A digital map on the wall showed the nation of Ukraine and the position of the few U.S. forces there, and everyone in the room had their eyes glued to it while they talked over options. Discussions among those in attendance in the Situation Room turned argumentative quickly, but Ryan brought the focus back to the task at hand.
President Jack Ryan held many titles, but at this moment he was the National Command Authority, the one who had to make the tough calls, and to do that, he damn well needed his experts focused on task and feeding him the best information as quickly and efficiently as possible. Jack was no longer a military officer; he was no longer an intelligence officer. He was an executive, and it was his job to keep the situation organized so the problem at hand could be solved.
As another heated discussion broke out, this one between a White House assistant National Security Council director and a naval adviser to the Joint Chiefs, Ryan silenced the argument by raising his hand. He then looked up at the monitors on the far wall. “I want to hear from Burgess and Canfield only. There must have been some preparations made in case this location was compromised. What contingencies do we have set up to get our guys out of the Lighthouse in case of attack?”
Burgess said, “We do have Delta, Rangers, and Army Special Forces in Ukraine right now, but they are dispersed all over the country in preparation for the Russian attack and are not prepared to operate as a quick-reaction force. We have a couple of Army Black Hawks at a Ukrainian Army base in Bila Tserkva, you can see it on the map there above Sevastopol. It’s a few hours’ flying time to the north. We could put together a QRF and send them down right now, but those RPGs in the area make landing rotary-wing aircraft in the Lighthouse extremely risky unless and until we can get some sort of standoff defense down there in addition to the helos.”
CIA director Canfield had even fewer good operations than SecDef. “Mr. President, since Ukraine is an ally, our contingency plans for getting our men out of there on the fly revolve around local forces providing a QRF.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said, strumming his fingers on the blotter in front of him and thinking. “That didn’t work out so well.”
A Marine Corps Pentagon adviser to the White House, a full-bird colonel named Dial, half raised a hand at the end of the table.
Ryan saw the gesture. “Colonel?”
“Mr. President, we have a pair of V-22 Ospreys with a Marine contingent in Lodz, Poland, doing some training with NATO forces. They aren’t a QRF, per se, but they are Marines. I can get the Ospreys and two dozen riflemen airborne and en route in a half-hour. The flight down would be roughly ninety minutes.”
Ryan asked, “What about defending the Ospreys? I remember they have a machine gun on the loading ramp, but that doesn’t seem like much against the threat that’s being described down there around the SMC.”
Dial said, “It’s true, the Ospreys aren’t the best platform for landing in a hot LZ like this. But these particular V-22s happen to have the IDWS, Interim Defensive Weapon System, it’s a belly turret gun attached to a FLIR and a TV camera. It’s operated by a gunner inside the aircraft.”
“Is that enough firepower?” The last thing Ryan wanted to do was send two flight crews and two dozen Marines into harm’s way without a way to defend themselves in the air.
Dial said, “Mr. President, it’s a three-barrel, seven-six-two-millimeter mini-gun that rotates three hundred sixty degrees and fires three thousand rounds per minute. That, along with the fifty cals on the back ramp, will bring a lot of American lead to that fight on landing and takeoff. On the ground I’d put twenty-four USMC riflemen up against five hundred armed rioters any day of the week. I’d prefer to have more guns and platforms there, but considering this is an in extremis situation, I think this is the best we can do.”
“Bob,” Ryan said, looking to Burgess, “make it happen. If we can get the installation evacuated by the Ukrainians before the Ospreys get there we’ll wave them off, but for now, get them en route.”
Burgess nodded, turned to his staff there at the Pentagon, and just like that, the operation was under way.
But President Ryan was not satisfied. “Ladies and gentlemen, that is our plan for two hours from now, but we are not finished. From these reports it doesn’t look like that installation has two hours. I want to know what we can do in the next sixty minutes to keep the Lighthouse from being overrun.”
Burgess blew out a sigh and held his hands up. “Honestly, sir, if we can’t get the local forces to help out, I don’t know what we can do.”
Ryan looked to Colonel Dial, who had no answer, either.
But one of Dial’s assistants attached to the White House was a young African American Air Force major. He sat against the wall behind his colonel on Ryan’s left, and when Dial failed to come up with anything, the major turned quickly toward the President. He said nothing; instead, he turned back away and looked down at his hands, but Ryan got the impression the officer thought he had something to offer.
Ryan leaned forward to read the man’s name tag on his uniform. “Major Adoyo? Something to add?”
“I am sorry, sir.” Ryan detected a slight African accent.
“Don’t apologize. Scoot up to the table and talk.”
Adoyo did as the President asked, moving his chair next to Colonel Dial’s. He looked nervous, and Ryan pointed this out.
“Relax, Adoyo. You clearly have more interest in talking than anyone else in the room right now. I want to hear what you have to say.”
“Well, sir . . . we have a squadron of F-16s from the 22nd Fighter Squadron over at Incirlik AFB in Turkey right now. That’s just on the other side of the Black Sea. I used to be stationed there myself. It’s less than a two-hundred-fifty-mile straight shot up to the tip of the Crimea.”
The secretary of defense almost yelled at the young major through his monitor. “We’re not going to bomb an urban population in a friendly—”
President Ryan held up his hand. Burgess stopped talking immediately.
“Continue, Major.”
“I know we can’t engage the people on the ground, but if we happen to have a flight on the runway or in the air over Incirlik with enough fuel, we could have fighters making low passes at near supersonic speeds over that CIA compound thirty or forty minutes from now.” He held his palms up on the table. “I mean . . . it’s no silver bullet, but that might keep some heads down for a while, anyway.” He paused again. “It is standard doctrine. Happened all the time when I was flying A-10s in Iraq. If you needed to provide close air support but couldn’t drop ordnance due to the proximity of noncombatants, you do the next best thing. Fly low, fast, and loud. Make noise and rattle fillings.”
President Ryan looked to Burgess’s monitor. “Bob? Why the hell not? It’s something.”
Burgess didn’t like it. “We don’t know if it will make the crowd disperse or the armed attackers back down.”
“What do we have to lose? Can anyone in that crowd outside the Lighthouse shoot down our F-16s?”
Adoyo muttered, “No fucking way.” And then he gasped, recognizing that he’d answered out loud a question that had been posed for SecDef, and, more important, he’d cussed in front of the President of the United States.
President Ryan looked to Colonel Dial. “Major Adoyo says ‘No fucking way.’ What do you say, Colonel?”
“Well, we only know for sure that the opposition has small arms. A fighter passing overhead pushing Mach 1 isn’t going to get shot down with a rifle or an RPG, I can promise you that.”
Ryan thought about the diplomatic implications of this for a moment, then said, “Let’s do it.” He looked up at Scott Adler as soon as he finished the order, because he knew the secretary of state wasn’t going to like this one bit.
Adler spoke first. “Mr. President, sending in unarmed or lightly armed transport aircraft for an emergency extraction is one thing, but what you are talking about is flying fighter bombers over the Black Sea fleet. The Russians are going to g
o nuts.”
Ryan replied, “I understand, and it’s our job to deal with that. I want to tell the Ukrainians first, then I want you personally on the phone with Russia’s foreign minister in the next ten minutes. If you can’t get him, get whomever you can. Tell them we will overfly Sevastopol with the blessing of the Ukrainian government. Tell them we understand Crimea is semiautonomous, we understand this is Russia’s neighborhood, and we understand this is provocative. But right now our only concern is the safety of our U.S. personnel in danger, who, you’ll need to stress, are only there because they are part of the Partnership for Peace program.
“Tell them we want their blessing for this, but we will accept their passive acceptance.” Jack held a hand up. “As a matter of fact, you can tell them we won’t push back if they raise holy hell about it on TV, or lodge a formal protest to NATO or the UN after the fact. But you tell them that this is going to happen, and it is going to happen in about a half-hour. Any intervention by the Russians will escalate into something neither party wants.”
Adler, America’s chief diplomat, was paid to think through the ramifications. He said, “The Kremlin will want something in return.”
Ryan was ready to do some horse trading. “That’s fine. We’ll remove some warships out of the Black Sea or something, but not until our people are out of harm’s way. If you need me on the phone to the foreign minister, or even Volodin himself, I’m sitting right here.”
“Got it,” Adler said. Ryan could tell the secretary of state was not happy. He couldn’t have been pleased to know a CIA compound was running under the guise of a NATO operation in the first place, which gave it a diplomatic-mission status. This sort of thing went on all over the world, but the diplomats, of course, hated it when CIA installations operated under the guise of diplomacy, because it jeopardized legitimate diplomatic installations.
Ryan knew once word got out this building had been a CIA front, all over the planet totally innocuous State Department missions would come under intense suspicion and scrutiny by the local population.
But that was a problem for another day. For now, Adler excused himself from the meeting, knowing he had to perform some diplomatic magic to keep the Black Sea fleet from firing on American aircraft.
42
A flight of U.S. Air Force F-16 Falcons flew over central Turkey in a finger-four formation. Around these jets flew three more four-aircraft flights of F-16s, but these weren’t wearing markings of the U.S. Air Force, instead their tails were emblazoned with the red and white flag of the Turkish Air Force. Together all sixteen aircraft flew in a squadron formation above a puffy sheet of white clouds.
The American aircraft were members of the U.S. Air Force’s 480th Fighter Squadron, the Warhawks, and although they were based in Spangdahlem, Germany, they had spent the week here in Turkey as part of a NATO training evolution with the Turkish Air Force.
The flight lead for the Americans was Air Force Captain Harris “Grungy” Cole, a thirty-year-old New Yorker, and even though all sixteen aircraft now appeared to be flying in near-perfect formation, Cole had experienced his share of difficulties above the clouds in the past few minutes getting everyone together. His problems stemmed chiefly from the constant struggle to understand the thick accents of the Turkish flight leads. But although he had to request several common transmissions be repeated so that he could be certain everyone was on the same page, he gave the Turk pilots a pass, because he didn’t know a damn word of Turkish himself except for “Bir bira, lütfen” (“A beer, please”) so if today’s training had hinged on his own command of a foreign tongue, all sixteen of these planes in this tight formation would have already slammed into one another in midair.
Just as Captain Cole began to transmit orders to the Turkish flight leaders ordering them to maintain this pattern while climbing to thirty-five thousand feet, a call came over his radio from Incirlik AFB ordering him to peel his flight away from the Turkish F-16s and begin heading north toward the Black Sea to await further instructions.
He received no other clarification, other than the fact that this was “real world” and not an exercise.
The Black Sea was a hotbed of activity of late, since the Russian Black Sea fleet began a drill that pushed dozens of their warships away from port and into deeper waters, but Cole could not imagine how his four fighter-bombers could be any help in that looming crisis.
Just minutes later, after his Warrior flight had left the Turkish Air Force fighters behind and proceeded north, Grungy received instructions ordering him to divert at best possible speed into Ukrainian airspace over the city of Sevastopol.
Cole’s quite reasonable question, whether or not the Ukrainians had cleared his flight to enter their airspace, was not immediately answered.
He knew he’d need that clearance quickly. To stress the urgency of the situation, he told the controller who’d sent him on this mission, “Be advised, ETA twenty-one minutes.”
The terse reply came back. “Understood. We are tracking.”
“Uh. Also . . . we might want to think about letting the Russians know what we’re doing. They’ve got their own air defenses over their fleet parked right there in Sevastopol. How copy?”
“Good copy, and we’re working on that. General Nathansan will speak with you directly in a moment with more information.”
Cole was already surprised by this strange event, but hearing that the commanding officer of the 52nd Operations Group, the fighter component of the 52nd Fighter Wing, would be directly entering his headset to tell him about his flight’s mission made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.
Something was up, it was big, and Grungy hoped like hell he’d get the clearance to fly over Sevastopol before he was shot down by the Russians. He also hoped someone was expediting a tanker to the area to get involved in all this, because he and his flight would need fuel if they were going to fly up to Sevastopol and do anything more than fly right back home.
Warrior flight was well over the Black Sea before they had more context for their mission. As promised, General Nathansan himself came on a radio channel to speak directly to Captain Cole. He talked in a rapid and frank manner, informing the captain about the situation on the ground in Sevastopol, passing along the GPS coordinates for the Lighthouse, and ordering Cole to overfly the area for as long as he had fuel to do so and get back to Turkish airspace, where a KC-135 Stratotanker would gas them up for the return the rest of the way back to base at Incirlik.
Cole computed his fuel quickly while Nathansan talked. The four aircraft in his flight would have enough gas for no more than four passes each over the city. From the way the general explained the situation, all parties involved were hoping four aircraft making a few fly-bys would somehow buy the Americans under attack on the ground the hour to hour and a half necessary to wait for air extraction by Marine V-22s.
Nathansan told Grungy they had the overflight cleared with the Ukrainians, and they were working with the Russians. Cole knew Russia had air defenses all over Sevastopol to protect the port, and immediately decided he’d have his flight approach from an easterly direction, the opposite direction of the port of Sevastopol, so that he would not fly directly over any Russian ships in port.
Before Grungy opened his channel to explain the situation to the rest of his flight, he brainstormed the problem for a moment, trying to think of ways to maximize the impact of their attempt at “shock and awe.” He came up with a quick plan, and then relayed instructions to the three other pilots.
“Warrior Oh One to Warrior flight. Here’s the sitrep. We’re going to put on an air show over the Black Sea fleet.”
He explained that an American installation—even though their transmissions were encrypted, Nathansan had not uttered “CIA”—was under attack by unknown forces, and there was concern rioters would attempt to penetrate the walls. He told his fellow pilots that U.S. personnel had already been killed and wounded, and they would need to fly low and hot enough to make a seriou
s impact on events on the ground.
His wingman, Captain James “Scrabble” Le Blanc, asked, “Are we going to be cleared hot for the Vulcan?”
Although these aircraft did not have air-to-ground munitions on their wings, an M61 “Vulcan” twenty-millimeter Gatling gun protruded from each fuselage. The guns were loaded with explosive shells, and could fire more than six hundred rounds per minute.
But Grungy threw water on the prospects for any gun runs today. “Negative. There are going to be too many noncombatants in too small an area for the Vulcans.”
Pablo, Warrior Three, next asked, “So we’re supposed to just fly around and look scary?”
Grungy replied, “We aren’t going to look scary. We’re going to be scary.” And then he explained the rest of his rushed plan to his pilots.
—
The helicopter crash in the open park in front of the Lighthouse seemed to have dispersed the crowd near the front gate to some degree. Chavez, Midas, and Bixby stood just inside the lobby doors and looked across the parking circle, down the drive, and through the metal bars. For the first time in the past half-hour, the large group of young men that had been standing there throwing bottles and bricks and incendiary devices onto the property was gone.
Word had filtered down to those trapped in the Lighthouse that a pair of V-22 Ospreys were en route, and in order for the big tiltrotor airplane-helo hybrids to be able to land within the walls of the Lighthouse, the men inside knew they would have to move everything out of the front of the property. This would create a landing pad about forty yards square, giving one Osprey just enough room to put down.
Midas used the thinning of the crowd to get several men outside so they could move the vehicles and police the area of debris that could be blown around in the prop blast. Clark, Ding, and Dom volunteered, as they were not manning weapons on the higher floors of the Lighthouse, and they, along with Keith Bixby, one of Bixby’s men, and Midas himself, each took a set of keys and ran out to the vehicles.