Yeah, they aren't being called "crew served" without reason.

Seriously though, I see him grabbing an assault rifle or maybe even a scoped rifle in pursuit of an - per his estimation - team of American soldiers. I would also assume that as a Spetsnats he feels supremely confident - possibly overconfident -, particularly since the shoulder patch suggests that they are airforce (and we all know how well an Albatros handles walking). But then again, he's facing two teenagers, and even if Perri is a good shot the boys will need a lot of luck to survive the confrontation.

makes sense

How about this:

Zubkhov had decided to travel light. A half-sized backpack, water, dry rations and sidearm. The school sports utility room had been commandeered as the unit's temporary armory and attrition meant he had a wide range of weapons to choose from. He'd selected a folding stock VSS Vintorez silenced sniper rifle with a few magazines of 9x39mm. He put 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. The Captain was watching him as he pulled on his gear and adjusted the strap on the rifle so it sat comfortably in the small of his back.
“I know what you’re thinking Sir. I should be taking the Dragunov,” Zubkhov said, talking as much to himself as to the Captain. “Better range, hits harder. But I need to move fast to try to catch up with this guy, and the Vintorez is lighter and quieter.”
The Captain actually appeared to be considering. “When there is no God, everything is permitted,” he quoted.

(And I rewrote the Nebo section so that it had just moved into position and was coming on line for the first time as the UCAVs made their ingress hence the surprise element.)

Also, in case anyone missed it, Zubkhov just unknowingly overtook Perri and Dave while they were burying their teacher... they are now behind him.

OK here we go. This is a big one ...

BARE BONES KICK A$$ERY



“These photos are from the attack on Lavrentiya, you say?” Bondarev said, reviewing the report Arsharvin had just put on his desk. He had moved his 4th and 5th fighter Battalions to the former US airfield at Savoonga to free up facilities at Lavrentiya for his heavy airlift and 6983rd Okhotnik ground attack aircraft. Both were equidistant from Nome, but Lavrentiya was his best protected airfield, with standing fighter patrols and heavy ground-air missile defenses.
Wary of being buried alive again, Bondarev had put his new operations center on the ground floor of the modern Hogarth Kingeekuk Memorial School in the Savoonga township. With fast communication links and its own wind turbines supplying power, plus a field medical clinic already set up inside to treat the local townsfolk, it made a surprisingly suitable headquarters.
Ordinarily he’d say it was also an advantage that the 200 remaining townspeople of Savoonga were being held in the school meeting hall ‘for their own safety’, as it should dissuade the US from attacking the school for fear of killing their own citizens. But they had already shown a callous disregard for such considerations.
“Yes. The photos show wreckage recovered off the coast from American UCAVs downed by the Nebo-M array attached to the 140th anti-air, before the Americans could get their missiles away,” Arsharvin said. He didn’t sound happy, because he knew his commander wouldn’t be.
Bondarev glowered, “More of your damn mobile Fantom units? You still can’t find the trucks they’re launching off?”
“Analysis of the wreckage confirms they were Fantoms,” Arsharvin said. “But they weren’t truck launched.”
“What the hell? The enemy has an operational airfield somewhere within Fantom strike range and we can’t find it?”
Arsharvin had a photograph on his tablet, and he pulled it up, pinched to expand it and showed it to Bondarev, “We’ve solved the mystery. They aren’t flying them off the ground.”
“What is this?” Bondarev peered at what looked like a bent ski attacked to a piece of aircraft fuselage.
“Landing skis,” Arsharvin said. “This is an F-47 variant we haven’t seen before. Some sort of top secret prototype I imagine.”
“A sea-plane?” Bondarev frowned. “The Americans haven’t fielded a combat version of a seaplane since… what?”
“The 1950s, the Martin P6M Sea Master,” Arsharvin said, having expected the question. “But it makes sense, yes? You could launch it off just about any ship the size of destroyer or bigger, land it alongside when it returned and recover it by crane. They’re already doing it with recon drones – this gives them a strike or air defense capability, extends a ship’s eyes, ears and teeth by hundreds of miles. You don’t need static airfields, or a big carrier to fly them off – the smallest guided missile destroyer could carry it. Same concept as putting them on trucks, just sea-borne.”
Bondarev had to reluctantly give his enemy credit. They were a generation ahead of his own country not only in the capabilities of their drones, but also in their application.
“Very well. Find me the damn ships these things are launching off,” Bondarev said. “Compared to finding a few trucks hidden in the Alaskan wilderness, finding a ship launching drones in the open sea south of here has to be easy, right comrade Intelligence Chief?”
Arsharvin gave a wan smile, “If you say so, Comrade Colonel.” He stumped out the door again.
Bondarev swung around in his chair and looked out of the window as one of the ubiquitous local four wheel electric bikes that had been commandeered by his security group hummed past. They were slowly getting the airfield organized for the upcoming operation to land troops in Nome. The American cruise missile attack had devastated its long range radar facility, no doubt because they were worried about what Russia could learn from it after it had fallen so easily and so intact into their hands. It was a state of the art long range early warning facility, with radar arrays dotting the hills of Saint Lawrence all the way down the spine of the island to the site of the old North-East Cape base it had abandoned nearly half a century earlier. With the improvements in communications achieved in the intervening years, the Americans now no longer had to have their command and control facility located right next to their radar arrays, so they had chosen to build up the airfield at Savoonga and create a small base comprising about 50 personnel just outside of the new village.
The base had given a big boost to the island’s economy, provide civilian jobs and make a posting to Saint Lawrence a little less like a prison sentence than it had been when the facility had been located hundreds of miles to the south-east. The USAF 712th Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron had been recommissioned under NORAD, a strike hardened cantonment was built, with the command center and personnel barracks inside. New businesses and infrastructure sprung up in Savoonga to service the small air force detachment - a bar, a supermarket, a new school with fast satellite internet links and even a new hotel to serve the needs of families flying in to visit the personnel stationed there. Savoonga had pulled younger people from Gambell, which is why there were more than 500 residents there when the Russian airborne troops arrived.
And why the most secure facility in the area to hold the residents had been the Savoonga cantonment, which US forces hit with enough high explosive to decimate the facility. And a large proportion of the personnel in it, including their own troops, who they knew would be there. And the civilians, who they claimed they didn’t.
Bondarev couldn’t imagine what the scene had looked like as the Russian troops who were left unscathed at the Savoonga airport had made their way into the ruins of the cantonment. They were only able to recover about 200 of 500 civilians alive, 15 with serious wounds and five with minor wounds. Since then five more had died. The Russian airborne commander had estimated nearly 600 dead including civilians, his own, and US troops caught inside the cantonment. Bondarev shuddered at the thought. The Americans had been lucky at Gambell that they had not hit the civilians there too. What sort of nation was it that would treat its own people with such callous disregard?
One to be feared, Yevgeny.
And yet their air forces were happy skulking down south, leaving their population in Alaska at the mercy of Bondarev and his pilots. They couldn’t know he wasn’t interested in attacking their population centers, and had been reading reports of the National Guard ground forces in Fairbanks, Anchorage and Juneau hastily building defenses against a Russian ground attack that would never come. Making inflated claims that they had downed several Russian aircraft, trying to bolster morale, when in fact Bondarev wasn’t even flying missions over populated and defended areas like Fairbanks, Juneau or Anchorage. His only interest was to keep the skies clear of US fighters and attack aircraft, not to terrorize the local population.
Let them pile their sandbags as high as they wanted, let their SAM sites ring their cities. Right now, there was only one threat to his dominance of the skies over Alaska and that was these damn pinprick attacks by sea-launched Fantoms. Anadyr had cost him both in men and materiel, and serious political capital. The Kremlin didn’t seem to care about the numerous US probing attacks he had stopped in the south and east and they were ignorant of the strike on Lavrentiya that had been thwarted. All that seemed to matter to them was that the Americans had gotten through at Anadyr and that had been enough to cause political knees to further weaken.
The Americans had been lucky once, and not since and he intended for it to stay that way.
All he had to do was hold them back for another few days. Looking out the window he couldn’t help a small swell of pride at the activity he saw. These were his forces, these aircraft, these men and women.
With the death of General Lukin he had lost a patron, but he had not been relieved of his command, yet. Gathered at Savoonga and Lavrentiya under his command now were more than 150 aircraft of the Russian 3rd Air and Air Defense Forces Command of the Eastern Military District. In Lavrentiya, and dispersed through nearby towns, were nearly 10,000 airborne and special forces troops, and the materiel needed to support the operation to take Nome.
He realized he shouldn’t let the pinprick attacks of the American drones bother him. A major submarine or ship-launched cruise missile strike was a greater threat and the one which his 14th Air Defense battalion at Lavrentiya was in place to prevent. Then there was the overhanging risk of a tactical nuclear strike against a target either in the OA, or against an unrelated target on the Russian mainland. The US had the assets in place to effect it, and Bondarev had the strike on Anadyr and the command vacuum it created to thank for the fact he was able to convince his superiors they should move on Nome as quickly as possible before it came. They may not care about the lives of a few hundred citizens on Saint Lawrence, but with the 4,000 citizens of Nome under Russian control, the US would have to start negotiating.
For the first time Bondarev had begun to think Operation LOSOS might actually work. As long as the US didn’t do anything precipitous first.

*
*



The call from the State Secretary showed he was still an old fashioned Southern gentleman, in the best sense of the concept. Devlin had always known that he would never break good or bad news to her in a communique or text. It always came in person. So when she was told to expect a call from the Secretary in ten minutes, she knew it would be one or the other - either very good, or very bad news.
She paced her office nervously, ordering her assistant to stop anyone else from coming in or calling in, no matter how urgent they insisted it was. She knew she wouldn’t be able to concentrate on a single thing until the call was out of the way, and any decision she made while distracted like this would be totally random.
Her mind raced. She was being recalled, that was one possibility. Perhaps Foreign Minister Kelnikov had complained one too many times about the directness of her language and approach, and had demanded she be called home. Or her own people had turned on her, called her out for running her own foreign policy agenda independent of State. That much was true - they had been pursuing a pointless appeasement agenda while she had been dealing with the reality of imminent invasion and trying to persuade her Russian contacts that the consequences of going down this path could be catastrophic.
And then there was this whole business of the commander of the Russian 6983rd Air Base being the father of her grandchild. She had not called her daughter about it. Like, how was that phone call supposed to go? Oh, hello darling, yes fine thanks, tell me, did you have a child with the man who is leading a war against the USA? No, but she was convinced HOLMES discovery was not his alone. Whether or not it had been leaked by him or Williams, it would be leaked, inevitably. That’s what this call must be. The Secretary would be nice about it, but he would expect her to understand they couldn’t have someone in Moscow representing US interests who had such an obvious personal conflict.
When it came, the ringing of her encrypted comms unit nearly made her jump out of her skin. She took a big breath and lifted the handset.
“McCarthy,” she said.
“Devlin, this is Gerard Winburg, how are you holding up?”
“Fine thankyou Mr. Secretary, what’s up?” she asked, and in the background she could hear the sort of burble of conversation that indicated to her that Winburg was in a room full of people.
“I have to keep this short Devlin, I’m sorry. It turns out you were right. I have to advise you that we have indications Russia has now moved considerable air power onto Saint Lawrence in what we assume is preparation for a major airborne landing and offensive. Our satellites are showing a huge amount of air and ground traffic indicating military mobilization in the Russian Far East too. The President is about to go public with this information and a warning to Russia to withdraw from Saint Lawrence and cease its military buildup in the Bering Strait, or there will be ‘catastrophic consequences’.” He paused, “Between you and me, the President has asked the Secretary of Defense to draw up plans to conduct a demonstration of a nuclear armed hypersonic cruise missile in the Pacific Ocean west of the Russian Kuril Islands. He wants it ready to execute in 23 hours.”
The world fell out from underneath Devlin. She’d had her own theories about the way the political winds were blowing, but she’d hoped she was wrong. “An atmospheric nuclear test off the coast of Russia?”
“Yup, and they should be thankful we’re just vaporising a few billion tons of seawater and fish. The President thinks Russia needs reminding of what will happen if it does not stay the hell out of Alaska.”
"That's close to Japan too," Devlin thought out loud, "The Japanese government will freak..."
"The Japanese government should have thought of that when they declined to support us in the last UN vote."
“My God…” she had no idea what to say. “What do you need from us?”
“Real time readout on reactions. I’ll get back to you with exact timing when I have it, but I want your people face to face with Russian key stakeholders when the news of the test drops. I want you getting their unfiltered reaction and then feed it with a single message, ‘yes we will use the nuclear option if they escalate further.”
“We’ll do our best here,” she said.
“I know it. In the meantime, get onto all of our so called ‘allies’. Tell them now is the time for them to #%&*$# or get off the pot. We are calling in our markers and if they are on the wrong side of the next vote in the UN Security Council or General Assembly - and neutral is the wrong side - there will be hell to pay for them too.”

*
*



Bunny had checked the weather, and calculated the best IL-77 flight for their shadow play would arrive at the top of its glide path over the Bering Strait south west of the Rock at 0630 the day after she dragged Rodriguez out of bed. That gave them the night and most of the morning to prep two Fantoms with ground to air ordnance and get them in the air and on station in time for the low level game of shadow puppets.
The Fantom didn’t have passive detection systems like many Russian fighter aircraft, but NORAD had managed to get two new satellites on station over the OA, and one of them was National Reconnaissance Satellite L-70, launched in 2022 with the specific mission of tracking Russian and Chinese military aircraft in real time through their digital, infrared and visual signatures. Satellite L-70 could track up to 100 individual targets at any one time, and by AI interpolation, could predict the flightpath of 1,000 different objects simultaneously.
For the mission that had been assigned to NCTAMS-A4, satellite L-70 dedicated a small part of its considerable attention span to one aircraft, an Ilyushin IL-77 ‘White Whale’ flight out of Murmansk it designed as ‘flight IL-203’. It was tracking all IL-77 flights out of Murmansk, and tracked flight IL-203 in real time as the aircraft made its way across northern Russia. About halfway through the flight, the AI monitoring L-70 calculated a 73% probability, based on signals intelligence and the aircraft flight path, that it was headed for Lavrentiya, and it alerted ANR, which alerted NCTAMS-A4, or to be specific, Lieutenant Alicia Rodriguez.
“You have a ‘White Whale’ incoming,” Rodriguez told Bunny as her fingers tapped her touch screen. “I’m patching the flightpath through now, plus coordinates for intercept.”
“Roger that ma’am,” Bunny said, voice tight. If she was tired, then like Rodriguez, she wasn’t feeling it right now. “I’ll be on them like a leech.”
“You mean remora,” Rodriguez told her.
“Sorry ma’am?” Bunny frowned, head lost in her multiple screens.
“Remoras attach themselves to whales,” Rodriguez told her. “Leeches attach themselves to mammals.”
Bunny didn’t break her stride, just shot back at Rodriguez, “Isn’t a whale a mammal, ma’am?”
“Land mammals then. You ever hear of a leech attaching itself to a whale Lieutenant?”
“No ma’am. Would I be correct in guessing the Air Boss is a little tense right now?” she asked, without looking over.
“Yes O’Hare,” Rodriguez told her. “Yes you would.”
“Chill, ma’am,” Bunny said. “I have a vector to the target. Uh, eight minutes to intercept. Entering Nebo low band range in ten.”
On a big screen in the middle of Bunny’s weapons and navigation system HUDs, Rodriguez was watching as the icon for the Russian transport plane appeared on the screen and began to track toward Bunny’s two JAGM armed Fantoms. She had managed to flit above the wave tops over the Strait without being detected by Russian land, air or satellite based systems so far, but the same parameters applied to this mission as previously. She could be spotted by any random Russian fighter flight that happened to look in her direction and get a lock, and within 30 miles of Lavrentiya, she was at the mercy of the Nebo-M array which had so easily batted her out of the sky last time.
The go-no go for Bunny was whether she could come up with a combination of AI routines that would allow her Fantoms to lock onto the incoming Ilyushin and then hold position underneath it at wave top height. To do it, she’d re-written and combined the code for an optical targeting algorithm with a nap of the earth formation keeping algorithm meant for use with air to ground radar, but it had been impossible to test, so it would either work, or … the Fantoms would die. Most probably by plunging into the ocean as the Ilyushin began its landing descent.
“Got a visual lock. AI matching course and speed,” Bunny said, eight minutes later. Rodriguez saw the two icons merge - the Ilyushin at 20,000 feet and descending, and the two Fantoms below it at wave top height, flying in train, nose to tail, making them nearly the same total length as the monster above them but with a much smaller radar cross-section.

*
*

The communications between the tower at Lavrentiya and the IL-77 were encrypted, but the L-70 could track the inherent pattern in them, and reported to NORAD-ANR-NCTAMS-A4 that comms appeared normal as Bunny’s Fantoms began gliding toward Lavrentiya directly underneath the track of the transport flight.
Inside the command trailer of Russia’s undisputed Nebo-M ace unit - the only unit now with two confirmed combat kills - Lieutenant Colonel Chaliapin listened to the chatter of Lavrentiya air traffic control and watched on his own display as the 0640 transport flight from Murmansk began its approach. There was no enemy air activity in the OA, and he reflected with some satisfaction that the US appeared to have given up any idea of trying to hit him in retaliation for the destruction of their aircraft two days earlier. Normally he would expect a ‘wild weasel’ air defense suppression attack or a cruise missile strike intended to target his radiation signature, and local air patrols had been increased in anticipation. But personally, he doubted the US had the capability for a strike this deep behind the forward line of control. The drone attack of the day before had probably been made with fighters piloted by an autonomous AI and sent on a one way trip from a base 1,000 miles distant, which is why it had been so dumb, and had failed.
He could see no activity around the incoming IL-77, and there were no reported contacts from either AWACS or any of the 3rd Air and Air Defense Forces Command fighter Combat Air Patrols currently blanketing Western Alaska. This particular White Whale was safe.
But he had not become the leading Nebo-M unit in the air force through complacency. If the enemy planned to take this particular flight down, it would be getting in position to hit it now, when it was in its vulnerable landing phase, wheels down, flaps up, flying close to a stall and unable to maneuver.
“Low frequency sector scan on the IL-77 now, 30 seconds,” he ordered. Any stealth aircraft sneaking in behind the White Whale thinking it was going to make an easy kill was about to get a serious dose of radiation poisoning. He smiled. He loved his job.

*
*

“Nebo in narrow beam search mode,” Bunny said suddenly. “They’re looking for us.”
“They can’t be,” Rodriguez said, pointing at the NORAD feed showing the Russian CAPs following their usual routine patrol routes. “We’d see fighters pulled your way if they were.”
“OK, maybe not for us, but they’re suspicious ba*tards,” Bunny said. “No lock. Yet.”

*
*



“Sir, I have… I’m not sure…” the systems officer of the Nebo-M said. “Here, look…”
Chaliapin bent over his system officer’s screen. It showed an icon for the White Whale, and overlaid on it, the icon for a potential UI contact. As they watched, the system’s AI wiped the unidentified contact from the screen due to ‘low return, low probability’.
“OK, get ready to override AI,” the Nebo commander said.
“But the UI contact has been wiped,” the man pointed out. “It was a false return.”
“You might trust your life to an AI system,” the Russian commander said. “I don’t. If you get another return like that, override and lock it manually.”
He turned to another officer. “Keep all arrays in circular mode. The ba*tards could be using the IL77 as a distraction, trying to jump us from a different direction.” To himself he muttered, “It’s what I’d do.”

*
*

“Five miles to release point ma’am!” Bunny said. “Goddamn, I never flew a combat mission so damn slow! Any slower, our bird will have to drop flaps and we’ll lose stealth…”
“Easy girl,” Rodriguez said, letting all formality go. “Can you show me the White Whale?”
“Sure,” Bunny said, swiveling her head to look at a virtual screen inside her helmet, tapping a touchscreen and then pointing to one of the overhead 2D viewing monitors. “Topside cameras.” The view on the screen flicked from a forward view, showing water and a smudge of land, to the sky above the Fantoms. The transport swam into focus and looked like it was about to drop right on top of the Fantom.
“#%&*$#…” Rodriguez said, holding herself back from grabbing Bunny’s shoulder. “What’s the separation?!”
Bunny looked down at her VR instrument panels, “500 feet,” she said. “If they evacuate the in-flight toilets, we’re going to get wet ma’am.”

*
*

“Sir!” the systems officer called. “I have another return. Manually locking unidentified object. Entering 30 mile inner ring range. Shall I bring the S-500s up?” He sounded unsure. “Whatever it is, it is congruent with the approaching aircraft. The Ilyushin will be at risk if we fire.”
“No, that’s the last resort. We can order the Whale to abort and go-around for another landing, see if that shakes anything loose.” He picked up a handset, prepared to call Lavrentiya air traffic control.
“It’s on final,” his operator said. “A go-around now would bring it nearly overhead anyway.”
Lieutenant Colonel Chaliapin squinted hard at the screen. Overlaid on the IL-77 icon was a ‘UI aircraft’ icon. The two were blinking alternately, indicating the returns were completely aligned. The AI had decided the two returns were both from the same aircraft, not unsurprising given how close the huge transport plane was to water level. They were probably getting a double return – refraction of their radar energy off the aircraft onto the surface of the water and back. It happened.
But almost never.
“Dammit. Bring the missiles up and give me a full burst sector scan of that Ilyushin,” the battalion commander said. “I really don’t like this.”
If he was wrong, he might be about to blow away one of the biggest aircraft in the world, its crew, and 200 tons of war supplies. But it was the kind of call he relished.

*
*

“JAG-ems one through eight away!” Bunny called, “CUDAs one and two away! Bugging the hell out.”
From the weapons bays of her two Fantoms, six JAGM air-to-ground missiles dropped and accelerated toward Lavrentiya, just visible on the horizon. Right behind them, two CUDA half-RAAMs fell free, lit their burners, turned 180 degrees to clear the tail of their launching Fantom and then sped over the top of it headed straight for the White Whale wallowing along above them. It didn’t stand a chance. Bunny’s fighters spun on their wingtips, went to full burner and began active jamming to spoof any missiles that might be fired their way.

*
*



Chaliapin had done everything a human could do to defend the airspace over Lavrentiya. He had his sector scanning radar pointed directly at the source of the coming attack. He had his missiles online. He had his people on the edge of their seats expecting an attack.
As soon as he heard the systems officer call a warning, he knew all of this wasn’t going to be enough.
“Vampires inbound!!” the man yelled. “UI aircraft maneuvering. AI engaging!!”
Outside the trailer, from three sites around him, missiles leapt off their rails. But prioritized by the combat AI, they weren’t aimed at Bunny’s Fantoms, which were heading as fast as they could out of range of the S-500s. The Russian AI had sensed the existential threat and stopped tracking the two stealth fighters to focus on intercepting the smaller, self-guided JAGMs, speeding downrange at 600 knots. The firing inclination of the S-500 launchers meant that as they were mounted on the elevated hills behind Lavrentiya, their missiles had to begin diving radically almost as soon as they were fired if they were to have any hope of intercepting the JAGMs speeding in at wave top height.
“Mayday from the Ilyushin, it’s going down!” his comms operator called. He turned in terror, looking to Chaliapin for hope, but seeing none.
One S-500 made a proximity detonation and took out a single JAGM. Two others detonated behind their targets, to no effect.
Five JAGMs made it through.
The first and second hit in the center of the truck park and container yard outside Lavrentiya township. The yard contained mostly food and clothing, and the explosions were less than impressive.
The third and fourth hit targets that had been identified as probable fuel containers, and these caused an altogether more impressive conflagration, with a single huge fireball rising a hundred feet into the air over the town. The explosion also rained burning debris, causing spot fires in multiple buildings including a row of containers holding anti-aircraft artillery ammunition. One of them was in the process of being unloaded and the exposed AA shells exploded in a fan-like spread of armor piercing anger, detonating one by one the other containers alongside them in a ripple that caused the air to quiver and sent out a blast wave that took out the windows of the five story administration center two miles away. The final shed to detonate was at the end of the Lavrentiya air field runway, and it sent shrapnel slicing laterally through three of the five temporary hangars housing the Okhotniks of Bondarev’s 6983rd Fighter Aviation Regiment.
The fifth missile wasn’t intended to cause massive destruction. It had been programmed by Bunny O’Hare to identify and home on the communications signature of a Nebo-M anti-aircraft radar array command hub, and the subsonic scream of its solid-propellant engine was the last sound heard by Lieutenant Colonel Alexandr Chaliapin, commander of Russia’s premier anti-aircraft defense battalion.
The last thought to go through his mind was, ‘I was bloody right.’

*
*



Bunny O’Hare had no time to celebrate.
She had nullified the threat from the Nebo-M, but it had not gone quietly into the night. Even as it fought to intercept the JAGMs closing on Lavrentiya, it was sending targeting data on the two Fantoms to a combat air patrol of two Su-57s circling overhead. Between the data from the Nebo and her own radical maneuvering, the Sukhoi pilots had no trouble locking up Bunny’s Fantoms.
“Missile launch!” Bunny grunted. “Jamming, firing countermeasures.” Rodriguez watched as she handed off control of one of the Fantoms to its autonomous defensive AI, and tightened the grip on her mouse. The VR helmet around her gave her a near 360 degree view, simulating the view out of a cockpit. The two Sukhois were high on Bunny’s starboard quarter and she ordered her Fantoms around to face them, staying low to the water, trying to force the Russian missiles to overshoot.
They did, missing her lead aircraft.
Checking the other Fantom she saw that the AI had spoofed the other pair of missiles too, either through jamming or by drawing them away with chaff and flares. The fact her machines were still alive told her the pursuing fighters weren’t carrying K-77s, they were probably fielding older R-77s – she still had a chance!
She had two units in the fight. They weren’t armed with anything but cannon, but that would have to be enough.
“I’m sorry baby,” Bunny said, taking her support drone off of defensive AI and commanding it to adopt an aggressive attack posture targeting the nearest Sukhoi. “We all have to die one day.”
It was the only chance she had. If one of the drones could engage and distract the fighters now dropping down on her rear quarter, the other might just have a chance of escape. In her downtime under the Rock, Bunny had ‘tweaked’ her drones’ offensive AI settings, creating what she called ‘bezerker mode’. When initiated, the AI would only execute maneuvers intended to give it a firing solution on an enemy. It would take no evasive action whatsoever, no matter how imminent the threat. And even after all ordnance was expended, unless she cancelled the ‘bezerker’ command, the drone would try to destroy its target by ramming it. With each drone costing upward of 80 million dollars, it wasn’t surprising the designers of the Fantom’s combat AI had not considered implementing anything like Bunny’s bezerker code. But Bunny hadn’t felt bound by budget constraints.
“It would totally suck to lose both drones again,” Rodriguez said, before she could stop herself.
“Understood ma’am,” Bunny said, dragging a waypoint across her touch screen and ordering her lead drone to bug out by scooting under the noses of the approaching enemy fighters. “Will try to avoid total suck outcome.” The two Sukhois were dropping on her like sea eagles hunting salmon. She locked them up with her missile targeting radar, knowing it would set alarms screaming in their cockpits, even though she had no missile to fire. Her ploy was psychological. Their AI would have told them by now that they were facing two UCAVs. Human pilots hated UCAVs. A UCAV like the Fantom had only a silicon life to lose, it could pull Gs that no human pilot could, and it knew no fear. US air combat orthodoxy said that if you couldn’t swat a UCAV with your first missile salvo, you should do everything possible to avoid getting in range of guns and short range missiles. Bunny was banking that at least one of the Sukhoi pilots would lose his #%&*$# at the sight of her Fantom closing on him with a missile warning screaming in his ears.
There was no sign of that yet though. As she tried to extend at least one of her Fantoms away from the oncoming Sukhois and let the other take the fight, a warning alarm filled the trailer and the Russians let fly with their second salvo of short range off-boresight missiles.

*
*



Carl Williams of course found out about the planned nuclear strike almost at the same time as the Ambassador. HOLMES didn’t spend all of his time gathering intel for the Ambassador; he also had a considerable portion of his bandwidth devoted to keeping Williams up to date with military developments, with orders to break in on whatever Williams was doing (including sleeping) with a flash alert for any event involving actual or potential losses to either side.
The small buzzing alarm from Williams laptop was the signal of just such an alert. Carl had dragged a mattress down to his office, and had taken to showering in the gym, and eating in the Annexe’s commissary. He hadn’t see his own apartment for nearly two weeks. Nowhere else had the connectivity he needed to keep his uplink to the NSA HOLMES platform operating at fully capacity.
He groaned, reaching an arm up from the mattress on the floor and batting the spacebar on his laptop. “Yes, what?”
“The time is 0100 hours,” HOLMES announced. “I have a military sitrep for you.”
“Go ahead,” Williams said, rubbing his eyes. He could have HOLMES copy it to NSA, and the Ambassador if it was material. He’d probably insist on doing so anyway. HOLMES was still trying to get back into her good books after the Bondarev thing.
“SatInt, ElInt and human source reporting from Saint Lawrence indicates that elements of the Russian 3rd Air and Air Defense Forces Command have moved into Savoonga. DoD analysts conclude this has been done to extend their flight time over the south eastern area of operations.”
“They’ve got Alaska pretty much to themselves then,” Williams observed.
“I have seen no reports of anything except reconnaissance flights from US mainland bases in the last 24 hours,” HOLMES confirmed. “However, there is a Navy covert air unit which has conducted two successful strikes on Russian mainland facilities in the last three days.”
“What covert air unit?” Williams asked, his ears pricking.
“I only have the code name,” HOLMES replied. “Its designation is NCTAMS-A4. I am unable to find any other information about this unit. But I can confirm that three days ago it carried out a strike on Russian military targets at Anadyr which caused significant damage including the incapacitation of a
UCAV squadron of the Russian 6983rd Air Defense Regiment. I have just picked up a report from ANR NORAD that about 30 minutes ago, the same unit apparently struck a Russian supply depot at Lavrentiya. BDA has not yet been conducted, and I have no details yet on the fate of the attacking Navy aircraft.”
“Get some, Navy!” Williams said, punching a fist in the air. “I’m guessing the Russian planes at Savoonga are going to be next on their Christmas list.”
“That may be planned but is unlikely to be effected,” HOLMES said. “A US Columbia Class nuclear submarine is currently moving into position off the coast of the Kuril Islands. My analysis of multiple intel inputs indicates that the submarine may be maneuvering to an established missile launch station.”
“Columbia class subs carry long range hypersonic cruise missiles right?” Williams said. He could imagine tempers in Washington getting short - they might want to send a high explosive ultimatum towards one or more Russian military targets.
“Yes. I have indications that other US SSBNs have also been ordered to readiness, although their posture appears more defensive than offensive. I have assigned a 78% probability to a tactical nuclear attack using hypersonic cruise missiles on a Russian military target by the SSBN located off the Kurils.” Williams was not sure he heard right.
“A nuke?!”
“Yes. I have a conventional weapons attack with subsonic cruise missiles or ICBMs at 54% probability.”
“What …. what target?” Williams said in a strangled voice.
“Repeat your question please Carl.”
“Assume this is a political attack, not an attempt to start an all-out nuclear war. Assume the submarine is only going to target a single Russian base, or location. What are the likely targets for a submarine based off the Kurils?” He had to believe that whatever this was, it was intended as a ‘shot across the bows’. He couldn’t believe his own country wanted to trigger Armageddon. Not over Alaska.
But then he realized, he was hoping exactly what the Russian planners were hoping, and hope was not a sound military strategy.
“Weighted for combined geopolitical and military impact - Iturup anti-ship missile facility 91% probability, Matua Northern Fleet Replenishment Facility 73%. I also calculate a probability of 34% that the warhead will be detonated over a remote area in the Northern Pacific, however this probability is low due to the limited military value of such an act.”
Williams swore. He was shaken to his core. He had grown up in a world where the use of nuclear weapons in conflict was simply inconceivable. It hadn’t happened since 1945. Sure, the world had come close to calamity a few times - the Cuban missile crisis, the Russian submarine malfunction, a US strategic bomber shot down by its own escort when it received a nuclear launch order by mistake. There were probably other events he didn’t know about, but they were all accidents. Even in the heat of the proxy wars in the Middle East, when US backed Turkish forces were being forced back out of Syria, nuclear weapons had never been considered.
But the world had let itself become complacent. Nuclear arms reduction treaties had lapsed and not been renegotiated. Politicians had more focus on the dangers posed by new technologies - hypersonic missiles, cyber warfare, AI systems, unmanned combat vehicles - and had all but forgotten about the first doomsday weapons. The number of nations with nukes had proliferated uncontrollably because no nation was willing to go to war over them before it was too late. North Korea had been the first example, then Iran and Saudi Arabia. Afraid of being left in the cold by weakening US commitment, Taiwan joined the nuclear arms club. And after the bruising it took at the hands of Russia and Syria, Williams had seen reports that Turkey was now starting its own underground weapons program, with the US turning a blind eye.
“Assume a hypersonic cruise missile strike. Have you run the numbers on how soon the sub will be within launch range?”
“Yes Carl. It is already within range of the former North Pacific Open Sea Testing Range. It can be within range of Iturup between 1500 and 1700 hours today. It can be within range of Matua by 2300 hours today.”
“So it’s going to happen today?” Carl whispered, still not believing it.
“There is still a 22% probability my analysis is wrong,” HOLMES said. “It requires that I assign motive and intent to numerous human actors on both sides, but I have calibrated for the recklessness of past strategic decisions and I believe, weighted the role of the US President appropriately.”
Williams knew what HOLMES was saying, even if he didn’t mean to say it. The current US President was a cowboy, in many senses of the word. Short in stature, short on temperament, inclined to shoot first and think later. If he had enough support in DC and the Pentagon…
He thought fast, “Copy your analysis to NSA,” Williams said. “If you have been able to identify a possible SSBN launch by analyzing signals traffic, Russia or China could have too. And copy the report to the Ambassador. She might be able to do something to calm down the hawks in Washington.”
“She may already be aware,” HOLMES said. “I logged a person to person call between her and the Secretary of State about five minutes ago. This was one of the data points that allowed me to refine my final probability analyses and prompted me to wake you.”
It made sense. The US had been pushed ignominiously out of its own territory. Its most powerful supercarrier crippled by cyber-sabotage and its other carrier groups were out of position. It could fight a conventional war that would cost tens of thousands of lives, or it could threaten nuclear retaliation. And potentially cost millions of lives.
And idea came to him.
“HOLMES,” Williams said. “I have a new priority A task for you. Find all possible contact details for Yevgeny Bondarev; landline, cell phone, sat phone, encrypted chat, Savoonga bloody post office, whatever you can pull down.” He had to stop his voice from shaking, as the reality of what was about to happen starting building inside him. “Send everything you can find to the Ambassador’s cell phone and mine.”
“Yes Carl.”
“OK, keep updating your ETA for those subs and send that report. You can log off for now. No, wait!” He said, suddenly remembering something. It had been niggling at him. Not an important thing, just a question he’d meant to ask. “HOLMES, about the Russian forces at Savoonga… you said you had seen human source reporting?”
“Yes Carl.”
“We have special forces on Saint Lawrence?” Carl said, impressed. “Right under the noses of the Russian 3rd Air and Air Defense Forces Command?”
“No Carl,” HOLMES said. “The human source reports are being generated by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. It is their agent on the ground, not one of ours.”

*
*

CSIS ‘agent in place’, Perri Tungyan, literally had his a$$ on the ground. He and Dave were camped on a low hill west of Savoonga, overlooking the town and the new base that the US had built nearly ten years ago, which okay, you couldn’t really call new.
Or more correctly, they were overlooking where the base had been. All they could see were the still smoking ruins of the cantonment. At least here, the Americans had spared the township.
Earlier that morning, they had watched as the weary column of townsfolk from Gambell and their Russian captors had trudged into Savoonga. Just as in Gambell, the townspeople had been herded into the Hogarth Kingeekuk Sr. Memorial School, which already looked like a stockade, so Perri figured there must be local Savoonga people in there too.
He didn’t know how few.
About mid-morning, they had made contact with Sarge. For a very long fifteen minutes they reported everything they could see from outside the town, from the number of troops and vehicles, their locations and apparent patrol routes to the number and type of aircraft down at the airfield.
And that, in particular, had taken time, because they had to count them three times to get it right. In the end they made it at about 45 fighter aircraft, mostly all Su-35s and Su-57s as far as Perri could tell. There were some aircraft without cockpits, that Sarge said were probably recon drones, not the bigger Hunter UCAVs. And there smaller transport aircraft coming and going almost continuously. The was one big one too. A huge, white flying wing thing Perri had never seen before. It needed drogue chutes to slow it down so that it didn’t run off the end of the airfield when it was landing, and when it took off again a couple of hours later, only lifted its nose at the very last minute before it ran out of runway.
“OK, that’s good, that’s good,” Sarge had said. “Now are you two safe where you are?”
“I guess,” Perri said. “We’re under a rock overhang, so you can’t see us from the air. We can stay pretty dry. Without a fire, it’s pretty cold though, eh.”
“Pretty cold, or dangerously cold,” Sarge asked. “You guys know your country better than me. It’s your call.”
Dave was making signs like he wanted them to head back to Gambell, to their nice warm bunker under the gas station.
“Nah, we’ll be OK,” Perri said. “We can stick it out a couple more days at least. Then we’ll be out of food, and probably battery too. It will take us three days to hike back to Gambell, or we can try to sneak into Savoonga. I’ve got people there.” He looked through his scope at the Russian troops in the streets, and realized he couldn’t see any locals. “Maybe.”
“OK, you’ll be calling in reports like this for me every four hours, but you shut down and lie low for now,” Sarge said. “You guys are doing awesome, you know that, right?”
“Awesome, yeah,” Dave said, unconvincingly.
Perri disconnected the radio and started to pack it away so it wouldn’t get wet. The wind was picking up and the sky looked like rain was coming. The small overhang they were sitting under wouldn’t offer that much protection. Dave had been sitting with his rifle across his knees, but put it down and picked up Perri's, switching on the scope. He waved it around a bit, then settled it on some far-off target. He squinted, “What’s these numbers across the bottom?” he asked.
“Uh, by memory? I think left to right it’s like compass bearing, then elevation, then windage,” Perri answered.
“Uh huh, and you got it zeroed in, right?”
Perri was winding up the battery cables. “Yeah.”
“So, if I was going to shoot something, I wouldn’t use the red dot in the middle of the scope, I would use these crosshairs off to the side. The ones that move around a bit?”
“You’re not going to shoot anything,” Perri told him.
“I said if I was,” Dave said.
“Sure,” Perri said. “You’d use the crosshairs, not the red dot. The bullet goes where the crosshairs are...”
Dave got up on one knee, pointed the rifle downhill toward the town. “Like, if I wanted to shoot that Russian soldier who is coming up the hill, straight toward us?”
Perri grabbed the rifle off him and stared down the scope. At first, he saw nothing. “Ha ha very fu…” he said, then stopped. A movement in the corner of the scope caught his eye, he swung it slightly to the right.
“#%&*$#. It’s that guy from Gambell,” Perri said. “The one we saw in the school office.”
“No way.”
“Way,” Perri said. He lowered the rifle. The soldier was too far away to see with a naked eye but he could see he had a large rifle strapped to his back, moving fast and staring intently at the ground. “How did he get ahead of us?”
“Quad bike or something?” Dave said. “Maybe a boat or chopper eh. But he’s walking back along the track from Savoonga. So he’s already been there, and now he’s going back to Gambell? Why?”
“Maybe he’s hunting.”
Dave laughed, “Freaking idiot. What, he thinks he’s going to get bear or walrus? Nothing out here this time of year except birds.”
Perri put his own rifle back up to his cheek. “No Dave, I got a feeling he’s hunting us.”

*
*

Private Zubkhov was cold too. But no one was giving him any praise. He’d followed the trail of the column of hostages all the way to Savoonga, but he hadn’t come across whoever it was that had been carrying that ghost radio. If he’d gone on any further, he’d have run a risk of bumping into one of his old comrades, or a sentry outside of Savoonga and he wasn’t ready for that. So there was nothing for it but to double back – his quarry must have turned off at some point and he missed their tracks.
Suddenly he got this funny feeling. He dropped to one knee and looked around himself. Nothing. He saw nothing but scrub, rock and sea birds in any direction. He felt like slapping himself. Come on boy, you’re getting spooked now. But you’re right, that American is around here somewhere, he must be. You just have to be patient, move slower, stay more alert and wait for night fall. He’ll probably light a fire to stay warm, and you’ll have him.
Zubkov didn’t hear the shot. The shooter must have been upwind. He felt something punch him in the chest, just below his right shoulder. It spun him around and knocked him to the ground.


*
*



Bunny’s bezerker routine had done its job. The attacking Fantom had locked up one of the enemy Sukhois, spooking it into thinking it was about to face a US all-aspect short-range missile at point blank range, and the pilot choked. He threw his machine into a twisting dive, firing off chaff and flares as he headed for the deck. The Fantom meanwhile centered its gun pipper on the other Sukhoi, which was following its missiles down range. One Fantom was able to dodge the missiles fired at it, but her kamikaze Fantom did not even try to evade. At maximum range, it opened up with its GAU-22/L 25mm cannon. The ‘L’ designator stood for ‘laser’, because the weapon had its own dedicated laser targeting system, making the system accurate out to 12,000 feet.
Which coincidentally was its exact distance from the Sukhoi at the moment it opened fire. In a head on attack situation, against an unswerving enemy target confidently barreling in behind his missiles at 1,000 miles an hour, it was hard for the GAU-22/L to miss. In the three seconds before the two Russian missiles slammed into it, the Fantom put nearly 200 25mm shells into the Sukhoi.
Its pilot was dead before his missiles hit their target, taking Bunny’s sacrificial drone off the board.
With his flight leader off the air, and his threat warning alarm telling him there was still one enemy UCAV out there, the second Sukhoi pilot decided to get while the going was good. One on one with a human pilot, he would back himself any day. Down on the deck, out of energy and facing a damn robot, those weren’t odds he liked. Bunny watched with satisfaction as he bugged out and she regained stealth status. She gave her surviving Fantom a dogleg route home to try to confuse any satellite surveillance that might be lucky enough to pick up her heat signature along the way, and leaned back in her chair.
“Permission to declare myself freaking awesome ma’am?” Bunny said, grinning widely but keeping her eyes on her monitors.
During the dogfight, Rodriguez had hovered behind the pilot’s chair, biting her bottom lip so hard she could taste blood now. It was ridiculous. Not like my life was on the line. But it felt like it. And that was the way O’Hare was running her drones too - as though her life depended on it.
“Denied,” Rodriguez said. “You don’t get to do that. I get to do that. That was simply awe inspiring, Lieutenant. From ingress to egress.”
“You know ma’am, I agree with you,” Bunny said. “What was it that inspired the most awe, in your personal opinion? Was it the way I snuck in under that IL-77 like a freaking ninja and blew it out of the sky, or was it the four solids I laid on Ivan at Lavrentiya?” She spun her chair around, giving Rodriguez a dead pan look. “Or was it the way I burned that Nebo, evaded like a hundred missiles and bagged myself a Sukhoi-57 in the process?”
Rodriguez knew better than to say something that would bring her ace pilot back down to earth. It was O’Hare’s moment, and she had earned it.
“Honestly?” Rodriguez smiled. “None of that. The most awesome thing of all, is that all that hurt was laid on the Russians by a single pilot whose handle is ‘Bunny’.”

*
*

Perri saw the Russian soldier drop and roll, then he disappeared from view behind some low scrub.
“Did you hit him?” Dave asked, scanning the ground in front of them with binoculars.
“Yeah I hit him,” Perri said. Crouched on one knee, the Russian was not a big target. He’d aimed for the guy’s center mass, not taking any chances. The shot had knocked him down, he hadn’t ducked, of that he was sure.
“I can’t see him,” Dave said. “Should we go look for him? Make sure he’s dead?”
“No, we should not go look for him, we should get the hell out of here. He might not be the only one looking for us. Someone could have heard that shot.”
“You want to go back to Gambell?” Dave asked, hopefully.
“Shut up, I’m thinking.” He and Dave were on a small rise, about two miles out from the south-west end of the long runway. Savoonga town was a ways off, on the other side of the runway. The bombed out Radar Facility cantonment was south of it, about two miles south-east of the runway. It wouldn’t have as clear a view over the town and airport as they had now, but they couldn’t stay here, and they had to hide out somewhere. “Saddle up,” Perri said, pointing at the ruins in the distance. “There’s our new home.”
He expected Dave to argue, but the guy just shouldered his rifle, lifted his pack onto his other shoulder and stood there waiting. “What?” he said. “You want me to congratulate you for taking down that Russian?” He walked off in the direction of the cantonment, muttering. “I’m the one spotted the guy. Shooting him was the easy part. I’ve shot sleeping walrus that were harder to shoot than that dumbass Russian…”

*
*


'That dumba$$ Russian' was having trouble breathing.
Laying on his back, looking up at the sky Zubkhov had clawed his rifle out from under him and had its butt propped against the ground, left hand with a finger inside the trigger guard, ready in case the ba*tard who shot him decided to come and finish the job. He had almost no chance if he did. Zubkov’s right arm was completely numb, and he couldn’t even unfold the rifle stock, let alone hold it steady and point it properly.
The American was good, Zubhkov had to give him that. The way he’d escaped back in Gambell, diving straight into the water instead of being stupid and trying to run for it along the runway. Found a Russian radio and got it working. It had to be the same guy. He’d tracked the Russian troops all the way to Savoonga, somehow realizing Zubkhov was on his tail, got around behind and set him up for a hit. Guy like that, he couldn’t be a simple radar technician. He had to be like, base security or something more, maybe special forces - just happened to be in Gambell. Yeah, you had to give him credit.
But not too much credit. Zubkhov was still alive, for now. He waited, expecting every second to be his last. But the kill shot never came.
When he was sure the guy wasn’t coming to confirm his kill - which either made him very cocky, or very careful - Zubkhov put down his rifle and felt around under his uniform. His shirt was soaked in blood: not good. But he could feel an entry wound at the front of his right shoulder, and a pretty damn huge exit wound at the back, that was where most of the blood was coming from. From a pouch on the leg of his uniform trousers he pulled a small field first-aid pack. Ripping open the foil with one hand and his teeth, he pulled out the sterilized gauze bandage, shoved the wrapping between his teeth, and then jammed the bandage as far into the wound in his back as he could. He had to stifle a scream, but he got a fair wad of gauze in there, and then rolled back onto it to try to keep some pressure on it.
He’d told Sergeant Penkov he was no medic. Zubkhov had basic combat medical training though, so unfortunately he knew enough to realize he was hit pretty good, but his wound wasn’t sucking air, so he hadn’t suffered a punctured lung cavity. Hurt like hell though and it was bleeding pretty good. If the shoulder blade wasn’t broken, the slug had taken a big chunk out of it. He could see blood pulsing out of the entry wound. He fumbled with the first aid pack, trying to find the large plastic adhesive wound patch he knew was in there. Finally his fingers grabbed the thin film and he ripped the back off it with his teeth. Luckily he was one of those semi-neurotic guys who were terrified of battlefield wounds so he shaved his chest, arm and legs to get rid of hair. And yeah, some of the others had given him #%&*$# about it, but right now, right now, who was the smart guy huh? Who was laughing now? He laughed out loud.
He realized his mind was wandering. The patch. He pulled the plastic film off the back of it, and slapped it over the entry wound, then remembered something. Something, something. He was doing something wrong. He needed a pressure bandage on there too but was it supposed to go over the patch, or under it? Whatever. He put a wad of gauze over the patch, bound a bandage around his arm and shoulder as best he could with one hand and punched an ampoule of fentanyl-NFEPP into his leg to dull the pain.
Then he just lay back again. No point sticking his head up and flagging to anyone he was still alive.
Actually it was quite nice down here out of the wind. He closed his eyes.

*
*
(C) 2018 Fred 'Heinkill' Williams. To Be Continued...

You probably meant to write air to ground?

Gatlings are cool, but I don't think it makes sense to field them as a dogfight weapon, not even a robo-dogfighter. Heavy, lots of recoil, and above all they eat too much ammo too fast. Also, not sure about using dU rounds, unless the thing is meant to attack ground targets. Air targets aren't armored, so frangible (full bore) AP rounds would appear totally adequate. No plastic sabot petals that mess with the air intake, lots of kinetic energy, and massive fragmentation inside the aircraft target. Possibly mix that with ballistically matched HE rounds, although with a computerized gunner I guess you can easily do without that, further reducing UXO problems/collateral damage and making your ammo loadout more insensitive. Given that you propose a 3000 RPM four-barrel gatling that means a cyclic rate of 750 RPM for the single barrel, way more than enough. I don't think you need more than three to five hits on a fighter to achieve a mission kill, directly downing it maybe on the eighth to tenth hit.

Low-balling, assuming a 50% hit rate (no reason to believe it couldn't be 80%, really) that means 10-20 rounds to expend on any air target, giving you potentially a lot more kills for the same number of rounds and much less weight to carry around.

Of course a berzerk mode might continue firing until it's a confirmed destruction of the target.Assuming a closing rate of 2 x Mach 0.8 = 530m/s, a v0 of 1200m/s, a (rather generous) velocity decay of 20m/sec per 100m flight distance, and a max engagement distance of 4,000m you'd get a burst length of 39 rounds. But why open fire at 4,000m when you can open fire at a straight flying target at maximum closure velocity? An AI gunner might open fire at 5600m range already, so that the rounds after a flight time of about 3.08 seconds impact the target at 4000m.

Ballistics is fun.

A small note, the Vintorez is really barely longer then a normal AK-74, it's a few inches shorter then an M-16A2/A4.

-Jenrick

Another great installment.

Thx, good catch!




Awesome work on the ballistics math! So at what range would a mach 2 missile have to be fired in order for the round from the gat to beat the missile to the target and or at least hit the target after the missile was fired?

I couldn't find any documentation on the gun planned for the X-47B so I assumed a repurposed F-35 25mm gat. I read an article saying DARPA had looked at an independent laser rangefinder and targeting system for the gat on the A10 to help it engage moving ground vehicles and missile targets simultaneously and so added this 'off boresight' gun capability to the UCAV, but yeah not DU rounds, that was the best graphic I could find!



Does that mean it is not a practical weapon for Zubkhov to choose? Looking at typical Spetsnaz weapons the Dragunov is heavier, larger. I figured he should take a sniper rifle with him so I chose the Vintorez because it has folding stock. Not knowing who/how many he is up against I figured his strategy would be to engage from a distance with rifle if he could. Except he didn't get the chance...



Thx, the question is how to wrap it up in the next few chapters!

1) Nuclear oblivion. HOLMES is the only survivor
2) Perri assassinates Bondarev on St Lawrence and together with the loss of Gen Lukin the attack falls apart
3) Russians take Nome and US nukes it
4) All of the above
5) None of the above

(Hint: remember how the story starts...)

And BTW YOU GUYS ARE AWESOME!!!!!!

Oh no, it's a reasonable choice. Particularly if he was a marksman or sniper for his unit. Particularly as he's worried about not being detected by his old comrades either, running a suppressed rifle makes perfect sense. The Vintorez is going to be effective out to about 400-500m. If the terrain and conditions allowed for longer engagements the SVD or SVU (which would actually be a reasonable transition for the Spetsnaz to go to by this time period) would have a lot more range, and a lot more impact. The major con with the either of them being a lack of suppression. It is also very possible by this time period that all arms are suppressed, as it makes command and control on the battlefield (and particularly urban operations) WAY easier, decreases signature, and a host of other things. They are still dang loud, but you can actually yell over them. The Marines are currently looking at going fully suppressed for these reasons. If that was the case, an AK-100 series rifle (probably the 105) with a suppressor would be a decent choice, and would be effective out to the same distance as the Vintorez though the lack of glass could be problematic.

One other option would be Zubkhov just going for something like the PKM/PKP and just humping it, he is an insane Spetsnaz trooper after all. And what story doesn't need some belt fed machine gun action?

-Jenrick

Per my rough estimations the distances at which missile and gun projectiles arrive at exactly the same time is 5100m for the missile (with 5600m for thegun, as previously mentioned), so the missile can be launched up to one second later. Beyond that point the missile will arrive earlier. Beyond about 8000m range the missile will arrive so much later that the Fantom can't get a single shot off. In order to achieve five hits (with an accuracy of 80%) the Fantom needs half a second (assuming a single-barrel gun), which would mean a missile release at 7.5km range (~8.5 seconds missile flight time). This extreme scenario does however not make too much sense to me because the Russian pilot would probably bank immediately after missile release, which doesn't allow the gun to open fire at 5600m (to hit at its nominal max range of 4000m).

So, 5,100...7,500m range is covered by your artistic license, I'd say.
I'm a crappy engineer, though, and not a rocket scientist, so my estimations are to be treated with caution. They should however give you an impression of the distances involved. It should also make clear why in the 1950s engineers thought they could do away with guns; with reliable missiles the gun is pretty much outranged in most relevant scenarios.

If I remember the beginning correctly (I don't reread it to make a genuine bet), I'd say 2/ is plausible, however I wish Bondy makes it (I know Perri and Dave won't), so I still hope 2/ may be altered.1 /, 3/ and 4/ are then out of hte loop, 5/ stays a possibility. Now, If I was the author tickling my readers, I'd choose 5/ of course. So 5/ is my choice, but I'm still sad for Perri and Dave, hope I misread the beginning.

The berzerk action needs rewriting imho, doesn't read as believable now from my POV. Not trying to calculate, just isn't convincing yet.

Still another great chapter, thanks a lot

Will work on it!

THE BEZERKER ALGORITHM



Bondarev knew it was going to be an interesting day when the Savoonga tower called him to let him know that General Vitaly Potemkin’s aircraft had entered Saint Lawrence airspace and would be landing in 15 minutes. Unannounced.
Potemkin was the commander of the Central Military District, 2nd Command of Airforce and Air Defence. He was without doubt flying in to advise Bondarev that he was taking over after Lukin’s death. In person. If so, it didn’t overly concern Bondarev – even if Potemkin questioned Bondarev’s performance, even if he had a commander of his own in mind for the 6983rd, he was unlikely to change horses mid stream. Yes, Bondarev had lost a considerable amount of hardware and men. He had the Okhotniks of the 573rd that were now un-crewed. But he could reassign to them the Okhotnik crews of the 6983rd that were now without aircraft and he would still have a mission capable ground attack battalion for Nome. He had already given the orders. Potemkin should have no reason to dismiss him.
Unlike Lukin, Potemkin did not fly himself around. As Bondarev waited for his Ilyushin 112 to taxi to a stop on the apron outside the old terminal building, he reflected it was always interesting to see who Lukin had in the aircraft with him. At least an adjutant and intelligence officer of course, but this time …
As the General and his retinue stepped out of the cabin and down the stairs, he saw someone he recognized. So, the indomitable intelligence officer, Lieutenant Ksenia Butyrskaya had survived the transition from Lukin to Potemkin. But why had he brought her? Bondarev stood with hands behind his back, and waited, his mind racing.
As he stood there, Arsharvin came panting up beside him. He looked at the man, busily adjusting his uniform and trying to catch his breath.
“You need to exercise more,” Bondarev told him, still watching the General dismount with assistance from a ground crew. “You’re getting fat.”
“Easy for you … to say … comrade Colonel,” Arsharvin said. “You aren’t answering your phone. I just sprinted … two kilometers.”
Bondarev patted his pocket, he hadn’t noticed the telephone ringing, but with the ever-present Saint Lawrence wind and the noise of aircraft out on the flight line, that wasn’t surprising. “Why?” he asked.
“We found where the Fantoms are launching from,” Arsharvin said. “Or actually I did, but I bet she’s going to try to take the credit.” He said pointing to Butyrskaya. “That’s why I wanted to get to you first…”
Butyrskaya reached him before the General did, and saluted, “Comrade Colonel,” she said. “I have a gift for you.”

*
*



Bunny had flown her remaining Fantom into the maw of the cave and splashed it down onto the Pond. They had secured it to a wrecked handrail and left it there for now. Recovery, refueling and rearming was a time-consuming chore that would have to wait. In the meantime, they had locked another Fantom onto the catapult and had another prepped, queued and ready to go. The BDA from Lavrentiya had showed significant damage to infrastructure, but the airfield was still in operation and they had made no discernible dent in Russian air strength. In a conventional war, it was a target they would be required to go back to again, and again, before it was considered NMC – ideally before Russia got another Nemo C3I system in place.
But this was not a conventional war.
It had become clear to Rodriguez their job was only to keep the enemy off balance. To strike them where it hurt, and show them they were vulnerable. In the absence of a major US air counteroffensive, Bunny was providing a taste of their capabilities that should be giving Russian military and political commanders pause for thought. Rodriguez knew they wouldn’t be the only pressure point in play, but she was determined that they would give Russia more than just a headache.
Their new tasking order however, posed more than a few challenges. The first was that NCTAMSA4 was down to eight fighter aircraft, not including the one floating out on the Pond, and they couldn’t afford to lose another. The second problem was the target they had been assigned.
“Savoonga? No problem,” Bunny said, looking at the intel they had been sent on her tablet. “OK, so the Russians have moved in some heavy anti-air. Another Nebo system, multiple close defense antimissile batteries.” She looked down at the map and printouts on the planning table in the trailer. “And sure, they have two fighter brigades, totaling 60 plus aircraft on station now. Round the clock CAPs protecting the airspace for 200 miles around. That’s all?” she asked ironically.
Rodriguez shoved another of the photos over toward her, “You forgot this.”
Bunny frowned, “Oh, right. Sure, that’s what, a Lider class destroyer?”
“Arrived off the Savoonga coast in the company of two older Sovremenny class destroyers yesterday.”
“S-500s?” Bunny asked, checking what anti-air systems the destroyers were fielding.
Rodriguez read the briefing file, “56 S-500 cells on the Lider, 24 SA-N-7Cs each on the Sovremennys. You know, it’s like they don’t want visitors.”
“I know, right?” Bunny said, pulling at her lip thoughtfully. “I guess the David and Goliath trick won’t work again.”
“You can fool Ivan only once,” Rodriguez said. “Fuel and ordnance is mostly coming in on smaller transports, and there’s a big tanker on the way from Anadyr, should arrive tomorrow.” Rodriguez didn’t mention it, but she could see from the source reporting on the intel that at least some of it was coming from a human source. They had a spy on the island feeding them realtime intel on airport traffic? Whoever it was, they had real cajones.
Bunny looked up, “Hit the transports? All those CAPs they’re flying, that’s got to burn a ton of hydrogen. No fuel, no fly.”
“They will basically be sailing under fighter and naval anti-air cover the whole way, we won’t get near them.”
“Try their own strategy on them? Hit them with a slew of cruise missiles, overwhelm the air defenses, we ride in on the slipstream while they’re shocked and confused?”
“I’m told we are on our own with this one, no available support assets.”
Bunny tapped a pen on her teeth. “Cool. Way I like it.” She moved some map printouts around like she was playing with a Rubik’s cube. Finally she stepped back from the table, “There’s simply no way to get in there with two measly Fantoms. I got nothing.”
“Coffee,” Rodriguez said. “I’m buying. You keep thinking.”

*
*

The man who saved the world: Vasily Arkhipov

Carl Williams was thinking. Not about imminent global thermonuclear war. He was thinking about a girl in Idaho called Kylie Lee who he had started building a real relationship with about two years ago. And how Kylie had asked him not to take the posting in Moscow, and to leave the NSA, and just come and do ‘some sort of IT stuff’ in Boise because, that’s what normal couples did. In Kylie’s world, normal couples didn’t just give up everything and move to Russia because their country asked them to, even if they were one of the world’s leading experts in machine learning.
And then he thought how he had asked for some time to think about it and how Kylie had said ‘whatever’ and things had just gone more and more wrong after that and now he found himself in Moscow, still with the NSA, and with no Kylie.
And he couldn’t help thinking how, when you sat here at what might just be the end of the civilization, you realized how freaking dumb you were.
He was still sitting there beating himself up about it when he saw an embassy marine security guard stick his head around his door, “Carl Williams? That you?”
He stuck up a finger, “Present.”
“Can you come with me sir?”, the guard asked.
Carl levered himself up, and followed the marine’s back through a maze of Annex corridors and then up some stairs, leading him into an empty office, “Can you wait here sir?” the man said. The marine was young, maybe 20. Carl found himself hoping the man made 21.
“What’s this about?” Carl asked him. “Just curious.”
“I don’t know sir,” the man said, and left him standing there. Carl looked around the office. He was in the commercial section, that much he could guess. Someone’s office, family photos on the wall, a few pictures from European holidays. Brochures from US companies sitting on a small coffee table. OK, no clues here.
A minute later, Devlin McCarthy walked in.
“Hi Carl,” she said simply.
“Hi ma’am,” Carl said. He always felt like he was in the presence of one of his old school teachers when he was with her, and he’d gone to a very strict school.
From the pocket of her jacket, she fished a telephone and held the screen out to face him, “What is this about?”
Carl looked and could see it was the list of contact numbers for Yevgeny Bondarev that HOLMES had sent to McCarthy.
“It was just an idea,” Carl admitted. “I thought you might…”
“You seem to know everything before I do, so I guess you know how freaking busy I am right now,” Devlin said. “I can’t even call my own daughter. Why would I call this guy?”
“I didn’t really think,” Carl said, shrugging. “But the guy is both the father of your grandchild, and leading the Russian air offensive over Alaska. What if you were to call him and tell him if he doesn’t pull his planes back to the other side of the Bering Strait before three o’clock, we’re going to nuke Kaliningrad and his grand daughter will never even get to grade school?”
“We’re not going to nuke Kaliningrad,” Devlin said, frowning. She worked on the assumption now that she could share any intelligence she had with Carl, because he had clearances she didn’t even know existed. “But we are going to conduct an above ground nuclear detonation in the Pacific off the Kirin Islands.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“It’s what I’ve been told.”
“And State wouldn’t lie to you.”
“Why would they lie to me?” she asked.
“Oh I don’t know, maybe because if they told you the truth you would tell everyone in the Embassy to take the rest of their lives off, call their mothers or see their priest before the world ended?”
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
Carl laid out HOLMES’ analysis of nuclear submarine movements and signals traffic for her. “It adds up to more than just a test. We are getting ready in case Russia wants to take this all the way. All it would take is a tiny miscalculation.”
She realized he was right. “Dammit Carl!” she said, “What do you think one woman can do about it?!”
“Call Bondarev, tell him unless he pulls his aircraft back, he’s courting Armageddon.”
“And he’ll take my call because why?”
“Duh. You’re Ambassador to the Russian Federation and grandmother to his child?”
She shook her head. “I can’t. It would be treason.”
“Is there still a death penalty for that?”
“I assume so.”
“Vasily Arkhipov,” Carl replied.
“What?”
“Captain of a Russian missile sub. Single handedly prevented his Captain from firing a nuclear torpedo during the Cuban missile crisis when he refused to authorize the launch. Saved the world, spent years in disgrace but ended up a Vice Admiral.”
“Is this supposed to encourage me? Because it isn’t working.”
“He received a posthumous medal.”
“Still not helping,” Devlin said.
“It’s a phone call, you call the guy, you tell him who you are, maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. Best case, it does, and you go to court. Worst case, global thermonuclear Armageddon.”
“I’m going to call an officer of the Russian Air Force currently on front line duty and somehow sweet talk him into surrendering because of some fling he had with my daughter two years ago and a child he probably doesn’t even know he has,” she said.
“And because, global thermonuclear Armageddon?” Carl pointed out. “In case he needs a real motivator.”
She thought about it.
“Every word I say on my phone, anything on any Embassy line, is monitored. Can you set it up through HOLMES? If we do this I can’t waste time leaving messages on his cell or with his damn secretary. I need to know I’ll get through.”
“If he’s contactable, we can get the guy on the line,” he said.
She paused, “I can’t believe I’m about to give our war plan to our enemy,” she said.
“Hey,” he said. “I'm in this too. We'd be going down together."
"Great comfort Carl."

*
*



The smell hit Perri before he saw the first body. He’d seen dead Russian soldiers through the scope of his rifle lying on the streets of Gambell after the attack there, but not decomposed like this. It wasn’t actually a body, it was a leg, buried under some rubble, that he assumed belonged to a body somewhere. This body must have been too hard for the surviving soldiers to recover, so they had been forced to leave it there and had just covered it with a tarpaulin. In the middle of the compound they found what looked like a mass grave, with smaller graves beside it. The smaller graves had small wooden crosses with a double horizontal bar on them and Russian names written in the middle. Most of these had small metal dog tags with rounded corners and Dave cupped one in his hand, reading it. It had a bunch of letters across the top, and numbers underneath. He dropped it and looked across the burial site.
“If these smaller ones are military graves, what are those big ones?” he asked, pointing to two long scars in the earth, each about a hundred feet long, with soil two feet high heaped on top.
“I have a bad feeling those are … non-military,” Perri said, unable to say what he was really thinking.
“It’s like they were dug with an earth mover,” Dave said, looking up and down the rows of earth. “They just piled the bodies in there, and pushed the dirt on top?” He started walking along the grave, and saw a sneaker toe sticking out. He pulled at it, and it came free. It looked like a child’s size. A bit further down, he bent down and picked up a telephone with a busted screen. He tried to turn it on, but it was dead. All along the graves were other small items - a plastic bead necklace, some walrus ivory ear rings, a man’s jacket turned inside out, a bloodied shirt. “Who did this?” Dave asked.
Perri was numb, “Does it matter? Russia, America … neither of them gives a damn about us man. Come on…” he pulled at Dave’s sleeve.
Dave jerked away, “It matters. These are our people!”
Perri pointed at the Russian graves, “And those are theirs.”
Beyond the graves, Perri saw what looked like a water tower that had somehow survived the bombing. It was about ten feet high, and sitting on four wooden legs, one of which was shattered. The round water tank on its platform had been perforated a hundred places and the water inside had long ago emptied itself out. But climbing up the ladder on the side, Perri pulled aside the manhole on top and saw that they could both fit through it and get inside.
He called down to Dave, “Hand me the gear. I found our hiding spot.”

*
*

Private Zubkhov woke, remembered what had happened to him and pried himself up from his hiding spot. Which wasn’t really a hiding spot, more just the bush he’d fallen behind after he got shot. He’d fallen asleep, or passed out; one or the other, or both. His uniform shirt and jacket were stuck to his back, but the blood was mostly dry. The entry wound had also stopped bleeding. His right shoulder was frozen, and any movement of his right arm sent a stabbing pain up his side and neck, so he had to hold the arm in tight against his chest. He picked up his rifle in his left hand, tried to lift the strap up to his shoulder but gave up and looked around. While he’d been lying on his back and before he’d gotten up, he’d decided on a new plan. He needed medical help, and the only place to get it was Savoonga. But he’d been ordered to stay in Gambell. OK, so this was his story now: he’d spotted the ghost radio signal, realized the Russian column was being followed. Suspected it was US forces - remember the Radar unit jacket he’d found at Gambell? He felt responsible. He’d let that American escape, he felt a duty to try to capture the American again. Except he got ambushed and wounded – that much was all true. What about the wounded back at Gambell, what about the civilians? Yeah, that was the tricky part. But that's where the Captain came in, and it made Zubkhov so glad he hadn’t killed him along with the others. He’d just say the Captain had seemed to recover, mentally at least. He’d given Private Zubkhov permission to go track the American, said he’d look after the wounded and the civilians.
What happened after that, Private Zubkhov couldn’t be expected to explain. He’d act shocked. They were dead? All of them? Wow, the Captain must have gone psycho.
Maybe they’d buy it, maybe not. It was his only choice now. The fishing trawler, that would have to wait until he was well again, but a wound like this? They’d have to evacuate him.
Every step was agony, but he began picking his way down the hill towards the town below.
And that was when, silhouetted against the sun behind the bombed out cantonment south of the town, he saw a figure, climbing up a ladder.

*
*


In the office he’d cleared for himself in a building beside the Savoonga airport terminal (a grand name for a big, roughly partitioned shed) Bondarev and Arsharvin were standing up against a cold side wall, while General Potemkin sat at the only desk. Butyrskaya had laid a map out on the desk.
“Little Diomede?” Bondarev asked skeptically. He’d flown over the tiny island a dozen times, and there was nothing there but a small American radome. Now even that… “We hit that on the first day,” Bondarev said. “I’ve seen the BDA. There’s nothing left on it but a black smudge.”
“Not on it Comrade Colonel,” Arsharvin said. “Under it.”
Butyrskaya looked annoyed that he had taken her thunder. “As you know, commercial shipping through the Bering Strait has been halted during the current conflict, but smaller coastal fishing vessels have defied the restrictions. Three days ago we got a strange report from one such vessel, which advised the Coast Guard it had seen an aircraft flying out of the cliff face on the eastern side of Little Diomede.”
“The report was ignored,” Arsharvin said. “By Eastern Military District. I never saw it.”
“Yesterday, comrade Arsharvin asked for any reports we may have received of American commercial shipping north or south of the Strait, large enough to launch a drone from. I asked him why. He shared with me his theory about the drones that hit Anadyr and Lavrentiya being amphibious…”
“And you remembered the report from the fishing boat?” Bondarev asked.
“I told her, the drones didn’t have to be ship launched. They could maybe also take off from a harbor. A boat yard or something,” Arsharvin said.
“I pulled satellite surveillance for the three weeks since your Okhotniks hit Little Diomede. I only have digital still imagery, no infrared or synthetic aperture. A lot of the days were foggy,” she said, reaching for a folder on the table. From it, she pulled a single image. “But this is from yesterday.”
The image showed a jelly bean shaped island, from above. It had a flat, plateau-like top and in the middle of the plateau was the cratered radome that Bondarev had mentioned. A number of wrecked fishing boats lay submerged in a shallow harbor on the concave side of the island, and just to the east of these a small blurred shape was clearly visible. Something shaped like an arrow head, moving fast.
Bondarev peered at it closely. It could be a Fantom, caught in the act of launching.
Or it could be nothing.
He looked at Butyrskaya, arching his eyebrows, “You must have more than a drunken fisherman and a blurred photograph to have dragged the General all this way?”
“Oh, she does comrade Colonel,” Potemkin said, enjoying the reveal. He nodded to the intelligence officer, “Show him.”
Now Arsharvin stepped forward, “Allow me. It was my UAV that took the photograph.”
“At my request,” Butyrskaya pointed out.
Potemkin sighed, “If you don’t mind…”
Arsharvin raised his hands in defeat, and stepped back as the photograph was placed in front of Bondarev. It was the same island, taken from above, but a much lower altitude. The time and date stamp showed it had been taken mere hours ago. It took him a moment to see the difference.
Floating on the water, hidden among the smashed and sunken fishing boats, was a US F-47 Fantom UCAV.

*
*



It had been Bunny’s idea. Of course.
Rodriguez had returned with two steaming mugs of coffee to find O’Hare sitting with her feet up on her console desk and big smile on her face.
“We can’t hit them on the ground, so we have to take them in the air,” Bunny said. “I think Sun Tzu said that.”
Rodriguez sat, and handed her a mug. “I’m pretty sure they didn’t have air warfare in ancient China,” she said. “Unless he was talking about kite fighting?”
Bunny leaned forward, “Or that von Clausewitz guy. Anyway, if we try and go anywhere near Saint Lawrence, we are going to get swatted, right?”
“Correct, whether we go for them on the land, or in the air,” Rodriguez said. “So?”
“So the biggest problem isn’t the 50 enemy fighters, it’s the damn ground and ship based anti-air. But what if we lure them up here to Little Diomede, out of range of their anti-air cover.” She looked at
Rodriguez like she had just laid a golden egg. “Boom. Problem solved.”
“Two Brigades of enemy fighters still sounds like a big problem to me,” Rodriguez said. “When we can only launch two fighters at a time.”
“Sure, if we only launched two at a time,” Bunny said. “But we have to lift our ambition level Air Boss.”
“Even three, or four,” Rodriguez said. “Against 50?”
“They wouldn't send everything against us at once. That's the beauty of my plan. We just launch a couple of birds, they act like a honeypot, draw some flies, we swat a couple and Ivan gets all riled up, sends a couple squadrons against us, we see them coming and we launch everything we got,” the pilot said. “Which is how many Boss?”
Rodriguez thought about it, “We have nine Fantoms, including the one docked on the Pond.”
“Ordnance?”
“Plenty. We could go with CUDA loadouts on all of them if we wanted to.”
“We don’t,” Bunny said. “Say seven carrying CUDAS, two configured with electronic warfare pods in one bay, CUDAs in the other.”
“That’s nine in total, O’Hare. Every machine we’ve got. Even with two full crews down here, we couldn’t preflight, load and launch any faster than one machine every five or ten minutes. We’ve been averaging two prepped and launched in an hour, you and me. A Fantom only has a 90 minute duration at combat airspeeds, so by the time we got the last machines up, the first two would have to come back down again.”
“I know, but what if we aren’t bringing any down? And what if we weren’t doing any preflight or quality. What if I programmed every drone to autonomous flight, set it to mount a CAP overhead, and you and I are just out there on the catapult, pulling down drones, locking them into the cat and just firing them into the air as fast as that conveyor belt can deliver them? Two EW Fantoms to make life hell for Ivan’s targeting systems, alert him that something is up so he comes sniffing around - the others are loaded for bear, with aggressor code activated. They’ll kill anything that comes near us and when they go bingo or guns dry they head for Nome.”
The words ‘no preflight, no quality’ were just not in Rodriguez’s lexicon. She was Air Boss; her job was to ensure the aircraft got off the ground, and back down again, safely. She bit down on her natural instincts. “The EMALS catapult can fire and recharge every ten minutes, theoretically. I’ve never pushed one that hard. Something is going to fail – the shuttle, the power supply, hydraulics, something mechanical say - it’s inevitable,” she said.
“Best guess then, how many can we get up, inside an hour?” Bunny persisted.
“Say 60 percent, about six of nine,” she said.
“Good enough. So we get a couple EW Fantoms in the air on overwatch, and then we start firing off the CUDA armed Fantoms, set them to form a fighting hex. Any Russian comes near us, it will be like flying into a wasp nest. I tell you ma’am if we can get Ivan here, and if you are willing to sacrifice some hardware, we can give them a kicking. A lot worse than if we try a ground attack on a heavily defended air base.”
“Eyes in the air won’t be enough,” Rodriguez said. “You need a way to attract their attention, get them to sortie against us in squadron strength. If they just pick up the radar noise of a couple of Fantoms buzzing around overhead they’ll respond proportionately – just send a few fighters over to take a look.”
They both sat thoughtfully. Perhaps Bunny’s plan was all holes and no cheese.
The only sound came from the wash of water on the dock below, and the occasional slap of one of the painters holding the Fantom from the Lavrentiya mission, tied up in the Pond below.
Bunny snapped her fingers and pointed at it, “That’s it. We pull that Fantom outside and tie it up in plain sight. Unless he’s blind and completely dumb, Ivan is going to see it sooner or later, probably sooner, all the trouble we’ve been making. I can set up a data link, set it up to radiate - use it like a mini radar base station. Two Fantoms in the air pushing out energy, and one on the deck acting like a ground radar... that’s got to get them real curious.”
For the first time, Rodriguez started to believe it might work. It would cost them everything they had, but it could set Russian ambitions back on their heels. If they could destroy just two Russian aircraft for every Fantom they lost, it would be a significant loss for Russia. Pilots lost over this part of the Strait would probably not make it back, even if they survived the destruction of their aircraft. It was a big sea, and cold.
“It’s a plan,” Rodriguez said. “It might even be a damn good one. I need to clear this with CNAF, we'd be burning this base for good.”
"Navy already wrote us off ma'am," Bunny reminds her. "We were decommissioned and on a sub to Nome a week ago."
“I'll make the call,” Rodriguez said. “You start pulling that decoy duck down toward the cave entrance.”
That had been in the morning. After Anadyr and Lavrentiya, Rodriguez had some credit in the bank, so when she argued they’d already pushed their luck beyond expected limits, Admiral Solanta had given them a green light for one last roll of the dice. They had paddled the floating Fantom out into the bay and lashed it to the mast of a sunken fishing boat. It hurt Rodriguez sorely to leave it out in plain view, but that was the point. While Bunny set up the Fantom as a ground based early warning radar, Rodriguez went into the automated launch delivery system and queued up every aircraft they had. She set up the launch sequence as Bunny had described, with two EW Fantoms, followed by seven dedicated air-air CUDA-armed Fantoms. The aircraft would be automatically fueled and primed for engine start, loaded with either jamming pods and/or A2A ordnance

And Bunny had configured the EW Fantoms with her ‘bezerker’ combat AI algorithm. They might be light on weapons, but on her command, they would do everything in their power to lock up an enemy and destroy it, and once they were out of missiles and guns, they would become the ordnance.

*
*

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

Lovin it...as always.

Epic last stand prep sequence........ check.

Don't want to rain on anyone's parade, but I don't see admirals easily sacrificing a quarter billion dollars just because the unit has been way more successful than expected so far; rather, people adapt their expectations and push for even more. People who roll like this usually don't make it to admiral, and those who do, well, they usually don't gamble. For the final version I suggest a section to explain why Solanta is an exception ... or maybe the girls decide to go rogue, or have exceptionally good arguments.
(But the normal/expected outcome would NOT be that the better argument wins. That's almost never works outside of mathematicians' circles, and even there it would be a hard sell if it weren't for actual proofs.)

Them going rogue is a hard sell too, of course. But maybe HOLMES is monitoring the conversation going bad, and filling them in with background info about the big picture. An AI, unburdened by considerations of social prestige, career, or atavistic hierarchy might be less fazed about a breach of knowledge compartmentalization when a decidedly non-zero chance of global thermonuclear escalation is the stake. The downside to this vector is of course the danger of turning the AI into some stupid deus ex machina (sic) to resolve the plot running into a dead end.

Or....................

Holmes goes rouge and runs the beserker plan on it's own.

Or...

Rosie O'Donnell offers herself to Russia to stop the war.

The nukes start flying three minutes later.

No rainclouds here, you are spot on! But wont reveal how ... hint is in the Arkhipov reference...

THE BEZERKER ALGORITHM PART II

“This American covert base has cost you hundreds of men, dozens of aircraft, tons of supplies,” General Potemkin said.
“Comrade General,” Bondarev explained. “Lavrentiya was a mosquito bite. Unlike at Anadyr we lost only a few personnel, and no critical capabilities. I have already given orders for the aircraft of the 573rd to be assigned to the crews of the 6983rd. The Nebo array will be up again within 12 hours. There will be no impact on ground support for LOSOS.”
Potemkin looked unimpressed. “You misunderstand, Colonel. First Anadyr, now Lavrentiya. These attacks have cost the VVS political capital and the respect of our peers. I want to see this American base dug out from under that island and obliterated.”
Bondarev was looking at the map of Little Diomede. “If they can fly a UCAV out of a hole in that cliff face, then I can put a missile down their throats.”
“It would be better to land a detachment of special forces,” Lieutenant Butyrskaya said. “They could deal with US security, secure the base. There may be valuable intel, not least examples of these new amphibious UCAVs.”
General Potemkin coughed, “I commend the Comrade Lieutenant for her professionalism. However, we can glean whatever intelligence can be gleaned from the burning sunken wrecks of these American floatplanes. I do agree though that special forces will be needed to ensure the complete destruction of this base. We don’t know what is in there, or how it is protected.” He turned to Bondarev, “Colonel, I authorize a combined-forces attack on Little Diomede immediately. You will use whatever assets are required to eliminate the threat, and achieve the complete destruction of the enemy base.”
“Yes General,” Bondarev said. “I’ll lead the air attack myself.”
Potemkin appeared to think carefully, “Ordinarily I would say your place is here, overseeing our operations over Alaska. But within these walls Comrade Colonel, a newsworthy victory wouldn’t hurt you right now. No one is blaming you directly for the losses these US aircraft have inflicted behind our line of control, but…”
“But they are…” Bondarev finished for him.
Potemkin gave him a wry smile. “We move on Nome in three days. These pinprick attacks have not impacted the schedule for LOSOS, but they must be stopped.”
“I’ll see to it,” Bondarev assured him. “And if the Americans dare come north against us, I will hold them back.”
“Good, good. Tell me Colonel, is there anything you need?” Potemkin asked, expansively. “I can’t magically make a replacement squadron of Hunter pilots available, but how about fuel, weapons, food?”
“Yes Comrade General. I do have one request,” Bondarev said. "A squadron of F-47 Fantoms.”

*
*


“Something big is going down,” Perri said. “Hook up the radio will you?” He had taken the scope off his rifle and was peering through a shrapnel hole in the water tank, which was easier than looking through one lens of the binoculars. He and Dave had made themselves a pretty cool nest, spreading out their sleeping bags on the bottom of the tank so they could sit in relative comfort. They’d been through the cantonment and salvaged a couple of wooden boxes that they could fit through the manhole, along with bottled water, canned fruit and vegetables and unspoiled dry food like breakfast cereals they’d recovered from the larder of a destroyed mess hall. They had a big juice bottle for pissing in, so the only time they had to leave the tank was if they needed to crap, and they had even found a few rolls of dry toilet paper for that.
What Perri was seeing was a whole bunch of activity on the airfield. He had been counting aircraft, but it was hard, because they were not only parked out beside the airfield or on the apron, but also under camouflaged canvas shelters behind walls made of barrels and sand bags. He figured there were at least fifty jets and maybe six propeller driven transports, plus three helicopters, distributed around the airfield. The jets had been taking off and landing in pairs, about every thirty minutes to an hour, with the largest a single flight of three which had departed about a half hour earlier. That had also been a little strange, because they had seen a large airliner style aircraft circling overhead, and then the three jets had taken off, fallen into formation with it, and then all of them had headed north.
But now he saw a large number of trucks and aircrew running around, and about ten jets were taxiing out, forming a line on the single runway, clearly getting ready for takeoff. He could see the engines had been started on another four or five, and even more were being pulled out of their hangars by towing trucks.
Even from inside the tank, two miles away from the airfield, the building roar of jet engines was palpable.
“Here you go,” Dave said, handing him up the radio handset. “Have you seen anyone we know out there?” They hadn’t seen the hostages from Gambell since they had been taken into the town, and both boys were wondering how they were doing. Their families were over there. And it was hard to shake the image of those mass graves, the small shoes and gloves lying half buried in the dirt.
“No, nothing,” Perri said, then squeezed the button on the handset. “Hey what was that stupid code name Sarge asked us to use instead of our names?”
“White Bear?”
“Yeah, thanks.” Perri clicked the button on the radio handset. “Sarge, are you there, this is White Bear, come in?” He had to repeat the call a couple of times, but that was normal. Sarge always answered eventually.
“Sarge here White Bear, how are you doing?”
“Doing just fine thanks Sarge,” Perri said. He put his eye to the hole in the tank again. “Sarge, I can see about fifty or sixty different aircraft on the base here. I can give you a run-down later, but I need to tell you, something big is happening.”
“Tell me exactly what you see, son,” the man said calmly.
“I see about twenty aircraft getting ready to take off, maybe more,” Perri said. “I think they’re mostly Sukhoi-35s and 57s, some Migs, but there are a few drones too, Hunters.”
“When you say ‘getting ready’, exactly what do you mean?”
As Sarge spoke, the first of the jets roared down the runway and lifted into the air. He held his hands up to his ears, then lowered the mike to his mouth again, “Did you hear that? I mean they are all taking off, that was the first one.”
“OK, got that. Anything else? Do you see rotary aircraft, transports anything like that?”
Perri watched as another pair of jets took off. “No, just the fighters. Oh wait, it may be nothing, but about a half hour ago there was a big airliner type of aircraft up high, circling over the island. Three jets took off, met up with it like an escort, you know, and they all headed north.”
Perri heard a noise like paper rustling at the other end. “Can you be more precise? What did the big aircraft look like, exactly what direction on the compass did they go? Not east, or southeast? Definitely north?”
Perri knew why he was asking. East was Alaska. Southeast the US mainland. North was … nothing. Big Diomede, Little Diomede. Open sea. “Yeah, north,” Perri said. “The big plane was way up high, just a little white shape. And I didn’t check the compass, I just know they went north,” he said. He looked at Dave in case the boy had anything to add, but he just shrugged. Another aircraft roared off the runway outside.
“I’m going to have to log out,” Perri said, “I don’t want to be yelling, and it’s getting noisy here. You got about twenty Russian fighters taking off right now. That’s all I can tell you.”
“OK White Bear, keep the radio close. Call me in thirty. I’ll have more questions, Sarge out.”
Perri sat down, hands over his ears. The metal of the perforated water tank was like a kind of echo chamber and the noise of the jets came in through the walls and shrapnel holes and bounced around, assaulting them from all sides. There was nothing they could do except grit their teeth and ride it out.

*
*


Admiral Solanta had come through for Rodriguez. He hadn’t been wild about the idea of sending his last remaining UCAVs up against a vastly superior enemy force, nor had he been wild about the idea of setting a trap that no matter how successful would more or less give away the location of his very expensive subterranean station under Little Diomede. But what he knew, that Rodriguez and O’Hare didn’t, was that congruent with the planned engagement over the Strait, a US Columbia class sub would be testing a nuclear armed hypersonic cruise missile off the coast of the Kuril Islands. If he could deal a significant blow to Russian air power over the Bering Strait at the same time as Russia got the message the US was deadly serious about defending its territorial integrity, it might just be enough to avert all out war.
He sent word to Rodriguez that he was committing two anti-air capable submersible fast attack drones (S-FADs) to the defense of Little Diomede. The Hunter Class S-FAD was a particularly potent weapons platform. A trimaran design, with the vast majority of its hull and superstructure built of lightweight and radar-translucent carbon-composite materials it had a length of around 130 feet and a long and streamlined center hull. Originally designed to be able to hunt and kill anything from nuclear to the newest near silent air-independent diesel subs it soon became evident the platform was capable of being adapted to serve multiple roles including sea launched ground or air attack missiles. Lurking beneath the waves, with only a cable-buoy mounted Naval Integrated Fire Control-Counter Air (NIF-CA) data link to air and land radar and satellite tracking systems each anti-air S-FAD/A carried 12 cells capable of firing the latest over-the-horizon, networked SM-6 (Enhanced) anti-air missile with active seeker autonomous terminal interception capabilities.
Solanta had intended to send his S-FADs north in support of the Enterprise Carrier Battle Group and two had already reached station in the Bering Strait when the Enterprise was forced to turn back, so he had kept them on station and in reserve. It was a platform that had demonstrated an ability in testing to intercept everything from fast moving fighters and bombers to satellites or ballistic missiles. But it had never been used in combat, until now.
Rodriguez' OPORD was simple: draw the enemy to Little Diomede and identify targets for the S-FADs. With a projected shoot-kill ratio of 70% against 5th gen Russian fighters the two S-FADs between them should be able to account for about 16 Russian aircraft. He’d just seen HUMINT indicating Russia was sending around 20 aircraft against Little Diomede, leaving Rodriguez and Bunny to mop up the remainder and then put their drones down in Nome. The Admiral hoped with a bit of luck, they may even be able to avert a direct strike on the base and if the ploy off the Kurils worked, the shooting match could be over before Russia could gather itself and mount a new attack on the island base.
It was a calculated risk. And his personnel on Little Diomede had already proven Lady Luck was their personal friend.

*
*

The FLASH traffic from NORAD came in almost simultaneous with an alert flashing onto Bunny’s threat warning screen. She scanned both reports.
“OK, we better get down to the deck ma’am,” Bunny said. They had both been lying on makeshift bunks inside the trailer, trying to doze, saving their strength. “ANR has intel indicating Russian aircraft are scrambling from Savoonga. Estimated 20+ bogies and they are headed this way. Bugsy outside has just detected what looks like a Beriev AWACS aircraft, with escort, taking up station about fifty miles south of us. We need to get our EW birds up there, jam that sucker and get those S-FADs networked.” She looked over at Rodriguez. “This is it, Boss.”
“Bugsy?” Rodriguez asked.
“The Fantom out in the harbor. I gave it a name,” Bunny shrugged. “It’s earned it.”
Rodriguez smiled, “OK Lieutenant, let’s get your production line rolling…”
They had a Fantom locked and loaded on the cat and had it on standby power, ready for a five minute power up and launch. The rest of the drones were queued, fueled, armed and programmed – two with Electronic Warfare pods and the rest with CUDA air-air missiles. They had disarmed the explosives in the cave, but were acutely aware that a lucky Russian shot through the cavern mouth or down the chute could trigger one of the charges and bring the roof down on them. It would have to be extremely lucky – the chute was only 100 feet wide and putting a missile all the way through it would be like Luke Skywalker’s Hail Mary shot at the Death Star thermal exhaust port. The only way to attack them within the cave would be from water level - a missile fired straight into the mouth of the cave - but all that would do, unless it was a nuke, was to take out the dock and command trailer. Bunny would lose her cockpit, and they would be deaf and blind (perhaps literally) but the flight deck was shielded from a direct hit for exactly that reason, and as long as the EMALS kept working, the chute was clear, and at least one of them was alive, they could keep launching.
One last precaution they had taken was to create a ‘castle keep’ - a fortified position deep inside the network of racks and belts serving the catapult feeder system; with light, food and water, arms and ammunition and a low frequency radio linked to the subsea array in the Strait so that they could stay in contact with CNAF. Bunny had wryly observed that they could hold off an army from inside the ‘keep’, so they were more likely to die of thirst and hunger, or boredom.
They sprinted down to the flight deck and pulled on helmets, as much so that they could communicate, as for protection. The first drone was already locked and loaded, so Bunny waited behind the blast shield while Rodriguez went to the shooter’s chair, just like in her former life aboard carriers. The console showed a lot of different readouts, digital and mechanical, but in the end it came down to just two buttons really: charge and launch. She hit the first, and the EMALS started humming. It was already on reserve power, and needed only a few minutes to reach full charge, drawing on only a small percentage of the power that could be generated by the small nuclear power plant buried deep under the Rock. As it charged, it triggered the engine start up sequence for the Fantom and the liquid hydrogen Scimitar engine whined into life. A slipstream exhaust fan sucked most of the displaced air down into vents for distribution around the cave, but not all, and dust and small particles started swirling while a small ripple began dancing on the surface of the Pond. Green lights began showing on the shooter’s console, telling her the EMALS was fully charged at ready to deliver the required thrust, the drone was locked to the shuttle, its engine was at full power, ready for the afterburner to be lit, and its combat and autopilot systems were up.
They rushed through the launch sequence.
“Preparing to light the tail,” Bunny said into her helmet mike. “Clear?”
“Clear, aye,” confirmed Rodriguez, crouching lower.
“Launching.”
The EMALS fired and the afterburner roared, hurling the Fantom along the catapult, flinging it down the chute and out into the open air. They both watched the shrinking silhouette to see that it flew true, turning away and slowly pulling up until it was gone from the small letterbox view they had of it.
“EW 1 away,” Bunny said. As she spoke, the catapult shuttle returned to its start position while the automated delivery system lifted a new drone cartridge off the conveyor belt, and dropped it on the catapult rails. Bunny hit a release and the two halves of the cartridge fell away into pits on either side of the catapult and were ejected into the Pond, like bowling pins at the back of an alley. While Rodriguez fixed a hand-held system diagnostics unit to the newly arrived Fantom, in essence ‘booting’ the drone to life, Bunny was rocking it back and forth to lock it into place on the shuttle and fitting the holding rods.
Rodriguez felt the Fantom thud into place.
“Locked!” Bunny said, arms in the air, stepping away.
“Booted!” Rodriguez said a moment later, seeing the go-codes on her handset and pulling the magnetic connecting cable off the access point on the drone’s skin.
Bunny jumped over the blast protector again, as Rodriguez ran for the shooter’s chair. Every minute now was literally life, or death. The Russians scrambling from Saint Lawrence would be forming up, waiting for guidance from their AWACS aircraft. If they formed up in the usual Russian formation of two flights of three, the first fighters could be on their way already. Flying time from Saint Lawrence to the Rock was about 20 minutes for an Su-57. They needed to get at least eight Fantoms in the air by then. What they were trying to do had never been done before. Launch two EW birds then a hex of air-to-air Fantoms inside thirty minutes? With only two people. It was crazy.
As she waited for her shooter’s console to light up green, she looked over at Bunny and saw the woman looking across at her too.
They could be hit at any moment but Bunny was grinning like a fool, “Are we having fun yet ma’am?”



*
*

“Spruce leader, this is Spruce Control,” Bondarev heard his AWACS controller say. “We are experiencing heavy jamming. Intermittent signal loss on several frequencies. Status over the target is unchanged, no activity.”
Bondarev cursed. The observation from the AWACS controller was contradictory. If the enemy had started active jamming, then the situation over the target had changed, obviously. It showed they had detected or anticipated Russian activity, they had spotted or suspected the presence of the AWACS plane, and were targeting it with EW aircraft. It was unlikely to be ground or satellite based jamming, therefore there was at least one US stealth aircraft in the OA that the AWACS and mainland based radar had not yet detected. Probably more than one.
He had taken off in the lead formation from Savoonga. Spent ten frustrating minutes forming up. Was still 20 minutes from Little Diomede. His flight of six aircraft would set up a CAP over the island. If there were any enemy aircraft in the air near the island, he would deal with them. And he didn’t need the AWACS controller to tell him they weren’t picking up any returns, he could see that on his empty threat warning screen. The only upside was that it confirmed beyond doubt that there was a significant enemy base on the island.
It was an interesting tactical challenge. Recon photos showed a small cave at water level, with an opening not much higher or wider than the profile of one of his Okhotniks. It was conceivable you could fly a drone through it, but it would require skill. And there was no clear flight path cleared along the water outside the cave. Several fishing boats were wrecked in the shallow harbor lying in front of the cave, so while it was possible a ski-equipped drone could land in the mouth of the cave, taking off would be problematic as there wasn’t enough ‘runway’ to get an aircraft up to takeoff speed. Once he had dealt with any threats, he needed to get a low level look at the mouth of the cave himself before he sent his special ops team in.
Following behind him were ground-attack armed Okhotniks, three with deep penetrating precision guided bombs with 1500 lb. warheads that could punch through 10 feet of hardened concrete, or 20 feet of soil. The rest were armed with short range ground attack missiles designed to take out enemy armor. Their warheads were smaller, but their guidance systems more precise. If he was to have a chance of getting a shot inside that cave mouth, it would most likely be with an Okhotnik, flying in at wave top height and delivering its ordnance at point blank range.
An icon Bondarev had rarely seen on his HUD threat display started blinking, as the AWACS aircraft broadcast again, “Spruce Control to Spruce leader, we are blind. Total signal failure. Interference on all frequencies, anti-jamming measures ineffective. Sorry Spruce leader, we could give you a vector to the likely source of the jamming, but you are already headed there. We will update if status changes.”
“Spruce leader, understood, out,” Bondarev replied.
He quickly scanned his HUD, the skies, his wingmen’s’ positions. The passive and active sensors on his Sukhois should be able to burn through any jamming once he arrived over the target, but that meant long range missiles were virtually useless, reducing his effective payload from eight to four missiles per aircraft. He was not concerned. The jamming aircraft were likely just unarmed UAVs. And if there was a significant force of UCAVs in the OA, the AWACS should have picked them up before it went off the air.
“Spruce leader to Spruce flight,” Bondarev said, speaking to his wingmen. “Radars up, arm short range ordnance, take your targeting from your flight leaders. We are probably facing stealth UAVs, stay sharp.”
He flicked his eyes around the skies and across his instruments again. That familiar combat operation tension was building in him. He didn’t believe the BS from pilots or commanders who tried to sound like a combat mission was just another day at the office. Any flight had the potential to cost you your life if you weren’t careful, and a combat mission put all the odds against you. And different thoughts went through your head. You couldn’t shut them out. He had no wife and he didn’t think about his mother or father at times like this. He thought about his grandfather, hero of the Russian Federation, former commander of the Aerospace Forces. The man who had taught him to fly, nearly thirty years ago, sitting on his lap in the cockpit of a Yak-152 turbo prop, his feet working the rudder pedals while Bondarev flew with stick and throttle. The man who had taught him how to fight – not the combat maneuvers, but the mindset he needed. “Kill without thought,” his grandfather had told him. “Without regret. The enemy pilot has made a choice to fly, to fight, and to die if needed. No pilot in modern war is there against his will. If he wanted, he could object, refuse to fight, and take the consequences. But if he fights, he also accepts the consequences.” His grandfather had died of old age ten years ago now, but Bondarev imagined the man watching his every move when he was in the air. Looking out for him? No, that was his own job, but perhaps guiding his decisions, yes.
His lessons applied to a bygone era though. Bondarev and his men were almost certainly going into combat against soul-less robots, not flesh and blood men or women. There were no moral dilemmas in the destruction of silicon and steel, only tactical ones. In a ritual that never varied, Bondarev crossed himself, and muttered under his breath, “Be with me Dedushka.”

*
*

“Fourth CUDA bird away!” Rodriguez called, bent double and panting. She was ready to collapse, had no idea how Bunny was still standing. The stocky, well-muscled aviator had stripped to her singlet, uniform trousers, gloves and boots. Her white, short cropped hair glistened with sweat and it ran in rivulets down her back between her shoulder blades. As they watched the sixth Fantom depart, Bunny arched her back. Rodriguez handed her a bottle filled with electrolytes and high dose caffeine and she chugged it hungrily.
Bunny looked over at the command trailer, “Ivan will be overhead any minute,” she said. “And my babies will still be trying to form up. I want to get into that trailer and get them through the sh*tstorm they’re flying into.”
“If those S-FADs don’t do their job, and Russian ground attack aircraft break though, the #%&*$# will be in here, not out there,” Rodriguez reminded her. They both watched wearily as the loading crane lifted another Fantom cartridge off the belt and dropped it on the catapult rails. So far, the only mechanical failure had been a catapult locking mechanism on the second Fantom that didn’t want to engage. They had talked through what they would do for nearly every possible failure scenario, and for this one, their only possible option was to push the malfunctioning drone down the rails and into the Pond at the end of the deck, losing not only a machine, but precious time. Just as Rodriguez was about to call it, the Fantom shuttle had clunked into place. “I’ve seen your code in action,” Rodriguez said. “Your ‘babies’ can look after themselves.”
Of course Bunny wanted to be at her desk, head in her VR helmet, guiding her machines through the engagement but she couldn’t be in two places. She had been forced to launch them in autonomous mode and leave them to fight or die on their own. The algorithm she had plugged in was hyper-defensive at the merge though – her EW birds and her fighting hex would seek altitude and try to ‘spot’ targets for the S-FADs, which would be pulling data from the UCAVs, their own targeting systems and ANR to triangulate the Russian aircraft. Only when the S-FADs reported they were weapons dry and disengaging would Bunny’s UCAVs engage and even then they were programmed to only engage with missiles, evade and then bug out for recovery at Nome and Port Clarence.
That’s what she’d told Rodriguez anyway. It wasn’t exactly dishonest, but she might have omitted to tell her CO that she had also programmed her Bezerker algorithm into the two EW UCAVs. It would be triggered if they were engaged and were in a guns dry state. Her logic was that if the engagement got to the state where her EW machines were still engaged after the S-FADs and her fighting hex were out of the fight, things were desperate enough to justify a little suicidality.
“Well, they’re going to need all the friends they can get,” Bunny sighed, looking at the next Fantom in line. “Are we just going to stand here doing the girl talk thing, or are we going to get this hex launched?”

*
*

The first CUDA armed Fantoms formed up north of Little Diomede and started creating a fighting hex. Their neural networks linked to share data, their passive and active targeting systems scanned the sky for targets to feed to the submersibles. The two EW Fantoms already airborne were sending data to the hex and the S-FADs on both the AWACS and its escort, but also a new group of aircraft entering the combat area which were radiating fearlessly, clearly confident and bent on detecting the US stealth aircraft. The two electronic warfare Fantoms had reached 30,000 feet and were climbing for 50. Bunny had programmed the flight waypoints for the EW Fantoms to be staggered between the Russian AWACS and Little Diomede, and Fantom EW 1 was jamming the AWACS undetected from a distance of only ten miles. It had a perfect lock on the AWACS plane and one of the S-FADs designated it as a priority target.
As Bondarev’s flight of six Sukhois flashed by underneath it, the S-FAD flooded opened its missile cell doors and launched. Fired from below the surface using high pressure steam the launch cannisters of seven missiles broke out above the water and the SM-6/E booster engines fired, accelerating the missiles to three and a half times the speed of sound. One launch cannister failed to release, sending its missile into a cartwheeling death across the surface of the sea. The other six missiles arced straight into the sky. Pulling on the data from three remote sources, coupled with their own active seeker systems, they took just over a second to cover the 30,000 feet to their targets.

*
*


The first Bondarev knew that his AWACS crew was under attack was a brief radar tone, the appearance of an enemy missile icon on his HUD showing a contact below him, then the flash of light and ball of flame on the horizon behind him that signaled the 160m dollar AWACs' destruction.
Before he could even react his combat AI took control of his aircraft, automatically fired flares and chaff and began to maneuver radically.
His formation split like a starburst, every pilot looking desperately for the source of the attack, threat warning HUDs ominously empty of enemy aircraft but his blurred vision could see the threat marked on his HUD. Ground launch! His head swiveled quickly, looking for the telltale contrail of a missile to tell him where it had been fired from. He was over the open ocean, so whatever ship had killed his AWACS must be close. He felt as much as saw a missile scream past his port wing and explode overhead. Simultaneously, left and right of him, he saw four of his wingmen hit, dissolving in bright yellow balls of fire.
As his machine pulled out of a near vertical dive he saw what must be the wreckage of the Beriev spiraling down to the sea, trailing ugly black and brown smoke behind it and around him, nothing but clear blue sky. Far below, a parachute bloomed, then another. That meant little. They aircrew still had to survive landing in the freezing sea below. Bondarev cursed and took back his stick. His threat display was only showing a general vector to a jamming signal over the Diomede islands. Threat display empty, sky clear! He flipped his radar to ground scan mode. Nothing! Where had the attack come from?! He flung his machine around the sky, bullying it down toward the relative safety of the waves below.
For the first time in multiple missions, Bondarev was at a loss. “Spruce Leader to Spruce flight, report!”
“Spruce 5,” a single voice replied. “Forming up Colonel. Orders?”
Bondarev checked his tac display, “I have a strong lock on a stationary radar signature by Little Diomede,” he said. “Do you copy?” The only threat on his board was an American radar broadcasting by the eastern side of the island. His AI had tagged it as an F-47 signature, but it was not moving. Perhaps it was the aircraft Arsharvin’s UAV had photographed, either landing or preparing to launch? It didn’t feel right. On the edge of his display he saw his follow on flight entering the combat area, another six Su-57s followed by 12 Mig-41s. Behind them should be six ground attack configured Okhotniks.
“Acknowledged, Spruce leader.” His remaining wingman responded. “Orders please?” The man sounded on the edge of panic.
Bondarev didn’t even have time to reply before his missile threat warning sounded again and the stick was ripped from his hands as his machine desperately inverted and dived.

*
*

The first S-FAD/A loosed two more missiles in the direction of Bondarev and his wingman but they were now moving into the optimal kill zone for the second S-FAD so it handed them off and turned its attention to the next wave of incoming Russian fighters. It had claimed four kills with its first seven shots, had two SM-6/E missiles in flight and three left. Based on solid and unconfirmed returns combined with standard Russian flight doctrine it estimated at least 12 Russian aircraft in the approaching wave. It had a firm lock on only four, but that was more than it had missiles for anyway. It sent its remaining three SM-6/Es downrange then closing its cell doors, reeled in its targeting comms buoy, cut off all emissions and began a silent glide toward the bottom of the Bering Strait.

*
*

One, two… five! Bondarev quickly counted five missile icons, and within the blink of an eye they detonated. His wingman, Spruce 5, had broken high, managing only to attract both of the missiles launched at them, and his machine disappeared in a maelstrom of metal and fire. In horror, Bondarev listened as voices full of controlled terror filled the air and the icons of his follow on wave began to wink out. Five missiles, four kills this time. He remaining nine Su-57s scattered wildly, looking for the source of the attack in vain.
Bondarev was down on the deck, back in control of his machine, still screaming toward Little Diomede but with nothing at which to aim his rage and anger than the loudly emitting F-47 still stationary next to the island and the vague vector he had to the jamming aircraft now high above him. He’d led his men into a trap and could see nothing for it but to call on them to disengage. He thumbed his comms.
“Spruce leader to all Spruce aircraft …” he called. His time had run out. With a sickening feeling of finality he heard a new missile launch tone, saw the icons for multiple ground launched missiles appear right in front of him, and closed his eyes.
Ignoring the virtual surrender of its pilot, the Sukhoi’s AI took control of the aircraft, rolled the machine hard to starboard, using thrust vectoring to put it at a radical angle of approach to the incoming missiles, punched flares and chaff and Bondarev felt his vision going red. An explosion, behind. Safe. A second, right above his damn head!
His aircraft shuddered and began to wing over toward the sea. He grabbed the stick, disengaged the AI, tried to keep his machine level, felt it falling away underneath him. Tried to roll level to port, and it was like trying to roll a damn airliner upright, so he took a crazy risk, flick rolled to starboard instead. The Sukhoi responded normally to the stick for a starboard roll, and he stopped the roll as the aircraft came level. Warnings were flashing in his HUD and in his ears. He realized he was pulling back on the stick, but the nose was still dropping slightly. Engine temp redlining. He eased back on the throttle, pushed the stick forward. Engine fire! Extinguishers fired automatically and that warning went out, but he could hear his engine slowly spinning down. HUD was down. Tac display was down. He could hear the comms of his remaining pilots, tried to order them to break off and RTB but got no response; he was deaf, blind and dumb, shooting over the sea still aimed at Little Diomede, not much more than 1,000 feet above the waves. If his Okhotniks began their ingress now, they would be decimated. His nose dipped as his engine began to spool down.
The Su-57 wasn’t a glider. But it wasn’t a brick either. He still had electrical power and the dynamic control surface modulation system did its best to optimize his wing for low speed flight as he fought to keep some altitude, avoid a stall, avoid the fighter tipping over onto one wing and going into a death spiral. He desperately scanned the sky around him, checked his altitude. He was already down to 800!
He should punch out.



Up ahead he saw a broad channel of sea, coasts on each side, too far away, and straight in front, the twin islands of Big Diomede and Little Diomede. Big Diomede was Russian territory. Uninhabited, but Russian. Little Diomede was, he now knew for sure, an enemy base. An enemy base that had survived an attack with mini-MOAB munitions, hit and hurt Anadyr and Lavrentiya, and had now claimed at least eight of his own aircraft, probably significantly more thinking of that last volley of missiles. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw several parachutes. Drones did not need parachutes, they could only be his own men. Destroyed by what? Ground based anti-air defences on Little Diomede? It couldn’t be – they had hit the island with MOABs, overflown it a hundred times in recent weeks without incident, scoured satellite and ELINT data for any sign of anti-air defences. Arsharvin had concluded its only defense was a solid cap of basalt.
As much as they were friends, it was an unforgivable mistake.
He was dropping toward the Little Diomede from the east and could feel, without looking at his instruments, that he was not going to clear it. Choices flashed through his head like items on a menu. Steer a little to starboard, punch out in the water between the two islands, swim for Big Diomede and Russian territory. Or punch out either near or over little Diomede and wait on the enemy island until the Spetsnaz or a rescue unit arrived, assuming they could even get through. But he had no idea what the currents were like between the islands, could just imagine himself being caught and swept north or south into the open sea where he would die in minutes from the cold, despite his insulated flight suit. His nose dipped further … no way to get over Little Diomede now … it was decision time. He scanned the rocky shore ahead of him … could jump in or near the small wreckage strewn harbor at the base of that cliff there … worst case swim to the mast of one of the sunken ships, best case, make it to shore … but what if he jumped right in the middle of all that wreckage, or got blown past … once again he was wracked with indecision. Dedushka! Why can’t I think!?
What the hell? In the middle of the cliff face ahead of him he saw a small rectangular aperture, not much wider or higher than his aircraft. He wouldn’t even have noticed if he hadn’t been pointed straight at it, and even then might have missed it except that out of its black maw an American Fantom blasted into the air and turning right in front of him, began a fast climbing turn to port.
A cold calm came over him. Suddenly his path was clear. He would aim his Sukhoi at the opening in the rock and fly his machine straight into it.
“This is Spruce Leader,” he called on his radio, just in case anyone could hear. “I have been hit, lost engine power, going down. Oak leader, get the job done, you are in command. Good luck Akinfeev. Bondarev out.”

*
*

“No response!” Rodriguez called out. She had the boot unit connected to the hull of the Fantom they had just dropped onto the catapult, and hit the command to initiate engine startup, but got nothing, even the boot unit was showing a blank display. It was their last drone. They had managed to get eight up, this would be the ninth, and the last CUDA armed fighter if they could only boot it to life.
“Try another boot unit!” Bunny yelled back. “It might not be the drone.”
Running back to her shooter’s console, she pulled out a reserve boot unit and turned it on. For safety’s sake she took a spare magnetic connection cable too, in case it was a cable problem. Bunny took the chance to swig some water. They had gotten ten Fantoms into the air now, but had no idea what was going on above them. What they were doing was the equivalent of firing arrows blindfolded into the air, one after the other, at a target they weren’t even sure was still there. Except of course that the arrows had brains and reflexes of their own. And if the enemy was out there, they would find them. What happened after that, that was a question of man against machine.
She slapped the magnetic connector onto the port on the side of the drone, and hit the boot command. An error code flashed up.
“Fault in fuel cell, access port 23a!” she called. “Where the hell is access port 23A!?.”
Bunny put her water bottle away and ran towards their engineering supply room, “I’ll get another fuel cell!”
“Goddamit!” Rodriguez said, going back to her console and pulling up the drone service schematics. “Port 23A, 23A … where are you?” She punched in a search string and a wire diagram came up on her screen, the battery port highlighted in pulsing blue. It was on the portside fuselage, under the wing root. Grabbing a pistol grip screwdriver she ran to the drone, ducked under the wing, located the port and ripped it open. The hydrogen fuel cell inside was held fast in a metal brace and she had to free it before she could pull it out. As she turned to drop it on the ground, Bunny jogged up, holding a new cell and she jammed it into the bracket, closed the port door and Rodriguez screwed it into place.
They had wasted valuable time. Bunny turned to Rodriguez, about to say something when a huge explosion threw them off their feet and fire roared out of the chute.

*
*



Bondarev never saw his machine hit the cliff. He had centered the nose of the Sukhoi just above the hole in the cliff face to allow for the last few feet of descent. He’d judged it was 500 feet above sea level, or about 500 feet below his safe ejection height. About a hundred feet from the cliff face, he pulled the ejection lever. His canopy flew away and the ejection gun hammered his seat out of the cockpit, then a rocket booster blasted him into the cold air at 200G per second. In any ejection there was a one in three chance the pilot would break their back, but when the alternative was to end as a red smear on a cliff face in the middle of the Bering Strait, it wasn’t something Bondarev had even thought about. His immediate problem was whether his chute would even deploy in time to retard his fall at this low altitude. The Sukhoi was equipped with a ‘zero-zero’ ejection system, designed to be safe even if the pilot ejected at zero altitude, zero speed, but while he was about 500 feet above the sea he was still ejecting below ground level if you counted from the top of the cliff face.
The solid fuel rocket boosters on the bottom of his chair burned white hot for 0.2 seconds, lifting him 200 feet into the air over Little Diomede. Having taken altitude data from the dying Sukhoi, the seat computer calculated it should dump the chair immediately and deploy both the drogue and main parachutes. Bondarev was still moving forward at about 500 miles an hour as he started to drop. He felt himself being jerked out of the chair - if his back hadn’t been broken by the kick out of the cockpit, there was another chance it would be snapped by the chute deploying - and he saw the lip of the cliff face disappear below him in a blur. He was still wearing his helmet, so he registered the explosion of his aircraft as a bright flash somewhere below his legs, but didn’t hear it; then his chute opened and swung him forward like a child on a swing. His legs kicked out in front of him and then he swung back down, the black rock and ice of the island rushing up to meet him. He braced for a hard impact, but the ground was a little further away than he had first sensed. A second went past, then another, then he hit hard.

*
*

Lieutenant Colonel Artem Akinfeev, Bondarev’s second in command and leader of the Mig-41 Oak squadron had heard his COs shouted missile warning as he came under attack over Little Diomede but he hadn’t heeded it. It wasn’t that he doubted the sanity of the order, questioned the tactical wisdom of committing his aircraft before the source of the threat was identified, or was arrogantly overconfident about the capabilituies of his Gen 6 Mig stealth fighters.
He hadn’t heeded Bondarev’s warning, because he was already dead.
Having dispatched most of Bondarev’s squadron the remaining S-FAD had immediately moved to engage the incoming Sukhois and Migs. An SM-6/E missile had struck his machine from a low portside aspect, detonating inches from his fuel tanks, causing an explosion that incinerated both the Mig and Artem Akinfeev in milliseconds. Akinfeev’s wingman, Lieutenant Igor Tzubya, had also heard Bondarev’s warning but luckily he had time to respond and had evaded the missile that had been aimed at him.
“Oak 4 to Birch leader, we are engaged over target,” he said to the Okhotnik commander, pushing his machine down to sea level to try to recover stealth capability as his sensors showed American Aegis ground-air and Fantom air-air radar sweeping across the skin of his fighter. “Hold your current position, do not approach the target. Repeat, do not approach.”
Igor Tzubya’s call sign was ‘Yeti’ because of his coolness under fire, and he showed it now, his voice giving no sign of the stress he was feeling, either mental or physical. As he recovered his stealth profile he swung his aircraft around toward the source of the Aegis radar and was looking for a surface ship when far ahead of him, he saw two sea launched missiles leap from the empty water. A submersible anti-air system! He had no air-ground weapons other than his guns, but he knew exactly how to respond. He locked the rough position of the S-FAD on his targeting system and sent the data to the other Russian aircraft.
“Oak squadron, get down on the deck,” he said. “We’re being targeted by sub-launched missiles. Converge on my coordinates!” Tzubya commanded. Tzubya and his men were trained in how to counter an S-FAD attack. The S-FAD had to be stationary to launch and the trick was to stay as close to the launch point as possible. After clearing the surface of the sea and being kicked out of their cannisters the SM-6/E missiles would accelerate straight up and then start homing on their targets, but if the targets were below them and close, they would be forced to try a radical 180 degree reverse to get back down to sea level to hit a circling aircraft. It was a maneouver they weren’t optimised to achieve and the chances of a miss were greatly improved.
Assuming there was only one S-FAD out there firing, of course.
He had no option. In moments he was joined by the remaining five fighters of Oak squadron and they began tight banking turns over the last known position of the S-FAD. He tried desperately to get a visual on the submersible drone but that was impossible. The water below glittered with sunlight, the reflections blinding.
“Missile launch!” one of his men called and he saw to port one of the missile cannisters exploding out of the water, the rocket booster igniting and sending the missile out of sight overhead.
“Hold your positions unless they get a lock!” he called sternly, knowing the pressure to break away would be almost irresistible to many pilots.
He counted the aircraft swimming through the air behind him. So few. But that must mean the enemy S-FAD was growing short on missiles.
He just had to hold his nerve.



*
*

If Rodriguez and Bunny had been in any doubt about whether there was a war going on outside, it disappeared in the gout of flame that spewed out of the chute at the end of the catapult. Having been standing off to one side pushing the wings of the disabled Fantom the flame spewed out of the chute between them and they scrambled aside, Rodriguez on all fours, Bunny almost comically crabbing backwards on her butt.
What saved them from almost certain immolation was that Bondarev’s Sukhoi had struck the cliff face about six feet over the chute. Smashing into the rock, its fuel tanks had ruptured and spewed flaming fuel into the chute, but the plane itself had simply pancaked into the cliff above the chute, exploded with huge force as its ammunition and fuel detonated, and then dropped to the rocky beach below.
Ironically, the smoking wreck served to obscure the chute from anyone who might have been looking for it from the air or sea.
When the fire subsided, Bunny stuck her head up and peered down the chute, still seeing unobstructed daylight ahead. “Missile, you think?”
“Had to be,” Rodriguez agreed. “But they missed. Come on, we can’t expect they’ll keep missing. And you can bet it’s just a matter of time before they’ll dropping some heavy harm on that cave mouth.
Let’s hustle!”
Having installed the new fuel cell and locked it down, they booted up their last drone without any drama and got it ready to launch. Rodriguez had no way of knowing how many of their fighters out there were still operational, but they had now put two EW aircraft and a full hex of A2A in the air. If the S-FADs had done their job, and each Fantom just killed two Russians each, they would account for the best part of a full enemy squadron. That would have to hurt. She checked her panel. Oh what now!
She deciphered the data on her screen. “EMALS is overheating,” she told Bunny. “We can push it, risk that it seizes, or wait and let it cool.”
“How long?”
“Ten … nine minutes.”
At that moment they heard a mighty crash outside as something, probably one of the combatants, smashed into the water in the harbor outside the cave mouth.
“We might not have ten minutes,” Bunny said. “I say take the shot, even if the damn thing blows up.” Her words were all fire and brimstone, but Rodriguez could see the woman was about to pass out if she didn’t kill herself with overexertion first.
“I’ll see if I can bypass the EMALS safety code,” Rodriguez said. “You run up to the trailer, try to get a read on what is happening out there. Grab some electrolytes, then get back here.”
“Yes ma’am,” Bunny said, without hesitation. She wanted to know what was happening above the Rock just as much as Rodriguez did. Rodriguez noticed she didn’t run over to the trailer, but moved with a shuffling jog.
They just needed to get their last Fantom away. Then they could rest forever.

*
*

Bondarev hit the hard ice covered rock and rolled. As he tumbled he tried to keep his head and his arms tucked in, but his head took a heavy blow that made him see stars even through the helmet. When he stopped rolling, he tried to stand, but found he couldn’t balance, even to get up into a crouch. Brain injury, something told him. Concussion. Take it easy. No one is shooting at you down here.
He decided to lie still where he had landed, knees curled up to his chest. He pulled his parachute up around himself to keep warm, felt down to his trouser leg and triggered his emergency beacon. No rescue could come until the area was secure, but at least aircraft above would know he was down and still alive.
Which, miraculously, he seemed to be. He gingerly rolled one foot, then the other, to test for a broken ankle. The same for his wrists and hands. He knew he might not feel any pain for a few minutes, the amount of adrenaline that had to be flowing, but it seemed he had gotten down in one piece. He still had spots in front of his eyes when he opened them, and a massive headache, but no pain in his back, no splintered bones.
He was, however, lying on the stone and ice roof of an enemy air base in the middle of a shooting war and if his pilots could secure the airspace over the island there would be an air strike bowling in any minute now.
Gathering himself, he rolled into a crouch. About two hundred feet to his left he saw what must have been the remains of the American radome. It was nothing more than blasted metal stumps and rough foundations but it offered the only potential shelter on the whole rock, in case any of the incoming Russian munitions went high.
He looked up at the clear blue sky, could see some contrails, and far away, a burning machine falling from the sky. He had no idea if it was American or Russian. But judging by the first ten minutes of the battle, he wasn’t hopeful. It was the first time he had ever gone up against an autonomous sub launched air defense system.
And it had kicked his human a$$.

*
*