by Tom Clancy
The crewmen in B-Troop’s command track looked at one another for several seconds before anyone spoke. They even managed to forget the presence of the reporter. The youngest of them, a PFC, looked down at shaking hands and had his say.
“Fuckers gonna pay. Motherfuckers gonna pay for this, guys.”
FOUR ARMORED PERSONNEL carriers were racing across the desert at about forty miles per hour. They avoided the beaten-dirt road to STORM TRACK for fear that it would be targeted with artillery fire; that proved to be a sensible precaution. Their first view of their objective was a cloud of smoke and dust drifting away from the antenna farm as fire continued to pour into the site. One of the three buildings appeared to be standing, but on fire, and the Saudi lieutenant leading the scout platoon wondered if anyone could possibly be alive there. To the north he saw a different sort of flash—five miles away, the horizontal tongue of flame from a tank’s main gun illuminated the bumps and knolls of a landscape that was not at all as level as it appeared in daylight. A minute after that, the fire on STORM TRACK diminished somewhat, shifting to where the tanks were evidently engaging enemy vehicles invading his country. He thanked Allah that his immediate job had just gotten a little easier while his radio operator called ahead on the track’s tactical radio.
The four APCs picked their way through the fallen antennas on the way into the wrecked compound. Then their rear doors opened and the soldier raced out to look around. Thirty men and women worked here. They found nine unhurt people, plus five wounded. The scout platoon took about five minutes searching the wreckage, but no more living people were discovered, and there wasn’t time to be fastidious about the dead. The tracks moved out, back toward the battalion CP, where helicopters waited to ferry the Americans out.
IT AMAZED THE Saudi tank commander that surprise had been achieved. He knew that most of his country’s forces were two hundred miles to the east. But the enemy was here and coming south. They weren’t going into Kuwait or after the oil fields at all. That became plain when the first UIR tanks appeared in his thermal viewer, cresting a low spot in the berm, out of gun range because he’d been ordered not to move too close. The young officer really didn’t know what to do. Ordinarily, his military worked under fairly tight control, and so he radioed back for instructions. But his battalion commander was busy now, his own command of fifty-four tanks and other vehicles spread over a front of thirty kilometers, all of which was being hit with indirect artillery fire, and much of which was reporting enemy tanks crossing the border, with infantry carriers in support.
The officer decided he had to do something, so he ordered his tanks forward to meet the attack. At three thousand meters, his men opened fire, and the first fourteen shots resulted in eight hits, not bad under the circumstances for part-time soldiers, he thought as he decided to stand and fight right there, and defend his soil against the invader. His fourteen tanks were spread over a line three kilometers long. It was a defensible deployment, but a stationary one, and in the center of his own line he was too fixed on what lay before him. The second volley got another six kills at the long range, but then one of his tanks took a direct hit from an artillery round, which destroyed its engine and started a fire that made its crew bail out, only to be shredded by more of the artillery fire before they could run five meters. He was looking that way and saw them die, four hundred meters away, and he knew that there was a hole in his line now, and he was supposed to do something about that.
His gunner, like the others, was looking for and trying to engage enemy tanks, the T-80s with their domed turrets, when the first flight of antitank missiles zoomed away from the BMP infantry carriers that lay behind them. Those started getting hits, and though they could not penetrate the frontal armor on his tanks, tracks were knocked off, more engines set afire, and fire-control systems damaged. When half his command was burning, it was time to pull back. Four started moving again turning and darting two kilometers south. The captain remained with the other three, and got another tank kill before he started to move. The air was filled with missiles now, and one of them hit the rear of his turret, igniting the ammo-storage box. The vertical flame sucked the air from the open hatch, asphyxiating his crew even as it burned him alive. Leaderless, the company fought on for thirty minutes, falling back again until the three surviving tanks ran south at fifty kilometers per hour, trying to find the battalion command post.
That was no longer there. It had been located by its radio transmissions and pounded by a full brigade of UIR artillery in its unprepared position just as the survivors from STORM TRACK arrived with the scout troop. In the first hour of the Second Persian Gulf War, a thirty-mile rent had been made in the Saudi lines, and there was a direct path to Riyadh. For that, the Army of God had lost half a brigade, a stiff price, but one which they were willing to pay.
THE INITIAL PICTURE wasn’t clear. It rarely was. That was the advantage the attacker almost always had, Diggs knew, and the job of the commander was to make order from chaos and use the former to inflict the latter on his enemy. With the destruction of STORM TRACK, his Predator capability was temporarily gone and would have to be reestablished. The 366th had deployed without J-STARS airborne radar capable of tracking the movement of ground troops. Aloft were two E-3B AWACS aircraft, each with four fighters in close attendance. Twenty UIR fighters came up and started going after them. That would be exciting for the Air Force.
But Diggs had his own problems. With the loss of STORM TRACK and its Predator drones, he was largely blind and his first remedial action was to order the 10th Cav’s air squadron to probe west. Eddington’s words had come back hard to him. The Saudi center of gravity might not be an economic target after all.
“OUR TROOPS ARE inside the Kingdom,” Intelligence told him. “They are meeting opposition, but are breaking through. The American spy post has been destroyed.”
The news didn’t make Daryaei any happier. “How did they know—how did they know?”
The intelligence chief was afraid to ask how they knew what. So he dodged the issue: “It does not matter. We will be in Riyadh in two days, and then nothing matters.”
“What do we know about the sickness in America? Why are not more people ill? How can they have troops to send?”
“This I do not know,” Intelligence admitted.
“What do you know?”
“It appears that the Americans have one regiment in Kuwait, and another in the Kingdom, with a third taking equipment from the ships—the ones the Indians failed to stop in Dhahran.”
“So attack them!” Mahmoud Haji almost shouted. The arrogance of that American, calling him by name in a way that his own people might have seen and heard ... and believed?
“Our air force is attacking in the north. That is the place of decision. Any diversion from that is a waste of time,” he replied reasonably.
“Missiles, then!”
“I will see.”
THE BRIGADIER COMMANDING the Saudi 4th Brigade had been told to expect nothing more than a diversionary attack in his area and to stand ready to launch a counterattack into the UIR right upon the commencement of their massed attack into Kuwait. Like many generals throughout history, he had made the mistake of believing his intelligence a little too much. He had three mechanized battalions, each covering a thirty-mile sector, with a five- to ten-mile gap between them. In an offensive role, it would have been a flexible deployment for harassing the enemy’s flank, but the early loss of his middle battalion had split his command in two, leaving him no easy way to command the separated parts. He next compounded the error by moving forward instead of backward. A courageous decision, it overlooked the fact that he had one hundred miles of depth behind him to King Khalid Military City, space in which he could have reorganized for a weighted counterstroke instead of a fragmented impromptu one.
The UIR attack was made on the model perfected by the Soviet army in the 1970s. The initial break-in phase had been composed on a heavy brigade surging forward behind massed
artillery fire. The elimination of STORM TRACK had been intended from the beginning. It and PALM BOWL—they even knew the code names—were largely the eyes of their enemy’s command structure. Satellites they could do nothing about, but ground-based intelligence-gathering posts were fair game. As expected, the Americans had deployed some assets, but not many, it appeared, and half of those would be day-flying aircraft. As with the Soviets, who had written the book to drive to the Bay of Biscay, the UIR would accept the cost, balancing lives against time to reach their political objective before the full weight of their potential enemies could come to bear. If the Saudis believed that Daryaei wanted their oil more than anything else, so be it, for in Riyadh was the royal family and the government. In doing so, the UIR risked its left flank, but Kuwait-based forces would have to negotiate the terrain of the Wadi al Batin, and then cross two hundred miles of desert just to get to where the Army of God had already been.
The key was speed, and the key to achieving speed was the rapid elimination of the Saudi 4th. The artillery still massed north of the berm tracked in on the urgent radio transmissions, and commenced a relentless area fire aimed at disrupting communications and cohesion in the units that they fully expected would be used to counter the initial invasion. It was a tactic almost certain to work, so long as they were willing to pay the price. One brigade each had been allocated to the three border battalions.
The 4th Brigade commander also had artillery of his own, but this, he decided, was best used on the center breakthrough, to punish the units with a clear road into the heart of his nation. The support mainly went there, to harass people just passing through rather than the brigades, which were just now making contact with his remaining mechanized forces. With their destruction, he would triple the width of the gap in the Saudi lines.
DIGGS WAS IN the main command post with all of this news coming in, and he realized what was happening to him, after a fashion. He’d done it to the Iraqis in 1991. He’d done it to the Israelis for a couple of years as CO of the Buffalo Cav. And he’d commanded the National Training Center for a time as well. Now he saw what it was like on the other side. Things were happening too fast for the Saudis. They were reacting rather than thinking, seeing the crisis in its magnitude but not its shape, semi-paralyzed by the speed of events which, had they been on the other side, would have seemed merely exciting and nothing more.
“Have the 4th pull back about thirty klicks,” he said quietly. “You have plenty of room to maneuver in.”
“We will stop them right there!” the Saudi commander replied, too automatically.
“General, that is a mistake. You are risking that brigade when you don’t have to. You can recover lost ground. You cannot recover lost time and lost men.”
But he wasn’t listening, and Diggs didn’t have enough stars on his collar to speak more insistently. One more day, he thought, one more goddamned day.
THE HELICOPTERS TOOK their time. M-Troop, 4th of the 10th, was made of six OH-58 Kiowa scout choppers and four AH-64 Apache attack birds, all carrying more extra fuel tanks than weapons. They had warning that enemy fighters were aloft, which prohibited flying very high. Their sensors were sniffing the air for the radar emissions of SAM radars—there had to be some around—while the pilots picked their way from hilltop to hilltop, scanning forward with low-light viewing systems and Longbow radars. Passing into UIR territory, they spotted the occasional scout vehicle, perhaps a company spread over twenty klicks within sight of the Kuwaiti border, they estimated, but that was all. The next fifty miles revealed much of the same, though the vehicles were heavier. Arriving on the outskirts of Al Busayyah, which the Army of God had been approaching according to satellite-intelligence information, all they really found were tracks in the sand and a few groups of support vehicles, mainly fuel trucks. Destroying them wasn’t their mission. Their task was to locate the enemy’s main body and determine its axis of advance.
That took another hour of ducking and side-slipping and darting, the helicopters leap-frogging. There were SAM vehicles around here, Russian- and French-made short-range ones that helicopters knew to avoid. One Kiowa-Apache team got close enough to see a column of tanks moving through a gap in the berm in brigade strength, and that was 150 miles from the point they’d left. With that information, the helicopters withdrew, without taking a shot at anything. The next time, they might well come in strength, and there was no sense in warning people about the gap in their air defenses before it could be properly exploited.
THE 4TH BRIGADE’S easternmost battalion stood its ground, and mainly died there. By this time, UIR attack helicopters had joined in, and while the Saudis shot well, the inability to maneuver doomed them. It cost the Army of God another brigade to accomplish this mission, but at the end of it, the gap in Saudi lines was seventy miles wide.
It was different in the west. This battalion, commanded now by a major with the death of his colonel, broke contact and headed southwest with half its strength, then tried to turn east, to get ahead of the advancing attack. Lacking the strength to stand, he stung and moved, in the process accounting for twenty tanks and a number of other vehicles, before running out of fuel, thirty kilometers north of KKMC. The 4th Brigade’s support vehicles had gotten lost somewhere. The major radioed for help and wondered if any might arrive.
IT CAME AS more of a surprise than it should have. A Defense Support System Program satellite over the Indian Ocean spotted the launch bloom. That word went to Sunnyvale, California, and from there to Dhahran. It had all happened before, but not with missiles launched from Iran. The ships were scarcely half unloaded. The war was only four hours old when the first Scud left its truck-bed launcher, heading south out of the Zagros Mountains.
“Now what?” Ryan asked.
“Now you see why the cruisers are still there,” Jackson replied.
RAID WARNING WAS scarcely needed. The three cruisers, plus Jones, had their radars sweeping the sky, and they all acquired the inbound ballistic track over a hundred miles out. National Guardsmen waiting their turn to fetch their tracked vehicles watched the fireballs of surface-to-air missiles lance into the sky, leaping after things that only radars could see. The initial launch of three exploded separately in the darkness, and that was that. But the soldiers were now even more motivated to collect their tanks as the triple boom came down from one hundred thousand feet.
On Anzio, Captain Kemper watched the track disappear from the display. This was one other thing Aegis should be good at, though sitting still under fire wasn’t exactly his idea of fun.
THE OTHER EVENT of the evening was a spirited air battle over the border. The AWACS aircraft had watched what turned out to be twenty-four fighters coming in directly for them in an attempt to deny the allies air coverage. That proved a costly exercise. No attack on the E-3B aircraft was actually accomplished. Instead, the UIR air force continued to demonstrate its ability to lose aircraft to no purpose. But would that matter? The senior American controller on one AWACS remembered an old NATO joke. One Soviet tank general ran into another in Paris and asked, “By the way, who won the air war?” The point of it was that wars were ultimately won or lost on the ground. So it would be here.
60
BUFORD
IT WASN’T UNTIL SIX hours after the first artillery barrage that enemy intentions were clear. It took the reports of the helicopter reconnaissance to give an initial picture, but what finally turned the trick was satellite photography that was impossible to discount. The historical precedents flooded into Marion Diggs’s mind. When the French high command had got wind of the German Schlieffen Plan prior to World War I, their reaction had been, “So much the better for us!” That assault had barely ground to a halt outside Paris. In 1940, the same high command had greeted initial news of another German attack with smiles—and that attack had ended at the Spanish border. The problem was that people tended to wed their ideas more faithfully than their spouses, and the tendency was universal. It was well after midnight, th
erefore, when the Saudis realized that the main force of their army was in the wrong place, and that their western covering force had been steamrollered by an enemy who was either too smart or too dumb to do what they’d expected him to do. To counter that, they had to fight a battle of maneuver, which they were unprepared for. The UIR sure as hell was driving first to KKMC. There would be a battle for that point on the map, after which the enemy would have the option of turning east toward the Persian Gulf—and the oil—thus trapping allied forces; or continuing south to Riyadh to deliver a political knockout and win the war. All in all, Diggs thought, it wasn’t a terribly bad plan. If they could execute it. Their problem was the same as the Saudis’, though. They had a plan. They thought it was pretty good, and they, too, thought that their enemy would connive at his own destruction. Sooner or later, everyone did, and the key to being on the winning side was knowing what you could do and what you couldn’t. This enemy didn’t know the couldn’t part yet. There was no sense in teaching them that too soon.
IN THE SITUATION Room, Ryan was on the phone with his friend in Riyadh.
“I have the picture, Ali,” the President assured him.
“This is serious.”
“The sun will be up soon, and you have space to trade for time. It’s worked before, Your Highness.”
“And what will your forces do?”
“They can’t exactly drive home from there, can they?”
“You are that confident?”
“You know what those bastards did to us, Your Highness.”
“Why, yes, but—”
“So do our troops, my friend.” And then Ryan had a request.
