by F X Holden
It was a stalemate. Russian forces remained in control of the island’s population centers of Gambell and Savoonga. Russian aircraft still patrolled overhead and Russian warships plied the seas up and down the Strait turning away any US shipping or aircraft that approached. They were letting the much-reduced trickle of internationally flagged ships through, but any US flagged or owned ship was being warned and if it did not turn back, boarded and forcibly turned around. There were no more viable military targets on Saint Lawrence for the US to attack and attacking Russian warships in the waters of Saint Lawrence would have been a major re-escalation.
What Devlin was going to the Foreign Ministry to tell her Russian counterparts today was that a US carrier group centered around the latest (and in fact probably the last) of the US supercarriers, the USS Enterprise, had just departed San Diego. Its objective: a ‘freedom of navigation’ transit through the Bering Strait.
Devlin had always thought of herself as a peacemaker. So she was surprised by the emotion boiling in her chest. A peacemaker should be feeling dismay, sadness or perhaps resignation. She felt something very different. It was outrage. As she sat in her car looking out at a rainy grey Moscow afternoon, she had one defiant thought.
Try to turn the USS Enterprise around, you bastards!
In the days since the thermobaric bombs had dropped on Little Diomede, the Rock had been left to fend for itself. US CNAF had not wanted to draw any attention to its top-secret facility, so Little Diomede had been included in general US protests about Russian aggression, without specifically calling out the attack there.
With the death of the CO, Lieutenant Commander Rodriguez had found herself suddenly in command of the Naval Computer and Telecommunications Area Master Station, Alaska – both her own people, and the personnel from the radar station. The chief petty officer and search party she had sent topside had found no survivors. In fact, they hadn’t even found any bodies. It was as though the officers and personnel manning the radar station had been scraped from the rock like barnacles from the hull of a ship. The radar station itself was nothing but melted metal and plastic, twisted rebar and foundation concrete. One of Rodriguez’s fears had been that the large elevator shaft down to the cave below, which had been hidden by the radar dome, would lie gaping and open for any prying Russian eye to see.
She needn’t have been concerned. The walls around the elevator shaft had collapsed over it, leaving only a small rubble-filled depression.
Dealing with the wounded had been her first priority. She had a Marine medical officer and two corpsmen still alive, and they quickly and efficiently triaged the injured personnel and treated the most severely wounded. Several urgently needed to be evacuated.
So communication had been her next priority. She needed to organize transport for the wounded, and let CNAF know that they had been hit hard, but were in the fight. By patching into the undersea drone command array they’d re-established voice and data contact. Their launch infrastructure had come through the attack largely undamaged. They could still hit any target within 300 miles, they just needed to be told what, and where. Without the heavy lift crane on the dock though, they couldn’t recover and recycle their drones from the Pond. Any drone they sent out the chute would be on a one way trip to the target and if it survived, onward to an airfield in Alaska. She still had a loaded magazine and a burning desire for payback. NCTAMS-A4 was still mission capable.
That was what she pitched to Pacific Command anyway. They didn’t see it the way she did.
Rodriguez had called a meeting of her ‘command staff’: a grand word to describe Bunny O’Hare, her arresting gear and catapult officers Stretch Alberti and Lucky Severin, and Chief Petty Officer ‘Inky’ Barrows, the senior ranking seaman from the radar station, so named because he got a new tattoo every time he hit a new port, and at 32 years of age, was fast running out of real estate to place it on.
“We’re being decommissioned,” Rodriguez announced. “Navy is sending a sub with medical facilities. We can’t get it into the dock here, so it will have to moor outside the harbor debris field. We are to rack all aircraft, power down all equipment and rig charges to bring the roof down by remote detonation just in case Ivan discovers it and tries to breach. The sub will take off all remaining personnel, not just the wounded.”
Their faces said it all, but Alberti was the first to speak. “They can’t decommission us, we hadn’t even been commissioned yet,” he commented dryly.
“Speak for yourselves,” CPO Barrows, the radar station electrician, said.
“I don’t think they’re too worried about protocol, Stretch,” Rodriguez said. “Informally, I was told they need to do an assessment of how it was we got hurt so badly by a few lucky bombs that weren’t even aimed at us.”
“Those MOABs are like mini-nukes,” Barrows protested. “And the whole point is they did get lucky, the Russians still don’t know we’re here.”
Severin was chewing on a thought, “A few weeks later, give us blast doors behind the Slot, we would have been fine. The seawall was rated for a category 4 hurricane and storm surge, not for a bloody thermobaric blast. We just need to re-engineer the cave entrance, create some baffles, fit that pressure door…”
“They’re not in the mood for re-engineering right now,” Rodriguez told them. “If we aren’t part of the solution to this standoff, we are apparently just part of the problem. They’re pulling us out.”
Rodriguez looked over at O’Hare; she looked angry but was suspiciously quiet. Rodriguez had expected her to explode. They discussed what needed to be done to decommission or destroy their equipment, how long it would take to rig explosives enough to bring the reinforced roof of the cave down if needed and whether there were any personnel too badly wounded to move. When they were done planning, Rodriguez dismissed them to start work.
“Lieutenant O’Hare, can I have a word?” Rodriguez said as they all rose to leave the trailer. When the others closed the door behind them, she looked at the woman who in the last few days had become just as much a friend as a junior officer. “OK Bunny, what’s up?”
“Sorry Boss?” O’Hare raised an eyebrow. “Don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes you do. I know you want payback. You’re choking for it. But I tell you we’re packing our bags and pulling out and you don’t say a word. Alberti and Barrows both erupt, even Severin is coming up with ideas, but you’re an Easter Island statue.”
Bunny sat down again, “I won’t lie Boss. I do want payback. But I’m not Navy, I’m DARPA. They pull us out of here, before I can even blink, I’ll be on a plane back to DARPA in California watching this war on CNN. It isn’t even my war. Hell, after this debacle they will probably cancel my green card and ship me back to Aussie.”
“Yeah,” Rodriguez said. “About that…”
Perri and Dave had grown bolder. Over the last three days they had set up a lookout ‘nest’ under an upturned satellite dish on the gas station roof that gave them a clear view down onto the town, and as long as there was no fog, they could see all the way across to the airfield. And they’d been out nearly every night, watching and listening to the town below.
They had been relieved to see the school buildings in Gambell had somehow escaped the destruction that had rained down on the town in those few short and terrifying minutes. They were worried about reprisals, but it seemed that those Russians left alive had other concerns than revenge on the local civilians.
They saw them bring their wounded to the school on stretchers and the hoods of jeeps. Then they saw them bring out their dead and line them up in bags on the road outside.
Some of the bags clearly didn’t hold a whole body. Perri counted fifty-nine body bags.
On the third day, Perri got a good count of the number of Russian troops left in Gambell when they held a funeral service for their dead comrades.
There were twenty-seven Russian soldiers still combat ready - physically at least - and maybe ten badly wounded inside the s
chool somewhere.
What Perri couldn’t understand, was why no help arrived for the Russian troops. The air had been swarming with fat-bellied helicopters that first day, and a few came and went in the days following, but the skies were completely empty now. There were no warships moored off the breakwater anymore, just the wreck of a transport ship that had been hit by a missile three days ago and exploded in a liquid hydrogen-fuelled fireball that had flattened all the harborside shacks and broken windows hundreds of yards back. With at least three missiles hitting the town and more out at the airstrip, Perri doubted there was a window left intact in the entire town. But the Russians should have been able to get new men and supplies in. There had been plenty of days with clear skies but it had been foggy the first two days after the attack, if they had wanted to sneak people in or out. And he had clearly seen Russian aircraft overhead, flying back and forth across Saint Lawrence, apparently unmolested. So why no choppers?
Whatever the reason, whatever their new orders, Perri and Dave could see the soldiers left in Gambell had little interest in keeping up patrols around the town, and even less interest in sitting in sandbagged bunkers out by the airstrip. The only semblance of their former routine were the guards posted at the doors of the school buildings, and the routine trips from the gym to the toilets with groups of hostages. Which was good, because it meant that at least once a day, Perri and Dave could see their families were still ok, even though they must be worried sick not knowing what had happened to their two boys. Perri had been able to confirm his parents and brothers were among the people in the school, so at least they hadn’t been stupid enough to pick a fight or try to run for the American mainland in their little fishing boat. Which by the way, had been destroyed in the American strike just like every other boat in the harbor.
He lowered his scope. “I’m sick of just watching and doing nothing.”
Dave clapped his hands together to keep the blood flowing in the cold late summer air, “Isn’t anything left for us to blow up or shoot holes in man, you know that.”
“I have another idea,” Perri said. “I don’t believe the whole world forgot about us. We need to remind them we’re still here.”
“Americans bombed the shit out of us,” Dave pointed out. “You expect their sympathy now?”
“Not them,” Perri said. “I’m thinking about those guys we met at the Pow Wow in Canada that time.”
Dave knew what he was talking about. The last time both of them had gotten off Saint Lawrence. Two glorious weeks on Vancouver Island in Canada for a meeting of indigenous youth. It was the first time Perri had realized there was a world of kids out there going through exactly what he was going through, and he’d stayed friends with a bunch of them over the years through social media.
“We’ve still got no internet,” Dave pointed out. “So the only calls we can make here are local and there’s no one to call. How are you going to get a message out?”
Gambell’s connection to the outside world was through a satellite internet router and dish up on the town hall roof that used to hook up to their cell network. It was the first thing the Russians took down, and then the Americans sealed the deal when they took out the whole block on which the town hall sat. They might have killed half of the Russian troops in Gambell, but they also made sure it was cut off from the world for good. Or had they?
“Those guys down there, they must have some way to contact their base back in Russia, right?”
“You’re going to call Moscow, ask them for help?” Dave joked. “Hey, come and save us from those crazy Americans? Oh wait, you were already doing that? My bad…”
“No you dick. I’m thinking whatever radio they have, it must hook up to a satellite somewhere. Maybe we can use it to get online. Like a mobile hotspot.”
Dave stood and winked, “OK, let’s just go ask them eh? Excuse me shithead invaders, got a radio we can borrow?”
Perri stood too, “Sure. Or, how about we just go out to the airfield where there are about a dozen smashed up Russian trucks, cars and ATVs and see what we can find?”
It turned out a razor sharp, needle-thin fragment of shrapnel had entered the Spetsnaz Captain’s skull just beside his eye, traveled right through his brain and then left his head at the back making a pinhole-sized exit wound.
It had turned him into a walking Dostoyevsky quotation machine, but that was about all he was capable of. Sergeant Penkov had talked more than once about just shooting him to put him, and everyone around him, out of their misery. But in the end they settled for locking him in a classroom and taking him to the toilet twice a day so he didn’t soil himself.
Sergeant Penkov had managed to contact 14th Squadron headquarters within a few minutes of the first American strike, and was told to bunker down and ride it out. When the cruise missiles hit, Private Zubkhov and the poetic Captain Demchenko were groveling under the foundations of one of the houses two blocks from the town hall. The explosion as the ship in the harbor went up was the loudest, nearly blowing Private Zubkhov’s eardrums out. So it was that he hardly heard the town hall strike which had killed most of his comrades.
He’d waited until things stopped blowing up, and then waited some more. He’d learned a few lessons since the ammo dump went up. When he finally emerged from under the house, it was starting to get light, and he was cold, hungry and pissed off at the world. His pique lasted until he found the first body part out on the street. He found his way through the wreckage of the town to the sound of someone shouting orders, and found Sergeant Penkov organizing search and rescue parties.
So much for food and warmth. He spent three days digging out the wounded and bagging the dead. When he ate, it was cold soup or ready to eat rations. When he slept, it was on the floor of one of the school buildings, shivering under a thin blanket because the bastard engineers had all been killed and no one left alive could get the damaged pumped hydro powerplant up and running. None of the Russians anyway. The locals had refused to help – they seemed impervious to the cold and apparently liked to see their captors suffer. They were probably used to the damn thing punking out on them.
Sergeant Penkov had sent urgent requests to 14th Squadron HQ for evacuation. Denied. Resupply. Denied. Reinforcement? Denied. He was given orders to do what he could, where he was, with what he had.
Private Zubkhov was there when he got this last piece of good advice.
“This stupid village doesn’t matter anymore,” Penkov spat, putting down the satellite radio mike. “If it ever did.” He looked around him at the beaten men who had given up looking at him with hope. Now they just looked at him with resignation. “We’re on our own boys. Ideas?”
“We need to get across the island to Savoonga,” someone offered. “Join up with the 308th, consolidate our strength.”
“We can’t just abandon our post private,” Penkov told him. “I need an operational imperative.”
“What about the civilians?” another prompted. “The American missiles took out our supplies and we aren’t being resupplied. We can’t feed them – either we shoot them or transport them to Savoonga.”
“Can’t drive, we’d have to walk out,” another pointed out. “The locals say there’s no road between the towns, only reindeer trails at best.”
“We can’t take our wounded out that way. We need air transport. Or a boat.”
“You’re right about the civilians and the supply situation. But we’ve got no transport,” the Sergeant pointed out. “And it isn’t going to magically appear. We’re walking out, or we’re going nowhere.”
Private Zubkhov spoke up, “What is the situation in Savoonga? Do they have supplies?”
“I spoke with the commander of the 308th yesterday,” Penkov said. “The airfield is still in our control and the air force is starting to build up, big time. If the Americans are coming we’ll be better off combining our strength and fortifying Savoonga, for sure.”
Zubkhov laughed at that. “Strength? Yeah, right.”
>
“Can it,” the Sergeant grunted at him. The man was a Muscovite and seemed to have a hate on anyone born east of the Urals. “This is what we’re doing. We’re walking out. We’ll take the locals with us, to show the way. The walking wounded come with us. Those too badly hurt to walk can stay here, with any of the locals who are too old or too weak to make the walk.”
“They’ll cut our guys’ throats the minute we leave town!” Private Zubkhov said.
“If our guys get their throats cut by a bunch of old women and geriatric men, they bloody deserve it,” Penkov said.
“We can’t just leave the wounded behind,” Private Zubkhov protested.
The Sergeant looked at Zubkhov for a long moment, “You’re right son. It can’t look like I just abandoned this post. So you’ll stay here with the wounded and the elderly civilians to make sure they’re properly looked after. How’s that?”
It was the first vehicle they looked in. A big Humvee-like jeep with a long aerial on the roof, it had just seemed natural to start with that one. It had been blown onto its side by a missile strike, and its underside was a tangle of gutted metal. The fuel tanks had caught fire, apparently without exploding, the tires had burned away and the underside was covered in an oily soot. Someone had been through the inside of the vehicle and emptied all of the lockers and compartments lining the interior. There wasn’t even a stray packet of cigarettes or random piece of paper left behind.
But they hadn’t taken the radio receiver out of its mount under the dashboard.
It took Perri twenty nerve-wracking minutes to free it and uncouple the cables leading into the engine compartment. While he worked, Dave was under the hood, pulling out one of the hydrogen fuel cell batteries. They weren’t sure if the radio would run off the same voltage as the battery they had down in the tank, so while Perri lugged the surprisingly heavy radio with him, Dave dragged the battery on a makeshift sled fashioned from a truck door and some electrical cables he’d scrounged from the wreckage around the airfield.