Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (320 page)

But then it began to stop. It stopped being duty. It stopped being revenge. It stopped being the fun they’d expected it to be. It became murder, and one by one, the men on the weapons realized what they themselves were supposed to be and what they might become if they didn’t turn away from this. It wasn’t like being an aviator, hundreds of meters away, shooting at shapes that moved comically in their aiming systems and were never really human beings at all. These men were closer. They could see the faces and the wounds now, and the harmless backs of people running away. Even those fools who still shot back attracted pity from the gunners who dispatched them, but soon the futility of it was clear to everyone, and soldiers who’d arrived in the desert with rage grew sick at what the rage had become. The guns gradually fell silent, by common consent rather than order, as resistance stopped, and with it the need to kill. Battalion Task Force LOBO rolled completely through the smoking ruin of two heavy brigades, searching for targets worthy of professional attention, rather than personal, from which they had to turn away.

THERE WAS NOTHING left to be done. The general stood and walked away from his command vehicle, beckoning for the crew to do the same. On his order, they put their weapons down and stood on high ground to wait. They didn’t have to wait long. The sun was rising. The first glow of orange was to the east, announcing a new day far different from the old.

THE FIRST CONVOY rolled right in front of them, thirty fuel trucks, driving at a good clip, and the drivers must have taken the south-moving vehicles for those of their own army. The Bradley gunners of I-Troop, 3rd of the 10th, took care of that with a series of shots that ignited the first five trucks. The rest of them halted, two of them turning over and exploding on their own when their drivers rolled them into ditches in their haste to escape. The Bradley crews mainly let the people get clear, plinked the trucks with high-explosive rounds, and kept moving south past the bewildered drivers, who just stood there and watched them pass.

IT WAS A Bradley that found him. The vehicle pulled to within fifty meters before stopping. The general who, twelve hours before, had commanded a virtually intact armored division didn’t move or resist. He stood quite still, as four infantrymen appeared from the back of the M2A4, advancing with rifles out, while their track covered his detail with even more authority.

“On the ground!” the corporal called.

“I will tell my men. I speak English. They do not,” the general said, then kept his word. His soldiers went facedown. He continued to stand, perhaps hoping that he could die.

“Get those hands up, partner.” This corporal was a police officer in civilian life. The officer—he didn’t know what kind yet, but the uniform was too spiffy for a grunt—complied. The corporal next handed his rifle off and drew a pistol, walked in, and held it to the man’s head while he searched him expertly. “Okay, you can get down now. If you play smart, nobody gets hurt. Please tell your men that. We will kill them if we have to, but we ain’t going to murder anybody, okay?”

“I will tell them.”

WITH THE COMING of daylight, Eddington got back into the helicopter he’d borrowed, and flew to survey the battlefield. It was soon plain that his brigade had crushed two complete divisions. He ordered his screen forward to scout ahead for the pursuit phase that had to come next, then called Diggs for instructions on what he was supposed to do with prisoners. Before anyone figured that out, a chopper arrived from Riyadh with a television crew.

EVEN BEFORE THE pictures got out, the rumors did, as they always do in countries lacking a free press. A telephone call arrived in the home of a Russian embassy official. It came just before seven, and awakened him, but he was out of his house in minutes and driving his car through quiet streets to the rendezvous point with a man who, he thought, was finally crossing the line to become an agent of the RVS.

The Russian spent ten extra minutes checking his back, but anyone following him this morning would have to be invisible, and he imagined that a lot of the Ayatollah’s security forces had been called up.

“Yes?” he said on meeting the man. There wasn’t much time for formalities.

“You are right. Our army was—defeated last night. They called me in at three for an opinion of American intentions, and I heard it all. We cannot even talk with our units. The army commander simply vanished. The Foreign Ministry is in a panic.”

“As well it might be,” the diplomat thought. “I should tell you that the Turkoman leader has—”

“We know. He called Daryaei last night to ask if the plague story was true.”

“And what did your leader say?”

“He said that it was an infidel lie—what do you expect?” The official paused. “He was not entirely persuasive. Whatever you said to the man, he is neutralized. India has betrayed us—I learned about that, too. China does not yet know.”

“If you expect
them
to stand with you, you have violated your religion’s laws on the consumption of alcohol. Of course, my government stands with America as well. You are quite alone,” the Russian told him. “I need some information.”

“What information?”

“The location of the germ factory. I need that today.”

“The experimental farm north of the airport.”

That
easy? the Russian thought. “How can you be sure?”

“The equipment was bought from the Germans and the French. I was in the commercial section then. If you wish to confirm, it should be easy. How many farms have guards in uniform?” the man asked helplessly.

The Russian nodded. “I will see about that. There are other problems. Your country will soon be fully—by which I mean
completely
—at war with America. My country may be able to offer her good offices to negotiate a settlement of some kind. If you whisper the right word into the right ear, our ambassador is at your disposal, and then you will have done the world a service.”

“That is simple. By noon we will be looking for a way out of this.”

“There
is
no way out for your government. None,” the RVS officer emphasized.

63

THE RYAN DOCTRINE

W
ARS USUALLY BEGIN AT exact moments in time, but most often end neither cleanly nor precisely. Daylight found the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment in command of yet another battlefield, having completed the destruction of one of UTR II Corps’s divisions. The other division was now facing the Saudi 2nd Brigade, which was attacking from the rising sun while the American unit halted again to refuel and rearm in preparation for the continued attack on III Corps, still not decisively engaged.

But that was already changing. Those two divisions now had the full and undivided attention of all tactical aircraft in theater. First their air defense assets were targeted. Every radar which switched on drew the attention of HARM High-speed Anti-Radiation Missile—equipped F-16s, and in two hours the skies were friendly to American and Saudi pilots. UIR fighters made an effort to strike down from their home bases to defend their beleaguered ground forces, but none made it past the radar-fighter screen set up well beyond the location of the forces they had been dispatched to support. They lost over sixty aircraft in the futile attempt. It was easier for them to lash out at the Kuwaiti brigades which had so impudently invaded their vastly larger and more powerful neighbor. The small air force of that country was on its own for most of the day, and the battle had little strategic relevance. The routes across the swamps were cut and would take days to repair. The resulting air battle was more a display of mutual anger than anything else, and here, too, the Kuwaiti forces held the day, not spectacularly so, but giving three kills for every one they absorbed. For a small country learning the martial arts, it was a battle that men would talk of for years, the magnitude of their deeds growing with every recounting. Yet all the deaths on this day would be useless, lives wasted in mere punctuation of a decision already reached.

Over III Corps, with the SAMs taken out, attention turned to more structured murder. There were over six hundred tanks on the ground, another eight hundred infantry carriers, more than two hundred pieces of towed and self-propelled artillery, several thousand trucks, and thirty thousand men, all of them well inside a foreign nation and trying to escape. The F-15E Strike Eagles circled at about 15,000 feet, almost loitering on low power settings, while the weapons-systems operators selected targets one by one for laser-guided bombs. The air was clear, the sun was bright, and the battlefield was flat. It was far easier than any exercise in the Nellis bombing range. Lower down in different hunting patches, F-16s joined in with Maverick and conventional bombs. Before noon, III Corps’s three-star commander, correctly thinking himself the senior ground officer, ordered a general retreat, gathered up the support trucks laagered in KKMC, and tried to get his units out in something resembling order. Bombs falling on him from above, the Saudi 5th Brigade approaching from the east, and an American force closing on his rear, he turned northwest, hoping to cross back into friendly territory at the same point he had entered. On the ground, his vehicles used smoke to obscure themselves as best they could, which somewhat frustrated the allied aviators, who did not, however, come down low to press their attacks, since the UIR forces might have shot back with some effect. That gave the commander hope that he might make it back with something like two-thirds of his strength. Fuel was not a concern. The combined fuel trucks for the entire Army of God were with his corps now.

DIGGS STOPPED OFF first to see Eddington’s brigade. He’d seen the sights and smelled the smells before. Tanks could burn for a surprisingly long time, as much as two days, from all the fuel and ammunition they carried, and the stink of diesel oil and chemical propellants served to mask the revolting stench of burning human flesh. Armed enemies were always things to be killed, but dead ones soon enough became objects of pity, especially slaughtered as they had been. But only a few, in relative terms, had died by the guns of the men from Carolina. Many more had surrendered. Those had to be gathered, disarmed, counted, and set to work, mainly in disposing of the bodies of their fallen comrades. It was a fact as old as warfare, and the lesson for the defeated was always the same:
This is why you don’t want to mess with us again.

“Now what?” Eddington asked, a cigar in his teeth. The victors suffered through many mood swings on the battlefield. Arriving in confusion and haste, facing the unknown with concealed fear, entering battle with determination—and, in their case, with such wrath as they had never felt—winning with exhilaration, and then feeling horror at the carnage and pity for the vanquished. The cycle changed anew. Most of the mechanized units had reorganized over the last few hours, and were ready to move again, while their own MPs and arriving Saudi units took possession of the prisoners gathered by the line units.

“Just sit tight,” Diggs replied, to Eddington’s disappointment and relief. “The remains are running hard. You’d never catch them, and we don’t have orders to invade.”

“They just came at us in the same old way,” the Guard colonel said, remembering Wellington. “And we stopped them in the same old way. What a terrible business.”

“Bobby Lee, remember, Chancellorsville?”

“Oh, yeah. He was right, too. Those couple of hours, Diggs, getting things set up, maneuvering my battalions, getting the information, acting on it.” He shook his head. “I never knew anything could feel like that... but now...”

“ ‘It is good that war is so terrible, else we should grow too fond of it.’ Funny thing is, you forget sometimes. Those poor bastards,” the general said, watching fifty men being herded off to trucks for the ride back to the rear. “Clean up, Colonel. Get your units put back together. There may be orders to move, but I don’t think so.”

“Three Corps?”

“Ain’t goin’ far, Nick. We’re ‘keepin’ up the skeer’ and we’re running them right into the 10th.”

“So you know Bedford Forrest after all.” It was one of the Confederate officer’s most important aphorisms.
Keep up the skeer:
never give a fleeing enemy the chance to rest; harry him, punish him, force him into additional errors, run him into the ground. Even if it really didn’t matter anymore.

“My doctoral dissertation was on Hitler as a political manipulator. I didn’t much like him, either.” Diggs smiled and saluted. “You and your people did just fine, Nick. Glad to have you on this trip.”

“Wouldn’t have missed it, sir.”

THE VEHICLE HAD diplomatic tags, but the driver and passenger knew that such things had not always been respected in Tehran. Things changed in a country at war, and you could often spot previously clandestine facilities by the fact that they got more guards in time of trouble instead of remaining the same. The latter would have been far smarter, but everyone did it. The car halted. The driver lifted binoculars. The passenger lifted a camera. Sure enough, the experimental farm had armed men around the research building, and that wasn’t the normal sort of thing, was it? It was just that easy. The car turned in the road and headed back to the embassy.

THEY WERE GETTING only stragglers. The Blackhorse was in full pursuit now, and this tail chase was proving to be a long one. American vehicles were better and generally faster than those they were pursuing, but it was easier to run than to chase. Pursuers had to be a little careful about possible ambushes, and the lust to kill more of the enemy was muted by the concern at dying in a war already won. Enemy disorder had allowed the 11th to pull in tight, and the right-flank units were now in radio contact with the advancing Saudis, who were just now finishing off the last few battalions of II Corps and thinking about engaging III in a final decisive battle.