Bering Strait

by F X Holden

  “A nuke?!”

  “Yes. I have a conventional weapons attack with subsonic cruise missiles or ballistic missiles at 54% probability.”

  “What …. what target?” Williams said in a strangled voice.

  “Repeat your question please Carl.”

  “Assume this is a political attack, not an attempt to start an all-out nuclear war. Assume the submarine is only going to target a single Russian base, or location. What are the likely targets for a submarine-based off the Kurils?” He had to believe that whatever this was, it was intended as a ‘shot across the bow’. He couldn’t believe his own country wanted to trigger Armageddon. Not over Alaska.

  But then he realized, he was hoping exactly what the Russian planners were hoping, and hope was not a sound military strategy.

  “Weighted for combined geopolitical and military impact - Iturup anti-ship missile facility 91% probability, Matua Northern Fleet Replenishment Facility 73%. I also calculate a probability of 34% that the warhead will be detonated over a remote area in the Northern Pacific, however this probability is low due to the limited military value of such an act.”

  Williams swore. He was shaken to his core. He had grown up in a world where the use of nuclear weapons in conflict was simply inconceivable. It hadn’t happened since 1945. Sure, the world had come close to calamity a few times - the Cuban missile crisis, the Russian submarine malfunction, a US strategic bomber shot down by its own escort when it received a nuclear launch order by mistake. There were probably other events he didn’t know about, but they were all accidents. Even in the heat of the proxy wars in the Middle East, when US-backed Turkish forces were being forced back out of Syria, nuclear weapons had never been considered.

  But the world had let itself become complacent. Nuclear arms reduction treaties had lapsed and not been renegotiated. Politicians had more focus on the dangers posed by new technologies - hypersonic missiles, cyber warfare, AI systems, unmanned combat vehicles - and had all but forgotten about the first doomsday weapons. The number of nations with nukes had proliferated uncontrollably because no nation was willing to go to war over them before it was too late. North Korea had been the first example, then Iran and Saudi Arabia. Afraid of being left in the cold by weakening US commitment, Taiwan joined the nuclear arms club. And after the bruising it took at the hands of Russia and Syria, Williams had seen reports that Turkey was now starting its own underground weapons program, with the US turning a blind eye.

  “Assume a hypersonic cruise missile strike. Have you run the numbers on how soon the sub will be within launch range?”

  “No Carl. Exact nuclear submarine location data is inaccessible even to me. But priority tasking orders are rarely issued more than 24 hours in advance.”

  “So it’s going to happen today?” Carl whispered, still not believing it.

  “There is still a 22% probability my analysis is wrong,” HOLMES said. “It requires that I assign motive and intent to numerous human actors on both sides, but I have calibrated for the recklessness of past strategic decisions and I believe, weighted the role of the US President appropriately.”

  Williams knew what HOLMES was saying, even if he didn’t mean to say it. The current US President was a cowboy, in many senses of the word. Short in stature, short on temperament, inclined to shoot first and think later. If he had enough support in DC and the Pentagon…

  He thought fast, “Copy your analysis to NSA,” Williams said. “If you have been able to identify a possible nuclear submarine launch by analyzing signals traffic, Russia or China could have too. And copy the report to the Ambassador. She might be able to do something to calm down the hawks in Washington.”

  As much as it terrified him, it made a dark kind of sense. The US had been pushed ignominiously out of its own territory. Its most powerful supercarrier crippled by cyber-sabotage and its other carrier groups were out of position. It could fight a conventional war that would cost tens of thousands of lives, or it could threaten nuclear retaliation. And potentially cost millions of lives.

  An idea came to him.

  “HOLMES,” Williams said. “I have a new priority-A task for you. Find all possible contact details for Yevgeny Bondarev; landline, cell phone, sat phone, encrypted chat, Savoonga bloody post office, whatever you can pull down.” He had to stop his voice from shaking, as the reality of what was about to happen starting building inside him. “Send everything you can find to the Ambassador’s cell phone and mine.”

  “Yes Carl.”

  “OK, keep updating your data on those subs and send that report. You can log off for now. No, wait!” He said, suddenly remembering something. It had been niggling at him. Not an important thing, just a question he’d meant to ask. “HOLMES, about the Russian forces at Savoonga… you said you had seen human source reporting?”

  “Yes Carl.”

  “We have special forces on Saint Lawrence?” Carl said, impressed. “Right under the noses of the Russian 3rd Air and Air Defense Forces Command?”

  “No Carl,” HOLMES said. “The human source reports are being generated by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. It is their agent on the ground, not one of ours.”

  CSIS agent, Perri Tungyan, literally had his ass on the ground. He and Dave were camped on a low hill west of Savoonga, overlooking the town and the new base that the US had built nearly ten years ago, which okay, you couldn’t really call new.

  Or more correctly, they were overlooking where the base had been. All they could see were the still smoking ruins of the cantonment. At least here, the Americans had spared the township.

  Earlier that morning, they had watched as the weary column of townsfolk from Gambell and their Russian captors had trudged into Savoonga. Just as in Gambell, the townspeople had been herded into the Hogarth Kingeekuk Sr. Memorial School, which already looked like a stockade, so Perri figured there must be local Savoonga people in there too.

  He didn’t know how few.

  About mid-morning, they had contacted Sarge. For a very long fifteen minutes they reported everything they could see from outside the town, from the number of troops and vehicles, their locations and apparent patrol routes to the number and type of aircraft down at the airfield.

  And that, in particular, had taken time, because they had to count them three times to get it right. In the end they made it at about 45 fighter aircraft, mostly all Mig-41s and Su-57s as far as Perri could tell. There were some aircraft without cockpits, that Sarge said were probably recon drones, not the bigger Hunter drones. And transport aircraft were coming and going almost continuously. There was one big one too. A huge, white flying wing thing Perri had never seen before. It needed drogue chutes to slow it down so that it didn’t run off the end of the airfield when it was landing, and when it took off again a couple of hours later, only lifted its nose at the very last minute before it ran out of runway. For what it was worth, he took some photos with his phone and uploaded those too.

  “OK, that’s good, that’s good,” Sarge had said. “Now are you two safe where you are?”

  “I guess,” Perri said. “We’re under a rock overhang, so you can’t see us from the air. We can stay pretty dry. Without a fire, it’s pretty cold though, eh.”

  “Pretty cold, or dangerously cold,” Sarge asked. “You guys know your country better than me. It’s your call.”

  Dave was making signs like he wanted them to head back to Gambell, to their nice warm bunker under the gas station.

  “Nah, we’ll be OK,” Perri said. “We can stick it out a couple more days at least. Then we’ll be out of food, and probably battery too. It will take us three or four days to hike back to Gambell, or we can try to sneak into Savoonga. I’ve got people there.” He looked through his scope at the Russian troops in the streets, and realized he couldn’t see any locals. “Maybe.”

  “OK, you’ll be calling in reports like this for me every four hours, but you shut down and lie low for now,” Sarge said. “You guys are doing awesome, y
ou know that, right?”

  “Awesome, yeah,” Dave said, unconvincingly.

  Perri disconnected the radio and started to pack it away so it wouldn’t get wet. The wind was picking up and the sky looked like rain was coming. The small overhang they were sitting under wouldn’t offer that much protection. Dave had been sitting with his rifle across his knees, but put it down and picked up Perri’s, switching on the scope. He waved it around a bit, then settled it on some far-off target. He squinted, “What’s these numbers across the bottom?” he asked.

  “Uh, by memory? I think left to right it’s like compass bearing, then elevation, then windage,” Perri answered.

  “Uh huh, and you got it zeroed in, right?”

  Perri was winding up the battery cables. “Yeah.”

  “So, if I was going to shoot something, I wouldn’t use the red dot in the middle of the scope, I would use these crosshairs off to the side. The ones that move around a bit?”

  “You’re not going to shoot anything,” Perri told him.

  “I said if I was,” Dave said.

  “Sure,” Perri said. “You’d use the crosshairs, not the red dot. The bullet goes where the crosshairs are. That’s the theory.”

  Dave got up on one knee, pointed the rifle downhill toward the town. “Like, if I wanted to shoot that Russian soldier who is coming up the hill, straight toward us?”

  Perri grabbed the rifle off him and stared down the scope. At first, he saw nothing. “Ha ha very fu…” he said, then stopped. A movement in the corner of the scope caught his eye, he swung it slightly to the right.

  “Shit. It’s that guy from Gambell,” Perri said. “The one we saw in the school office.”

  “No way.”

  “Way,” Perri said. He lowered the rifle, then lifted it again. The soldier was too far away to see with a naked eye but in the scope he could see he had a large rifle strapped to his back, was moving fast and staring intently at the ground. “How did he get ahead of us?”

  “Quad bike or something?” Dave said. “Maybe a boat or chopper eh. But he’s walking back along the track from Savoonga. So he’s already been there, and now he’s going back to Gambell? Why?”

  “Maybe he’s hunting.”

  Dave laughed, “Freaking idiot. What, he thinks he’s going to get bear or walrus? Nothing out here this time of year except birds.”

  Perri put his own rifle back up to his cheek. “No Dave, I got a feeling he’s hunting us.”

  Private Zubkhov was cold too. But no one was giving him any praise. He’d followed the trail of the column of hostages all the way to Savoonga, but he hadn’t come across whoever it was that had been carrying that ghost radio. If he’d gone on any further, he’d have run a risk of bumping into one of his old comrades, or a sentry outside of Savoonga, and he wasn’t ready for that. So there was nothing for it but to double back – his quarry must have turned off at some point and he missed their tracks.

  Suddenly he got this funny feeling. He dropped to one knee and looked around himself. Nothing. He saw nothing but scrub, rock and seabirds in any direction. He felt like slapping himself. Come on boy, you’re getting spooked now. But you’re right, that American is around here somewhere, he must be. You just have to be patient, move slower, stay more alert and wait for nightfall. He’ll probably light a fire to stay warm, and you’ll have him.

  Zubkhov didn’t hear the shot. The shooter must have been upwind. He felt something punch him in the chest, just below his right shoulder. It spun him around and knocked him to the ground.

  Bunny’s berserker routine had done its job. The attacking Fantom had locked up one of the enemy Sukhois, spooking it into thinking it was about to face a US all-aspect short-range missile at point blank range, and the pilot choked. He threw his machine into a twisting dive, firing off chaff and flares as he headed for the deck. The Fantom meanwhile centered its gun pipper on the other Sukhoi, which was following its missiles down range. One Fantom was able to dodge the missiles fired at it, but her kamikaze Fantom did not even try to evade. At maximum range, it opened up with its GUA8/L 25mm cannon. The ‘L’ designator was intended to indicate it was a lighter version of the aircraft and ship mounted heavy attack cannon that it had been based on, but the only thing ‘light’ about it was that it used 25mm ammunition instead of traditional 30mm. You could also speculate that the ‘L’ stood for ‘laser’, which it didn’t, but the weapon did have its own laser targeting system, making the system accurate out to 12,000 feet.

  Which coincidentally was its exact distance from the Sukhoi at the moment it opened fire. In a head-on attack situation, against an unswerving enemy target confidently barreling in behind his missiles at 1,000 miles an hour, it was hard for the GUA8/L to miss. In the three seconds before the two Russian missiles slammed into it, the Fantom put nearly 200 25mm shells into the Sukhoi.

  Its pilot was dead before his missiles hit their target, taking Bunny’s sacrificial drone off the board.

  With his flight leader off the air, and his threat warning alarm telling him there was still one enemy drone out there, the second Sukhoi pilot decided to get while the going was good. One on one with a human pilot, he would back himself any day. Down on the deck, out of energy and facing a damn robot, those weren’t odds he liked. Bunny watched with satisfaction as he bugged out and she regained stealth status. She gave her surviving Fantom a dogleg route home to try to confuse any satellite surveillance that might be lucky enough to pick up her heat signature along the way, and leaned back in her chair.

  “Permission to declare myself freaking awesome ma’am?” Bunny said, grinning widely but keeping her eyes on her monitors.

  During the dogfight, Rodriguez had hovered behind the pilot’s chair, biting her bottom lip so hard she could taste blood now. It was ridiculous. Not like my life was on the line. But it felt like it. And that was the way O’Hare was running her drones too - as though her life depended on it.

  “Denied,” Rodriguez said. “You don’t get to do that. I get to do that. That was simply awe-inspiring, Lieutenant. From ingress to egress.”

  “You know ma’am, I agree with you,” Bunny said. “What was it that inspired the most awe, in your personal opinion? Was it the way I snuck in under that IL-77 like a freaking ninja and blew it out of the sky, or was it the four solids I laid on Ivan at Lavrentiya?” She spun her chair around, giving Rodriguez a deadpan look. “Or was it the way I burned that Nebo, evaded like a hundred missiles and bagged myself a Sukhoi-57 in the process?”

  Rodriguez knew better than to say something that would bring her ace pilot back down to earth. It was O’Hare’s moment, and she had earned it.

  “Honestly?” Rodriguez smiled. “None of that. The most awesome thing of all, is that all that hurt was laid on the Russians by an Australian pilot whose handle is ‘Bunny’.”

  Perri saw the Russian soldier drop and roll, then he disappeared from view behind some low scrub.

  “Did you hit him?” Dave asked, scanning the ground in front of them with binoculars.

  “Yeah I hit him,” Perri said. Crouched on one knee, the Russian was not a big target. He’d aimed for the guy’s center mass, not taking any chances. The shot had knocked him down, he hadn’t ducked, of that he was sure.

  “I can’t see him,” Dave said. “Should we go look for him? Make sure he’s dead?”

  “No, we should not go look for him, we should get the hell out of here. He might not be the only one looking for us. Someone could have heard that shot.”

  “You want to go back to Gambell?” Dave asked, hopefully.

  “Shut up, I’m thinking.” He and Dave were on a small rise, about two miles out from the south-west end of the long runway. Savoonga town was a ways off, on the other side of the runway. The bombed out radar facility cantonment was south of it, about two miles south-east of the runway. It wouldn’t have as clear a view over the town and airport as they had now, but they couldn’t stay here, and they had to hide out somewhere. “Saddle
up,” Perri said, pointing at the ruins in the distance. “There’s our new home.”

  He expected Dave to argue, but the guy just shouldered his rifle, lifted his pack onto his other shoulder and stood there waiting. “What?” he said, when he noticed Perri was staring at him. “You want me to congratulate you for taking down that Russian?” He walked off in the direction of the cantonment, muttering. “I’m the one spotted the guy. Shooting him was the easy part. I’ve shot sleeping walrus that were harder to shoot than that dumbass Russian…”

  That dumbass Russian was having trouble breathing.

  Lying on his back, looking up at the sky, Zubkhov had clawed his pistol off his belt and had its butt propped against the ground, left hand with a finger inside the trigger guard, ready in case the bastard who shot him decided to come and finish the job. He had almost no chance if he did. Zubkhov’s right arm was completely numb, and he couldn’t even lift the pistol, let alone hold it steady and point it properly.

  The American was good, Zubkhov had to give him that. The way he’d escaped back in Gambell, diving straight into the water instead of being stupid and trying to run for it along the runway. Found a Russian radio and got it working. It had to be the same guy. He’d tracked the Russian troops all the way to Savoonga, somehow realizing Zubkhov was on his tail, got around behind and set him up for a hit at a range so great Zubkhov hadn’t even heard the report of his rifle. Guy like that, he couldn’t be a simple radar technician. He had to be at least base security or something more, maybe special forces - just happened to be in Gambell. Yeah, you had to give him credit.

  But not too much credit. Zubkhov was still alive, for now. He waited, expecting every second to be his last. But the kill shot never came.