Bering Strait

by F X Holden

  “You needn’t worry about the Enterprise,” Lukin assured him. “It is a big stick the Americans rattle at small nations. The Navy will take care of the Enterprise. Admiral Kirov assures me the Americans will soon learn how vulnerable their capital ships are.”

  Vulnerability was something Perri knew all about.

  How to feel it in yourself, how to see it in others. It wasn’t an easy life on Saint Lawrence, you had to earn your living from the land and sea around you, no one was going to give it to you. And sometimes you et the bear, sometimes the bear et you.

  Right now he was staring at that damn radio again, knowing it was like a homing finger of death that pointed straight at him and Dave, wondering whether he should turn it on and tell the Sarge what he was seeing.

  Because something was happening down there in Gambell and it didn’t look good. All yesterday, they’d watched the Russians go house to house with sacks, looting. Not televisions or computers or jewelry, though they probably didn’t hesitate to help themselves to anything shiny that was lying around … they saw one guy with a shopping trolley and it looked to Perri like they were loading up on food. OK, so there hadn’t been any helicopters flying in supplies for weeks now, they were probably running low, but what had been low level scrounging the last couple of weeks seemed like planned pilfering now.

  Then they heard shouting down by the school. Perri and Dave were up on the bluff, and looked down on the town with scope and binos.

  “They’re pulling people out of the schoolhouse,” Dave said. “Lining them up.”

  “I see your brothers,” Perri said. “Shit. I think they’re going to shoot them.”

  “Do something man!” Dave said, “You’ve got the gun. You’re the sniper!”

  “Shut up!” Perri hissed. He knew he was too far away to take a shot. Sure, he could spray a few downrange, and he might disturb whatever was going on, but he wouldn’t be doing any more than making the troops down there aware he was up here. Maybe a few of their people could get away though…

  “Wait, no. The Russians all have backpacks. Our people have got packs on too, coats and boots! Would you load people up and then take them out to shoot them?” Dave asked, confused.

  Perri watched down the scope a minute more. “They’re moving them somewhere. They’re all heading out.”

  “Where the hell…”

  “I don’t know, but everyone down there is kitted out like they’re going cross country,” Perri said. As he spoke, he saw his family in the lines of townspeople. His brothers and father, his mother. She looked so small. And pissed. She was yelling at a Russian soldier who was trying to push people into line. Yeah, that was his ma.

  When they finally had the 200 townspeople lined up in two long lines, the Russian soldiers formed up ahead and either side of them, with a few at the rear, and they headed off down toward the road out of town that went along the airstrip and then skirted the bluff – after that it went nowhere in particular. Only bird watchers and hunters, or berry pickers, used the tracks out that way. In ten minutes though, it was clear they were quitting town.

  “I can’t see my grandma,” Dave said, running his binos up and down the line of hostages. “I can’t see your grandparents either. None of the elders are with them.”

  “Kids are with them though,” Perri said. He ran the scope back through town and stopped at the school, where he saw a solitary Russian soldier standing on the school steps, watching everyone leave. He didn’t appear in a hurry to join them. Perri watched as he finished a cigarette, ground it out under his boot, and went back inside the schoolhouse.

  “They split them up,” Perri said. “I bet they left the elders back in Gambell, took the adults and kids with them.”

  “Human shields,” Dave said. “That’s what they call it, right? Can’t get a missile up your butt if you’re walking next to a bunch of civilians.”

  Perri thought about it. “Yeah, but walking where? We’ve got to decide; do we follow the group, or stay here, see if we can somehow get the kids and elders out.”

  They looked at each other. Without speaking they knew what they had to do.

  Ask Sarge.

  Devlin also knew what she had to do. She had to have a shot of bourbon.

  Just a little one. Medicinal.

  She swirled it around her mouth. It was a John J Bowman single barrel, and five-time winner of the World Whiskey Best Bourbon award. A fine example of American craftsmanship, and every glass she poured for a guest was trade promotion, right? She put the bottle back on the tray beside the gin which was the favored end-of-day tipple among the diplerati. And it was the end of a very long day.

  Her people had been working their networks in Embassies and Consulates across the city, testing support for a coming UN Security Council resolution rescinding the recognition of the Barents’ Council of Nations. It couldn’t succeed, not with Russia and probably China abstaining, but it was the first step to a full vote in the UN chamber to have the Council delegitimized so that Russia could no longer hide its aggression behind a veil of international probity. State wanted to get that done to take one of Russia’s threatening pieces off the chess board.

  They were also drawing up a ‘skins and shirts’ list of who would be with them, who would be with Russia, and who would try to stay neutral, if the shooting war started again. It didn’t look good. The US had its traditional steadfast allies behind it: the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Also looking like it would fall behind Team USA was Turkey, still worried about continued Russian influence in neighboring Syria. Russia could be sure of the support of its newly won Baltic ally, Finland, and the ‘Stans’: Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan. Russia could also muster Middle East support from Syria and Iran. But there was a depressingly long list of countries declaring this was a bilateral ‘maritime dispute’ between Russia and the USA, including most of Europe.

  Devlin had spent the morning with the Swedish Ambassador, impressing on him in diplomatic double-speak that if he wanted to keep selling Volvo motor cars in the USA and Swedish arms like Gripen fighters and Bofors cannons to US allies the US would be expecting Sweden to get off the fence and vote in the UN to de-accredit the Barents Council at its next meeting in two days. “Abstaining again is not an option,” she’d told him. “I suspect it would annoy Volvo’s Chinese owners mightily if they weren’t able to sell their cars in the US anymore because of a political miscalculation?”

  The reason she needed a drink was not because it was the end of a hard working day - she’d had plenty of those. It was because she feared all her efforts, all her people’s efforts, were like firing buckshot at a hurricane. She had called Washington at midnight the night before to follow up on her report about the imminent Russian attack on Alaska, only to be told it was regarded as ‘interesting but unlikely’. It did not concur with intelligence from other sources, or reports from other embassies. Russian military movements were consistent with defensive preparations or the proposed ‘no-fly’ zone over Alaska, but not consistent with what would be needed to mount a full-scale invasion. That would require the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of troops, the transport of armor and material, and there were no indications that was taking place.

  “They’re mobilizing their Far East fighter Brigades, air defense batteries, airborne troops and special forces Ambassador,” a State Department analyst in the Secretary of State’s office had told her in a patronizing tone. “Not the Divisions of troops, main battle tanks and the ships they’d need to land them. They’re getting ready to defend themselves and their position on Saint Lawrence, not go on the attack.”

  She didn’t have the stripes to be able to ask anyone in the Pentagon what specific preparations - beyond sallying forth with the Enterprise strike group - the US was making to either challenge the Russian occupation of Saint Lawrence or defend against an attack on Alaska, so she had turned to an alternative source. An old Canadian friend from her days as a junior officer in the embassy in Ott
awa. He sat on the Canadian Foreign Ministry Joint Intelligence Committee now, and she asked him if her communique had reached his desk, or had it been buried.

  “Oh, I got it,” he said. “Or a filtered version. Under the five-eyes agreement they couldn’t exactly bury it, they had to share it, but they 'contexted' it with five other reports indicating this business was all about Saint Lawrence Island and needling the USA, and nothing to do with trying to land troops in Alaska.”

  She had blown her top, “Needling the USA?” she’d asked him. “Why the hell would Russia risk nuclear war just to ‘needle’ the USA?”

  “No one believes you’d start WW3 over Saint Lawrence Island,” the man said, with untypical directness. “The Ukraine, Syria, Finland … this is Russia once again testing how far they can push you.”

  She saw how you could look at it that way, if you bought into the bill of goods Russia was selling. “OK, but look. You’ve seen my report, what is Canada’s play here? If Russia marches into Alaska, you have to react.”

  “We’re not worried, but we’re ready,” he’d said. “Army is activating the 3rd Division, moving all 4 brigades into British Columbia. And in the unlikely event of an invasion, our Prime Minister would probably be open to discuss US air and ground forces staging out of BC if he received a formal approach.”

  “Oh he’d be open to discuss,” she’d sighed. “That’s so kind.”

  She sat down in her chair and swung her tired legs up on her desk. At her elbow was a pile of papers and she picked from the top of it a book Carl Williams had sent her a few days before. “The Man Who Saved Britain,” by a Harvard history professor. She had read the blurb on the inside cover. The professor had come across a trove of papers in Germany written by the impressively named Friedrich-Werner Graf von der Schulenburg, the last German ambassador to the Soviet Union before Operation Barbarossa, the battle which signaled the start of the German war on Russia. In his personal letters, written communiques and personal diaries von der Schulenburg had relentlessly pursued a campaign to persuade the Reich Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, and his trusted coterie, that if they embarked on an invasion of Britain, their Russian ‘allies’ would take advantage of their distraction and immediately stab them in the back, marching into Poland, Czech, Slovakia, Albania, Yugoslavia and most importantly, the precious oilfields of Romania. He cited numerous conversations with Russian politicians, bureaucrats and military officers to back his claims, he sent translated clippings from newspapers, and he made three trips to Berlin to personally brief the Nazi party hierarchy about the threat. He also cited conversations with the US Ambassador in Russia indicating the US had no intention of entering the war in Europe.

  In the end, he prevailed. Hitler postponed his plan to invade England, shored up his defenses along the Atlantic front, and sent his tanks and Stukas east. He was mostly right, Russia would have stabbed Germany in the back, postwar documents confirmed that. But the US did enter the war and together with Russia, gave Nazi Germany a spanking.

  The small handwritten note in the front told her what Williams was thinking, sending her the book.

  To Devlin von der McCarthy,

  Sometimes the voice of one person is enough. Keep at it.

  In the early part of the century, the US became very concerned about the threat to its ability to project sea power from Chinese and Russian hypersonic anti-ship missiles. In testing, the scram-jet driven missiles proved capable of speeds up to Mach-8; eight times the speed of sound. Fitted with double core fragmentation warheads Russia had showed that a missile like its Tsirkon DM33 could achieve a terminal velocity of 5,800 miles per hour, making it impossible for even state of the art counter-missile defenses to track, let alone intercept it.

  With a range of about 250 miles and the ability to cover 100 miles in less than a minute, able to be launched from multiple platforms on, above or under the sea, the missiles risked making not just aircraft carriers and larger surface combatants vulnerable, they could make them obsolete.

  In addition to accelerating its own hypersonic missile program in the face of advances by China and Russia, the US invested billions into research on how to counter such missiles. How could they even be tracked? The problem wasn’t designing a radar that could detect them, but whether the software could keep up and what type of algorithm was needed to solve the problem of target ‘ambiguity’. What type of processing capabilities would be needed to react and activate countermeasures when reaction time was measured in milliseconds? Could they be spoofed by decoy strategies? Could they be jammed? Could they be destabilized with simple air cannons fired by perimeter vessels?

  Quantum computing and dedicated radar and processing software solved the detection problem, and the answer to intercepting hypersonic missiles was found not in ballistics, but in optics. The only defensive system able to target and fire quickly enough was a high-powered laser. After successful testing, the Gen 5 High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System (HELLADS) was deployed on all US Navy ships, military and industrial targets which were deemed vulnerable to hypersonic or ballistic missile attacks. In the Syria - Turkey conflict it had proven able to intercept eight out of ten conventional ballistic missiles before they reached their targets.

  Seen to be politically akin to a weapon of mass destruction, no hypersonic missiles were used in the Syria conflict and it was widely perceived that the first nation to use them in war would be opening a new Pandora’s box.

  Of course, HELLADS just triggered a new arms race, on the premise that the best way to defeat HELLADS was to overwhelm it with multiple missiles, and all the major armies started stockpiling scramjet missiles at the same time as fitting their surface warships, submarines and aircraft to be able to field them, while arguing strenuously in public that the use of hypersonic missiles by any nation would be akin to using a tactical nuke.

  Still, it remained that a hypersonic weapon had never been used in war, and the HELLADS system on the USS Enterprise and its escorts had never actually been tested in combat.

  Perri Tungyan was feeling pretty combat tested.

  “I’m looking at him right now,” Perri said down the line to his new friend Sarge in Canada. “Through the window of the headmaster’s office. Got my scope on him.”

  “For God’s sake, don’t do anything stupid!” Sarge said urgently. “You don’t know what the situation is inside that building.”

  “He’s on his own in there, just smoking a cigarette, scratching his butt,” Perri said. “I could take him down, then we could check out the school. If he’s the only one, I could get our people out.”

  “And if he’s not, they could all be dead,” Sarge said. “Did the Russians take any wounded with them? Did you see stretchers, people being carried?”

  Perri looked at Dave, who shook his head. “No.”

  “Then if they’re alive, they’re still in there and they’re probably still able to hold a gun on your people. Or they could have wired the place with explosives in case they are attacked, take out your entire town with a flick of a switch. Just relax son.”

  “I am relaxed,” Perri said to him through gritted teeth. “But I have about ten minutes to decide if we do something about this guy and try to get our people out of that school, or we go after the others who are getting further and further away the longer we talk.”

  Sarge gave him a moment to calm down. “They are probably going to an evacuation point, to meet a ship or submarine,” Sarge speculated. “If they are, we need to know.”

  “Why would they be heading out of town?” Perri asked. “A ship could pick them up here.”

  “I thought you said the harbor was destroyed,” Sarge asked. “It looked like it in the photos you sent.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “They could be going down to Kavalghak Bay,” Dave said. “You could get a small ship in close to shore there.”

  “If the Russians are quitting Gambell, if they’re pulling them off the island, that’s critical intel,” Sarge
said.

  “Oh man,” Perri groaned. There had been no activity in the town, so he and Dave had climbed up to the roof of a building two streets back from the school and he had perfect line of sight down into the school master’s office and the Russian soldier sitting there drinking his coffee and enjoying his cigarette, while he stared at some sort of screen. Dave was dragging the car battery and the Russian radio and complaining all the way because he’d had to leave his rifle behind; he couldn’t carry it all. They’d worked out that they could wire the radio to any old TV aerial or satellite dish and get a good signal, so they’d hit the general store and stolen one of those folding portable TV and radio aerials and it worked just fine.

  “I could knock this guy out now, and then we could head out after the others,” Perri insisted. He’d zeroed the scope with a few shots at a target a good distance out of town a couple of days ago, and the crosshairs in his electronic scope were indicating very little windage, and minimal bullet drop. He put the red dot right on the temple of the Russian soldier, with the crosshairs sitting on his ear. He told himself it was a shot even Dave could make.

  “What you’re doing there is bigger than those elders Perri,” Sarge told him. “I’ve passed your intel to our military here, and they’ve passed it to the Americans. Yeah, maybe you could free your old people from that school, or you could stay cool, and maybe help to free your whole island. The US just announced it is sending a carrier task force your way. The marines are coming Perri and they need your intel.”

  Perri felt his finger tighten on the trigger, saw the crosshairs quiver on the head of the Russian soldier. Then he rolled onto his back and swore up at the lead-grey sky.

  Private Zubkhov scratched his temple, not realizing how lucky he was. To still have a temple, that is. But he wasn’t exactly focused on the world outside the school office window. He was focused on that damn ghost radio signal, because if he was reading the screen right, the damn thing was transmitting again and it had gotten closer. The screen showed range rings in bands of 5 kilometers, and he could see the last remaining field handset, taken by the Sergeant, had just moved from the 5km ring to the 10km ring as his unit hiked out of town with their captives and headed north around the bluff toward the coast.