Mountains.
'Now what?' Ryan asked.
'Now you see why the cruisers are still there,' Jackson replied.
RAID WARNING WAS scarcely needed. The three cruisers, plus Jones, had their radars sweeping the sky, and they all acquired the inbound ballistic track over a hundred miles out. National Guardsmen waiting their turn to fetch their tracked vehicles watched the fireballs of surface-to-air missiles lance into the sky, leaping after things that only radars could see. The initial launch of three exploded separately in the darkness, and that was that. But the soldiers were now even more motivated to collect their tanks as the triple boom came down from one hundred thousand feet.
On Anzio, Captain Kemper watched the track disappear from the display. This was one other thing Aegis should be good at, though sitting still under fire wasn't exactly his idea of fun.
THE OTHER EVENT of the evening was a spirited air battle over the border. The AW ACS aircraft had watched what turned out to be twenty-four fighters coming in directly for them in an attempt to deny the allies air coverage. That proved a costly exercise. No attack on the E-3B aircraft was actually accomplished. Instead, the UIR air force continued to demonstrate its ability to lose aircraft to no purpose. But would that matter? The senior American controller on one AWACS remembered an old NATO joke. One Soviet tank general ran into another in Paris and asked, 'By the way, who won the air war?' The point of it was that wars were ultimately won or lost on the ground. So it would be here.
60 BUFORD
IT WASN'T UNTIL SIX hours after the first artillery barrage that enemy intentions were clear. It took the reports of the helicopter reconnaissance to give an initial picture, but what finally turned the trick was satellite photography that was impossible to discount. The historical precedents flooded into Marion Diggs's mind. When the Fre'nch high command had got wind of the German Schlieffen Plan prior to World War I, their reaction had been, 'So much the better for us!' That assault had barely ground to a halt outside Paris. In 1940, the same high command had greeted initial news of another German attack with smiles—and that attack had ended at the Spanish border. The problem was that people tended to wed their ideas more faithfully than their spouses, and the tendency was universal. It was well after midnight, therefore, when the Saudis realized that the main force of their army was in the wrong place, and that their western covering force had been steamrollered by an enemy who was either too smart or too dumb to do what they'd expected him to do. To counter that, they had to fight a battle of maneuver, which they were unprepared for. The UIR sure as hell was driving first to KKMC. There would be a battle for that point on the map, after which the enemy would have the option of turning east toward the Persian Gulf—and the oil—thus trapping allied forces; or continuing south to Riyadh to deliver a political knockout and win the war. All in all, Diggs thought, it wasn't a terribly bad plan. If they could execute it. Their problem was the same as the Saudis', though. They had a plan. They thought it was pretty good, and they, too, thought that their enemy would connive at his own destruction. Sooner or later, everyone did, and the key to being on the winning side was knowing what you could do and what you couldn't. This enemy didn't know the couldn't part yet. There was no sense in teaching them that too soon.
IN THE SITUATION Room, Ryan was on the phone with his friend in Riyadh.
'I have the picture, Ali,' the President assured him.
'This is serious.'
'The sun will be up soon, and you have space to trade for time. It's worked before, Your Highness.'
'And what will your forces do?'
'They can't exactly drive home from there, can they?'
'You are that confident?'
'You know what those bastards did to us, Your Highness.'
'Why, yes, but—'
'So do our troops, my friend.' And then Ryan had a request.
'THIS WAR HAS started badly for allied forces,' Tom Donner was saying live on NBC Nightly News. 'That's what we're hearing, anyway. The combined armies of Iraq and Iran have smashed through Saudi lines west of Kuwait and are driving south. I'm here with the troopers of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, the Blackhorse. This is Sergeant Bryan Hutchinson of Syracuse, New York. Sergeant, what do you think of this?'
'I guess we're just going to have to see, sir. What I can tell you, B-Troop is ready for anything they got. I wonder if they're ready for us, sir. You come along and watch.' And that was all he had to say on the subject.
'As you see, despite the bad news from the battlefield, these soldiers are ready—even eager—for contact.'
THE SENIOR SAUDI commander hung up the phone, having just talked with his sovereign. Then he turned to Diggs. 'What do you recommend?'
'For starters, I think we should move the 5th and 2nd Brigades southwest.'
'That leaves Riyadh uncovered.'
'No, sir, actually it doesn't.'
'We should counterattack at once!'
'General, we don't have to yet,' Diggs told him, staring down at the map. The 10th sure was in an interesting position…. He looked up. 'Sir, have you ever heard the story about the old bull and the young bull?' Diggs proceeded to tell one of his favorite jokes, and one which, after a few seconds, had the senior Saudi officers nodding.
'YOU SEE, EVEN the American television says that we are succeeding,' the intelligence chief told his boss.
The general commanding the UIR air force was less sanguine. In the past day, he'd lost thirty fighters, for perhaps two Saudi aircraft in return. His plan to bore in and kill the AW ACS aircraft which so tilted the odds in the air had failed, and cost him a gaggle of his best-trained pilots in the process. The good news, for him, was that his enemies lacked the aircraft needed to invade his country and do serious damage. Now more ground forces were moving down from Iran to advance on Kuwait from the north, and with luck all he would have to do would be to cover the advance ground forces, which his people knew how to do, especially in daylight. They'd learn about that course in a few hours.
A TOTAL OF fifteen Scud-type ballistic missiles had been launched at Dhahran. Hitting the COMEDY ships had been a long shot at best, and all of the inbounds had either been intercepted or, in most cases, had fallen harmlessly into the sea during a night of noise and fireworks. The last of the load — mainly trucks at this stage— were rolling off now, and Greg Kemper set his binoculars down, as he watched the line of brown-painted trucks fade into the dawn haze. Where they were heading, he didn't know. He did know that about five thousand very pissed-off National Guardsmen from North Carolina were ready to do something.
EDDINGTON WAS ALREADY south of KKMC with his brigade staff. His WOLFPACK force would probably not get there in time to fight a battle. Instead, he had headed them to Al Artawiyah, one of those places which sometimes became important in history because roads led there. He wasn't sure if that would happen here, though he remembered that Gettysburg had been a place where Bobby Lee hoped to get some shoes for his men. While his staff did their work, the colonel lit a cigar and walked outside, to see two companies of men arriving with their vehicles. He decided to head over that way while the MPs got them scattered into hasty-defense locations. Fighters screamed overhead. American F-15Es, by the look of them. Okay, he thought, the enemy'd had a pretty good twelve hours. Let 'em think that.
'Colonel!' a staff sergeant Bradley commander saluted from his hatch. Eddington climbed up as soon as the vehicle stopped. 'Good morning, sir.'
'How is everybody?'
'We're just ready as hell, sir. Where are they?' the sergeant asked, taking off his dust-covered goggles.
Eddington pointed. 'About a hundred miles that way, coming this way. Tell me about how the troops feel, Sergeant.'
'How many can we kill before they make us stop, sir?'
'If it's a tank, kill it. If it's a BMP, kill it. If it's a truck, kill it. If it's south of the berm, and it's holding a
