Mace glanced to one side and saw Mark Fogelman. This kid, who was injured badly in the crash landing with Furness only a couple days ago, was up and around and was pronounced fit to deploy with the rest of his squadron. He still looked like hell, with bad bruises on his face and missing a couple of front teeth, but he was dressed and pumped and ready to go. But he had been pushed into the background by the First Lady and the White House handlers and the photographers, probably because he looked like a casualty instead of a crewman. By contrast, Ted Little, the actor, who hadn’t been hurt nearly as badly as Fogelman, wasn’t going to Turkey. The bastard got his Hollywood studio to use a little pressure and extend his convalescent leave.
Several minutes later, when the podium and grandstands and photographers were cleared out of the way, the crews climbed into their aircraft, and on a signal from the First Lady herself, the aircraft started engines and began to depart, Stratotankers first, followed by Vampires. The First Lady stood out in front of Rebecca Furness’ bomber beside a female crew chief, wearing ear protectors and holding two taxi wands, and, mimicking the crew chief’s actions, helped taxi the first RF-111G carrying the first female combat pilot to her first overseas deployment.
Mace was, by this point, ready to barf. God, how he loathed politicians — male or female.
Well, while the First Lady was putting on a show, others in Washington were fighting this war for real. He was glad someone was on the job.
THIRTY-ONE
It was the pride and joy of the Turkish Navy. Laid down on New Year’s Day, 1986, launched on 30 August 1987, Turkish Victory Day, and placed in service one year later, the guided-missile frigate F-242 Fatih was one of the most sophisticated warships in the world. Designed in Germany but license-built at the modern Golcuk naval shipyards southeast of Istanbul, the Fatih was three hundred and thirty feet long, weighed over 2,700 tons, and could reach a top speed of 27 nautical miles per hour. It was a very multinational ship as well, carrying only the best naval weapons from the Western World: an American-made AB-212 antisubmarine-warfare helicopter that could launch British-made Sea Skua antiship missiles; American-designed Harpoon antiship cruise missiles also license-built in Turkey; German Sea Zenith antiaircraft guns with optronic and track-while-scan radar fire-control directors; American Sea Sparrow antiship and antiaircraft missiles; and American-made Mark 32 torpedoes and SQS-56 sonar gear. Once deployed, it was designed to take control of the seas and skies around it for a hundred kilometers.
The Fatih was cruising the northwestern coast of Turkey in its usual circuit of the Black Sea offshore from the Bosporus Strait, along with its escorts, the guided-missile patrol boats Poyraz and Firtina and, not far away, an ex-German Type 209 diesel submarine, the Yildiray, built in Turkey with German assistance and used as an antisubmarine escort for Fatih. Also sailing along with the powerful patrol convoy was the large underway-replenishment oiler Akar, which dwarfed the frigate and its escorts; she was waiting for first dawn to begin transferring fuel and supplies. Normally the Fatih stayed on patrol only for ten to fourteen days, depending on the status of its patrol craft, but with tensions so high in the region all Turkish warships were on almost constant alert, and Turkey’s ten oilers and tenders were very busy in the Black Sea keeping Turkey’s combat fleet in action.
Fatih’s patrol area was one of the most important — control the approaches to the Bosporus Strait and the southwest Black Sea, and defend Turkish territorial waters. Refugee sea traffic from the Ukraine, Romania, and Bulgaria was extremely heavy in the past few months, especially after the Russian nuclear attack, and people were taking anything that could float into the dangerous Black Sea and trying to escape to the West and to Israel. The Navy’s job was to keep the normal shipping lanes open for international traders that still dared to risk sailing into the Black Sea, and to keep close tabs on the Russian Navy.
A major source of tension between Turkey and Russia lately was the dispersal of Ukrainian Air Force units to Turkey and the news that thousands of tons of weapons and supplies had been secretly shipped from the Ukraine to Turkey over the past few months. Russia had called for a halt to all military assistance from Turkey, and had called any continued shipments or military support “of grave concern” to Russia. They had said it was another example of Western interference in Russia’s internal affairs. The threat was clear: stop supporting the Ukraine or you’ll be considered an enemy also. But if the Russians knew nothing else about Turkish history since 1928, it was that Turkey did not respond to threats — they fought back.
Control and access to the Mediterranean from the Black Sea was the responsibility of the Republic of Turkey, and it was an awesome task. The Russian naval fleet in the Black Sea Fleet alone consisted of over two hundred vessels, including submarines and aircraft-carrying cruisers — the Russians classified its smaller aircraft carriers as cruisers because Turkey does not allow aircraft carriers of any nation to transit its waters — and if allowed to break into the Mediterranean intact, it would quickly dominate the entire region. No fewer than five major naval bases, one army base, and three air force bases were stationed in a three-hundred-mile stretch of territory from the island of Cyprus, through the Aegean and the Dardanelles, across the Sea of Marmara, past the Bosporus, and into the Black Sea — half of Turkey’s 480,000-man active-duty military, the largest in NATO except for the United States and unified Germany, was stationed in this strategic region.
However, the most important military asset to Turkey was in an oval orbit twenty-nine thousand feet over the Paphlagonia Mountains of northern Turkey, about sixty miles north of the capital city of Ankara — a lone E-3A AWACS (Airborne Warning and Command System) radar plane, owned and manned by multinational NATO technicians and flight crews and commanded by a Turkish colonel. The AWACS plane interfaced with every facet of the Turkish and NATO military establishment in the region.
It was almost midnight when the command radio on the bridge of the frigate Fatih crackled to life. “Serpent, this is Diamond, be advised, unidentified aircraft detected at zero-one-three degrees at one-two-zero miles bullseye, angels five, airspeed five hundred knots, heading south, number of targets four. We have scrambled Firebrand flight of eight to intercept.”
“Diamond, Serpent copies.” To Captain Turgut Inonu of the Turkish Navy, skipper of the frigate Fatih, the bridge operations chief reported, “Sir, message from the AWACS radar plane, four unidentified high-speed aircraft north of our position, heading south. Eight F-16 interceptors from Merzifon have been scrambled to intercept.”
“Very well,” Inonu replied. He rose stiffly, stretching the kinks out of his sixty-year-old sea-weary joints. “Sound general quarters. I’m going down to Combat.” As the battle stations alert and klaxon alarm sounded, he donned a helmet and life jacket as he left the bridge and headed below.
Captain Turgut Inonu and his small Bosporus task force had received four or five such alerts each and every day since the current Russian crisis began. These were Russian patrol planes, cruising along Turkey’s twelve-mile territorial limit over the Black Sea. Most times they were MiG-25R Foxbat reconnaissance planes, the fastest fighter planes in the world, which would sometimes scream past the Turkish flotilla at one and a half times the speed of sound and drop bomblike magnesium flares to take pictures at night — the flares were so bright that shore installations sixty miles away sometimes saw the flares and thought the naval task force was under attack.