Bering Strait

by F X Holden

  But at what targets? Thanks to the air and sea picket Russia had established around the Bering sea, his own frontline airfields at Lavrentiya, Anadyr and Savoonga were out of range of anything but a ballistic missile strike, which the Americans would only conduct as a last resort. Strategic bombers launched out of Guam, or attack submarines, would also have the range and ability to launch cruise missiles, but not in the numbers needed to completely overwhelm his defenses in the way he had been able to do against Eielson and Elmendorf.

  Savoonga however, as his southernmost airbase, was the most exposed. Twelve hours earlier he had begun airlifting heavy anti-air and anti-shipping missile defense systems to Savoonga to reinforce the airfield. A Russian navy destroyer flotilla was also én route to add its radar coverage and firepower to the island’s defense. That was why he was now able to move the bulk of his 6983rd drone unmanned aircraft to Savoonga, just 150 miles from Nome. They were ideally suited to flying out of the limited facilities at the forward base, because their pilots and system officers could be based at Anadyr, hundreds of miles away. They didn’t need to be quartered with their planes and he didn’t risk losing valuable pilots if the US against all odds successfully targeted Savoonga for another cruise missile attack.

  The bulk of his precious 4th and 5th Air Battalions, his critical Su-57 fighters and pilots and ground crews, he would keep at Lavrentiya. To reach him there, even if did have the range, the enemy air force would have to fight its way across the skies of Alaska or the North Pacific and back again, and its navy would have to brave ring after ring of Russian anti-submarine defenses.

  The American situation looked hopeless. But Bondarev wasn’t a man to take the enemy for granted. So he also had a surprise or two up his sleeve in Lavrentiya and Savoonga for any US aircraft or missile that did make it through.

  Perri and Dave had been following the column of hostages for a couple of hours now, and it was clear they weren’t going down the coast to Kavalghak Bay. Once they had cleared the road out of town to the south of the bluff, they had turned northwest and started hiking up an old hunting trail that would take them over the bluff to the deserted inland of the island. It was harsh, windswept terrain that didn’t offer much in the way of game, berries or shelter, so the Islanders rarely ventured inland. The sea and the ice around the island were their home, not the rocky interior. They decided the destination must be Savoonga.

  “Why would they be going to Savoonga?” Perri asked. “Wouldn’t it have been just as badly hit as Gambell?” He could have kicked himself. While they were online last time, he should have downloaded some news videos to see if there was any information about what had happened to Saint Lawrence. All they knew was what Sarge had told them, and that wasn’t much. He’d spent most of the time they were online asking questions, not giving out information.

  “Where else could they be going, there’s nothing else in this direction except vole turds and bird droppings,” Dave asked.

  “It’s going to take them days.”

  “And us. Oh man,” Perri settled the straps of his backpack on his shoulders. “I hope we’ve got enough food.”

  “Yeah? Well we could have carried about another 20 pounds except you’ve got me lugging this damned battery and radio,” Dave complained. He was carrying the same big backpack that Perri was carrying, with the difference being the bottom two-thirds of his pack was the car battery and on top was the Russian radio they’d liberated.

  “You keep telling me how you’re the strongest of all your brothers,” Perri said. He was looking at the ground, seeing the scuff marks in the snow and dirt from hundreds of feet. Following the column wouldn’t be hard, they were leaving tracks you could probably see from space. He looked up to test the weather, saw low cloud, but no sign of rain. At least they’d be dry the next day or so. As he watched, he heard the now familiar sound of jet engines crossing the island from west to east. They hadn’t heard or seen any more signs of combat, so he had to assume the aircraft overhead weren’t American.

  They trudged on, “Sarge said there were Russians in Savoonga, as well as Gambell. Maybe the ones in Savoonga were dug in better,” Perri speculated. “The ones here were pretty dumb, just hiding out in the town hall, waiting to get bombed. Maybe the guys up there were better prepared.” He thought about the radar station at Savoonga, the Air Force officer who’d come to talk to them. “I’m going to call Sarge tonight if we can get a signal,” he said. “Ask him does he know what’s happening at Savoonga. If we get that far, I’ve got cousins we could hide out with.”

  Dave grunted, “I can tell you this for free. If we can’t get a signal on this stupid radio, it’s going in the nearest creek!”

  There had been no working radio in the wrecked APC near the town hall, so Private Zubkhov had hiked out to the airfield. Two of the APCs out there were total write-offs, just burned out, half melted hulks. The third had taken a hit that had flipped it on its roof, shredded its tires and filled it full of holes before its fuel had caught fire, but the fire had burned upward, through the chassis, and the cabin was still pretty much intact. Except that the radio and handset were gone.

  And Zubkhov had a pretty good idea where.

  He leaned back in his chair inside the school master’s office, watching the display on the base station for it to pop up again, just to be sure. His orders were to keep the wounded comfortable and the prisoners fed until reinforcements arrived from Russia or the unit returned to Gambell. But if Russia had really intended to hold Gambell, it would be swarming with choppers, anti-air batteries and new troops. He wasn’t seeing anything like that. There weren’t going to be any ‘reinforcements’ for Gambell.

  Air cover or not, a US Navy Seal team could sneak in here on a sub and who could stop them? Zubkhov and his team of gut-shot and crippled comrades? They were all going to end up dead, or as prisoners, probably be tried for war crimes. And once he started thinking about those Navy Seals, climbing out of the water in their wetsuits to cut his throat in the middle of the night, he couldn’t stop.

  If he was going to get off this island, it had to be now. But he couldn’t just leave his comrades here to starve to death, so he had to work something out for them. Luckily when he’d been searching for the radio, he had found the solution.

  Most of the wounded Russian soldiers were sleeping, which wasn’t surprising given firstly their injuries and secondly, that he had crushed quite a lot of sedative tablets into their food earlier in the day. One of them was awake, a young boy who had lost most of his foot, and who had said he had no appetite. He had joined the unit after Zubkhov and Zubkhov hadn’t really bothered to get to know him. Zubkhov looked at the chart at the end of his bed - Kirrilov, that was his name.

  “I need some painkillers,” the guy said. “My foot hurts like hell.”

  “OK, I got something for you here,” Zubkhov said, pulling out a syringe he had taken from the back of a wrecked field ambulance out at the airfield. “It’s pretty strong though.”

  The man lifted his bedsheets to reveal a bloodied bandage. Zubkhov pulled it gingerly away and saw the man had lost the two leftmost toes from his foot, a strip down the side and most of his heel. “If all I did was sleep between now and when they airlift me off this bloody island that would be fine with me. So don’t hold back,” the boy said. He was propped up on one elbow, watching.

  “OK,” Zubkhov said. “This will make you very drowsy.” He dialed up two units of the N-phenylpropionamide or NFEPP injection, did an air shot and then injected the rest into the man’s thigh.

  “Man, that was one big needle,” the guy said through gritted teeth, an arm covering his eyes. “It better work.”

  Zubkhov had little doubt it would work. NFEPP was a pH modified version of the tried and true anesthetic fentanyl, created to help overcome issues with addiction, but the effects of an overdose were identical. He had just given the man three times the recommended dose per kilo. As the man closed his eyes and sighed, it was just a questio
n of how long until he either had a heart attack or just stopped breathing.

  He sat back to watch.

  SUPERIORITY

  Bondarev paced the floor of his operations room at Lavrentiya airfield like a caged animal. The day’s operations had gone to plan, that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that as long as he was in command of this part of the air war, he was tethered to the ground. He preferred to lead from the air, but that wasn’t practical. Instead, he was here, barking orders and watching his men move icons around on the huge screens mounted on the walls.

  Bomb damage and combat assessments of the opening battle the day before showed 24 US fighters destroyed on the ground and 11 in the air, for the loss of 13 of his own. Since being driven back to Oregon, Washington State and Idaho the day before, US forces had only engaged in squadron strength probing patrols at the southernmost part of the front, the extreme limit of their range. Their satellites and ground-based radar inside Alaska blinded, they were no doubt ruing the decision to abandon their own anti-satellite offensive program. It meant they needed to rely on vulnerable Airborne Control aircraft to fill the gap. In these contacts over the last 12 hours he had claimed five American aircraft destroyed for the loss of none of his own and had brought down one US Airborne Control aircraft that had wandered too far northeast trying to map the Russian presence over Alaska. Fixed and mobile US anti-air units inside Alaska were being dealt with by ground attack configured Okhotniks across the State as quickly as they appeared, but he had lost three of the drones to ground fire. His losses were within acceptable parameters and he was close to being able to demonstrate that he could repel any attempt to challenge the airspace over Alaska - the definition of air supremacy.

  Despite Russian submarine and surface naval pickets 300 miles out from Saint Lawrence, the US still had formidable naval firepower and the ability to unleash a rain of cruise missiles on Saint Lawrence or Russian mainland targets like the Pacific Fleet base at Vladivostok or the Northern Fleet base at Sevoromorsk. It would be a logical response to their attacks on the US strategic air bases in Alaska, but beyond moving a carrier strike group from the Atlantic through the Panama Canal into the South Pacific the US naval response since the crippling of the USS Enterprise task force had been muted and it appeared to be trying to avoid a major naval confrontation. The US response would come, of that he was sure. The question was only how, and when.

  What troubled him most in this respect were the aircraft from the Enterprise. Details weren’t clear, even to Bondarev, but Lukin had delivered on his promise that the Enterprise wouldn’t be a factor in the conflict. The carrier strike group had stopped dead in its tracks, and the US media was reporting that there had been fires reported on board the carrier, perhaps even a collision with an escort vessel. They were speculating that the carrier had been sabotaged, or had struck a mine, but Russia was denying any involvement. The carrier was being ignominiously towed back to port in San Diego.

  The Enterprise task force might have been taken out of play, but its aircraft weren’t. Russian satellite surveillance showed more than 50 of the carrier’s aircraft had been flown off after it was put under tow. Bondarev wanted desperately to know where those aircraft were. His big fear was that Canada would give the US permission to use not just its airspace, but also its western Yukon airfields. They were mostly gravel, not paved, and couldn’t support intensive operations, but the navalized versions of the US F-35 and F-47Bs carried by the Enterprise had Short Take-Off Vertical Landing capabilities and may be able to operate out of Canadian bush or civilian airstrips or even paved highways if they needed to. If the Canadians had been reluctant to give the US permission to use their facilities, Bondarev was pretty sure that as longstanding members of NATO, they would sooner or later be compelled to.

  He desperately wanted to know where those carrier aircraft were, and brightened as he saw the man he had tasked to find out, the GRU intelligence chief Arsharvin, walking quickly through the crowded operations room toward him.

  “You have news I hope,” Bondarev said, as Arsharvin put a tablet down on the table in front of him and turned it on.

  “Not good,” Arsharvin said. “Look for yourself.”

  The screen showed a small table, listing the aircraft types which had been flown off the Enterprise, and how many of each type were estimated to have been re-positioned. Beside them was the base they had been flown to. Bondarev expected that column to show him the names of the now familiar Air Force stations in the US Northwest States.

  “Naval Air Station Leemore?” he asked, looking up at Arsharvin. “Where is that?”

  “Fresno, California,” Arsharvin said. “3,000 miles from Alaska.”

  “What? The range of an F-35 is 1,500 miles. A Fantom is 1,800. Even with airborne refueling they can’t fight a war in Alaska out of Fresno, California!”

  “No.”

  “Are they under repair, or taking on ordnance?” It was all Bondarev could think of. Perhaps the Americans were worried their aircraft had been damaged by fire, or US logistics were taking time to get ordnance into place further north, so the Navy planes were having to repair and load up further south.

  “Satellite intel shows them parked, with not much activity around them,” he said. “We thought it might be some interservice political problem preventing Navy aircraft using US Air Force bases in the north, but our human sources say that wouldn’t be it.” He pointed at the screen. “The US is keeping them back. And the US Navy is holding all of its visible assets south of our naval picket line. They might sneak a few submersibles through, but not enough to mount a significant counterattack in the Operations Area. My people think that can only mean one thing.”

  “It’s a good sign,” Bondarev said hopefully. “They are leaving Alaska to its fate, as we hoped.”

  “No,” Arsharvin said. He leaned forward and dropped his voice. “We think they could be preparing a tactical nuclear strike.”

  “What? Why? We haven’t even moved on Nome yet,” Bondarev said.

  “No, but the loss of their two key air bases in Alaska is a pretty obvious precursor.”

  “The fact they are holding their air and sea assets in reserve is hardly proof they are preparing a nuclear strike. Are their ICBM silos or mobile units on alert?”

  “No, but they don’t need to be. Our SOSUS line in the Bay of Finland picked up a trace today. Not definitive, but the acoustic signature fits with one of their new Columbia class boats.” He didn’t have to say more, his voice said it all. Bondarev had been friends with the man for many years, and this was the first time he had heard him sound truly frightened.

  The Columbia class nuclear stealth submarine was the newest and quietest in the US fleet. Even bringing one close to the borders of Russia would have been regarded as an act of war in more peaceful times. If the US had managed to get one of their doomsday machines within a few minutes’ missile flight time of Saint Petersburg, it could either mean they were being prudent, or they were preparing for nuclear war.

  Bondarev scowled, “We need to initiate the attack on Nome now!” he said. “Get it underway before the Americans stop dithering and do something stupid.” He grabbed his uniform jacket off his chair. “Where is Lukin today?”

  Arsharvin looked at his watch, “Right now? He’d be airborne, én-route to Anadyr,” the man said. “I was told he has a meeting with the commander of the 573rd Air Base. What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking I have to persuade him the air supremacy window is open now. We need to act before it closes. I’m flying to Anadyr.”

  If she was flying a jet off the deck of a carrier at sea Bunny would be engaged in a carefully choreographed dance right now. As Air Boss, Rodriguez would have cleared her for take-off and she’d be watching her yellow-shirted flight deck controller as he directed her with hand motions up to the catapult. She’d be holding up her hands to show she wasn’t touching the controls while checking the red-shirted ordnance guy as he loaded weapons or drop
tanks. Then she’d be looking back at one of the yellow shirts again as they pulled her machine forward and into the shuttle. As he swept his arms back and forward and they ratcheted up the tension on the Cat, she’d be applying full power, putting her stick to all four corners and cycling the rudders to show the deck her controls were free and clear. The yellow shirt would then point her attention to the shooter and her life would be in his or (in the case of Rodriguez, her) hands for the next few vital seconds as she waved you off the deck.

  Down under the Rock it all had to be much simpler. With a full crew, Rodriguez would have had her green shirted technical crews under the command of Stretch Alberti, yellow-shirted plane handling crew and launch officers under the command of Lucky Severin and a few red and blue-shirted fuel and ordnance personnel working away from the flight deck in the storage hangars. With just the two of them under the Rock now, she and Bunny had to do all the grunt work getting their Fantom’s wings down, locked into the shuttle for launch and booted up and once that was done, Bunny ran to the trailer for the launch.

  They already had one Fantom in the air. They’d prepped two of the machines the night before when they’d got their orders and had taken just 20 minutes doing a final pre-flight check and launch of the first drone. Now they were ready with the second. Rodriguez had told NORAD there was no way the two of them could get a hex of six drones in the air in anything like the time needed for combat operations, but a flight of two - that they could manage. Bunny had set the first to hold position at wave-top height about ten miles north of Little Diomede. They were both terrified it would be spotted by overflying Russian aircraft, but so far the little fighter’s stealth defense was holding.