“Think of us as a kind of military Uber,” he said. “Hell, if we’re supposed to ferry the silver bars into Baghdad, then we might not get tasked with heavy fighting orders.”
“Just what I was worried about,” said Sergeant King. “That explains why the heavy troops pulled out south over an hour ago. They got us bringing up the squadron rear now, and all because of this shmuck from CIA.”
“Ours is not to reason why,” said the Weasel.
Luckily, no one in the troop had died yet, and they wanted to keep things that way. They thought they would get orders to move, but lingered there at the airfield, watching more helos come and go, until a truck was brought up at the back of number three troop.
“Something’s going on back there,” said the King. “I think I just may well get the courage up to go see the Jackal and find out what’s up. That last helo was a Ghost Hawk. Did you see that?”
Wondering was one thing; finding out was another. Information usually flowed one way in the military, from the bottom to the top, and not the other way around until an operation started. The King figured he could see what the Jackal may have learned, but not now. Now was a good time to sleep, until they got real orders. He settled in, closing his eyes and thinking of better times.
Part VI
The Oil War
“God is a witness to anything done in secret.”
Chapter 16
Operation Clipper in the far south was a major success for the Coalition forces defending Saudi Arabia, and it immediately forced a retreat north into Kuwait. As that got underway, the 82nd Airborne had swooped in to set up blocking position on key roads, and a good many Iraqi formations were trapped, including the 8th, 10th, 15th, 28th, and 47th Motor Rifle Brigades. The prize included all that remained of the Al Faw Motorized Republican Guard Division, though the mechanized Andan Division was one of the lucky units to escape into northern Kuwait. These forces included the 1st, 6th, 9th, and 20th Motor Rifle Brigades, three Iranian Marine battalions, numerous Iranian Revolutionary Guard units, Takavar special forces, and their 92nd Armored Division, or what was left of it, about three battalions of armor.
The Iranian forces anchored their lines on the coast in northern Kuwait, forward of the port of Umm Qasr. Composed of about three to four brigades in actual strength, the line covered the Sabiryah Oil fields and stretched all the way west to the end of the Kuwaiti border. The four Iraqi MR Brigades then took over, positioning to screen and defend their own valuable Rumailah oil fields The Andan Republican Guard Division moved further north as a mobile reserve unit screening the valuable oil producing center of Basrah.
That was where all these surviving units would stay, in the south. They would not be attempting to conduct a long retreat north under withering Coalition air strikes as had been expected. Instead they would defend the key cities and installations in their sector, and of these, Basrah was the most important. To that end, Iran had promised, and was now sending, significant reinforcements into Iraq, seeing that as advantageous whether the war was won or lost.
All this was in keeping with the strategy Qusay Hussein had insisted upon—to disperse the combat power of the army to as many cities as possible, so that it could not be engaged or destroyed in any one decisive battle by the superior Western forces. If that were to be possible, it might only happen in Baghdad, which would surely be the site of major fighting. But positioning strong forces in the south, between Al Qurna and Abadan, was also forcing the Coalition to rethink its overall operational plan.
The major difference was that there would be not strong push north by US units after the liberation of Kuwait. There was only one US ground division there, 1st USMC, and the 3rd Brigade of 1st Cav, along with the 82nd Airborne. That entire corps would be needed to drive the invaders from Kuwait, and then secure Basrah and Abadan. In effect, this set up two distinct theaters for the war, SOUTHCOM based in Kuwait, and CENTCOM focused on Baghdad. So the fabled 21 day advance north by 1st Marine Division was not in the plans here. The Leathernecks would stay in the south.
There, along the marshy swamps of the Shatt al Arab waterway that ran through Basrah, the Iraqis hoped to create a kind of Stalingrad on the Tigris, or in this history, a Volgograd. Called the Arvand Rud, or “Swift River” by the Iraqis, that waterway was actually formed by the confluence of both the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, which joined further north at the city of Al Qurna. As wide as 2600 feet in some places, it presented a formidable water barrier, and had served in the south as the border between Iraq and Iran. As both nations had oil production facilities in that region, they had squabbled and fought there, until China brokered the peace.
Yet now China seemed very far away. No Chinese air squadrons had been sent to Iraq, and no troops had yet come from far away Beijing. The region was left on its own, though at least it would fight with much equipment that had been purchased from China over the years. Hot and humid in the summers, with temperatures topping 120 degrees (F), there were vast groves of date palm trees steaming in the heat. But was much cooler in January, with an average high between 63 and 68. Second only to Baghdad’s teeming 7.5 million souls, there were 2.6 million in Basrah, which made it a warren of virtually unlimited resistance fighters if things went that way.
The city was famous for the old mosque of Basrah, the first ever built outside the Arabian Peninsula. Now, in 2026, its sported shopping malls, a sports city, bustling markets and bazaars, swank hotels and amusement parks, like the Basra Fun City. Another park sat on “Sinbad Island” where one of the main bridges crossed the Shatt al Arab. Yet the thing that made it most important was oil, now as it was in WWII decades earlier. Today it was mostly managed by the Iraqi South Oil Company.
The so called “Mesopotamian Foredeep Basin” was rich with oil and gas fields. The Rumailah Oil fields alone contained 14% of the world’s known oil reserves, and further north, the West Qurna Oil Field was the second largest in the world with 42 billion recoverable barrels of oil. These were among the most lucrative supergiant fields in the world, so it was not the city, but these oil fields that would be the object of the campaign.
Executives at Western Oil Companies had been rubbing their palms together since the war began, realizing that the terrible disruption of their operations worldwide would also yield huge opportunities. They were already lining up for the bidding war on development rights after Iraq was “liberated.” Royal Dutch Shell was eying Kirkuk in the north. Both Shell and BHP Billiton were looking at the Missan fields on the Iranian border, and Petronas wanted the Majnoon field, along with the Chinese. Chevron had its mind set on taking the development contracts away from the Chinese in the big West Qurna fields complex. Exxon Mobile coveted the nearby Zubair fields, and the old master of the region dating from the last war, British Petroleum, was laying claim to the big Rumailah fields, where the Chinese presently had big interests. The fact that Basra’s 2.6 million citizens were in the region did not interest them in the least. That was just an unfortunate inconvenience, and a source of “above ground” complications they would have to deal with. So Basrah had to be tamed.