Command Authority

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 serious 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.

The two Highlanders and one of the Land Rovers were moved quickly and without incident to a gravel area on the side of the building. The second Land Rover would not start, but Caruso used a fire extinguisher to put out a fire on the grass nearby, then he put the truck in gear and, with the help of the CIA men, pushed the fully loaded vehicle to the wall of the Lighthouse and out of the way.

Both of the Delta Force Yukons had been badly damaged by gunfire, and their wheels were all flattened, so the decision had been made to use one of the Highlanders to push the trucks out of the way. Dom got behind the wheel while Chavez directed him into position.

While the men were out on the parking circle and on the drive, Rex, the American sharpshooter on the roof, lay prone and facing the east. He scanned intently for any snipers, while his spotter, the Delta man called Mutt, did the same through his binos. Mutt saw movement on the roof of a four-story building on Suvorov Street, a few blocks away, and directed the contractor with the AR-15 to the location.

Rex identified two men through his scope crawling along the roof of the building. Each man carried an AK-47 rifle. The two men stopped and aimed at the Americans on the driveway of the Lighthouse, so Rex took a shallow breath, then he blew it out halfway. He brought his finger to the trigger of his AR-15 and shot the man on the right. His semiautomatic sniper rifle might not have been terribly powerful, but it was capable of quick follow on shots. He fired again a second later, hitting the man on the left.

Both gunmen on the roof in the distance rolled around in agony for a moment before disappearing from view. Rex did not know if he’d killed either one, but he was reasonably certain they were now out of the fight.

Dominic Caruso had successfully pushed the first Yukon out of the open area in front of the portico with the Highlander, and now he was driving around to line up with the rear bumper of the last remaining vehicle. Midas, Bixby, and four other men worked to put out small fires from the Molotovs and to clear some pieces of debris off the parking lot in advance of the arrival of the Ospreys. They grabbed rocks, bricks, and pieces of metal and broken glass and threw everything to the walls so that the rubble could not be blown around by the huge twin rotors of the V-22 when it landed.

Every twenty seconds or so a crack from a distant rifle filled the air, and occasionally the American men manning rifles, either on the roof or on the balconies, would themselves return fire at targets in the distance.

When this happened, the men on the driveway ducked lower, but they had no choice but to continue to expose themselves to the nearby buildings while they prepped the Lighthouse grounds for the inbound V-22s.

They were only halfway finished with this task when a new sound came over the shouting of the crowds. Chavez was directing Caruso in the Highlander when the whistling noise came; he dove to the concrete of the parking circle, as did two of the CIA technicians. But the two CIA case officers from Kiev as well as Bixby did not hit the deck; instead, they just looked up for the origin of the noise.

Midas was near Bixby, and he tackled the station chief to the ground; they both crashed on the cold asphalt of the driveway, and Midas rolled on top of Bixby as an explosion ripped through the air twenty-five yards behind them. The whistling sound of supersonic shrapnel passed just over their heads.

Almost instantly, another streaking whistle filled the air and another explosion erupted, this one on the south side of the building. Windows in the Lighthouse building shattered and glass rained down into the parking circle.

“Eighty-twos!” Midas shouted into Bixby’s ear.

“Eighty-two what?”

Midas rose to his knees. “Eighty-two-millimeter mortars! Get into the Lighthouse!” He pulled Bixby all the way up to his feet, and together with the CIA officers they started to run.

Chavez and Caruso finished moving the last Yukon, then ran for the entrance to the building. Another round crashed into the parking circle just after they returned to the relative safety of the lobby, and shrapnel shattered glass in the lobby windows.

As soon as Midas made it inside, he shouted into his radio, “Mutt, you guys get off the fucking roof! I want all other security personnel repositioned back from the windows with the best line of sight you can get on the compound walls and the streets beyond. If you see any armed target, that includes individuals armed with Molotovs, bricks, rocks, whatever, you are clear to engage. We might get overrun, but we are not going down with cold guns.”

“Roger that. Engaging,” one of the security officers transmitted, and within seconds the sound of rifle fire erupted as a target in the street was identified and engaged.

Just then a crash shook the entire building, and the sound of broken glass could be heard on the floors above. It sounded to the Delta commander as if a mortar round had hit the roof where his two men had been positioned.

“Mutt? You boys all right?”

There was no response.

“Mutt? How copy?”

The radio remained silent.