Perhaps a quarter of Yevtushenko’s men were native to the Crimea, and many others had wives or sweethearts here. His own wife and twelve-year-old son lived in base housing at Glazivska, just a few kilometers north of Kerch. He and his people were not simply going to abandon their homes and loved ones to the Ukrainian genocides.
And if protecting those homes required in some left-handed fashion that they fight fellow Russians, so be it. He’d explained that by stopping ― or at least punishing ― the mass defection of Boychenko’s men, Krasilnikov would be made to understand the larger issues at stake here, perhaps even be induced to send more men to the Crimea’s defense.
And as for the rumors that U.S. Marines were helping Boychenko’s troops, so much the better. The Morskaya Pekhota would have them for breakfast… then turn and crush the Ukrainians if and when they dared set foot on Crimean soil. It was unfortunate only that Boychenko himself, at last report, had escaped to refuge with the American fleet, coward and deserter that he was.
Scouts had already reported on the rebel position, occupying a low ridge not far from the Arsincevo refinery and storage facility south of Kerch. American fleet units were reported approaching from the south. Yevtushenko’s unit ― a reinforced battalion ― was not enough to block a major amphibious assault, but they could certainly spoil the enemy’s plans to cross the straits at that point.
Thunder boomed overhead, and he looked up. Mig-29s, a flight of six of them, howled overhead, their bellies bristling with missiles.
He was eager for this coming clash. Boychenko’s force did not stand a chance.
CHAPTER 24
Saturday, 7 November
0830 hours (Zulu +3)
Arsincevo
Crimea Military District
By 0830 hours, the U.S. Marines were firmly ashore, moving onto and across the beach by a variety of means. Dozens of LVTP-7 amtracks, each carrying twenty men, churned through light surf at nine knots toward the beach. As their tracks hit sand, they lurched up out of the water like prehistoric beasts rising from the sea, grinding inland in a meticulously planned double envelopment that secured both the undefended beachhead and the refinery complex at Arsincevo. A public beach south of Kerch was designated Red Beach. Moments after dawn, LCACS ― Landing Craft Air Cushion ― howled across the surf in billowing curtains of spray, then drifted across the beach shelf over self-generated hurricanes of windblown sand. As each hovercraft settled down onto collapsing rubber skirts, bow and stern ramps dropped to disgorge twenty-four troops or as many as four vehicles. The first amtracks growled ashore at 0750 hours, just twenty minutes after sunrise.
Overhead, Marine helos clattered through the air, racing inland to touch down and disgorge Marine strike teams at key points around the tank farm and the naval base. Marine Harrier jets and Cobra gunships joined with the F/A-18 Hornets off the Jefferson to hit the Kerch airfield and various military facilities all over the eastern end of the peninsula. Others were precision-blasted by cruise missiles launched from the carrier group’s attack subs, a storm of robotic killers droning in on stub wings to seek out SAM sites, radar complexes, command posts, communications centers, and even individual vehicles with deadly precisionist accuracy. Larger or more dispersed targets were hit repeatedly by A-6 Intruders of VA-84 and VA-89, flying mission after low-level mission off the Jefferson.
These attacks, particularly the air attacks, were not intended to destroy all opposition. Indeed, the strike planners had recognized early on that there were simply too many targets to hope for a clean sweep. Rather, they had been designed to throw the defenders into disorganized confusion for a critical several hours, isolating them from outside communications, and misleading them as to the exact scope and target of the Marine incursion.
Since the 1970s, U.S. Marine doctrine had stressed the MAGTF concept, or Marine Air-Ground Task Force, as a means of providing combined arms ― sea, air, and land ― at all levels of Marine unit deployment. The largest MAGTF unit was the Marine Expeditionary Force, or MEF, which consisted of an entire Marine division, an aircraft wing, and ancillary support units, with a total of over fifty thousand Navy and Marine Corps personnel deployed from a task force consisting of about fifty amphibious ships. The recent operation in the Kola Peninsula had been carried out by II MEF.
Next in size and complexity was the Marine Expeditionary Brigade, which deployed fifteen thousand Marines and six hundred seventy naval personnel ― not counting the ships’ crews ― from twenty-one to twenty-six amphibious ships. It consisted of a Regimental Landing Team, a reinforced aircraft group, and support units.
Smallest of the deployable MAGTF units in the Marine Corps was the MEU, the Marine Expeditionary Unit, composed of a Battalion Landing Team, a reinforced helicopter squadron, and an MEU Service Support Group. Total strength, not counting the Navy crews of its four to six amphibious operations ships, totaled 2,150 Marines and 116 Navy personnel. Colonel Winston Howell commanded MEU-25’s ground forces.
Twenty-five-hundred-odd men was not much of an invasion force, but they had the advantages of speed and surprise, backed by the tremendous sheer firepower of CVBG-14. MEU-25 had shifted position during the night, keeping pace with the fast-moving carrier group. The LPH Guadalcanal, the LHA Saipan ― only recently detached from service with II MEF ― and the LPD Shreveport made up the core of the naval half of the MEU, together with several other amphibious vessels, a scattering of supply ships, two Perry-class frigates, and the guided-missile destroyer Isaiah Robinson. Another advantage was the wing of twenty CH-53A Super Stallions. Normally, an MEU included only four of the smaller CH-53E Sea Stallions, relying for most of their air-mobile needs on twelve of the older CH-46 Sea Knights. The helicopter carrier Guadalcanal had been recently attached to MEU-25, however, specifically to carry out the Marines’ mission in Georgia, and the Super Stallions aboard were a welcome addition to an operation that in most other areas was already feeling the pinch of limited supplies and assets.
The air attacks on various Russian installations had been continuing since well before 0500 hours. The first heliborne troops were disembarking at a dozen different locations half an hour before sunrise. By the time the amtracks were coming ashore, the most stubborn defenses had already been overrun or neutralized. Resistance was fierce in spots, but only briefly. When a pillbox or heavy weapons site pinned down an advancing Marine party, Cobra gunships or Harrier jump jets would appear within minutes, blasting the site with Hellfire missiles, Zuni rockets, and high-speed 30mm rotary cannon fire.
In most areas, the Russian defenders had fled the fire and death raining from the predawn skies. Marines entered the outskirts of the Kerch naval base on foot at just past 0830 hours to find it deserted, with half a dozen guided-missile corvettes and patrol boats, a couple of armed tugs, and a Riga-class frigate, all of them aflame or already settled into the dark, shallow waters of the port, as oil-black smoke stained the blue morning sky.
Throughout the landing area, prisoners were rounded up and interrogated.
Morale among the defenders, it turned out, was low, though a few elite naval infantry troops were defiant and possessed undeniably high spirits.
Navy and Marine Corps public affairs officers had already characterized the landings, however, as “meeting little opposition” and “suffering only very minor casualties,” all in all a “remarkably clean and uncomplicated, surgically precise strike.”
0835 hours (Zulu +3)
Above Arsincevo
Tombstone lay flattened in a pool of near-liquid mud, face-down, hands clasped over his head, as the ground beneath him bucked and rocked. Thunder passed, caressing him; he looked up and saw smoke boiling into the sky.
“Goddamn it, Matt!” Pamela screamed from her patch of mud a few feet away. “Tell them we’re on their side!”
“Rule number one of combat, miss,” Chief Geiger growled from close by.
“Friendly fire isn’t.”
Slowly, Tombstone rose to his knees, staring
after the departing aircraft in time to see sunlight flash from the wings of the two A-6 Intruders that had just spilled an avalanche of high explosives ― a “force package” in the sterile lexicon of official reports ― across the top of the ridge.
There was nothing, nothing more demoralizing in warfare than being attacked by your own side.
Rising unsteadily from the mud, he jogged toward the smoke. Boychenko was there, pointing and giving orders as Russian soldiers trotted toward the crest of the ridge. Several vehicles had been hit on the road and were burning furiously, including, he noticed, the ACN van. Oh, God, no…
But there were no bodies, no screaming wounded. He spotted PO/2 Kardesh standing near the general. “Natalie!” he called. “Anybody hit in that attack?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so, sir! But the general asked me whose side those Intruders were on. He says some of the men are a little shaken by that attack!”
“I can believe that.” Fortunately for the rebel column and its American auxiliaries, the Intruders had dumped their load on the vehicles, which had been standing empty along the Kerch Road, on the west side of the ridge.
“Tell him he’s got to get the panels out!” Tombstone told her.
“I did! He said this ridge is too exposed, that we have to try moving closer to the refinery. Otherwise, we’re going to get flanked up here.”
“God save us from military geniuses.”
Natalie blinked at him. “Pardon, sir?”
He hadn’t realized he’d muttered the thought aloud. “Never mind. Come on. Translate for me.”
Tombstone could hear the sound of the ground battle developing up ahead, on the east side of the ridge, a sharp rattling and cracking of automatic weapons. As they reached General Boychenko, he was conferring with several of his officers. He looked up from a map as Tombstone and Natalie approached. “Ah, Captain Magruder,” he said, raking Tombstone with his eyes. “You… are one of us now, da?” He added something in Russian, and his officers chuckled.
Tombstone looked down at his full dress uniform ruefully, now so coated with mud that he was very nearly as well camouflaged as the Spetsnaz troops in their camo fatigues. Both of his shoulder boards with their four broad gold stripes were gone, and he’d pocketed his medals during the drive from Yalta. His uniform was no longer blue, but a smeared mix of black and clay-brown. It felt as though his face were probably colored the same way.
“General,” Tombstone said. “if you don’t get those marker panels out, we’re going to be one big, happy bull’s-eye on top of this hill.” During his planning session with Coyote, they’d agreed that cloth ground panels ― parachute material or canvas or whatever else could be scavenged for the purpose ― would be laid out in the shape of large Vs, visible from the air, identifying Boychenko’s column. If there’d been time, he would have insisted that Vs be painted on the vehicles as well, but they’d been on the move, on the run, really, all night.
And now it was too late. He was just glad no ACN people had been in that van when the Intruders had struck.
Natalie translated, then gave Tombstone Boychenko’s reply. “He wants to know if we aren’t in communication with our ships.”
“Tell him yes, we are, but things are pretty confused out there right now. With so many planes in the sky, it’s hard to coordinate. All of these ridges up here look pretty much the same from the air.”
Boychenko nodded. “We are… how you say? Stuck.” He pointed to the map, then told Natalie something in Russian.
“He says that an armored force coming out of Kerch has spread out along the east side of this ridge.” She pointed to the map. “Here… and here. Between us and the port. He says they’re naval infantry.”
“Morskaya Pekhota,” Boychenko added for emphasis, making a face. “Like American Marines. Good soldiers.”
“He says the lead elements of his column have been skirmishing with them for several minutes now. That’s what the gunfire is, over the top of the ridge. He says there’s no way to go through, and he doesn’t think we can go around. He wants to know if helicopters can come here to pick us up.”
Tombstone looked up. Contrails were twisting wildly through the sky high overhead. One contrail ended in a fleecy white puff, from which a black streak emerged, arrowing downward toward the sea.
“Not until we have air superiority,” he replied. “And probably not until we do something about that naval infantry. The helos can’t touch down if they’re under heavy fire from the ground.”
Boychenko looked grim as Natalie passed on Tombstone’s assessment. A moment later, she told him the general’s reply. “He says… he says he hopes we can use rifles as well as aircraft, because we’re in the infantry now. He cannot promise us a way through to the beach.”
On the other side of the ridge, to the east, the crackle of small arms fire was increasing.
0840 hours (Zulu +3)
Over Arsincevo
Crimea Military District
In the skies over Kerch and Arsincevo, the real battle was beginning to take shape. As Tomcats and Hornets flew constant patrols, shielding the Marine landings, the ships offshore, and the attack and support aircraft that were backing up the landings, two major groups of Russian aircraft approached, one from the north, coming in low across the Sea of Azov, the other from the west, bursting across the Crimean Mountains and streaking straight for the fleet gathered in the shallow gulf between the Crimea and the Caucasus.
The Americans struck the first blow in the aerial engagement, loosing their AIM-54C Phoenix missiles while the enemy was still eighty miles away. The survivors pressed on, however, their numbers only somewhat thinned.
At 0840 hours, the Russian aircraft, now numbering about forty, mostly Mig-27 Floggers and Mig-29 Fulcrums, hit the wall of American fighters ― a total of sixteen Tomcats and fourteen Hornets flying in four squadrons. Marines on the ground looked up in something like awe as white contrails crawled and scratched across the sky, etching out twists and turns and occasional deadly plunges toward the earth on smoke trails turned black.
The twisted mass of contrails thickened, swiftly tangling into what aviators referred to as a furball.
In the skies above the Kerch Peninsula, aircraft and men were dying.
0905 hours (Zulu +3)
U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson
Arsincevo fueling dock
So far, the information supplied by the Russians through Captain Magruder had proven accurate. South of the naval base facilities at Kerch, and just offshore from the tank farm and refinery complex at Arsincevo, an enormous offshore fueling dock was connected to the shore by a bridge and a massive bundle of petroleum loading lines. The dock approaches had been carefully checked by the frigate Leslie, making certain that the shipping channels were clear and deep enough for the supercarrier’s ponderous draft. Two hours earlier, a shore party of fuel handlers from the Air Wing’s V-4 Division ― ”grapes” in Navy parlance, because they wore purple jerseys during flight deck operations ― together with a security detail of Marines off the Jefferson, had boarded the offshore dock and begun readying it for fueling operations.
Commander Tom Hadley stood on the starboard side of the Jefferson’s bridge, looking down at the fueling dock… and out across the water beyond to the shoreline a mile away. This was the key moment in Operation Ranger, the whole point of the raid, and the time when the huge carrier was at her most vulnerable. He’d brought her into the narrow waters between the Taman and Kerch Peninsulas, facing south with her starboard side toward the landing beaches to the west. The shore party was hooking up the fueling lines now, swaying the ends up to Jefferson’s starboard fuel ports and locking them home. A Seabee crew ashore had already identified the storage tanks containing high-octane aviation gasoline, while Lieutenant Commander Volkwein, senior officer of V-4, had pronounced the avgas “sweet” and up to Jefferson’s demanding standards.
Now all they had to do was pump nearly three million gallons ― a
bout nine thousand tons ― of the highly flammable stuff on board.
All flight deck operations had been suspended, of course, and the smoking lamp was out throughout the ship. More worrisome, Hadley had ordered the automatic fire control computers for Jefferson’s three CIWS defense systems switched to standby mode. If something triggered the Close-in Weapons System’s radar-linked computer while it was on active, it would acquire the target and open fire by itself within two seconds, loosing a stream of depleted uranium shells at a buzz-sawing fifty rounds per second… and possibly ignite the gasoline fumes spilling from the carrier’s starboard side.
That meant, however, that for the critical thirty minutes or so necessary for the transfer of fuel from shore to carrier, the Jefferson would be relying solely on its fighter cover for defense from enemy aircraft.
Of course, the carrier always relied on her aircraft as her first and primary line of defense; CIWS, pronounced “sea-whiz” in Navy-speak, was strictly a last-ditch defense against missiles or aircraft that had “leaked” through the outer defensive perimeters and approached to within fifteen hundred yards of the carrier. But this close inshore, this close to the battle, with a defensive perimeter as tight and as restricted as this one, they were taking a terrible chance.
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