THE BEZERKER ALGORITHM



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

*
*



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

*
*

The man who saved the world: Vasily Arkhipov

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

*
*



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

*
*

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

*
*


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

*
*



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

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

*
*

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