Tom Clancy - Command Authority

Midas had spent seventeen years in the military, first as a Ranger enlistee, then as a Mustang—a term given to an enlisted man who joins the officer ranks. He moved over to Delta six years prior, starting out as an assaulter and then graduating into the elite of the elite, a Delta Force recce troop.

Most U.S. military units used the term “recon” as an abbreviation for reconnaissance, but the founder of Delta Force, “Chargin’” Charlie Beckwith, had served as an exchange officer with the United Kingdom’s 22nd SAS Regiment in the 1960s. Beckwith had adopted many traits of the SAS into Delta, and Brits called reconnaissance “recce”—pronounced “wrecky”—so Delta followed suit.

Midas came from a Polish family; he grew up speaking both English and Polish at home, and he’d learned some Russian in college. He’d spent much of the past year here in Ukraine, and with his vast experience and understanding of the landscape, the enemy, and the Ukrainian military, he had been tapped by the Pentagon to lead operations on the ground.

In Sevastopol, Midas had run an Advance Force Operations cell, meaning he had direct control over only three other Delta men. For a lieutenant colonel, this was highly unusual, but given his language skills and his unique knowledge of the region, he had gone where he was needed. Now, just days later, he found himself in control of a force of 429 men. There were sixty operators and support personnel from Delta’s B Squadron, along with men from 5th Special Forces Group and 10th Special Forces Group, as well as a unit of British SAS commandos.

He also had a U.S. Army Ranger rifle platoon of forty men here on the base to provide site security.

Besides these assets, he had a few transport and scout helicopters from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, three Black Hawks, and six tiny MH-6 Little Birds for transporting his forces around.

And an hour earlier, Midas received delivery of a large addition to his air support. Four CIA Reaper drones flown out of Boryspil International Airport near Kiev were tasked to JSOC, and several Army helos arrived here in Cherkasy from Poland. These helos would be used principally for laser targeting, but Midas had been thinking outside the box on this, and he had sent word that he wanted one flight crew in particular to drop in on his operations center as soon as they settled into their new quarters.

Obviously, the Americans and the Brits were not alone. The Ukrainian military was in place along the border and held in reserve, and they were expecting a fight, but Midas was painfully aware how unprepared for it they were. He had spent the past month receiving reports of the poor state of equipment, training, and, most important, morale in the Ukrainian military. There had been widespread desertions and credible reports of spies and sabotage. More debilitating than this was a general sense from Ukrainian leaders far away from the border that if fighting started, NATO would swoop in and help them out, or at least enact painful sanctions against Russia that would force Volodin to stop his attack.

Midas had been a war fighter long enough to know the suits in Kiev were fooling themselves.

He had spent the morning in secure communications to individual Ukrainian commanders he knew around the region, stressing the fact that the 429 U.S. and UK troops here in country were pretty much all the help Ukraine was going to get.

His most recent conversation, which had ended just a minute earlier, went much like all the others. A Ukrainian artillery colonel told Midas, “If you know the Russians are coming, you need to attack them before they cross the border.”

Midas patiently replied that he and his 429 weren’t going to be invading Russia in this lifetime.

The colonel replied, “The Russians will attack with a few rusty tanks. They will fly overhead and drop bombs on airports we aren’t even using. They will sail their Black Sea fleet around and shell our beaches.”

“They will do more than that,” Midas replied somberly.

The colonel shouted back at the American, “Then I will die on my feet with a gun in my hand!”

Midas wondered about the last time the artillery colonel had held a firearm in his hand, but he didn’t ask.

As a JSOC officer, Barry “Midas” Jankowski had fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he had advised militaries in the Philippines and Colombia.

Ukraine was the largest country he had ever operated in, with the biggest GDP and the most educated population.

But he’d never been in a more hopeless situation. His 429 men and women were pitted against somewhere in the neighborhood of 70,000 Russians poised near the border, ready to invade Ukraine. When the Russians invaded, his one and only hope was to use his few troops to assist the Ukrainians to be a force multiplier, not so Ukraine could win. Not so they could beat the Russians back over the border.

No. Their only chance at survival— his only chance at survival —hinged on slowing the Russians down, giving them more casualties and headaches than they bargained for in the hopes they would quit the attack.

He’d spent the past day setting up his Joint Operations Center here in Cherkasy with all the communications and intelligence personnel he needed to keep an unblinking eye on eastern Ukraine.

Midas did not control the CIA nonofficial cover assets in Ukraine, they were not part of Joint Special Operations Command, but he did have one more arrow in his quiver. At the Lighthouse he’d run into three men: Clark, Chavez, and Caruso. When he’d learned they weren’t CIA, DIA, NSA, or any other official acronym, he’d been ready to kick them back out the gate of his secure location, but all three of the men had proven their abilities and their allegiance in the battle for the CIA compound. After the air evac from Sevastopol, John Clark had told Midas he and his guys would be returning to Kiev, where they were watching over the organized-crime group that had infiltrated the country on behalf of the FSB. Clark also told Midas they were ready to help him, if and when he needed it.

It wasn’t exactly by the book—hell, Midas had no authority whatsoever to ask American civilians to assist him in his combat operations. But Midas liked knowing he had a few operators outside the military and intelligence chain of command he could call on if necessary.

Midas had a master’s degree in military science from American Military University. He’d learned much in his higher education that he’d found applicable on the ground, but he’d never found anything in school that more reflected the real world of combat than a quotation he’d picked up studying a nineteenth-century German field marshal named Helmuth von Moltke.

Moltke said, “Strategy is a system of expedients.”

Midas himself was from West Virginia, and he preferred plain talk, so his translation of Moltke’s quote was “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”

When the Russians attacked, Midas expected things would turn unconventional very fast. Moltke’s more famous quote, “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy,” was another military truism. Once the Russians kicked off this party, Midas expected the meticulously planned Operation Red Coal Carpet to devolve into a situation where he and his team here in the Cherkasy JOC would just start winging it the best they could.

Chief Warrant Officers Two Eric Conway and Andre Page walked across the Ukrainian military base on a bright and cool spring morning. They didn’t know their way around and neither of the men could read the Cyrillic signs, but they’d been told to head to the end of the helicopter flight line, turn left, and then keep walking till they saw the gate with the Americans guarding it.