Conway just laughed, but he was genuinely curious about just how far into the inner sanctum of the “special” side of the Army they were heading.
Soon they arrived at the last building on the base. It was protected by another group of Rangers, who read Conway’s and Page’s name tapes and called someone over the radio. A moment later they were led into a hallway and told to knock on the last door on the right.
Nervously, Conway and Page looked at each other, then Conway rapped on the metal door.
“Enter,” came a booming voice from inside.
They entered, then found themselves facing a half-dozen men in civilian attire. The average age of these guys looked like it was about ten years older than the Green Berets back in the hangar, and they all wore scruffy beards and different types of adventure-wear clothing. Each one of the men also wore a pistol on his hip, and both Conway and Page noticed that the guns were individual to the men, and this told the young warrant officers that these guys were likely JSOC, Joint Special Operations Command operators. This would mean they were either SEAL Team Six or Delta. Either way, neither Conway nor Page had a clue what they were doing here.
“Come on in, gents. Thanks for dropping by,” one of the bearded men said.
In the U.S. Army, one does not “drop by.” They had been ordered over here by their CO, but if these guys wanted to be informal about this, Conway and Page were happy to oblige.
The man who clearly was the team leader introduced himself and his men. “I’m Midas, this is Boyd, this is Greyhound, these guys in back are Arctic, Beavis, and Slammer.”
Both Page and Conway thought the same thing at the same time. These dudes are fucking Delta Force!
Midas said, “It’s an honor to meet you guys. I read the AAR about that piece of flying you did up in eastern Estonia. They say you two jokers grabbed a road map and flew into disputed territory so low that Russian radar thought you were driving a taxi. Then you took out a half-dozen T-90s.”
Conway knew the after-action review of his operation in Estonia had been classified by the military. Still, it was no surprise these black operators had read it.
Conway beamed with pride but replied, “Thank you, sir. But to be honest, we had some luck.”
Page added, “We also had some Apaches.”
The entire room burst into laughter.
“I love it,” Midas said, and he read Page’s name tape. “Mr. Page, what do you say? Is Mr. Conway as good a pilot as that AAR made him out to be?”
Dre Page nodded. “I hate to admit it in front of him, but he’s badass, sir.”
Midas said, “That’s good enough for me. He’s the one flying you around, so I figure you are the man to ask about his abilities.”
Conway said, “Page does all of the targeting, but he does some flying, too.”
Midas pointed to a sofa against the wall, and the two Chief Warrant Officers sat down. Midas walked over to a cooler on a table, opened it, and pulled out some bottles of iced Slavutich beer, a local brand. He popped off the caps on the edge of the table, then walked them over to the two wide-eyed young men.
“Welcome to Ukraine,” he said as he handed over the beers. He went back to the cooler and got one for himself. He took a swig, and only then did the helo crew follow suit. Conway thought this was really weird, and he wondered if he was on some new American Forces Network TV version of Candid Camera.
Midas sat on top of a wooden table next to his men. The other guys were loading rifle magazines with bullets from ammo cans. Conway and Page noticed the rifles lined up along the wall. They were HK416s, which looked much like their Colt M4s and fired the same caliber bullet, but the Delta Force rifles were far superior.
Midas said, “You’re probably wondering why you’re here.”
Conway was the quieter of the two men, so Dre answered. “Yes, sir.”
Midas said, “Some general in Washington has seen fit to give me command authority over this operation in Ukraine. With the arrival of your company, I now have under my command four hundred twenty-nine men.” He held a hand up quickly. “Correction. Four hundred eight men and twenty-one women. There are some female intel support, as well as Flight Ops personnel. There is one female pararescue Black Hawk pilot, too, I hear.”
“Saw her this morning. She’s pretty hot,” mumbled the Delta man called Greyhound.
“Anyway, if you hadn’t guessed yet, the Russians are coming over the border. Might be today, might be tomorrow, might not be for a week. But they are coming, and when they do, we’ll have SOF teams up and down the region, not right at the border, but fifty or so miles inside. They are hooked up with SOFLAM laser designators, and they will mark targets for the Ukrainian Air Force to take out with air-to-ground ordnance. You follow me so far?”
Conway and Page both said, “Yes, sir.”
Midas sighed. “Okay, best we get this out of the way. Do me a favor. Cut the ‘sir’ shit right now.”
Conway and Page were regular Army. The idea of calling a man who was clearly a superior officer “Midas” made them both uncomfortable.
“Yes . . . Midas,” Conway managed to say.
“We also just got your company of OH-58s. Now, the rest of your company will do the same thing as the SOF troops. That is, use laser designation to find and fix targets for the Ukrainian AF to finish. The other Kiowas will have Stinger missiles to give themselves some air defense capabilities.”
“Okay,” Conway said, unsure where this was going.
“But I want you guys to do something different. I want to load you boys up with Hellfires, so you can do some of the finishing yourselves.”
“Yes, sir,” Page said, holding his beer up high in salute.
Midas stared him down for a moment.
“Uh . . . I mean, Midas.”
“Good. Our primary mission is to be lasing targets for the Ukrainians, but that’s not good enough. I want to have the ability, in an in extremis situation, to operate independently of the Ukrainians.”
Conway got it now. “I understand.”
“We have Reaper drones from the CIA armed with Hellfires that we can call on targets. But I want my own bird in the air, you guys, to be ready to go places on the fly to attack targets when necessary. Can you do that for me?”
“Absolutely.”
“As you might have guessed, I am not conventional Army. You guys are in the conventional system, but I need pilots who can think unconventionally in this. From the AAR I read about the stunt you pulled in Estonia, I’m thinking you guys might be perfect as my hired gun up in the sky.”
Conway said, “Whatever you need.”
“Good to hear it.”
Page said, “One question, Midas. Where will we be going?”
“That’s going to be classified. Certainly not into the Crimea. Probably not to Donetsk, either. We’ll let you know before takeoff, usually, but we just need you ready for a call from us. We’ll talk to your CO and get you taken off the regular flight line so you can run your own op.”
Eric and Dre finished their beers, shook the hands of the men in the room, and started to leave. Eric turned away from the door. He didn’t know if he should push his luck, but he thought he was on a roll. “Um, Midas . . . Ukraine isn’t a NATO member. I don’t understand. Is our country really going to war for them?”
“Our country is not.” He shrugged. “We are. Welcome to the dark side, boys.”
57
Thirty years earlier
CIA analyst Jack Ryan awoke to a determined knock at his hotel room door in Zug, Switzerland. He looked at the clock on the bedside table and saw it was just after four a.m. He rolled quickly out of bed and unlatched the door; it was all the way open before it occurred to him that even though he was an analyst and not an operative, he was working in the field, and it might have been a good idea to look through the damn peephole before flinging open the door.
C’mon, Jack. Pay attention to what you’re doing.
It was Nick East
ling in the hall, and Jack could immediately tell the man had been up for some time.
He could also tell something was wrong.
“What’s going on?”
Eastling said, “I need to come in.”
“Sure.”
Eastling entered, and Jack shut the door behind him. Both men moved to chairs in a comically tiny sitting area.
Jack said, “You just getting back from the safe house?”
“Yeah. Been on the phone with Century House and contacts at the embassy in Zurich.”
“What’s going on?”
“The explosion tonight at the Restaurant Meisser. There were fourteen dead.”
Jack couldn’t read the man’s face. He looked simultaneously excited and confused.
Nick added, “One of the victims was Marcus Wetzel.”
Jack cocked his head. “And he is . . . who, exactly?”
Eastling gave a long sigh. “You would find out soon enough, anyway. He was our source in the bank. He was Morningstar.”
Ryan put his head in his hands. “Oh my God.”
“Yeah. He was dining with another man, who survived. He identified the body.”
Ryan stood. “You still think this was random?”
“I . . . obviously . . . Of course not. I’m no bloody fool, Ryan. Morningstar was murdered. I have to think it was the same actor who killed Tobias Gabler.”
“I’m glad you’ve come around.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve come around to the fact the bankers were murdered, but not David Penright.”
“How can you be so certain of that?”
“Because German leftists wouldn’t have much interest in David Penright, now, would they?”
“German leftists? What are you talking about?”
“One of the bodies found in the explosion in Rotkreuz was identified as a twenty-five-year-old German woman named Marta Scheuring. The location of her body was curious, it gave the Swiss reason to stop what they were doing and focus on her. She was found in the kitchen, near the gas lines, but she did not work in the restaurant. They are assuming she brought some sort of explosive into the place, but when she tried to set the timer, the bloody thing went off in her face.”
Jack assumed there was more. “How do they know she wasn’t just looking for the john?”
“You mean the loo, don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Because coincidences like this don’t occur. Marta Scheuring was closely affiliated with the Red Army Faction. She has two arrests in Germany for subversive acts. She lives in Berlin. They found her address with her identification in a backpack she’d left in an alley behind the Meisser.”
Jack knew all about the RAF. He also knew they did not normally operate in Switzerland. “Why would RAF blow this restaurant up?”
Eastling shrugged. “I don’t know. I do know I am heading to Berlin. Century House has been in contact with the German police. The Germans will raid her flat, and I will be there when it happens.”
“What about the other guy?”
“What other guy?”
“The man the Swiss police picked up at the Meisser restaurant. The man who was taken away in the squad car?”
Eastling said, “Oh, him. He escaped custody. Picked his cuffs and wrestled a gun away from one of the cops. He cuffed the coppers together, back-to-back, around a light pole in the city center near the Bahnhof. Looks like he left on the train.”
“Surely he was involved, too.”
“Might have been. Probably RAF. Maybe I’ll find out more in Berlin. As I said, I’m off in a few hours. You are welcome to join me, although I can’t speak for the Germans. Might want to get that cleared with your home office.”
Jack rubbed his eyes. “Two days ago you heard that a girl from Berlin was drinking with a British agent who was then killed, working on the same case where all these other people have been killed. Now a German woman tied to RAF is also tied to the other deaths.
“Do you really think the death of David Penright was just a coincidence? Why not go back to the bar where Penright died and show them the picture of Marta and ask if it was the same woman?”
“We’ll pass it on to the Swiss, who I am quite certain will do just that. But there are German girls all over the place. If Penright had not been chatting up a German, he would have been with an Aussie or a Kiwi or a Frenchie or some Swede. The girl in the bar doesn’t matter.”
Eastling continued, “We will go to Berlin, look at the RAF evidence there, and if it somehow should lead us back to David Penright’s death, we will act accordingly. In the meantime, don’t you bloody tell me how to do my job!”
Ryan said, “That’s fine. Let’s go. But I want to be involved in the exploitation of the intelligence found in the location in Berlin. I don’t want to be standing on the sidelines.”
“Not for me to say, Jack, old boy. Take it up with the Huns.”
58
Present day
Tatiana Molchanova smiled into the camera as New Russia’s six p.m. news began. Normally, the evening news here, like every evening news program on earth, began by reporting on the day’s events, but Valeri Volodin had shown up right before the start of the newscast, and he’d walked himself onto the set and sat down in what he considered to be his chair.
So the camera faded in with a close-up shot of Molchanova, she stretched an introduction of the president out a little while an audio technician miked Volodin on her left, then she turned and greeted the president with a wide but not overtly unprofessional smile.
Molchanova had no questions for him; his arrival had been a complete surprise, and the producers in her earpiece seemed to be arguing with one another about how to start his interview.
She would have to wing this segment, but she could do it, because she was a pro. Plus, she had a strong suspicion the president wouldn’t give her too much opportunity for improvisation.
“Mr. President, there have been some dramatic events within the borders of our largest neighbor to the west. What comments do you have about the attacks in Ukraine that seemed to be so clearly designed to threaten Russian supporters there?”
Volodin was like a coiled spring released. “Not just supporters, Tatiana Vladimirovna. I remind you that millions of Russian citizens live within the borders of Ukraine.
“The attack against my good friend Oksana Zueva and the bombing in Donetsk were both clearly by the hands of pro-nationalist guerrilla forces supported by Western intelligence agencies. Add to this the attack by the American CIA in Sevastopol. These were provokatsii!” Provocations! “The enemies of Russia are trying to draw us out into a fight. We have kept our disagreements peaceful and within the diplomatic realm, and they did not know how to handle this level of sophistication, so they resorted to bloodshed.”
Molchanova recognized her cue. She asked a vague question about how actions in Ukraine affected the Motherland.
Volodin did not miss a beat. “There are fifty million people in Ukraine, one-sixth of whom are ethnic Russians. And the Crimean peninsula is vital to Russian security interests. That is obvious to even the most basic student of international, economic, and military affairs.
“It is home of the Black Sea fleet. There are oil and gas pipelines to Europe, Russia’s vital market, and military highways to the West that are important to our security interests.”
Volodin continued, “Ukraine belongs in our sphere of influence. As I see it, there are two threats to our nation. Only two. These are terrorism and the lawless criminality of the West on our borders.
“Our enemies would dismember us, and we know this, so we keep them outside our borders, but that is not enough. Eastern European countries have become slaves of America and Europe, and we must protect ourselves from them, no matter the cost.
“We have reduced terrorism in Russia to a large degree. Ethnic divisions within, along with the criminal element, most of whom were of ethnic minority, have been controlled to a large measure. We will need to contin
ue our struggle, to promote the strength of our law enforcement and judicial system at home, and increase the scope of our security services abroad. There is no other way to survive.
“But looking into what is going on in Ukraine, I see we not only share interests with our Slavic neighbors, but we also share threats.
“The Ukrainian nationalists in power in Kiev are just such a threat.”
Volodin stared into the lens of the camera. Tatiana Molchanova sat meekly to the side. The president had clearly forgotten he was in an interview for the time being. “No rogue regime will be allowed to exist peacefully on our borders. This is just the thing I have been trying to protect the Motherland from.
“The pervasive crime and lawlessness in Ukraine has shown me that the Russian citizens there must be protected, and this protection must be actual, and not some new line drawn on a map, which will not serve anyone’s interests.”
He paused, so Tatiana Molchanova filled the dead air with her voice: “Can you tell us what steps your government is prepared to take to alleviate the threats along our border?”
“I have ordered our military to prepare a series of small-scale security actions to protect Russia’s interests in the Crimea, and Russia’s population who live in eastern Ukraine. I cannot go into any operational details, of course.” He smiled. “Not even for you, Tatiana Vladimirovna.”
She smiled back.
“But everyone should remember this is nothing more than a mission of mirotvorsty.” Peacemaking.
Tatiana said, “Ukraine is not a NATO member state, but they are a member of the Partnership for Peace, which means there is some training and coordination with NATO forces. Do you expect this to cause trouble in any security operation?”
Volodin said, “We were NATO members until a year ago, but I saw the folly of this. How could we continue in NATO, an organization that was set up for the express purpose of defeating us?
“NATO is not so much of a threat. Most European nations are completely reasonable. But America is a concern, and I will give you an example of why. They have an obsession for antiballistic missiles. This was started by Ronald Reagan, and it has continued for thirty years. The Americans want these missiles only for one reason. To cloak themselves in safety for an inevitable battle. A battle they plan on starting.