73 EASTING
Slightly stunned, the infantry scrambled out of their IFVs and did a foot recon all around the area. They found signs of a long-term camp, and dead bodies, and a couple of empty APCs, but no living soldiers in the wadi. The uphill slope was littered with burning machinery. Dead Iraqis were scattered around, looking like piles of rags in the dusty starlight. If there were others, they had broken and were gone. They buttoned up again and hit the slow road, on and on into the big gray wasteland, and all the way they hit not one damn thing. If this was AirLand War, as far as Crane was concerned, they could mail it in and wake him when it was over.
Later that day, as a bleak desert rain drifted across the horizon and the light turned from pale gray to deep dun yellow and black, Wolochek got on the ’net from his Company IFV to get an update.
He told Huckaby to take 1st Squad of 3rd Platoon in the IFV and do a sweep, see if there were Iraqis around, but not to get sucked into anything ugly. Advance to Contact, then pull back and call it in.
They settled back into a slow advance in skirmish and went forward, grinding up the slope. In their rear they could see other units mopping up the remainders, blue lights flashing like cop cars at an accident, and the radio cross talk died away after a few sit-rep checks. The silence came back in around them, just the steady growling and clanking of the tanks and the TOWs and the IFVs, spreading out in Traveling Overwatch and Combat Column now that the terrain was opening up. Everyone was getting jumpy now. Where the hell was Bob and all his goddam gear?
Boomer popped up again like a prairie dog, looking a little worried. He leaned over toward Crane.
“That contact back there? That wasn’t operational. That was FUBAR! How’d they get inside us?”
“It’s a big country. I’d say they were there a long while, up the wadi, had everything shut down so there’d be no thermal, had all the bodies inside their Erks and Bumpers, so we’d get no heat signature. Scouts would have passed them by in the dark. A regular VC ambush—let the point man go by, take out the patrol in enfilade.”
“Shit, Dee … where the hell is Bob?”
At that point, three Kiowas and an Apache gunship went through their airspace at speed, a thousand feet up.
“Something’s up” said Boomer.
At that point, they got the commander’s call sign on the MSE Internet. About fifty miles up the line, Eagle Troop of the 2nd Armored Cavalry had encountered elements of what looked like the Tawakalna Republican Guards at phase line 73 Easting. They had fought hard, sustained losses, but they had marked out and defined the target. Now they were waiting for backup and Franks had changed his plans for the Big Red. They were now going to power forward forty miles and pass through the 2nd Armored to engage the Tawakalna. Pass through their own units engaged in a firefight. And engage a massive Iraqi armored division. Listening to LC Pat Ritter’s laconic voice on the radio as he described what had to be one of the most dangerous military maneuvers in the book, neither Crane nor Boomer could think of one damned thing to say.
So they just did it.
It was a minute before midnight, the twenty-seventh of February. The rain was ceaseless and chilling, and everybody was soaked through to their boots. The inside of the M1s were hot and wet as the rain dripped through the leaky turret seals. They had cleared the last of the nearly invisible units of the 2nd Cavalry, marked off with glowing chemical wand-lights, talked through the rear-echelons by the Ops Officer of the 3rd Squadron. Now there was nothing ahead of them but the Iraqis. The radio ’net talk was terse, staccato, full of tension.
“Blue One, roger. Say again, Kilo Team?”
“Kilo Team Leader, this is it. This is it. It’s the Guards. Tanks. Arty. BMPs and Erks and APCs. Multiple infantry on foot. Multiple infrared contacts through ninety degrees. T Seventy-Twos, Sixty-Twos, lots and lots of APCs and BMPs. Estimate OpFor at division-strength. Bearing zero six five range five thousand six hundred repeat multiple contacts. Can you support?”
Support? Crane had to laugh. If Franks didn’t support, he’d be back in Frankfurt cleaning latrines with his mustache. Jack would see to it personally.
“Kilo Leader, this is Blue One, we will support. Kilo Leader, patch yourself through to ComCon One, tell the man! We will engage immediate upon ComCon One okay. Do not engage yourself. Pull back and wait for support. Do not paint them again. Do not switch on ranging radar. Go to Tac Two on your MSE. Blue Team, you copy that?” Crane could hear the other tank platoons acknowledging the orders.
As they were reacting, the MSE Internet web was blistering all the way up to Rhame’s mobile HQ. Rhame had been expecting this and now the time had come to take the Republican Guard to pieces. The assault tactics were doctrine, practiced time and time again in the hills and fields around Fort Riley, and in any number of sand-table run-throughs in the KTO. Everyone knew what to do.
Soon both battalions of the 34th Armor were deploying for an armored assault, almost ninety M1 tanks, along with the cavalry platoon M3 Bradleys, twelve self-propelled mortars, and elements of tanker support units. And in support of the armor, the two battalions of the 16th Infantry, each with four companies of infantry in Bradleys, a headquarters company with M2 IFVs, and anti-armor companies with M901 TOW vehicles and M113 Command-tracked vehicles. And in the air, deployed for support, two battalions of the 1st Aviation, close to eighty choppers, a mix of Kiowas and Cobras and Apache gunships. To a lizard sitting under a rock and watching, they must have looked like the worst shamal of the season.
Boomer was already dropping down the hatch. Crane heard his answer on the crew ’net, Boomer’s voice low and steady. “Roger, Blue One, we copy.”
The other tankers in the platoon responded and Crane felt Godzilla lurch to the left and accelerate, a blast of smoke and heat coming out of her exhaust vents. The engine noise was deafening up in the hatch and Crane dropped into the turret compartment, bracing himself in a fold-away seat behind Lymons. Lymons grinned at Crane.
“Sergeant Crane. I hear you did good up there.”
Bigrig twisted to give him the thumbs-up sign, smiling, flushed with the afterburn of a firefight. Crane smiled briefly and buckled in.
The entire column was now spreading out in an assault formation as the forward elements, the cavalry scouts and the Kiowas, were sending back GPS and fire data directly to Blue One’s ballistic computers. Forward fire control numbers started to appear on Boomer’s Internet screen.
Crane watched Boomer listening to information on a combat tactical channel, punching numbers into his GPS as Jimmy brought Godzilla up to speed. Forty … forty-three … forty-nine …
Fifty miles an hour.
Inside the tank it was an altogether different experience for Crane. He had nothing to do but brace himself against the bounce and plunge of their headlong advance and watch the numbers change on Bigrig’s plasma screen. The muted roar of the fifteen-hundred-horsepower turbine was changing into a deep whistling howl. Christ, thought Crane, what would it be like to sit in a stone-bermed emplacement down-range and watch something like this iron mountain come at you? Godzilla. Boomer had named the tank very well.
Intelligence reports on the combat readiness of the Tawakalna and 12th Tank divisions indicated that they were virtually untouched by coalition air power. Hussein had committed his Guard units in the original assault into Kuwait, and then withdrawn them, replacing them with inferior line units. He wanted to use the Guards as a threat force against his own forward units. If his forward units knew that a retreat would only bring them under the guns—and the fundamentalist fury—of the Guards, they might fight harder against the infidel hordes. Well, that was the plan, anyway.
Crane had a handbook listing the probable size and firepower of the Tawakalna. He tugged it out of his flak jacket and held it up to the red glow of a maplight behind the Lymons position.
Jesus. This was going to be interesting as hell.
The Guards were Hussein’s SS, supposed to be the very best, the most fanatical, the least “attritted” by the air war. There was no reason to believe that this collision would be anything like the breakthrough back at the jump-off point, hammering into a broken brigade of half-starved and thoroughly cowed Iraqi conscripts.
Everybody in the Republican Guards division was a made man, part of Hussein’s Takriti Mafia, and every one of them knew that if Hussein went down, they’d go with him. They had every reason to fight hard and, according to Crane’s handbook, a hell of a lot to fight with.
The Tawakalna had two maneuver brigades left, and each brigade had two battalions of armor, sixty tanks to a battalion, for a probable total of one hundred and twenty tanks, plus mechanized infantry and mobile artillery. The 12th Tank Division had perhaps another sixty tanks operational, with support from their own mortars, and infantry fighting from APCs with machine guns. The ground forces in front of them were supposed to have air support from a battalion of Hind gunship choppers—Crane would believe that when he saw it, since most of the Iraqi choppers had either been vaporized by Apaches or had simply “bugged out” at top speed. The guys in 1st Aviation had taken to calling the Hind battalions Bob’s Bug-out Brigade.
Well, no matter how you cut it, the 1st Infantry Division was about to collide with at least one hundred and eighty T-72 tanks backed up by mobile arty and mechanized infantry—probably over three thousand enemy soldiers. Crane looked around the turret chamber, at the flickering yellow numbers on the plasma screens and the red glow of the interior lights, at Lymons’s glossy black skin, and at Bigrig’s skinny shoulders hunched over the thermal imager, and then at Boomer Riebold. Boomer was looking into his own imager and as Crane watched him, he began to smile, a slow revealing of blood-red teeth in the cabin glow. He looked up and saw Crane watching him.
“Dee, this you gotta see. Come here—Bigrig, you getting this?”
“Roger that, Boomer.”
Crane leaned over Boomer’s shoulder. On the IR screen they could see a field of targets, green and pulsing slightly. Crane could see the outline of tanks and smaller indistinct shapes that looked like personnel carriers. And around the carriers, even smaller man-shaped blobs formed into larger clusters, broke apart, rejoined like green Jell-O. Boomer was humming like a small electrical engine.
“Why haven’t they fired?”
Boomer looked at the laser range indicator.
“Bob’s out there about three thousand yards. I don’t think he can see us. All he’s got are optical sights. There’s hardly any light and the oil fumes are making it even worse. Bigrig, can you get that tank ranged?”
“Roger that.”
The turret swiveled and the hydraulics whined as Bigrig got the main gun sights onto the distant tank. The laser range finder flickered through some numbers. So far, it looked like Blue Four was the first tank in the platoon to make contact.
“Blue Four to Blue One. I have a tank at three thousand two hundred yards bearing zero-six-five. Can I engage?”
“Blue Four, this is Blue One. Wait one. We’re gonna hit them all at once. Boomer, everybody has targets. Break.”
“Roger, Blue One.”
Boomer took his mike away from his mouth.
“That I don’t get. Bob knows we’re here. He just got lit up by First Aviation. Why give him a chance to get set?”
“He’s already set, Boomer. There’s nothing he can do to change the game now. That’s positional warfare—OpFor did it all the time. I’d say he’s still betting on his ambush dispositions. Anychway, he can’t actually see anything. He may be dumb enough to figure he was dinged by scouts, figure the rest of the ground forces are a long way away. Whatever, he’s got no choice but to sit still and hope he has a strong enough position to carve us up forward and break us into a running fight, expose our flanks to Saggers and RPGs. There’ll be infantry all over, in every rathole. Let me talk to Wolochek, will ya?”
Boomer handed him a link mike from the wall set.
“Baker Six Actual, this is Crane in Blue One.”
“Blue One, this is Six.”
“Six, we go in, there’ll be antitank all around, infantry in the woodwork to the flanks. Do you want me to come back, link up with the platoon leaders?”
“Six to Blue One, negative on that. Stay up with Blue Leader, we’ll deploy left and do an Overwatch. Keep us up to date if you see anything we need to watch for. Out.”
“Roger, Six Actual, Blue One out.”
Boomer smiled. “Glad to have you staying. What’ll happen, we’ll get into position, move up inside three thousand yards. What we do, we usually assign targets to everybody in the platoon, see that—”
“Boomer, I was at the NTC. Gimme a break.”
Boomer grinned at him. “Sorry. With you sitting there doing squat, I forgot you were eleven bravo. I figured you were Just Another—”
“Fucking Observer, yeah. Want me to go up, get on the seven-six-two?”
“It’s gonna be hot up there. If you want, okay. But don’t blame me, you get your head taken off. There’s gonna be a shit storm of steel flying around out there in about thirty seconds.”
“I stay here, all I’m gonna do is puke down Lymons’s back. Gimme your NVGs.”
“So go. Watch your head.”
Boomer handed Crane a set of night-vision goggles and Crane pulled the strap over his helmet. Boomer leaned back over the screen and pulled the helmet mike around. Crane slapped him on the shoulder and crawled over to the loader’s hatch, pushing it up and out.
It was a relief to get his head out into the night air. There were tanks and IFVs everywhere around him, right and left and in the rear, perhaps a hundred different vehicles within a five-hundred-yard front line. He fiddled with the setting on the NVGs until he got a fairly clear image of the machinery around him, a vast green plain filled with softly luminous shapes and plumes wavering in the chilly wind.
In the next few seconds, the advance elements would have established target assignments and agreed on fields of fire. Everybody had a priority target and a series of secondaries. The idea was to open up all at once, destroy as much of the enemy’s Command and Control units as possible, and then blow the shit out of everything else. Up ahead the Iraqi forces were deployed in an ambush formation, in positions that should have concealed them from ordinary night eyes, hull-down behind hasty berms of sand, camouflaged with brush and canvas rigging, backed up into wadis and riverbanks and rocky defiles. They also had their ears on, but so far no Iraqi units had been able to intercept, let alone decipher, the fast-burst encrypted information that was flying around them on tactical ’nets.
The terrain was rough and broken ground, a tilted irregular plain almost ten miles wide by twenty miles deep, pocked with sinkholes and little ravines, low sand hills and rocky crests. Bob had dug himself in all over the place, in every location that provided the least bit of fire protection.
The trouble was, it was a cold night, there was fog and mist and oil smoke everywhere, and Bob was stone blind. Worse than that, Bob was warm.
Warm enough to show up on hundreds of thermal imagers, and those thermal imagers were attached to tanks or TOWs or Apache gunships that could kill from a very long way away, much farther than anything Bob could throw. If the first volley was telling enough, they might be so rattled that the whole division would break and scatter, and once they lost unit cohesion, they were dead.
Godzilla had been purring up a little grade and was now hull-down, the main gun clearing the rise but the bulk of her body hidden by the slope. On the helmet ’net, Crane listened to Boomer’s low and slightly lazy voice, and the Internet cross talk, short, sharp bursts of information, laconic and flat, as the company commanders worked out their dispositions and made their final target assignments. Now they were just waiting for the word to come down from Rhame. They got it about a minute later.
A half second later, they blew the night to pieces.