Command Authority

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V-22 Osprey pilots like to say they can fly twice as fast and five times as far as a helicopter, and though the aircraft is difficult to fly, those who pilot them are uniquely proud of their state-of-the-art platform.

The two aircraft arriving over Sevastopol were designated Steadfast Four One and Steadfast Four Two; they were members of Tiltrotor Squadron VMM-263 of the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing. The squadron had been given the colorful nickname “Thunder Chickens” when it was a helicopter transport squadron in the Korean War era, and the moniker remained with them through the years as they made the transition from airframe to airframe. The Thunder Chickens transitioned to a tiltrotor squadron in 2006, and since then they had carried troops and equipment into and out of combat environments all over Iraq and Afghanistan.

On this in extremis mission over the Crimean peninsula, Steadfast Four One carried eighteen Marine riflemen, as well as a flight crew consisting of two pilots, two gunners, and a crew chief. Steadfast Four Two carried six Marine riflemen as well as a five-man crew.

The average age of the riflemen in the back of the two aircraft was only twenty-one years old and, as was often the case in the military, no one told the Marines in the back of the Ospreys that they would be evacuating a secret CIA base. No one told the Marines in the back of the Ospreys much of anything other than the fact they would be sweeping into a fluid combat situation, landing in some sort of a U.S. diplomatic compound, and extracting fifteen to twenty Americans who were taking fire from all compass points.

And they knew one other thing. They’d been informed on the way down that they were weapons-free at the target location, which meant they would get to shoot, which was nice, considering they’d already been informed they were going to be shot at.

The first passes made by the two fat aircraft were done in airplane mode; the big rotors on the wings of the V-22s were pointed forward so they could operate as massive propellers. Four One and Four Two raced over the city at one thousand feet with a ground speed of more than three hundred fifteen miles per hour. The attackers on the deck did little more than turn their heads toward the thundering planes with the massive props. Most hesitated; they had never seen an Osprey, and they had a feeling they were looking at enemy aircraft. That said, the last flight of enemy had done nothing more than fly around the sky before departing, so most of the attackers were undaunted by the arrival of these new, strange planes.

The turret gun on the bellies of both aircraft spun as the gunners inside scanned through their FLIR monitor, hunting for targets, using the coordinates given to them by the man on the other end of the radio.

The turret gun was called the Interim Defensive Weapon System; it was a late addition to the Osprey design, giving the big transport aircraft 360 degrees of covering fire. Before the installation of the IDWS, the V-22s had to rely on support helicopters and the single fifty-caliber machine gun fired from the open rear ramp, which greatly limited the survivability of the aircraft in combat operations.

The ramp gunner was on his knees behind his big weapon, and his headset kept him in radio contact with the turret gunner, and both of them were in comms with the gunners in the other Osprey, as well as the man called Midas on the ground at the diplomatic compound via a VHF channel. Midas had spent the last sixty seconds talking all four gunners through where he thought the mortar fire was coming from, and as the aircraft raced overhead, all four of the gunners were hunting for these targets.

The gunners knew they had to take out the mortar positions before landing. An Osprey landing is a big, fat, and slow-moving creature, and an Osprey on the ground is damn near helpless, especially when a mortar crew has had hours to range their weapon to drop shells exactly where the Osprey was parked, so these birds would not land until the gunners could tell the pilots they had destroyed the mortars.

In order to drive the turret gun below him, the gunner in Steadfast Four One used a handheld controller that looked like it had been taken from a video-game console. His FLIR camera was slaved to the weapon’s sight, so when he turned the weapon left and right and up and down with the controller, he saw the aim point of his three-barreled weapon represented as crosshairs in the center of his small monitor. He searched an area Midas had suspected as being one of the mortar locations, and almost immediately his screen revealed a two-man team on a building to the east of the Mi-8 crash site in the middle of the park.

The men showed up as black-hot signatures on the green screen. The gunner also saw the hot mortar tube between them. Within moments of spotting the mortar, a black-hot flash showed the gunner that the eighty-two crew was firing a shell toward the diplomatic compound.

Steadfast Four One’s turret gunner pressed the fire button on his weapon an instant later.

Below him, hanging out of the bottom hatch of the Osprey, the big Gatling gun roared, smoke and fire shot out with the fifty-round burst, and hot ejected shells poured from the side of the weapon like liquid from a faucet.

On the roof of the building the two mortar men were blasted into the creosote tiles, their bodies shredded into an almost unrecognizable state.

While this was going on, the fifty-caliber ramp gunner in Four Two saw a man with an RPG launcher on a street on the western side of the compound, and he opened fire, raking the street and the side of the building around where the man stood. Dust and dirt and bits of the building filled the air, covering the entire area, but when it settled, the RPG launcher was lying in the street and the man was lying facedown next to it, his legs several feet from the rest of his body.

The two Ospreys flew an opposing racetrack pattern around the entire area, and the four gunners found individual targets and eliminated them. The fifty-caliber machine guns mounted on the rear ramp buzzed as they fired; spent brass went through a long rubber tube like a drainpipe that hung loose, whipping off the end of the ramp, and then the brass tumbled out of the end, falling through the sky.

After the second lap of the pattern, most all guns and gunmen on the ground had sought cover, but the second mortar position had not been found. The pilots of the two aircraft discussed going ahead with the extraction without finding the mortar, but they decided to continue their racetrack pattern, giving their gunners more time.

The turret gunner sitting inside Steadfast Four Two ID’d the second mortar position on the fourth pass over the neighborhood. The mortar was in a small parking lot next to a steel waste receptacle, and several crates were stacked next to it, although no obvious personnel were around. The IDWS fired on the area, pulverizing the mortar tube, the receptacle, and several cars parked nearby.

Steadfast Four One’s pilot throttled back on the next pass over the Lighthouse. The V-22 slowed as it banked back around again; its airspeed dropped quickly as the wings went from vertical to horizontal and the tiltrotors began transitioning to helicopter mode. While Four Two flew cover above, Four One came to a hover over the Lighthouse. The crew chief on the ramp of the aircraft leaned out and looked down; next to him, the fifty-cal gunner spun his weapon left and right, ready to respond to any threats, and the chief spoke through his headset to the pilot, directing him to just the right spot to put his big fat bird on the ground.

While this was going on, the second Osprey continued its tight circular pattern overhead, its turret gunner searching every doorway, rooftop, balcony, and cluster of cars in the parking lots, desperate to find any dangers quickly enough to neutralize them before they killed either his airship or the one on the ground.

Steadfast Four One touched down, but there was no perceptible change in its two big engines. It wasn’t going to spool down here and relax. All eighteen Marines in the back of the aircraft raced down the ramp, their weapons out in front of them, though they could see nothing in the dust being kicked up. Half went to the left, the other half to the right, and they ran on until they reached the front gate and the walls of the compound. The men at the gate trained their guns into the park area, and the men at the walls climbed up on wrecked vehicles and other items so they could get a line of sight on the buildings and terrain outside the walls.

To the young Marines new to the scene, the neighborhood around this compound looked like a postapocalyptic ghost town. Bodies lay in the street, automobiles smoldered and burned, hundreds of windows in buildings all around had been shattered. Car alarms raged. The wreckage of the Mi-8 that had crashed in the center of the park was little more than a pile of ash now, but black smoke still billowed from it.

The Marines knew there were still enemy forces in the area. The crack of a sniper rifle fired from a distance caused rifles in the Lighthouse to return fire, keeping enemy heads down.

The Osprey above identified the sniper position on the balcony of a hotel, and the pilot turned away from the location so the ramp gunner could get a line of fire on the area. He fired several short bursts from his fifty, killing the sniper and causing the other armed men in the area to stand down.

When the Marine riflemen were in position in a cordon around the Osprey, the men still alive in the Lighthouse came out. Every able-bodied man was either wielding a gun or tending to the wounded or dead.

Ding and Dom carried the bagged body of CIA station chief Keith Bixby, and John Clark steadied the civilian contractor who had taken a ricochet through the back of the hand hours earlier. Clark passed the man off to the crew chief of the Osprey and then stopped at the bottom of the ramp.

In his nearly half-century of military and intelligence service to the United States and NATO, John Clark had climbed aboard most every aircraft, from propeller-driven airplanes, to turboprops, to jets, and he’d ridden aboard more helicopters than he cared to count.

But Clark approached the rear ramp of the Osprey with a tightness in his stomach.

Tiltrotor aircraft made sense, but there was something about that moment of transition from helo to airplane that seemed aerodynamically unsound to John Clark.

Nevertheless, as bad as the prospect of crashing into the ground in a craft with all the flight characteristics of a double-wide trailer sounded, the very certainty of getting sawed in half by a Russian mafia goon with a Kalashnikov if he stuck around helped him find the wherewithal to put one boot in front of the other and board the Osprey.

Thirty-eight-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Barry Jankowski, call sign Midas, was the last of the Lighthouse survivors to board the aircraft. While a third of the Marines had boarded, he and another Delta man quickly set charges on the vehicles next to the building. Midas covered the Delta sergeant holding the remote trigger as he boarded Steadfast Four One, and then ran up the ramp, turned back around, and took a knee with his H&K rifle pointed out in front of him. The fifty-caliber machine-gunner next to him reached out with a tether line and hooked it to his body armor, and then the crew chief called over the intercom to the pilot. “All aboard and clear! Go!”

The massive engines roared even louder, and the aircraft pulled itself up into the sky.

Steadfast Four One slowly transitioned to airplane mode, then began circling the area to provide cover while Steadfast Four Two landed to pick up the rest of the Marines. Once the second Osprey was clear of the scene, the Delta sergeant pushed a button on the remote detonator in his hand, and the six SUVs went up in a fireball that morphed into a mushroom cloud.

The two Thunder Chickens turned to the north and raced away.

The entire extraction, from the arrival of the Ospreys to the relative quiet that enveloped the Lighthouse after the last vestiges of rotor noise left the neighborhood, took only five and a half minutes.