by F X Holden
“I can’t rule that out,” Kelnikov said. “But we knew it was a possibility. She mentioned civilian casualties.”
“It won’t be a disaster if they do use tactical nukes,” Burkhin responded. “They would become international pariahs.”
“We could lose thousands of front-line troops, aircraft and ships,” Kelnikov said. “Not to mention the civilian casualties. Surely…”
“Show some spine Kelnikov. The troops on Saint Lawrence are … expendable,” Burkhin said. “And they number in the hundreds, not thousands. The ships are cold war relics, Albatross class corvettes. Aircraft losses would be limited to those directly over Saint Lawrence at the time. Civilian losses are a US matter. I’d almost welcome a nuclear strike. We could probably march into Alaska with the whole of the UN at our backs.”
“All we need is a military response of some sort, preferably conventional,” Kelnikov said, a part of him recoiling at the thought of nuclear weapons being used so close to the Russian mainland. “Could we not just have our ships sink a…”
“There will be a US military response, that is guaranteed now,” Burkhin said. “And it will be executed with the typical American aversion for risking the lives of its troops - a blizzard of cruise missiles is most likely. All we need is for America’s allies in Europe and Asia to baulk at entering the conflict when we announce we are creating a demilitarized zone in Alaska. Two to four weeks, and we will control the entire Bering Land Bridge to the Yukon River basin.”
Kelnikov couldn’t help noticing the uncertainty in his colleague’s timeline. “You said two to four weeks? I thought this was supposed to be a lightning attack, over in days.”
“Relax Roman,” Burkhin said. “You get the United Nations behind us, leave the battle plan to me.”
Williams had been right, Devlin had to admit. Of course there were areas of her own embassy that she was not able to waltz in and out of - high-security communications or intelligence collection areas on the ‘Tophat’ restricted access floors for example. But she hadn’t been aware that an obscure office of the Environment, Technology, Science and Health section in the basement of the New Annex was one of them. Mind you, she’d never had occasion to go there. It had taken Harrison a frustrating two hours on the telephone; first to find out which wheels he needed to grease to secure the necessary above-Top Secret clearances so that Devlin could be briefed directly by Williams, and then to get the clearances approved by Washington where it was still the middle of the night and no one seemed to want to take responsibility for letting a lowly Ambassador into what was apparently a very closed circle of Need To Know.
As she followed Harrison and a security guard through the maze of corridors in the New Annex it struck Devlin that they should find a new nickname for it. Built at the turn of the century, it had the working name ‘New Annex’ when people moved in, before later being officially called the ‘Mueller Wing’, after a former head of the CIA, in a move intended to irk their Russian hosts. The new name came too late though. To everyone working at the Embassy, it would always be the ‘New Annex’, just as the additional secure floors of the Chancery were called the ‘Tophat’.
“In here ma’am,” the security guard said, keying a door. “Mr. Williams’ is the third office on the left.” He held it open to let Harrison and herself through but Harrison stayed in the doorway with a shrug, “I’ll wait here. I could only get clearance for you ma’am.”
She didn’t have to worry about where to go once the door swung shut behind her. A portly, bearded and bespectacled man in his 30s with disheveled salt and pepper hair and a spot on his white shirt which looked distinctly like pasta sauce stepped out into the corridor and gave her a small wave.
She walked down and held out her hand, “You must be Carl Williams?”
“In the flesh, Ambassador,” he said, shaking her hand then turning to open the door behind him.
“Call me Devlin, please,” she said stepping inside and looking around. “OK … disappointed.” It just came out, without her thinking. She had expected to walk into some sort of supercomputer center, huge mainframes in liquid nitrogen cooled towers behind hermetically sealed glass, sucking power from a small nuclear reactor buried under the floor of the New Annex. What else could have required such an effort to get her cleared?
Instead, Williams office was about the size of her walk-in wardrobe in Spaso House, with just enough room for a desk holding a laptop and a coffee cup, a file safe and a chair for one visitor. Looking at the chair, she could see it hadn’t had much use. Although he had a bit of the mad professor look about him, Carl Williams’ office wasn’t as disheveled as his person. There wasn’t a piece of paper, stray paperclip or even a pen on his desk; just a few rings from coffee cups that hadn’t been cleaned off. The only personal item was a photo of a seascape that looked like it had been taken on a Pacific Coast somewhere.
“I know, right?” he said, clearly not offended. “They asked what kind of office I would need and I said as long as it had an encrypted 1.5 terabit fat pipe both up and down, I didn’t care.” He looked up, “At least it has high ceilings. You want a coffee?”
“Thanks, do you even have…” she asked, looking dubious.
He held up a finger and then pulled out a drawer. Inside was a kettle, which he switched on, and a container of instant coffee. “You take cream and sugar?” he asked, pulling a paper cup full of small sachets out of the drawer. “I don’t myself, but I still have the stash I stole on the plane flight over.” The water boiling was very loud in the small space.
“Black is fine,” she said. She looked up at the seascape photograph on his wall, “You grew up on the coast?”
“No ma’am … Devlin,” he said. “That’s where I’m going to retire. La Jolla, San Diego, you know it?”
“Can’t say I do.”
“I’ve been putting away every spare dollar I made in China, and now here. Should have enough to buy into a condo by the beach in a couple of years, and then I’m going to learn to surf.”
She looked at him dubiously. Despite the mop of grey speckled hair he didn’t look old enough to be thinking about retiring, nor fit enough to think about surfing.
He held up a hand, little finger and thumb outstretched, “Sick idea, right?”
“California dreaming,” she said. “There are worse retirement plans. But it takes a lot of money to retire.”
He pulled out the kettle and poured two cups of coffee, “Oh, not completely retire. I’ll still do consulting and stuff to pay the bills. There are only about 20 people in the world who can do what I do.”
“And what is that, exactly?” she asked. “I’m told I’ve been cleared now.”
“Yeah, I got the paperwork. Well ... I program natural scenes and natural language on recursive neural networks,” he said.
“Again?”
“I teach machines to speak and understand plain English and interpret images,” he said.
“OK, and what do you do for the NSA?” she asked. “Here at my Embassy?”
“Oh, I work with HOLMES, keeping him fed, debugged, and reporting on any intel he finds interesting,” he said.
“HOLMES?”
“I know, you’re wondering is it an acronym or something?” he said. “It’s kind of. It’s like, I’m Dr. Watson, and he’s…”
“Sherlock Holmes?”
“Yeah, the someone I wanted you to meet,” he said, opening his laptop and typing in a long password that he supplemented with a DNA thumb swipe. The laptop was hard-wired to the wall by something Devlin hadn’t seen in a long time – a long thin optical fiber Ethernet cable. “I couldn’t just bring him to your office – it’s best if he’s hard-wired so his comms can’t be intercepted. And you don’t have the bandwidth up there anyway for me to show you what he is capable of.” He turned his laptop around and Devlin saw a window that looked like a simple video conference window. She saw an image of herself captured by the laptop camera on one side of the screen, and a Ja
panese manga style image of Sherlock Holmes on the other.
“Say hello to the Ambassador HOLMES,” Williams said.
“Pleased to meet you Ambassador Devlin,” a British accented voice said from the speakers of the laptop. “That’s a nice necklace you’re wearing. Australian South Sea Pearls from Broome, correct? A present from the Australian Foreign Minister.”
Involuntarily, Devlin’s hand went to the pearls at her neck. She looked at Williams, “That’s creepy. I was given this about six years ago, when I was leaving Canberra.”
“There must be a photo of it on a State Department server somewhere,” Williams said, sounding unimpressed. “Ignore him, he’s just trying to show off. HOLMES, the Ambassador met with the Russian Foreign Minister today. She is going to ask you some questions.”
Devlin stared at the manga detective on the screen, not sure where or how to start.
“Just ask,” Williams prompted. “Start your questions with his name, like you do for Siri or Alexa. If I need to rephrase your question, I’ll chime in.”
“Ok… HOLMES, do… what do you know about the current political situation between Russia and America over Saint Lawrence Island?” She leaned forward, but Williams spoke before the A.I. could.
“Parse it HOLMES, ultra-brief download, specific answers only from here,” he said, then looked at Devlin, “I’m guessing you don’t want to know everything he knows. That could take hours.”
“Yes Carl,” the British voice said. “At 0400 hours last Monday Russian ground, air and sea forces invaded the US territory of Saint Lawrence Island in the Bering Strait and have occupied the territory claiming they are doing so to protect commercial shipping from quote ‘unprovoked US aggression’. They have demanded that the US enter into negotiations on a new treaty guaranteeing freedom of navigation in Arctic waters. The incursion followed the destruction at sea of a Russian owned merchant vessel and an alleged cyber attack on a Russian nuclear submarine both of which Russian has blamed the USA for. Is this summary sufficient?”
“Ah, yes, sure. State Department has a theory that this is just a pretext, and the Russian occupation of Saint Lawrence is a feint, intended to test our willingness to go to war over control of the Bering Strait. The first step in a possible attempt to redefine maritime boundaries. But when I put this to the Russian Foreign Minister this morning, he looked… I don’t know…” Devlin petered out.
“Confused, relieved, guilty, happy, sad….” Williams offered.
“Smug,” Devlin said after thinking about it. “He looked smug.”
“Thank you Ambassador, that is very valuable input,” HOLMES said. “I was able to take the audio file of your meeting off the Danish Embassy server but I had no video with which to put your discussion into emotional context.”
Devlin looked at Williams, “The Danes recorded us?”
“Of course,” Williams said. “Wouldn’t we have?”
“I guess,” she said. “But you hacked…”
“Their server, yeah. We already had a backdoor into most of the missions in Moscow. Those we didn’t, we do now thanks to HOLMES. Except for the Chinese. Those Unit 61398 guys are good. What do you want to ask, Ambassador?”
“You worked out it was a Finnish submarine firing one of our missiles that sank that Russian robot ship,” she said to Williams. “You warned in a briefing note to NSA of a scenario in which Russia would use that attack as a pretext for political or military action of some sort in the near future and you were right.”
“That was HOLMES,” Williams said. “Scenarios are his thing. He runs them night and day. He has access to every single data point collected by the NSA, CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, Border Force, DIA, Aerospace Command… you name it… going back twenty years. Once he lands on a scenario he tests it against the data, and then refines it as new data comes in. He’s good at it, aren’t you HOLMES?”
“I love new data,” HOLMES said.
Devlin raised her eyebrows.
“I didn’t program that,” Williams said, defensively. “He’s decided that himself. He means ‘like’, he likes new data. I give him broad areas of investigation. Then he builds scenarios and he’s programmed to seek data out, use every new datum point to refine the probabilities in his scenarios. Once they reach a threshold of 30 percent probability, I write them up.”
“I don’t like new data,” the voice from the laptop said, sounding piqued. “I love it.”
“Still working on that,” Williams said to Devlin. “Sorry. He’s only supposed to respond when you page him, but he’s always listening so he’s started to anticipate verbal queues. You want him to share the scenarios he’s building on the Russian invasion of Saint Lawrence?”
“Yes,” Devlin said. “That’s exactly…”
“OK, HOLMES? What’s the highest probability scenario you are working on the Russian invasion of Saint Lawrence.”
“I currently have a scenario with 83% probability Carl,” the voice said.
“HOLMES, describe that scenario, parse, ultra-brief summaries until further notice please.”
“Yes Carl. The Russian government plans to create the pretext for a nuclear attack on the United States of America which will result in assured mutual destruction, massive radiation fallout, climate change and potential human extinction,” the voice said calmly.
Devlin felt the hairs rise on her neck, but Williams just sighed.
“OK HOLMES, let’s just assume for now that isn’t their plan - what is the second highest rated probability?”
“The Russian government is trying to create international sympathy for its next move, which is likely to be an invasion of the United States mainland.”
“Supplement. Supporting evidence?” Williams asked, ignoring the shocked look on Devlin’s face.
“In the two weeks prior to the invasion of Saint Lawrence Island, Russian military command ordered the following elements of the Eastern Military District to high readiness: the 29th Army, the 5th Red Banner Army and the 36th Army, totaling 120,00 troops. Ordered to active combat duty was the 3rd Air and Air Defense Forces Command and the 14th Spetsnaz Brigade which was the unit that conducted the initial ground operation on Saint Lawrence. Further Special Forces units ordered to active combat duty but not yet deployed include the 24th Spetsnaz Brigade, the 11th and 83rd Airborne Brigades. Do you want me to continue?”
“Yes.”
“In the Russian Central Command, the following units were also activated. The Yekaterina Communications Brigade, 3rd Guards Spetsnaz Brigade, 31st Guards Airborne Brigade and the 14th Air and Air Defense Forces Army.”
“Uh, HOLMES? How do these ‘activations’ support your hypothesis of a ground invasion of mainland America?” Devlin asked.
“In the last two years the 3rd Air and Air Defense Forces Command has been built up significantly and almost exclusively with squadrons and pilots returning from the Middle East and it now comprises the most combat-hardened air force unit in Russia. It is a composite force of fighters, ground attack, airborne refueling, command and control, electronic warfare, transport and close air support rotary winged aircraft. It would be ideally suited to the task of achieving air supremacy over a battlefront, while the air army of Central Command filled in for its continental duties. Continue?”
“Yes please.”
“The ground units ordered to active combat duty in the Eastern Military District are too numerous for the occupation of Saint Lawrence alone and are almost exclusively rapid deployment units: Spetsnaz and airborne troops. These are the forces that would be used in the initial phase of an invasion to quickly eliminate threats and secure high-value targets…”
“Stop HOLMES,” Williams said. He had a pencil twirling between his fingers and tapped it on his teeth. “HOLMES have you seen any evidence of major ground forces of battalion strength or greater being brought to readiness?”
“No Carl.”
“Supplement. Wouldn’t that be necessary if Russia intended a full-scal
e invasion of the US mainland?”
“Yes Carl. In 2019 the US Army War College in Carlisle Pennsylvania wargamed a major conventional war in Europe between Russian and NATO forces. Russia initially made significant gains in Eastern Europe before the intervention of US forces on the Western Front. ‘Russian’ commanders then decided to try to alleviate the US pressure by attacking the USA through Alaska in order to threaten the major population centers of the US northeast. The Alaska invasion required the initial commitment of 80-100,000 Eastern District ground troops and if successful would have required up to 620,000 troops.”
“It wasn’t successful,” Williams guessed.
“No. However Russian airborne forces nullified and captured the key US Air Force bases at Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, and Eielson in Fairbanks, as well as the port of Anchorage, and used them to land ground forces via an air and sea bridge. From there, they attacked through Canada, reaching Vancouver, where they paused to consolidate before attacking Seattle. Two US carrier task force groups were deployed and together with attack submarines began interdiction of Russian sea and air supply lines across the Bering Sea and Alaskan airspace. A Russian attempt to land troops of its 35th Army in Anchorage by sea through the Aleutian Islands was intercepted by the US Pacific Fleet. US ground forces attacked Russian forces in Vancouver from the south and then Canadian and US ground forces attacked their eastern flank through the Canadian Yukon Territory, recapturing Fairbanks and Anchorage and causing the Russian attack to collapse. The total irrecoverable personnel losses of the Soviet Armed Forces, frontier, and internal security troops in the US came to 14,453. Soviet Army formations, units, and HQ elements lost 13,833, FSB security service subunits lost 572, MVD formations lost 28, and other ministries and departments lost 20 men. US and Canadian losses were however double these numbers.”