“It is possible to provide security against other ills, but as far as death is concerned, we men live in a city without walls.”
Epicurus
*****
16:20pm EST UTC -4:30
MV Iran Deyanat, near Cape Hatteras
Atlantic Ocean
THE PLAINTIVE and incessant complaints of gulls drifted down from their hectic, circling flight above the fantail. Below them, the drifting container ship lounged quietly on the current. With its engines now silent, the only non-bird sounds came from its Iranian flag flapping lazily on the salty breeze and small white-capped breakers that lapped against the water line.
With large binoculars, Lieutenant Nadar ed-Din scanned the horizon and saw only two small fishing trawlers in the distance. Those boats matched the location of the blinking green contacts on the radar screens on the ship’s bridge. The busy eastern seaboard shipping lanes had scant business on this momentous day and that pleased him. We are free from any interference.
As news of the successful strikes across America continued to stream out from the vessel’s radio speakers, Din leaned forward and watched as his lead engineer and a technician completed their checks to the missile guidance and launch control systems. Din raised the satellite phone to his ear.
The two men on the other end of that call waited nervously for Din’s order. Each man stood in the wheel house of his own merchant container ship, as all three vessels were now staged at differing points on the oceans of Earth. Lieutenant Ahmad Dulabi, aboard the MV Iran Tavastland, was three-hundred-fifty miles west of San Luis Obispo, California. The third commander, Lieutenant Hassan Bani-Sadr, was aboard the MV Iran Esharaghi, floating ninety-miles east-northeast of the rocky island of Minorca in the Mediterranean Sea.
Each ship had triumphantly delivered its Russian-supplied two-megaton warheads, installed within their Shahab-4 missiles. The Makeyev-designed MRBM launch platforms had been customized to fit inside the equally modified shipping containers during their construction at the Bushehr terminal. During the ocean transport, nothing about those harmless looking containers hinted at the massive capabilities hidden inside. The ships appeared as just three more merchant vessels plying their trade upon the busy shipping lanes of the world. Once they had arrived at their current stations, the ship’s crane had removed the welded tops to the containers and the missiles were raised and readied for launch. Each of the three nuclear-tipped missiles now sat, waiting, at an eighty-five degree angle. The heavy smell of oxidizer and grease floated in the air around the launchers.
As each ship had left Bushehr, the missile arming sequence had been initiated. That was an extremely dangerous thing to do, but had been necessary. The decision meant that the Islamic Republic would be protected against immediate and massive retaliation if the attack plans were compromised and the missiles discovered. If the ships were threatened with boarding from the military forces of either NATO or the United States, the ship’s commander would detonate their weapon. This act would obliterate any evidence as well as kill some infidel scum. And since it was highly improbable that any intelligence service that might discover the operation would also be capable of identifying all three ships, it was almost guaranteed that one or more of the ships would be able reach their launch point unmolested, and any that were forced to detonate would act as an excellent distraction.
Din understood the necessity for the precaution, especially since it was one of the stipulations the Russians had demanded be in place. It was the ultimate precaution to ensure that they could never be associated with the attacks if the mission was a failure. Din felt it was unfortunate that without Russian and Chinese assistance, the entire operation would have never gotten this far, ending long ago. That irked Din mightily. Very soon we will have no need of them.
If they were discovered, President Ahmadinejad had prepared a cover speech, accusing the western powers of ‘brutally’ attacking ‘innocent’ merchant vessels. All nuclear explosions would be blamed on NATO and the Americans. Iran and her allies would accuse them of causing the explosions as a cover-up to make the Iranians appear guilty of attempting to obtain nuclear weapons. The western governments would know better but their domestic populations would fracture politically over the resulting confusion, and that should be enough political mayhem to halt any nuclear retaliation, especially with the Russians and Chinese running interference at the United Nations.
Din was confident that even if the entire flotilla were forced to sacrifice themselves before missile launch, and the mission were to ultimately fail, the western populations would still be deeply alarmed and that would make it highly likely they would withdraw even further out of involvement and interest in the matters of Asia Minor and the Middle East.
Those populations would sink ever deeper into a mindset of severe vulnerability. This would cause ever greater isolationism and protectionism among their terrified masses. At the same time the other Muslim nations would be forced, by Iran’s bold action and nuclear capabilities, to be ever more respectful and subservient to Persia’s growing power and influence. The rise and spread of the next great Persian Caliphate would gain momentum and eventually expand toward the domination of all the Islamic nations. From Gibraltar to Malaysia, oil and other resources contained therein would fall under the control of the Persians. Then, isolated and unprotected by any western powers, Israel’s demise would be assured.
The ships had left port innocuously, one by one, travelling the regular international shipping lanes. Din’s flag ship, the Deyanat, had triumphantly sailed past two American and one British naval task forces, the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier group in the Indian Ocean and a USS Nassau led MARG in the Mediterranean. The last was the British HMS Illustrious carrier group, just three days ago during his transit of the Atlantic. Each time his men had yelled their victory cries after they successfully passed under the noses of the arrogant enemy fleets.
Din had marveled at how much brute strength his enemies had at their disposal, and yet, how poorly they used it. He well understood that all the force in the world was useless if the moral and political will was not there. If he had that power, even the atheistic Russians and Chinese would be on their knees praying to the Kaába. Nadar ed-Din was a man who had the strength of will necessary to use power like that very effectively. He looked forward to showing these complacent infidels, these timid and weak fools, the error of their ways. Soon, when they looked with tears upon the destruction that he had wrought upon their miserable lives, they would know deep inside their godless souls the extent of his great wisdom and their own pathetic weakness.
Taking in a large breath from the salty air he looked out with satisfaction. The long-awaited and momentous day was finally here. His racing heart drummed in his ears as his excitement rose. The culmination of his lifetime of planning, hard work, and sacrifice had finally paid off. He stood at the cusp of the world turning a page, and starting a new chapter in the book of world history. He would be that historic figure, the fulcrum that would turn that page, by taking his nation’s nuclear sword and cutting out the beating heart from the arrogant west and feeding it down their screaming throats.
The great Salidin would not rank nearly as mighty as Nadar ed-Din in the future Shia-dominated world to come. He would be held in high esteem among all Muslims, maybe second only to the Prophet himself. No others would ever equal his accomplishments. The Supreme Leader had already commissioned a giant Masjid to be built in his honor on the flanks of the Alborz Mountains north of Tehran. Its construction would begin after his success today. Its gold-plated minarets would stand taller than the Milad Tower and be a place of solemn pilgrimage for every follower of Ali to worship in.
The engineer waved off the technician and looked up at Din, saying, “Done!”
Din smiled and brought his fist down on the handrail as the engineer climbed down from the launcher. Din turned to his men who stood at attention inside the wheel house, impatiently waiting for the launch. The moment had arrived. He lifted his fist into the air as he yelled the fire command into the phone as he pressed the fire switch
“Allahlu Akbar!”
The electrical circuit completed its route to the fuel igniter in one-one-thousandth of a second. The Shahab-4 rocket instantly streaked off the launcher, quickly reaching over 3,400 mph. It left behind a long white contrail of burned rocket fuel.
Din and his men bellowed with joy and jumped with excitement, praising Allah for their successful launch. Din yelled into the satellite phone, seeking confirmation from his fellow commanders that their launches had gone as well. For several seconds all he heard was a clamoring of voices, yelling joyously. The jubilation from his men softened as they watched him eagerly for news of their compatriots. Din loudly repeated his demands for launch confirmation. Finally, the other field commanders affirmed their success had matched his own.
The weighty consequence of the moment came crushing down on Din and his men, tears of joy and divine reverence poured down their faces. The will of heaven was done and nothing could stop the future, and the proud and arrogant would be laid low. They all dropped to their knees and began to fervently pray.
*****
THE FRIGATE, D620 Forbin, a French Horizon class warship, cruised leisurely at nine knots as it approached the last buoy marker at the harbor exit to the port of Toulon. The rosy, late-evening sky made the painted and picturesque hillside challis and villas on Mount Faron stand out brilliantly against the stone cliffs and olive trees. The old sixteenth-century stone fortifications of Fort Saint Louis overlooked a vast bay of sparkling blue waters. The small escort tug bobbed on the water next to the larger vessel, and standing in the doorway to his pilot house the harbor-master gave three short blasts on his air horn to salute and say farewell to his longtime friend. Gulls croaked and squawked their displeasure at the burst of rude noise as they trailed after the departing ship, hoping for cast-away scraps.
Captain Francis Ouelette waved goodbye to the older man and passed off piloting duties to the Officer of the Deck. He turned and strolled down the narrow halls into the darkened confines of the Combat Information Center (CIC). He believed, undoubtedly, that with the Americans being attacked so terribly today, that very soon his crew would be sent out to many more duty stations around the globe, and their training schedule must keep apace.
The French fleet had been downsizing their capitol ships for decades, but his ship was one of France’s modern and sophisticated missile frigates, and even though it was smaller, the Forbin now completed duties that were once handled by the larger ships of the past.
They had recently returned home for refit and resupply after maritime security duties in Operation Enduring Freedom, in cooperation with the USS Eisenhower carrier group assigned to the Indian Ocean. Today the Forbin was leaving port for a high-speed engine r.p.m. test and the captain looked forward to cruising on the open sea on such an extraordinarily gorgeous Mediterranean evening.
Unlike her commander, the young naval officer Aspirant Camille Piercy sat unhappy and unenthusiastic in her chair inside the dimly lit CIC. She stared blankly at the two uninteresting screens in front of her. A green radar screen was to her right and a black sonar screen to her left. Beside her sat Sub-lieutenant Antoine Jouet, who, as her instructor, thumbed through the pages in the thick training manual, but he felt as sullen and miserable as she.
Her training assignments for the night would keep them both glued to the darkened room, staring at those screens for the next six hours. As one of the ships newly commissioned midshipmen, Camille was learning first-hand how each of the complex electronics within CIC operated, and she would be stuck there all night. The two young officers were going to miss the beauty of the early fall night as they were forced to endure the glum mechanical and electrical prison, its artificial air and cramped space feeling very much like a tomb. Then tomorrow they would be sleeping for their next night-shift while the blue waters shined below sunny skies. Depressing.
Captain Ouelette entered and quickly shut the door behind him to keep the brighter light from disturbing those inside. Making their unhappiness quickly evaporate from their faces, the two young officers greeted their commander warmly as he passed by. He had only taken two steps past them when all hell broke loose.
Dozens of blinking lights and buzzing alarms suddenly clamored to life while almost every computer screen came on and displayed rapidly changing words and numbers, causing Camille’s heart to leap into her throat. The abruptly activated panels and electronics in front of her seemed to have a crazy sort of consciousness. She frantically watched it all in bewilderment, as if someone had rudely placed a smelly and crying baby in her lap. Her eyes quickly darted from left to right as she attempted to absorb the incoming data.
Jouet jumped in his seat, sending the training manual flying as he reached for the wall, to keep himself from tipping over onto his back.
“What did you do?” he screamed.
“Nothing, I did nothing! I don’t know what’s happening!” she screamed back excitedly. Her long blond ponytail swung wildly as she scanned the screens and panels.
As they tried to determine what had activated the alarms, the tactical officer and captain came running up behind them. Very quickly all four sets of eyes were drawn to the air defense radar screen. Shocked, silent, strangely curious, and becoming rapidly horrified they all stared at the impossible and unexplainable. A bright green blinking dot moved rapidly across the radar screen with accurate and terrifying readouts documenting its travel.
As the dot crossed the thin green line representing the French coastline, Jouet frantically adjusted the screen resolution to reveal a greater view of the surrounding European continent.
Captain Ouelette jerked at his tactical officer’s shoulder.
“Man fire control! Get your ass to fire control, now!”
*****
SIMILAR TO Camille, Canadian Air Force Sergeant Greg Miller also sat amid a large bank of computer terminals. Every work day, for the past four months he had typed at those terminals while monotonously staring up at the twelve huge wall-mounted flat-screens that blanketed the far wall. His workstation was square in the middle of the old NORAD Command Center that sat deep inside the hard granite rock of Cheyenne Mountain. Before today, he had thought that the most exciting thing he would ever do was cataloging Santa’s holiday travels for the website in December.
The famously non-secret missile defense center for the entire North American continent was once holed-up inside these cavernous vaults under the eastern flanks of the majestic Colorado Rockies, due west of Colorado Springs. The NORAD complex had since moved to Peterson Air Force Base in 2006, but the facilities under the mountain were still manned as a back-up.
Unlike young Camille’s radar screen that showed only one dot, the giant screens Greg stared at showed many more blinking lights, each one representing a single missile that was being methodically tracked by the multitude of military satellites, land-based radar stations, planes, and naval ships that fed information directly to the installation.
His screens showed a total of seventeen missiles in flight, three red ones and fourteen blue ones. There was one red dot that represented the same missile that Camille was watching fly above the European Alps. Then there was the red dot that had crossed the eastern coast of the United States and was now flying above the Appalachians, while the third red dot had crossed the west coast and now flew high over the Sierra Nevada range.
Meanwhile, across those same screens, Greg watched as eleven blue dots were converging toward, and very slowly catching up to, the two missile threats to North America, while three NATO blue dots converged toward the single missile above the Alps. Those blue dots represented air-to-air missiles launched to destroy the attacking weaponry.
The sudden and complex electronic game had existed for a mere thirty seconds, yet Greg was still trying to wrap his mind around what was happening. If not for the automatic responses that had been triggered inside the massive bank of super-computers that controlled allied missile-defense, there would be few, if any, speeding blue dots up on the screens. Greg was rapidly realizing that relying on human reaction speed for missile defense was a useless and pitiful endeavor.
Greg stared, transfixed, at the red blinking light that travelled over the California coastline and was now speeding high above the dry desert of central Nevada, directly above the lanes of scenic Highway 50. His eyes darted to the European map where another red dot was crossing over the city of Bern, Germany headed northeast. His gaze shifted to the last red dot as it cleared southern Maryland and was now a hundred miles above central West Virginia. A fast moving blue dot, from the missile defense arsenal around Washington, DC, had rapidly closed to within fifty miles of downing that threat.
Sergeant Miller pounded at the keys to his terminal as he attempted to extrapolate the location of origin for the incoming missiles. The atomic clocks that so precisely calibrated the digital time displayed on his screens read 16:38:41pm EST when the red dot over West Virginia stopped blinking forever, and every screen in front of Greg went dark.