Executive orders - Tom Clancy [588]
That was no longer there. It had been located by its radio transmissions and pounded by a full brigade of UIR artillery in its unprepared position just as the survivors from STORM TRACK arrived with the scout troop. In the first hour of the Second Persian Gulf War, a thirty-mile rent had been made in the Saudi lines, and there was a direct path to Riyadh. For that, the Army of God had lost half a brigade, a stiff price, but one which they were willing to pay.
THE INITIAL PICTURE wasn't clear. It rarely was. That was the advantage the attacker almost always had, Diggs knew, and the job of the commander was to make order from chaos and use the former to inflict the latter on his enemy. With the destruction of STORM TRACK, his Predator capability was temporarily gone and would have to be reestablished. The 366th had deployed without J-STARS airborne RADAR capable of tracking the movement of ground troops. Aloft were two E-3B AWACS aircraft, each with four fighters in close attendance. Twenty UIR fighters came up and started going after them. That would be exciting for the Air Force.
But Diggs had his own problems. With the loss of STORM TRACK and its Predator drones, he was largely blind and his first remedial action was to order the 10th Cav's air squadron to probe west. Eddington's words had come back hard to him. The Saudi center of gravity might not be an economic target after all.
OUR TROOPS ARE inside the Kingdom, Intelligence told him. They are meeting opposition, but are breaking through. The American spy post has been destroyed.
The news didn't make Daryaei any happier. How did they know-how did they know?
The intelligence chief was afraid to ask how they knew what. So he dodged the issue: It does not matter. We will be in Riyadh in two days, and then nothing matters.
What do we know about the sickness in America? Why are not more people ill? How can they have troops to send?
This I do not know, Intelligence admitted.
What do you know?
It appears that the Americans have one regiment in Kuwait, and another in the Kingdom, with a third taking equipment from the ships-the ones the Indians failed to stop-in Dhahran.
So attack them! Mahmoud Haji almost shouted. The arrogance of that American, calling him by name in a way that his own people might have seen and heard and believed?
Our air force is attacking in the north. That is the place of decision. Any diversion from that is a waste of time, he replied reasonably.
Missiles, then!
I will see.
THE BRIGADIER COMMANDING the Saudi 4th Brigade had been told to expect nothing more than a diversionary attack in his area and to stand ready to launch a counterattack into the UIR right upon the commencement of their massed attack into Kuwait. Like many generals throughout history, he had made the mistake of believing his intelligence a little too much. He had three mechanized battalions, each covering a thirty-mile sector, with a five- to ten-mile gap between them. In an offensive role, it would have been a flexible deployment for harassing the enemy's flank, but the early loss of his middle battalion had split his command in two, leaving him no easy way to command the separated parts. He next compounded the error by moving forward instead of backward. A courageous decision, it overlooked the fact that he had one hundred miles of depth behind him to King Khalid Military City, space in which he could have reorganized for a weighted counterstroke instead of a fragmented impromptu one.
The UIR attack was made on the model perfected by the Soviet army in the 1970s. The initial break-in