then, the battalion, with the scouts out front, continued forward.
The tank commander of the T-80 heard the squeaking but could not pinpoint it. He whispered to his gunner to search the area, but got no response.
Looking down, the tank commander saw the gunner hunched over, asleep.
With his left boot the commander kicked the gunner in the back. The gunner began to curse, but was cut short when the tank commander curtly reminded him that the penalty for sleeping while on outpost duty was death. When he had the gunner's attention, the commander ordered him to search the area. There was something moving out there.
The gunner switched on his night-vision sight and put his eye up to it.
The darkness turned to day. On his first sweep he scanned his sector without noticing anything. But as he traversed the turret back, he saw an antenna, not more than four hundred meters away. He yelled to his commander that he had them. The commander, watching through his sight, also did not see the antenna at first. Only when the turret of the Bradley slowly began to rise above the crest of the hill did he see the source of the noise.
Pleased and excited, the tank commander reported the sighting and ordered the gunner to prepare to engage.
As they pulled into a turret defilade, Capell ordered the driver to stop.
He keyed the intercom and ordered the gunner to search the area. Using his night-vision goggles, Capell leaned forward and also began to search for signs of the enemy. He never saw the T-80's muzzle flash or heard the crack of the 125mm. gun. A brilliant flash and a shower of sparks that lit the night and washed over Capell were the first indication that they were in the presence of the enemy. The noise of ripping metal was accompanied by the scream of the driver. Capell felt a wave of searing heat rush up between his legs. The gunner, his hatch closed, was engulfed in flames, screeching at the top of his lungs, like a wild animal in agony. The smell of burning flesh and the intensity of his own pain destroyed Capell's ability to reason. With fire racing up his back, he began screaming louder than his gunner.
The detonation of stored TOW missiles stopped Capell's screams, throwing him clear of the turret into the dirt, where he writhed and squirmed, his mind overwhelmed with pain and more pain.
The movement to contact was successful. The enemy had been located.
Chapter 15
Leadership is intangible, and therefore no weapon ever designed can replace it.
Deep in the bowels of the building that served as the Red Army's nerve center, a captain by the name of Dubask sat at a small desk overcrowded with papers and photos. He was hunched over, studying the latest glut of satellite photos. On one corner of the desk was a pile of photos awaiting his review. They had long since swamped the in box, flopping over onto his desk. He had little time to examine each in detail. For his task, however, he did not need much time. Unlike most of the other photo analysts in his section, Dubask was looking for a specific target. He could therefore ignore anything that did not fit his target criteria. He noted in very general terms items of interest he stumbled across, but left the detail analysis to someone else.
The target he was interested in seemed at first as though it would be simple to locate. He had to find a base camp with manufacturing facilities.
The KGB major who had briefed Dubask stressed continuously the importance of pinpointing this facility, though no reason was given. Nor was one expected. You did not ask questions unless you really had to.
The simple task, however, became frustrating. Dubask was amazed at the number of villages there were in the areas that were officially labeled uninhabited. It took him several days to confirm that most were in fact permanent settlements. His next problem was sorting out the roving bands of Iranian partisans. Once the permanent settlements had been tagged, he concentrated on these groups. Clearing them from the clutter took over a week as Dubask tagged each group and checked for them over the next several days.
If they moved, he stopped worrying about that area and reduced his list of likely targets. He didn't even bother with the numerous photos showing small groups, some as small as ten people, wandering about the great expanses of Iran. In Dubask's section, any group that numbered fewer than twenty-five people was considered tactically insignificant and was not reported. There was too much that needed to be reported to waste time on such a small number of people.
On this particular day Dubask came across two photos that caught his attention. The first was of an area in the Dasht-a Lut near a place called Robat-a Abgram. Several days before, when an early-morning photo dated 9 July showed a number of trucks gathered there in a compound of several buildings, he had marked that area as one that needed to be watched.
The photos of 8 and 10 July had shown no vehicles present. Digging back, he found that in earlier analyses of the area he had discounted the compound as being a permanent settlement and had scratched it from his list. The unaccounted-for appearance of trucks, however, was out of the norm. He had not seen trucks at any of the other settlements, the Iranians having been reduced to animals and foot for transportation. Dubask began to watch that area with greater interest, alerting his superior that Robat-a Abgram was a possible target.
The second item of interest, though not falling within his target criteria, was also sufficiently significant to warrant alerting his superior. In the southeast corner of the Dasht-a Lut he came across a large number of armored vehicles. A quick check showed that they did not belong to the 89th Motorized Rifle Division, the unit responsible for that area of the front.
The American unit opposing the 89th MRD was the 6th U.S. Marine Division, unit that did not possess large armored formations. The sudden appearance of these vehicles was out of the norm.
Dubask's first reaction was to pass the photo off to someone else, with a simple note on it, as he had done with another such photo on 9 July, the day he found the trucks at Robat-a Abgram. On that day he had come across a photo that showed large numbers of armored vehicles moving north around the eastern flank of the 28th Combined Arms Army. Dubask had thought this odd and important, but it was not his concern. He had already noted the trucks at Robat-a Abgram and wanted to go back and study that photo more closely. Dubask therefore placed a note on the photo and dropped it into an out box behind him. There it sat for an hour, until a runner making his rounds came by, emptied the out box and dumped the photo and the note into another overfilled in box on another analyst's desk. Somewhere in the process, the note and the photo became separated.
It was not until the tenth that Dubask made the connection between the disaster that befell the 28th CAA and the photo of the armor column he had looked at but passed on. All day on the tenth and the eleventh he sat at his desk, fearing that someone would find out that he had seen the photo but had taken no action. He feared what might happen to him and his family when it was found that he could have alerted STAVKA to the threat to the 28th CAA's flank. But no one said anything or even broached the subject.
From his desk he watched the routine continue unabated. Every hour a new glut of photos was distributed on the stack of unviewed photos already in the in boxes of the analysts in the section. Dubask's error went undetected.
Dubask finally satisfied himself that nothing would ever happen.
Everyone was too overwhelmed worrying about what was about to happen and did not have time to go back and try to figure out what had happened. Free of his unfounded fears, he began to concentrate on his immediate task, sorting through the stack before him, looking for the latest photos of Robat-a Abgram. He had already made two serious errors, discounting Robat-a Abgram the first time and the 9 July photo showing the U.S. armored column. They had been costly. Dubask doubted he would be as lucky a third time.
The sun had already dipped below the western horizon when Staff Sergeant Hernandez woke his platoon leader, Sergeant First Class Duncan.
