There had inevitably been a delay in analysing the content of the drums of Zeolite seized from the freighter in the Red Sea, mainly because of the time taken to get them to the places where scientists could examine them. And, once they were able to start their investigation, they had to take extreme care in their procedures. But once they got started, the results came quite quickly, and were unambiguous: the Zeolite contained enormous quantities of weaponised Anthrax. Discovering whether or not the bacteria had been modified to only attack people of Jewish descent would take a lot longer, and involve much more detailed analysis.
But that didn’t really matter. The presence of that amount of Anthrax in all the drums so far checked was enough in itself to justify some kind of retaliatory action, and the delivery details of the load – they were to have been off-loaded at Haifa and then collected by regular trucks to be transported to one of the water softening plants in Israel – was enough to confirm the target.
The USS Florida had been ordered in February 1975, launched in November 1981 and commissioned on 18 June 1983 with the designation SSBN-728, as an Ohio-class ballistic missile nuclear-powered submarine. In July 2003 she entered the Naval Shipyard at Norfolk, Virginia, for her S8G PWR reactor to be refuelled, and for the boat to be converted to an SSGN – a cruise missile – submarine. She was re-designated accordingly and recommissioned at Mayport in Florida in May 2006.
On 19 March 2011, as part of Operation Odyssey Dawn, the Florida became the first Ohio-class submarine ever to engage in combat operations when the boat fired 93 Tomahawk cruise missiles at Libyan air defence targets to help create a no-fly zone over Libya and prevent Muammar Gaddafi from attacking rebel forces from the air. The normal war load carried by the boat amounted to 160 Tomahawks, costing around $2 million a pop, so that historic action had only used a little over half of the total armoury of the vessel.
The captain, officers and crew of the Florida had no knowledge of the Iranian scheme, or the preliminary results of the examination carried out at Fort Detrick, or anything else relating the matter. And they didn’t need to know. They just knew they had a job to do, and once the coded signal had been received on the boat, together with the target coordinates, the crew simply set to work prepping the weapons and programming the route and destination the cruise missiles were to follow.
It wouldn’t be anything like the attack on Libya. The coded operation order specified that only four missiles were to be used – a small number for a major assault but quite a lot for one single building. But Washington had wanted nothing left, to send a clear and unequivocal message to Tehran. And as each warhead contained 450 kilograms – 1,000 pounds – of high explosive, there were going to be no misunderstandings.
The Tomahawk has a range of between 700 and 1,350 nautical miles, depending upon the type, the Block number, and the Florida was carrying the Block IV TLAM-E variants, each with a range of about 900 nautical miles. So the boat didn’t need to be anywhere near the target, which suited everyone on board. Zahedan is about 600 kilometres inland from the coast of Iran, or about 330 nautical miles, so the Florida took up a position more or less in the middle of the Arabian Sea, well off the coast of Oman, ascended to the correct depth for missile release and waited for the go signal.
At just after 09:33 local time, the order to fire was given, and a precisely-determined series of events then took place on board the submarine, culminating in four cruise missiles being ripple-fired from the VLS – Vertical Launch System – on board.
As soon as the firing was completed, the Florida dived deep and turned south-east to head back towards her regular patrol area.