“YOUR HIGHNESS, I need to thank you for your cooper- ‘ ation to this point,” Ryan said over the phone. The wall clock in the Sit Room said 2:10.
“Jack, with luck they will see this and not move,” Prince Ali bin Sheik replied.
“I wish I could agree with that. It is time for me to tell you something you do not yet know, Ah. Our ambassador will present you with full information later in the day. For the moment, you need to know what your neighbors have been up to. It isn’t just about the oil, Your Highness.” He went on for five minutes.
“Are you certain of this?”
“The evidence we have will be in your hands in four hours,” Ryan promised. “We haven’t even told our soldiers yet.”
“Might they use these weapons against us?” The natural question. Biological warfare made everyone’s skin crawl.
1182
“We don’t think so, Ali. Environmental conditions militate against it.” That had been checked, too. The weather forecast for the next week was hot, dry, and clear.
“Those who would use such weapons, Mr. President, this is an act of utter barbarism.”
“That’s why we do not expect them to back down. They can’t–”
“Not ‘they,’ Mr. President. One man. One godless man. When will you speak to your people about this?”
“Soon,” Ryan replied.
“Please, Jack, this is not our religion, this is not our faith. Please tell your people that.”
“I know that, Your Highness. It isn’t about God. It’s about power. It always is. I’m afraid I have other things to do.”
“As do 1.1 must see the King.”
“Please give him my respects. We stand together, Ali, just like before.” With that the line went dead.
“Next, where exactly is Adler right now?”
“Shuttling back to Taiwan,” Rutledge answered. Those negotiations were still going on, though their purpose was now rather clear.
“Okay, he has secure comm links on the plane. You brief him in,” he told the Under Secretary. “Anything else I need to do right now?”
“Sleep,” Admiral Jackson told him. “Let us do the all-nighter, Jack.”
“That’s a plan.” Ryan rose. He wobbled a bit from the stress and lack of sleep. “Wake me up if you need me.”
We won’t, nobody said.
“WELL,” CAPTAIN KEMPER said, reading the CRITIC message from CINCLANT. “That makes things a lot simpler.” Range to the Indian battle group was now two hundred miles, about eight hours of steaming–still the term they used, though all the combatant ships were now powered by jet-turbine engines. Kemper lifted the phone and flipped a switch to speak on the ship’s 1-MC address system. “Now hear this. This is the captain speaking.
“Task Group COMEDY is now at DefCon 1. That means
1183
if anybody gets close, we shoot him. The mission is to deliver our tank-carriers to Saudi Arabia. Our country is flying in the soldiers to drive them in anticipation of an attack on our allies in the region by the new United Islamic Republic.
“In sixteen hours, we will link up with a surface action making a speed-run down from the Med. We will then enter the Persian Gulf to make our delivery. The group will have friendly air cover in the form of Air Force F-16C fighters, but it is to be expected that the UIR–our old Iranian friends–will not be happy with our arrival.
“USS Anzio is going to war, people. That is all for now.” He flipped the switch back. “Okay, let’s start running simulations. I want to see everything those bastards might try on us. We will have an updated intelligence estimate here in two hours. For now, let’s see what we can do about aircraft and missile attacks.”
“What about the Indians?” Weps asked.
“We’ll be keeping an eye on them, too.” The main tactical display showed a P-3C Orion passing COMEDY to relieve the aircraft now on station. The battle group was heading east, again recrossing its wake, as it had been doing for some time now.
A KH-11 SATELLITE was just sweeping down, northwest-to-southeast, over the Persian Gulf. Its cameras, having already looked at the three heavy corps of the Army of God, were now photographing the entire Iranian coast, looking for the launch sites of Chinese-made Silkworm missiles. The take from the electronic cameras was cross-linked to a communications satellite over the Indian Ocean, and from there to the Washington area, where technicians still wearing chemically impregnated surgical masks started looking for the airplane-shaped surface-to-surface missiles. The fixed launch sites were well known, but the weapon also could be fired off the back of a large truck, and there were plenty of coastal roads to survey.
1184
THE FIRST GROUP of four airliners touched down without incident outside Dhahran. There was no arrival ceremony. It was already hot. Spring had come early to the region after the surprisingly cold and wet winter season, and that meant noon temperatures close to 100 degrees, as opposed to the 120 of high summer, but night temperatures down in the forties. It was humid this close to the coast as well.
When the first airliner stopped, the truck-mounted stairs were driven up, and Brigadier General Marion Diggs was the first off. He would be the ground commander for this operation. The virus epidemic still raging in America had also compromised MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, home of Central Command, which had responsibility for this area. The briefing papers he’d seen to this point said that the commander of the 366th Air Combat Wing was also a one-star, but junior to him. It had been a long time since so vital an operation had been turned over to someone as junior as himself, Marion Diggs thought on the way down the steps.
At the bottom was a Saudi three-star. The two men exchanged salutes and entered a car for the ride to the local command post, and an intelligence update. Behind Diggs was the command group of the llth ACR, and on the other three aircraft, a security group and most of the Second Squadron of the Black Horse. Buses waited to take them to the POMCUS site. It was all rather like the RE-FORGER exercises of the Cold War, which had anticipated a NATO-Warsaw Pact clash requiring American soldiers to get off the airplanes, board their vehicles, and march off to the front. That had never happened except in simulation, but now, again, it was happening, and this time it was for real. Two hours later, 2nd of the Blackhorse was rolling into the open.
“WHAT DO YOU mean?” Daryaei asked.
“There appears to be a major troop movement under way,” his intelligence chief told him. “Radar sites in western Iraq have detected commercial aircraft entering Saudi
1185
Arabia from Israeli airspace. We also show fighters escorting them and patrolling the border.”
“What else?”
“Nothing at the moment, but it would seem likely that America is moving another force into the Kingdom. I am not sure what it could be–certainly, it cannot be very large. Their German-based divisions are under quarantine, and all their home-quartered divisions are in the same condition. Most of their army is actually deployed for internal security.”
“We should attack them anyway,” his air force adviser urged.
“I think that would be a mistake,” Intelligence said. “It would be an invasion of Saudi airspace, alerting those goatherds too soon. The Americans can at most move one brigade-sized force. There is a second based at Diego Garcia–the equipment, that is–but we have no information to suggest that it has moved, and even if it does, we expect that our Indian friends can stop it.”
“We trust pagans?” Air Force asked with contempt. That was how Muslims viewed the official religion of the Subcontinent.
“We can trust their antipathy to America. And we can ask them if their fleet has spotted anything. In any case, the Americans can deploy another brigade-sized force. That is all.”
“Kill it anyway!”
“That throws away operational security,” Intelligence pointed out.
“If they don’t know we are coming by now, then they are fools,” Air Force objected.
“The Americans have no reason to suspect that we have taken hostile actions against them. To attack their aircraft, if that’s what they are, will alert them unnecessarily, not just the Saudis. They are probably concerned about our troop movements in Iraq. So they fly in some small reinforcements. We can deal with them when the time comes,” Intelligence told them.
“I will call India,” Daryaei said, temporizing.
1186
“NAVIGATION RADARS ONLY . . . make that two air-search, probably from the carriers,” the petty officer said. “Their course track is zero-niner-zero, speed about sixteen.”
The tactical officer on the Orion, called a tacco, looked down at his chart. The Indian battle group was at the extreme eastern edge of the racetrack pattern they’d been following for the last several days. In less than twenty minutes, they should reverse course to head west. If they turned, things would become exciting. COMEDY was now 120 miles away from the other formation, and his aircraft was feeding constant information to Anzio and Kidd. Under the wings of the four-engine Lockheed turboprop were four Harpoon missiles. White ones, war shots. The aircraft was now under the tactical command of Captain Kemper on Anzio, and on his order they could launch those missiles, two each at the Indian carriers, because they were the long gun of the opposing navy. A few minutes behind would be a swarm of Tomahawks and more Harpoons headed the same way.