Azov. Especially prominent was the small port city of Poti, on the
Georgian coast fifty miles from Hopa and the Turkish border. A cluster
of green icons lay thirty miles offshore, identified by the alphanumeric
MEU-25.
Tombstone pursed his lips for a moment as he studied the display. The
Marine Expeditionary Unit was not technically part of CBG-14 at all,
though MEUS were attached to the battle group from time to time,
depending on deployment and mission. This time, MEU-25 was operating
under UN auspices as part of the Georgian relief program. With Operation
Sustain Hope, the old question of U.S. forces serving under United
Nations leadership had come to the forefront again and was rapidly
proving to be a disaster.
MEU-25 consisted of the LPD Little Rock, the LHA Saipan, and the LPH
Guadalcanal, plus a small fleet of transports and escorts assigned to
carry a reinforced Marine Battalion Landing Team anywhere in the world
at short notice as a rapid-response peacekeeper force. The expeditionary
unit had arrived in the Black Sea a few days before the Jefferson with
orders from the National Command Authority–meaning the President–to
open up a secure port at Poti in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia
so that UN humanitarian aid could begin to flow into the war-ravaged
little country lying on the southern slopes of the Caucasus Mountains.
It was supposed to be a routine operation–routine, that is, save for
the extraordinary fact that U.S. military force was being projected into
this corner of the world for the first time in history. A British
peacekeeping force under direct UN control was already on its way to
take over, but as usual the U.S. Marines would bear the brunt of the
initial operation.
It was all quite a tangle, Magruder reflected. Who would have thought,
just a few years back, that when American troops stood on soil that had
belonged to the Soviet Empire they’d be doing it as glorified security
guards? Or that in the end Russia and her former satellites would turn
into just so many more Third World hot spots where the UN formula of
humanitarian aid, peacekeepers, and no-fly zones would be applied the
very same way it had been in Iraq, and Bosnia, and Haiti, and Macedonia?
But the world was changing fast, sometimes so fast that it almost seemed
to out-pace American foreign policy itself.
The Republic of Georgia was mirror to the drama that was being played
throughout this part of the world now and for most of the past decade.
Once a federated S.S.R., Georgia had declared its independence from the
old Soviet Union on April 9, 1991. Even as the nation fought for
freedom, however, the autonomous provinces of Abkhazia, Adharia, and
South Ossetia were fighting for independence from Georgia. By 1994,
Georgia’s President Shevardnadze had agreed to a cooperation pact that
increased Russian military influence in the country, a frank exchange of
freedom for security, and Georgia joined the Moscow-led Commonwealth of
Independent States soon after. By the time the Soviet Union was briefly
reborn and the tanks had been rolling into Norway, Georgia was again
solidly under Russian control.
But then the Scandinavian campaign had collapsed, the Russian military
had been proven a hollow shell, and American forces were landing on the
once sacrosanct soil of the Kola Peninsula. Leonov and Krasilnikov were
battling one another in the streets of Moscow and a hundred other
Russian cities, and the entire nation was sliding relentlessly toward
the yawning chasm of total anarchy. States that had enjoyed a brief
freedom in the era of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, states like Ukraine and
Belarus, the Baltics and Georgia, were shaking off the neo-Soviet mantle
and reasserting their independence. In one ex-Soviet state after
another, popular uprisings were driving out garrisons weak enough or
discouraged enough to give way.
But independence is never cheap. There were still plenty of neo-Soviet
units scattered across the length and breadth of the former empire,
controlled by hard-liner Reds and pro-Krasilnikov factions, and the
fledgling rebel movements were rarely strong enough to break the
militarists’ control by themselves. One after another of the newborn
governments had applied to the United Nations for support; at the same