Grand Alliance

“Sir!” Sims was off at the trot, soon disappearing into the heavy brown desert airs, still occluded heavily at ground level from the recent storm.

Send out a Wingo, which was Army slang for WngO, a Warning Order. Sense, warn, consider, decide, execute… And be ready to take risks. He might be faulted for stopping now, leaving his column strung out, motionless, a massive sinuous heat signature on the desert. That wouldn’t matter much to another ICBM, so he decided to take the risk. He knew that mobility was his first guarantor of survivability, but something told him it was not good just blundering ahead until he could understand his environment and make some sense of this situation.

He wanted to talk to that Russian Captain again, but even as he thought this, he heard the rebuke so often quoted in the Army Operations Manual about the last war in this goddamned desert. ‘The British were plagued by feebleness, by lack of instant authority in the high command. Intentions were too often obscure. Orders at army, corps, or divisional level were too often treated as the basis for discussion, matters for visit, argument, expostulation even. The result was a system of command too conversational and chatty, rather than instant and incisive…’

What if these two characters had been sent out here to serve as a grand distraction to delay his move north? That thought was silly. Could he imagine the Russians dreaming up something like this charade? How can we make sure the British will stay in the target zone? I know, send in a few men on helicopters to ID their position, and better yet, we can dress them up in old World War Two uniforms and tell the British they’ve been transported to that old romantic era of the past where the Desert Rats first made their mark on these sands.

He shook his head… Impossible. The Russians couldn’t dream this up in a century. This business with the LRDG, Popski, O’Connor and the whole bit… well it all seemed so damnably authentic. The look in O’Connor’s eye was riveting, and he was mad as a hornet now in the other FV432. To calm the man he had played along, almost comically.

“General,” he had said. “We’re glad you’ve been recovered, but I’ve a bit of a problem on my hands at the moment, and more than one. Would you be so kind as to wait here while I complete my reconnaissance? We’re trying to get through to the liaison officer in Cairo.”

That worked. It at least gave him the time he needed to slip away and sort this whole mess out. Yet the more he looked at the situation, the more wild and crazy it all became! The Russian had come to him bang away with the assertion that he should look over his shoulder and return to the Sultan Apache facilities. In the end, he had granted the man the small grace of compliance, and sent a patrol back to check on the status of things at the massive oil drilling site. They reported nothing was there, and Kinlan immediately assumed they had wandered off somewhere in this damn desert sand storm and were probably lost in the desolation of the Qattara Depression. So he went to look for himself.

Nine months out here in the desert had given him an uncanny sense of how to navigate, even in conditions like this. He knew where his column was when the lights went out and they had lost all satellite links and GPS. So he got in his FV432, pulled out a compass, only to find the needle was spinning like a top! Something was certainly wrong, but he moved south, able to follow the fading remnant of the column’s tracks. Sixty ton tanks leave a good footprint on the desert wherever they go, and he had sixty Challenger IIs in the brigade. It wasn’t long before he saw the familiar shape of Hill 587, and realized he had come east to the edge of the Qattara Depression. Beyond this point the land would cascade down in a steep escarpment into the silted, wadi infested Sebka that was completely impassible to vehicles. But behind him he had the stony plateau where the Sultan Apache facilities should be… and they were gone.

Not destroyed… not blasted to hell by another damn Russian ICBM… The desert was a sublime, immaculate wasteland, with fresh drifts of windblown sand forming even here. This was something he had not counted on; something no man could factor into his operational planning, no matter how closely he read the manual and adhered to the principles of the Operational Art. This was something wholly unaccountable, a madness that had come upon him like the desert storm, obscuring all reason and sanity and presenting him with the bewildering prospect of having to lend credence to the impossible story spewed by this Russian Captain.

Popski, O’Connor, and a Russian Naval Captain… Now he had the distinct feeling that O’Connor had never once laid eyes on the Russian, and knew nothing whatsoever of the man. If this was an act, aimed at distracting him into immobility here, it was masterful.