Captain Dasht smiled as he angled his Flogger-D in for a landing. So far, this war was going very well for Iraq. He couldn’t wait for the debriefing and to tell how they had wiped out at least twenty jet fighter aircraft on the ground. It would be an attack that would long be remembered in Iraqi military history.
Captain Hadr stood in his tank, watching out from the hatch. So far, he had not used the cannon. There had been no targets. His machine gun had been fired three times at infantry. The Syrian soldiers had scattered, and at least half had been killed or wounded. Each time, there had been no more than a dozen Syrian infantrymen. They would be no trouble.
His radio came on, and he listened carefully.
“Company, we may have some trouble just ahead. The lead tank reports a pair of Syrian tanks, the T-55 type. They evidently have dug in with just their cannons and turrets showing. It looks like they have been ordered to stand and fight.”
“Range?” someone asked.
“Twenty-five hundred yards. They haven’t fired yet.”
“Flank them,” Captain Kayf said.
“Go, Hadr. Take a forty-five to the right. I’ll take a forty-five to the left. Fire as soon as you see the side of the tank. Race you.”
Both tanks slanted out on an angle and raced through the desert. Captain Hadr kept looking through his sights and range finder to his left. At last he saw a mound that looked out of place. Yes, the tank had prepared a nest. The side bank of dirt wasn’t high enough to hide the tank. He swung his machine around; the gunner sighted in on the tank and fired.
Just after the first round, Captain Kayf’s tank fired. Both rounds hit the Syrian tank and jolted large pieces of it into the air. Evidently, some rounds inside went off. The second tank in the blocking position turned and charged to the west and was soon lost in the dirt cloud it produced.
The Iraqi tanks re-formed, then charged ahead again.
“Well past the ten-mile mark,” Captain Hadr told his crew. “Wonder when we stop and regroup and let the infantry catch up?”
A moment later, a furious geyser of dirt, dust, and shrapnel exploded twenty yards in front of them.
“Hard left turn,” Captain Hadr yelled at his driver. He swiveled around to the right to try to find the tank that had fired at him. He couldn’t find it. A thousand yards away, a pale haze of smoke hung over some brush near a small spring. Then another puff of smoke appeared in the same spot. Hadr yelled at his gunner and spun the gun around. The tank’s old computer figured the range and settings, and before the other tank could fire again, Captain Hadr sent a round in counterbattery. It exploded in the brush, then nothing. No fire from a tank burning, no men running from the brush, no return fire, either.
“We either scared him away or hurt him,” Captain Hadr said and reported the shot to his commander.
Captain Kayf took his report. “Good shooting. In another two miles, we’ll have come fifteen. There we stop and let the rest of them catch up with us and give us some lateral support. Our flanks right now are wide open.”
They had no more action in the next two miles. They went down the gentle side of a wadi and up the other side and set up their line of tanks on a small ridge that gave them a view for eight miles to the west across the desert floor. They could see no sign of life.
“Tank commanders, pop the lid and take a look around. There must be some Syrian air out there somewhere,” the tank’s radio said. “Let’s see that they don’t catch us by surprise. Just how effective their air is depends on what kind of air-to-ground missiles they have. Let’s hope they don’t have the guided kind. Look sharp.”
It was almost an hour before any of the other elements caught up. Then it was half a dozen armored personnel carriers. They parked on the near side of the wadi and waved at the tankers. A Russian jeep pulled up next. It hesitated on the top of the wadi, then drove down and up the other side and stopped at the first tank. A bird colonel came out of the jeep and called to the tanker on top.
He was directed down three rigs to the tank company commander.
The Syrian MiG-29 Fulcrum-A came out of the desert without a hint of any forward sound. Someone shouted, then the big fighter dropped a missile. It ignited at once at two hundred feet and jetted at Mach 2 on line at the tank commander’s machine. Before the men could more than look up in wonder, the four-hundred-pound missile exploded on the front of the tank. It erupted in a shattering roar as thirty of the high-explosive cannon rounds inside the tank went off in a sympathetic detonation.
The jet screamed overhead and made a sweeping turn and headed back.
The tank was a shattered hulk of twisted metal and smoking shards. The jeep had been caught in the explosion as well, and its fuel tank went up to finish the jeep and kill the colonel and the driver.
By the time the jet came back, the .50-caliber machine guns on the armored personnel carriers were activated and met the jet head-on with a chattering fire of hot lead. It wavered early on, and the second missile missed its target, but the shrapnel killed a tank commander who stood in his machine.
The Syrian MiG-29 Fulcrum made one more run but high up, evidently surveying the mass of men and machines so far inside Syria. Then it streaked away to the west.
Captain Hadr grabbed an AK-47 and jumped to the ground. The commander’s tank was gone, disintegrated. The commander and his crew were dead, too. He had slammed three rounds at the Syrian jet when it made its second pass.
He shook his head. In an instant, the commander and his crew were dead. It could happen to him. He watched another Russian jeep drive down the wadi and up the near side. It stopped next to his tank, and a colonel looked at him.
“Captain, one of these tanks yours?”
Captain Hadr saluted smartly. “Yes, Colonel. This one, number 34.”
“You are now promoted to major and are in command of this tank group. You still have fifteen tanks. I’ll bring you a new radio so I can contact you. When we’re ready, you’ll move out in the spearhead again and work the way your company did today.
“Too bad about Captain Kayf. Things like this happen in a war. I’m Colonel Irbil. We’ll be in this position for the rest of the afternoon and evening. I’ll have a platoon of infantry out in front of you as a security patrol. Talk to your men.” The colonel shook his head. “No, let me use your radio, and I’ll talk to them.” The colonel climbed into the tank and used the tank-to-tank radio and told the men about their new commander, Major Hadr. He came out quickly and headed back across the wadi, where more and more troops and equipment were gathering.
Hadr went to the first tank and talked to the men, his men. Damn, he was a major now.
22
Lieutenant Commander Blake Murdock and Ed DeWitt looked at Don Stroh where the SEALs had assembled in their room on the carrier.
“So that’s it?” Murdock asked.
“That’s it,” Stroh said. “Simple little job. Those two Iranian submarines have been prowling around the Enterprise again, and we’ve had permission to go in and take them out. Yes, we have some submarines in the gulf, but it’s only three hundred feet deep except in two spots. No sub driver likes those kinds of conditions. No place to dive to in case of trouble. One sub commander told me he felt like he was a sitting duck in a bathtub here in the gulf.”
“Why doesn’t our sub sink their sub?” Murdock asked.
“That would be an official act, an act of war. We’re not at war with Iran. But when we send you men in sub rosa, it could be just a whopping big accident, or maybe Syria sabotaged them.”