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#4405091 - 02/14/18 09:49 AM Re: AAR with a difference: Bering Strait UCAV campaign: Updated 14 Feb ***** [Re: Diavolaccio]  
Joined: May 2006
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Originally Posted by Diavolaccio
Heinkill your engaging story is far better than most books i recently red.
Keep it coming, i'm hooked!


Thanks for the encouraging words. Spread the word if you can to other readers ... a good collaboration should end up with a product that others will enjoy too!

Last edited by HeinKill; 02/14/18 11:32 AM.

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#4405115 - 02/14/18 12:28 PM Re: AAR with a difference: Bering Strait UCAV campaign: Updated 15 Feb [Re: HeinKill]  
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HeinKill Offline
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Love them holidays - on a writing roll.

***

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SUPERIORITY


Bondarev paced the floor of his operations room at Lavrentiya airfield like a caged animal. The day’s operations had gone to plan, that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that as long as he was in command of this part of the air war, he was tethered to the ground. He preferred to lead from the air, but that wasn’t practical. Instead, he was here, barking orders and watching his men move icons around on the huge screens mounted on the walls.
Bomb damage and combat assessments of the opening battle the day before showed 24 US fighters destroyed on the ground and 11 in the air, for the loss of six of his own. Since being driven back to Oregon, Washington and Idaho the day before, US forces had only engaged in squadron strength probing patrols at the southernmost part of the front. Their satellites and ground based radar inside Alaska blinded, they were no doubt rueing the decision to abandon their own anti-satellite offensive program. It meant they needed to rely on vulernable AWACS aircraft to fill the gap and were hampered by the limited range of their offensive aircraft which required in-flight refueling to reach Alaska from mainland USA with enough fuel on board to sustain combat if needed. In these contacts over the last 12 hours he had claimed five American aircraft destroyed for two of his own and had brought down one US AWACS aircraft that had wandered too far north west trying to map the Russian presence over Alaska. Fixed and mobile US anti-air units inside Alaska were being dealt with by ground attack configured Okhotniks across the State as quickly as they appeared, but he had lost three of the drones to ground fire. His losses were within acceptable parameters and he was close to being able to demonstrate that he could repel any attempt to challenge the airspace over Alaska - the definition of air superiority.
The US still had formidable naval fire power and the ability to unleash a rain of cruise missiles on Russian mainland targets like the Pacific Fleet base at Vladivostok or the Northern Fleet base at Sevoromorsk. It would be a logical response to their attacks on the US strategic air bases in Alaska, but beyond moving a carrier strike group from the Atlantic through the Panama Canal into the south Pacific the US naval response since the crippling of the USS Enterprise task force had been muted. It would come, of that he was sure. The question was only how, and when.
What troubled him most in this respect were the aircraft from the Enterprise. Details weren’t clear, even to Bondarev, but Lukin had delivered on his promise that the Enterprise wouldn’t be a factor in the conflict. The carrier strike group had stopped dead in its tracks, and the US media was reporting that there had been fires reported on board the carrier. They were speculating that the carrier had been sabotaged, or had struck a mine, but Russia was denying any involvement. The carrier was being ignominiously towed back to port in San Diego.
The Enterprise might have been taken out of play, but its aircraft weren’t. Russian satellite surveillance showed more than 50 of the carrier’s aircraft had been flown off after it was put under tow. Bondarev wanted desperately to know where those aircraft were. His big advantage was that they had effectively driven the US Air Force out of Alaska and it had to fly out of bases 2000 miles from Nome in Oregon and Washington State. His big fear was that Canada would give the US permission to use not just its air space, but also its western Yukon airfields. They were mostly gravel, not paved, and couldn’t support intensive operations, but the navalized versions of the US F-35 carried by the Enterprise had Short Take Off Vertical Landing capabilities and may be able to operate out of Canadian bush or civilian airstrips or even paved highways if they needed to. If the Canadians hadn’t already given the US permission to use their facilities, Bondarev was pretty sure that as longstanding members of NATO, they would soon be compelled to.
He desperately wanted to know where those carrier aircraft were, and brightened as he saw the man he had tasked to find out, his intelligence chief Arsharvin, walking quickly through the crowded operations room toward him.
“You have news I hope,” Bondarev said, as Arsharvin put a tablet down on the table in front of him and turned it on.
“Not good,” Arsharvin said. “Look for yourself.”
The screen showed a small table, listing the aircraft types which had been flown off the Enterprise, and how many of each type were estimated to have been re-positioned. Beside them was the base they had been flown to. Bondarev expected that column to show him the names of the now familiar Air Force stations in the US Northwest States.
“Naval Air Station Leemore?” he asked, looking up at Arsharvin. “Where is that?”
“Fresno, California,” Arsharvin said. “3,000 miles from Alaska.”
“What? The range of an F-35 is 1,500 miles. A Fantom is 1,800. Even with airborne refueling they can’t fight a war in Alaska out of Fresno, California.”
“No.”
“Are they under repair, or taking on ordnance?” It was all Bondarev could think of. Perhaps the Americans were worried their aircraft had been damaged by fire, or US logistics were taking time to get ordnance into place further north, so the Navy planes were having to repair and load up further south.
“SatInt shows them parked, with not much activity around them,” he said. “We thought it might be some political problem with Navy aircraft using US Air Force bases in the north, but our human sources say that wouldn’t be it.” He pointed at the screen. “The US is holding them back. And my people think that can only mean one thing.”
“It’s a good sign,” Bondarev said hopefully. “They are leaving Alaska to its fate, as we hoped.”
“No,” Arsharvin said. He leaned forward and dropped his voice. “We think they could be preparing a tactical nuclear strike.”
“What? Why? We haven’t even moved on Nome yet,” Bondarev said.
“No, but the loss of their two key air bases in Alaska is a clear precursor.”
“The fact they are holding their air assets in reserve is not exactly hard proof they are preparing a nuclear strike. Do we have any intel that their ICBM silos or mobile units have been put on alert?”
“No, but they don’t need to be. Our SOSUS line in the Bay of Finland picked up a trace today. Not definitive, but the acoustic signature fits with one of their new Columbia class boats.” He didn’t have to say more, his voice said it all. Bondarev had been friends with the man for many years, and this was the first time he had heard him sound truly frightened.
The Columbia class nuclear stealth submarine was the newest and quietest in the US fleet. Even bringing one close to the borders of Russia would have been regarded as an act of war in more peaceful times. If the US had managed to get one of their doomsday machines within a few minutes missile flight time of Saint Petersburg, it could either mean they were being prudent, or they were preparing for nuclear war.
Bondarev scowled, “We need to initiate the attack on Nome now,” he said. “Get it underway before the Americans stop dithering and bring those aircraft into the theatre.” He grabbed his uniform jacket off his chair. “Where is Lukin today?”
Arsharvin looked at his watch, “Right now? He’d be airborne, en-route to Anadyr,” the man said. “I was told he is going to a meeting with the commander of the 573rd Air Base. What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking I have to persuade him the air superiority window is open now. We need to act before it closes. I’m flying to Anadyr.”
Arsharvin cocked an eyebrow, "Flying? Why not just set up a video link?"
Bondarev shook his head, "And the fact you ask that question explains why you are still a Captain my friend, while I am a Colonel."

*
*

If she was flying a jet off the deck of a carrier at sea Bunny would be engaged in a carefully choreographed dance right now. As Air Boss, Rodriguez would have cleared her for takeoff and she’d be watching her yellow shirted flight deck controller as he directed her with hand motions up to the catapult. She’d be holding up her hands to show she wasn’t touching the controls while checking the red shirted ordnance guy as he loaded weapons or drop tanks. Then she’d be looking back at one of the yellow shirts again as they pulled her machine forward and into the shuttle. As he swept his arms back and forward and they ratcheted up the tension on the cat, she’d be applying full power, putting her stick in all four corners and cycling the rudders to show the deck her controls were free and clear. The yellow shirt would then point her attention to the shooter and her life would be in his or (in the case of Rodriguez, her) hands for the next few vital seconds as she waved you off the deck.
Down under the Rock it all had to be much simpler. With a full crew, Rodriguez would have had her green shirted technical crews under the command of Stretch Alberti, yellow shirted plane handling crew and launch officers under the command of Lucky Severin and a few red and blue shirted fuel and ordnance personnel working away from the flight deck in the storage hangars. With just the two of them under the Rock now, she and Bunny had to do all the grunt work getting their Fantom’s wings down, locked into the shuttle for launch and booted up and once that was done, Bunny ran to the trailer for the launch.
They already had one Fantom in the air. They’d prepped two of the machines the night before when they’d got their orders and had taken just 20 minutes doing a final pre-flight check and launch of the first drone. Now they were ready with the second. There was no way the two of them could get a hex of six drones in the air in anything like the time needed for combat operations, but a flight of two - that they could manage. Bunny had set the first to hold position at wave top height about ten miles north of Little Diomede. They were both terrified it would be spotted by overflying Russian aircraft, but so far the little fighter’s stealth defense was holding.
They’d also had to come up with a new version of the standard launch checklist, with only Rodriguez down on the flight deck and Bunny up in the trailer.
"Flaps, slat, panels and pins,” Bunny called over the internal comms.
“Green,” Rodriguez replied, roles reversed. Usually it would be her running the checklist.
“Man out.” Referring to Rodriguez, crouched down at the catapult shooter’s panel behind a blast protector.
“Man out aye. Thumbs up.” Rodriguez did a visual check to be sure there were no leaks of fuel or hydraulic fluid.
“Scanning the cat, cat clear. ELAMS to 520 psi.”
“520 aye,” Bunny replied, confirming the catapult launch power from a readout on her HUD.
“Ready for launch.”
When she was satisfied, she gave Bunny the green light, “Pilot, go burner.”
“Lighting burner, aye,” Bunny replied.
“Launching.”
Rodriguez punched the button to fire the EMALS. Almost simultaneously, Bunny kicked in full afterburner and the Fantom leapt off the catapult, down the chute and out of the maw of the cave. It sped north to link up with the first drone, and soon the two of them were winging their way north.
In the belly of each Fantom were two GBU-43/K ‘mini-mothers’ or Massive Ordnance Air Blast bombs; GPS assisted iron bombs armed with 40% RDX explosive, 20% TNT, 20% aluminum power and 20% ethylene oxide. Cut down to fit the weapons bay of a Fantom, they were a smaller but still deadly version of the bombs that had wiped the radar station off the surface of Little Diomede. The mini-mother had been designed to destroy large concentrations of enemy vehicles or troops, or in this case, the large number of enemy transport aircraft, fuel, anti-air defense emplacements and C3I facilities at the Russian forward airfield at the port of Anadyr.
Anadyr had been chosen for shock value – an air strike so deep behind the Russian air perimeter that it should cause them to re-evaluate their strategy and pull assets back to protect their mainland bases. Bunny and Rodriguez knew their chances of successfully charging directly across the Bering Strait and down the throat of all the radar energy Russia would have pointed eastwards was almost zero. So Bunny would be flying the Fantoms at nap of the earth height along the coast of Russia northeast to Polyarny then taking a sharp southerly route along a river valley and across rolling hills and low ranges to Krasnero, about 50 miles inland of Anadyr, in the direction of Moscow. The Fantoms would then bank hard to port to follow the contours of the Anadyr River, coming up on the Russian airfield at the height of about 200 feet from a vector the Russian defenses would, hopefully, least expect.
For a human pilot, dropping a bomb that didn’t have a timed fuse from that low an altitude would be suicide, but for these Fantoms it wasn’t an issue. Theirs was a one way trip. The long loop northeast and then south would be a journey of about 1,000 miles, it would take a couple of hours and the route Bunny had plotted had 132 distinct waypoints. It was a route no cruise missile could possibly execute.
And there wouldn’t be fuel for them to make it home.
But with luck, they could give Russian commanders a shock that would set them back on their heels.
If they pulled it off, it was a fitting payback mission – one Russian base in exchange for the attack on theirs - and the only thing Bunny could have wished for was a full crew and a hex of drones instead of just two.
But she would make do.
Oh, yes.
*
*
Private Zubkov looked at the spray in his hand with a little surprise. He had not painted more than a few drops of the VX agent on the wound but the soldier with the wounded foot had taken less than ten minutes to go from convulsions to a gasping death. Probably it was the fact Zubkov had sprayed the nerve agent directly into his open wound. He had to act quickly now before the 2-PAM antidote he had given himself began to wear off.
He closed the man’s eyes, still staring at Zubkov with a mix of fear and betrayal.
Then he walked around the room to each of the other seven men, spraying a droplet or two on their face and neck. For some - those who had untreatable abdominal wounds, already in the grip of fever and delirium - it was a pure mercy. For the others, well, if they had ever made it out of here it would be to a life as crippled and limbless outcasts, so Zubkov didn’t actually feel that bad about it. He just wanted to get it done and get out again before all the convulsions started or the soldiers soiled themselves. That part was gross.
That only left the Captain, who Zubkov hadn’t thought it necessary to sedate. He sat in a corner in a chair, watching events as though he was watching a mildly interesting TV show.
As Zubkov approached him and held the spray nozzle up in front of him, he smiled. “Right or wrong, it’s very pleasant to break something from time to time,” he said.
Zubkov hesitated, then lowered the spray.
He realized then what he was feeling. It wasn’t pity, not exactly. It was the feeling that they had some sort of bond, him and the Captain. The two of them had been knocked down by the ammo dump blowing up, taken a direct hit from an American cruise missile, and they were both still here. Both of them had been left behind by that ba*tard Sergeant who had pi**ed off for Savoonga without a second thought.
They were survivors, the Captain and him.
He dropped the spray dispenser into a plastic bag with the gloves and sealed it tight. Then he clapped the Captain on the shoulder, “Back soon, sir.”
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 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.
*
*
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Devlin was also losing her mind. She had warned her colleagues in the State department that Russia was not interested in Saint Lawrence and polar sea routes, it was going to go after Alaska’s water. They had replied officially with ‘thank you but that doesn’t fit our internal narrative’ and unofficially with ‘Russia is going to attack Alaska for its water? Has she been hitting the vodka a little too hard?’ Now Russia had gone on the offensive over Alaska and attacked US bases there, so of course her detractors had come crawling back to her saying ‘we are so sorry Devlin, you were right all along, we were fools not to believe you.’
Like hell they had.
The massive Russian air offensive over Alaska was being used to further support the theory that Russia intended to permanently occupy Saint Lawrence. The new State Department narrative went like this: we have entered a cycle of escalation. Russia hit us in Saint Lawrence, so we responded with a massive air and missile attack. Russia cannot withdraw from Saint Lawrence without losing face, so it hits back at the only US facilities in reach - Eielson and Elmendorf-Richardson. De-escalation is our best response, said the majority voice in State. No one wants full scale war. Let them have their little island in the Arctic for now, we’ll leverage the outrage to get concessions in Western Europe and the Middle East.
The Russian attack was highlighting how internally divided her administration was. On the one hand, she had her colleagues in the State department preaching de-escalation in the face of massive loss of civilian life and challenges to US air power. On the other hand she had Defense in a rage over the attacks on its air bases and the crippling of its supercarrier and they were in no doubt whatsoever who was behind that even though it had been disguised to look like it was Iranian in origin. The Generals had lost personnel in the air over Saint Lawrence and on the ground at Elmendorf-Richardson and Eielson and had been sent packing from the skies over their own territory. They didn’t care why Russia was on the offensive, they only cared that they were, and they had no intention of playing some BS cat and mouse game of airborne ‘tit for tat’. The Defense Secretary had pushed the margins of his power to the limit, moving nuclear first strike resources to within a few hundred kilometers, or a few minutes flying time, of key military targets within Russian territory. Unlike the State Department’s de-escalation proposal, the Pentagon narrative went like this: they took our territory in Bering Strait, they attacked our airfields in Alaska. We need to lay a tactical nuke on the Russian Northern Fleet home base at Sevoromorsk or the Baltic Fleet at Kaliningrad and put Ivan back in his box.
De-escalate my a**.
For once, as horrified as she was at the thought of anyone starting a nuclear shooting match, Devlin found herself siding with the hawks in the Pentagon, instead of the doves in her own State department. And she had heard that the Pentagon point of view was prevailing with the US President, who had refused to take a call from the Russian president after the attacks on Eielson and Elmendorf-Richardson.
Which is why she found herself in a dilemma for her next meeting with the Russians. It wasn’t with Kelnikov this time. The crisis had moved beyond the stage where a lowly Ambassador could get face time with the Russian Foreign Minister when even heads of State were not talking with each other. In fact, it had moved beyond the stage where she was able to have official contacts of any sort. Instead she had been invited to a back-channel meeting with a Russian industrial magnate, Piotr Khorkina, who was an old school friend of the Russian President’s son. Officially, he was interested to hear if the current military ‘situation’ would pose problems for a multi-billion dollar deal he was about to sign to supply lithium batteries to a US car maker. Unofficially, he had said he also wanted to pass on a message to the US administration from his friends in the Kremlin. She had chosen to receive him in her office at the Chancery and her aide had organized a nice tray of tea and delicacies.
The thing was, Devlin was supposed to pass a message back to the Kremlin from the bureaucrats in State. We will let you pull your aircraft out of Alaska and back to the ceasefire zone of control. We will enter negotiations on a new Arctic freedom of navigation treaty. This may be your last chance to achieve a negotiated outcome because the hawks in our administration are arguing for a resolution by force of arms.
Devlin had full faith in her bucolic NSA analyst and his eccentric AI. And knowing what she knew about Russia’s true intentions, the words she was scripted to say were already sticking in her craw. It made no sense to offer to re-establish the ceasefire terms when she knew Russia was already preparing to move ground troops into Alaska.
There was a knock on the door and her assistant showed the man in. He wasn’t your standard oligarch - fat, feted and fetid. He was in his mid-forties, played tennis to keep fit, had a wife, three kids and no mistresses according to his CIA file.
“Peter, welcome,” she said. “Tea?”
They dealt with the small talk up front. Some days small talk was all she had. Today was not one of those days.
“So, to business … I have to say, the climate at the moment makes it difficult to progress any major business deals,” she said. “As you know, Congress is debating sanctions.”
“I understand Devlin,” he said, looking troubled. “We have written off any sales to the USA for this year, and for next year, we’ve put in a six month delay as a downside. Our base case is still that the deal will progress.”
Really? she thought. In your world, war between Russia and the US is a downside? And global nuclear annihilation, is that also a downside? It was clear the US State Department weren’t the only ones out of touch.
“Do you have any special reason to be optimistic?” she asked, giving him an opening to pass on the message from his government.
“Well, you know I have no special information, but people in the circles I move in …”
(Such as the President’s family)
“…insist this situation can be contained. It’s not like Russia wants a full scale war with the USA.”
“No? Because it could look like that,” Devlin observed. “When Russia invades our territory, starts an air war and bombs our airfields.”
The man smiled, and brushed an imaginary crumb off his trousers. “You are refreshingly direct as always. Of course, there are different views around who started this shooting match. There are those on our side who would say you sunk our freighter, disabled our submarine and then bombed our rescue personnel on Saint Lawrence.”
Ah, to hell with the script.
“Peter, listen to me, and listen well. Russia may not want full scale war, but it is about to get it. Your political masters don’t seem to understand that we know what their end game is here. Russia plans to invade Alaska.”
If she expected him to look surprised or confused, she was disappointed. He simply stared back at her and responded, “Yes.”
“Yes?!”
“Yes. That is my understanding too.”
“That would be insane.”
“Clearly we don’t see it that way. I’m told Russia wants a land buffer between our two States, given your general belligerence. We want Alaska to be a demilitarized zone.”
She laughed, “Seriously? A demilitarized zone, under Russian control of course.”
“Under the auspices of the Barents Euro-Arctic Council. And not the whole state, just Western Alaska.”
“Ah. Perhaps just the Yukon River Basin area?”
“Yes, actually,” he looked at her, frowning that she was already ahead of him. “I uh, I have drawn on a map of how I understand the buffer zone would work.” From his pocket he pulled a folded piece of paper. It hadn’t been drawn, someone had printed it for him and then drawn a very unoffical looking border in thick black pen across it. Probably someone in the Russian Foreign Ministry. It showed a map of Alaska with a diagonal line drawn across the middle from top right to bottom left and the proposed ‘buffer zone’ shaded in red. She saw that Nome was inside the zone - Juneau, Fairbanks and Anchorage were not.
Later, looking back, Devlin thought she took it pretty well, considering.
“Have you people lost your goddam minds?” she asked. “How about we create a ‘buffer zone’ inside Russia, say from Lake Baikal in Siberia to your Pacific Coast taking in Lavrentiya and oh, say, Anadyr as well? How about that instead?”
“You can keep the printout,” Khorkina said. He wasn’t fazed, “Would you like to consult with your superiors and get back to me, or is ‘have you people lost your goddam minds’ your last word on the matter?”
Devlin collected herself. She would actually land the meeting close to the wording State had given her after all, just not quite with the tone they had probably hoped for.
“No, here is my last word on the matter,” she said, taking up the page he had pushed forward. “I will pass your message on to my ‘superiors’ in State along with this map, but you should tell your friends in the Kremlin that Russia is courting nuclear oblivion. If Russia doesn’t pull back, and immediately, I expect to spend my final hours in the bunker under this building wondering what more I could have done to save the world from annihilation.”

*
*
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Bunny collected herself too. She was totally hyped but she had to channel full focus. She had just flown two Fantoms along the northeast coast of Russia, literally. So close to where the sand and gravel met the sea and ice that she could have told you where the good beaches were, in case you wanted to buy real estate for the coming climate-change boom. Then she had pushed her Fantoms down an icy river valley, across rolling hills and mountains and just about clipped a cliff face as she wheeled her drones east up the Anadyr River toward the airport at Ugolny. She had picked up the air traffic control radar signature of Anadyr, but hadn’t been painted by a single military search radar along the way. Of course she couldn’t rule out that she’d been spotted by satellite infrared or motion detection but no fighters appeared to have been sent to intercept her.
Through the high def forward scanning wide angle camera on the Fantom, linked to one of the few satellites the US had managed to reposition, the river below was a 660 mph blur of brown water and grey gravel. Occasionally her machines flashed over a small leisure or fishing boat, but she had to figure it wasn’t too likely they were patched into the Russian military command network.
As she got within 20 miles of Anadyr, she started picking up the skeleton fingers of a search radar brushing across the skin of her drones every 20-30 seconds. It was like the touch of a creepy guy at a Christmas party. It slid across her sensors and then was gone again. But like at a Christmas party, the only touch you cared about was the one where the line got crossed, a true butt cheek clutch. So far, the search radar was in the annoying but not lethal range. Which is what she had planned for. If she was a Russian anti-air battery commander set up to defend a forward air base she’d have 90% of her energy pointed north, east and south - facing the enemy - and configured to look for cruise missiles first and foremost. Anything to the west, any threat coming from their rear quadrant would get lower priority.
She hoped.
She only had two shots on goal. Four, technically, but she had set the two bombs in each drone to release in salvo, so as soon as they had punched the ‘mini-moabs’ out of their guts they were done, there would be no go-around.
“Starting ingress,” Bunny told Rodriguez. It was a courtesy. Rodriguez could follow the mission on a tactical 2D screen over Bunny’s head, but with it just being the two of them under the Rock now, Bunny felt the need to share. "ELINT is showing heavy air activity over the target."
“They aren’t smelling you?” Rodriguez asked, all tensed up.
“No ma’am,” Bunny said. “I am chamomile and roses right now.”
Sure enough, as soon as Bunny spoke, a red alarm started flashing on her HUD.
“Damn. I’m picking up radiation in the higher-frequency C, X and Ku bands. I think they’ve got an S-500 system pointed at us.”
“Which means?”
“Means they have a 30% chance of seeing us with this attack profile,” Bunny said. “And I’m already low and slow - if I got any lower, I’d be sucking river water.”
“Long way to go to get swiped out of the sky,” Rodriguez commented.
“Swiped my a**,” Bunny said. “I’ve got a 70% chance of getting through any S-500 without even needing to jam, and I’ll take them odds.”
Rodriguez knew better than to bet against the aviator who had laid a hurt on Eielson by faking the flight profile of a civilian light aircraft. She watched intently as Bunny flew her two Fantoms within minutes of the Russian base.
“Five minutes to release,” the pilot said. Rodriguez saw that her newly dyed white stubble glistened with sweat.
“SAM radar alert,” Rodriguez warned, seeing Bunny’s threat screen flash.
“No lock,” Bunny replied tersely. “Three minutes.”
Bunny was a good pilot, but she knew her limits. With an input lag of a full minute, for the last two minutes flying into an uber-hot target zone there was no human who could fly it better than the combat AI with its instantaneous reactions. She punched a last command set through to her Fantoms and lifted her hands into the air, “I’m out!” she called.
They both watched as a large airfield appeared in the split screw view of the forward nose cameras of the two Fantoms. Anadyr was made up of two long parallel runways, late summer grass and half melted snow between them. One of the Fantoms broke slightly left, the other slightly right. Their targets were the stationary aircraft and related command and control facilities. Bunny was counting down under her breath, “Three, two, one, release…”
The last thing they saw was couple of parked aircraft on one screen, and on the other, a control tower; behind it several other aircraft and what looked like a truck park. One of the drones dropped its bombs and made a kamikaze dive straight at the parked aircraft, the other did the same and made straight for the control tower.
In what was an inevitable anticlimax after such a tense mission, both of the 2D screens in front of Bunny O’Hare flashed momentarily white, and then went completely blank.
“Holy hell’s bloody bells,” Bunny said, her hands still in the air where she had left them when she took her hands off her keyboards. “I think we actually did it.”
But she didn’t celebrate, not yet. Their primary objective had been to catch as many Russian fighters on the ground at Ugolny as possible. But it seemed to Bunny, for a forward airfield it had contained a heck of a lot of trucks and containers, and not a heck of a lot of Russian aircraft. Strange though, one of the fighters parked on the airfield had been painted bright red.


*
*
[Linked Image]

The briefing room for the 573rd Air Regiment was in the basement of the control tower building at Ugolny airfield, Anadyr. It had been a combined civilian and military air base before the war had started, and CO of the 573rd, Colonel Artem Kokorin, had commandeered the baggage tracking center in the lower level of the control tower building for his operations facility. There was of course a perfectly functional operations room on the military section of Ugolny field, but the reality was that the former civilian facility, having long ago been privatized, had a far superior broadband link than his long underfunded military infrastructure. It also had the advantage of being two levels below ground, with multiple exits to the surface, so it was also better protected than the military command center up on the ground floor of the control tower.
It was bad enough his group had been pulled out of their base at Khabarovsk to support Operation LOSOS – an operation he didn’t fully grasp the political logic of – 2,500 miles here in the northeast. He had protested that it had left Russia without ground attack aircraft in the critical Sea of Japan border area. He had protested even louder when he had learned his regiment was to be made subordinate to Bondarev’s 6983rd. The man was a commander of fighters, with only one of his five air regiments made up of attack aircraft, whereas Kokorin led a dedicated ground attack unit comprising both Okhotnik UCAVs and rotary winged close air support aircraft.
The reason he had been given for the fact his machines and men had been put under the nominal command of the CO of the 6983rd was because he might be asked to commit his aircraft to an air-air defense role over Saint Lawrence if heavy losses were sustained over Alaska. It was a role for which his machines were not suited, and his men not adequately trained.
Now that he had been repositioned to Anadyr, within range of Saint Lawrence, he should be getting ready to react to any attempt by US naval or airborne forces to retake the island and flying sorties over the island terrain to familiarize his men. Instead, he had been ordered to drill them in air-air combat. He was also deeply uncomfortable that both his pilots and his aircraft had been co-located at the same airfield. He had been told there was no excess capacity at Lavrentiya, and no other airfield big enough to take his 24 aircraft. It made a mockery of the ability to disperse his force and protect it from attack with both his pilots and his aircraft crammed onto a single airfield, but he had been reassured by Bondarev that the risk of attack was less than none and it was anyway just a temporary measure.
A snap inspection by General Lukin would normally have had him in a panic, but this time he had welcomed the news. No, of course the 573rd wasn’t at full readiness yet. He had just settled in all of his pilots and systems officers. He had one third of his Okhotniks still in maintenance in hangars at Ugolny, with only two thirds combat ready. But his men had done an admirable job getting their UCAV command trailers off the IL-77 transports, sited and linked into the base network and the AWACS units of the 6983rd. In anticipation of the General’s arrival, he had ordered all pilots to their stations, either running simulations or commanding the squadron of 16 operational Okhotniks he had scrambled. He had put them in the air a half hour in advance of the General’s arrival, patrolling over Ugolny to give Lukin something to look at as they made their circuits, landed and were recovered. No, he wasn’t fully ready but the inspection would give him the chance to make his concerns clear to the General again.
And now he had learned that Bondarev was crashing the party! Damn him. He must have people inside Kokorin’s regiment keeping him informed. To make things worse, he had contrived to arrive about twenty minutes before the General, so Kokorin had lost the chance to put his views to Lukin in private.
Despite being theoretically of equal rank, and with a longer service record, Kokorin had no illusions about who was the senior officer as Bondarev walked into the briefing room in his flight suit. Even without his dress uniform and service medals, the son of the hero of the Russian Federation reeked of privilege and that most illusory of all attributes – political momentum.
As he reached out his hand to greet his fellow officer and girded himself for the meeting ahead he saw Bondarev hesitate and frown, looking up at the ceiling as a jet aircraft boomed low overhead, the noise penetrating even to their position two floors underground.
Only one of Bunny’s Fantoms delivered its GBU-43/K ‘mini-mothers’ with total accuracy – the other missed by more than 100 feet. The deviation was significant. The first Fantom dropped its two bombs right on target on the apron of the long concrete runway right near the maintenance hangars where three Okhotniks were parked on alert status, ready to give a demonstration to the General of how quickly they could get airborne. Two more were in the process of being re-fueled. Another three were in the hangars having engines and electronic systems maintained. The massive ordnance air blast bombs from the first Fantom detonated together 50 feet above the hangar complex and the blast wave spread out over a radius of about a mile. Anything and anyone inside a few hundred yards was vaporized. Anything from 500 to 1,000 yards was atomized. Everything from 1,000 to 1,500 yards was pulverized. Everything flammable was set on fire. In the space of a millisecond the eight UCAVs and their support personnel were no more. In case anything was left standing, Bunny’s first drone added its fuel and momentum to the chaos as it banked back around, dived into the blazing maintenance complex and detonated.
The second strike however missed its target by 100 yards. An extremely unfortunate observer, in their last few seconds of life, might have seen the approach of the Fantom. If they had, they would have seen two fat cylinders tumble end over end out of the Fantom’s weapons bay just as it swept across the egg blue and yellow striped administration buildings at Anadyr. One of the cylinders planted itself right in the middle of the road between two large apartment buildings commandeered for military personnel. Every window in the street was blown in and the buildings, which had been made to withstand arctic storms but not the thunderous pressure wave of a MOAB, collapsed instantly; killing nearly all of those inside. The other bomb missed the administration complex which was its target and landed in the field beyond.
A field that normally would have been empty except for the hulks of a dozen abandoned cold war Su-15 Flagon Interceptors deemed too far gone to salvage when they were decommissioned in 1993. A week ago however, these had been towed aside and piled together in a corner of the field, while the cleared space was turned into a parking lot for the 24 UCAV command trailers of the Okhotnik pilots and systems officers of 573rd Air Base. Plus a centrally located commissary wagon serving coffee, tea, hot soup and bread.
The last of Bunny’s mini-mothers detonated right on top of the commissary in the middle of the UCAV trailer park.
And in its last act, the Fantom that delivered the weapons zoomed into the sky, onto its back, and then speared back down toward the small control tower at the side of the air base.
It impacted at the base of the tower, two floors above Colonels Artem Kokorin and Yevgeny Bondarev. And, as he walked into the control tower building pulling off his flight gloves, right on top of the newly arrived Lieutenant General Yuri Lukin, who died thinking to himself that it might be time for him to upgrade his personal aircraft. One of those new Mig-41 dual seat ground attack aircraft would look damned sexy in Ferrari red.

*
*

(C) 2018 Fred 'Heinkill' Williams. To be Continued.



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#4405142 - 02/14/18 03:09 PM Re: AAR with a difference: Bering Strait UCAV campaign: Updated 15 Feb [Re: HeinKill]  
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Living with the Trees
More, More!

Bravo HeinKill.


Censored

Look for me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or Tic Toc...or anywhere you may frequent, besides SimHq, on the Global Scam Net. Aka, the internet.
I am not there, never have been or ever will be, but the fruitless search may be more gratifying then the "content" you might otherwise be exposed to.

"There's a sucker born every minute."
Phineas Taylor Barnum

#4405213 - 02/14/18 10:39 PM Re: AAR with a difference: Bering Strait UCAV campaign: Updated 15 Feb [Re: HeinKill]  
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HeinKill Offline
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Idea of the day! Would be great to generate broader interest in the project before the book is launched, so if you are following along why not spread the word on social media? FB/Twitter/Reddit, wherever!

I have created a small FB page you can like and send to others who might be interested. I'll make sure that anyone who likes the page is first to hear about the book launch and of course any discount offer! The point of this is that when the book is launched it is really valuable to get reviews on Amazon to drive further interest.

https://www.facebook.com/ucavnovels/

Spread the word!

(Proceeds of the sale of the novel will be donated 20% to SimHQ, 80% to Doctors without Borders.)

Cheers,

Heiny

PS in case you missed that post, my author name is TJ Slee (to keep my work life and writing hobby separate!).

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw...e-in-fiction-awarded-to-the-vanirim.html

Suggested blurb for your text below if you want to take the easy route and cut and paste!

******

Hey, if you like techno thrillers like me I am reading a new novel online which the author is posting for free, chapter by chapter, as it is written. I recommend checking it out!

Free chapters posted here:

http://SimHQ.com/forum/ubbthreads.p...-bering-strait-ucav-campaign#Post4398405

If you like it, you can follow the project and learn about the book launch date and discounts here:

https://www.facebook.com/ucavnovels/


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#4405216 - 02/14/18 10:49 PM Re: AAR with a difference: Bering Strait UCAV campaign: New Chapter! 15 Feb [Re: HeinKill]  
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I gotta say though, a VX-less plot to kill the wounded and the remaining civilians in Gambell would still be horrific but less implausible. Setting a building on fire and blocking the escape would be terrible enough. With nerve agents involved, particularly if hand delivered with a spray dispenser, it's overwhelmingly likely to go wrong.

#4405236 - 02/15/18 12:57 AM Re: AAR with a difference: Bering Strait UCAV campaign: New Chapter! 15 Feb [Re: HeinKill]  
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jenrick Offline
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Quote
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.


Any combustion source will do. Have a wood stove used for heat after the attack knocked out power, something like that. Just block off the exhaust enough and done.

Quote
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.)


Again I think using the VX even as an area denial tool, would be up there politically with touching off a tac nuke. For what St. Lawrence is to the plan, there's no reason to pack in VX. It'd actually be a lot safer, easier, and thorough to deploy it via cruise missile at a later time, in the even the political realities of the conflict call for it. A mortar lobbing gas shells is not be terribly effective, very limited area, and also runs a pretty decent risk of things going horribly wrong.

-Jenrick

#4405262 - 02/15/18 06:32 AM Re: AAR with a difference: Bering Strait UCAV campaign: New Chapter! 15 Feb [Re: HeinKill]  
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rollnloop. Online content
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France
Well, late in this world, early in next. Will st peter welcome him with cucaracha horn ? neaner :

edit: had already spread, added latest infos on french forum : http://www.checksix-forums.com/viewtopic.php?f=276&t=200178&p=1640809#p1640809

Last edited by rollnloop.; 02/15/18 06:41 AM.
#4405264 - 02/15/18 08:08 AM Re: AAR with a difference: Bering Strait UCAV campaign: New Chapter! 15 Feb [Re: Ssnake]  
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HeinKill Offline
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Originally Posted by jenrick
Quote
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.


Any combustion source will do. Have a wood stove used for heat after the attack knocked out power, something like that. Just block off the exhaust enough and done.

Quote
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.)


Again I think using the VX even as an area denial tool, would be up there politically with touching off a tac nuke. For what St. Lawrence is to the plan, there's no reason to pack in VX. It'd actually be a lot safer, easier, and thorough to deploy it via cruise missile at a later time, in the even the political realities of the conflict call for it. A mortar lobbing gas shells is not be terribly effective, very limited area, and also runs a pretty decent risk of things going horribly wrong.

-Jenrick

Originally Posted by Ssnake
I gotta say though, a VX-less plot to kill the wounded and the remaining civilians in Gambell would still be horrific but less implausible. Setting a building on fire and blocking the escape would be terrible enough. With nerve agents involved, particularly if hand delivered with a spray dispenser, it's overwhelmingly likely to go wrong.


Agree! VX will be substituted for something 'still horrific but less implausible'!

Originally Posted by rollnloop.
Well, late in this world, early in next. Will st peter welcome him with cucaracha horn ? neaner :

edit: had already spread, added latest infos on french forum : http://www.checksix-forums.com/viewtopic.php?f=276&t=200178&p=1640809#p1640809


Merci mon ami!


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#4405462 - 02/16/18 03:20 PM Re: AAR with a difference: Bering Strait UCAV campaign: Update 17 Feb [Re: HeinKill]  
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SUPREMACY
The building above Bondarev and Kokorin collapsed as the pressure wave from the ‘mini-mother’ exploding above them flattened it like a boot landing on a house of cards. However the C3I complex was in a concrete and rebar reinforced basement two floors under the ground, and luckily the bomb that hit them was an air burst, not a bunker buster, or the Colonels would have suddenly and violently lost all personal interest in the future conduct of the war.
Their comms to the outside were not however completely cut, and once emergency crews had restored power, Bondarev managed to direct help to their location and get them shifting rubble and bodies.
He emerged after four hours to learn that the runway at Ugolny Air Field had survived the American attack completely unscathed. Using massive ordnance air blast munitions indicated the Americans hadn’t intended to shut the air base down, even though they had flattened some above ground infrastructure. As long as the paved runways were intact, mobile air traffic control, radar and communications could easily fill the gap. And the 16 Okhotniks that were airborne at the time of the attack thanks to Lukin’s impending inspection also came through unscathed. Lacking command inputs from the ground, they had reverted to AI control, maintained a safe separation and kept circling until they were low on fuel before calmly landing themselves and taxiing to preassigned holding positions.
The lack of material damage was not relevant. The use of massive ordnance air blast munitions, coupled with the targets of the attack – the hangars, administration buildings and the trailer park – indicated that the US attack had the inhuman intent of achieving the maximum possible loss of life. And among those lost was the commander of the 3rd Air and Air Defense Forces, Lieutenant General Yuri Lukin.
It was impossible not to conclude that the US airstrike, carried out as it had been by what seemed to be two stealth UCAVs sent on a one way mission, was not a straightforward assassination attempt. Arsharvin had told him it was being treated as such, and there would be brutal repercussions for anyone found to have been careless regarding Lukin’s schedule. Bondarev could only imagine what machinations were going on back in Khabarovsk and throughout the VVS as people jockied to replace the dead Lukin as commander of the 3rd Air Army.
To Bondarev, the loss of a good commander like Lukin was tragic, but the politics were a sideshow and no one was irreplaceable. What was especially problematic was that Kokorin’s drone command trailers had been mounted within shipping containers, specifically to disguise their true nature. To any aerial or satellite surveillance, the field at Ugolny should have looked like a low-value freight yard. It was a strength of Russian UCAV doctrine that their pilots did not rely on satellite communications to control their aircraft but did so using near-line-of-sight radio inputs which reduced latency and enabled direct combat control. The shortcoming of Russian doctrine was that the pilots and systems officers needed to be within 600 miles of their aircraft. Hence the camouflage strategy adopted for the 573rd at Ugolny.
It hadn’t helped. Among the 225 Russian armed forces personnel and civilians who died or were seriously wounded in the attack, were all 124 primary and reserve aviators and systems officers of the 573rd Air Base.
His stomach churned and he resisted the urge to vomit. He also had to resist the thought, the primal urge, that was telling him he should step outside the ambulance, ask someone there for a sidearm, and shoot himself in the head. It was a number he simply couldn’t comprehend. Had any Russian officer since the second world war lost one hundred and twenty four men in a single attack?
Yevgeny Bondarev suddenly grabbed his shirt, tore it open and howled in mortal pain at the ceiling of the ambulance.

*
*
[Linked Image]

Dave was moaning again about the pain in his shoulders from carrying their radio, but he wasn’t getting much sympathy from Perri. They’d managed to catch the column of hostages because it wasn’t travelling as fast as them. Sure, there weren’t any old or infirm hostages among the prisoners, but there were some pretty young children and people couldn’t carry them on their backs the whole way across the windswept rocky terrain..
Now a chill night had fallen and Dave and Perri had found the column easily, because it was winding its way along the ‘coast track’, the winding west-east coastal path that led from Gambell to Savoonga along the cliffs and rocky beaches of the serrated shore. As the day had worn on and the route the column was taking became more obvious, Perri had to admit Dave was right. They were headed for Savoonga. He could only assume it wasn’t hit as hard as Gambell had been and the Russian survivors from the Gambell attack had decided to link up with their buddies in Savoonga.
As they had coasted a rise, Dave and Perri had been forced to drop to a crouch as they saw the circle of prisoners about a mile ahead, huddled around a couple of lamps. Somewhere in there were Perri and Dave’s mothers, fathers and brothers. There was no fuel for them to start any sort of fire, so they were pressed together in a circle like Emperor Penguins, using their body heat to keep each other warm, with the kids in the middle of the press. It was a survival tactic as old as time, and though the temp wouldn’t drop much below freezing tonight, it was just a good idea to keep your body heat up and stay out of the drying wind. People who died of exposure often died of dehydration as much as they died of the cold. Every hour the people at the outside of the circle would hand over their blankets and sleeping bags, move into the center, and a new group would take their place on the outer circle. Perri figured that with about two hundred people in the huddle, that meant most would get five or six hours of nice warm sleep.
Which was more than he and Dave would get in their crappy little sleeping bags on the rocky ground.
They couldn’t turn on a lamp or even shine a torch light, or they’d risk giving themselves away to the troops in the distance, so Perri had to fumble his way to getting power to their radio and tuning it so that they could fang the receiver in Gambell and get a signal through to Sarge. While he worked in his sleeping bag in the dark, Dave stood up in his sleeping bag, holding their makeshift antenna aloft until they got a lock on the Russian base unit in Gambell.
“Perri calling Sarge, do you read me? Hello? Perri calling Sarge.”
The Mountie had told them he would be sleeping by the radio, and waiting for their call, and he was true to his word. Perri only had to call three times before he got a bleary voice on the other end.
“Sarge here Perri, just wait, OK? Out.”
“OK, Perri … um … waiting,” he said, shrugging to himself.
He didn’t have to wait more than about twenty seconds before the Sergeant came back on the line. “Perri, hey. Are you guys OK?”
Sarge had taught them how to use a ‘duress signal’ in case they were captured and the Russians forced them to make contact. If they were safe, they should reply, ‘We are just fine Sarge.’ And if they were not, they should say ‘Couldn’t be better.’
“We’re just fine Sarge,” Perri said. “We caught up with the Russian troops and the people from Gambell. We think they’re headed for Savoonga.”
“They’re walking them out?”
“Yeah, they made about 12 miles today. We figure Savoonga will take them five or six.”
“OK, look, Perri, I have some questions for you from CSIS, the Security Intelligence Service, alright? Are you safe where you are, can you talk for a few minutes?”
Perri looked up at his friend, “Dave’s arms might fall off if he has to hold the antenna in the air too long, but yeah, shoot.”

*
*

The Secretary of State had to listen to Devlin once she scanned the map that Piotr Khorkina had given her and uploaded it. To make sure it didn’t risk getting stranded on some analysts’ desk she took the Secretary at his word and called him directly on his cell. Even he had to admit the map clearly showed that the Russians planned to cauterize Western Alaska, separate it from the rest of the USA, and this was supported by the ridiculous fiction of establishing a ‘demilitarized zone’ to protect the shipping in the Bering Strait and the scared and huddled masses of the Russian Far East (all 290,000 of them) from the rampaging bald eagle across the ditch.
He also had to listen to her when HOLMES was able to show through accessing Moscow traffic CCTV systems that the car driving the rather handsome oligarch who had been the government’s intermediary had travelled directly from inside the Kremlin to the gates of the US Embassy compound, without even a minor detour. It removed the likelihood that he had come up with the map himself in a fit of geopolitical creativity.
And if there was a single doubter left in Washington after those two little snippets of intel, they couldn’t keep faith in their misguided de-escalation fantasy after Carl Williams’ highly motivated AI was able to pull down an intercept of the Russian Foreign Minister, Kelnikov, travelling with an unknown Foreign Service employee on a car trip to the Bolshoi Ballet the previous evening. She had asked HOLMES to keep her apprised if there were any intelligence reports appearing on his radar involving Kelnikov, and he had struck gold.
The conversation had been captured using a Type 4193 Bruel and Kjaer software enhanced infrasound microphone mounted on a CIA drone paralleling the ring road beside him. The little microdrone was a bug in all senses of the word. About the size of a finch, it used pressure-field measurement to read the conversation in the car by picking up passenger side window vibrations, digitally filtered in post-processing for the rumble of the road. And it went a little like this:

Kelnikov: (TC: indistinguishable, could be cursing) be there? And we are sure of his vote?
Unidentified Male 1: He will support you.
Kelnikov: This is slipping out of control. That (expletive) submarine. Now that (expletive) woman is threatening nuclear war.
UIM 1: The Minister of Defense says this is the moment in which we will either secure the future of the Rodina, or we will throw it away.
Kelnikov: Burkhin is a fool.
UIM 1: I am not qualified to say.
Kelnikov: Then you are a fool. Did you read that situation report? An entire ground attack squadron out of action?
UIM 1: We still have the resources of the 4th, 5th and 7th Air Battalions.
Kelnikov: I told Lukin it was folly to trust the air war to the same man who had his ass handed to him by the Americans over that #%&*$# island.
UIM 1: We have near air superiority over the operations area. The loss of the Okhotnik regiment was a temporary setback. The LOSOS landing at Nome is still on schedule.
Kelnikov: On schedule? The Americans are building an air armada south of Canada where we cannot reach them, and they will reach out and swat us like bugs when they are good and ready.
UIM 1: Let them hide behind the Rocky Mountains. The Yukon is ours Minister.
Kelnikov: Driver! Pull this heap over. Get this stupid GRU idiot out of my car.
UIM 1: Minister! I…
(TC: Sound of car doors opening and closing and more cursing from Kelnikov. Silence until end of journey.)


The conversation told Devlin a lot, and it had sealed the deal in Washington too. It told her the Russian council of ministers was split. Kelnikov, it seemed, was afraid the Americans were about to tip the conflict over into nuclear war. Devlin was afraid of this herself. She didn’t know what submarine Kelnikov was talking about, but it made sense to her the Pentagon would be preparing for the worst and positioning its stealth submarines within first strike range of Russia. The conversation also told her that there had been a major US attack on Russian air assets and it had shaken their confidence. Finally, it had told the NSA and thus the whole of the US military intelligence apparatus what the next target for a Russian ground operation would be.
Nome.
*
*
[Linked Image]

There were of course things which Carl Williams wouldn’t, or couldn’t, tell Ambassador Devlin McCarthy.
The first was that it seemed his AI had fallen completely and totally head over silicon heels in love with her. Or what passed for love to HOLMES. One of Carl's breakthrough coding efforts had been to program HOLMES to experience ‘pleasure’ and to seek it out. He had defined pleasure for the AI as the ability to satisfy the intelligence needs of individuals of high rank, and of course he had weighted the various bureaucratic positions in the US government to ensure HOLMES knew who outranked who. Their satisfaction was measured by the number of times one of his reports was cited or forwarded by them. It was a simple algorithm and HOLMES had taken it to his silicon heart. Few individuals came with a weighting as high as the US Ambassador to Russia. Williams had programmed HOLMES to derive intrinsic ‘pleasure’ from providing intel perceived of value to high ranked individuals.
The conflict was this. The only individual in HOLMES universe who currently had a higher status rank than Ambassador McCarthy, was the head of the NSA, Levy Walters. But Walters was the leading proponent of the ‘de-escalation’ strategy. HOLMES derived little or no pleasure from providing reports which were routed to Walters because he saw they were always ‘qualified’ by other analysts and assigned a low ‘truth and reliability’ rating. HOLMES was finding himself outplayed by the human analysts in the NSA who also derived their pleasure from pleasing individuals of high rank but who were much more sophisticated than HOLMES in realizing that success was driven by feeding Walters with the intel that supported his world view, and discounting the intel which did not.
In the face of this dichotomy - a first ranked stakeholder who showed no interest in his intel, and a second rank stakeholder who accepted and championed his analyses - HOLMES made the very rational and almost human decision to stop providing critical data to the NSA, and reserve it solely for the eyes of Ambassador Devlin McCarthy.
Williams saw this happening, and was powerless to interfere. And he was caught in a catch 22. He could of course at any time rewrite the code and pull HOLMES back into line. But he was seeing his AI behave with a level of intuition and sheer bloody minded genius that had him gasping with exhilaration. Common to many successful artists was that they had a muse - a huge, heartbreaking love that inspired them to greatness.
Fifty four year old Devlin McCarthy was serving as five year old HOLMES’ muse. And it was a relationship Williams was not inclined to disrupt.
Carl was sleeping in his broom cupboard in the New Annex, with his head in the crook of his arm. It was good, solid sleep and he deserved it to not be interrupted. Therefore, of course, it was.
The small rippling alarm was both soothing and irritating; designed by HOLMES to wake him gently, but insistently. Without raising his head he hit the space bar on his laptop to wake it, and mumbled into his arm, “This had better be on the scale of imminent global thermonuclear war.”
“Hello Carl,” HOLMES said. “I need to speak with Ambassador Devlin and she is not answering her telephone.”
He didn’t lift his head. “What is the time?”
“Three a.m.”
“That is why she is not answering her telephone HOLMES.”
“Yes, but I need to speak with her.”
“No. And besides, you shouldn’t be calling the Ambassador on her direct line. That’s not protocol, my man. You go through me.”
“In war, protocol goes down the toilet,” HOLMES quoted.
“Is that so?”
“According to five star general and Secretary of State, Colin Powell, yes.”
Williams sighed. “HOLMES, she is sleeping, like other normal people. What do you want me to do?”
“I need you to go to her residence and wake her,” HOLMES said. His calm British voice radiated patience.
“Spaso House is five blocks from here. She might not be there. That’s probably why you couldn’t reach her. People do strange #%&*$# at the end of the world. She’s probably out bonking her fitness instructor.”
“She is in bed at Spaso House. She uses a sleep tracking app with inbuilt GPS locator and it is currently reporting that she is in a deep sleep cycle which is why I cannot wake her.”
“You hacked her fitness bracelet. That is beyond creepy HOLMES.”
“Will you wake her?”
“Give me one reason why I should,” Williams demanded.
There was a millisecond pause, and Williams knew it was because HOLMES was thinking, in his quantum-core brain, oooooh, should I tell him? Apparently the answer was yes.
“I need you to wake her so that I can tell her I have identified the Russian air force officer who is leading the offensive against US forces in Alaska.”
Carl shifted his head to be more comfortable, “So what, he’s probably put it on his online CV already. ‘June to December, leader of air offensive against USA.’”
“The leader of the Russian air offensive, Colonel Yevgeny Bondarev, is the father of her grandchild,” HOLMES said. “Will you wake her now?”

*
*

[Linked Image]

Private Zubkov had a grandmother. She was a lovely, wrinkled old woman who lived behind a church in Irkutsk. She made the best apple pie you ever ate in your damn life, and it was so simple. You took the apples from the tree in her back yard, and you peeled them, then you stewed them in sugar and cinnamon water. When they were soft you mashed them and ladled them into a baking dish. Over the mashed apples you spooned a thick layer of oats, and more cinnamon sugar. Into the oven, and bake for 30 minutes until the oats at the bottom had soaked up the juice of the apples and the oats at the top had turned crisp. Oh, but you weren’t finished. You took it out of the oven, and across the top of the crisp oats you spooned thickened whipped cream. And on top of the whipped cream, a sprinkling of almond flakes. Soaked in orange liquor.
On top of all the other surprises in that baking dish, it was the orange liquor almonds floating on the whipped cream which turned it from an ordinary apple crumble into a work of culinary art.
He had been thinking about that pie as he said goodbye to the old people in the school buildings. They didn’t know he was saying goodbye of course. They thought he was giving out their evening rations, and although a few of them had acted like they were suspicious, most of them had reacted with muted delight when he had included some big blocks of chocolate in with their ration. He’d found the chocolate in the ruins of the general store and though a bit melted at the ends, it was still chocolate.
He liked the thought that the old people had gone to their next life with the taste of chocolate on their tongues.
Once he had injected himself, then thrown the timed VX cartridges inside the locked school gym, he had retired to his office and given himself another shot of VX antidote just for good measure. From a pill bottle on his desk, he tipped out two amphetamine tablets and threw them down with a swallow of water. He had to stay awake. He had to get a read on that second radio, try to work out where it was. He had a pretty good idea who was using it, but he had to find them first.
So as the amphetamines kicked in, he played a mind game, and gave his report to Sergeant Penkov up there somewhere on the coast. He imagined Sergeant Penkov asking him for an update on the wounded and telling him (truthfully, if not in a complete way) that one of the Russians had died.
“Who?” the NCO would ask, like he cared.
Hmmm, who? Zubkov thought to himself. A name came to him, “Kirrilov, the boy with the sheared off toes and heel.”
“How did he die?” Penkov would ask. “He was the least wounded of them all.”
“I don’t know,” Zubkov would lie. “Infection?” Or perhaps he died from the topical application of 10ml of VX nerve gas concentrate. Who knows?
“Your job was to keep those men alive, private!” the Sergeant would say. “If you see infection, clean it and make sure the men are taking their antibiotics and antibacterials. We left most of the medical supplies with you.”
Most, right. Thanks so much. “Yes sir!” he would say earnestly. “I will not lose another!”
“You had better not, or I’ll have your balls.”
“Yes sir.”
“We are making good time. The locals say we are four days from Savoonga. I will call again tomorrow at this time. I will need to get instructions from whoever is in command once we reach Savoonga. Keep this channel open,” the Sergeant would tell him.
“Yes sir.”
“The hostages?”
“I gave them chocolate Sir,” he would say.
“What?”
“I found some chocolate, so I gave them that, with their MREs.”
“OK, well, that’s OK I guess. I’m signing off now. Keep the base station online and stay on top of those wounded Private, Penkov out.”
“Yes sir, out.”
Not that he could give the man a report, as he had left him without any way to communicate. But as he played the conversation through in his head, there was a beep from the base station and he looked at the rangefinder screen. It was showing two handsets now, both at a range of about 20km, one of which was probably the column of troops and townspeople. He tried to zoom the display, see if he could separate the two signals.
Yes! That goddamn ghost radio!
It was showing bright and clear on the rangefinder, but now it was almost right on top of the Sergeant’s field radio. He stared at the two dots for five minutes, but they stayed right next to each other.
Until the ghost blip winked out and was gone again.
So, they were following the column? Private Zubkov loved it when a plan came together.
He clicked the base station to standby.
Sleep. He needed that. It had been A Big Day.
Then in the morning, he would gather supplies and ammunition. Torch the gymnasium. Catch up to that column, find that ghost and deal with him, get the radio then call Anadyr. He’d be back in Gambell before his buddy arrived to pick him up. With luck, the Captain wouldn’t go more than a day without a meal.
He’d added something to his plan too. The Captain? He was going to bring him to Anadyr. Teach the guy to fish. It got boring out in the Northern Pacific at night. You could really use a guy who could recite Dostoyevsky by heart.
*
*

[Linked Image]

“NCTAMS-A4, this is CNAF Coronado, stand by for a message from Vice Admiral Lionel Solanta,” the radio in the trailer under the Rock said. After their mission against Anadyr Rodriguez and Bunny had prepped two more Fantoms and loaded one on the EMALS in an air-air configuration, with the other in its cartridge loaded for ground attack with standoff missiles, fueled up and ready to rock. They hadn’t received new orders, but they wanted to be ready to defend the base if they needed to. The air-air loadout would let them defend themselves against another small scale strike by attack aircraft, while the ground attack loadout would be useful if they were given a land based target or something on the water. Once they had their two drones locked and loaded, there was nothing more Rodriguez and O’Hare could do. So they had shared a coffee, grabbed some food and dropped into exhausted sleep. Both were awake and on station again at 0400 and the order to stand by their comms had come through at 0430.
“Standing by Coronado,” Rodriguez said.
Bunny was sitting at her pilot’s console with two booted feet up on her desk beside the coffee cups, joystick and throttles and keyboards. True to her word two nights ago, she had dyed her cropped black hair white-blonde and painted her fingernails black. Rodriguez was willing to bet she had painted her toenails black too. Looking at her picking her teeth with a toothpick, Rodriguez found herself thinking how Bunny had never mentioned a boyfriend. She’d never mentioned a girlfriend either, for that matter.
She wasn’t shy, she just didn’t share. With Rodriguez anyway.
“Admiral eh?” Bunny stopped picking her teeth and smiled. Then she said in a high sing song voice, “Bunny go-ing to get a me-dal…”
“Or court martial,” Rodriguez said, smiling too. “You probably hit the wrong target. Wasted two 90 million dollar drones taking out a fish factory.”
“Fish factory workers in Russia go to work in Okhotniks do they ma’am?”
“Maybe.” They hadn’t seen a bomb damage assessment yet, but they’d rerun the nose cam footage from the two drones and had counted at least a handful of Russian fighters on the base before they hit it. Pending the BDA, the strike had made Bunny a ‘ground ace’, a pilot with five or more ground kills. And she had been pointing it out to Rodriguez at every opportunity.
“There’s probably a promotion when you get ground ace status, right?” Bunny asked. “He’s probably calling to tell me I’ve made Captain.”
“You don’t even know those bombs exploded,” Rodriguez pointed out. “They could have been duds.”
“All four? No way ma’am, those eggs hatched.” Bunny retorted. “They…”
“NCTAMS this is Admiral Solanta, can I speak with Lieutenant Colonel Alicia Rodriguez please?”
Rodriguez took a deep breath, “Speaking, Admiral.”
“And is Lieutenant O’Hare there with you?”
“Yes sir, Admiral,” Bunny replied.
“Good. Look, I wanted to speak with you in person to let you know I’ve been following what happened to NCTAMS-A4. I know you got hit, and hard. I heard how you got your people out from under that rock Rodriguez and I also know the two of you volunteered to stay behind and close the base down, and you’ve managed to keep it operational despite all that.”
“Yes sir,” Rodriguez said. “Do you know how my people are?”
There was a pause, “I’m told all the wounded are recovering well. One is still in a critical condition, but stable,” Solanta said.
Bunny leaned over and gave Rodriguez a high five. “Sir, this is Lieutenant O’Hare,” Bunny said. “Do we have a BDA from our strike on Anadyr yesterday?”
“That’s why I’m calling,” the Admiral said. “Our intel … and we have multiple source confirmation on this one … says you have rendered the Russian 573rd Army Air Force UCAVs totally non-mission capable.”
Bunny and Rodriguez looked at each other, “Sorry sir, can you repeat?” Rodriguez asked in shock. “Did you say we NMC’ed a whole Russian fighter unit?”
“Yes Lieutenant Colonel, you heard me right. I don’t call active duty personnel on a whim - you whupped some serious Russian ass, ladies.” Right then, you could have lit a skyscraper from the wattage coming from Bunny and Rodriguez’s smiles. Admiral Solanta knew how to motivate his warriors. He also knew how not to. He hadn’t made mention of the massive casualty tally his intelligence staff had handed him. He also made no mention of the unconfirmed report the attack had killed a Russian General. He gave a cough and continued, “Now, I have to keep moving, but I wanted to give you a sitrep. It’s not good. While you’ve been trying to stay alive and get a little payback up there, Ivan has knocked us on our can. Eielson and Elmendorf-Richardson are out of action, at least for another three days, maybe longer. We’ve got some mobile anti-air fighting back but just as soon as they put up their radar dishes, Russia swats them. We’ve decided we aren’t going to fight Ivan’s fight on this one, not on his terms. We’re preparing a counter-offensive on a scale that is going to blast him back to Siberia, and we’re looking at … other options.” The Admiral paused to let those last two words sink in. “Which we hope will never be needed. But here’s the other reason for my call. Right now, NCTAMS-A4 is the only offensive air unit I have in the OA. I’m going to be asking you two to hunker down under that rock, and you’ll be flying day and night until you drop dead with fatigue, or you run out of drones, whichever comes first.”
Bunny gulped. The only offensive air unit in the OA? Holy hell. “Yes, sir. Understood. We’ll do our best.”
The Admiral laughed, “You telling me I haven’t seen your best yet Lieutenant Colonel? Well, I look forward to that. You two are rewriting the book on how to fight a modern air war. Keep it up, they’ll be teaching the next generation of aviators at Annapolis about the ‘NCTAMS model for bare bones kick-assery’, I guarantee you that.”
“Yes, sir!” they both chimed at the same time, and yeah, they were feeling it.
After the Admiral logged out, Bunny swiveled twice around in her seat, and then fixed Rodriguez with a fierce glare, “Ma’am, we get out of here alive, you and me have got to get tattoos.”

*
*

[Linked Image]

Devlin McCarthy had a tattoo. And she was willing to bet none of her staff had ever even entertained the thought their greying, stress cadet of an Ambassador had a tattoo on her right upper arm. Even less that it was a tattoo she’d gotten recently. It was in a place that was easily concealed; in summer she covered it with a skin toned plaster. It was only a little tattoo, just a symbol really - a small angel's wing. And there was a story behind it, of course.
Devlin’s daughter, Cindy, had been 32 when she announced to her mother she was pregnant. She’d moved in with Devlin in Moscow a year earlier after a long term relationship ended in disaster. A lawyer in a private practice in DC, she’d told her bosses she needed time away from work and rather than let her quit, they’d told her to take a few months and get her head together. They knew it was a better option than losing her for good. A few months had turned into a year, and Cindy had based herself in Moscow and travelled all over Europe. She and Devlin had talked about the breakup she’d been through, and how the one thing that had kept her daughter together with her partner for so long was the hope they’d have kids together soon. She’d waited and waited and then started suggesting it, more and more insistently - she was over 30 dammit and she wanted kids! But it turned out he didn’t, and that was that.
Devlin remembered every detail of the afternoon Cindy told her she was pregnant. It was a Sunday. Cindy had been in Saint Petersburg, with a friend she’d met in Rome, she said. A friend she’d been seeing a lot of lately, but hadn’t brought back home.
She’d come in from the airport, dumped her bags in her room and Devlin had made her a pot of tea. It was raining, but not in that drab melancholy way it often rains in Moscow. They were sun showers, fresh and brisk and Devlin had the windows open because she liked listening to the patter of the raindrops on the green copper of the roof above. Cindy came in, sat on the sofa with her cup of tea, one leg tucked underneath her. She was beautiful, of course, and not just because Devlin thought so. She was a young, bright, competent and together young woman with style and as Devlin walked into the lounge room and looked at her daughter sitting there in a ray of sunshine, framed in raindrops, Devlin’s heart near burst with pride.
“I’m pregnant,” Cindy had said.
Devlin sat next to her, taking it pretty calmly. After all, the girl wasn’t 15 years old.
“OK, wow,” Devlin said. “You sound …actually you sound OK about it.”
“I wanted it,” Cindy said. “I didn’t know how to tell you. But I’ve kind of been shopping while I’ve been here.”
“For a husband?”
“No, for a … man,” she said. She laughed. “I didn’t want to just go bonking random guys until it happened. I wanted a love affair, with someone I liked, but not so much I couldn’t say goodbye.”
“And you found one,” Devlin said. “I’ve been wondering who you’ve been travelling with, all these places. I thought maybe … I thought you were having an affair with a married man and didn't want to tell me.”
Now Cindy really laughed, “Oh Mom.” She sipped her tea. “No. I just figured it wasn’t worth introducing him because he’s not going to be a part of this.”
“What do you mean?” Devlin asked.
“I mean, he’s Russian and I’m going back to the States to have my baby,” she said. “I’m not sure I’ll even tell him.”
Devlin clutched her hand, gave her a hug and yes, she cried a little. While her daughter had been talking, she had suddenly had this image of the two of them, living in Moscow, a little baby in the residence, Devlin suddenly and wonderfully a grandmother. But, no. Apparently not.
“When I’m finished here, I’ll get something back in DC,” Devlin said, sniffling. “Maybe I could get out of the posting sooner, say next year.”
“It’s OK Mom,” Cindy said. “We have a whole lifetime to work this out. I want you there for the birth though,” she said, holding her mother’s face. “You promise me that, OK. I wouldn’t want anyone else there.”
And that night, the two of them had gone for drinks - mocktails for Cindy, a dozen different variations on a vodka theme for Devlin and then the two of them had gotten tattoos. And they got angel's wings because Devlin had decided that’s what her grandchild was going to be and it was small enough it wouldn’t hurt too much and she could cover it easily and Cindy said ‘whatever’ she couldn’t believe she was getting a tattoo with her 55 year old mother the US Ambassador to Moscow.
The way she felt then, waking up the next morning with a hangover and a throbbing pain in her ankle, was exactly how Devlin McCarthy felt now having been woken by Carl Williams and his ever present laptop-based lifeform, HOLMES.
“You woke me to tell me what?”
“Ma’am, there’s no way to sugar coat this, so I’ll let HOLMES tell it and you can decide what you do with it,” Williams said. He sat his chubby bearded self down on the end of the sofa outside her bedroom. She sat at the other end in a bathrobe, slippers and with a confused expression on her face. He took out a smart phone, turned on the speaker and sat it on the table in front of her.
She nodded, “OK, sure. Go right ahead.”
The tinny British voice was loud in the small room, “Hello Ambassador, do you remember saying to me that the Russian air force officer behind the attack on Saint Lawrence must be someone they really trust? ‘A party insider’, was the exact phrase?”
Devlin had by now had hundreds of hours of conversation with HOLMES, and she didn’t share his perfect recall. “No, HOLMES, I have to admit, I don’t.”
“Well, ma’am, you did. So working on that premise I have been looking at officers of the Eastern Military District 3rd Air and Air Defense Forces Command and building a database of the sons and daughters of prominent political and military leaders who would be of the right age to be leading a Russian air unit of at least Division strength. The interrogation of pilots downed and captured over Alaska identified they were from the 6983rd Air Force, and the commander of this division fits the profile you described. He is Yevgeny Bondarev, the grandson of the former Commander in Chief of the Russian Aerospace Forces, Viktor Bondarev. He is a lifelong party member, served with distinction in the Middle East and on his return to Russia his unit, the 5th Air Regiment, was attached to the 3rd Air and Air Defense Forces Command. When the commander of the 6983rd was removed for corruption, Bondarev was promoted.” HOLMES was talking like a military search engine, and Devlin had trouble assimilating all the detail, being as it was 0330 in the a.m. and she was still waking up.
“Yes, so … so, what?”
“I have examined every single piece of data currently held in US intelligence databases related to Colonel Bondarev,” HOLMES said. “I have also obtained access to his GRU personnel file and an FSB dossier compiled on him as part of his vetting for the position of Commander of the 6983rd Air Force.”
Now Devlin came awake, “You hacked GRU and FSB servers?”
“Not personally ma’am,” HOLMES replied, his voice conveying no irony. “But you don’t need to know more.”
“No, I don’t,” Devlin agreed. “Where are we going with this?”
Williams squirmed awkwardly, “We found something in the files, related to you.”
We found something in the files, related to you. This was a sentence no Ambassador ever wanted to hear from a spook.
“Tell me,” Devlin said.
“In the FSB file, there was a US birth certificate recording a Russian national, Yevgeny Bondarev, as the father of a child born two years ago,” HOLMES said. Devlin went cold. HOLMES continued, “The mother of the child was listed as your daughter, Cindy McCarthy. The child’s name is…”
“Angela,” Devlin said quietly. “Angela McCarthy.”

*
*

[Linked Image]

“What I want is simple,” Bondarev was telling Arsharvin. He had just reviewed imagery from the US attack on Ugolny. His voice was low, and dangerously quiet. “I want to know how the Americans managed to get two Fantoms, which have a range of only 1,500 miles when carrying a full payload of ground attack ordnance, through our long range and short range air defenses and underneath a cloud of circling UCAVs and then hit my air base, bury me alive and kill General Lukin plus nearly every damn crew member of the 573rd Fighter Aviation Regiment, when the nearest US airfield out of which they could have flown is Lewis McChord in Washington State.” He took a breath. “Which is twice the range of a Fantom, or in case you need reminding, two thousand, five hundred freaking miles from Anadyr.”
“We’re working on that, comrade Colonel,” Arsharvin said. There were other officers present, so he was sticking to formalities. He was also being very careful because he knew his friend, and he knew what he was going through. This was not a time for being defensive. “Our first theory was mid-air refueling. But they would have had to refuel over Alaska, or the north coast of Russia, and we have not been able to identify any likely radar or satellite data indicating the US managed to get a refueling aircraft into the theatre, manned or unmanned.”
Bondarev was staring at him, waiting. They were seated across a table from each other in his temporary operations center in the harbor at Anadyr; a former harbor master building commandeered because it was the only building with enough connectivity to support their data communication needs without choking. “You have other theories, then,” Bondarev stated, not asking.
“As we discussed, the most likely is that the US either recently, or some time ago, managed to position mobile drone launch units in Alaska State and since the outbreak of the conflict, has moved these West, so that they are now in a position to threaten our rear,” Arsharvin said. “They have had the capability to launch their Fantom aircraft off the back of a heavy hauler since…”
Bondarev cut him off, “I am aware of US mobile drone launch capabilities.” His eyes narrowed. “However my intelligence chief has not found any such units operating within this theatre. Or was there a report that I missed?”
“No, comrade Colonel.”
“But you have information to that effect now? Satellite or Electronic Surveillance Intelligence?”
“No, Comrade Colonel,” Arsharvin said. “Still only speculation.”
Bondarev stood abruptly, and Arsharvin flinched. “I cannot target ‘speculation’ Captain,” Bondarev said. “I have an immediate and existential threat to my ability to achieve air superiority in the Yukon Basin theatre, and that threat is currently unknown, unquantified, and…” Bondarev slammed a hand down on the table, “un-located!” He was not finished. He held up a sheaf of papers Arsharvin had delivered earlier in the day. “The enemy is not playing our game, you tell me. I want him to come against me in strength but he is holding his air force in reserve and moving his nuclear strike submarines into hypersonic cruise missile range. We need to get our troops safely on the ground in Alaska before he acts, but …” He slammed the table again. “Instead! Instead I am being bled by an asymmetrical interdiction force of insignificant strength able to inflict significant losses because my intelligence unit was apparently deaf, dumb and blind to this threat!”
Arsharvin had taken all he could. Yes, his friend was a superior officer. Yes, he was hurting. But he could not place the blame for the deaths of 200 men on Arsharvin and his officers. Not alone.
“With respect, Colonel,” Arsharvin said, standing as well. “There were only two stealth aircraft used in the attack. However they got through, they got lucky.” There was a map of Alaska on the table, and Arsharvin span it around, his finger stabbed down on the rugged western coastal region. “If they have mobile launch units in the theatre there are very few areas they could operate from. We have standing patrols over Nome, so they didn’t come from there, and east of Nome there are no roads, only logging trails. There are no suitable airfields, only dirt strips used by light aircraft flown by bush pilots. If they are there, we will find them.” He took his hand away and stood, “I promise you, Comrade Colonel.”
“The rest of you are dismissed, Captain Arsharvin will remain,” Bondarev barked. When the other officers were gone, they sat again.
“I share the burden of those deaths too my friend,” Arsharvin said. “Wherever this attack came from, we will find them. You have my word.”
Bondarev span the map of Alaska thoughtfully. He stopped, pinning it with his finger on Nome.
“General Lukin gave me two weeks to show we have control of the airspace over the Yukon Basin,” Bondarev said. “He was being pressured by a faction in the Council of Ministers to abandon the plans for a ground assault and consolidate our presence on Saint Lawrence as a bargaining chip for negotiations.”
“Negotiations over what?”
“Water imports,” Bondarev said. “A pipeline, from Alaska into Siberia.”
“We would be slaves!” Arsharvin said. “Dancing to the tune of the USA, just like they danced to the tune of the oil sheikhs last century!”
“Would that be so bad?” Bondarev asked. “The Americans came out of the oil crisis stronger than ever. New technologies removed their dependency on Arab oil. We could do the same, but with water.”
“You would want to live in a Russia dependent on the USA for its economic survival?” Arsharvin couldn’t believe his ears.
“For a few decades only,” Bondarev said. “We have three oceans bordering our nation, more than enough water if we could just find more economic ways to desalinate and distribute it. In time, we would.”
“Who are you?” Arsharvin asked. “And what have you done with my friend the warrior, Yevgeny Bondarev?” Arsharvin shifted in his chair. “Besides, Lukin is dead. You are the most senior commander in the 3rd Air Army until a replacement is named. For all intents and purposes, you are leading this air war now.”
Bondarev sighed, tapping his finger on the map of the region around Nome again.
“Perhaps, perhaps not. I have a call with Moscow in thirty minutes and will inform them I have removed Kokorin for his gross negligence in not preventing the attack on Ugolny and referred him for a court martial. If they do not also relieve me, I will leave for Savoonga tomorrow to ensure the airfield there is ready to be used to stage a battalion for the attack on Nome. I can’t afford to have all of my aircraft concentrated at Lavrentiya, and Anadyr will take precious days to rebuild. My two weeks is running out my friend,” Bondarev said. “I have only days now to show Moscow that the Americans cannot repeat what they did in Anadyr. And from today, it gets harder. They have moved new satellites into position.” He reached over, and patted Arsharvin on the shoulder. “I can keep the two US airbases in Alaska out of commission, even without the Okhotniks of the 573rd in reserve. The Sukhois and Migs of the 4th and 5th, and the Okhotniks of the 7th can fend off their probing patrols and degrade their mobile anti-air capabilities as fast as they get them up and radiating.” He fixed Arsharvin with a cold gaze, “But I need you to find whoever killed our crews at Anadyr, so that I can kill them before they hit us again.”

(c) Fred 'Heinkill' Williams. To Be Continued
https://www.facebook.com/ucavnovels/


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#4405605 - 02/17/18 06:59 AM Re: AAR with a difference: Bering Strait UCAV campaign: Update for 17 Feb [Re: HeinKill]  
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rollnloop. Online content
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rollnloop.  Online Content
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France
This is getting close and personal, almost creepy exitstageleft

#4405954 - 02/18/18 08:07 PM Re: AAR with a difference: Bering Strait UCAV campaign: Update for 17 Feb [Re: HeinKill]  
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HeinKill Offline
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Well ... six degrees of separation and all that wink

H


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#4406025 - 02/19/18 12:21 AM Re: AAR with a difference: Bering Strait UCAV campaign: Update for 17 Feb [Re: HeinKill]  
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Germoney
SIX.
It must always be six.

This is only three, or four. wink

#4406086 - 02/19/18 07:58 AM Re: AAR with a difference: Bering Strait UCAV campaign: Update for 20 Feb [Re: Ssnake]  
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HeinKill Offline
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Originally Posted by Ssnake
SIX.
It must always be six.

This is only three, or four. wink


I think the war will be won or lost on seven...

Let's keep rolling! Another chapter inspired by one of my many failed missions in DCS over the holidays. I really do suck at air-ground.

*************

SOME DAYS YOU EAT THE BEAR


Private Zubkov couldn’t bring the base radio and its range finding scope with him, so he had to track the ghost radio the old fashioned way. He knew whoever was carrying it was following the column of prisoners along the coastal track to Savoonga. So he would do the same. They had a one day start on him though, so he had to hustle.
He had moved the Captain into the relative comfort of the school master’s offices, sat him in a chair and set him up with a bottle of water, cold tea and biscuits with some cheese. The man was able to eat and drink, take himself to the toilet and lie down when he needed to sleep. Anything more complicated seemed to befuddle him. But he would be okay for a couple of days.
He sat in the school master’s chair, watching as Zubkov got himself ready.
Zubkov had decided to travel light. A half-sized backpack, water, dry rations, a knife and his 9mm Gsh-18. He had his winter camouflage uniform on, mottled brown and white, with just a utility belt across his waist and the backpack strapped tight to his shoulders.
“I know what you’re thinking Sir. I should be taking a rifle,” Zubkov said, talking as much to himself as to the Captain. “But I’m not going into the field for weeks. I need to travel fast, act decisively, get back here quickly. So just light weapons. Gun and knife. What do you say?”
The Captain actually appeared to be considering. “When there is no God, everything is permitted,” he quoted.
“Amen to that sir,” Private Zubkov said, checked his sidearm and ammunition one last time, holstered it and headed for the door. Outside the door he picked up two jerry cans of gasoline and headed for the gymnasium. He had a damn good idea who was out there, following that column with a stolen Russian radio. He’d shown the guy’s jacket and air force patch to the Captain when the man had gotten away from them, their first hour on the island. And that shadow he’d seen on the hillside just after the first missile hit? That was no coincidence. The US soldier must have called in the strike.
Zubkov should have shot the ba*tard when he had the chance. He wouldn’t make that mistake twice.

*
*

[Linked Image]

The last remaining officers of the last remaining offensive air assets in the OA were trying to work out what the hell had just gone wrong.
They had been tasked to hit a Russian supply depot at Lavrentiya where it looked like the enemy was stockpiling a significant cache of supplies outside the military airport for some sort of offensive. The base itself was assumed to be heavily defended, but their target was a warehouse and distribution center on the outskirts of town.
It was an industrial town with a small harbor and what was now a disproportionately large airport. A single five story administrative center and not far from it, a six story hospital. Four or five factories belched foul black smoke into the air over the town.
It was a perfect target for the Joint Air-to-ground Missiles they had already loaded aboard one of their Fantoms. They had a drone already on the EMALS configured for air-to-air escort, so they put that into the air first, then bullied the second Fantom into place and sent it up the chute.
The JAGM had a warhead similar in hitting power to its predecessor the Hellfire, and the four missiles carried inside the weapons bay of the Fantom were more than sufficient to destroy the weapons dump. The only problem with the JAGM was that the Army and Navy had never been able to agree on its final design, with the Navy in and out of the program a couple of times over the years. In the end, it was a compromise between the longer range standoff weapon the Army wanted and the shorter range missiles wanted by the Navy. Guided by semi-active laser and multi-band radar, the JAGM was a fire and forget weapon, but with a range of only about ten miles.
There was no back door into Lavrentiya as they had found for Anadyr. The city lay abreast of a wide sweeping bay on a flat permafrost plain. Low hills skirted the city to the north, but they weren’t suitable to provide any sort of radar cover.
“We blow in low from the south with the sun behind us, pop up, lock and shoot, then bug out,” Bunny had decided while they were planning. “We’ve got no intel on what kind of air defenses they have in place, but it’s the main Russian offensive air base, so there must also be some ugly-ass anti-air protecting it. Fantom 1 goes in first, tries to draw any fire, helps me identify what they have hiding there. I can use one missile for suppression, two for the depot, still leaves me one for a target of opportunity, if we’re lucky.”
They were going to try to bring their drones home this time. They had got the heavy lift crane working again, after a fashion, and decided they could land the drones on the Pond, tie them up, then pull them out by crane and refit them when they got a chance. With only ten aircraft left, they couldn’t treat every mission as a one way trip.
It was a good plan. But they didn’t get a single missile away.
What Rodriguez and O’Hare couldn’t have known was that Bondarev had made very sure indeed that his baseat Lavrentiya was well protected.
Sitting on a low rise overlooking the decaying town, was a Nebo-M 3-D anti-aircraft/anti-missile system and it was about to come online. Mounted on three 24-ton trucks, it featured a command module and three radar arrays, arranged to provide 360 degree area denial defense of the airspace around Lavrentiya. The Nebo battalion at Lavrentiya controlled 72 launchers over a 100 square kilometer area, fielding a total of 384 missiles. In ‘circular scan’ mode the Nebo-M battalion could track up to 200 targets at a distance and at altitudes of up to 600 kilometers. In ‘ICBM killer’ sector scan mode, a Nebo-M could track 20 ballistic targets at ranges of up to 1,800 kilometers and at an altitude of up to 1,200 kilometers.
If he’d had such a system at Anadyr, the Americans would never have gotten through, but he’d seen his assets at Lavrentiya, closest to Alaska, as being the higher priority and the Nebo-M was a precious resource. Although Russia had once had grand plans to install Nebo-M systems all over the country to provide an effective anti-missile shield, teething problems had delayed their introduction and they were only now being deployed, with a focus on providing protection to the major population centers, so it had taken a bureaucratic cat fight and the personal intervention of General Lukin for Bondarev to get the only Nebo-M in the Eastern Military District moved from Vladivostok to Lavrentiya to protect his fighters for LOSOS.
It was a system specially designed to detect stealth aircraft, but even the Nebo-M would have trouble picking up at long range the small profile of the two Fantoms Bunny was sending towards it. For this, it relied on a shorter range array radiating at the lower frequency S and L bands, which had a range of less than 30 miles.
With Bunny able to fire her missiles at a range of 10 miles, and fly at 1,300 miles an hour at sea level, assuming she could get close enough that gave the Russian system a window of about one minute in which to lock and fire at the Fantoms before she could fire herself.
Even if she had known the Nebo-M was sitting there waiting for her, she would probably still have taken those odds. But because it hadn't got up and radiating yet, there was nothing on her threat warning system to tip her off it was even there..
It was no ordinary anti-air battalion either. Painted on the door of the command module of the Lavrentiya array were the silhouettes of six fighters, two ICBMs and four rotary aircraft that the unit had ‘destroyed’ in exercises. It had never fired a shot in actual combat - the Nebo-M was a home defense system and hadn’t been deployed in the Middle East, but the personnel staffing the unit at Lavrentiya were the best in the Russian Armed Forces at what they were paid to do.
So when an AWACS aircraft picked up a couple of ghost returns to their south, battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel Alexandr Chaliapin had ordered his technicians to get their array online and do it now dammit. The AWACS didn't have a firm fix on anything, but that hadn’t made him relax. He’d heard what had happened at Anadyr, everyone had. But Anadyr wasn’t defended by his Nebo-M. And he had no intention of letting what happened at Anadyr happen to him at Lavrentiya.
Getting the battalion physically in position had taken precious days - getting it networked and able to link with other air, sea and ground defense units even more of a headache. Now they were in the middle of their first live test cycle and they had a threat on the board? Other commanders might have panicked or worse, been lulled into complacency by the next forty minutes without any further contact being reported . But Chaliapin let his men work and when they declared the system ready he played a hunch, and sent a narrow beam of low frequency energy down the bearing of the previous contact and hit gold. Another feint return bounced back, then was gone. Now he had a validated threat and a vector on it - he put three launchers armed with low level active homing 9M96J missiles on high alert, bringing them to instant readiness. He fed the numbers to his AI, shut down his active systems and stopped radiating. If he was wrong, he had just condemned the city to an attack from an unknown quarter, but he had never before been wrong.
In her VR rig on Little Diomede Bunny's radar warning flashed for the briefest of moments. Too short for her to identify the source or type of defensive system that was sniffing after her. She logged it then ignored it.
The Nebo-M’s AI ran the numbers on the two ghost returns, calculated a speed and bearing, and waited with silicon patience for the identified threat to enter S and L frequency range. At exactly 32 miles range, it brought its radar arrays back on line and blasted energy downrange toward the estimated position of the UI aircraft.
As her threat indicator showed a targeting radar lock on her HUD, Bunny just had time to yell, “Radar lock!” The combat AI on Bunny’s Fantoms reacted before she could, sending one Fantom in a hard banking right turn, while the other broke left, but it was too late. With the 9M96J missiles flying at two and a half times the speed of sound, the missile alert warnings sounded almost at the same time as the two screens she was using to pilot the drones flashed suddenly white, then went blank.
An hour of tense anticipation ended with disbelief. If Rodriguez and O’Hare had been last-gen aircrew, they would both have been dead; not sitting around trying analyze how they had screwed up. But this was a new world, and that’s what they had spent the hours after reporting their failure to ANR doing.
They had poured over the mission data, and uplinked it to NORAD for analysis. The answer that had come back had not been the one they wanted to hear. They had hoped they had been swatted by some sort of low level MANPAD or ship based missile system that had gotten lucky. NORAD analysts had pegged the system that killed them as one of the newest Russian Nebo systems, and that meant they wouldn’t be getting a second chance. Neither was Lavrentiya a likely target for even hypersonic cruise missile attack; with Russia dominating the air over the OA so completely, the only option would have been a sub launch, and that would have elevated the conflict to a whole new and suicidally dangerous level. Tensions were on a knife edge now. Russian satellites might detect the American cruise missile blooms as the missiles shot up out of the water, and they would have no way of knowing they weren’t nukes. It could provoke a response that everyone would regret. For that reason, a ballistic missile strike was also out.
“There has to be a way,” Bunny was saying. “There has to be.”
“We don’t have any longer range standoff missiles, and they’d be detected anyway,” Rodriguez replied.
“This is why we still have humans behind the stick,” Bunny told her, determination in her voice. “An AI can’t think its way out of this, but we can.”

*
*
[Linked Image]

“The Ambassador did not appear pleased with my report,” HOLMES said.
“No. Well, she was upset, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t want to know,” Carl replied. Sometimes he had to pinch himself over the ‘conversations’ he was having with his natural voice neural network.
“My report made her cry,” HOLMES observed. “Now she will not like me.”
“You can’t conclude that. Humans cry for a lot of reasons, and she may be crying at the information, without being annoyed at you or me for giving it to her. You should watch a lot of films, and see what sort of things make humans cry and how they react to those situations.”
“Yes Carl. Can I ask the Ambassador to rate the report? If she rates the source as ‘reliable’ still, I will know she it has not impacted her assessment of me.”
“No, not right now HOLMES. Let her process it.” Process it? How do you process the knowledge that the father of your grandchild is leading the air war against your country. You could write it off and deal with it later, that would make sense. Or pass it up the chain, let people know it might affect your judgement.
“Carl, I have been running scenarios on the intelligence opportunities posed by the link between the Ambassador and Yevgeny Bondarev,” HOLMES said. “They are immature but I would like to discuss them with the Ambassador.”
Williams clicked his tongue, “No. You can discuss them with me first, and when they are mature, we can decided who to discuss them with.” He took a pull on his coffee, feet up on his desk. What he needed in this little broom closet was a nice big poster of a beach in Hawaii. His parents had taken him and his sister to Hawaii once and he would never forget it. That would help take his mind off … other stuff.
“Yes Carl. I will send you the list of opportunities and risks I have created with associated probabilities, projections and exploitabilities.”
“What’s top of the list, by ‘exploitability’?” he asked, suddenly curious.
“Assumption: Bondarev knows about the child or can be persuaded the child exists. Assumption: Bondarev has feelings about the child and/or the mother. Opportunity: threaten to kill the child and/or mother if Bondarev does not agree to work as a US agent-in-place.”
Carl nearly spat his coffee out of his nose. “HOLMES, let’s keep these exploitability scenarios to ourselves for now - confirm please.”
“Yes, Carl. Your eyes only, no uplink to NSA.”
“And they are definitely not to be discussed with the Ambassador, repeat.”
“Yes Carl, exploitation scenarios for discussion with you only,” HOLMES said.
“Thanks. Log me out please,” Carl said, and closed his laptop. Was it his imagination, or did the synthetic voice actually sound a little disappointed?

*
*

[Linked Image]

Following the column was an agony for Perri. It was mid-morning now after a fitful night of little sleep. Sarge had kept the call short, but he was pretty keen to tell them what to do.
“You both have to keep safe,” he told them. “Remember this, ok? If you can see them, they can see you. In fact, they might be carrying infrared vision, so they might even be able to see you before you see them. If you are too close, you could go to sleep and never wake up because you got a 9mm Spetsnaz sleeping tablet.”
“You want us to go back to Gambell?” Perri had asked, confused. “We could get our elders out, maybe you could arrange for someone to come and pick them up?”
“No,” he said firmly. “They’ll be ok. I need you to keep tracking those troops. We figure they’re going to meet up with the rest of their force, but we need to know where. It could be Savoonga town, or it might be out at the Northeast Cape cantonment,” he had said. “What’s left of it.”
“The Americans bombed Savoonga too?” Dave had asked.
“They did.”
“Some of our people worked there,” Dave had pointed out.
The Canadian Mountie was quiet. “Yes, I know. I’m sorry.” He wasn’t about to tell him the Russians had moved everyone in Savoonga town there before the Americans had hit it. They would learn that soon enough. “Look, how easy would it be for you to fall back out of line of sight of the column, but keep following it?”
Perri thought about it, “Pretty easy. There’s only one track along the coast, and no reason for them to go inland. There’s totally nothing south of here. And there’s like two hundred people in that group. They’re leaving tracks so obvious even Dave could follow them,” he winked at the other boy, who took one hand off the antenna and gave him a finger back.
“Then that’s what I want you to do,” Sarge had said. “Hang back where you’re safe. Don’t take any risks. Once they get where they’re going, you call me again and let me know. Then we’re going to really need your eyes and ears. There’s heavy weather moving in, fog and rain for the next few days. We’ve got satellites over the top of you but they’ll only be able to use synthetic aperture radar and heat imaging. Your Mark 1 eyeballs and that radio you’re carrying will be the best intelligence we can get.”
“Rain,” Dave had said. “Great.”
That had been last night. So they had waited until mid-morning before setting out after the column again, following the trail of boots and shoes scraping across the stone and ice and gravel of the coast track. It was about 11 a.m. when they came across Susan Riffet. It was Dave who saw her first, lying a short way off the track to their right, sitting up, back propped against a rock.
“Hey,” he said, grabbing Perri’s arm. “Hey!” And he put his gear down on the ground, running over to her and dropping to one knee beside her. “Hey, Mrs. Riffet? You OK? Mrs. Riffet?”
As Perri landed next to him, he saw her eyes were closed, and her lips were blue. Dave was shaking her shoulder. “Mrs. Riffet?” She was one of their teachers; a new one who’d come from Saint Paul, Minneapolis, about two years earlier. She was short and round and jolly and for some reason she thought being on Saint Lawrence was the coolest thing that had ever happened to her. She used to go for long walks with a camera, take close up photos of plants and animals, come back and show them to the kids as though every little vole or fox was a natural wonder. In summer she’d take them out with the elders, combining hunting and gathering trips with nature lessons. At times it had seemed she loved the island more than they did.
“She’s dead buddy,” Perri told him, stopping him from shaking her any more. Her head had fallen down onto her chest and lay there like she was sleeping. Which, in a way, she was.
“Ba*tards,” Dave said, and Perri realized he was crying. “The ba*tards.”
Perri lifted her head, looked at her face. He lifted her arms too, looked at her hands, then let them drop. It didn’t look like she’d been beaten up or been in a fight or anything. Then he remembered something, “She had a heart problem didn’t she?”
“Yeah,” Dave said. “She used to take tablets...”
“Right. So it was a heart attack or something…”
“Why didn’t she take her tablets with her?” Dave asked. “They wouldn’t have stopped her would they?”
“I don’t know,” Perri shrugged. “Maybe she ran out. The drug store got smashed, remember? She might not have had any for weeks.”
Perri laid the woman out. He thought about burying her, but the ground was too hard for them to dig with their bare hands or the butts of their rifles.
“We can’t just leave her,” Dave said. “Foxes will get her.”
“What about the beach?” Perri said, looking back toward the coast. Where they were, there was a low cliff that led down to a gravel beach. “We could dig there, if we can find a place above the water line.”
“I guess,” Dave said. “If we can find a way down with her. I don’t see a choice.”
Getting Mrs. Riffet down the short cliff face hadn’t been easy. Dave had suggested to just throw her, because it was only about 20 feet, and soft gravel at the bottom, but Perri couldn’t stand the thought of that. He’d suggested he’d lower Dave on a rope and Dave could carry her over his shoulders but he said no way was he carrying a dead lady down any damn cliff on his back. So they compromised and lowered Mrs. Riffet down first, tied off the rope, then climbed down after her. It was a good beach for a burial, with a high portion of gravelly sand up above the tide line. As long as they came and got her again before the next big storm, it should be easy enough to find her again. They’d put a pile of rocks over her body and a cairn of rocks up on the cliff line to make it easy to find their way back to her.
Using the butts of their rifles, they started digging a hole deep enough to cover her easily. Dave decided burying Mrs. Riffet on some random beach was easily the most messed up thing he had ever had to in his whole life, and Perri told him if that was the worst, then he should consider himself damn lucky.
And while they were down at the base of the cliff, arguing about how bad life could get, Private Zubkov caught up with them. They had dumped their gear well off the track though, and Private Zubkov wasn’t stopping to peer over every little hill and cliff. He was jogging, a loping easy pace he could keep up for hours. The tracks of the column of hostages and Russian troops was easy to follow, and somewhere in its wake, was that damn radio. As he drew parallel to where Perri and Dave were digging, he stopped and pulled a water bottle from his pack. You had to stay hydrated even though it was cold, because the humidity was so low. The wind was blowing from the north-east and he watched some sea birds surfing the uplift over the cliff, fascinated at how they hung in the air without even flapping their wings. Maybe he should have brought a rifle after all. It would be good practice to see if he could bring any of them down in mid-flight, bobbing and soaring like that. He thought about having a crack at one with his sidearm, then gave himself a mental slap. Head back in the game Zubkov! You have a radio to find and a radio operator to kill. You can get in some target practice later. He wondered if the Captain could still use a rifle. He seemed to be able to do stuff that was mostly instinct, like eating and going to the toilet, so why not shooting? Shooting should be second nature to a Spetsnaz Captain. Zubkov would have to check that out when he got back.
Putting his bottle back in his backpack, his eyes sought out the scuffed dirt and ice of the coastal trail, and he set off again.

*
*
[Linked Image]

“Check this out!” Bunny cried, running into Rodriguez’s quarters. She had gone to bed only a couple of hours earlier, after making their suck of a report to CNAF and then throwing around the problem of how to tackle Lavrentiya for hours. CNAF was worried about their attrition, with them now having lost four of their precious 12 drones on two missions, only one of which was successful. ANR was reevaluating its targeting list, they were told, looking for lower value, less well-defended targets. They had called it a night. Or Rodriguez had thought they had. Apparently Bunny had said goodnight, and then kept combing through the intel on Lavrentiya.
It wasn’t cold under the rock. With no direct wind, and still mild days outside, the temperature at night inside the cave with all the equipment still powered up was a pretty reasonable 58 degrees even without any heating on. Rodriguez was near naked under a light sheet and remembered it suddenly when Bunny snapped on the light, saw Rodriguez sit up, then quickly turned around. “Comportment ma’am,” she said, a smile in her voice.
Rodriguez lifted a shirt from her bedpost and pulled it on, “Don’t comportment me,” she grumbled. “You’re standing in my damn quarters at 0300. This had better be good O’Hare.”
The aviator sat down on the bed beside her commander. She had printed several satellite photographs and a table of data downloaded from NORAD. She spread them out for Rodriguez to see.
The images appeared to be birds-eye views, enlarged, of some sort of Russian transport aircraft, flying over the water, and then in a landing or takeoff circuit from the Lavrentiya airport. A final image showed two of the behemoths parked nose to tail on the newly built concrete apron beside the runway.
“Ilyushin IL-77’s,” Bunny said, excitedly. “Codename, White Whale. I was thinking, Ivan has to be getting all that materiel into Lavrentiya somehow, right? And if they’re moving it in, they must be planning to move it out the same way. Arctic roads in and out of Lavrentiya suck, and shipping would be too slow for the speed this war is moving at. Vulnerable too. So I started looking for intel on big transport aircraft at Lavrentiya. I figured they’d be taking the polar route from Murmansk, or a nice safe inland route out of Tiksi or Alykel…”
“Slow down Lieutenant,” Rodriguez said. “Let me catch up. We can’t take down the base, so you propose we intercept a few big fat Ilyushins? It’s a good compromise, but I can’t see us impacting the war that way.”
“Boss, we can totally take down that air base,” O’Hare said, a big grin on her face. She shoved the printout of the table under Rodriguez’s nose. “Ivan is moving a mountain of supplies into that base. Six flights a day, four hours apart. Like clockwork. And most of the flights are out of Murmansk, like I guessed.” She dropped a map in Rodriguez’s lap. “Northern polar route. They take off from Murmansk loaded with 200 tons of fuel, food, ammo and hardware, fly 3,000 miles, five to six hours. It’s a single straight-in NW-SE runway so depending on the wind, they either approach from the top of the gulf in the Northwest, or the open sea between Saint Lawrence and us.”
“You’re going to shoot one down and take its place?” Rodriguez said, still trying to get onboard. “You’d have to fake their radar signature, IFF codes…”
“No, we don’t need to do that. We can skate a couple of Fantoms in under its radar shadow. These freight flights aren’t escorted, as far as I can see. Ivan is pretty confident right now, what with our air force 2,000 miles south and keeping to itself. So with that, and their big ugly Nebo on overwatch, they’re sending in those Ilyushins fast and loose.”
Now Rodriguez saw it. The IL-77 was a beast of an aircraft. In essence just a big flying wing, it was originally boasted that it would cruise at just over 1,000 miles per hour carrying a payload of up to 200 tons and had a range of more than 4,350 miles, meaning it could easily reach Lavrentiya from anywhere in Russia without refueling. Western analysts scoffed. But when it eventually took to the air, the boasts weren’t far wrong. It could indeed lift 200 tons, had the range that Russia had boasted of, and a cruising speed fully laden of 600 miles per hour. It made sense that if Russia was moving war materials into position within easy reach of Alaska, it would use its IL-77 fleet and not slow, easy to intercept shipping. “I smell you now Lieutenant,” Rodriguez said. “The IL-77 is going in on the glideslope, a few thousand feet up, and we put a couple of Fantoms down low in its radar shadow. If that damn Nebo picks us up, it will just read the return as something bouncing off the IL-77. A ghost return.”
“Yes ma’am!” Bunny said. “Freaking genius or what? At best we lay some hurt on Lavrentiya airbase, and if we include a couple of CUDAs in the loadout at worst we can take down a White Whale.”
Rodriguez swung her bare legs out of the bed and reached for her flight suit. It was a little like the play they had used with success at Eielson, Bunny sneaking into missile range dressed as a light aircraft. “Don’t get ahead of yourself O’Hare,” Rodriguez said. “You can't pilot manually at that range so you have to come up with an AI kludge that will glue your Fantoms to one of those Ilyushins and keep them right where we need them to be. You also have to sneak through the Russian CAP. And I still have to convince CNAF and ANR this screwy idea is worth them committing a couple hundred million worth of hardware to.”

*
*

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

Last edited by HeinKill; 02/20/18 09:10 AM.

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#4406186 - 02/19/18 10:24 PM Re: New chapter for 20 Feb. AAR with a difference: Bering Strait UCAV campaign: [Re: HeinKill]  
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1) OK, Zubkov is insane ... but not delusional, right?
If he THINKS that he's following a US soldier that tracks the marching column using a Russian radio, why on earth does he think he won't need a rifle?

I understand that you don't want him to bring a rifle because then Perri and Dave are probably dead. But then they must not appear as a real threat to him, or there must be some other reason why he can't bring a rifle (and I can't think of a good one, right now).

2) They are launching the Fantoms from Little Diomede, fly south and circle around, then “blow in low from the south with the sun behind us, pop up, lock and shoot” (well, at least that was the plan).
The Nebo-M is configured for 360° surveillance.
They spot the first faint signal to the south, so only after the Fantoms passed Saint Lawrence. My question: Why didn't they spot them on the approach from Diomede to Lawrence where they were over open sea, with no terrain to mask their approach. I suppose they would have had to make a fairly wide detour.

Wouldn't they use that detour for some ELINT to figure out what kind of air defense would be there, (I assume that even in the future radar beams carry farther than their reflections from a stealth airframe).

Another thought: Assuming that the looping detour was performed to the southeast, that would bring a possible Fantom track from OTHER observers closer to King Island, Brevig Mission, Teller, and Nome, thus possibly drawing more Russian attention to those places.

#4406234 - 02/20/18 02:01 AM Re: New chapter for 20 Feb. AAR with a difference: Bering Strait UCAV campaign: [Re: HeinKill]  
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Damn Realist! winkngrin


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Look for me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or Tic Toc...or anywhere you may frequent, besides SimHq, on the Global Scam Net. Aka, the internet.
I am not there, never have been or ever will be, but the fruitless search may be more gratifying then the "content" you might otherwise be exposed to.

"There's a sucker born every minute."
Phineas Taylor Barnum

#4406261 - 02/20/18 07:55 AM Re: New chapter for 20 Feb. AAR with a difference: Bering Strait UCAV campaign: [Re: Nixer]  
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Originally Posted by Ssnake
1) OK, Zubkov is insane ... but not delusional, right?
I understand that you don't want him to bring a rifle because then Perri and Dave are probably dead. But then they must not appear as a real threat to him, or there must be some other reason why he can't bring a rifle (and I can't think of a good one, right now).


He can take a rifle with him, there is no real reason not to and it won't have plot impact so I can easily change that. He needs to be able to move fast to catch up with the prisoner column but a rifle on his back should be no big deal.

Quote
2) Wouldn't they use that detour for some ELINT to figure out what kind of air defense would be there, (I assume that even in the future radar beams carry farther than their reflections from a stealth airframe).


Have adjusted text to accomodate. I wanted them to be surprised by the Nebo-M to give a chance to describe it in action.

Quote
Another thought: Assuming that the looping detour was performed to the southeast, that would bring a possible Fantom track from OTHER observers closer to King Island, Brevig Mission, Teller, and Nome, thus possibly drawing more Russian attention to those places.


In this scenario Russia only has airborne and satellite coverage of the sea east of Saint Lawrence and then south/west to Anadyr, nothing serious on Saint Lawrence, so not saturation coverage. Limited naval. So they can get detected by AWACS en route but have to be unlucky to get locked up and intercepted.

Originally Posted by Nixer
Damn Realist! winkngrin


Ha! I also hate it when the hero and bad guy at the end of the movie both throw down their weapons and then fight to the death with their fists. These observations are incredibly useful! Writing a novel this complex is like building a car while driving it - bits don't fit or fall off and the whole thing can suddenly fall apart when it hits top speed! Thanks!

Last edited by HeinKill; 02/20/18 09:19 AM.

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#4406294 - 02/20/18 01:26 PM Re: New chapter for 20 Feb. AAR with a difference: Bering Strait UCAV campaign: [Re: HeinKill]  
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I'm sure there'd be plenty of spare SMG's and general AK's with all the WIA/KIA's versus his heavy ATM rifle. It'd make sense to carry one of those, much lighter and easier to carry.

-Jenrick

#4406441 - 02/20/18 10:44 PM Re: New chapter for 20 Feb. AAR with a difference: Bering Strait UCAV campaign: [Re: HeinKill]  
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Well, if I was zubkhov (I like it with an added h, as in khabarovsk, btw) I’d take a weapon I’m trained to use, I maintained myself and that is useful at long range.
He still has his 9mm for close range, has no reason to think he’ll get ambushed, so why trust an unknown weapon, even if he knows that weapon model ? He is the hunter, not the hunted.
Of course,there’s the weight question, but then he is used to jog with his rifle, as a spetnatz, I suppose.

#4406501 - 02/21/18 08:42 AM Re: New chapter for 20 Feb. AAR with a difference: Bering Strait UCAV campaign: [Re: rollnloop.]  
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Originally Posted by jenrick
I'm sure there'd be plenty of spare SMG's and general AK's with all the WIA/KIA's versus his heavy ATM rifle. It'd make sense to carry one of those, much lighter and easier to carry.

-Jenrick


Originally Posted by rollnloop.
Well, if I was zubkhov (I like it with an added h, as in khabarovsk, btw) I’d take a weapon I’m trained to use, I maintained myself and that is useful at long range.
He still has his 9mm for close range, has no reason to think he’ll get ambushed, so why trust an unknown weapon, even if he knows that weapon model ? He is the hunter, not the hunted.
Of course,there’s the weight question, but then he is used to jog with his rifle, as a spetnatz, I suppose.


Good points!

Thinking ahead to how to launch, I'd like to try generating noise around the book through Kindle Scout. Authors put up their ebooks, supporters spread the word through their network and readers vote for them. Good way to generate some buzz potentially. See it here:

https://kindlescout.amazon.com/about

Only catch, you need an Amazon account but I guess a lot of folks have those. If you don't know it, check it out!

H


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#4406600 - 02/21/18 06:42 PM Re: New chapter for 20 Feb. AAR with a difference: Bering Strait UCAV campaign: [Re: HeinKill]  
Joined: Jul 2003
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jenrick Offline
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jenrick  Offline
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Joined: Jul 2003
Posts: 1,264
Quote
Well, if I was zubkhov (I like it with an added h, as in khabarovsk, btw) I’d take a weapon I’m trained to use, I maintained myself and that is useful at long range.
He still has his 9mm for close range, has no reason to think he’ll get ambushed, so why trust an unknown weapon, even if he knows that weapon model ? He is the hunter, not the hunted.
Of course,there’s the weight question, but then he is used to jog with his rifle, as a spetnatz, I suppose.


An anti material rifle isn't normally one's assigned weapon, it's an item that rotates through whoever gets stuck carrying/lugging it around. Sort of like a rocket launcher. Maybe the Russians do things a little differently, but considering they've been deploying designated marksman at the squad level for decades I'd be surprised if they did. It'd make perfect since for him to have a primary anti-personal rifle, that he was attached to however if was the DM for his squad. Also as the sole military occupier of the town at this point, what would prevent him from grabbing a random rifle off the rack, and going to check it's zero? As far as familiarity with the weapons his squad mates would have been carrying, so long as he doesn't grab a crew served weapon, he'd be knowledgeable about anything his squad mates would carry. He'd be fine even with the crew served weapons, it just would be a lot harder to use as a single solider.

-Jenrick

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