Originally Posted by rollnloop.
I meant, tomorrow in the story. I expect quite some action by then.

Safe flight fred.


Let's see ... action. (OK, throws out the chapter about the United Nations mediating a peaceful resolution ...) Let's go with ... this:

AMERICAN CARNAGE


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Bondarev knew the crew of the A-100 AWACS aircraft. He had hand-picked them. He had seen them at work over Syria and Turkey, seen them stay calm even in the face of a direct attack intended to bring their aircraft down. He knew the scene inside the aircraft right now would be one of frenzied efficiency, plotting targets, handing them off to the AI to assign to his aircrafts’ targeting systems, confirming and reconfirming that every US aircraft had been triangulated to maximize the chances of a kill while they awaited orders from Lukin’s staff.
Still, he wanted to scream at them to hurry the hell up and decide.
“Gold leader, you are free to engage. Repeat, weapons free, you may engage.”
“Gold and Silver leaders, engage!” he said. Even as he spoke, he swung his own machine east north east, seeing his wingmen follow, and one by one the six missiles in his ordnance bay dropped out and raced away east. Soon the night sky around him was a tracery of white smoke and bright fire, leaping ahead of his fighters like bony white fingers of death. He looked away so that he didn’t completely burn his night vision.
There was no time to even register the kills. On his HUD he saw the icons of US aircraft scattering as their threat warning systems reacted to the missile onslaught. Several winked out, and at the edge of his vision he thought he saw bright flashes in the night sky, far away. Then his own threat warning alarm sounded.
“Evade!” he called, “And re-engage.” If he survived the next two minutes, if any of his men did, the next phase of this battle would be fought with guns.
At night. Against robots, piloted by a generation of video gamers safe in trailers that could be anywhere in the world.

*
*
She heard the feet running down the corridor toward her office before her security detail burst through the door.
“Madam Ambassador? Come with us please,” the senior Secret Service officer said, holding the door open as she jumped to her feet. Somewhere in the building an alarm began to sound and her stomach fell. She felt her feet going from underneath her and had to grab the doorway as she went through to stop herself from falling.
It was the Critical Incident alarm. A terrorist attack. Or worse.
“New Annex safe room ma’am,” the officer said, confirming her worst fears. “Stairs, this way. We can get there inside two minutes, just take it easy.”
“What’s the alert for?”
“Just follow us ma’am, you’ll be briefed when we’re in the secure area.”
Two minutes to safety. It seemed like such a short time. But she knew that ‘safety’ was an illusion. A US sub-launched ICBM starting from the Baltic sea would take less than 20 minutes to reach Moscow, but a hypersonic cruise missile launched from an aircraft over Germany would take only ten. Say she did make it to the bunker under the Embassy. Say she did survive the nuclear strike. Then what?
“No,” she said, stopping in her tracks. She knew the protocol; the bunker was equipped with a pulse shielded land line to the Kremlin. In the case of a nuclear attack, she was supposed to ride it out and then seek to establish contact with Russian authorities and either negotiate their surrender or await further instruction. She also knew how insane that idea was.
“Ma’am,” the Secret Service officer said, grabbing at her elbow. “Please.”
“Let me go. Make sure our people are safe. I’m getting on the line to Washington,” she said, in a voice that made it clear she was not interested in discussion.
“Yes Ma’am,” the officer said, exchanging a look with the others in the detail, before bending his head to the microphone in his collar and running off down the corridor.
*
*
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“Not good, not good,” Bunny said, horrified. She had zoomed out the tactical map and patched in a feed from NORAD, and they watched as she saw the map light up with hundreds of missile tracks over the air east of Saint Lawrence, not to mention another lancing out from Gambell but falling away behind her drone as it scooted to safety. The missile ID showed it was an older ship launched Pantsir-SA, but they might as well have fired at a random arc of sky. Without a system that could home on her digital transmission signal or a solid lock from ground radar or another data source, the radar and infrared seekers on the older missile were just sniffing empty air.
“ANR, this is Colonel Halifax of NCTAMS-A4, please confirm upload of data from Gambell recon, and I request update on the full disposition of blue and red forces over Saint Lawrence.”
“Upload confirmed NCTAMS,” a voice replied. “Data request denied. You are directed to return your aircraft to base and await further orders.”
“It’s goddamn world war three up there,” Bunny said, tapping in new waypoints for her birds before pulling off her helmet and pointing at the air-to-air missile tracks the 2D screen. She had punched in a return course for their Fantoms that would skirt around the hell over Saint Lawrence and get them back up north to the rock. It would take at least an hour.
Halifax didn’t respond to her exclamation - he picked up a handset and called up to the commander of the Naval Computer and Telecommunications Area Master Station, inside his radar dome.
“Sound general quarters Captain Aslam,” he said. “When the men are assembled, I want everyone not on active duty inside the station to get down here under the Rock. Meet me topside at the elevator.”
Rodriguez looked at him, and he turned to the threat display. “This little cold war just got real hot Boss,” he said. “Things can either escalate from here, or de-escalate, but I’m not giving peace much of a chance. Russia may not know we’re down here, but they sure as hell have seen our radar dome up there and it wouldn’t take more than an old Mig with a bunch of dumb iron bombs to scrape my nice white radar installation off the top of the rock and into the sea, and everyone up there with it.” He turned and took a step toward the door of the trailer, “I’m going topside to make sure only essential personnel stay behind. You get this place organized and find bunks for everyone.”
*
*

Having been bustled down unfamiliar corridors on the way to the basement bunker under the New Annex, Devlin found herself taking one wrong turn after another as she tried to move against the flow of people running for the illusory safety of the New Annex bunker. It wasn’t entirely irrational, the same alarm was also used for both a terrorist or chemical weapons attack, and the airtight, radiation shielded and self-contained secure rooms below the New Annex were adequate to protect staff against threats that were slightly less dramatic than a direct hit by a thermonuclear weapon. As the panicked traffic thinned out, Devlin found herself standing in a corridor that looked familiar and yet…
“You lost ma’am?”
She turned and saw the analyst, Carl Williams, with his head sticking out of his office.
“You should be in the bunker,” Devlin replied, pointing up at the ceiling where a loudspeaker blared. “Shouldn’t you?” he asked. He clearly wasn’t in a hurry to go anywhere.
She didn’t have time for this. “I need to get a secure line to Washington. What is the quickest way to the Chancery from here?”
“You can do it from my office,” he said.
“But it’s a dedicated…”
“No problem,” he insisted. “Trust me.”
He stood aside so she could get into his little cubicle of an office and he closed the door behind her. The critical incident alarm was still blaring outside and she winced. It would make holding a phone conversation a real pain.
Williams read her mind, “You want me to turn that off?”
She hesitated, “I don’t think you should.”
“There’s no threat to the embassy,” he said calmly. “A little skirmish in the air over Saint Lawrence, but that’s all. Triggering a critical incident alert based on that is a complete over-reaction by someone in
State.”
Devlin was about to ask him how the hell he knew that, but she was learning that with Carl Williams, for deniability purposes it was probably best she didn’t ask.
“Can you shut off the siren without pulling everyone out of the bunkers quite yet?” she asked.
“HOLMES? Can you kill the critical incident siren, but leave the alert in place until it is cancelled by State?” Williams spoke towards his laptop.
“Yes Carl,” the cultured British voice replied.
“Do it please.”
The alarm cut instantly, an eerie silence replacing it. No heels on the floors, no voices in the corridor.
“Just sit there ma’am, tell him who you want to call,” Williams said, pointing to his chair behind the desk and laptop. “Once you connect, I’ll leave you alone.”
Devlin sat, then leaned forward over this laptop, “OK, this is Ambassador Devlin McCarthy…”
“Confirmed ma’am, I have facial recognition,” HOLMES replied.
“Right, well … I want to speak to Secretary of State, Gerard Winburg please, on his direct encrypted line.”
“Yes ma’am. He is airborne in Airforce 1 at the moment. All communications are encrypted. Putting you through,” the AI said.
Williams pointed at the door and moved toward it, but Devlin reconsidered. There was probably no point in secrecy, and she might be able to use Williams’ help. She motioned to him to stay put.
“That line is busy ma’am,” the AI said. “We are on hold. Do you want me to put you through to the
President’s direct line instead? He is on Airforce 1 with the Secretary of State.”
Devlin hesitated, but before she could answer, there was a click on the laptop’s loudspeaker, “Winburg here.”
“Mr. Secretary, this is Ambassador McCarthy in Moscow,” she said. “The critical incident alarm has sounded here.”
“Yes, I authorized it,” the harried voice at the other end said, clearly under pressure. “I don’t know how much you know about current developments over Saint Lawrence.”
Devlin looked at Williams. He came around to her shoulder, tapped a couple of keys on his laptop and Devlin saw he had been preparing an intelligence report when she had interrupted him. She put her finger on the screen and started reading.
“Sir, I know that at 0200 Alaskan time this morning explosions were reported in the township of Gambell, cause unknown. Local Russian anti-aircraft missile batteries however responded to an unknown threat, indicating the source of the explosion was possibly an attack by US aircraft, or they simply panicked. Following this, Russian aircraft stationed in the eastern no-fly zone around Saint Lawrence engaged US aircraft on patrol along the Alaska Coast.” She hesitated, looking at Williams in disbelief, but he nodded. “And as of … five … minutes ago, data from NORAD and AWACS aircraft in the combat area indicates the destruction of 17 Russian aircraft for the loss of 23 US aircraft destroyed, eight damaged.” She had to read the last part again. That was nearly as many aircraft lost in one engagement as had been lost in the entire Middle East conflict, and the battle was still going?
There was a silence at the other end, before Winburg came back on the line, “Dammit how are you getting that intel in Moscow?! You have real time data on kills and losses over the OA? That’s more than I have!”
“I have an NSA analyst on station here Secretary,” she winked at Williams. “He’s very … resourceful.”
“Apparently. Anything else?”
“No Sir, we are working to identify Russia’s strategic aims in this conflict. I hope to get back to you soon on that;” Devlin said. “Sir I am not CIA head of station, I know that, but I wanted to report that we have seen no signs of military preparations on the streets here in Moscow, we have heard of no evacuations or civilian warnings and as far as I am aware key senior politicians and bureaucrats are still in
Moscow and behaving normally. Russian TV and radio is also running normal programming:”
“OK…”
“Sir I have seen nothing today, or in the last week, to indicate the Russian government is about to conduct a nuclear strike on the USA or that they are anticipating one from us.”
“Which could of course, be part of their strategy,” Winburg said. He was the former CEO of a major defense contractor, and Devlin had heard him say his policy was to trust no one, in business or politics, until proved wrong. “Look .... this was a good call Ambassador. Good context. Make sure you share what you have with CIA. And you feel free to call me again when you have anything to add.”
“Will do, goodbye Mr. Secretary.”
She looked at Williams, “How do I hang up?”
The British voice replied, “I have disconnected the call ma’am.”
Looking at the screen again, she whistled. “That’s what you call a ‘little skirmish’?”
Williams shrugged, “In the big picture, yeah. I mean, it’s not thermonuclear war.”
“Yet. You heard the man, can you be sure to copy your report to CIA?” She said to the analyst.
Williams looked a little uncomfortable, “Sorry ma’am, no.”
She looked surprised, “No?”
“No, I mean. Someone will. The data is all there. HOLMES is pulling it from servers inside NORAD, DIA, CIA, PACCOM and so on. I was just putting that report together for NSA to show what he can do in these type of situations. I can’t share data on HOLMES capabilities with anyone outside NSA.” She was clearly not impressed, because he stammered on. “I mean, except you, because, like, you have clearance now.”
“So sanitize it, include the information I gave the Secretary and then send it as soon as the dust settles, can you do that?”
“Sure, I guess, but aren’t there other people who…”
“Carl, right now, the only people above ground here are you and me, and to be honest only one of us seems to know what the hell is going on out there, and that’s you.”
*
*

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To Yevgeny Bondarev, it was no little skirmish. It was a tooth and nail fight to the death. The melee over Saint Lawrence had degenerated into a knife fight. Most of the aircraft remaining after the opening volleys of missiles fired at point blank range, about fifteen Russian and twenty US fighters, were engaged in one on one, gun on gun combat.
Bondarev had survived the first blizzard of US missiles, registered one, maybe two kills of his own, but was now twisting and turning above the sea with a very determined F-47 on his tail. He had no more short range missiles left, but apparently, neither did his opponent. As tracer flashed over his canopy for the third time, he put his machine into a fast roll, then flicked into a climbing starboard turn to try to gain a little separation from his attacker. He needed altitude for what he had in mind, but it was a desperate last chance roll of the dice. If he screwed it up, he was dead.
The Su-57 was a magnificent airplane, but it was big and intended to kill airborne enemies at long range. It was not optimal for close range combat. The smaller American F-47 was less deadly at range, but much more maneuverable in a knife fight because there was no pilot to black out. The thrust vectoring nozzles on his Sukhoi however gave him one spectacular trick for an opponent who was close on its six and he was willing to bet that whether he was up against a drone flown by a ground-based pilot, or operating on autonomous control, he’d catch it unprepared. As he levelled out at the top of his turn he could almost feel the gun pipper on the HUD of the machine behind him settle on his tail. He bunted the nose of his Sukhoi down, keeping his speed at 450 knots, trying not to give the other pilot too easy a shot. Tracer blasted over his wing.
He checked his airspeed. Good. Now! He hauled back sharply on his stick, pulling it all the way back until it rammed into the stays and couldn’t go any further. To the American behind him, man or machine, it must have seemed as though the Sukhoi had simply stopped in mid-air and pointed its nose at the sky. The American machine nearly lost control as it tried to avoid colliding with the Sukhoi that was skidding through the air on its tail, like the cobra the maneuver was named after.
“Come on you fat a**ed #%&*$#!” Bondarev yelled at his Sukhoi, pushing the nose down before it pitched over backwards and increasing his engine to full burner, regaining forward momentum. This was the moment Bondarev was most vulnerable, recovering from a virtual stall, hydrogen fire pouring from his afterburner like a small sun, he knew he was a sitting duck if there was more than one F-47 behind him. He hunched his shoulders waiting to die, but grunted as he saw the exhaust flames of the American fighter wallow through the night sky ahead of him, having failed to keep the Sukhoi in its sights, fighting against a stall itself. It pulled an ugly looping turn across Bondarev’s nose and his guns fired automatically as soon as they had a lock on the American. The machine fell apart in a glittering rain of metal shards.
Bondarev had control over his own aircraft again, and scanned his threat display for another target. He tried desperately to get a grip on the situation. Where were his pilots, where was the enemy? He was at ten thousand feet again, swinging wildly around the sky to avoid the trap of being the legendary sitting duck. “Gold squadron, report your…”
At that moment he heard a missile launch warning scream in his ears. The enemy must have been close, because even as his automatic countermeasures of flares and chaff fired into the sky behind him, the Sukhoi’s combat AI took control of the machine from him and flung it into an inverted dive that pulled all the blood from his head. His pressurized combat suit inflated, trying to keep the blood flowing to his brain, but it wasn’t enough. He was pulling too many G’s, and his world went black.
What happened next wouldn’t matter to Yevgeny Bondarev. He was out cold.

*
*
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It was designated ‘Hunter’ for a reason. Like the F-47, the unmanned Okhotnik UCAV was a multirole platform, with a range of more than 4,000 miles. It could stay airborne for 20 hours at cruising speed, carry a payload of two tons, and while it was able to pull data from multiple sources to assist its own air-to-air targeting, and engage enemy aircraft with both long and short range missiles, its real talent was stealth delivery of air-to-ground ordnance.
Like the 1,500 kg KAB 1900-SE thermobaric fuel air explosive precision guided bomb. Comprising pressurized ethylene oxide, mixed with an energetic nanoparticle such as aluminum, surrounding a high explosive burster, when detonated it created an explosion equivalent to 49 tons of TNT. It couldn’t be mounted on a missile - an aircraft had to penetrate enemy air defenses to be able to deliver it, which was a drawback. But just one could flatten a small town, render a harbor unusable and sink all the ships in it, or destroy every hangar, aircraft and living person on an airfield inside a radius of about 1,600 feet.
Stealthy delivery of the KAB 1900 was a talent that had been honed in the deserts and mountain ranges of Northern Syria by pilots and system officers of the 575th Army Air Force, and they were exceedingly good at both the stealth, and the delivery. While Bondarev’s 6983rd Air Force Okhotniks had been held back from the battle for Saint Lawrence, no such restriction had been put on the Okhotniks of the 575th.
At the same time as Bondarev received his order to engage, a squadron of 575th Okhotniks in a low level holding pattern in the middle of the Bering Strait split like a starburst, with four three-plane elements departing to attack US ground targets within the no-fly exclusion zone. Three flights headed for Saint Lawrence, to be ready for tasking should close air support be needed against US ground targets on the island.
The fourth flight headed for the only other US installation inside the no-fly zone. It wasn’t a target on which you’d usually use thermobaric bombs - something much less powerful would have been sufficient, but sometimes you just had to use what you had to hand.
And at least there was complete certainty they would no longer have worry about that annoying US long range radar installation on Little Diomede Island.
*
*


Alicia Rodriguez had trained her whole adult life to go to war. But now that she was, she found all that training suddenly failed. The world under the Rock had descended into a noisome chaos, turning her perfectly ordered flight deck into a mass of personnel from the 712th Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron all looking for somewhere to park backpacks, backsides and for someone to answer their big and small questions. That person should have been their CO, Captain Ali Aslam, but Aslam was still topside with Halifax getting his men down from the station above in the goods elevator that held only 15 personnel at a time. Men and women were also pouring out of the emergency stairs beside the elevator shaft.
Bunny wasn’t helping either, trapped in her ‘cockpit’ growling at anyone who came within twenty feet. Her recon drones had been parked in a sea level orbit ten minutes south of Saint Lawrence and hadn’t been re-tasked or recalled. She only had about ten minutes fuel left before she would have to call them home anyway. Rodriguez had just finished ensuring her recovery team was ready to recycle them when it landed, despite all the chaos in the cavern.
Rodriguez pulled open the door to the trailer and stepped inside, closing the door behind her and taking a breath. She pressed her forehead to the door. Come on girl. You can get a hex of drones into the air through a hole in a rock inside twenty minutes, you can land a measly two kites and deal with 100 worried base personnel and their stupid questions. Right?
Right. Question of the moment. The head of base security, Master Sergeant Collaguiri had been ordered down under the Rock by Halifax, but insisted his place was topside with the CO. He had tried appealing the case to Rodriguez, and Rodriguez had promised him she would call up to the CO and see what he wanted to do about it.
She sighed and picked up the comms, punching in the number for the radar installation control room, assuming that was where Halifax would be. It wasn’t a long call.
“Rodriguez, we are currently tracking about a hundred friendly and enemy aircraft in combat over the Bering Sea, tell the Master Sergeant he can…” The line went dead.
Then a second later the entire island shook as though the God of Thunder himself had spoken.

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*
*

The effect of a thermobaric blast against living targets is gruesome. First, the pressure wave from the fuel air explosion (FAE) flattens anyone caught unprotected. If you are within the kill zone and unlikely enough survive the pressure wave, the vacuum created collapses your lungs so that you suffocate. Not all of the fuel in the bomb is guaranteed to go off, so if the fuel deflagrates but doesn’t detonate, anyone still left alive will be severely burned and probably also inhale the burning fuel. Since the most common FAE fuels, ethylene oxide and propylene oxide, are highly toxic, undetonated FAE is as lethal to personnel caught within the cloud as most chemical warfare agents.
Luckily for Halifax, he was at ground zero for the first of the three KAB 1900s that hit the Naval Computer and Telecommunications Area Master Station on Little Diomede. As he was talking with Rodriguez he just had time to register the sound of an explosion and a sharp kerosene like odor before he and every man, woman and bird on the surface of the Rock were obliterated.

*
*

It was like two or three earthquakes hit them in quick succession, followed shortly afterward by a thundering series of booms. Spreading outward from the point of impact on top of the rock dome a series of pressure waves pushed the sea surrounding Little Diomede down and outward. The three pressure waves passed quickly, and the first ring of displaced seawater came flooding back.
The gantry over the submarine docking bay rocked and a part of the reinforced roof over the small harbor collapsed. Seconds later a tidal wave flooded in through the entrance of the cave and instantly submerged the entire dock area in waist deep water.
Anyone there fifty feet below the trailer who had kept their feet through the first round of violence was knocked down by the force of the water and as Rodriguez got to her feet she saw the harbor was a maelstrom of churning water and flailing personnel. Her mind raced.
A nuke, we must have been hit by a nuke. But, shouldn’t there have been a flash? Wouldn’t a nuke have evaporated the seawater, turned it to steam? The cave was open to the sea, so if they were at the center of a nuclear explosion, even here under the Rock they should have been toasted to a crisp.
Not a nuke, then.
She saw Bunny struggling to her feet, cursing as usual.
That was as far as thinking got her. Outside the trailer people were drowning. She jumped for the door and ran down to the still rising waterline.

(C) 2018 Fred 'Heinkill' Williams. To be continued---



Last edited by HeinKill; 02/05/18 03:13 PM.

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