by F X Holden
Arsharvin had taken all he could. Yes, his friend was a superior officer. Yes, he was hurting. But he could not place the blame for the deaths of 200 men on Arsharvin and his officers. Not alone.
“With respect, Major-General,” Arsharvin said, standing as well. “There were only two stealth aircraft used in this attack. However they got through, they got lucky.” There was a map of Alaska on the table, and Arsharvin span it around, his finger stabbed down on the rugged western coastal region. “If they have mobile launch units in the theatre there are very few areas they could operate from. We have standing patrols over Nome, so they didn’t come from there, and east of Nome there are no roads, only logging trails. There are no suitable airfields, only dirt strips used by light aircraft flown by bush pilots. If they are there, we will find them.” He took his hand away and stood, “I promise you, Comrade Major-General.”
“The rest of you are dismissed, Lieutenant Colonel Arsharvin will remain,” Bondarev said. When the other officers were gone, they sat again.
“I share the burden of those deaths too my friend,” Arsharvin said quietly. “Wherever this attack came from, we will find them. You have my word.”
Bondarev span the map of Alaska thoughtfully. He stopped, pinning it with his finger on Nome.
“General Lukin gave me two weeks to show we have control of the airspace over Western Alaska,” Bondarev said. “He said he was being pressured by a faction in the Council of Ministers to abandon the plans for a ground assault and consolidate our presence on Saint Lawrence as a bargaining chip.”
“Bargaining chip for what?” Arsharvin asked, frowning.
“That is what I want to tell me, Tomas,” he said. “I deserve to know the real reason 200 of my people died.”
Arsharvin stared at him for a moment, then stood, went to the door and locked it. He returned to the table and sat.
“Alright. This isn’t about us monopolizing the polar shipping route,” Arsharvin said.
“No new Panama Canal? Give me some credit, I already guessed that much. What then?”
Arsharvin leaned back in his chair, “To answer that, I have to take you back to a meeting I attended a year ago in Vladivostok.”
Bondarev groaned, “You’re going to tell me how you met President Navalny again.”
“Yes and no. I told you I met him, I didn’t tell you why.”
“A briefing on Far East resources I think you said. ‘Pivot to the Pacific’ blah blah blah. Sorry, I fell asleep while you were explaining.”
“And you thought the President would travel all the way to Vladi-bloody-vostok for a boring briefing on Far East resources?”
“I don’t recall thinking much at all except how tiresome it was listening to you name dropping about your top secret Far East intelligence committee meetings again.”
“Russia is dying my friend,” Arsharvin said. And he said it with such surety that Bondarev stifled the laugh that was forming in his throat.
Bondarev waved his hand dismissively, “Moscow is corrupt yes, but it has always been. Our economic partnership and trade pacts with China mean our economy has not been stronger for a hundred years. Chelyabinsk is now the third biggest city in Russia. Anadyr will soon be bigger than Vladivostok. What do you mean, ‘dying’?”
“This is different Yevgeny. I’m not talking about trade, I’m talking raw human survival.” Arsharvin reached over Bondarev’s desk, picking up a bottle of water. He uncapped it and slowly poured himself a glass, then held it out to him. Bondarev picked up a glass, confused. Arsharvin filled it, poured one for himself and then clinked his glass against Bondarev’s before drinking the water down. He held his glass up to the light, “Enjoy it. Because it’s soon going to be more precious than your 25 year old whiskey.”
“I don’t get you,” Bondarev admitted.
“Remember at military college, you and I, we used to argue about peak oil?” Arsharvin asked.
“Sure. You said the next world war would be over oil, and I said that renewables would solve the problem before it got that bad,” Bondarev said. “And I was right.”
“You were. But we were arguing about the wrong thing,” Arsharvin said.
“So what’s the right thing, if it’s not peak oil?”
“Peak water. And Russia passed it ten years ago without the world even knowing it.”
“This country is covered in snow, rivers, lakes. Plus…” Bondarev pivoted and pointed out the window. “Head that way to the coast. You’ll hit the Sea of Japan. East of there is the biggest body of water on the planet, the Pacific Ocean. Follow that far enough, you’ll hit the Atlantic. This planet is 70 percent water Tomas.”
“Russia has poisoned its lakes and rivers. The snow melts into empty aquifers. And the sea is saltwater my friend. Salt. I am talking about peak freshwater.”
Bondarev reached over and poured some more water into Arsharvin’s glass. “You never heard of desalinization? What do you think you have been drinking the last 20 years? Mountain fresh spring water? Every city lives on desalinated water - Moscow pipes it from Saint Petersburg since Lake Kljasma dried up, but so what?”
“That’s the whole point!” Arsharvin said. “We can supply the big cities, but the smaller cities and towns, they have been living off whatever they can pull out of poisoned rivers and lakes, or suck out of the melting permafrost. The meeting I was at, it had the title, Coming water shortages.”
Bondarev scoffed, “Since I was a boy there have been water shortages. Then they bring another desal plant online, and everyone relaxes again.”
“Not like this. Within ten years Yevgeny, 40 out of 150 million Russians will be facing water rationing. If we built a new desalination plant every month for the next two years, we couldn’t provide for that many people, and that’s if we had the time and money to build all those plants and pipelines, which we don’t.”
“There was talk of a pipeline from Scandinavia,” Bondarev said, trying to absorb what Arsharvin was saying. “I thought that…”
“Will buy us five years, and is already accounted for. Plus it puts us at the mercy of Europe, which could bring us to our knees just by turning off a tap. The Middle East is already tearing itself apart over water, did you think we were immune?”
Bondarev was quiet, staring into his glass. Water? Seriously? “Wait, what does the Bering Strait have to do with this? Polar ice or something?”
Now it Arsharvin’s turn to laugh. “Polar ice? What polar ice?” he asked. “It’s melting at an exponential rate. That’s why we can sail the northern route even in winter now. But you aren’t completely wrong.”
“What then?”
“As that ice cap melts, all that beautiful freshwater goes somewhere. Into the sea, most of it, raising the sea level. Some into Canada, a little into our northern territories - not enough of it though, we are too far from the pack ice now. But there is one place where the glaciers reach down from the pole into mountains and valleys and canyons and become huge raging rivers and lakes of pure, fresh water.”
“Not Saint Lawrence Island, I’m guessing,” Bondarev said.
“No, but close. Alaska accounts for more than forty percent of US freshwater reserves. The Yukon River alone delivers six thousand cubic meters of fresh water into the Bering Sea near Nome every second! That’s close to the flow of the Volga, three times the flow of the Nile River. With a dam on the Yukon feeding our Far East expansion, we can save Russia and rule the north.”
Bondarev felt his fist tightening on his small glass, and realized he was in danger of crushing it before he relaxed his grip.
Arsharvin saw his white knuckles, “That’s why your men are dying Yevgeny. Nothing less than the survival of their homeland.” Arsharvin shifted in his chair. “Now, Lukin is dead. You are the most senior commander in the 3rd Air Army until a new General is named. For all intents and purposes, you are leading this air war now. What is our next move?”
Bondarev sighed, tapping his finger on the map of the regi
on around Nome again.
“I leave for Savoonga tomorrow to see if the airfield there can be used to stage a squadron or two more for the attack on Nome. I can’t afford to have so many aircraft concentrated in Lavrentiya, and Anadyr will take precious days to rebuild. My two weeks is running out my friend,” Bondarev said. “I have only days now to show Moscow that the Americans cannot repeat what they did in Anadyr. And from today, it gets harder. They have moved new satellites into position.” He reached over, and patted Arsharvin on the shoulder. “I can keep the two US airbases in Alaska out of commission, even without the Okhotniks of the 573rd in reserve. The Sukhois and Migs of the 4th and 5th, and the Okhotniks of the 7th can fend off their probing patrols and degrade their mobile anti-air capabilities as fast as they get them up and radiating.” He fixed Arsharvin with a cold gaze, “But I need you to find whoever killed my people at Anadyr, so that I can kill them before they hit us again.”
SOME DAYS YOU EAT THE BEAR
Private Zubkhov couldn’t bring the base radio and its range finding scope with him, so he had to track the ghost radio the old-fashioned way. He knew whoever was carrying it was following the column of prisoners along the coastal track to Savoonga. So he would do the same. They had a one day start on him though, so he had to hustle.
He had moved the Captain into the relative comfort of the school master’s offices, sat him in a chair and set him up with a bottle of water, cold tea and biscuits with some cheese. The man was able to eat and drink, take himself to the toilet and lie down when he needed to sleep. Anything more complicated seemed to befuddle him. But he would be okay for a couple of days.
He sat in the school master’s chair, watching as Zubkhov got himself ready.
Zubkhov had decided to travel light. A half-sized backpack, water, dry rations, a knife and a folding stock VSS Vintorez silenced sniper rifle with a few magazines of 9x39mm. He had his winter camouflage uniform on, mottled brown and white, with just a utility belt across his waist and the backpack strapped tight to his shoulders. The Captain was watching him as he pulled on his gear and adjusted the strap on the rifle so it sat comfortably on his back.
“I know what you’re thinking Sir. I should be taking the Dragunov,” Zubkhov said, talking as much to himself as to the Captain. “Better range, hits harder. But I need to move fast to try to catch up with this guy, and the Vintorez is lighter and quieter.”
The Captain actually appeared to be considering. “When there is no God, everything is permitted,” he quoted.
“Amen to that sir,” Private Zubkhov said, checked his sidearm and ammunition one last time, holstered it and headed for the door. He had a damn good idea who was out there, following that column with a stolen Russian radio. He’d shown the guy’s jacket and air force patch to the Captain when the man had gotten away from them, their first hour on the island. And that shadow he’d seen on the hillside just after the first missile hit? That was no coincidence. The US soldier must have called in the strike.
Zubkhov should have shot the bastard when he had the chance. He wouldn’t make that mistake twice.
The last remaining officers of the last remaining US offensive air asset in the Operations Area were trying to work out what the hell had just gone wrong.
They had been tasked to hit a Russian supply depot at Lavrentiya where it looked like the enemy was stockpiling a significant cache of supplies outside the military airport for some sort of offensive. The base itself was assumed to be heavily defended, but their target was a warehouse and munitions depot on the outskirts of town.
It was an industrial town with a small harbor and what was now a disproportionately large airport. A single five-story administrative center and not far from it, a six-story hospital. Four or five factories belched foul black smoke into the air over the town.
It was a perfect target for the Joint Air-to-Ground JAGM missiles they had already loaded aboard one of their Fantoms. They had a drone already on the Cat configured for air-to-air escort, so they put that into the air first, then bullied the second Fantom into place and sent it up the chute.
The JAGM had a warhead similar in hitting power to its predecessor the Hellfire, and the four missiles carried inside the weapons bay of the Fantom were more than sufficient to destroy the weapons dump at Lavrentiya. The only problem with the JAGM was that the Army and Navy had never been able to agree on its final design, with the Navy in and out of the program a couple of times over the years. In the end, it was a compromise between the longer range standoff weapon the Navy wanted and the shorter range missiles wanted by the Army. Guided by semi-active laser and multi-band radar, the JAGM was a fire and forget weapon, but with a range of only about ten miles.
There was no back door into Lavrentiya as they had found for Anadyr. The city lay abreast of a wide sweeping bay on a flat permafrost plain. Low hills skirted the city to the north, but they weren’t suitable to provide any sort of radar cover. Electronic intel showed the base was covered by short-range SAM surface-air systems, but stealth and the Fantom’s onboard electronic warfare suite should enable them to get in under the base defenses.
“We blow in low from the south with the sun behind us, pop up, jam, lock and shoot, then bug out,” Bunny had decided while they were planning. “We’ve got no intel on what missile systems they have in place, but it’s the main Russian offensive air base, so there must also be some ugly-ass anti-air protecting it. Fantom 1 goes in first, tries to draw any fire, helps me identify what they have hiding there. I can use one missile for suppression, two for the depot, still leaves me one for a target of opportunity, if we’re lucky.”
They were going to try to bring their drones home this time. Neither Eielson nor Elmendorf were ready to receive them yet, while Nome and Port Clarence were covered by standing Russian fighter patrols. They had got the heavy lift crane working again, after a fashion, and decided they could land the drones on the Pond, tie them up, then pull them out by crane and refit them when they got a chance. Yes, it increased the chances of their being discovered twofold, but with only ten aircraft left, they couldn’t treat every mission as a one-way trip.
They made a careful plan. But they didn’t get a single missile away.
What Rodriguez and O’Hare couldn’t have known was that unlike Ugolny, Bondarev had made very sure indeed that his front line base at Lavrentiya was well protected.
Sitting on a low rise overlooking the bustling town, was a Nebo-M 3-D anti-aircraft/anti-missile system and it was just about to come online. Mounted on four 24-ton trucks, it featured a command module and three radar arrays, arranged to provide 360-degree area denial defense of the airspace around Lavrentiya. The Nebo-M battalion at Lavrentiya controlled 72 launchers over a 100 square kilometer area, fielding a total of 384 missiles. In ‘circular scan’ mode the Nebo-M battalion could track up to 200 targets at a distance and at altitudes of up to 600 kilometers. In ‘ICBM killer’ sector scan mode, a Nebo-M could track 20 ballistic targets at ranges of up to 1,800 kilometers and at an altitude of up to 1,200 kilometers. They were Russia’s equivalent to the US HELLADS system, but based on older, more proven technologies.
If Bondarev had had such a system at Anadyr, the Americans would never have gotten through, but he’d seen his assets at Lavrentiya, closest to Alaska and Savoonga, as being the higher priority and the Nebo-M was a precious resource. Although Russia had once had grand plans to install Nebo-M systems all over the country to provide an effective anti-missile shield, teething problems had delayed their introduction and they were only now being deployed, with a focus on providing protection to the major population centers, so it had taken a bureaucratic catfight and the personal intervention of General Lukin for Bondarev to get the only two Nebo-M systems in the Eastern Military District moved from Vladivostok and Khabarovsk to Lavrentiya and Savoonga, to protect his fighters for LOSOS.
The Nebo-M was a system specially designed to detect stealth aircraft, but even it would have trouble picking up at long range the sm
all profile of the two Fantoms Bunny was sending towards it. For this, it relied on a shorter range array radiating at the lower frequency S and L bands, which had a range of less than 30 miles.
With Bunny able to fire her missiles at a range of 10 miles, and fly at 1,300 miles an hour at sea level, assuming she could get close enough, that gave the Russian system a window of about one minute in which to lock and fire at the Fantoms before she could fire herself.
Even if she had known the Nebo-M was sitting there waiting for her, she would probably still have taken those odds. But because it had just arrived in theatre and hadn't got up and radiating yet, it had not been flagged by electronic signals intel and there was nothing on her threat warning system to tip her off it was even there.
It was no ordinary anti-air battalion either. Painted on the door of the command module of the Lavrentiya array were the silhouettes of six fighters, two ICBMs and four rotary aircraft that the unit had ‘destroyed’ in exercises. It had never fired a shot in actual combat - the Nebo-M was a home defense system and hadn’t been deployed in the Middle East - but the personnel staffing the unit at Lavrentiya were the best in the Russian Armed Forces at what they were paid to do.
So when an Airborne Control aircraft picked up a couple of ghost returns to their south, battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel Alexandr Chaliapin had ordered his technicians to get their array online and do it now dammit. The airborne control aircraft didn't have a firm fix on anything, but a fighter patrol was dispatched to scan the sector – and still that hadn’t made him relax. He’d heard what had happened at Anadyr, everyone had. But Anadyr wasn’t defended by his Nebo-M. And he had no intention of letting what happened at Anadyr happen to him at Lavrentiya.
