by F X Holden
When he was sure the guy wasn’t coming to confirm his kill - which either made him very cocky, or very careful - Zubkhov let his pistol drop and felt around under his uniform. His shirt was soaked in blood: not good. But he could feel an entry wound at the front of his right shoulder, and a pretty damn huge exit wound at the back, which was where most of the blood was coming from. From a pouch on the leg of his uniform trousers he pulled a small field first-aid pack. Ripping open the foil with one hand and his teeth, he pulled out the sterilized gauze bandage, shoved the wrapping between his teeth, and then jammed the bandage as far into the wound in his back as he could. He had to stifle a scream, but he got a fair wad of gauze in there, and then rolled back onto it to try to keep some pressure on it.
He’d told Sergeant Penkov he was no medic. Zubkhov had basic combat medical training though, so unfortunately he knew enough to realize he was hit pretty good, but his wound wasn’t sucking air, so he hadn’t suffered a punctured lung cavity. Hurt like hell though and it was bleeding pretty good. If the shoulder blade wasn’t broken, the slug had taken a big chunk out of it. He could see blood pulsing out of the entry wound. He fumbled with the first aid pack, trying to find the large plastic adhesive wound patch he knew was in there. Finally his fingers grabbed the thin film and he ripped the back off it with his teeth. Luckily he was one of those semi-neurotic guys who were terrified of battlefield wounds so he shaved his chest, arm and legs to get rid of hair. And yeah, some of the others had given him shit about it, but right now, right now, who was the smart guy huh? Who was laughing now? He laughed out loud.
He realized his mind was wandering. The patch. He pulled the plastic film off the back of it, and slapped it over the entry wound, then remembered something. Something, something. He was doing something wrong. He needed a pressure bandage on there too but was it supposed to go over the patch, or under it? Whatever. He put a wad of gauze over the patch, bound a bandage around his arm and shoulder as best he could with one hand.
Then he just lay back again. No point sticking his head up and flagging to anyone he was still alive.
Actually it was quite nice down here out of the wind. He closed his eyes.
BERSERKER ALGORITHM
Bondarev knew it was going to be an interesting day when the Savoonga tower called him to let him know that General Vitaly Potemkin’s aircraft had entered Saint Lawrence airspace and would be landing in 15 minutes. Unannounced.
Potemkin was the commander of the Central Military District, 2nd Command of Airforce and Air Defense so a courtesy call on a 3rd Air Army unit was not part of his normal remit. Bondarev sincerely hoped it wasn’t the attack on Lavrentiya that had prompted the visit. Although it was the second time American aircraft had gotten through his defenses to hit a mainland Russian target, the actual damage caused by the American attack was inconsequential. Casualties had been light. Materiel losses were replaceable. The crippled Nebo unit had been restored to full capability within hours. It was a pinprick, nothing more.
He realized not everyone in the VVS or back in Moscow would see it that way. Bondarev’s Air Army network had told him the rumor was Potemkin was the one taking over after Lukin’s death. Potemkin had been a junior officer under his grandfather and reported directly to him at one point. But he had served almost his entire career within Russia’s borders and Bondarev knew almost nothing else about him. Once again he found himself walking a tightrope across possibly hostile seas. He could almost hear sharks snapping in dark waters beneath him.
Unlike Lukin, Potemkin did not fly himself around. As Bondarev waited for his Ilyushin 112 to taxi to a stop on the apron outside the old terminal building, he reflected it would be interesting to see who Potemkin had brought in the aircraft with him. A couple of staff lackeys would be normal – a GRU guards unit would not. He held his breath.
As the General and his retinue stepped out of the cabin and down the stairs, he saw someone he recognized. So, the indomitable intelligence officer, Lieutenant Ksenia Butyrskaya had survived the transition from Lukin to Potemkin. But why had he brought her? Bondarev stood with hands behind his back, and waited, his mind racing.
As he stood there, Arsharvin came panting up beside him. He looked at the man, busily adjusting his uniform and trying to catch his breath.
“You need to exercise more,” Bondarev told him, still watching the General dismount with assistance from a ground crew. “You’re getting fat.”
“Easy for you … to say … comrade Major-General,” Arsharvin said. “You aren’t answering your phone. I just sprinted … two kilometers.”
Bondarev patted his pocket; he hadn’t noticed the telephone ringing, but with the ever-present Saint Lawrence wind and the noise of aircraft out on the flight line, that wasn’t surprising. “Why?” he asked.
“We found where the Fantoms are launching from,” Arsharvin said. “Or actually I did, but I bet she’s going to try to take the credit.” He said pointing to Butyrskaya. “That’s why I wanted to get to you first…”
Butyrskaya reached him before the General did, and saluted, “Comrade Major-General,” she said. “I have a gift for you.”
Bunny had flown her remaining Fantom into the maw of the cave and splashed it down onto the Pond. They had secured it to a wrecked handrail and left it there for now. Recovery, refueling and rearming was a time-consuming chore that would have to wait. In the meantime, they had locked another Fantom onto the catapult and had another prepped, queued and ready to go. The BDA from Lavrentiya had showed significant damage to infrastructure, but the airfield was still in operation and they had made no discernible dent in Russian air strength. In a conventional war, it was a target they would be required to go back to again, and again, before it was considered Non Mission Capable – ideally before Russia got another Nemo command and control system in place.
But this was not a conventional war.
It had become clear to Rodriguez their job was only to keep the enemy off balance. To strike them where it hurt, and show them they were vulnerable. In the absence of a major US air counteroffensive, Bunny was providing a taste of their capabilities that should be giving Russian military and political commanders pause for thought. Rodriguez knew they wouldn’t be the only pressure point in play, but she was determined that they would give Russia more than just a headache.
Their new tasking order however, posed more than a few challenges. The first was that NCTAMS-A4 was down to eight fighter aircraft, not including the one floating out on the Pond, and they couldn’t afford to lose another. The second problem was the target they had been assigned.
“Savoonga? No problem,” Bunny said, looking at the intel they had been sent on her tablet. “OK, so the Russians have moved in some heavy anti-air. Another Nebo system, multiple close defense antimissile batteries.” She looked down at the map and printouts on the planning table in the trailer. “And sure, they have two fighter brigades, totaling 60 plus aircraft on station now. Round the clock CAPs protecting the airspace for 200 miles around. That’s all?” she asked ironically.
Rodriguez shoved another of the photos over toward her, “You forgot these.” It was a satellite photo of a formation of ships underway.
Bunny frowned, “Oh, right. Sure, that’s what, a Lider class destroyer?”
“Arrived off the Savoonga coast in the company of two older Sovremenny class destroyers yesterday.”
“S-500 missiles?” Bunny asked, checking what anti-air systems the destroyers were fielding.
Rodriguez read the briefing file, “56 S-500 cells on the Lider, 24 older SAM 7Cs each on the Sovremennys. You know, it’s like they don’t want visitors.”
“I know, right?” Bunny said, pulling at her lip thoughtfully. “I guess the David and Goliath trick won’t work again.”
“You can fool Ivan only once,” Rodriguez said. “Fuel and ordnance is mostly coming in on smaller transports, and there’s a big fuel freighter on the way from Anadyr, should arrive tomorrow.” Rodriguez didn’t m
ention it, but she could see from the source reporting on the intel that at least some of it was coming from a human source. They had a spy on the island feeding them real-time intel on airport traffic? Whoever it was, they had real cojones.
Bunny looked up, “Hit the fuel transports? All those CAPs they’re flying, that’s got to burn a ton of hydrogen. No fuel, no fly.”
“That tanker will basically be sailing under fighter and naval anti-air cover the whole way, we won’t get near it.”
“Try their own strategy on them? Hit them with a slew of cruise missiles, overwhelm the air defenses, we ride in on the slipstream while they’re shocked and confused?”
“I’m told we are on our own with this one, no available support assets.”
Bunny tapped a pen on her teeth. “Cool. Way I like it.” She moved some map printouts around like she was playing with a Rubik’s cube. A long time went past without anyone saying anything. Finally Bunny stepped back from the table, “Shit ma’am. There’s simply no way to get in there with two measly Fantoms. I got nothing.”
“Coffee,” Rodriguez said. “I’m buying. You keep thinking.”
Carl Williams was thinking too. Mostly, he was thinking about imminent global thermonuclear war. He was also thinking about a girl in Idaho called Kylee Lee who he had started building a real relationship with about two years ago. And how Kylee had asked him not to take the posting in Moscow, and to leave the NSA, and just come and do ‘some sort of IT stuff’ in Boise because, that’s what normal couples did. In Kylee’s world, normal couples didn’t just give up everything and move to China and then Russia because their country asked them to, even if they were one of the world’s leading experts in machine learning.
And then he thought how he had asked for some time to think about it and how Kylee had said ‘whatever’ and things had just gone more and more wrong after that and now he found himself in Moscow, still with the NSA, and with no Kylee.
And he couldn’t help thinking how, when you sat here at what might just be the end of the civilization, you realized how freaking dumb you were.
He was still sitting there beating himself up about it when he saw an embassy marine security guard stick his head around his door, “Carl Williams? That you?”
He stuck up a finger, “Present.”
“Can you come with me sir?”, the guard asked.
Carl levered himself up, and followed the marine’s back through a maze of Annex corridors and then up some stairs, leading him into an empty office, “Can you wait here sir?” the man said. The marine was young, maybe 20. Carl found himself hoping the man made it to 21.
“What’s this about?” Carl asked him. “Just curious.”
“I don’t know sir,” the man said, and left him standing there. Carl looked around the office. He was in the commercial section, that much he could guess. Someone’s office, family photos on the wall, a few pictures from European holidays. Brochures from US companies sitting on a small coffee table. OK, no clues here.
A minute later, Devlin McCarthy walked in.
“Hi Carl,” she said simply.
“Hi ma’am,” Carl said. He always felt like he was in the presence of one of his old school teachers when he was with her, and he’d gone to a very strict school.
From the pocket of her jacket, she fished a telephone and held the screen out to face him, “What is this?”
Carl looked and could see it was the list of contact numbers for Yevgeny Bondarev that HOLMES had sent to McCarthy before the lockdown.
“It was just an idea,” Carl admitted. “I thought you might…”
“You seem to know everything before I do, so I guess you know how freaking busy I am right now,” Devlin said. “I can’t even call my own daughter. Why would I call this guy?”
“I didn’t really think,” Carl said, shrugging. “But the guy is leading the Russian air offensive over Alaska. I was thinking what if someone were to call him and warn him that if he doesn’t pull his planes back to the other side of the Bering Strait before three o’clock, we’re going to nuke Kaliningrad?”
“A call from his enemy? If he even picked up, which I doubt, he would hang up in a flash,” Devlin said. “Besides, we’re not going to nuke Kaliningrad,” Devlin said, frowning. She worked on the assumption now that she could share any intelligence she had with Carl, because he had clearances she didn’t even know existed. “But we are going to conduct an above ground nuclear detonation in the Pacific off the Kirin Islands.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“It’s what I’ve been told.”
“And State wouldn’t lie to you.”
“Why would they lie to me?” she asked.
“Oh I don’t know, maybe because if they told you the truth you would tell everyone in the Embassy to take the rest of their lives off, call their mothers or see their priest before the world ended?”
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
Carl laid out HOLMES’ analysis of nuclear submarine movements and signals traffic for her. “It adds up to more than just a test. We are getting ready in case Russia wants to take this all the way. All it would take is a tiny miscalculation.”
She realized he was right. “Dammit Carl!” she said, “What do you think I can do about it?!”
“Call Bondarev, tell him unless he pulls his aircraft back, he’s courting Armageddon.”
“And he’ll take my call because why?”
“Duh. You’re Ambassador to the Russian Federation and grandmother to his child?”
She shook her head. “I can’t. It would be treason.”
“Is there still a death penalty for that?”
“I assume so.”
“Vasily Arkhipov,” Carl replied.
“What?”
“Commander of a Russian missile sub flotilla. Risked a death penalty but single-handedly prevented one of his Captains from firing a nuclear torpedo during the Cuban missile crisis when he refused to authorize the launch. Saved the world, faced a court martial.”
“Is this supposed to encourage me? Because it isn’t working.”
“He was found not guilty, returned to service and eventually received a medal. Posthumous.”
“Still not helping,” Devlin said.
“It’s a phone call! You call the guy, you tell him who you are, maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. Best case, it does, and you go to court. Worst case, global thermonuclear Armageddon!”
“I’m going to call an officer of the Russian Air Force currently on frontline duty and somehow sweet talk him into surrendering because of some fling he had with my daughter two years ago and a child he probably doesn’t even know he has,” she said.
“No, of course not, but it might mean he’d take your call. And if you tell him the consequences are global thermonuclear Armageddon?” Carl pointed out. “Maybe he’s another Arkhipov.”
She thought about it.
“Every word I say on my phone, anything on any Embassy line, is monitored. Can you set it up through HOLMES? If we do this I can’t waste time leaving messages on his cell or with his damn secretary. I need to know I’ll get through.”
“If he’s contactable, we can get the guy on the line,” he said.
She paused, “I can’t believe I’m about to give our war plan to our enemy,” she said.
“If it helps,” he said. “Blame me later. I’ll blame it on HOLMES.”
She was still holding up her phone and a tinny British voice interrupted them, “I heard that Carl.”
The smell hit Perri before he saw the first body. He’d seen dead Russian soldiers through the scope of his rifle lying on the streets of Gambell after the attack there, but not decomposed like this. It wasn’t actually a body, it was a leg, buried under some rubble, that he assumed belonged to a body somewhere. This body must have been too hard for the surviving soldiers to recover, so they had been forced to leave it there and had just covered it with a tarpaulin. In the middle of the compound they fou
nd what looked like a mass grave, with smaller graves beside it. The smaller graves had small wooden crosses with a double horizontal bar on them and Russian names written in the middle. Most of these had small metal dog tags with rounded corners and Dave cupped one in his hand, reading it. It had a bunch of letters across the top, and numbers underneath. He dropped it and looked across the burial site.
“If these smaller ones are military graves, what are those big ones?” he asked, pointing to two long scars in the earth, each about a hundred feet long, with soil two feet high heaped on top.
“I have a bad feeling those are … non-military,” Perri said, unable to say what he was really thinking.
“It’s like they were dug with an earth mover,” Dave said, looking up and down the rows of earth. “They just piled the bodies in there, and pushed the dirt on top?” He started walking along the grave, and saw a sneaker toe sticking out. He pulled at it, and it came free. It looked like a child’s size. A bit further down, he bent down and picked up a telephone with a busted screen. He tried to turn it on, but it was dead. All along the graves were other small items - a plastic bead necklace, a single walrus ivory earring, a man’s jacket turned inside out, a bloodied shirt. “Who did this?” Dave asked.
Perri’s face showed nothing, “Does it matter? Russia, America … neither of them gives a damn about us man. Come on…” he pulled at Dave’s sleeve.
Dave jerked away, “It matters. These are our people!”
Perri pointed at the Russian graves, “And those are theirs.”
Beyond the graves, Perri saw what looked like a water tower that had somehow survived the bombing. It was about ten feet high, and sitting on four wooden legs, one of which was shattered. The round water tank on its platform had been perforated a hundred places and the water inside had long ago emptied itself out. But climbing up the ladder on the side, Perri pulled aside the manhole on top and saw that they could both fit through it and get inside.