Bering Strait

by F X Holden

  Igor Tzubya heard the alert and saw eight missiles on his heads-up display threat display, four vectored on him. His AI wrenched his machine into a tight banking turn, firing chaff and flares automatically.

  But Tzubya took his hands from his stick and throttle and closed his eyes. He knew Death had finally come for him. Goddamn robots.

  With her Fantoms out of Russian missile range and on their way to Nome, Bunny ran from the trailer, “Ground attack aircraft inbound!!” she yelled. Rodriguez looked over from the flight deck. “We have about five minutes!” She ran up beside Rodriguez and grabbed her arm. “Forget that!”

  Rodriguez did the math. Five minutes until the Russian attack aircraft were in position to launch missiles at the cave. One minute for their missiles to run. That was six. But it would take her two to boot the Fantom, two to run the emergency take-off routine, two to spool up the Scimitar engines, one to launch.

  They were out of time.

  Bondarev looked over the sea to the south and watched in anger as the last of his Migs was skewered by several missiles at once. The Mig-41 disintegrated instantly, scattering into a thousand parts, several of which were his pilot. Further out, a formation of US Fantoms wheeled in the sky and headed northeast.

  They were withdrawing?

  Despair turned to hope and he stood and cheered as nine Sukhois in tight formation appeared on the horizon, with no sign of pursuit. In seconds they were flashing overhead. Which meant his Okhotniks must be…

  Sure enough, moving in just above sea level, he spotted a flock of small dark delta shapes spearing in toward Little Diomede. If he had a radio he would have yelled at them to divide their fire between the cave mouth and the small window in the rock high and to the left. But some well-placed munitions in the maw of the cave might be enough.

  Sitting in their trailers in Anadyr, the pilots and systems operators of the Okhotniks had AI enhanced, HD magnified, simulated real-time vision of the cliff face ahead. They had lost true real-time control of their drones when they lost their airborne control link but the remaining satellite links were good enough for them to identify the low mouth of the cave as a cold dark smudge above the water, and place the targeting crosshairs of their KH-31F missiles right in the middle of it. To do it they had to designate the target manually, because it was actually an absence of something, not an object in itself. But with no enemy aircraft to worry about, it didn’t matter that they didn’t have real-time control of their drones.

  A further complication was that the half to one second of lag caused by sending their targeting commands via satellite meant a difference between what their pilots were seeing as the aircraft position and status, and what its real position and status was. To allow for that margin of error, they had committed more than the usual number of aircraft to the attack and the Okhotnik drivers were taking no chances they would miss. They let the drones close to two miles out before Bondarev saw the tell-tale flash under their bellies as missiles dropped out of their weapon bays. Lines of smoke traced a path from the aircraft toward the island. Despite himself, he crouched lower. He tried quickly to count the contrails but they were moving too fast. As they disappeared from view under the lip of the cliff he lowered his head to his arm and waited.

  In fact there were six missiles tracking toward the mouth of the cave.

  Targeting a post-box shaped slit just above the water was no easy feat even for a missile with a trimode target seeker, when the pilot firing them was giving his orders from a hundred and fifty miles away in Lavrentiya, a full second into the past. One malfunctioned when its stub wings did not properly open and curved wide. Two hit the water a few hundred yards out. One smashed into ice overhanging the cave mouth and another slammed into the cliff beside the Slot.

  But one missile flew straight into the opening of the cave, and straight toward the dock under the Rock.

  NCTAMS-A4 was designed to take a punch in the guts from a Russian cruise missile or torpedo and stay operational. The cave opening led to the Pond and the hardened concrete walls of the dock beyond. The ‘flight deck’ was set off to the left behind blast deflectors, so unless a missile could stop in mid-air and turn ninety degrees left, it would slam into the dock at the end of the Pond and any explosion would dissipate among the infrastructure of the dock which was largely made up of personnel ready rooms, the lower galley and the heads. Fittings, cranes and loading gear were replaceable. The command trailer was set up high, with its own blast deflecting armor. The single missile that made it into the cave slammed into the back of the dock at two and a half times the speed of sound.

  The blast from its 90kg high explosive warhead struck the already canted dock crane and cracked the concrete and wood dock fairings, while the pressure wave shattered the windows of the crew quarters, mess and ready rooms, sending glass, metal and rock flying around the cavernous space like a thousand small arrows. If Bunny and Rodriguez had been standing in the open, they would have been flayed alive.

  But as soon as Bunny had screamed about the Okhotniks to Rodriguez, she had jumped from behind her console, grabbed Bunny around the neck and pushed her toward the iron door leading to the loading mechanism for the flight deck, barreling in behind the pilot and pulling the heavy blast door shut behind her.

  The designers of NCTAMS-A4 had calculated the base should be able to remain drone launch-capable through such a strike. But they hadn’t planned for the roof of the cave above the Pond to be laced with demolition munitions when it got hit.

  Even though they had been manually disarmed by Bunny and Rodriguez, the charges were still buried in the roof, positioned to bring it down on top of the dock and block the cave mouth. While it didn’t penetrate the cave, the missile that had struck the ice at the cave mouth detonated with enough force to trigger a sudden and catastrophic ripple of blasts, from the mouth of the cave inward towards the dock as the demolition munitions exploded, dropping tons of concrete and rock into the Pond. The mouth of the cave had received special attention and the ring of charges there collapsed the mouth of the cave so thoroughly that within seconds it was completely sealed.

  Not a chink of light shone through.

  Bondarev could hear the detonations below him, but if he expected the Rock to shake and tremble with their force he was mistaken. Little Diomede Island had towered over the Arctic seas for tens of thousands of years and seen two ice ages come and go - despite the outrages visited on it today, it would stand ten thousand more.

  He lifted his head and looked up again. The battle for the airspace above him was over. He saw his Sukhois make another pass over him and then sweep up into a steep climbing turn. He jumped up from the hole he had been crouched in, and over to where he had left his parachute rolled into a ball, weighted down by rocks. He unfurled it and spread it out, using the rocks to hold down the edges. Then he stood in the middle of it, and waved.

  A Sukhoi circling overhead broke away, and dropped low. As it passed, the pilot lowered a wing and Bondarev saw him clearly, waving from his cockpit to show he’d been seen. Bondarev watched as the fighter pulled around and made another pass, slower and lower this time. As he dropped his wing this time, Bondarev thought he saw the pilot hold up his fist and flash five fingers, twice.

  Ten minutes, the pilot was saying.

  Bondarev waved back to show he understood, and sat down on his chute.

  The Spetsnaz quadrotor was on its way.

  When the cacophony of sound on the other side of the door finally stopped, Bunny and Rodriguez tried the hydraulically operated blast door. It was jammed, the mechanism probably warped by the pressure waves from the blasts.

  “No effing way,” Bunny cursed, trying the door again. They could hear bolts sliding back, could hear the hydraulic system whirring, but the blast door stayed obstinately, firmly and depressingly shut.

  They had an exit – out through the tool room to the hangar level elevator shaft – but that only let down deeper under the Rock, not outside. Power to the base ha
d not been lost - the reactor was of course not vulnerable to anything less than a nuke going off inside the base.

  Rodriguez patted the door, “Well I think it is safe to assume this place is a high degree of screwed,” Rodriguez observed.

  “So are we ma’am,” Bunny added, nodding at the jammed blast door. “If that’s jammed, the only way out of here is down.”

  Rodriguez felt a lump in her chest as she bit down on her despair. They’d prepared for a siege, laid in food, water, weapons. Booby-trapped the environment around them to give Ivan a few surprises. They hadn’t prepared to be entombed.

  “So what’s the plan ma’am?” Bunny asked. She looked around her, “It’s possible the blast door into the aircraft elevator isn’t jammed. We could access the elevator shaft, find a way to bridge the gap, get out that way.” She tried to make it sound easy.

  “The elevator shaft is a 30-foot wide hole in the rock,” Rodriguez said. “We still have power, so we still have comms. I think our best idea is to get a signal out to CNAF, tell them our status, wait here for a rescue.”

  “Yeah … unless Ivan comes and ‘rescues’ us first,” Bunny observed.

  As Perri watched the last of the Russian jets lift off and light its burners, heading north, he pulled his hands down from his ears and then dropped on his backside, onto his sleeping bag beside Dave.

  “About damn time,” Dave said. “Seriously, they have the whole Russian air force out there?”

  “Not anymore,” Perri said. “I think we need to get onto Sarge, tell them they just put about everything they have into the air and sent it north.”

  Dave reached across his legs to haul the car battery onto his lap and picked up the cable connecting it to the radio. “Yeah, yeah, I’ll just…”

  From outside the tank, there came three sharp reports, and three small holes appeared in the tank above their heads!

  Both of them froze.

  “Hey, American!” came a heavily accented voice. “You hear me in there?” There was another shot and another hole appeared in the tank, lower down this time, making them both duck. “Yeah, I think you hear me.” There was a bitter laugh. “It’s me, guy you tried to kill.” Another shot, another hole in the tank, even lower this time. Dave and Perri both scuttled as far from that side of the tank as they could, but there was nowhere to go. “Hey!” the voice called. “I think you have radio in there. First thing you are going to do, you drop that radio down to me.” Another laugh. “Softly. I have been looking for that radio.”

  BLITZ

  Yevgeny Bondarev hadn’t planned to join the Spetsnaz assault on the enemy base, so it was with not a little surprise that he found himself on the end of a rope, rappelling down the cliff face overlooking the collapsed cave, trying to find the drone-sized egress hole in the cliff.

  The GRU Spetsnaz company commander was a Siberian Yakut, Captain Mikhael Borisov. He had grown up in the coldest region on the planet, Verkhoyansk, where the average winter temperature was 30 degrees below. The near zero winds on top of Little Diomede were like a spring breeze to him, but he wouldn’t have felt them anyway, because he was boiling with rage.

  He had decided the operation to capture the US base was a basic airfield seizure, with the complication that he had no intel on the layout inside the Rock. Fresh VVS drone imagery of the entrance to the base showed the cave mouth had collapsed. Ingress would have to be through the remaining cliff face tunnel unless his men could find a lift or stairwell leading from the destroyed US radome down into the base below. He had planned to take the US base using five 5-man squads in three quadrotors, a mix of rifle and weapons troops.

  But one of his machines had developed engine trouble and had been forced to turn back, taking with it eight of his men including a number of their heavy weapon specialists. Their attack was timed to follow as closely as possible behind the VVS missile strike on the enemy base - he had decided to move ahead with the troops he had. That left him with 16 men, himself and the Russian VVS Major-General who had been waiting for them on top of the rock, with further bad news. The aviator had scouted the ruins of the American base and had not been able to identify any sort of lift, stairs or shaft leading down from the dome of the rock into the base below due to the damage caused by the thermobaric bombs used in the first wave of the LOSOS attack. That didn’t mean there wasn’t one, just that he hadn’t found it. It could be well concealed; now Borisov would have to use valuable time and resources looking for and securing it to ensure they didn’t find themselves suddenly flanked. He would also have to leave one of his squads on the surface to check the wrecked radar base and protect their copters while he took his remaining squad through the launch chute and down under the rock to probe the enemy’s strength.

  The observation had led to a heated exchange.

  “You no longer have the strength to take his base,” Bondarev said. “You should call in at least another platoon.”

  “With respect Comrade Major-General…” the GRU officer pointed out. “That is not your call to make. I am the ground force commander and this element of the operation is being led by the GRU, not the VVS. Every minute we delay, the enemy can be recovering from your missile attack,” Borisov said. “Attending to their wounded, shoring up their defenses.” He took a step forward toward Bondarev. “Perhaps the VVS would like another week of rest and recreation before finishing its job, but we are Spetsnaz, and I say I still have enough men to both secure this landing zone, penetrate that base, assess the size and disposition of the enemy defenders and only then will I make a decision about whether to call in reserves.” Realizing he had taken his authority as far as it would go, he gave an insincere smile, “Now, perhaps you would care to equip yourself for climbing? Seeing you are here, your insights about this base could be valuable.”

  Borisov had created a defensive perimeter around the copter with one of his squads but Bondarev looked at the remaining ten or so soldiers standing behind their commander and he could see that if they weren’t going to be allowed to start killing some Americans, and soon, they might very well decide a coward of a VVS officer would make a fine substitute. In reality, there was nothing he could do about it.

  Which was how he’d found himself dangling on the end of a rope, trying to identify the American drone launch chute for the Spetsnaz team above. Bondarev had taken his best guess, looking at where his Sukhoi lay crumpled and still smoking at the bottom of the cliff, and with Borisov on a rope beside him, had dropped over the edge of the cliff and was easing his way down.

  About a hundred feet down, and still 500 feet above the sea, he found it. It lay off to his left, so he had to kick and bounce his way over to it. He gave a hand signal to the Spetsnaz soldier on the other rope, and they took up positions on either side of the hole. It showed nothing but complete darkness. Bondarev had discussed with Borisov that it was possible the attack through the mouth of the cave had knocked out the base and everyone in it, but neither of them was willing to trust their lives to that assumption.

  Pulling down the night vision device on his helmet, Borisov stuck his head tentatively around the rock and Bondarev half expected to see it disappear in a volley of fire and spray of blood, but the darkness remained silent.

  “Long tunnel, some sort of low-intensity lighting at the end, so we can assume your attack didn’t kill the power. Big enough to stand up in, slight incline. No cover I can see. Stealth is out, we’re going to have to pop smoke, go in fast.” He started relaying orders to his men above. Bondarev had borrowed one of the Spetsnaz helmets and took a look for himself. The NOD, or Night-vision Optical Device, on the helmets could be flipped between light enhancing and an infra-red mode that would penetrate dust and fog. He saw the tunnel was long – he could see only a faint glow at the end, and there was a guide rail set in the floor which must be used to keep the drones centered in the tunnel during launch. It was big enough for them to stand up in without crouching, and the roof and sides were shored up with steel beams, recessed i
nto the rock. Bondarev whistled; the tunnel was a major piece of engineering in itself. He couldn’t help but be impressed by what the Americans had done, right under their noses.

  When the others had joined them, Borisov and one of his men took a position on either side of the tunnel entrance and pulled out smoke grenades. On a signal from Borisov they swung into the opening, threw their grenades and dropped prone with OSV-96 AMR rifles extended in front of them. The others swung in behind them and rushed down the slight incline, also throwing themselves flat. Bondarev came in last, unable to see anything, with only the small Makarov he always carried in a trouser pocket on the leg of his flight suit. He smelled wet concrete, machine oil, salt air and spent explosive.

  “No contact,” the Spetsnaz commander said to his squad. “Move up!” They began crawling down the tunnel through the smoke, on their stomachs. The walls of the tunnel were smooth, covered only by a black soot that Bondarev guessed was the remains of fuel from either drone launches, or his own exploding Sukhoi. As they’d identified, there was no natural cover, so Borisov’s men moved in overlapping teams of two down either side of the tunnel. All Bondarev could do was keep his eyes on the dark shadow of the man in front of him and try not to bump into anyone.

  Suddenly up front there was a signal, and everyone stopped.

  “End of the tunnel,” someone radioed back. “Three-meter gap. Continues on the other side.”