The leading group of tanks was shooting now, seeking out the flashes of the Bradley guns, activating their own night-vision systems, and again there was a brief, vicious battle over the barren, unlit ground. One Bradley was hit and exploded, killing all aboard. The rest got off one or two missiles each, collecting twenty tanks in reply before their commander called them back, and just escaping the artillery barrage called in by the enemy tank commander on their positions. HOOTOWL left behind that one Bradley, and two Hummers, and the first American ground casualties of the Second Persian Gulf War. These were reported up the line.
IT WAS RIGHT after lunch in Washington. The President had eaten lightly, and the word came into the Situation Room just after he’d finished, still able to look down at the gold-trimmed plate, the crust of bread from his sandwich, and the chips he’d not eaten. The news of the deaths hit him hard, harder, somehow, than the casualties on USS Yorktown or the six missing aviators–missing didn’t necessarily mean dead, did it? he allowed himself to think. These men certainly were. National Guardsmen, he’d learned. Citizen soldiers most often used to help people after floods or hurricanes . . .
“Mr. President, would you have gone over there for this mission?” General Moore asked, even before Robby Jackson could speak. “If you were twenty-something again, a Marine lieutenant, and they told you to go, you’d go, right?”
“I suppose–no, no, I’d go. I’d have to.”
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“So did they, sir,” Mickey Moore told him.
“That’s the job, Jack,” Robby said quietly. “That’s what they pay us for.”
“Yeah.” And he had to admit that it was what they paid him for, too.
THE FOUR F-117 Nighthawks landed at Al Kharj, rolling out and taxiing to shelters. The transports carrying the spare pilots and ground crews were right behind. Intelligence officers down from Riyadh met the latter group, taking the spare pilots aside for their first mission briefing in a war which was just now getting started in a big way.
THE MAJOR GEN ERAL in charge of the Immortals Division was in his command vehicle, trying to make sense of things. It had been a quite satisfactory war to this point. II Corps had done its job, blasting open the hole, allowing the main force to shoot through, and until an hour before, the picture had been both clear and pleasing. Yes, there were Saudi forces heading southwest for him, but they were the best part of a day away. By then, he’d be on the outskirts of their capital, and there were other plans for them as well. At dawn, II Corps would jump east from its covering position on his left, feinting toward the oil fields. That should give the Saudis second thoughts. Certainly it would give him another day in which, with luck, he’d get some, maybe all of the Saudi government. Maybe even the royal family–or, if they fled, as they might well do, then the Kingdom would be leaderless, and then his country would have won the war.
It had been costly to this point. II Corps had paid the price of half its combat power to deliver the Army of God this far, but victory had never been cheaply bought. Nor would it be the case here. His forward screen had disappeared right off the radio net. One call of contact with unknown forces, a request for artillery support, then nothing. He knew that a Saudi force was somewhere ahead of him. He knew it was the remains of the 4th Brigade, which II
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Corps had almost but not quite immolated. He knew it had fought hard north of KKMC and then pulled back… it had probably been ordered to hold so that the city could be evacuated … it was probably still strong enough to chew up his reconnaissance force. He didn’t know where the American cavalry regiment was . . . probably to his east. He knew that there might be another American brigade somewhere, probably also to his east. He wished for helicopters, but he’d just lost one to American fighters, along with his chief intelligence officer. So much for the air support he’d been promised. The only friendly fighter he’d seen all day had been a smoking hole in the ground just east of KKMC. But though Americans could annoy him, they couldn’t stop him, and if he got to Riyadh on time, then he could send troops to cover most of the Saudi airfields and preempt that threat. So the key to the operation, as his Corps and Army command had told him, was to press on with all possible speed. With that decision made, he ordered his lead brigade to advance as scheduled, with his advance guard playing the reconnaissance role. They’d just reported contact and a battle, losses taken and inflicted on an enemy as yet unidentified, but who had withdrawn after a brief firelight. Probably that Saudi force, he decided, doing its best to sting and run, and he’d run it down after sunrise. He gave the orders, informed his staff of his intentions, and left the command post to drive forward, wanting to see things at the front, as a good general should, while the staff radioed orders to subordinate commanders.
THERE WERE SOME screening elements, the Kiowas reported. Not many. They’d probably been badly shot up on the drive south, Colonel Hamm thought. He directed one of his squadrons to maneuver left to avoid, and told his air commander to detail an Apache to deal with that one in a few minutes. One of the others could be bypassed easily. The third was directly in the path of 3rd Squadron, and that was just too bad. The position of the BRDMs was marked on the IVIS screens, along with most of UIR’s battered II Corps.
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SO WERE THE Immortals, Eddington saw that the advance guard, with the leading elements of the main force close behind, was just entering gun range of his tanks, advancing at about twenty kilometers per hour. He called Hamm.
“Five minutes from now. Good luck, Al.”
“You, too, Nick,” Eddington heard.
IT WAS CALLED synchronicity. Thirty miles apart, several groups of Paladin mobile guns elevated their tubes and pointed them to spots picked by Predator drones and ELINT intercepts. The cannoneers of the new age punched the proper coordinates into their computers so that the widely separated weapons could fire to the same point. Eyes were on clocks now, watching the digital numbers change, one second at a time, marching toward 22:30:00 Lima time, 19:30:00 Zulu, 14:30:00 Washington.
It was much the same in the Multiple-Launch Rocket System tracks. There the troops made sure their compartments were sealed, locked their suspension to stabilize the vehicles during the launch cycle, and then closed down windshield shutters. The exhaust from their rockets could be lethal.
South of KKMC, the Carolina Guard tankers watched the advancing white blobs. Gunners thumbed their laser range-finders. The lead screening elements were now 2,500 meters distant, and the follow-on line of the main body a thousand behind them, mixed tanks and BMPs.
Southeast of KKMC, the Blackhorse was advancing at fifteen kph now, toward a line of targets on a ridge four thousand meters west.
It wasn’t perfect. B-Troop, 1st of the llth, stumbled right into an unsuspected BRDM position and opened fire on its own, starting fireballs into the air, turning eyes, and alerting people a few seconds too soon, but in the end that didn’t matter, as the digital numbers kept changing at the same pace, either fast or slow, depending on the perceptions of the onlookers.
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Eddington timed it to the second. Unable to smoke throughout the evening, for fear of making a glow that would show up on somebody’s night viewer, he opened his Zippo and flicked it as 59 changed to 00. A little bit of light wouldn’t matter … now.
THE ARTILLERY WENT first, already ordered to time its fire to the second. The most spectacular were the MLRS rockets, twelve from each launcher, rippling out less than two seconds apart, their flaming motors illuminating the exhaust smoke as they streaked into a sky no longer dark. By 22:30:30, nearly two hundred of the M77 free-flight rockets were in the air. By that time, the mobile guns were being reloaded, their lanyards pulled, the guns discharged, and now their breeches open for the next set of rounds.
The night was clear, and the light show could not be missed by anyone within a hundred miles. Fighter pilots aloft to the northeast saw the rockets fly, and looked closely at their course. They didn’t want to be in the same sky with the things.
Iraqi officers in the advancing Guards Armored Division saw them first, coming up from the south, and next they saw that all were angling west of the north-south road from KKMC to Al Artawiyah. Many of them had seen the same sight as lieutenants and captains, and knew exactly what they meant. Steel rain was coming. Some were paralyzed by the sight. Others shouted orders for men to get cover, close their hatches, and ride it out.