The Disciple

He had killed them. Oh, they would have killed him if given the chance, but the aircraft designers and technical wizards in the States had given him a superior airplane, so he lived and the other fellows died for their country. Just like that.

Now he had to live with it.

Quereau was thinking about that, about living after killing, when his peripheral vision picked up something on his left. Something moving… He looked. A fighter, coming in on a bounce! Now a missile streaked from under a wing.

He slammed the left wing down and lit the burners at the same time. He manually triggered his chaff dispenser, which included flares to attract heat-seekers, which is probably what this guy launched.

He watched the missile as he turned a five-G corner. The incoming heat-seeker went behind the F-22, perhaps decoyed by a flare, perhaps because it couldn’t hack the turn.

He kept the turn in. The other fighter was creeping forward on the canopy, so he was out-turning him. He could see vapor trails off the other fighter’s wingtips.

He was canopy to canopy with the other fellow now, who was about a mile away. He was looking at its planform. MiG-29.

The F-22’s vectored thrust made this a lopsided contest. As maneuverable as the MiG was, the F-22 was even more so. The MiG was in his forward quadrant now. He was wi

It would have to be a gunshot. He had only AMRAAMs aboard, and the MiG was too close for them to arm. Yet his thumb didn’t move to the gun button on the stick.

Turning, turning, the MiG pilot knew he was dead if he tried to dive away. The G was bleeding off the MiG’s airspeed, so the F-22 appeared to be closing. Quereau pulled the throttles back out of maximum burner, so he wouldn’t overshoot, kept the G on.

He also stole glances at his threat indicator and tactical screen. If this guy had a wingman, Quereau couldn’t afford to play. Apparently he didn’t. Or if he did, Quereau hadn’t seen him yet.

Now the MiG pilot reversed his turn, half a roll, and jammed the stick forward, going into serious negative G, the classic escape maneuver. He had waited too long-Quereau was directly behind him and followed his every move.

Normally, in fighters of roughly equal performance, the lead fighter could escape with this gambit. But the fighters weren’t equal. The F-22’s superior roll rate and responsiveness more than made up for the lag due to the pilot’s reaction time.

Quereau couldn’t believe this encounter was happening. The F-22 was an artifact left over from the Cold War, or so the politicians said. And every living expert had solemnly pronounced the dogfight dead as dollar gas, yet here he was in one.

The MiG pulled positive and negative G, turned and rolled and climbed and did a Split-S. Quereau stuck to him like glue, even closing on him a little; less than fifty yards separated them now.

This guy doesn’t have a wingman. He’s out here solo looking for a fight. The realization hit like a hammer. Even if there were another Iranian fighter up here stooging around, the guy would never get a weapons solution on a target maneuvering this wildly or risk a missile shot with his victim this close to an Iranian fighter.

Quereau gri

“Uh-oh! We got company,” G. W. said on the tactical net.

I looked behind us. Dawn was here, and I could see fairly well. Two vehicles were coming down the access road toward the mosque. The lead vehicle looked like a limo. For sure, it was a long, low car. Behind it was an army truck with an open bed. I could see helmets in the bed. Troops.

“Can the door to the upper elevator chamber be opened from the outside?” I asked Davar, who was hunched down beside me.

“No,” she said, “but there is a telephone by the door, a direct line to the bunker command center. They can talk to the people inside, and they can take the elevator up and open the door.”

I thought about that as the vehicles drove toward the mosque. What if the B-2s didn’t drop their bombs, or the bombs missed the elevator shaft? What if Ahmadinejad came out?

One thing I knew for certain-Jake Grafton didn’t want that to happen, and he had told me to prevent it.

I glanced at the infrared designator lying in the grass beside me. A Hell-fire or two on the mosque would lock Ahmadinejad in, but there wasn’t time.

“Haddad,” I said on my tactical radio, “we gotta take these people down.”

The vehicles stopped in front of the mosque. As the rear passenger door closest to the mosque opened and someone got out, troops came pouring out of the truck and raced away in all directions to set up a perimeter.

Nouri and Qajar opened up with the machine gun, cutting them down. Still, some of the troops escaped the kill zone. At least four of them ran into the mosque behind the limo passenger. Our guys concentrated on taking down the exposed troopers.

I keyed the tac net radio again. “Joe, take out the vehicles. Don’t let them escape.”

“Okay,” he said.

The limo blew up, literally disintegrated right before my eyes, with pieces going everywhere. Then the booming report of the 100 mm tank gun reached me.

The truck driver wasn’t waiting to see what happened next. He popped the clutch and floored the accelerator. He managed to get the truck turned and pointed toward the access road before the second shell from the tank blew the cab clear off the truck. The carcass rolled forward for about fifty feet, then came to rest with the fuel tank ablaze. Smoke boiled up.

“Get those soldiers,” I roared into the mike and grabbed the satchel charge.

“No,” Davar screamed and grabbed my arm. “No. Don’t go down there. Wait for the bombers!”

“They might miss,” I told her, shrugging out of her grasp. I put my hand on Larijani’s shoulder. “Give me cover.”

Then I started ru

I lengthened my stride and ran like the wind toward the mosque. Bullets snapped in the air around me. The machine gun was vomiting bursts, I could hear several AKs going… I was going to get it any second.

For some reason I didn’t care. I had reached the combat plateau and no longer gave a damn.

I quit jinking and just flat-out sprinted. I went through the door with the AK going. One soldier was inside, maybe one of the guys who had sat outside the door for hours. He was just a mite too slow, and I gave him a burst right in the chest.

I slammed my back against the wall and waited for my eyes to adjust. The entrance to the bunker was in the basement, Davar had said-but where were the stairs down?

I heard ru

“You don’t run fast enough,” I said.

In the basement of the mosque, General Aqazadeh grabbed the telephone on the wall adjacent to the entrance to the bunker, which was sealed with a steel bombproof door. “The president,” he shouted at the man who answered. “This is General Aqazadeh.”

In two seconds Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came on the line.

Against the background noise of machine-gun bursts and random bursts from AK-47s, the general tried to tell the president how the war was going. “We couldn’t communicate with you,” he said, “and thought you might not be aware of events. The Americans have attacked all the sites. The American president is in Baghdad, on television, making political propaganda of our efforts. We have two missiles on the way to Israel. You must come out of the bunker and talk to believers worldwide.”