Executive Orders jr-7

by Tom Clancy

  AT HOLLOMAN AIR Force Base in New Mexico, a total of eight pilots arrived at the base hospital to have their blood checked. The Ebola testing kits were finally coming out in numbers. The first major military deliveries went to the Air Force, which could deploy more power more quickly than the other branches of the service. There had been a few cases in nearby Albuquerque, all being treated at the University of New Mexico Medical Center and two on this very base, a sergeant and his wife, the former dead and the latter dying—the news of it was all over the base, further enraging warriors who already possessed a surfeit of passion. The aviators all checked out clean, and the relief they felt was not ordinary. Now, they knew, they could go out and do something. The ground crews came in next. These also tested negative. All went off to the flight line. Half of the pilots strapped into F-117 Nighthawks. The other half, with the ground crews, boarded KC-10 tanker/transport aircraft for the long flight to Saudi.

  Word was coming in over the Air Force's own communications network. The 366th and the F-16s from the Israeli base were doing pretty well, but everyone wanted a piece of this one, and the men and women from Holloman would lead the second wave into the battle zone.

  "IS HE QUITE mad?" the diplomat asked an Iranian colleague. It was the RVS officers who had the dangerous— or at least most sensitive—part of the intelligence mission.

  "You may not speak of our leader in that way," the foreign ministry official replied as they walked down the street.

  "Very well, does your learned holy man fully understand what happens when one employs weapons of mass destruction?" the intelligence officer asked delicately. Of course he did not, they both knew. No nation-state had done such a thing in over fifty years.

  "He may have miscalculated," the Iranian allowed.

  "Indeed." The Russian let it go at that for the moment. He'd been working this mid-level diplomat for over a year. "The world now knows that you have this capability. So clever of him to have flown on the very aircraft that made it possible. He is quite mad. You know that. Your country will be a pariah—"

  "Not if we can—"

  "No, not if you can. But what if you cannot?" the Russian asked. "Then the entire world will turn against you."

  "THIS IS TRUE?" the cleric asked.

  "It is quite true," the man from Moscow assured him. "President Ryan is a man of honor. He was our enemy for most of his life, and a dangerous enemy, but now, with peace between us, he turns into a friend. He is well respected by both the Israelis and the Saudis. The Prince Ali bin Sheik and he are very close. That is well known." This meeting was in Ashkhabad, capital of Turkmenistan, disagreeably close to the Iranian border, especially with the former Premier dead in a traffic accident—probably a creative one, Moscow knew—and elections pending. "Ask yourself this: Why did President Ryan say those things about Islam? An attack on his country, an attack on his child, an attack on himself—but does he attack your religion, my friend? No, he does not. Who but an honorable man would say such things?"

  The man on the other side of the table nodded. "This is possible. What do you ask of me?"

  "A simple question. You are a man of God. Can you condone those acts committed by the UIR?"

  Indignation: "The taking of innocent life is hateful to Allah. Everyone knows that."

  The Russian nodded. "Then you must decide for yourself which is more important to you, political power, or your faith."

  But it wasn't quite that simple: "What do you offer us? I have people who will soon look to me for their welfare. You may not use the Faith as a weapon against the Faithful."

  "Increased autonomy, free trade of your goods to the rest of the world, direct flights to foreign lands. We and the Americans will help you to arrange lines of credit with the Islamic states of the Gulf. They do not forget acts of friendship," he assured the next Premier of Turkmenistan.

  "How can a man faithful to God do such things?"

  "My friend" — he wasn't really, but that was what one said—"how many men start to do something noble and then become corrupted? And then what do they stand for? Perhaps it is a lesson for you to remember. Power is a deadly thing, most deadly of all to those who hold it in their earthly hands. For yourself, you must decide. What sort of leader do you wish to be, and with what other leaders will you associate your country?" Golovko leaned back and sipped at his tea. How wrong his country had been not to understand religion—and yet, how right was the result. This man had clung to his Islamic faith as an anchor against the previous regime, finding in it a continuity of belief and values which the political reality of his youth had lacked. Now that his character, known to all in the land, was carrying him to political power, would he remain what he had been, or would he become something else? He had to recognize that danger now. He hadn't thought it all the way through, Golovko saw. Political figures so rarely did. This one had to do so, and right now, and the chairman of the RVS watched him search his soul—something the Marxist doctrine of his youth had told him did not exist. It turned out to be better that it did. "Our religion, our Faith, it is a thing of God, not of murder. The Prophet teaches Holy War, yes, but it does not teach us to become our enemies. Unless Mahmoud Haji proves these things are false, I will not stand with him, for all his promises of money. I would like to meet this Ryan, when the time comes."

  BY 13:00 LIMA TIME, the picture was firming up nicely. The numbers were still pretty unattractive, Diggs thought, with five concentrated divisions on the move facing four brigade-sized forces, which were still dispersed. But there were things that could be done about that.

  The small Saudi blocking force north of KKMC had held for three spectacular hours, but was now being enveloped and had to move, despite the wishes of the Saudi general staff. Diggs didn't even know the kid's name, but hoped to meet him later. With a couple years of proper training, he might really turn into something.

  At his "suggestion," King Khalid Military City was being evacuated. The one part about that which hurt was turning off the intelligence assets there. Especially the Predator teams which now had to recall their birds for their withdrawal to WOLFPACK'S line north of Al Artawiyah. Now that they'd all had time to think about it, the battle was like a huge training exercise at the NTC— three corps instead of battalions to face, but the principle was the same, wasn't it?

  The lingering concern was an Iranian heavy division now known to be crossing the swamps west of Basra. The enemy's operational concept did leave one blank spot. In bypassing Kuwait, they had not had a covering force in place, perhaps because they thought it unnecessary, more likely because they didn't want to tip their hand, figuring to patch the hole as they were doing now. Well, every plan had a flaw.

  So did the plan he'd put together for Operation Bu-FORD, probably. But he didn't see it, despite two hours of looking.

  "Are we agreed, gentlemen?" he had to ask. Every Saudi officer in the room was still senior to him, but they'd come to see the logic of his proposal. They were going to fuck 'em all, not just a few. The assembled generals nodded. They didn't even complain any more about leaving KKMC to the enemy. They could always rebuild it. "Then Operation BUFORD commences at sundown."

  THEY FELL BACK by echelon. A few Saudi mobile guns had appeared and they now fired smoke to obscure the battlefield. As soon as they landed, half of Major Abdullah's vehicles backed off their positions and hurried south. The flanking units were already moving, fending off encirclement attempts which the enemy had adopted, probing expensively for the extreme ends of the Saudi line.

  Berman's helicopter had never arrived, and the afternoon of noisy and confusing action—you couldn't see crap down here! he had come to learn—had been instructive. Calling in four more air strikes and seeing the effects on the ground was something he would keep in mind, if the Saudis clawed their way out of the trap the other side was casting about them.

  "Come with me, Colonel," Abdullah said, turning to run for his command track, ending the First Battle of KKMC.

  61 GRIERSON
'S RIDE

  THE VIEW ON THE MAP was just awful. It was easy for anyone to see, a lot of long red arrows and short blue ones. The maps on the morning TV shows were not all that different from those in the Situation Room, and commentary—especially «expert» commentary—talked about how American and Saudi forces were badly outnumbered and poorly deployed, with their backs to the sea. But then there was the direct satellite feed.

  "We've heard stories of fierce air battles to the northwest," Donner told the camera from "somewhere in Saudi Arabia." "But the troopers of the Blackhorse Regiment have yet to see action. I can't say where I am right now— the fact of the matter is that I just don't know. B-Troop is stopped for refueling now, pouring hundred of gallons into those big Ml Abrams tanks. It's a real fuel-hog, the troopers tell me. But their mood remains the same. These are angry men—and women—back in the headquarters troop," he added. "I don't know what we will find at the western horizon. I can say that these soldiers are straining at the leash despite all the bad news that has come down from the Saudi high command. The enemy is somewhere out there, driving south in great strength, and soon after sundown, we expect to make contact. This is Tom Donner in the field with the B-Troop, 1st of the Black-horse," the report concluded.

  "His poise isn't bad," Ryan noted. "When does that go on the air?"

  Fortunately for all concerned, the television uplinks were over military channels, which were encrypted and controlled. It wasn't time for the UIR to learn exactly who was where. The negative commentary of the «defeat» of the Saudi army was, however, going out. That news, leaked in Washington, and studiously not commented on by the Pentagon, was being accepted as gospel. Jack was still worried, however amusing it might have been in the abstract that the media was doing disinformation without even being asked.

  "This evening. Maybe sooner," General Mickey Moore replied. "Sunset over there is in three hours."

  "Can we do it?" POTUS asked.

  "Yes, sir."

  WOLFPACIC, FIRST BRIGADE, North Carolina National Guard, was fully formed now. Eddington took to a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter for a flyover of his forward units. LOBO, his 1st Battalion Task Force, had its left edge on the road from Al Artawiyah to KKMC. WHITEFANG, the 2nd, was arrayed to the west side of the highway. COYOTE, the 3rd, was in reserve, his maneuver force, leaning to the west, because that's where he thought the possibilities were. His artillery battalion he split into two segments, able to cover the left or right extremes, and both able to cover the center. He lacked air assets and had been unable to get anything more than three Black Hawks for medevac. He also had an intelligence group, a combat-support battalion, medical personnel, MPs, and all the other things organic to a unit of brigade size. Forward of his two frontline battalions was a reconnaissance element whose mission was, first, to report, and second, to take out the enemy's eyes when they appeared. He'd thought of asking the 11 th ACR for some of their helicopter assets, but he knew what Hamm had planned for those, and it was a waste of breath to ask. He would get the take from their reconnaissance efforts, and that would have to do. Looking down, he saw that the forward line of Ml A2s and Bradleys had all found comfortable spots, mainly behind berms and mini-dunes, where possible just behind high ground, so that at most the top of a turret was visible and mainly not even that. Just the track commander's head and a pair of binoculars would suffice in most cases. The tanks were spaced no less than three hundred meters apart, and mostly more than that. It made them an unattractively diluted target for artillery or air attack. He'd been told not to worry about the latter, but he worried anyway, as much as circumstance allowed. His subordinate commanders knew their jobs as well as reservists could, and the truth of the matter was that the mission was right out of the textbooks written by Guderian and practiced by Rommel and every mounted commander ever since.

  THE WITHDRAWAL STARTED with a ten-mile dash at thirty-five miles per hour, enough to outrun artillery fire, and to look like the rout that Berman initially thought it to be—until he remembered that he made a practice of leaving enemy fire behind at least fifteen times as fast as these mechanized vehicles were doing. They were riding with top hatches open, and Berman stood to look behind, past the brown-black fountains of exploding artillery shells. He'd never known what a defensive stand was like. Mainly lonely, he thought. He'd expected bunched vehicles and men, forgetting what he himself did to such things when he spotted them from the air. He saw what had to be fifty columns of smoke, all vehicles blown apart by the Saudi National Guard. Maybe they didn't take training seriously enough—he had heard such things—but this team had stood their ground against a force at least five times as large, and held them for three hours.

  Not without cost. He turned forward and counted only fifteen tanks, plus eight infantry tracks. Perhaps there were more he couldn't see in the clouds of dust, he hoped. He looked up, into what he hoped was a friendly sky.

  IT WAS THE score since dawn was forty UIR fighters down, all of them air-to-air, against six American and Saudi losses, all of them ground-to-air. The opposing air force had been unable to overcome the advantage of the allied airborne radar coverage, and the best thing that could be said for their effort was that they had distracted efforts to attack the ground forces, which would otherwise have been totally unimpeded. The ragtag collection of American-, French-, and Russian-made fighter aircraft looked impressive on paper and on the ramp, but less so in the air. But the allied air forces were far less capable at night. Only the small collection of F-15E Strike Eagles was really all-weather capable (night is considered a weather condition). There were about twenty of those, UIR intelligence estimated, and couldn't do all that much harm. The advancing divisions halted right before KKMC, again to refuel and rearm. One more such jump, their commanders thought, and they'd be to Riyadh before the Americans were organized enough to take the field. They still had the initiative, and were halfway to their objective.

  PALM BOWL KEPT track of all that, feeding what radio intercepts it was garnering from the southwest, but now facing a new threat to- the north from an Iranian armored division. Perhaps the UIR had expected that, with the Kingdom out of the way or at least heavily engaged, the Kuwaitis would be intimidated into inaction. If so, it was wishful thinking. Borders could be crossed in two directions, and Kuwait's government made the correct assumption that doing nothing would only make things worse for them, not better. It turned out to be another case of one more day needed to patch things up, but this time it was the other side which needed the extra time.

  The Air Cavalry Squadron, 4th of the 10th, lifted off twenty minutes after sunset, heading north. There were some light motorized units on border guard duty, soon, they thought, to be relieved by the unit now crossing the Tigris-Euphrates delta. It comprised two battalions of troops in trucks and light armored vehicles. They'd chatted quite a bit on their radios, the commanders moving units back and forth, but strangely unprepared to be invaded by a nation not a tenth the size of their own. For the next hour, all twenty-six of the Buffalo Cav's Apaches would hunt them with cannon and rocket fire, burning a path for Kuwait's own light mechanized brigade, whose reconnaissance vehicles fanned out, searching for and finding the lead elements of Iranian armor. Five kilometers back was a battalion of heavy armor guided by the reconnaissance information, and the first major surprise of the night for the UIR was the sundering of nightfall by twenty tank guns, followed two seconds later by fifteen kills. The next lesson applied was that of confidence. Their first contact with the enemy a successful one, the lead Kuwaiti elements pressed the attack with gusto. It was all coming together for them. The night-vision systems worked. The guns worked. They had an enemy with his back to unsuitable ground and noplace to go.

  Listening at PALM BOWL, Major Sabah heard the radio calls, again experiencing things at second hand. It turned out that only one brigade of the Iranian 4th Armored Division, mainly a reserve formation, had gotten across, and had driven blithely and unwarned into an advancing armor force. It was, Sabah
thought, just about as fair as what had happened to his country on the morning of 1 August 1990. By sunset plus three hours, the only usable access route into southern Iraq was completely blocked, and with it, easy reinforcement of the Army of God. Throughout the night, precision-guided bombs would drop bridges to make certain of that. It was a small battle for his small nation, but a winning one to set the stage for her nation's allies.

  The Buffalo Cav was already moving its ground elements due west, while the Air Cav squadron returned to refuel and rearm, leaving a buoyant Kuwaiti army holding the allied rear and spoiling for another battle.

  THE UIRI CORPS had been in reserve until this point. One division was the former Iranian 1 st Armored, "The Immortals," accompanied by another armored division comprised mainly of surviving Republican Guards officers, and a new class of enlisted men untouched by the 1991 war. II Corps had made the breakthrough at the border and held the lead for the advance to KKMC, though in the course of combat action losing more than a third of its strength. That task accomplished, it moved left, east, clearing the path for I Corps, as yet untouched except by a few air attacks, and III Corps, similarly untouched. II Corps would now guard the flank of the advancing force against counterstrikes fully expected from the seaward side. All units, following their doctrine, sent out reconnaissance forces as darkness fell.

  The lead units, advancing by bounds, skirted around King Khalid Military City, surprised to find no opposition. Emboldened, the commander of the reconnaissance battalion sent units directly into the city, then found it virtually empty of people, most of whom had driven out during the previous day. It seemed logical when he thought about it. The Army of God was advancing, and though it had taken a few heavy blows, nothing the Saudis had could stop it. Satisfied, he pressed south, a little more cautiously now. There had to be some opposition ahead.

  EDDINGTON'S MP DETACHMENT had done its job conveying people south and out of the way. He'd seen a few faces, downcast mainly, until they'd gotten a look at what was waiting between KKMC and Al Artawiyah. WOLF-PACK couldn't hide everything. Saudi MP units brought up the rear, passing through the recon screen at 21:00 local time. They'd said that there was nothing behind them. They were wrong.