Sword Point (5 page)

Now all that was left to do was wait. A briefing given by the battalion commander had been the least informative briefing Evans had ever attended.

They were told that the current alert was in response to the Soviet invasion of Iran. But that was about all. Several contingencies had been discussed, but none in detail and none that the battalion commander felt confident the unit would execute. Despite this lack of information, the brigade had been alerted for immediate deployment, with a warning order that they might have to make a combat jump somewhere. No doubt, Evans thought, the people in Washington were thrashing about trying to decide what the division was to do. Until a decision was made, the 17th Airborne Division was going to be held in a ready-to-go posture.

As he sat on the concrete, resting against his gear with sweat rolling down his face, Evans looked at his men baking in the hot May sun. You can bet, he told himself, the Soviets aren’t sitting around in Iran with nothing to do.

Tabriz, Iran 0410 Hours, 27 May (0040 Hours, 27 May,
GMT
) It had been almost an hour since the last Iranian attack. Junior Lieutenant

Nikolai llvanich carefully raised his head over the edge of the parapet of the shallow trench his unit occupied. He took great care while he did this.

Less than two hours before, his company commander had been killed doing the same thing. The deputy company commander had said that it had been a lucky shot. But as far as Ilvanich was concerned, dead was dead, regardless of what luck had to do with it.

In the darkness he could see only shadows and faint images in the no-man’s-land between his position and the ditch that the Iranians had come from. The barbed wire that had been strung up by Ilvanich’s men in the center of the no-man’s-land had been breached in several places during the four Iranian attacks so far. Those attacks had not been easy or cheap.

Iranian bodies lay draped across the wire where it was still attached to the posts. In the gaps where the Iranians had succeeded in breaching the wire, a confused pile of corpses and limbs had accumulated. Every now and then a soft moan would rise from the pile, indicating that some of the attackers had only been wounded.

Slowly Ilvanich slipped back down into the trench, coming to rest on the ground and facing toward the rear with his back against the trench wall. He looked at his watch. There were only twenty or so minutes to go before sunrise. He was sure that if they could hang on until the sun came up, they would be able to hold. Ilvanich and his men, what was left of them, were exhausted and drained. The stress and exertion of the last twelve hours had pushed them all to the brink of collapse.

They had parachuted into Tabriz two days before and seized the airport without much effort. The first twenty four hours had gone well, more like maneuver than war. Starting just before dawn of the second day, however,

Iranian militia forces had begun to make their presence felt. It had begun with sniping that was effective enough to be dangerous.

In the early afternoon of that day Iranians began to arrive in force.

The first group drove up in buses and trucks and began to dismount in plain view of Ilvanich’s position five kilometers away. Patiently Ilvanich waited for the battalion’s mortars or divisional artillery to smash the assembling enemy horde. But nothing happened. He continued to report the location and the growing number of Iranians, but received nothing in return other than an acknowledgment of his report. He was sure the artillery observers could see what he saw. Still, nothing was fired on the enemy as they dismounted from their vehicles. While he watched in frustration, Ilvanich remembered that in his study of Western imperialist armies he had read that even platoon leaders like him could request and direct artillery fire. The book went on to explain how this practice was wasteful and tended to dilute a unit’s combat power. As he watched the Iranians go about their preparations for attack unmolested, Ilvanich wished that he could have been a little wasteful.

“Here they come again!” The shout was followed immediately by the crack of small-arms fire and the din of exploding grenades. Ilvanich leaped to his feet and rushed over to the machine gun just to his left.

The crew of that weapon was already hammering away into the darkness.

They could not see their targets, but that didn’t matter. The crew had the weapon set to fire along a prescribed arc at a set height. Anything standing more than one meter in height entering that zone would be hit.

The rest of Ilvanich’s platoon was doing likewise. So long as every man covered his zone, in theory no Iranian could reach them alive.

From behind the platoon’s positions a flare raced upward, then burst, casting a pale light over no-man’s-land. Their attackers were now clearly visible. Numbering in the hundreds, the Iranians piled through the gaps in the wire and rushed toward the platoon’s position. With the aid of the flare, the machine gun stopped its sweep and concentrated on the gap immediately to its front; its rounds were clearly hitting in the mass of attackers, knocking the lead rank back.

The follow-on rank, however, merely pushed over the bodies of their comrades and surged forward. In their turn they were cut down. And in turn the next rank pressed forward.

This process was maddening to Ilvanich. Each rank of attackers gained a few more meters. The Iranians were closing on the platoon’s positions. Ilvanich suddenly realized that the situation he faced was a simple question of mathematics: Did the Iranians have more men than he had bullets to kill them with?

This line of thought was interrupted by a scream to his left. A junior sergeant came running up to Ilvanich and, gasping for breath, reported that the platoon to their left had collapsed and the Iranians were pouring through the gap created. Rushing past the sergeant, Ilvanich began to make his way along the trench to the left flank of his position, stepping over bodies of his men who had fallen during this and previous attacks.

On reaching his last position, he could clearly see Iranians running past his platoon, headed for the airport’s runway. The sergeant in command of the squad covering that section of the trench had already reoriented some of his men to face the flank and the rear. His men were firing into the

Iranians as they went by, but to no effect. The Iranians were hell-bent to reach the runway.

In the gathering light, Ilvanich saw two
BMD
infantry fighting vehicles charge from the direction of the runway toward the head of the Iranian penetration. With guns blazing, the BMDs cut down the lead rank. The Iranians who were on either side of the line of fire moved away from the BMDs and sought cover. Without firing, they allowed the two BMDs to pass.

Suddenly Ilvanich realized what the Iranians were up to. They were going to allow the BMDs to go by, then hit them in the rear. Before he could act, the Iranians began to close on the BMDs from behind. In groups of twos and threes they rushed forward, some with mines, others with explosive charges.

Those with the mines were going to shove them under the tracks of the advancing BMDs to immobilize them. Once the vehicles were stopped, the

Iranians with the charges would be able to set their charges and blow the

BMDs up. With the BMDs destroyed, there would be nothing immediately available to plug the gap. The Iranians with the mines had to be stopped.

Looking back to the front, Ilvanich could see no letup in the Iranians’

attacks on his positions. They were still slowly gaining ground. If he switched a machine gun from the front to assist the BMDs, the horde he faced would surge forward and overwhelm his position. By the same token, if the Iranians destroyed the BMDs, eventually they would surround the platoon’s position and wipe it out. Without another thought, Ilvanich ordered the machine gun to switch positions to face the rear and engage the

Iranians attacking the BMDs. Four riflemen were ordered to cover the machine gun’s former zone to the front.

The machine gun was immediately effective. The fire from the rear caused some of the Iranians approaching the BMDs to stop and go to ground. In addition, the crews of the BMDs, alerted by ricocheting rounds from

Ilvanich’s machine gun that hit their vehicles, realized they were in trouble and began to turn on their Iranian attackers. For the
BMD

farthest from llvanich’s position, this realization came too late. With a thunderous explosion, it was flipped up and over onto its top as it ran over a mine. The remaining
BMD
continued to fight for its life.

A scream from the squad sergeant to Ilvanich was cut short by a gurgling sound. Ilvanich turned back toward his platoon’s front to see the squad sergeant sink to the bottom of the trench, clutching his bloody face in his hands. A dozen Iranians stood at the lip of the trench, ready to jump in.

Ilvanich ordered the machine gun back to the front. The Iranians were in the trench, however, before it could be brought to bear.

In a blur of actions, the fight degenerated into a hand to-hand brawl.

Ilvanich shoved his pistol into the face of the nearest Iranian and fired twice. Without pausing, he turned on a second Iranian just as the Iranian ran a bayonet into the stomach of one of Ilvanich’s men.

Two rounds finished the Iranian and emptied Ilvanich’s pistol. Not taking the time to reload, Ilvanich threw down the pistol and grabbed an AK assault rifle. In a single upward swing, he fired a burst into a group of three Iranians rushing at him and managed to kill two and wound the third.

Now only he and two other Russians were still standing. All the Iranians who had entered the trench were down, mixed in with his own dead and wounded. Ilvanich looked over the top of the trench, only to see another wave of Iranians approaching. “Get the machine gun!” The three Russians searched but could not find the machine gun, now hidden somewhere on the floor of the trench under bodies.

The Iranians were within twenty meters of the trench. There was no time to find the machine gun. Ilvanich yelled to his remaining men,

“Forget the machine gun! Shoot the bastards with your rifles!” He turned to get to the front wall, but discovered that his legs were wedged in the tangle of bodies cluttering the trench floor. Unable to move, Ilvanich realized he was going to die.

At that instant there came the sharp crack of a BMD’s cannon and the chatter of a machine gun from the rear. Ilvanich looked in the direction of the noise and saw the surviving
BMD
moving up to his position, firing as it came. He watched the last of the Iranians stop, waver, then withdraw.

As the sun began to crest the horizon, Ilvanich freed his legs and staggered over to the side of the trench. Panting, he leaned against the dirt wall for support and surveyed the scene before him. There was no distinguishing the body of friend or foe. In the confined trench before him were twenty bodies, twisted and interwoven into a grotesque quilt work of death. They had held. But it had cost them.

Junior Lieutenant Ilvanich bent over and began to vomit.

Beaumont, Texas 1930 Hours, 28 May (0130 Hours, 29 May,
GMT
) The rail loading of the brigade’s equipment at Ford Hood and the offloading in Beaumont were going surprisingly well. Annual trips to the National

Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, ensured that there were always an adequate number of officers and soldiers in the units who had the skills and experience required for the tasks of planning, organizing and carrying out the movement of the unit by rail.

The 2nd Brigade, 25th Armored Division, had been tagged as the first unit to move by virtue of the fact that it had been in the final stages of preparation for movement to the National Training Center and was to have begun the actual move as soon as the three-day weekend was over.

The Soviet invasion of Iran had changed the goal. Rather than going to California to face a U.S. Army unit trained and organized as a Soviet motorized rifle regiment, the 2nd Brigade was en route to meet the real thing.

While the XO of 3rd Battalion, 4th Armor, remained at Fort Hood to handle last-minute details at that end, Major Dixon moved to Beaumont to orchestrate the transfer of the unit’s equipment from rail to naval trans ports and tend to the billeting and messing of the men moving the equipment. The battalion commander had to stay loose, ready to go where he was required the most.

Much of his time was consumed by meetings, planning sessions and briefings. At first he would religiously rush back to his staff and provide them with all the information that he had just been given. He stopped this practice, however, when it became apparent that plans and information provided by the division, which changed at every meeting, were only causing confusion within the battalion staff. He therefore decided to wait until a final plan was developed before issuing any type of order. Until then, only that information that was required to prepare and deploy the force was provided.

Upon arrival at Beaumont, it became readily apparent that neither the port nor the Navy was ready to receive the 3rd of the 4th. If there was a plan for loading the lead elements from the 25th Armored Division onto the transports, it wasn’t evident on the dock next to the S.S.

Cape Fear.

The Cape Fear was part of the Ready Reserve Fleet. Civilian owned and operated, the Cape Fear, like other ships in the
RRF
, conducted normal commercial operations until activated for use as a military transport during war or emergencies. At the time of activation, ships of the
RRF

were required to report within a specified number of days, anywhere from five to fifteen, to designated ports, where they fell under the control of the

Military Sealift Command. While the Navy routinely conducted readiness tests to determine whether ships could respond. The size and frequencies of the tests had always been limited. The speed with which the current crisis developed, and the size of the force requiring movement and the force designated for deployment, were placing on the transport system a demand that had been discussed but never practiced.