by F X Holden
They’d also had to come up with a new version of the standard launch checklist, with only Rodriguez down on the flight deck and Bunny up in the trailer.
"Flaps, slat, panels and pins,” Bunny called over the internal comms.
“Green,” Rodriguez replied, roles reversed. Usually it would be her running the checklist.
“Man out.” Referring to Rodriguez, crouched down at the catapult shooter’s panel behind a blast protector.
“Man out aye. Thumbs up.” Rodriguez did a visual check to be sure there were no leaks of fuel or hydraulic fluid. “Scanning the Cat, Cat clear.” She bent to the shooter’s console. “Cat to 520 psi.”
“520 aye,” Bunny replied, confirming the catapult launch power from a readout on her heads-up display.
“Ready for launch.”
When she was satisfied, she gave Bunny the green light, “Pilot, go burner.”
“Lighting burner, aye,” Bunny replied.
“Launching!”
Rodriguez punched the button to fire the Cat. On full afterburner the Fantom leaped off the catapult, down the chute and out of the maw of the cave. It sped north to link up with the first drone, and soon the two of them were outbound.
In the belly of each Fantom were two GBU-43/K ‘mini-mothers’ or Massive Ordnance Air Blast bombs; GPS assisted iron bombs filled with 40% RDX explosive, 20% TNT, 20% aluminum power and 20% ethylene oxide. Cut down to fit the weapons bay of a Fantom, they were a smaller but still deadly version of the bombs that had wiped the radar station off the surface of Little Diomede. The mini-mother had been designed to destroy large concentrations of enemy vehicles or troops, or in this case, the large number of enemy transport aircraft, fuel, anti-air defense emplacements and command and control facilities at the Russian forward airfield at the port of Anadyr.
Anadyr had been chosen by US war planners for political shock value – an air strike so deep behind the Russian air perimeter that it might cause them to re-evaluate their strategy and pull assets back to protect their mainland bases. It was also intended to give Russia pause for thought – the US fighters were armed with conventional weapons, but what if they had fielded nukes?
Bunny and Rodriguez knew their chances of successfully charging directly across the Bering Strait and down the throat of all the radar energy Russia would have pointed eastwards was almost zero. So Bunny would be sending the Fantoms at nap of the earth height along the coast of Russia northeast to Polyarny then take a sharp southerly route along a river valley and across rolling hills and low ranges to Krasnero, about 50 miles inland of Anadyr, in the direction of Moscow. The Fantoms would then bank hard to port to follow the contours of the Anadyr River, coming up on the Russian airfield at the height of about 100 feet from a vector the Russian defenses would, hopefully, least expect.
For a human pilot, dropping a bomb that didn’t have a timed fuse from that low an altitude would be suicide, but for these Fantoms it wasn’t an issue. Theirs was a one-way trip. The long loop northeast and then south would be a journey of about 1,000 miles, it would take a couple of hours and the route Bunny had plotted had 132 distinct waypoints. It was a route no cruise missile could possibly execute. And there wouldn’t be fuel for them to make it home.
But with luck, they could give the Russian commanders a shock that would set them back on their heels.
If they pulled it off, it was a fitting payback mission – one Russian base in exchange for the attack on theirs - and the only thing Bunny could have wished for was a full crew and a hex of drones instead of just two.
But she would make do.
Oh, yes.
Private Zubkhov looked at the syringe in his hand with a little surprise. The soldier with the wounded foot had taken less than ten minutes to go from injection to a gasping death. It seemed he had the man’s bodyweight about right – he’d just looked up a dosing guide online and tripled it.
He lifted the man’s sheet and covered his face with it.
Then he walked around the room to each of the other seven men, injecting each with a freshly loaded syringe. For some - those who had untreatable abdominal wounds, already in the grip of fever and delirium - it was a pure mercy. For the others, well, if they had ever made it out of here it would be to a life as crippled and limbless outcasts, so Zubkhov didn’t actually feel that bad about it. One had woken from his drug-addled sleep and watched in confusion as Zubkhov injected him, but he didn’t protest. Zubkhov had simply held a hand under his head, lowered him back down to his pillow and held his hand until he fell asleep. It was very peaceful actually.
That only left the Captain, who Zubkhov hadn’t thought it necessary to sedate. He sat in a corner in a chair, watching events as though he was watching a mildly interesting TV show.
As Zubkhov approached him and held the needle up to do the air shot, the Captain smiled. “Right or wrong, it’s very pleasant to break something from time to time,” he said.
Zubkhov hesitated, then lowered the syringe.
He realized then what he was feeling. It wasn’t pity, not exactly. It was the feeling that they had some sort of bond, him and the Captain. The two of them had been knocked down by the ammo dump blowing up, taken a direct hit from an American cruise missile, and they were both still here. Both of them had been left behind by that bastard Sergeant who had pissed off for Savoonga without a second thought.
They were survivors, the Captain and him.
He dropped the full syringe into a soda bottle with the others then put that into a plastic bag with his gloves and sealed it tight. Then he clapped the Captain on the shoulder, “Back soon, sir.”
Giving his comrades an overdose of NFEPP had been a simple and pragmatic solution to the problem of leaving them behind without anyone to care for them. He wasn’t a monster, he didn’t want them to spend their last days in agony, starving and thirsty and in unbearable pain. It wasn’t a solution he could use for the twenty or so Yup’ik town elders though. He didn’t have enough NFEPP for starters.
So he had taken some of the oral opioids he’d used to sedate the wounded Spetsnaz and mixed them in a saucepan with some melted chocolate he’d scrounged from the ruins of one of the town’s grocery stores. He couldn’t be sure all of the old people would eat the chocolate though, so he had also added the sedative to the huge pot of onion soup he’d cooked up for their lunch.
Outside the school administration building, Zubkhov picked up two jerry cans of diesel that had survived the cruise missiles and walked over to the gymnasium building. Early that morning he’d piled packing crates and wooden building debris around the outside of the sports hall and he started singing to himself as he went around soaking the wood in diesel fuel. The walls of the nearly twenty-year-old gym were wood framed, clad in light aluminum and painted with an oil-based paint so that the paint would flex in the extreme cold. Zubkhov had no doubt it would burn nicely and leave a big smoking wreck that looked just like every other burned building in town.
He dribbled a line of fuel through the dirt to a safe distance and then threw a match on it. The piled-up diesel-soaked wood went up with a whoomph that he could feel against his chest, and in minutes the blaze had really taken hold. Between the chocolate and the soup, he was pretty sure everyone inside would be having a nice nap by now, but just to be sure, he sat on a nearby ATV with his pistol in his lap and waited in case any of the old people ran out.
No one did. He didn’t even hear any cries for help.
He waited until the gym roof collapsed, sending bright orange sparks into the late afternoon air. One more job done. Now he just had to drag his comrades’ bodies into the grave he had dug with a small bobcat he had found and give them a proper Spetsnaz burial – they deserved that, after all – and he was free to start executing his exit plan. It was a very simple plan: find that ‘ghost’ radio handset, deal with whoever was using it, call his buddy in Anadyr, and start a new life as part owner of a fishing trawler.
There was just one problem, bu
t it didn’t trouble Zubkhov. In fact, he was blithely ignoring it.
That offer from Zubkhov’s buddy in Anadyr? That had been eight years ago. The guy had gone broke, sold his trawler, and was a bank clerk in Vladivostok now. Private Zubkhov hadn’t spoken to him for about five years, but in Zubkhov’s shattered mind, it was like it had been yesterday.
Everyone deals with the brutality of war in their own very individual way. Private Zubkhov had seen a man decapitated, a town obliterated, his Captain lobotomized and his fellow soldiers killed and wounded, before being abandoned by his own NCO and the men he had believed were his comrades in arms.
He had dealt with this by going completely and irrevocably insane.
Devlin was also losing her mind. She had warned her colleagues in the State Department that Russia was not interested in Saint Lawrence and polar sea routes, it was going to go after Alaska. They had replied officially with ‘thank you but that doesn’t fit our internal narrative’ and unofficially with ‘Russia is going to attack Alaska? Has McCarthy been hitting the vodka a little too hard?’ Now Russia had attacked ground targets in Alaska, so of course her detractors had come crawling back to her saying ‘we are so sorry Devlin, you were right all along, we were fools not to believe you.’
Like hell they had.
The massive Russian air offensive over Alaska and the fact they were shoring up defenses in Savoonga were being used to further support the theory that Russia intended to permanently occupy Saint Lawrence. The new State narrative went like this: we have entered a cycle of escalation. Russia hit us in Saint Lawrence, so we responded with a massive air and missile attack. Russia cannot withdraw from Saint Lawrence without losing face, so it hits back at the only US facilities in reach - Eielson and Elmendorf-Richardson. In this through-the-looking-glass view, the cyber-attack on the Enterprise was actually taken as further proof Russia was trying to limit the conflict. De-escalation is our best response, said the majority voice in State. No one wants full-scale war. Let them have their little island in the Arctic for now, we’ll leverage the outrage to get concessions in Western Europe and besides, we have bigger problems in the Middle East.
The Russian attack was highlighting how internally divided her administration was. On the one hand, she had her colleagues in the State department preaching de-escalation in the face of massive loss of civilian life and challenges to US air and sea power. On the other hand you had Defense in a rage over the attacks on its air bases and the crippling of its supercarrier and they were in no doubt what was behind that. Air Force had lost personnel in the air over Saint Lawrence and on the ground at Elmendorf-Richardson and Eielson and had been sent packing from the skies over its own territory. The Pentagon didn’t care why Russia was on the offensive, it only cared that it was, and it had no intention of playing some BS Cat and mouse game of airborne ‘tit for tat’. The Defense Secretary had pushed the margins of his power to the limit, moving nuclear first strike resources to within a few hundred kilometers, or a few minutes flying time, of key military targets within Russian territory. Unlike the State Department’s de-escalation proposal, the Pentagon narrative went like this: they took our territory in Bering Strait, they attacked our airfields in Alaska. We need to lay a tactical nuke on the Russian Northern Fleet home base at Sevoromorsk or the Baltic Fleet at Kaliningrad and put Ivan back in his box. De-escalate my ass.
For once, as horrified as she was at the thought of anyone starting a nuclear shooting match, Devlin found herself siding with the hawks in the Pentagon, instead of the doves in her own State Department. And she had heard that the Pentagon point of view was prevailing with the US President, who had refused to take a call from the Russian president after the attacks on Eielson and Elmendorf-Richardson.
Which is why she found herself in a dilemma for her next meeting with the Russians. It wasn’t with Kelnikov this time. The crisis had moved beyond the stage where a lowly Ambassador could get face time with the Russian Foreign Minister, when even heads of State were not talking with each other. In fact, it had moved beyond the stage where she was able to have official contacts of any sort. Instead she had been invited to a back-channel meeting with a Russian industrial magnate, Piotr Khorkina, who was an old school friend of the Russian President’s son. Officially, he was interested to hear if the current military ‘situation’ would pose problems for a multi-billion dollar deal he was about to sign to supply lithium batteries to a US car maker. Unofficially, he had said he also wanted to pass on a message to the US administration from his friends in the Kremlin. She had chosen to receive him in her office at the Chancery and her aide had organized a nice tray of tea and delicacies.
The thing was, Devlin was supposed to pass a message back to the Kremlin from the bureaucrats in State. We will let you pull your aircraft back from Alaska, to the ceasefire zone of control. We will not allow your continued presence on Saint Lawrence, but we would be open to a new Arctic freedom of navigation treaty. This may be your last chance to achieve a negotiated outcome because the hawks in our administration are arguing for a resolution by force of arms.
Devlin had full faith in her bucolic NSA analyst and his eccentric AI. HOLMES had been monitoring Russian military signals traffic and troop movements and had increased his assessment of the likelihood of Russian airborne troops moving on Nome to 99.7%. And knowing what she felt she knew about Russia’s true intentions, the words she was scripted to say were already sticking in her craw. It made no sense to offer to re-establish the ceasefire terms when she knew Russia was already preparing to move ground troops into Alaska.
There was a knock on the door and her assistant showed the man in. He wasn’t your standard oligarch - fat, feted and fetid. He was in his mid-forties, played tennis to keep fit, had a wife, three kids and no mistresses, according to his embassy file.
“Peter, welcome,” she said. “Tea?”
They dealt with the small talk up front. Some days small talk was all she had. Today was not one of those days.
“So, to business … I have to say, the climate at the moment makes it difficult to progress any major business deals,” she said. “As you know, Congress is in emergency session debating sanctions.”
“I understand Devlin,” he said, looking troubled. “We have written off any sales to the USA for this year, and for next year we’ve put in a six-month delay as a downside. But our base case is still that the deal will progress.”
Really? she thought. In your world, war between Russia and the US is a downside? And global nuclear annihilation, is that also a downside? It was clear the US State Department weren’t the only ones out of touch.
“Do you have any special reason to be optimistic?” she asked, giving him an opening to pass on the message from his government.
“Well, you know I have no special information, but people in the circles I move in …” (Such as the President’s family) “…insist this situation can be contained. It’s not like Russia wants a full-scale war with the USA.”
“No? Because it could look like that,” Devlin observed. “When Russia invades our territory, starts an air war and bombs our airfields.”
The man smiled, and brushed an imaginary crumb off his trousers. “You are refreshingly direct as always. Of course, there are different views around who started this shooting match. There are those on our side who would say you sank our freighter, disabled our submarine and then bombed our rescue personnel on Saint Lawrence.”
Ah, to hell with the script, she decided.
“Peter, listen to me, and listen well. Russia may not want full-scale war, but it is about to get it. Your political masters don’t seem to understand that we know what their end game is here. Russia plans to invade Alaska.”
If she expected him to look surprised or confused, she was disappointed. He simply stared back at her and responded, “I was told you would say that. And I understand that you are alone in your State Department in thinking it.”
She scowled, “Do not bet on that.”
>
“I hope to persuade you that war is the last thing we want. I’m told by my contacts in the government that The Barents Arctic Council will propose a demilitarized buffer zone between our two States, given your general belligerence. No military aircraft, no navy ships will be allowed in or near the Strait.”
She laughed, “Seriously? A military no-fly zone over our own State?”
“Initially, yes. And not the whole state, just Western Alaska.”
“Ah. Well that’s alright then,” she said sarcastically.
“Here. I have drawn on a map how I understand the no-fly zone would work.” From his pocket he pulled a folded piece of paper. It hadn’t been drawn, someone had printed it for him. Probably someone in the Russian Foreign Ministry. It showed a map of Alaska with a diagonal line drawn across the middle from top right to bottom left and the proposed ‘buffer zone’ shaded in red. She saw that Nome was inside the zone - Juneau, Fairbanks and Anchorage were not.
Later, looking back, Devlin thought she took it pretty well, considering.
“Have you people lost your goddam minds?” she asked. “How about we create a ‘no-fly zone’ inside Russia, say from Lake Baikal in Siberia to the Pacific Coast, taking in Lavrentiya and oh, say, Anadyr as well? How about that instead?”
“You can keep the printout,” Khorkina said. He wasn’t fazed, “Would you like to consult with your superiors and get back to me, or is ‘have you people lost your goddam minds’ your last word on the matter?”
Devlin collected herself. She would actually land the meeting close to the wording State had given her after all, just not quite with the tone they had probably hoped for.
“No, here is my last word on the matter,” she said, taking up the page he had pushed forward. “I will pass your message on to my ‘superiors’ in State along with this map, but you should tell your friends in the Kremlin that Russia is courting nuclear oblivion. If Russia doesn’t pull back, and immediately, I expect to spend my final hours in the bunker under this building wondering what more I could have done to save the world from atomic annihilation.”