22: Chapter 22 The Precision Spear

December 25, 1977. 2:00 AM.

The desert temperature had dropped to three degrees below zero.

In stark contrast to the scorching summer heat, the winter nights in southeastern Lorestan Province were bone-chillingly cold. A dry, freezing wind blew in from the direction of Iraq, carrying grains of sand that stung the face like tiny needles.

The launch site was the same as last time, chosen in the uninhabited Gobi desert right next to the Iraqi border. But this time, there were a few more things on the site—

A radio encryption device modified by Karimi, used for secure communication between the launch site and the Cyrus Workshop.

Two trucks, their beds carrying a "Simple Telemetry Receiving Station" designed by Fatima, which was essentially two antennas plus a Soviet-made Signal Recorder.

It couldn't monitor the missile's flight attitude in real-time like a professional telemetry system, but it could receive pulse signals emitted by a small radio transmitter on the missile body.

By analyzing the Doppler shift of the pulses, the missile's speed and direction could be roughly calculated.

It was much more advanced than the primitive method of "launching it and then relying on people to find the crater" used last time.

"The last one was a blind shot," Fatima said during the pre-launch briefing, her tone carrying an engineer's characteristic dissatisfaction with crude work. "This time is different. This time, I want to see the data with my own eyes."

The P1-G01 was mounted on a reinforced launcher.

On the guidance compartment casing in the middle of the missile body, Fatima had written a line of Persian in white paint.

Reza leaned in to take a look—

"The First Arrow."

He looked back at Fatima.

Fatima remained expressionless: "I gave every missile a name. This one is called 'The First Arrow.' Serial numbers are too cold."

A scientist's romance.

Reza said nothing.

At 2:30 AM, all preparations were complete.

The ignition method had also been upgraded.

No longer using the crude method of connecting wires to a car battery, they now used an old military electric ignition system Karimi had acquired from Lorestan Province.

Though old, its reliability was far superior to the makeshift equipment.

Fatima stood in the bunker.

This time, she didn't operate the igniter herself.

She stood next to the telemetry receiving station, staring at the screen of the Signal Recorder.

"Countdown," her voice reached everyone's ears via the encrypted radio, "thirty seconds."

Reza stood at an observation point three hundred meters away.

Hassan was to his left, and Karimi was to his right.

This was Karimi's first time witnessing a missile launch.

The old Lieutenant Colonel's hand instinctively pressed against the gun at his waist, the same reaction as Hassan.

"Ten seconds."

The cold wind whipped up a low wail across the sandy ground.

"Five. Four. Three. Two. One—"

"Ignition."

There was no delay this time.

At the moment of ignition, the white flames spewing from the nozzle illuminated the desert for five hundred meters around, tearing the night in two.

The P1-G01 shot up from the launcher, noticeably faster than last time because Fatima had optimized the propellant formula for the second-generation body, increasing the initial thrust by fifteen percent.

But the real difference lay in—

Three seconds after the missile left the launcher, a change almost invisible to the naked eye occurred: the missile body slightly adjusted its flight direction.

The magnitude was less than one degree.

But that one-degree adjustment was proof that the Inertial Navigation System was working.

The gyroscope sensed the deviation between the missile's actual flight direction and the preset trajectory, the analog computing circuit calculated the correction amount, and the aerodynamic actuators executed the correction command.

The entire process was completed within 0.3 seconds.

"The First Arrow" trailed a straight pillar of smoke as it charged toward the eastern horizon, the straightness of the smoke trail clearly a level above the previous uncontrolled missile.

Fatima stared at the screen of the Signal Recorder.

The pulse signal was stable, continuous, and uniform in frequency.

"Engine working normally. Flight attitude stable. Speed... 620 meters per second... 650... 680..."

The engine shut down after burning for thirty-five seconds. The missile entered the unpowered inertial flight phase.

From this moment on, "The First Arrow" was a stone following Newton's laws—flying at over seven hundred meters per second along a parabolic trajectory toward the preset impact point two hundred kilometers away.

The pulse signal lasted for about four minutes.

At the four-minute and twelve-second mark, the signal suddenly vanished.

"Impact," Fatima's voice came over the radio, still cold, but her speaking rate was five percent faster than usual—she was calculating.

"Based on the signal duration and Doppler shift, the impact point is approximately 204 kilometers away, at a bearing of three degrees north of east from the launch point. The preset impact point was 200 kilometers away at a bearing of 2.5 degrees north of east."

She paused for a moment.

"Deviation—approximately six hundred meters."

Six hundred meters.

The previous uncontrolled missile was 4,700 meters.

This one was 600 meters.

The deviation had shrunk by nearly eightfold.

No one spoke at the observation point.

Then Karimi spoke. There was an imperceptible tremor in the old Lieutenant Colonel's voice.

"Six hundred meters... that is to say, if the target were a military airfield, this missile could land on the runway?"

"If the runway is more than 1,200 meters long," Fatima replied.

The runways of major military airfields in the Middle East were typically between 2,500 and 3,500 meters long.

With a 600-meter deviation, hitting a runway was more than feasible.

Karimi turned to Reza.

There was a light in the old Lieutenant Colonel's eyes—not of worship, but the light of an old soldier who had spent a lifetime in military intelligence, seeing too much of the reality where "Iran can only buy weapons, not build them," seeing for the first time "Iranians building a real weapon with their own hands."

"Your Highness—" his voice was very soft, "can this thing be mass-produced?"

Reza looked at Fatima.

Fatima walked out of the bunker, wrapped in a thick military overcoat, her face flushed red by the cold wind. She stopped in front of Reza, holding the printout from the Signal Recorder.

"It can be mass-produced," she said. "But each missile needs a gyroscope, and we only have thirty. Subtracting the one used this time and the two consumed in bench tests, we have twenty-seven left. That is to say—"

"At most, we can build twenty-seven more guided versions."

"Yes. After twenty-seven, we either get another batch of gyroscopes, or—"

She paused.

"Or I build them myself."

Reza and Karimi looked at her simultaneously.

"The core difficulty of a gyroscope lies in high-precision bearings and high-speed rotors. I can't make the bearings for now; I need equipment with micron-level machining precision. But the rotors... if I can get a Precision Balancing Machine, I have a way to machine them using the lathes at Cyrus Workshop. The precision will be lower than imported ones, and the flight deviation might regress from six hundred meters to around fifteen hundred meters. But—"

"Fifteen hundred meters is enough," Reza finished her sentence.