by Tom Clancy
THE FIRST GROUP of four airliners touched down without incident outside Dhahran. There was no arrival ceremony. It was already hot. Spring had come early to the region after the surprisingly cold and wet winter season, and that meant noon temperatures close to 100 degrees, as opposed to the 120 of high summer, but night temperatures down in the forties. It was humid this close to the coast as well.
When the first airliner stopped, the truck-mounted stairs were driven up, and Brigadier General Marion Diggs was the first off. He would be the ground commander for this operation. The virus epidemic still raging in America had also compromised MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, home of Central Command, which had responsibility for this area. The briefing papers he'd seen to this point said that the commander of the 366th Air Combat Wing was also a one-star, but junior to him. It had been a long time since so vital an operation had been turned over to someone as junior as himself, Marion Diggs thought on the way down the steps.
At the bottom was a Saudi three-star. The two men exchanged salutes and entered a car for the ride to the local command post, and an intelligence update. Behind Diggs was the command group of the llth ACR, and on the other three aircraft, a security group and most of the Second Squadron of the Black Horse. Buses waited to take them to the POMCUS site. It was all rather like the REFORGER exercises of the Cold War, which had anticipated a NATO-Warsaw Pact clash requiring American soldiers to get off the airplanes, board their vehicles, and march off to the front. That had never happened except in simulation, but now, again, it was happening, and this time it was for real. Two hours later, 2nd of the Blackhorse was rolling into the open.
"WHAT DO YOU mean?" Daryaei asked.
"There appears to be a major troop movement under way," his intelligence chief told him. "Radar sites in western Iraq have detected commercial aircraft entering Saudi Arabia from Israeli airspace. We also show fighters escorting them and patrolling the border."
"What else?"
"Nothing at the moment, but it would seem likely that America is moving another force into the Kingdom. I am not sure what it could be—certainly, it cannot be very large. Their German-based divisions are under quarantine, and all their home-quartered divisions are in the same condition. Most of their army is actually deployed for internal security."
"We should attack them anyway," his air force adviser urged.
"I think that would be a mistake," Intelligence said. "It would be an invasion of Saudi airspace, alerting those goatherds too soon. The Americans can at most move one brigade-sized force. There is a second based at Diego Garcia—the equipment, that is—but we have no information to suggest that it has moved, and even if it does, we expect that our Indian friends can stop it."
"We trust pagans?" Air Force asked with contempt. That was how Muslims viewed the official religion of the Subcontinent.
"We can trust their antipathy to America. And we can ask them if their fleet has spotted anything. In any case, the Americans can deploy another brigade-sized force. That is all."
"Kill it anyway!"
"That throws away operational security," Intelligence pointed out.
"If they don't know we are coming by now, then they are fools," Air Force objected.
"The Americans have no reason to suspect that we have taken hostile actions against them. To attack their aircraft, if that's what they are, will alert them unnecessarily, not just the Saudis. They are probably concerned about our troop movements in Iraq. So they fly in some small reinforcements. We can deal with them when the time comes," Intelligence told them.
"I will call India," Daryaei said, temporizing.
"NAVIGATION RADARS ONLY… make that two air-search, probably from the carriers," the petty officer said. "Their course track is zero-niner-zero, speed about sixteen."
The tactical officer on the Orion, called a tacco, looked down at his chart. The Indian battle group was at the extreme eastern edge of the racetrack pattern they'd been following for the last several days. In less than twenty minutes, they should reverse course to head west. If they turned, things would become exciting. COMEDY was now 120 miles away from the other formation, and his aircraft was feeding constant information to Anzio and Kidd. Under the wings of the four-engine Lockheed turboprop were four Harpoon missiles. White ones, war shots. The aircraft was now under the tactical command of Captain Kemper on Anzio, and on his order they could launch those missiles, two each at the Indian carriers, because they were the long gun of the opposing navy. A few minutes behind would be a swarm of Tomahawks and more Harpoons headed the same way.
"Are they EMCON'D?" the officer wondered. "With nav sets emitting?" the sailor replied. "COMEDY must have 'em on their ESM gear by now. Damned sure our guys are lighting up the sky, sir." COMEDY had essentially two choices. Adopt EMCON—for emissions control—turning off their radars to make the other side expend time and fuel searching for them, or simply light everything off, creating an electronic bubble which the other side could easily see, but the penetration of which would be dangerous. Anzio had gone with the second option.
"Any airplane chatter?" the tacco asked another crewman.
"Negative, sir, none at all."
"Hmph." As low as the Orion was flying, its presence was probably not known to the Indians, despite their use of air-search gear. He was sorely tempted to pop up and illuminate himself with his own search radar. What were they up to? Might a few ships have broken away from the group, heading west, say, to launch an off-axis missile attack? He couldn't know what they were saying or thinking. All he had were computer-generated course tracks based on radar signals. The computer knew exactly where aircraft was at all times off the Global Positioning Satellite system. From that the bearing to the radar sources enabled calculation of their location and…
"Course change?"
"Negative, system shows them still leading zero-niner-zero at sixteen knots. They are passing out of the box now, sir. This is farther east than we've seen them in three days. They are now thirty miles east of COMEDY'S course to the Strait."
"I wonder if they changed their minds about this…."
"YES, OUR FLEET is at sea," the Prime Minister told him.
"Have you seen the American ships?"
The leader of the Indian government was all alone in her office. Her Foreign Minister had been in earlier, and was on his way back at this moment. This phone call had been anticipated, but not hoped for.
The situation had changed. President Ryan, weak though she still thought him to be—who else but a weak man would have threatened a sovereign country so? — had nonetheless frightened her. What if the plague in America had been initiated by Daryaei? She had no evidence that it had, and she would never seek such information out. Her country could never be associated with such an act. Ryan had asked—what was it, four times? five? — for her word that the Indian navy would not hinder the American fleet movement. But only one time had he said weapons of mass destruction. That was the deadliest code phrase in international exchange. All the more so, her Foreign Minister had told her, because America only possessed one kind of such weapons, and for that reason, America regarded biological weapons and chemical weapons to be nuclear weapons. That led to another calculation. Aircraft fought aircraft. Ships fought ships. Tanks fought tanks. One answered an attack with the same weapon used by one's enemy. Full power and rage, she remembered also. Ryan had overtly suggested that he would take action based on the nature of the supposed attack by the UIR. Nor, finally, did she discount the lunatic attack on his little daughter. She remembered that from the East Room, the reception after the funeral, how Ryan doted on his children. Weak man though he had to be, he was an angry weak man, armed with weapons more dangerous than any others.
Daryaei had been foolish to provoke America in that way. Better just to have launched his attack on Saudi and win with conventional arms on the field of battle, and that would have been that. But, no, he had to try to cripple America at home, to provoke them in a way that was the pure
st form of lunacy—and now she and her government and her country could be implicated, the P.M. realized.
She hadn't bargained for any of that. Deploying her fleet was chance enough—and the Chinese, what had they done? Launched an exercise, perhaps damaged that airliner—five thousand kilometers away! What risks were they taking? Why, none at all. Daryaei expected much of her country, and with his attack on the very citizens of America, it was too much.
"No," she told him, choosing her words carefully. "Our fleet units have seen American patrol aircraft, but no ships at all. We have heard, as you perhaps have, that an American ship group is transiting Suez, but only warships and nothing more."
"You are sure of this?" Daryaei asked.
"My friend, neither our ships nor our naval aircraft have spotted any American ships in the Arabian Sea at all." The one overflight had been by land-based MiG-23s of the Indian air force. She hadn't lied to her supposed ally. Quite. "The sea is large," she added. "But the Americans are not that clever, are they?"
"Your friendship will not be forgotten," Daryaei promised her.
The Prime Minister replaced the phone, wondering if she'd done the right thing. Well. If the American ships got to the Gulf, she could always say that they hadn't been spotted. That was the truth, wasn't it? Mistakes happened, didn't they?
"HEADS UP. I got four aircraft lifting off from Gasr Amu," a captain said aboard the AWACS. The newly-constituted UIR air force had been working up, too, but mainly over what was the central part of the new country, and hard to spot even from the airborne radar platform.
Whoever had timed this wasn't doing all that badly. The fourth quartet of inbound airliners had just crossed into Saudi airspace, less than two hundred miles from the UIR fighters doing their climb-out. It had been quiet on the air front to this point. Two fighters had been tracked over the last few hours, but those appeared to be check-hops from the mission profiles, probably aircraft that had been fixed for some major or minor defect, then taken up to see if the new widgets worked properly. But this was a flight of four which had taken off in two closely spaced elements. That made them fighters on a mission.
The current air cover for Operation CUSTER in this sector was a flight of four American F-16s, orbiting within twenty miles of the border.
"Kingston Lead, this is Sky-Eye Six, over."
"Sky, Lead."
"We have four bandits, zero-three-five your position, angels ten and climbing, course two-niner-zero." The four American fighters moved west to interpose themselves between the UIR fighters and the inbound airliners.
Aboard the AWACS, a Saudi officer listened in to the radio chatter between the ground radar station controlling the flight of four and the fighters. The UIR fighters, now identified as French-made F-ls, continued to close the border, then turn ten miles short of it, finally tracing only one mile inside. The F-16s did much the same, and the pilots saw each other, and examined one another's aircraft from four thousand yards apart, through the protective visors of their helmets. The air-to-air missiles were clearly visible under the wings of all the aircraft.
"Y'all want to come over and say hello?" the USAF major leading the F-16s said over guard. There was no response. The next installment of Operation CUSTER proceeded unhindered to Dhahran.
O'DAY WAS IN early. His sitter, with no classes to worry about, rather enjoyed the thought of all the money that would come in from this, and the most important bit of news for everyone was that not a single case of the new illness had happened within ten miles of his home. Despite the inconvenience, he had slept at home every night— even though on one occasion that had been a mere four hours. He couldn't be a daddy if he didn't kiss his little girl at least once a day, even in her sleep. At least the ride into work was easy. He'd gotten a Bureau car. It was faster than his pickup, complete with a flashing light that allowed him to zip through all the checkpoints on the way.
On his desk were the case summaries from the background checks of all the Secret Service personnel. The work in nearly every case had been stultifyingly duplica-tive. Full background checks had been done on every USSS employee, or else they could not have held the security clearances that were an automatic part of their jobs. Birth certificates, high-school photos, and everything else matched up perfectly. But ten files showed loose ends, and all of those would be run down later in the day. O'Day went over all of them. He kept coming back to one.
Raman was of Iranian birth. But America was a nation of immigrants. The FBI had originally been constructed of Irish-Americans, preferably those educated at Jesuit institutions—Boston College and Holy Cross were the favorites, according to the legend—because J. Edgar Hoover was supposed to have believed that no Irish-American with a Jesuit education could conceivably betray his country. Doubtless, there had been some words about that at the time, and even today, anti-Catholicism was the last of the respectable prejudices. But it was well-known that immigrants so often made the most loyal of citizens, some ferociously so. The military and other security agencies often profited from that. Well, Pat thought, it was easily settled. Just check out the rug thing and let it be. He wondered who Mr. Sloan was. A guy who wanted a rug, probably.
THERE WAS A quiet to the streets of Tehran. Clark didn't remember them that way from 1979-80. His more recent trip had been different, more like the rest of the region, bustling but not dangerous. Being journalists, they acted like journalists. Clark reentered market areas, talking politely to people about business conditions, the availability of food, what they thought of the unification with Iraq, what their hopes for the future were, and what he got was pure vanilla. Platitudes. The political comments were especially bland, singularly lacking in the passion he remembered from the hostage crisis, when every heart and mind had been turned against the entire outside world— especially America. Death to America. Well, they'd given substance to that wish, John thought. Or someone had. He didn't sense that animus anymore among the people, remembering the strangely cordial jeweler. Probably they just wanted to live, just like everyone else. The apathy reminded him of Soviet citizens in the 1980s. They'd just wanted to get along, just wanted to live a little better, just wanted their society to respond to their needs. There was no revolutionary rage left in them. So why, then, had Daryaei taken his action? How would the people respond to that? The obvious answer was that he'd lost touch, as Great Men so often did. He'd have his coterie of true believers, and a larger number of people willing to ride the bus and enjoy the comfortable seating while everyone else walked and kept out of the way, but that was it. It was fertile ground to recruit agents, to identify those who'd had enough and were willing to talk. What a shame that there was no time to run a proper intelligence operation here. He checked his watch. Time to head back to the hotel. Their first day had been both a waste and part of their cover. Their Russian colleagues would arrive tomorrow.
THE FIRST ORDER of business was to check out the names Sloan and Alahad. That started with a check of the telephone book. Sure enough, there was a Mohammed Ala-had. He had an ad in the Yellow Pages. Persian and Oriental Rugs. For some reason, people didn't connect «Persia» with "Iran," a saving grace for a lot of rug merchants. The shop was on Wisconsin Avenue, about a mile from Raman's apartment, which was not in the least way remarkable. Similarly, there was a Mr. Joseph Sloan in the crisscross, whose telephone number was 536-4040, as opposed to Raman's 536-3040. A one-digit goof, which easily explained the wrong number on the Secret Service agent's answering machine.
The next step was pure form. The computer records of telephone calls were run by command. The massive numbers of them took almost a minute to run, even with knowledge of the probable dates… and there it came up on the agent's screen, a call to 202-536-3040 from 202-459-6777. But that wasn't Alahad's store number, was it? A further check showed -6777 as a pay phone two blocks from the shop. Odd. If he were that close to his shop, why drop a dime—actually a quarter now—to make the call?
Why not make another check? The agent
was his squad's techno-genius, with a mustache and a marginal haircut. He'd been something less than a raving success working bank robberies, but had found foreign counterintelligence to his liking. It was like the engineering classes of his college days. You just kept picking at things. He'd also found that the foreign spies he chased thought the same way he did. Toss in his technical prowess… hmph, in the past month there had not been a call from the rug shop to 536-4040. He went back another month. No. How about the other direction? No, 536-4040 had never called 457-1100. Now, if he'd ordered a rug, and those things took time—must have, if the dealer had called to let the guy know it had finally come in… why hadn't there been a call about it in either direction?
The agent leaned over to the next desk. "Sylvia, want to take a look at this?"
"What is it, Donny?"
THE BLACKHORSE WAS fully on the ground now. Most of them were in their vehicles or attending their aircraft. The llth Armored Cavalry Regiment comprised 123 M1A2 Abrams main-battle tanks, 127 M3A4 Bradley scout vehicles, 16 M109A6 Paladin 155mm mobile guns, and 8 M270 Multiple-Launch Rocket System tracks, plus a total of 83 helicopters, 26 of which were AH-54D Apache attack choppers. Those were the shooting platforms. They were supported by hundreds of soft vehicles—mostly trucks to carry fuel, food, and ammunition—plus twenty extras locally called Water Buffaloes, a vital need in this part of the world.
The first order of business was to get everyone away from the POMCUS site. The tracked vehicles were driven onto low-boy trailers for the ride north to Abu Hadriyah, a small town with an airport and the designated assembly point for the 11th Cav. As every vehicle rolled out of its warehouse, it stopped on a pre-selected spot painted red. There the GPS navigation systems were checked against a known reference point. Two of the IVIS boxes were down. One of them announced the fact all by itself, sending a coded radio message to the regiment's support troop, demanding that it be replaced and repaired. The other was completely dead, and the crew had to figure it out for themselves. The large red square helped.