The two men looked out over Lake Zug and toward the lights on the far side of the bay. It was beautiful; Jack could imagine Penright sitting here just days earlier, planning his next move with Morningstar.
Ryan said, “So that’s it, then? We just go home?”
“That’s up to London. If Sir Basil is going to send someone else to town to make contact with Morningstar, then we might stick around another day or so to report our findings directly to—”
Ryan’s eyes were on the far shore of Lake Zug, and near where he was looking, a brilliant flash of light appeared, casting a glow all the way up to a patch of low clouds hanging over the shore. The light seemed like it was on the land, not over water, but it was hard to tell immediately. Five seconds after the flash, a low rumble reached the balcony where the two men were standing.
Eastling had been looking in the same direction. “That’s an explosion.”
Ryan peered into the distance. “I think I see a fire.” He ran back into the flat, asked the men working there if they had seen any binoculars in the safe house. One of the men pulled a decorative but functional brass telescope off a tripod in the office, and the others chuckled as he offered it to Ryan.
The American snatched it and ran back out to the balcony.
He struggled to bring the big telescope up to his eye. Eastling just stood there and watched him.
On the far shore, almost lost in the twinkling of lights from the buildings, he could definitely make out a fire. It was a few blocks from the shoreline, higher on a hill.
“What is that place over there?”
“That’s Rotkreuz,” Eastling said.
“The same place the banker Tobias Gabler was killed the other day.”
“As a matter of fact, yes. It is.”
Jack lowered the telescope. “Let’s go.”
“Go? Over there? Why?”
“Why? Are you serious?”
“Ryan, what is it you think just happened?”
“I don’t know, but I’m going to get a closer look.”
“You are being ridiculous.”
“Then why don’t you hang out here at the safe house and help your men search through the corn flakes? I’m heading over there.” Ryan turned and left the balcony. He scooped up off the table a set of keys belonging to one of the rented cars and then shot out the door of the suite.
As he stuck the key in the lock, he heard someone hurrying down the gravel behind him. It was Eastling. “I’ll drive.”
—
It took them nearly a half-hour to get around the lake to Rotkreuz. As they entered the little village, there was no mistaking which way to go. A structural fire raged fifty feet in the air. Eastling merely had to keep his car pointed toward the glow and, despite being rerouted by hastily erected roadblocks designed to clear the way for emergency vehicles, he managed to park near enough to the scene so that he and Ryan had to walk only a few blocks.
Jack and Nick worked their way forward through a large crowd of onlookers across the parking lot from the blaze. Jack could feel the heat on his face as he neared the fire.
The building looked like it must have been a beautiful restaurant; there was an open seating area with fire pits to keep the patrons warm on chilly nights, and behind this sat a long structure with floor-to-ceiling windows that afforded the patrons of the restaurant amazing views of Lake Zug. A sign high above the parking lot read “Restaurant Meisser.” But now the building was fully engulfed in flames, the windows were broken, and the wrought-iron tables and chairs around the fire pits had all been knocked aside so firefighters and other first responders could pull victims from the carnage.
There were bodies under black plastic sheets in the parking lot. Jack counted at least ten, but it was hard to tell in the wildly flickering firelight and the multicolored strobes of the emergency vehicles.
Dozens of firefighters still worked on the fire, hoses attacked it from a dozen directions, and police kept the crowd back with tape, shouts, and the occasional shove. Someone in the crowd said gas lines were feeding the fire, and then, minutes after Ryan and Eastling arrived, the entire tapeline was moved back to the opposite side of the street, in fear of a larger explosion.
While Jack and Nick stood there on the edge of the light from the roaring flames, Jack noticed a cluster of Swiss police cars on a street corner on the opposite side of the taped-off parking lot. Two police officers had a bearded man in handcuffs, and they walked him to one of the vehicles and placed him in the back. He looked to be a few years younger than Jack, but from this distance Jack couldn’t be sure.
Jack said, “Wonder what that’s all about.”
Nick started walking that way. “I suppose we could go find out.”
By the time they made it around the parking lot, the police car with the man in back had raced out of the parking lot and down the hill, out of view.
Two officers stood by another car at the edge of the police line. Nick Eastling walked up to them and said, “Entschuldigung. Sprechen Sie Englisch?”
In German, one of the officers replied, “Yes, but we are busy.”
“I understand. I was only wondering why that man was arrested.”
“He wasn’t arrested. He was detained for questioning. He had been in the building, but he left right before the explosion. He wasn’t a patron, he just walked through, then exited through the back. After the explosion, one of the waiters saw him in the crowd and pointed him out.”
“I see.”
“Were you a witness to the explosion?”
“No, I’m sorry, I didn’t see a thing.”
Eastling and Ryan turned away and pushed back into the crowd. They left the area a few minutes later, returning to the SIS safe house so Eastling could contact Century House via the STU phone. MI6 would need to pressure the Swiss for information on the crime, the detainment of the bearded young man, and any other information that could be more readily obtained at a higher level.
Eastling dropped Ryan back at the hotel on his way to the safe house. Once again the American CIA analyst felt as though he was being pushed aside by the counterintelligence officer, but he knew he wouldn’t have anything meaningful to do at the safe house, so he didn’t press the issue.
56
Present day
Delta Force officer Barry Jankowski, call sign Midas, had survived the battle for the Lighthouse in Sevastopol, Ukraine, along with two of his operators and eleven other Americans. But unlike most of the security officers and CIA men who’d made it out of the Lighthouse alive, Midas and his boys were still in country.
For the past three days Midas had been in Cherkasy, a midsized city in Ukraine’s heartland, and the location of a large Ukrainian Army base that was home to the nation’s 25th Airborne Brigade.
Midas had lost friends at the Lighthouse, but like most military special operations personnel, he was not given time to grieve for them in the field. Yesterday afternoon, Jankowski had been a lieutenant colonel. But a call from Fort Bragg last night informed him he had been promoted to colonel, and not only was he the highest-ranking member of Joint Special Operations Command here in Ukraine, he was now the senior command authority of all U.S. and British forces in Ukraine for Operation Red Coal Carpet.
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 ho
me, 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.
Walking around base without their helmets, the two-man flight crew of the U.S. Army’s OH-58D Kiowa Warrior looked very much like two regular Army infantry soldiers. They did not wear flight suits; instead, the men wore tan, gray, and green uniforms under their SAPI (Small Arms Protective Insert) steel plates. They carried U.S. Army–issued Colt M4 rifles on slings around their chests along with Beretta M9 pistols on their hips, and extra rifle magazines hung in ammo racks over their body armor.
They passed a group of Ukrainian helicopter maintenance men who stopped them and shook their hands. None of these guys spoke much English, but they seemed happy to have the American forces here. Dre was black, which was about as rare here as Eric and Dre running into a Ukrainian back at their base in Kentucky, and consequently he drew fascinated stares from the young Ukrainian men.
Eric and Dre were polite, but they broke away from the group as quickly as possible, because their CO had ordered them over to a building on the opposite side of the base.
And they had no idea why.
After fighting in Estonia, Chief Warrant Officers Conway and Page returned to Poland, where they served in European Command. Their unit was part of a NATO detachment that trained with the Poles, and it was as interesting an assignment as either of them needed after the stress of combat in Esto
nia.
But just yesterday their company received the surprise news that they’d be heading to Ukraine. They assumed it had something to do with the attack on the Partnership for Peace office in Sevastopol that was all over the news, but other than a ton of idle conjecture by themselves and the other men in their company, they didn’t have any real idea what they would be doing here.
And they weren’t given much time to think about it. For the past twenty-four hours they had been prepping for their mission, and then they and their entire company, helicopters included, flew over from Poland in the back of two C-17s, arriving here in Cherkasy just an hour earlier.
During their walk across the Ukrainian base, Eric and Dre argued playfully about what was in store for them on the other side of the base. Neither thought they were in any trouble, but the fact they’d been separated from the rest of their company, just when everyone else was getting situated in the barracks and bedding down for a little relaxation after twenty-four hours of constant movement, was somewhat annoying.
They found the gate with the Americans, and they entered an area protected by men they recognized to be members of the 75th Ranger Regiment. They were elite soldiers, and Conway and Page normally didn’t have much direct contact with them, so Regiment studs were something of a novelty to see.
They next made their way across a row of small barracks with large garage-type doors that were open to let in fresh air. Inside one of the barracks, Conway and Page spied a group of men in camouflage with nonregulation haircuts and beards. They were unboxing some of their equipment, and one look at the haircuts and the gear told the two twenty-six-year-olds that these were Army Special Forces.
Page leaned over to Conway as they passed by. “Eric, first we walked by Regiment dudes, now we’re walking by Green Berets. I guess we’re working our way up.”