But there was none to be found. As two tanks from the lead company began to pour machine-gun fire into the area Vorishnov had indicated, another tank, equipped with a plow blade, began to move down the road past the fuel trucks, now pulled off to the side. When it reached the remains of the destroyed fuel truck, it pushed them through the defile and out of the way.
Then the plow tank pulled off the road and began to fire toward the area at which the other tanks were shooting. Those two tanks, in turn, ceased fire and moved down the road to join the plow tank.
Vorishnov, by then, had mounted his BTR and followed the two tanks through the defile. Once on the other side, the tanks deployed off the road near the plow tank and began to search the area for signs of the enemy. As Vorishnov also searched the far hill with his binoculars, he realized that their efforts were fruitless. The enemy was gone. Odds were, it had been nothing more than two men with a rocket launcher. Guerrillas, stay-behinds whose sole purpose was to harass and disrupt the Soviet rear area. Still, Vorishnov thought as he turned to look at the remains of the shattered fuel truck, their choice of targets had been good. In order to reach the Strait of Hormuz, the 28th CAA would depend on a long line of fuel trucks like the one just destroyed. The army couldn't afford to lose too many of them to stray parties of guerrillas wandering about its supply routes. Either the Iranians had been incredibly lucky to hit such an important target or they knew exactly what they were doing and had waited for the fuel trucks. If the latter was the case, the delays the 28th CAA had experienced to date were only a foretaste of hard times to come.
Visions of a second Afghanistan began to creep into Vorishnov's troubled mind.
Lieutenant General Weir tried hard to relax on the soft sofa that ran along the wall of the Pentagon office belonging to the Army's Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations. He needed to. Since the beginning of the current crisis he had had little time to do so. The stress, an irregular schedule and poor eating habits were beginning to take their toll on him. He thought back to his days as a younger of cer when it had seemed as though he could go for weeks with barely two hours of sleep and one Cration meal a day. That, however, was a long time ago.
Since then he had put a lot of mileage on his body, and it was beginning to tell.
The briefing he had just left had done little to ease his anxiety over the upcoming operation. The initial concept and plan he had been given on the twenty-fourth of May had changed almost daily. Additional intelligence, a better grasp of who all the players were, what the Soviets and the United
States were capable of doing and what help the U.S. could expect had resulted in several revisions of the plan. While Weir didn't like the initial plan, he liked the revisions even less. Plans, like most things, do not improve when more people get involved.
The initial plan, called Blue Thunder, had been simple and limited in its objectives. The first phase was to move his 10th Corps, a Marine amphibious expeditionary force and supporting Air Force units to the vicinity of the
Persian Gulf and get them assembled. At best, it would require forty to fifty days to move and stage the necessary forces. During that time, the State Department was to work all the friendly governments in the area in an effort to secure bases and overflight rights while the CIA, the NSA and other intelligence agencies built a complete picture of what was happening.
The Navy would also have 40 time to establish superiority in the Gulf and assemble the required shipping to support large-scale operations.
Given time, there was even the possibility that the Iranian government could be convinced that it would be to its benefit to cooperate with the United States. But regardless of the Iranian response, once the true situation was clear a capable and fully assembled force operating from secure and friendly bases in the area would be able to take effective and meaningful action.
Unfortunately, war is seldom left to professional soldiers to manage.
From the very beginning, a hue and cry from the Congress and right-wing political factions called for an immediate response to the Soviet invasion.
With the cry of 'No more Afghanistans' to rally around, politicians of every persuasion offered their ideas on how to keep the world safe for democracy and punish the Russians. The newly elected President, not wanting to be labeled as indecisive or impotent, was stampeded into selecting a course of action that showed immediate results. The current plan fit the bill, but it was, at best, very risky.
The new plan called for the immediate introduction of the Rapid Deployment Force, or RDF, into Iran. The 17th Airborne Division, working with a Marine amphibious brigade, would seize from the Iranians an airhead centered around the city of Bandar Abbas on the Strait of Hormuz.
Reinforced with the 12th Infantry Division (Light) and the 52nd Infantry Division (Mechanized), these units would move inland and west along the coast to establish blocking positions to prevent the Soviets from reaching the Persian Gulf. The 10th Corps, when it arrived, would continue that expansion.
With his head laid back on the sofa, Weir was lost in his thoughts and didn't notice that Lieutenant General Robert Horn, the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, had entered the room until Horn reached out and offered him a cup of coffee. Weir and Horn had been classmates at West
Point, had served in the same armored cavalry squadron in Vietnam, had commanded armor battalions in the same division at the same time and had attended both the Command and General Staff College and the Army War College together. Throughout the years their careers had paralleled and crossed. They had stayed in close touch, considering themselves the best of friends and confidants on all matters, personal and professional.
It was therefore natural that they shared the same misgivings about the upcoming operation in Iran.
Rather than sit at his desk, Horn settled down in a leather chair opposite
Weir. After taking a sip of his coffee, he said, 'The Chief doesn't buy our argument. The plan goes as briefed.'
Weir thought about that for a moment, then laid his head back against the sofa. 'Then the Airborne Mafia has won. Next thing you know they'll want to send in another light-infantry division for good measure.'
'Don't be so quick. That was seriously considered. I had a hell of a fight cutting that one out.'
Weir's head shot up. 'You have got to be bullshitting me! It's bad enough that I've lost all priority on shipping. Does that cowboy who commands the 13th Airborne Corps seriously believe he can go toe to toe with Soviet tank units and hold all of southern Iran single-handed using a handful of grunts with oversized rucksacks on the ground? Doesn't anyone do a threat analysis around here anymore?'
'Frank, we have no choice. There's simply too much pressure to do something immediately. The RDF can get there faster than you can.'
'And do what, Bob, die? Sacrifice themselves in the name of political expediency? Damn it, Bob, you know that they can't do everything that they've been assigned. At best, they can hang on to Bandar Abbas and a couple of hundred kilometers of the coast. To push them inland along the line of Kazerun-Shiraz-Kerman-Zahedan without the 10th Corps is insane.
They have neither the manpower to hold that line nor the transportation to keep it supplied. The Soviets will simply bypass whomever they don't want to mess with and leave them to wither on the vine. Jesus, are we the only ones who see that, Bob?' Weir stopped and sipped on his coffee in an effort to compose himself.
'Frank, between you and me, the Vice agrees. He and I went in to the Chief and presented the same argument, a little less passionately, of course. The Chief, however, felt that the risks were acceptable. As he said, we need to 'get there the fastest with the mos test '
Weir pounded his knee with his fist, lowered his head and shook it from side to side. 'Damn it. It takes twelve hours to fly from Washington to Tehran. It only takes three hours to fly from Moscow to Tehran. How does the Chief expect us to get around that? And the Iranians? What about the Iranians? Has anyone been watching the news lately? How the hell is the 13th Airborne Corps going to hold the Russians and fight the Iranians?'
There were several moments of silence as the two generals sipped their coffee and thought. To date the Iranian government had refused all offers of U.S. assistance. Daily demonstrations in Tehran condemned the United States as fervently as they did the Soviets. Under the original plan, there would have been time to work out some type of arrangement or, at worst, allow the Soviets to get so deep into Iran that the Iranians would have no choice but to accept U.S. help. But the new plan didn't allow any time. The CIA was projecting that U.S. forces would be met with armed resistance by the Iranians. Ground forces would be fighting with hostile forces to their rear as well as their front.
Finally, Weir broke the long silence. 'Bob, I know you did your best.
