On its way to the Kermanshah complex, Boogie was well clear of the Iranian VII Brigade's line of advance, since the main force of the Firouzabadi was preoccupied with reaching the Mashdad presidential palace which, according to reports, was under attack by a sizable paratroop force. Nevertheless, Boogie was to come under fire by a far smaller platoon-sized element of Takavar that was lurking just beyond the downslope of a deep wadi athwart the Eagle Patchers' line of advance.
In the wake of sporadic yet insistent special operations strikes against Iranian WMD facilities located in the vastness of the desert reaches, the general staff in Baghdad had opted to deploy small mobile units in strategic locations.
These light commando forces were downsized but heavily armed and, for Iranian troops, well-trained.
Each motorized desert platoon was equipped to fight spoiling attacks and stage ambushes against Western counter-WMD units sent into Iran. They had studied the enemy's methods of operation and had trained hard.
They were motivated, their unit morale was high and many of their troops were seasoned desert fighters. So it was not much of a surprise that neither Sgt. Death's Boogie Force or the two Viper gun ships spotted the telltale silhouette of the camouflaged periscope that poked its way up from above the crest of a sandy rise. Behind it, a spotter peered at the oncoming formation through one of the newest and most accurate night-vision scopes that Iran had imported from Germany.
Minutes later, Boogie was suddenly taking fire from seemingly everywhere at once. The jackhammering of automatic weapons began to fill the air and an RPG rocket strike came shrieking in, blowing up a JLTV, killing the troops inside and cooking off the stored armaments it carried, including the TOW missile in its roof-mounted launcher.
As the US armored vehicle burned, the rest of Boogie ate gravel and took up defensive positions. The chattering of small arms fire intensified as 80 millimeter mortar shells now rained down on the Americans with the characteristic sound of zippers opening to explode near the armored vehicles.
The mortars initially fell wide of the mark, but the Iranians in the mortar pit were getting updates from a spotter behind binoculars flat against the top of a desert rise, and they were beginning to walk their fire toward the center of the massed enemy armor.
The Pasdaran were clearly intent on slugging it out, because from out of the wadi came two BMP-2s, front-mounted 30-millimeter cannons blazing away while machinegunners poured 7.62-millimeter automatic fire at the American invaders. By this time, though, Boogie's fast and upgunned Bam-Bams were answering with their own 25-millimeter cannons, coaxial MGs and TOW ATGMs. In the course of the battle one of the Bimps took a TOW hit broadside from a maneuvering Bam-Bam, catching fire and going up in a whooshing fireball that rained down charred body parts and burning debris.
By now the two backup Angry Falcon AH-1Zs had overflown the combat zone and were cooking off missiles into the unfriendlies' positions.
The mortar pit was taken out by a salvo of Sidewinder missile strikes from one chopper while the surviving Bimps were set ablaze by the other helo. As every veteran infantry crunchy knows, one drawback of mortars is that being short-range artillery weapons, they make easy targets for counter-mortar air. The Takavar in the now blazing mortar pit had been taught this lesson the hard and permanent way.
The battle was extremely brief, but it was also very bloody. It had whittled down Boogie's forces and had caused many friendly casualties. Now the Omega unit's target installation would surely also be on the alert. Still, Boogie had no option except to push on, taking friendly dead — or what was left of some — with it in human remains pouches. The enemy the troops just left to the whims of the buzzards and the hot desert sun.
Breaux's forces were meanwhile mopping up resistance from other Iranian special ops detachments at the presidential palace, many of whom were putting up fanatical resistance. Either they had been threatened with death if they failed to halt the advance, or their objective was to stall the consolidation of the base by unfriendly forces until Iranian reserves from the Firouzabadi VII Mechanized arrived.
Probably the defenders' motivation was a mixture of both motivations, Breaux decided. The cluster of Global Hawk surveillance UAVs and manned E-8 JSTARS surveillance aircraft (both airborne assets fielded by USAF) orbiting just across the Iranian border in Iraq and over the northern reaches of the Persian Gulf were reporting the approach of a battalion-sized mobile force over Omega's ground-soldier ensemble technology-enabled tactical geospatial mapping displays so their morale might have been buoyed by reports that arrival in theater of friendlies was in progress.
The Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System, or JSTARS system, used a GSM or ground station module, a mobile companion rig on the ground containing radar and communications equipment needed to calibrate the movements and positions of the ground forces that JSTARS tracked. The GSM had been moved as close as possible to the Iranian border. Though sited in Kuwait, the GSMs were near enough to Iranian territory to bring the ops zone into proximal range of Joint STARS' scopes.
JSTARS, unlike AWACS, didn't operate with an air component alone, because it was one thing to track objects in the skies as AWACS did, but another to be flying hundreds of miles slant-range of ground-based targets and thereby fall victim to false returns common to slang-ranging. The airborne component of JSTARS was only one-half of the system; it was actually a ground/air system.
Breaux was not surprised either by the heavy defensive resistance or the new intel that enemy troops were advancing. Contingency plans had included the very obvious and distinct possibility that a battalion of invading Americans might just happen to alert Iranian forces to the fact they were coming under coordinated attack. Sand Viper's OPPLAN took this development — and other, even worse, scenarios — into consideration and provided for extraction under fire, should such become necessary. In the meantime, whatever jokers the Pasdaran was about to deal SFOD-O were still far enough away to worry about later. Right now, the force had its work cut out for it.
Breaux's assault troops were home free in some places, bogged down under fire in others, and mopping up suppressed resistance in yet others still. Blue Man was still on his rooftop, commanding a bird's eye view of the unfolding developments on the ground, while the building itself was in the hands of an Eagle Patcher security detail, part of whose role was to set up an O.P. and aid Blue Man as spotters from above.
On Breaux's end of the fight, the perimeter was already in friendly hands. Breaux wasted no time in joining one of the squads that were hunting for the super gun tubes and/or hybrid ammunition thought to be hidden somewhere on the estate. Breaux had been back-briefed and knew where the likely hiding places might be located.
His crew's job was to clear those hiding places of opposition, carefully search them, and destroy any weapons of mass destruction that were discovered.
Three squads had been assigned the task of locating and destroying weapons of mass destruction and precision machinery found on the estate. These squads, numbering six combat personnel each, now hit their assigned search areas.
Each squad had been briefed in what the search areas were suspected of harboring, in the type of threats they might face, and in what to do if they found anything. From downloaded satellite imagery, sand table models had been constructed. The squads had used the models to help plan their ends of the mission, and had also used the Ground Soldier Ensemble system's computerized TACMARS mission planning system.