by Dale Brown
Wakil looked at Turabi—then, to Turabi’s joy, looked behind him, back to the northeast, toward Chärjew. It was such a slight movement, such a casual thing, but to Turabi it spoke volumes.
They had marched almost two hundred kilometers from Chärjew in less than a week across the barren, burning Kara Kum Desert to get here, fighting off attacks to their flanks by Turkmen guerrillas, chasing away scouts, burying their dead, taking captives and executing spies, and planning their final assault—and not once in all those days had Wakil Mohammad Zarazi ever looked backward. He hadn’t looked backward once since getting jumped by American bombers in northern Afghanistan, since he’d first heard the word of God and set out on this quest.
“We can set up the rear guard in Ravnina. We found good water supplies there, the terrain is a bit higher, and we’re far enough away from the canal so we don’t have to set up security posts there,” Turabi said quickly, excitedly. He had been working out the details in his head for days—but for an escape, not for a withdrawal. This was better than he could ever have hoped. “We leave Second Battalion and Second Air Mobile there, and we pull back—a little at a time, so the Turkmen don’t realize what’s happening. The two units deploy along the Halach oil fields east and west—we know we can hide a battalion-size force among all those wells. In three days we can be back in Chärjew, and we fortify the ten-kilometer perimeter I set up after leaving Chauder. As we pull back, we pull the rear guards in. They’ll pull back to a safe, secure perimeter and be relieved. Once they’re rested and rearmed, we push the perimeter out to twenty kilometers. Now we control everything east of the sixty-third meridian. Solid as a rock.”
Zarazi was silent for a long moment. Turabi looked at Orazov and saw nothing but hatred and loathing in his eyes. Keep quiet, you asshole, Turabi said silently. Keep quiet or I’ll kill you. . . .
“We do not need to pull back, General,” Orazov said. “Mary Airport is less than thirty kilometers right in front of us. We haven’t seen more than a few helicopter probes come our way since we moved into position. We can take Mary, sir, just as easily as we took Chärjew.”
“We didn’t take Chärjew, Orazov—I took it,” Turabi snapped. “And there was nothing easy about it. I lost a lot of good men, one out of every five of my force. But Chärjew will be nothing compared to the battle that awaits us in Mary. The Russians will be waiting with their close-air-support fighters and—”
“What fighters? We haven’t seen one fighter since leaving Chärjew.”
“They are there, Orazov, we know it.”
“They were there at Chärjew, too—many of them. But not one lifted off to oppose us.”
“They were flown into Chärjew to scare us away, but the pilots left as soon as they got out of their planes,” Turabi said. “Those planes were worthless anyway—a bunch of old Sukhoi-17 bombers, over thirty years old and not very well maintained. They were never a threat to us.”
“They were a very great threat when we first planned the assault on Chärjew.”
“Our intelligence said the Turkmen had asked the Russians to bring up their Sukhoi-24s and MiG-27s—the ones based at Mary,” Turabi argued. “They brought up the relics instead. That means the first-line fighters and bombers are probably still in Mary. And we still don’t know exactly what the Americans are doing in Turkmenistan.”
“Ah, yes, your ghostly Americans,” Orazov said derisively. “You say you saw only two men, but they destroyed two armored vehicles, killed a half dozen men—but did nothing to you but question you.”
“Shut up, damn you,” Turabi snapped. “The Americans were there to retrieve their crashed aircraft or cruise missile or spy plane—whatever it was that got shot down.”
“So you say,” Orazov said dryly. “Or did you really lead your men into a minefield, as the helicopter-patrol officers surmised . . . ?”
“Go to hell, Orazov.”
“In any case we haven’t seen any evidence of American soldiers in Turkmenistan—if they ever existed in the first place,” Orazov said to Zarazi. “They probably came in just to retrieve their cruise missile. There’s nothing to be concerned about.”
“Nothing to be concerned about? We are facing five to ten thousand Turkmen and Russian soldiers to the west, and we might have these American supersoldiers to the east—or at the very least over our heads with their spy planes and satellites.” Turabi turned to Zarazi. “I’ll take my scout company into Mary and find out exactly what’s happening, Wakil. But if you are considering a pullback to a more defensible position, sir, I recommend we proceed immediately. We need to shift the vanguard to defensive positions and move the main force forty kilometers north along the highway to get across the Kara Kum Canal. That’s a hard day’s march.”
“What is it with you, Colonel?” Orazov asked. “Why are you so bent on retreating all of a sudden?”
“Because any fool can see we are overextended in this position, with a large entrenched force up ahead of us,” Turabi retorted. “We barely have enough supplies to last us three days while we’re on the march. If we go into battle, we’ll use up all our supplies in less than a day.”
“Are you calling the general a fool, Turabi?”
“I am no expert in maneuver warfare,” Turabi went on, ignoring Orazov’s remark, “but I do know that hundreds of successful campaigns have been lost when an army marches beyond its secure supply lines. We are well beyond that point now, Wakil. It now takes more than a day to bring in enough fuel for our helicopters, armor, and vehicles. One interruption in our supply lines and we’ll have no choice but to retreat—and that’s when the chaos and confusion start.”
For the first time since the battle of Chauder, Zarazi looked confused and . . . yes, a little frightened. The change was amazing, Turabi thought. He didn’t know for sure, but perhaps this was the beginning of the long march home.
“General, we must attack, and do it now,” Orazov insisted. “Let’s not wait any longer. We should move with all possible speed to within artillery range of Mary Airport and begin the assault.”
“That would be suicide!” Turabi retorted. “Wakil, we have incomplete intelligence, our air defenses are not in place, and, as I’ve told you repeatedly, our supply lines are stretched to the limit—”
“Address him as ‘General’ or ‘sir,’ Colonel,” Orazov said angrily.
“Shut up, you bastard!” Turabi exploded. “You don’t know what you’re—”
At that moment a siren began to wail throughout the headquarters company—the air-raid siren. Turabi’s blood turned cold. It was too late. He thought for certain they had one more day. They were at the extreme edge of effective combat range of the Mi-24 attack helicopters based at Mary. Turabi believed that the Russians would wait until they attempted their assault on their objective, the oil-control facility at Bayramaly. That would give the big Hind-D attack helicopters several more weapons to carry into the attack, several more minutes over the target area. But surprise was everything in battle—and the Russians had just achieved it.
“Gunships! Helicopter gunships to the south!” one of the command-post lieutenants shouted. “Sir, spotters have detected two formations of three, about fifteen kilometers out.”
“Not even a full squadron. It might be a feint,” Turabi said. He motioned for the radio handset and shouted, “This is Colonel Turabi. Clear this net! I said clear this net immediately!” He waited a few moments for the excited chatter to die down. Then: “Echo Company, Echo Company, alert your scouts and make sure they’re ready to deal with the main body. If it’s coming, they’ll be rushing in from the north.
“Break. All antiaircraft crews, all antiaircraft crews, listen up. Do not panic when you see the damned Hinds. If you keep your cool, you’ll have a good chance. Dismount your man-portable missile crews, disperse and hide in every crack and crevice you can find, and go to remotes on your gun units. The Hinds like big targets out in the open—don’t give them one. Relax and get hits. Vanguard units, don
’t break out of formation until you see the enemy break first, and don’t start radioing artillery-grid coordinates until you see their attack formation take shape. I want our artillery to drop ordnance on where they are, not where they were.” He threw the headset into Orazov’s face. “You wanted a fight, Orazov, you got one now.” Turabi ran off to the command truck, not waiting to see if Zarazi or Orazov followed.
They did not.
Turabi sat in the commander’s seat, in front of a large Plexiglas board with a grid showing the location of all their units. Behind the transparent board were communications technicians receiving reports from scouts and brigade commanders; another technician quickly drew and erased the symbols on the board, writing backward so Turabi on the other side could see them properly, as the battle progressed. On either side of the commander’s seats were the deputy’s seat and seats for communications officers and other advisers and specialists. Turabi could speak with anyone in his team, from a rifle-platoon leader to a battalion commander, by flicking a switch.
It was happening exactly as he’d envisioned it: a classic Soviet-style envelopment attack. Two flights of helicopter gunships were sweeping in from the south; a small formation of light tanks, just a dozen spotted so far, were heading up the highway toward them. But these were just the diversions—the main-objective force had still not been spotted. “Echo Three, this is Green One,” Turabi radioed to one of the scout platoons that was the farthest north and west, “what do you see? They should be right in front of you.”
“Negative contact, Green One,” the leader of the three-tank scout platoon reported.
Either the platoon was not where it was plotted on the board, Turabi thought, or the Turkmen forces were coming in from even farther north than he’d anticipated. “Echo, this is Green One, move one of your platoons straight north, straight north, right to that H-1 access road. They have to be coming in from farther north—your scouts are too close in and too far west.”
“Echo acknowledges,” the scout-company commander radioed back.
Turabi studied the board for a few moments, counting scout units, then flipped the channel selector: “Airborne Two, this is Green One, I don’t see any of your units up. What’s the problem?”
“Green One, we lost the diesel-powered pump for the refueling bladders,” the helicopter-company commander radioed back. The helicopters were refueled from giant twenty-thousand-deciliter collapsible rubber bladders, resembling tire inner tubes, using high-volume, diesel-powered pumps. They could have all the fuel they needed available—but if the pumps went out, getting the fuel into the aircraft’s fuel tanks was long, hard work. “Our first chopper should be airborne in five to ten minutes.”
“Two, if you ever again fail to report a malfunction like that in a timely manner, I’ll have your eyeballs for breakfast!” Turabi shouted. “Break. Airborne Three, how fast can you get a cover aircraft over to grid three-zero-Charlie?”
“Green One, stand by,” the commander of another helicopter company reported. After a short but utterly nerve-racking wait: “Green One, I’ll send a unit in right now, ETE three minutes. He can be on station for about five minutes before he bingos.”
“Very well, Airborne Three. Break. Airborne Two, get your aircraft in the air as soon as you can, or—”
A tremendous explosion outside shook the command-post vehicle so hard that Turabi almost flew out of his seat. “What was that?” he shouted, struggling back to his seat.
“A bomb!” someone else shouted. “At least a two-hundred-kilo gravity bomb! It hit the radar truck!”
An antiradar missile or TV-guided missile, Turabi thought. Too big for a small, helicopter-fired missile, Turabi knew—it had to be from a fixed-wing aircraft. And if it was TV-guided, it could just as easily have hit the command-post truck—that would have been a juicier target. No one had reported any low-level bombers inbound, so it had to be a cruise missile, launched from high altitude, or a long-range guided missile. “Switch to the number-two radar van and recalibrate,” Turabi directed, “then order them to go to intermittent operation.” It took several moments, but finally he could see the radars up front in the command vehicle come back to life. They were still in the fight, but down to their last radar array.
“Should we retreat, sir?” the operations officer asked nervously, shouting his question out at the top of his lungs even though Turabi was only a couple meters away. “I think we should get out of here now!”
“No one is retreating, Captain—not yet,” Turabi said quickly. No, he thought, they should have retreated days ago—it was way too late now. “Calm yourself. Go get a report on that impact area. Have someone check for chemical or biological weapons. Pressurize the command cab.” Turabi had to swallow hard as the pressure quickly built up in the command-post truck. If those last weapons dropped nearby had chemical or biological weapons aboard, the positive pressure inside the cab would help keep toxic chemicals from seeping inside. On the commandwide net, Turabi radioed, “All units, I think that was an antiradar-missile attack. Check for biochem weapons and report. Bravo Three, Bravo Three, wheel north to H-1 and engage targets.”
“No targets spotted yet, Green One.”
“They’ll be there!” Turabi insisted. “Bravo Four, back up Bravo Three to the north. Bravo Six, move forward and take Five’s position on the tail, and do it right now,” Turabi ordered. “Prepare to move to the west to engage the enemy’s left flank if they come in from the north. Acknowledge.”
Another long pause, more confusion on the network. Turabi thought the reserve unit had bugged out already. But finally: “Acknowledged, Green One, Bravo Six is on the move.”
“Very well. Move up as fast as you can. Break. Bravo Five, take Bravo Two’s position on the left flank and move forward fast. Airborne One, take the point. Airborne Two, get your birds fueled and move north to cover Bravo Three and Four, and you’d better have them all up in ten minutes or I’m going to rip your head off and shit down your throat! Airborne Three, don’t engage those Hinds—go around them and see if you can get them to follow you. They have to be low on fuel. Get Chärjew to start moving fuel down here on the double!”
He thought for another moment. There was no supply line behind them anymore, Turabi knew. They would either make it to Bayramaly and their objective, the petroleum-control station outside the city, or they would get smashed out here. If they ran out of fuel, they weren’t going to get any more from Chärjew in time. The reserve force, Battalion Six, had to move up to join the fighting. If they didn’t advance, they were going to turn and run back to Chärjew on first contact.
“Bravo One and Bravo Two, move out and engage the point vehicles. Blast them the hell off the highway, and don’t dance with them—those Hinds will be after you before too long. I want both One and Two at the objective point in one hour, or we’re going to get chewed to pieces. Let’s get moving, or we’ll die out here in the desert.”
He held on as the command vehicle lurched forward, wheeled sharply left up and down over the edge of the highway, and drove several dozen meters away into the cotton fields. Moments later another explosion shook the area—and, yes, it had landed two hundred meters northeast on the highway, exactly where they’d be if they’d pulled back and stayed on the highway. Crap, this was getting hairy now. Turabi could practically feel a TV- or laser-guided bomb on its way for the command-post vehicle right now.
“Fast-movers!” the senior watch officer shouted. “Sukhoi-24s, at least two inbound!”
“Inbound PGM attack!” Turabi radioed. “Radars to standby! All units pop smoke.” Not only could the tanks and heavier armored personnel carriers obscure themselves with smoke from their exhaust stacks, but they could also fire volleys of smoke grenades several dozen meters away to make it appear as if there were more vehicles than there really were. He didn’t know if it would fool sophisticated sensors, but it was the only countermeasure his forces had.
“SAM-12 Bravo One,” the ops officer reporte
d. One of the air-defense units in the lead battalion was launching surface-to-air missiles, their mobile 2K12 “Cub” missiles. “Another SAM-12 Bravo One . . . SAM-12, three missiles away, Bravo One.” That was a typical Cub engagement, Turabi knew, but he had ordered the operators to launch only one missile at a time to try to save missiles. Each battalion had only six systems—nine missiles total—to counter all the high-powered fighter-bombers at Mary. “Got one!” the ops officer crowed. “SAM-33 Bravo One engaging.” The SAM-33, or 9K33 Osa, or “Wasp,” was a short-range, low-altitude capable antiaircraft-missile system—that meant that the aircraft had blown past the longer-range Cub missile system and had to be engaged by the shorter-range, close-in Wasp. “Triple-A-Six-Mike Bravo One engaging radar.” Now the self-propelled antiaircraft guns were responding. The enemy aircraft were coming in fast.
“How many aircraft, damn it?” Turabi shouted. “Where are they?”
“Got another one!” the comm officer crowed. “Sukhoi-24s, coming in low! They—”
They heard it almost simultaneously: the hiss of a high-speed jet passing very close by, like a fast-approaching swarm of angry bees racing across the desert, followed by two sonic booms that rattled everything not welded in place, followed by a string of large explosions. One or two bombs landed close enough to make the command-post vehicle jump a meter or two off the ground, and Turabi wasn’t sure which direction was up—they could have been blasted on their side or blasted to hell, for all he knew. The lights went out inside the cab, and there was nothing but a loud squeal in his headphones. An electrical fire started someplace—the cab started filling with acidy fumes.
“Power!” Turabi shouted. “Get the power on!” Someone tried to push past him in the darkness—one of the techs who sat behind the Plexiglas board, panicking and rushing toward the exit. Turabi shoved him back through the hinged board. “Get back to your station!” he shouted. “Get some battery lights on and get the generator restarted! Do it now!”