Bering Strait

by F X Holden

  He called down to Dave, “Hand me the gear. I found our hiding spot.”

  Private Zubkhov woke, remembered what had happened to him and pried himself up from his hiding spot. Which wasn’t really a hiding spot, more just the bush he’d fallen behind after he got shot. He’d fallen asleep, or passed out; one or the other, or both. His uniform shirt and jacket were stuck to his back, but the blood was mostly dry. The entry wound had also stopped bleeding. His right shoulder was frozen, and any movement of his right arm sent a stabbing pain up his side and neck, so he had to hold the arm in tight against his chest. He picked up his Makarov, put it in his belt and looked around. While he’d been lying on his back and before he’d gotten up, he’d decided on a new plan. He needed medical help, and the only place to get it was Savoonga. But he’d been ordered to stay in Gambell. OK, so this was his story now: he’d spotted the ghost radio signal, realized the Russian column was being followed. Suspected it was US forces - remember the Radar unit jacket he’d found at Gambell? He felt responsible. He’d let that American escape, he felt a duty to try to capture the American again. Except he got ambushed and wounded – that much was all true. What about the wounded back at Gambell, what about the civilians? Yeah, that was the tricky part. But that is where the Captain came in, and it made Zubkhov so glad he hadn’t killed him along with the others. He’d just say the Captain had seemed to recover, mentally at least. He’d given Private Zubkhov permission to go track the American, said he’d look after the wounded and the civilians.

  What happened after that, Private Zubkhov couldn’t explain. He’d act shocked. They were dead? All of them? Wow, it must have been the Captain’s work.

  Maybe they’d buy it, maybe not. It was his only choice now. The fishing trawler, that would have to wait until he was well again, but a wound like this? They’d have to evacuate him.

  Every step was agony, but he began picking his way down the hill towards the town below.

  And that was when, silhouetted against the sun behind the bombed-out cantonment south of the town, he saw a figure, climbing up a ladder.

  In the office he’d cleared for himself in a building beside the Savoonga airport terminal (a grand name for a big, roughly partitioned shed) Bondarev and Arsharvin were standing up against a cold side wall, while General Potemkin sat at the only desk. He’d advised them he was now taking over the 3rd Air Army after the death of Lukin, as Bondarev had expected, but that was not the main reason for his visit. Butyrskaya had laid a map out on the desk.

  “Little Diomede?” Bondarev asked skeptically. He’d flown over the tiny island a dozen times, and there was nothing there but a small American radome. Now even that… “We hit that on the first day,” Bondarev said. “I’ve seen the BDA. There’s nothing left on it but a black smudge.”

  “Not on it Comrade Major-General,” Arsharvin said. “Under it.”

  Butyrskaya looked annoyed that he had taken her thunder. “As you know, commercial shipping through the Bering Strait has been halted during the current conflict, but smaller coastal fishing vessels have defied the restrictions. Three days ago we got a strange report from one such vessel, which advised the Coast Guard it had seen an aircraft flying out of the cliff face on the eastern side of Little Diomede.”

  “The report was ignored,” Arsharvin said. “By Eastern Military District. I never saw it.”

  “Yesterday, comrade Arsharvin asked for any reports we may have received of American commercial shipping north or south of the Strait, large enough to launch a drone from. I asked him why. He shared with me his theory about the drones that hit Anadyr and Lavrentiya being amphibious…”

  “And you remembered the report from the fishing boat?” Bondarev asked.

  “I told her, the drones didn’t have to be ship launched. They could maybe also take off from a harbor. A boat yard or something,” Arsharvin said.

  “I pulled satellite surveillance for the three weeks since your Okhotniks hit Little Diomede. I only have digital still imagery, no infrared or synthetic aperture. It hasn’t been a priority surveillance zone, and a lot of the days were foggy,” she said, reaching for a folder on the table. From it, she pulled a single image. “But this is from yesterday.”

  The image showed a jelly bean shaped island, from above. It had a flat, plateau-like top and in the middle of the plateau was the cratered radome that Bondarev had mentioned. A number of wrecked fishing boats lay submerged in a shallow harbor on the concave side of the island, and just to the east of these a small blurred shape was clearly visible. Something shaped like an arrowhead, moving fast.

  Bondarev peered at it closely. It could be a Fantom, caught in the act of launching.

  Or it could be nothing.

  He looked at Butyrskaya, arching his eyebrows, “You must have more than a drunken fisherman and a blurred photograph to have dragged the General all this way?”

  “Oh, she does comrade Major-General,” Potemkin said, enjoying the reveal. He nodded to the intelligence officer, “Show him.”

  Now Arsharvin stepped forward, “Allow me. It was my drone that took the photograph.”

  “At my request,” Butyrskaya pointed out.

  Potemkin sighed, “If you don’t mind…”

  Arsharvin raised his hands in defeat, and stepped back as the photograph was placed in front of Bondarev. It was the same island, taken from above, but a much lower altitude. The time and date stamp showed it had been taken mere hours ago. It took him a moment to see the difference.

  Floating on the water, hidden among the smashed and sunken fishing boats, was a US F-47 Fantom drone.

  The decoy had been Bunny’s idea. Of course.

  Rodriguez had returned with two steaming mugs of coffee to find O’Hare sitting with her feet up on her console desk and a big smile on her face.

  “We can’t hit them on the ground, so we have to take them in the air,” Bunny said. “I think Sun Tzu said that.”

  Rodriguez sat, and handed her a mug. “I’m pretty sure they didn’t have air warfare in ancient China,” she said. “Unless he was talking about kite fighting?”

  Bunny leaned forward, “Or that von Clausewitz guy. Anyway, if we try and go anywhere near Saint Lawrence, we are going to get swatted, right?”

  “Correct, whether we go for them on the land, or in the air,” Rodriguez said. “So?”

  “So the biggest problem isn’t the 50 enemy fighters, it’s the damn ground and ship-based anti-air. But what if we lure them up here to Little Diomede, out of range of their anti-air cover.” She looked at Rodriguez like she had just laid a golden egg. “Snap. Problem solved.”

  “Two brigades of enemy fighters still sounds like a big problem to me,” Rodriguez said. “When we can only launch two fighters at a time.”

  “Sure, if we only launched two at a time,” Bunny said. “But we have to lift our ambition level Air Boss.”

  “Even three, or four,” Rodriguez said. “Against 50?”

  “Yeah, what I’m thinking - we launch them all,” the pilot said. “How many do we have?”

  Rodriguez thought about it, “We have nine Fantoms, including the one docked on the Pond.”

  “Ordnance?”

  “Plenty. We could go with Cuda loadouts on all of them if we wanted to.”

  “We don’t,” Bunny said. “Say seven carrying Cudas, two configured for electronic warfare.”

  “That’s nine in total, O’Hare. Every machine we’ve got. Even with two full crews down here, we couldn’t pre-flight, load and launch any faster than one machine every five or ten minutes. We’ve been averaging two prepped and launched in an hour, you and me. A Fantom only has a one-hour duration at combat airspeeds, so by the time we got the next two up, the first two would have to come back down again.”

  “I know, but what if we weren’t bringing any down? And what if we weren’t doing any pre-flight or quality? What if I programmed every drone to autonomous flight, set it to mount a CAP overhead, and you and I are out there on t
he catapult, pulling down drones, locking them into the Cat and just firing them into the air as fast as that conveyor belt can deliver them? Two Fantoms set to jamming mode, make life hell for Ivan’s targeting systems, alert him that something is up so he comes sniffing around - the others are loaded for bear, with aggressor code activated. They’ll kill anything that comes near us.”

  The words ‘no pre-flight, no quality’ were just not in Rodriguez’s lexicon. She was an Air Boss; her job was to ensure the aircraft got off the ground, and back down again, safely. She bit down on her natural instincts. “The Cat can fire and recharge every five minutes, theoretically. I’ve never pushed one that hard. Something is going to fail – the shuttle, the power supply, hydraulics, something mechanical say - it’s inevitable,” she said.

  “Best guess then, how many can we get up, inside an hour?” Bunny persisted.

  “Say 60 percent, about six of nine,” she said.

  “Good enough. So we get a couple Electronic Warfare Fantoms in the air on overwatch, and then we start firing off the Cuda armed Fantoms, set them to form a fighting hex. Any Russian comes near us, it will be like flying into a wasp nest. I tell you ma’am, if we can get them here, and if you are willing to commit all our hardware, we can give Ivan a kicking. A lot worse than if we try a ground attack on a heavily defended air base.”

  “Eyes in the air won’t be enough,” Rodriguez said. “You need a way to attract their attention, get them to sortie against us in squadron strength. If they pick up the radar noise of a couple of Fantoms buzzing around overhead they’ll respond proportionately – just send a few fighters over to take a look.”

  They both sat thoughtfully. Perhaps Bunny’s plan was all holes and no cheese.

  The only sound came from the wash of water on the dock below, and the occasional slap of one of the painters holding the Fantom from the Lavrentiya mission, tied up below.

  Bunny snapped her fingers and pointed at it, “That’s it. We pull that Fantom outside and tie it up in plain sight. Unless he’s blind and completely dumb, Ivan is going to see it sooner or later, probably sooner, all the trouble we’ve been making. I can set up a data link, set it up to radiate - use it like a mini radar base station. Two Fantoms in the air pushing out energy, and one on the deck acting like a ground radar... that’s got to get them real curious.”

  For the first time, Rodriguez started to believe it might work. It would cost them everything they had, but it could set Russian ambitions back on their heels. If they could destroy just two Russian aircraft for every Fantom they lost, it would be a significant loss for Russia. Pilots lost over this part of the Strait would probably not make it back, even if they survived the destruction of their aircraft. It was a big sea, and cold.

  “It’s a plan,” Rodriguez said. “It might even be a damn good one. I need to clear this with CNAF, we'd be burning this base for good.”

  “Navy already wrote us off ma'am," Bunny reminds her. "We were decommissioned and on a sub to Nome a week ago."

  “I'll make the call,” Rodriguez said. “You start pulling that decoy duck down toward the cave entrance.”

  That had been in the morning. After Anadyr and Lavrentiya, Rodriguez had some credit in the bank, so when she argued they’d already pushed their luck beyond expected limits, Admiral Solanta had given them a green light for one last roll of the dice. He authorized them to commit all of their remaining aircraft and send any survivors east to Juneau’s civilian field.

  “I can’t lift you out of there anytime soon, you know that Lieutenant Commander?” he’d asked.

  “We do sir,” Rodriguez had replied. “But using this base as a honeypot is our best chance of dealing some serious hurt.”

  Solanta approved because he knew something Rodriguez didn’t. If her plan worked, she would be dealing a big blow to Russian air power in the Operations Area at the same time as it was being dealt a political shock by the test off the Kurils. Together, the double whammy might be enough to check Russian ambitions.

  They had paddled the floating Fantom out into the bay and lashed it to the mast of a sunken fishing boat. It hurt Rodriguez sorely to leave it out in plain view, but that was the point. While Bunny set up the Fantom as a ground-based early warning radar, Rodriguez went into the automated launch delivery system and queued up every aircraft they had. She set up the launch sequence as Bunny had described, with two electronic-warfare Fantoms, followed by six dedicated air-air Cuda-armed Fantoms. The aircraft would be automatically fueled and primed for engine start, loaded with either jamming pods and/or A2A ordnance. And Bunny had configured the electronic-warfare Fantoms with her ‘berserker’ combat AI algorithm. They might be light on weapons, but on her command, they would do everything in their power to lock up an enemy and destroy it, and once they were out of missiles and guns, they would become the ordnance!

  BERSERKER ALGORITHM II

  “This American covert base has cost you hundreds of men, dozens of aircraft, tons of supplies,” General Potemkin said.

  “Comrade General,” Bondarev explained. “Lavrentiya was a mosquito bite. Unlike at Anadyr we lost only a few personnel, and no critical capabilities. Our Nebo-M unit was operating at full capability again within ten hours of the American strike. I have already given orders for the aircraft of the 573rd to be assigned to the crews of the 6983rd. There will be no impact on ground support for LOSOS.”

  Potemkin looked unimpressed and Bondarev could sense his second in command, Colonel Artem Akinfeev, shifting his weight nervously beside him. “You misunderstand, Major-General. First Anadyr, now Lavrentiya. These attacks have cost the VVS political capital, and the respect of our peers. I want to see this American base dug out from under that island and obliterated.”

  Arsharvin was looking at the map of Little Diomede. “If they can fly a drone out of a hole in that cliff face, then we can put a missile down their throats General.”

  “It would be better to land a detachment of special forces,” Lieutenant Butyrskaya said. “They could deal with US security, secure the base. There may be valuable intel, not least examples of these new amphibious drones.”

  General Potemkin coughed, “I commend the Comrade Lieutenant for her professionalism. However, we can glean whatever intelligence can be gleaned from the burning sunken wrecks of these American floatplanes. I do agree though that special forces will be needed to ensure the complete destruction of this base. We don’t know what is in there, or how it is defended.” He turned to Bondarev, “Major-General, I authorize a combined-forces attack on Little Diomede immediately. You will use whatever assets are required to eliminate the threat, and achieve the complete destruction of the enemy base.”

  “Yes General,” Bondarev said. “I’ll lead the air attack myself.”

  Potemkin appeared to think carefully, “Ordinarily I would say your place is here, overseeing our operations over Alaska. But within these walls Comrade Major-General, a newsworthy victory wouldn’t hurt you right now. No one is blaming you directly for the losses these US aircraft have inflicted behind our line of control, but…”

  “But they are…” Bondarev finished for him.

  Potemkin gave him a wry smile. “We move on Nome in three days. These pinprick attacks have not impacted the schedule for LOSOS, but they must be stopped.”

  “I’ll see to it,” Bondarev assured him. He turned to his second in command, Akinfeev. “You know what to do, get the wheels in motion.” He turned back to Potemkin. “And if the Americans dare come north against us, I will hold them back.”

  “Good, good. Tell me Major-General, is there anything you need?” Potemkin asked, expansively. “I can’t magically make a replacement squadron of Hunter pilots available, but how about fuel, weapons, food?”

  “Yes Comrade General. I do have one request,” Bondarev said. "A squadron of F-47 Fantoms.”

  Potemkin glowered at him, “Very droll, Major-General.” He nodded towards the others, “Comrades would you leave us for a moment?”r />
  Butyrskaya smirked as she left the room, Akinfeev looked mildly panicked and Arsharvin shot him a look of sympathy, none of which reactions were particularly helpful. “Sit, sit,” Potemkin said, indicating the chair opposite him and pulling his coffee cup closer. He watched as Bondarev seated himself, and waited a beat longer, looking into his eyes. “I served under your Grandfather. You don’t look much like him.”

  “I’m told I get my looks from my mother comrade General,” Bondarev replied, carefully.

  Potemkin raised his eyebrows, “Really. And how about your loyalties Bondarev? From whom do you take those?”

  “My … what?” Bondarev replied. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand the question General.”

  Potemkin looked out a window, as though regarding the dark sky, “I’ve followed your career from afar. Progress Party darling. Lukin’s protégé. But the Party is not what it once was, and Lukin is … no more.” He waved his hand at the window, “A storm is gathering. When it breaks, where will your loyalties lie?”

  Bondarev frowned, “My loyalties are with our homeland, with the Rodina, comrade General. Is that in question?”

  “Ah. But the Rodina is many things, is it not?” Potemkin said enigmatically, turning in his chair to drill Bondarev with his gaze again. “Not just one thing. It is the earth beneath us, the sky above, the songs we sing and food we eat. But what Russia really is, who we are, depends on who leads it. Would you agree?”

  If there had been witnesses to this conversation, Bondarev would be suspicious he was being led into a trap, to committing an error of speech that could be used against him. But only himself and Potemkin were present. This was something else and he decided neutrality was his best play until he could work out what.

  “My grandfather frequently used a quote to sum up how he felt about serving in the VVS, General,” Bondarev said. “I have lived my life by those words. With your permission?”