Two hundred twenty kilometers ― over 130 miles. A four-to five-hour trip, calculated by the best highway speed of the slowest vehicles in Boychenko’s convoy.
If nothing went wrong. If they were able to break away from Dmitriev’s troops and searching aircraft.
If… if… if…
CHAPTER 23
Saturday, 7 November
0145 hours (Zulu +3)
Office of the Commander, Black Sea Fleet
Sevastopol Naval Base, Crimean Military District
Starshiy-Leytenant Anton Ivanovich Kulagin stood to attention and saluted his superior. “We cannot confirm the reports, Comrade Admiral,” he said. His uniform, usually spotlessly immaculate, was mussed, and there was a smudge of something, smoke or grease, on his face. “But it appears that Boychenko has escaped.”
Dmitriev swiveled in his chair to face the young officer. “How?” The word was flat and emotionless.
“Sir, the Americans launched a heavy air strike against our positions in the mountains above Yalta. Under cover of that strike, they landed a number of helicopters at the White Palace and evacuated a large number of people. Their wounded, the UN people, their naval UN attaches. We cannot confirm that Boychenko was among them, but-“
“But we must assume that he is.” Dmitriev closed his eyes, suddenly very tired. Boychenko would not have missed his opportunity to flee to asylum with the American battle group.
“Yes, sir. Casualties were light among our ground forces, moderate to heavy in the air. We lost twenty-five aircraft of various types, mostly interceptors.”
He looked up. “Twenty-five? So many?” That was nearly twenty percent of all of the combat aircraft they possessed, gone in a single engagement!
“Yes, sir. And several more damaged. Colonel Vorodin reports twelve American aircraft shot down, but we have no confirmation on that as yet. Fifteen of our pilots are dead or still missing.” Kulagin paused. “The Americans, it seems, possess a considerable advantage in their Phoenix missiles.”
“Da. Those monsters.” Once again, the Americans had shown the value of their undeniable technological lead in weapons systems. An air-to-air missile that could guide itself across nearly two hundred kilometers at five times the speed of sound…
He shook his head. The best in the Russian arsenal still could not match the AIM-54C.
“And the rebel forces?” he asked. “Surely they did not evacuate all of them by helicopter?”
“No, sir. In fact, our observers reported that a number of Americans remained behind when the helicopters left.”
“Indeed!”
“Yes, sir. American Marines. Our scouts were not able to get close enough to formulate a detailed report, of course. We don’t know how many remained ashore.”
“American military forces are helping the rebels.” Dmitriev’s fingers drummed rapidly on his desktop. “What do they hope to achieve? They will be trapped in Yalta-“
“Sir…” Kulagin stopped, obviously afraid.
“Go on, go on. Nothing you say can be worse than the news that we’ve lost so many aircraft.”
“Sir, shortly after the helicopters left, the rebel forces evacuated the palace as well. They appear to be retreating up the coast road.”
The news struck Dmitriev like a physical blow. “What?”
“Yes, sir. We estimate fifteen hundred rebels, mostly from the 4th Fleet Spetsnaz, are now on the road.”
Dmitriev got up and walked around his desk. A map on the wall next to his office door showed the entire Crimean Peninsula and the northern third of the Black Sea in considerable detail. Pins with colored tags had been stuck into the map at various points, marking ground forces, while the American fleet’s movements had been drawn in with broad strokes of a blue felt-tip pen.
“That is an interesting detail, Anton Ivanovich,” he said. “You are sure of this?”
“Yes, Comrade Admiral. At last report.” He leaned forward, his forefinger brushing the town of Alusta, twenty-five kilometers up the coast from Yalta. “They were here. That was perhaps an hour ago. Vorodin reports attempting to launch an air strike on the convoy, but American carrier aircraft continue to provide cover for them. His aircraft have not been able to get close enough to attack.”
“The coast road.” Dmitriev’s thoughts were spinning. “The coast road.”
Where are fifteen hundred rebel soldiers going? His eyes followed the coast road to the northeast, to Feodosiya, where it swung gradually eastward across the Kerch Peninsula.
“Kerch,” he said abruptly. His finger came down hard on the seaport city at the easternmost tip of the peninsula, overlooking the narrow Kerch Strait that connected the Black Sea with the Sea of Azov to the north. The strait was only five kilometers wide at that point, separating the Crimea from the Taman Peninsula… and Russia proper. “Kerch,” he said again, turning to Kulagin. “They are going home, as Boychenko promised them.”
“Then we have won, Comrade Admiral!”
“Hardly!” Turning from the map, he hurried back to his desk. There was much to be done.
“But if the rebels are fleeing-“
“An hour ago I had a report from our aerial reconnaissance unit,” Dmitriev said. “The American battle group is now moving northeast at full speed.”
Kulagin remained in front of the map, studying it carefully. After a few moments he said, “The Americans are going to Kerch as well?”
“Yes. It is obvious, no? They intend to provide naval transport for Boychenko’s troops across the strait. It could be that Boychenko plans to cut a deal with Krasilnikov.” Probably by painting me as a bungler, he told himself, but he was unwilling to voice the thought to his subordinate.
“But we have naval facilities at Kerch. And a battalion of naval infantry.”
“Exactly,” Dmitriev said as he picked up the telephone on his desk. He punched a button. “Vasily! Get me Yevtushenko at Kerch! I don’t care what time it is! Get him!” As he waited for the connection to be made, he looked at Kulagin. “And Anton! While I discuss this with Yevtushenko, call an assembly of all ship captains. In the main briefing room down the hall, three hundred hours.”
Kulagin’s eyebrows crept up his forehead. “All captains? A sortie, Comrade Admiral?”
“A sortie. With speed, we can catch the American battle group against the Taman Peninsula, while Yevtushenko deals with Boychenko’s soldiers ashore. If we cannot use the American carrier group, we can destroy it… a demonstration that should impress our Ukrainian friends. More likely, we will actually be able to force their surrender, and that would be a prize indeed to present to Krasilnikov!”
“But, sir! An American battle group!”
“Don’t you see, Anton? They have been flying air operations steadily since Thursday morning. Since before that, even, if you count their ASW and fighter patrols. They were in combat Thursday against our Bosporus strike force. And this evening they mounted a major operation that must have involved all of their air assets. And with their lines of supply cut, they simply do not have the reserves of aviation fuel necessary to continue operations much longer. Even an American aircraft carrier battle group cannot fight for long without fuel for its aircraft!”
“We don’t know how much they still have, though-“
Dmitriev laughed. “They do not have enough, and that is all we need to know! That, and the fact that we know where their carrier force is going… straight into the pocket south of Kerch and the Taman Peninsula! We will trap them, force them to use the last of their aviation gasoline… and then we will have them! Go now! Quickly!”
“Da, Comrade Admiral!”
It was, as the Americans might say, a long shot, but they might just be able to pull this off.
0720 hours (Zulu +3)
Tomcat 207
U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson
Tomboy guided her F-14, nose number 207, into position astride the slot for catapult two, following the arm and hand motions of a Green Shirt on the deck i
n front of her. The cat shuttle was run back, and she heard the thumps and clanks as the deck crew attached it to her nose-wheel. It was still dark, with sunrise another ten minutes away, but the entire sky was alight with a deep blue radiance that clearly illuminated the activities on the deck.
She felt again the familiar thrill of anticipatory excitement, waiting for the cat shot.
“Ready to roll back here, Tomboy,” her RIO, Lieutenant Bruce “Hacker”
Kosinski said from the backseat.
“Okay, Hack. You keep your eyes peeled back there. We’re going to be knee-deep in Russian interceptors as soon as we hit the coast.”
“Roger that.”
She thought again of Tombstone ashore. His order still rankled, and since returning aboard late last night, she’d had to watch herself to keep from sounding short or sharp with Hacker or her other fellow NFOS. She glanced down at the map clipped to a board attached to the right thigh of her flight suit. A carrier’s chief strength, outside of the obvious punch and counterpunch represented by her aircraft, was her speed. Jefferson had covered 150 miles during the night and was now less than forty miles south of Kerch, well into the broad, open bite that stretched along the southeastern coast of the Crimea and down the western coast of Caucasian Russia.
“Hey, Tomboy.”
“Yeah?”
“You think this thing’s gonna work?”
“Of course it will,” she replied. Her earlier bad humor, she realized, was rapidly dissipating. She couldn’t help grinning behind her face mask as she added, “We’re about to go take a bite out of Crimea.”
Hacker groaned appreciatively. Thunder boomed from the right as Tomcat 201 ― Batman and Malibu ― roared off Cat One and into the early morning sky. White-shirted checkers paused, crouched low, as Batman’s F-14 howled off the bow, then continued their inspection of Tomboy’s aircraft. A Green Shirt standing to starboard of her cockpit held up a board reading 65000. She nodded and signaled OK, the tally matching her figure for the Tomcat’s full-loaded weight. An ordie held up a bundle of red-tagged arming wires and she counted them off. A standard intercept warload: four Phoenix, two AMRAAM, and two Sidewinder missiles ― correct. She gave the Red Shirt a thumbs-up and he dashed away, getting clear.
The deck officer signaled for her to wipe her controls and she did so ― flaps, ailerons, spoilers, rudder ― as White Shirts checked each movement, then signaled OK. Another signal, and she eased the throttle forward, feeling the raw thunder of the F110-GE 400 engines building as she took them all the way up to full military power. The checkers watched carefully, then signaled thumbs-up.
All clear, ready for launch.
Another Tomcat was being rolled onto Cat One and hooked up as steam swirled off the slot from Batman’s launch. The nose number was 216 ― Dixie and Cat. Tomboy caught Cat’s eye in the other aircraft’s backseat and waved; Cat tossed back a jaunty salute.
The pace of launches was rapid this morning ― one every forty-five seconds to a minute. The deck crew scurried about, sometimes appearing to be some sort of huge, brightly colored colonial or amebic creature moving with urgent purpose rather than a scattered group of tired, hard-worked men and women.
“Green light,” Hacker called.
“Good. Let’s grab us some sky!”
“Fine. But no more Crimea puns. Please!”
“Deal.”
The launch officer took a last look up and down the deck and around the Tomcat. He looked up at Tomboy and saluted.
She returned the salute. The launch officer dropped to his knee, pointing down the deck as the Green and Yellow Shirts nearby crouched low. He touched his thumb to the deck.
Acceleration ― a momentary surge of pressure and noise as she sank back hard against her ejection seat ― and then the dark gray of the carrier’s deck was gone and she was soaring out over the open sea. She pulled back on the stick, climbing, climbing. Glancing back over her shoulder, she saw the Jefferson’s bow dwindling with distance. The rescue station helicopter was a tiny toy well off the carrier’s port side, its rotors sparkling in the sun. To the north, Shiloh and Decatur held station. Beyond that was the forbidding-looking coast of the eastern Crimea.
Tomboy held her climb, taking the aircraft past eight thousand feet in seconds, rising swift and clean out of the Earth’s shadow. Sunlight exploded around her, warm, golden, and glorious.
She hated like hell to admit it, but Tombstone was right. This was where she belonged.
0744 hours (Zulu +3)
Near Arsincevo
Kerch Peninsula, the Crimea
Tombstone stood on the low hill, peering through binoculars at the tank farm below. It was typical of such facilities the world over, endless rows of squat, cylindrical tanks painted a drab olive color, together with the tangle of piping, fractionating towers, compressor buildings, flare towers, and furnaces that marked a petroleum refinery.
Arsincevo was a small town, a village, really, on the southern outskirts of the sprawl of Kerch. The naval port was directly on the north, almost adjacent to the tank farm, while a major airfield was visible to the northwest. By the dazzling light of the new-risen sun, Tombstone could see Kerch itself to the northeast, a drab-looking city separated by the sparkling blue waters of the Kerch Strait from the gray strip of land marking the western tip of the Taman Peninsula. Where much of the southeastern coastline of the Crimea had been devoted to resorts, health spas, and recreational beaches, the eastern end of Crimea, the Kerch Peninsula, was nearly entirely given over to the Russian military.
In particular, there was a Black Sea Fleet port at Kerch itself, together with a major refinery and military petroleum storage facility at Arsincevo. A major pipeline from the rich oil fields of the Caucasus came through the town of Chuska on the Taman Peninsula, then crossed the strait underwater, emerging south of the Kerch naval base and running through the Arsincevo refinery complex. The storage facilities here held millions of gallons of diesel fuel for the Black Sea Fleet ships deployed at the base.
And some of those tanks, according to General Boychenko, held several million gallons of aviation fuel, a formulation identical to the JP-5 used by U.S. Navy aircraft.
CBG-14 might have been left to its own devices by Washington, but they were about to demonstrate that those devices could still be very effective indeed.
“Hey, Captain Magruder?”
It was Doc Ellsworth. During the drive up the coast from Yalta, Tombstone had been able to draw the young man out a bit more. He’d been right in his guess that Doc was a SEAL, a member of the elite Navy commando unit descended from the famous UDT frogmen of World War II. He was serving now as part of a Marine Force Recon unit; SEALS and Marine Recon often teamed up in four-man units for special ops.
“Whatcha got, Doc?”
“Trouble. Coming out of the Kerch naval base and headed this way.”
Tombstone nodded. “Okay. On my way.”
He was tired, though the pump of adrenaline had been keeping him going since yesterday. It had been a long, long night.
The coming day promised to be longer still.
0745 hours (Zulu +3)
Company “Sobaka,” 15th
Naval Infantry, Kerch
Naval Command Polkovnik Yuri Nikolaivich Yevtushenko was riding with his head and shoulders above the circular commander’s hatch in the turret of his BTR-60 as the armored personnel carrier crested the ridge north of Arsincevo. It was a glorious morning, the sun sparkling off the sea, though a low line of dark clouds to the north held the promise of rain later.
On the highway ahead, the BTRS of the reconnaissance platoon were stirring up a cloud of dust. Turning in his steel-ringed perch and looking back past the heads of the naval infantry commandos riding on his command vehicle, he could see the rest of the column strung out on the road behind him, six amphibious PT-76 tanks and a long line of personnel carriers.
“We’re all here, Comrade Colonel,” one of the soldiers said, shouting to make hi
mself heard above the roar of the armored car’s engine. The others laughed. “None of us has left yet!”
“Well, then,” Yevtushenko said, grinning, “perhaps I’d better get into uniform!” Ducking back below the hatch, he removed his regulation steel helmet and pulled out his beret, the famous black beret of the Russian naval infantry, and donned it at a jaunty angle. Rising again in the hatch, he grinned at the soldiers and tossed them a strictly nonregulation one-fingered salute.
“Ah!” one shouted. “Now I know we are going into combat!” He removed his own helmet and pulled his beret out from inside his one-piece, light-camouflage uniform. In seconds, the others had done the same. Russian military uniform doctrine specified steel helmets for naval infantry troops, but the black beret was such a beloved and distinctive part of their uniform by now that most commanders had long since given up trying to enforce that regulation. In fact, the Morskaya Pekhota, the naval infantry, was an elite combat unit, classified as a “Guards” unit, in fact. As such, they were permitted to wear their berets, with the red triangular patches peculiar to the Russian marines, and at any desired angle, shape, or position on the head, a bit of unit nonconformity surprising for an otherwise superbly disciplined force.
The morale of the men was good, and Yevtushenko was pleased at that. In a civil war ― or a mutiny ― it was never possible to know ahead of time exactly how the troops would react. Often they had friends, even family, among the troops on the other side.
Fortunately, in this case, at least, the enemy forces were composed mostly of Spetsnaz, and there was little love lost between the Russian special forces and the marines. Spetsnaz ― the name was a contraction of the Russian Spetsialnoye Nazranie, “Special Designation Forces,” and they technically belonged to military intelligence, the infamous GRU. Naval Spetsnaz units worked closely with the naval infantry, providing frogman and reconnaissance forces, but Boychenko’s Bodyguard, as some of the men jokingly called the 4th Black Sea Fleet Spetsnaz Brigade, were army, participants in the sharp rivalry between naval and army units throughout the Russian military. Yevtushenko had explained the situation carefully to his men ― itself something rare among Russian military commanders in any service ― telling them that Boychenko’s people wanted to abandon the Crimea to the Ukrainians.
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