Sword Point (6 page)

As a result, there was a three-way debate on how to run operations.

The

Army, which owned the equipment being moved, had its ideas on how, when and what to load. There was the desire to keep unit integrity and place a balanced mix of equipment on all ships in the event that the Soviets intercepted the convoy and attacked it. It would do no good to arrive in the Persian Gulf with all the trucks of the division if the transports with the tanks on it sank.

But loading ships in that manner is wasteful as far as space and time are concerned. As there were few ships in the
RRF
available to move the corps’s equipment and supplies, the Navy wanted to pack each ship as efficiently as possible. The bulk of the Navy’s true cargo-handling capability was either scattered around the world or in mothballs. Time would be required to assemble those ships or refit and man those in mothballs. Until then, every ship counted.

The third party was the ships’ owners and their agents on the spot, the ships’ captains. While the theory of the
RRF
was fine in peacetime, a severe case of cold feet broke out when the plan began to be implemented for real. Some captains and ships’ crews went out of their way to accommodate the Navy and Army personnel. Others were openly hostile, one ship’s captain having to be threatened with arrest if he failed to comply with his contract. Most fell between the two extremes, doing what was required of them, but with great reluctance.

As one seaman put it, “I ain’t in the Navy or the Army. I didn’t sign on to get my ass blown off and don’t intend to.” The number of

“unaccounted-for personnel” increased daily. The captain and crew of the Cape Fear fell into this middle category.

The Cape Fear itself was designed to allow vehicles to simply roll on and roll off without the use of cranes or hoists, hence the name
RO-RO

ship.

She had a crew of thirty-four and a capacity of almost twelve thousand tons, or enough hauling capacity, in theory, to transport two hundred tanks. This was where the problems began.

When Dixon arrived at the dock, he found the unit’s equipment being driven off the Cape Fear instead of on. Bewildered, he grabbed the first noncommissioned officer he found and asked what was going on. The sergeant said they had been told by a Navy officer with an oak leaf like a major that they were loading the boat wrong and would have to start over again.

Infuriated, Dixon stormed off in search of the ship’s bridge, with the idea that he might find the naval officer there. Knowing nothing about ships other than what he had seen in the movies, he went up the ramp that the battalion’s equipment was coming down on. Once inside the cavernous cargo area, he wandered about until he found a door. His plan of attack was simple: so long as he continued to go up, he was sure that eventually he would find the bridge. Surprisingly, it worked until he was just short of the bridge, when a seaman stopped him and said that the soldiers weren’t allowed or welcomed there. They almost came to blows when Dixon tried to bull his way past. Only intervention by a ship’s officer stopped the fight.

The officer was the first officer of the Cape Fear, and Dixon could tell right off that he was not happy about his ship’s current mission.

When

Dixon asked why equipment was being offloaded instead of loaded, the first officer gave him a quizzical look, then replied that they were doing what they had been told to do by the Navy. He had no idea of the whereabouts of the Navy officer who had told them. That officer, he said, had come aboard after most of the battalion’s equipment was loaded, and he had left after seeing the manifest and issuing new orders to the crew. The ship’s first officer went on to say that until the military got its act together and decided on what it wanted to do, his crew wasn’t going to load another piece of equipment. With that, he turned away from Dixon and went up to the bridge.

Dixon stood there, seething with anger that an entire day had been wasted.

He turned toward the dock and viewed the confused tangle of men and equipment there. As far as he could tell, there was no rhyme or reason to the effort below him. In a rage, he stormed back into the passageway he had used to reach the bridge and headed for the dock to search for someone in charge.

Suflan, Iran 0735 Hours, 29 May (0405 Hours, 29 May,
GMT
) Major Vorishnov sat in the shade of a fruit tree, listening as the second officer, in charge of intelligence, summarized the regimental intelligence report on Iranian

operations to date for him and the company commanders. Across from them the tanks of the 3rd Battalion waited in line, pulled off the road. The crews moved around their vehicles with little enthusiasm, giving the appearance of working on the tanks, but in reality doing nothing. Fuel trucks rolled by, winding down the serpentine road into a narrow defile five hundred meters from where the officers sat. The trucks kicked up dust and almost drowned out the second officer.

The sporadic and disorganized resistance of the first two days had given way to an increase in activities by the Iranians. While the lead division of the 28th
CAA
had yet to meet any sizable forces, it had been seriously delayed by incessant roadblocks and an increasing number of ambushes. At each of the roadblocks, forces had to stop, deploy, and scatter any enemy forces covering the obstacle. Once that had been done, engineers had to come forward and clear the road. The delays that were thus incurred had shattered the time schedule of the operation and were causing a growing number of casualties. Instead of reaching Tabriz on the third day, the 28th was still short of the objective on the morning of the fifth day. The airborne unit that had been dropped into Tabriz was hanging on to most key installations, but would be hard pressed to last for more than another day or two. Twice, the Iranians had actually gotten onto the airfield, the airborne unit’s only link to the outside world, before being thrown back.

Vorishnov turned to watch the fuel trucks while the second officer droned on. As each truck reached the defile, it had to slow, change gears and ease between the sheer sides of the defile. Suddenly Vorishnov saw a flash, a puff of smoke, and a streak of flame that raced toward a truck which had just begun to slow down in the defile.

Dumbfounded, he watched the flame hit the truck. In an instant the truck disintegrated into a ball of fire.

The force of the explosion caught the second officer off guard and threw him to the ground. Vorishnov could feel the heat of the fireball as it passed over them.

“Ambush!”

The officers scattered. Vorishnov leaped to his feet and grabbed the commander of the lead company. Pointing to where he had seen the initial flash, he ordered the commander to move his three lead vehicles into a position where they could fire on that location. He cautioned him to be careful of other attacks from the flank.

The crews that had been going through the motions of working had disappeared into their tanks. Engines sprang to life as gunners and tank commanders began to traverse the turrets, searching for targets.

But there was none to be found. As two tanks from the lead company began to pour machine-gun fire into the area Vorishnov had indicated, another tank, equipped with a plow blade, began to move down the road past the fuel trucks, now pulled off to the side. When it reached the remains of the destroyed fuel truck, it pushed them through the defile and out of the way.

Then the plow tank pulled off the road and began to fire toward the area at which the other tanks were shooting. Those two tanks, in turn, ceased fire and moved down the road to join the plow tank.

Vorishnov, by then, had mounted his
BTR
and followed the two tanks through the defile. Once on the other side, the tanks deployed off the road near the plow tank and began to search the area for signs of the enemy. As

Vorishnov also searched the far hill with his binoculars, he realized that their efforts were fruitless. The enemy was gone. Odds were, it had been nothing more than two men with a rocket launcher. Guerrillas, stay-behinds whose sole purpose was to harass and disrupt the Soviet rear area. Still,

Vorishnov thought as he turned to look at the remains of the shattered fuel truck, their choice of targets had been good. In order to reach the Strait of Hormuz, the 28th
CAA
would depend on a long line of fuel trucks like the one just destroyed. The army couldn’t afford to lose too many of them to stray parties of guerrillas wandering about its supply routes. Either the

Iranians had been incredibly lucky to hit such an important target or they knew exactly what they were doing and had waited for the fuel trucks. If the latter was the case, the delays the 28th
CAA
had experienced to date were only a foretaste of hard times to come.

Visions of a second Afghanistan began to creep into Vorishnov’s troubled mind.

The Pentagon, Washington, D.C. 1635 Hours, 29 May (2135 Hours, 29 May,
GMT
)

Lieutenant General Weir tried hard to relax on the soft sofa that ran along the wall of the Pentagon office belonging to the Army’s Deputy Chief of

Staff for Operations. He needed to. Since the beginning of the current crisis he had had little time to do so. The stress, an irregular schedule and poor eating habits were beginning to take their toll on him. He thought back to his days as a younger of cer when it had seemed as though he could go for weeks with barely two hours of sleep and one Cration meal a day. That, however, was a long time ago.

Since then he had put a lot of mileage on his body, and it was beginning to tell.

The briefing he had just left had done little to ease his anxiety over the upcoming operation. The initial concept and plan he had been given on the twenty-fourth of May had changed almost daily. Additional intelligence, a better grasp of who all the players were, what the Soviets and the United

States were capable of doing and what help the U.S. could expect had resulted in several revisions of the plan. While Weir didn’t like the initial plan, he liked the revisions even less. Plans, like most things, do not improve when more people get involved.

The initial plan, called Blue Thunder, had been simple and limited in its objectives. The first phase was to move his 10th Corps, a Marine amphibious expeditionary force and supporting Air Force units to the vicinity of the

Persian Gulf and get them assembled. At best, it would require forty to fifty days to move and stage the necessary forces. During that time, the

State Department was to work all the friendly governments in the area in an effort to secure bases and overflight rights while the
CIA
, the
NSA
and other intelligence agencies built a complete picture of what was happening.

The Navy would also have 40 time to establish superiority in the Gulf and assemble the required shipping to support large-scale operations.

Given time, there was even the possibility that the Iranian government could be convinced that it would be to its benefit to cooperate with the United States. But regardless of the Iranian response, once the true situation was clear a capable and fully assembled force operating from secure and friendly bases in the area would be able to take effective and meaningful action.

Unfortunately, war is seldom left to professional soldiers to manage.

From the very beginning, a hue and cry from the Congress and right-wing political factions called for an immediate response to the Soviet invasion.

With the cry of “No more Afghanistans” to rally around, politicians of every persuasion offered their ideas on how to keep the world safe for democracy and punish the Russians. The newly elected President, not wanting to be labeled as indecisive or impotent, was stampeded into selecting a course of action that showed immediate results. The current plan fit the bill, but it was, at best, very risky.

The new plan called for the immediate introduction of the Rapid Deployment

Force, or
RDF
, into Iran. The 17th Airborne Division, working with a Marine amphibious brigade, would seize from the Iranians an airhead centered around the city of Bandar Abbas on the Strait of Hormuz.

Reinforced with the 12th Infantry Division (Light) and the 52nd Infantry Division (Mechanized), these units would move inland and west along the coast to establish blocking positions to prevent the Soviets from reaching the

Persian Gulf. The 10th Corps, when it arrived, would continue that expansion.

With his head laid back on the sofa, Weir was lost in his thoughts and didn’t notice that Lieutenant General Robert Horn, the Deputy Chief of

Staff for Operations, had entered the room until Horn reached out and offered him a cup of coffee. Weir and Horn had been classmates at West

Point, had served in the same armored cavalry squadron in Vietnam, had commanded armor battalions in the same division at the same time and had attended both the Command and General Staff College and the Army War College together. Throughout the years their careers had paralleled and crossed. They had stayed in close touch, considering themselves the best of friends and confidants on all matters, personal and professional.

It was therefore natural that they shared the same misgivings about the upcoming operation in Iran.

Rather than sit at his desk, Horn settled down in a leather chair opposite

Weir. After taking a sip of his coffee, he said, “The Chief doesn’t buy our argument. The plan goes as briefed.”

Weir thought about that for a moment, then laid his head back against the sofa. “Then the Airborne Mafia has won. Next thing you know they’ll want to send in another light-infantry division for good measure.”

“Don’t be so quick. That was seriously considered. I had a hell of a fight cutting that one out.”

Weir’s head shot up. “You have got to be bullshitting me! It’s bad enough that I’ve lost all priority on shipping. Does that cowboy who commands the 13th Airborne Corps seriously believe he can go toe to toe with Soviet tank units and hold all of southern Iran single-handed using a handful of grunts with oversized rucksacks on the ground?