Tom Clancy - Command Authority

“Sounds like a bloody handy friend.”

“He has his moments.”

Eric Conway and Andre Page headed out to their helicopter at five a.m. They’d been up for more than an hour already, drinking coffee and going over weather reports in the flight operations center. Conway had spent a little longer than usual at the weather desk in Flight Ops, because a thick fog had settled over Cherkasy, and storms were brewing to the north. It was something they would have to monitor, but this was combat; it would not affect their planned six a.m. departure.

Even though there was a war going on out there somewhere, it seemed quiet and peaceful here. Most of the Ukrainian ground forces at the base had rolled out for the front lines as soon as the fighting broke out, leaving behind the company of American multipurpose scout helos, the Ranger security force, and Midas’s Joint Operations Center.

Four of Bravo Company’s eight matte-black Kiowas were already up in the air to support Ukrainian Mi-24 attack helicopters fighting against ground units near Chuhuiv Air Base, a half-hour flying time to the east.

Those OH-58s would be used to fire lasers at targets in locations where the Special Forces and Delta teams were not available. Their work would be no more or less dangerous than today’s flight by Conway and Page, except for the fact Eric and Dre would be flying into battle without any air defense missiles.

Black Wolf Two Six wore four Hellfire missiles on its pylons, and that was all. They had considered operating with a pair of Stingers on one pylon and a pair of Hellfires on the other, but Conway decided to trust in the advanced countermeasures of his helicopter as well as its radar, and to give up air-to-air capability to buy himself double the air-to-ground capability.

They finished their preflight workup outside the helo and each man walked to his side of the OH-58. Here, they stood at the crew station doors, put on their helmets, attached their commo sets, and unhooked their M4 rifles from the slings around their necks. It was impossible for them to fly with rifles hanging off their chests, so they stored the weapons on the dashboard above the instrument panels, keeping them within reach at all times so they could grab them and fire out the open sides of the little helicopter if necessary. They kept a few frag grenades and smoke markers Velcroed into position here as well.

A couple of carbines and some frags wasn’t much when compared with the four antiarmor missiles on the outboard stores, but the battle rifles had come in handy for the two men before. Two years earlier, in Afghanistan, they’d been on a close air-support mission over a group of Dutch coalition infantry in danger of being overrun by Taliban on a hillside. They launched all of the Kiowa’s Hydra seventy-millimeter rockets at an enemy position, wiping out the threat there, but almost immediately after this an RPG streaked past the windscreen of the OH-58. Conway saw the origin of the launch, called out the location to his copilot, then turned the helo ninety degrees. He flew sideways at the threat while Dre aimed his M4 and emptied a full magazine at the RPG crew, killing both men before they’d been able to fire another rocket at either the helicopter or the Dutch troops in the valley.

The two young warrant officers flew back to Jalalabad celebrating with high fives, but Page had been nearly despondent upon returning to the ready room after the fact when it became clear the Kiowa’s gun camera hadn’t recorded the shooting for posterity because it had been positioned forward, not facing out the side of the helicopter.

Both men knew that the campaign here in Ukraine would bear little resemblance to what they had experienced around J-bad. The Russian military, with its Air Force and long-range missiles, along with its sophisticated attack helos and T-90 tanks, made the Taliban look like amateurs.

While they prepped for takeoff this foggy morning, each of the men worked from a checklist, going through the various systems on the helicopter; Conway focused on testing his Sperry Flight Control System and his avionics, while Page spooled through his cameras, targeting computer, and mast-mounted sight laser designation and backup systems.

Both men tested their comms, and both men felt over their bodies for all SERE equipment.

Shortly before six a.m. their crew chief gave them a thumbs-up on the pad and Conway started the Rolls-Royce engine. There was a ten-second-long high-pitched whine before the main rotor even began to spin, and it took more than a minute for the Allison engine to transfer enough power to the main and tail rotors for takeoff. Another round of checklists was tackled; by now Page was talking on a channel to the crew chief, discussing the possibility of a quick return to the pad to get more Hellfires in the case of heavy action.

The crew chief insisted he’d be ready for them when they came back, whether it was in four hours or four minutes.

At six a.m. Eric Conway keyed his microphone. “Black Wolf Two Six, Cherkasy Ground, over?”

“Cherkasy Ground, Black Wolf Two Six.”

“Black Wolf Two Six, ready for takeoff.”

The flight control officer cleared the OH-58 for takeoff and a southerly departure out of the base, and the black bird rose slowly into the foggy morning.

They were just a few hundred feet in the air when a transmission came through their headsets from the JOC, which was different from Bravo Company Flight Ops.

“Black Wolf Two Six, Warlock Zero One. How copy?”

Both Conway and Page knew this was Midas transmitting on the net. He ran the JOC, but in typical Army obfuscation his radio call sign was different from his Delta call sign.

“Warlock Zero One, copy. We are outbound to waypoint Alpha. ETA is one-nine mikes, over.”

“Roger, Two Six. Proceed to waypoint Golf and advise. At this point I do not have any targets for you, so I’ll need you to loiter on station, how copy?”

“Black Wolf Two Six copies all.”

Conway pushed the cyclic forward and pulled up the collective; the aircraft climbed up through the fog as it raced toward the Crimea.

“You don’t feel like skimming the trees in this soup?” Page asked jokingly.

“You know what they say. ‘Speed is life, but altitude is life insurance.’”

Their mission today was flexible. Their primary task was to collect battlefield intelligence for the force commander, but Conway knew at any moment Midas, or Warlock Zero One, or whatever the hell his name was, might order them to support one of the dozen or so U.S. and British special operations teams active in Operation Red Coal Carpet.

As they climbed out of the fog, seeing nothing but blue sky and green pastureland in the distance, a series of crackling transmissions came over their radios. Two of the Kiowas near the Chuhuiv Air Base had located targets moving through a paved road linking two small towns. The Warriors were in the process of lasing targets for a squadron of Mi-24 Hinds, and their transmissions made the two men in Black Wolf Two Six wish they were part of the action.

The bulk of the fighting so far had been in the provinces—called oblasts in Ukraine—of Donetsk and Luhansk, and the American helicopters were ordered to stay outside of this area, although some of the Delta Force teams were operating in Donetsk just to blunt the speed at which the Russians advanced.

More than an hour into its flight, Black Wolf Two Six was flying low along the E50 highway east of the large industrial town of Dnipropetrovs’k. The highway was filled with civilian vehicles leaving Donetsk to the east; many, if not most, looked like they were full of personal belongings and valuables.

Conway spoke through his intercom: “Hey, Dre, I read that over eighty percent of the citizens around here are, to one degree or another, allied with Russia.”