A handful of lucky soldiers were sucked out of the aircraft and into the night sky where they could safely descend in their parachutes to the marshlands below. A few more pushed themselves out of the already open door, fighting against the centrifugal G-forces that were trying to pin them inside. But most of the paratroopers rode with the Ural Moon as she spun to the ground, howling and scratching at the darkness as they fell.
The Ural Moon impacted the side of a small hill and burst into flames. Within minutes, the only recognizable part of aircraft number 8-0564 was the core of its four jet engines. Everything else, from the composite structural spines to the pilot’s seats, was melted into a semifluid aluminum goo. Eighty-thousand pounds of burning jet fuel would do that to an aircraft. Inside the wreckage, only a few skeletal remains and charred weapons would ever be recovered.
No accident investigation board or review panel would ever be convened to determine what had caused the deaths of so many men. No one would ever try to identify the human remains or give them a proper burial. Instead, the wreckage was bulldozed into a large pit and then covered up, along with a burned-out tank and some unexploded ordinance that was discovered nearby. The exact location of the pit was forgotten. Such was the indignity of death during war.
Huge searchlights illuminated the sky over Sevastopol as thousands of Russian paratroopers descended onto the airfield. White and blue tracers arced upward to meet the descending paratroopers, making them easy targets for the Ukrainian forces. Although there was some question in the minds of a few of the Ukrainian officers as to the legality of firing upon an enemy soldier who was still descending in a parachute, none of them considered withholding their fire.
So the Ukrainian ground forces continued to light up the sky as they fired upon the descending paratroopers, while their missile batteries sent salvo after salvo of missiles up into the darkness. An occasional explosion encouraged them onward as they fired upon the transports that flew four miles above their heads.
But in the end, it didn’t make all that much difference. The Ukrainians were wholly unprepared, and thus were outnumbered, out-trained, and outgunned. Within twelve hours, seventeen thousand Russian paratroopers were on the ground in Sevastopol. The Russians quickly secured a defensive parameter around the airfield. Further reinforcements were quickly flown in. Within a day, more than thirty thousand Russian soldiers, along with their armor and equipment, were grouping into squads and regiments along the outskirts of the city. Within fifty-six hours, the Ukrainian port commander was forced to surrender what remained of his defensive forces. The Sevastopol operation would go down as one of the largest and most successful aerial assaults in the history of modern day war.
The Russians soldiers continued pouring in — the line of holding Russian IL-76 transports stretched through the sky for twenty miles as the aircraft waited their turn to land at the captured base and unload their troops and equipment. The Black Hogs began to fan out through the city, taking control of the area’s major communication lines, power supplies, radio and television stations, industrial centers, and military facilities. Terror fell upon the port city like a dark winter snow — heavy and bitter and cold. The streets ran red with the blood of cowering civilians and poorly trained home-soldiers who were hopelessly attempting to protect their families and homes. The captured Ukrainian troops, what few there were, were taken to the rusty docks that lined the Black Sea and loaded onto transport ships, which acted as POW holding facilities. There, the officers were separated from the enlisted. Late in the night on the second day of the invasion, the officers were loaded into the back of transport trucks, taken out to the country and shot twice in the head. Their bodies were then burned in mass crematoriums made of huge pits of burning oil.
Throughout the city, Russian soldiers began to enjoy the spoils of war. Russian officers looked away as their men raped and plundered with abandon, a reward for a job well done. The Hogs knew that they only had a few days to pillage the city before they would battle again, and they sought to take advantage of the opportunity in a violent and brutal way.
Soon, they would begin their long and deadly march northeast-ward — toward the mass of Ukrainian soldiers that were waiting for them along the five-hundred-mile stretch of Russian front. Moving across the unprotected belly of the Ukraine, they would attempt to meet up with other divisions of Russian ground troops that were even now battling their way across the heavily defended border. Approaching from the enemy’s rear, they hoped to pin them from two sides, wedging the outgunned Ukrainian forces in a crushing vice.
As the Hogs were landing in Sevastopol, one thousand kilometers to the north, along the Ukrainian border, the war raged in full force. Twenty Russian divisions, along with their tanks and field artillery, hacked at the Ukrainian forces in a coordinated land-air attack. Supported by waves of supersonic fighters and thousands of crushing 120 millimeter guns, the Russian soldiers pounded soft spots along the Ukrainian front. Batteries of deadly, multiple-rocket-launchers and hundreds of laser-guided rockets fired from attack helicopters rained exploding metal upon the hunkered-down defensive forces. Thirty kilometers behind the front, two thousand Russian T-80 tanks waited for any opening, prodding for any hint of a weakness, pushing at every fracture, in hopes of punching a hole through the enemy lines.
EIGHTEEN
Andrei Liski, The Ukrainian Director of State Border Defense, opened the door into Richard Ammon’s room without knocking, then walked silently over to sit on a black metal chair. The room was a small cubicle built from gray cinder block and white cement. Besides the black chair, the only other furniture in the room was a short bed and the small wooden desk where Ammon sat reading.
Ammon immediately recognized him as one of the four Ukrainians he had been introduced to that first night in the cabin. He was so frail. So droopy and thin. Ammon remembered him well.
Neither man spoke for a moment as Liski surveyed Ammon’s sparsely furnished room. From where he was sitting, he could touch the foot of Ammon’s bed, and he reached over to push on the bed springs, as if to test them for comfort and strength. After compressing the bed several times, he smoothed out the covers, then turned to Richard Ammon.
“Have you found everything to your liking so far?” he asked. “We want you to be as comfortable as possible.”
Ammon couldn’t tell if Liski was serious, or just trying to make light of his obviously uncomfortable living conditions. Ammon studied Liski for a moment before he answered. The expression on Liski’s face didn’t change, and Ammon decided he probably wasn’t the kind of man who sported a great sense of humor. He decided to keep his answer simple. “Everything is fine,” was all he said.
Liski pointed to the huge manual that was laying on top of Ammon’s desk and then asked, “Do you feel that you have enough information now? Or is there something else we could get you?”
Richard turned back to the manual and thumbed through the pages as he considered the question. The book was almost three inches thick, and full of charts, graphs, and very small print. It was the manufacturer’s flight manual for the Rockwell B-1 bomber. It told the pilot everything he needed to know in order to safely fly the B-1 and use all of its systems. There were more than two thousand pages in the manual, and everything in it was critical. Ammon flipped the book closed with a heavy thump, then turned back to face his unwelcome visitor.