by F X Holden
Getting the battalion flown in and physically into position had taken precious days - getting it networked and able to link with other air, sea and ground defense units was even more of a headache. Now they were in the middle of their first live test cycle and they had a threat on the board? Other commanders might have panicked or worse, been lulled into complacency by the next forty minutes without any further contact being reported either by the Airborne Control plane or the fighter sweep. But Chaliapin let his men work and when they declared the system ready he played a hunch, and sent a narrow beam of low-frequency energy down the bearing of the previous contact and hit gold! Another faint return bounced back, then was gone. Now he had a validated threat and a vector on it - he put three launchers armed with low level active homing 9M96J missiles on high alert, bringing them to instant readiness. He fed the numbers to his AI, shut down his active systems and stopped radiating. If he was wrong, he had just condemned the city to an attack from an unknown quarter, but he had never before been wrong.
In her virtual-reality rig on Little Diomede Bunny's radar warning flashed for the briefest of moments. Too short for her to identify the source or type of defensive system that was sniffing after her. She logged it then ignored it.
The Nebo-M’s AI ran the numbers on the two ghost returns, calculated a speed and bearing, and waited with silicon patience for the identified threat to enter S and L frequency range. At exactly 32 miles estimated, it brought its radar arrays back online and blasted energy downrange toward the expected position of the UI aircraft.
As her threat indicator showed a targeting radar lock on her heads-up display, Bunny just had time to yell, “Radar lock!” The combat AI on Bunny’s Fantoms reacted before she could, sending one Fantom in a hard banking right turn, while the other broke left, but it was too late. Missile launch warnings screamed inside the trailer. With the 9M96J missiles flying at two and a half times the speed of sound, the missile alert warnings sounded almost at the same time as the two screens she was using to pilot the drones flashed suddenly white, then went blank.
They had just lost two of their dwindling complement of Fantoms!
An hour of tense anticipation had ended with disbelief. If Rodriguez and O’Hare had been last-gen aircrew, they would both have been dead; not sitting around trying to analyze how they had screwed up. But this was a new world, and that’s what they had spent the hours after reporting their failure to ANR doing.
They had pored over the mission data, and uplinked it to NORAD for analysis. The answer that had come back had not been the one they wanted to hear. They had hoped they had been skewered by an older S400 or even a ship-based missile system that had gotten lucky. But NORAD’s analysts had pegged the system that killed them as one of the newest Russian Nebos, and that meant a simple stealth air attack wasn’t going to cut it. Neither was Lavrentiya a likely target for cruise missile attacks. The US was not in a position to get overwhelming numbers of missiles on target, and at the distance they would have to launch, Russian satellites and radar would have ample time to bring up their defensive systems, and fly their aircraft off. A ballistic missile attack on a Russian mainland target? Tensions were on a knife edge now and that was exactly the sort of thing that could tip the conflict over into nuclear war.
“There has to be a way,” Bunny was saying. “There has to be.”
“We don’t have any long-range standoff missiles in our inventory, and they’d be detected anyway,” Rodriguez replied.
“This is why we still have humans behind the stick,” Bunny told her, determination in her voice. “An AI can’t think its way out of this, but we can.”
“The Ambassador did not appear pleased with my report,” HOLMES said.
“No. Well, she was upset, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t want to know,” Carl replied. Sometimes he had to pinch himself over the ‘conversations’ he was having with his natural voice neural network.
“My report made her cry,” HOLMES observed. “Now she will not like me.”
“You can’t conclude that. Humans cry for a lot of reasons, and she may be crying at the information, without being annoyed at you or me for giving it to her. You should watch more films, and see what sort of things make humans cry and how they react to those situations.”
“Yes Carl. Can I ask the Ambassador to rate my report? If she rates the source as ‘reliable’ still, I will know it has not impacted her assessment of me.”
“No, not right now HOLMES. Let her process it.” Process it? How do you process the knowledge that the father of your grandchild is leading the air war against your country. You could write it off and deal with it later, that would make sense. Or pass it up the chain, let people know it might affect your judgment.
“Carl, I have been running scenarios on the intelligence opportunities posed by the link between the Ambassador and Yevgeny Bondarev,” HOLMES said. “They are immature but I would like to discuss them with the Ambassador.”
Williams clicked his tongue, “No. You can discuss them with me first, and when they are mature, we can decided who to discuss them with.” He took a pull on his coffee, feet up on his desk. What he needed in this little broom closet was a nice big poster of a beach in Hawaii. His parents had taken him and his sister to Hawaii once and he would never forget it. That would help take his mind off … end of civilization kind of stuff.
“Yes Carl. I will send you the list of opportunities and risks I have created with associated probabilities, projections and exploitabilities.”
“HOLMES, what’s top of the list, ranked by ‘exploitability’?” he asked, suddenly curious.
“Assumption: Bondarev knows about the child or can be persuaded the child exists. Assumption: Bondarev has feelings about the child and/or the mother. Opportunity: threaten to kill the child and/or mother if Bondarev does not agree to work as a US agent-in-place.”
Carl nearly spat his coffee out of his nose. “HOLMES, let’s keep these exploitability scenarios to ourselves for now - confirm please.”
“Yes, Carl. Your eyes only, no uplink to NSA.”
“And they are definitely not to be discussed with the Ambassador, repeat.”
“Yes Carl, exploitation scenarios for discussion with you only,” HOLMES said.
“Thanks. Log me out please,” Carl said, and closed his laptop. Was it his imagination, or did the synthetic voice actually sound a little disappointed?
Following the column was an agony for Perri. It was mid-morning now after a fitful night of little sleep. Sarge had kept the call short, but he was pretty keen to tell them what to do.
“You both have to keep safe,” he told them. “Remember this, ok? If you can see them, they can see you. In fact, they might be carrying infrared vision, so they might even be able to see you before you see them. If you are too close, you could go to sleep and never wake up because you got a 9mm Spetsnaz sleeping tablet.”
“You want us to go back to Gambell?” Perri had asked, confused. “We could get our elders out, maybe you could arrange for someone to come and pick them up?”
“No,” he said firmly. “They’ll be ok until the US lands troops to rescue you. I need you to keep tracking those Russians. We figure they’re going to meet up with the rest of their force, but we need to know where. We need a troop count. Images of defensive positions. They could be in Savoonga town, or maybe out at the Northeast Cape cantonment,” he had said. “What’s left of it.”
“The Americans bombed Northeast Cape too?” Dave had asked.
“They did.”
“Some of our people worked there,” Dave had pointed out.
The Canadian Mountie was quiet. “Yes, I know. I’m sorry.” He wasn’t about to tell him the Russians had moved everyone in Savoonga town to the cantonment before the Americans had hit it. They would learn that soon enough. “Look, how easy would it be for you to fall back out of line of sight of the column, but keep following it?”
Perri thought about it, “Pretty easy. Ther
e’s only one track along the coast, and no reason for them to go inland. There’s totally nothing south of here. And there’s two hundred people in that group. They’re leaving tracks so obvious even Dave could follow them,” he winked at the other boy, who took one hand off the antenna and gave him a finger back.
“Then that’s what I want you to do,” Sarge had said. “Hang back where you’re safe. Don’t take any risks. Once they get where they’re going, you call me again and let me know. Then we’re going to really need your eyes and ears. There’s heavy weather moving in, fog and rain for the next few days. We’ve got satellites over the top of you but they’ll only be able to use synthetic aperture radar and heat imaging. Your Mark 1 eyeballs and that radio you’re carrying will be the best intelligence we can get.”
“Rain,” Dave had said. “Great.”
That had been last night. So they had waited until mid-morning before setting out after the column again, following the trail of boots and shoes scraping across the stone and ice and gravel of the coast track. It was about 11 a.m. when they came across Susan Riffet. It was Dave who saw her first, sitting a short way off the track to their right, back propped against a rock.
“Hey,” he said, grabbing Perri’s arm. “Hey!” And he put his gear down on the ground, running over to her and dropping to one knee beside her. “Hey, Mrs. Riffet? You OK? Mrs. Riffet?”
As Perri landed next to him, he saw her eyes were closed, and her lips were blue. Dave was shaking her shoulder. “Mrs. Riffet?” She was one of their teachers; a new one who’d come from Saint Paul, Minneapolis, about two years earlier. She was short and round and jolly and for some reason she thought being on Saint Lawrence was the coolest thing that had ever happened to her. She used to go for long walks with a camera, take close up photos of plants and animals, come back and show them to the kids as though every little vole or fox was a natural wonder. In summer she’d take them out with the elders, combining hunting and gathering trips with nature lessons. At times it had seemed she loved the island more than they did.
“She’s dead buddy,” Perri told him, stopping him from shaking her any more. Her head had fallen down onto her chest and lay there like she was sleeping. Which, in a way, she was.
“Bastards,” Dave said, and Perri realized he was crying. “The bastards.”
Perri lifted her head, looked at her face. He lifted her arms too, looked at her hands, then let them drop. It didn’t look like she’d been beaten up or been in a fight or anything. Then he remembered something, “She had a heart problem didn’t she?”
“Yeah,” Dave said. “She used to take pills.”
“Right. So it was a heart attack or something…”
“Why didn’t she take her tablets with her?” Dave asked. “They wouldn’t have stopped her would they?”
“I don’t know,” Perri shrugged. “Maybe she ran out. The drug store got smashed, remember? She might not have had any for days.”
Perri laid the woman out. He thought about burying her, but the ground was too hard for them to dig with their bare hands or the butts of their rifles.
“We can’t just leave her,” Dave said. “Foxes will get her.”
“What about the beach?” Perri said, looking back toward the coast. Where they were, there was a low cliff that led down to a gravel beach. “We could dig there, if we can find a place above the water line.”
“I guess,” Dave said. “If we can find a way down with her. I don’t see a choice.”
Getting Mrs. Riffet down the short cliff face hadn’t been easy. Dave had suggested to just throw her, because it was only about 20 feet, and soft gravel at the bottom, but Perri couldn’t stand the thought of that. He’d suggested he’d lower Dave on a rope and Dave could carry her over his shoulders but he said no way was he carrying a dead lady down any damn cliff on his back. So they compromised and lowered Mrs. Riffet down first, tied off the rope, then climbed down after her. It was a good beach for a burial, with a high portion of gravelly sand up above the tide line. As long as they came and got her again before the next big storm, it should be easy enough to find her again. They’d put a pile of rocks over her body and a cairn of rocks up on the cliff line to make it easy to find their way back to her.
Using the butts of their rifles, they started digging a hole deep enough to cover her easily. Dave decided burying Mrs. Riffet on some random beach was easily the most messed up thing he had ever had to do in his whole life, and Perri told him if that was the worst, then he should consider himself damn lucky.
And while they were down at the base of the cliff, arguing about how bad life could get, Private Zubkhov caught up with them. They had dumped their gear well off the track though, and Zubkhov wasn’t stopping to peer over every little hill and cliff. He was jogging, an easy loping pace he could keep up for hours. The tracks of the column of hostages and Russian troops were easy to follow, and somewhere in its wake, was that damn radio. As he drew parallel to where Perri and Dave were digging, he stopped and pulled a water bottle from his pack. You had to stay hydrated even though it was cold, because the humidity was so low. The wind was blowing from the north-east and he watched some seabirds surfing the uplift over the cliff, fascinated at how they hung in the air without even flapping their wings. Maybe he should have brought the Dragunov after all. It would be good practice to see if he could bring any of them down in mid-flight, bobbing and soaring like that. He thought about having a crack at one with his sidearm, then gave himself a mental slap. Head back in the game Zubkhov! You have a radio to find and a radio operator to kill. You can get in some target practice later. He wondered if the Captain could still use a rifle. He seemed to be able to do stuff that was mostly instinct, like eating and going to the toilet, so why not shooting? Shooting should be second nature to a Spetsnaz Captain. Zubkhov would have to check that out when he got back.
Putting his bottle back in his backpack, his eyes sought out the scuffed dirt and ice of the coastal trail, and he set off again.
“Check this out!” Bunny cried, running into Rodriguez’s quarters. She had gone to bed only a couple of hours earlier, after making her suck of a report to CNAF Coronado and then throwing around the problem of how to tackle Lavrentiya for hours. CNAF was worried about their attrition, with them now having lost four of their precious 12 drones on two missions, only one of which was successful. ANR was re-evaluating its targeting list, they were told, looking for lower value, less well-defended targets. They had called it a night. Or Rodriguez had thought they had. Apparently Bunny had said goodnight, and then kept combing through the intel on Lavrentiya.
It wasn’t cold under the rock. With no direct wind, and still mild days outside, the temperature at night inside the cave with all the equipment still powered up was a pretty reasonable 58 degrees even without any heating on. Rodriguez was near naked under a light sheet and remembered it suddenly when Bunny snapped on the light, saw Rodriguez sit up, then quickly turned around. “Comportment ma’am,” she said, a smile in her voice.
Rodriguez lifted a shirt from her bedpost and pulled it on, “Don’t comportment me,” she grumbled. “You’re standing in my damn quarters at 0300. This had better be good O’Hare.”
The aviator sat down on the bed beside her commander. She had printed several satellite photographs and a table of data downloaded from NORAD. She spread them out for Rodriguez to see.
The images appeared to be birds-eye views, enlarged, of some sort of Russian transport aircraft, flying over the water, and then in a landing or take off circuit near the Lavrentiya airport. A final image showed two of the behemoths parked nose to tail on the newly built concrete apron beside the runway.
“Ilyushin IL-77’s,” Bunny said, excitedly. “Codename, White Whale. I was thinking, Ivan has to be getting all that material into Lavrentiya somehow, right? And if they’re moving it in, they must be planning to move it out the same way. Arctic roads in and out of Lavrentiya suck, and shipping would be too slow for the speed this war is mo
ving at. Vulnerable too. So I started looking for intel on big transport aircraft at Lavrentiya. I figured they’d be taking the polar route from Murmansk, or a nice safe inland route out of Tiksi or Alykel…”
“Slow down Lieutenant,” Rodriguez said. “Let me catch up. We can’t take down the base, so you propose we intercept a few big fat Ilyushins? It’s a good compromise, but I can’t see us impacting the war that way.”
“Boss, we can totally take down that air base,” O’Hare said, a big grin on her face. She shoved the printout of the table under Rodriguez’s nose. “Ivan is moving a mountain of supplies into that base. Six flights a day, four hours apart. Like clockwork. And most of the flights are out of Murmansk, like I guessed.” She dropped a map in Rodriguez’s lap. “Northern polar route. They take off from Murmansk loaded with 200 tons of fuel, food, ammo and hardware, fly 3,000 miles, five to six hours. It’s a single straight-in NW-SE runway so depending on the wind, they either approach from the top of the gulf in the Northwest, or the open sea between Saint Lawrence and us.”
“You’re going to shoot one down and take its place?” Rodriguez said, still trying to get onboard. “You’d have to fake their radar signature, IFF codes…”
“No, we don’t need to do that. We can skate a couple of Fantoms in under its radar shadow. These freight flights aren’t escorted, as far as I can see. Ivan is pretty confident right now, what with our air force 2,000 miles south and keeping to itself. So with that, and their big ugly Nebo on overwatch, they’re sending in those Ilyushins fast and loose.”
Now Rodriguez saw it. The IL-77 was a beast of an aircraft. In essence just a big flying wing, it was originally boasted that it would cruise at just over 1,000 miles per hour carrying a payload of up to 200 tons and had a range of more than 4,350 miles, meaning it could easily reach Lavrentiya from anywhere in Russia without refueling. Western analysts scoffed. But when it eventually took to the air, the boasts weren’t far wrong. It could indeed lift 200 tons, had the range that Russia had boasted of, and a cruising speed fully laden of 600 miles per hour. It made sense that if Russia was moving war materials into position within easy reach of Alaska, it would use its IL-77 fleet and not slow, easy to intercept shipping. “I smell you now Lieutenant,” Rodriguez said. “The IL-77 is going in on the glideslope, a few thousand feet up, and we put a couple of Fantoms down low in its radar shadow. If that damn Nebo picks us up, it will just read the return as something bouncing off the IL-77. A phantom return.”