Bering Strait

by F X Holden

  “I don’t think so,” Bunny said. “I’m no ordnance expert, but the snow is only melted on top of the island and down by the accommodation, which makes it look like whatever hit us, hit the top of the island and the harbor at the same time. The rest of the island still has some snow and ice on it though. I’d have thought a nuke would melt it all.”

  “I didn’t see a flash,” Rodriguez remembered, “Did you?”

  “No lightning, just thunder,” Bunny agreed. “I’m thinking more thermobaric than thermonuclear.”

  She looked down on Rodriguez’s frown. “You’re thinking what I’m thinking, right boss?”

  “That this attack wasn’t about us?” Rodriguez said.

  “Right. If they knew about this place, they’d have used some kind of deep penetrator, a bunker buster. Or flown a cruise missile straight into the mouth of the cavern. But they just wanted to scrape a barnacle off the Rock, so they went with thermobaric,” Bunny said. She waved a hand at the destruction outside the trailer. “This was all just collateral damage. They got lucky.”

  Rodriguez looked at her watch, then closed her eyes. 0330 hours. So tired.

  “Get me some drugs will you?” she said. “Painkillers and stimulants. We’ve got to tend to our dead and wounded, send a party out the cave entrance and check for survivors topside, then restore comms with CNAF and see if we can get this base back online.” She looked across the dock to the intact loading bays next to the catapult. “That was a classic ‘first strike’ if you ask me. We’ve still got hangars full of hardware capable of kicking some serious Russian ass and I would dearly love to get some orders and get it in the air.”

  Bunny looked at her admiringly, “Hoo-bloody-yah Boss.’”

  As the boys watched, a huge mushroom cloud was rising over the town where the town hall was. Over by the airfield there were three or four fires burning and what looked like fuel exploding. Several houses in the town seemed to be on fire too. Their eyes went immediately to the two-story gym at the school.

  It was untouched. There were fires just a block away, a huge crater where the town hall had been, but the school gym and its outbuildings were still standing. If they could feel the bombs down in the bunker, he could only imagine what it had been like for their families, holed up in the steel-walled gym just a block or two away.

  Perri looked at the town through his scope. He had expected to see Russian troops running around the streets, jeeps, maybe ambulances or something. But apart from a couple of soldiers standing around or picking themselves up off the ground, there was nothing except for flickering flames and rising columns of smoke.

  “Our own side bombed us,” Dave said unbelievingly. “They bombed Gambell.”

  “They never cared about us before,” Perri said bitterly. “Why should they start now?”

  “Yeah, but… this is like, this is US territory. They bombed their own territory!”

  Perri tapped Dave on the shoulder, pointing back to the tank, “Let’s get back down. Any Russian out there left alive is going to be looking for blood after this. Lying low is looking like an even better idea now.” Even as he said it, a shadow streaked across the harbor, straight for a Russian ship that had berthed there the day before. It struck with a muffled thump, a half second passed, then the ship, the harbor and everything around it lit up in a boiling, black and red ball of fire!

  Private Zubkhov had been caught out in the open when the cruise missiles hit. He knew they were cruise missiles because he saw one of the bastards curl around the bluff at the end of town and head straight for the harbor.

  It hadn’t even been an hour since the ammo dump had gone up. They were still looking for the Captain. It was kind of strange. Not like there was some big explosion there on the street that could have vaporized him. The guy next to Zubkhov had been hit with the base plate of a field mortar, that was what took his face off. And another guy, he took a ricochet in the leg. So they’d all ducked behind cover and waited until all of the ammo had cooked off and it was just a red smoldering mess down there, and then they stuck their heads up again.

  But the Captain was missing. The Sergeant who had been sent to the airfield had finally come back after about thirty minutes, wondering why he hadn’t received any further orders and the Captain wasn’t on comms. He’d told them to start searching through the town, block by block.

  “Could have been freaking partisans,” Sergeant Penkov said. “They blew the ammo dump, took the Captain hostage maybe.”

  Zubkhov thought about the frightened Inuit families he’d helped herd into the school building, and didn’t think so. They were fishermen and women with kids. Grandmothers and grandfathers. He didn’t see an armed resistance in their faces, more like weary resignation. But then he remembered the flickering shadows of men running up on the bluff, and he wasn’t so sure. He was thinking about that as he rounded a corner behind some sort of warehouse and found the Captain.

  The man was standing and staring out to sea. Just standing there, staring. He didn’t react when Zubkhov called out to him, and didn’t turn when he came up behind him. “Captain Demchenko?”

  He was just standing with a strange smile on his face, watching the sea.

  “Comrade Captain?”

  Now he turned, eyes semi-glazed, looking at Zubkhov, or looking through him. Zubkhov couldn’t tell.

  “I love mankind,” the officer said. “But I find to my amazement, that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man himself.”

  Zubkhov stared at him. Demchenko stood there, as though he was waiting for an answer. Zubkhov was used to the vagaries of the officer class, and took the observation in his stride.

  “Well, yes sir. There’s not a lot to love.” Zubkhov looked around himself. “Especially in a shithole like this, sir.”

  The Captain frowned, like that was not the reply he had expected. “The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for,” he said, looking out to sea again.

  The voice was so dead and even, it chilled Zubkhov. He stepped in front of his CO. “Sir, I think maybe we should just…” Then he stopped talking, because he saw a thin line of blood running down the man’s cheek, from the corner of his eyeball to the corner of his mouth, pulsing with every beat of his heart. The man’s tongue darted out of the corner of his mouth, licking at it.

  “Sir, why don’t you just come with me,” Zubkhov said. He took his arm and started to lead him, unresisting, back to the poorly lit, smoky streets.

  “You can be sincere, and still be stupid,” the Captain said, conversationally.

  Finally Zubkhov realized where he had heard the words before. It was Dostoyevsky. The man was standing out in the ruined night quoting Dostoyevsky to himself. He stopped, and took a flashlight off his belt. He shone it in the face of the Captain, and the man flinched, but he didn’t ask Zubkhov what the hell he was doing, he just screwed his eyes shut.

  Zubkhov looked carefully at the line of blood leaking from the man’s eye. It was still pulsing out of the eye in a tiny, red stream. On an instinct, he reached his hand up to the opposite side of the Captain’s head, and felt the hair there. There was blood there too.

  “Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately in love with suffering,” the Captain pointed out.

  “Yes sir,” Zubkhov agreed. “He most certainly is. This way if you please.”

  And as they’d emerged from between buildings, with Zubkhov wondering where the hell in this chaos he might find a medic, the first cruise missile had hit. It exploded with enormous force, across the other side of town near the town hall; bracketed almost immediately by two more strikes out by the airfield.

  Not partisans then!

  Zubkhov had shoved his damaged Captain back behind a wall and then dived for the dirt. As he watched, he saw a dark deltoid with a tail of fire come screaming around the bluff, over the bay and head straight for him.

  Bondarev seemed to exist in a twilight of blurred
grey light for eternity. Was this death? Just as it seemed it must be, features around him started to come into sharper relief. A window showing a bleak snowy landscape outside, a bed with rails on both sides, curtains around him. A hospital then, not quite the Valhalla he had been hoping for.

  “Welcome back. It is a miracle you didn’t go into cardiac arrest,” the base physician said as he realized Bondarev was awake and watching him. “You lost more than a liter of blood.”

  “Yes. I was trying to do the math on that,” Bondarev admitted. He looked up at the IV bag next to his bed, then down at his bandaged leg.

  “Otherwise, it’s not too bad,” the doctor moved down to the end of the bed and pulled the bed cover aside. “Wiggle your toes for me.”

  He did so, wincing as something felt like it was tearing in his calf. “OK, that’s enough, stop now,” the man said. “Just rest.” It sounded like a grand idea.

  He was wide awake the next time the physician called past.

  “Good, you’re looking more alert now. The shrapnel sliced through your gastrocnemius, opened up a vein, but didn’t sever the Achilles. We’ve stitched you up, you just need to rest.”

  “How long?”

  “Six weeks,” the doctor said. “Maybe five if you can stay off it. Then you can start physiotherapy.”

  “No, doctor, I need to fly,” Bondarev said.

  “Not with that leg. Not happening.”

  Bondarev sighed, “Comrade Doctor, in world war two the British had an ace, Douglas Bader, who had no legs at all. He flew Hurricane fighters; big, stinking, gasoline-powered metal and wooden beasts without fly-by-wire, without dynamic control surfaces, without the help of a combat AI.” Bondarev lifted his leg off the bed, trying not to wince, “So put a splint and a bandage around it, give me a crutch and sign me out. I need to find out what is left of my 4th and 5th Air Regiments.”

  The physician held his foot, and lowered it back onto the bed, “There is no rush Comrade Major-General. Your men won the air battle, but American cruise missiles exterminated almost all of our troops along with half of their own citizens on that island. Our governments have agreed a cease-fire. The genie has been put back in the bottle. For now.”

  Despite his bravado, his leg was throbbing and his vision blurring again. Bondarev laid his head back on the pillow, “Tell someone I want to see Lieutenant Colonel Arsharvin please.” The man did not instantly react. “Now!”

  He needed to find out how many men and machines he had lost. This hiatus wouldn’t last long, of that he was sure. The American attack had been expected, had in fact been needed. With or without him, Operation LOSOS would be moving into phase 2 by now. Leveraging global outrage over the US attack on Russia, on its own citizens, the invasion of Nome would soon begin.

  SUBTERRANEAN

  “There is no way to sugar coat it Major-General. We got a lesson in air power,” Arsharvin said. He watched as Bondarev put his hands on the wall in front of him, one leg straight and heel to the ground then crossed the other leg in front of it and stretched until it seemed like his Achilles would snap. “I bet that exercise gives you buns of steel.”

  “Air power?” Bondarev stretched again. “We faced an enemy greater in number and claimed two of theirs for every one we lost.”

  “We claimed two aircraft, not two pilots,” Arsharvin pointed out. “Most of the machines you faced were drones. This was the first real test of Russian fighter doctrine against American and the results were not … compelling.”

  “Two for one is not compelling?” Bondarev asked bitterly. “Tell me comrade, what is compelling. Three for one? Five for one?”

  Arsharvin held up his hands, trying to calm his friend, “Let’s just talk numbers. I’ve sent you the report but perhaps you didn’t read it. I wrote it, so I know the math.” He held up his hand and started counting off his fingers, “Firstly, the Americans sent up a force of 97 fighters, 80 of which were F-47 Fantoms, 17 of which were piloted F-35s. You faced them with a force of about 54 Su-57s and Mig-41s. You fired first, though that was moot, as the enemy drones reacted with counter fire as soon as they detected your missiles launching. I’ll save you the blow by blow commentary, get straight to the final result. You lost 14 aircraft destroyed and 8 damaged. The Americans lost between 30 and 35 machines destroyed, and 15 damaged.”

  “Better than 2 for 1 then,” Bondarev grunted.

  “In machines, yes,” Arsharvin said. “But not in pilots. We lost 12 pilots! The Americans lost just six, killed or captured! Six men! That’s two to one in their favor!”

  Bondarev was quiet a moment. He was well aware of his losses. Had been sitting in his hospital bed writing to as many widows and parents in the few days after the battle as he had in three years over Syria and Turkey.

  “A human pilot will beat a machine every time, we have proven it in testing against our own Okhotniks over Armavir, we proved it again in combat over Syria,” Bondarev insisted.

  “But not in these numbers, not against Fantoms armed with their new Cuda missiles, and you aren’t just fighting machines Comrade Major-General,” Arsharvin said, clearly frustrated. “Their ‘hex’ data linked combat formation means there is one pilot to every six drones. They can choose to fly and operate weapons systems, or let their drones operate semi-autonomously. One pilot to six drones Yevgeny!” Arsharvin threw his hands in the air. “Every one of our drones requires two crew and we can’t train them fast enough to keep them fully manned.”

  “I was fighting with my hands tied,” Bondarev pointed out. “Not allowed to commit my Okhotniks, not allowed to engage until we were almost at guns range. The odds were all in the Americans’ favor. They won’t be next time, I promise you.”

  “If there is a next time,” Arsharvin said. “Lukin is in Vladivostok with a bunch of other generals and politicians looking at the same numbers I sent to you.”

  Bondarev frowned, “The way I see it, we’re committed now. It’s not like there’s anything to talk about,” he said. Getting down on his haunches, he tipped forward, balancing on his toes. His right calf muscle screamed in protest, but he embraced the pain. When the time came to return to duty, he would be ready.

  Arsharvin winced, “If you’re a politician, there’s always something to talk about my friend. We haven’t yet moved on Nome, so for now it’s still just about Saint Lawrence. Moscow aren’t just spooked by the capabilities of the US air forces. They aren’t getting the sympathy or even the neutrality they expected from the UN after the US attack. And my sources in the Kremlin tell me President Navalny is personally rattled by the brutality of an opponent who apparently had no qualms about the mass murder of fifty of their troops and several hundred of their own citizens at Savoonga.”

  It was to be Devlin’s third meeting with the Russian Foreign Ministry in as many weeks, but the first with their Foreign Minister since a ceasefire was declared, the day after the ‘Battle of Bering Strait’.

  Whether her superiors had really expected Russia to fold in the face of a demonstration of US airpower and withdraw from Saint Lawrence, she couldn’t say. But she did know they had been fazed by the unhesitating Russian willingness to defend their ‘no-go’ zone. Just as she was aware the Russians were fazed by the US willingness to do whatever it took to defend its territorial rights.

  Devlin had been shocked too. She had emerged from Carl Williams’ office to the news that US Pacific Command had ordered the effective destruction of the Savoonga cantonment, accepting that with that decision there would be inestimable loss of civilian life. Russia was claiming that in addition to 200 of their own troops who died in Gambell and at Savoonga, the attack had resulted in 80 US service personnel and 1000 civilians dead or wounded. Russian media had been quick to broadcast video footage of shocked civilians, being treated at a medical center at Savoonga, asking why? Why had their own government attacked them? Some couldn’t believe it, but one Yup’ik elder was more sanguine, “America hasn’t given a damn about us the last two hundred yea
rs, and this just proves it still doesn’t give a damn.”

  In the court of international opinion, the US had tried to hold Russia responsible, claiming it had provoked the attack by opening fire on ‘US aircraft patrolling inside US territory, outside the illegal Russian no-fly zone.’ Russia in turn had claimed that the massive US provocation that was ‘Operation Resolve’ had been timed together with a stealth missile or aircraft attack on its ‘legitimate peacekeeping forces’ in Gambell, and followed by the massive cruise missile attack on Russian and civilian targets spread across Saint Lawrence Island.

  The US had made no mention of the Russian attack on Little Diomede.

  International sympathy had split across traditional lines, current allies siding with the super-power they were aligned with, and no neutral states stepping outside their comfort zones to get in between the two combatants. The UN Secretary-General had called for urgent de-escalation, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Science and Security Board had moved their ‘Doomsday Clock’ to thirty seconds to midnight, the closest it had been set since 1953 when the US and Russia both tested hydrogen fusion bombs. Her Russian counterparts had one clear goal in any conversation Devlin had with them; to find out whether the US was willing to use nuclear weapons to defend its territory. If Russia still refused to withdraw from Saint Lawrence, even after the scorched earth approach the US had taken with non-nuclear weapons, would it truly consider using tactical nuclear weapons and risk planetary scale nuclear destruction?

  Devlin had been ordered to reply that the US demand for the remaining Russian troops to withdraw from Saint Lawrence was still valid, and that any attempt to reinforce the island would be met with ‘the necessary force’.

  But the same thing still puzzled Devlin now as had puzzled her before. Would Russia really risk nuclear destruction just to test American resolve in the Bering Strait? It remained the only theory the State Department could anchor the Russian aggression to, and the people inside State who propounded it were arguing now that Russia had gone too far to back away, that the loss of nearly 200 ground troops on Saint Lawrence and numerous front-line aircraft could not be ignored and domestic political pressure would stop them from backing down.