Bering Strait

by F X Holden

  Bunny collected herself too. She was totally hyped but she had to channel full focus. She had just flown two Fantoms along the northeast coast of Russia, literally. So close to where the sand and gravel met the icy sea that she could have told you where the good beaches were, in case you wanted to buy real estate for the coming climate-change boom. Then she had pushed her Fantoms down a frozen river valley, across rolling hills and mountains and just about clipped a cliff face as she wheeled her drones east up the Anadyr River toward the Anadyr airport at Ugolny. She had picked up the air traffic control radar signature of Anadyr, but hadn’t been locked up by a single military search radar along the way. Of course she couldn’t rule out that she’d been spotted by satellite infrared or motion detection but no fighters appeared to have been vectored to intercept her.

  Through the low def forward scanning wide-angle camera on the Fantom, sending its feed up to one of the only functional air force satellites over the Operations Area, the river below was a 660 mph blur of brown water and grey gravel. Occasionally her machines flashed over a small leisure or fishing boat, but she had to figure it wasn’t too likely they were patched into the Russian military command network.

  As she got within 50 miles of Anadyr, she started picking up the skeleton fingers of a search radar brushing across the skin of her drones every 20-30 seconds. It was like the touch of a creepy guy at a Christmas party. It slid across her sensors and then was gone again. But like at a Christmas party, the only touch you cared about was the one where solid contact was made, a true butt cheek clutch. So far, the search radar was in the annoying but not lethal range. Which is what she had planned for. If she was a Russian anti-air battery commander set up to defend a forward air base against the USA she’d have 90% of her energy pointed north, east and south - facing the enemy - and configured to look for cruise missiles first and foremost. Anything to the west, any threat coming from their rear quadrant would get lower priority.

  She hoped.

  She only had two shots on goal. Four, technically, but she had set the two bombs in each drone to release in salvo, so as soon as they had punched the ‘mini-moabs’ out of their guts they were done, there would be no go-around.

  “Starting ingress,” Bunny told Rodriguez. It was a courtesy. Rodriguez could follow the mission on a tactical 2D screen over Bunny’s head, but with it just being the two of them under the Rock now, Bunny felt the need to share.

  “They aren’t smelling you?” Rodriguez asked, rolling her shoulders and massaging the back of her own neck.

  “No ma’am,” Bunny said. “I am chamomile and roses right now.”

  Sure enough, as soon as Bunny spoke, a red alarm started flashing on her heads-up display.

  “Damn. I’m picking up radiation in the higher-frequency C, X and Ku bands. I think they’ve got a DS-500 system pointed at us.”

  “Which means?”

  “Means they have a low 30% chance of seeing us with this attack profile,” Bunny said. “And I’m already low and slow - if I got any lower, I’d be sucking river water.”

  “Long way to go to get swiped out of the sky,” Rodriguez commented.

  “Swiped my ass,” Bunny said. “I’ve got a 70% chance of getting through any S-500 without even needing to jam, and I’ll take them odds.”

  Rodriguez knew better than to bet against the aviator who had laid a hurt on Eielson by faking the flight profile of a civilian light aircraft. She watched intently as Bunny flew her two Fantoms within minutes of the Russian base.

  “Five minutes to release,” the pilot said. Rodriguez saw that the newly dyed black stubble at her neck under her virtual-reality helmet glistened with sweat.

  “SAM radar alert,” Rodriguez warned, seeing Bunny’s threat screen flash.

  “No lock,” Bunny replied tersely. “Three minutes.”

  Bunny was a good pilot, but she knew her limits. With only simulated real-time vision and an input lag of a half second, for the last two minutes flying into an uber-hot target zone there was no human who could fly it better than the combat AI with its instantaneous reactions. She punched a last command through to her Fantoms and lifted her hands into the air, “I’m out!” she called.

  They both watched as a large airfield appeared in the split screw view of the forward nose cameras of the two Fantoms. Anadyr was made up of two long parallel runways, late summer grass and half melted snow between them. One of the Fantoms broke slightly left, the other slightly right. Their targets were the stationary aircraft and related command and control facilities. Bunny was counting down under her breath, “Three, two, one, release…”

  The last thing they saw was a couple of parked aircraft on one screen, and on the other, a control tower; behind it several other aircraft and what looked like a container park. One of the drones dropped its bombs and made a kamikaze dive straight at the parked aircraft, the other did the same and made straight for the control tower.

  In what was an inevitable anticlimax after such a tense mission, both of the screens in front of Bunny O’Hare flashed momentarily white, and then went completely blank.

  “Holy hell’s bloody bells,” Bunny said, her hands still in the air where she had left them when she took her hands off the controls. “I think we actually did it!”

  But she didn’t celebrate, not yet. Their primary objective had been to catch as many Russian fighters on the ground at Ugolny as possible. But it seemed to Bunny, for a forward airfield it had contained a heck of a lot of trucks and containers, and not a heck of a lot of Russian aircraft.

  Strange though, one of the fighters parked on the airfield had been painted bright red.

  The briefing room for the 573rd Air Brigade was in the basement of the control tower building at Ugolny airbase, Anadyr. It had been a combined civilian and military air base before the war had started, and CO of the 573rd, Major-General Artem Kokorin, had commandeered the baggage tracking center in the lower level of the control tower building for his operations facility. There was of course a perfectly functional operations room on the military section of Ugolny field, but the reality was that the former civilian facility, having long ago been privatized, had far superior comms links than his long underfunded military infrastructure. It also had the advantage of being two levels below ground, with multiple exits to the surface, so it was also better protected than the military command center up on the ground floor of the control tower.

  Nevertheless he looked around at the peeled-paint walls and cursed. It was bad enough his group had been pulled out of their base at Khabarovsk to support LOSOS – an operation he didn’t fully grasp the political logic of – 2,500 miles here in the northeast. He had protested that it had left Russia without ground attack aircraft in the critical Sea of Japan border area. He had protested even louder when he had learned his regiment was to be made subordinate to Bondarev’s 6983rd. The man was a commander of fighters, with only one of his five squadrons made up of attack aircraft, whereas Kokorin led a dedicated ground attack unit comprising both Okhotnik drones and rotary winged close air support aircraft.

  The reason he had been given for the fact his machines and men had been put under the nominal command of the CO of the 6983rd, was because he might be asked to commit his aircraft to an air-air defense role over Saint Lawrence if heavy fighter losses were sustained over Alaska. It was a role for which his machines were not suited, and his men not adequately trained.

  Now that he had been repositioned to Anadyr, within range of Saint Lawrence, he should be getting ready to react to any attempt by US naval or airborne forces to retake the island and flying sorties over the island terrain to familiarize his men. Instead, he had been ordered to drill them in air-air combat. He had dispersed his aircraft and their maintenance techs to nearby roads and freeways but he was deeply uncomfortable that all of his pilots had been collocated at the same airfield. He had been told there was no excess capacity at Lavrentiya, and no other facility that could service his 50 crews and provide them with the b
andwidth and electricity they required to function. It made a mockery of the ability to disperse his force and protect it from attack with his pilots crammed onto a single airfield, but he had been reassured by Bondarev that the risk of attack this far behind the air front was less than none. In the event of a cruise missile strike, he would have warning enough to get his men to safety.

  Maybe, unless the Americans decided the situation warranted hypersonic missiles, he had mused uselessly.

  And now he had Lukin dropping in. A snap inspection by General Lukin would normally have had him in a panic, but this time he had welcomed the news. No, of course the 573rd wasn’t at full readiness yet. He had just settled in all of his pilots and systems officers. He had one-third of his Okhotniks still in maintenance in hangars at Ugolny, with only two-thirds deployed to Savoonga and combat ready. But his men had done an admirable job getting their drone command trailers off the IL-77 transports, sited and linked into the base network. In anticipation of the General’s arrival, he had ordered all pilots to their stations, either running simulations or commanding the squadron of 16 operational Okhotniks he had scrambled. He had put them in the air over Ugolny a half hour in advance of the General’s arrival, patrolling overhead to give Lukin something to look at as they made their circuits, landed and were recovered. No, he wasn’t fully ready but the inspection would give him the chance to make his concerns clear to the General again.

  On top of everything, he had just learned that Bondarev was crashing the party! Damn him. He must have people inside Lukin’s staff keeping him informed. To make things worse, Bondarev had contrived to arrive about twenty minutes before the General, so Kokorin had lost the chance to put his views to Lukin in private.

  Despite being theoretically of equal rank, and with a longer service record, Kokorin had no illusions about who was the senior officer as Bondarev walked into the briefing room in his flight suit. Even without his dress uniform and service medals, the son of the hero of the Russian Federation reeked of privilege and that most critical of all attributes – political momentum.

  As he reached out his hand to greet his fellow officer and girded himself for the meeting ahead he saw Bondarev hesitate and frown, looking up at the ceiling as a jet aircraft boomed low overhead, the noise penetrating even to their position two floors underground.

  “Your men need not show off for my benefit Kokorin,” Bondarev said.

  Kokorin frowned too, “That was not one of mine.”

  Only one of Bunny’s Fantoms delivered its bombs with total accuracy – the other missed by more than 100 yards. The deviation was significant. The first Fantom dropped its two bombs right on target on the apron of the long concrete runway right near the maintenance hangars where three Okhotniks were parked on alert status, ready to give a demonstration to the General of how quickly they could get airborne. Two more were in the process of being refueled. Another three were in the hangars having engines and electronic systems maintained, but unknown to US planners, most had already been moved or were on their way to Savoonga. The air blast bombs from the first Fantom detonated together 50 feet above the hangar complex and the blast wave spread out over a radius of about a mile. Anything and anyone inside a few hundred yards was vaporized. Anything from 500 to 1,000 yards was atomized. Everything from 1,000 to 1,500 yards was pulverized. Everything flammable was set on fire. In the space of a millisecond the eight drones and their support personnel were no more. Bunny’s first drone added its fuel and momentum to the chaos as the pressure wave from its own bomb flung it into the maintenance complex and it detonated.

  The second strike however missed its target. An extremely unfortunate observer, in their last few seconds of life, might have seen the approach of the Fantom. If they had, they would have seen two fat cylinders at the end of tiny parachutes tumble end over end out of the Fantom’s weapons bay just as it swept across the egg blue and yellow striped administration buildings at Anadyr. One of the cylinders floated briefly down right in the middle of the road between two large apartment buildings commandeered for military personnel. As it reached fourth floor level, it detonated. Every window in the street was blown in and the buildings, which had been made to withstand arctic storms but not the thunderous pressure wave of a mini-MOAB, collapsed instantly; killing nearly all of those inside.

  The other bomb completely missed the administration complex which was its target and landed in the field beyond.

  A field that normally would have been empty except for the hulks of a dozen abandoned cold war Su-15 Flagon interceptors deemed too far gone to salvage when they were decommissioned in 1993. A week ago however, these had been towed aside and piled together in a corner of the field, while the cleared space was turned into a parking lot for the 24 drone command trailers of the Okhotnik pilots and systems officers of 573rd Air Brigade. Plus a centrally located commissary wagon serving coffee, tea, hot soup and bread.

  The timeline Bondarev had been given for LOSOS didn’t allow for optimal dispersion of the Okhotnik crews. The trailers holding the precious pilots, whose aircraft were now flying out of Savoonga, had been camouflaged and hidden among rusted shipping containers - so that the park looked like it had gone from a dumping ground for obsolete aircraft to a dumping ground for empty containers. They had been spread as widely as practical, but so many trailers and crew drew down a lot of power and needed hard wired data links so that they didn’t fill the sky with radio energy, and give themselves away that way.

  The camouflage was ingenious, and the trailers hadn’t been spotted by ANR’s strike planners. But camouflage was no defense against an errant MOAB.

  The parachute on the last of Bunny’s mini-mothers deployed a half second late, it overshot, and then detonated right on top of the commissary in the middle of the drone trailer park.

  And in its last act, the Fantom that delivered the weapons zoomed into the sky, onto its back, and then speared back down on full afterburner toward the small control tower at the side of the air base.

  It impacted at the base of the tower, two floors above Major-Generals Artem Kokorin and Yevgeny Bondarev. And, as he walked toward the control tower building pulling off his flight gloves, right beside Lieutenant General Yuri Lukin, who had stopped to watch in horror as the fireball of the first strike, across the airfield, lit up the sky and rolled toward him. He was dead before the thunder of its detonation even reached his ears.

  SUPREMACY

  The building above Bondarev and Kokorin collapsed as the pressure wave from the ‘mini-mother’ exploding above them flattened it like a boot landing on a house of cards. However the command and control complex was in a concrete and rebar reinforced basement two floors under the ground, and luckily the bomb that hit them was an airburst, not a bunker buster, or the Major-Generals would have suddenly and violently lost all personal interest in the future conduct of the war.

  Their comms to the outside were not however completely cut, and once emergency crews had restored power, Bondarev managed to direct help to their location and get them shifting rubble and bodies so that they could be dug out.

  He emerged after four hours to learn that the runway at Ugolny Air Field had survived the American attack completely unscathed. Using massive ordnance air blast munitions indicated the Americans hadn’t intended to shut the air base down, even though they had flattened some above ground infrastructure. As long as the paved runways were intact, mobile air traffic control, radar and communications could easily fill the gap. And most of the Okhotniks that were airborne at the time of the attack thanks to Lukin’s impending inspection also came through unscathed. Lacking command inputs from the ground, they had reverted to AI control, maintained a safe separation and kept circling until they were low on fuel before calmly landing themselves and taxiing to preassigned holding positions.

  The lack of material damage was not relevant. The use of air blast munitions, coupled with the targets of the attack – the hangars, administration buildings, accommodation block and the d
rone trailer park – indicated that the US attack had the inhuman intent of achieving the maximum possible loss of life. And among those lost was the commander of the 3rd Air and Air Defense Forces, Lieutenant General Yuri Lukin.

  It was hard not to conclude that the US airstrike, carried out as it had been by what seemed to be two stealth drones sent on a one-way mission, was a straightforward assassination attempt. Arsharvin had told him it was being treated as such, and there would be brutal repercussions for anyone found to have been careless regarding Lukin’s schedule. Bondarev could only imagine what machinations were going on back in Khabarovsk and throughout the VVS as other officers jockeyed to replace the dead Lukin as commander of the 3rd Air Army.

  To Bondarev, the loss of a good commander like Lukin was tragic, but the politics were a sideshow and no one was irreplaceable. What was especially problematic was the strike on his drone crews. Among the 225 Russian armed forces personnel who died or were seriously wounded in the attack, were all 54 primary and reserve aviators and systems officers of the 573rd Air Base Hunter regiment.

  His stomach churned and he resisted the urge to vomit. He also had to resist the thought, the primal urge, that was telling him he should step outside the ambulance in which he was lying, ask someone there for a sidearm, and shoot himself in the head. It was a number he simply couldn’t comprehend. Had any Russian officer since the second world war lost two hundred and twenty-five lives in a single attack?

  Yevgeny Bondarev suddenly grabbed his shirt, tore it open and howled in mortal pain at the ceiling of the ambulance.