Chapter 20
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Translator: penny
Chapter: 020
Chapter Title: Coup Conditions. 8 - Baghdad Air Raid
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Tehran outskirts.
Late in the evening, the vehicle slipped out of the palace and raced southward.
Hassan, riding in the back with him, delivered the battlefield report.
It had been just one day since the war began, but the news pouring in from all directions was utterly devastating.
Even Hassan's voice dripped with despair as he spoke.
"Iraq's armored forces are pushing east, and the defensive lines in Khuzestan have completely collapsed. The problem is there's no central control at all. The Revolutionary Guard units guarding the border are acting on their own whims, responding to the armor with mortars and rockets."
"Against over 500 tanks, they're just getting shredded."
Hassan nodded silently in agreement.
"From the start, they've never fought a proper war between nations, sitting up top like that. No way they can control it properly. What's the situation on Khomeini's side?"
"The Guardian Council has seized the Joint Chiefs of Staff and is still opposing any redeployment of armored forces."
Tanks could only be stopped by tanks of equal caliber—that was the iron rule.
Even without that, the Iranian military had plenty of ways to repel the Iraqi offensive.
Not just overwhelming air power, but over 200 Cobra attack helicopters, the natural predator of tanks.
But.
"If they're not redeploying armor or issuing air support orders, it looks like Khomeini's side still doesn't trust the air force."
"Makes sense. The only forces they couldn't fully replace with Revolutionary Guard are armor and air."
Militia-level Revolutionary Guard couldn't operate professional armor or air assets requiring specialized knowledge and experience.
So they'd splintered the armor into small units scattered nationwide,
and for the air force, they'd disrupted training and maintenance under the guise of ideological vetting for pilots and ground crew.
"That's why casualties are mounting at the front. Already thousands dead or wounded."
"What's their current advance route?"
"Khorramshahr, 20 kilometers west of Abadan."
"Good enough. Time to catch a breather."
"Pardon?"
"They rolled in easy from the border to Khorramshahr with no obstacles, but from there, even the Iraqis have no choice but urban combat."
"But with the troop and firepower gap, I doubt they'll hold."
"Don't worry. They'll hold."
"Does the Revolutionary Guard have that kind of tactical skill? From what we've seen so far, not at all..."
"No, that's not it. The enemy won't have it easy either."
"Pardon?"
"Iraqi forces are just as bad off as us. They're all Ba'ath Party hacks too."
After the Ba'ath Party coup in '68,
the Iraqi military purged professionals and filled the ranks with party political officers.
Political soldiers excelled at bootlicking power brokers, not military training or tactics.
"In a drawn-out urban fight, if they lose air superiority and take supply line hits, those idiots will just flail around in panic."
"Ah. Yes."
By the time the report wrapped up,
the vehicle had entered the air base south of Tehran.
It passed the checkpoint smoothly
and sped down the runway to stop before the hangar.
The door swung open,
and he stepped out, heading straight into the hangar.
Inside the hangar.
Pilots stood in formation on either side, snapping salutes.
"To Prince Sahour—salute!"
"Loyalty!"
"Loyalty!!!"
Dozens of pilots, fully prepped for scramble.
Loyalty chant.
Normally, the Iranian military didn't attach slogans to salutes,
but it had become a signature for the Sahour Scholars.
He returned their salute with a simple hand gesture,
then walked through the pilots into the depths.
"This is it."
Before his eyes,
a sleek fuselage with wings spread wide like an eagle in flight.
An F-14 Tomcat, bristling with ordnance, sat silently awaiting launch.
"Alright. Let's go have some fun."
A line of F-14 Tomcats rolled out of the hangar, taxiing slowly toward the runway.
Seated in the cockpit of one amid the formation, he continued instrument checks.
His hands moved instinctively over the controls, like a veteran with decades of flight time.
Actually, in pure flight hours, no one on Earth could match him.
As he waited for takeoff, his mind wandered.
When he first opened his eyes in Sahour's body,
he immediately realized his past life's experiences, knowledge, and habits were implanted intact into this new vessel.
A kid not even ten, grinding a snack into the floor like a cigarette butt.
And it wasn't just that.
Even his gaming experiences from his past life
were fused into him as if he'd lived them firsthand.
He could recall the use, disassembly, and reassembly of nearly every firearm like drawing a picture,
and the controls and handling for vehicles, tanks, attack helos, fighters—every machine from the games felt real.
Locked in his room for nearly ten years, grinding twenty hours a day,
all that embedded in his body as lived experience.
Games had time compression, of course,
and it seemed perfectly translated to reality.
Accounting for that, his total combat time equated to roughly 1,000 years.
In his body flowed
1,000 years of battlefield mastery:
slaughtering hundreds of thousands,
downing tens of thousands of fighters, helos, tanks,
executing hundreds of mission types—infiltration, assassination, defense, demolition, rescue, you name it.
The issue was, it wasn't pure experience alone.
No human mind stays sane after 1,000 years of war.
From the moment he awoke, he'd been a full-blown war addict.
Lost in thought,
Hassan's voice crackled over the helmet radio.
"Your Highness. Next in sequence."
"Roger."
He taxied forward to the runway threshold.
And began spooling the engines.
Weeeeeeng~~~~ Kuuuuw~~~~.
The rear nozzles constricted, spewing azure flames fiercely.
Moments later,
ground crew signals followed,
and tower cleared for takeoff.
"Night Raven One, cleared for takeoff."
"Roger. Here we go. Hang on tight."
No sooner said than he released the brakes.
The stationary Tomcat lunged forward.
Kuuuuwuuu~~~~!!
Accelerating rapidly, the fighter soon lifted off the ground.
Pulling back gently on the stick,
the nose-up Tomcat climbed steeply into the sky.
He keyed the radio.
"Hassan."
"Yes, Your Highness."
"You can sleep now. Wake you when we hit Baghdad."
Forty-eight hours after Iraq's preemptive strikes.
Unreported to high command,
the Iranian Air Force's independent counterstrike, Operation Night Phantoms, commenced.
Having seized the initiative with preemptive attacks, Iraqi forces surged across the border unstoppable.
Hundreds of armored vehicles unleashing overwhelming firepower,
while Iran's defenses, centered on the Revolutionary Guard, countered with RPGs and outdated recoilless rifles.
Naturally, Iranian troops were being pulverized across the front.
Of course, Iran had armor and attack helos rivaling—no, surpassing—Iraq's,
but the command echelons meant to wield them floundered, blind to tactics or even the situation.
Outmatched in firepower, numbers, and tactics, Iranian forces were picked off piecemeal,
losing thousands in just two days.
The invaded Khomeini and Islamic Supreme Council issued a statement.
"This is our Shia holy war to defend two millennia of Islam's true orthodoxy. They are heretics denying the rightful successor to Prophet Muhammad, Prophet Ali, traitors hand-in-glove with the West. The time has come to exterminate the heretics and prove who are Islam's true heirs. All citizens, join the holy war. God is with us. We will triumph again."
Khomeini urged holy war via statement and seized media control.
To rally the masses to jihad
while hiding their frontline bungling.
But,
as war erupted, the muzzled press and independents swarmed like bees.
"Iraqi Armored Corps Breaches Border."
"500+ Iraqi Tanks Raze Khuzestan Defenses."
"Banisadr Government's Dispersed Armor Deployment Blamed for Weakened Defenses..."
"Revolutionary Guard's Human Wave Against Iraqi Armor Falls Short..."
"Religious Guardian Council Meddles in Joint Chiefs Ops, Causing Deployment Chaos Everywhere..."
The pent-up media broadcast frontline horrors live.
Revolutionary Guard and regime blunders hit headlines and footage, spreading real-time nationwide, even to Tehran.
Public fury at invading Iraq soon turned on the inept government and its clerical puppeteers.
Amid the boiling outrage and dread,
the Air Force's secret op, unknown even to the Joint Chiefs in Tehran, launched.
Zagros Mountains.
Hundreds of peaks thrusting thousands of meters,
crisscrossed by deep gorges in rugged terrain.
Under moonlight, a lone fighter streaked through the shadowed valleys.
Shuuuaaa~~~ Kuku kuku ku~~~!! Shuuuaaa~~~!!
Each stick deflection banked the wide-winged F-14 Tomcat sharply left and right.
"Y-Your Highness! Too fast.... Urk!!"
Hassan's frantic voice, ignored—he wrenched the stick again.
The Tomcat snapped into another turn, brushing past the gorge walls.
"Hang in there. Almost out."
Night Phantoms targeted 13 sites total.
His: Iraq's capital, Baghdad.
Path to the capital: through the brutal Zagros.
Shortest route from Zagros to Baghdad: a mere 130 kilometers.
Meanwhile, the high peaks would neutralize Iraqi air defenses.
Of course, exploiting that meant low-level penetration through the peaks—a challenge,
but trivial with his tens of thousands of flight hours.
Light stick inputs left and right.
The fuselage rolled fully sideways,
lift surging under the wings to shove it upward, skimming the cliff face.
Subsonic through peaks on a moonlit night—insane,
but his lips curled up.
"Feels good to cut loose."
Nearing the end of the traverse.
"Here we are. Eyes out."
Hassan, regaining wits, worked his panel.
Detected incoming radar waves ahead.
"Bearing 20 klicks. Radar lock confirmed."
Target pinged on his scope:
Iraqi primary radar site.
Reason he led through Zagros: wipe these out first.
Key to air ops:
Blind the enemy.
"Weapons hot. Here we go. Hang on."
Sweep wings aft.
Twin engines roared like explosions,
shockwave shattering the sound barrier with a sonic boom.
Kuku ku ku~~Bang! Shuuuaaa~~~!!
Wings swept, the Tomcat erased 20 klicks in seconds,
arriving at the radar site's doorstep.
"Bombs away."
Two AGM glide bombs detached from the wings, plummeting earthward.
Moments later.
Kwaaang kwaaang kwaang~~!!
Two fireballs bloomed in the dark.
Fire pillars erupted.
"Radar destroyed. Emissions ceased."
"Perfect. Time to trash Baghdad."
His signal flew to the F-4 bombers waiting east of Zagros.
"Radar down. Operation go."
"Roger. All birds max throttle to Baghdad."
Forty-odd bombers surged,
Mach 2, 2,500 kph, slipping through the night
into blind Baghdad airspace.
Baghdad air defense base.
Sudden crisis triggered full alert.
The duty officer hounded the comms tech.
"What the hell?!"
"No idea, sir. Starting with Site 16, eastern radars just vanished. Looks like they're hit."
"That possible?"
"We don't know. No reports before cutoff. Only that they're under attack..."
The officer couldn't believe it.
Gone sites all watched east, toward Zagros.
To approach undetected meant flying the peaks.
No pilot could pull that off.
At night.
Chaos mounting,
the radar tech yelled.
"Bogeys! Multiple bandits inbound, dozens!"
"What?!"
He rushed behind the tech.
Dozens of blips swarmed his screen.
"How'd they get this close undetected? Never mind—sound the alarm! Battle stations! Battle sta—"
A soldier reached for the klaxon,
when a half-ton bomb punched through the thick ceiling.
And detonated.
Kwaaang kwaang kwaang kwaang~~!!!
Blast shredded gear and men,
2,000°C inferno sweeping the rest.
A Tomcat streaked overhead.
Shuuuwaaaa~~~~!!
Low pass over enemy turf, bombs away, it snapped wings forward,
surge of lift pitching it skyward.
Tomcat cockpit.
"Baghdad's blind now. Have at it."
Above the climbing Tomcat,
F-4 bomber formations knifed through the night sky,
vanishing toward Baghdad.
Operation: Night Phantoms.
145 Iranian F-14s, F-4s, F-5s hit 13 Iraqi targets in a surprise raid.
Airbases, SAM radars, ammo depots.
Unlike Iraqis, Iran focused hangars and armories—destroying 60 aircraft, 20% of their force.
But as the fighters returned home,
Revolutionary Guard arrest teams awaited.
They seized the rogue pilots—no orders, no reports—and dragged them to prison.