by F X Holden
Devlin had been told her security detail and her aide were welcome to wait in the anteroom today. The meeting she was invited to attend with Kelnikov was to take place under four eyes only. When she’d walked in, he’d been sitting at his desk talking with a secretary and he’d risen to shake Devlin’s hand, then sat back down at his desk again. No fruit for her today then.
“Yes please,” Devlin said to the offer of tea, and the secretary fussed arranging tea and a plate of small dry cakes for them both and then hurried out of the office.
“You look well,” Kelnikov smiled, his bald head glistening in the light of the overhead lamps. He was about sixty, overweight, known to have an occasionally recurring barbiturate habit and a predilection for preying on ballerinas from the Bolshoi, where he had a private box. Devlin found him completely and totally without charm. “I think you have even got a little early summer tan, is that possible?”
Oh, so that’s how you want to start? Devlin thought, immediately shifting herself into cold, minimalist mode. She ignored the poorly disguised barb about her color.
“Why was I summoned I here Mr. Secretary?” she asked.
“Invited,” Kelnikov smiled, thin lips parting over yellow teeth. “As you know, if you had been summoned, there would have been a public press pronouncement to that effect. We are not there yet.”
“Where are we then?” she asked. Fortunately her people had done their work and knew exactly what it was that she had been ‘invited’ to talk about. She had been both forewarned, and forearmed.
Kelnikov reached into his desk and pulled out a small folder tied with a string, which he took his time untying. He pulled out a large photograph and slid it across the table to her.
“The Ozempic Tsar,” he said, pointing at it. “The most advanced autonomous pilotless freight vessel in the world, and valued at more than 250 million of your American dollars. On its most recent voyage, it was carrying a cargo of 1.9 billion US dollars’ worth of processed lithium.”
“Then I sincerely hope it was insured,” she said, immediately playing the ball back at him. “Because my information is that it is now lying at the bottom of the Bering Strait.”
His hands were folded and resting on the desk in front of him, but he fanned them wide now, “Oh please, do tell me what information you have on the demise of this pride of the Russian merchant fleet?”
She had been planning to save her ammunition, but his racist remark, his obsequious manner, his slimy smile, they all conspired to make her want to have this audience over and done with as quickly as possible. From her own folio she pulled Carl Williams’ intel report and placed it so that the cameras which she assumed were in Kelnikov’s office could take a nice clear shot of it. She was about to tell him what was in it anyway.
“We are happy to share the intelligence we have on this tragedy. I’ll give you the short version,” she said. “Thirty minutes before that ship was sunk, a Russian naval communications center at Anadyr sent a message to a Finnish submarine, the FNS Vesikko, sailing 20 miles south-west of the Ozempic Tsar. Six minutes before the Tsar sent out its first mayday, that same vessel reported it had fired its missiles.” She watched with satisfaction as Kelnikov’s eyes narrowed and he pursed his mouth. “Six minutes later, at least two subsonic submarine-launched surface to surface missiles hit the Ozempic Tsar and detonated its hydrogen fuel stores. The explosion was so catastrophic it was registered on one of our thermal imaging satellites as a possible ICBM missile launch bloom, but luckily for you, our AI detected that it had the wrong heat signature and our military alert level was not raised.”
Kelnikov spoke in a tight voice, verging on anger, “You accuse us of collusion in this crime? What proof do you have?”
“You know that there would be no conclusive satellite imaging available for the undersea launch of stealth cruise missiles.”
“Then you have nothing,” he said, suddenly happy, reaching into his folder again. “Whereas we have this.” He took out another photograph and almost threw it at her.
It was a satellite photograph of a ship, with latitude, longitude and date stamp clearly visible. She could guess what ship it was, but Kelnikov spoke before she could say anything. “That is a US Navy vessel, the USS Venice Beach. An unmanned guided missile cruiser, armed with anti-ship missiles.” He took out another photo and flipped it at her so hard, it spun on the table in front of her.
She stopped it spinning and held it down with a single finger as she looked at it. It showed a large metal plate on the deck of what looked like a fishing vessel, with the word TSAR stenciled across it. If she had to guess, she’d guess it would turn out to be a close match for the name a certain Russian freighter had stenciled across its stern. Next to the wreckage lay a crushed tubular shape about two yards long and what looked like a mangled engine of some sort.
“Does your report tell you what that is?” Kelnikov asked gleefully.
“Actually it does,” she said. “I’m guessing that tube next to that clearly faked stern plate is the housing of a US PIKE anti-ship missile.”
“Salvaged, not faked, and yes it is!” Kelnikov said, building up a head of steam now. “You don’t deny it? The missile that destroyed a Russian freighter while it was moving through Russian territorial waters was American!”
“Your tone is accusatory,” Devlin said. “But I have seen no evidence to justify your anger being directed at the USA.”
Kelnikov leaned over and jabbed his finger angrily down on the photo, “Your missile, fired by one of your ships!”
She laughed, realizing as she did so that she was ignoring ten years of training and practice in protocol. Kelnikov’s face clouded. No, it boiled.
“Just what about this act of naked aggression do you regard as funny?” he demanded. “Tell me!”
“How about you tell me something?” she asked, speaking in firm controlled tones. “PIKE missiles have been exported to 13 countries, two of which have unfortunately recently moved out of our sphere of influence and into yours. One of those is Finland. I don’t deny the missile in that photograph may be a PIKE, but I strongly deny that it was fired by one of our ships. Our information indicates it was fired by a Finnish submarine which was in communication with Russian far east military command.”
“You accuse Russia of sinking a Russian merchant vessel? What nonsense.”
“The Venice Beach did not fire those missiles. Finland however, recently signed a defense cooperation treaty with Russia. One of Finland’s refurbished French Scorpene class hydrogen-electric submarines was in the area, and would have been more than capable of this attack.”
“Again, I ask you what proof you have for this baseless accusation?”
“The same as you have for yours,” she said coolly. “None.” She closed her folder, “Was this the only matter you wanted to discuss today?” she asked.
Kelnikov slapped the table, but if he expected Devlin to flinch or jump, he was disappointed. She’d seen him in this state many times and had been waiting for it. She did little more than blink at him. “You have 24 hours,” he said. “To admit responsibility for this heinous act, issue an apology and offer suitable reparations to the owners of the Ozempic Tsar.”
“Or…”
Kelnikov glared at her, “Or, as you Americans are so fond of saying, ‘All options are on the table’.”
Back in her limo, Devlin fished out the intel report again and looked at it carefully. She handed it to her aide. “I see that the origin of this report is NSA Moscow. Find out which analyst wrote it will you? By the look on Kelnikov’s face I knew more about this Ozempic Tsar incident than he did, and that was a damn nice place to be. I want to write a note to say thank you.”
ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE
If there was a shittier rock on the whole planet than Little Diomede Island, Lieutenant Commander Alicia Rodriguez wanted to know where. Because she’d be on the first plane there and she’d wallow in its complete shittiness and then be able to return t
o Little Diomede happy that she wasn’t actually living on the shittiest damn rock on the whole damn planet.
Or in fact, not even on the shittiest rock, but under it. At least if you were living on top of the rock, you’d get 360-degree sea views. Sure, you’d be looking through fog, out over windblown white caps not seeing much apart from shitty seabirds and ice floes, but you could at least look east and tell yourself that right over there, just over the horizon, that was Alaska in the good old US of A. And if you looked West, you could tell yourself you were looking at the Evil Empire reborn and get a bit of a thrill telling yourself you were manning the closest US military base to Russia and they didn’t even know you were there.
But no, she wasn’t living on top of the rock. She and her personnel were living in the cave that a millennia of beating waves had carved under the pockmarked, moss-covered basalt of Little Diomede. Who had discovered the cave? If she ever met them, she would beat ten kinds of crap out of them as a thank you. But it probably wasn’t even a person. It was probably a drone, which was kind of ironic.
Rodriguez wasn’t sure exactly how many years the facility on Little Diomede had been under construction, but she knew why it had been built. A Pentagon position paper had warned that with the opening of polar shipping routes, an increasing amount of vital commerce was now moving through the Bering Strait, giving it the potential to be as strategically important as the Strait of Hormuz between Iran and the Emirates was in the last century. When Russia expanded its naval base at Lavrentiya in the early 2020s, as part of its ‘Pivot to the Pacific’, diplomatic tensions had risen, and the US had looked for responses. It could have recommissioned the old Marks Army Airfield at Nome but strategists pointed out that since the advent of hypersonic cruise missile technology, large fixed infrastructure such as air bases was near impossible to defend and while it had political and economic value, its true value in a conflict would be very limited.
The idea for a secret base under the rock cap of Little Diomede had been born.
There was nothing there but a tiny fishing village twenty years ago. The Navy had bought out the two dozen or so villagers, turned their houses into barracks and then moved in construction crews. They’d created a plausible cover story by building a naval radar dome on the crown of the island, and the first thing they did was throw up a hulking great storage shed next to the dome and then fill it full of mining gear to sink a shaft straight down through the middle of the island to the cave below. Then they began hollowing it out. The Russians showed a lot of interest while the radar was being built, and sent a flight over to scan and photograph it every time it got an upgrade, but as long as they couldn’t see the US putting anti-missile systems there or building airstrips on Little Diomede they generally ignored it, apart from the occasional electronic countermeasure attack trying to jam it when one of their naval battle groups was moving through the Strait.
At first it was conceived as a missile launch platform with ground to air ordnance concealed under the large radome and an autonomous anti-shipping missile system hidden in the cavern, covering the eastern approaches to the Strait. Navy solved the question of how the island would be covertly supplied, by dredging the floor of the sea cave, widening it, and putting in a submarine dock.
But it was with the widespread adoption of unmanned aircraft that Little Diomede came into its own. Plans were soon laid to base 30 aircraft under the Rock, a mixture of reconnaissance Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs), commonly known as drones. Little Diomede wasn’t intended to be a manned military base. It was to be a ‘second strike’ facility. In the case of full-scale nuclear war, or even a major regional conventional war, it would wait out the first strike, or first wave of attacks and then strike back, its thirty fully autonomous attack aircraft in range of all major Russian military and civilian targets in the Russian Far East and unlike ICBM silos, able to carry out multiple strikes thanks to automated landing, recycling and relaunch capabilities. The only personnel who would remain on the base when it was operational would be a handful of service technicians, staying topside in the radar facility during peacetime and deploying under The Rock in time of war.
Except the whole automated landing, recycling and relaunch concept was still just that, a concept.
The challenge the Navy threw at the planners for Little Diomede was seen as impossible at first. New aircraft variants had to be developed and systems just didn’t exist that would allow drones to be landed, refueled, rearmed and relaunched without human assistance. The first phase of the project, before they did a full build-out of the base, was to prove that it was even viable to stage drones out of The Rock. And that meant that during the pilot phase, they needed humans to launch, land and recover the machines. Navy had done as much as it could ashore in Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) test facilities to automate the loading of fuel and ordnance and transport of the drones from hangars to launch ramps but the litmus test was whether those systems would function at all in extreme environments like the Bering Strait.
The Rock was essentially supposed to operate as a concealed aircraft carrier, but where an aircraft carrier had hundreds of personnel dedicated to aircraft operations, the cavern under Little Diomede could take no more than fifty. It wasn’t that the enlarged cavern wasn’t huge, but once you took out the existing dock infrastructure, added hangar space for thirty drones, storage for parts and fuel and the machinery needed for getting the aircraft airborne and recovering them after a water landing, there wasn’t much left over for all the humanity needed to service the robots. Everything that could be automated was. They could draw a lot on the systems that had been developed for the latest generation of supercarriers, but tailor-made kludges were needed for multiple systems.
So where on an aircraft carrier you had separate teams for aviation fuel, plane handling, aircraft maintenance and ordnance just to name a few, under the rock all those functions had been boiled down to Air Boss Alicia Rodriguez and her small team. They were no ordinary assemblage of personnel. She’d had to put together a tailor-made team of launch/recovery specialists, air traffic controllers, machinist and electrician mates, plane captains for aircraft maintenance, aerographers for weather forecasting and ordnancemen to fit the weapons into the auto-load magazines. They’d pulled Rodriguez off the USS Trump, where at 26 she’d been one of the Navy’s youngest ever ‘mini-bosses’ or Assistant Air Commanders, and told her she could have her pick of personnel from any vessel she named. She’d drawn up a shortlist of personnel who had served in at least two functions aboard a carrier, preferably three. They’d given her 20 bodies, and she’d argued for 30, ending with 24. She split them into two shifts, and all of them had to understudy a different function so they could back each other up. She didn’t have enough people for redundancies.
The drones that Rodriguez and her crew were put on the island for service had been designed for carrier ops and didn’t need a long runway; they were built to be launched from a catapult and needed significant modifications so that they could fly right into the mouth of the cave and drop down onto the water to be retrieved with a crane and sling. Rodriguez had heard it had taken Northrop Grumman Boeing two years to work out how to fit retractable skis to their machines instead of wheels, and another two years to work out how to avoid them sucking seawater into their air intakes every time they splashed down.
Fuel for the drones wasn’t an issue, because a purification and catalyzation unit was installed that could supply 200 liters of liquid hydrogen and 400 liters of potable water an hour. A repurposed S8G nuclear power plant from a decommissioned Ohio class submarine provided power to the entire base.
Being as it didn’t officially exist, the drone wing under Little Diomede didn’t have a typical Navy designation; in organization charts it was buried deep under Naval Network Warfare Command and was simply known as ‘Auxiliary Unit 4 of Naval Computer and Telecommunications Area Master Station, Alaska’ or NCTAMS-A4, but to
the aircrew and officers based there, Little Diomede airbase was just ‘the Rock’.
Rodriguez had been an aviator, most recently a ‘shooter’ or launch catapult officer before she’d been promoted to Mini-Boss, but in the role of Air Boss under Little Diomede, she doubled as squadron CO. Normally she would have had to ‘fleet up’ through a squadron department head role, then XO, before being assigned a squadron command, but things under the Rock were far from normal.
Besides which, there was only one pilot on Little Diomede right now and none of the aircraft had yet been certified for operations. So her only pilot was going stir crazy waiting to get one of the machines onto the Cat and into the air so she could fly it back in through that cave mouth and try her skill at ‘threading the needle’ as she called it. A drone pilot could theoretically fly their aircraft from anywhere in the world with a fast satellite link, but with NCTAMS-A4 they were trying new tactics with line of sight comms and that meant a pilot co-located with her fighters, at least in the test and certification phase.
The lone pilot’s name was Lieutenant Karen ‘Bunny’ O’Hare and Rodriguez had not had a part in choosing her. For a start, the woman wasn’t even American. She was Australian, and had come across from the DARPA Joint Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle program where she had been the lead pilot testing and perfecting the water landing capabilities of the Northrop Grumman Boeing F-47 Fantom fighter. On paper, it made perfect sense that the pilot who had led the testing of the seaplane version of the F-47 would also lead the establishment of the unit for which they were designed, but Rodriguez soon learned there was more to Bunny O’Hare than appeared on paper.
