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.”
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.
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
