Sword Point (39 page)

There the regiment would assume a hasty defense and await further orders. With luck, orders would not arrive until dawn, maybe later. He could sleep. He would be able to lie down on the ground and wrap a blanket about himself and sleep. How wonderful that idea seemed to

Vorishnov. One could always hope.

East of Hajjiabad, Iran 2230 Hours, 9 July (1900 Hours, 9 July,
GMT
) The two Bradleys slowly inched their way up the small hill. Their engines were barely running above idle, almost inaudible in the still night air. The sound of track grinding on the sprockets was, on the other hand, piercing.

Capell stood in his open hatch, stretching in an effort to see over the top of the hill. He should have dismounted the scouts, now sleeping in the rear of the track, but had decided against it. They were exhausted. The whole platoon was. Since midnight the night before, the battalion had been on the move. An attack in the north, a withdrawal, now a movement to contact the enemy. At least when the enemy was finally found this time, the battalion was to go to ground and hold for a while. Perhaps they would finally have an opportunity to rest. Until 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.

Leadership is intangible, and therefore no weapon ever designed can replace it.

-
GENERAL
OMAR
BRADLEY

Moscow, Headquarters,
STAVKA
0845 Hours, 13 July (0545 Hours, 13 July,
GMT
)

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.

Northwest of Chah-a Qeyser 1915 Hours, 13 July (1545 Hours, 13 July,
GMT
)

The sun had already dipped below the western horizon when Staff Sergeant

Hernandez woke his platoon leader, Sergeant First Class Duncan.

Hernandez and three other men of the I st Platoon were completing their four-hour tour of guard duty. This did not mean, however, that they were finished for the day. On the contrary. Since they had escaped being annihilated with the rest of the battalion at Rafsanjan, Duncarrand his men had been operating exclusively at night.

By day the platoon went to ground, concealed in the nooks and crannies of the wadis and draws that cut through the Iranian wilderness like unhealed scars. It was only at night, hiding under the cloak of darkness, that they came out like the other desert predators. Their sole purpose in life since the twenty-eighth of June had been survival.

They moved south in the forlorn hope of eventually finding friendly forces. Making it back was only a hope-a dim, flickering light at the end of along, dark and dangerous tunnel. The more immediate tasks of escaping detection and finding sufficient food were the reality of the day, two problems that constantly loomed before each of the men with Duncan.

Simply put, these two tasks were in direct conflict with each other. On one hand, in order to live the men had to avoid being detected by the Soviet patrols searching for such ragtag collections of men. Besides the Russians,

Iranian bands also roamed the desert looking for unwary infidels, Americans and Russians alike. On the other hand, Duncan and his men had to hit either the Soviets or the Iranians to secure food, water, weapons and medicine. The trick was to find isolated groups or small convoys moving around at night, sneak up on them and hit them hard, fast and without mercy. They could not afford to take prisoners, who would only compound Duncan’s problems. By being selective about whom they hit and backing off from questionable confrontations, Duncan and his men had managed to survive two weeks and put many miles between themselves and their start point.

As Duncan passed from sleep to consciousness, his first reaction was to tighten his grip on the Kalashnikov assault rifle that lay at his side.

He had picked the Russian rifle up one night to replace his own M-16

when the platoon became short of 5.56mm. ammo. Hernandez watched this and calmed his platoon leader’s fears. “Nothin’ happening, Sarge. Just sunset.”

Duncan raised his head and turned slowly. Around him he could see the rest of the platoon being rousted out of their cubbyholes by Specialist Four

Thorton, one of Hernandez’s men. Duncan turned back to Hernandez.

“What’s for supper?”

Faking an Oriental accent, Hernandez said, smiling, “Oh, no problem, GI. fix you right up, chop chop.” He reached into a wide fatigue-pants pocket, pulled out a clump of foil and offered it to Duncan. “I got just the ticket for you, GI. Number one. Fresh five months ago.”

Duncan sat up and accepted the clump of foil. He looked it over before unwrapping it. When he began to peel away the foil, he did so with great care, not wanting to lose a single crumb. The prize in the center was a chunk of black bread. Under ordinary circumstances, he would have tossed it away. These, however, were not ordinary circumstances. Duncan knew that the chunk of bread, captured four days ago in the ambush of alone Soviet truck broken down on the side of the road, represented his entire evening meal.

As he inspected it, he decided that the fuzzy green mold growing on it had to go, starvation or not. He reached into one of his ammo pouches and pulled out a Swiss Army knife. As he carefully cut away the offending mold, he talked to Hernandez, the second man in the platoon’s chain of command.

“Everyone else get something to eat?”

Using his normal conversational voice, Hernandez replied, “Roger that,

Boss. Thorton’s passing out the last of the rations as he goes along.”

Finishing his carving, Duncan held the bread up before his face at arm’s length and inspected his dinner one more time. “I hope they fared better than I did.” With that he stuck it into his mouth, tore a chunk off with effort and began to chew, talking as he ate. “Well, looks like it’s time to go grocery shopping. What do you feel like tonight? More Russian, or should we try the local cuisine again?”

Hernandez made a face. “Fuck that Iranian shit. I’ve seen maggots turn down better food than what the Iranians eat. It’s no wonder these people are so pissed at the whole world. If I had to eat their food all the time, I’d have a grudge, too.”

“Beggars can’t be choosers. If we can’t find a good target on the road by midnight, we go into the nearest village and grab what we can. We don’t have the time to sit around and wait for the Soviets to send us a mess truck.”