Bering Strait

by F X Holden

  “Yes ma’am!” Bunny said. “Freaking genius or what? At best we lay some hurt on Lavrentiya airbase and if we include a couple of Cudas in the loadout, at worst we can take down a White Whale.”

  Rodriguez swung her bare legs out of the bed and reached for her flight suit. It was a little like the play they had used with success at Eielson, Bunny sneaking into missile range dressed as a light aircraft; the kind of play only Bunny O’Hare could have thought of. “Don’t get ahead of yourself O’Hare,” Rodriguez said. “You can't pilot manually at that range so you have to come up with an AI kludge that will glue your Fantoms to one of those Ilyushins and keep them right where they need to be. You also have to sneak through a swarm of Russian fighters. And I still have to convince CNAF and ANR this screwy idea is worth them committing a couple hundred million worth of hardware to!”

  BARE BONES KICK ASSERY

  “These photos are from the attack on Lavrentiya, you say?” Bondarev said, reviewing the report Arsharvin had just put on his desk. He had moved his 4th and 5th fighter regiments to the former US airfield at Savoonga to free up facilities at Lavrentiya for his heavy airlift and 6983rd Okhotnik ground attack aircraft. Both were equidistant from Nome, but Lavrentiya was his best-protected airfield, with standing fighter patrols and heavy ground-air missile defenses.

  Wary of being buried alive again, Bondarev had put his new operations center on the ground floor of the modern Hogarth Kingeekuk Memorial School in the Savoonga township. With fast communication links and its own wind turbines supplying power, plus a field medical clinic already set up inside to treat the local townsfolk, it made a surprisingly suitable headquarters.

  Ordinarily he’d say it was also an advantage that the 200 remaining townspeople of Savoonga were being held in the school meeting hall ‘for their own safety’, as it should dissuade the US from attacking the school for fear of killing their own citizens. But they had already shown a callous disregard for such humanitarian considerations.

  “Yes. The photos show wreckage recovered off the coast from American drones downed by the Nebo-M array attached to the 140th anti-air, before the Americans could get their missiles away,” Arsharvin said. He didn’t sound happy, because he knew his commander wouldn’t be.

  Bondarev glowered, “More of your damn ‘mobile Fantom units’? You still can’t find the trucks they’re launching off?”

  “Analysis of the wreckage confirms they were Fantoms,” Arsharvin said. “But they weren’t truck launched.”

  “What the hell? The enemy has an operational airfield somewhere in this theatre and we can’t find it?”

  Arsharvin had a photograph on his tablet, and he pulled it up, pinched to expand it and showed it to Bondarev, “We’ve solved the mystery. They aren’t flying them off the ground.”

  “What is this?” Bondarev peered at what looked like a bent ski attached to a piece of aircraft fuselage.

  “Landing ski floats,” Arsharvin said. “This is an F-47 variant we haven’t seen before. Some sort of top-secret prototype I imagine.”

  “A sea-plane?” Bondarev frowned. “The Americans haven’t fielded a combat version of a seaplane since… when?”

  “The 1950s, the Martin P6M Sea Master,” Arsharvin said, having expected the question. “But it makes sense, yes? You could launch it off just about any ship the size of destroyer or bigger, land it alongside when it returned and recover it by crane. They’re already doing it with recon drones – this gives them a strike or air defense capability, extends a ship’s eyes, ears and teeth by hundreds of miles. You don’t need static airfields, or a big carrier to fly them off – the smallest guided missile destroyer could carry it. Same concept as putting them on trucks, just sea-borne.”

  Bondarev had to reluctantly give his enemy credit. They were a generation ahead of his own country not only in the capabilities of their drones, but also in their application.

  “Very well. Find me the damn ships these things are launching off,” Bondarev said. “Compared to finding a few trucks hidden in the Alaskan wilderness, finding a ship launching drones in the open sea south of here has to be easy, right comrade Intelligence Chief?”

  Arsharvin gave a wan smile, “If you say so, Comrade Major-General.” He stumped out the door again.

  Bondarev called out to his retreating back, “And attack options! I need a way to disable or sink that damn ship without starting world war three!” He swung around in his chair and looked out of the window as one of the ubiquitous local four-wheel electric bikes that had been commandeered by his security group hummed past. They were slowly getting Savoonga airfield organized for the upcoming operation to land troops in Nome. The American cruise missile attack had devastated its long-range radar facility, no doubt because they were worried about what Russia could learn from it after it had fallen so easily and so intact into their hands. It was a state of the art long-range early warning facility, with radar arrays dotting the hills of Saint Lawrence all the way down the spine of the island to the site of the old North-East Cape base it had abandoned nearly half a century earlier. With the improvements in communications achieved in the intervening years, the Americans now no longer had to have their command and control facility located right next to their radar arrays, so they had chosen to build up the airfield at Savoonga and create a small base comprising about 50 personnel just outside of the new village.

  The base had given a big boost to the island’s economy, provided civilian jobs and made a posting to Saint Lawrence a little less like a prison sentence than it had been when the facility had been located hundreds of miles to the south-east. The USAF 712th Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron had been recommissioned under NORAD, a strike hardened cantonment was built, with the command center and personnel barracks inside. New businesses and infrastructure sprung up in Savoonga to service the small air force detachment - a bar, a supermarket, a new school with fast satellite internet links and even a new hotel to serve the needs of families flying in to visit the personnel stationed there. Savoonga had pulled younger people from Gambell, which is why there were more than 500 residents there when the Russian airborne troops arrived.

  And why the most secure facility in the area to hold the residents had been the Savoonga cantonment, which US forces hit with enough high explosive to decimate the facility. And a large proportion of the personnel in it, including their own troops, who they knew would be there. And the civilians, who they claimed they didn’t.

  Bondarev couldn’t imagine what the scene had looked like as the Russian troops who were left unscathed at the Savoonga airport had made their way into the ruins of the cantonment. They were only able to recover about 200 of 500 civilians alive, 15 with serious wounds and five with minor wounds. Since then five more had died. The Russian airborne commander had estimated nearly 600 dead including civilians, his own, and US troops caught inside the cantonment. Bondarev shuddered at the thought. The Americans had been lucky at Gambell that they had not hit the civilians there too. What sort of nation was it that would treat its own people with such callous disregard?

  One to be feared, Yevgeny.

  And yet their air forces were happy skulking down south, leaving their population in Alaska at the mercy of Bondarev and his pilots. They couldn’t know he wasn’t interested in attacking their population centers, and had been reading reports of the National Guard ground forces in Fairbanks, Anchorage and Juneau hastily building defenses against a Russian ground attack that would never come. Bragging in fact about the fact they had downed several Russian aircraft, trying to bolster morale, when in fact Bondarev wasn’t even flying missions over populated and defended areas like Fairbanks, Juneau or Anchorage. His only interest was to keep the western Alaska skies clear of US fighters and attack aircraft, not to terrorize the local population.

  Let them pile their sandbags as high as they wanted, let their SAM sites ring their cities. Right now, there was only one threat to his dominance of the skies over Alaska and that was these damn p
inprick attacks by sea-launched Fantoms. Anadyr had cost him both in men and material, and serious political capital. The Kremlin didn’t seem to care about the numerous US probing attacks he had stopped in the south and east and they were ignorant of the strike on Lavrentiya that had been thwarted. All that seemed to matter to them was that the Americans had gotten through at Anadyr and that had been enough to cause political knees to further weaken.

  The Americans had been lucky once, and not since and he intended for it to stay that way.

  All he had to do was hold them back for another two days. Looking out the window he couldn’t help a small swell of pride at the activity he saw. These were his forces, these aircraft, these men and women.

  With the death of General Lukin he had lost a patron, but he had not been relieved from his position, yet. Gathered at Savoonga and Lavrentiya under his command now were more than 150 aircraft of the Russian 3rd Air and Air Defense Forces Command of the Eastern Military District. In Lavrentiya, and dispersed through nearby towns, were nearly 10,000 airborne and special forces troops, and the material needed to support the operation to take Nome.

  He realized he shouldn’t let the pinprick attacks of the American drones bother him. A major air or ship-launched cruise missile strike was a greater threat and the one which his 14th Air Defense battalion at Lavrentiya was in place to prevent. Then there was the overhanging risk of a tactical nuclear strike against a target either in the Operations Area, or against an unrelated target on the Russian mainland. The US had the assets in place to effect it, and Bondarev had the strike on Anadyr and the command vacuum it created to thank for the fact he was able to convince his superiors they should move on Nome as quickly as possible before it came. They may not care about the lives of a few hundred citizens on Saint Lawrence, but with the 4,000 citizens of Nome under Russian control, the US would have to start negotiating.

  When the war had been about sea commerce, his attitude had been cynically professional. But now he knew he was fighting for the very survival of his nation, the fight had become personal.

  The call from the State Secretary showed he was still an old-fashioned Southern gentleman, in the best sense of the concept. Devlin had always known that he would never break good or bad news to her in a communique or text. It always came in person. So when she was told to expect a call from the Secretary in ten minutes, she knew it would be one or the other - either very good, or very bad news.

  She paced her office nervously, ordering her assistant to stop anyone else from coming in or calling in, no matter how urgent they insisted it was. She knew she wouldn’t be able to concentrate on a single thing until the call was out of the way, and any decision she made while distracted like this would be totally random.

  Her mind raced. She was being recalled, that was one possibility. Perhaps Foreign Minister Kelnikov had complained one too many times about the directness of her language and approach, and had demanded she be called home. Or her own people had turned on her, called her out for running her own foreign policy agenda independent of State. That much was true - they had been pursuing a pointless appeasement agenda while she had been dealing with the reality of imminent invasion and trying to persuade her Russian contacts that the consequences of going down that path would be catastrophic.

  And then there was this whole business of the Russian commander of the 6983rd Air Brigade being the father of her grandchild. She had not called her daughter about it. Like, how was that phone call supposed to go? Oh, hello darling, yes fine thanks, tell me, did you have a child with the man who is leading the war against the USA? No, but she was convinced HOLMES’ discovery would not remain confidential. Whether or not it had already been leaked by him or Williams, it would be leaked, inevitably. That’s what this call must be. The Secretary would be nice about it, but he would expect her to understand they couldn’t have someone in Moscow representing US interests who had such an obvious personal conflict.

  When it came, the ringing of her encrypted comms unit nearly made her jump out of her skin. She took a big breath and lifted the handset.

  “McCarthy,” she said.

  “Devlin, this is Gerard Winburg, how are you holding up?”

  “Fine thank you Mr. Secretary, what’s up?” she asked, and in the background she could hear the sort of burble of conversation that indicated to her that Winburg was in a room full of people.

  “I have to keep this short Devlin, I’m sorry. It turns out you were right. I have to advise you our satellites are showing a huge amount of air and ground traffic indicating military mobilization in the Russian Far East. We estimate at least one airborne division. Russia has now moved considerable air power onto Saint Lawrence in what we assume is preparation for a major airborne landing and offensive. The President is about to go public with this information and a warning to Russia to withdraw from Saint Lawrence and cease its military build-up in the Bering Strait, or there will be ‘catastrophic consequences’.” He paused, “Between you and me, the President has asked the Secretary of Defense to draw up plans to conduct a demonstration of a nuclear-armed hypersonic cruise missile over the Pacific Ocean, east of the Russian Kuril Islands. He wants it ready to execute in 23 hours.”

  The world fell out from underneath Devlin. She’d had her own theories about the way the political winds were blowing, but she’d hoped she was wrong. “An atmospheric nuclear test off the coast of Russia?”

  “Yup, and they should be thankful we’re just vaporizing a few billion tons of seawater and fish. The President thinks Russia needs reminding why it should stay the hell out of Alaska.”

  “My God…” she had no idea what to say. “What do you need from me?”

  “Real-time readout on reactions. I’ll get back to you with exact timing when I have it, but I want your people face to face with Russian key stakeholders when the news of the test drops. I want you getting their unfiltered reaction and then feed it with a single message; that we will use the nuclear option if they escalate further.”

  “We’ll do our best here Mr. Secretary,” she said.

  “I know it. In the meantime, get onto all of our so-called NATO ‘allies’. Tell them now is the time for them to shit or get off the pot. We are calling in our markers and if they are on the wrong side of the next vote in the UN Security Council or General Assembly - and neutral is the wrong side - there will be hell to pay for them too!”

  Bunny had checked the weather, and calculated the best IL-77 flight for their shadow play would arrive at the top of its glide path over the Bering Strait south-west of the Rock at 0630 the day after she dragged Rodriguez out of bed. That gave them the night and most of the morning to prep two Fantoms with ground to air ordnance and get them in the air and on station in time for the low-level game of shadow puppets.

  The Fantom didn’t have passive detection systems like many Russian fighter aircraft, but NORAD had managed to get two new satellites on station over the Operations Area, and one of them was National Reconnaissance Satellite L-70, launched in 2022 with the specific mission of tracking Russian and Chinese military aircraft in real time through their digital, infrared and visual signatures. Satellite L-70 could track up to 100 individual targets at any one time, and by AI interpolation, could predict the flight path of 1,000 different objects simultaneously.

  For the mission that had been assigned to NCTAMS-A4, satellite L-70 dedicated a small part of its considerable attention span to one aircraft, an Ilyushin IL-77 ‘White Whale’ flight out of Murmansk it designed as ‘flight IL-203’. It was tracking all IL-77 flights out of Murmansk, and tracked flight IL-203 in real time as the aircraft made its way across northern Russia. About halfway through the flight, the AI monitoring L-70 calculated a 73% probability, based on signals intelligence and the aircraft flight path, that it was headed for Lavrentiya, and it alerted ANR, which alerted NCTAMS-A4, or to be specific, Lieutenant Commander Alicia Rodriguez.

  “You have a ‘White Whale’ incoming,” Rodriguez told Bunny as her fi
ngers tapped her touchscreen. “I’m patching the flightpath through now, plus coordinates for intercept.”

  “Roger that ma’am,” Bunny said, voice tight. If she was tired, then like Rodriguez, she wasn’t feeling it right now. “I’ll be on them like a leech.”

  “You mean remora,” Rodriguez told her.

  “Sorry ma’am?” Bunny frowned, head lost in her multiple screens.

  “Remoras attach themselves to whales,” Rodriguez told her. “Leeches attach themselves to mammals.”

  Bunny didn’t break her stride, just shot back at Rodriguez, “Isn’t a whale a mammal, ma’am?”

  “Land mammals then. You ever hear of a leech attaching itself to a whale Lieutenant?”

  “No ma’am. Would I be correct in guessing the Air Boss is a little tense right now?” she asked, without looking over.

  “Yes O’Hare,” Rodriguez told her. “Yes you would.”

  “Chill, ma’am,” Bunny said. “I have a vector to the target. Uh, eight minutes to intercept. Entering Nebo low band range in ten.”

  On a big screen in the middle of Bunny’s weapons and navigation system HUDs, Rodriguez was watching as the icon for the Russian transport plane appeared on the screen and began to track toward Bunny’s two Joint Air-Ground Missile JAGM armed Fantoms. She had managed to flit above the wave tops over the Strait without being detected by Russian land, air or satellite-based systems so far, but the same threat vectors applied to this mission as previously. She could be spotted by any random Russian fighter flight that happened to look in her direction and get a lock, and within 30 miles of Lavrentiya, she was at the mercy of the Nebo-M array which had so easily batted her out of the sky last time.