Bering Strait

by F X Holden

  There was a chance, just a small one, that the Russian action would be so swift, so unexpected, that the US would have no time to react. Arsharvin had revealed the broad strategic strokes to him. First, they would take Saint Lawrence, which would send the US politicians into apoplectic fits. They would mobilize their reserves, of that there was no doubt. But the bulk of their expeditionary armed forces were engaged in the Middle East and Asia - so the reserves they could call on at short notice were less effectual national guard units with older equipment. If the American politicians bought the cover story of a crisis over international shipping rights, they would spend most of their energy on pointless diplomacy. By the time they realized they were dealing with an invasion, Saint Lawrence would be in Russian hands.

  Alaska was a barely populated State, with a token military presence. The Russian plan relied on surprise. Using the emergency in the Bering Strait to justify pre-positioning forces and raising its alert level, Russian troops would in short order leapfrog from Saint Lawrence to neutralize US military installations in Alaska and secure the westernmost city in the USA, Nome. The critical point, the one on which the plan would stand or fall, was the ability of Russian air and sea transport to land sufficient ground troops in Western Alaska to enable them to control events on the ground.

  Moscow would not threaten the major Alaskan population centers of Juneau, Fairbanks or Anchorage, it would not use nuclear weapons and it was banking on the weak, indecisive US leadership to blink before resorting to its own nuclear arsenal, both out of moral weakness, but also out of the fear it would be killing its own citizens.

  Within a week, perhaps two, Russia would have secured Nome and the Bering peninsula and would be negotiating a cease-fire.

  Bondarev cursed, switched on his bedside lamp, and sat up. He pulled his tablet over and turned it on, calling up the latest report on the disposition of his 6983rd Air Brigade. On a screen in Moscow, it no doubt looked formidable - under President Navalny the Russian military was as strong on paper as it had been at any time since the cold war. The report in front of him told a slightly different story.

  His command comprised several regiments, but one was a rotary winged command transport unit, and another was a strategic bomber ‘graveyard’; a parking lot for obsolete Tu-22m Backfire bombers.

  Of the other six, one was a regiment of 48 Sukhoi Okhotnik drones attached to his personal command based at Kurba. The Okhotnik or ‘Hunter’ was a stealth drone based on the same platform as the piloted Su-57 but with an avionics suite optimized for ground attack. In that role it was designed to be operated by ‘near-line-of sight’ communications, in which radio signals from a ground station were relayed to the drones via an orbiting Airborne Warning and Control System, or airborne control aircraft. Only in the case of loss of the airborne control link would an Okhotnik fall back on slower satellite links. It meant they had an operational radius of only 600 miles from their base, but it also meant their pilots could control them manually with almost no input lag. Theoretically the drones could be used in air-air combat, or beyond a range of 600 miles if executing an autonomous AI directed attack, but these applications fell outside Russian drone doctrine orthodoxy. The Okhotnik was a close air support platform, and close meant close.

  Bondarev had a further 78 ground attack aircraft in the 3rd, 7th and 8th Aviation Regiments, but these were 4th generation Su-34s, lacking in any stealth capability.

  His primary air defense units were the aircraft of the 4th and 5th Aviation Regiments, comprising 30 Su-57s and 32 of the newer Mig-41 air superiority fighters respectively, and he had just given orders to move these to the new 8th Regiment base at Lavrentiya, from where they could cover all of Western Alaska as needed. The remaining unit was the 6th Air Regiment strategic airlift squadron comprising 12 An-124 transport aircraft and four Beriev Airborne Control aircraft.

  The reality was that his 6983rd Air Brigade was designed to fight and support a ground defense of Russia in a time before the current détente with China, and not an operation like LOSOS which would require him primarily to fight his enemy air-to-air. For that, he had only 62 Sukhois and Migs, and could press his Okhotniks into an air-air role if needed, but their weapon bays were optimized for air-to-ground ordnance; they could carry only four air-to-air missiles to the piloted fighters’ six.

  There was another problem.

  While his personal battalion of 48 Okhotniks was nominally at full strength, the Russian drones required two men to fly each. Unlike the US drones, several subordinate drones could not be slaved to a master drone flown by a single pilot. Each Okhotnik required one pilot and a weapons and systems officer, flying them from ground-based stations. Unlike the weaker command and control system of the US drones, which was over-reliant on vulnerable satellite communications for command inputs, the Russian drones were highly mobile – they could fly off almost any strip of dirt and be transported easily by train or truck - and they used encrypted digital shortwave for communications. His men and aircraft could be dispersed across hundreds of kilometers of front, and yet still be coordinated as a single attacking unit. It was a difference in strategy that had proven itself in combat on multiple occasions - it was easy for Russian forces to find and disable enemy airfields or depots, but almost impossible for their enemy to do the same, so widely dispersed were the Russian pilots and their drones.

  If he had the pilots and weapons officers he needed, that is. The 6983rd Hunter Regiment was still in a build-up phase. Its aircraft were all on line, but only 80 percent of its aircrew were. He could use almost any pilot certified for one of the Russian fighter marques, but the weapons and systems used by the new drones were not widely used and the all aspect air-to-air missile system in particular was barely more than a prototype, its rotary launch system jamming if deployed at high speeds or high Gs. Too few systems officers had been certified to operate the Okhotnik and training was taking far too long. Too long by peacetime standards, impossibly long if they were going to war. Bondarev had only 38 crewed drones ready for what was to come.

  It was why he had asked Lukin if he could call on the resources of Central Command, which he knew numbered at least 80 fighter aircraft, both Su-57s and Mig-41s. As importantly, he wanted access to its 6980th Air Regiment Okhotnik crews.

  Bondarev was a realist, not an optimist, and that had served him well in his career so far. He would always try to under-promise and over-deliver, ensuring he had more than enough assets at hand for the task he was given. Right now, yes, he had the assets he needed to secure the airspace over Saint Lawrence for a few days. But to achieve air superiority over Western Alaska, if that was the long game? That, he did not.

  That thought led him to speculate on the long game; occupying Western Alaska. He could see why Nome was the key, and the strategy for taking Nome included denying the small airfield at Saint Lawrence to the Americans. Built to service the US communications base at Savoonga, it was capable of landing both fighters and heavy aircraft and one to two squadrons could easily stage out of there. Denying it to the Americans meant they would need to fly out of their Eielson or Elmendorf-Richardson air bases, each 600 miles from Nome. And if the ultimate plan was to knock out Eielson and Elmendorf-Richardson, which is what Bondarev would do, then the US fighters would be forced back to mainland USA, with their nearest air force bases 1,800 miles from Nome in Washington State, making it almost impossible for them to contest the airspace over Western Alaska against Russian forces which were flying less than a couple of hundred miles to cover the same operations area.

  The US might react angrily to events on Saint Lawrence, and Bondarev expected to lose good men as it lashed out. But when Russia moved against Alaska, personally he had no doubt the American Grizzly would wake from its recent hibernation and strike back with nuclear claws.

  His hand jerked and he nearly dropped the tablet. He closed it down and laid it back down on the bedside table. Sleep. He should sleep while he could.

  There would be no t
ime for sleep a few days from now.

  THIS IS YOUR WAKEUP CALL

  On the deck of a carrier, everyone knew their place, and aircraft were launched amid the roar of jet engines in an elaborate dance of colored shirts, hand-arm gestures and precision movements. Under the Rock, they relied on tightly choreographed commands over their headsets.

  Rodriguez stood in the trailer, looking down on the flight deck at her crew crouched around the Fantom.

  “Flaps, slats, panels, pins!” she intoned.

  The reply from the deck came immediately, “Green.”

  “Man out.” Referring to the hook up petty officer who attached the drone launch bar to the catapult shuttle.

  “Man out aye.”

  “Visual.”

  “Thumbs up.” A last check to be sure there were no leaks of fuel or hydraulic fluid. Her shooter turned, held his hand in the air, thumb up.

  “Cat scan.” Asking her shooter to make a last visual check of the catapult. No foreign objects, foreign object damage or people where they shouldn’t be.

  The cavern filled now with the roar of the Fantom’s twin jet engines.

  “Cat clear!”

  “Cat to 520 psi.”

  “520 aye.”

  “Pilot, go burner.”

  “Lighting burner, aye,” Bunny replied, spooling up the Fantom’s jet engine and lighting the afterburner.

  “Launch launch launch.”

  Rodriguez watched with satisfaction as the big aircraft shot along the deck and down the rails, flung through the chute like a rock from a slingshot. She had started her career as a shooter on huge, roaring steam-powered catapults, crouched on the flat top, ducking under the wings of aircraft blasting along the deck. The electro-magnetic Cat system had had a troubled birth, and had nearly been scrapped. But it was one thing to fire a steam catapult on an open deck in a windswept sea. In the confines of the cave under Little Diomede, it would never have worked. They would have had to find a way to capture the steam or vent it out over the sea without it being visible for miles in the Arctic air. The hugely powerful magnetos driving a Cat didn’t need a steam compressor, but they did suck a ton of juice. On a US carrier that power came from the ship’s own nuclear power plant, and nothing less was capable of pushing out the wattage needed. Which was why they had a repurposed Ohio class submarine reactor buried deep under the Pond. Little Diomede was made possible by kludges.

  Rodriguez bit her lip and watched as the flight systems aboard the Fantom stabilized it and it transitioned from kinetic to onboard hydrogen fuel power from its Scimitar engines. This was the moment most prone to disaster. The drones had to kick in full afterburner at the moment of launch or they would simply drop into the sea outside the chute.

  Bunny had her hand on the stick and her eye on her simulated cockpit flight screen, but Rodriguez knew for all her bravado about flying her drone out of the chute, she was pretty much a passenger at this point. The drone’s onboard AI could react to its environment and adjust its flight envelope a hundred times faster than Bunny and her redundant flight stick could. By the time she could twitch her stick a millimeter, the drone had already decided it had enough power for a successful launch, and aimed itself at the open air above Little Diomede. But AI could glitch, which was why she had her hand on the stick in case she needed to take back manual control while it was still in range of their undersea transmission array.

  Bunny was controlling her Fantom through a virtual-reality helmet, with Rodriguez relegated to watching it in 2D on a bank of screens that simulated cockpit views, tactical overviews and a heads-up display of instrument readouts. Flicking her eyes to the forward view screen, Rodriguez saw the hulks of the old fishing fleet flash past underneath the drone and then it began to climb into the night sky. Before she had even exhaled the breath she didn’t realize she was holding, the roar of the drone had died away and the cavern was suddenly quiet, and empty of all motion but the swirling water vapor from the drones Scimitar engines. Until a huge cheer went up from the personnel ringing the dock. Rodriguez couldn’t help but smile, and heard the relief in Bunny’s voice as she calmly announced, “Fantom 4-1 successful egress. AI has control. Turning to 150, altitude 200.” She leaned back from her stick, letting it go and flexing her fingers. She pulled up her virtual-reality visor, turned to Rodriguez briefly, flashing her a quick thumbs up, before turning and pulling the visor back down.

  “Cat return to launch readiness. Recovery team to standby,” Rodriguez said into her comms, and watched with satisfaction as the members of the red-shirted crash and salvage crew returned to their rest stations and changed their shirts to green in anticipation of recovering the aircraft after its mission.

  The only other person in the trailer was the CO, Halifax. He patted her shoulder. “Nice launch Boss. Almost be a shame when it becomes routine.”

  “If shooting 80 million dollars’ worth of warplane through a hole the size of a barn door underneath a billion tons of rock ever becomes routine sir, you can hand me my discharge slip.”

  “Now you’ve got that Cat working again, you’ll be firing three next time, then six, then twelve Lieutenant Commander. And you’ll be doing it at a pace you never thought possible. Your people ready for that?”

  She watched as Lieutenant Severin, her catapult officer, went around high fiving everyone on the flight deck. “They were born for it sir,” Rodriguez said, sounding as confident as she felt.

  The trailer was quiet for a moment, as they watched Bunny at work, pulling data from the drone and tweaking its flight path as it settled in for its flight down the Alaska coast, skimming the sea at not much more than wave top height. It would be an hour before it went feet dry over Alaska’s southern coast near Anchorage. Rodriguez had plenty to do outside, giving props to her people for a picture-perfect launch.

  “Permission to hit the flight deck sir?” she asked Halifax.

  “Granted. Lieutenant Commander, before you go?” Halifax asked. “A question?”

  “Sir?”

  “How you and your pilot run this mission is entirely your call, but the coast facing Russia is probably the most watched piece of sky outside of Atlanta International Airport. I know the Fantom is 5th generation stealth, but what radar can’t see, thermal and magnetic imaging satellites can. No disrespect to Lieutenant O’Hare, but I’d like to know you have a plan so that Air Force won’t be laughing their asses off at us for the next five years.”

  Bunny was listening; lifted up her visor and gave Rodriguez a wink, then went back to work.

  “Well sir, firstly, you have to remember Air Force has been staring at that piece of sky for seventy years, without seeing anything but the occasional lone flight of Russian bombers acting like they accidentally got lost. Stare at nothing long enough, you start seeing nothing.” She held up two fingers, “Plus, I checked and it’s two years since the Pentagon put Eielson through an unannounced exercise like this. Whoever is on duty at this time of night is sitting over there right now, sucking back lukewarm coffee and probably sneak-watching porn on a tablet. They have no idea what kind of shitstorm is about to hit them. Plus, Lieutenant O’Hare there has a cunning plan for not getting my very expensive warplane shot down. Tell the Commander, O’Hare.”

  O’Hare turned around and took off her helmet. Her bleached white cropped hair topped a brown freckled nose and piercing green eyes that were never at rest. She opened her mouth to answer, but Halifax tried to prick her balloon, “Let me guess. You’re going to circle south and blast up some river valley or mountain range at Mach 1.5 and treetop height, then pop up within cruise missile launch range, get a GPS lock on the target and call it mission accomplished before you high-tail it south again on afterburner.”

  Bunny grinned, “It’s called the Tanana River Valley sir, and maybe that’s the way you’d do it. That’s the way most folks would do it and the radar operators at Eielson would have wargamed that a hundred times. So yeah, I’m going to come at Eielson from the south … or so
uth-southwest actually. But on the commercial flight path that goes between Anchorage and Fairbanks. And I’m going to be flying at ten thousand feet, with my landing lights on, wheels and flaps down, at a stately 200 miles an hour. Every long and short-range radar and every infrared satellite in the northern hemisphere should be able to see me.”

  Halifax looked at Bunny like she had completely lost her marbles, and then at Rodriguez, who couldn’t hide how much she was loving it. And he could see clearly neither of them was going to tell him any more right now.

  “With your permission sir,” Rodriguez said to Halifax. “We have work to do.”

  “Permission granted Boss,” Halifax said, his frown turning to a slight smile.

  Airman E4 Dale Racine first saw the blip on his screen and heard the chime of the audio alarm as it came into the air traffic control zone for Fairbanks, 120 miles south of Eielson airbase. His eyes flicked to his screen as his system analyzed the flight profile of the unidentified object and compared it to civil and military flight plans. By its size, speed and altitude the system identified it as a probable light passenger aircraft but it didn’t match any logged civilian flight plan. Plus it was on a direct heading for Eielson. Had he missed it earlier? He quickly checked the data logs for that sector, but came up empty. Air traffic control at Anchorage should have called it in then handed it off, but there was no record of them having pinged it. He sighed.

  “Sir, I have an unidentified aircraft 100 miles out approaching from 185 degrees, altitude ten thousand, speed 226 miles an hour,” Racine called out to the officer of the watch, Staff Sergeant Elmore Bruning. Bruning and the other Airman in the tower at Eielson were busy planning how they were going to land both a C130 transport flight and a flight of drone-modded F-22s twenty minutes from now with only one functioning runway and one man short up in the tower because Airman E3 Scarlatti had just reported sick again the lazy bastard.