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real combat had never measured up to battle practice in the Nellis Air Force Base weapons range. It did now. The mission was only planned in a general sense. He was looking for targets in real time with look-down radar and mark-one eyeball, and unlike his playtime at Nellis, these guys were shooting back with real bullets. Well, he was dropping real bombs, too. More ground fire started up as he lined his aircraft on the next collection of targets.
IT SEEMED, OF all things, like a cough in the middle of a conversation. There was a final crash of twenty or thirty rounds on the desert a hundred meters in front of his position. Thirty seconds later, ten more fell. Thirty seconds after that, only three. On the horizon, well behind the first row of tanks just appearing, there were dust clouds. Some seconds later, they felt something through their boots, and after that a distant rumble. It became clear in a few seconds. Green-painted fighters appeared, heading due south. They were friendly, he saw from their shape. Then another appeared, trailing smoke, staggering in the sky, then tipping over, and two objects jolted out of it, turning into parachutes that drifted to the ground a kilometer behind his position, as the fighter smashed down separately, making an immense fireball. The major dispatched a vehicle to pick them up, then returned his attention to tanks still out of range–and he had no artillery to call in on them as yet.
WELL, SHIT, THE colonel thought, it was like Red Flag after all, except this night wouldn’t be spent telling lies in the O club and sneaking off to Vegas for a show and some time in a casino. His third pass had run him into fire, and the Eagle was too sick to make it all the way home. He wasn’t even on the ground yet when he saw a vehicle coming toward him, and he wondered whose it was. A moment later, it looked like an American-made Hummer, fifty meters away when he hit the ground, jolting hard on the packed sand. He popped the release on his chute and pulled his pistol out, but sure enough the vehicle was
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friendly, with two Saudi soldiers in it. One came over to him while the other took the Hummer to where the wizzo was standing, half a mile away.
“Come, come!” the Saudi private said. A minute later, the Hummer was back with the wizzo, who was holding his knee and grimacing.
“Twisted it bad, boss. Landed on a fuckin’ rock,” he explained, getting in one of the backseats.
Everything he’d heard about Saudi drivers was true, the colonel learned in a few seconds. It was like being inside a Burt Reynolds movie, as the Hummer bounded its way back to the safety of the wadi, but it was good to see the shapes of friendly vehicles there. The Hummer took him to what had to be the command post. There were still some shells falling forward of their position, but their aim had worsened, now dropping the shells five hundred meters short.
“Who are you?” Lieutenant Colonel Steve Berman asked.
“Major Abdullah.” The man even saluted. Berman bolstered his pistol and looked around.
“I guess you’re the guys we came to support. We took out their artillery pretty good, but some bastard got lucky with his Shilka. Can you get us a chopper?”
“I will try. Are you injured?”
“My wizzo had a bum knee. We could use something to drink, though.”
Major Abdullah handed over his canteen. “We have an attack coming in.”
“Mind if I watch?” Berman asked.
ONE HUNDRED MILES to the south, Eddington’s brigade was still forming. He had one battalion pretty much intact. This he moved twenty miles forward, left and right of the road to KKMC, to screen the rest of his forces as they came up the road from Dhahran. Unhappily, his artillery was the last group to have been off-loaded, and they weren’t due for at least another four hours. But that couldn’t be helped. As units arrived, he first of all got them to assembly areas where they could top off their fuel
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tanks. What with getting people off the road, directed to their intermediate destinations, and gassed up, it took about an hour per company to get things organized. His second battalion was just about ready to move. This one he would send west of the road, which would allow the first one to move laterally to the east, and double his advanced security force. It was so hard to explain to people that fighting battles was more about traffic control than killing people. That, and gathering information. A combat action was like the last act of a massive ballet–most of the time it was just getting the dancers to the right parts of the stage. The two acts–knowing where to send them and then getting them there–were interactive, and Ed-dington still didn’t have a very clear picture. His brigade intelligence group was just setting up and starting to get hard information from Riyadh. Forward, his lead battalion had a reconnaissance screen of HMMWVs and Bradleys ten miles in advance of the main force, all of them hunkered down, their vehicles hidden as best they could be, and the troops on their bellies, scanning forward with binoculars, so far reporting nothing but the occasional wisp of dust well beyond the visible horizon and the rumbles of noise that carried amazingly far. Well, Ed-dington decided, so much the better. He had time to prepare, and time was the most valuable commodity a soldier could hope for.
“LoBO-Six, this is WOLFPACK-SIX, over.”
“LoBO-Six copies.”
“This is WoLFPACK-Six-AcxuAL. WHITEFANG is moving out now. They should be on your left in an hour. You may commence your lateral movement when they arrive on line. Over.”
“LoBO-Six-AcTUAL copies, Colonel. Still nothing to see up here. We’re in pretty good shape, sir.”
“Very well. Keep me informed. Out.” Eddington handed the radio phone back.
“Colonel!” It was the major who ran his intelligence section. “We have some information for you.”
“Finally!”
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THE ARTILLERY FIRE continued, with a few rounds dropping right in the wadi. It was Colonel Berman’s first experience with that, and he found that he didn’t like it very much. It also explained why the tanks and tracks were spread out so much, which had struck him as very odd at first. One round went off a hundred meters to the left of the tank behind which he and Major Abdullah were sheltering, thankfully to the far side. They both quite distinctly heard the pings of fragments hitting the brown-painted armor.
“This is not fun,” Berman observed, shaking his head to clear the noise of the shell-burst.
“Thank you for dealing with the rest of their guns. It was quite frightening,” Abdullah said, looking through his binoculars. The advancing UIR T-80s were just over three thousand meters away, having not yet spotted his hull-down MlA2s.
“How long have you been in contact?”
“It started just after sunset yesterday. We are all that is left of the 4th Brigade.” And that didn’t help Berman’s confidence at all. Above their heads, the tank’s turret made a slight adjustment to the left. There was a short phrase over the major’s radio, and he replied with a single word–shouted, however. A second after that, the tank to the left of them jerked backward a foot or so, and a blast of fire erupted from the main gun. It made the artillery round seem like a firecracker in comparison. Against all logic, Berman raised his head. In the distance he saw a column of smoke, and tumbling atop it was a tank turret.
“Jesus!”
“You have a radio I can use?”
“SKY-ONE, THIS is Tiger Lead,” an AWACS officer heard on a side channel. “I am on the ground with a Saudi tank group north of KKMC.” He gave the position next. “We are in heavy contact here. Got any help you can send us? Over.”
“Tiger, can you authenticate?”
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“No, God damn it, my fuckin’ codes went down with my -15. This is Colonel Steve Berman out of Mountain Home, and I am one very pissed-off aviator right now, Sky. Forty minutes ago, we beat the snot out of some Iraqi artillery, and now we got tanks coming out the ass. You gonna believe me or not, over.”
“Sounds American to me,” a more senior officer thought.
“And if you look close, their tanks are round on top and pointing south and ours are flat on the top and pointing north, over.” That bit of information was followed by the crash of an explosion. “This ground-pounder shit ain’t no fun at all,” he told them.
“Me too,” the first controller decided. “Tiger, stand by. Devil-Lead, this is Sky-One, we have some business for you. . .”
It wasn’t supposed to be this way at all, but it was happening even so. There were supposed to be frag–for fragmentary–orders detailing “packages” of tactical aircraft to hunting patches, but there weren’t enough aircraft for that, and no time to select their patches, either. Sky-One had a flight of four F-16s waiting for some air-to-mud action, and this seemed as good a time as any.