“No.” This came from Ed Foley. “They can’t, not now.”
THE RENDEZVOUS TOOK place fifty miles off Cape Rass al Hadd, the far southeast corner of the Arabian Peninsula. Cruisers Normandy and Yorktown, destroyer John Paul Jones, and frigates Underwood, Doyle, and Nicholas took a trailing position so that Platte and Supply could take them alongside after their high-speed run down from Alexandria, to top off their bunkers. Helicopters ferried the captains to Anzio, whose captain was senior, for an hour’s worth of discussion of the mission. Their destination was Dhahran. To get there they had to drive northwest into the Strait of Hormuz. Getting there would take just over six hours, 2200 hours local time. The strait was twenty miles across and speckled with islands, plus it was one of the most heavily traveled waterways in the world—even now, despite the growing crisis. Supertankers, one of which displaced more water than all of the warships in the now-designated TF-61.1 combined, were merely the best-known vessels transiting the area. There were also massive container ships wearing the flags often nations, and even a multilevel sheep carrier which looked like a big-city parking garage, which was bringing in live mutton from Australia. The smell of it was famous on all the oceans of the world. The strait was covered by radar to establish traffic control—the possibility of a ramming incident between two supertankers didn’t bear thinking about—which meant that TF-61.1 would be unlikely to sneak in entirely unnoticed. But they could do a few things. At the narrowest point, the Navy ships would hold to the south, dodging between islands belonging to Oman, and hopefully somewhat obscured by the clutter. Next they’d move south of Abu Musa, past the crowd of oil platforms, again using them for radar cover, and then make a straight run for Dhahran, past the mini-states of Qatar and Bahrain. Opposition, the intelligence officers said, included ships of American, British, Chinese, Russian, and French origin, all of them armed with one sort of missile or another. The most important ships in the group, of course, were totally unarmed. Maintaining their box formation, Anzio would lead them, 2,000 yards in front. Normandy and Yorktown would take position 2,000 yards to starboard, with Jones in trail. The two under way-replenishment ships, with O’Bannon and all the frigates in close escort, would form a second, decoy group. Helicopters would be aloft, both to patrol and, with their radar transponders on, to simulate much larger targets. The various COs agreed on the plan and waited for their helicopters to return them to their commands. It was the first time in ages that an American naval formation had stood in harm’s way without a carrier in close support. Their bunkers full of fuel, the group formed up as planned, pointed their bows northwest, and bent on twenty-six knots. At 1800 local time, a flight of four F-16 fighters blazed overhead, both to give the Aegis ships a chance to practice fire-control against live targets and also to verify the IFF codes to be used for the night’s mission.
MOHAMMED ALAHAD, THEY saw, was just as ordinary as hell. He’d come to America more than fifteen years earlier. He was said to be widowed and childless. He ran a decent and profitable business on one of Washington’s nicer shopping streets. He was, in fact, in there right now. Though the CLOSED sign was on the door, they supposed he had nothing better to do but sit in his shop and go over his bills.
One of Loomis’s squad went up to the shop and knocked on the door. Alahad came to open it, and a brief conversation ensued, with the expected gestures, and they could figure what was being said. I’m sorry, but all businesses are closed because of the President’s order—Yeah, sure, but I don’t have anything to do, and neither do you, right?—Yes, but it is an order—Hey, who’s gonna know, what’d’ya say? Finally the agent went in, wearing a surgical mask. He stayed there for ten minutes before coming back out, walking around the corner, and making a radio call from his car.
“It’s a rug shop,” the agent told Loomis over the encrypted radio channel. “If we want to toss the place, we’ll have to wait.” There was already a tap on the phone line, but so far there had not been a single call in or out.
The other half of her squad was in Alahad’s apartment. There they found a photo of a woman and a child, probably his son, wearing something like a uniform—about fourteen, the agent thought, photographing them with a Polaroid. But again, everything was pure vanilla. It was exactly the way a businessman would live in the Washington area, or an intelligence officer. You just couldn’t tell. They had the beginning of a case, but not enough evidence to take to a judge, certainly not enough for a search warrant. Their probable-cause quotient was a little on the thin side. But this was a national-security investigation involving the personal safety of the President, and headquarters had told them that there were no rules. They’d already committed two technical violations of the law in invading two apartments without a warrant, and two more in tapping a couple of phone lines. With all that work accomplished, Loomis and Selig made their way into an apartment building across the street. From the manager, they learned that there was a vacant apartment facing Alahad’s storefront. They got the keys to that without any difficulty and set up their surveillance of the front, while two more agents watched the back door. Sissy Loomis then used her cellular phone to call headquarters. Maybe it wasn’t enough to take to a judge or a U.S. attorney, but it was enough to talk to another agent about.
ONE OTHER POTENTIAL subject wasn’t completely clear yet, O’Day noted. There was Raman, and a black agent whose wife was a Muslim and who was evidently trying to convert her husband—but the agent had discussed it with his comrades, and there was a notation in his file that this agent’s marriage, like others in the Service, was on shaky ground.
The phone rang.
“Inspector O’Day.”
“Pat? It’s Sissy.”
“How’s Raman looking?” He’d worked three cases with her, all involving Russian spies. The cheerleader had the jaw of a pit bull once she got onto something.
“The message on his phone, the wrong number?”
“Yeah?”
“Our rug merchant was calling a dead person whose wife is allergic to wool,” Loomis told him.
Click.
“Keep going, Sis.” She read off her notes and the information garnered by the people who’d entered the dealer’s apartment.
“This one feels real, Pat. The tradecraft is just too good. Right out of the book. It looks so normal that you don’t think about it. But why the pay phone, except that he’s worried somebody might have a tap on his phone? Why call a dead man by mistake? And why did the wrong number go to somebody on the Detail?”
“Well, Raman’s out of town.”
“Keep him there,” Loomis advised. They didn’t have a case. They were still struggling for probable cause. If they arrested Alahad, he’d have the sense to ask for a lawyer—and what did they have? He’d made a phone call. He wouldn’t have to defend the call. He just had to say nothing. His lawyer would say it was all some kind of mistake—Alahad might even have a plausible explanation already prepared; he’d keep that one in his pocket, of course—ask for evidence, and the FBI would have nothing to show.
“That tips our hand, too, doesn’t it?”
“Better safe than sorry, Pat.”
“I have to take this to Dan. When are you tossing the shop?”
“Tonight.”
THE TROOPERS OF the Blackhorse were thoroughly exhausted. Fit and desert-trained soldiers that they were, they’d spent two-thirds of a day in airplanes with dry air, sitting in cramped seats, their personal weapons in the overhead bins—that always got a curious reaction from the stewardesses—and then arrived eleven time zones away in blazing heat. But they did what they had to do.
First came gunnery. The Saudis had established a large shooting range for their own use, with pop-up steel targets as close as three hundred meters and as far as five thousand. Gunners bore-sighted their weapons, then tried them out, using real ammunition instead of practice, then learned that the war shots were far more accurate, the projectiles flying “right through the dot,” meaning the circular reticle in the center o
f their sighting systems. Once off the transport trailers, drivers exercised their mounts to make sure that everything worked properly, but the tanks and Bradleys were in the nearly mint condition promised on the flight over. Radio checks were made so that everyone could talk to everyone else. Then they verified the all-important IVIS data links. The more mundane tasks came last of all. The Saudi-deployed M1 A2s did not yet have the newest modification to the vehicle series, pallet-loaded ammunition racks. Instead there was a large steel-wire bustle for personal things, especially water. One by one, the crews cycled their vehicles through the course. The Bradley crews even got to fire a single TOW missile each. Then they entered the reloading area, taking on new ammunition to replace what had been expended on the range.
It was all quiet and businesslike. The Blackhorse, because they trained other soldiers so regularly in the fine art of mechanized death, were utterly desensitized to the routine tasks of soldiering. They had to remind themselves that this was not their desert—deserts all look pretty much alike; this one, however, didn’t have creosote bushes and coyotes. It did have camels and merchants. The Saudis honored their hospitality laws by providing food and soft drinks in abundance to the troopers, while their senior officers conferred over maps with the region’s bitter coffee.
Marion Diggs was not a big man. A cavalryman all of his life, he’d always enjoyed the ability to direct sixty tons of steel with his fingertips, to reach out and touch someone else’s vehicle at three miles’ distance. Now he was a senior commander, effectively commanding a division, but with a third of it two hundred miles to the north, and another third aboard some ships which would be running a gauntlet later this evening.
“So what are we really up against, how ready are they?” the general asked.
Satellite photos went down, and the senior American intelligence officer, based at KKMC, went through his mission brief. It took thirty terse minutes, during which Diggs stood. He was very tired of sitting.
“STORM TRACK reports minimal radio traffic,” the briefing officer, a colonel, reported. “We need to remember that they’re pretty exposed where they are, by the way.”
“I have a company moving to cover it,” a Saudi officer reported. “They should be in position by morning.”
“What’s Buffalo doing?” Diggs asked. Another map went down. The Kuwaiti dispositions looked all right to his eye. At least they were not forward-deployed. Just the screening force on the berm, he saw, with the three heavy brigades in position to counter a penetration. He knew Magruder. In fact, he knew all three of the ground-squadron commanders. If the UIR hit there first, outnumbered or not, the Blue Force would give the Red one hell of a bloody nose.
“Enemy intentions?” he inquired next.
“Unknown, sir. There are elements to this we do not understand yet. Washington has told us to expect an attack, but not why.”
“What the hell?”
“Tonight or tomorrow morning for that, best I can tell you, sir,” the intel officer replied. “Oh, we have newsies assigned to us. They flew in a few hours ago. They’re in a hotel in Riyadh.”
“Marvelous.”
“In the absence of knowledge of what they plan to do ...”
“The objective is plain, is it not?” the senior Saudi commander observed. “Our Shi’ite neighbors have all the desert they need.” He tapped the map. “There is our economic center of gravity.”
“General?” another voice asked. Diggs turned to his left.
“Colonel Eddington?”
“Center of gravity is political, not military. We might want to keep that in mind, gentlemen,” the colonel from Carolina pointed out. “If they want to go for the coastal oil fields, we’ll have a lot of strategic warning.”
“They do have us outnumbered, Nick. That does give them a certain degree of strategic flexibility. Sir, I see a lot of fuel trucks in these photos,” the American general noted.
“They stopped at the Kuwait border the last time because they were out of fuel,” the Saudi commander reminded them.
The Saudi army—actually called their National Guard—comprised five heavy brigades, almost all of it American equipment. Three were deployed south of Kuwait, with one at Ras al Khafji, site of the only invasion of the Kingdom, but right on the water, and nobody expected an attack from the sea. It was not unusual for soldiers to prepare to fight the last war, the American remembered.
For his part, Eddington remembered a quote from Napoleon. When shown a defense plan that had troops evenly spaced on the French border, he’d asked the officer if the idea was to prevent smuggling. That defensive concept had been given the patina of legitimacy by NATO’s doctrine of forward defense on the inner German border, but it had never been tested, and if there were ever a place to trade space for time, it was the Saudi desert. Eddington kept his mouth shut on that one. He was junior to Diggs, and the Saudis seemed quite possessive about their territory, as most people were. He and Diggs shared a look. As the 10th Cav was the theater reserve for the Kuwaitis, so the 11th would perform the same function for the Saudis. That might change when his Guardsmen mounted their tracks at Dhahran, but for the moment this deployment would have to do.
One big problem with the situation was the command relationship in place. Diggs was a one-star—one hell of a good one, Eddington knew, but just a brigadier. Had CENTCOM been able to fly over, he would have had the rank status to make firmer suggestions to the Saudis. Evidently, Colonel Magruder of the Buffalo Cav had done something like that, but Diggs’s position was just a little ticklish.
“Well, we’ll have a couple of days, anyway.” The American general turned. “Get additional recon assets in place. If those six divisions fart, I want to know what they had for dinner.”
“We’ll have Predators going up at sunset,” the intel colonel promised.
Eddington walked outside to light a cigar. He needn’t have troubled himself, he realized after a few puffs. The Saudis all smoked.
“Well, Nick?” Diggs asked, joining him.
“Beer’d be nice.”
“Just empty calories,” the general observed.
“Four-to-one odds, and they have the initiative. That’s if my people get their gear in time. This could get right interesting, Diggs.” Another puff. “Their deployments suck.” A phrase acquired from his students, his senior thought. “By the way, what are we calling this?”
“BUFORD, Operation BUFORD. Pick a moniker for your brigade, Nick?”
“How’s WOLFPACK grab you? It’s the wrong school, but TARHEEL just doesn’t sound right. This damned thing’s going pretty fast, General.”
“One lesson the other side must have learned from the last one: don’t give us time to build our forces up.”
“True. Well, I have to see after my people.”
“Use my chopper,” Diggs told him. “I’ll be here a while.”
“Yes, sir.” Eddington turned, saluted, and started walking off. Then he turned. “Diggs?”
“Yes?”
“Maybe we’re not as well-trained as Hamm and his boys, but we’ll get it done, y’hear?” He saluted again, tossed his cigar, and walked off to the Black Hawk.
NOTHING MOVES AS quietly as a ship. An automobile moving at this speed, a fraction below thirty miles per hour, made noise one could hear for hundreds of yards on a silent night, but for a ship it was the high-frequency swish of steel hull cutting through what were at the moment calm seas, and that didn’t carry very far at all. Those aboard could feel the vibrations of the engine, or hear the deep sucking breath of the turbine engines, but that was all, and those sounds scarcely carried a hundred yards across the water at night. Just the swish, and behind every ship was a foaming wake, a ghostly shade of green in the water from tiny organisms upset by the pressure wave of their passage, and phosphorescing as some sort of biological protest to the disturbance. To those on the ships, it seemed hellishly bright. On every bridge, the lights were turned down, so that night vision wouldn’t be compromi
sed. Navigation lights were turned off, a rules-of-the-road violation in these confined waters. Lookouts used conventional binoculars and light-amplification gear to scan forward. The formation was just now turning the corner, in the narrowest part of the passage.
In every combat information center, people hovered over scopes and charts, talking in whispers lest they somehow be heard. Those who smoked wished they could in the antiseptic spaces, and those who’d quit now wondered why. Something about a health hazard, they remembered as they contemplated surface-to-surface missiles mounted in emplacements about fifteen thousand yards away, each of them with a ton of explosives right behind the seeker-head.
“Coming left, new course two-eight-five,” the officer of the deck reported on Anzio.
On the main plot, there were over forty “targets,” as radar contacts were called, each with a vector showing approximate course and speed. The number of inbounds and outbounds was about the same. Some of them were huge, the radar returns of supertankers being about that of a medium-sized island.
“Well, we’ve made it this far,” Weps said to Captain Kemper. “Maybe they’re asleep.”
“Maybe there really is a Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.”
Only navigation radars were turning now. The Iranian /UIR-ians had to have ESM gear over there, but if they were standing a patrol in the Strait of Hormuz, they hadn’t spotted it yet. There were unexplained targets. Fishing boats? Smugglers? Somebody in a pleasure craft? There was no telling. Probably the enemy was a little reticent about sending their vessels too far over the centerline of the strait. The Arabs were as territorial as everyone else, Kemper imagined.
The ships were all at battle stations. All combat systems were fully powered up, but on standby. If somebody turned toward them, they would first try to get a visual. If somebody lit them up with a targeting radar, then the ship on the clearest bearing would step up her alert level somewhat and make a few sweeps with the SPY radars to see if there might be an inbound track. But that would be tough. Those missiles all had independent seeker-heads, and the strait was crowded, and a missile just might acquire something unintended. The other side couldn’t be all that trigger-happy. They might even end up slaughtering a few thousand sheep, Kemper thought with a smile. As tense as this part of the mission was, the task for the other side wasn’t all that easy.
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