tank's fuel gage was reading empty. He immediately radioed the battalion commander and informed him of the problem. The battalion commander ordered the battalion to pull off the road and halt for ten minutes. That done, he radioed Vorishnov and ordered him to dismount and personally check each tank's fuel status and then report to him.
By the time Vorishnov finished and approached the battalion commander's tank at the front of the column, the regimental commander was there.
Vorishnov saluted the two colonels and reported, 'As we suspected, the battalion is out of fuel. Half of the tanks' fuel gages, including nunc, show they are empty. A commander on one of those tanks said he had no idea what his tank was running on anymore.
We also have three tanks that have completely run dry. The rest of the tanks are approaching empty.' He was about to add that the battalion could no longer advance, but decided not to. That conclusion was obvious, but the decision had to be made by a commander, not by a battalion staff of cer
The regimental commander spoke first. 'We must continue. Continue until we can go no further. Fuel, I am sure, will make its way forward.'
The battalion commander did not hesitate to disagree. 'Comrade Colonel, we cannot do that. If we run ourselves completely out of fuel, the battalion will be totally strung out and unable to maneuver.
We will be nothing more than steel pillboxes dotting the road and easy prey for attack aircraft or a counterattack. We must stop now and laager here into a defensive position until fuel arrives. We should go forward only when we can do so with all the tanks and with some measure of assurance that we will not run out of fuel in the middle of a battle.'
'I cannot halt the attack. I do not have the authority to do that,' the regimental commander said.
The battalion commander shot back, slightly agitated now, 'Comrade, either we stop the attack now, while we are still together and have some fuel to maneuver with, or we wait until the lack of fuel stops us when we are not.
Your only choice, Comrade Colonel, is whether you want the regiment to be together and have some fighting capability or whether you want it to be scattered to the four winds. The lack of fuel has already stopped us.'
With a sigh, the regimental commander acknowledged that the other was right. Before he returned to his command vehicle, he ordered the battalion commander to assume a defensive posture to the west. The battalion immediately behind would swing to the east and do likewise.
With the regimental commander gone, Vorishnov turned to his battalion commander and asked the question that neither of them had the answer for: 'Now what?'
The AWACS controller had been tracking a single-aircraft plot for over fifteen minutes, coming from the northeast. At first he thought very little of it. The plane was flying relatively slowly and very low.
Then it dawned upon him that it was a recon flight. He informed the commander and immediately began to search the area for fighters providing high cover.
There was none. Both he and the commander thought that odd. Sending in recon without cover was not a normal practice. A single one without air cover was as good as dead. Satisfied that all was as it appeared, the commander ordered the alert fighters from Bandar Abbas to scramble and intercept. The order of the day was to keep the Soviets from getting any air recon through.
The Army was maneuvering about, doing something really weird, and didn't want the Russians to catch on before they were ready.
The order to scramble caught Martain dozing. The entire squadron was dead on its ass after yesterday. Omaha Flight alone had gone up eight times, four of them in the ground-attack role, three times to provide cover for their own air-recon flights and once to squash a Russian recon flight. The men and the machines of the squadron were reaching their limits. Martain had once thought he would never reach the point where he would hate flying.
He had been wrong. After yesterday, he was sick of it.
Mechanically, he and his wingman did their preflight. Though the ground crew tried, they too dragged as they did their thing to get the two F-15s airborne. Because of exhaustion, the whole procedure took far longer than normal. When the F-15s were finally up and Martain checked in with the
AWACS controller, the controller sneered, 'Good morning. Hated to wake you guys up so early.'
Martain was livid. 'Cut the crap, clown, and give me a vector.'
The commander on the AWACS, monitoring the transmission, got on both of them and ordered them to restrict 258 transmissions to proper radio procedures. Martain was about to tell him to fuck off, too, but decided against that. No need to piss off a full-bird colonel that early in the morning.
Following the instructions from the controller, Omaha Flight closed on the boggy. Once they were in the area, Martain's wizzo switched on the radar and began to search for their target. They had no trouble finding it, for the boggy continued on a straight-line course, flying low and slow. While his wingman covered him, Martain went down after the boggy. As he tracked it, the wizzo called out, 'Hey, Ed, this guy's a real zombie. He just keeps flying low and dumb. Let's play with him for a while.'
Martain thought about it but decided against it. 'Screw that, Frank. This is too easy. Let's just bounce this clown and get back. No doubt today is going to be a real zoo, just like yesterday.'
The wizzo agreed and gave Martain the final information he needed for the setup. Martain took over, aligned his sights. When he heard the tone telling him he had missile lock, he held his fire for a moment.
The boggy continued to fly straight and low, making no attempt to evade. 'Jesus, Frank. That guy must be asleep. Or he's in a real hurry to meet his maker.'
'Well, Ed, if that's so, go ahead, make his day.'
Without further hesitation, Martain launched a shortrange Sidewinder air-to-air missile. Both he and the wizzo tracked it until it hit. In the predawn darkness, there was a slight explosion ahead and below them. Immediately after that, the plot disappeared, indicating that Martain had made his tenth confirmed kill.
Chapter 14
Men willingly believe what they want to.
When the orders to attack were received by the 2nd Brigade, the brigade staff had no doubt that the staff of the 13th Corps was hallucinating.
The orders came by courier shortly before 1900 hours at a brigade CP that was shadow of its former self. Most of the wheeled vehicles were still unaccounted for or lost. The signal platoon, unable to break down its multichannel equipment in time, lost much of it. The TOC itself, while it had not lost any of its M-577 command-post tracks, had little of its equipment left. Personnel losses were equally staggering. Many of the brigade staff who had not been on duty at the time of the attack were either dead, wounded or missing.
Worse than the physical losses, bad as they were, was the psychological damage. The survivors suddenly found themselves face to face with the reality of war. 'Battle' was no longer a paper drill of moving little markers about on a map or writing orders. The idea that their primary task was the cool analytical process of thinking about and debating tactics had been smashed. They had seen the face of war. It was the shattered remains of a body left in the dirt.
It was Major Price, a first-class runner and all round jock, reduced to a helpless cripple with a severed spine. It was the smell of fear and the look of panic in the eyes of people with whom they had worked for so long. And, worse, it was the realization that only the dead had seen an end to the suffering and horror.
This was the brigade staff-stunned by their introduction to combat, left with three M-577 command-post tracks, operating with an ad hoc communications lash-up which was less than adequate-that received the order to attack. Their reactions, though slow at first, were surprisingly positive. The senior officers and NCOs led by example
