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.
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.
45
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.<
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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.
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