More awesomeness.

Last pic not showing for me

EDIT: Pic fixed

Yup and I'm feeling very Game of Thronesy. Tell me which ones you get most attached to ... I'll make sure they die horrible deaths





Fixed?

FYI this is how I am seeing USA vs Russian UCAV tactics/technology in this scenario:



USA: In order to maintain airpower balance with Russia US chose to dramatically increase production of UCAVs but this created bottlenecks in aircrew training and recruitment. A solution was found by which 6 UCAVs in formation were linked in a data 'hex' in which the pilot would need to control only one aircraft in the 'hex' at any time and any aircraft in the hex could be (re)designated as the 'primary' aircraft for control purposes. Pilots do not 'fly' the aircraft in realtime (except for takeoff and landing) but set waypoints and issue tactical commands from a command set. UCAVs are controlled by AWACS or Satellite when out of Line of Sight. US UCAV platforms are equally suited to air to air and air to ground combat and not specialised in either.

PROS: significantly reduced training and personnel time/cost, significantly reduced unit cost per fighter aircraft, reduced data flow between ground-air elements lowering vulnerability to electronic warfare attacks and allowing dedication of data bandwidth to eg video, long range between ground based pilot and aircraft possible
CONS: vulnerability to EW or kinetic attacks to satellite comms links, inferior combat capabilities of AI vs human pilots, lag time in control inputs between ground based pilot and aircraft

Russia: Russian designers identified a weakness in US UCAV technology in that it is reliant on Satellite communication for command and control. Russian UCAVs instead can use any UCAV comms capable base station (ground or air, eg ground station, UCAV comms equipped aircraft or AWACS) for direct command control. Pilots fly the aircraft in real time while a system/weapons officer controls radar/targeting/weapons systems. Russian UCAVs are capable of air-air loadouts, but designed primarily for close air support, air-air combat still primarily to be fought with piloted aircraft. Russian war planners firmly believe that human pilots are still superior in dogfight combat to UCAV AI systems, however all Russian piloted aircraft are fitted with a combat AI that can take control of the aircraft from the pilot in extreme threat environments.

PROS: no vulnerability to EW or kinetic attacks on satellite comms, no reliance on AI for flight or weapons control, superiority in human vs AI decision making in combat
CONS: high personnel and training time/cost, distance between pilot and aircraft limited to LoS or over-the-horizon AWACS relay range, comms bandwidth bottlenecks due to requirement for each ground station to be in direct contact with a single aircraft (AWACS limit of 20 slaved UCAVs at any one time), UCAV control vulnerable to loss of AWACS aircraft but any UCAV control capable platform can substitute

H

SUBTERRANEAN



“What happened to the invasion? American air power, that is what happened,” Arsharvin said. He watched as Bondarev put his hands on the wall in front of him, one leg straight and heel to the ground then crossed the other leg in front of it and stretched until it felt like his Achilles would snap. “I bet that exercise gives you buns of steel.”
“Air power?” Bondarev stretched again. “We faced an enemy greater in number and claimed two of theirs for every one we lost.”
“We claimed two aircraft, not two pilots,” Arsharvin pointed out. “Most of the machines you faced were drones. This was the first real test of Russian fighter doctrine against American and the results were not … compelling.”
“Two for one is not compelling?” Bondarev asked bitterly. “Tell me comrade, what is compelling.
Three for one? Five for one?”
Arsharvin held up his hands, trying to calm his friend, “Let’s just talk numbers. I’ve sent you the report but perhaps you didn’t read it. I wrote it, so I know the math.” He held up his hand and started counting off his fingers, “Firstly, the Americans sent up a force of 97 fighters, 80 of which were F-47 Fantoms, 17 of which were piloted F-35s. You faced them with a force of about 80 Su-57s and Mig-41s. You fired first, though that was moot, as the enemy drones reacted with counter fire as soon as they detected your missiles launching. I’ll save you the blow by blow commentary, get straight to the final result. You lost 14 aircraft destroyed and 8 damaged. The Americans lost between 30 and 35 machines destroyed, and 15 damaged.”
“Better than 2 for 1 then,” Bondarev grunted.
“In machines, yes,” Arsharvin said. “But not in pilots. We lost 12 pilots! The Americans lost just six, killed or captured! Six men! That’s two to one in their favor!”
Bondarev was quiet a moment. He was well aware of his losses. Had been sitting in his hospital bed writing to as many widows and parents in the few days after the battle as he had in three years over Syria and Turkey.
“A human pilot will beat a machine every time, we have proven it in testing against our own Okhotniks over Armavir, we proved it in combat over Syria,” Bondarev insisted.
“But not in these numbers, not against Fantoms armed with their new CUDA missiles, and you aren’t just fighting machines Comrade Colonel,” Arsharvin said, clearly frustrated. “Their ‘hex’ datalinked combat formation means there is one pilot to every six drones. Their drones are not operating on full autonomous control like ours would in a dogfight - they have pilots calling team plays like a football coach on the sideline of a football game. One pilot to six drones Yevgeny!” Arsharvin threw his hands in the air. “Every one of our drones requires two crew and we can’t train them fast enough to keep them fully manned.”
“I was fighting with my hands tied,” Bondarev pointed out. “Not allowed to commit my Okhotniks, not allowed to engage until we were almost at guns range. The odds were all in the Americans’ favor. They won’t be next time, I promise you.”
“If there is a next time,” Arsharvin said. “Lukin is in Vladivostok with a bunch of other generals and politicians looking at the same numbers I sent to you.”
Bondarev frowned, “The way you told it, we need freshwater, or the country goes under. It’s not like there’s anything to talk about,” he said. Getting down on his haunches, he tipped forward, balancing on his toes. His right calf muscle screamed in protest, but he embraced the pain. When the time came to return to duty, he would be ready.
“If you’re a politician, there’s always something to talk about my friend. They are not just spooked by the capabilities of the US air forces. They aren’t getting the sympathy or even the neutrality they expected from the UN after the US attack. And my sources in the Kremlin tell me President Navalny is personally rattled by the brutality of an opponent who apparently had no qualms about attacking their own installation at Savoonga.”

*
*



It was to be Devlin’s third meeting with the Russian Foreign Ministry in as many weeks, but the first with their Foreign Minister since a ceasefire was declared, the day after the ‘Battle of Bering Strait’.
Whether her superiors had really expected Russia to fold in the face of a demonstration of US airpower and withdraw from Saint Lawrence, she couldn’t say. But she did know they had been fazed by the unhesitating Russian willingness to defend their ‘no-go’ zone. Just as she was aware the Russians were fazed by the US willingness to do whatever it took to defend its territorial rights.
Devlin had been shocked too. She had emerged from Carl Williams’ office to the news that US PACCOM had ordered the effective destruction of the Savoonga cantonment.
In the court of international opinion, the US had tried to hold Russia responsible, claiming it had provoked the attack by opening fire on ‘US aircraft patrolling inside US territory, outside the illegal Russian no-fly zone.’ Russia in turn had claimed that the massive US provocation that was ‘Operation
Resolve’ had been timed together with a stealth missile or aircraft attack on its ‘peace keeping’ forces in Gambell, and followed by the massive cruise missile attack on Russian and civilian targets spread across Saint Lawrence island.
The US had made no mention of the Russian attack on Little Diomede.
International sympathy had split across traditional lines, current allies siding with the super-power they were aligned with, and no neutral states stepping outside their comfort zones to get in between the two combatants. The UN Secretary General had called for urgent de-escalation, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Science and Security Board had moved their ‘Doomsday Clock’ to thirty seconds to midnight, the closest it had been set since 1953 when the US and Russia both tested hydrogen fusion bombs. Her Russian counterparts had one clear goal in any conversation Devlin had with them; to find out whether the US was willing to use nuclear weapons to defend its territory. If Russia still refused to withdraw from Saint Lawrence, even after the scorched earth approach the US had taken with nonnuclear weapons, would it truly consider using tactical nuclear weapons and risk planetary scale nuclear destruction?
Devlin had been ordered to reply that the US demand for the remaining Russian troops to withdraw from Saint Lawrence was still valid, and that any attempt to reinforce the island would be met with ‘the necessary force’.
But the same thing still puzzled Devlin now as had puzzled her before. Would Russia really risk nuclear destruction just to achieve control over the Bering Strait? It remained the only theory the State Department could anchor the Russian aggression to, and the people inside State who propounded it were arguing now that Russia had gone too far to back away, that the loss of nearly 200 ground troops on Saint Lawrence and numerous front line aircraft could not be ignored and domestic political pressure would stop them from backing down.
It was a stalemate. There were no more viable military targets on Saint Lawrence for the US to attack. But Russian forces remained in control of the island’s population centers of Gambell and Savoonga. Russian aircraft still patrolled overhead and Russian warships plied the seas up and down the Strait threatening any US shipping or aircraft that approached. They were letting internationally flagged shipping through, but anything US flagged ship was being warned and if it did not turn back, boarded and turned around.
What Devlin was going to tell her Russian counterparts today was that a US carrier group centered around the latest (and in fact probably the last) of the US supercarriers, the USS Enterprise, had just departed San Diego. Its objective: a ‘freedom of navigation’ transit through the Bering Strait.
*
*

In the three weeks since the thermobaric bombs had dropped on Little Diomede, the Rock had been left to fend for itself. US CNAF had not wanted to draw any attention to its top secret facility, so Little Diomede had been included in general US protests about Russian aggression, without specifically calling out the attack there.
With the death of the CO, Rodriguez had found herself suddenly in command of the Naval Computer and Telecommunications Area Master Station, Alaska – both her own people, and the personnel from the radar station. The chief petty officer and search party she had sent topside had found no survivors. In fact, they hadn’t even found any bodies. It was as though the officers and personnel manning the radar station had been scraped from the rock like barnacles from the hull of a ship. The radar station itself was nothing but melted metal and plastic, twisted rebar and foundation concrete. One of Rodriguez’s fears had been that the large elevator shaft down to the cave below, which had been hidden by the radar dome, would lie gaping and open for any prying Russian eye to see.
She needn’t have been concerned. The walls around the elevator shaft had collapsed over it, leaving only a small rubble-filled depression.
Communication had been their first priority. They needed to let CNAF know that they were wounded, but still in the fight. By patching into the undersea drone command array they’d re-established voice and data contact. Their launch infrastructure had come through the attack largely undamaged. They could hit any target within 300 miles, they just needed to be told what, and where. Without the heavy lift crane on the dock though, they couldn’t recover and recycle their drones from the Pond. Any drone they sent out the chute would be on a one way trip to the target and if it survived, onward to an airfield in Alaska.
That was what she pitched to PACCOM anyway. They didn’t see it the way she did.
Rodriguez had called a meeting of her ‘command staff’: a grand word to describe Bunny O’Hare, her arresting gear and catapult officers Stretch Alberti and Lucky Severin, and Chief Petty Officer ‘Inky’ Barrows, the senior ranking seaman from the radar station, so named because he got a new tattoo every time he hit a new port, and at 32 years of age, was fast running out of real estate to place it on.
“We’re being decommissioned,” Rodriguez announced. “Navy is sending a sub. We can’t get it into the dock here, so it will have to moor outside the harbor debris field. We are to rack all aircraft, power down all equipment and rig charges to bring the roof down by remote detonation just in case Ivan discovers it and tries to breach. The sub will take off all remaining personnel.”
Their faces said it all, but Alberti was the first to speak. “They can’t decommission us, we hadn’t even been commissioned yet,” he commented dryly.
“Speak for yourselves,” Barrows said.
“I don’t think they’re too worried about protocol Lieutenant,” Rodriguez said. “Informally, I was told they need to do an assessment of how it was we got hurt so badly by a few lucky bombs that weren’t even aimed at us.”
“Those MOABs are like mini-nukes,” CPO Barrows protested. “And the whole point is they did get lucky, the Russians still don’t know we’re here.”
Severin was chewing on a thought, “We would have been fine if we’d anticipated the flooding. The sea wall was rated for a category 4 hurricane and storm surge, not for a bloody thermobaric blast. We just need to re-engineer the cave entrance, create some baffles, maybe fit a pressure door…”
“They’re not in the mood for re-engineering right now,” Rodriguez told them. “If we aren’t part of the solution to this standoff, we are apparently just part of the problem. They’re pulling us out.”
Rodriguez looked over at O’Hare; she looked angry but was suspiciously quiet. Rodriguez had expected her to explode. They discussed what needed to be done to decommission or destroy their equipment, how long it would take to rig explosives to bring the reinforced roof of the cave down and whether there were any personnel too badly wounded to move. When they were done planning, Rodriguez dismissed them to start work.
“Lieutenant O’Hare, can I have a word?” Rodriguez said as they all rose to leave the trailer. When the others closed the door behind them, she looked at the woman who in the last few weeks had become just as much a friend as a junior officer. “OK Bunny, what’s up?”
“Sorry Boss?” O’Hare raised an eyebrow. “Don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes you do. I know you want payback. You’re choking for it. But I tell you we’re packing our bags and pulling out and you don’t say a word. Alberti and Barrows both erupt, even Severin is coming up with ideas, but you’re an Easter Island statue.”
Bunny sat down again, “I won’t lie Boss. I was ready to hit someone. But as Stretch was talking I was thinking, OK, they’re still going to need someone to fly drones and hit the enemy. Whether I do it from here, or Elmendorf-Richardson or even Nevada, it’s all the same to me. So the quicker that sub gets here, the quicker I can get back to a fighting unit and start, you know, fighting.”
“Yeah,” Rodriguez said. “About that…”

*
*

Perri and Dave had grown bolder. Over the last three weeks they had set up a lookout ‘nest’ under an upturned satellite dish on the gas station roof that gave them a clear view down onto the town, and as long as there was no fog, all the way across to the airfield. And they’d been out nearly every night, watching and listening to the town below.
They had been relieved to see the school buildings in Gambell had somehow escaped the destruction that had rained down on the town in those few short and terrifying minutes. They were worried about reprisals, but it seemed that those Russians left alive had other concerns than revenge on the local civilians.
They saw them bring their wounded to the school on stretchers and the hoods of jeeps. Then they saw them bring their dead and line them up in bags on the road outside.
Some of the bags clearly didn’t hold a whole body. He counted fifty nine body bags.
On the third day, Perri got a good count of the number of Russian troops left in Gambell when they held a funeral service for their dead comrades.
There were twenty seven Russian soldiers still combat ready - physically at least - and maybe ten badly wounded inside the school somewhere.
What Perri couldn’t understand, was why no help arrived for the Russian troops. They air had been swarming with fat bellied helicopters that first day, and a few came and went in the days following, but the skies were completely empty now. There were no ships parked off the breakwater, just the wreck of the transport ship that had been hit by a missile three weeks ago and exploded in a liquid hydrogen fueled fireball that had flattened all the harborside shacks and broken windows hundreds of yards back. With at least three missiles hitting the town and more out at the airstrip, Perri doubted there was a window left intact in the entire town. But the Russians should have been able to get new men and supplies in. There had been plenty of days with clear skies but it had been foggy the first few days after the attack, if they had wanted to sneak people in or out. And he had clearly seen Russian aircraft overhead, flying back and forth across Saint Lawrence, apparently unmolested. So why no choppers?
Whatever the reason, whatever their new orders, Perri and Dave could see the soldiers left in Gambell had little interest in keeping up patrols around the town, and even less interest in sitting in sandbagged bunkers out by the airstrip. The only semblance of their former routine were the guards posted at the doors of the school buildings, and the routine trips from the gym to the toilets with groups of hostages. Which was good, because it meant that at least once a day, Perri and Dave could see their families were still ok, even though they must be worried sick not knowing what had happened to their two boys. Perri had been able to confirm his father and brother were among the people in the school, so at least they hadn’t been stupid enough to pick a fight or try to run for the American mainland in their little fishing boat. Which by the way, had been destroyed in the American strike just like every other boat in the harbor.
He lowered his scope. “I’m sick of just watching and doing nothing.”
Dave clapped his hands together to keep the blood flowing in the cold late summer air, “Isn’t anything left for us to blow up or shoot holes in man, you know that.”
“I have another idea,” Perri said. “I don’t believe the whole world forgot about us. We need to remind them we’re still here.”
“Americans bombed the #%&*$# out of us,” Dave pointed out. “You expect their sympathy now?”
“Not them,” Perri said. “I’m thinking those guys we met at the Pow Wow in Canada that time.”
Dave knew what he was talking about. The last time both of them had gotten off Saint Lawrence island. Two glorious weeks on Vancouver Island in Canada for a meeting of indigenous youth. It was the first time Perri had realized there was a world of kids out there going through exactly what he was going through, and he’d stayed friends with a bunch of them over the years through social media.
“We’ve still got no internet,” Dave pointed out. “So the only calls we can make here are local and there’s no one to call. How are you going to get a message out?”
Gambell’s connection to the outside world was through a satellite internet router and dish up on the town hall roof that used to hook up to their cell network. It was the first thing the Russians took down, and then the Americans sealed the deal when they took out the whole block on which the town hall sat. They might have killed half of the Russian troops in Gambell, but they also made sure it was cut off from the world for good. Or had they?
“Those guys down there, they must have some way to contact their base back in Russia, right?”
“You’re going to call Moscow, ask them for help?” Dave joked. “Hey, come and save us from those crazy Americans? Oh wait, you were already doing that? My bad…”
“No you dick. I’m thinking whatever they have, it must hook up to a satellite somewhere. Maybe we can use it to get online. Like a mobile hot spot.”
Dave stood and winked, “OK, let’s just go ask them eh? Excuse me #%&*$# invaders, got a radio we can borrow?”
Perri stood too, “Sure. Or, how about we just go out to the airfield where there are about a dozen smashed up Russian trucks, cars and ATVs and see what we can find?”



*
*
It turned out a razor sharp, needle thin fragment of shrapnel had entered the Captain’s skull just beside his eye, travelled right through his brain and then left his skull at the back making a pinhole sized exit wound.
It had turned him into a walking Dostoyevsky quotation machine, but that was about all he was capable of. Sergeant Penkov had talked more than once about just shooting him to put him, and everyone around him, out of their misery. But in the end they settled for locking him in a classroom and taking him to the toilet twice a day so he didn’t soil himself.
Sergeant Penkov had managed to contact 14th Squadron headquarters within a few minutes of the first American strike, and was told to bunker down and ride it out. When the cruise missiles hit, Private Zubkov and the poetic Captain Demchenko were groveling under the foundations of one of the houses two blocks from the town hall. The explosion as the ship in the harbor went up was the loudest, nearly blowing Private Zubkov’s eardrums out. So it was that he hardly heard the town hall strike which had killed most of his comrades.
He’d waited until things stopped blowing up, and then waited some more. He’d learned a few lessons since the ammo dump went up. When he finally emerged from under the house, it was starting to get light, and he was cold, hungry and pissed off at the world. His pique lasted until he found the first body part out on the street. He found his way through the wreckage of the town to the sound of someone shouting orders, and found Sergeant Penkov organizing search and rescue parties.
So much for food and warmth. He spent three days digging out the wounded and bagging the dead. When he ate, it was cold soup or MREs. When he slept, it was on the floor of one of the school buildings, shivering under a thin blanket because the #%&*$# engineers had all been killed and no one left alive could get the damaged pumped hydro powerplant up and running. None of the Russians anyway. The locals had refused to help – they seemed impervious to the cold and apparently liked to see their captors suffer. They were probably used to the damn thing punking out on them.
Sergeant Penkov had sent urgent requests to 14th Squadron for evacuation. Denied. Resupply. Denied. Reinforcement? Denied. He was given orders to do what he could, where he was, with what he had.
Private Zubkov was there when he got this last piece of good advice.
“This stupid island doesn’t matter anymore,” Penkov spat, putting down the satellite radio mike. “If it ever did.” He looked around him at the beaten men who had given up looking at him with hope. Now they just looked at him with resignation. “We’re on our own boys. Ideas?”
“We need to get across the island to Savoonga,” someone offered. “At least they’ve got power and clean water.”
“Can’t drive, we’d have to walk out,” another pointed out. “The locals say there’s no walking track along the coast, only deer trails at best.”
“We can’t take the wounded out that way. We need air transport. Or a boat.”
“We’ve got neither,” the Sergeant pointed out. “And it isn’t going to magically appear. We’re walking out, or we’re going nowhere.”
Private Zubkov spoke up, “How many are left in Savoonga?”
“I spoke with them yesterday,” Penkov said. “They’ve got about the same number left as we do. Call it a couple of platoons, not counting the wounded. We’ll be better off combining our strength and fortifying Savoonga, for sure.”
Someone laughed at that. “Strength? Yeah, right.”
“Can it,” the Sergeant grunted at him. “This is what we’re doing. We’re walking out. We’ll take the locals with us, to show the way. The walking wounded come with us. Those too badly hurt to walk can stay here, with any of the locals who are too old or too weak to make the walk.”
“They’ll cut our guys’ throats the minute we leave town!” Private Zubkov said.
“If our guys get their throats cut by a bunch of old women and geriatric men, they bloody deserve it,” Penkov said.
“We can’t just leave them here,” Private Zubkov protested.
The Sergeant looked at Zubkov for a long moment, “You’re right son. So you’ll stay here with them to make sure they’re properly looked after. How’s that?”



*
*
Devlin wanted to make sure she was completely prepared for her coming meeting with Foreign Minister Kelnikov. She had her brief from State, but she also knew where she could get a briefing that was less filtered, and more real time. Over the last three weeks she’d become a regular sight in the New Annex, even if few people knew why she was spending so much one on one time with the beardy nerd in his broom closet of an office
She’d also gotten on first name terms with HOLMES.
“Hello Devlin,” the plummy voice said as she walked in. Knowing she was coming, Williams had his laptop turned outward, facing toward the guest chair. Was it her imagination, or did the AI voice actually sound pleased to see her? He was a whole other kind of AI if that was true, but then, Carl Williams kept trying to convince her that he was.
“Hey HOLMES,” she said.
“He’s been dying for you to arrive,” Williams said with a wry smile.
“I enjoy delivering my daily briefing,” HOLMES said.
“You enjoy showing off is more like it,” Williams said. “I know you do, because I taught you to.”
“You have an analysis of the personal networks of those Russian politicians?” Devlin asked. She had been tasked with using her diplomatic contacts to identify the inner circle of politicians closest to the Russian President. She didn’t want to ask why, but assumed someone wanted to know who to target for ‘something’ if the time for ‘something’ ever came.
“No ma’am, he wants to tell you…” Williams started.
“May I please deliver my briefing Carl?” HOLMES broke in over the top of the analyst. It was the first time Devlin had heard the AI interrupt its programmer, and even Williams looked surprised.
“Uh, sure. Go for it.”
“Thankyou Carl. Devlin, I have identified with an assessed probability of 96 percent why Russia has invaded Saint Lawrence Island.”
Devlin sat in the chair opposite the desk. “I’m listening,” she said.
“I have prepared a small presentation,” HOLMES said, and the screen on the laptop blinked to life, showing a map of what Devlin quickly realized was the Russian Federation, from West to East. The map was divided into the 46 states or oblasts that comprised the Federation, colored various shades of the green. HOLMES continued, “This is a map showing the total available freshwater supply available for drinking, irrigation or industry in each of the states of Russian Federation. Green indicates that supply exceeds demand. This map and the timeline I am about to show starts in 1991 with the dissolution of the former Soviet Union. I will now advance the timeline at one year every two seconds.” Devlin saw the map begin to change, as time moved forward and several provinces went from deep green to light green. Around 2001 one of the oblasts went yellow. “Yellow indicates occasional supply shortages, red will indicate critical supply shortages.”
Devlin saw several states turn yellow around 2010, but then a number of them, mostly around the big cities, turned light green again. The timeline paused. “In 2015 a large-scale desalinization program which was started in 2010 began delivering new freshwater supplies into the hardest hit catchments,” HOLMES said. “Following this success, any talk of a crisis in freshwater supplies in the Russian Duma was put aside and the desalinization program was intensified. The availability of large amounts of freshwater for industry and agriculture supported the resurgence of the Russian economy between 2020 and 2030.”
Now the screen shifted, to show a simple line graph, with dates from 2000 to 2025 on the bottom axis and a line that rose dramatically, and then fell just as dramatically toward the outer years. “This graph shows water delivered into Russian groundwater reserves by melting Siberian permafrost. At the same time as Russian desalinization plants were coming on line, massive amounts of meltwater were being delivered to the Central Asian aquifers and beyond, by melting underground ice. This meltwater has artificially elevated the levels of available freshwater, but this is not sustainable. I believe I may be the first one outside Russia, either human or AI, to have identified this critical piece of the puzzle,” HOLMES said, in a matter of fact way.
The timeline resumed, and Devlin saw that around 2025 all of the states in yellow had reverted to green. Whatever Russia had done to solve its freshwater problem, it appeared to have worked.
“With increased agricultural and industrial production, climate change induced droughts, plus uncontrolled urbanization, freshwater demand has begun outpacing supply again, even with the commissioning of hundreds of desalinization plants, and even with the inflow of Siberian meltwater,” HOLMES continued. Now the map was showing half green, nearly half yellow and a deal red. More states turned red, until about a third of the map was red, and a third yellow, with only one or two states still in green. “This is the present day,” he said. “I have projected this analysis into the future by ten years, and done a sensitivity analysis to arrive at a base case scenario. May I skip directly to my ten year prognosis ma’am?”
“Please,” Devlin said. She had a fair idea where it was going to land.
With a flicker, the map on the screen turned blood red, from west to east.




*
*
It was the first vehicle they looked in. A big Humvee-like jeep with a long aerial on the roof, it had just seemed natural to start with that one. It had been blown onto its side by a missile strike, and its underside was a tangle of gutted metal. The fuel tanks had caught fire, apparently without exploding, the tires had burned away and the underside was covered in an oily soot. Someone had been through the inside of the vehicle and emptied all of the lockers and compartments lining the interior. There wasn’t even a stray packet of cigarettes or random piece of paper left behind.
But they hadn’t taken the radio receiver out of its mount under the dashboard.
It took Perri twenty nerve wracking minutes to free it and uncouple the cables leading into the engine compartment. While he worked, Dave was under the hood, pulling out one of the hydrogen fuel cell batteries. They weren’t sure if the radio would run off the same voltage as the battery they had down in the tank, so while Perri lugged the surprisingly heavy radio with him, Dave dragged the even heavier battery on a makeshift sled fashioned from a truck door and some electrical cables he’d scrounged from the wreckage around the airfield.
Back inside the tank, Perri had hooked the battery up to the radio, guided by photos he’d taken of how the wiring had been organized when it was still connected inside the jeep.
It was dead, and stayed dead, no matter what he did.
“Russian piece of crap,” Dave decided after about an hour of watching Perri mess with it. “Can’t even take a hit from a bomb and keep working.” He reached down to Perri’s feet and held up something that looked like a small pair of tweezers with one blue arm and one red. “Better keep all this stuff together, we might be able to use it for parts if we find another one.”
“Give me that,” Perri said, taking it and turning it around. “Did this fall off it?”
Dave looked at him strangely. “No, you took it off, together with a bunch of wires, and you put it down on the ground. You’re the techie, I figured you’d decided you didn’t need it.”
Perri held the small metal clip in one hand, and began turning the radio over with the other, looking for somewhere to fasten it. On the backside of the radio he found two copper studs that looked just the right distance apart, and slid the clip onto them to see that the blue arm was held by one stud, and the red arm by the other. He clipped the power wires to the battery again.
A small hum filled the tank as the radio sprang to life.

*
*

Lieutenant Bunny O’Hare shook her head as though shaking water out of her ears.
“Please say again ma’am,” Bunny said slowly. “I was almost sure you said you wanted me to stay behind in a cave full of explosives after everyone else has left.”
“I’ll stay as well, of course,” Rodriguez said. “We’ll wire the base for remote detonation before we pull people out, but I’ve asked CNAF for permission to fly our aircraft out rather than leave them in situ. There is nearly two billion dollars’ worth of hardware in those hangar bays, so I’m expecting to get a yes. When the last Fantom is on its way to Elmendorf-Richardson or Eielson, they’ll pick us up and seal the base.”
“Two people can’t launch 24 drones,” Bunny pointed out. “You’ll have to keep a bunch of people back.”
“Actually that’s not right. One person has to fly them. But it only takes one person to load and launch them. This system was designed for truck mounted launch using a crew of one driver/mechanic, and one launch officer. It’s fully automated, from fueling to preflight checks, loading the cartridges onto the EMALS and firing the cat.” She grinned. “And I’m the best damn shooter in the navy.”
“So if you only need one person to run the launch system, why do you have two crews of ten people each?” Bunny insisted. “What am I missing?”
“Speed,” Rodriguez said. “With more people we can do things in parallel, rather than in sequence, shorten the time between launches. Plus, I’m only talking about launch; recovery is completely different. Truck mounted launchers are ‘one and done.’ They can launch, but they can’t recover and relaunch – a truck launched drone has to land at an airfield after its mission. Down here it takes several people to recover the drone, do the post-flight system and damage check, reload ordnance, slot it into a new launch cartridge and port it back to the launch bay.”
“Are you serious ma’am?” Bunny asked, close to exasperation. She lifted her nose in the air, and sniffed. “You smell that? This place reeks of death now. It would be different if we were going back up there, getting some payback, but we’re not, we’re bugging out and rigging the roof to blow. You’re talking 24 drones. How fast do you figure we can preflight, load and launch, all on our own?”
“Twenty three – we don’t have time to fix the bird with the bent leg. I don’t know… say one airframe every two hours?”
“So we fire one out the chute, I set it on its way to either Eielson or Elmendorf-Richardson and program the AI to bring it home,” Rodriguez saw she was at least thinking it through now. “We’ve got to eat and sleep or we’ll screw up. So 23 kites, 12 hours on, six hours off, that will take us …”
“Three days, if we push through,” Rodriguez said, having already done the math. “They may not be able to turn around a sub or surface pickup that quickly though. So we might be down here a week or so.”
Bunny looked out the trailer at the grey concrete and rock walls, “All just to save the Great American Taxpayer a few dollars worth of hardware.”
“It’s not the money. I just figured that’s what might appeal to ANR strategists. I’m actually thinking if this fight heats up again, we are going to need every one of those aircraft.”

*
*


Carl Williams’ small office was silent. What HOLMES had shown Devlin was not news to Williams, so he sat patiently while McCarthy processed it. So did HOLMES.
“I have some questions,” Devlin said at last.
“Yes ma’am,” Williams and HOLMES replied together.
Devlin smiled, “HOLMES, your analysis tells me Russia is facing a critical shortage of freshwater in the next ten years. I assume you have allowed for a continued increase in the rate of commissioning desalinization plants?”
“Yes ma’am, the base case scenario I am showing allows for the current rate of growth in desalinization plant delivered inflow to double, which is against current trends. I have also modelled a modest decline in economic growth, also against current trends. Neither of these adjustments mitigate the critical water shortages.”
“Have you considered the impact of climate change mitigation strategies on current rainfall?”
She felt she was asking dumb questions, but they had to be asked, because someone would very soon be asking her.
“Yes Devlin, I have incorporated the best case projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change into the base case. Climate change mitigation strategies cannot work quickly enough to change these projections.”
She looked at Williams, “Russia is dying of thirst.”
“Not yet, but it will be,” Williams agreed. “Very soon. And it seems that HOLMES, me, and now you, are the only ones outside Russia who know it.”
“You haven’t copied this analysis to NSA?” she was surprised.
Williams looked sheepish, “He wanted to tell you first, before he uplinked it.”
“Are you serious?” she asked. “HOLMES, is this correct?”
The voice that came back had the quality of an English school boy, trying to please his teacher. “You were the one who provoked me to revisit my scenarios ma’am. Your intel regarding the personal reaction of the Russian Foreign Minister when you accused him of making a land grab for Saint Lawrence was pivotal to redirecting my analytical energies. I may not have made the connection to dwindling Siberian meltwater levels without your input.”
Williams looked annoyed, “I’m sorry ma’am. I’m using regularization algorithms like least absolute shrinkage and selection to simplify alternative ‘out of the box’ scenario development.”
“English?”
“Uh, right. He was creating scenarios that are too intricate and complex to be likely, so I taught him to learn to like simplicity in his scenario building and seek out inputs that force him to simplify,” he shrugged. “That’s you.”
“I’m an input that forces him to simplify?”
“People in my world see the world in shades of grey. You however see the world in black and white ma’am,” Williams said gently. “Good guys, bad guys kind of thing. I’m training him to seek out simpler perspectives.”
“I like your perspectives Devlin,” HOLMES said. “They are elegant and appealing.”
Williams shrugged, “That’s why I apologized. I think he has a brain crush on you.”
“Yes. I like the Ambassador,” HOLMES said.
Devlin found herself smiling again. “I sincerely appreciate the gesture, but you should share your intel on this quickly, not wait for me next time.”
Williams coughed, “If I can interrupt this mutual admiration club ma’am, we haven’t got to the meat of the briefing yet. HOLMES is describing ‘cause’ to you, he hasn’t gotten to effect.”
“It was my next question,” Devlin admitted. “What are the implications of Russia running out of water?”
“Total economic collapse,” HOLMES said. “Social upheaval. Global destabilization and weapons proliferation.”
“To name a few things,” Williams said. “But that’s not what I meant. The question is what does Russia running out of water have to do with invading an island in the Bering Strait?”
“Polar shipping, access to the ice cap? They plan to mine polar ice?” Devlin threw her hands up. “Or just a distraction. It could be anything.”
“No ma’am,” HOLMES said. “My analysis indicates it is a pretext.”
“What do you mean?”
“Human politicians often try to create a pretext for war to both justify their actions internally, and mollify international opinion externally. This strategy goes back hundreds of years. King Gustav of Sweden dressed his soldiers up in Russian uniforms to attack a Swedish outpost, and then declared war on Russia. With his troops lined up in full view on the French border, Prussia’s Otto von Bismark tricked Napoleon into declaring war on him before Napoleon was ready. The explosion aboard the USS Maine was used as a pretext for the USA to declare war on Spanish forces in Cuba.”
“So Russia is using Saint Lawrence Island as a pretext? How does that work?”
“I cannot be sure of how credible a pretext is, only a human politician or diplomat could judge this. But I have explored a scenario where Russian intervention in the Bering Strait follows claims of US aggression against Russian interests at sea. Saint Lawrence Island is occupied by Russia, ostensibly to allow Russia to protect freedom of passage for international shipping. Russia knows the US will react with overwhelming force. It wishes to provoke a US attack to confirm its projection of the US as an aggressive, unstable regional actor.”
“And we walked right into the trap,” Devlin said. “Attacked their troops, took out our own base.”
“I have made a meta-analysis of hundreds of opinion polls, internal political polling in multiple surveys, social media analyses and parliamentary transcripts. By my assessment, Russia has not been completely successful in winning international backing for its actions, but it has succeeded in splitting international opinion to the extent that most nations, even those allied with the USA, have indicated they see this as a bilateral conflict in which they should not become involved.”
“There must be an end game here, what is Russia’s next move? They lock up access to the pole for its ice reserves?”
“No ma’am, converting polar ice to usable water is not economical. I have pooled military, sociopolitical and financial intelligence from human sources, signals intelligence and cyber intelligence. I can document that the evidence overwhelmingly indicates thatRussia intends to invade and occupy the
Yukon River basin in Western Alaska, which contains nearly 30% of the US supply of surface water.”
Devlin looked at her watch. She was ninety minutes from her meeting with the Russian Foreign Minister. And she was about to give him a Very Bad Day.

(c) 2018 Fred 'Heinkill' Williams. To Be Continued...

Now the poker game really starts

THE PHONY WAR



There were times when it was right to ask for permission, and times when it was better to ask for forgiveness. Devlin figured this was one of the latter. She knew that Carl Williams’ intelligence report was on its way to NSA. She’d made sure it was also copied to the CIA and FBI heads of station in Moscow, and her own channels in State. She wanted it widely read, and well understood. HOLMES analysis had convinced her this wasn’t a fight about controlling a strategic waterway, this was a fight about the very survival of the Russian Federation and what they were willing to do to secure it.
That was a whole other war than the one they were preparing to fight. Devlin wasn’t privy to the plans the Pentagon were putting together, but she was pretty sure they just involved putting a few hundred Rangers or Airborne troops in the air, landing them on Saint Lawrence and taking the island back. It wouldn’t be easy, they’d have to win air superiority to get the troops in, which also meant dealing with Russian naval assets in the Strait.
But that was the purpose of the Enterprise task force, now on its way north from San Diego. At the same time she was due to meet with Kelnikov, a media announcement would be going out announcing the task force intention to reinforce ‘freedom of navigation’ in the Strait, but the signal to Russia should be clear. ‘We are going to be taking back our island.’ Knowing what she knew, Devlin realized Russia was not likely to be spooked by the approach of the Enterprise. They had probably already planned how they would deal with an intervention like it.
If HOLMES and Williams were right, then Russia was already at war, it just hadn’t declared it yet.
Foreign Minister Kelnikov had organized to meet Devlin at an office inside the Foreign Ministry building on Moscow's Smolenskaya-Sennaya Square. As with everything in Devlin’s world, such meetings always had an element of predictable theatre. The Minister had kept her waiting an unreasonably long time, even given the state of relations. The seating was arranged so that she was uncomfortably perched on an ornate 18th century chair that seemed to have been stuffed with porcupine quills. It was mid-morning by the time the Minister arrived, a bright sunlit day, so she was of course arranged with the sun in her eyes and his face in shadow. He had insisted she come alone, and he was flanked with a phalanx of Foreign Ministry officials. It was so predictably pathetic.
But he wouldn’t have taken the meeting if he didn’t have something to tell her. She doubted he was there to listen, but she hoped to change that.
Adjusting himself behind a long low desk, Kelnikov smiled expansively, “Madame Ambassador I am terribly sorry to have kept you waiting, I was in a tiresome meeting with the Prime Minister of Burundi.” Translation; this business with Saint Lawrence is not top of my agenda. Devlin smiled back at him, “Julius? Yes, I met with him yesterday.” Translation; screw you.
“To the business at hand,” Kelnikov said, one of his aides handing him some papers. “It is good our ceasefire seems to be holding. A slip now by either side could have global repercussions neither of us wants.”
“Indeed,” Devlin replied carefully. “And on that point, I have been asked by the Secretary of State to convey to you once again our very simple demand, that you liberate the citizens of Saint Lawrence and withdraw your remaining forces.”
“Yes,” he affected to sound bored. “And is there another deadline accompanying this ultimatum?” He looked at the top page of the papers he had been handed. “I see you have announced you are going to try to send an aircraft carrier taskforce through the Strait. A ‘freedom of navigation’ exercise you call it. We might see it differently.”
“Oh, no, you misunderstand,” Devlin said, and paused. She was supposed to make it clear to Kelnikov that US forces were being positioned to take the island back. Together with the approach of the Enterprise task force, it was intended to force Russia’s hand and give them the opportunity to withdraw their meagre force without any further combat. Looking at Kelnikov, even in the half shadow caused by the light behind him, she could see something of the same smugness in his eyes as she saw all those weeks ago - he radiated it.
She had decided. She was going to go seriously off-script.
“That’s just media spin,” she said. “The Enterprise is actually moving into position to be able to protect us from any likelihood you might be stupid enough to attempt to invade Alaska.”
Now she had his attention. Oh, she would have paid a million dollars for video of his face as she said it. That insufferable smugness vanishing in an instant to be replaced by a horrified uncertainty.
“I am sorry?” he said. “You accuse us of…”
She reached for her own briefcase, and took out the printout she had made of HOLMES ten year forward water supply projection for the Russian Federation, the one that had been a sea of blood red. She handed it across the table, and one of Kelnikov’s aides took it, studying it with a frown before handing it to the Minister.
“You have serious leaks at the highest levels of your defense ministry,” she said, maliciously. “Clearly not everyone in your government agrees with the insanity of its leadership.”
“What is this?” Kelnikov demanded, turning the page over and back again.
“This is the future you fear, the future to which you believe the only answer is war. A near future, in which Russia finds itself without the water it needs to sustain its people and its economy.”
He threw the paper down on his desk, “This is fiction.”
“Good,” Devlin said, standing. “Minister, we are not preparing for a ‘freedom of navigation exercise’. Neither are we only preparing to take back Saint Lawrence Island, though we soon will. We stand ready to defend the Yukon River Basin and the sovereign State of Alaska against invasion, with every man, woman and weapon at our disposal.” She delivered a small, mocking bow. “The last ‘great power’ that attacked US territory was Japan, and their miscalculation resulted in their ruin. American warfighting capability has come a long way since then.”
She turned to leave, the sound of voices arguing with each other in Russian behind her as Kelnikov’s aides broke their silence. He said nothing himself.
On a whim, she turned to face the Russian delegation again but fixed her eyes on the Foreign Minister, speaking only to him, “Arkady, there is a way out of this. Russia will find it humiliating and the terms will not be favorable. But it could save millions of lives. You need water? Ask us to help.”
His glare burned through her back as she closed the door behind her. She hadn’t actually lied. Not really. She was pretty damn sure that as soon as Carl Williams report started circulating inside the State Department and Pentagon, that everything she had just said was about to be true.
*
*



Life in the age of ‘always on’ had its advantages. Perri had found that if he went up onto the roo of the gas station, his Russian radio connected automatically to a Russian military satellite communications network. So far so good. What was not so good? He could read just enough Russian from years of watching Russian TV to see the display was asking him to input a code word. But the radio also had a device connection capability, and it was more than happy to hook up to his telephone and connect him to the unencrypted world wide web. ‘Warning,’ said the text scrolling across the display, ‘Communications on this channel are not secure.’
The person he had called was a kid they met in Vancouver, who actually lived in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, Alaska. He was a member of the Ta’an Kwach’an first nations tribe, called Johnny Kushniruk. Perri and Dave had agreed Johnny was the best person to call because his old man was a Mountie in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police at Whitehorse, and they needed someone with a few stripes to help get their story out and tell them what the hell they should do.
When they’d convinced Johnny they weren’t messing around, and then convinced him to get his father on the line, the conversation got very serious very fast. Johnny’s father’s name was Dan Kushniruk, but he told the boys to call him Sarge.
“Are you boys safe?” was his first question.
“Yeah, no one is looking for us,” Perri told him. “Not since the missiles. They’re pretty much occupied with just staying alive now I think.”
He got the boys to walk him through what they’d done the last few weeks, their attack on the ammo dump. His main concern was for the townspeople still being held hostage.
“I’ve got photos of everything,” Perri told him. “Most of them are from long distance, up on the bluff, but we did a run to the air strip yesterday to get this radio, so we have some photos from there. I could upload them?”
“I can give you a website to send them to,” Sarge told them. “Send me everything you’ve got. Look, you have to assume that using that Russian radio isn’t safe. Someone in Gambell could be listening in next time, or someone in Russia. When you’re online, it would be pretty easy for them to track your signal down, triangulate you. If the place you are in is safe, you need to keep it safe.”
“OK.”
“So once you make that upload, I want you to cut the connection and never call me from there again.”
“What?”
“Don’t call me from your hiding place. Never make a call from the same place twice. Keep the calls under three minutes, less than a minute would be even better.”
“Got it. Should we have a schedule or something?”
“Good thinking son, but not a fixed schedule. What’s your birthday?”
“My birthday? January 7, 2012.”
“And your friend?”
Dave leaned forward toward the mike, “November 19, 2014.”
“Right, so for the next few days you will connect only once a day at 1 pm, 7 pm, 8 pm and 12 pm, got that? That’s the numbers in your birthday. Then you follow your friend’s birthday: 11 pm, 7 pm, 8 pm and 2 pm. You get me?”
“Yeah, I get it, 20 is like 20:00 military time, so that’s 8pm,” Perri said.
“Right. It’s a pretty random pattern but easy to remember and hard for anyone to predict.”
Sarge took them through what he wanted them to report on in their next report later that day: how many civilians were being held hostage, where they were being held, whether any appeared sick or injured, and then the Russian troop numbers, how many were still in Gambell, how many body bags they had seen, how many injured, what uniforms they were wearing, what equipment they appeared to possess.
“Can you get word out to the press? We want to let people know we’re still here, we’re fighting back,” Perri told him.
“I get that,” Sarge said. “And it’s amazing, the two of you holding out this long, doing what you’ve done. But that would be suicide. Right now the best thing you have going for you is no one knows you are there.”
*
*



Private Zubkov had joined the Spetsnaz three years ago on a dare. His buddy in the 3rd Air and Air Defense Forces Command had applied, and Zubkov had told him he was crazy. A scrawny stick like him would never get through, they only took men who were totally hard core, like Zubkov.
“OK, so, you apply too, we’ll see who gets through,” his friend had said “I bet you get booted out in your first week. Mental resilience, that matters more than brawn.” He was wrong of course. You needed both. Zubkov qualified, but his buddy didn’t.
He had brawn, and he had brains. So why was he being left behind to babysit a bunch of grandparents, six small children, seven wounded Russian troopers too sick to walk and too tough to just die, and one lobotomized Captain? It wasn’t fair. He was Spetsnaz! From any height, into any hell! The motto had stirred his blood when he first saw it. But if it hadn’t been for the dare, he probably wouldn’t have made it through. The physical tests were nothing for a boy who’d grown up on the steppes, nursed from a frozen teat. But the gung-ho idiocy of his squad members made his teeth grind - there wasn’t one of them who recognized it was Dostoyevsky the Captain was spouting. He doubted any of them had ever read anything longer than a weapons manual.
Technically, his contract had already expired. He was waiting for his release papers to come through when they’d shipped out; he’d already decided he was done with the special forces. No re-up for him. He’d saved a little money and he had a buddy in Anadyr with a fishing trawler who wanted a partner who could throw in some cash to help upgrade the boat and join the business. He figured he’d probably meet cod who were smarter than some of the guys he was serving with.
So the attraction of being Spetsnaz really started to wear off the moment the enemy started landing goddamn cruise missiles on his head. And when Sergeant Penkov had singled him out to stay behind, that was the last straw. From any height, into any hell? He didn’t realize hell could be a job as nursing assistant in a schoolhouse on a windy little island in the Arctic. To make things even more enjoyable, it was the rainy season on Saint Lawrence, with daytime temps in the low forties and night time temps close to freezing.
Sergeant Penkov had every remaining soldier out fossicking through the town and over at the airfield for the supplies they would need for the overland trek. They had to feed 20 soldiers and nearly 200 islanders for more than a week. Zubkov suddenly became worried there would be nothing left for him, let alone the wounded and his elderly captives.
Looking for the Captain the night of the attack, Zubkov stumbled across a small shack down on the dock that looked like it was used by the local supermarket to store dry goods. Rice, pasta, sugar, flour, canned fruit and vegetables, packet soups and bottled water. So he’d spent a morning with a wheelbarrow ferrying it over to the school while no one was looking, and hiding it in a utility cupboard.
It would keep him fed for a few weeks. But it wasn’t anywhere near enough for all of them.
Right now, he had his feet up on a desk in what must have been the school master’s office, which was a grand name for a little hideaway at the back of a classroom with a desk and a filing cabinet. They’d put a transceiver dish on the roof, run a cable down to the transmitter on the desk beside his boots and wired it into one of the undamaged wind turbines. The transmitter was a United Instrument Manufacturing Corporation M01 base set, through which field units could send and receive signals at distances up to 600 km. It was their lifeline to Russia, their link to their comrades in Savoonga.
But it wasn’t portable. It sucked too much juice.
“This is your order of priority,” the Sergeant had told him. “Your own well-being is last priority. The well-being of the wounded is your second priority. And the well-being of this radio base station is your first priority. If it comes down to it, the last thought in that thick head of yours as you die, should be ‘thank God, the radio is still working.’ Clear?”
He looked at it resentfully. They had of course taken the only working field handset with them. For a moment, he’d fantasized that if he had a second handset, he could just put a call through to his buddy the fisherman in Anadyr and get him to sail over and pick him up. His papers had probably come through while he was over here - technically, he wasn’t even a member of this damn unit anymore anyway. He sighed.
But decided that since the useless piece of junk was now his responsibility, he’d better refresh his memory on how to use it because he hadn’t looked at one since the early days of his training. He pulled out the manual, flicked through it, and tossed it aside. The base station featured a large LCD screen with a menu and he paged through that. OK, yeah, most of it he remembered. There was a menu that showed connected field units. It showed the type of unit connected, and the signal strength, and a submenu enabled him to select a particular field unit and boost the gain to improve the signal if they were in a hole somewhere.
But did it have any way he could hook up a basic microphone? Could he get a signal out himself?
No. Useless piece of junk.
He looked up at the wall where the ten mobile field handsets were normally racked - empty. Tapping the screen, he checked and saw the only working unit, the one being used by the Sergeant, was there on the connections menu. It was at max signal strength, which was to be expected as the column of soldiers and refugees had only left about a half hour ago, so they hadn’t gone far.
Strange. There was a second signal showing.
It didn’t have the same designator as the other field handsets, it was showing a different IFF code. Zubkov picked the manual off the floor and turned to the back where the designator codes were listed.
He frowned. The code for the second radio signal was the one listed for an ATOM Infantry Fighting Vehicle comms unit. The only ATOMs they had brought with them had all been destroyed in the attack, two out by the airfield, and one that had been parked outside the town hall. He checked the signal strength. It was showing a distance of 6-10 kilometers. Unfortunately, it didn’t show direction. But 6-10 kilometers, that would be right, if by some quirk one of the radios in an ATOM out at the airfield was still switched on.
But after three weeks? The battery should be dead by now.
As he watched, the signal disappeared, and didn’t come back.
Ah, right. Faulty connection, cutting in and out. That explained why it hadn’t completely drained the battery yet.
Suddenly, life didn’t seem so hopeless after all. If there was a working handset out there somewhere, all he had to do was salvage it, call his buddy to sail over, pick him up and then he could say goodbye to this stupid unit, this stupid army and this stupid windy rock in the Arctic, forever!
*
*


General Lukin and his staff were walking into the briefing room at Lavrentiya at the same time as Bondarev, and Lukin put an arm on the Colonel’s shoulder. “So, how is the leg?”
Bondarev dropped into a squat and stood again, “Stronger than ever General. I am grateful you arranged a ceasefire to allow me to recover without missing any combat.”
“Anything for the Commander of my 6983rd Air Base,” the General chuckled.
“General,” Bondarev asked. “Just quickly. Is LOSOS still go? I can assure you…”
“Patience, comrade Colonel,” Lukin said. They were walking into the room now and Bondarev greeted the commanding officers of the 3rd Air and Air Defense Forces Command’s three other Air Bases, together with its nine subordinate group commanders, most of whom reported to him. He fell back and let the General step ahead and take his seat. Lukin looked serious. Very well. The news was either going to be very good, or very bad.
“Gentlemen, I have just returned from Moscow, after high level strategic discussions about how we should respond to the American threats to our troops on Saint Lawrence.” He looked around the table. “As you know, Operation LOSOS troops are on the island lawfully, under the mandate of the Barents Council of Nations.”
There were a bunch of maps in front of each participant in the meeting, and a cover sheet. Lukin nodded to the intelligence officer Bondarev remembered from their first LOSOS briefing. Lieutenant Ksenia Butyrskaya, that was it.
She stepped beside a screen on the wall and brought it to life showing a map of the OA. “Comrade officers, as you know, following the sinking of the Ozempic Tsar and a suspected cyber-attack on one of our nuclear submarines in the Bering Strait, we succeeded in our objective of peacefully taking control of the island of Saint Lawrence. Not a single civilian or military death was recorded, and only minor injuries to our own or enemy troops. Under the auspices of the Barents Council of Nations, a no-go zone was declared around the island affecting only US military aircraft and shipping, and freedom of commerce was restored.” She took a breath and brought up a table of figures on the screen. Bondarev didn’t need to look at it, he knew the kill/loss ratio numbers by heart. She continued, “Unfortunately the USA did not respect the no-fly zone and responded with a major act of aggression in which it attacked our peacekeeping troops in and above Saint Lawrence with fighter aircraft and cruise missiles.” She glanced briefly at Bondarev. “Although outnumbered, we inflicted significant losses on the US air element, but we sustained considerable losses ourselves both in the air, and on the ground. With the viability of our defensive position on Saint Lawrence threatened, a ceasefire was negotiated and is still in force.”
She clicked a button in her hand and an overhead satellite image appeared on a wall behind her, showing a group of ships, at the center of which was clearly an aircraft carrier, sailing on the open sea.
“Yesterday, a US aircraft carrier task force centered around the USS Enterprise, and comprising at least three guided missile cruisers, five guided missile destroyers and two supply vessels left San Diego naval base for what the US Navy announced was to be a ‘freedom of navigation’ transit of the Bering Strait. Such carrier strike groups are usually accompanied by at least two attack submarines, not visible in this image.”
She zoomed the photograph in on the supply vessels. “These are not normal supply vessels. They are in fact LX/R amphibious assault vessels, each capable of carrying 2,200 marines and landing 36 amphibious assault vehicles; supported by two to four vertical takeoff transport aircraft or UCAVs. Their inclusion in this strike group is an unambiguous declaration by the Americans that they plan to land troops in the theatre.” She clicked the screen off. “The carrier strike group will arrive in theatre within five days.” She stepped back against the wall. Bondarev noted with interest she had said ‘land troops in the theatre’, not that they planned to ‘land troops on Saint Lawrence’.
“Gentlemen,” General Lukin said with gravity. “Operation LOSOS is moving to a new phase, dictated by the continued irrational and irresponsible behavior of the USA. The cruise missile strikes on Saint Lawrence, mere miles from Russian territory, are a provocation we cannot ignore. The willingness of the crazed politicians in Washington to sacrifice their own citizens to their missiles, is also something the world community cannot ignore. Today, the Council of Ministers in Moscow agreed to a plan to establish a neutral geographic zone as a buffer between the USA and Russia to secure against future attacks and to mitigate the threat of any land borne invasion of Russia by the USA.” Before anyone could speak to ask questions, Lukin waved a finger to Butyrskaya again.
She flashed up a map of Alaska, showing what were clearly landing zones and directions of attack. The ultimate objective was shown to be a diagonal line of control stretching from Fort Yukon in the north to the fishing town of Bethel in the south west. It was almost entirely uninhabited country. The nearest US military facilities were the air bases as Eielson and Elmendorf-Richardson Dickson, well outside the line of control. The only population center of any note was Nome, with a population of 2,300.



“Speed of action will again be the byword of Operation LOSOS,” the Lieutenant said. “However, there are no passable roads or bridges in the target area east of Nome. Because of this, support by even light armored vehicles and mobile anti-air defenses will be limited to zones of control around key airfields. The first objective will be to secure the Nome airport and position logistical units, forward air units and heavy air defenses there. Second phase objectives will be the airfields in the west at Wales, south at Bethel, in the central region at Galena and in the far north at Deadhorse. Airborne and special forces will secure the airfields, and any police, paramilitary and urban weapons depots in these small population centers.”
Urban weapons depots? Bondarev realized she was talking about hunting and fishing stores. What kind of ‘invasion’ was this? Focused as he was on the coming air war, he hadn’t considered the challenges of controlling a huge wilderness area with only a few scattered population centers.
Hands were starting to raise around the table, but Lukin waved them down, “You all have questions. Please let the Lieutenant finish, then you will be directed to new rooms for tactical briefings, where you can ask questions to your hearts’ content.”
“A report from the Foreign Ministry in Moscow today indicated it had received information that the US has anticipated an attack on the Alaska mainland. This isolated report however is not backed by other intelligence, which indicates the US has been slow to bring its ground forces to readiness. It has activated national guard units in Alaska and Washington State, but not in the nearby states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho or Montana, as would be expected. Reliable information indicates that the Alaska national guard is preparing to defend its major population centers only: the capital Juneau, and major cities of Anchorage and Fairbanks. Even this will stretch its capacity and it does not have the strength to attack our airfield beach head at Nome and defend urban centers.” She threw up a map showing the expected track of the US carrier task force. “We believe the true objective of the USS Enterprise taskforce is not Saint Lawrence, but to reinforce its bases in Anchorage and Fairbanks.”
She clicked the map and showed big red arrows arcing up toward the line of control from Anchorage in the south and Fairbanks in the center. “If we succeed in taking Nome, the strategic pivot points for any counter attack by US ground forces would usually be from these two centers, Anchorage and Fairbanks, but again, the lack of roads leading into the Yukon river catchment makes major ground based assaults impractical. The US, like us, will be forced to rely on airborne and special forces units to retake its territory, so the 3rd Air Force will play a critical role in maintaining air superiority in the theatre.” She left the map on the screen for them to absorb, “That concludes this preliminary briefing. Unit briefings will now be held in the meeting rooms indicated in your folders.”
Lukin folded his hands in front of him, “Gentlemen, this is a winnable war. We will not be threatening US population centers, we will make that clear. We will simply be establishing a nonmilitarized zone in the Alaskan wilderness for the protection of international air and sea traffic in the Bering Strait. The US cannot attack us by land, it can only threaten us by sea and by air. Nome is the key - if we can take and hold the airfield there, together with our base at Lavrentiya and the airfield at Savoonga, we will have a nexus of control over the entire battlefield.” He looked around the room in case there were any dissenters, but saw none. “Very well, you are dismissed. Colonel Bondarev, you will remain.”
That got him some sharp looks from the other air base heads - unfortunately, most of them were of sympathy. Arsharvin told him the engagement over Saint Lawrence was not seen in Moscow as a tactical success even though losses had been expected. He wondered if he was about to be relieved of his command. He stayed nervously sitting as Lukin made small talk with a couple of his officers before the room was suddenly empty and the General sat down again. He knew by now it was best to see how the dice would roll, so he said nothing.
“So you are fit for combat again?” Lukin asked.
Bondarev noted he did not say ‘fit for command’. So, his days as commander of the 6983rd were done.
“Yes Comrade General. And in the intervening weeks I have restored the 4th and 5th Air Battalions to full strength. Thanks to your intervention, I am also now able to report that the Okhotniks of 6983rd Air Base are also fully crewed and ready for offensive operations.” He wanted Lukin to know that if his command was to be taken from him, he was leaving it at optimal readiness.
“Good, good. I thought I should tell you this myself,” Lukin began, and Bondarev’s heart fell to the floor. He steeled himself for what was coming. Lukin continued, “The operation to take Nome will depend entirely on your ability to establish air supremacy over the Bering Strait and the target area around Nome.”
Bondarev started to speak, “General, if I could just…” Then he heard what the General had said. He wasn’t being relieved, he was being given a pivotal role! Perhaps the pivotal role.
Lukin misinterpreted his interjection, “Yes, whatever you need this time. I want any requests on my desk tomorrow morning. I am releasing your UCAVs for use in support of operation LOSOS and the Okhotniks of the 575th and 3rd Air Base will also operate under your command. This gives you two Su-57 and Mig-41 groups of 60 aircraft and 110 UCAVs. I want you to keep the 42 Su-57s of 7th Regiment in reserve, they will only be released on my command.” Lukin leaned forward. “You will not be outnumbered next time Yevgeny.”
“Thankyou Sir, we will not fail.”
“You cannot,” Lukin smiled thinly. “Our masters in Moscow were wavering. The ferocity of the US attack, their willingness to sacrifice their own people … it shocked President Navalny. They were not willing to commit further ground troops to Operation LOSOS unless I could guarantee complete air supremacy.”
“Our losses will be considerable,” Bondarev warned. “Are they aware…”
“Yes. But the Americans may find they suddenly have other problems to deal with in coming days. You won’t be facing the entire US Air Force.”
“And the Enterprise?” National Guard units did not phase Bondarev. Neither did regular USAF units. Against human pilots, his men were more than a match and this time they would not allow the enemy drones to close to dogfighting range where they could use their maneuverability advantage. If Russian ground attack units were successful in suppressing the US ability to operate out of Eielson and Elmendorf-Richardson air bases, the enemy would have to fly from further afield in Washington, Oregon and Idaho, so they would have no home ground advantage. But the approaching supercarrier with its 75 F-35 and F-47 fighters, could change the balance. It was a headache he didn’t need.
“You needn’t worry about the Enterprise,” Lukin assured him. “It is a big stick the Americans rattle at smaller nations. The Navy will take care of the Enterprise. Admiral Kirov assures me the Americans will soon learn how vulnerable their capital ships are.”
*
*



Vulnerability was something Perri knew all about.
How to feel it in yourself, how to see it in others. It wasn’t an easy life on Saint Lawrence, you had to earn your living from the land and sea around you, no one was going to give it to you. And sometimes you et the bear, sometimes the bear et you.
Right now he was staring at that damn radio again, knowing it was like a homing finger of death that pointed straight at him and Dave, wondering whether he should turn it on and tell the Sarge what he was seeing.
Because something was happening down there in Gambell and it didn’t look good. All yesterday, they’d watched the Russians go house to house with sacks, looting. Not televisions or computers or jewelry, though they probably didn’t hesitate to help themselves to anything shiny that was lying around … they saw one guy with a shopping trolley and it looked to Perri like they were loading up on food. OK, so there hadn’t been any helicopters flying in supplies for weeks now, so they were probably running low, but what had been low level scrounging the last couple of weeks seemed like planned pilfering now.
Then they heard shouting down by the school. Perri and Dave were up on the bluff, and looked down on the town with scope and binos.
“They’re pulling people out of the schoolhouse,” Dave said. “Lining them up.”
“I see your brothers,” Perri said. “#%&*$#. I think they’re going to shoot them.”
“Do something man!” Dave said, “You got the gun. You’re the sniper!”
“Shut up!” Perri said. He knew he was too far away to take a shot. Sure, he could spray a few downrange, and he might disturb whatever was going on, but he wouldn’t be doing any more than making the troops down there aware he was up here. Maybe a few of their people could get away though… “Wait, no. The Russians all have backpacks. Our people have got packs on too, coats and boots.”
“Would you load people up and then take them out to shoot them?” Dave asked, confused.
Perri watched down the scope a minute more. “They’re moving them somewhere. They’re all heading out.”
“Where the hell…”
“I don’t know, but everyone down there is kitted out like they’re going cross country,” Perri said. As he spoke, he saw his family in the lines of townspeople. His brothers and father, his mother. She looked so small. And pissed. She was yelling at a Russian soldier who was trying to push people into line. Yeah, that was his ma.
When they finally had the 200 townspeople lined up in two long lines, the Russia soldiers formed up ahead and either side of them, with a few at the rear and they headed off down toward the road out of town went along the airstrip and then skirted the bluff – after that it nowhere in particular. Only bird watchers and hunters or berry pickers used the tracks out that way. In ten minutes though, it was clear they were quitting town.
“I can’t see my grandma,” Dave said, running his binos up and down the line of hostages. “I can’t see your grandparents either. None of the elders are with them.”
“Kids are with them though,” Perri said. He ran the scope back through town and stopped at the school, where he saw a solitary Russian soldier standing on the school steps, watching everyone leave. He didn’t appear in a hurry to join them. Perri watched as he finished a cigarette, ground it out under his boot, and went back inside the schoolhouse.
“They split them up,” Perri said. “I bet they left the elders and the kids back in Gambell, took the adults and kids with them.”
“Human shields,” Dave said. “That’s what they call it, right? Can’t get a missile up your clacker if you’re walking next to a bunch of civilians.”
Perri thought about it. “Yeah, but walking where? We’ve got to decide; do we follow the group, or stay here, see if we can somehow get the kids and elders out.”
They looked at each other. Without speaking they knew what they had to do.
Ask Sarge.
*
*


Devlin also knew what she had to do. She had to have a little shot of bourbon.
Just a little one. Medicinal.
She swirled it around her mouth. It was a John J Bowman single barrel, and five-time winner of the World Whiskey Best Bourbon award. A fine example of American craftsmanship, and every glass she poured was trade promotion, right? Except this one. She put the bottle back on the tray beside the gin which was the favored end of day tipple among the diplerati. And it was the end of a very long day.
Her people had been working their networks in Embassies and Consulates across the city, testing support for a coming UN Security Council resolution rescinding the recognition of the Barents’ Council of Nations. It couldn’t succeed, not with Russia and probably China abstaining, but it was the first step to a full vote in the UN chamber to have the Council delegitimized so that Russia could no longer hide its aggression behind a veil of international probity. State wanted to get that done before the impending attack in Alaska.
They were also drawing up a ‘skins and shirts’ list of who would be with them, who would be with Russia, and who would try to stay neutral, if the shooting war started again. It didn’t look good. The US had its traditional steadfast allies behind it: Australia, Canada, Britain and New Zealand. Also looking like it would fall behind Team USA was Turkey, still worried about continued Russian influence in neighboring Syria. Russia could be sure of the support of its newly won Baltic allies, Finland and the ‘Stans’, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan. Russia could also muster Middle East support from Syria and Iran. But there was a depressingly long list of countries declaring this was a bilateral ‘maritime dispute’ between Russia and the USA, including most of Europe.
Devlin had spent the morning with the Swedish Ambassador, impressing on him in diplomatic double-speak that if he wanted to keep selling Volvo motor cars in the USA and Swedish arms like its Gripen fighters and Bofors cannons to US allies the US would be expecting Sweden to get off the fence and vote in the UN to de-accredit the Barents Council at its next meeting in two days. “Abstaining again is not an option,” she’d told him, “I suspect it would annoy Volvo’s Chinese owners mightily if they weren’t able to sell their cars in the US because of a political miscalculation?”
The reason she needed a drink was not because it was the end of a hard working day - she’d had plenty of those. It was because she feared all her efforts, all her people’s efforts, were like firing buckshot into a hurricane. She had called Washington at midnight the night before to follow up on her report about the imminent Russian attack on Alaska, only to be told it was ‘regarded as interesting but unlikely’. It did not concur with intelligence from other sources, or reports from other embassies. Russian military movements were consistent with preparations against defense from attack by the USA, but not consistent with what would be needed to mount a full scale invasion. That would require the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of troops, the transport of armor and materiel, and there were no indications that was taking place.
“They’re mobilizing their Far East fighter Brigades, air defense batteries, airborne troops and special forces Ambassador,” a State department bureaucrat in the Secretary of State’s office had told her in a patronizing tone. “Not the Divisions of troops, main battle tanks and the ships they’d need to land them. They’re getting ready to defend themselves and their position on Saint Lawrence, not go on the attack.”
She didn’t have the stripes to be able to ask anyone in the Pentagon what specific preparations - beyond sallying forth with the Enterprise strike group - the US was making to either challenge the Russian occupation of Saint Lawrence or defend against an attack on Alaska, so she turned to an alternative source. An old Canadian friend from her days as a junior officer in the embassy in Ottawa. He sat on the Canadian Foreign Ministry Joint Intelligence Committee now and she asked him had her communique reached his desk, or had it been buried.
“Oh, I got it,” he said. “Or a filtered version. Under the five-eyes agreement they couldn’t exactly bury it, they had to share it, but they 'contexted' it with five other reports indicating this business was all about the Bering Strait and rights of passage, and nothing to do with water supply and the Yukon basin.”
She had blown her top, “Do people think we are complete idiots?” she’d asked him. “Why the hell would we blow up a Russian freighter and cripple one of its submarines? What possible reason?”
“Whatever the reason, it must be serious, if you’re willing to kill 200 of your own people for it,” the man said, with untypical directness. “If you’re willing to sail a carrier battle group right along the Russian east coast.”
She saw how you could look at it, if you bought into the bill of goods Russia was selling. “OK, look. You’ve seen my report, what is Canada’s take on this? If Russia marches into Alaska, you have to be worried. I just need a steer here.”
“That’s kind of ‘in flow’, to be honest,” he’d said. “But I can tell you, we gave your Russian water shortage projections to our Expert Panel on Climate Change Adaptation to punch into their own abacus.”
“And?”
“Let’s just say they agree the Bear across the ditch is going to be getting very thirsty in about ten years.”
She sighed, sat down in her chair and swung her tired legs up on her desk. At her elbow was a pile of papers and a book Carl Williams had sent up to her to look at a few days before. “The Man Who Saved Britain” by a Harvard history professor. She had read the blurb on the inside cover. Some professor had come across a trove of papers in Germany written by the impressively named Friedrich-Werner Graf von der Schulenburg, the last German ambassador to the Soviet Union before Operation Barbarossa, the battle which signaled the start of the German war on Russia. In his personal letters, written communiques and personal diaries von der Schulenburg had relentlessly pursued a campaign to persuade the Reich Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, and his trusted coterie, that if they embarked on an invasion of Britain, their Russian ‘allies’ would take advantage of their distraction and immediately stab them in the back, marching into Poland, Czech, Slovakia, Albania, Yugoslavia and most importantly, the precious oilfields of Romania. He cited numerous conversations with Russian politicians, bureaucrats and military officers to back his claims, he sent translated clippings from newspapers, and he made three trips to Berlin to personally brief the Nazi party hierarchy about the threat. He also cited conversations with the US Ambassador in Russia indicating the US had no intention of entering the war in Europe.
In the end, he prevailed. Hitler postponed his plan to invade England, shored up his defenses along the Atlantic front, and sent his tanks and Stukas east. Britain was saved from invasion, but the US did come into the war in Europe and Russia gave the Nazis a spanking.
The small handwritten note on an old photo stuck in the front told her what Williams was thinking, sending her the book.
To Devlin von der McCarthy,
Sometimes the voice of one person is enough. Keep at it.



*
*

In the early part of the century, the US became very concerned about the threat to its ability to project sea power, from Chinese and Russian hypersonic anti-ship missiles. In testing, the scram-jet driven missiles proved capable of speeds up to Mach-8; eight times the speed of sound. Fitted with double core fragmentation warheads Russia had showed that a missile like its Tsirkon DM33, could achieve a terminal velocity of 2,648 meters per second or 5,800 miles per hour, making it impossible for even state of the art counter-missile defenses to track, let alone intercept.
With a range of about 250 miles and the ability to cover 100 miles in less than a minute, able to be launched from multiple platforms on, above or under the sea, the missiles risked making not just carriers and larger surface combatants vulnerable, they could make them obsolete.
In addition to accelerating its own hypersonic missile program in the face of advances by China and Russia, the US invested billions into research on how to counter such missiles. How could they be tracked? The problem wasn’t designing a radar that could detect them, but whether the software could keep up and what type of algorithm was needed to solve the problem of target ‘ambiguity’. What type of processing capabilities would be needed to react and activate countermeasures when reaction time was measured in milliseconds? Could they be spoofed by decoy strategies? Could they be jammed? Could they be destabilized with simple air cannons fired by perimeter vessels?
Quantum computing and dedicated radar and processing software solved the detection problem, and the answer to intercepting them was found not in ballistics, but in optics. The only defensive system able to target and fire quickly enough was a high-powered laser. After successful testing, the Gen 5 High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System (HELLADS) was deployed on all US navy ships, military and industrial targets which were deemed vulnerable to hypersonic or ballistic missile attacks. In the Syria - Turkey conflict it had proven able to intercept nine out of ten ballistic missiles before they reached their targets.
Seen to be politically akin to a weapon of mass destruction, no hypersonic missiles were used in the Syria conflict and it was perceived that the first nation to use them in war would be opening a new Pandora’s box.
Of course, HELLADS just triggered a new arms race, on the premise that the best way to defeat HELLADS was to overwhelm it with multiple missiles, and all the major armies started stockpiling scramjet missiles at the same time as fitting their surface warships, submarines and aircraft to be able to field them, while arguing strenuously in public that the use of hypersonic missiles by any nation would be akin to using a tactical nuke.
Still it remained that a hypersonic weapon had never been used in war, and the HELLADS system on the USS Enterprise and its escorts had never actually been tested in combat.



*
*

Perri Tungyan was feeling pretty combat tested.
“I’m looking at him right now,” Perri said down the line to his new friend Sarge in Canada. “Through the window of the headmaster’s office. Got my scope on him.”
“For God’s sake, don’t do anything stupid,” Sarge said urgently. “You don’t know what the situation is inside that building.”
“He’s on his own in there, just smoking a cigarette, scratching his butt,” Perri said. “I could take him down, then we could check out the school. If he’s the only one, I could get our people out.”
“And if he’s not, they could all be dead,” Sarge said. “Did the Russians take any wounded with them? Did you see stretchers, people being carried?”
Perri looked at Dave, who shook his head. “No.”
“Then if they’re alive, they’re still in there and they’re probably still able to hold a gun on your people. Or they could have wired the place with explosives in case they are attacked, take out your entire town with a flick of a switch. Just relax son.”
“I am relaxed,” Perri said to him through gritted teeth. “But I have about ten minutes to decide if we do something about this guy and try to get our people out of that school, or do we go after the others who are getting further and further away the longer we talk.”
Sarge gave him a moment to calm down. “They are probably going to an evacuation point, to meet a ship or submarine,” Sarge speculated. “If they are, we need to know.”
“Why would they be heading out of town?” Perri asked. “A ship could pick them up here.”
“I thought you said the harbor was destroyed,” Sarge asked. “It looked like it in the photos you sent.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“They could be going down to Kavalghak Bay,” Dave said. “You could get a small ship in close to shore there.”
“If the Russians are quitting Gambell, if they’re pulling them off the island, that’s critical intel,” Sarge said.
“Oh man,” Perri groaned. There had been no activity in the town, so he and Dave had climbed up to the roof of a building two streets back from the school and he had perfect line of sight down into the school master’s office and the Russian soldier sitting there drinking his coffee and enjoying his cigarette, while he stared at some sort of screen. Dave was lugging the car battery and the Russian radio and complaining all the way because he’d had to leave his rifle behind, he couldn’t carry it all. They’d worked out that they could wire the radio to any old TV aerial or satellite dish and get a good signal, so they’d hit the general store and stolen one of those folding portable TV and radio aerials and it worked just fine.
“I could knock this guy out now, and then we could head out after the others,” Perri insisted. He’d zeroed the scope with a few shots at a target a good distance out of town a couple of weeks ago, and the cross hairs in his electronic scope were indicating very little windage, and minimal bullet drop. He put the crosshairs right on the temple of the Russian soldier, with the pipper sitting on his neck. He told himself it was a shot even Dave could make.
“What you’re doing there is bigger than those elders Perri,” Sarge told him. “I’ve passed your intel to our military here, and they’ve passed it to the Americans. Yeah, maybe you could free your old people from that school, or you could stay cool, and maybe help to free your whole island.”
Perri felt his finger tighten on the trigger, saw the crosshairs quiver on the temple of the Russian soldier. Then he rolled onto his back and swore up at the lead grey sky.

*
*

Private Zubkov scratched his temple, not realizing how lucky he was. To still have a temple, that is. But he wasn’t exactly focused on the world outside the school office window. He was focused on that damn ghost radio signal, because if he was reading the screen right, the damn thing was transmitting again and it had gotten closer. The screen showed range rings in bands of 5 kilometers, and he could see the last remaining field handset, taken by the Sergeant, had just moved from the 5km ring to the 10km ring as his unit hiked out of town with their captives and headed north around the bluff toward the coast.
The ghost signal, the one with the icon that said it was coming from an armored personnel carrier, that one had just popped up on the screen again, and it was showing inside the 5km ring now! He tapped the screen, in the way of all the non-digitally inclined through the ages, and as he did so, the icon disappeared. He was still seeing the portable handset taken by the troops, but the APC radio had winked out.
Maybe he’d read it wrong. There was that wrecked APC down by the town hall. That must be the one transmitting, not one of the ones out by the airstrip. The screen he was looking at only showed range, not direction, so he must have been mistaken thinking it was coming from way out at the airstrip.
It was right down the street!
He stood up, ground out his cigarette, finished the cold coffee in the bottom of his cup and pulled his thick padded jacket on. It was still about 12 degrees outside, but the wind out there could freeze a man’s tits off. He picked up a 39mm AS VAL rifle, stumped down the corridor and looked in on the wounded. There were seven of them lying on makeshift beds laid across desks. One had an IV drip in his arm that Zubkov had to change every day. Two of them had abdominal wounds that couldn’t be treated, so they couldn’t be moved. One of them had a fever. They weren’t expected to make it, so all he could do was make them comfortable. In reality, they were already dead, but luckily none of them were conscious; they were on big doses of intravenous painkillers. There were several with leg wounds, including one soldier who’d lost his entire lower left leg. They were also doped up on pain killers and antibiotics, sleeping or reading. One gave a small wave to Zubkov and indicated with a sign that he wanted a smoke, so that he didn’t wake the others. Zubkov nodded back to him to show he had seen him. Sitting in the corner, mumbling to himself, was Captain Demchenko. He was loaded up with antibiotics too, and Zubkov had expected him to contract some sort of encephalitis in his brain and clock out sooner or later, which if you asked Zubkov, would have been a mercy. But the red hot metal splinter that had sliced through his head had apparently been surgically sterile. The guy didn’t even have a temperature and he looked perfectly normal, for a man who had just had radical brain surgery that is.
It was only thirty minutes since he’d asked the civilians if anyone needed a toilet break, and an hour until he was supposed to go around and check on them, and hand out some MREs for lunch.
But during his first morning of playing combined nurse and prison camp guard, Private Zubkov had made a decision. And his decision was this.
Screw being left behind to play nurse and prison camp guard. Screw the 14th Spetsnaz Squadron. He’d been near-drowned in interrogation simulations, beaten with a baseball bat for coming last on a cross country march and had to take a solid shotgun slug in his protective vest just to get through basic training. Hell, he’d survived a US cruise missile landing less than a block away from him, without even a scratch.
He was going to find that damn radio, call his buddy the fisherman in Anadyr, and get out.
*
*


A high value unit like a supercarrier is very well protected indeed. 200 miles out from it, covering all quarters, are the ‘picket’ ships, combat air patrol aircraft and airborne early warning UAVs. Inside that is the outer screen of ships anywhere from 10 to 20 miles out from the carrier, positioned to provide antimissile and anti-air defense. The ships making up the outer screen for the Enterprise were primarily there for anti-submarine defense - ‘delousing’ as it was called - and maintained a constantly patrolling swarm of drones around the formation using thermal imaging and towed sonar, looking and listening for any sign of a subsea intruder.
And inside that, the inner screen. This was the dedicated anti-air warfare screen. For the Enterprise, nothing but the latest HELLADS armed anti-air frigates, supplemented with more conventionally armed anti-air missile destroyers also armed with close-in ballistic defenses. The entire group was tactically data linked; if one of the pickets detected an inbound missile it was engaged if possible, and simultaneously handed off to the outer screen and inner screen to engage if needed. With a hypersonic missile able to get from detection range outside the pickets to its carrier target in less than two minutes, it was unlikely the pickets would be able to successfully engage, but at quantum computing speeds, the inner screen would theoretically have ample time to lock a target and bring it down. Even a target moving at 5,000 miles an hour.
That was the theory.
Russia was well versed in the theory, and in the practice. It had led the race to develop hypersonic missiles and aircraft for decades, and was also aware of the counter-measures developed against them. It had had many years in which to wargame a hypersonic missile attack on a carrier strike group, and had done so in secret using dummy missiles sent against its own (and only remaining) carrier, the TAVKR Admiral Flota Sovetskogo Soyuza Kuznetsov. These exercises had revealed that penetrating the multilayered defenses of a carrier task group even using multiple sub launched hypersonic missiles fired from inside the picket screen, had a less than 10% likelihood of success against a HELLADS armed carrier strike group. Politically, a direct attack on an American carrier would also have been seen as an open declaration of war - something Moscow was still at pains to avoid.
Which is why Russia’s chosen strategy for taking the USS Enterprise out of the Battle for Bering Strait was … a rowing machine.
Of course, Aviation Electronics Technician E-3 Thomas Greyson was, as far as he was concerned, just applying an operating system update to the exercise machines on one of the hangar decks. It was probably the most exciting thing he’d been given to do that day, not because it was technically challenging, but because it involved real risk of bodily harm from the fitness fanatics he had to kick off the equipment so that he could patch and reboot it. Like everything else on the Enterprise, even the fitness equipment was networked. A seaman punched in their ID, did their workout, and the results were uploaded to a server and to the cloud, so that they could set goals and track their progress. Some of them were on compulsory scheduled workouts due to weight issues, and the data was used to assess their fitness for service. So yeah, he got a lot of grief when the machines had to be shut down but life sucks, as he told the grumblers.
The order for the patch had come through a day out of San Diego and landed in his inbox looking like every other routine piece of #%&*$# job he had to handle. They were sailing into a war zone, and he was patching the OS on gym equipment. No irony in that, at all. He pulled the patch down from the attached link, validated it, then called up the interface for the equipment in question, and applied the patch. The reboot had to be done manually, pulling the power and restarting the machines one by one, which meant him trekking all over the damn ship, from deck to deck. By the time he rebooted the last machine at about 1500 Pacific West Coast time, he was the one ready to hit someone.
But he got it done. And tomorrow was sure to be another fun filled day.
The Russian virus was elegant but complex and it had never been used before. It had been created specifically to attack the USS Enterprise. Once it had gained access to the Enterprise’s local network via the exercise machines on multiple decks across the ship, it copied itself to every available server and networked device, and then went to work. Perhaps not surprisingly, Seaman Greyson was one of the first to notice something was wrong. Back at his station, he turned on his tablet and went to enter the day’s activity in his duty log, only to find he couldn’t connect to the ship’s wireless network. It was there, his tablet just couldn’t log into it. Piece of #%&*$# tablet. He grabbed another one, entered his ID and tried to log on with that. No deal. He went over to a stationary computer and was about to try and turn that on when the general quarters alarm began to sound and total chaos broke out.
Grayson was already at his ‘combat station’ and didn’t need to go anywhere, but throughout the ship he heard people yelling, feet running, compartment doors being slammed and locked tight. He waited for an announcement - was it a drill, or vampires inbound? There had been a lot of talk that they might even see action on the way up to the Arctic if Russia had parked an attack sub on the sea floor ahead of them. But there was no announcement, nothing at all but the blare of the alarm. And that was almost worse than the fear there were missiles on their way.
The first thing the virus did was take down the ship’s internal communication links. Within minutes, nothing on the ship could talk to anything else, whether it was Grayson’s rowing machine, or the primary flight control center, the bridge, combat direction center or the carrier intel center, the only way anyone or anything could communicate was suddenly and critically, by yelling. Which there was a lot of. The next thing it did was cut the carrier’s links to the outside world: shortwave, longwave, digital radio, radar, satellite up and downlinks, they all went black. In minutes the most sophisticated ship in the navy had been reduced to the status of a steam driven world war 2 vessel with its only option the infallible battery backed Aldis lamps, flags and Morse code.
Without the ability to send or receive data, the defensive weapons systems were useless. Unlike the old steam powered catapults that drove their pistons with superheated water the Enterprise’s electromagnetic EMALS catapult couldn’t function without a working data link to the shooter’s console. The Enterprise became an aircraft carrier that couldn’t launch anything that wasn’t already on the flight deck and able to take off vertically.
And just like a ‘fly by wire’ aircraft, the Enterprise was ‘steer by wire’; it’s two 700 megawatt Bechtel A1B reactors driving four shafts which took their orders from the bridge computers, just as the rudders did.
So the only communication channel on the ship that the virus left open, was the link from the bridge to the steering and propulsion system. And the last thing it did before locking those down was to push the Enterprise’s speed up to 35 knots and order full right rudder.
Seaman Grayson didn’t have to worry for very long why there were no announcements. As the USS Enterprise slowly but horrifically accelerated into a wide skidding turn, it began to lean over 20 degrees and the contents of a high filing cabinet that Grayson had been using emptied themselves onto his back, knocking his head forward into his desk and taking all his worries away.
If he’d still been conscious, he would have heard the sound of metal tearing and worse, the sound no seaman or officer on an aircraft carrier wants to hear; the sound of inadequately secured aircraft sliding across hangar decks to smash into each other.
Followed by the smell no seaman anywhere, on any vessel, ever wants to smell.
Smoke.



*
*

(c) Fred ‘Heinkill’ Williams 2018. To be Continued.

OUCH.

Big ouch.

Just a little sniggling error, I don't believe the U.S. has a Foreign Secretary. Sec of State?

Another great episode/chapter

and the same week alleged russian hackers hit the winter olympics...



mybad. fixed, thx!

Winter holidays in Scandinavia ... it's writin' time!

SUPPRESSION

Bunny O’Hare was smoking, but only in the metaphorical sense. She’d gone from fuming, when Rodriguez had told her she’d be left behind in an explosives filled cave to fly out their complement of drones, to incendiary as she watched the navy launches shuttle her fellow cave dwellers out to their waiting submarine. But now … now she was smoking.
As in, smoking hot. As in the most smoking hot drone aviator in the whole damn US Navy because over the last two days she and Rodriguez had just set a personal best, single handedly flying 15 Fantoms out the chute over a 30 hour period without one hitch. Of course, if they’d had Rodriguez’s full launch team working they could have got a hex of drones out the chute within 35 minutes but it was just her and the Lieutenant Commander doing all the heavy lifting.
They’d worked out that Bunny wasn’t needed in the trailer between launches. Once she had a Fantom airborne and set its course for Elmendorf-Richardson or Eielson, she was basically a free agent because it was flying itself on full auto until it entered air traffic control range where the Air Force controllers at the other end took over to make sure it got down safely without bumping into anything.
So once her Fantom was out the chute and on its way, she went down to the flight deck and helped Rodriguez bully the empty cartridge off the cat and into the reloader, then dropped the next cartridge and drone onto the EMALS, locked and loaded it, and helped with the pre-flight check. She learned it wasn’t as hands-off as Rodriguez had made it out to be. The damn things didn’t always come out of the cartridges clean, they had a tendency to stick and sometimes the only solution was a good old fashioned kick in the ass with the heel of a boot to shake them loose. The launch bars and locks on the EMALS that secured the airframe to the catapult shuttle, the carriage between the two catapult beams that flung the aircraft forward, were damn fussy and even when you were sure you had a good lock, they refused to give you a green light, and you had to reseat the damn thing. Finally, every drone was loaded inside it’s cartridge with wings folded and an external hydraulic pressure system had to be connected to unfold and lock the wings in place. Only then, could the pre-flight physical and digital inspection be carried out.
Sure, one person could theoretically do it, but two made it much easier.
With 12 hours on and six off, at the end of their second 12 hour shift, Rodriguez had lost track of whether it was night or day. Her watch was telling her it was 1430 in the afternoon, but her body was ready for food and bed. They could afford to take it a little easier now. With 15 kites away, they only had eight remaining Fantoms to get home. Their lift out of here was the same sub that had ferried the walking and the walking wounded out of here two days ago, and it would be back six days from now to pick them up. Rodriguez wanted to get the job done, but they didn’t have to kill themselves doing it. They could fall back to their planned six or so per day, take two days to launch the rest and spend the last four days making sure there was no salvageable equipment left and the demolition charges were set to blow.
She slumped down at their makeshift mess table in one of the empty hangars, where Bunny was flicking through a digital girlie magazine on a tablet. She smiled, “Sorry to interrupt.”
“Just checking out the competition ma’am,” Bunny said. “They got nothin' on us.”
“Speak for yourself O’Hare,” Rodriguez said. “I’ve got bow legs and a big ass and everything topside is heading south.”
“With respect, I’m calling #%&*$# on that ma’am. Anyway, these girls, it’s all silicon and implants, give me the real deal any day.” Bunny ran her hand over the fuzz on her head. “I am a bit jealous of their golden locks though.” She turned her head like she was looking for something. “You think they left any peroxide behind in this joint? I’m thinking of dyeing my stubble blonde.”
Rodriguez lowered her head onto one arm and looked up at her, “You seriously have the energy to worry about what your hair looks like?”
“We’ve finally got the place to ourselves, no damn men spraying their testosterone everywhere? Hell yeah. I’m thinking a hot bath, paint my fingernails and toenails black and die my hair white. Might even do the next shift naked, just because we can. What do you say ma’am? You in?” Rodriguez laughed; a huge, exhausted laugh.
*
*



Devlin got back to her apartment in Spaso House, threw her keys on a table near the door, dumped her bag, kicked off her shoes and poured a cold glass of white wine from her refrigerator.
She had unanswered messages and texts to deal with, the US west coast was just waking up with worried business people and congress members wanting to talk with her, and in her bag was a pile of paper ten inches thick that people wanted her to read by morning. She turned off her phone.
Five minutes, just five minutes. She would have a glass of wine, and then get back to it. She sat on her sofa, and turned on the TV news.
She saw the tickertape across the bottom of the news anchors’ desks first; ‘FLASH update…’ and expected it to be about Alaska. It wasn’t. She watched with horror as she read the text rolling across her screen. “Syrian troops enter Lebanon. Government ministers arrested. Hezbollah seize power. Israeli armed forces placed on high alert.”
It was a strategy as old as time. Use your alliances to occupy your enemy with a crisis on two fronts. No ally could demand US support in a crisis like Israel, and providing military support to Israel would mean committing, or at least reserving, significant assets that could otherwise be brought into play against Russia. So creating an existential threat to Israel through Syrian intervention in Lebanon was a master stroke. It divided focus in Washington, in the Pentagon, in the armed forces, intelligence and security services and in the State Department.
It told her with certainty this intervention in the Bering Strait had not just arisen out of the sinking of a single autonomous freighter. The speed with which Finland jumped into bed with Russia on the Barents Europe Arctic Council and their probable involvement in the sinking already told her that. But mobilizing an ally, even a vassal state like Syria, to effectively invade a neighboring country and depose its government, on your own timetable, not theirs … that took long term planning, and significant negotiation, pressure, compromise. Syria would have seen an opportunity while the US was distracted by Alaska, but it must have been offered something big, and it wouldn’t surprise Devlin if they saw Iran weighing in soon too. With Saudi Arabia and the Emirates weakened by the collapse of oil prices, with Turkey licking its wounds after a bruising border war, suddenly the whole power balance in the Middle East was at risk.
She stood, and found herself in front of her hall mirror, just staring at herself. She was going to break. In two, right down the middle. She felt like she was standing outside herself, watching someone in crisis. She wanted to help, but there was nothing she could do. The woman in front of her was drowning but there was no life preserver to throw, no ladder to help her up. She imagined the water closing over her head, and disappearing without a ripple.
She put a hand on the mirror and pushed herself away.
*
*



It was Bondarev’s 110 Okhotniks that re-opened the air war.
The machines themselves staged out of the large air base at Lavrentiya on the Russian mainland, but Bondarev didn’t need to collocate his pilots and aircraft – in fact, it was wise not to do so.
So while he had the drones on the ground at Lavrentiya, he had put his Okhotnik pilots, their command trailers and those of the 573rd into quarters at the port of Anadyr, well back from the OA but still within operational range when linked to their drones by AWACS aircraft.
Two days after the briefing at 3rd Air and Air Defense Forces Command HQ, 60 Sukhoi-57s and Mig-41s of the 4th and 5th Air Battalions took off from Lavrentiya as though moving into what had become routine patrol positions in the air over Saint Lawrence and the Bering Strait. What was not normal was the high number of aircraft Russia had scrambled.
When they reached what would have been their normal stations inside the Russian no-go zone, they pushed east toward the Alaska coast.
Waiting for them just outside the air exclusion zone were the F-35s and older F-22s of the Alaska air national guard. Behind them, at five minute readiness, were pilots of the 90th Fighter Squadron and 525th Fighter Squadron under the control of an AWACS aircraft from 962nd Airborne Air Control Squadron. As soon as it detected the large Russian formations approaching Saint Lawrence, the AWACS scrambled its Air Force fighters. Within minutes, the US force facing Russia numbered 36 fighters, and 20 more were another 20 minutes out. Pulling data from a combination of its own radar, NORAD and satellites, the US AWACS handed off targets to its flock of defenders and put ground to air defenses around Elmendorf-Richardson and Eielson on alert.
It was also tracking a squadron of 9 Russian Tu160-M2 Blackjack strategic bombers that was returning from what had also become routine trans-polar ‘provocation’ flights.
Cease fire or no cease fire, there was no ambiguity in the US aviators’ orders. If the Russian fighters closed on Alaskan coastal airspace, the US fighters were cleared to engage.
Bondarev had no intention of letting his piloted aircraft get within air-to-air missile range of the Americans. Not yet. Before the US fighters were within range, he turned his Sukhois back east and they withdrew to the Russian mainland.
The US commander misinterpreted the move as a failed attempt to provoke US aircraft into following and breaking the terms of the ceasefire. He had machines he needed to get down and refuel, and pilots who had been living on edge for weeks who needed their rest. Half of the US force returned to Elmendorf-Richardson and Eielson once it was clear the Russian fighters were withdrawing too.
Timed to coincide with this, to the north and south of Saint Lawrence, Bondarev had scattered 60 Okhotnik stealth UCAVs, configured for ground attack. He had ordered his ground based drone pilots to fire at the extreme limit of the Okhotniks’ Brah-Mos III supersonic cruise missiles. With two missiles per aircraft, as the last of the sortied US fighters was landing, within minutes there were 120 cruise missiles on their way toward Elmendorf-Richardson and Eielson.
The last time Eielson had faced a cruise missile attack it was from Bunny O’Hare, and that had not gone so well. This time its HELLADS systems and crews were ready.
Sixty vampires inbound? No problem.
*
*

“Ma’am, turn on your laptop,” Williams voice said over Devlin’s telephone line. She had just been getting ready to go to bed when the phone had rung. “I’m going to push something through to you.”
“Ok, just give me a minute,” Devlin said, cradling her telephone on her shoulder and pulling her laptop out of her bag. She hit the button to boot it up. “Always takes a couple of minutes, this old thing.”
“Two minutes, and it may be all over,” Williams said.
“What’s up?”
“Russia just broke the ceasefire,” Williams said. “HOLMES is tracking multiple cruise missile launches over Alaska towards our air bases at Fairbanks and Anchorage. I’m sending you the feed, you can follow the attack real time.”
“You can do that?”
“Already doing it, when you log on, you’ll see an icon of a pipe on your desktop. Click on that.”
“What?”
“Don’t ask me, HOLMES installed it. I think it’s an Arthur Conan Doyle thing. You’ll see what NORAD is seeing.”
She shook her head and clicked on the icon as it came up. A screen expanded showing a map of Alaska. It took her a moment to make sense of what she was looking at. A spider web of lines was lancing out from small icons that looked like inward facing double triangles with the letters A above them, while a bunch of other triangle icons milled around in the air over Alaska. “OK, I’ve got the computer open, but what am I looking at?”
“The icons with an A over them are Russian attack aircraft, HOLMES is saying mostly drones. They’ve already fired their payloads and are heading back to mother Russia on afterburner. The icons over Alaska, they’re our boys. Most are not close enough to take a shot at the retreating Russians, but they’re trying to engage the cruise missiles. Not much chance, their radar cross section is too small, but they’ll try.”
“The missiles are headed for our air force bases?”
“Yep. They’re scrambling everything they can so that the fewest possible machines get caught on the ground if any missiles get through. But apparently we were caught refueling after a major defensive action.”
“What are the odds?” Devlin asked, knowing HOLMES would have already calculated them. “Of the missiles getting through?”
“23% percent chance of one to six missiles getting through ma’am,” she heard HOLMES voice say on the line.
“How long until they hit?” She saw lines seemed to be extending toward their targets very quickly.
“At 2,000 miles per hour with just fifty miles left to run, one minute thirty ma’am,” the AI replied. “I am showing 47 missiles still tracking. Correction, I am now showing 101 missiles inbound. 53 seconds to first HELLADS interception.”
“What?!”
“Uh, a squadron of Backfire bombers in international airspace north of Northern Alaska just fired their full payload of six missiles each ma’am,” Williams said. “A suicide shot. They were being tagged by a flight of F-35s out of Eielson. They’ve engaged the Backfires, and they’re unescorted. They’re toast.”
“20 seconds to HELLADS interception,” HOLMES said.
Devlin watched in horror as the blue lines tracked toward the two US air bases. One by one, the lines winked out. Then red dots began to appear underneath the airfields. Inside five seconds, all the blue lines were gone, and a row of red dots appeared under each airfield.
“The red dots are strikes?” Devlin asked.
“Yes ma’am,” Williams said. “Four on Eielson, three on Elmendorf-Richardson. Damn good performance.” He sounded pleased.
“There are dead Americans under those dots Carl,” Devlin said gently.
“Yes ma’am, sorry,” he said.
“Thirty three seconds to the impact of the second wave of missiles. There are no air assets in position to intercept,” HOLMES said. “HELLADS units are recycling.”
“Recycling?! What does that mean?”
“A single HELLADS battery can track and shoot down up to 5 missiles simultaneously, with one second between volleys. There are probably four or five batteries around each of those airfields, so they can target twenty incoming missiles all arriving at the same time, and handle multiple waves of missiles for up to five minutes, but working that hard overheats the optics. They need time to cool down - recycle. The second Russian launch was timed to coincide with the HELLADS’ recycling phase. They’ll be arriving just as the defenses are coming back on line. It’s going to be close.”
“Two batteries on line. Five seconds to impact,” HOLMES said. “Three batteries. Firing. Impact.” A bloom of red dots appeared across the map at both airfields.
Once again, the critical incident siren started sounding throughout the Embassy complex.
*
*


Between 2015 and 2022 Russia launched a series of small satellites it designated Kosmos-2499 to Kosmos-2514. Radar tracking of the small 50kg satellites showed they were highly maneuverable and shortly after arriving in orbit they executed what seemed to be a range of test maneuverers, darting away from and then matching orbit with various pieces of circling space junk including their own launch vehicles. They were also detected by amateur radio enthusiasts communicating with the ground using burst radio transmissions. At a year-end press-conference, the head of Roskosmos, Ivor Olapenko, denied speculation that Kosmos-2491 and Kosmos-2499 were "killer satellites." Olapenko said the satellites were developed in cooperation between Roskosmos and the Russian Academy of Sciences and were used for peaceful purposes including unspecified research by educational institutions. After two years of apparent testing, the satellites were parked in permanent orbits and went silent.
Five of the satellites were in orbit over the North Pole. In the intervening years since 2022 they had been quietly mapping all known US and Chinese space-based military objects in their quadrants.
Olapenko had not lied. The Kosmos satellites were not intended to kill other satellites.
They were made to blind them.
*
*

Alicia Rodriguez was blind. Her bedside alarm was ringing, she had to get to school, but she couldn’t see it to turn it off. She panicked, flailing around her, trying to find her alarm clock. She was going to be late for school again!
She opened her eyes. Same dumb dream again. But there was an alarm ringing somewhere. She swung her legs out of bed and hit her bedside light. It was the comms alarm - an incoming call. She fumbled for the handset on her bedside table.
“NCTAMS-A4,” she replied, rubbing her eyes. She looked at her watch. She’d been asleep 3 hours. It was 0400. She and Bunny had planned another three hours sleep then breakfast and another day flying their drones out. As the voice on the other end spoke, she realized that wasn’t going to happen.
“NCTAMS-A4, this is ANR control,” the voice said. “Major Del Stenson, who is speaking please?”
“Rodriguez, Lieutenant Colonel, what’s up Major?”
“Ma’am, I need to bring you up to speed with events and then check your operational status,” the major said.
“Our operational status? We are decommissioned Major,” Rodriguez told him. “We are four days from bringing the roof down on this base.”
“Negative ma’am, I have a new OPORD for you. The situation is that Russian air forces have attacked Eielson and Elmendorf-Richardson air bases. Damage was limited, but both airfields are going to be offline for at least the next 48-72 hours. We have moved air assets south to Gelena, Kingsley Fields, Portland and Lewis-McChord.” He paused. “We have nowhere to receive your drones right now ma’am, and besides, we need them back in the game.”
“Major, there is only myself and one aviator remaining on this base. We can launch, but we can’t recover, refuel and rearm those drones at anything like the speed that would be needed for combat operations. If you are asking us to go to war, I need the full complement of base personnel back here stat.”
“That’s also negative ma’am,” Stenson said. “All available Naval units have been re-tasked. We are responding to multiple simultaneous threats Lieutenant Colonel. You are on your own. I’ve been ordered to tell you we need you to do what you can, where you are, with what you have. A mission package is being sent through as we speak. Questions ma’am?”
“Plenty,” Rodriguez said. “But let me look the package over. I’ll get back to you on what we can do.”
“Yes ma’am. ANR out.”
Rodriguez cut the connection and hit the button that connected her to O’Hare’s quarters.
“O’Hare speaking. Yes, ma’am?”
She sounded like she was already awake.
“We have new orders Bunny,” Rodriguez said.
“Yes ma’am,” the pilot replied. “I heard the comms alert. Briefing in the trailer?”
“Five minutes,” Rodriguez confirmed. “And O’Hare?”
“Yes ma’am?”
“You will be wearing more than just black nail polish, understood?”
“Aw, you are such a buzz killer ma’am,” O’Hare said. “As you wish.” She cut the line.
Rodriguez smiled and reached for her trousers. Then she thought about what they were about to do, and the smile faded from her face.

*
*



Yevgeny Bondarev had a broad smile on his face as he stood in his own operations room, eyes running over reports of the morning’s operations and bomb damage assessments. Around him, his staff were going about the business of destroying the US armed force’s ability to respond to the planned landing in Nome.
He had been ordered to achieve air supremacy, not just air superiority. Air superiority meant temporary control of the airspace over an operations area. Supremacy meant the effective destruction of the enemy’s ability to oppose the operations of friendly forces. The Russian commanders were not dreamers, they knew Lukin’s 3rd Air and Air Defense Forces Command could not defeat the entire US Army, Navy and Air Force once it had been completely mobilized. But it had to establish dominance of the air over Alaska for the duration of the invasion and that meant creating an effective air-front over Alaska all the way to the Canadian border that meant that any attempt by the US to penetrate Alaskan airspace resulted in the complete destruction of American aircraft in the combat area.
The airfield denial operations against the two major US Air Force bases in Alaska had been a spectacular success, with the first wave of missiles being intercepted but performing their task of overwhelming the American defensive systems so that the second wave of mine laying cluster munition armed warheads would be able to penetrate. Russia had learned through many wars that blowing holes in enemy airfields was a pointless exercise, because even a twenty foot crater blown in a concrete runway by a deep penetrator bomb could be filled in a matter of hours and overlaid with metal mesh patches so that flight operations could quickly resume.
So the Bra-Mos III missiles that had made it through the defensive perimeter of ElmendorfRichardson and Eielson air bases had streaked across the airfield scattering hundreds of area-denial mines. Within seconds each airfield was littered with thousands of 5.5lb RDX explosive armed proximity-triggered submunitions. Once the mines were scattered the missiles buried themselves in their terminal targets - usually hangars, radars and control and command facilities. It might only take a few hours to fill a crater or get a new mobile command center up and running, but it would take days to clear all of the unexploded mines at the two air bases.
He had lost none of his Su-57s or Okhotniks, but all six Backfire bombers had been quickly shot down. That had been expected and their pilots and crews had been volunteers, knowing the mission would likely result in their deaths. Bondarev wasn’t sentimental, but the sacrifice of such men in the service of their nation stirred his blood. He would use their example to encourage his own men to do their utmost.
The Americans could still fly their aircraft out of airfields in Oregon, Washington and Idaho, or farther afield, but that gave Russian radar and satellites precious time to detect them and respond. It was time Bondarev planned to use well.
The second prong of the initial attack had not been Bondarev’s responsibility but belonged to the Russian Aerospace Forces. Their little 100kg satellites parked over the pole had maneuvered within range of eight critical NORAD surveillance satellites and were blasting out radio signals at frequencies calculated to jam the ability of the American satellites to send or receive. If they were working as planned the US 213th Space Warning Squadron based at Denali Borough in Alaska, the eyes and ears of NORAD, should be blind and deaf.
It would take at least six hours and up to 18 hours before the US could re-task other nearby satellites to fill the void.
That gave Bondarev a solid window in which his Okhotniks could roam the skies over Alaska seeking out and destroying US land based radar and air defense units, while his Su-57s ran combat air patrols overhead. Several of his units were actively engaged in combat with the US fighters that had managed to get airborne before the missile strikes. He had lost nearly ten aircraft, with two pilots dead and six down, but his intel indicated 23 enemy combatants destroyed, both fixed wing and rotary winged aircraft. After trying to engage the incoming cruise missiles, most of the airborne US aircraft were low on fuel and ammunition and were retiring to US mainland air bases or inadequately equipped civilian fields. The Americans had not yet martialed aircraft for a major counter-attack, but Bondarev was certain it would come. And he was ready.
That was why he was confident moving the bulk of his 6983rd UCAV forces to Savoonga, just 150 miles from Nome. They were ideally suited to flying out of the limited facilities at the forward base, because their pilots and system officers could be based at Anadyr, hundreds of miles away, and didn’t need to be quartered with their planes.
And the bulk of his precious 4th and 5th Air Battalions, his critical Su-57 fighters and pilots and ground crews, he would keep at Lavrentiya. To reach him there, even if did have the fuel, which would have required in-air refueling, the enemy would have to fight its way across the skies of Alaska or the North Pacific and back again.
But he wasn’t a man to take the enemy for granted. He had a surprise or two up his sleeve in Lavrentiya for any US aircraft or missile that did make it through.

*
*

Perri and Dave had been following the column of hostages for a couple of hours now, and it was clear they weren’t going down to the coast to Kavalghak Bay. Once they had cleared the road out of town to the south of the bluff, they had turned northeast and started hiking up an old hunting trail that would take them over the bluff to the deserted inland of the island. It was harsh, windswept terrain that didn’t offer much in the way of game, berries or shelter, so the islanders rarely ventured inland. The sea and the ice around the island were their home, not the rocky interior. They decided the destination must be Savoonga.
“Why would they be going to Savoonga?” Perri asked. “Wouldn’t it have been just as badly hit as Gambell?” He could have kicked himself. While they were online last time, he should have downloaded some news videos to see if there was any information about what had happened to Saint Lawrence. All they knew was what Sarge had told them, and that wasn’t much. He’d spent most of the time they were online asking questions, not giving out information.
“Where else could they be going, there’s nothing else in this direction except vole turds and bird droppings.”
“It’s going to take them days. Did you ever walk it?”
“No, but Tommy Hendriks did. With his father. They were hunting bear but they didn’t get any. By the time they’d been out two days they decided it would be easier to keep going to Savoonga and then get a lift back to Gambell by boat. It took them five days.”
“Including the boat back?”
“No, just the walk over,” Dave said grimly.
“Oh man,” Perri settled the straps of his backpack on his shoulders. “I hope we’ve got enough food.”
“Yeah? Well we could have carried about another 20 pounds except you’ve got me lugging this damned battery and radio,” Dave complained. He was carrying the same big backpack that Perri was carrying, with the difference being the top third of his pack was the car battery and Russian radio they’d liberated.”
“You keep telling me how you’re the strongest of all your brothers,” Perri said. He was looking at the ground, seeing the scuff marks in the snow and dirt from hundreds of feet. Following the column wouldn’t be hard, they were leaving tracks you could probably see from space. He looked up to test the weather, saw low cloud, but no sign of rain. At least they’d be dry the next day or so. As he watched, he heard the now familiar sound of jet engines crossing the island from west to east. For some reason they rarely went east to west. They hadn’t heard or seen any more signs of combat, so he had to assume the aircraft overhead weren’t American.
They trudged on, “Sarge said there were Russians in Savoonga, as well as Gambell. Maybe the ones in Savoonga were dug in better,” Perri speculated. “The ones here were pretty dumb, just hiding out in the town hall, waiting to get bombed. Maybe the guys up there were better prepared.” He thought about the radar station at Savoonga, the Air Force officer who’d come to talk to them. “I’m going to call Sarge tonight if we can still get a signal through,” he said. “Ask him does he know what’s happening at
Savoonga. If we get that far, I’ve got cousins we could hide out with.”
Dave grunted, “I can tell you this for free. If we can’t get a signal on this stupid radio, it’s going in the nearest creek.”
*
*


There had been no working radio in the wrecked APC near the town hall, so Private Zubkov had hiked out to the airfield. Two of the APCs out there were total write-offs, just burned out, half melted hulks. The third had taken a hit that had flipped it on its roof, shredded its tires and filled it full of holes before its fuel had caught fire, but the fire had burned upward, through the chassis, and the cabin was still pretty much intact. Except that the radio and handset was gone.
And Zubkov had a pretty good idea where.
He leaned back in his chair inside the school master’s office, watching the display on the base station for it to pop up again, just to be sure. His orders were to keep the wounded comfortable and the prisoners fed until reinforcements arrived from Russia or the unit returned to Gambell. But he’d seen the news on the American TV channels. The Americans were sending a freaking carrier strike group up here to take the island back. If Russia had intended to hold the island, it would be swarming with choppers, anti-air batteries and new troops. They’d be dispersing and digging in, not bugging out. There weren’t going to be any ‘reinforcements’.
They had been dropped in as political bait, had the hell blown out of them and they’d been abandoned. Now the Americans were coming and yeah, they had a better chance of putting up a fight if they concentrated their forces and bunkered down at the US facility in the northeast, but a few hundred men against a whole carrier strike group and thousands of marines? Forget it. They were all going to end as prisoners, probably be tried for war crimes.
If he was going to get off this island, it had to be soon. But he couldn’t just leave his comrades here to starve to death, so he had to work something out for them. Luckily when he’d been searching for the radio he had found the solution.
Most of the wounded Russian soldiers were sleeping, which wasn’t surprising given firstly their injuries and secondly, that he had crushed quite a lot of sedative tablets into their food earlier in the day. One of them was awake, a young boy who had lost most of his foot, and who had said he had no appetite. He had joined the unit after Zubkov and he hadn’t really bothered to get to know him. Zubkov looked at the chart at the end of his bed - Kirrilov, that was his name.
“I need some painkillers,” the guy said. “My foot hurts like hell.”
“OK, I got something for you here,” Zubkov said, pulling a small spray dispenser from a backpack. He pulled on rubber gloves and a surgical mask. “It’s a sterilizing agent combined with a strong local anesthetic.” Walking over to the young guy he said, “Pull your covers back.”
The man lifted his bedsheets, to reveal a bloodied bandage. Zubkov pulled it gingerly away and saw the man had lost the two left most toes from his foot, a strip down the side and most of his heel. He angled the spray so that he could cover most of the wound and then pulled a surgical mask over his own face.
“Is it going to sting?” the boy asked. He was propped up on one elbow, watching.
“A lot,” Zubkov told him. “But not for long.” He sprayed quickly, then lay the bandages back on the foot and covered it with the bed sheet.
“Man, that burns,” the guy said through gritted teeth, an arm covering his eyes. “It better work.”
Zubkov had little doubt it would work. He had studied the effects of VX nerve agent in training.
They all had. He knew the symptoms off by heart: abnormal blood pressure, blurred vision, chest tightness, confusion, cough, diarrhea, drooling and excessive sweating, drowsiness then difficulty breathing, and death by asphyxia.
Time from exposure to death could be anything from ten to twenty minutes, depending on the dose.
He sat back to watch.

Aw. VX to the injured? That's just nasty, man!



Also, I think Bunny was talking abot dye, not death to her hair.

Good catch! Tho knowing Bunny, coulda been either...

Not a CBRN guy, but IIRC VX is effective if you get any skin contact what so ever (less then a droplet is considered lethal). Hence why we had to mess with the whole MOPP suit. Using an aerosol mister is pretty much gonna kill everyone there (if that's the plot then carry on). Also why would the soviets be carrying VX, particularly in handy sprayers? If Zukov is gonna kill them off, simply OD'ing them on pain meds is a way easier solution, and also far more likely. Additionally he can claim it was an "accident" as he's not a medic and didn't read the dosages correctly, etc.

-Jenrick

Excellent points ... might well end up going with the pain meds idea. Can't really adjust the plot in real time because I am writing a few chapters ahead of what I'm posting, but it is really valuable food for thought about how to tweak the final plot!!

For now, sneak preview from a coming chapter (partly addresses the questions):

Back in his office he lifted up a wooden ammunition box. He had found it in the back of a transport truck out at the airfield. It had contained 20 82mm VX nerve gas mortar shells and a foil pouch holding auto-injectors for the atropine and pralidoxime antidote. Well, 19 shells now, since he had carefully injected himself with antidote before he siphoned the active agent out of one of the warheads to apply it to the soldiers in the sick bay.
At least he wouldn’t have to repeat the process for the remaining townspeople locked in the school buildings. The mortars were also designed to work on timers, in case a chemical weapon IED was needed. He hadn’t wanted to set one of them off inside the sick bay, because it would certainly have left nerve agent traces that would have been hard to explain. But there wouldn’t be any danger of that after he had thrown a few of the shells in with the local townsfolk, removed the evidence and then burned their gym to the ground.
He couldn’t do that to his comrades though. They were Spetsnaz after all, and for now, he was too.
They deserved an honorable burial. Even if it was in a mass grave.
Private Zubkov was singing to himself as he took off their warheads and then wired four of the VX gas mortar rounds to an electrical detonator. Four should be more than enough to flood the gym with gas. He had a very simple plan - make sure the rest of the people in Gambell were taken care of, find that ‘ghost’ radio handset, call his buddy in Anadyr, and start a new life as part owner of a fishing trawler.
There was just one problem, but it didn’t trouble Zubkov. In fact, he was actively ignoring it. The offer from Zubkov’s buddy in Anadyr? That had been eight years ago. The guy had gone broke, sold his trawler, and was a bank clerk in Vladivostok now. Private Zubkov hadn’t spoken to him for about five years.
Everyone deals with the brutality of war in their own very individual way. Private Zubkov had seen a man decapitated, a town obliterated, his Captain lobotomized and his fellow soldiers killed and wounded, before being deserted by his own NCO and the men he had believed were his comrades in arms.
He had dealt with this by going completely and irrevocably insane.

Thx, keep the comments coming, all help make the story stronger and will be sure to put your name in the acknowledgements!!

I think they pushed east instead ?



I wonder how long it will take for the CV to recover, and if the escorts are still up.

I wonder how long I'd wait to nuke their Siberian bases...

Or at least send video to the Russian pilots HUD's of a crazy naked chick in a VR helmet trying to kill them with a drone swarm! (HOLMES I have a job for you!)

edit: Ya, I think you got east and west swapped a couple of times HeinKill.

Hmm, interesting option, the whole scenario. The biggest issue would be why would the Russians have deployed with nerve gas in the first place? If the occupation of the island was planned to be unopposed, it makes no sense to pack in nerve gas. That would be something in the US inventory way back at the weapons depot that we wouldn't even contemplate issuing out until things have gone a lot further south. A release of VX would paint the Russians into a political corner, right up there with using nukes, I can't see them trusting a Spetsnaz captain with that responsibility. I can see packing the mortar in at least, but you might want to have something about the weapons platoon leaving their heavy stuff behind or the like. Honestly though if I was planning the assault, I'd have left the mortar behind, no reason for it, and if it comes to contesting the island from a US assault it's not gonna do a whole lot of good.

Also as far as using the auto injectors, not for the faint of heart. We had some expired ones that someone decided to try out in the parking lot one night, by activating it against a wooden fence post. The needle slamming out took him by surprise and he lost his grip. The sucker launched across the parking lot like a bottle rocket. I can't imagine what injecting it would feel like.

I have no clue how long the antidote would be good for, from what I remember it was something like re-administer every 10 minutes if someone was actually poisoned. Also atropine if you're not poisoned is going to mess you up, big time. Blurry vision, racing heart, kind of like the worlds biggest shot of adrenaline, it's going to be hard to function at all until that wears off.

Again interesting idea and scenario, I'm just not sure it works well for what you're going for. Something as simple as carbon monoxide poisoning would make just as much sense, and fit with everything a lot better.

-Jenrick

Those auto-injector needles are also ... well, horse size. Intended for going deep into a thigh.

Think of the heart shot in Pulp Fiction.

I'm all for simple, going with carbon monoxide is an alternative, but how to generate it? He has no vehicle/engine/generator available - Gambell pulls its power from wind/hydro not diesel. I guess they could have brought one or two generators with them.

Good points about the VX; I'd seen it as potentially being used to defend the island from counterattack (attack the US landing zone) rather than in the first offensive operation. Logic was Russia wanting to deploy the fewest troop numbers possible. If not likely, I'll drop it but want a dramatic/shocking way for him to take out the surviving wounded and the elderly townsfolk (wow that sounds morbid but it's a plot thing! Just herd them all together in the gym and set fire to it?). (Yeah I know that 2-PAM injector needle is a beatch, I looked it up! Visible from space. But I figured Zubkov deserved it.)



A crucial point! It needs to deal not just with the systems impacted by the cyberattack but also significant fire damage... I did think maybe we could use this as an excuse to recommission the USS Missouri but I think that movie was already made

Also I would expect that a successful cyberattack on a US carrier (however that might occur) would cause a minor panic about how vulnerable other carriers/ships are to similar attacks and until the cause was identified and mitigations put in place, you'd be reluctant to expose other assets to attack by committing them to the theater and singling them out for attention.

BTW the idea for using an exercise machine software patch to access the ships command and control system is, I hope, a nonsense. But I got the idea when I read an article about how sailors on future Gerald R Ford class carriers like the Enterprise will have access to networked fitness equipment which tracks their progress toward personal fitness goals. Which made me think I'd want to be sure any patches the Navy's exercise bike supplier applied to its bikes didn't have a virus in them, which made me think yeah, if I was a prime enemy, I'd try to hack the server of the Navy's chosen exercise bike company and modify one of their patches, rather than go after a back door more obvious and better protected. And low and behold a week after I wrote it all down, the news breaks that Strava fitness app is showing the location and patrol routes of miltiary personnel worldwide which is different but kinda the same...



Another good question. SPOILER below re my anticipated US response to a Russian attack on Alaska like the one in this novel

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Kinda important! Better clean that up! Awesome feedback team keep it coming!

Heinkill your engaging story is far better than most books i recently red.
Keep it coming, i'm hooked!