Command Authority

44

In the Lighthouse, Chavez and Caruso climbed back up off the floor and onto their knees. When the first jet appeared in the sky in front of them they’d dropped flat on the deck, not knowing if it was friend or foe. The obscene noise of its roaring, fire-belching engine rattled the already broken glass out of the windows in front of them and assaulted their ears, which were already ringing loudly from the gunfire in the enclosed office.

They had caught a glimpse of the jet as it passed, just a dark blur on the blue sky, and then a second jet raced overhead going south to north. By the third high-speed overflight, this one from north to south, the men in the Lighthouse had a good idea these aircraft had come to try and keep the enemies’ heads down, and Ding and Dom decided to take advantage of the confusion that was reigning outside.

They opened fire on men inside the walls of the SMC who’d dived for cover or stopped to aim their weapons at the sky. Above and below them, many of the other Americans still in the fight also took the opportunity to thin the herd of armed aggressors.

When the fourth jet appeared in the sky, two rocket-propelled grenades were launched from rooftops far to the east.

The RPGs didn’t have a prayer of hitting a target that was traveling a mile every seven seconds; all the launches did was reveal the RPG locations to the American rifles in the Lighthouse. Two positions were targeted immediately by Delta shooters on the third floor, sending both of the RPG operators to cover.

Jets continued to tear through the sky directly overhead. Ding couldn’t tell if he was seeing the same planes over and over, but the noise and vibration and the very sight of the lightning-fast fighters were doing what they had set out to do. The attack on the Lighthouse had all but fizzled out while people on the ground in a several-block radius were running for their lives, desperately seeking any cover they could find.

Clark shouldered up to Ding and Dom. “The guys who stick around through this are the ones who are operating under orders. Find some guy standing his ground and I bet you’ll find a weapon.”

“Roger that,” both men said, and they scanned the area in front of the Lighthouse, searching for more targets.

We should be charging for this air show,” Grungy said, as he began his third pass.

Pablo’s voice came over the headset in Warrior Three: “I just hope we’re going fast enough so those fuckers down there can’t see we don’t have any damn ATG ordnance.”

Before Grungy could key his mike, Scrabble replied, “You know those ground pounders will see our air-to-air weapons and think we’re carrying napalm.” He laughed over the net. “There are a lot of Russians shitting their britches down below.”

Grungy answered back, “We’re going to get a little less scary each time we pass without doing anything.” He checked his position. “All right, I’m going to give them one more thrill.”

Grungy finished his fourth pass a moment later, pulled up to flight level two thousand, and began heading back to the east, taking a wayward route that would keep him from passing over the port.

Dom Caruso reloaded his rifle and, while doing so, took a moment to get a quick view of the entire area. “Look at ’em run,” he said.

Ding took his eye out of his gun sight for a moment and took in the scene himself. There was a mad scramble of rioters; they scurried away in all directions. Men with lit Molotovs dropped them on the ground and ran; a woman who had been rendering first aid to a bystander injured in the helo crash left the victim on the pavement in the park and darted across the street, disappearing into an alley.

There were over a dozen men in civilian clothing lying dead or wounded inside the outer walls of the Lighthouse; the closest had made it all the way to the door under the portico. Another fifteen or more attackers had retreated back out the gate to cover.

Outside the gate, fully seventy-five percent of the rioters and attackers who had been in front of the building three minutes ago had now either fled into buildings, jumped into vehicles and driven away, or otherwise vacated the area.

The men in the Special Mission Compound had no doubt in their minds that if not for the arrival of the F-16s, which had scattered most of the rioters outside the gate, the three-story building would have been breached. And the men still alive in the building would have been overrun in moments.

But the earthshaking roar of the jet engines subsided almost as quickly as it had started, and an uncomfortable still came over the neighborhood.

Midas entered the room where the Campus men were positioned. He said, “You guys need to be ready. That was it for the air support until the extract gets here. This isn’t over yet.”

Clark said, “I can guarantee we will get hit again. It might take them a minute to regroup and to talk themselves into it, but they’ll see that the gun runs were just a bluff, and they will be back, pushing even harder to finish us.”

“You sound like a man who’s been through this sort of thing.”

Clark just shrugged without answering.

Midas got on his radio now. “Everybody reload and do what you can to improve your defensive positions. We’ve got forty-five minutes more before extract arrives. This shit is not over.”

Grungy was over the sea less than two minutes after leaving Sevastopol, and here he banked to a southerly heading and slowed his speed down to conserve his rapidly diminishing fuel.

The three other aircraft in the flight all checked in as soon as they were feet wet, and Grungy started to relax a little.

But not for long.

The flight’s air controller came over the radio soon after Grungy settled into his new heading to the KC-135 over the Turkish coast. “Warrior One, be advised, Russian Flankers, flight of four, inbound on intercept course. Heading zero five zero, angels five and climbing.”

Cole muttered, “Su-27s. Shit.”

Incirlik came back on the net a moment later. “Warrior One, be advised. Flankers expressed their intentions. They are going to converge with your flight and escort you back over the Black Sea to Turkish airspace.”

Scrabble heard the transmission and said, “Just to say they did.”

Cole responded: “Right. This shit will be on TV in Russia. They’ll be talking about how they repelled the Yankee hordes.”

Pablo added, “We don’t have enough gas for a dogfight. If they want to fly along nice and straight with us, that’s not really the worst thing that could happen.”

“That’s a good point,” Grungy admitted.

Cole braced himself for a tense half-hour flight of fuel worries while being babysat by a flight of angry Russian pilots who were looking to flex their muscle. He told his pilots not to worry about the Flankers, and he told himself to make sure he didn’t do anything provocative. The excitement of the overflight of the imperiled CIA base was behind him, and now was the time to fly straight, slow, and boring.

He just hoped he’d managed to buy those guys back there in Sevastopol a little time.

The mortar attacks on the Lighthouse started up again fifteen minutes after the jets departed. Clark made the observation that it seemed clear the mortar squads — from the rate and cadence of the incoming shells, the men of the Lighthouse had decided there were two teams at work — had broken down their weapons and sought shelter during the low-level F-16 runs, and had only now reestablished their positions.

The defenders of the CIA station were hunkered down in survival mode now.

Midas ordered everyone to move downstairs to the lobby and other rooms at ground level, because the sniper fire hitting the second and third floors, along with mortar and rocket attacks, had rendered the top two stories too dangerous. There were only nine able-bodied men now, and Midas decided it would be better to consolidate at ground level, so he moved men to all sides of the building, positioning Chavez and Caruso at the front door.

Here at ground level the men were safer from the distant shooters, but as a result of the decision to vacate the upper floors, they’d lost the majority of their visual coverage over the neighborhood.

The mortar rounds had been hitting steadily, two crashing explosions every minute, but then they stopped suddenly. Soon after, a truck raced up to the entrance of the property, made the turn into the smashed gate, and began streaking up the driveway.

Caruso, Chavez, and Midas were all at the front door under the portico, and they flipped the selector switches on their weapons to the full automatic setting.

A pair of RPG rounds impacted the building high above them while they dumped round after round on the truck. They blew out the windscreen, killing the driver, and fired into the gas tanks of the vehicle until they ignited. The truck veered off the driveway, rolled over the grass on the south side of the property, and crashed into the wall.

As soon as it came to rest, armed men leapt from the rear of the burning vehicle. Ding and Dom and Midas fired on them, but the vehicle erupted into a ball of flames that engulfed several attackers before they’d even begun their attack on the Lighthouse.

Burning men ran from the wreck, rolled on the ground, and flailed to extinguish their burning clothing.

As the men in the portico reloaded their weapons, the mortar attack resumed. They ran back inside and took shelter.

Midas said, “Soon enough they are going to figure out that all they have to do is keep those mortars raining down until they are at the front gate. We’ll be in here holding our helmets instead of watching for them, and we won’t be able to get a bead on the next vehicle till it’s on top of us.”

A faint crackle came over Midas’s radio, and he brought it to his ear.

“Say again last transmission?”

“Lighthouse, Lighthouse. This is Steadfast Four One, inbound on your pos, ETA two mikes. How copy?”

Midas looked up to the low tile ceiling of the lobby and thanked God.

“Good fuckin’ copy, Marine!”

Dom and Ding exchanged a high five, but a man posted at one of the windows in the lobby shouted that attackers were once again coming over the northern wall of the SMC, so the celebration was short-lived.