan Air Base. It also allowed two separate Patriot missile batteries to coordinate their coverage, to ensure that if the missile made a course change to Riyadh it could still be intercepted.
After the Patriot’s failure to stop a ballistic missile attack against Riyadh in 2018, the US had approved its upgrade to the MIM-104F (PAC-3) standard.
This comprehensive overhaul to the system’s computer hardware and software as well as its communications hardware was coupled with a dramatic upgrade to the missiles fired by the Patriot system. Now each launch canister, instead of firing a single PAC-2 missile, could hold four PAC-3 missiles.
The PAC-3 missile was also made more maneuverable, due to tiny pulse solid propellant rocket motors mounted in the front of the missile. An even more significant upgrade was the addition of an active radar seeker, allowing the missile to drop its system uplink and acquire the target itself once it was near, critical when trying to keep up with a fast-moving ballistic missile target.
The accuracy of the PAC-3 missile was improved so it could specifically target the warhead portion of a ballistic missile, giving it the capability to destroy the missile simply by striking it for a “kinetic kill.” However, the missile also included a small explosive warhead launching twenty-four low-speed tungsten fragments enveloping the target — just to be sure.
This upgrade had already been underway when the apartment building in Riyadh struck by a Khorramshahr 2 had collapsed. That disaster had dramatically speeded the pace of the conversion to PAC-3 on both the US and Saudi sides of the program, and it was now complete. Today would see its first test.
Since the original Khorramshahr missile had been based on the Hwasong-10, which the North Koreans had sold to Iran, it and the improved version 2 had similar capabilities. These did not include detecting and evading interceptors.
Once the Khorramshahr 2 missile was in range of a Patriot battery in southern Riyadh, it launched two canisters of PAC-3 missiles at the target, for a total of eight interceptors. This left it with another two canisters in reserve while the first two were reloaded, in case of another ballistic missile launch.
The first interceptor malfunctioned and veered off course, eventually impacting harmlessly in the desert.
The second struck one of the missile’s tail fins, changing its course from Prince Sultan Air Base to the city of Al Kharj.
The third had been on course to hit the warhead, but could not cope with the last second course change, and also ended up impacting in the desert.
The fourth hit the warhead and the fifth hit the fuselage at almost the same instant. The warhead had been designed to detach and deploy the VX just before the missile’s impact, so that the missile’s burning rocket fuel would not consume it.
With a boiling point of 298 degrees Celsius, VX had to reach an even higher temperature for incineration. Fortunately the hypergolic propellant used in the Khorramshahr 2 missile, a mix of unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide, served that purpose very effectively.
The remaining interceptors sailed through the expanding cloud of burning fuel and debris. Once the Patriot crew confirmed the Khorramshahr 2 missile’s successful interception, they were detonated remotely to ensure they would not impact an unintended target on the ground.
The plan to neutralize Prince Sultan Air Base and cripple Saudi agricultural production had failed.
Chapter Twenty Six
Though he’d known reorganizing his forces would take time after the beating they’d just suffered, Prince Bilal was dismayed that as the Royal Saudi Air Force (RSAF) planes approached they were still almost exactly where they’d been during the attack. One problem had been getting medical assistance to injured tank crews, which were scattered and in many cases too badly wounded to even reach their radios.
Another problem had been track replacement. Dispersal had reduced the effectiveness of the air attack, but it had made getting replacement tracks to Leopards needing them a time-consuming chore.
Fortunately, the Qatari Emeri Air Force (QEAF) had been on alert from the moment Bilal’s force crossed the Saudi border, and had already radioed him that they were en route to provide cover.
Ironically, many of the fighter jets about to meet in the skies above Bilal’s force were the same aircraft operated by different countries. Both the RSAF and the QEAF flew the F-15 and the Typhoon, while only the QEAF flew the French Mirage 2000-5 and Rafale.
The QEAF’s sole advantage was that its aircraft were newer. With the exception of the Mirage 2000-5, its entire Air Force had been purchased largely as a reaction to Saudi threats, culminating in the blockade and the start of construction on the Salwa Canal.
The RSAF’s advantages included more planes and pilots, as well as more experience and training. While QEAF pilots had flown out of Crete to enforce the no-fly zone over Libya in 2011 and had later flown missions against ISIS in both Iraq and Syria, that experience paled in comparison to the combat flying time the RSAF had accumulated in Yemen.
Of course, both the RSAF and the QEAF shared a complete lack of air-to-air combat experience since the Libyans had never sortied aircraft to challenge the Qataris, and neither the Houthis nor ISIS had an Air Force.
The air superiority versions of the F-15 (A/C/I/S) had never been shot down in air-to-air combat, while it had downed over a hundred aircraft in engagements in Europe and the Middle East. The Mirage 2000 had a less inspiring record of one enemy aircraft shot down, and one lost to ground fire.
The RSAF had lost both a Panavia Tornado and a Typhoon to ground fire in Yemen. The Rafale had flown in combat before, but had neither shot down an enemy aircraft nor been shot down itself.
All that would change today.
American trainers in Saudi Arabia for the F-15 were employees of its manufacturer, and were based at King Khalid Air Base near Khamis Mushait about one hundred sixty kilometers north of Yemen. British trainers for the Typhoon in Qatar were still considered on active duty in the Royal Air Force.
Neither group of trainers would have ever considered flying with their students.
The French instructors for Qatar’s new Rafale aircraft, however, were retired French Air Force pilots, and all three volunteered to fly with the QEAF. All of them sympathized with Qatar, disliked the idea that the Saudis could push it around simply because it was bigger, and thought that changing Qatar from a peninsula to an island with the Salwa Canal could reasonably be considered an act of war.