Command Authority

43

Mutt and Rex were both dead.

Just as the two men had left cover to run to the stairwell, an eighty-two-millimeter mortar round slammed onto the top corner of the building, and hot shrapnel ripped through their bodies, killing them instantly.

They were found a minute later by the two remaining operational Delta sergeants, and their bodies were dragged to cover just an instant before another shell slammed down on the roof of the Lighthouse.

Clark, Chavez, and Caruso helped Midas get the bodies down two flights of stairs and into body bags. It was backbreaking work, and mortar fire continued to rain down on the Lighthouse grounds the entire time.

As soon as the two bagged bodies were dragged to the front door, Midas turned to the Campus men.

“Forget what I said before. You boys better get yourselves some guns. Same ROEs as everybody else. Armed targets only. Got it?”

“Got it,” they all said, and they headed up the stairs to get weapons. They were happy to field the new Heckler & Koch 416s. As extensive as their firearms options were with The Campus, this was the first time any of them had fired the staple weapon of Delta Force.

Midas himself went up to the second floor and entered the large office area with a window that gave him a view of the front gate of the building, the park with the downed helicopter, and the neighborhood beyond. He scanned the distance with his rifle, hoping he’d get lucky and spot the mortar position.

Bixby was with him now, speaking into his sat phone to Langley. “We’ve got inbound mortar fire. Effective RPG and small-arms fire as well. We have multiple KIA and WIA. It looks like we are being engaged by trained irregular forces and possibly Russian military.”

Chavez knelt in an office on the second floor of the Lighthouse; his eyes peered through the holographic sight of his HK416 rifle. A red dot was superimposed on the glass lens of the sight, and even though the sight was not magnified, he was able to make out individuals running around on the streets in front of the front gate.

He saw his first weapons in the crowd within seconds. Two men with AK-47 assault rifles low by their sides pushed through the thick crowd of angry rioters.

On Chavez’s right, Dom Caruso was scanning a different sector of the crowd. Dom said, “I’ve got a dude with a rifle. Fifteen yards to the right of the helo crash. He’s right in the thick of all the noncombatants there.” Dom growled in frustration. “No shot.”

Ding said, “I’ve got two guys with guns. They are mixed in with the crowd in the street to the north of the park. These guys are using the civvies to get right up to the gate.”

Dom said, “They’re going to try to bust through, aren’t they?”

Chavez said, “Bust through. Climb over. Whatever. Yeah. They are coming in.”

“What’s this all about?” Dom asked.

Clark entered the room with Bixby. They knelt down behind a desk to stay out of the line of fire of any snipers. Clark said, “I’ve got a theory.”

Bixby said, “I want to hear it.”

“The Russians want to overrun this place and bust a CIA operation in the Crimea. They are going to use it to justify an invasion.”

Bixby said, “The existence of this place isn’t enough to justify an invasion, not even for Volodin.”

Clark peered through the sight of his rifle. “Maybe not yet, but if Talanov does another one of his false flag attacks, like he did with Biryukov or Golovko, then he can blame the American interlopers for it.” Clark added, “If we can get out of here and demo our stuff, we won’t make it so easy for them to frame the CIA in their scheme.”

Bixby said, “So what you’re saying is, as long as they have us and our equipment to use as proof, we are just as good to them dead or alive.”

“That’s about the size of it.”

A school bus pulled into view on the far side of the park. Both Ding and Dom tracked it with their weapons as it came up the road, past the burning helicopter wreckage. It began picking up speed; the driver seemed to have no concern about the men and women protesting in the street. The rioters dove out of the way of the accelerating vehicle.

It was quiet in the second-floor office as the men watched it approach. Finally, Caruso spoke in a deadpan voice. “Right on, this guy is coming to save us.” It was an attempt at gallows humor. He knew this wasn’t a rescue — this bus only signaled the beginning of the next phase of the attack.

The bus slammed into the iron gate of the Lighthouse, smashing it in, even tearing some of the stone wall away as it broke through. It tried to keep going up the driveway, but Ding, Dom, and several other rifles in the three-story building all began firing into the driver’s side of the windshield, and the bus veered sharply to the right and crashed against the inside wall of the compound.

Almost instantly, a pair of eighty-two-millimeter mortar rounds slammed on the roof of the Lighthouse and the lights in the building went dark.

Midas was somewhere upstairs; his voice came over the radios in the office: “Deploy gas over the wall. Everything you’ve got. Anyone with a rifle, I want you to put a bullet into every motherfucker that comes onto the property.”

Ding reloaded his rifle, and while doing so he noticed men climbing onto the top of the north wall, near where the school bus crashed inside the property.

“Dom! Ten o’clock!”

“Got ’em,” Caruso said, and he fired at the men as they dropped down, killing one, wounding one more, and sending a third falling back over the wall as he tried to get out of the line of fire.

More men mounted the wall on the southern side now, gunfire into the compound picked up, and, just when Caruso stepped onto the balcony to get a line of sight on the south side, several incoming rounds whizzed by his head, making a high-pitched snapping sound.

Dom dropped down on his chest, but behind him he heard a loud grunt.

Chavez and Clark spun around and looked back over their shoulders.

Keith Bixby was behind them at the entrance to the office. They saw him stumble back out of the office and into the hallway, where he collapsed facedown.

“Bixby?”

Clark crawled over to Bixby on his hands and knees, keeping out of the line of sight from the doors out to the balcony. He rolled the CIA station chief on his back and found his eyes unfixed and a bullet wound to the side of his head.

Clark knew instantly there was nothing that could be done.

Two CIA men appeared in the hall a moment later with a trauma kit from one of the security officers in their hands.

Clark got out of their way, returning to his rifle in the office. Dom and Ding were prone next to him.

“The chief of station is dead,” Clark said somberly.

More men came over the walls now; first they moved in ones and twos. To the men of The Campus, the attackers did not look like a military force. Clark was more certain than ever that these guys were Seven Strong Men muscle. They’d been trained to shoot their weapons and they had been ordered to take the CIA compound, but the real skill facing the Americans in the compound were the snipers surrounding them and the mortar squads pounding them from a distance. Those would be Russian forces, perhaps FSB Spetsnaz troops, here with orders to take the Lighthouse before the men and materiel inside could be extracted.

The Americans in the Lighthouse would have been able to hold these attackers back with no great difficulty if not for the accurate and persistent sniper and mortar fire that kept their heads down, kept men crouched behind desks and couches and interior walls, prevented the men from getting a wide field of view on the entire scene. The three American Campus operators, the two Delta men still in the fight, and the other men with rifles had to make do with narrow views from positions around the building that were so far back away from the windows and so obstructed it was a rarity when a gun sight found a target coming over the wall without the gunner having to rise up and expose himself to withering fire.

Still, a few minutes after the plainclothes attackers started coming over the wall, the driveway, the grass on either side of it, and the top of the wall were littered with dead bodies.

A pair of trucks with canvas-covered beds appeared now, and they raced along the road that ran right in front of the Lighthouse, driving right through a low gray cloud of tear gas. At the gate the vehicles braked suddenly, and armed men began pouring out of the back of them. Some of the men ran the wrong way, disoriented by the gas, but most fought through the coughing and hacking and the tearing eyes, and they stormed the Lighthouse.

The ten rifles in the Lighthouse building barked. Semiautomatic rounds rained down on the new group of attackers, who themselves fired automatic Kalashnikovs at the building as they began running up the driveway.

Four more men scaled the wall to the north, ran across the open ground of the parking circle, and made it to the portico in front of the lobby — without being seen, because of the activity at the front gate. The four men raced for the entrance to the building, but the two guards who had been firing the gas grenades from the front portico drew their pistols and opened fire on them.

Two of the attackers were killed, and the other two sought cover behind a concrete planter at the edge of the portico.

While the gunfight was taking place in the portico, an RPG raced parallel across the ground over the park, heading directly toward the Lighthouse. The American defenders on the two upper floors who saw it all pressed themselves tight to the ground, but the rocket slammed into the northeast corner of the third floor, striking the glass door to the balcony of a room where two CIA men were hunkered down, watching the north for any breaches of the compound there. The shell detonated upon hitting the door, sending glass and shrapnel along with a shock wave through the small room. Both men were killed instantly, and a third security contractor on the floor below was injured when the ceiling caved in on him.

Midas ran for the stairwell to support the men in the lobby from the attack, and Clark ran up the hall to help anyone caught in the RPG blast.

Chavez heard the shooting downstairs, and he felt the rumble of the explosion above him and to his left. As he reloaded his rifle again, he spoke with a calm that belied the situation. “There are too many of them. It’s going to get hand-to-hand here in a minute.”

Caruso fired at a man racing up the driveway, catching him in the forehead and dumping him to the ground.

He shouted back over the sound of his weapon. “I’d rather fight them in the stairwell than sit here and wait for the next mortar round!”

Another truck full of attackers appeared in the distance, on the far side of the park; it was heading toward the Lighthouse, making its way through the throngs of rioters on the streets.

Three miles due east of the Lighthouse, Harris “Grungy” Cole flew the first aircraft in a trail formation; each plane was lined up, one after the other, a few hundred yards apart. He gave a command, and the three aircraft behind him broke off from the formation; Warrior Two went right, Warrior Three went left, and Warrior Four followed Two to the right. Grungy kept his nose on the blur of black smoke dead ahead, and he pushed the throttle past full military power.

Cole’s plan was for each jet to fly directly over the Lighthouse at nearly seven hundred miles per hour; each member of Warrior flight would come from a slightly different direction, and he had it timed so they would arrive, one after the other, about fifteen seconds apart. This would create a constant wall of sound, and they would then each make a turn and then return for a second pass, and then a third and a fourth.

If it all worked according to plan, the attackers on the ground would have no idea how many aircraft were overhead, nor would they have any idea what the jets’ intentions were.

He’d designed it to be about four minutes of chaos, confusion, terror, and pounding headaches for the rioters and attackers.

The war birds were only three hundred feet above the ground, racing at nearly Mach 1, their engines roaring and flaming exhaust drawing faint smoke trails in the wake of each single-engine aircraft.

Grungy said, “All right, let’s break some windows.”

At the speed he was traveling, there was no way Grungy could tell what was going on in and around the Lighthouse. He only had his waypoint set in the computer, and he kept his nose lined up on a tick mark on his heads-up display, keeping much of his focus on his warning systems and the hills around the city so that he could fly as low as possible without impacting terrain.

Grungy saw the haze of dark get closer and closer to his windscreen; even here at three hundred feet it had not diffused completely, and within seconds he raced through the smoke and instantly broke through to clear sky to the west.

He knew he’d flown over the action because his waypoint indicator said so, so he pulled back on the throttle, putting his aircraft into a bank that caused the lower portion of his G-suit to fill, forcing oxygenated blood to remain in his upper body.