“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.
“THIS WAR HAS started badly for allied forces,” Tom Don-ner 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.”
THESENIORSAUDI 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.”
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“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.
“YOU 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 AW ACS 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 COMEDY 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.
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EDDiNGTON WAS ALREADY south of KKMC with his brigade staff. His WOLFPACK 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.”
GEOMETRY 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 for-
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ward 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.
REMNANTS 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 intel-
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ligence, 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.