Command Authority (28 page)

M
utt 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.”

—

C
havez 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.

—

T
hree 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.

I
n 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.

—

W
e 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.

—

D
om 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.”

—

G
rungy 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.

—

T
he 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.