by Tom Clancy
The Immortals’ staff was just coming to terms with the incoming signals. Some officers requested confirmation or clarification, information needed before they could react properly to the situation. That was the problem with command posts. They were the institutional brains of the units they commanded, and the people who made up the decision process had to be together to function.
From six kilometers away, the collection of vehicles was obvious. Four SAM-shooters were oriented south, and there was a ring of AAA guns, too. Those went first. The Apaches of P-(Attack)-Troop stopped in place, picking a spot with nothing dangerous around, and hovering at about a hundred feet. Front-seated gunners, all of them young warrant officers, used optical equipment to zoom in, selected the first group of targets, and selected Hellfire laser-guided missiles. The first launch was made by surprise, but an Iranian soldier saw the flash, and shouted to a gun crew, which slewed its guns around and started shooting before the missiles were all the way on. What followed was a madhouse. The targeted Apache dodged left, accelerating sideways at fifty knots to throw them off, but also ruining the aim of the startled gunner, who had to shoot again, as the first missile went wide. The other AH- 64s were not hampered, and of their six launches, five hit. In another minute, the antiair problem was neutralized, and the attack choppers closed. They could see people running now, out and away from the command tracks. Some soldiers in the command security group started firing their rifles into the sky, and there was more structured activity from machine-gunners, but surprise was on the other side. The gunners fired 2.75-inch rockets to blanket the area, Hellfires to eliminate the few remaining armored vehicles, and then shifted to their 30mm cannon. In display of their rage, they closed in now, like the oversized insects they appeared to be, buzzing and slipping from side to side while the gunners looked for people the heavier weapons had missed. There was noplace to hide on the flat terrain, and the human bodies glowed on the dark, colder surface, and the gunners hunted them down in groups, in pairs, and finally one by one, sweeping across the site like harvesters. In their pre-mission discussion on the flight line, it had been decided that, unlike in 1991, helicopters would not accept surrender in this war, and the 30mm projectiles had explosive tips. P-Troop—they called themselves the Predators—lingered for ten minutes before they were satisfied that every single vehicle was destroyed and every moving body dead before they twisted in the sky, dipped their noses, and headed back east for their rearm points.
THE PREMATURE ATTACK on II Corps’s reconnaissance element had started one part of this battle a little too early, and alerted a reasonably intact tank company sooner than intended, but the enemy tanks were still white blobs on a black background, and less than four thousand meters away.
“Battlestars engage,” B-Troop’s commander ordered, firing off his first round, soon to be followed by eight more. Six hit, even at this extreme range, and the attack by the Blackhorse on II Corps began even before the first MLRS volley. The next volley was delivered on the move, and five more tanks exploded, their return rounds falling short. It was a little harder to hit this way. Though the gun was stabilized, hitting a bump could throw the aim off, and misses were expected, if not exactly welcomed.
B-Troop’s tanks were spaced fully half a kilometer apart, and each had a hunting zone exactly that wide, and the farther they went, the more targets appeared. The Bradley scout vehicles hung back a hundred yards or so, and their gunners looked for infantry who might wield antitank weapons. II Corps’s two divisions were spread across twenty miles of linear space and about eight miles of depth, so said the IVIS gear. In ten minutes, B-Troop chopped its way through a battalion diminished by the Saudis and now erased by the Americans. The bonus came ten minutes later, when they spotted a battery of artillery setting up. The Bradleys got those, sweeping the area with their 25mm cannon and adding to the fireballs that gave the lie to the sunset only four hours old.
“DAMN.” EDDINGTON MERELY spoke the word, without any emphasis at all. He had been called forward by his battalion commanders and was now standing up in his HMMWV.
“You believe less than five minutes?” LOBO-SIX asked. He’d heard the amazement himself over his battalion net: “Is that all?” more than one sergeant had asked aloud. It was crummy radio discipline, but everyone was thinking the same thing.
But there was more to do than admire the work. Eddington lifted his radio handset and called for his brigade S-2.
“What’s Predator tell us?”
“We have two more brigades still southbound, but they slowed some, sir. They’re roughly nine klicks north of your line on the near one, and twelve on the far one.”
“Put me through to BUFORD,” WOLFPACK-SIX ordered.
THE GENERAL WAS still in the same place, with death before and behind. Scarcely ten minutes had passed. Three tanks and twelve BMPs had run backward, stopping at a depression and holding position while they waited for instructions. There were men coming back now, too, some wounded, most not. He could not scream at them. If anything, the shock of the moment was harder on him than it was on them.
He’d already tried contacting his divisional command post, but gotten only static in return, and for all his experience in uniform, his time in command, the schools he’d attended, and the exercises he’d won and lost—nothing had prepared him for this.
But he still had more than half a division to command. Two of his brigades were still fully intact, and he hadn’t come here to lose. He ordered his driver to turn and head back. To the surviving elements of the lead brigade went orders to hold until further word. He had to maneuver. He’d run into a nightmare, but it couldn’t be everywhere.
“WHAT DO YOU propose, Eddington?”
“General Diggs, I want to move my people north. We just ate up two tank brigades easier’n a plate full of grits. The enemy’s artillery is largely destroyed, sir, and I have a clear field in front of me.”
“Okay, take your time and watch your flanks. I’ll notify BLACKHORSE.”
“Roger that, sir. We’ll be moving in twenty.”
They’d thought about this possibility, of course. There was even a sketch plan on the maps. LOBO would shift and extend right. WHITEFANG would go straight north, straddling the road, and the so far unengaged Battalion Task Force COYOTE would take the left, echeloned to be able to sweep in from the rough terrain to the west. From their new positions, the brigade would grind north to phase-lines spaced ten kilometers apart. They’d have to move slowly because of the darkness, the unfamiliar ground, and the fact that it was only half a plan, but the activation code word was NATHAN, and the first phase-line was MANASSAS. Eddington hoped Diggs wouldn’t mind.
“This is WOLFPACK-SIX to all sixes. Code word is NATHAN. I repeat, we are activating Plan NATHAN in two-zero minutes. Acknowledge,” he ordered.
All three battalion commanders chimed in seconds later.
DIGGS HAD KEPT him in the loop, and the picture, such as it was, was up on the command screen in the M4 God Track. Colonel Magruder wasn’t all that surprised at the initial results, except maybe that the Guardsmen had done so well. Rather more surprising was the progress the 10th had made. Advancing at a steady thirty kilometers per hour, he was well into the former Iraq, and ready to turn south. This he did at 0200L. His helicopter squadron left behind to cover the Kuwaitis, he felt a little naked at the moment, but it was still dark and would be for another four hours. By then he’d be back in Saudi. BUFFALO-SIX judged that he had the best cavalry mission of all. Here he was, deep into enemy territory, and deeper still in his rear. Just like what Colonel John Grierson had done to Johnny Reb, and what he and the Buffalo Soldiers had done to the Apaches. He ordered his units to spread wide. Reconnaissance said there wasn’t much out here to get in the way, that the enemy’s main strength was deep in the Kingdom. Well, he didn’t think it would get much deeper, and all he had to do was slam the door behind.
DONNER WAS STANDING up in the top hatch of the scout track, behind the turret, with
his Army cameraman next to him. It was like nothing he’d ever seen. He’d gotten the assault on the gun battery on tape, though he didn’t think the tape would be all that usable, what with all the bouncing and bumping. All around him was destruction. Behind to the southeast were at least a hundred burned-out tanks, trucks, and other things he didn’t recognize, and it had all happened in less than an hour. He lurched forward, striking his face on the hatch rim when the Bradley stopped.
“Get security out!” the track commander shouted. “We’re gonna be here for a bit.”
The Bradleys were arrayed in a circle, about a mile north of the wrecked UIR guns. There was nothing moving around them, which the gunner made sure of by traversing his turret around. The rear hatch opened, and two men jumped out, first looking and then running, rifles in hand.
“Come here,” the sergeant said, holding his hand out. Donner took it and climbed to the vehicle’s roof. “Want a smoke?”
Donner shook his head. “Gave it up.”
“Yeah? Well, those folks’ll stop smoking in a day or two,” he said, gesturing to the mess a mile back. The sergeant thought that was a pretty good one. He lifted binoculars to his eyes and looked around, confirming what the gunsights said.
“What do you think of this?” the reporter asked, tapping his cameraman.
“I think this is what they pay me for, and it all works.”
“What are we stopped for?”
“We’ll get some fuel in half an hour, and we need to replenish ammo.” He put the glasses down.
“We need fuel? We haven’t been moving that much.”
“Well, the colonel thinks tomorrow might be kinda busy, too.” He turned. “What do you think, Tom?”
62
READY AND FORWARD!
WHAT PEOPLE CALL “THE initiative,” whether in war or any other field of human activity, is never anything more or less than a psychological advantage. It combines one side’s feeling that they are winning with the other side’s feeling that something has gone wrong—that they must now prepare for and respond to the actions of their enemy instead of preparing their own offensive action. Couched in terms of “momentum” or “ascendancy,” it really always comes down to who is doing what to whom, and a sudden change in that equation will have a stronger effect than that of a gradual buildup to the same set of circumstances. The expected, when replaced by the unexpected, lingers for a time, lingers in the mind, since it is easier, for a while, to deny rather than to adapt, and that just makes things harder for those who are being done to. For the doers, there are other tasks.
For the American forces in contact, there came a brief, unwelcome, but necessary pause. It should have been easiest of all for Colonel Nick Eddington of WOLFPACK, but it wasn’t. His force of National Guard troops had done little more than stay in place for their first battle, which had allowed the enemy to come into their kill box, an ambush fifteen miles wide by fifteen deep. Except for the brigade’s reconnaissance screen, the men from Carolina had hardly moved at all. But now that had to change, and Eddington was reminded of the fact that though he was after a fashion a ballet master, the things performing the maneuvering were tanks, ponderous and clumsy, moving in the dark across unfamiliar ground.
Technology helped. He had radios to tell his people when and where to go, and the IVIS system to tell them how. Task Force LOBO started by backing off the reverse-slope positions that had served them so well only forty minutes earlier, turning south and heading through pre-selected navigational way points to destinations less than ten kilometers south of their initial fighting positions. In the process, the augmented battalion diluted itself, spread itself more thinly than it had been, a feat made possible because the battalion staff was able to program the move electronically and transmit their intentions to sub-unit commanders, who, assigned areas of responsibility, were able to subdivide them almost automatically, until every single vehicle knew its destination to the meter. The initial delay of twenty minutes from notification that Plan NATHAN was about to be activated allowed that selection process to begin. The lateral shift required an hour, with the vehicles moving across what appeared to be vacant land at the speed of commuters in a particularly congested rush hour. Even so, it worked, and an hour from the time the movement was started, it had been completed. WOLFPACK, now covering well over twenty miles of lateral space, wheeled, turned north, and started moving out at ten kilometers per hour, with recon teams darting forward faster still to take position five klicks in advance of the main body. That was well short of what the book said the interval should be. Eddington had to be mindful of the fact that he was maneuvering a large force of part-time soldiers whose dependence on their electronic technology was a little too great for his total comfort. He’d keep his force of three fighting battalions under tight control until contact was established and the overall picture was clear.
IT SURPRISED TOM Donner that the support vehicles, nearly all of them robust-looking trucks, were able to follow the fighting units as quickly as they did. Somehow he hadn’t understood how important this was, accustomed as he was to hitting one particular gas station once or twice a week. Here the service personnel had to be as mobile as their customers, and that, he realized, was a major task. The fuel trucks set up. The Bradleys and battle tanks came to them two at a time, then went back to their perimeter posts, where ammunition was dropped off other trucks for the track crewmen to load up. Every Bradley, he learned, had a Sears socket wrench, in nearly every case bought out of the gunner’s salary, to facilitate reloading of the Bushmaster magazine. It worked better than the tool designed for the purpose. That was probably worth a little story, he thought with a distant smile.
The troop commander, now in his command HMMWV instead of his M1A2, raced about from track to track to ascertain the condition of each vehicle and crew. He saved Three-Two for the last.
“Mr. Donner, you doing okay, sir?”
The reporter sipped at coffee brewed up by the Bradley’s driver, and nodded. “Is it always like this?” he asked the young officer.
“First time for me, sir. Pretty much like training, though.”
“What do you think about all this?” the journalist asked. “I mean, back there, you and your people, well, killed a lot of the enemy.”
The captain thought about that briefly. “Sir, you ever cover tornadoes and hurricanes and stuff?”
“Yes.”
“And people get their lives all messed up, and you ask them what it’s like, right?”
“That’s my job.”
“Same with us. These guys made war on us. We’re making war back. If they don’t like it, well, maybe next time they’ll think more about it. Sir, I got an uncle in Texas—uncle and an aunt, actually. Used to be a golf pro, he taught me how to play, then went to work for Cobra—the club company, okay? Right before we left Fort Irwin, my mom called and told me they both died of that Ebola shit, sir. You really want to know what we think of this?” asked an officer who’d killed five tanks this night. “Saddle up, Mr. Donner. The Blackhorse will be rolling in ten. You can expect contact right before dawn, sir.” There was a dull flash on the horizon, followed a minute or so later by the rumble of distant thunder. “I guess the Apaches are starting early.”
Fifteen miles to the northwest, II Corps’s command post had just been destroyed.
The plan was evolving. First Squadron would pivot and drive north through remaining II Corps units. Third Squadron would come south through lighter opposition, massing the regiment for the first attack into the enemy III Corps’s left flank. Ten miles away, Hamm was moving his artillery to facilitate the destruction of the remains of II Corps, whose commanders his helicopter squadron had just eliminated.
EDDINGTON REMINDED HIMSELF again that he had to keep it simple. Despite all his years of study and the name he’d assigned to his counterstroke, he wasn’t Nathan Bedford Forrest, and this battlefield wasn’t small enough for him to ad-lib his maneuvers, as that racist genius had done so o
ften in the War of the Northern Aggression.
HOOTOWL was spread especially thin now, with the brigade’s front almost doubled in the last ninety minutes, and that was slowing them down. Probably not a bad thing, the colonel thought. He had to be patient. The enemy force couldn’t maneuver too far east for fear of running into the left of Blackhorse—assuming they knew it was there, he thought—and the ground to the west was too choppy to allow easy movement. They’d tried the middle and gotten pounded for it. So the logical move for the enemy I Corps was to try a limited envelopment maneuver, probably weighted to the east. Incoming pictures from the Predator drones started to confirm that.
THE COMMANDER OF the Immortals no longer had a proper command post to use, and so he absorbed what was left of the command post from the vanished 1st Brigade, having also learned that he had to keep moving at all times. The first order of business for him had been to reestablish contact with I Corps command, which had proved somewhat difficult, as that CP had been on the move when he’d walked into the American—it had to be American—ambush along the road to A1 Artawiyah. Now I Corps was setting up again, and probably talking a lot to Army command. He broke in, got the three-star, a fellow Iranian, and told what he could as rapidly as possible.