Bering Strait

by F X Holden

  “Will do, goodbye Mr. Secretary.”

  She looked at Williams, “How do I hang up?”

  The British voice replied, “I have disconnected the call ma’am.”

  Looking at the data onscreen again, she whistled. “That’s what you call a ‘little skirmish’?”

  Williams shrugged, “In the big picture, yeah. I mean, it’s not thermonuclear war.”

  “Yet. You heard the man, can you be sure to copy your report to CIA?” She said to the analyst.

  Williams looked a little uncomfortable, “Sorry ma’am, no.”

  She looked surprised, “No?”

  “No, I mean. Someone will. The data is all there; HOLMES is pulling it from servers inside NORAD, DIA, CIA, Pacific Command and so on. I was just putting that report together for NSA to show what he can do in these type of situations. I can’t share data on HOLMES capabilities with anyone outside NSA.” She was clearly not impressed, because he stammered on. “I mean, except you, because, like, you have clearance now.”

  “So sanitize it, include the information I gave the Secretary and then send it as soon as the dust settles, can you do that?”

  “Sure, I guess, but aren’t there other people who…”

  “Carl, right now, the only people above ground here are the two guys outside your door plus you and me, and to be honest only one of us seems to know what the hell is going on out there, and that’s you.”

  To Yevgeny Bondarev, it was no little skirmish. It was a tooth and nail fight to the death! The melee over Saint Lawrence had degenerated into a knife fight. Most of the remaining aircraft, about 20 Russian and 40 US fighters, were engaged in one on one, gun on gun combat.

  Bondarev had survived the first blizzard of US missiles, registered one, maybe two kills of his own, but was now twisting and turning above the sea with a very determined F-47 on his tail. He had no more short-range missiles left, but apparently, neither did his opponent. As tracer fire flashed over his canopy for the third time, he put his machine into a fast roll, then flicked into a climbing starboard turn to try to gain a little separation from his attacker. He needed altitude for what he had in mind, but it was a desperate last chance roll of the dice. If he screwed it up, he was dead.

  The Su-57 was a magnificent airplane, but it was big and intended to kill airborne enemies at long range. It was not optimal for close range combat. The smaller American F-47 was less deadly at range, but much more maneuverable in a knife fight because there was no pilot to black out. The thrust vectoring nozzles on his Sukhoi however gave him one spectacular trick for an opponent who was close on his six o’clock and he was willing to bet that whether he was up against a drone commanded by a ground-based pilot, or operating on autonomous AI control, he’d catch it unprepared. As he leveled out at the top of his turn he could almost feel the gun pipper on the heads-up display of the machine behind him settle on his tail. He bunted the nose of his Sukhoi down, keeping his speed at 450 knots, trying not to give the other pilot too easy a shot. Tracer blasted over his wing.

  He checked his airspeed. Good. Now! He hauled back sharply on his stick, pulling it all the way back until it rammed into the stays and couldn’t go any further. To the American behind him, man or machine, it must have seemed as though the Sukhoi had simply stopped in mid-air and pointed its nose at the sky. The American machine nearly lost control as it tried to avoid colliding with the Sukhoi that was skidding through the air on its tail, like the cobra the maneuver was named after.

  “Come on you fat-assed bastard!” Bondarev yelled at his Sukhoi, pushing the nose down before it pitched over backward and increasing his engine to full burner, regaining forward momentum. This was the moment Bondarev was most vulnerable, recovering from a virtual stall, hydrogen fire pouring from his afterburner like a small sun, he knew he was a sitting duck if there was more than one F-47 behind him. He hunched his shoulders waiting to die, but grunted as he saw the exhaust flames of the American fighter wallow through the night sky ahead of him, having failed to keep the Sukhoi in its sights, fighting against a stall itself. It pulled an ugly looping turn across Bondarev’s nose and his guns fired automatically as soon as they had a radar lock on the American. The machine fell apart in a glittering rain of metal shards.

  Bondarev had control over his own aircraft again, and scanned his threat display for another target. He tried desperately to get a grip on the situation. Where were his pilots, where was the enemy? He was at ten thousand feet again, swinging wildly around the sky to avoid the trap of being the legendary sitting duck. “Gold squadron, report your…”

  At that moment he heard a missile launch warning scream in his ears. The enemy must have been close, because even as his automatic countermeasures of flares and chaff fired into the sky behind him, the Sukhoi’s combat AI took control of the machine from him and flung the Sukhoi into an inverted dive that pulled all the blood from his head. His pressurized combat suit inflated, trying to keep the blood flowing to his brain, but it wasn’t enough! He was pulling too many G’s, and his world went black.

  What happened next wouldn’t matter to Yevgeny Bondarev. He was out cold.

  It was designated ‘Hunter’ for a reason. Like the F-47, the unmanned Okhotnik drone was a multirole platform, with a range of more than 4,000 miles. It could stay airborne for 20 hours at cruising speed, carry a payload of two tons, and while it was able to pull data from multiple sources to assist its own air-to-air targeting, and engage enemy aircraft with both long and short range missiles, its real talent was stealth delivery of air-to-ground ordnance.

  Like the 1,500 kg thermobaric fuel-air explosive precision guided bomb. Comprising pressurized ethylene oxide, mixed with an energetic nanoparticle such as aluminum, surrounding a high explosive burster, when detonated it created an explosion equivalent to 49 tons of TNT. That was why it was unofficially called a MOAB – Mother of All Bombs. It couldn’t be mounted on a cruise missile - an aircraft had to penetrate enemy air defenses to be able to deliver it, which was a drawback. But just one could flatten a small town, render a harbor unusable and sink all the ships in it, or destroy every hangar, aircraft and living person on an airfield inside a radius of about 1,600 feet.

  Stealthy delivery of the MOAB was a talent that had been honed in the deserts and mountain ranges of Northern Syria by pilots and systems officers of the 575th Army Air Force, and they were exceedingly good at both the stealth, and the delivery. Further, while Bondarev’s 6983rd Okhotniks had been held back from the battle for Saint Lawrence, no such restriction had been put on the Okhotniks of the 575th.

  At the same time as Bondarev received his order to engage, a squadron of 575th Okhotniks in a low level holding pattern in the middle of the Bering Strait split like a starburst, with four three-plane elements departing to attack US ground targets within the no-fly exclusion zone. One flight headed for targets around Nome and Port Clarence. Two flights headed for Saint Lawrence, to be ready for tasking should close air support be needed against US ground targets on the island.

  The fourth flight headed for the only other US installation inside the no-fly zone. It wasn’t a target on which you’d usually use thermobaric bombs - something much less powerful would have been sufficient, but sometimes you just had to use what you had to hand.

  And at least there was complete certainty they would no longer have worry about that annoying US long-range radar installation on Little Diomede Island.

  Alicia Rodriguez had trained her whole adult life to go to war. But now that she was, she found all that training suddenly failed. The world under the Rock had descended into a noisome chaos, turning her perfectly ordered flight deck into a mass of personnel from the 712th Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron all looking for somewhere to park backpacks or backsides, and for someone to answer their big and small questions. That person should have been their CO, Captain Ali Aslam, but Aslam was still topside with Halifax getting his men down from the station above in the goods elevator that held only 15 person
nel at a time. Men and women were also pouring out of the emergency stairs beside the elevator shaft.

  Bunny wasn’t helping either, trapped in her ‘cockpit’ growling at anyone who came within twenty feet. Her recon drones had been parked in a sea level orbit ten minutes south of Saint Lawrence and hadn’t been re-tasked or recalled. She only had about ten minutes fuel left before she would have to call them home anyway. Rodriguez had just finished ensuring her recovery team was ready to recycle them when it landed, despite all the chaos in the cavern.

  Rodriguez pulled open the door to the trailer and stepped inside, closing the door behind her and taking a breath. She pressed her forehead to the door. Come on girl. You can get a pair of drones into the air through a hole in a rock inside ten minutes, you can land a measly two kites and deal with 100 worried base personnel and their stupid questions. Right?

  Right. Question of the moment. The head of base security, Master Sergeant Collaguiri, had been ordered down under the Rock by Halifax, but insisted his place was topside with the CO. He had tried appealing the case to Rodriguez, and Rodriguez had promised him she would call up to the CO and see what he wanted to do about it.

  She sighed and picked up the comms, punching in the number for the radar installation control room, assuming that was where Halifax would be. It wasn’t a long call.

  “Rodriguez, we are currently tracking about a hundred friendly and enemy aircraft in combat over the Bering Sea, tell the Master Sergeant he can…” The line went dead.

  Then a second later the entire island shook as though the God of Thunder himself had spoken.

  The effect of a thermobaric blast against living targets is gruesome. First, the pressure wave from the fuel-air explosion flattens anyone caught unprotected. If you are within the kill zone and unlucky enough to survive the pressure wave, the vacuum created collapses your lungs so that you suffocate. Not all of the fuel in the bomb is guaranteed to go off, so if the fuel deflagrates but doesn’t detonate, anyone still left alive will be severely burned and probably also inhale the burning fuel. Since the most common FAE fuels, ethylene oxide and propylene oxide, are highly toxic, undetonated FAE is as lethal to personnel caught within the cloud as most chemical warfare agents.

  Luckily for Halifax, he was at ground zero for the first of the three MOABs that hit the Naval Computer and Telecommunications Area Master Station on Little Diomede. As he was talking with Rodriguez he just had time to register the sound of an explosion and a sharp kerosene-like odor before he and every man, woman and bird on the surface of the Rock were obliterated.

  It was like two or three earthquakes hit them in quick succession, followed shortly afterward by a thundering series of booms. Spreading outward from the point of impact on top of the rock dome a series of pressure waves pushed the sea surrounding Little Diomede down and outward. The pressure waves passed quickly, and the displaced seawater came flooding back.

  Little Diomede was ultimately supposed to be fitted with blast doors and airlocks at the mouth of the Slot that could withstand a tactical nuclear strike and enable the base to keep functioning. There had been no urgency; they had not yet been installed.

  The gantry over the submarine docking bay rocked and a part of the reinforced roof over the small harbor collapsed. Seconds later a huge wave flooded in through the entrance of the cave and instantly submerged the entire dock area in waist deep water.

  Anyone there fifty feet below the trailer who had kept their feet through the first round of violence was knocked down by the force of the water and as Rodriguez got to her feet she saw the harbor was a maelstrom of churning water and flailing personnel. Her mind raced.

  A nuke, we must have been hit by a nuke! But, shouldn’t there have been a flash? Wouldn’t a nuke have evaporated the seawater, turned it to steam? The cave was open to the sea, so if they were at the center of a nuclear explosion, even here under the Rock they should have been toasted to a crisp.

  Not a nuke, then.

  She saw Bunny struggling to her feet, cursing as usual.

  That was as far as thinking got her. Outside the trailer people were drowning. She jumped for the door and ran down to the still rising waterline.

  IN YOUR FACE

  Bondarev woke with a headache like he’d dropped an entire bottle of whiskey in a single sitting, then realized he was still strapped into his cockpit. His vision was blurred and greying out, alarms were sounding in his ears and he could smell the distinct ozone tinged smell of fried wiring. An instant of panic rose in him, the most basal fear of all fighter pilots - fire!? With one hand he reached for his ejection handle, with the other he fumbled for the oxygen dial that supplied air to his mask, turning it to full rich, breathing deeply.

  Almost immediately his vision cleared, his headache dropped to a dull throb, and he could see he was flying straight and level, about a hundred meters above the sea. His heads-up display was dead, but his instruments still worked, if they could be trusted. A quick scan told him he had taken a hit from either missile or gunfire. His right wing was perforated and the control surfaces there jammed, but his engine was running within normal operating ranges. No fuel or fluid leaks being reported. His combat AI had saved his life and gotten him out of the fight, put him on autopilot and set a course for Lavrentiya. He was about twenty minutes out.

  He knew better than to take manual control. If it’s broken, don’t try to fly it. Cutting out the autopilot now, without knowing the state of his aircraft or how the AI was compensating for flight damage could send him into an irrecoverable spin and he didn’t have the altitude to risk it. Just like when he was in his passenger car at home in Vladivostok, he was putting his life in the hands of the AI.

  He should never have looked down at the floor of the cockpit. But something felt wrong and he realized his right foot felt wet. That was when he noticed the noise, the high whistling sound of air rushing past and into the cockpit. He looked down. There were holes in the wall of the cockpit where no holes should be. And a pool of blood on the floor by the pedals where no blood should be.

  Between the two of them, Rodriguez and O’Hare had pulled ten people out of the water before anyone else around them had reacted. Being up in the command trailer a good distance from the mini-tsunami had helped them get their wits together faster than most people, but pretty soon there were twenty or thirty people down at the waterline, hands grasping limbs, heaving bodies out of the water.

  Most were alive.

  Some weren’t.

  It seemed to Rodriguez they were just starting to get on top of things - there were more people up above the waterline than there were still foundering in the water.

  Suddenly there was an almighty crash from the direction of the topside elevator as the plane lift and a few hundred feet of cable crashed to the floor of the cave, then as though in sympathy, the loading crane by the submarine dock gave a forlorn groan and with majestic gravity, it fell across the Pond, its heavy crown smashing into the transformer room on the other side of the dock. The last thing Rodriguez saw was Master Sergeant Collaguiri and a group of men disappearing under dust and rubble.

  And then the cave fell into total darkness.

  Perri fell to the bottom of the ladder and just managed to get out of the way before the hatch above slammed shut with a clang and Dave and his rifle fell in a heap right where he’d landed.

  “Screw this,” Dave grunted.

  Perri looked up, “Did you lock it?”

  “No I didn’t freaking lock it,” Dave swore, looking at him like it was a totally unreasonable question. “I came in head first. You can lock it.”

  Perri didn’t argue. Pulling himself up off the floor he climbed the ladder and pulled the combination padlock through the eyelets that Dave had drilled into the wall, clicking it shut. He slid down the ladder using just his hands to slow himself and landed lightly. He had so much adrenaline in his system he felt he could have flown down.

  He looked at Dave and the two of them burst out laugh
ing. It was a hysterical, uncontrollable kind of laughter and they let it roll all the way out and then back again before they both fell onto their backsides.

  Perri gasped, “That was insane.”

  “Asymmetrical you said?” Dave said, wiping his eyes. “That was totally asymmetrical man!”

  “I know.”

  “I thought maybe you could hit it, maybe a bullet would get through the roof, but I never thought…”

  “I know.”

  “Did you see those missiles blasting off? Was that us?”

  Perri remembered the missiles arcing into the sky and heading out to sea, definitely hunting something out there. “Don’t think so.”

  Dave wiped his face. His hand was shaking, and he sat on it.

  They were both quiet a while.

  “That was one mother of an explosion. You don’t think…” Dave asked.

  “Think what?”

  “You think we killed anyone? I mean, the school…”

  “The school was five hundred yards away, no way.”

  “No. What about Russians?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t look. I was too busy running and getting crapped on by auklets.” They laughed again.

  “Yeah, at least someone was more freaked than us,” Dave said.

  Perri reached over and checked the rifle he’d thrown down the ladder ahead of him. It had landed on its stock, but he quickly checked the scope, turning it on to see if he’d damaged it. No, it was okay. It was built to take some tough love.

  “They’re going to start hunting us now,” Dave said, watching him as he jacked out the remaining ammunition and started pulling the rifle apart to clean it.