by F X Holden
Bondarev tensed. If the enemy was waiting in ambush, this would be the perfect time, as they paused at the edge of the drop. Bondarev heard a splash.
“Water below,” the man up ahead called back. “Still no contact. We can jump it.”
“Coming forward,” Borisov said and ran up to the lip of the chute in a crouch. He signaled to Bondarev to join him, giving Bondarev his first look inside the enemy base. Or what was left of it. He could hear heavy duty exhaust fans working overtime to clear the dust, smoke and water vapor left behind by the cruise missile strike but with his helmet on infra-red mode he could see no movement inside. It appeared the cave had once been much bigger, but a huge rock slide had closed part of it off. He could see the outline of a trailer or comms room set up above the waterline, cables running from it to the roof where they were gathered into thick plastic tubes that ran over to what must be the drone flight deck and launch catapult.
“Tell me what we are looking at,” Borisov said, coughing. Bondarev was also having trouble breathing but the American air filtration system was doing its job, the smoke was visibly thinning out.
Bondarev explained, “The Americans have basically recreated the deck of an aircraft carrier in this cave.” He pointed, “That is the catapult, electromagnetic. They pull a lot of juice, so I would suspect they installed a nuclear power plant to drive it.”
“Shit, we don’t have anti-radiation gear,” Borisov said. “We could be soaking up lethal doses already.”
“I’d guess not,” Bondarev said. “They’d bury something like that deep in the bedrock. It wouldn’t be vulnerable to a simple missile strike.” He pointed a finger in the air. “Listen, the air filters are still working, so they have power.”
Borisov cocked his head to listen, then nodded to the rockslide that filled half the cavern, “That doesn’t look like a simple missile strike.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Bondarev agreed. “I’d say that was deliberate. Sabotage. Might even have been done before we attacked.”
“They were launching aircraft right up until we moved in,” Borisov pointed out.
“Something was,” Bondarev said. He looked at the flight deck. The base was lit with emergency lighting and through his low light vision he saw more clearly the feeder system that pulled the drones out of hangars inside the rock and dropped them on the catapult, where one of the American drones sat patiently, apparently ready to launch. Could the whole thing be automated? Was their enemy that far ahead of them that they had built an unmanned robot base to launch their robot warplanes from? “Automated feeder system,” he explained to the Spetsnaz commander. “Pulls the drones out of hangars back there somewhere, loads them on the catapult.” He looked more carefully. “But that’s a standard catapult officer’s chair and console right there. And you’d need maintenance crew for recovery and repair even if the pilots were based elsewhere.” Bondarev decided. “Whoever was launching those drones at us, they’re still in here somewhere.”
“OK,” Borisov said quietly. “Give me an estimate of how many.”
It’s a fault in warriors consistent throughout history. If they are challenged in battle, it is always by a numerically superior force. Their pride lets them admit no other option. “I’d estimate we were up against as many as twenty drones,” Bondarev said, “Plus sea-launched anti-air submersibles, which might also have been based here. That would take a sizeable base. The crew down on the flight deck there, say six people. Officers, two or three. Security detail perhaps, five or six. For the base to operate under combat conditions, every active duty crew member would need to be matched with one who was off duty. Logistics, intelligence and administrative officers. Cooks and maintenance staff.” He did the math. “There would need to have been at least fifty people serving on this base, but it could be as many as one hundred.”
Borisov lifted his rifle and used the scope to look around at what was left of NCTAMS-A4.
“So where the hell are they all, Comrade Major-General?”
“Where the hell is he?” Dave whispered urgently. “The next shot could be into our heads.” He was holding the radio up to Perri. “Just give it to him!”
Perri was doing some panicked thinking. If the guy outside was the one he had shot, he was likely to be sorely pissed. Hadn’t he said ‘American’, not ‘Americans’ plural? Maybe he didn’t know there were two of them in the tank. A plan began to form. Their only chance was to try to kill him, before he was able to kill them. But all the Russian had to do was stand out there and fill the tank full of holes until Perri and Dave were dead. Or drop a grenade through the manhole and shred them. Their situation was multiple degrees of suck. Looking around he saw the bullet holes, tried to guess where the guy had been standing. “You do it,” Perri whispered. “Get up that ladder with a backpack, I’ll do the talking. I’m going to try to get a line on the guy.”
Perri lifted his rifle and waddled over to the side of the tank where he thought the voice and shots had come from. The tank was perforated in multiple places, a few of them big enough to get a rifle muzzle through, if he could just find an eye-hole too.
“OK!” he yelled, motioning to Dave to start climbing the ladder. “Stop shooting! I’ll bring the radio out. I’m surrendering!”
Dave looked at him like he had lost his marbles. But Perri gave him a just do it face and turned back to try to get a direction on the Russian soldier.
“Yes, first radio, then your weapons,” the man said. “Then we take a nice walk to Savoonga and I get medal for capturing you.”
Perri had guessed right. He could tell from the voice the man was standing right in front of him, somewhere below. He heard Dave start to climb the ladder to the manhole.
He found an eyehole, and slowly put the muzzle of his rifle against a tear in the metal just below it. He couldn’t sight it, just aim in a general direction. It was a Hail Mary play.
But he didn’t believe for a minute the guy he had just shot was going to take them prisoner.
Rodriguez’ call to CNAF Coronado had got her a ‘message received, hold for further orders’. They were unable to confirm whether her drones had made it through the Russian CAP and managed to put down at Juneau. They were unable to confirm Bunny’s estimate of kills and losses in the dogfight over Little Diomede. The one thing they could confirm was that Russia retained air superiority over the Strait and that meant an extraction in the near future was highly unlikely, which increased the chances that Russian ground troops would get to them first.
While they had a number of surprises ready in case enemy troops made it into the base, Rodriguez had held Bunny back from booby trapping the drone launch chute.
“It’s a perfect choke point,” Bunny had told her earlier, squinting up the tunnel at the weak daylight beyond. “We blow the cave mouth, mine the floor or ceiling of the chute, the two of us down here with HKs, we’d run out of targets before we ran out of bullets.”
“You blow the cave mouth, this is our only way out of here,” Rodriguez had pointed out. “Turn it into a kill zone, Ivan will just haul off and hammer it with a bunker buster and with the stairs to the surface blocked, we’re trapped in here forever.”
The redoubt Bunny and Rodriguez had built for themselves was at the end of the service shaft that the techs used to get at the machinery that fed the drones onto the catapult. It was a narrow tunnel, two persons wide, one person high, that ran back fifty feet into the rock, then took a left hand turn around behind the equipment another hundred feet. At the end of it was a tool room, which they had prepared for their last stand.
The enemy would first have to breach the blast door. It was 3 inch hardened steel, hydraulically operated and set into the rocks with two-inch steel rods; built to stop a blast and pressure wave inside the cave penetrating the service tunnel and destroying the delicate machinery inside. In fact, given the scale of the explosions outside Rodriguez doubted an enemy could open the door even if they tried. But of course, it could be cut out or blo
wn off its frame with shaped charges.
Once through the door, their enemy would have to get down the first corridor, one or two at a time. She and Bunny had put three heavy chest high barrels of graphite lubricant at the bend in the corridor to provide defensive cover and jammed them in place with timber reinforcing. Overhead pipes left only a small gap between the barrels and the roof, which would provide some protection against anyone trying to lob grenades at them. But the gap was large enough to vault over, assuming you weren’t under fire.
If they got pushed back from there, they would retreat to the tool room, which had a metal anti-flood door with a brace bolt they could shelter behind. It wouldn’t hold long, but they had a little surprise in store for anyone who started knocking on the tool room door. Bunny had mounted a belt of 25mm Fantom fragmentation ammunition in the pipes in the roof that would fire mercilessly down into the corridor when triggered. The ammunition was fired by electrical primer, an innovation that completely eliminated ‘lock time’ when the single barrel cannon of the Fantom was firing, but which also meant it could be ignited by the electrical primer cable Bunny had pared and clipped to the contacts on the belt and wired to a fuel cell with a simple switch. She’d set the detonation range to zero so that the slugs would immediately frag into lethal .50 cal sized shrapnel, shredding anything in their path.
If they were forced to abandon the toolroom, there was a service hatch leading to the 30-foot wide aircraft elevator shaft. They probably wouldn’t have time to ride the heavy elevator down so they had put it in maintenance mode and parked it at the top of the shaft, fixing ropes to a workbench so that they could slide down to the lower level drone hangars and maintenance bays. The lower levels of NCTAMS-A4 were wide and open with no obviously defensible positions apart from the ordnance storage facility which was not a place you would want to be sheltering in a firestorm. They both knew that if they were forced down that elevator shaft, it could only end one way.
Bunny had a remote detonator switch in one hand, and a sandwich in the other as she and Rodriguez sat with their backs up against the graphite barrels in the corridor.
Rodriguez was a little troubled by how careless she seemed to be with the switch. “Can you put that down?” she asked. “I don’t want anything going off while we’re out in this corridor.”
Bunny held it in two fingers and showed her the light on the end, which was dead. “It’s safe Boss,” she said. “But if it makes you feel better.” She leaned over and put the trigger on the ground between the barrels, taking a bite of her sandwich and pulling her HK416 rifle closer to her. Suddenly she froze.
They heard muffled voices outside.
Russian voices.
One of the Spetsnaz troopers had jumped the gap over the Pond between the launch ramp and chute with a rope tied around him, and secured it on the other side. It was only a three-meter gap, but Bondarev had held his breath as the man sailed through the air, half expecting him to miss or hit the lip on the other side, but he cleared it with room to spare. The gap wasn’t designed to prevent access, it was there so that defunct drones could be pushed off the catapult, into the pond and out of the way. On the other side he found a control that extended a bridge across the gap and they all moved into the main chamber of the cavern. There were only a few wan red emergency lights still burning inside the cavern, so they kept their low light visors down.
Bondarev was fascinated by the mini aircraft carrier flight deck the Americans had built under the island. It was simply amazing. And it was the first time he had seen one of the amphibious F-47F Fantoms up close and personal. It was bigger than it seemed in the air and seemed to have been able to ride out the missile strike further down in the dock without visible damage. Of course, its systems could be fried. He could get right under it, and saw the retractable ski-floats it used for take-off and landing. They would have to have been replaceable – even coated with graphite lubricant, they would have worn out after just a few launches. The aircraft was hanging from a claw that held onto three hardpoints on its upper shell and the claw ran on a belt that went back into the rock to where he assumed there were hangars and service bays.
And if there were service bays, that meant there had to be maintenance and ordnance crew access somewhere, probably on multiple levels. He passed his assessment on to Borisov as his men worked their way around what remained of the misty cavern, ensuring it was clear of threats.
His eye followed the wall away from the Fantom, into the gloom in the corner of the base. “Can I borrow your torch?” he quietly asked a trooper standing beside him. The man handed him the light and they walked down into the darkness. At the end of the wall he came to the door he had known must be there. It was solid metal, and he had more than a hunch that it would be locked, but he took out his pistol, stood to one side and spun the wheel that served as both a handle and lock. It turned freely, but did nothing. It was either locked from the other side or warped hard into place by the cruise missile blast. Walking along the wall the full length of the launch ramp, he found another heavy blast door further down. Judging by what he could see of the drone conveyor belt and loading system, he made an educated guess that the second door opened into the system of hangars that fed the drones up to the flight deck for launch, exactly as on an aircraft carrier.
Automated or not, machinery had to be maintained. The drones that flew out of here had to be stored, along with fuel, ordnance. He was certain that behind these doors had to be a network of hangar bays, maintenance floors and storage facilities.
He looked around for Borisov, “Captain! Over here.”
As he called out, he heard a telephone buzzing. With a frown he looked around and realized it was coming from a pocket in his flight suit. He had been given a satellite phone by Borisov so that he could let his staff know he was down and safe and to get an update on the tactical situation before he went down into the base. He had given the number to his operations staff on Saint Lawrence and ordered them to re-route any urgent calls to his official cell number to this one, but he hadn’t expected he could get a signal down here.
It seemed he could, even under 300 feet of rock. The Americans must have built a signal repeater into the base which a brace of thermobaric bombs and several air-to-ground missiles hadn’t managed to disrupt. He shook his head – there was no end to the surprises this base held.
“It’s ringing,” said Devlin McCarthy.
The ringtone stopped and a gruff voice came on the line, “Eto Bondarev, kotoryy zvonit?”
“Major-General Bondarev, please hold. I am putting you through to the Ambassador for the United States in Moscow, Devlin McCarthy,” HOLMES voice announced, like he was just any other embassy official.
For a moment she thought the man had hung up, then she heard him say in English, “Who are you and how did you get this number?”
“Connecting you now,” HOLMES said. “Go ahead please Ambassador.”
Devlin took a deep breath, “Major-General Bondarev, this is Ambassador McCarthy, I hope you have a few minutes to speak.”
There was another silence at the end of the line, then a caustic laugh, “Whoever this is, no, I do not. Thank you and goodbye.”
Devlin jumped in as soon as she heard his tone of dismissal, “Yevgeny, I’m the grandmother of your child. The child you had with my daughter, Cindy?” Devlin heard a voice in the background and Bondarev barked at them. She had no doubt they were being told to shut up.
“Cindy McCarthy is your daughter?” he asked.
“Yes Major-General, you are the father of my grandchild, Angela.”
“I know my child’s name. Why are you calling, has something happened to the child?” he asked.
OK, so he wasn’t taken by surprise, and maybe even cared. Good. She wouldn’t have to convince him the whole story was some sort of psy-ops trick.
“Major-General I know this call is highly irregular. Believe me I know. I am about to commit treason. And you will ask yourself why you should tr
ust what I’m telling you, and I can only tell you I am calling you as the grandmother of your child, and not as the US Ambassador to Russia.”
“Go on.”
“Major-General, my country is currently preparing to conduct an above-ground nuclear missile test off the Russian Kuril Islands. We are also moving strategic nuclear assets into position to conduct a retaliatory strike on Russia should you continue your misadventures in Alaska. Following the test, our President will issue Russia with a final ultimatum to withdraw from Saint Lawrence Island, and I can assure you it is final. If you do not comply, there will be a full retaliatory nuclear strike by the USA.”
“With respect, why should I believe you?” the man asked.
“We know the Bering Strait incident is a pretext. We know you intend to occupy Alaska. We know almost to the hour how and when you plan to invade. I can’t tell you how we know, but I can tell you, we will not allow it. I have a Commander in Chief who would rather be known as the man who started World War Three than he would be known as the man who surrendered Alaska.”
“I will pass your message to my superiors,” Bondarev said.
“No damn you!” Devlin said. “Your superiors already know they are risking nuclear war. They have made their choices. I am talking to you, on behalf of your child and her entire generation! You are the theatre air commander – there can be no invasion without air cover. Ground your aircraft. Before it’s too late.” There was nothing but silence at the other end of the line.
Devlin held the phone out to Carl Williams, “I think the bastard hung up.”
“HOLMES, can you confirm?” Carl asked into the handset.
“I can confirm Carl, the line has been cut and that telephone is now offline.”
Looking around the corner of the corridor, Rodriguez saw the wheel on the inside of the blast door spinning. It had been disabled when they had locked it from their side, but it still spun. She heard a shout, in Russian, and more muffled voices, then pulled her head back and checked her weapon.
