Originally Posted by Ssnake
SIX.
It must always be six.

This is only three, or four. wink


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

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

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SOME DAYS YOU EAT THE BEAR


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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