Three Kings

When the tank hit back, it used a formidable 120mm main gun, with the same 7.62 chain and machine gun systems on the lighter vehicles, and provisions for a grenade launcher and larger 12.7 MG.

All these formations were grouped under the banner of the 7th Armored Brigade. Now, after 80 long years away, the Desert Rats were returning to their old stomping ground in Egypt, where their forefathers had once hallowed the battlefields like BedaFomm, Tobruk, SidiRezegh, El Alamein, and the pursuit of the German Afrika Korps to Tunisia. Now it would face a wild and wily foe in the Berber tribes of middle Egypt, functioning as a heavy security contingent, largely within the border zone of the Sultan Apache fields, a rough equilateral triangle measuring 50 kilometers per side.

The British press made good mileage from the motto of the heavy Royal Scotts Dragoons Battalion: “No one provokes me with impunity.” British units in Challenger tanks had destroyed a total of 300 enemy fighting vehicles in the Gulf War, without losing a single tank to enemy fire. There were no further attacks on BP facilities after the Desert Rats arrived, and Britain was soon busy again with the business of extracting oil from the deep depressions when the threat of growing war loomed heavily in 2021.

The 7th Brigade was still in Egypt when hostilities opened in the Pacific, and over nine bitter days of increasing escalation, the flames of war burned ever closer as all the world’s energy centers became prime targets of opportunity. The fighting had started over an isolated rock in the East China Sea, the Senkaku Islands to Japan, the Diaoyutai Islands to mainland China. It had soon spread to Nigeria, the Gulf of Mexico, the Persian Gulf, and the Kashagan fields of the Caspian Basin.

Too isolated to be threatened by land, the 7th Brigade stood its watch with its air defense units on high alert. Only an air strike could really do any harm… Or a missile. All was quiet over those first eight days in the desert. The soldiers manned their patrols, the desert heat remained relentless and the cold nights equally unforgiving. Then the ire of man became a fire of wrath and doom on that ninth day, the last day that humanity and civilization itself would have any need for oil and gas on planet earth. The 9th day was the day the first missiles fired and, as might be expected, Sultan Apache was high on the target list.

When they got the brief emergency flash message indicating a missile was inbound, the 7th Brigade rushed to activate its Aster-30 Block III Ballistic Missile Defense Battery, the only one in the unit capable of responding. It fired at dusk that day, the thin trails streaking up through the sky as the Berbers watched from the nearby oasis settlement atSiwa. They had seen the heavy British armored units, the tough, professional soldiers that manned the Brigade, and they wanted nothing more to do with their war on Western oil men. Now they wondered what the British were firing at, as news travels slow in the desert, even news of the impending end of the world…

Brigadier General Jacob “Jake” Kinlan was in his command vehicle when it came, high up in the desert sky, three explosions as the Aster missiles hungrily sought out their targets. They got two of the three warheads from the incoming missile, a mini MIRV re-entry vehicle with three 15 kiloton bombs. The third was jarred enough by the explosions that it was sent careening off target, falling wide of the mark over the desolation of the Qattara Depression and exploding in a massive aerial fireball, about a thousand meters above ground. It was meant to fall just a little lower, and ignite its awful nuclear fire directly over the Sultan Apache site, but fate or good luck had intervened in the tip of that third Aster missile, and the Desert Rats would be spared.

The Brigade was “buttoned up” when the attack came in, their desertized, air conditioned fighting vehicles on full NBC alert, many already hull down in revetments dug into the chalky yellow loam of the desert soil. They would survive the blast to a man, with not a single casualty, but they would never fight for the government that had sent them to Egypt again… at least not for the government that died that day when the missiles fell on London in the year 2021.

Yet strangely, the battle history of the Desert Rats would not end that day, the 9th day, the final day of the long escalation that brought hell to earth and ended human civilization. It was the day that left behind little more than the blighted, charred remains of cities all across the globe, places seen only by the living eyes of a very few, and most of those aboard one brave Russian ship that had disappeared a month before the fighting began-the battlecruiser Kirov.