Tom Clancy - Command Authority

Page transmitted in his headset. “Warlock Zero One, this is Two Six. We are requesting clearance for fires for Hellfire.”

Midas came over the radio instantly: “Black Wolf Two Six, this is Warlock Zero One. I’ve got no Ukrainian air assets in the area. You are cleared hot with Hellfires, over.”

“Roger, cleared hot.”

Conway said, “Let’s do it.”

Page ignored Conway; he knew that Conway’s adrenaline fired him up like this, but Page prided himself on staying cool. “Frito Actual. Black Wolf Two Six. Be advised, we will be weapons release.”

“Roger that, Black Wolf. We are well clear. Negative friendlies at target pos. Get those missile trucks and get the fuck out of here before enemy helos come hunting for you.”

“Roger that.”

Conway slipped his thumb under the guard on the Weapons Fire switch on his cyclic.

He said, “Firing in three, two, one.” He pressed the fire button and sent an air-to-ground missile toward the first of the two huge mobile missile launchers.

“Hellfire blazing,” Conway said, confirming he could see good propulsion on the missile as it raced to the east.

“That’s sixty-five grand, off the rails,” Page said calmly. It was his joke, not Conway’s, because Page was the more relaxed of the two men in combat.

Conway did not wait to watch the impact on the MFD. Instead, he selected a second missile, and fired at the same target as the first. He could have switched between the two targets, but stacking up two back-to-back shots at the same target increased the chances the antimissile features of the battery would be defeated.

The first Hellfire was detected by laser warning receivers set up at the emplacement, and countermeasures were fired into the air. The American warhead was knocked down seventy-five yards away from impact by an automatic missile defense battery that neither Page nor Frito had detected.

But the second Hellfire got through, and detonated above the missile launcher, and even though Conway had been in the process of counting down his third Hellfire launch, he stopped when his MFD whited out.

He thought something was wrong with the system at first, and he began adjusting the monitor.

In his headset he heard, “Two Six, Frito Actual. Good hit, good hit. Multiple secondary detonations. Damn, dude, you really nailed it.”

Just then Page called out next to him: “Holy smokes.”

Conway looked up. Five miles in the distance, a black form was slowly morphing into a mushroom cloud. Several seconds later, a low boom was audible through his headset and the sound of the rotors above him.

It took a moment to get reset, but he fired his third missile to the east.

Just as he did so, a digitized male voice boomed in his and Page’s headsets. “Laser! Laser! Eleven o’clock.”

Page said, “Inbound fire!”

“Rapid release!” Conway said, and he fired another missile, this one at the second BM-30.

Just then Conway pulled right on the cyclic and punched down on the left pedal, turning the craft ninety degrees. He put the aircraft in a nose-down attitude, and the helicopter dove at the gravel road behind the brick factory building.

“Countermeasures,” Page said, and the Kiowa automatically fired flares as it plummeted.

Just a few feet above the ground Black Wolf Two Six leveled out, and raced over a field.

Less than one hundred fifty yards behind, a missile from a shoulder-fired launcher slammed into one of the factory’s three smokestacks, blowing it to bits and sending redbrick shrapnel in all directions.

Conway kept his speed up as a second missile hit the factory behind them. As he looked back over his left shoulder, his ears filled with an excited transmission from Frito team.

“Hell, yeah! Second target destroyed! Another fuckin’ neutron bomb!”

“Roger that,” Page said calmly. Now he looked out the open door on his side. The warning alarms had ceased, but he and Conway were still on the lookout for threats.

Warlock Zero One came over the net now. “Black Wolf, hell of a job, but they know you’re out there. Return to base.”

Conway said, “Roger that. RTB.”

Both young men’s hearts pounded against their body armor as they raced over a larch forest to the northwest. Normally, they did a lot of fist pumping after a successful target engagement, but right now both men were lost in their own thoughts, because they knew they’d just come a hair’s breadth away from death.

John Clark and his group of operations officers from The Campus had spent every day since their return from Sevastopol photographing people who visited the ninth floor of the Fairmont Grand Hotel.

They had quite an impressive array of characters in their rogues’ gallery, and to put names with the faces, Gavin Biery ran the pictures through facial-recognition software, using databases from the CIA SIPRNet, the Ukrainian Security Service files, and other open-source locations.

Still, none of the team had gotten eyes on Gleb the Scar himself. It was clear that this was by design. The team had staked out all the exits of the hotel in the worry that he had some sort of clandestine access to his penthouse, but after spending a day spread around the neighborhood, watching employee entrances, loading docks, and the rooftop heliport, they came to the conclusion that Gleb wasn’t coming and going. No, he was apparently just sitting.

Clark had moved his operation to yet another safe house. This was a smaller flat, just two blocks away from the Fairmont, and it was owned by a friend of Igor’s. The flat owner had fled the city with his wife and kids when the war started in the east, fearing the Russians would drive all the way to Kiev, and this gave Clark and company a secure safe house with a living room window that afforded them a good view of the Fairmont, and with their photographic equipment they could get decent imagery of those who came and went in the building.

A balcony on the ninth floor was also in view, and on it they could see two armed security officers standing, twenty-four hours a day. The men had scoped Dragunov sniper rifles, as well as binoculars. They looked out over the neighborhood, scanning for any surveillance or threats, but the Campus men had covered all of their apartment windows with black paper, save for a small hole where they could position their cameras.

Clark and his team had swept for bugs here, and found the place to be clean. The FSB didn’t have every apartment in the city under surveillance, of course, and Kryvov’s friend had not been deemed a security target by either the Ukrainians or the Russians.

As secure as the Campus staff felt in their new digs, they felt more and more insecure on the streets of the city. In the past three days several police officers and government officials, and even an SSU spy, had been killed on the streets of Kiev. A pro-national television station’s broadcast had been interrupted by the explosion of a bleach bomb that rendered the air in the studios caustic, and a radio station that had spoken out against Russia’s attack in the east had been set on fire and knocked off the air.

Just before eight p.m., Gavin sat on the sofa in the safe house. In front of him on the coffee table sat several slap-on GPS transmitters with their battery compartments open. He and Clark were changing out the batteries, a dull but necessary task, made a little harder for Clark because he’d had most of the bones in his right hand shattered more than a year earlier.

As they worked in silence, Gavin’s mobile phone rang; he didn’t even look at it before he answered. “Yeah?”

“Hey, Gav, it’s Jack.”

“Ryan! Good to hear from you. How’s everything in jolly ol’ England?”