“Look, you already said this was going to be tough flying,” Tammie said, exasperated. “And you’re talking about birds we’ve got no time in! We transitioned two years ago! I can barely recall where the controls are laid out!”
“You’re going to be ferrying them over a thousand miles,” Jenkins said, shrugging. “Practice.”
“There’s… ” Kacey said then paused. “We’ll have to think about this. But there are a few things that any helo pilot is going to need in this sort of situation.”
“Go,” Mike said, leaning back.
Kacey suddenly realized that despite the strong appearance of focus and animation this guy was tired. Desperately tired. He didn’t show it much, but something about the way he leaned back told her he hadn’t been getting much sleep lately.
“We need ground crew,” Kacey said.
“The Czechs are supplying a crew initially,” Mike said, nodding. “I’m not sure if they can teach the Keldara women everything they need to know. They’re going to be very much starting from scratch and I’m even running out of labor on that side. I may end up hiring some outside personnel. But for this mission you’re going to have a supplied Czech ground-crew, the team leader at least speaking good English.”
“Well we’re going to need a good crewchief,” Kacey said. “What the Air Force calls a flight engineer. Somebody familiar with the birds. More familiar than we are would be best.”
“That’s going to be harder,” Mike said with a sigh. “If you know anybody hireable I’ll hire them, gladly. And if you can’t find somebody, if I have to I’ll tap the Uncle Sam well again. I’d prefer you find them. If you take the job and head to CR you’ll be taking a sat phone. Feel free to use it extensively. Get two. You realize that it might become necessary to solo fly on one or more missions.”
“Solo,” Tammie said. “On a hot mission?”
“Two birds, two pilots,” Mike said, stone-faced. “But I won’t tell you to. If the moment comes you’ll just do it. Or I’ve got the wrong pilots.”
“Pierson.”
“Colonel, this is Major Fowler in USAF Missions Tasking.”
“Go,” Pierson said with a sigh.
“Sir, your office has placed a tasking on us for two C-17s to loft a Ranger company to the country of Georgia and perform an airborne insertion.”
“And we’ve got a high level tasking number on it,” Pierson said. “What’s the problem.”
“The problem, sir, is that we’re flat out of birds for that period,” the major replied. “Sir, you can go through a general or the USAF Chief of Staff or the president, but the problem is that the tasker is in too quick of time. We don’t have birds we can redeploy that fast that aren’t on equal high level taskers.”
“Major, that was a JCS level tasker,” Pierson said, confused.
“Sir, you can look at my board if you’d like,” the major said. “We shot this around for quite a while because it was such a high tasker. But you’re talking about six day’s time and most of our -17s are deployed over in the AOR. And if we turn two birds we’re going to fail on equally high-level taskers. Sir, we’re scheduled out two months not two weeks. Bitch about not having enough lift or whatever you’d like, sir, I fully agree. But we’re out-tasked at the moment. The only birds we could recall would be on the Azerbaijan relief missions and I note that you’ve already taskered one of our birds from that.”
“Time to pound your nuts flat and find me two birds,” the colonel said.
“Sir, I already got out the brick,” the major said with a sigh. “You’re not the first person I’ve had this conversation with today, just the highest tasker. We did come up with an OTB idea, though.”
Pierson, who thought of himself as a master, even if he hated to admit it, of Pentagon speak locked up on “OTB” then managed to parse it. “How ‘Out-of-the-Box?’ ”
“Sir, we can fly them commercial to Ukraine. The Ukrainians finally have those new AN-70s which are essentially identical to C-130s from a jumper’s perspective. They fly and drop about the same, they just carry a bunch more troops.”
Pierson rolled that one around in his head for a moment. It had a certain allure but a dozen problems jumped up immediately in his mind.
“Ukraine is registered as a friendly country, not allied,” Pierson said, musingly. “They’re going to want to get paid for the bird time.”
“There’s a coding for payments for air-time to friendly nations,” Major Fowler replied. “We already checked. The problem from our perspective is that their aircraft aren’t mission certified. The AF mil attache in Ukraine is a former cargo pilot. I contacted him off-record and he says that he’s seen enough of their ops to be able to do a prelim cert but he’s not he could full cert them for airborne ops. He doesn’t have a problem with them being able to do airborne ops, the cert paperwork is pretty complex, though. There’s a way around that, though.”
“Don’t keep me waiting, major,” Pierson said, dryly.
“For TS ops, and I note that this op has has a codeword class over the confidential attached to the op, there’s a point at which we can skip the cert requirement due to mission confidentiality.”
“That sounds like following the letter while violating the spirit,” Pierson said. “I like it.”
“Yes, sir, I thought you might,” the major replied with a chuckle. “But here’s a stranger one, sir. Brace yourself.”
“Go.”
“How about a press release? ‘Elite US military force uses Ukrainian Air Force for training operation.’ ”
“Major, you just noted that this operation is TS codeword,” Pierson pointed out.
“The drop, though, is Confidential. We can get low-level permission to open it to the PIO with certain mission data left out. We think it would be good press and the Ukrainian government would probably appreciate it. They’ve got problems with Russia and showing that their planes can carry American special-ops… ”
Pierson really had to pause at that one. The major in tasking didn’t realize, because that side of the mission was totally black at a very high level, to just what extent it might tweak the Russians.
“Major, begin the tasking but final authority is probably going to have to come after consultation with higher,” Pierson said after a moment’s thought. “Certainly the press release will have to hold. I’ll get back to you. But get working on the tasking and I’ll get back on the rest.”
“Yes, sir,” the major said, deflated. He clearly was enjoying playing at that level.
“Major, I’m not just being an asshole,” Pierson said. “There are parameters to this mission, the reasons that it is codeworded at such a high level, that may be risked at a higher level by some of these actions. The truth is, I’m not qualified or knowledgeable enough to decide. But I can contact those that can better eval the risks and rewards.”
“They want to do what?” the Secretary of State said.
“Mike needs the Rangers to ensure security and for a maskirova,” Pierson said, sighing. “Rangers or somebody like them. I’d actually considered Polish GROM commandoes, but that was just too complicated to set up. So the Rangers are going. But then SOCOM noted that the entire company is just about out of jump pay status due to deployments, one of the reasons they’re back in the States besides to get some down-time. So we were going to throw a jump in as a sweetener and to keep them on status. But we are tasked out for birds. I double checked that one and we really are flat tasked out. There are actually a couple of ARNG units we could call up for it, but they’re out of cert on airborne ops and damned near undeployable or they’d be tasked. So that left looking outside the box. Which means the Ukrainians. They have indicated a willingness, hell an eagerness, to do a drop with our Rangers. But then I got to thinking about how the Russians would react, given what the op is all about… ”