Out of the Dark by David Weber Page B

claimed it had. And, for another, because China was currently much more interested in the possibilities in Pakistan’s oil- and gas-rich but penniless Baluchestan Province.
    In the meantime, Iran had stepped up its efforts to supply weapons—and increasingly capable ones—to its proxy forces like Hamas. There’d been a significant upsurge in terrorist attacks in Israel and Iraq, as well, and there wasn’t much doubt that Iranian intelligence had been deeply involved in them. Add in the normal vituperation of its lunatic president (who would have believed they could have found someone
worse
than Ahmadinejad?) and the increased fervency of the mullahs’ calls for jihad against both the Greater and Lesser Satans, and there was a lot of room for anxiety. In fact, Sanders rather suspected antacid makers were doing land office business in Wonderland on the Potomac.
    The hard part was trying to figure out how much of the anxiety was justified, and recent Iranian “military exercises” had added to the ambiguity. There was a lot of discussion about the West’s avenues for bringing even more pressure to bear on the régime, and the possibility of a complete naval blockade had been coming up more and more frequently of late. Personally, Sanders didn’t think the Palmer Administration had any serious intention of doing it, but the US Navy clearly had the capability, and enough of that navy was forward deployed to the Red Sea and Western Med to make the mullahs understandably nervous.
    Whatever the reason, their public belligerence had grown even more vitriolic of late, and Iran had recently reinforced its positions along its eastern frontier with Iraq despite its nominally friendly relationship with Iraq’s majority-Shiite government. No one took too much stock in the “friendliness” of that particular relationship, however, given Iraq’s continuing relationship with the United States and the last few months’ sudden spate of assassinations of Sunni government ministers, governors, and mayors. Even the Shiite Interior Minister, who’d apparently made the mistakeof seeming too willing to conciliate his Sunni fellows, had been mysteriously assassinated, and fear that Iran was likely to try something genuinely irrational had risen accordingly.
    In addition, Tehran had stationed a corps consisting of an armored division and a mechanized infantry division at Tayyebat in Razavi Khorasan Province, less than ninety miles east of Herat. It was unlikely that a single Iranian division of long-in-the-tooth T-55s and T-72s was going to jump off on an invasion of Afghanistan, especially given all the air power available in-country to knock it on its ass if it tried. Despite that, the Powers That Were had decided that presenting a régime as . . . radically energetic as the current one in Tehran with something a little more noticeable than out-of-sight, out-of-mind F-35s might be a good idea.
    Thus Sanders’ orders to go and be noticeable.
    Of course, this was only the warning order, giving him time to hand over his battalion’s present responsibilities to its designated relief and organize the move. It was always possible the actual move would be canceled. In fact, Sanders wished he had a nickel—well, maybe a dollar, given inflation—for every time he’d seen orders canceled or changed at the last minute. He didn’t think that was going to happen this time, though. There was too much tension in the air. By this time, tension was actually feeding upon tension in an accelerating feedback loop on both sides of the confrontation.
    Given the current circumstances, his presence might simply exacerbate the situation. How much of the Iranians’ apparently irrational rhetoric was genuine and how much represented the actual intentions of the régime had always been one of the really fun guessing games where Iran was concerned, and it had turned into even more of a case of paying your money and taking your choice over the last couple