“You’re not suggesting that we give up, are you, Admiral?” Scott asked sharply. Magruder heard in that tone a bit of desperation; Scott needed support here and was afraid that Magruder was backing off.
“Certainly not. But there are other governments in the area that we could approach. If we could convince Greece and Bulgaria to go along with us on this, we might manage an air-mobile op against just the Black Sea end of the Bosporus. We could land north of Istanbul just long enough to clear the shipping channel.”
“We’d still have the problem of extracting our ships,” Scott said.
“But it would buy us time and open some new possibilities, I think.”
“There’s also,” Kirkpatrick said, “the option of striking directly at the problem. Hit the Russians, threaten them with an expanded war against a real enemy, not just Ukrainians or other Russians. Hit ‘em and hurt ‘em until they yell uncle and let our people go.”
“Difficult, General,” Scott said, “without a nearby base of operations.
Or are you suggesting we invade Russia from eastern Europe or the Baltic?”
“Unacceptable!” Reed said sharply. “Remember, the whole point of this exercise is to avoid becoming involved in a war over there. It would be easier and cheaper to go ahead and let the Russians have our damned ships!”
“Gentlemen,” Waring said, shaking his head. “I have to weigh in and say that I’m completely opposed to any operations against Turkey anywhere along those straits. There’s historical precedent not to try something like that, you know. Anybody here remember Gallipoli?”
“What’s that?” Reed asked him. “A city?”
“A battle, Madam Secretary,” Magruder said. “In World War I.”
“That,” Reed said with a lift of her chin, “was a bit before my time.”
Gallipoli had been one of the bloodier failures of the First World War, an attack by Great Britain against Germany’s Ottoman Turk allies in 1915. Brainchild of the British First Lord of the Admiralty, one Winston Churchill, the idea had been to land on the Gallipoli Peninsula at the Aegean mouth of the Hellespont and seize the straits, isolating Istanbul from the Asian portion of the Turkish-Ottoman Empire, knocking the Turks out of the war, and opening a new line of supplies to the embattled Russians. Simple in concept, the plan had been wrecked by hesitation and slow-moving commanders. After seizing a beachhead with few casualties against light opposition, the invasion force had failed to move inland off the narrow thrust of the peninsula; the Turks had closed them off, and there’d followed an extended battle by attrition.
Some 252,000 men had become casualties on the Allied side alone. Nearly as many Turks had been killed or wounded as well, and the entire operation had accomplished exactly nothing. The most skillfully handled part of the entire campaign had been the British evacuation of the beachhead at the end, early in 1916.
“Gallipoli failed,” Magruder said carefully, “because of a failure of nerve and of vision on the part of the people running it. It was a fine strategic concept, with a major screw-up in the execution.”
“If you ask me,” Gordon West, the White House Chief of Staff, said, “this whole thing has been one colossal screw-up. I know the President isn’t going to want to get into any major military operation until we know just what went wrong in there. This, this could have an incalculable impact on his image.”
Scott snorted loudly. “We’re not talking about public opinion polls here, Mr. West.”
“We are talking,” West said with a quiet, deadly earnestness, “about the President of the United States, and his perceived effectiveness as a world leader. I’d say that is at least as important as the safety of your precious aircraft carrier.”
“Perhaps, gentlemen,” Waring said, glancing back and forth nervously between the two men as though he feared they were about to come to blows, “and Madam Secretary, ah, perhaps it’s too soon yet to make any decision at all. I mean, a rash decision now could have unfortunate effects on all concerned, on the President, and on the Jefferson and her escorts. If we wait, the situation may resolve itself.”
“I might remind you all,” Admiral Scott added, “of the service motto of the British Special Air Service, the SAS. “Who dares, wins.” This isn’t a time for halfhearted measures, fixing the blame, or mealymouthed political shenanigans.”
Reed shook her head. “Mr. Waring, I cannot in good conscience recommend any act that will deepen our military involvement in that region.” She looked pointedly at Scott. “We will not send in the Marines and risk this, this incident escalating into a major war.”
Admiral Magruder looked up. “Madam Secretary, excuse me, but you’re suggesting we do nothing? What about our people?”
“There are times, Admiral, when political expediency must take precedence. For the good of the country.”
“You’re suggesting that we abandon them? Let them just, just hang out to dry?”
“There are wounded personnel ashore,” Admiral Scott added, his voice growing harder, angrier. “Including the commanding officer of that battle group. So far, the Russians have not even been willing to discuss allowing us to extract them. That’s a problem quite separate from the larger one of our battle group being trapped inside the Black Sea. Madam, we can’t simply turn our backs on them!”
She drummed her fingers briefly on the tabletop. “I will remind you, both of you, once again, Admiral Magruder, Admiral Scott, that I will happily accept your resignations if either or both of you cannot see things my way. I need team players here, not dissent. Not squabbling. My recommendation will be that we engage the Russians in a meaningful dialogue. Perhaps something can be negotiated. We should tell Dmitriev no right up front, but keep the door open for further bargaining. I think we can work something out, given time.
“We should also, Mr. Heideman, continue our talks with Ankara. If we can secure rights to berth our ships in one of their Black Sea ports, in Sinop, possibly, the entire problem goes away. Don’t you agree?”
“Oh, absolutely, Madam Secretary.”
“In any case,” Waring added, “we can extend those negotiations as long as is necessary. Long enough to see what the Russians do. Long enough for the President to garner support for military intervention, if necessary.”
“That raises an interesting possibility,” Gordon West said.
But Magruder leaned back in his chair and closed eyes and ears alike. He recognized the signs. This discussion was going to continue throughout the rest of the morning, possibly into the afternoon as well, but nothing would be decided, nothing accomplished. A wholehearted advocate of the necessity of separating military from government and keeping them separate, he nonetheless resented it, resented it deeply, when the civilian bureaucrats in charge regarded military men and women as expendable pawns. The same sort of thing had happened time after time in the past. The U.S. government had known there were still POWS in captivity in North Vietnam and Laos when the Paris peace accords had been signed, but in the name of political expediency and a crumbling presidency…
Sometimes Magruder, patriot that he was, felt deeply ashamed for his country.
CHAPTER 22
Friday, 6 November
1604 hours (Zulu +3)
ACN Satellite transmission
Medium shot of a large, imposing, white building surrounded by trees. UN troops, wearing bulky flak-jackets and blue helmets, are everywhere in evidence. Cut to medium close-up of Boychenko, speaking earnestly with a U.S. Navy captain and an enlisted woman.
“In the historic city of Yalta today, the chaotic disintegration of the Russian Federation took yet another step into anarchy, as Russian naval forces in the Crimea refused to go along with General Sergei Boychenko’s plan to turn the region over to UN forces.”
Cut to long shot of Russian soldiers moving cautiously along a street, using abandoned vehicles or fallen rubble for cover. Cut to blurry view of a jet aircraft streaking overhead, then back to another long shot of soldiers in t
he street. Two men drag a wounded comrade to shelter.
“The mutiny has precipitated sharp fighting between army units loyal to Boychenko, and naval infantry and air force units under the command of Vice-Admiral Nikolai Dmitriev. Casualties are reported to be heavy.
“Dmitriev has declared Boychenko to be a rebel in the employ of antigovernment forces and has assumed full command of all military units in the Crimea, this in the wake of the attempted assassination of Boychenko during UN ceremonies here yesterday morning. Authorities believe that attempt was probably instigated by Dmitriev, though spokesmen for the Black Sea Fleet’s commander deny it.”
Medium shot of UN soldiers near the White Palace. Cut to a view of the wreckage of a large helicopter on the palace grounds.
“In the meantime, some one hundred UN personnel, including a contingent from the U.S. Navy’s Jefferson battle group, now steaming offshore, have been trapped in Yalta by the rapidly escalating hostilities. All flights out of the area have been canceled, and military helicopters have been grounded. Dmitriev has threatened to shoot down any foreign aircraft in the region, fearing, perhaps, Boychenko’s escape.”
Cut to long shot of an older Russian woman with a small child, huddled against the side of a building. Zoom in on her age-wrinkled face as she stares apprehensively up at the sky. Cut to medium shot of a wood-frame house burning, then to several long shots of civilians in small, desolate groups. Some look fearful, some angry. Most look bewildered or simply numb. Cut to tight close-up of the first woman’s face. She is crying.
“For the people of Yalta, and the entire Crimea, the war goes on… and the killing… and it doesn’t really seem to matter who is fighting whom.
“For ACN, this is Pamela Drake, reporting live from Yalta.”
2135 hours (Zulu +3)
Tomcat 216
The Black Sea
Dixie held his Tomcat, his new Tomcat, steady at five hundred feet, a sea-skimming altitude that would put him in a vulnerable spot if the Russians jumped him but that might give him and the seven other Tomcats flying in an extended formation with him a critical few more minutes of evasion from Russian radar. It was fully dark, with sunset having taken place four hours earlier, the sky partly cloudy, and the new moon just two days away. He couldn’t see the water flashing beneath his F-14’s belly, couldn’t see anything, really, except the mingled cool green-yellow glows of his cockpit instrumentation lights, his vertical and horizontal display indicator screens, and his HUD.
His pulse was pounding; he could feel it in his throat, against the collar of his flight suit. It felt good being on a full op again, instead of flying racecourse ovals over featureless spots of ocean on CAP.
Cat Garrity was riding backseat with him again, and that felt good as well.
“Coming up on the way point, Dix,” Cat told him over the ICS. “We have unknown aircraft in the vicinity, at two-seven-oh to three-three-five. No sign that they’ve noticed us yet.”
“Rog. Maybe they can’t see in the dark, huh?”
“Don’t count on it. Our Prowler friends can only jam them so much. When they get close enough, they’ll see us.”
Two separate flights of EA-6 Prowler ECM aircraft had departed from the Jefferson an hour earlier. One had cut inland, flying straight north and crossing the coast near Gurzuf. The other had paralleled the coast, jamming hard and recording any radar sites careless enough to paint them and give away their own positions. The first group was code-named Spoiler, and their job was to literally stir up an enemy response, attracting missile fire and interceptor squadrons, if possible, in order to clear the path to Yalta from the sea. The second group, Pouncer, would provide selective ECM jamming coverage for the rest of the aircraft, as well as loosing deadly AGM-136A anti-radiation cruise missiles. These weapons, called Tacit Rainbow, actually patrolled large sections of sky, detecting and storing the locations of all radar and radio emitters in the area, until, on command, they were directed against a selected target ― even some minutes after that target had stopped transmitting. They’d proved themselves superbly effective in the Gulf War and elsewhere at knocking out hostile radar arrays and weapons-targeting systems.
“I’ve got two more unknowns at two-zero-eight,” Cat told him. “They’re up high. Looks like a search sweep.”
“Rog.”
He was absolutely dependent on his RIO in a night operation, as dependent on her for radar information ― both that picked up by the F-14’s AWG-9 radar and that relayed to the squadrons from the E-2C Hawkeyes orbiting far to the south ― as he was dependent on his instruments now to tell him how high above the water he was flying and in what direction.
“Way point one,” she announced. “Come right to zero-zero-four.”
“Zero-zero-four,” he echoed as the F-14 tilted sharply to the right.
“Coming around to new heading… now.”
“We should have the coast in sight.”
He glanced up, peering past the reflections on his canopy and out into the darkness. “Got it. Funny. The place is still lit up like Christmas.”
“The Crimean Riviera, remember? They probably don’t shut down for anything short of a power failure.”
He could see the lights of Yalta ahead, smeared into a gradually thinning glitter of light inland and cut off sharp and hard by the curve of the coastline. Triple A ― antiaircraft fire ― was already floating into the sky from several points inland, along the mountain chain that pinned Yalta to the shore.
“Okay,” Cat told him. “We’re going feet dry. Swing us into the racetrack now.”
“Rog.” Lights swept beneath his aircraft. He looked behind and to either side, trying to spot Badger and Red, flying his wing, but he couldn’t see their aircraft. They were flying loose wing, perhaps a mile to his right and slightly behind.
He’d studied maps of the Yalta coastal area thoroughly and knew that the White Palace where Captain Magruder and a number of other Americans and UN personnel were trapped was just up the coast to the east… just about there, in fact. The light show was dazzlingly beautiful… and deadly. Some of those slowly drifting globes of light ― they looked like softly glowing tennis balls ― seemed to be chasing one another in gently arcing lines across the sky only a few feet away, close enough for Dixie to reach out and catch one.
Their distance and their slowness were illusory. They were close, within a mile or so, but traveling fast enough to punch clean through his wing if they struck it. Proximity fuses could trigger them to explode within a set range of several meters, peppering his relatively fragile and vulnerable aircraft with white-hot shrapnel.
An explosion rocked his Tomcat… and another. Once he heard a sharp ping of metal on metal, but after a heart-stopping moment of scanning his damage indicators, he decided that it had missed anything vital. The Tomcat was rocking now with the gentle throb of aerial explosions. Streams of tracer rounds, green and yellow, floated and arced across the sky.
“So what do you think, Cat?” he asked his RIO. “Are we at war yet?”
She laughed. “I don’t know what Washington has to say about it,” she said, “but I was at war with those bastards the moment they shot our people.”
“You don’t think it was a terrorist attack, like they’re saying?”
Everybody in the battle group, it seemed, had been watching the ACN broadcasts, live, since the ships were all set up to receive satellite news feeds. It was a little eerie, Dixie thought, that he’d been seeing news programs broadcast from this spot on the Crimean coast just a few hours ago. He’d been watching the TV monitor set up in the Vipers’ ready room, and the explosion of cheers and applause when Tombstone appeared briefly in one of the shots had been thunderous.
Washington might be undecided as to how to handle the Crimean mess, but every man and woman aboard the ships of CVBG-14 and MEU-25 was ready to go in now and kick ass until their people were returned safe.
The flak was growing thicker toward the mountains… but had vanished
along the coast west of Yalta. That in itself was a warning.
“Yeah, that’s where they’re coming from, Dix,” Cat told him. “I’ve got four, no… make that five bogeys coming in at two-eight-five, range fifty-two miles. I’m getting radar tone.” There was a pause. Then, “Missiles! We have missiles incoming!”
“Tell me when!”
Seconds dragged past. “Hold it… hold it… okay! Zone five and break left!”
Dixie threw the F-14 into a hard turn to port, slamming the throttle forward to the final detent. As acceleration crammed him down against his seat, he looked up… and saw two bright stars curving through the night sky, coming straight at his head.
“Dropping chaff!” Cat said… and the missiles streaked past, passing beneath the aircraft and out over the sea.
Dixie kept the afterburner on as he straightened out on a new heading, flying directly toward the oncoming wave of hostiles.
“Poor Man, Poor Man,” Dixie called over the radio, using Jefferson’s code name for this op. “This is Air Hammer One-three! We are taking fire!”
“Poor Man” had been adopted from the name of John Paul Jones’s most famous command, the Bonhomme Richard. “Air Hammer, this is Poor Man,” replied the voice of Jefferson’s Ops watch officer. “We copy Hammer One-three taking fire. Can you confirm? Over.”
“Poor Man, Hammer One-four,” Badger’s voice said. “We confirm.”
“Poor Man, Hammer One-one,” Batman added. “Missile launch confirmed.
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