by F X Holden
BERING STRAIT
by FX Holden
© 2018 Fred ‘FX’ Holden.
Independently Published
Typeset in 12pt Garamond
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. To contact the author, please write to the email address below.
[email protected]
From a working draft titled ‘Under the Hammer’
With special thanks to the following weapons and military tactics technical advisers without whom this book might have been a fantasy, rather than hardcore future fiction!
Gary Carillo, Austin, Texas, USA
Richard Campan, Villeneuve Loubet, France
‘SSnake’, SBPro, Hannover, Germany
And the crew of SIMHQ AAR
All proceeds from this novel are donated to charity.
INDEX
IF A TREE FALLS
TUNDRA TCON
HOLES IN THE CHEESE
ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE
OPERATION LOSOS
NO REST FOR THE WICKED
SCOTTISH VODKA
THIS IS YOUR WAKEUP CALL
A RUN IN THE SNOW
SNOWFLAKES IN THE BREEZE
IN COMMISSION
OPENING VOLLEY
STANDOFF
TETE A TETE
SIGHTSEEING
AMERICAN CARNAGE
IN YOUR FACE
SUBTERRANEAN
THE PHONY WAR
SUPPRESSION
SUPERIORITY
SUPREMACY
SOME DAYS YOU EAT THE BEAR
BARE BONES KICK ASSERY
BERSERKER ALGORITHM
BERSERKER ALGORITHM II
BLITZ
ARMAGEDDON
POSTSCRIPT
AUTHOR’S NOTE
PREVIEW: ‘LIAONING’
IF A TREE FALLS
Bering Strait, August 2031
The iceberg had calved off the Arctic ice pack two years earlier. After wallowing for a while in the ocean off the coast it had been picked up by the transpolar current and then flung into the Beaufort Gyre, a swirling maelstrom of hurdy-gurdy waters that circulated between the East Siberian Sea and the Beaufort Sea off Alaska. Like a small child thrown off a playground carousel that was spinning too fast, it was dumped into the mouth of the Bering Strait, slowing but moving inexorably south at a stately two to three knots.
The violence of its birth and the impact of wind and tides had seen its original tabular shape worn away until just a thin sliver of a dome remained above the water. Below the water, 200 tons of ice and trapped rock served as both ballast and rudder, driving the berg forward. At 800 feet long, it was at least twice the size of the iceberg that sank the Titanic.
And it was headed straight toward the Russian container vessel Ozempic Tsar!
The bridge of the Ozempic Tsar was silent. Under a panel of windows with a 360-degree view of the sparkling sea around it, a bank of screens and instruments flashed and blinked. Two doors, one to port, and one to starboard, let out to an over-bridge watch station in which sat Ozempic Line Maritime Apprentice, Fyodor Leonov. He was taking the approach of the huge iceberg very calmly.
The Tsar was outfitted with the latest in subsea sonar and high-frequency radar for detecting both shipping and subsurface objects, and as it bore down on the iceberg at a combined closing speed of 18 knots, the sonar was the first to react. A collision warning alarm began to sound throughout the ship, but there was no panicked shouting, no thud of feet running on steel decks.
The AI controlling the X-band 10Ghz radar directed the beam toward the suspected location of the iceberg, but saw nothing. Indecision might have paralyzed a human captain, but the Ozempic Tsar had no such problems. Confirming that the sea lane to starboard was clear of other traffic, the massive container ship feathered its starboard screw, punched in portside bow impellers, dialed its speed back to 10 knots and began a grindingly slow, skidding turn to starboard. It was helped by the fact it was carrying a bulky but lightweight cargo for this journey, but without perfect information about the speed and bearing of the iceberg, its computers calculated a ten percent chance that the ship would not clear the object ahead of it in time.
A new alarm began to sound throughout the ship, warning the six-person crew of mostly security personnel to get to emergency stations and brace for impact. Leonov stayed seated, and no one else responded. There was no sign of panic either above, or below decks.
Slowly, the bows of the supertanker swung around, and the ship’s radar was able to pick up a return from the dome of ice that was riding above sea level. Now the AI could use two inputs, the radar and sonar, to calculate the position, speed and bearing of the iceberg and it revised its estimate of the likelihood of collision to zero. Immediately it began replotting a track to get itself back on course once the iceberg was passed. As the iceberg slid along the Tsar’s port side, a comfortable two miles away, the ship sent a warning message about the berg to both the Russian and US Coast Guard channels, giving its position, speed and likely heading given prevailing currents. And then it canceled the blare of klaxons ringing out over its empty decks.
Pimple faced and ruddy cheeked, Apprentice Fyodor Leonov was from a long line of merchant sailors, and distantly descended from Captain Viktor Nikolayevitch Leonov, a two time Hero of the Soviet Union. Steely nerves were hard coded into his salty DNA, even though at 19, he was the youngest among the small crew. Entering the Maritime Academy he had been desperate to prove himself to his fisherman father, and hadn’t been able to believe his luck when he was told his first seagoing assignment was going to be aboard the most advanced container ship in the entire world! He had spent most of the first day of the voyage just thinking about the look of pride in his father’s eyes as he’d waved goodbye to Fyodor and his ship in Anadyr.
The Ozempic Tsar was proof that the future of merchant shipping was autonomous. The fourth of its kind in the Ozempic Imperial Line it was first to make the polar voyage from Archangelsk in Russia to Hokkaido in Japan completely unmanned. As its name implied, the Tsar was very much a king of the seas.
It had a capacity of 400,000 deadweight tons and had sailed with a consignment of powdered lithium from a dialysis plant in Anadyr. It was 300 feet long and four stories high, steered not by a shore-based human helmsman like its remotely piloted sister ships, but by a Norwegian-designed AI core that managed both navigation and systems overwatch.
The crew aboard the Ozempic Star were mostly there to deter hijackers, but there was no way to pilot the ship or alter its course if the ship was boarded at sea, and the engine room, cargo and fuel supply were completely sealed against intruders. Young Leonov had been given basic training in how to repel pirates using the ship’s anti-boarding defenses, and in the unlikely event pirates made it aboard, how to secure himself deep in the bowels of the ship inside its invulnerable panic room. Not that pirates were a big problem in the Arctic seas yet, but a fully laden supertanker with absolutely no crew to guard it would have been a tempting prize if precautions hadn’t been taken.
The Ozempic Tsar was a 250-million-dollar miracle of progress in the field of self-piloted freighters and proof that the Russian oil oligarchs who built her had shown amazing foresight in realizing that global warming could be an upside business opportunity if it meant a permanent polar freight route could be opened as the Arctic ice cap melted. They had a dream that they could take Anadyr from a small local container port to the biggest port
in the Russian Far East in coming years, shipping the riches of the Chukotka gold, copper and lithium mining region to markets on the East Coast of America and beyond, whose demand for the raw materials for batteries to supplement its renewable energy obsession was insatiable.
The Tsar also held the world record for the Anadyr - New York transit, completing the 3,000 km trip in 16 days, requiring as it did, little time in port for crew rest or replenishment, and taking its fuel from the sea as it sailed, using solar and wind-powered catalytic converters to turn the seawater into hydrogen for its engines. Taking the northern sea route also shaved nearly two weeks off the trip from the container terminal at Anadyr, which otherwise would have had to go via the Panama Canal.
Up in his watch station, his head turned toward the iceberg now sliding past the Ozempic Tsar’s port bow, Apprentice Fyodor Leonov could have been forgiven a moment of pride. Feeling his ship slice through the slight swell of a brisk, sunlit summer in the Strait, thinking nothing in the world could stop it!
Unfortunately, Apprentice Leonov wasn’t really capable of thinking at all, because like the other five members of his crew, he was dead, and didn’t really care anymore about what a magnificent ship the Ozempic Tsar was.
And he cared just as little when two AGM-158C PIKE anti-ship missiles appeared on the horizon, tails streaming liquid fire, and then buried themselves deep in the Tsar’s guts before they detonated their 1,000lb blast-fragmentation warheads.
After which the still unimpressed Apprentice Leonov set his own world record, for the fastest trip to the bottom of the Bering Strait on an autonomous pilotless freighter.
TUNDRA TCON
The A.I. controlling the Ozempic Tsar managed to get several longwave, satellite telephone and high-frequency radio burst transmissions away before it was silenced by the cold dark waters of the Strait. It also managed to fire a tethered distress buoy from its bow section that bobbed up to the surface of the sea even as the carcass of its host ship settled on the seabed 15 fathoms below. Fixed to the ship by a gossamer thin carbonite string with the strength of tensile steel it sent the position of the now doomed Tsar to its owners, its insurers and to the nearest naval air and sea rescue service - which happened to be the Arkhangelsk headquarters for the Coast Guard of the Russian Federal Security Service.
The comms operator who received the mayday immediately and instinctively hit the alert button which sounded a klaxon across the base at the hangar where the Sikorsky Skywarrior naval rescue quadrotor and its crew were stationed. The next thing he did was call up the international ship register to identify the ship that was in distress so that he could send imagery to both the Sikorsky crew and any other nearby shipping that might be directed to help.
The next thing he did after that, was to sigh, reach over and click a checkmark next to the ship on his screen to advise the rescue crew what type of distress call they were responding to.
Bloody robot ship.
He was from three generations of fishermen and sailors, had a grandfather who had served on the cold war flagship the Kuznetsov, striking terror into the hearts of the weak NATO fleets every time it sallied out of the Black Sea past Gibraltar and into the Atlantic. A ship crewed by heroes of the Soviet Union, back when Russia had heroes. Men braving radiation leaks and the constant threat of annihilation in nuclear fire to keep Mother Russia safe from a Western alliance bent on its destruction.
Now half the fleet was Unmanned Combat Warships or UCWs, and the rest were slated for either conversion or retirement. ‘Sailors’ didn’t stand watch on the decks of ships, in the freezing air of Baltic seas watching for torpedo wakes or missile contrails, they didn’t even sit deep in the Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence centers of their warships watching glowing green screens for radar returns or listening for the acoustic signatures of submarines. They sat in reverse cycle air-conditioned trailers on a shoreside base and watched the world through the sensors on their UCWs, only taking control when they needed to tap in new navigation orders or use their linked sensor arrays to explore and identify unknown contacts. And even the humans were redundant, because the UCWs were programmed with failsafe routines that would kick in if contact to Archangel was lost, or an enemy attack rendered comms unavailable.
The comms operator looked again at the image of the Ozempic Tsar on his screen and paged away from it in disgust. Four hundred thousand tons of cargo, steel and silicon sitting and breaking apart on the floor of the Bering Strait. It might not even have had a crew aboard.
Apart from environmentalists, the owners and their insurance company, who gave a damn?
In the Situation Room of the Russian 3rd Air and Air Defense Forces Command, Captain Andrei Udicz gave a damn. He was watching the same cry for help from the Ozempic Tsar scroll across his screen and he turned his face from the screen to look at the five other officers in the room.
“The ship in question has been confirmed as the Ozempic Tsar Comrade General,” he reported. The ship was famous even among Russian naval officers. “It has deployed a distress buoy, which indicates that at least part of the hull is lying on the sea floor.”
General Yuri Lukin, Commander of the 3rd Air and Air Defense Forces Command, sat with his fingers on his expansive belly and looked up at the ceiling. “How long until we have visual confirmation?” He was flanked by several intelligence officers and aides.
Udicz looked down at the tablet in front of him. “I can have a pair of Okhotnik drones over the site of the incident within …. eight minutes,” he said. “And I have two rotary wing drones on standby if we need more eyes.”
“Incident? You mean attack, do you not Comrade Captain?” The General asked, arching his eyebrows. “Our satellites picked up the bloom of a violent explosion. The Ozempic Tsar was carrying no explosive cargo. Inert cargo ships do not just explode in the middle of the Bering Strait.”
“Yes comrade General,” Udicz replied carefully. “Perhaps it hit another ship, or an iceberg?”
“A high explosive iceberg?” the General asked.
“There is a commercial fishing vessel within ten clicks of the site of the attack Comrade General,” Udicz said, ignoring the jibe. “They will be the first people on the scene. The Navy has directed them to search for wreckage.”
Lukin fixed his gaze on Udicz. “Let us assume the Ozempic Tsar was not destroyed by a collision with a highly explosive iceberg. Let us speculate Captain, about other causes,” Lukin invited. “Military causes.”
Udicz moved from one foot to the other, like he was being invited to step into a trap of some sort, but couldn’t see what kind, yet. “If I should speculate about a military cause Comrade General, I would speculate that such a catastrophic loss could only be caused by one or more long-range anti-ship missiles such as the US fields on any one of their several destroyers currently deployed in the Strait.”
Udicz was probably the only officer in the meeting who had actually seen one of the deadly PIKE missiles up close and in action. Two years ago he’d been part of an official Russian delegation observing a NATO fleet combat exercise. Not as a friendly gesture from the Americans of course, but because for any such exercise involving three or more nations bordering the Russian Federation it was a treaty obligation. He still remembered the chill he felt, standing on the bridge of the American stealth missile cruiser the USS Zumwalt, watching as a US submersible fast attack drone (S-FAD) reared up out of the sea beside them, popped its hatches and loosed a volley of 4 of the deadly anti-ship missiles in less than a minute, before sliding beneath the waves again. Forget the missiles though. It wasn’t the sight of the small grey-green stealth catamaran appearing from nowhere and firing missiles over the horizon that had made him shiver either, it had been the thought that the machine could be launched below the waterline of the very cruiser he was standing on, and then pilot itself under the surface through the Kattegat Strait, down the Gulf of Finland and park itself invisibly on the mud riverbed alongside the Cruise Ship terminal in
St Petersburg, ready at any time to detonate a nuclear warhead in the heart of the city.
Of course they had deployed detection systems in the river now, and for the Americans to even attempt to do so as a test or exercise would be regarded as an act of war, but Udicz had to wonder if they had got their countermeasures in place in time. What was to say there wasn’t already an American S-FAD snuggled under a pier in the old imperial capital, covered in silt and just waiting to unleash armageddon on command.
“Difficult to confirm though, I imagine,” the General mused. “Such an isolated body of water, and not even a crew member as a witness.”
“The American PIKE is a surface to surface stealth missile. Our satellites, even infrared, would not have picked up the launch. But the Navy may be able to recover sensor data from the ship’s black box, assuming it is still reporting via the buoy,” Udicz said. “That might provide visual or even audio evidence of a missile strike. The staggered-pulse engines of the US PIKE missile have a very distinctive acoustic signature.”
“Not very definitive evidence though,” the General grumbled. “Readily deniable. Video and audio files are so easily doctored.”
“I agree,” Udicz said. “But why? Why would the Americans do something so stupid? Unless it was an accident.”
“Accident?” Lukin said. “It strikes me Udicz, that you would have to be very determined to accidentally sink a ship the size of a small island.”
Carl Williams had only been an environmental science attaché at the Moscow Embassy for three weeks. With 700 full-time staff in the Russian Federation, 200 of which were based in Moscow, Carl was only one of several new staff who had moved into the Embassy compound on Bolshoi Deviatinsky within the last month, and he still had that newbie halo hanging over him.
