Tom Clancy - Command Authority

Jack was taken to the Notting Hill station by the police after the two patrol officers quickly sorted out the fact the son of the President of the United States had just been attacked before their eyes. He was treated like a celebrity, and the most difficult part of the ordeal for Jack was the fact he had to tell no less than a dozen different people a dozen different times that he neither needed nor wanted to go to a hospital.

His knee was going to be good and sore, but it wasn’t hospital sore. He just wanted to go home.

The police lectured him that he was a high-profile person and was entitled to security officers and, if only he would allow this, there would be people around to protect him the next time two muggers in a park chose him as a target.

Ryan thanked them, told them he’d think about it, and a little squad car delivered him back to his flat at eight-thirty a.m. The two officers made him promise to call if he had any other problems, and he thanked them once again for their concern. He climbed the stairs to his flat, went inside, and triple-locked the door.

In the bathroom, he peeled out of his filthy clothes and turned on the shower, then sat down on the edge of his tub. While the bathroom steamed up, he thought about the implications of what had just happened.

He knew he needed to call Sandy and let him know. He’d probably get an “I told you so” from his boss, although Ryan was in no way convinced that what happened this morning had anything to do with his job.

If this was about the cases he was working on at Castor and Boyle, if that was the reason he had been followed here in the UK, then what had changed that had made them go from simple surveillance to an attack?

Nothing. Although the Galbraith case involved Gazprom, and some potentially dangerous characters, he’d been on the case for months, and he’d been taken off the case days earlier. If anyone wanted to hurt him for his involvement with Malcolm Galbraith, why the hell would they do it now ?

Suddenly it occurred to him he had made one change to his routine in the past few days. He’d driven to Corby the previous afternoon in a failed attempt to talk to Victor Oxley.

Jack thought it over. Could that have been the reason he was attacked? It didn’t make any sense to him, but nothing else did, either.

There was clearly no relationship between his Castor and Boyle work and the ex–British spy Victor Oxley. In fact, he knew he had been under surveillance since before he’d ever heard the name Victor Oxley.

But he saw no other explanation. He’d gone to meet with a British spy who might have answers as to the past of the current head of Russian intelligence, and then, the very next day, two guys try to come after him with clubs and knives. Ryan did not believe in coincidence, and though he didn’t have any answers, he knew who did.

Either Oxley was somehow behind what happened this morning or, at the very least, he might know why Ryan was attacked. As he climbed into the hot shower, he decided he needed to go back up to Corby and somehow get the surly bastard to talk.

Thirty minutes later, he was showered and changed and behind the wheel of his Mercedes, racing to the north.

The direct-action phase of Operation Red Coal Carpet began shortly before four a.m. on the second morning after the Russians crossed the border. Air-to-air battles, mostly between Russian Kamov-52 attack helicopters with sophisticated night-flying technology and Ukrainian Mi-24s that had no night-flying technology but were airborne anyway, had raged over the hilly forests east of Donetsk throughout the night. Below them, a twelve-man A-team from 5th Special Forces Group had positioned themselves on the roof of a press box above an abandoned soccer field in the town of Zuhres. From here, with their sophisticated optics, they could see twenty miles to the east, and range targets with their Special Operations Forces Laser Acquisition Marker at more than twelve miles.

It was a mostly clear night; the Americans watched the helicopters in the distance, pinpricks of light mostly, until fighting started, and flashes and streaks around the pinpricks created a futuristic show. This continued for hours. Occasionally, a fast mover would race overhead, and rarer still, a ground unit of Ukrainian troops would themselves fire artillery to the west, creating two sets of flashes on the horizon.

But shortly before four, the A-team spied a column of vehicles through their FLIR units moving unobstructed up Oblast State’s H21 Highway. The American forces ID’d the vehicles as BTR-80 armored personnel carriers, which was armor in use by both Russian and Ukrainian forces. They radioed back to the JOC, letting them know they had possible targets inside the engagement zone, but they could not positively identify the vehicles as enemy, or “red,” forces. The JOC tried to get positive confirmation from the Ukrainians, but the Ukrainian Army was fully engaged and in a state of chaos, and even the Air Force was slow to respond.

After fifteen minutes, the BTR-80s had approached to within eight miles of the Special Forces team. Midas ordered one of the patrolling Reaper drones in the area to overfly the column, and it quickly arrived overhead and began transmitting images back to the intelligence personnel at the JSOC facility.

The Reaper showed all vehicles to be wearing the Russian flag. The Reaper itself had two Hellfires on board, but Midas ordered his communications officer to relay the target mission to the Ukrainians again.

This time a pair of MiGs arrived on station quickly. They read the laser designation from the SOFLAM laser designator fired by the Americans, and soon the Ukrainians began raining Kh-25 air-to-ground missiles on the column that was moving up the highway.

The 5th Group A-team on the ground was pleased with the progress of the attack at first, but it soon became clear that the Ukrainian MiGs were dawdling too long over the target area. The team commander relayed his concerns through the JOC, but only half the Russian column had been destroyed when inbound missiles appeared from the horizon in the east. The 5th Group men had not seen the attacking aircraft, but figured them to be fast movers twenty miles or more away.

One of the Ukrainian fighters exploded into a fireball, and the second broke off the attack.

The 5th Group men lased two of the four remaining targets for the Reaper Hellfires to destroy, but two BTR-80s survived.

Operation Red Coal Carpet had begun with a very qualified success. Yes, they had destroyed six pieces of Russian armor well inside Ukraine, but it had come at the cost of one of Ukraine’s most powerful air weapons. Midas knew this was an attrition rate that worked to the advantage of the Russians.

President Ryan met with Attorney General Murray in the Oval Office. Both men were tired from overwork, but both men also had the experience and discipline to know how to power through the exhaustion in times of national crisis.

Ryan had spent the morning in conversations with his military advisers, but by necessity he had kept a normal schedule. The Russian attack was getting a lot of attention in the United States, of course, but the White House was busy making statements about sanctions, protesting to the UN Security Council, even threatening to cancel U.S. attendance at the upcoming Winter Olympics in Russia, and other diplomatic “combat” that no one in the Ryan administration thought would do much of anything. But this front of diplomatic hand-wringing was necessary to hide the hard measures America was using to counter the Russian advance, the covert U.S. military action on the ground in eastern Ukraine.

President Ryan didn’t have time for many Oval Office visits from cabinet-level staff who weren’t in the U.S. military or members of the intelligence community, but he made time for Dan Murray. They sat across from each other and Ryan poured coffee for them both. “Dan,” he said, “I really hope you have good news.”