A RUN IN THE SNOW



While Bunny was belly flopping her Fantom onto the Pond, Bondarev was freezing his butt off in the melting snow of a Khabarovsk summer. He’d asked for a few minutes of General Lukin’s time and had been told he could meet with him at 0630 when the General was taking his morning run.

Fifty-eight years old and he was still taking a morning run in the subarctic temperatures of Khabarovsk? Bondarev sincerely hoped he would be dead before he had to even think about keeping up that kind of discipline himself.

He waited outside the General’s quarters in his running gear, hopping from one leg to the other to keep warm. He knew it was dumb at these temperatures to blow warm air into his mittens, because it would condense, turn to water and freeze his fingers. Same for the Balaklava around his face - blowing warm air into the mouth and neck would be as dumb as peeing in his pants to keep warm. There was nothing for it but to keep moving, but he knew Lukin was the type who thought five minutes early was already late, so he wasn’t too worried he’d be kept waiting.

Sure enough, at 0625 he saw the General come thumping down the stairs, fling open the doors from his quarters and take a deep breath. “Bondarev,” was all he said before nodding and pointing up the single road out of the base and then padding off down the road. Once he might have been a high jumper or a hurdler, but Lukin was carrying a few pounds now, thank God. He pounded down the road like a heavyweight boxer and Bondarev jogged by his side, wondering who should speak first. It was a little awkward, because quality time with the most senior officer in the 3rd Command of Air Force and Air Defense was not something he got that often, and spending that time running through the snow in the dark was something he’d never had to do before.

Luckily Lukin broke the silence, “That shifty bugger Arsharvin has brought you into the circle then?”

“Sir?” Bondarev asked, not wanting to throw his friend under the bus.

Lukin was the annoying type who could apparently talk and run without panting. The only sign he was exerting himself was that he timed his words with his inhalations.

“You don’t have to cover for him,” Lukin said. “I know you two served together in Syria. You asked my staff for an urgent meeting with me and I can’t believe it’s because you misunderstood your orders from yesterday. It’s a pretty simple CAP cover role, no matter the context. You take your machines to Saint Lawrence, scare away anyone who gets in the way, and make sure by the end of two days our troops are boiling tea and warming MREs on the ground below you without any American bombs or missiles upsetting their appetites.”

“Yes sir,” Bondarev agreed. “The Saint Lawrence objective is clear. But I have a suspicion that this is just our first move in a larger maneuver.”

“Suspicion, Colonel?”

“Unfounded suspicion, Sir,” Bondarev said carefully. “But if I’m right, I’d like permission to bring the 6983rd up to full readiness. It’s not the weapons platforms Sir, they are already on trains, moving to Lavrentiya. I’m short of pilots and systems operators.”

They had left the base now, and were headed up a hill to a tree lined horizon, dark on dark. As though to test him, Lukin perversely picked up pace when they began the climb. Bondarev matched his pace, but was glad to see the older man at least begin to breathe more heavily.

“I can’t confirm your ‘suspicions’ Colonel,” he said. “But I am concerned to hear the 6983rd is not at full readiness already. It is intended to be a front-line unit. No one has told me anything about pilot or systems officer shortages.”

Bondarev knew that was not true. He had been warning of the personnel shortages monthly in his reports to the General Staff for nearly 18 months and knew these were read personally by Lukin. He had been told that Russian Aerospace Command was prioritizing combat operations in the Middle East and Africa and that the Eastern Military District was too far down the list for anyone to listen to him. He had accepted that, but hadn’t stopped flagging the shortages in his monthly reports, or in fact, at any opportunity. He had personally had a conversation with Lukin about it six months earlier.

“The Comrade General is not expected to be across such details,” Bondarev panted. “But it is the case that I am currently 20 aircrew short of being able to field my full regiment of 48 Okhotniks.”

He half expected criticism from Lukin for Bondarev not keeping him informed, or at least something about the incompetence of his staff. Instead, he was silent. They jogged side by side, Lukin apparently in thought, Bondarev in stasis, until they crested the hill and began the curving downhill part of the run that would take them through a small village and then back toward the base.

“Twenty crew you say,” Lukin said finally.

“Yes sir. For full operational capability I would require 24 to allow for … rotations.”

Bondarev had hoped that Lukin would ease off his pace as they jogged through the darkened, quiet town. Only one or two houses were lit, with early risers who no doubt had duties somewhere on the military base. A dog barked off in the distance, highlighting to Bondarev how still the early morning was. There was no traffic, neither foot nor wheeled. In his soul, Bondarev hoped to hear at least a cock crow, but he knew that was a thought dredged up from a semi-rural childhood and not likely here in the middle of the icy wind-blasted desolation of Khabarovsk.

“You are not to commit the 6983rd to the operation over Saint Lawrence,” Lukin said finally, as the lights of the base appeared over a rise. “I expect a limited reaction from the Americans. They are weak and indecisive but if the 4th and 5th Air Regiments suffer losses, you will bear them, Colonel.”

“Yes sir.”

If Bondarev had hoped for Lukin to share any of the grand plan with him, he was disappointed. They ran in silence for the rest of the distance back to the base, threading their way through the main gates, around a dead circle of hedge rustling in the early morning Arctic wind and then back to the front door of the General’s quarters.

Bondarev expected a curt dismissal, but was a little surprised as Lukin stopped on his steps, stretched out a leg, and bent over it, warming down. “I am a fighting pilot like you Bondarev,” he said. He was looking at his foot, grabbing the toe as he pulled on his hamstrings.

“Yes sir,” Bondarev said.

“Did you know I am still current on the Yak-130?” he asked pulling in his right leg and stretching out his left, still not looking at Bondarev directly.



Bondarev smiled, of course he knew. The whole of the 3rd Air and Air Defense Forces Command knew that Lukin had his own Ferrari red Yak-130, a two seater light ground attack fighter and trainer that had hard points for weapons and drop tanks. He flew himself from base to base for inspections, to observe exercises and join staff meetings.

“Yes sir,” he replied simply.

“You do your job,” Lukin said. “Keep those skies clear. And I’ll look forward to flying my Yak into that American field at Savoonga. You join me there, we will toast a job well done. Deal?” The General held out his hand, looking directly into Bondarev’s eyes for the first time.

Bondarev tool his hand, “A deal General.”

The General held his hand a moment longer than necessary. The gesture had a feeling of finality about it that unsettled Bondarev. It was as though they were saying goodbye. But Lukin dropped his hand and smiled, “I will see about that personnel shortage, Colonel,” Lukin said. “The fighting in Syria is more or less over now, from what I hear.” He patted Bondarev on the shoulder and pulled open the door to his quarters and Bondarev watched as he bounded upstairs for a shower.

I am already dead, Bondarev was thinking. He knows it, but he can’t say it.

*
*

“You don’t know your history,” Arsharvin was telling him. It didn’t quite come out that way though. It was more like, “Youdonknowyourhistry.”

Bondarev was aware of, and he spat upon, the clichéd Western images of Russians as big drinkers. He came from a family of teetotalers, in which he was the first in many generations who had ever taken a drink and recent events aside, it was rare he took two. His grandfather had been head of the entire Russian Air Force and he had never seen him touch a drop, even when he had turned up at a family dinner, pale faced and quiet, clearly shocked over something that had happened that day, or some news he had received. Yevgeny’s mother had plagued her father to tell her what had happened, but he had told her not to worry, it was just a military matter, not something he could share with her. Bondarev remembered once when his 13 year old self had watched the grey haired, box jawed older man sitting at the table, staring into his cold coffee for nearly an hour without moving. A week later they heard an entire Russian airfield and all its personnel had been overrun by Turkish forces after the base was obliterated with American-made ‘city-killer’ conventional weapons. The Turks, who had bought Russian made air defense systems during a period of detente in the early 2010s, had used their experience with the Russian tech to find a way to hack the systems to make them blind; an exploit that resulted in the deaths of several hundred Russian personnel and Syrian civilians.

That was the first, maybe the only time, Bondarev had seen his mother and father take a drink.

They had seen the shocked look on their son’s face and his father had pulled him over to the table as they sat there. “There will be war now, Yevgeny,” his father had said. “Not like you have seen before. I will be recalled, and you will …” he had looked at his wife. “You will do your duty too.”
¨
His father had been right. After several years of providing support and ‘advice’ to the Syrian regime, Russia had declared war on Turkey. Attacking that country from the south in Syria, from the Black Sea, and from airfields in the Caucasus, Russia had one goal. To show the West that it was once again a military power to be reckoned with, to show its allies or those in its shadow that they would need to choose sides for the second part of the 21st Century, as divided loyalties were no longer an option. And, Bondarev realized now, to test the resolve of the United States when it came to meeting its many treaty obligations.

Russia had achieved all of those objectives and more. Turkey alone was never going to be a match for the Russian Navy, Air Force or regular troops. And Turkey was very quickly left alone to deal with Russia. After years of antagonizing its European neighbors and throwing their overtures of friendship back in their faces, it had metaphorically burned all the bridges across the Bosporus leading to Europe. Similarly it had alienated its NATO partners through unbridled aggression against US Kurdish allies on its southern border, succeeding only in getting itself expelled from NATO. When an unfortunate clash between Turkish and Russian ground troops in Syria turned ugly, Turkey called for help from its traditional European and NATO allies and found itself in an echo chamber, facing Russian backed Syrian forces alone.

Bondarev had just earned his fighter wings. Russian overconfidence had seen early victories in Syria and Turkey met with some unfortunate reverses, and a war that planners had foreseen might take one year to 18 months before Turkey was forced to capitulate, was still raging two years later.

The fabled Blue Mosque in Istanbul was shown on Russian television as proof of both the discipline of Russian forces and the precision of its missiles and bombs, as it stood almost unscathed amongst the rubble of Istanbul.



Bondarev’s first combat mission had been in the skies over Istanbul, as he followed his flight in for a strike on anti-aircraft positions along the river dividing the city between Asia and Europe. They had blasted in at sea level, popped up over the first ruined bridge at Besiktas, and loosed their anti-radiation missiles at the targets that had been identified by high flying AWACS aircraft and drones. Yevgeny had not seen the missiles strike. His flight had headed for the nap of the earth again as soon as their missiles were away and were headed back to Sevastopol by the time they detonated. Russia had no need, nor appetite, for losing valuable pilots over enemy territory.

It was also the first time Bondarev had seen Okhotnik drones in action. As he had followed his flight leader away from the release point, he had seen a flight of nine Okhotniks, like small triangular darts, sweep in from his nine o’clock high to deal with the inadequate Turkish air force response to their attack. Turkish air defense satellites and radar had identified Bondarev’s flight as it had popped up, and two outdated but well-armed F-18 Superhornets had been directed to pursue Bondarev’s flight. He was picking up their search radars as they tried to get a lock on the fleeing Russian flight and watched as the Okhotniks flashed past his wing, loosed two AMRAAMs each at the Turkish jets and then immediately transitioned into an impossible full thrust vertical climb that would have turned a human pilot’s brain to mush. Within seconds the entire flight of Okhotniks was gone, surfing the stratosphere and no doubt looking for new targets even as their missiles swiped the Turkish Superhornets from the sky.

Bondarev saw the kills confirmed on one of the screens in his Su-57, and heard a grunt from his flight leader. “This isn’t war,” the man said. “It’s a video game and other side is still in the Nintendo age.”

“That silicon can sure as hell fly and shoot though sir,” Bondarev said.

“You looking for a transfer Bondarev? Your idea of war is sitting on your a** in a trailer in Georgia looking at a video screen, where the worst thing that can happen is you spill your coffee if things get hairy?”

Bondarev had instinctively run his eyes from controls to instruments, across his wing, the sky high and low around him and then back to his controls. A hill was rushing toward them and as one, the flight rose and then fell to avoid it. He checked the position of his wingman and felt the machine respond as he pulled back gently on his stick, felt the pressure of his seat against his back as he slid back into formation, the hill receding quickly behind him. “Not likely sir,” he’d said.

But with a fabled name like Bondarev he wasn’t going to be allowed to live out his days as a simple pilot. And despite their technological superiority, Russian losses were mounting as the second year dragged into a third, and then a fourth. A quick campagn had turned into a problematic, drawn out intervention and occupation facing an asymmetric enemy, with Turkish forces maintaining control of their vital oil reserves and a newly guilt-ridden sympathetic Europe coming in late with support; if not with troops, then at least with weapons. With two air and 15 ground kills against his name Bondarev had been given a Nesterov Air Medal and command of his own Su-57 squadron.

He wasn’t ready for command, but he had learned quickly. Arsharvin had been head of his combat intelligence unit, but to Bondarev, his greatest value wasn’t intelligence about the Turkish enemy. It was his network within the Russian air force, the Voyenno-Vozdushnye Sily Rossii or VVS, which had meant there wasn’t a single political maneuver Bondarev wasn’t forewarned about. When Arsharvin had learned about a near insurrection about to erupt in 573rd Army Air Force Base Arsharvin had handed the names of the plotters to Bondarev, and he had taken them to Lukin personally, afraid of trusting the information to anyone else. When the recriminations died down, Lukin had demoted the commander of the 573rd, and put Bondarev in charge. It was an inglorious command, rotary winged transport aircraft mostly, but it was based in Khabarovsk with high visibility. He leveraged his time there to eventually achieve command of the 5th Air Regiment, an elite unit composed of the latest Su-57 and Mig-41 fighters. From there it was just a matter of not screwing up, and he was handed command of the 6983rd Air Base: nine regiments, 200 fighters or attack aircraft, 100 rotary winged attack and support aircraft.

After the heat and dust of Syria, the move to the 6983rd’s base in the Russian Far East had been welcome. Bondarev was no stranger to snow and ice. Loved, in fact, the biting cold of a cloudless night, salt tears in his eyes, lips numb. His mother, dead five years now, had taught him there was no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.

His father had been right about the war coming, but he hadn’t been there to see it end. He had died of an undiagnosed heart problem manning a radar station outside Tbilisi; but he had seen his son decorated and Bondarev remembered he had cried when he saw him wearing his medal. He had held his son by the shoulders and then tapped the medal. “Each one of these is forged with the tears of mothers who have lost their sons and daughters,” his father had said. “Remember that, every time you pin it on.”

“Hey, I’m talking to you,” Arsharvin said, punching his shoulder and bringing him back to the present. Bondarev had just told Arsharvin it was his professional military opinion that Operation LOSOS was going to be just like Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. A fantastic military victory that would guarantee their ultimate defeat.

“Saint Lawrence is not Pearl Harbor,” Arsharvin was insisting, “The US will react to our move on Saint Lawrence, yes. That is the intention - to create a provocation they simply cannot ignore. We will incur losses, inevitably. In fact, we are counting on it. In the face of continued US military aggression we will move on Alaska and declare our intention to secure the west of Alaska as neutral territory, a bulwark between a militant USA and a peaceful Russia. Traditional US lapdogs like Australia, South Korea and Japan may react, but our diplomats assure us NATO will not mobilize.”

“NATO will react when American cruise missiles start to fly,” Bondarev said. “I guarantee you that.”

Arsharvin took another glass, “It won’t come to that. This is a border dispute, nothing more. If we move with overwhelming conventional force, take Alaska quickly, the US will find itself in a hostage negotiation, not a war.”

“They might hesitate to use their nuclear weapons against targets on US soil, I agree,” Bondarev allowed. “But sub-launched tactical nukes aimed at our Far East airfields and ports would be my response. The battle for Alaska would be over before it started.”

“And how would we respond to an attack like that?” Arsharvin asked.

“Massively, and irrationally,” Bondarev sighed. “The sky would rain ICBMs. We would be looking at the end of all civilization, not just Russia.”

“Yes. Or no. Say the self-absorbed US President and the weak-kneed liberals in power in the US Congress hesitate. The US does not need Alaska. They have one third of the world’s freshwater in the Great Lakes region. Alaskan oil has become irrelevant since the renewable energy revolution. They will fight, yes, but not with nuclear weapons.”

“I’m not buying that, but what makes you think we can even win a conventional war?” Bondarev asked.

“Nothing, but what a righteous cause!” Arsharvin yelled, raising an arm in the air. “Let us toast to it! A fight against a worthy enemy, for the survival of Mother Russia!”
*
*
(c) 2018 Fred 'Heinkill' Williams. To Be Continued...