345: Chapter 345 Missile Barrage, Suicide Squad Charge

This was, of course, an exaggeration.

According to a joint assessment by Mossad and the CIA, as of the day of the attack, Persia possessed only about sixteen to twenty "Persian Gulf-3" missiles, with a monthly production rate not exceeding four.

But the battlefield does not require real numbers; it only requires real fear.

And fear had already spread within the US Navy.

Every captain of an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer knew that when facing a warhead maneuvering at Mach 15 in the terminal phase, the interception probability of their Standard-3 interceptors was compressed to a disturbingly low level—exactly how low, only the underground assessment reports of the Pentagon knew.

And those reports were currently sealed in specially encrypted folders, labeled with a red tag: "For the eyes of the President and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff only."

Southern Gaza, thirty-five kilometers north of the Port of Eilat.

At 4:00 AM, the roar of diesel engines echoed on the desert highway.

Six T-72 tanks and twelve BMP-3 infantry fighting vehicles formed a marching column, their hulls painted with the red, white, and black flag of the Republic of Yemen and the Arabic characters for "Yemen Defense Forces."

This was the "Desert Cheetahs" detachment sent by Houssa, commanded by a Death Soldier officer with a severely burned face, codenamed "Scorpion."

His real name was irrelevant—in fact, even in the official archives of the Yemen Defense Forces, his real name was not recorded.

As an Advanced Death Soldier with a completely customized identity background, he only knew his mission: to cut off the land connections to the Port of Eilat and coordinate with the Gaza Liberation Army to complete the encirclement.

"Scorpion" poked half his body out of the turret hatch, scanning the coastal highway ahead with night-vision binoculars.

To the left of the highway was the deep gray desert, and to the right was the pitch-black sea of the Gulf of Aqaba.

There were no lights on the sea—it was the shadow of fear left behind after the Squid Nation's Sa'ar 6-class corvette was hit by a YJ-83 and sank.

Since then, the Squid Nation navy had not dispatched any vessels into the Gulf of Aqaba.

"Roadblock three kilometers ahead," the adjutant reported over the vehicle's internal communication system, "drone reconnaissance shows: about two platoons of troops, one 12.7mm heavy machine gun, and one 'Spike' anti-tank missile launcher."

"Scorpion" lowered his binoculars, retracted into the turret, and patted the gunner's helmet.

"One high-explosive shell. Stop behind the sand dune on the north side of the checkpoint, infantry dismount and flank from the right. Ten minutes to resolve the battle."

At 4:17 AM, the 125mm main gun of the T-72 let out its first roar.

The high-explosive shell exploded in a cloud of white smoke on the sand dune fifty meters north of the checkpoint; this was a deliberate near-miss—not because they couldn't hit it, but to create panic.

The Squid Nation sentries scrambled for cover amidst the violent shockwave.

The "Spike" missile gunner poked his upper body out of the bunker, but before he could set up the launcher, the sniper team under "Scorpion" had already hit the two operators beside the launcher from eight hundred meters away.

The BMP-3's 100mm main gun covered the checkpoint with a rate of fire of ten rounds per minute.

In less than four minutes, the checkpoint's 12.7mm heavy machine gun went silent, the communication antenna was blown off, and the last few surviving soldiers raised their hands and walked out from behind the sandbag bunkers.

They were from a border defense brigade of the Squid Nation's Southern Military District—not an elite armored brigade, but a second-line unit composed of reservists and a small number of regular army non-commissioned officers.

These soldiers had experienced multiple waves of rocket and drone attacks from the Gaza direction over the past week and were already exhausted.

"Scorpion" handed over the prisoners to the following military police squad and then ordered the troops to continue advancing south along the highway.

At this point, they were less than thirty kilometers from the outer suburbs of the Port of Eilat.

His mission was to control the main highways leading into the port after reaching its outskirts, cutting off land traffic.

As for the port itself—that would be resolved jointly by Marshal Sinwar's main force and the subsequent amphibious landing units of the Yemen Defense Forces.

Meanwhile, in the Gaza direction.

The main force of Sinwar's 2nd Brigade was advancing westward along the coastal highway.

After severely damaging the 401st Armored Brigade of the Squid Nation's Southern Military District during the "Blade of Dawn" counter-offensive, the 2nd Brigade had encountered almost no effective resistance.

The Squid Nation's defense line was not pierced from the front but hollowed out from underground—Sinwar had spent three full months digging a tunnel network twelve kilometers deep between Gaza and the southern border of the Squid Nation.

When the counter-offensive was launched, the Death Soldiers poured out from twenty-eight underground exits simultaneously, creating dozens of small breakthrough points behind and on the flanks of the enemy's defense line.

The infiltrated defense line was like a wall eaten through by ants; it looked intact on the outside, but was riddled with holes on the inside.

At 10:30 AM, Sinwar's vanguard forces and "Scorpion's" Yemeni mechanized detachment officially linked up on the highway about fifteen kilometers north of the Port of Eilat.

Soldiers from both units embraced on the road, greeting each other in Arabic and the Gaza dialect.

Someone took out a black flag of the Gaza Liberation Army and a flag of the Republic of Yemen, tied them together, and hung them on a discarded billboard by the side of the road.

This scene was captured by the "Lens" team and spread across global social media that afternoon.

The encirclement of the Port of Eilat was shrinking.

On the east side—the sea of the Gulf of Aqaba—it was already completely controlled by Houssa's coastal missile positions.

On the north and northwest sides—land traffic—it had been cut off by Sinwar's 2nd Brigade and the "Desert Cheetahs" detachment.

On the south and southwest sides—the direction of the Egyptian border—the border posts on the Sinai Peninsula had been breached to a distance visible to the naked eye.

The only route not yet completely blocked was a narrow desert highway leading to Jordan in the northwest of the city.

But both sides of that road were open terrain with no air defense cover, and any large convoy attempting to pass through would become a sitting duck for drones and rocket artillery.

The Squid Nation's high command had already realized that the Port of Eilat was about to fall.

But their focus at this moment was not on the south.

In the north, the infrastructure of Tel Aviv and Haifa was being continuously struck by Persian ballistic missiles.

The missile attacks by Persia on the Squid Nation's homeland began to escalate on the third day after the US entered the war.

The Revolutionary Guard used the newly deployed "Meteor-3" improved ballistic missiles and "Hoveyzeh" cruise missiles, with attack targets extending from military facilities to critical civilian infrastructure.

The power grid hub of Tel Aviv was hit directly by at least three missiles, leaving two-thirds of the city without power.

The oil refineries and storage facilities in Haifa were subjected to continuous attacks by five cruise missiles; huge fireballs of oil and gas shot hundreds of meters into the air, and the black clouds formed by the thick smoke lingered over Haifa Bay for two full days.