But why were the Americans advancing toward them?
“COMMENCE FIRING AT four thousand meters,” the company commander told his crews. The Abrams tanks were spread nearly five hundred meters apart in two staggered lines, covering a lot of ground for one mounted battalion. The TCs mainly kept their heads up and out of the vehicles for the approach phase, then ducked down to activate their own fire-control systems.
“I’m on one,” one gunner told his TC. “T-80, identified, range forty-two-fifty.”
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“Setting?” the tank commander asked, just to make sure.
“Set on Sabot. Loader, all silver bullets till I say different.”
“I hear you, gunner. Just don’t miss any.”
“Forty-one,” the gunner breathed. He waited for another fifteen seconds and became the first in his company to fire, and to kill. The sixty-two-ton tank staggered with the shot, then kept moving.
“Target, cease fire, target tank at eleven,” the TC said over the interphones.
The loader stomped his boot down on the pedal, opened the ammo doors, and yanked out another “silver bullet” round, then turned in a graceful move, first to guide, then to slam the mainly plastic round into the breech.
“Up!” he called.
“Identified!” the gunner told the TC.
“Fire!”
“On the way!” A pause. The tracer flew true. “Right through the dot!”
Commander: “Target! Cease fire! Traverse right, target tank at one.”
Loader: “Up!”
Gunner: “Identified!”
Commander: “Fire!”
“On the waaaaay!” the gunner said, squeezing off his third shot in eleven seconds.
It wasn’t like reality, the battalion commander saw, really too busy watching to take his own shots. It was like an advancing wave. First the lead rank of T-80s blew up, just a handful of misses that were corrected five seconds later, as the second rank of enemy vehicles started to go. They started to return fire. The flashes looked like the Hoffman simulation charges he’d so recently seen at the NTC, and turned out to be just as harmless. Enemy rounds were marked with their own tracers, and all of their first volley fell short. Some of the T-80s got off a second shot. None got off a third.
“Jesus, sir, give me a target!” his gunner called.
“Pick one.”
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“Bimp,” the gunner said, mainly to himself. He fired off a high-explosive round, and got a kill at just over four thousand meters, but as before, the battle was over in less than a minute. The American line advanced. Some of the BMPs launched missiles, but now they were being engaged by tanks and Bradleys. Vehicles exploded, filling the sky with fire and smoke. Now individual men were visible, mainly running, some turning to fire or trying to deploy. The tank gunners, with nothing large left to shoot, switched to the coaxial machine guns. The Bradleys pulled up level with the tanks, and they did the serious hunting.
The lead line of tanks passed through the smoking wreckage of the Immortals division less than four minutes after the first volley. Turrets traversed left and right, looking for targets. Tank commanders had their heads back up, hands on their top-mounted heavy machine guns. Where fire originated, it was returned, and at first there was a race to see who could kill the most, because there is an excitement, a rush to battle unknown to those who have never felt it, the feeling of godlike power, the ability to make a life-and-death decision and then enforce it at the touch of a finger. More than that, these Guardsmen knew why they were here, knew what they had been sent to avenge. In some, that rage lasted for some minutes, as the vehicles rolled forward, grinding along at less than ten miles per hour, like farm tractors or harvesting combines, collecting life and converting it to death, looking like something from the dawn of time, utterly inhuman, utterly heartless.
But then it began to stop. It stopped being duty. It stopped being revenge. It stopped being the fun they’d expected it to be. It became murder, and one by one, the men on the weapons realized what they themselves were supposed to be and what they might become if they didn’t turn away from this. It wasn’t like being an aviator, hundreds of meters away, shooting at shapes that moved comically in their aiming systems and were never really human beings at all. These men were closer. They could see the faces and the wounds now, and the harmless backs of people running away. Even those fools who still shot back attracted pity from the gunners who dispatched them, but
soon the futility of it was clear to everyone, and soldiers who’d arrived in the desert with rage grew sick at what the rage had become. The guns gradually fell silent, by com-mon consent rather than order, as resistance stopped, and with it the need to kill. Battalion Task Force LOBO rolled completely through the smoking ruin of two heavy brigades, searching for targets worthy of professional attention, rather than personal, from which they had to turn away.
THERE WAS NOTHING left to be done. The general stood and walked away from his command vehicle, beckoning for the crew to do the same. On his order, they put their weapons down and stood on high ground to wait. They didn’t have to wait long. The sun was rising. The first glow of orange was to the east, announcing a new day far different from the old.
THE FIRST CONVOY rolled right in front of them, thirty fuel trucks, driving at a good clip, and the drivers must have taken the south-moving vehicles for those of their own army. The Bradley gunners of I-Troop, 3rd of the 10th, took care of that with a series of shots that ignited the first five trucks. The rest of them halted, two of them turning over and exploding on their own when their drivers rolled them into ditches in their haste to escape. The Bradley crews mainly let the people get clear, plinked the trucks with high-explosive rounds, and kept moving south past the bewildered drivers, who just stood there and watched them pass.
IT WAS A Bradley that found him. The vehicle pulled to within fifty meters before stopping. The general who, twelve hours before, had commanded a virtually intact armored division didn’t move or resist. He stood quite still, as four infantrymen appeared from the back of the M2A4, advancing with rifles out, while their track covered his detail with even more authority.
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“On the ground!” the corporal called.
“I will tell my men. I speak English. They do not,” the general said, then kept his word. His soldiers went facedown. He continued to stand, perhaps hoping that he could die.
“Get those hands up, partner.” This corporal was a police officer in civilian life. The officer–he didn’t know what kind yet, but the uniform was too spiffy for a grunt– complied. The corporal next handed his rifle off and drew a pistol, walked in, and held it to the man’s head while he searched him expertly. “Okay, you can get down now. If you play smart, nobody gets hurt. Please tell your men that. We will kill them if we have to, but we ain’t going to murder anybody, okay?”
“I will tell them.”
WITH THE COMING of daylight, Eddington got back into the helicopter he’d borrowed, and flew to survey the battlefield. It was soon plain that his brigade had crushed two complete divisions. He ordered his screen forward to scout ahead for the pursuit phase that had to come next, then called Diggs for instructions on what he was supposed to do with prisoners. Before anyone figured that out, a chopper arrived from Riyadh with a television crew.
EVEN BEFORE THE pictures got out, the rumors did, as they always do in countries lacking a free press. A telephone call arrived in the home of a Russian embassy official. It came just before seven, and awakened him, but he was out of his house in minutes and driving his car through quiet streets to the rendezvous point with a man who, he thought, was finally crossing the line to become an agent of the RVS.
The Russian spent ten extra minutes checking his back, but anyone following him this morning would have to be invisible, and he imagined that a lot of the Ayatollah’s security forces had been called up.
“Yes?” he said on meeting the man. There wasn’t much time for formalities.
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“You are right. Our army was–defeated last night. They called me in at three for an opinion of American intentions, and I heard it all. We cannot even talk with our units. The army commander simply vanished. The Foreign Ministry is in a panic.”
“As well it might be,” the diplomat thought. “I should tell you that the Turkoman leader has–”
“We know. He called Daryaei last night to ask if the plague story was true.”
“And what did your leader say?”