Command Authority

40

President Jack Ryan hurried into the conference room of the White House Situation Room at seven a.m., wearing an open collar and a blazer he’d been handed by an aide on his walk over from the residence. He’d been notified a half-hour earlier in the residence that there was a situation involving American military and intelligence personnel in Ukraine, and SecDef Burgess was asking for an urgent Situation Room meeting.

Jack was surprised to find the conference room was empty of senior advisers. Yes, there were some White House military personnel and Situation Room staff in attendance, as well as some senior national security staff, but NSA director Colleen Hurst, DNI Mary Pat Foley, CIA director Jay Canfield, and Secretary of Defense Bob Burgess were all on monitors, speaking from their respective offices. The U.S. ambassador to Ukraine was on a monitor from Kiev, and Secretary of State Scott Adler was on-screen from a secure communications room at the U.S. embassy in Brussels.

Jack sat at the end of the table, then motioned to the men and women sitting along the wall. “Come on, this is ridiculous, fill up the table here with me.”

Quickly, several intelligence and military advisers took seats at the table that was normally used just for the President and his senior staff. After all twelve remaining seats were filled, there were just a few junior personnel still seated against the walls.

Jack looked at the bank of monitors displaying his cabinet members, and he found the CIA director on the far left. “All right, what’s happening in Ukraine?”

Jay Canfield sat in McLean, Virginia, on the seventh floor of CIA headquarters. He said, “Mr. President, we have a special mission compound, essentially a SIGINT listening post in Sevastopol, Crimea. Its code name is Lighthouse. Like much of our infrastructure in Ukraine, it was compromised in the affair with the SSU earlier in the week, and we were in the process of shutting it down. There were a lot of sensitive electronics that needed to be disassembled and hauled out of there, so it took some time. Unfortunately, the men at the SMC did not vacate before word of the Lighthouse broke to the opposition, and now they appear to be under attack.”

“What do you mean ‘appear to be’?”

“There was a protest for a couple of hours, it got bigger, rougher, but in the past half-hour a riot has broken out and the Lighthouse has come under small-arms fire from the nearby hills and buildings. We have reports of some injuries to our personnel, though no fatalities as of yet.”

“Who is there in the facility?”

Canfield replied, “Normally, at the Lighthouse there is just a four-man JSOC team — Delta guys, that is — along with four CIA technical personnel and a half-dozen security officers. Usually, this is supplemented by Ukrainian security and intel personnel as well, but not at present. Unfortunately, the chief of station and two covered case officers from Kiev were there to help close the facility when the attack started.”

“This is that Bixby guy you mentioned the other day?”

“Keith Bixby. Yes, Mr. President.”

“And they can’t drive out of there?”

“No, sir. They say the streets are blocked, the gunfire is steady enough, and the local cops are just watching it all happen from up the street.”

“Son of a bitch. Who is doing the shooting?”

Burgess chimed in on this: “There are reports of irregular forces in the area, though at this point we can’t be sure.”

Ryan said, “We need to talk to the Ukrainian government.”

Scott Adler spoke up: “The Ukrainian president is aware of the situation, and he has ordered Ukrainian Air Force helicopters to pick up the Americans. They are en route to a forward staging area now.”

“Good,” Jack said, but he caught an uncomfortable look on the Ukrainian ambassador’s face. “Is there a problem with that, Arlene?”

Ambassador Arlene Black said, “Mr. President, he is asking — I should say he is demanding — that you call him personally to request the extraction.” Black shrugged. “You know Kuvchek. He is a showboater.”

There were groans in the room from some of the junior advisers.

Ryan just looked back over his shoulder at one of the Situation Room communications staff standing by the door. “Get Kuvchek on the phone. I’ll make the request. He’s a jerk, but this is no time to stand on protocol. I’ll kiss his ass if that’s what it takes to get our people out of there.”

Gunfire into the CIA compound known as the Lighthouse was picking up; windows had been shattered on all sides of the building, indicating the fire was coming from all directions, and the roof was pockmarked, revealing the fact that at least some of the shooters were firing from high positions. So far, none of the Americans positioned on the balconies or on the roof had managed to positively ID anyone in the crowd or in the neighboring hills and buildings doing the shooting.

Small fires from the Molotov cocktails thrown over the wall burned around the property. A group of garbage barrels on the south side of the Lighthouse was fully engulfed in flames, and grass along both sides of the driveway smoldered.

One of the Delta men on the second floor had been shot high on the shoulder, snapping his collarbone, and a security contractor had taken a ricochet round into the back of his hand, breaking bones and tearing flesh. Although both men had been taken to the Lighthouse’s infirmary, they were being treated with a small trauma kit on the chest rig of one of the Delta operators, because the first-aid boxes had already been loaded into one of the Delta Force Yukons that now sat exposed to fire on the eastern side of the compound.

Rex, the contractor on the roof with the scoped rifle, scanned distant rooftops and balconies through his nine-power optic, searching for snipers. This was a slow process, because he had to low-crawl under an air-conditioning unit to look in different directions. Mutt was there with binoculars, but he, too, seemed to always be facing away from the source of gunfire when it came. They got the distinct impression the sniper fire coming in was coordinated, and done for the purpose of keeping heads down.

A Delta man on an upstairs balcony took a round into the steel plate on his chest. His partner dragged him back into an office and checked him out, then reported in to Midas.

Midas was in the communications room on the second floor with Bixby when he received this news. He looked to the CIA man. “This fire is too damn accurate to be coming from a couple of untrained civilian assholes.”

Bixby nodded. “We could be looking at local SWAT or Ukrainian Army deserters or FSB-trained irregulars.” He added, “Hell, it could even be Spetsnaz that came over the border from Russia on a destabilizing mission. Make no mistake about this, whoever is out there might very well be looking to overrun this installation.”

John Clark, Ding Chavez, and Dom Caruso appeared in the doorway. Clark asked, “What do you guys hear from Langley?”

Midas said, “Expedited helos are on the way. We’ve got two Ukrainian Air Force Mi-8s inbound to pick us up. ETA twenty minutes.”

Caruso said, “Anything you want me to get out of the vehicles before we get out of here?”

Midas shook his head. “We’re going to toss C-4 and demo every bit of that as soon as we take off. I don’t want anyone going outside until we have some air cover.”

A few minutes later, Clark, Chavez, and Caruso stood in the small lobby, watching the occasional Molotov cocktail arc over the wall and explode onto the ground into a raging fireball. The gunfire that cracked around the neighborhood still seemed to be coming from all different directions. No one was manning the front gate now; the security contractors were all above on the balconies with the CIA men and the Delta AFO personnel.

A crowd of rioters in civilian dress, virtually all of them appearing to be young males, pressed against the locked iron gate, but so far no one had tried to breach the compound.

The phone in Clark’s pocket rang, and he stepped into the stairwell to find a quieter place to talk before answering it.

“Clark.”

“Hey, Mr. C. This is Sam.”

“What’s up?”

“Gavin has been tracking the GPS transmitters we put on the suspicious vehicles yesterday. Two of them left the city about four a.m., but we had no idea where they were heading. Now Gavin thinks he’s figured out their destination.”

“Where are they going?”

“Sevastopol. They will get there in about an hour.”

“Interesting. I had a feeling this attack involves goons from the Seven Strong Men. That pretty much confirms my suspicion.”

“You need us on the way? We can head to the airport now, charter something to get us down there on the double.”

Clark said, “No. You guys keep doing what you’re doing. We’re pinned down in here, but air extract is en route. Don’t know where the helos will take us, but when we land I’ll let you know if we need help getting back to Kiev.”

“Roger that. You guys keep your heads low.”

As the extraction neared, the armed men in the Lighthouse spent their time scanning for any targets in the surrounding buildings and hills. Without a weapon in their hands, the three Campus operators felt somewhat useless, just standing around waiting to get flown out of danger, but this changed when another call of a “man down” came over the radio. Ding and Dom raced up the stairs to the third floor and found a CIA technical officer who had been in an interior hallway when a lucky round penetrated a balcony window, then an interior wall, and finally lodged itself in the center of his chest. The middle-aged man was unresponsive with his eyes wide open when he was found by a contractor, and Ding and Dom spent several minutes trying to get the man breathing again. But the bullet had shredded his heart, and there was nothing they could do for him. They helped two other CIA techs drag the body downstairs — a slow, difficult, and exhausting task — and then they put him in a body bag, positioning him by the front door so they could get him on the helo quickly when it landed.

The two fat gray Mi-8 helicopters approached from the north just after three p.m. The men on the roof notified Midas, who immediately began pulling operators, contractors, and CIA personnel from their positions on the balconies and ordering them down to the lobby. The two wounded men were helped down the stairs and positioned next to the body of the fallen technician.

Midas spoke directly with the pilots of the helos and warned them about the sporadic incoming fire, and the Ukrainians’ Mi-8s flew in with their side doors open and their mounted machine guns scanning for any threats. But as Midas watched them approach, he thought they didn’t seem as careful as they could have been, considering the danger. They flew close together, directly over the riot in the park, and made just one slow circle to search for threats before one of the craft began descending toward the Lighthouse.

Midas got the impression the helo pilots thought just their mere presence would discourage anyone from firing while they were in the air above the installation, and Midas radioed a warning to them that they were approaching a hot LZ and needed to act accordingly.

He saw no change in the tactics in the helicopters above.

There was only enough room between the vehicles parked in the parking circle in front of the Lighthouse building and the front wall of the compound to safely land one helo at a time, so the first Ukrainian Air Force Mi-8 descended while the other circled above to provide cover.

For a moment, there was no gunfire; it even seemed the shouts of the crowd softened as the gray helo came in for a landing. In the CIA building, Midas opened the lobby door, and he and Bixby stepped out under the portico so he could talk the helo down.

As the Mi-8 descended below four hundred feet, right before the eyes of Midas and Bixby, a bright speck of light appeared over the eastern wall of the Lighthouse. It raced up from between two apartment buildings on the far side of the park in front of the CIA compound. It shimmied in the air as it climbed into the blue sky toward the helicopter.

Someone on board the Mi-8 either saw it coming or else the pilot had some sort of onboard warning indicator. The helo banked hard to the right. Bixby and Midas both saw the door gunner fly back inside the cabin of the aircraft as it spun away, trying to get out of the line of fire of the ascending rocket.

The rocket raced just past the tail rotor and shot harmlessly skyward.

But not the second one. The second speck of light on the blue sky also appeared from the east; the men in the portico did not see the origin of the launch, but it rose confidently up to the helo and slammed into its body, just aft of the open side door.

The initial explosion wasn’t much, but almost immediately there was a secondary explosion that blew out the sides of the Mi-8 and then shredded the rotors to pieces. Centrifugal force fired metal from the rotor blades more than half a mile in all directions; the burning wreckage fell three hundred feet toward the ground and slammed into the center of the park, right into a cluster of rioters.

A fireball billowed up over the walls of the CIA compound, and a pillar of black smoke rose out of it higher into the sky.

The one remaining Mi-8 helicopter never fired a shot. It had been circling at one thousand feet, but seconds after the first helo hit the ground the second turned to the north and raced away.

There were shouts and exclamations and curses all over the Lighthouse, but neither Bixby nor Midas spoke for several seconds. Then the CIA station chief said, “I’ll call Langley,” and he stepped back inside.