Sword Point

Chapter 2

Company A of the 2nd Battalion, 517th Airborne Regiment, was used to waiting. It wasn't unusual to get rigged for a jump, move out onto the ready line and then wind up waiting for hours as an unexpected weather front or increase in winds caused a delay. The men were no strangers to the Green Ramp either. At times it seemed to them that every time some head of state in an obscure country sneezed, the 17th Airborne Division was put on alert.

And, of course, there were always the readiness tests, called at all hours of the day to gauge the response of the unit on strip alert. The 1983 invasion of Grenada had done much to add meaning to the endless drills, alerts and training exercises. But that had been a small affair by any standards and, to a unit in the U.S. Army, a long time ago. There were few men in the 2nd of the 517th who wore a division patch on both sleeves.

Captain John Evans, the new commander of A Company, was one of them. At the time of the Grenada invasion he had been a second lieutenant who had just made his cherry jump, a first jump with one's unit. Not having had the experience of numerous alerts and readiness tests that never went anywhere and tended to dull rather than sharpen the reactions of some, Evans had tackled the alert for the Grenada operation with enthusiasm and vigor. His performance at Bragg and on the island had earned him a name as a hard charger and an energetic young officer. As a result, he had found it easy to stay in the 517th, moving from one position to another until he made it to the most coveted position for a company-grade officer in the division, command of an airborne infantry company.

Evans had come down off brigade staff to assume command of Company A less than two months ago. Thus far he had been unimpressed with the company.

While there was more than enough effort and enthusiasm on the part of the leadership and the soldiers, the unit lacked a sense of orientation and an ability to really understand what was important.

For example, when the unit assembled at the Green Ramp for pre combat inspections, Evans had found that the men were hopelessly overburdened with useless equipment and far too much ammunition. Had they jumped with everything that they had when they initially fell out, the company would never have made it off the drop zone. It reminded Evans of the Grenada operation, when people had taken all of their military equipment with them, only to discard it once they reached the island and found they didn't need it. Today, together with his first sergeant, a veteran of eighteen years in and out of airborne units, he had inspected every man's load and equipment. Anything that was considered to be of no value was discarded into a pile at the end of the company line. When they were finished, the pile was higher than Evans. The inspection had taken the entire morning, but the results were worth the effort. The men in the company looked right to him.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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? Doesn't anyone do a threat analysis around here anymore?"

"Frank, we have no choice. There's simply too much pressure to do something immediately. The RDF can get there faster than you can."

"And do what, Bob, die? Sacrifice themselves in the name of political expediency? Damn it, Bob, you know that they can't do everything that they've been assigned. At best, they can hang on to Bandar Abbas and a couple of hundred kilometers of the coast. To push them inland along the line of Kazerun-Shiraz-Kerman-Zahedan without the 10th Corps is insane.

They have neither the manpower to hold that line nor the transportation to keep it supplied. The Soviets will simply bypass whomever they don't want to mess with and leave them to wither on the vine. Jesus, are we the only ones who see that, Bob?" Weir stopped and sipped on his coffee in an effort to compose himself.

"Frank, between you and me, the Vice agrees. He and I went in to the Chief and presented the same argument, a little less passionately, of course. The Chief, however, felt that the risks were acceptable. As he said, we need to "get there the fastest with the mos test "

Weir pounded his knee with his fist, lowered his head and shook it from side to side. "Damn it. It takes twelve hours to fly from Washington to Tehran. It only takes three hours to fly from Moscow to Tehran. How does the Chief expect us to get around that? And the Iranians? What about the Iranians? Has anyone been watching the news lately? How the hell is the 13th Airborne Corps going to hold the Russians and fight the Iranians?"

There were several moments of silence as the two generals sipped their coffee and thought. To date the Iranian government had refused all offers of U.S. assistance. Daily demonstrations in Tehran condemned the United States as fervently as they did the Soviets. Under the original plan, there would have been time to work out some type of arrangement or, at worst, allow the Soviets to get so deep into Iran that the Iranians would have no choice but to accept U.S. help. But the new plan didn't allow any time. The CIA was projecting that U.S. forces would be met with armed resistance by the Iranians. Ground forces would be fighting with hostile forces to their rear as well as their front.

Finally, Weir broke the long silence. "Bob, I know you did your best.

Now it's time for me to do mine." With that he stood up and began to gather up his briefcase and hat.

Horn stood up also and walked across the room to bid his friend farewell.

With a few pleasantries, the two men parted. After Weir had left, Horn went to the window and stared out at the Potomac. He could not escape the thought that he had not only failed his friend but condemned him to death.

How easy, he thought, it had been in Vietnam when they were young lieutenants. At least they knew what they were doing then and didn't have to bother with the politicians, both in and out of uniform.