Tin Soldiers

by Michael Farmer

  Contents

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  Chapter 1 Muster

  CHAPTER 2 That Old-Time Religion

  CHAPTER 3 Assemble

  CHAPTER 4 Probes

  CHAPTER 5 Prelude to a Kiss

  CHAPTER 6 Night Fliers

  CHAPTER 7 Contact, North!

  CHAPTER 8 Dawn

  CHAPTER 9 Battle Met

  CHAPTER 10 Flirting with Disaster

  CHAPTER 11 The Rescue

  CHAPTER 12 Outside the Fire

  CHAPTER 13 Attack

  CHAPTER 14 Operation Phoenix

  CHAPTER 15 Homecoming

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  TIN SOLDIERS

  A Signet Book / published by arrangement with the author

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2003 by Michael P. Farmer

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

  For information address:

  The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is http://www.penguinputnam.com

  ISBN: 978-1-1012-0976-9

  A SIGNET BOOK®

  Signet Books first published by The Signet Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  SIGNET and the “S” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

  Electronic edition: November, 2003

  To Melinda Britt Farmer

  Words cannot convey the support, love, and critical insights you provided during the writing of this novel. Melinda, you are my best friend, my true love, and my inspiration.

  You keep this old tanker young and have his eternal thanks . . . and his heart.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To the men of C Company, 1-68 Armor, Fort Carson, Colorado, May 1996 to August 1997—thanks for the great ride with Cold Steel. It’s one I will never forget.

  From a military standpoint, many have inspired. Special thanks to my mentors—Tobin Green, Steve Speakes, William S. Wallace, Dave Styles, Dave Bartlett, Ralf Zimmermann, and E. W. Chamberlain. Also to the many great NCOs who broke me into the world of tank operations and to those who later provided great support and sage counsel—Lon Hardy, Glenn Duke, Dave List, Steve Krivitsky, Jeff Gates, and all of the NCOs of Cold Steel. And thanks to Ron Bickel for making me never regret throwing a corporal into the company commander’s tank as a gunner.

  To Joseph Davidson, Cookie Sewell, Dave Norton, Bob Summitt, Steve Meachem, Greg Valloch, and Jackie Barnes—all of whom made valiant efforts to ensure I didn’t stray too far from the mark technically. As always, any mistakes are my own and not a reflection of the hours you donated to the manuscript.

  To those who helped me break into the world of writing and publishing, many thanks—Dale Brown, David Hackworth, W.E.B. Griffin, Ralph Peters, Bob Norris, Victor O’Reilly, Fred Chiaventone, Michael DiMercurio, Jake Elwell and Olga Wieser of Wieser & Wieser, Bob Kane, Sr., of Presidio Press, Paul McCarthy of McCarthy Creative Services, and last but not least, the late George Wieser.

  Special thanks to a few others . . . Bill Parker and his staff at Parker Information Resources for designing my Web site, www.TheTanker.com. Bill, you’re a true professional (and a great guy for a Texan). A debt of gratitude to Michael Garman, the renowned sculptor from Colorado, for allowing the image of his “Tanker” piece on the Web site. To Jody Harmon, the world’s premier illustrator of armored vehicles; the use of the print “M1A2” on The Tanker.com is much appreciated.

  Kudos to the Central Intelligence Agency for the use of their Middle Eastern map database. You’re good people and I take back any past comments to the contrary.

  To Trooper, my chocolate Labrador Retriever; thanks for keeping my feet warm under the desk during late nights of manuscript editing and for providing moments of desperately needed diversion.

  Finally, I’d like to thank my wife, Melinda, and our daughters, Meagan, Dylan, Logan, and Carson. These ladies are the lights of my life. During the few times when writing became a chore, the five of them could be counted on to bring me back to earth and make clear the things in life that are truly important. My love to you all.

  PROLOGUE

  29 August: Baghdad (AP)—In a surprise announcement, Saddam Hussein today stepped down as president of the Republic of Iraq after more than twenty years in power. President Hussein cited personal reasons for the sudden resignation. A Baath Party spokesman, speaking on condition of anonymity, stated that the former president has been in failing health for more than six months. Abdul Aref, Hussein’s prime minister and right hand for the past two years, was sworn in to office within minutes of the resignation. Aref, an unknown to those outside of Iraq’s inner circles, is thought by many Middle Eastern analysts to be the man behind the Islamic fundamentalist movement that has slowly worked its way through Iraq’s Revolutionary Command Council over the past year.

  04 October: Baghdad (Reuters)—President Aref has announced that the majority Shiites will no longer go voiceless within his nation’s government. While details are not clear, it is widely speculated that Aref has conducted a systematic purging of the Revolutionary Command Council, Iraq’s all-powerful decision-making body formerly led by Saddam Hussein. During his first two months in office, Aref is rumored to have removed those Baath Party officials who opposed his more fundamentalist approach to governing Iraq. Additionally, Aref is said to be opening dialogue between his country and Iran. This would be the largest diplomatic step taken between the two nations since the end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988.

  07 October: Kuwait City (AP)—Kuwaiti prime minister Sheikh Saad al-Abdullah al-Salem al-Sabah denounced the latest in a series of troop movements by Iraq along his nation’s northern border in a morning address to the National Assembly. Al-Sabah, who is also the crown prince of the small Gulf nation, says that such actions by Iraq can do nothing but erode an already strained peace.

  08 October: Baghdad (London Times)—In an address to the Revolutionary Command Council earlier today, Abdul Aref declared that Kuwait and the other peace-loving nations of the Middle East need not concern themselves with the military maneuvers currently being conducted by Iraq. He reminds everyone that Iraq fulfilled all obligations placed on it by the United Nations as of last year and that his nation is merely conducting the training necessary to sustain a viable defense force.

  08 October: Tehran (Christian Science Monitor)—The Iranian parliament has proclaimed a new era of brotherhood with western neighbor Iraq. Tensions have been up and down between these two Middle Eastern powers for decades, but Iraq’s new tolerance toward Islamic fundamentalists has made for the most diplomatic relationship between the two nations in recent history. Exactly what this “new era of brotherhood” means in practical terms is yet to be seen.

  10 October: CNN News Desk—President Drake has just announced that the United States will deploy U.S. ground forces to Kuwait in response to a request by the Kuwaiti government. The unit has not yet been identified, but is expected to be on the ground in less than two weeks. The president is quoted as saying that his intention is to stabilize tensions in the area, not escalate them. The president added that such deployments to Kuwait have become commonplac
e for American military forces since Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, with the U.S. having a brigade on the ground almost year-round. The exact length of the deployment is yet to be determined.

  Chapter 1

  Muster

  Phase Line Dog

  11 October, 0500 Hours Local

  Two hours earlier a hunter’s moon had hung over the mountains. Now, an hour before dawn, there was nothing but darkness. A night bird lifted his head, cocking it as he heard a foreign sound. It was an eerie whine, and the source was drawing nearer. The tree he’d chosen for shelter began to gently vibrate beneath him. With a rush of wings, the bird retreated deeper into the forest, abandoning his home to this new predator.

  A few feet away, an M1A1 Abrams tank slowed to a halt in a stand of pines. The tank commander, his upper body extending from his vehicle’s cupola, scanned the darkness from the vantage of his perch ten feet above the ground. Speaking into his helmet’s boom mike, the lieutenant called to his driver over the tank’s intercom. “Shut down the engine.”

  The fifteen-hundred-horsepower turbine engine faded into silence. No lights of any kind were visible on the giant war machine. The tank crew was in a deadly game of cat and mouse with an unseen force, their task made all the more difficult by the necessity for stealth. It was tough playing a phantom in the night when your steed was sixty-eight tons of steel.

  The lieutenant lifted the right earcup of his helmet to listen for those sounds he might not have heard earlier due to the tank’s engine noise and his combat vehicle crewman’s helmet. The helmet, commonly called a CVC, served three purposes: to broadcast radio messages through the boom mike running across its front, to receive radio traffic through the speakers embedded in its earcups, and to protect tank crewmen’s hearing from the blast of the tank’s main gun. The young officer knew that if there were any heavy vehicles moving in the area, he should now be able to hear them. Instead he heard nothing but the sound of his wingman in another M1A1 idling 150 meters to his right. Three hours into tonight’s mission and the silence was almost deafening. Radio chatter through his CVC from the company commander and the other three tank commanders of his platoon provided distraction, along with the sounds of hydraulics as his gunner traversed their turret in search of targets for their 120mm main gun. He turned slowly in the cupola, a set of PVS-7 night-vision goggles to his eyes, searching. . . .

  He keyed the transmitter switch on his CVC. “White Four, White One. Radio Check, Over.” The anxiety in the lieutenant’s voice was clear as he attempted to reach his platoon sergeant. This was the third call he’d made to the White Four tank in the past five minutes. This one, like the others, would go unanswered.

  “Sir,” said the NCO in the gunner’s seat of the tank, “I’m telling you, they’re gone. Zipped.”

  The lieutenant nodded wearily. Would this night ever end? “Roger. Take up a scan and see if you can find whoever’s out there before we stumble into them.” He shook his head. “I’ve gotta call the Old Man.”

  “Jesus. Good luck with that, sir,” said the gunner, slipping his face back to the tank’s thermal imaging system in an attempt to locate their elusive prey.

  After switching channels, the lieutenant keyed the radio again. “Steel Six, White One, over.”

  “Steel Six,” a distant voice responded.

  The lieutenant took a deep breath. “Steel Six, this is White One. My slant is two. I say again two, over.”

  A barely perceptible pause from the other station. “White One, what happened to your other tanks? I’ve received no contact reports, over.”

  “Steel Six . . . I don’t know, over.”

  A groan issued from the gunner’s compartment. “Ohh, well done, sir. Well done indeed.”

  The lieutenant slid down through the cupola’s hatch and sat in his tank commander’s seat, a puzzled expression on his face. He nudged his gunner with the dirty toe of a combat boot. “What’s that, Sergeant Izzo?”

  The gunner, busy looking through his sights, turned and looked up at the lieutenant, then returned to his scan. “You’ll see. It should be comin’ any—”

  A booming voice issued from the speaker in the lieutenant’s helmet. “What the hell do you mean you don’t know what happened to them? Give me a sitrep, over!”

  Jumping up, the lieutenant slammed his head into the roof of the tank hard enough to see stars. He again activated the helmet’s transmit switch. “Sir . . . I mean . . . Steel Six . . . they just dropped off the net a few minutes ago and—”

  “So you’re telling me that I’ve got two fewer tanks in my company than I thought. When were you going to share this intel jewel, over?”

  “This is White One, uhh . . .”

  “White One, this is Steel Six. Your mission has not changed. I need you at support by fire position Charlie Two, time now. We’ve got to be in position to support the rest of the battalion as they move forward, over.”

  The lieutenant looked at the map in his lap. In the M1A1’s blue dome light he could make out little detail. He scrutinized the dot indicating his tank’s GPS position taken just before calling the CO and compared it to Charlie Two’s location. Only one kilometer west if he went straight over the hill to their front. By taking the low ground and bypassing the hill, he would cover more like four kilometers—screw that. “This is White One. Roger, I’ll have my two remaining tanks set in zero five minutes, over.”

  “Roger, keep me informed. Steel Six, out.”

  The lieutenant exhaled with relief. “Driver, start the engine.”

  To the lieutenant’s left, his loader flipped off the switch controlling the tank’s communications system to ensure a surge from the start-up didn’t fry the radios. As the big turbine engine spooled up and leveled off, the loader flipped the switch back on.

  “Driver, get ready to move up that hill to our front. I’m going to have you stop just short of the crest so I can conduct a sweep of the far side with PVS-7s. Once we move out again, you kick this old girl in the ass . . . get us over the top before anyone I might have missed on the far side has a chance to shoot.” A tanker’s worst nightmare was moving over the top of a hill and having a large-caliber round or missile pumped into his underbelly.

  The sound of a throat clearing issued from the gunner’s hole. “Sir, I wouldn’t do that. Let’s go around the hill.”

  Once again the lieutenant reviewed his options. Option one, go straight and save three kilometers, but at the risk of being caught cresting the hill and popped by an enemy gunner—but if he was careful, he’d get to Charlie Two quickly. Option two was safer, but it would take a while, especially navigating the big main battle tank over goat trails in the dark.

  “I understand what you’re saying, Sergeant Izzo, but we need to get to that support by fire position now. We don’t have time to go around.” His decision made, White One folded his map and stuffed it into one of the leg pockets of his Nomex coveralls. “Driver, move out.”

  Switching to his platoon radio frequency, the lieutenant called his wingman as their tank moved forward. “White Two, White One. Follow my move to Charlie Two, over.”

  “This is White Two, wilco,” the NCO commanding the White Two tank called back hesitantly, clearly not excited at the prospect of rushing over a hill.

  The turbine whine of the M1A1’s engine increased as the driver accelerated and moved up the hill.

  Once again in the cupola, the lieutenant had the PVS-7s to his eyes. He scanned the near side of the hill and the woods surrounding the tank. While not as good as the tank’s thermal imaging system, which registered heat emanating from objects such as vehicle engines, the PVS-7s weren’t bad. They picked up the ambient light available, such as starlight, and used it to turn the darkness into a faint green glow. No sign of anything sinister. So what had happened to his Bravo section? The platoon sergeant and his wingman seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth without a word.

  As they were almost at the crest, the lieutenant called
for his driver to slow to a stop. Stretching his body to its full height in the cupola, he scanned over the hill with the night-vision goggles.

  “Looks good to me, Iz,” the lieutenant said to his gunner over the intercom. “Clear as a bell over there.”

  The NCO sighed. “I hear you, sir.” His face was plastered against the thermal sight. He wanted a good look on the far side of the hill as soon as they cleared the top. Until the tank moved forward his sight picture was restricted to the darkness represented by the side of the hill.

  “Driver, you ready to move?” said the lieutenant.

  “Roger,” came the driver’s tinny reply through the tank’s intercom system. The sixty-eight-ton tank almost shuddered in anticipation of the jump-off.

  “All right, move out.”

  The M1A1 shrieked as it accelerated over the crest. White One congratulated himself as they safely made it over the top and continued to accelerate downhill. He’d made the right decision after all.

  The gunner stiffened at his controls as his optics displayed the area to his front. “Shit! Driver, stop the tank. Stop the damned tank and back up!”

  When the tank jerked to a stop, the lieutenant’s face unfortunately maintained its forward momentum. His eye smashed into the .50 caliber machine gun mounted just forward of his cupola. Applying pressure to the rapidly swelling eye with one hand, White One held the PVS-7s to his good eye. The tank was now rapidly reversing up the hill and he was having a difficult time finding what had caused his gunner’s reaction as he bounced back and forth in the cupola like a pinball.

  What the hell had Izzo seen . . . Oh mother of God.

  A barrier of mines and concertina wire stretched in both directions at the hill’s midway point. No way around it. Their only hope of survival was to get on the back side of the hill they’d just crossed, because whoever had emplaced that obstacle would surely be watching it with—