by F X Holden
She put a hand on the mirror and pushed herself away.
SUPPRESSION
As Syrian tanks rolled across the border into Lebanon, Bondarev’s 110 Okhotniks re-opened the air war over Alaska.
The machines themselves staged out of roads and highways around the large air base at Lavrentiya on the Russian mainland, but Bondarev didn’t need to collocate his pilots and aircraft – in fact, it was wise not to do so. They had to be within 200 miles of the target area, but otherwise he was free to place their container sized trailers anywhere with fast data links, a good supply of juice and enough food and water for 200 plus crew.
So while he had the drones based at Lavrentiya, he had put his Okhotnik pilots, their command trailers and those of the 573rd into quarters at the port of Anadyr, well back from the Operations Area but still within operational range when linked to their drones by Airborne Control aircraft.
Two days after the briefing at 3rd Air and Air Defense Forces Command HQ, 60 Sukhoi-57s and Mig-41s of the 4th and 5th Air Battalions took off from Lavrentiya as though moving into what had become routine patrol positions in the air over Saint Lawrence and the Bering Strait. What was not normal was the high number of aircraft Russia had scrambled.
When they reached what would have been their normal stations inside the Russian no-go zone, they pushed east toward the Alaska coast.
Waiting for them just outside the air exclusion zone were the F-35s and older F-22s of the Alaska air national guard. Behind them, at five-minute readiness, were pilots of the USAF 90th Fighter Squadron and 525th Fighter Squadron under the control of an Airborne Control aircraft from 962nd Airborne Air Control Squadron. As soon as it detected the large Russian formations approaching Saint Lawrence, the Airborne Control aircraft scrambled its Air Force fighters. Within minutes, the US force facing Russia numbered 36 fighters, and 20 more were another 20 minutes out. Pulling data from a combination of its own radar, NORAD and satellites, the US Airborne Control aircraft handed off targets to its flock of defenders and put ground to air defenses around Elmendorf-Richardson and Eielson on alert.
NORAD was also tracking a squadron of 9 Russian Tu160-M2 Blackjack strategic bombers that was returning from what had now become routine trans-polar ‘provocation’ flights.
Ceasefire or no ceasefire, there was no ambiguity in the US aviators’ orders. If the Russian fighters closed on Alaskan coastal airspace, the US fighters were cleared to engage.
Bondarev had no intention of letting his piloted aircraft get within air-to-air missile range of the Americans. Not yet. Before the US fighters were within range, he turned his Sukhois back west and they withdrew to the Russian mainland.
The US air commander fell for the ruse. He misinterpreted the move as a failed attempt to provoke US aircraft into following and breaking the terms of the ceasefire. Now he had machines he needed to get down and refuel, and pilots who had been living on edge for weeks who needed their rest. He pulled half of his force back to Elmendorf-Richardson and Eielson once it was clear the Russian fighters were withdrawing too, and ordered the rest to keep station until they were at bingo fuel.
Timed to coincide with this, to the north and south of Saint Lawrence, Bondarev had scattered 60 Okhotnik stealth drones, configured for ground attack. He had ordered his drone pilots to fire at the extreme limit of the range of the Okhotniks’ Brah-Mos III supersonic cruise missiles. With two missiles per aircraft, as the last of the sortied US fighters was landing, within minutes there were 120 cruise missiles on their way toward Elmendorf-Richardson and Eielson!
The last time Eielson had faced a cruise missile attack it was from Bunny O’Hare, and that had not gone so well. But this time its HELLADS systems and crews were ready. They might not have anticipated when Russia would strike, but the two US air bases were targets too strategically vital for Russia to ignore and US war planners knew it. So additional units had been flown in from Stateside to ensure the critical US airfields in Alaska were bristling with anti-air systems.
Sixty vampires inbound? No problem.
“Ma’am, turn on your laptop!” Williams voice said over Devlin’s telephone line. She had just been getting ready to go to bed when the phone had rung. “I’m going to push something through to you.”
“Ok, just give me a minute,” Devlin said, cradling her telephone on her shoulder and pulling her laptop out of her bag. She hit the button to boot it up. “Always takes a couple of minutes, this old thing.”
“Two minutes, and it may be all over,” Williams said.
“What’s up? Lebanon?”
“No. Russia just broke the ceasefire,” Williams said. “HOLMES is tracking multiple cruise missile launches over Alaska towards our air bases at Fairbanks and Anchorage. I’m sending you the feed, you can follow the attack real time.”
“You can do that?”
“Already doing it, when you log on, you’ll see an icon of a pipe on your desktop. Click on that.”
“What?”
“Don’t ask me, HOLMES installed it. I think it’s an Arthur Conan Doyle thing. You’ll see what NORAD is seeing.”
She shook her head and clicked on the icon as it came up. A screen expanded showing a map of Alaska. It took her a moment to make sense of what she was looking at. A spider web of lines was lancing out from small icons that looked like inward facing double triangles with the letters A above them, while a bunch of other triangle icons milled around in the air over Alaska. “OK, I’ve got the computer open, but what am I looking at?”
“The icons with an A over them are Russian attack aircraft, HOLMES is saying mostly drones. They’ve already fired their payloads and are heading back to mother Russia on afterburner. The icons over Alaska, they’re our boys. Most are not close enough to take a shot at the retreating Russians, but they’re trying to engage the cruise missiles. Not much chance, their radar cross-section is too small, but they’ll try.”
“The missiles are headed for our air force bases?”
“Yep. They’re scrambling everything they can so that the fewest possible machines get caught on the ground if any missiles get through. But apparently we were caught refueling after a major defensive action.”
“HOLMES, what are the odds?” Devlin asked, knowing HOLMES would have already calculated them. “Of the missiles getting through?”
“23% percent chance of one to six missiles getting through ma’am,” she heard HOLMES voice say on the line.
“How long until they hit?” She saw the lines seemed to be extending toward their targets very quickly.
“At 2,000 miles per hour with just fifty miles left to run, one minute thirty ma’am,” the AI replied. “I am showing 47 missiles still tracking. Correction, I am now showing 101 missiles inbound. 53 seconds to first HELLADS interception.”
“What?!”
Williams peered at the screen, “Uh, a squadron of Backfire bombers in international airspace north of Alaska just fired their full payload of six missiles each ma’am,” he said. “A suicide shot. They were being tagged by a flight of US F-35s out of Eielson. They’ve engaged the Backfires, and they’re unescorted. Those Backfires are toast.”
“20 seconds to HELLADS interception of the first wave,” HOLMES said.
Devlin watched in horror as the blue lines tracked toward the two US air bases. One by one, the lines winked out. Then red dots began to appear underneath the airfields. Inside five seconds, all the blue lines were gone, and a row of red dots appeared under each airfield.
“The red dots are strikes?” Devlin asked.
“Yes ma’am,” Williams said. “Four on Eielson, three on Elmendorf-Richardson. Damn good performance by the HELLADS.” He sounded pleased.
“There are dead Americans under those dots Carl,” Devlin said gently.
“Yes ma’am, sorry,” he said.
“Thirty-three seconds to the impact of the second wave of missiles. There are no air assets in position to intercept,” HOLMES said. “HELLADS batteries recycling.”
>
“Recycling?! What does that mean?”
“A single HELLADS battery can track and shoot down as many as 5 missiles simultaneously, with a half second between volleys. There are probably four or five batteries around each of those airfields, so they can target twenty incoming missiles all arriving at the same time, and handle multiple waves of missiles for up to five minutes, but working that hard overheats the optics. They need time to cool down - recycle. The second Russian launch was deliberately timed to coincide with the HELLADS’ recycling phase. They’ll be arriving just as the laser defenses are coming back on line, so until then, the base will only be defended by last-gen anti-air missiles and ballistics. It’s going to be close,” Carl said, pulling anxiously at his beard.
“Two batteries on line. Five seconds to impact,” HOLMES said. “Three batteries. Firing. Impact.” A blood-red bloom of dots appeared across the map at both airfields.
“I’m coming in to the embassy,” Devlin said hurriedly, and put down her telephone, reaching for her robe. She was in no doubt that what she had just witnessed was a declaration of war.
Between 2015 and 2022 Russia launched a series of small satellites it designated Kosmos-2499 to Kosmos-2514. Radar tracking of the small 100kg satellites showed they were highly maneuverable and shortly after arriving in orbit they executed what seemed to be a range of test maneuverers, darting away from and then matching orbit with various pieces of circling space junk including their own launch vehicles. They were also detected by amateur radio enthusiasts communicating with the ground using burst radio transmissions. At a year-end press conference, the head of Roskosmos, Tomas Olapenko, denied speculation that what Russia had launched were "killer satellites." Olapenko said the satellites were developed in cooperation between Roskosmos and the Russian Academy of Sciences and were used for peaceful purposes including unspecified research by educational institutions. After two years of apparent testing, the satellites were parked in permanent orbits and went silent.
Five of the satellites were in orbit over the North Pole. In the intervening years since 2022 they had been quietly mapping all known US and Chinese space-based military objects in their quadrants.
Olapenko had not lied. The Kosmos satellites were not intended to kill other satellites.
They were made to blind them.
Alicia Rodriguez was blind. Her bedside alarm was ringing, she had to get to school, but she couldn’t see it to turn it off. She panicked, flailing around her, trying to find her alarm clock. She was going to be late for school again!
She opened her eyes. Same dumb dream again. But there was an alarm ringing somewhere. She swung her legs out of bed and hit her bedside light. It was the comms alarm - an incoming call. She fumbled for the handset on her bedside table.
“NCTAMS-A4,” she replied, rubbing her eyes. She looked at her watch. She’d been asleep 3 hours. It was 0400. She and Bunny had planned another three hours sleep then breakfast and another day flying their drones out. As the voice on the other end spoke, she realized that wasn’t going to happen.
“NCTAMS-A4, this is ANR control,” the voice said. “Major Del Stenson, who is speaking please?”
“Rodriguez, Lieutenant Commander, what’s up Major?”
“Ma’am, I need to bring you up to speed with events and then check your operational status,” the major said.
“Our operational status? We are decommissioned Major,” Rodriguez told him. “We are four days from bringing the boom down on this base.”
“Negative ma’am, I have a new Operations Order for you. The situation is that Russian air forces have attacked Eielson and Elmendorf-Richardson air bases. Damage was limited, but both airfields are going to be offline for at least the next 48-72 hours. We have moved air assets south to Kingsley Fields, Portland and Lewis-McChord.” He paused. “We have nowhere to receive your drones right now ma’am, and besides, we need them back in the game.”
“Major, there are only myself and one aviator remaining on this base. We can launch, but we can’t recover, refuel and rearm those drones at anything like the speed that would be needed for combat operations. If you are asking us to go to war, I need the full complement of base personnel back here stat.”
“That’s also negative ma’am,” Stenson said. “All available Naval units have been re-tasked. We are responding to multiple simultaneous threat vectors Lieutenant Commander. You are on your own. A mission package is being sent through as we speak. You are to review it and respond. Questions ma’am?”
“Plenty,” Rodriguez said. “But let me look the package over. I’ll get back to you on what we can do.”
“Yes ma’am. ANR out.”
Rodriguez cut the connection and hit the button that connected her to O’Hare’s quarters.
“O’Hare speaking. Yes, ma’am?”
She sounded like she was already awake.
“We have new orders Bunny,” Rodriguez said.
“Yes ma’am,” the pilot replied. “I heard the comms alert. Briefing in the trailer?”
“Five minutes,” Rodriguez confirmed. “And O’Hare?”
“Yes ma’am?”
“You will be wearing more than just black nail polish, understood?”
“Aw, you are such a buzz killer ma’am,” O’Hare said. “As you wish.” She cut the line.
Rodriguez smiled and reached for her trousers. Then she thought about what they were being asked to do, and the smile faded from her face.
Yevgeny Bondarev had a broad smile on his face as he stood in his own operations room, eyes running over reports of the morning’s operations and bomb damage assessments. Around him, his staff were going about the business of destroying the US armed forces’ ability to respond to the planned landing in Nome.
He had been ordered to achieve air supremacy, not just air superiority. Air superiority meant temporary control of the airspace over an operations area. Supremacy meant the effective destruction of the enemy’s ability to oppose the operations of friendly forces. The Russian commanders were not dreamers, they knew Lukin’s 3rd Air and Air Defense Forces Command could not defeat the entire US Army, Navy and Air Force once it had been completely mobilized. But it had to establish dominance of the air for the duration of the invasion and that meant creating an effective air-front over Alaska all the way to the Canadian border so that any attempt by the US to penetrate Alaskan airspace resulted in the complete destruction of American aircraft in the combat area.
The airfield denial operations against the two major US Air Force bases in Alaska had been a spectacular success, with the first wave of missiles being intercepted but performing their task of overwhelming the American defensive systems so that the second wave of mine laying cluster munition armed warheads would be able to penetrate. Russia had learned through many wars that blowing holes in enemy airfields was a pointless exercise, because even a twenty-foot crater blown in a concrete runway by a deep penetrator bomb could be filled in a matter of hours and overlaid with metal mesh patches so that flight operations could quickly resume.
So the Bra-Mos III missiles that had made it through the defensive perimeter of Elmendorf Richardson and Eielson air bases had streaked across the airfield scattering thousands of area-denial anti-personnel and anti-vehicle mines. Within seconds each airfield was littered with 5.5lb RDX explosive armed proximity-triggered submunitions. Once the mines were scattered, the missiles buried themselves in their terminal targets - usually hangars, radars and control and command facilities. It might only take a few hours to fill a crater or get a new mobile command center up and running, but it would take days to clear all of the unexploded mines at the two air bases.
He had lost none of his Su-57s or Okhotniks, but all six Backfire bombers had been quickly shot down. That had been expected and their pilots and crews had been volunteers, knowing the mission would likely result in their deaths. Bondarev wasn’t sentimental, but the sacrifice of such men in the service of their nation stirred his blood. He would use their
example to encourage his own men to do their utmost.
With no US carrier task force within range, that meant that unless Canada allowed the US to base its aircraft out of British Columbia, America had to fly its combat aircraft from airfields in Oregon, Washington State and Idaho, and ten years of US bullying over trade and tariff disputes meant that without evidence of an actual invasion yet, Canada wasn’t looking disposed to choose sides. That meant US aircraft could only reach the combat area with the help of in-flight refueling, which gave Russian radar and satellites precious time to detect them and respond. It was time Bondarev planned to use well.
The second prong of the initial attack had not been Bondarev’s responsibility but belonged to the Russian Aerospace Forces. Their small 100kg satellites parked over the pole had maneuvered within range of eight critical NORAD surveillance satellites and were blasting out radio signals at frequencies calculated to jam the ability of the American satellites to send or receive. If they were working as planned the US 213th Space Warning Squadron based at Denali Borough in Alaska - the eyes and ears of NORAD - should be blind and deaf.
His staff advised it would take at least six and up to 18 hours before the US could re-task other nearby satellites to fill the void or find workarounds to mitigate the jamming.
That gave Bondarev a solid window in which his Okhotniks could roam the skies over Alaska seeking out and destroying US land-based radar and air defense units, while his Su-57s ran combat air patrols overhead. Several of his units were actively engaged in combat with the US fighters that had managed to get airborne before the missile strikes. He had lost nine aircraft, with two pilots dead and six down, but his intel indicated 23 enemy combatants destroyed, both fixed and rotary winged aircraft. After trying to engage the incoming cruise missiles, most of the airborne US aircraft were low on fuel and ammunition and were retiring to US mainland air bases or inadequately equipped civilian fields. The Americans had not yet martialled aircraft for a major counter-attack, but Bondarev was certain it would come, probably in the form of another blizzard of cruise missiles launched from naval vessels or strategic bombers.