Tom Clancy - Command Authority

The opening attacks of the invasion began as the president spoke on television. The late-afternoon start of the action had the desired effect of surprising the Ukrainian forces near the border. They did expect an attack from the east—but they did not expect one that began at dinnertime.

Long-range missile batteries devastated Ukrainian defensive positions, and fighter bombers flew inland to destroy airfields in the eastern Crimea. Tanks rolled west over the border, much as they had done in Estonia, but here they met more resistance in the form of the Ukrainian T-64s. The older Ukrainian tanks were not nearly the quality of the Russian T-90s, but they were plentiful, and most of them were well dug in or were in hardened bunker positions.

Pitched battles of tanks and Grad multiple rocket launcher system systems on both sides of the line continued for the first hours of the conflict, and as the Russian armor crossed deeper into Ukraine, Ukrainian howitzers were brought to bear. Russian MiGs and Sukhois controlled the skies, however, and they took out the gun emplacements just as fast as they could arrive overhead.

The Ukrainians also had a significant number of self-propelled 152-millimeter artillery vehicles—a Russian-built mobile howitzer named after the Msta River, and these were well hidden and mobile enough to present a problem for the T-90s, but the Ukrainian generals kept the majority of this valuable resource in reserve, all but condemning the forward-deployed Msta units to destruction by Russian Kamov helicopter gunships and MiG-29s.

By nine p.m. the Ukrainian cities of Sverdlovs’k and Krasnodon, both just miles from the Russian border, were taken with barely a shot fired within their city limits, and Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov, fell by ten-fifteen.

At midnight, a flight of six huge Antonov An-70 troop transport aircraft left Russian territory over the Sea of Azov; they crossed into Ukrainian airspace minutes later. On board each aircraft were between two hundred and three hundred troops. Most of them were members of the 217th Guards Airborne Regiment of the 98th Guards Airborne Division, but there were also several hundred GRU Spetsnaz forces in the mix.

The flight of air-transport aircraft was supported by fighter jets and radar-jamming equipment, and when they flew over Sevastopol, Russian ships in the Black Sea also provided defense for their countrymen overhead with their surface-to-air missiles.

The Ukrainians engaged the aircraft with a flight of Su-27s, but all four were shot down over the sea, two by Russian fighters and two more by surface-to-air missiles.

The Russians lost five fighters of their own, but all six An-70s made it to their drop zones.

The paratroopers leapt into the night from the Antonovs and landed all over the southern tip of the Crimean peninsula.

By half past one Russia had 1,435 lightly armed but well-trained troops on the ground in Sevastopol; they attacked two Ukrainian garrisons and destroyed several small anti-air batteries in the center of the city.

If the Ukrainians didn’t know why the Russians dropped troops in Sevastopol that evening, they would know soon enough. Across the Black Sea, the small port of Ochamchira in the autonomous nation of Abkhazia had been the makeshift home of a flotilla of Russian ships, on board of which some five thousand Russian marines had been living for several days. As soon as the An-70s took off from their base in Ivanovo, Russia, the flotilla set sail for Sevastopol. They would not arrive till the middle of the following day, but this would give the paratroopers and Spetsnaz forces the time they needed to completely control the neighborhoods around the port.

While the Russian forces spread out from drop zones in the Crimea, tanks and other armor rolled deeper into eastern Ukraine. The Russians had significantly better night-vision equipment than the Ukrainians, and their tanks would use this to press on through the entire night, catching the enemy blind and panicked. Although the invasion itself had been no surprise, the Ukrainian leadership recognized in hours that their generals had misjudged the speed, the tactics, and the utter intensity of the fight that the Russians were bringing over the border.

There were a lot of morning joggers in London, not as many as in D.C., but considering how miserable the weather had been here this spring, Jack Ryan, Jr., was surprised just how many men and women he saw lacing up their shoes to get some dawn cardio exercise in the elements.

Usually, however, Jack saw the majority of the runners during the home stretch of his morning cardio. He liked to hit it very early, before the other joggers were out, as this gave him a certain sense of accomplishment that he never felt when he got a late start to his day.

But this morning was different. Yes, he was up early—it was just after six and he’d already run several miles. But he wasn’t feeling the normal sense of exuberance that came along with the workout. It was wet and cold, and he was tired, and his head hurt a little from all the ale he drank the night before.

After returning from his wasted trip to Corby to meet a man once called Bedrock, he’d gone to a pub near his flat in Earl’s Court. He’d downed two orders of fish-and-chips and several pints of ale. Mercifully, no one noticed him or even talked to him at all in the pub, but on his way back to his place on Lexham Gardens he’d detoured around several blocks, making a winding, backtracking hour-long surveillance-detection run until the early morning, and he was almost certain an unmarked panel truck had passed three different times.

He lay in bed for hours wondering who the hell was tailing him, and now it was half past six and his run was suffering greatly for the poor treatment he’d subjected his body to the evening before.

At mile three he ran through Holland Park, trying to sweat out some of the alcohol and fried food he’d put into his system. He circled a brown soccer pitch enshrouded in mist and then started up the long, steep hill to the Notting Hill neighborhood, following the Holland Walk, a narrow footpath that ran at the edge of the park along a brick garden wall of a long row of townhomes on his right.

He passed a pair of women running downhill with their high-end baby strollers, and they both gave him a smile.

Fifty yards behind them were two more joggers, big and broad men who crested the top of the hill at a leisurely pace and continued down the footpath in his direction.

Jack’s mind wandered back to Oxley, the old British spy. Bedrock. Jack had not called his father to tell him he’d struck out in his attempt to get any information from the man. He tried to think of some new tactic to get the geezer to talk, but he hadn’t come up with anything so far. He halfway wanted to just forget the entire affair and have his dad sic the CIA or some other organization on the man to try to find out what he knew about a shadowy, perhaps imaginary, assassin called Zenith.

He told himself he’d give himself another day to try to think of a new tactic, and then he would hand over his info on Bedrock.

The war had begun in Ukraine; Jack had seen this on the news this morning as he laced up his shoes. He had no way of knowing the United States had forces in country ready to engage, but he still knew his father would be working diplomatically and in the intelligence field against the Russian government’s attack, so he knew finding out any details about Talanov could prove useful in resolving this crisis.

As he ascended the narrow footpath, Jack glanced at the faces and the hands of the two big joggers ahead. He had been trained to identify preassault indicators, small cues of trouble, and he did this automatically now, especially when he saw fit or muscular young men in his proximity.