Tom Clancy - Command Authority

Ryan leaned forward to read the man’s name tag on his uniform. “Major Adoyo? Something to add?”

“I am sorry, sir.” Ryan detected a slight African accent.

“Don’t apologize. Scoot up to the table and talk.”

Adoyo did as the President asked, moving his chair next to Colonel Dial’s. He looked nervous, and Ryan pointed this out.

“Relax, Adoyo. You clearly have more interest in talking than anyone else in the room right now. I want to hear what you have to say.”

“Well, sir… we have a squadron of F-16s from the 22nd Fighter Squadron over at Incirlik AFB in Turkey right now. That’s just on the other side of the Black Sea. I used to be stationed there myself. It’s less than a two-hundred-fifty-mile straight shot up to the tip of the Crimea.”

The secretary of defense almost yelled at the young major through his monitor. “We’re not going to bomb an urban population in a friendly—”

President Ryan held up his hand. Burgess stopped talking immediately.

“Continue, Major.”

“I know we can’t engage the people on the ground, but if we happen to have a flight on the runway or in the air over Incirlik with enough fuel, we could have fighters making low passes at near supersonic speeds over that CIA compound thirty or forty minutes from now.” He held his palms up on the table. “I mean… it’s no silver bullet, but that might keep some heads down for a while, anyway.” He paused again. “It is standard doctrine. Happened all the time when I was flying A-10s in Iraq. If you needed to provide close air support but couldn’t drop ordnance due to the proximity of noncombatants, you do the next best thing. Fly low, fast, and loud. Make noise and rattle fillings.”

President Ryan looked to Burgess’s monitor. “Bob? Why the hell not? It’s something .”

Burgess didn’t like it. “We don’t know if it will make the crowd disperse or the armed attackers back down.”

“What do we have to lose? Can anyone in that crowd outside the Lighthouse shoot down our F-16s?”

Adoyo muttered, “No fucking way.” And then he gasped, recognizing that he’d answered out loud a question that had been posed for SecDef, and, more important, he’d cussed in front of the President of the United States.

President Ryan looked to Colonel Dial. “Major Adoyo says ‘No fucking way.’ What do you say, Colonel?”

“Well, we only know for sure that the opposition has small arms. A fighter passing overhead pushing Mach 1 isn’t going to get shot down with a rifle or an RPG, I can promise you that.”

Ryan thought about the diplomatic implications of this for a moment, then said, “Let’s do it.” He looked up at Scott Adler as soon as he finished the order, because he knew the secretary of state wasn’t going to like this one bit.

Adler spoke first. “Mr. President, sending in unarmed or lightly armed transport aircraft for an emergency extraction is one thing, but what you are talking about is flying fighter bombers over the Black Sea fleet. The Russians are going to go nuts.”

Ryan replied, “I understand, and it’s our job to deal with that. I want to tell the Ukrainians first, then I want you personally on the phone with Russia’s foreign minister in the next ten minutes. If you can’t get him, get whomever you can. Tell them we will overfly Sevastopol with the blessing of the Ukrainian government. Tell them we understand Crimea is semiautonomous, we understand this is Russia’s neighborhood, and we understand this is provocative. But right now our only concern is the safety of our U.S. personnel in danger, who, you’ll need to stress, are only there because they are part of the Partnership for Peace program.

“Tell them we want their blessing for this, but we will accept their passive acceptance.” Jack held a hand up. “As a matter of fact, you can tell them we won’t push back if they raise holy hell about it on TV, or lodge a formal protest to NATO or the UN after the fact. But you tell them that this is going to happen, and it is going to happen in about a half-hour. Any intervention by the Russians will escalate into something neither party wants.”

Adler, America’s chief diplomat, was paid to think through the ramifications. He said, “The Kremlin will want something in return.”

Ryan was ready to do some horse trading. “That’s fine. We’ll remove some warships out of the Black Sea or something, but not until our people are out of harm’s way. If you need me on the phone to the foreign minister, or even Volodin himself, I’m sitting right here.”

“Got it,” Adler said. Ryan could tell the secretary of state was not happy. He couldn’t have been pleased to know a CIA compound was running under the guise of a NATO operation in the first place, which gave it a diplomatic-mission status. This sort of thing went on all over the world, but the diplomats, of course, hated it when CIA installations operated under the guise of diplomacy, because it jeopardized legitimate diplomatic installations.

Ryan knew once word got out this building had been a CIA front, all over the planet totally innocuous State Department missions would come under intense suspicion and scrutiny by the local population.

But that was a problem for another day. For now, Adler excused himself from the meeting, knowing he had to perform some diplomatic magic to keep the Black Sea fleet from firing on American aircraft.

A flight of U.S. Air Force F-16 Falcons flew over central Turkey in a finger-four formation. Around these jets flew three more four-aircraft flights of F-16s, but these weren’t wearing markings of the U.S. Air Force, instead their tails were emblazoned with the red and white flag of the Turkish Air Force. Together all sixteen aircraft flew in a squadron formation above a puffy sheet of white clouds.

The American aircraft were members of the U.S. Air Force’s 480th Fighter Squadron, the Warhawks, and although they were based in Spangdahlem, Germany, they had spent the week here in Turkey as part of a NATO training evolution with the Turkish Air Force.

The flight lead for the Americans was Air Force Captain Harris “Grungy” Cole, a thirty-year-old New Yorker, and even though all sixteen aircraft now appeared to be flying in near-perfect formation, Cole had experienced his share of difficulties above the clouds in the past few minutes getting everyone together. His problems stemmed chiefly from the constant struggle to understand the thick accents of the Turkish flight leads. But although he had to request several common transmissions be repeated so that he could be certain everyone was on the same page, he gave the Turk pilots a pass, because he didn’t know a damn word of Turkish himself except for “Bir bira, lütfen” (“A beer, please”) so if today’s training had hinged on his own command of a foreign tongue, all sixteen of these planes in this tight formation would have already slammed into one another in midair.

Just as Captain Cole began to transmit orders to the Turkish flight leaders ordering them to maintain this pattern while climbing to thirty-five thousand feet, a call came over his radio from Incirlik AFB ordering him to peel his flight away from the Turkish F-16s and begin heading north toward the Black Sea to await further instructions.

He received no other clarification, other than the fact that this was “real world” and not an exercise.

The Black Sea was a hotbed of activity of late, since the Russian Black Sea fleet began a drill that pushed dozens of their warships away from port and into deeper waters, but Cole could not imagine how his four fighter-bombers could be any help in that looming crisis.

Just minutes later, after his Warrior flight had left the Turkish Air Force fighters behind and proceeded north, Grungy received instructions ordering him to divert at best possible speed into Ukrainian airspace over the city of Sevastopol.