Bering Strait

by F X Holden

  “For sure.”

  “We should stay down here a while eh? Stupid to go out the next couple of days.”

  “Like we agreed.”

  “I know. We have to pull that old sheet of tin across the hatch cover though.” They’d found an old sheet of corrugated iron and worked out how to lean it up and over the hatch covering the tank and then pull the hatch down so the tin covered it over. It was light enough they could lift the hatch and the tin at the same time from below, but heavy enough it wouldn’t easily blow away. It wasn’t much, but it hid the hatch from plain view and looked like the hundred other pieces of junk lying around the gas station.

  “So do it,” Perri said. “Better to do it now while it’s dark, then we can bunk down.”

  “Yeah, right.” Dave disappeared up the ladder again. Perri heard him fooling around outside and pulling the cover shut a couple of times before he was satisfied it was good enough, then he came back down and collapsed on a mattress next to Perri. He grabbed a water bottle off a shelf and took a long pull. “Damn, I should have taken a whizz while I was up there,” Dave said, and Perri laughed again.

  After a few minutes Perri laid the parts of his rifle aside. He heard heavy breathing and looked across and saw Dave with his head cradled onto the crook of his arm, asleep.

  Perri suddenly realized he was exhausted too. He drank some water, then reached over Dave to cut the power to the lights. Blackness consumed their small cold cell deep under the dirt and he lay himself down, pulling a sleeping bag over himself.

  “Sniper team,” Dave said somewhere to his right. “Deadly, eh?”

  “You did great brother,” Perri told him.

  “I did, right?” Dave said. “You too.”

  “Sleep Dave.”

  Private Zubkhov had rolled out of his bed and found himself crouched on the floor beside it before he’d even realized he was awake. From somewhere outside, maybe out by the airfield, he heard the unmistakable whoosh of a ground to air missile.

  Then as a second explosion rocked the air, he realized what had woken him. A few blocks away, it sounded like a full-on war was raging. As the men around him had tumbled out of their bunks, he’d grabbed up pants and a jacket, found his anti-materiel rifle against the wall and staggered out into the freezing dark night.

  Across the other side of town, explosions lit the night sky.

  “What the hell?” he asked no one in particular

  Captain Demchenko took control, sending half of the men to the airfield where they’d been digging sandbagged emplacements all afternoon. He pointed at Zubkhov, “You, and the rest of you, with me.” And with that he’d started running toward the explosions, which seemed to Zubkhov to be the complete opposite of what they should be doing. That opinion was confirmed five minutes later, as their squad rounded a corner to see half of the houses on the next block on fire and at the end of the row, a volcano of white fire spitting shrapnel and 7.62mm rounds at them.

  “They hit the ammo dump,” Zubkhov said to himself.

  “Who did?” asked the man next to him.

  Zubkhov looked at the dark sky around him, as another ground to air missile leaped off its rails and sped away into the night.

  “Who you think, dumbass?” Zubkhov replied.

  The other soldier had a quick comeback ready, and he was about to throw it back at Zubkhov but never got that far. Something whizzed past their ears.

  Zubkhov watched in horror as the smile on the man’s face was replaced with a gaping hole through which Zubkhov could see his brains. Then he crumpled to the ground.

  The emergency lighting kicked in, bathing the cavern below the Rock in a ghostly red light. People had frozen in place, with the exception of the few still in the water, kicking to keep their heads above the freezing waves.

  Bunny pulled another woman out of the Pond and hauled her up onto the dock. The water was flooding out of the cave again now, dragging debris and bodies with it as though it was pouring into a bottomless hole somewhere outside the cave.

  Tsunami. Rodriguez was thinking. She’d seen a movie once about a tidal wave hitting Asia. One thing she remembered - the water pulling away leaving fish flapping on an empty beach. Then it came back. She realized people were standing watching in fascination as the Pond emptied.

  “Everyone! Up to level two, higher if you can!” she yelled. She bent to help up an aircrewman beside her and pushed him up the dock.

  “I have to get to the trailer,” Bunny panted beside her. “I have to bring those Fantoms down somewhere.”

  “If the trailer has power.”

  “I’ll try the backup generator,” Bunny replied. “Or we can patch it into the emergency grid.”

  “I’ll get everyone up above the old waterline,” Rodriguez said. “I don’t care if you get those Fantoms down in one piece or send them to Nome, but I want you to get vision of whatever the hell happened topside.”

  “Yes Boss,” Bunny said before sprinting away.

  From the direction of the cave entrance she heard a sound like a steam engine blowing, and felt the air pressure inside the cave start to build. A boiling wall of water appeared in the darkness at the other side of the Pond.

  Her stomach fell as she realized it was twice her height and still fifty feet away.

  She had just turned to run when it hit her.

  The US Air Force Pacific Command did not hesitate when the shooting started. Their President had promised ‘fire and fury’ and though Operation Resolve was intended to be a simple show of force in advance of the approaching deadline for Russian withdrawal, they were prepared for belligerence.

  Analysts had rushed Bunny O’Hare’s recon images into strike planners who added her data to satellite imagery and then quickly identified the likely location of the hostages at the school in Gambell, the Russian HQ and anti-air emplacements there and the presence of Russian troops, air defenses, US personnel and civilians inside the US cantonment at Savoonga.

  The 36th Air Wing had already prepositioned six of its B-21 Raider stealth bombers at Elmendorf Richardson and two of them were on patrol east of the US base when the first of Bondarev’s air-air missiles left its weapons bay east of Saint Lawrence. Each of them carried 12 second-generation Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff - Extended Range missiles, capable of putting a 1000 lb. warhead onto a target the size of a minivan. It had a range of nearly 300 miles and it didn’t matter that Russian laser weapons were effectively jamming satellite coverage over Saint Lawrence, the JASSM-ER had its own inertial and optical based navigation and onboard target identification system.

  There had been a lot of talk in the early part of the last century about whether the strategic heavy bomber still had a role in the age of the drone, but no US drone or attack fighter could field the larger standoff stealth weapons and it took eight drones to match the payload of a single B-21 Raider. By the time the first US fighter pilot was ejecting from his F-35, 24 of the deadly stealth cruise missiles were on their way to targets at Saint Lawrence.

  Gambell could be hit cleanly. The civilians there were judged to be outside the blast radius of the inbound cruise missiles. Six missiles were allocated to Gambell, three to Russian positions and stores identified at the airfield, one to a Verba emplacement near the town hall, one to a Russian transport ship that had recently arrived in the harbor and one to the town hall itself. Savoonga was another matter. Bunny’s initial recon and limited satellite data showed that Russian troops there had quartered themselves in buildings all over the US military cantonment, and distributed their military and civilian hostages like human shields, scattered throughout the complex. At least two potential Verba air defense systems had been identified, but planners had little or no intel on the specific disposition of Russian forces and equipment at the site.

  There was no way to avoid friendly casualties at Savoonga, but the order had come from the very top. The 712th Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron Savoonga base and its top-secret tech was to be denied to Russi
an forces. Eighteen cruise missiles were allocated to targets in and around Savoonga. The facility would be leveled.

  Private Zubkhov had dived for the ground and lay there until it seemed the secondary explosions from the ammo dump were done. The fire still burned like a small volcano, lighting up the whole town, and the body of the faceless man beside him.

  Udinov, that had been his name. They’d served together nearly a year. He liked American country and western music. Had liked.

  Zubkhov had taken off his jacket and laid it over the man’s head. A few other men had hit the dirt around him, and they were slowly picking themselves up, checking to see if they still had all their arms and legs.

  Captain Demchenko had disappeared. Literally. Usually he would have been there shouting at them to pull themselves together and do … something. Zubkhov looked around him. He counted seven other soldiers like himself, saw a jeep roaring toward them from the other side of town. But the captain was nowhere.

  He found himself looking at the dirt, expecting to see a bloody smudge somewhere, but all he saw was dirt, ground ice and debris.

  That was when he’d looked up at the bluff that towered over the town and had seen the black clouds of birds lifting into the night, like a small squawking storm cloud, lit by the lightning in the town below.

  He watched them swirl into the sky in panic, circle once or twice, and then land again.

  And beyond them, barely more than shadows flashing between the rocks, he could swear he saw two men, running.

  The water smashed Rodriguez face first onto the concrete of the dock and then rolled her across it. It seemed to Alicia just a question of how she was going to die, not whether she would. Her head collided with something solid and her arms flailed around her trying to grab a hold of something, anything. A leg appeared out of nowhere and gave her an almighty kick in the chest, forcing what little air she had left out of her lungs and she kicked back reflexively, legs slamming into something. She sucked in water, then foam, then blessed air, coughing and heaving before her head went under again. But she’d got a glimpse of where she was, and which way was up.

  Kicking out, she sought the red light that must be the surface and broke out onto the top of a wave just as it hammered into the seawall above the submarine dock, and rolled back onto itself. She rolled with it, calmer now, seeing the man who had probably kicked her in the chest floating past, his head and neck bent at an impossible angle.

  “Got you Boss!” she heard a voice yell, as a hand grabbed her collar and pulled her over to where she could throw one weak arm around the rungs of a ladder and the other around someone’s legs.

  It was her arresting gear officer, Lieutenant “Stretch” Alberti. His small frame clung doggedly to the ladder with one hand, while the other held her collar in a titan’s grip and refused to let the sucking water pull her away.

  The broken man who had floated away floated back again, dead eyes looking up at her with an accusatory expression as the ebbing tide carried him past.

  Could have been me, she thought, then looked across the Pond at the smashed cranes, collapsed elevator shaft and blocked stairwell. I wonder who’s luckier.

  A fighter pilot in Bondarev’s 6983rd Air Brigade had to land one out of three sorties himself, without autopilot, in order to remain qualified for combat operations. Most of Bondarev’s pilots had too much pride to let the AI land their kite even once. Right now, Bondarev had no choice. It wasn’t just that he didn’t dare touch the stick and throttle, it was also because he couldn’t seem to lift his arm to even touch it.

  A shell, or parts of a missile warhead, had hammered through the skin of his fighter beside his leg, sliced across his calf, opening up his great saphenous vein, and then spent the last of its energy as it buried itself in the floor beside his foot.

  By the time he’d realized what was happening, he’d lost about a half liter of blood. He’d stared at his leg, asking himself why his foot felt wet, why he was having trouble moving it, why he could hear wind blasting around the cockpit. Finally something in his mind clicked, or some of the years of training kicked in, and he pulled a cord from a utility pouch in his flight suit and tied a tourniquet tight around his leg. By then, blood was pooling on the floor.

  He spent the next fifteen minutes watching the instruments as the AI steered him down the glide path toward the airfield on the horizon, trying to remember how many liters of blood a human body had in them. Wasn’t it five liters, and you could afford to lose twenty percent, right? So that was what, a liter? Or was it twenty liters, and you could afford to lose five? No matter how he turned it around, the answer wouldn’t come.

  The lights of the airport approached.

  Definitely five liters. You gave blood, they usually took a third of a liter, maximum, right? So more than that must be dangerous. He looked at the floor. That down there, that is way over the permitted maximum Yevgeny.

  He laughed, and then laughed at himself laughing.

  Two green lights. Wheels down.

  That was good. Assuming there were wheels and tires at the end of the struts and not just broken stumps.

  Like his leg down there. Maybe that was just a stump too.

  He laughed at that too. Change his call sign to ‘Stumps Bondarev’.

  The ground rushed up. His head jerked as the Sukhoi hit the deck once, bounced and then settled into a hard three-point touchdown.

  Useless bloody AI, bouncing all over the field. He tried to reach for the stick again, saw his arm flop to his side as though it belonged to someone else, and saw the flashing red lights of emergency vehicles speeding across the field.

  Damn. Not good. Someone must be in trouble.

  Perri woke to the ground shaking. They were ten feet below ground, but he could feel the mattress beneath him vibrating. Then a sound like muted thunder rolled overhead, penetrating even the hatch cover and the shaft down to their tank. More sonic booms from fighters maybe.

  He reached over and turned on the battery powered lamp. Dave had been woken too.

  “What was that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Another rumble shook the tank and some cans fell off one of the makeshift shelves.

  “We have to look,” Dave said.

  “Or we could stay here and wait it out,” Perri said. “Which would be smarter.”

  “It’s our families out there,” Dave said. “I’m going to look.”

  Perri rolled into a crouch and handed Dave the binoculars, taking up his rifle and scope. “You’re right. Here.”

  Dave opened the hatch cover slowly and quietly, lifting it just a few inches so that he could look for any sign of Russian troops nearby. When he was sure they were still alone, he eased it a few more inches up and pushed the sheet of rusted tin aside before crawling out onto the cold ground. It was still dark.

  They hadn’t slept long.

  Crouching, they ran into the gas station office through the back door and peered out through the windows, onto a scene from hell.

  Rodriguez wasn’t sure when she had passed out, but it must have been somewhere between when Stretch Alberti had pulled her up onto the flight deck and when they laid her out on the padded bench inside the command trailer. It wasn’t necessarily because she was the ranking officer under the Rock they thought she should be laid out in the command trailer. It was because there was no other space. Every bit of dry ground up above the high water mark was littered with the drowned and half drowned, bent, broken or shattered bodies of the personnel of NCTAMS.

  Levering herself up onto an elbow and looking out the windows of the trailer above her head, she saw in the red-lit cavern maybe half of the complement had been taken by the surging water, caught in the fall of the crane or the explosion of debris triggered by the falling elevator. The other half were tending to them as best they could, with supplies from the flight deck sickbay.

  Someone had apparently bandaged her head and decided Rodriguez just needed to sleep it off. She touch
ed her head, feeling the bandage and the swelling on her face.

  “It’s still all there ma’am,” Bunny said, leaning into view from the bench beside her. She held Rodriguez’s head gently, put a hand on her shoulder to stop her getting up and lowered her back down onto the bench. “Your nose is a bit flatter now, but it’s actually prettier.”

  “Screw you O’Hare,” Rodriguez managed, wincing.

  “Yes ma’am,” Bunny smiled.

  “What’s our status? Collaguiri? I saw him…”

  “He took five tons of elevator to the head, he’s gone ma’am. We’ve got about 13 dead, ten with serious injuries, fractures and the like.” She held up a bruised hand, “Dug two out of the stairwell, might be more in there. Another dozen walking wounded but still in the fight, twenty uninjured.”

  Rodriguez remembered something, “Topside, did you…”

  “Yeah, no. I couldn’t bring the Fantoms in and I couldn’t land them outside and risk they would be seen if the Russians did a bomb damage assessment overflight. I sent one straight to Nome. Had enough fuel left in the other for a few passes over the Rock before I sent it off too,” she took a breath. “I can replay the night-cam vision for you but it’s like…everything up there was just scraped into the sea. The dome is gone, and everything inside it. The cabins and huts down by the water are just ashes and splinters, floating around in the water with a hundred tons of wrecked boats and pontoons.”

  “No survivors?”

  “None moving, that I could see,” Bunny shook her head. “No IR signatures.”

  “Do we have comms?”

  “Drone comms, yeah. The cable to the undersea array survived, just like it was designed to do. But we’ll need someone to find a kludge if we want to use it to contact CNAF without putting a drone in the air.”

  “What was it? Tactical nuke?”