Bering Strait

by F X Holden

  Dave was moaning again about the pain in his shoulders from carrying their radio, but he wasn’t getting much sympathy from Perri. They’d managed to catch the column of hostages because it wasn’t traveling as fast as them. Sure, there weren’t any old or infirm hostages among the prisoners, but there were some pretty young children and people couldn’t carry them on their backs the whole way.

  Now a chill night had fallen and Dave and Perri had found the column easily, because it was winding its way along the ‘coast track’, the barely traveled west-east coastal path that led from Gambell to Savoonga along the cliffs and rocky beaches of the serrated northern shore. As the day had worn on and the route the column was taking became more obvious, Perri had to admit Dave was right. They were headed for Savoonga. He could only assume it wasn’t hit as hard as Gambell had been and the Russian survivors from the Gambell attack had decided to link up with their buddies in Savoonga.

  As they had coasted a rise, Dave and Perri had been forced to drop to a crouch as they saw the circle of prisoners about a mile ahead, huddled around a couple of lamps. Somewhere in there were Perri and Dave’s mothers, fathers and brothers. There was no fuel for them to start any sort of fire, so they were pressed together in a circle like Emperor penguins, using their body heat to keep each other warm, with the kids in the middle of the press. It was a survival tactic as old as time, and though the temp wouldn’t drop much below freezing tonight, it was just a good idea to keep your body heat up and stay out of the drying wind. People who died of exposure often died of dehydration as much as they died of the cold. Every hour the people at the outside of the circle would hand over their blankets and sleeping bags, move into the center, and a new group would take their place on the outer circle. Perri figured that with about two hundred people in the huddle, that meant most would get five or six hours of nice warm sleep.

  Which was more than he and Dave would get in their crappy little sleeping bags on the rocky ground.

  They couldn’t turn on a lamp or even shine a torchlight, or they’d risk giving themselves away to the troops in the distance, so Perri had to fumble his way to getting power to their radio and tuning it so that they could fang the receiver in Gambell and get a signal through to Sarge. While he worked in his sleeping bag in the dark, Dave stood up in his sleeping bag, holding their makeshift antenna aloft until they got a lock on the Russian base unit in Gambell.

  “Perri calling Sarge, do you read me? Hello? Perri calling Sarge.”

  The Mountie had told them he would be sleeping by the radio and waiting for their call, and he was true to his word. Perri only had to call three times before he got a bleary voice on the other end.

  “Sarge here Perri, just wait, OK? Out.”

  “OK, Perri … um … waiting,” he said, shrugging to himself.

  He didn’t have to wait more than about twenty seconds before the Sergeant came back on the line. “Perri, hey. Are you guys OK?”

  Sarge had taught them how to use a ‘duress signal’ in case they were captured and the Russians forced them to make contact. If they were safe, they should reply, ‘We are just fine Sarge.’ And if they were not, they should say ‘Couldn’t be better.’

  “We’re just fine Sarge,” Perri said. “We caught up with the Russian troops and the people from Gambell. We figure they’re headed for Savoonga.”

  “They’re walking them out?”

  “Yeah, they made about 12 miles today. Savoonga will take them another three or four days.”

  “OK, look, Perri, the Russians are moving some heavy hardware into Savoonga and you are our best chance to get some up close and personal intel on exactly what they’re doing there. Are you safe where you are, can you talk for a few minutes?”

  Perri looked up at his friend, “Dave’s arms might fall off if he has to hold the antenna in the air too long, but yeah, shoot.”

  The Secretary of State had to listen to Devlin once she scanned the map that Piotr Khorkina had given her and uploaded it. To make sure it didn’t risk getting stranded on some analysts’ desk she took the Secretary at his word and called him directly on his cell. Even he had to admit the map clearly showed that the Russians planned to cauterize Western Alaska, separate it from the rest of the USA, at least by air, and this supported by the ridiculous fiction of establishing a ‘demilitarized zone’ to protect the shipping in the Bering Strait and the scared and huddled masses of the Russian Far East (all 290,000 of them) from the rampaging bald eagle across the ditch.

  He also had to listen to her when HOLMES was able to show through accessing Moscow traffic CCTV systems that the car driving the rather handsome oligarch who had been the government’s intermediary had traveled directly from inside the Kremlin to the gates of the US Embassy compound, without even a minor detour. It removed the likelihood that he had come up with the map himself in a fit of geopolitical creativity.

  And if there was a single doubter left in Washington after those two little snippets of intel, they couldn’t keep faith in their misguided de-escalation fantasy after Carl Williams’ highly motivated AI was able to pull down an intercept of the Russian Foreign Minister, Kelnikov, travelling with an unknown Foreign Service employee on a car trip to the Bolshoi Ballet the previous evening. Devlin had asked Williams and HOLMES to keep her apprised if there were any intelligence reports appearing on his radar involving Kelnikov, and they had struck gold.

  The conversation had been captured using a Type 4193 Bruel and Kjaer software enhanced infrasound microphone mounted on a French intelligence microdrone paralleling the ring road beside him. The little microdrone was a bug in all senses of the word. About the size of a finch, it used pressure-field measurement to read the conversation in the car by picking up passenger side window vibrations, digitally filtered in post-processing for the rumble of the road. And it went a little like this:

  Kelnikov: (Translator Comment (TC): indistinguishable, could be cursing) be there? And we are sure of his vote?

  Unidentified Male (UIM) 1: He will support you.

  Kelnikov: This is slipping out of control. That (expletive) submarine. Now that (expletive) woman is threatening nuclear war.

  UIM 1: The Minister of Defense says this is the moment in which we will either secure the future of the Rodina, or we will throw it away.

  Kelnikov: Burkhin is a fool.

  UIM 1: I am not qualified to say.

  Kelnikov: Then you are a fool. Did you read that situation report? An entire ground attack squadron out of action?

  UIM 1: We still have the resources of the 4th, 5th and 7th Air regiments.

  Kelnikov: I told Lukin it was folly to trust the air war to the same man who had his ass handed to him by the Americans over that shitty island.

  UIM 1: We have air superiority over the operations area. The loss of the Okhotnik regiment was a temporary setback. The LOSOS landing at Nome is still on schedule.

  Kelnikov: On schedule? The Americans are building an air armada south of Canada where we cannot reach them, and they will reach out and swat us like bugs when they are good and ready.

  UIM 1: Let them hide behind the Rocky Mountains. Nome is ours Minister.

  Kelnikov: Driver! Pull this heap over. Get this idiot out of my car.

  UIM 1: Minister! I…

  (TC: Sound of car doors opening and closing and more cursing from Kelnikov. Silence until end of journey.)

  The conversation told Devlin a lot, and it had sealed the deal in Washington too. It told her the Russian council of ministers was split. Kelnikov, it seemed, was afraid the Americans were about to tip the conflict over into nuclear war. Devlin was afraid of this herself. She didn’t know what submarine Kelnikov was talking about, but it made sense to her the Pentagon would be preparing for the worst and positioning its stealth submarines within first strike range of Russia. The conversation also told her that there had been a major US attack on Russian air assets and it had shaken their confidence. Finally, the French intel had shown the NSA and thus the w
hole of the US military intelligence apparatus that the next target for a Russian ground operation would be Nome.

  There were of course things which Carl Williams wouldn’t, or couldn’t, tell Ambassador Devlin McCarthy.

  The first was that it seemed his AI had fallen completely and totally head over silicon heels in love with her. Or what passed for love to HOLMES. One of Willams’ breakthrough coding efforts had been to program HOLMES to experience ‘pleasure’ and to seek it out. He had defined pleasure for the AI as the ability to satisfy the intelligence needs of individuals of high rank, and of course he had weighted the various bureaucratic positions in the US government to ensure HOLMES knew who outranked who. Their satisfaction was measured by the number of times one of his reports was cited or forwarded by them. It was a simple algorithm and HOLMES had taken it to his silicon heart. Williams had programmed HOLMES to derive intrinsic ‘pleasure’ from providing intel perceived of value to high ranked individuals. Few individuals came with a weighting as high as the US Ambassador to Russia.

  The conflict was this. One of the only individuals in HOLMES universe who currently had a higher status rank than Ambassador McCarthy, was the head of the NSA, Levy Cohen. But Cohen was a cheer leader for the ‘de-escalation’ strategy. HOLMES derived little or no pleasure from providing reports which were routed to Cohen because he saw they were always ‘qualified’ by other analysts and assigned a low ‘truth and reliability’ rating. HOLMES was finding himself outplayed by the human analysts in the NSA who also derived their pleasure from satisfying individuals of high rank but who were much more sophisticated than HOLMES in realizing that success was driven by feeding Walters with the intel that supported his worldview, and discounting the intel which did not.

  In the face of this dichotomy - a first ranked stakeholder who showed no interest in his intel, and a second rank stakeholder who accepted and championed his analyses - HOLMES made the very rational and almost human decision to down-prioritize data requested by the NSA, and focus on the intel requests of Ambassador Devlin McCarthy.

  Williams saw this happening, and was powerless to interfere. And he was caught in a catch 22. He could of course at any time rewrite the code and pull HOLMES back into line. But he was seeing his AI behave with a level of intuition and sheer bloody-minded genius that had him gasping with exhilaration. Common to many successful artists was that they had a muse - a huge, heartbreaking love that inspired them to greatness.

  Fifty-four-year-old Devlin McCarthy was serving as five-year-old HOLMES’ muse. And it was a relationship Williams was not inclined to disrupt.

  Carl was sleeping in his broom cupboard in the New Annex, with his head in the crook of his arm. It was good, solid sleep and he deserved it to not be interrupted. Therefore, of course, it was.

  The small rippling alarm was both soothing and irritating; designed by HOLMES to wake him gently, but insistently. Without raising his head he hit the space bar on his laptop to wake it, and mumbled into his arm, “This had better be on the scale of imminent global thermonuclear war.”

  “Hello Carl,” HOLMES said. “I need to speak with Ambassador Devlin and she is not answering her telephone.”

  He didn’t lift his head. “What is the time?”

  “Three a.m.”

  “That is why she is not answering her telephone HOLMES.”

  “Yes, but I need to speak with her.”

  “No. And besides, you shouldn’t be calling the Ambassador on her direct line. That’s not protocol, my man. You go through me.”

  “In war, protocol goes down the toilet,” HOLMES quoted.

  “Is that so?”

  “According to former five-star general and Secretary of State, Colin Powell, yes.”

  Williams sighed. “HOLMES, she is sleeping, like other normal people. What do you want me to do?”

  “I need you to go to her residence and wake her,” HOLMES said. His calm British voice radiated patience.

  “Spaso House is five blocks from here. She might not be there. That’s probably why you couldn’t reach her. People do strange shit at the end of the world. She’s probably out bonking her fitness instructor.”

  “She is in bed at Spaso House. She uses a sleep tracking app with inbuilt GPS locator and it is currently reporting that she is in a deep sleep cycle which is why I cannot wake her.”

  “You hacked her fitness bracelet. That is beyond creepy HOLMES.”

  “Will you wake her?”

  “Give me one reason why I should,” Williams demanded.

  There was a millisecond pause, and Williams knew it was because HOLMES was thinking, in his quantum-core brain, oooooh, should I tell him? Apparently the answer was yes.

  “I need you to wake her so that I can tell her I have identified the Russian air force officer who is leading the offensive against US forces in Alaska.”

  Carl shifted his head to be more comfortable, “So what, he’s probably put it on his online CV already. ‘June to December, leader of air offensive against USA.’”

  “The leader of the Russian air offensive, Major-General Yevgeny Bondarev, is the father of her grandchild,” HOLMES said. “Will you wake her now?”

  Private Zubkhov had a grandmother. She was a lovely, wrinkled old woman who lived behind a church in Irkutsk. She had an apple tree in her backyard and made the best apple pie you ever ate in your damn life, and it was so simple. You took the apples, and you peeled them, then you stewed them in sugar and cinnamon water. When they were soft you mashed them and ladled them into a baking dish. Over the mashed apples you spooned a thick layer of oats, and more cinnamon sugar. Into the oven, and bake for 30 minutes until the oats had soaked up the juice of the apples and turned crisp on top. Oh, but you weren’t finished. You took it out of the oven, and across the top of the crisp oats you spooned thickened whipped cream. And on top of the whipped cream, a sprinkling of almond flakes. Soaked in orange liquor.

  On top of all the other surprises in that baking dish, it was the orange liquor almonds floating on the whipped cream which turned it from an ordinary apple crumble into a work of culinary art.

  He had been thinking about that pie as he said goodbye to the old people in the school buildings. They didn’t know he was saying goodbye of course. They thought he was giving out their rations, and although a few of them had acted like they were suspicious, most of them had reacted with muted delight when he had handed out the big blocks of chocolate alongside the soup.

  He liked the thought that the old people had gone to their next life with the taste of chocolate on their tongues.

  Once he had dragged the bodies of the Russian wounded outside and covered them up with the bobcat, he had retired to his office. From a pill bottle on his desk, he tipped out two sleeping tablets and drank them down, with a glass of water. Leaned his chair back and put his feet up on his desk. He needed to sleep. Tomorrow he had to get a read on that second radio, try to work out where it was. He had a pretty good idea it was that damn American soldier using it, but he had to find him first.

  And as the pills kicked in, he played a mind game, and gave his report to Sergeant Penkov up there somewhere on the coast. He imagined Penkov asking him for an update on the wounded and Zubkhov telling him (truthfully, if not in a complete way) that one of the wounded had died.

  “Who?” the NCO would ask, like he cared.

  Hmmm, who? Zubkhov thought to himself. A name came to him, “Kirrilov, the boy with the sheared off toes and heel.”

  “How did he die?” Penkov would ask. “He was the least wounded of them all.”

  “I don’t know,” Zubkhov would lie. “Infection?” Or perhaps he died from an overdose of painkillers. An unfortunate mistake but after all, he wasn’t a trained medic.

  “Your job was to keep those men alive, private!” the Sergeant would say. “If you see infection, clean it and make sure the men are taking their antibiotics and antibacterials. We left most of the medical supplies with you.”

  Most, right.
Thanks so much. “Yes sir!” he would say earnestly. “I will not lose another!”

  “You had better not, or I’ll have your balls.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “We are making good time. The locals say we are four days from Savoonga. I will call again tomorrow at this time. I will need to get instructions from whoever is in command once we reach Savoonga. Keep this channel open,” the Sergeant would tell him.

  “Yes sir.”

  “The civilian hostages?”

  “I gave them chocolate sir,” he would say.

  “What?”

  “I found some chocolate, so I gave them that, with their rations.”

  “OK, well, that’s OK I guess. I’m signing off now. Keep the base station online and stay on top of those wounded Private, Penkov out.”

  “Yes sir, out.”

  Not that he could give the man a report, as he had left him without any way to communicate. But as he played the conversation through in his head, there was a beep from the base station and he looked at the rangefinder screen. It was showing two handsets now, both at a range of about 20km, one of which was probably the column of troops and townspeople. He tried to zoom the display, see if he could separate the two signals.

  Yes! That goddamn ghost radio!

  It was showing bright and clear on the rangefinder, but now it was almost right on top of Penkov’s field radio. He stared at the two dots for five minutes, but they stayed right next to each other.

  Until the ghost blip winked out and was gone again.

  So, the American was following the column? Private Zubkhov loved it when a plan came together!

  He wearily clicked the base station to standby.

  Sleep. It had been A Big Day.

  In the morning, he would gather supplies and ammunition. Catch up to that column, find that ghost and deal with him, get the radio handset off him then call Anadyr. He’d be back in Gambell before his buddy arrived to pick him up. With luck, the Captain wouldn’t go more than a day without a meal. Let the US send its black clad assassins to Gambell to try to take it back. All they would find would be charcoal, ashes and graves.