by FX Holden
Missile launch, missile launch, a voice in his helmet exclaimed. At the same time, the missile warning alert on his helmet-mounted display lit up, showing him the bearing to the missile and the missile type. Vanguard. The bloody Iranians had fired on them!
“Break break break,” Alakeel commanded. “Evade and bug out.” His combat AI was already firing flares as he put his machine ninety degrees to the threat and pointed it at the sea, giving the enemy infrared missiles as hard a target as possible by obscuring his aircraft’s glowing hot exhaust ports.
Miss. The two missiles went for the white-hot flares hanging in his wake and flew harmlessly into the sky behind him. He checked the sky, checked on Zedan. He was also clear. Two thousand feet over the sea, he hauled his aircraft around and pointed it southeast to their rally point in the Gulf of Oman.
“Control, Haya One, we have been fired on,” Alakeel reported calmly. “Sea to air missiles, AI tagged them as Misagh-2 Vanguards. No contact or damage. Haya flight is reforming at grid delta golf three three, awaiting orders.”
Despite the deliberate evenness of his voice, his heart was pounding as he pointed his machine up to 15,000 feet and saw Zedan swinging in behind him. His eyes flicked from instruments to the sky around and then back again. His tactical display showed no Iranian military aircraft in range. Yet. One blessing, at least.
His heart missed a beat a second later as a voice speaking English broke in on the unencrypted Guard open channel. “Saudi fighter aircraft over the Gulf of Oman, this is Commander of Republic of Iran Air Force fighters on your six o’clock. You are interfering with the lawful military activities of the Iranian Navy. You are ordered to return to Saudi airspace immediately. Please acknowledge.”
There was nothing on his threat warning receiver! A bluff? He swung his head around desperately, searching the sky, rolling his aircraft slowly left, then right, ready to break away at any moment.
“Captain Alakeel?” Zedan asked, his voice pitched an octave higher than normal.
Alakeel ignored him, craning his head to look over his left shoulder … there!
Four small black dots, falling down behind them, about five miles back. He couldn’t see what they were, but his sensors could, now that he knew they were there. The Lightning’s 360-degree, spherical situational awareness system used electro-optical distributed aperture sensors (DAS) to detect targets, assuming you had DAS engaged and were paying bloody attention. Dammit Alakeel, you got complacent and let them get the jump on you! But the fact that these aircraft had crept up on him unnoticed told him one thing. They were stealth fighters.
And Iran did not possess any stealth fighters.
“Haya Two, Haya One, hold formation,” he said through gritted teeth, working his AN/AAQ-37 sensor suite.
There.
As they drew closer, he got an optical lock on the enemy flight behind him. He still couldn’t get a radar or infrared lock.
Easy does it, Amir, he told himself. Let’s see what we are dealing with. He put his aircraft into a gentle bank that would force the aircraft behind to follow or to pass him.
The thickly accented voice broke in again and repeated itself. “Saudi fighter aircraft over the Gulf of Oman, this is Commander of Republic of Iran Air Force fighters on your six o’clock. You are interfering…”
At almost the same moment as his combat AI made the identification, the enemy aircraft closed to within visual range, off Alakeel’s port wing, banking to stay in short-range missile position on his six o’clock.
What the hell? The aircraft were Russian Sukhoi-57 stealth fighters. There was no mistaking the broad wings and bird-like nose of the big twin-engined fighters. As he watched, two of the four behind him pulled ahead of the others, one accelerating to take up a position on their starboard side, another to take up a position on their port side. They bore no camouflage paint, and certainly not Iranian Air Force markings. No Russian markings or tail numbers either, just dull silver paint all over.
One of the Sukhoi pilots waved to him and pointed to the horizon straight ahead. Alakeel’s banking turn had taken him around to a northwesterly heading, and the man’s gesture was clear. Keep going back to where you came from.
Alakeel’s temper spiked. He opened the Guard channel. “This is Saudi fighter flight over the Oman Sea to aircraft on our port and starboard. You are dangerously close. Please increase separation and identify yourself.”
“This is the Iranian Air Force,” the other pilot replied, his eyes fixed on Alakeel. The accent was as far from Iranian as he had ever heard. It could only be Russian. “Please stay on your current altitude and heading until you reach Saudi airspace.” Stay on his current heading?! He couldn’t deviate left or right without slamming into one of them.
He switched to the Saudi mission control frequency. “Control, we have been intercepted by fighter aircraft claiming to be Iranian Air Force. Four Su-57 stealth fighters, I repeat, four Su-57 type stealth fighters. No markings. They are ordering us to return to Saudi airspace. Instructions please.”
He knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to order Zedan to break low and right as he broke low and left. The aircraft behind might fire short-range missiles at them, but if they evaded and survived, he was carrying six Sidewinder Block III lock-after-launch short-range missiles. At the range they would engage, he would give these arrogant Russian dogs something to think about.
“Haya One, Haya Control, you are to disengage and return to Dhahran. Repeat, disengage, return to 92 Squadron base, Dhahran. Confirm, please.”
“Control, Haya One, disengage and return to Dhahran. Haya One confirms.” He hammered his fist against the side of his cockpit in frustration. Well, there was disengaging and there was disengaging. He did not plan to meekly comply with the Russian’s command.
“Haya Two, Haya One,” Alakeel said to Zedan. “You heard the order. Stay on this heading but climb rapidly to 20,000 feet, please. I will cover your six. I want to see what these dogs do.”
“Roger, Haya One,” his wingman said. “Initiating climb.” With that, the aircraft on his wing lifted its nose and pointed it skyward, accelerating above him, while he kept his current speed, altitude and heading. Alakeel watched his situational display intently. After a moment of hesitation, the two trailing Russian fighters broke off and followed Zedan up. The other two stayed on Alakeel’s wings, shooting suddenly less confident glances across the hundred or so feet separating them on each side.
“Saudi fighter, you are once again requested…” the Russian pilot began repeating.
Alakeel did not plan to keep meekly plowing through the sky toward Saudi airspace. But he didn’t want to panic his wingman. He didn’t believe the Russians were going to fire on them, or they would have already done so. But he would show them that the Saudi Air Force was not to be easily cowed.
Alakeel had been trained to fly his F-35 Lightning fighter by instructors at Nellis Air Force Base’s 6th Weapons Squadron. He had matched himself against the best the USAF had to offer, from knife fights with nimble F-22s to missile engagements with deadly-at-a-distance F-15Cs. He had lost more engagements than he had won, but he had learned a trick or two that weren’t in the 6th Weapon’s Squadron’s official handbook. He rolled his shoulders and flexed his fingers. Request this, Ivan…
He jammed his portside rudder pedal down, pulled back on his stick and rolled his F-35 right. It looped up and over the Russian aircraft on his starboard wing and he snapped level as he lined up with the wing of his adversary. With his left hand, before the other pilot could react, he gave the Russian the universal gesture for screw you, then rolled inverted and dived for the sea.
As he extended away, he half hoped the Russian pilots would follow him down so he could really test his F-35 against the Russian fighters. But instead, they peeled off, including the two who were following Zedan up to 20,000 feet, and headed north to set up a new patrol over the top of the captive Saudi tanker.
By the time the Saudi corvette reached t
he area, Alakeel was certain the crude carrier would have either been boarded or would be making its way to Bandar Abbas under the guns of the Iranian vessels.
Alakeel watched the icons for the Russian fighters cruise north on his helmet-mounted display and frowned.
Russian stealth fighters over the Persian Gulf posing as Iranians! Where were they based? How had they begun operating in his sector without Saudi intelligence alerting him? And more importantly, why the hell now?
Conscientious objector
Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, January 2034
Corporal Maqsud Khan was descended from Uyghur royalty. His father had told him so. His father had told him many stories, but he liked that one. His great-great-grandfather on his father’s side was Yulbars Khan, the Uyghur warlord and a Kuomintang general during the Chinese civil war before he fled to Taiwan, where he died in exile in 1971. He left a large family behind in the Uyghur province of Xinjiang and they did not fare well in his absence. When the Chinese started rounding up Uyghurs in 2018 and putting them in ‘re-education’ facilities, Maqsud’s grandfather was one of those who were put away. He came out three years later with a certificate declaring him a model citizen, and immediately gathered his family and fled north, to Russian Novosibirsk, where a growing Siberian economy was hungry for fresh bodies to meet its employment shortfall. Maqsud was in the last year of a five-year military hitch that he’d signed up for straight out of his conscript year because he hadn’t wanted to work in a lithium mine like his father and had no idea what else to do. Five years’ service and he would qualify for a small pension and a subsidized apartment, and the Voyenno-Vozdushnye Sily Rossii or Russian Air Force wasn’t as bad as other branches of the armed forces. He’d pretty quickly turned a talent for computer programming into a cushy job in the Space Force ballistic missile program.
Maqsud’s definition of ‘cushy’ was what a lot of people would call ‘boring.’ He loved boring. The best days of his life were right now: where he rolled out of his bunk at 0530, did his obligatory morning run around the base at Baikonur, downed his breakfast of butterbrot (bread with a slice of cheese) and then reported for duty in the Command Information Center of the 820th Main Center for Missile Attack Warning. Where, for the first four years of his tour, he’d worked on the Russian ballistic missile early warning satellite network. It was the perfect job for Maqsud. He would come to work, his small team of cadets and privates would run systems diagnostic checks on the network of ten Kosmos satellites, and nine days out of ten, nothing would happen to disturb the beautiful monotony of service in the anti-ballistic missile defense of Russia. On the occasionally annoying days, they’d be tasked to monitor a US, Chinese, North Korean or Indian rocket launch and prepare a report, but these were few and the analysis was handled by an AI bot so all he had to do was watch the launch to see if there were any deviations from norms, check the data for anomalies and then forward it. His people got excited if they detected a new type of rocket being tested or a launch which apparently didn’t go to plan … Maqsud couldn’t care less what the so-called ‘main enemy’ was up to. But he tried to show some interest, returned the enthusiastic high fives of the younger cadets with a robust slap.
Maqsud Khan had sought a posting to the rocket force because he was a pacifist. The irony wasn’t lost on him. His first assignment was on the systems maintenance team in an ICBM silo, responsible for ensuring Russia’s new RS-28 Sarmat thermonuclear intercontinental ballistic missile was launch-ready at all times. The Sarmat’s multiple warheads could deliver a destructive force of 50 million tons of TNT – just one missile was capable of destroying half the capitals of Europe and tipping the northern hemisphere into a nuclear winter. Which made keeping it fully operational an odd career choice for most pacifists. But Maqsud had decided when he joined the Russian Aerospace Forces that he didn’t want a posting where he would actually have to kill anyone, directly or indirectly. He didn’t want to work on warplanes that might be sent to bomb civilians in Syria, or on-air defense systems that might be called on to shoot down enemy pilots. So he requested a posting to work on the one weapons system that in 90 years had never been used in war; thermonuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Maqsud had planned to spend five years in the Russian military and, unlike millions of his compatriots, never have a single death on his conscience.
His request to be posted to the strategic rocket force was quickly approved because it was not a glamorous duty. The Sarmat was the latest and most potent of all Russian nuclear missile platforms, but the silos in which it was stored were cold, dank, mold-infested concrete holes in the ground dug in the 1960s. The computer systems controlling the missile launch had not been updated significantly since the 1990s and the launch software had to be loaded from CD-ROMs in a process that took nearly 60 potentially precious minutes if the system went down, which it frequently did. Because he was Uyghur and signed on in Novosibirsk, his first posting was to the silo in Svobodnyy, a frozen town beside the Zeya River, 103 miles north of Blagoveshchensk. In summer, it was a stinking 80 degrees and humid for three months and in winter, it got quickly down to -4 and stayed there forever. On arrival, Maqsud had been told that when China and Russia had been negotiating the modern border that ran just south of Svobodnyy, they had not argued about who would get to keep Svobodnyy, but who would have to take it. In the year he had reported for duty, there had been three suicides among the personnel, and the Lieutenant commanding the silo had been removed from duty for drug abuse.
But Maqsud’s conviction that his missile would never actually be used grew with each day that passed. Its true level of readiness was well below what his superiors reported to their commanders in Blagoveshchensk. He had entered the service in the belief it would never be fired, and now he realized that it was highly likely it could never be fired, due to the many system faults and failures. Exercises were particularly fraught and likely to expose how fundamentally flawed the launch control systems were, and more often than not, he was ordered to fake the paperwork certifying that the exercise had been carried out successfully. Their superior officers rarely left the comfort of their warm bases to oversee the exercises themselves. The new Lieutenant in command of his unit had appreciated his enthusiastic willingness to cooperate in the falsification of test records and also mistook his pacifistic convictions for ‘calm under pressure’ because in one of his infrequent service evaluations the Lieutenant had described him that way. And maybe there was an element of psychological profiling in the fact he got the promotion to corporal in charge of a tech team that was supposedly at the pointy end of Russia’s ballistic missile defenses because God forbid you had someone excitable in charge of a missile that packed the power of 50 million tons of TNT.
His wonderfully impotent military career had recently been painfully interrupted, though, with his transfer to the Groza program. Due to his serene efficiency, his superiors had nominated him to head up a Target Acquisition Squad for the Groza satellites. There were 16 operational satellites in total, and three teams of six men each under the command of a corporal working three eight-hour shifts to ensure the Groza satellites were either still correctly tracking their allocated targets or updated with new tasking at the whim of the 821st Main Center for Reconnaissance of the Situation in Space. Maqsud had joined the program at the end of field testing, when they were still carrying out live-fire attacks on targets in Siberia and the Black Sea, which had been stressfully demanding, not least because of the high level of scrutiny by superior officers and senior scientists. But now that the satellites were fully operational, the excitement had died down and routine had settled in.
Groza was not the moribund arm of the service that the rocket forces had been. In fact, it was probably the program that had drained the rocket forces of every spare ruble that might have been used to upgrade the ballistic missiles’ decades-old launch systems, because it had been ruinously expensive to build and was very resource-intensive to maintain. Maqsud had experienced
a momentary twinge of conscience and had thought more than once about requesting a transfer back to the rocket forces. But he had only one year of his service to go and had managed to convince himself that like any other weapon of mass destruction, Groza was never actually going to be used. Probably.
Except that now, something was up. The first sign was the queue of traffic at the main gates as he and his squad finished their morning run. Usually, there would be one or two vehicles at the most waiting for the driver’s ID to be checked and the vehicle to be scanned. Today there were five, with more coming down the road, and they were all armored luxury cars, with dark tinted windows. A snap inspection, perhaps? He certainly hadn’t been warned today would be anything other than just another Thursday. He told his men they’d better shower and make ready twenty minutes earlier than normal – with that traffic outside, this didn’t look like the kind of day they should show up for shift change even a minute late.
He’d made the right call. The outgoing shift leader, a Corporal Yeltsin (who was no relation to the previous Russian President), pulled him aside and warned him the Combat Information Center observation level – a platform on a low scaffold that overlooked the CIC from a rear wall – was creaking under the weight of about twenty newly arrived and unannounced guests.
“Who are they?” Maqsud asked him. “Politicians?”
“Some. I recognized Defense Minister Kelnikov, and a general or two. A half dozen other officers, Colonels, Majors and such. Air Force and Space Force. And Popovkin, of course.”
