Jack Ryan 9 - Executive Orders (143 page)

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.

T
HE
4
TH 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.

I
T 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.

R
AID 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.

T
HE 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.

BUFORD

I
T 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, therefore, 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.

I
N 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.

“T
HIS WAR HAS
started badly for allied forces,” Tom Donner was saying live on NBC Nightly News. “That's what we're hearing, anyway. The combined armies of Iraq and Iran have smashed through Saudi lines west of Kuwait and are driving south. I'm here with the troopers of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, the Blackhorse. This is Sergeant Bryan Hutchinson of Syracuse, New York. Sergeant, what do you think of this?”

“I guess we're just going to have to see, sir. What I can tell you, B-Troop is ready for anything they got. I wonder if they're ready for us, sir. You come along and watch.” And that was all he had to say on the subject.

“As you see, despite the bad news from the battlefield, these soldiers are ready—even eager—for contact.”

T
HE
S
ENIOR
S
AUDI
commander hung up the phone, having just talked with his sovereign. Then he turned to Diggs. “What do you recommend?”

“For starters, I think we should move the 5th and 2nd Brigades southwest.”

“That leaves Riyadh uncovered.”

“No, sir, actually it doesn't.”

“We should counterattack at once!”

“General, we don't have to yet,” Diggs told him, staring down at the map. The 10th sure was in an interesting position. . . . He looked up. “Sir, have you ever heard the story about the old bull and the young bull?” Diggs proceeded to tell one of his favorite jokes, and one which, after a few seconds, had the senior Saudi officers nodding.

“Y
OU SEE, EVEN
the American television says that we are succeeding,” the intelligence chief told his boss.

The general commanding the UIR air force was less sanguine. In the past day, he'd lost thirty fighters, for perhaps two Saudi aircraft in return. His plan to bore in and kill the AWACS aircraft which so tilted the odds in the air had failed, and cost him a gaggle of his best-trained pilots in the process. The good news, for him, was that his enemies lacked the aircraft needed to invade his country and do serious damage. Now more ground forces were moving down from Iran to advance on Kuwait from the north, and with luck all he would have to do would be to cover the advance ground forces, which his people knew how to do, especially in daylight. They'd learn about that course in a few hours.

A
TOTAL OF
fifteen Scud-type ballistic missiles had been launched at Dhahran. Hitting the C
OMEDY
ships had been a long shot at best, and all of the inbounds had either been intercepted or, in most cases, had fallen harmlessly into the sea during a night of noise and fireworks. The last of the load—mainly trucks at this stage—were rolling off now, and Greg Kemper set his binoculars down, as he watched the line of brown-painted trucks fade into the dawn haze. Where they were heading, he didn't know. He did know that about five thousand very pissed-off National Guardsmen from North Carolina were ready to do something.

E
DDINGTON WAS ALREADY
south of KKMC with his brigade staff. His W
OLFPACK
force would probably not get there in time to fight a battle. Instead, he had headed them to Al Artawiyah, one of those places which sometimes became important in history because roads led there. He wasn't sure if that would happen here, though he remembered that Gettysburg had been a place where Bobby Lee hoped to get some shoes for his men. While his staff did their work, the colonel lit a cigar and walked outside, to see two companies of men arriving with their vehicles. He decided to head over that way while the MPs got them scattered into hasty-defense locations. Fighters screamed overhead. American F-15Es, by the look of them. Okay, he thought, the enemy'd had a pretty good twelve hours. Let 'em think that.

“Colonel!” a staff sergeant Bradley commander saluted from his hatch. Eddington climbed up as soon as the vehicle stopped. “Good morning, sir.”

“How is everybody?”

“We're just ready as hell, sir. Where are they?” the sergeant asked, taking off his dust-covered goggles.

Eddington pointed. “About a hundred miles that way, coming this way. Tell me about how the troops feel, Sergeant.”

“How many can we kill before they make us stop, sir?”

“If it's a tank, kill it. If it's a BMP, kill it. If it's a truck, kill it. If it's south of the berm, and it's holding a weapon, kill it. But the rules are serious about killing unresisting people. We don't break those rules. That's important.”

“Fair 'nuff, Colonel.”

“Don't take any unnecessary chances with prisoners, either.”

“No, sir,” the track commander promised. “I won't.”

G
EOMETRY PUT THE
Blackhorse first, advancing west from their assembly area toward KKMC. Colonel Hamm had his command advancing on line, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Squadrons lined up south to north, each covering a twenty-mile frontage. The 4th (Aviation) Squadron he kept in his pocket, with just a few helo scouts probing forward while the ground-support elements of their battalion moved to set up an advanced base at a point which his leading troops had not yet reached. Hamm was in his M4 command track—called, naturally enough, the Star Wars (some called it “God”) Track—sitting athwartships, which made for motion-sickness, and starting to get that “take” from his advanced units.

The IVIS system was starting to go on-line now in a real tactical environment. The Inter-Vehicle Information System was a data-link network the Army had been playing with for about five years. It had never been tested in combat, and it pleased Al Hamm that he would be the first to prove its worth. His command screens in the M4 got everything. Each single vehicle was both a source and a recipient of information. It began by telling everybody where all friendly units were, which, with GPS location equipment, was accurate to the meter, and that was supposed to prevent blue-on-blue “friendly fire” losses. At the touch of a key, Hamm knew the location of every fighting vehicle he had, plotted on a map which showed all relevant terrain features. In time he would have a similarly accurate picture of enemy dispositions, and with the knowledge of everyone's location came the option to pick his spots. The Saudi 2nd and 5th Brigades were to his northwest, coming down from the Kuwaiti border area. He had about one hundred miles to move cross-country before he had to worry about making contact, and the four hours of approach march would serve to establish control of his units and make sure that everything was working. He had few doubts of that, but it was a drill he had to perform, because mistakes on the battlefield, however small, were expensive ones.

R
EMNANTS OF THE
Saudi 4th Brigade tried to assemble north of KKMC. They amounted to perhaps two companies of tanks and infantry carriers, most having fought hit-and-run actions during the long desert night. Some had survived from pure luck, others through the brutally Darwinian process that was mobile warfare. The senior surviving officer was a major whose billet had been intelligence, and who had commandeered a tank from an angry NCO. His men had neglected practice on their IVIS gear, preferring gunnery and racing about instead of more structured battle drills. Well, they'd paid for that, the major knew. His first order of business was finding and calling in the scattered fuel trucks his brigade had kept to the rear, so that the surviving twenty-nine tanks and fifteen other tracks could fill up their tanks. Some ammunition trucks were also found, which allowed about half of his heavy vehicles to replenish their storage racks. With that done, he sent the support vehicles to the rear and selected a wadi—a dry riverbed—north and west of KKMC as his next defense position. It took another half hour for him to establish reliable contact with his high command and to call for support.

His force was not coherent. The tanks and tracks came from five different battalions. Some crews knew others only casually or not at all, and he was short of officers to command what force he had. With that knowledge came the realization that his job was to command rather than to fight himself. He reluctantly returned the tank to the sergeant who “owned” it, and chose instead an infantry carrier with more radios and fewer distractions. It wasn't a warlike decision, not for a person whose cultural tradition was leading a mob of warriors on horseback with a sword waving in the air, but he'd learned a few hard lessons in the darkness south of the berm, which put him one up on a lot of men who'd died from not learning fast enough.

T
HE DAY
'
S FIGHTING
began after a pause from both movement and killing that would afterward seem as stylized as the halftime of a football game. The reason the Saudi 4th's survivors had garnered the time and space to reorganize and replenish was that the Army of God had to do the same. Trailing elements refueled from the bowsers, which had followed the combat units. Then they leapfrogged forward, allowing the fuel trucks to succor the erstwhile advance units. That process took four hours. The brigade and divisional commanders were pleased to this point. They were only ten kilometers behind the plan—plans are always too optimistic—in distance, and an hour in time. The refueling took place almost on schedule as well. They'd smashed the initial opposition, taking more losses than hoped, but crushing their foe in any case. Men were tired, but soldiers were supposed to be tired, too, everyone thought, and the time for refueling allowed most to nap enough to freshen them. With the coming of dawn, the Army of God started its diesel engines and renewed its drive south.

T
HE FIRST BATTLES
this day would be aloft. The allied air forces started taking off in numbers just after four from bases in the southern portion of the Kingdom. The first rank of aircraft were F-15 Eagles, which joined up with three circling E-3B AW ACS aircraft lined up east and west of Riyadh. The UIR fighters rose as well, still in the control of ground radar stations inside the former country of Iraq. It began as a sort of dance between two chorus lines. Both sides wanted to know where the other side's SAMs were, information on which had been gathered during the dark hours. Both sides, it was gradually determined, would have a missile belt to hide behind, but in both cases the initial battles would be fought in an electronic no-man's-land. The first move was by a flight of four from the 390th Fighter Squadron, the Wild Boars. Alerted by their control aircraft that a UIR flight had turned east, the Eagles angled west, went to burner, and darted across the empty space, reversing course back toward the sea as they did so. The Americans expected to win, and they did. The UIR fighters—actually, Iranian F-4s left over from the time of the Shah—were caught looking the wrong way. Warned by their ground controllers, they turned back, but their problem was deeper than the tactical situation. They'd expected an engagement pattern in which one side would fire missiles, and the other would evade, then turn back to fire its own in a style of encounter as rigid as a medieval joust. Nobody had told them that this was not how their American enemies were trained.

The Eagles fired first, loosing one AMRAAM each. It was a fire-and-forget missile, which allowed them to retreat after shooting. But they didn't, and instead bored in behind them, following both their doctrine and inclinations after ten hours of contemplating what their President had said on the radio. It was all personal now, and the first team of Eagle drivers kept closing while their missiles tracked in on the first group of targets. Three of the four targets were destroyed, adversely surprised by the missile American pilots called the Slammer. The fourth evaded, blessed his luck, and turned back to fire off his own weapon, only to see on his radar that there was a fighter fifteen kilometers distant, with a closure rate of nearly two thousand knots. That made him flinch and turn south, a mistake. The Eagle pilot, his wingman half a mile behind, chopped power to slow down and got in a tail-chase position. He wanted an eyeball-kill, and he got it, closing on the enemy's “six,” and selecting guns. The other guy was a little slow to catch on this morning. In fifteen more seconds, the F-4 expanded to fill the gunsight . . .