Tom Clancy: Command Authority

Chief Warrant Officer Two, Eric Conway, U.S. Army, Bravo Troop, 2nd Squad, 17th Cavalry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, glanced down at his multifunction display and looked at the thermal image of Russian tanks in the trees more than two miles away. Then he returned his attention to his blades above. The tips of the four main rotor blades of the OH-58D Kiowa Warrior spun perilously close to the walls of buildings on either side of the street. If he did not hold his cyclic perfectly steady he would strike one of the buildings and send his helo spinning and crashing, and his own poor flying would kill him and his copilot even before the Russian tanks got their chance.

Satisfied he was steady, he blew out a long breath to calm himself, then spoke through his intercom. “You ready, dude?”

His copilot, CW2 Andre Page, replied calmly, “’Bout as ready as I’m gonna get.”

Conway nodded, then said, “Lase target.”

“Roger. Spot on.”

Quickly Conway keyed his mike to broadcast on the fires net. “Blue Max Six Six, Black Wolf Two Six. Target lased.”

Four full miles beyond the OH-58D Kiowa Warrior, hidden behind the relative safety of a forested hill, two massive Apache Longbow attack helicopters hovered low over a pasture just north of the village of Aarna. The flight leader, Blue Max Six Six, received the transmission from the scout helo at the same time his copilot/gunner, seated in front of and below him, saw the laser spot tracker on his multifunction display indicating a laser fix on the first target, several miles away.

“Roger, Black Wolf Two Six. Good laser. Stand by for remote Hellfire mission.”

The Kiowa Warrior scout helo hovering over the town of Põlva was not heavily armed. But its power was not in its onboard stores; rather, its power came from its ability to find and fix targets for the big Apache gunships behind it. This was VCAS, very close air support, and CW2 Conway and his copilot had taxed their skills to the limit by, essentially, driving their helo through the village to stay off enemy radar so they could get into position to scout for the Apaches.

“Roger, Blue Max Six Six. We’re gonna need to hurry this up. We are out in the open.”

In the tree line, the commander of the tank on the northern flank of Lapranov’s squadron shouted into his microphone: “Storm Zero One, this is Storm Zero Six. Laser warning!”

“Shit!” Lapranov muttered into his headset. The little helicopter in the distance may not have been armed with missiles of its own, but it was, apparently, designating targets for some unseen aircraft.

“Arena systems on!” he commanded.

The T-90’s Arena countermeasure system used Doppler radar to detect an inbound threat to the tank. As soon as the attacking projectile was within range, the Arena-equipped tank would fire a defensive rocket designed to close to within two meters of the missile before exploding, destroying the threat.

Lapranov next said, “This helo is spotting for Apaches or jets. Where is my air cover?”

The commander of Storm Zero Five answered back: “Inbound in ten minutes.”

Lapranov slammed his fist into the wall of his commander’s console. “All tankers, load Refleks.”

The 9M119 Refleks guided missile round was designed to fire from the main gun, then “grow” fins and race toward its target. It would take the six gunners upward of thirty seconds to unload the high-explosive shell already chambered in the main gun and then have the autoloader replace it with a Refleks.

Storm Zero Two said, “Target is beyond effective range, sir.”

Lapranov shouted, “Just do it, damn you!” He hoped like hell firing all six missiles at the little Kiowa Warrior on the hill would force the American chopper to break its laser targeting sequence long enough for the Storm tanks to get back into the cover of the forest.

Four miles due west, hovering north of the village of Aarna, the two Apache Longbows each carried eight Hellfire missiles. On command from the flight lead, both gunners launched. As the Hellfires flashed through the blue sky toward an unseen target in the east, the Apache lead transmitted to the scout helo in Põlva.

“Be advised, Black Wolf Two Six. Multiple Hellfires off the rails and inbound, target Alpha.”

In Storm Zero One, Captain Arkady Lapranov saw the streaking blip on his Catherine. He knew it was heading to Zero Six, as that was the tank whose laser indicator alarm had sounded.

The first Hellfire missile appeared above the hill as a tiny quivering spark of light. On the backdrop of blue sky, there was no perspective to show it was approaching for several seconds, but then it angled down toward the tree line.

Storm Zero Six’s automatic Arena system saw the incoming Hellfire missile, and it launched a rocket to defend itself from it. Fifty meters from impacting the tank, the Hellfire exploded, sending metallic shrapnel all through the trees.

The Arena worked once, but the second inbound Hellfire came too quickly behind, before the Arena could reset and reacquire the new target. The missile slammed into Storm Zero Six’s turret before the system could launch another defensive rocket.

Lapranov was inside the commander’s station of his tank with his hatch closed, and Zero Six was one hundred twenty meters to the north of him, but still the explosion sent pieces of metal pinging off the hull of his tank.

A second tank, Storm Zero Two, fired two Arena defensive rounds a moment later, and it managed to survive two inbound Hellfires. As the second missile was destroyed in front of Zero Two, Storm Zero Five announced it was now being painted by a laser beam.

Zero Five disintegrated a moment later.

Lapranov gave up on the Refleks missiles; the four remaining tanks’ autoloaders were still in the process of selecting the right projectile from the magazine.

Lapranov shouted, “Fire smoke and disengage!” to all Storm units, and then in his own intercom, “Driver, get us out of here! Back! Back! Back!”

“ Da , Captain!”

In the Kiowa Warrior hovering four feet above the ground in Põlva, Eric Conway and Andre Page watched while the four remaining tanks began pulling back away from the town, trying to get into the cover of the trees. A dozen huge bursts of white smoke all around them shrouded them in a puffy cloud.

Page said, “They’re popping smoke and bugging out.”

Conway spoke calmly into his mike: “Change polarity.”

“Roger,” answered Page, and he switched his thermal imaging system from white hot to black hot.

On the screen in front of them, the four tanks hiding in the wide cloud suddenly appeared as plain as day.

In Conway’s headset he heard, “Black Wolf Two Six, be advised, two more missiles away.”

“Keep sending ’em,” Conway said.

While Page pointed his laser on the fourth tank from his left, Conway moved his attention back to his rotor blades. He’d come left a little; the tips were only six feet from impacting the second floor of the hospital. He checked the right side quickly, saw he had a little more clearance over there, so he smoothly rocked the cyclic to his right and recentered his helicopter in the parking lot.

In the trees one of the T-90s’ countermeasure systems fired, and small explosions flashed on the TIS image. They were nothing, however, compared with the massive detonation of the fifty-ton tank that happened a second later when the trailing Hellfire slammed into its turret from above.

“Good hit, Blue Max. Target destroyed. New target lased.”