Able Sentry

by John Schettler

  The US presence in the region had not been heavy, except when Syria and Israel got into a shooting war that ended badly for Damascus in 2015. The loss of face, and overall control exercised by the Assad regime had allowed all the many fighters that had joined his cause to seed themselves in the sandy soil of the Syrian deserts. Ten years later, Syria was a patchwork of insurgent groups, terrorist cells, freedom fighters, and cadres from both Iraq and Iran, all simmering in a constant boiling low level war around a hard core centered on Damascus that was still controlled by Assad. This was why there were no Syrian units involved in the invasion of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, except volunteers and hangers on that had migrated south when the fighting began, seeking glory, grudging revenge, or an easy route to paradise through martyrdom.

  In the Levant, Israel had walled itself off after fighting wars with both Syria and Egypt. It had seized the West Bank from Jordan and most the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt in the 1960’s, until the UN brokered a peace and set up a DMZ there in the Sinai Desert. It had also taken the Golan Heights from Syria, and then threatened to drive on Damascus until the Syrian regime sued for peace. After that, the region simmered like a volcano gone dormant, with occasional eruptions in Lebanon when the Iranian backed Hezbollah would go too far in their constant antagonizing of the Israelis. By 2025, with Jordan now at peace with Israel and a friend to the West, and Syria much less of a threat, Israel had been content to keep a guarded watch along the Sinai DMZ.

  Yet that barren frontier was now about to become the focus of the war planners in the West. The war had suddenly flared up in the Mediterranean, and Egypt closed the Suez Canal when China pulled its navy into the Red Sea. To the West, it was clear that the vital canal could not be sealed off indefinitely, and that free access to that route had to be restored. Once the locks were closed, and the Trans-Arabian Pipeline through Jordan was shut down, it was not long before the European Union became amenable to talks with the US about correcting the situation. Yet Egypt was a staunch ally and client state of China, and the senior member of the North African Coalition that China had helped to organize. Even though the Naval battle in the Med was seen as untenable for China in the short run, on the land, from Cairo to Morocco, an armed camp of angry and hostile Muslim states had begun to make life miserable for all interests of the United States and Europe.

  In Egypt, the big British Petroleum venture at Sultan Apache was seized outright, and before anyone by the name of Kinlan had ever been sent to guard it. Shipments of oil from Libya, Algeria and the rest were all stopped cold, and a general embargo of oil and oil based lubricants was imposed. A month after the war had begun in the region, Europe was already feeling the pinch, and with a very cold winter setting in, the pain was quite real.

  Something had to be done.

  Chapter 11

  The President settled in to his favorite chair, opening the thick briefing book and adjusting his reading glasses. There, in large bold letters on the cover page, was the code word for what would soon set thousands of ships planes, men and women in motion, all in the service of war—ABLE SENTRY. After finishing the preliminary background information on the general strategic situation he fingered the heading of the next section, events that had given rise to the outbreak of hostilities in Arabia.

  After a long series of border skirmishes between Iran and Iraq threatened to break out into a general war, China brokered peace negotiation in Beijing, co-opting the role that the US might have normally played on the world stage. Somehow, they managed to get Saddam and the Ayatollah, the former Sunni, the latter Shiite to bury their hatchets and make a grudging peace. Behind that deal came billions in investment money to modernize and expand the oil trade of both nations, and China signed a purchase agreements extending out twenty years.

  It was a strange rapprochement that the West saw as untenable in the long run, but it held together as both countries slowly tightened their orbits around the warm glow of the rising Chinese sun. Now, in 2025, Beijing had called in a few markers, and Saddam and the Ayatollah of Iran joined forces to invade Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

  It was an extreme that no one had expected, until the divisions started mustering along the Kuwaiti border as 2025 grew old. The threat they posed soon became a real and present danger, not just to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, but to all of Europe and North America. This was why the plans presented by General Millard of the Joint Chiefs did not have much trouble penciling in the cooperation of France, Germany, Italy, and of course, the United Kingdom. It was also why the US planners had cast their eyes on Israel and Jordan as a natural support base for the bold thrust east they were proposing. With Israel a staunch ally of the US, it was also easy to enlist their support for the so called “Suez Option.”

  That option was an adjunct of the plan aimed at reopening the Suez Canal and restoring access to the Red Sea. As the Generals and Admirals looked ahead, they could see that the control of those waters, and the Gulf of Aden, were both going to be as essential as assuring control of the Strait of Hormuz. That was going to primarily be a naval and air battle, but it would also have a land element. China had bases in Eritrea, Djibouti, and Yemen, and there were insurgencies underway in Yemen, Ethiopia, and Somalia. The Saudis had sent military forces into Yemen to combat a hostile Houthi insurgency that was threatening to spill over into the Kingdom, but when Qusay Hussein came south, those units had to pull out. That left the region a hotbed of anti-Western, anti-Saudi insurgents.

  Something had to be done there as well, which was why the initial defensive plan dubbed Able Sentry had suddenly caught fire to become a general war plan for the entire Middle East theater of operations. It’s initial limited aim of defending Saudi Arabia soon added objectives intended to address all these strategic choke points. Saudi Arabia had to be defended, Kuwait liberated, the Strait of Hormuz opened, and Persian Gulf secured. That meant both Iraq and Iran had to be engaged and defeated, and Able Fire was the bold plan that answered that great challenge. Beyond that, the Suez Canal had to be opened, and free passage reestablished in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. That meant Egypt, Eritrea, Djibouti and Yemen all had to be dealt with in the general plan. The president realized that this end of the plan was already underway. A British and Australian force had just landed at Aden, and chased the Chinese out of Djibouti to restore access to the Red Sea from the South.

  This was, in fact, the heart of the war in 2025, not the naval squabble between China and Japan in the East China Sea that had pulled in the US 7th Fleet. China really had no further territorial ambitions in the Pacific, but if the great gambit it had set in motion in the Middle East was to have any chance of success, it had to fight in the Indo-Arabian theater, and with everything it could muster. This was why Admiral Sun Wei had been reinforced with the entire Mediterranean Fleet, and also why Admiral Wu Jinlong had been tasked again with his ongoing campaign to control the Strait of Malacca.

  In effect, World War Three was all to be about four long time strategic chokepoints governing commerce and the flow of oil: Suez, the Gulf of Aden, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Malacca Strait. As the war slipped into December, all four of those great choke points were closed to commercial traffic, and Able Sentry was expanding to plan how they would all be reopened, and made secure. To do that, Able Fire had to burn before that sentry could take up his watch.

  So when the US President spent that long night reading the operational briefing book, he saw that the military was reaching for a grand campaign to win a sweeping victory in the Middle East, and do what General Millard had proposed. The planners wanted to completely reset the strategic balance in the region, contain or expel Chinese influence, defeat the strange bedfellow alliance of Iraq and Iran, and neuter the rising influence of Egypt. It soon became evident to the President that working to win any single one of the four chokepoint objectives would be useless in the end unless the other three were also won. It would do little good to save the House of Saud and open the Strait of Hormuz unless the other chokepoints c
ould also be secured and opened as well.

  The longer he read the plan, the more he came to realize that this was now to be a real war, and not simply a campaign. It was going to potentially involve hostilities with China, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Yemen and the other states bordering the Gulf of Aden. It could also spill over into the other North African States, though the intelligence assessment there had been one that believed those countries would “fall into line” once the other great antagonists in the region had been cowed. What started off as a necessary reaction to the invasion of Kuwait, had now mushroomed into something quite more, and one way or another, all nations bordering this key central region which held so much of the world’s energy, would have to choose sides.

  It had taken a month to organize the movement of just two US divisions into the Pacific when war erupted. The 25th Infantry had been the first to go to Japan, and it was to have been reinforced by the 1st USMC Division, until the satellites saw the buildup on the Kuwaiti border. That division was then diverted to Darwin in Australia, and then to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Now it was heading for Oman, and when it got there, it would have completed a journey of 12,500 nautical miles. That was a very long way to go, and the alternate route around the Cape of Good Hope was just 1000 miles shorter.

  Now in this briefing, the planners had therefore chosen the far shorter trans-Atlantic route, through the Strait of Gibraltar and across the Med to Israel. That was just 5500 nautical miles, and along the way, it looked to open the Suez Canal with a big Israeli operation, bring in military support from the European Union, compel the withdrawal of all Iraqi and Iranian forces in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and then open the Gulf of Aden and Strait of Hormuz. To say it was ambitious was a bold understatement.

  But the President liked it.

  There was only one great reservation in his mind…. What to do in Iraq? Should he order Able Fire to burn its way to the southeast, crossing the Jordanian border into Saudi Arabia in a shorter left hook? This way, Western forces would not enter Iraq. Instead they would drive down the long border zone towards Kuwait. Would that nation survive intact as the battle compressed to that area in the end? The planners opinion was that the oil infrastructure of Kuwait would be largely destroyed under this option. If, however, the thrust was due east into Iraq towards Baghdad, then it was thought that a general retreat north to defend Iraq might leave the facilities in Kuwait intact.

  Then what? The planners suggested that if the Iraqis remained in Kuwait, negotiations on the withdrawal of Western Coalition forces from Iraq would insist that all Iraqi forces leave Kuwait, and without any wanton destruction or further pillaging.

  It would leave the Hussein regime in power, thought the President. While an evil in one respect, that option at least relieved the United States and Coalition forces from a long occupation, which was something the President wanted to avoid if at all possible. The Generals always made it look easy when they planned their routes into wars. Getting out again was another matter. As he contemplated this weighty decision, the telephone would ring in the quiet of the oval office at 02:00 on the 4th day of the new year

  “Sir,” came the familiar voice of the President’s Chief of Staff. “We have just received an encrypted communication, in three parts—coded Geronimo.

  The midnight oil had already burned away by that hour, but when that single word was spoken, the President knew he would get no sleep at all that morning. Geronimo…. It was the single most explosive code signal that had ever been transmitted, first established by the Royal Navy in WWII. Every US President had been briefed as to its significance, but few had ever heard it used in earnest, as it was that night. When the message was decrypted and brought in, the courier was accompanied by two Marine Guards, which remained posted just outside the doors to the oval office while the President reviewed the contents, provided on a memory key that was inserted into a secret device kept in a secure safe in the Oval Office.

  The message originated from a Royal Navy destroyer, or at least a ship that had been pressed into service of the Crown—the Argos Fire. Mack Morgan had gotten wind of the US plan on the Deep Net, and he thought he would also take a look at the consequences, an aftermath he was all too familiar with from the timeline he had been born to. So he sent a file through to Washington, coded Geronimo. It was a brief history from his own time, where there had been two big wars against the Iraqi regime, after it had also invaded Kuwait. One war was aimed at ejecting the Iraqis from Kuwait, in 1990, but it was interesting to note that they had never entered Saudi Arabia. In that war, Saddam was defeated, but his regime left intact.

  The second war was to actually invade Iraq and unseat that regime some years later in 2003, and the President noted that US forces then remained active in a long fought counterinsurgency, and were still there by the year 2020! He shook his head. It wasn’t for the freedom and democracy of Iraq either. We tried to nation build there, he knew, to create a friendly Western leaning state, and of course, all for the oil.

  My God, he thought. That had to cost a trillion dollars, and this message, this chilling chronology of a completely altered history, is certainly unnerving. Real Men go to Baghdad, do they? It seems they never leave once they do. That was what was so frightening about any message coded Geronimo. It meant that you were about to get a look at how events had already played out from another time. It was not a fantasy either, as there were living men, and cold steel ships that had moved from that time to this one, something that had been documented as long ago as the first appearance of a mysterious ship in the Norwegian Sea, in the middle of the Second World War!

  Seeing this account of the history he might now be about to write, the President had a sobering look at the outcomes and consequences of any invasion of Iraq. At the same time, he had concluded that the bold thrust up Highway One, the Guderian Plan as he liked to think of it, was the preferred military operation. It forced the enemy withdrawal without having to push them back all the way from this Rivet Joint One.

  There was one other reason to go to Baghdad, and that was, in fact, the principle reason why this coded message had been sent. Mack Morgan had sat with Elena Fairchild for many hours, hearing all she ever knew about the mysterious keys, and the box that seemed engineered to hold them, still right there on the Argos Fire. Now it seemed that the Russians had a box of their own, and they had found one more key.

  The message also related the fact that the ship’s Captain, and Miss Fairchild herself, had gone missing in South Africa, and that one of the keys had been on her person. This was all very mysterious, and troubling. Every President since Truman had been briefed on the existence of these keys, their apparent purpose and use, and of course the doors they opened—in time itself.

  Morgan’s message at the end was right to the point: It was taken on good authority, he wrote, that one of the last of the missing keys was now thought to be in the Baghdad Museum, though its exact location there is not known. Western Intelligence has been unable to gain access to the museum, and can therefore not speak further on the matter, but the present situation presents the opportunity to gain physical control of the museum grounds and facilities, whereupon a thorough search might be conducted to recover this artifact. It is not known as to whether or not the present Iraqi regime is even aware of the significance of what it might now hold. If discovered and retrieved, this objective alone would strongly argue for a course of action aimed at Baghdad. Such an attempt was made in the time milieu I report on here, but the failure to secure the museum site led to rampant looting, and the key was never found.”

  There it was… Yet one more reason to pay a visit to the ancient capital of Mesopotamia. If that key was there, it simply had to be recovered, and by all means, removed from the hands of men like Saddam and his sons. Yet if we go there, thought the President, we must not stay. General Millard suggests a 90-day occupation to set up an authority that will then be governed by the United Nations. I can live with that. In fact I can have Congress
mandate it. After seeing this Geronimo file, I will simply not allow us to get into a quagmire in the Middle East. We get in, kick the Hussein regime out of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and then we damn well get out…. And oh yes, we send a special team to the Baghdad Museum while we’re at it. I shall have to take a good long look at that. Who to send?

  Finishing the file, the President pressed “END,” and all the data was automatically deleted, the memory key made useless. The information that had been transmitted now lived only in the minds of two men, the one who had originated the message, and the President who had received it.

  Chapter 12

  It was the appendix in the briefing that really raised an eyebrow for the President. It involved participation of international forces, specifically those from the European Union states. In particular, there was a daring operation being put forward by the British, who had been rankling for weeks ever since the Egyptian Army seized its major BP owned oil drilling site in the lucrative Sultan Apache fields of central Egypt. There, over 500 British nationals had been holed up as prisoners of the Egyptian state, and their fate and wellbeing were matters of daily discussion in both Parliament and the British media. There had been a growing sentiment that something should be done about the situation, and when the Americans floated their western plan element of Able Sentry, the British had turned their eyes on Egypt with a plan of their own.

  In the mind of the British General Staff, it was thought that a force of two or three brigades might land on the North African coast and make the 310 mile journey south to the Sultan Apache site, making themselves ready for operations there within 48 hours. It was an even more audacious plan than that proposed by the Americans, because the Egyptian Army was no pushover. It had three large Field Armies, each with at least three divisions and four to six independent brigades attached. It possessed 2,200 tanks, while Britain had just 330. Yet the British military planners believed the bulk of the Egyptian Army would be deployed near the Nile Delta, and that it would be primarily engaged with the Israeli operation aimed at securing the Suez Canal.