THE PREDATORS WERE working on that. Three had crashed with the loss of their ground-control at STORM TRACK, creating a gap in intelligence coverage that had taken hours to rectify. There were only ten left in theater. Four of those were up and flying at eight thousand feet, loitering almost invisibly over the advancing divisions. The UIR forces relied mostly on towed tubes. These were now setting up for the next major attack, lined up behind two mechanized brigades about to make the next leap toward KKMC. One Predator found the six-battery group. The data went to a collection team, then up to the AWACS, and back down to the sixteen Strike Eagles of the 391st.
THE SAUDI FORMATION waited tensely. Their forty-four fighting vehicles were spread over eight kilometers, as wide as the major commanding them dared, having to balance dispersal against firepower in what he hoped would be at least a delaying action, and maybe a stand. An approaching scream in the sky told him and his men to button up, as eight-inch shells started landing in front of his position. The initial bombardment lasted three minutes, the rounds advancing toward where his vehicles were....
“TIGERS IN HOT!” the strike commander called. The enemy had evidently expected his first attack to go after the leading tanks. That’s where the SAMs were, and the Vipers were trying to deal with them. The three flights of four separated, then split into elements of two, coming down to four thousand feet, smoking in at five hundred knots. The gun batteries were lined up nice and neat, in even lines, the cannons spaced about a hundred meters apart, along with their trucks, just like their manual must have said, LTC Steve Berman thought. His weapons-system operator selected cluster munitions and started sprinkling them with bomblets.
“Lookin’ good.” They had dropped two canisters of BLU-97 combined-effects munitions, a total of over four hundred softball-sized mini-bombs. The first battery was wiped out when the pattern covered their position. Secondary explosions erupted from the ammo trucks. “Next.” The pilot reefed his fighter into a tight right turn. His wizzo called him back around toward the next battery, then he spotted—
“Triple-A at ten.” That proved to be a ZSU-23 mobile antiaircraft vehicle, whose four guns started sending tracers at their Strike Eagle. “Selecting Mav.”
This death dance lasted just a few seconds. The Eagle evaded fire and got off a Maverick air-to-ground missile, which streaked down to obliterate the gun-track, and then the pilot went after the next battery of howitzers.
It was like Red Flag, the pilot thought in a blink. He’d been here in 1991 as a captain and killed targets, but mainly wasted his time in Scud-hunts. The experience of real combat had never measured up to battle practice in the Nellis Air Force Base weapons range. It did now. The mission was only planned in a general sense. He was looking for targets in real time with look-down radar and mark-one eyeball, and unlike his playtime at Nellis, these guys were shooting back with real bullets. Well, he was dropping real bombs, too. More ground fire started up as he lined his aircraft on the next collection of targets.
IT SEEMED, OF all things, like a cough in the middle of a conversation. There was a final crash of twenty or thirty rounds on the desert a hundred meters in front of his position. Thirty seconds later, ten more fell. Thirty seconds after that, only three. On the horizon, well behind the first row of tanks just appearing, there were dust clouds. Some seconds later, they felt something through their boots, and after that a distant rumble. It became clear in a few seconds. Green-painted fighters appeared, heading due south. They were friendly, he saw from their shape. Then another appeared, trailing smoke, staggering in the sky, then tipping over, and two objects jolted out of it, turning into parachutes that drifted to the ground a kilometer behind his position, as the fighter smashed down separately, making an immense fireball. The major dispatched a vehicle to pick them up, then returned his attention to tanks still out of range—and he had no artillery to call in on them as yet.
WELL, SHIT, THE colonel thought, it was like Red Flag after all, except this night wouldn’t be spent telling lies in the O club and sneaking off to Vegas for a show and some time in a casino. His third pass had run him into fire, and the Eagle was too sick to make it all the way home. He wasn’t even on the ground yet when he saw a vehicle coming toward him, and he wondered whose it was. A moment later, it looked like an American-made Hummer, fifty meters away when he hit the ground, jolting hard on the packed sand. He popped the release on his chute and pulled his pistol out, but sure enough the vehicle was friendly, with two Saudi soldiers in it. One came over to him while the other took the Hummer to where the wizzo was standing, half a mile away.
“Come, come!” the Saudi private said. A minute later, the Hummer was back with the wizzo, who was holding his knee and grimacing.
“Twisted it bad, boss. Landed on a fuckin’ rock,” he explained, getting in one of the backseats.
Everything he’d heard about Saudi drivers was true, the colonel learned in a few seconds. It was like being inside a Burt Reynolds movie, as the Hummer bounded its way back to the safety of the wadi, but it was good to see the shapes of friendly vehicles there. The Hummer took him to what had to be the command post. There were still some shells falling forward of their position, but their aim had worsened, now dropping the shells five hundred meters short.
“Who are you?” Lieutenant Colonel Steve Berman asked.
“Major Abdullah.” The man even saluted. Berman holstered his pistol and looked around.
“I guess you’re the guys we came to support. We took out their artillery pretty good, but some bastard got lucky with his Shilka. Can you get us a chopper?”
“I will try. Are you injured?”
“My wizzo had a bum knee. We could use something to drink, though.”
Major Abdullah handed over his canteen. “We have an attack coming in.”
“Mind if I watch?” Berman asked.
ONE HUNDRED MILES to the south, Eddington’s brigade was still forming. He had one battalion pretty much intact. This he moved twenty miles forward, left and right of the road to KKMC, to screen the rest of his forces as they came up the road from Dhahran. Unhappily, his artillery was the last group to have been off-loaded, and they weren’t due for at least another four hours. But that couldn’t be helped. As units arrived, he first of all got them to assembly areas where they could top off their fuel tanks. What with getting people off the road, directed to their intermediate destinations, and gassed up, it took about an hour per company to get things organized. His second battalion was just about ready to move. This one he would send west of the road, which would allow the first one to move laterally to the east, and double his advanced security force. It was so hard to explain to people that fighting battles was more about traffic control than killing people. That, and gathering information. A combat action was like the last act of a massive ballet—most of the time it was just getting the dancers to the right parts of the stage. The two acts—knowing where to send them and then getting them there—were interactive, and Eddington still didn’t have a very clear picture. His brigade intelligence group was just setting up and starting to get hard information from Riyadh. Forward, his lead battalion had a reconnaissance screen of HMMWVs and Bradleys ten miles in advance of the main force, all of them hunkered down, their vehicles hidden as best they could be, and the troops on their bellies, scanning forward with binoculars, so far reporting nothing but the occasional wisp of dust well beyond the visible horizon and the rumbles of noise that carried amazingly far. Well, Eddington decided, so much the better. He had time to prepare, and time was the most valuable commodity a soldier could hope for.
“LOBO-SIX, this is WOLFPACK-SIX, over.”
“LOBO-SIX copies.”
“This is WOLFPACK-SIX-ACTUAL. WHITEFANG is moving out now. They should be on your left in an hour. You may commence your lateral movement when they arrive on line. Over.”
“LOBO-SIX-ACTUAL copies, Colonel. Still nothing to see up here. We’re in pretty good shape, sir.”
“Very well
. Keep me informed. Out.” Eddington handed the radio phone back.
“Colonel!” It was the major who ran his intelligence section. “We have some information for you.”
“Finally!”
THE ARTILLERY FIRE continued, with a few rounds dropping right in the wadi. It was Colonel Berman’s first experience with that, and he found that he didn’t like it very much. It also explained why the tanks and tracks were spread out so much, which had struck him as very odd at first. One round went off a hundred meters to the left of the tank behind which he and Major Abdullah were sheltering, thankfully to the far side. They both quite distinctly heard the pings of fragments hitting the brown-painted armor.
“This is not fun,” Berman observed, shaking his head to clear the noise of the shell-burst.
“Thank you for dealing with the rest of their guns. It was quite frightening,” Abdullah said, looking through his binoculars. The advancing UIR T-80s were just over three thousand meters away, having not yet spotted his hull-down M1A2s.
“How long have you been in contact?”
“It started just after sunset yesterday. We are all that is left of the 4th Brigade.” And that didn’t help Berman’s confidence at all. Above their heads, the tank’s turret made a slight adjustment to the left. There was a short phrase over the major’s radio, and he replied with a single word—shouted, however. A second after that, the tank to the left of them jerked backward a foot or so, and a blast of fire erupted from the main gun. It made the artillery round seem like a firecracker in comparison. Against all logic, Berman raised his head. In the distance he saw a column of smoke, and tumbling atop it was a tank turret.
“Jesus!”
“You have a radio I can use?”
“SKY ONE, THIS is Tiger Lead,” an AWACS officer heard on a side channel. “I am on the ground with a Saudi tank group north of KKMC.” He gave the position next. “We are in heavy contact here. Got any help you can send us? Over.”
“Tiger, can you authenticate?”
“No, God damn it, my fuckin’ codes went down with my -15. This is Colonel Steve Berman out of Mountain Home, and I am one very pissed-off aviator right now, Sky. Forty minutes ago, we beat the snot out of some Iraqi artillery, and now we got tanks coming out the ass. You gonna believe me or not, over.”
“Sounds American to me,” a more senior officer thought.
“And if you look close, their tanks are round on top and pointing south and ours are flat on the top and pointing north, over.” That bit of information was followed by the crash of an explosion. “This ground-pounder shit ain’t no fun at all,” he told them.
“Me too,” the first controller decided. “Tiger, stand by. Devil-Lead, this is Sky-One, we have some business for you ...”
It wasn’t supposed to be this way at all, but it was happening even so. There were supposed to be frag—for fragmentary—orders detailing “packages” of tactical aircraft to hunting patches, but there weren’t enough aircraft for that, and no time to select their patches, either. Sky-One had a flight of four F-16s waiting for some air-to-mud action, and this seemed as good a time as any.
THE ADVANCING TANKS stopped to trade fire at first, but that was a losing game against the fire-control systems on the American-made Abrams tanks, and these Saudi crews had gotten a post-graduate course in gunnery earlier in the day. The enemy backed off and maneuvered left and right, blowing smoke from their rear decks to obscure the battlefield. More vehicles were left behind, contributing their own black columns to the morning sky as their ammunition racks cooled off. The initial part of the engagement had lasted five minutes and had cost the UIR twenty vehicles that Berman could see, with no losses for the friendlies. Maybe this wasn’t so bad after all.
The Vipers came in from the west, hardly visible about four miles downrange, dropping their Mark-82 dumb bombs in the middle of the enemy formation.
“Brilliant!” the English-educated Major Abdullah said. They couldn’t tell how many vehicles had died as a result, but now his men knew they were not alone in their engagement. That made a difference.
IF ANYTHING, THE streets of Tehran had become grimmer still. What struck Clark and Chavez (Klerk and Chekov, currently) was the absence of conversation. People moved along without speaking to one another. There was also a sudden shortage of men, as reserves were being called up to trek into their armories, draw weapons, and prepare to move into the war which their new country had halfheartedly announced after President Ryan’s preemption.
The Russians had given them the location of Daryaei’s home, and their job really was only to look at it—which was easily said, but rather a different task on the streets of the capital city of the country with which you were at war. Especially if you had been in that city shortly before, and seen by members of its security force. The complications were piling up.
The man lived modestly, they saw from two and a half blocks away. It was a three-story building on a middle-class street that displayed no trappings of power at all, except for the obvious presence of guards on the front steps, and a few cars spotted at the corners. Looking closer from two hundred meters away, they could also see that people avoided walking on that side of the street. Popular man, the Ayatollah.
“So, who else lives there?” Klerk asked the Russian rezident. He was covered as the embassy’s second secretary, and performed many diplomatic functions to maintain his legend.
“Mainly his bodyguards, we believe.” They were sitting in a cafe, drinking coffee and studiously not looking directly at the building of their interest. “To either side, we think the buildings have been vacated. He has his security concerns, this man of God. The people here are increasingly uneasy under his rule—even the enthusiasm of the Iraqi conquest fades now. You can see the mood as well as I, Klerk. These people have been under control for almost a generation. They grow tired of it. And it was clever of your President to announce hostilities before our friend did. The shock value was very effective, I think. I like your President,” he added. “So does Sergey Nikolay’ch.”
“This building is close enough, Ivan Sergeycvich,” Chavez said quietly, calling the kaffeeklatsch back to order. “Two hundred meters, direct line of sight.”
“What about collateral damage?” Clark wondered. It required some circumlocutions to make that come out in Russian.
“You Americans are so sentimental about such things,” the rezident observed. It amused him.
“Comrade Klerk has always had a soft heart,” Chekov confirmed.
AT HOLLOMAN AIR Force Base in New Mexico, a total of eight pilots arrived at the base hospital to have their blood checked. The Ebola testing kits were finally coming out in numbers. The first major military deliveries went to the Air Force, which could deploy more power more quickly than the other branches of the service. There had been a few cases in nearby Albuquerque, all being treated at the University of New Mexico Medical Center and two on this very base, a sergeant and his wife, the former dead and the latter dying—the news of it was all over the base, further enraging warriors who already possessed a surfeit of passion. The aviators all checked out clean, and the relief they felt was not ordinary. Now, they knew, they could go out and do something. The ground crews came in next. These also tested negative. All went off to the flight line. Half of the pilots strapped into F-117 Nighthawks. The other half, with the ground crews, boarded KC-10 tanker/transport aircraft for the long flight to Saudi.
Word was coming in over the Air Force’s own communications network. The 366th and the F-16s from the Israeli base were doing pretty well, but everyone wanted a piece of this one, and the men and women from Holloman would lead the second wave into the battle zone.
“IS HE QUITE mad?” the diplomat asked an Iranian colleague. It was the RVS officers who had the dangerous—or at least most sensitive—part of the intelligence mission.
“You may not speak of our leader in that way,” the foreign ministry official replied as they walked down the street.
“He may have miscalculated,” the Iranian allowed.
“Indeed.” The Russian let it go at that for the moment. He’d been working this mid-level diplomat for over a year. “The world now knows that you have this capability. So clever of him to have flown on the very aircraft that made it possible. He is quite mad. You know that. Your country will be a pariah—”
“Not if we can—”
“No, not if you can. But what if you cannot?” the Russian asked. “Then the entire world will turn against you.”
“THIS IS TRUE?” the cleric asked.
“It is quite true,” the man from Moscow assured him. “President Ryan is a man of honor. He was our enemy for most of his life, and a dangerous enemy, but now, with peace between us, he turns into a friend. He is well respected by both the Israelis and the Saudis. The Prince Ali bin Sheik and he are very close. That is well known.” This meeting was in Ashkhabad, capital of Turkmenistan, disagreeably close to the Iranian border, especially with the former Premier dead in a traffic accident—probably a creative one, Moscow knew—and elections pending. “Ask yourself this: Why did President Ryan say those things about Islam? An attack on his country, an attack on his child, an attack on himself—but does he attack your religion, my friend? No, he does not. Who but an honorable man would say such things?”
Executive Orders (1996) Page 136
