Afterburn

CHAPTER 22

Medium shot of a large, imposing, white building surrounded by trees. UN troops, wearing bulky flak-jackets and blue helmets, are everywhere in evidence. Cut to medium close-up of Boychenko, speaking earnestly with a U.S. Navy captain and an enlisted woman.

“In the historic city of Yalta today, the chaotic disintegration of the Russian Federation took yet another step into anarchy, as Russian naval forces in the Crimea refused to go along with General Sergei Boychenko’s plan to turn the region over to UN forces.”

Cut to long shot of Russian soldiers moving cautiously along a street, using abandoned vehicles or fallen rubble for cover. Cut to blurry view of a jet aircraft streaking overhead, then back to another long shot of soldiers in the street. Two men drag a wounded comrade to shelter.

“The mutiny has precipitated sharp fighting between army units loyal to Boychenko, and naval infantry and air force units under the command of Vice-Admiral Nikolai Dmitriev. Casualties are reported to be heavy.

“Dmitriev has declared Boychenko to be a rebel in the employ of antigovernment forces and has assumed full command of all military units in the Crimea, this in the wake of the attempted assassination of Boychenko during UN ceremonies here yesterday morning. Authorities believe that attempt was probably instigated by Dmitriev, though spokesmen for the Black Sea Fleet’s commander deny it.”

Medium shot of UN soldiers near the White Palace. Cut to a view of the wreckage of a large helicopter on the palace grounds.

“In the meantime, some one hundred UN personnel, including a contingent from the U.S. Navy’s Jefferson battle group, now steaming offshore, have been trapped in Yalta by the rapidly escalating hostilities. All flights out of the area have been canceled, and military helicopters have been grounded. Dmitriev has threatened to shoot down any foreign aircraft in the region, fearing, perhaps, Boychenko’s escape.”

Cut to long shot of an older Russian woman with a small child, huddled against the side of a building. Zoom in on her age-wrinkled face as she stares apprehensively up at the sky. Cut to medium shot of a wood-frame house burning, then to several long shots of civilians in small, desolate groups. Some look fearful, some angry. Most look bewildered or simply numb. Cut to tight close-up of the first woman’s face. She is crying.

“For the people of Yalta, and the entire Crimea, the war goes on… and the killing… and it doesn’t really seem to matter who is fighting whom.

“For ACN, this is Pamela Drake, reporting live from Yalta.”

Dixie held his Tomcat, his new Tomcat, steady at five hundred feet, a sea-skimming altitude that would put him in a vulnerable spot if the Russians jumped him but that might give him and the seven other Tomcats flying in an extended formation with him a critical few more minutes of evasion from Russian radar. It was fully dark, with sunset having taken place four hours earlier, the sky partly cloudy, and the new moon just two days away. He couldn’t see the water flashing beneath his F-14’s belly, couldn’t see anything, really, except the mingled cool green-yellow glows of his cockpit instrumentation lights, his vertical and horizontal display indicator screens, and his HUD.

His pulse was pounding; he could feel it in his throat, against the collar of his flight suit. It felt good being on a full op again, instead of flying racecourse ovals over featureless spots of ocean on CAP.

Cat Garrity was riding backseat with him again, and that felt good as well.

“Coming up on the way point, Dix,” Cat told him over the ICS. “We have unknown aircraft in the vicinity, at two-seven-oh to three-three-five. No sign that they’ve noticed us yet.”

“Rog. Maybe they can’t see in the dark, huh?”

“Don’t count on it. Our Prowler friends can only jam them so much. When they get close enough, they’ll see us.”

Two separate flights of EA-6 Prowler ECM aircraft had departed from the Jefferson an hour earlier. One had cut inland, flying straight north and crossing the coast near Gurzuf. The other had paralleled the coast, jamming hard and recording any radar sites careless enough to paint them and give away their own positions. The first group was code-named Spoiler, and their job was to literally stir up an enemy response, attracting missile fire and interceptor squadrons, if possible, in order to clear the path to Yalta from the sea. The second group, Pouncer, would provide selective ECM jamming coverage for the rest of the aircraft, as well as loosing deadly AGM-136A anti-radiation cruise missiles. These weapons, called Tacit Rainbow, actually patrolled large sections of sky, detecting and storing the locations of all radar and radio emitters in the area, until, on command, they were directed against a selected target ― even some minutes after that target had stopped transmitting. They’d proved themselves superbly effective in the Gulf War and elsewhere at knocking out hostile radar arrays and weapons-targeting systems.

“I’ve got two more unknowns at two-zero-eight,” Cat told him. “They’re up high. Looks like a search sweep.”

“Rog.”

He was absolutely dependent on his RIO in a night operation, as dependent on her for radar information ― both that picked up by the F-14’s AWG-9 radar and that relayed to the squadrons from the E-2C Hawkeyes orbiting far to the south ― as he was dependent on his instruments now to tell him how high above the water he was flying and in what direction.

“Way point one,” she announced. “Come right to zero-zero-four.”

“Zero-zero-four,” he echoed as the F-14 tilted sharply to the right.

“Coming around to new heading… now.”

“We should have the coast in sight.”

He glanced up, peering past the reflections on his canopy and out into the darkness. “Got it. Funny. The place is still lit up like Christmas.”

“The Crimean Riviera, remember? They probably don’t shut down for anything short of a power failure.”

He could see the lights of Yalta ahead, smeared into a gradually thinning glitter of light inland and cut off sharp and hard by the curve of the coastline. Triple A ― antiaircraft fire ― was already floating into the sky from several points inland, along the mountain chain that pinned Yalta to the shore.

“Okay,” Cat told him. “We’re going feet dry. Swing us into the racetrack now.”

“Rog.” Lights swept beneath his aircraft. He looked behind and to either side, trying to spot Badger and Red, flying his wing, but he couldn’t see their aircraft. They were flying loose wing, perhaps a mile to his right and slightly behind.

He’d studied maps of the Yalta coastal area thoroughly and knew that the White Palace where Captain Magruder and a number of other Americans and UN personnel were trapped was just up the coast to the east… just about there, in fact. The light show was dazzlingly beautiful… and deadly. Some of those slowly drifting globes of light ― they looked like softly glowing tennis balls ― seemed to be chasing one another in gently arcing lines across the sky only a few feet away, close enough for Dixie to reach out and catch one.

Their distance and their slowness were illusory. They were close, within a mile or so, but traveling fast enough to punch clean through his wing if they struck it. Proximity fuses could trigger them to explode within a set range of several meters, peppering his relatively fragile and vulnerable aircraft with white-hot shrapnel.

An explosion rocked his Tomcat… and another. Once he heard a sharp ping of metal on metal, but after a heart-stopping moment of scanning his damage indicators, he decided that it had missed anything vital. The Tomcat was rocking now with the gentle throb of aerial explosions. Streams of tracer rounds, green and yellow, floated and arced across the sky.

“So what do you think, Cat?” he asked his RIO. “Are we at war yet?”

She laughed. “I don’t know what Washington has to say about it,” she said, “but I was at war with those bastards the moment they shot our people.”

“You don’t think it was a terrorist attack, like they’re saying?”

Everybody in the battle group, it seemed, had been watching the ACN broadcasts, live, since the ships were all set up to receive satellite news feeds. It was a little eerie, Dixie thought, that he’d been seeing news programs broadcast from this spot on the Crimean coast just a few hours ago. He’d been watching the TV monitor set up in the Vipers’ ready room, and the explosion of cheers and applause when Tombstone appeared briefly in one of the shots had been thunderous.

Washington might be undecided as to how to handle the Crimean mess, but every man and woman aboard the ships of CVBG-14 and MEU-25 was ready to go in now and kick ass until their people were returned safe.

The flak was growing thicker toward the mountains… but had vanished along the coast west of Yalta. That in itself was a warning.

“Yeah, that’s where they’re coming from, Dix,” Cat told him. “I’ve got four, no… make that five bogeys coming in at two-eight-five, range fifty-two miles. I’m getting radar tone.” There was a pause. Then, “Missiles! We have missiles incoming!”

“Tell me when!”

Seconds dragged past. “Hold it… hold it… okay! Zone five and break left!”

Dixie threw the F-14 into a hard turn to port, slamming the throttle forward to the final detent. As acceleration crammed him down against his seat, he looked up… and saw two bright stars curving through the night sky, coming straight at his head.

“Dropping chaff!” Cat said… and the missiles streaked past, passing beneath the aircraft and out over the sea.

Dixie kept the afterburner on as he straightened out on a new heading, flying directly toward the oncoming wave of hostiles.

“Poor Man, Poor Man,” Dixie called over the radio, using Jefferson’s code name for this op. “This is Air Hammer One-three! We are taking fire!”

“Poor Man” had been adopted from the name of John Paul Jones’s most famous command, the Bonhomme Richard. “Air Hammer, this is Poor Man,” replied the voice of Jefferson’s Ops watch officer. “We copy Hammer One-three taking fire. Can you confirm? Over.”

“Poor Man, Hammer One-four,” Badger’s voice said. “We confirm.”

“Poor Man, Hammer One-one,” Batman added. “Missile launch confirmed.

The bastards are shooting at us, too!”

“Air Hammer, this is Top Hat,” a new voice said… Admiral Brandt, speaking from Jefferson’s CIC. “We confirm hostile action at twenty-one-forty hours. Weapons free. I say again, weapons free!”

“Music to my ears,” Dixie said. “I’m tired of being shot at.”

“Radar lock,” Cat said. He heard it, the shrill, chirping warble in his ear. “Let’s see if we can discourage them, Dix.”

“I’m with you.”

“Shall I do the honors?”

“By all means.”

“Okay. Bring us left a bit. There. That’s it. Hold it steady.” He could hear the flick-flick-flick of console switches as she armed the Tomcat’s AIM-54C missiles. “I have target lock, smack on the leader. I have tone… Fox three!”

The Tomcat bucked skyward for a moment, even though Dixie had been ready for it, as the 447-kilogram missile dropped clear. Its exhaust flared a dazzling, blinding white as the missile slid off the F-14’s wing and Dixie found himself staring briefly right up its tailpipe.

“Shit,” he said, blinking. His night sight was gone, shattered by that flare of light.

Cat guessed what had happened. “Next time-” she said.

“Don’t look,” the two of them chorused together, completing her statement. He blinked hard several times. He could still read his instruments well enough, and that was all that mattered.

“Target two… lock,” Cat said. “Fox three!”

This time, Dixie closed his eyes as the Phoenix missile blasted away from the F-14 and streaked into darkness.

They were carrying a total of six Phoenix air-to-air missiles, a full load; their AWG-9 radar was capable of tracking six targets and the missiles assigned to them simultaneously.

It was, Dixie thought, a strange kind of warfare. He couldn’t see the targets, wouldn’t have been able to see them even in broad daylight at a range of over fifty miles. Cat chose the first two targets; the aircraft’s fire control computer chose the next four, in decreasing order of threat to the aircraft. The elapsed time between her first Fox three and her last was just thirty-eight seconds.

Her first missile, flying at better than Mach 5, covered the forty-eight miles to the first target in a little over forty seconds. He saw the detonation when it went off, a tiny flash in the night far to the west. Her second missile hit, the third missed ― evaded by some spectacular aerial maneuvers by the target ― and then in rapid-fire succession, the fourth, fifth, and sixth AIM-54s all struck home.

Within the space of a minute and a half, Dixie and Cat had just launched six million dollars’ worth of technology, destroying five aircraft worth some twenty-five times the total cost of the AIM-54Cs.

There was no way of knowing at this range whether or not those aircraft’s pilots had managed to eject or not.

“Poor Man, this is Air Hammer One-three,” Dixie called. It was strange, but he didn’t feel the elation he’d expected. The engagement had been so distant, so… clinical. “We’re five for six and dry.”

“One-three, hold one.”

“COPY.”

It wasn’t until sometime later that something else occurred to him:

They’d just scored five kills, technically qualifying him as an ace. He didn’t feel like an ace; Cat had fired two of the missiles, and four had been launched by the aircraft’s computer. Over the tactical channel, he could hear bursts of radio chatter from other aviators as they launched on the unseen enemy.

“Fox three! Fox three!”

“That’s one! I saw it hit!”

“God, look at those flames. I’ve got a Mig here, going down inflames!”

“That’s Fox three for Hammer Two-two.”

They sounded so distant, so isolated. It seemed a cold and lonely way to fight a war, and he was glad Cat was with him.

“One-three, this is Poor Man. We copy you dry. Hold your position. The helos are going in.”

“Roger that. Hammer One-three, maintaining position.”

This was the part of Operation Ranger that he’d not been sure he could handle. With no missiles remaining, his only weapons were the F-14’s guns, weapons useful only for extremely close-ranged combat ― at “knife-fighting distance,” as aviators liked to say ― and then only when you could actually see the other guy. But the operational plan had called for two flights of Tomcats, Air Hammer One and Air Hammer Two, to move in over the Crimean coast and, once the weapons-free command had been given, to down enough enemy aircraft to keep the rest cautious. If they turned tail and fled for the Jefferson now, the enemy would follow… and blunder into the flight of helicopters off the U.S.S. Guadalcanal that even now ought to be streaking through the darkness toward Yalta at wave-clipping height.

By maintaining position, the two Tomcat squadrons presented a formidable wall of radar targets that ought to keep the enemy guessing… and at a distance. Not all of the F-14s had launched; half were holding their warloads in reserve. Dixie and Cat were relying now on Badger and Red to cover them with their load-out of Phoenix missiles.

Nonetheless, Dixie felt naked, orbiting through the night without a missile left to his name.

“Are you sure you want to go through with this, General? There’s still time to get out.”

Tombstone watched Boychenko’s mouth quirk upward at the corner as PO/2 Kardesh translated for him. Her Russian was precise, fluid, and glib.

“I… am sure,” Boychenko said, his accent thick. “is my gift to you, for save my life.” He hesitated, frowned, then said something quickly in Russian to Kardesh.

The woman nodded, then looked at Tombstone. “He wants to know if our battle group will have fuel enough to carry out this operation, with all of the flying that’s going on now.”

Tombstone glanced up at the dark sky, laced with the colorful streams of antiaircraft tracers. It was strange to think that his people were up there, Batman and Brewer and Nightmare and Dixie and all the rest.

“Tell him we’ll have enough to take the facility, Tomb stone said after a moment. “But it’s essential that we secure the Arsincevo complex, or this whole exercise is going to do nothing but leave our planes grounded and our ships helpless. Make sure he understands that. I also want him to understand that we’ll be attacking a pretty fair-sized Russian force. Russians against Russians. I want to know if he can trust his people.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

After Boychenko replied at length, she delivered the translation. “He says he understands the risks and thinks that Arsincevo can be taken. He also says that his troops, specifically, the 4th Spetsnaz Fleet Brigade and some attached support units are loyal to him, personally.”

“A Spetsnaz brigade; That’s what… a thousand men?”

“Twelve hundred, in this case, sir, plus a piece of a transport company and some other odds and ends he’s scraped up in the last couple of days.”

“He understands that we won’t be able to evacuate them as well.”

Another brief exchange in Russian.

“The general says, sir, that they are loyal to him specifically because he promised to find a way for them to go home. They don’t want to stay here in the Crimea. After Arsincevo, they will cross the Kerch Strait and hook up with Krasilnikov forces there. He… he does say they don’t know he will be leaving them.”

“Yeah.” Tombstone took a hard look at Boychenko, wondering what kind of man would simply abandon his men in the field. Granted, his own death sentence had already been signed, most likely, and his execution at the hands of Krasilnikov’s agents would not serve any real purpose beyond the traditional honor of the captain going down with his ship.

Still, what kind of cold-blooded bastard did it take, Tombstone wondered, to use troops as fanatically loyal as his were supposed to be and then calmly walk away from them while they were carrying out his last set of orders?

The thunder started far out over the sea as a faint, distant rumble, then swelled rapidly to a shrill, booming crescendo that rattled the windows of the White Palace. Tombstone looked up but saw only afterburners, brilliant, paired eyes of white-orange light gleaming in the night as they streaked low overhead.

Hornets. With Jefferson’s two Tomcat squadrons serving as FORCECAP to keep the enemy from striking either the American ships or the rescue helicopters, it fell to the F/A-18 Hornets of VFA-161 and VFA-173, along with the A-6 Intruders of VA-84 and VA-89, to deliver the massive air-to-ground strike necessary to let Boychenko’s troops break free of their death grip with Dmitriev’s naval infantry. The Hornets howled, two by two, above Yalta and the White Palace, vanishing into the darkness above the mountains to the north. Seconds later, he could hear the thunder of their bombs and air-to-surface missiles.

It was almost time.

Pamela and Joyce both were standing on the palace’s south patio, a few yards away, apparently deep in conversation. Tombstone wasn’t exactly looking forward to what he had to do now, but there would be no better time. Excusing himself from Boychenko, he walked toward them.

“Well, ladies,” he said. “Are you ready to say farewell to the sunny Russian Riviera?”

Both women turned to him, and both looked angry. “I beg your pardon, Matt?” Pamela said. “We’re going with you.”

As he’d expected, they were going to give him an argument.

“Negative,” Tombstone said. He nodded toward the sea. “We’ll have helos touching down in just a few moments, and I want all unnecessary personnel on board.”

“Is that what I am, CAG?” Tomboy demanded. “”Unnecessary personnel’?”

“Tomboy-“

“Damn it, sir, my assignment was here, with you.”

“Your assignment as press liaison can continue as you escort Ms. Drake here to the Jefferson. Take good care of her.”

“Now just one goddamn minute, Matt,” Pamela said.

“You’ve been talking about your career. Now we’re talking about mine.

There’s a story to be covered here. I’m a reporter. And you have no right to stop me from doing my job.”

He looked at Pamela. “This is an evacuation, damn it. The Arsincevo is a military operation and there will be no-“

“If you will check your orders, Captain,” Pamela said, ice and steel in her voice, “you will see that ACN personnel are not under your military command, or even the UN’s. We’re free agents, and we can come and go as we please.”

“And if I’m still press liaison,” Tomboy added, “my place is here.

Keeping an eye on her.”

The two women exchanged glances… and a “I-guess-that-told-him” nod.

Tombstone sighed. There was no time for argument, and he had no patience at all with political correctness games.

He pointed at Pamela. “You. You’re quite right. I can’t give you orders, but you will stay the hell out of the military’s way. Got me?”

“Certainly, Captain.” She gave him her sweetest smile. “Oh, and will you still be requiring assistance from the civilian sector for your communications?”

He grinned. “That’s a negative. They’re flying in everything we need.

You I don’t need, and if you give me half an excuse, I’ll fly you out of here, orders or no.”

She started to open her mouth and he held up his hand. “And, Ms. Drake, if you insist on staying ashore, you will follow my orders regarding where you can and cannot go, what you may and may not film. I’m not going to telegraph my plans to Dmitriev on the ACN nightly news.”

Pamela started to respond, then nodded. “Okay, Matt. You’re the boss.”

Tombstone shifted his finger to Tomboy. “You, at least, are an officer in the United States Navy and subject to my orders. You will return to the carrier immediately and report for duty with your squadron.”

Her eyes widened. “Tombstone-“

“That’s an order, Flynn. They’re going to need every aviator they can get up there. I want you flying an F-14, not wading around in the mud with the grunts.”

He was remembering that cold tundra in the Kola, and Tomboy on the ground with a broken leg.

“What about you, CAG?” Tomboy demanded. “You’re an aviator.”

He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, taking in Boychenko and the Marines and a number of Russian soldiers standing on the patio nearby. “I’m also the architect of all of this. I’ve got to see it through… and someone ought to stay with it on this end to make sure the Russians carry out their part of the bargain.” Even yet, he didn’t entirely trust them.

“This is not fair. If you’re trying to send me someplace safe-“

“There is no fair here, Commander. And the front seat of an F-14 isn’t exactly what I would call safe. This has nothing to do with PC or me trying to protect you. It’s what’s best for all of us. Our ship. Our shipmates.” The fewer people he had to worry about…

Besides, he was concerned about her safety. Charging around in the dark behind enemy lines with a bunch of Russian special forces and U.S. Marines wasn’t the sort of thing she’d been trained to do.

He was carefully ignoring the fact that that sort of activity wasn’t listed on his job description either.

Tombstone thought she was going to keep fighting him, but then she took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. “Aye, aye, sir.” She sounded resigned.

“As for you,” Tombstone told Pamela, “if I thought I’d get away with it, I’d have you hog-tied and dragged on board the first helicopter to hit the LZ.”

“I’m glad to see you know your own limits, Matt.”

He was about to give her a sharp reply when he heard the distant flutter of rotors. He turned, staring out to sea. Moments later, the helicopters materialized out of the night in a throbbing of turning rotors, the far-off whup-whup-whup cascading swiftly to a droning thunder. There were five of them, big, gray CH-53 Sea Stallions off the Guadalcanal, and they came in hot and hard, flaring out one after another as Marines and sailors directed them in with flashlights used as landing signal wands. They settled onto the beach, their rotor washes setting up great, wet swirls of sea spray and blown sand. As soon as the first helo touched down, its rear ramp dropped open and a dozen U.S. Marines spilled out, taking up defensive positions around the aircraft. Waiting men, crouched nearly double to avoid the descending tips of the slowing rotor blades, hurried down the beach, carrying the wounded men on stretchers. Hospital corpsmen dashed out to meet them, beginning to check each man as the stretcher-bearers continued carrying them up the ramp and into the aircraft’s cargo compartment.

Admiral Tarrant, still unconscious, was first up the ramp.

Tomboy was gone. Pamela still stood at his side. “Seriously, Pamela.

This could be your last chance to get out of this hellhole.”

“I told you, Matt. You have your career. I have mine.” He gave a short, hard nod, then left her, trotting down the beach toward one of the helos.

“Captain Magruder?”

A hard-looking man in camouflage fatigues and a floppy, broad-brimmed booney hat, with an H&K MP5 submachine gun slung over his shoulder and his face blackened with paint, approached him. He was carrying two heavy-looking canvas satchels.

“I’m Magruder.”

“Ellsworth,” the man said. “Got your satcom shit here.”

“Great.” Magruder’s eyes narrowed. The man wore no insignia at all but was carrying enough grenades and other gear in his combat load-bearing vest to equip a small army. “Ellsworth. You’re a Marine?”

Ellsworth grinned, his teeth startlingly white in his paint-blackened face. “That’s a negative, sir. I just work with ‘em now and again. And… you can just call me Doc. Everybody else does.”

A SEAL. He had to be, with that outfit and that cocksure attitude.

Tombstone pointed back up the beach. “We’re getting ready to move out, Ellsworth. Get the satcom up to that BMP.”

“Right, Captain.”

Nearby, Joyce Flynn stopped at the ramp long enough to give Tombstone a long, indecipherable look. He waved, and she tossed her head, obviously still angry, and strode up the ramp.

Moments later, the last of the civilians and evacuating UN personnel were on board. The Marines on LZ perimeter defense, who were joining the shore party, leaped to their feet and scrambled up the beach as the helo pilots set their rotors spinning faster once more. Sailors on the beach waved all-clears with their flashlights, and one by one the CH-53s rose off the sand, hovered momentarily, then swung their bows toward the night and the sea and vanished, swallowed by the darkness.

Tombstone watched with a terrible, icy apprehension. It was impossible to see those big CH-53s lifting off from their makeshift LZ without remembering that Operation Eagle’s Claw, the failed Delta Force op to free the American hostages in Iran in 1980, had used Sea Stallions as well. Military operations never went entirely as planned, and mechanical or human failures were constants in any endeavor as big and as complex as Operation Ranger. The entire operation could fail right here, right now, if one of those big aircraft crashed, if two collided in midair, if the enemy attacked…

“I like her,” Pamela said.

He turned. He’d not noticed her approach. “She’s a good person.”

“I wish you hadn’t split us up. I was just getting to know her.”

“You could have gone with her, you know.” She gave him a warning look, and he held up his hands. “Okay! Okay! But, anyway, I had to split you two up. I had the distinct impression you were joining forces against me.”

More aircraft thundered overhead… A-6 Intruders, this time, on their way to hit Dmitriev’s positions north of Yalta. It was time to move out, before the attacks ran out of steam, before Dmitriev’s fighters broke through the American air perimeter, before Boychenko’s people just plain ran out of time.

Boychenko had rounded up a fair-sized transport convoy ― Zil trucks, mostly, but an odd collection of other mismatched vehicles as well, including ZSU-34-4s, BMP personnel carriers, and even a T-80 tank. They were parked along the highway on the north side of the palace complex, engines idling, ready to go. It would be a long and dangerous passage, especially if Dmitriev’s people figured out what Boychenko was up to. The coast highway followed the Crimea’s southeastern coast for nearly 120 kilometers to the point where it joined highway M25 east of Feodosija, then turned east for another hundred kilometers the rest of the way to their final destination.

Two hundred twenty kilometers ― over 130 miles. A four-to five-hour trip, calculated by the best highway speed of the slowest vehicles in Boychenko’s convoy.

If nothing went wrong. If they were able to break away from Dmitriev’s troops and searching aircraft.

If… if… if…