Command Authority (25 page)

Present day

J
ohn Clark and Ding Chavez each drove a Toyota Highlander through the night, following the Dnieper River for a while before heading southeast toward the Crimean peninsula. Dom Caruso rode along as well, giving them a third driver so that the men could arrive at least somewhat rested.

They knew little about what lay ahead, other than the fact a CIA SIGINT operation had been compromised and they needed a couple of clean vehicles on the fly to help them get some material back up to Kiev and out of the country.

—

B
y the time the three Campus men arrived at the front gate of the Lighthouse the next morning, a crowd had formed in the street. Ding estimated there were two hundred people milling about; some had signs saying “CIA Get Out” in English, but most just chanted or yelled or stood in the road.

They parked up the street, within sight of the gate, and Clark called Bixby, who told him to head straight to the entrance.

A moment later, the two Highlanders did just that, honking their horns and approaching at speed. Protesters dove out of the way, and some threw water bottles and cardboard signs at the SUVs as they raced past, but the two vehicles were able to rush through the gates, which opened just before they arrived and were then immediately closed again by armed U.S. security contractors on the inside.

The two Toyotas pulled into a parking circle alongside four other vehicles: two Yukons and two Land Rovers.

As soon as they parked, several armed men—Americans, by their greetings and appearance—approached pushing rolling carts and carrying hardened-plastic cases. The men began loading the Highlanders within seconds.

—

C
lark, Chavez, and Caruso met Bixby in the lobby of the building. Clark could see the worry on the younger man’s face.

Bixby shook everyone’s hands. “Gentlemen, I can’t thank you enough, but when we get out of here, I sure as shit am going to try.”

“Not a problem,” said Chavez. “What’s the situation?”

“We have six vehicles now, which will be just enough to get our guys and gear out.”

Dom said, “The question is, is that crowd going to let us out?”

Now Midas, the bearded leader of the Delta Advance Force Operations unit here at the Lighthouse, stepped into the lobby. He said, “We’re going to fire tear gas, and then we’re going to just try and bust through. We don’t expect armed roadblocks or anything like that. Once we get out of this neighborhood, we should be able to make it out of town undetected. Of course, the longer it takes us to get out of here, the harder this shit is going to be.”

Bixby offered quick introductions, and Midas shook hands with the three new arrivals, but he seemed a little uncertain. “I thought I knew all the Langley guys here in theater.”

Bixby said, “Actually, these men are ex–federal employees. They are good to go.”

Midas looked them over again. “No offense, and I appreciate you guys bringing the vehicles, but I don’t know you, and I am responsible for keeping this little dump secure. I don’t want to see any of you touching a weapon. We clear about that?”

Bixby turned to the Delta man. “Midas, I am COS, and I said I vouched for them.”

Midas held his ground. “If you didn’t vouch for them, they wouldn’t have gotten through the front gate.” He pointed at the men. “No guns. Got it?”

Immediately, Clark said, “Not a problem.” He turned to Ding and Dom. “Let’s see about helping the men load up the vehicles.”

Just as he said this, the faint chanting from the crowd at the front gate suddenly grew louder. Over and over, they repeated the same phrase.

Clark listened to it for a moment. “Can you make out what they are saying?”

Midas said, “Been listening to that one for two hours already. ‘Yankees go home.’”

“An oldie but a goodie,” said Clark, and he, Dom, and Ding headed up the hall to see what they could carry out to the trucks.

—

F
orty minutes after Chavez, Caruso, and Clark arrived at the Lighthouse, the rest of the classified equipment was loaded into the Toyota Highlanders, and Midas broadcast on the walkie-talkies to all personnel, giving everyone a heads-up that they would be leaving in five minutes.

But in the short time since the arrival of the two SUVs from Kiev, the size of the crowd in front of the CIA Special Mission Compound had more than doubled. Local radio stations had announced the location of the CIA safe house—where they and the local police got the information was still unknown—and this had brought protesters and curious bystanders out in droves.

There were union workers in the crowd; Bixby had ID’d them by the slogans on their signs and the men walking around with megaphones telling them where to stand while leading them in chants. He’d also recognized the blue T-shirts of a longstanding pro-Russian youth group, an organized gang of teenagers, mostly, who through the secret backing of the FSB had been turned into roving bands of useful idiots. All over Russia and eastern Ukraine they conducted marches, sit-ins, and any other mass-movement tool as requested by their leadership, who were, in turn, run directly by FSB agents.

When Clark, Chavez, and Caruso arrived, the street in front of the gate was congested with pedestrians, but it was still possible to drive through them, albeit with difficulty. Now the two Delta men on the roof of the Lighthouse reported that the street was nearly impassable and another couple hundred protesters had spilled into the park across the street—essentially, just a concrete pathway around an open block with a few bushes and small trees.

All morning the men at the Lighthouse had been on the phone to the local cops, asking for a police escort out of the area, but so far no one had come. They’d also called a nearby Ukrainian military installation—the Americans were ostensibly a part of the Partnership for Peace, after all—but they were told their request for help was being kicked up the chain of command and, anyway, the Ukrainian Army base had no men or equipment to spare at the moment for a rescue.

Delta AFO leader Midas, the on-site commander of the Lighthouse, had a pair of M79 tear-gas launchers, but using tear-gas grenades was not his first choice. Although gas could be effective at getting people to move away from the front gate, it might also blow back on the Americans as they left the area, and it very well might have the undesired effect of turning the already angry protest into a violent riot.

By noon, the six vehicles were all running in the parking circle in front of the portico at the entrance to the Lighthouse, and six men were ready behind the steering wheels. Caruso and Chavez were tasked with driving the two Highlanders; they would be third and fourth in the convoy, behind the two Delta Yukons and in front of the two CIA Land Rovers.

Midas stood with his radio in his hand just behind the vehicles in the portico at the front of the building, and looked down the driveway at the entrance to the SMC. There, three security contractors, all of whom spoke some Ukrainian, remained inside the locked iron gate, nervously watching the tight group of shouting, chanting, angry protesters. As Midas brought his radio to his mouth, ready to tell the men at the gate to remain in their positions while everyone else loaded into the vehicles, one of the two Delta men on the roof of the Lighthouse transmitted over the net.

“Midas, this is Mutt on the roof. We’ve got buses off-loading about three blocks up the street.”

“Buses?”

“Affirmative. Four full-sized buses. I see people pouring out. Say fifty pax per bus, so two hundred more coming to the gate. Looks mostly male, maybe exclusively male. Civilian dress, but they look like an organized bunch.”

“Is it more of the union folks, or more brown shirts from the youth group?”

“Definitely not the youth group. They don’t look like union, either. They look like fucking goons. Skinheads. Leather and denim. That kind of thing.”

“Weapons?”

“Can’t tell from here. Wait. They all have backpacks—not sure what they are carrying.”

“Any sign of local law enforcement?”

Mutt replied, “Affirmative. On the far side of the park I see four, maybe five, squad cars, and what looks like some sort of a riot-control armored vehicle. They definitely appear to be standing aside for this.”

“Roger that,” Midas said, and then he spoke to everyone on the property carrying a radio. “All right, everyone in the trucks except for the two on the roof and the two men on the M79s.”

Just as he finished transmitting this order, items began flying over the front wall of the compound. As they crashed to the ground, he identified the projectiles as bottles and bricks, and though they all hit the driveway and the forecourt short of the parking circle where the SUVs were parked, the three security officers just inside the metal gate of the property were definitely in range.

Mutt called over the radio from the roof. “Yo, Midas? These new fuckers are throwing shit.”

More glass bottles came crashing down in the forecourt; this was clearly an orchestrated attack by the new group that had joined the protesters.

Midas brought his radio back to his mouth. “Yep, I see it. Okay, you guys down at the gate, I want you to pull back to the vehicles. We’re leaving now.”

The rear wall of the Lighthouse compound backed up to a deep concrete ditch with several feet of running water in it, so none of the protesters were hitting them from the back, but people stood on the streets on the opposite sides of the other three walls and threw all types of trash into the compound.

The three security contractors ran back up the twenty-five-yard-long driveway from the gate to the parking circle. The entire way, they were bombarded with debris. One of the men was hit in the back with a piece of board, knocking him down, but he got back up and kept running.

While the three men retreated from the gate, two security contractors wearing gas masks stepped out of the building and into the parking circle next to the Yukons. Each carried an M79 grenade launcher along with a bandolier full of forty-millimeter tear-gas canisters. They knelt next to each other, loaded their launchers, and waited for the order from the on-scene commander.

“How’s the wind?” Midas yelled to them.

One of the men looked back over his shoulder. “Wind is good. The gas will push out across the park.”

“All right, three cans from each of you into the crowd.”

Both men fired, the canisters popped out of the launcher and arced above the gate, hitting near the center of the massive crowd outside.

More debris flew over the wall now, as if it was a direct response to the tear gas. This salvo came from a position far to the right of the front gate, and two of the projectiles spinning through the air were clearly burning.

These were Molotov cocktails; just the two at first, then more flew into the Lighthouse forecourt from the opposite side of the gate. They streaked through the air over the wall, crashing into the driveway and into a small rock garden in front of the parking circle, exploding in burning fuel and shards of glass.

Black smoke stained the air over the flight path of the Molotovs.

The grenade launchers popped again, this time firing the forty-millimeter shells over the walls near where the Molotovs were thrown.

“Shit,” Midas mumbled. With the addition of the homemade bombs, this had suddenly graduated into a lethal attack. The protest had become a riot. He had nineteen men here with him, and most of them were armed with the equipment and the expertise to bring a lot of pain to the attackers, but the Delta Force officer had the responsibility of not making this incident any worse than it already was.

The three security men who had just made it up from the gate all turned around and raised their AK-74 rifles back toward the gate.

Midas yelled at them, “Hold fire!”

They did as ordered, but as the projectiles continued to rain down, and the prospects for getting out of the compound diminished, Midas knew the men’s trigger fingers would be twitching.

The men firing the M79 launchers each sent a third gas grenade over the wall. As they reloaded a fourth tear-gas round into their weapons, there was a loud crackle to the west, on the opposite side of the building, far past the rear wall of the compound.

The men outside in the parking circle ducked low or sought cover behind the six vehicles. They all recognized the sound of automatic gunfire when they heard it.

Midas called up to the roof, “Mutt, talk to me.”

There was a delay before he answered. “Uhh, wait one, boss.” There was another short pause; Midas hoped that meant the two men were moving to cover. Seconds later he heard, “We are receiving small arms from the west. It’s either coming from the hills or one of the buildings overlooking our pos, because we’re getting bullet strikes up here on the roof. We’ve repositioned back to a spot between the stairwell and the AC unit. I think we’ve got cover here for now, but we’re not going to be able to get a three-sixty view of the area from right here.”

Keith Bixby had moved to the second floor, to an office above the lobby. He looked out a window, past a balcony, and then beyond the front wall of the property. The crowd had thickened to more than one thousand, and there was a chaos to the scene now that a small amount of tear gas had been dropped in the middle of the action. But although rioters ran around in all directions to get away from the gas, the streets were still choked with a thick mass of humanity.