CH. 3

HOLES IN THE CHEESE



The US Ambassador to Moscow, Devlin McCarthy, had a number of firsts to her name but the one she liked best was that she was the first black Irish American to be named Ambassador to a top tier post like Moscow. In fact, Devlin was pretty sure she was the first black Irish American in the State Department, let alone in Moscow. She wasn’t the first ever black Irish American, that she knew for a fact because that honor went to her father, his father, and his father’s father. Further back than that, she hadn’t checked. She loved her Grandfather’s explanation though - he insisted his ancestors were Viking slaves, captured Moors bought in the slave markets of Hedeby and shipped to Ireland to serve in Viking families during the reign of Harold Bluetooth.

It was a great story, and she told it to anyone brave enough to ask her about her family history, which most of the Embassy staffers were too timid to do. She wouldn’t mind if they did - it would give her a chance to break down the Ice Queen reputation she seemed to have brought here with her. Small talk wasn’t something people seemed comfortable trying on her, so luckily she was comfortable with their small awkward silences. She really didn’t think she deserved the rep she had. Sure, she was forty and twice divorced - she never had much of an interest in lifelong attachments - and she spent most of her waking life at work, but she did take two weeks holiday every year to be with her now-adult daughter, always taking her somewhere outdoorsy for at least a week, followed by a week somewhere nice like a beach resort or theme park. When she had hit her adult years she’d been expecting her daughter Anne to find something better to do in the summer than hang with her absentee State Department mother Devlin, but Anne hadn’t missed a holiday yet. Devlin figured that said something nice about them both.

Apart from her annual family get together then, most of her daily life was polite society and diplomatic double speak. So she actually relished days like today she was summoned to meet with the Russian Foreign Minister Roman Kelnikov at his State offices inside the Kremlin walls. His Ministry was actually on the ring road that circled Moscow, but the fact he was meeting her here indicated to her she was in for a bit of diplomatic theatre.

She sat in the back of her two tonne armored limo with two bodyguards up front, one facing forward, one backward and her personal aide beside her. In the days when cars needed a driver, they’d needed a detail of three - one to drive, two to guard. But driverless vehicles had freed up the third spot either for additional protection, guests or in this case, legroom. As they approached the River Gates that led directly into the Russian foreign ministry underground carpark there was the usual ceremony with credentials and Kremlin guards running a sweep of the car and its occupants. They all had to demount and go through biometric scanners before they were allowed back into their car and inside the Kremlin walls.

As their car found its assigned parking bay, Devlin patted the small printed folio on her lap. She never took a tablet or telephone into Russian Government offices because since passive data retrieval had become a thing, it was the work of seconds for a concealed scanner to strip an electronic device of all its data. The great privacy backlash of about 20 years ago when people got sick of their data being stolen, their identities cloned and their secrets sold to the highest bidder had seen a revival in the use of good old fashioned paper that had to be physical stolen, held and read before it gave up its secrets. All truly sensitive information these days was only held on paper.

And the information in the folio on her lap was about as sensitive as it came.
*
*
“Tea?” Kelnikov asked, motioning to the samovar on a silver table next to his desk. His office was big enough to hold a large oak desk which legend said had been gifted to the Russian foreign minister Molotov by Minister of the Reich Ribbentropp. There were also two long sofas both facing in to a less formal teak coffee table decorated with fresh flowers and fruit.

Devlin had been told her security detail and her aide were welcome to wait in the ante room today. The meeting she was invited to attend with Kelnikov was to take place under four eyes only. When she’d walked in, he’d been sitting at his desk talking with a secretary and he’d risen to shake Devlin’s hand, then sat back down at his desk again. No fruit for her today then.

“Yes please,” Devlin said to the offer of tea, and the secretary fussed arranging tea and a plate of small dry cakes for them both and then hurried out of the office.

“You look well,” Kelnikov smiled, his bald head glistening in the light of the overhead lamps. He was about sixty, overweight, known to have an occasionally recurring barbituate habit and a predilection for preying on ballerinas from the Bolshoi, where he had a private box. Devlin found him completely and totally without charm. “I think you have even got a little early summer tan, is that possible?”

Oh, so that’s how you want to start? Devlin thought, immediately shifting herself into cold, minimalist mode. She ignored the poorly disguised barb about her color.

“Why was I summoned I here Mr Secretary?” she asked.

“Invited,” Kelnikov smiled, thin lips parting over yellow teeth. “As you know, if you had been summoned, there would have been a public press pronouncement to that effect. We are not there yet.”

“Where are we then?” she asked. Fortunately her people had done their work and knew exactly what it was that she had been ‘invited’ to talk about. She had been both forewarned, and forearmed.

Kelnikov reached into his desk and pulled out a small folder tied with a string, which he took his time untying before opening the folder. He pulled out a large photograph and slid it across the table to her.

“The Ozempic Tsar,” he said, pointing at it. “The most advanced autonomous pilotless freight vessel in the world, and valued at more than 250 million of your American dollars. On its most recent voyage, it was carrying a cargo of 1.9 billion US dollars worth of processed lithium.”

“Then I sincerely hope it was insured,” she said, immediately playing the ball back at him. “Because my information is that it is now lying at the bottom of the Bering Strait.”

His hands were folded and resting on the desk in front of them, but he fanned them wide now, “Oh please, do tell me what information you have on the demise of this pride of the Russian merchant fleet?”

She had been thinking to save her ammunition, but his racist remark, his obsequious manner, his slimy smile, they all conspired to make her want to have this audience over and done as quickly as possible.

From her own folio she pulled Carl Williams’ intel report and placed it so that the cameras which she assumed were in Kelnikov’s office could take a nice clear shot of it. She was about to tell him what was in it anyway.

“We are happy to share the intelligence we have on this tragedy. I’ll give you the short version,” she said. “Thirty minutes before that ship was sunk, a Russian naval communications center at Anadyr sent a message to a Finnish submarine, the FNS Vesikko, sailing 20 miles south west of the Ozempic Tsar. Six minutes before the Tsar sent out its first mayday, that same vessel reported it had fired its missiles.” She watched with satisfaction as Kelnikov’s eyes narrowed and he pursed his mouth. “Six minutes later, at least two subsonic submarine-launched surface to surface missiles hit the Ozempic Tsar and detonated its hydrogen fuel stores. The explosion was so catastrophic it was registered on one of our thermal imaging satellites as a possible ICBM missile launch bloom, but luckily for you, our AI detected that it had the wrong heat signature and our military alert level was not raised.”

Kelnikov spoke in a tight voice, verging on anger, “You accuse us of collusion in this crime? What proof do you have?”

“You know that there would be no conclusive satellite imaging available for the undersea launch of stealth cruise missiles.”

“Then you have nothing,” he said suddenly happy, and reaching into his folder again. “Whereas we have this.” He took out another photograph and almost threw it at her.

It was a satellite photograph of a ship, with lattitude, longitude and date stamp clearly visible. She could guess what ship it was, but Kelnikov spoke before she could say anything. “That is a US Navy vessel, the USS Venice Beach. An unmanned guided missile cruiser, armed with anti-ship missiles.” He took out another photo and flipped it at her so hard, it spun on the table in front of her.

She stopped it spinning and held it down with a single finger as she looked at it. It showed a large metal plate on the deck of what looked like a fishing vessel, with the word TSAR stenciled across it. If she had to guess, she’d guess it would turn out to be a close match for the name a certain Russian freighter had stencilled across its stern. Next to the wreckage lay a crushed tubular shape about two yards long and what looked like a mangled engine of some sort.

“Does your report tell you what that is?” Kelnikov asked gleefully.

“Actually it does,” she said. “I’m guessing that tube next to that clearly faked stern plate is the housing of a US PIKE anti-ship missile.”

“Salvaged, not faked, and yes it is!” Kelnikov said, building up a head of steam now. “You don’t deny it? The missile that destroyed a Russian flagged freighter while it was moving through Russian territorial waters was American!”

“Your tone is accusatory,” Devlin said. “But I have seen no evidence to justify your anger being directed at the USA.”

Kelnikov leaned over and jabbed his finger angrily down on the photo, “Your missile, fired by one of your ships!”

She laughed, realizing as she did so that she was ignoring ten years of training and practice in protocol. Kelnikov’s face clouded. No, it boiled.

“Just what about this act of naked aggression do you regard as funny?” he demanded. “Tell me!”

“How about you tell me?” she asked, getting control of herself again. “PIKE missiles have been exported to 13 countries, two of which have unfortunately recently moved out of our sphere of influence and into yours. One of those is Finland. I don’t deny the missile in that photograph may be a PIKE, but I strongly deny that it was fired by one of our ships. Our information indicates it was fired by a Finnish submarine which was in communication with Russian Far East military command.”

“You accuse Russia of sinking a Russian merchant vessel? What nonsense.”

“The Venice Beach did not fire those missiles. Finland however, recently signed a defense cooperation treaty with Russia. One of Finland’s refurbished French Scorpene class hydrogen-electric submarines was in the area, and would have been more than capable of this attack.”

“Again, I ask you what proof you have for this baseless accusation?”

“The same as you have for yours,” she said coolly. “None.” She closed her folder, “Was this the only matter you wanted to discuss today?” she asked.

Kelnikov slapped the table, but if he expected Devlin to flinch or jump, he was disappointed. She’d seen him in this state many times and had been waiting for it. She did little more than blink at him. “You have 24 hours,” he said. “To admit responsibility for this heinous act, issue an apology and offer suitable reparations to the owners of the Ozempic Tsar.”

“Or…”

Kelnikov glared at her, “Or, as you Americans are so fond of saying, ‘All options are on the table’.”
*
*
Back in her limo, Devlin fished out the intel report again and looked at it carefully. She handed it to her aide. “I see that this origin of this report is NSA Moscow. Find me the person who wrote it. By the look on Kelnikov’s face I knew more about this Ozempic Tsar incident than he did, and that was a damn nice place to be. I want to write a note to say thankyou.”
*
*
CH 4

ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE



If there was a crappier rock on the whole planet than Little Diomede Island, Lieutenant Commander Alicia Rodriguez wanted to know where. Because she’d be on the first plane there and she’d wallow in its complete crappyness and then be able to return to Little Diomede happy that she wasn’t actually living on the crappiest damn rock on the whole damn planet.

Or in fact, not even on the crappiest rock, but inside it. At least if you were living on top of the rock, you’d get 360 degree sea views. Sure, you’d be looking through fog, out over windblown white caps not seeing much apart from #%&*$# seabirds and ice floes, but you could look east and tell yourself that right over there, just over the horizon, that was Alaska in the good old US of A. And if you looked West, you could tell yourself you were looking at the Evil Empire reborn and get a bit of a thrill telling yourself you were manning the closest US military base to Russia and they didn’t even know you were there.

But no, she wasn’t living on top of the rock. She and her crew were living in the cave that a millenia of beating waves had carved into the pock marked, moss covered basalt of Little Diomede. Who had discovered the cave? If she ever met them, she would beat ten kinds of crap out of them as a thankyou. But it probably wasn’t even a person. It was probably a drone, which was kind of ironic.

Rodriguez wasn’t sure exactly how many years the facility on Little Diomede had been under construction but she knew why it had been built. A Pentagon position paper had pointed out that with the opening of polar shipping routes, an increasing amount of vital commerce was now moving through the Bering Strait, giving it the potential to be as strategically important as the Strait of Hormuz between Iran and the Emirates was in the last century. When Russia expanded its military base at Lavrentiya in the early 2020s as part of its ‘Pivot to the Pacific’ diplomatic tensions had risen, and the US had looked for a response. It could have recommissioned the old Marks Army Airfield at Nome but strategists pointed out that since the advent of hypersonic cruise missile technology, large fixed infrastructures such as air bases were near impossible to defend and while they had political and economic value, their true value in a conflict would be very limited.

The idea for a secret base under the rock cap of Little Diomede had been born.

There was nothing there but a tiny fishing village twenty years ago. The Navy had bought out the two dozen or so villagers, turned their houses into barracks and then moved in construction crews. They’d created a plausible cover story by building a naval radar dome on the crown of the island, and the first thing they did was throw up a hulking great storage shed next to the dome and then fill it full of mining gear to sink a shaft straight down through the middle of the island to the cave below. Then they began hollowing it out. The Russians showed a lot of interest while the radar was being built, and sent a flight over to scan and photograph it every time it got an upgrade, but as long as they couldn’t see the US putting anti missile systems there or building air strips on Little Diomede they generally ignored it, apart from the occasional electronic countermeasure attack trying to jam it when one of their naval battle groups was moving through the Strait.

At first it was conceived as a missile launch platform with ground to air ordnance concealed under the large radome and an anti-shipping missile system hidden in the cavern, covering the eastern approaches to the Strait. Navy solved the question of how the island would be covertly supplied, by dredging the floor of the sea cave, widening it, and putting in a submarine dock.

But it was with the widespread adoption of unmanned aircraft that Little Diomede came into its own. Plans were soon laid to base 30 aircraft under the Rock, a mixture of reconnaissance UAVs and UCLASS (Unmanned Carrier Launched Surveillance and Strike) aircraft.

The challenge the Navy threw at the planners for Little Diomede was seen as impossible. The base was essentially supposed to operate as a concealed aircraft carrier, but where an aircraft carrier had hundreds of personnel dedicated to aircraft operations, the cavern under Little Diomede could take no more than fifty. It wasn’t that the enlarged cavern wasn’t huge, but once you took out the existing dock infrastructure, added hangar space for thirty drones, storage for parts and fuel and the machinery needed for getting the aircraft airborne and recovering them after a water landing, there wasn’t much left over for all the humanity needed to service the robots. Everything had to be automated, from aircraft handling, to refueling, launch and recovery. They could draw a lot on the systems that had been developed for the latest generation of supercarriers, but tailor-made kludges were needed for multiple systems.

So where on an aircraft carrier you had separate teams for aviation fuel, plane handling, aircraft maintenance and ordnance just to name a few, under the rock all those functions had been boiled down to Air Boss Alicia Rodriguez and her team. They were no ordinary assemblage of personnel. She’d had to put together a tailor-made team of launch/recovery specialists, air traffic controllers, machinist and electrician mates, plane captains for aircraft maintenance, aerographers for weather forecasting and ordnancemen to load the weapons on her drones. They’d pulled Rodriguez off the USS Trump, where at 26 she’d been one of the Navy’s youngest ever ‘mini-bosses’ or assistant Air Commanders, and told her she could have her pick of personnel from any vessel she named. She’d drawn up a shortlist of personnel who had served in at least two functions aboard a carrier, preferrably three. They’d given her 20 bodies, and she’d argued for 30, ending with 24. She split them into two shifts, and all of them had to understudy a different function so they could back each other up. She didn’t have enough people for redundancies.

The drones that Rodriguez and her crew were put on the island to service had been designed for carrier ops and didn’t need a long runway; they were built to be launched from a catapult and needed just a little modification for recovery so that they could fly right into the mouth of the cave and drop down onto the water to be retrieved with a crane and sling. That was the theory anyway. Rodriguez had heard it had taken Northrop Grumman Boeing two years to work out how to fit retractable skis to their machines instead of wheels, and another two years to work out how to avoid them sucking seawater into their air intakes every time they splashed down.

Fuel for the drones wasn’t an issue, because a purification and catalysation unit was installed that could supply 200 litres of liquid hydrogen and 400 litres of potable water an hour. A repurposed S8G nuclear power plant from a decommissioned Ohio class submarine provided power to the entire base.

Being as it didn’t officially exist, the UCAV wing under Little Diomede didn’t have a typical Navy designation; in organization charts it was buried deep under Naval Network Warfare Command (NETWARCOM) and was simply known as ‘Unit 4 of the Naval Computer and Telecommunications Area Master Station, Alaska; or NCTAMS-A4’, but to the aircrew and officers based there Little Diomede air base was just ‘the Rock’.

Rodriguez had been an aviator, most recently a ‘shooter’ or launch catapult officer before she’d been promoted to Mini Boss, but in the role of Air Boss under Little Diomede, she doubled as squadron CO. Normally she would have had to ‘fleet up’ through a squadron department head role, then XO, before being assigned a squadron command, but things under the Rock were far from normal.

Besides which, there was only one pilot on Little Diomede right now and none of the drones had yet been certified for operations. So her only pilot was going stir crazy waiting to get one of the machines onto the cat and into the air so she could fly it back in through that cave mouth and try her skill at ‘threading the needle’ as she called it.

The pilot’s name was Lieutenant Karen ‘Bunny’ O’Hare and Rodriguez had not had a part in choosing her. She had come across from the DARPA J-UCAS programme where she had been the lead pilot testing and perfecting the water landing capabilities of the NG-Boeing F-47 Fantom fighter. On paper, it made perfect sense that the pilot who had led the testing of the seaplane version of the F-47 would also lead the establishment of the unit for which they were designed, but Rodriguez soon learned there was more to Bunny O’Hare than appeared on paper.

She had cut her teeth on F-35s before an ‘attitude problem’ got her assigned to a unit flying UCAV modded F-22s in the Turkey-Syrian conflict and suddenly found herself sitting in a trailer ‘flying’ via VR goggles rather than in a cockpit. But she acquitted herself so well as a drone pilot that she came to the attention of recruiters at DARPA and moved to their dedicated J-UCAS programme, which had delivered a new weapons platform to specification, but now needed a new breed of pilot to fly it. DARPA was looking for pilots whose flying and social skills were less important than a talent for continuous partial attention and an ability to contribute to AI coding and development. For the first time in her life, Bunny’s attention deficit disorder was actually an asset.

The aircraft that had emerged from the J-UCAS programme, the NG Boeing F-47, was a real killer. Twenty six feet long, with a wingspan of 33 feet, it was powered by a hydrogen fuelled Reaction Engine Scimitar powerplant giving it the ability to hit a maximum airspeed of mach 1.8 or 1,300 mph and carry a payload of 10,000 lbs - ranging from tri-mode semi-active laser, imaging infrared (IIR), and radar guided precision air-to-ground munitions to Cuda ‘Halfraam’ air-to-air hit-to-kill missiles.

Unlike Rodriguez, and despite her frustrations, Bunny liked Little Diomede. She liked the idea of being the only pilot on an island with two dozen aircraft to fly. Did she miss bossing her F-35 around the sky? Hell yeah, but unlike a lot of other aviators, Bunny already lived in the future and the future was remote-piloted, semi-autonomous and she would never go back. In her F-35 Bunny only ever felt in control of her own machine, even flying as wing leader. Hell, half the time whatever fool she had on her wing didn’t do as they were ordered, or screwed it up. Chewing out one too many fellow pilots for #%&*$# results over NAS Fallon was one of the things that got her transferred, but she couldn’t help calling human error for what it was - dumb ass error. And you couldn’t afford a wide margin of error in modern combat where the distance between dead and alive was measured in milliseconds.

At the stick of a Fantom though, she commanded not one machine, but six. Not one wingman, but five. She flew the queen bee in the formation, and the other five machines were slaved to hers, executing her orders exactly as she issued them, right or wrong. If she screwed up, lost a machine, missed a target, there was no one to blame but herself.

She didn’t often blow up, but when she did, Rodriguez was glad they had a few hundred feet of solid rock over their heads, because she was sure the Russians could have heard Bunny swearing down in Vladivostok. And right now Bunny was only getting flight time on simulators, so Rodriguez could only imagine what she’d be like if she was in a fight for real. Like a lot of combat pilots Rodriguez had met, Bunny seemed to start every day looking for a target to hit.

And today, that target was Air Boss Alicia Rodriguez’s catapult officer.

“With respect you said ‘tomorrow’ three days ago Lieutenant,” Bunny was saying, staring at the ops ready Fantom waiting to be loaded onto the electromagnetic aircraft launch system down on the flight deck. She was facing down Rodriguez’s shooter, Lieutenant KC Severin and several of Rodriguez’s flight operations personnel were sitting on their butts on a rock shelf behind her, enjoying the show.

“And that drone has been ready for two days, as promised, Lieutenant,” Severin said. He was a small man, but all muscle and had been Rodriguez’s assistant on the Trump. “It’s the EMALS that’s the problem. No matter what we dial into the catapult, it’s delivering 196,000 pounds of thrust and by our reckoning, that will send your little paper planes into the lip above the egress chute like bugs into a windscreen.”

“So I’ll compensate with a little elevator trim,” Bunny said. “Stick the drone to the rails.”

“Good idea Lieutenant,” Severin said, irony his voice. “Tell you what, why don’t we tie your butt to the shuttle, send you through that chute with 196,000 lbs of thrust, you hold your arms out and flap, see if you can stick to those rails.”

They’d had to come up with their own terminology for the world under the rock. The drones were launched through a fifty by fifty foot smooth bored tunnel straight through the rock that emerged from a cliff face five hundred feet above sea level. It was called ‘the chute’. The drones landed by flying under the overhanging rock and into the mouth of the cave at sea level, which was called ‘the slot’. The artificial harbour inside the cave consisted of a simple rectangular submarine dock beside which the drones launched, and the seawater filling the cavern was known as ‘the Pond’.

The chute exited the Rock directly east, toward Alaska, masking the egress of the drones from anything but a luckily placed satellite or high altitude recon overflight. To further confuse any imaging, a mooring had been created outside the egress port, and several old fishing boats were tied up there, the remnants of the fishing fleet that had once sailed out of Little Diomede. Demasted, they were small enough that there was no risk to the drones taking off and landing, but numerous enough that any overhead image would just see a clutter of ships, with a launching drone, if it was unlucky enough to be caught entering and leaving, just a blurred dot.

“This base is supposed to go hot in six months, you know that Lieutenant,” Bunny sighed and turned to appeal to Rodriguez. “Between now and then I have to do the forms on 30 drones ma’am. There’s going to be a submarine full of Secretaries of this and Generals of that, docking in the Pond in about 20 something weeks, and after six hours underwater in some stinking tin can, followed by a shower, some strong coffee and crappy food, they are going to stand right here…” she pointed at the platform they were standing on next to the flight deck, “… expecting to see me fly a Hex of Fantoms out that chute, dodge a few lurking F-35s, blow the hell out of some barge in the Eastern Strait, and then watch as I gracefully and professionally glide them back through the slot to a perfect water landing and recovery.”

No matter how annoying, arrogant and disagreeable she could be, Bunny O’Hare was seldom wrong. Rodriguez turned to her catapult officer. “How much longer Lieutenant?”

“We’re reconfiguring the catapult software ma’am. Four hours. Then we have to test and recalibrate. Six hours. If we can, we’ll get it done by 2300, midnight latest. Next shift can do the fueling and pre-flight for the Fantom, 2 hours. If all goes well, we’ll be good to launch at 0300.”

To anyone else but Bunny O’Hare, laying down a flight time of 0300 would have gotten Rodriguez at least a groan. Bunny just smiled, “Permission to get some beauty sleep ma’am,” she said, before saluting and turning on her heel.

Rodriguez watched her go, then returned to Severin and his smirking team, “If that EMALS hasn’t been reconfigured, test fired and made ready by 0300 it’s your butts I’ll be launching off that catapult gentlemen.”