I just hope the Iranians aren’t up to something nasty today, Lampert thought to himself.

Ahh… nothing will happen.

Sultani looked over the shoulder of the radar operator at the screen. He saw the blips that were Lampert’s four Hornets began to separate from the single spot of light as they came up the gulf. “Send the boats,” he told the military aide at his elbow. The man, a colonel, picked up the telephone. The wire had been run to this site just two days ago.

At the airbase at Bandar-e Abbas, one hundred nautical miles away, two SU-30 fighters were on five-minute alert, with the pilots in the cockpits, ready to start engines. Sultani looked at his watch. They could be here within twenty minutes. Their arrival should be a nice surprise for the Americans, if the Sukhoi pilots obeyed orders and left their radars turned off. The F-18s’ fuel state should be down significantly by then.

This might work, Sultani told himself. He found his nephew Ghasem looking at him. He made eye contact, nodded affirmatively and stepped outside. Nestled in the shade of a tree was a table that contained a computer. Wires led away in all directions to antennas spotted up and down the coast and at four sites inland. Two men were there, monitoring the signals coming in from the various sites.

The senior man, a Russian in a white shirt and dark trousers, turned toward Sultani when he saw him approach.

“Is your equipment working properly?” the Iranian asked.

“Yes. Quite satisfactory,” the Russian replied and glanced at Ghasem, who was two paces behind his uncle.

“A flight of four American fighters is coming up the Gulf,” Sultani said. “Our fighters are thirty minutes away. After the American planes pass us, I am going to have the gunboats sortie. They can make a run on that tanker there.” He pointed to a tanker far away, just visible against the haze that obscured the horizon.

The Russian looked in the indicated direction, held his hand to shade his eyes, then turned back to Sultani. “This may be interesting,” he said with a grin.

In the cockpit of his F/A-18 Hornet, Harry Lampert could see mountain peaks to his right poking up through the haze. They were about a hundred miles away, he guessed, in Iran. To his left, on the Arabian Peninsula, he saw several lower peaks, probably six thousand feet in elevation, but they were far away, indistinct, barely visible in the yellow sky. Yes, the sky over Arabia was yellow… Perhaps the sun reflecting from the sand and rock and packed earth of that desert hellhole upon the dust and dirt suspended in the atmosphere. Whatever, the yellowish tint to the sky extended up, up, up. Lampert thought the air over Arabia must be laden with dust well into the stratosphere.

He turned back to the business at hand, checked his radar, then his wingmen, listened to that steady beep as the Iranian radar beam swept him every few seconds, turned the plane slightly to stay in the center of the channel through the Strait of Hormuz. Causing an international incident by violating foreign airspace would not be career-enhancing.

In the Number Four plane in Lampert’s flight, Hillbilly Jones was also looking at the yellow sky over Arabia. Dirt in the air, he thought. He wondered what that dirt was doing to the engines as they sucked it in. Nothing good, that’s for sure.

Hillbilly wasn’t worried about navigation or even paying much attention to the location of the flight. The senior guys could worry about that. All he had to do was follow Number Three, Chicago O’Hare, wherever she went. In the unlikely event Chicago got lost, he would be, too, but probably she would stay found, and so would he. All in all, being a junior officer was pretty simple.

Ol’ Chicago’s plane was suspended in this goo, as were the other two away to the right. They looked sort of like fish lying there motionless in the sky. They were all moving, of course, but only the relative motion could be seen, and with good formation pilots, there was damn little of that. They looked, he thought, as if they were painted upon that featureless, hazy backdrop.

Hillbilly Jones made a mental note to say that when he wrote a letter to his girlfriend this evening. She was studying for a master’s in English lit and liked it when he described how stuff looked.

He sighed and tried to rearrange his testicles so the parachute harness didn’t cut him so much.

The undecked open gunboats were about fifty feet long and were driven by two powerful V8 engines; they were capable of forty knots in relatively calm water. Amidships, three men stood by the 37 mm, one to optically aim and fire, the other two to load magazines as necessary. Eight other men armed with AK-47s rode forward. Their job, if the captain ordered action, was to sweep people from the decks of the victim ship while the 37 mm tore at her guts. The gunboats were cheap and effective patrol boats. Or pirate boats, depending on one’s political persuasion.

Out of the harbor, the three boats set up in a left echelon formation. Soon they had worked up to twenty-five knots and were on course to intercept the tanker that Sultani had pointed out to the Russian technician, a tanker that was barely visible on the horizon to the men in the gunboat.

The captain of the lead boat, whose name was Omar, kept increasing speed as he found his boat was manageable in the swell. He got to thirty knots, decided the ride was rough enough, then backed off a few hundred RPMs on his engines. The boat pounded the swells, and the unmuffled engines sang loudly behind him. Standing at the helm with his knees bent, the sea wind streaming his hair and filling his nostrils with that clean salt smell, Omar felt as if he had died and entered Paradise. He concentrated on holding the tanker on a constant angle of bearing, not letting it drift toward the bow or stern.

“The boats are out,” the Black Eagle controller told Harry Lampert. “They are behind you about sixty miles, three of them, apparently on their way to intercept a tanker. Your orders are to provide cover for the tanker.”

The standing rules of engagement under which the U.S. Navy operated said that the Iranians would not be allowed to stop shipping in international waters. On the other hand, the rules also said not to fire at an Iranian boat, ship or airplane unless fired upon. The rules went on for six pages and read as if they had been written by lawyers, which was the truth of it. Like policemen who had only seconds to make life-or-death decisions, the naval officers who had to deal with these confrontations knew that their superiors would scrutinize their actions at their leisure. Fitness reports would be written and, if necessary, courts-martial convened.

Harry Lampert wasn’t thinking about any of that right now. He had the tanker headed south and the nearby destroyer on radar and began descending and accelerating. When he was twenty-five miles out, he saw the tanker’s wake, then the destroyer’s. The tanker was a leviathan, making about twelve knots, carrying every gallon of crude oil the captain could get in her. Even as he watched, he saw the destroyer turn to cross the tanker’s wake to the east side, and he saw her wake grow longer. She was accelerating.

Lampert stopped his descent at five thousand feet and motored on inbound, doing about four hundred knots. The wakes of the gunboats came into view at ten miles.

Harry concentrated on the gunboats as he closed and flew directly over them. He extended out and set his planes up in a loose circle around the tanker. All the while the gunboats came steadily on.

Lampert’s radio was ominously silent. The radar operator could see everything Lampert could see, so there was no need for chatter. The radar picture was data-linked to the carrier, where the battle group commander, Rear Admiral Stanley Bryant, and his staff could also see it. The admiral was in radio contact with Black Eagle and the destroyer that was now on the east, or gunboat, side of the tanker, whose wake was straight as a string as she plowed her way southward.