Jack Ryan Books 7-12

by Tom Clancy

  “Pretty good picture here, sir,” his S-2 intelligence officer said.

  “Send it out.” And with that, every fighting vehicle in the Blackhorse had the same digital picture of the enemy that he had. Then Hamm lifted his radio.

  “WOLFPACK-SIX, this is BLACKHORSE-SIX.”

  “This is WOLFPACK-SIX-ACTUAL. Thanks for the data feed, Colonel,” Eddington replied over the digital radio. Both units also knew where all the friendlies were. “I’d say initial contact in about an hour.”

  “Ready to rock, Nick?” Hamm asked.

  “Al, it’s all I can do to hold my boys back. We are locked and cocked,” the Guard commander assured him. “We have visual on their advance screen now.”

  “You know the drill, Nick. Good luck.”

  “Blackhorse,” Eddington said in parting.

  Hamm changed settings on his radio, calling BUFORD-SIX.

  “I have the picture, Al,” Marion Diggs assured him, a hundred miles back and not liking that fact one bit. He was sending men into battle by remote control, and that came hard to a new general officer.

  “Okay, sir, we are fully in place. All they have to do is walk in the door.”

  “Roger, BLACKHORSE. Standing by here. Out.”

  The most important work was now being done by the Predators. The UAV operators, sited with Hamm’s intelligence section, circled their mini-aircraft higher to minimize the chance they might be spotted or heard. Cameras pointed down, counting and checking locations. The Immortals were on the enemy left, and the former Iraqi Guards Division on the right, west of the road. They were moving along steadily, battalions on line and tightly packed for maximum power and shock effect if they encountered opposition, ten miles behind their own reconnaissance screen. Behind the lead brigade was the divisional artillery. This force was divided in two, and as they watched in the intel track, one half halted, spread out, and set up to provide covering fire, while the other half took up and moved forward. Again, that was right out of the book. They would be in place for about ninety minutes. The Predators flew over the line of guns, marking their position from GPS signals. That data went down to the MLRS batteries. Two more Predators were sent along. These were dedicated to getting exact locations on enemy command vehicles.

  “WELL, I’M NOT sure when this will go out,” Donner told the camera. “I’m here inside Bravo-Three-Two, number-two scout track in 3rd Platoon of B-Troop. We just got information on where the enemy is. He’s about twenty miles west of us right now. There are at least two divisions moving south on the road from King Khalid Military City. I know now that a brigade of the North Carolina National Guard is in a blocking position. They deployed with the 11th Cavalry Regiment because they were at the National Training Center for routine training.

  “The mood here—well, how can I explain this? The troopers of the Blackhorse Regiment, they’re almost like doctors, strange as that may sound. These men are angry at what’s happened to their country, and I’ve talked to them about it, but right now, like doctors waiting for the ambulance to come into the emergency room. It’s quiet in the track. We just heard that we’ll be moving west in a few minutes to the jump-off point.

  “I want to add a personal note. Not long ago, as you all know, I violated a rule of my profession. I did something wrong. I was misled, but the fault was mine. I learned earlier today that the President himself requested that I should come here—maybe to get me killed?” Donner adlibbed in an obvious joke. “No, not that. This is the sort of situation that people in the news business live for. I am here where history may soon take place, surrounded by other Americans who have an important job to do, and however this turns out, this is where a reporter belongs. President Ryan, thank you for the chance.

  “This is Tom Donner, southeast of KKMC, with B-Troop, 1st Squadron of the Blackhorse.” He lowered the mike. “Got that?”

  “Yes, sir,” the Army spec-5 told him. The soldier said something into his own microphone. “Okay, that went up to the satellite, sir.”

  “Good one, Tom,” the track commander said, lighting up a cigarette. “Come here. I’ll show you how this IVIS thing works and—” He stopped, holding his helmet with his hand to hear what was coming over the radio. “Start ’er up, Stanley,” he told the driver. “It’s showtime.”

  HE LET THEM come in. The man commanding the WOLFPACK’S reconnaissance screen was a criminal-defense attorney by profession who’d actually graduated from West Point but later decided on a civilian career. He’d never quite lost the bug, as he thought of it, though he didn’t quite know why. Age forty-five now, he’d been in uniformed service of one sort or another for almost thirty years of drills and exhausting exercise and mind-numbing routine which took away from his time and his family. Now, in the front line of his recon force, he knew why.

  The lead scout vehicles were two miles to his front. He estimated two platoons that he could see, a total often vehicles spread across three miles, moving three or four at a time in the darkness. Maybe they had low-light gear. He wasn’t sure of that, but had to assume that they did. On his thermal systems he could make them out as BRDM-2 scout cars, four-wheeled, equipped with a heavy machine gun or antitank missiles. He saw both versions, but he was especially looking for the one with four radio antennas. That would be the platoon or company commander’s vehicle ...

  “Antenna track direct front,” a Bradley commander called from four hundred meters to the colonel’s right. “Range two-kay meters, moving in now.”

  The lawyer-officer lifted his head above the abbreviated ridge and scanned the field with his thermal viewer. Now was as good a time as any.

  “HOOTOWL, this is Six, party in ten, I say again, party in ten seconds. Four-Three, stand by.”

  “Four-Three is standing by, Six.” That Bradley would take the first shot in 2nd of KKMC. The gunner selected high-explosive incendiary tracer. A BRDM wasn’t tough enough to need the armor-piercing rounds he had in the dual-feed magazine of his Bushmaster cannon. He centered the target in his pipper, and the on-board computer adjusted for the range.

  “Eat shit and die, ” the gunner said into the interphones.

  “HOOTOWL, Six, commence firing, commence firing.”

  “Fire!” the track commander told the gunner. The spec-4 on the 25mm gun depressed the triggers for a three-round burst. All three tracers made a line across the desert, and all three hit. The command BRDM erupted into a fireball as the vehicle’s gas tank—strangely for a Russian-made vehicle, it was not diesel-powered—exploded. “Target!” the commander said instantly, confirming that the gunner had destroyed it. “Traverse left, target burdum. ”

  “Identified!” the gunner said when he was locked on.

  “Fire!” A second later: “Target! Cease fire, traverse right! Target burdum, two o’clock, range fifteen hundred!” The Bradley’s gun turret rotated the other way as the enemy vehicles started to react.

  “Identified!”

  “Fire!” And the third one was dead, ten seconds after the first.

  Within a minute, all the BRDMs the screen commander had seen were burning. The brilliant white light made him cringe to see. Then other flashes appeared left and right of his position. Then: “Move out, run ’em down!”

  Across ten miles of desert, twenty Bradleys darted from behind their hiding places, going forward, not backward, their turrets traversing and their gunners hunting for enemy scout vehicles. A short, vicious, running gunfight began, lasting ten minutes and three klicks, with the BRDMs trying to pull back but unable to shoot back effectively. Two Sagger antitank missiles were launched, but both fell short and exploded in the sand when their launch vehicles were killed by Bushmaster fire. Their heavy machine guns weren’t powerful enough to punch through the Bradleys’ frontal armor. The enemy screen, comprising a total of thirty vehicles, was exterminated by the end of it, and HOOTOWL owned this part of the battlefield.

  “WOLFPACK, this is HOOT-SIX-ACTUAL, I think we got ‘em all. Their lead screen is toas
t. No casualties,” he added. God damn, he thought, those Bradleys can shoot.

  “SOME RADIO CHATTER got out, sir,” the ELINT trooper next to Eddington reported. “Getting some more now.”

  “He’s calling for artillery fire,” a Saudi intelligence officer said quickly.

  “HOOT, you may expect some fire shortly,” Eddington warned.

  “Roger, understand. HOOT is moving forward.”

  IT WAS SAFER than staying in place or falling back. On command, the Bradleys and Hummers darted two klicks to the north, looking for the enemy supplementary reconnaissance screen—there had to be some—which would move up now, probably cautiously, on direction of their brigade or divisional commanders. This, the Guard lieutenant colonel knew, would be the reconnaissance battle, the undercard for the main event, with the lightweights duking it out before the heavyweights closed. But there was a difference. He could continue to shape the battlefield for WOLEPACK. He expected to find another company of reconnaissance vehicles, closely followed by a heavy advanced guard of tanks and BMPs. The Bradley had TOW missiles to do the tanks, and the Bushmaster had been designed for the express purpose of killing the infantry carrier they called the bimp. Moreover, though the enemy now knew where the Blue Force recon screen was—had been—he would expect it to fall back, not advance.

  That was plain two minutes later, when a planned-fire barrage dropped a klick behind the moving Bradleys. The other side was playing it by the book, the old Soviet book. And it wasn’t a bad book, but the Americans had read it, too. HOOTOWL pressed on rapidly for another klick and stopped, finding a convenient line of low ridges, with blobs on the horizon again. The lawyer/colonel lifted his radio to report that.

  “BUFORD, THIS IS WOLFPACK, we are in contact, sir,” Eddington relayed to Diggs from his CP. “We just clobbered their recon element. Our screening forces now have visual on the advance guard. My intentions are to engage briefly and pull them back and right, southeast. We have enemy artillery fire dropping between the screen and the main body. Over.”

  “Roger, WOLFPACK.” On his command screen, Diggs saw the advancing Bradleys, moving in a fairly even line, but well spread. Then they started spotting movement. The things they saw started appearing as unknown-enemy symbols on the IVIS command system.

  It was immensely frustrating to the general in command. He had more knowledge of a developing battle than had ever been possible in the history of warfare. He had the ability now to tell platoons what to do, where to go, whom to shoot—but he couldn’t allow himself to do that. He’d approved the intentions of Eddington, Hamm, and Magruder, coordinating their plans in space and time, and now as their commander he had to let them do it their way, interfering only if something went wrong or some new and unexpected situation offered itself. The commander of American forces in the Kingdom, he was now a spectator. The black general shook his head in wonderment. He’d known it would be like this. He hadn’t known how hard it would hit him.

  IT WAS ALMOST time. Hamm had his squadrons advancing abreast, covering only ten kilometers each, but separated by intervals of ten more. In every case, the squadron commanders had opted to have their scout troops in the lead, and their tank companies in reserve. Each troop had nine tanks and thirteen Brads, plus two mortar-carrying M113 tracks. In front of them, now seven kilometers away, were the brigades of UIR II Corps, bloodied by the breakthrough battles north of KKMC, weakened, but probably alert. There was nothing like violent death to get someone’s attention. His helicopters and video feed from the Predators had well defined their positions. He knew where they were. They didn’t know about him yet probably, he had to admit. Certainly they were trying as hard as he would have done to make sure. His final order was for his helicopters to make one more sweep of the intervening terrain for an enemy outpost line. Everything else was pretty well locked into place, and fifty miles back, his Apaches started lifting off, along with their Kiowa scouts, for their part in the main event.

  THE F-15E STRIKE Eagles were all up north. Two of their number had been lost earlier in the day, including that of the squadron commander. Now, protected by HARM-EQUIPPED F-16s, they were pounding the bridges and causeways across the twin-rivers estuary with smart bombs. They could see tanks on the ground, burning ones west of the swamps and intact ones bunched up to the east. In an exciting hour, every route across was destroyed by repeated hits.

  The F-15Cs were over the KKMC area, as always under AWACS control. One group of four stayed high, outside the envelope of the mobile SAMs with the advancing land force. Their job was to watch for UIR fighters who might get in the way of things. The rest were hunting for helicopters belonging to the armored divisions. It didn’t carry the prestige of a fighter kill—but a kill was a kill, and was something they could do with near-total impunity. Better still, generals traveled in helicopters, and most of all, those would be part of the UIR reconnaissance effort, and that, the plan said, couldn’t be allowed.

  Below them, word must have gotten out in a hurry. Only three choppers had been killed during the daylight hours, but with the coming of darkness a number had lifted off, half of them splashed in the first ten minutes. It was so different from the last time. The hunting was pretty easy. The enemy, on the offense, had to offer battle—couldn’t hide in shelters, couldn’t disperse. That suited the Eagle drivers. One driver, south of KKMC, was vectored by his AWACS, located a chopper on his look-down radar, selected AIM-120, and triggered the missile off in seconds. He watched the missile all the way in, spotting the fireball that jerked left and splattered widely on the ground. Part of him thought it a needless waste of a perfectly good Slammer. But a kill was a kill. That would be the last chopper kill of the evening. The pilots heard from their E-3B Sentry control aircraft that friendly choppers were now entering the battle area, and weapons went tight on the Eagles.

  LESS THAN HALF of his Bradley gunners had ever fired TOW missiles for real, though all had done so hundreds of times in simulation. HOOTOWL waited for the advance guard to get just within the margins. It was tricky. The supplementary recon screen was closer still. The Bradleys engaged them first, and this gunfight was a little more two-sided. Two BRDMs were actually behind the American scout line. Both turned at once. One nearly drove over a HMMWV, hosing it with its machine gun before a Bradley blew it apart. The armored vehicle raced to the site, finding one wounded survivor from the three-man crew on the Hummer. The infantrymen tended to him while the driver got up on a berm and the gunner elevated his TOW launcher.

  The leading group of tanks was shooting now, seeking out the flashes of the Bradley guns, activating their own night-vision systems, and again there was a brief, vicious battle over the barren, unlit ground. One Bradley was hit and exploded, killing all aboard. The rest got off one or two missiles each, collecting twenty tanks in reply before their commander called them back, and just escaping the artillery barrage called in by the enemy tank commander on their positions. HOOTOWL left behind that one Bradley, and two Hummers, and the first American ground casualties of the Second Persian Gulf War. These were reported up the line.

  IT WAS RIGHT after lunch in Washington. The President had eaten lightly, and the word came into the Situation Room just after he’d finished, still able to look down at the gold-trimmed plate, the crust of bread from his sandwich, and the chips he’d not eaten. The news of the deaths hit him hard, harder, somehow, than the casualties on USS Yorktown or the six missing aviators—missing didn’t necessarily mean dead, did it? he allowed himself to think. These men certainly were. National Guardsmen, he’d learned. Citizen soldiers most often used to help people after floods or hurricanes ...

  “Mr. President, would you have gone over there for this mission?” General Moore asked, even before Robby Jackson could speak. “If you were twenty-something again, a Marine lieutenant, and they told you to go, you’d go, right?”

  “I suppose—no, no, I’d go. I’d have to.”

  “So did they, sir,” Mickey Moore told him.

&nb
sp; “That’s the job, Jack,” Robby said quietly. “That’s what they pay us for.”

  “Yeah.” And he had to admit that it was what they paid him for, too.

  THE FOUR F-117 Nighthawks landed at Al Kharj, rolling out and taxiing to shelters. The transports carrying the spare pilots and ground crews were right behind. Intelligence officers down from Riyadh met the latter group, taking the spare pilots aside for their first mission briefing in a war which was just now getting started in a big way.

  THE MAJOR GENERAL in charge of the Immortals Division was in his command vehicle, trying to make sense of things. It had been a quite satisfactory war to this point. II Corps had done its job, blasting open the hole, allowing the main force to shoot through, and until an hour before, the picture had been both clear and pleasing. Yes, there were Saudi forces heading southwest for him, but they were the best part of a day away. By then, he’d be on the outskirts of their capital, and there were other plans for them as well. At dawn, II Corps would jump east from its covering position on his left, feinting toward the oil fields. That should give the Saudis second thoughts. Certainly it would give him another day in which, with luck, he’d get some, maybe all of the Saudi government. Maybe even the royal family—or, if they fled, as they might well do, then the Kingdom would be leaderless, and then his country would have won the war.

  It had been costly to this point. II Corps had paid the price of half its combat power to deliver the Army of God this far, but victory had never been cheaply bought. Nor would it be the case here. His forward screen had disappeared right off the radio net. One call of contact with unknown forces, a request for artillery support, then nothing. He knew that a Saudi force was somewhere ahead of him. He knew it was the remains of the 4th Brigade, which II Corps had almost but not quite immolated. He knew it had fought hard north of KKMC and then pulled back... it had probably been ordered to hold so that the city could be evacuated ... it was probably still strong enough to chew up his reconnaissance force. He didn’t know where the American cavalry regiment was ... probably to his cast. He knew that there might be another American brigade somewhere, probably also to his east. He wished for helicopters, but he’d just lost one to American fighters, along with his chief intelligence officer. So much for the air support he’d been promised. The only friendly fighter he’d seen all day had been a smoking hole in the ground just east of KKMC. But though Americans could annoy him, they couldn’t stop him, and if he got to Riyadh on time, then he could send troops to cover most of the Saudi airfields and preempt that threat. So the key to the operation, as his Corps and Army command had told him, was to press on with all possible speed. With that decision made, he ordered his lead brigade to advance as scheduled, with his advance guard playing the reconnaissance role. They’d just reported contact and a battle, losses taken and inflicted on an enemy as yet unidentified, but who had withdrawn after a brief firefight. Probably that Saudi force, he decided, doing its best to sting and run, and he’d run it down after sunrise. He gave the orders, informed his staff of his intentions, and left the command post to drive forward, wanting to see things at the front, as a good general should, while the staff radioed orders to subordinate commanders.