Executive Orders

"But America does not have a tradition of deliberate attack on the i

"To our allies in Kuwait, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, and all the Gulf states: America stands again with you to stop aggression and restore the peace. Good luck." Ryan's voice changed then, for the first time allowing his emotions to show. "And good hunting."

The crewmen in B-Troop's command track looked at one another for several seconds before anyone spoke. They even managed to forget the presence of the reporter. The youngest of them, a PFC, looked down at shaking hands and had his say.

"Fuckers go

FOUR ARMORED PERSONNEL carriers were racing across the desert at about forty miles per hour. They avoided the beaten-dirt road to STORM TRACK for fear that it would be targeted with artillery fire; that proved to be a sensible precaution. Their first view of their objective was a cloud of smoke and dust drifting away from the ante

The four APCs picked their way through the fallen ante

IT AMAZED THE Saudi tank commander that surprise had been achieved. He knew that most of his country's forces were two hundred" miles to the east. But the enemy was here-and coming south. They weren't going into Kuwait or after the oil fields at all. That became plain when the first UIR tanks appeared in his thermal viewer, cresting a low spot in the berm, out of gun range because he'd been ordered not to move too close. The young officer really didn't know what to do. Ordinarily, his military worked under fairly tight control, and so he radioed back for instructions. But his battalion commander was busy now, his own command of fifty-four tanks and other vehicles spread over a front of thirty kilometers, all of which was being hit with indirect artillery fire, and much of which was reporting enemy tanks crossing the border, with infantry carriers in support.

The officer decided he had to do something, so he ordered his tanks forward to meet the attack. At three thousand meters, his men opened fire, and the first fourteen shots resulted in eight hits, not bad under the circumstances for part-time soldiers, he thought as he decided to stand and fight right there, and defend his soil against the invader. His fourteen tanks were spread over a line three kilometers long. It was a defensible deployment, but a stationary one, and in the center of his own line he was too fixed on what lay before him. The second volley got another six kills at the long range, but then one of his tanks took a direct hit from an artillery round, which destroyed its engine and started a fire that made its crew bail out, only to be shredded by more of the artillery fire before they could run five meters. He was looking that way and saw them die, four hundred meters away, and he knew that there was a hole in his line now, and he was supposed to do something about that.

His gu

That was no longer there. It had been located by its radio transmissions and pounded by a full brigade of UIR artillery in its unprepared position just as the survivors from STORM TRACK arrived with the scout troop. In the first hour of the Second Persian Gulf War, a thirty-mile rent had been made in the Saudi lines, and there was a direct path to Riyadh. For that, the Army of God had lost half a brigade, a stiff price, but one which they were willing to pay.

THE INITIAL PICTURE wasn't clear. It rarely was. That was the advantage the attacker almost always had, Diggs knew, and the job of the commander was to make order from chaos and use the former to inflict the latter on his enemy. With the destruction of STORM TRACK, his Predator capability was temporarily gone and would have to be reestablished. The 366th had deployed without J-STARS airborne radar capable of tracking the movement of ground troops. Aloft were two E-3B AW ACS aircraft, each with four fighters in close attendance. Twenty UIR fighters came up and started going after them. That would be exciting for the Air Force.

But Diggs had his own problems. With the loss of STORM TRACK and its Predator drones, he was largely blind and his first remedial action was to order the 10th Cav's air squadron to probe west. Eddington's words had come back hard to him. The Saudi center of gravity might not be an economic target after all.

"OUR TROOPS ARE inside the Kingdom," Intelligence told him. "They are meeting opposition, but are breaking through. The American spy post has been destroyed."

The news didn't make Daryaei any happier. "How did they know—how did they know?"

The intelligence chief was afraid to ask how they knew what. So he dodged the issue: "It does not matter. We will be in Riyadh in two days, and then nothing matters."

"What do we know about the sickness in America? Why are not more people ill? How can they have troops to send?"

"This I do not know," Intelligence admitted.

"What do you know?"

"It appears that the Americans have one regiment in Kuwait, and another in the Kingdom, with a third taking equipment from the ships—the ones the Indians failed to stop—in Dhahran."

"So attack them!" Mahmoud Haji almost shouted. The arrogance of that American, calling him by name in a way that his own people might have seen and heard… and believed?

"Our air force is attacking in the north. That is the place of decision. Any diversion from that is a waste of time," he replied reasonably.