Bering Strait Page 17

  “A full-scale invasion makes no sense,” Devlin said to Williams. “They couldn’t invade the USA with a few brigades of special forces troops, no matter how powerful their air force.”

  “HOLMES, thoughts?”

  “I concur with the Ambassador. But my scenario does not consider that Russia intends a full-scale invasion of the USA,” HOLMES said.

  “What then?”

  “In this scenario, the forces assembled are too numerous for Saint Lawrence Island to be the main objective. However they may be sufficient to take and hold Alaska.”

  “Thanks HOLMES, let us think about this,” Williams said. “Stand by.”

  Devlin reached for her coffee cup, “No wonder that bastard Kelnikov looked so smug when I accused him of designs on Saint Lawrence. If your silicon friend is right, I couldn’t have been further from the mark.” She sipped. “I accused him of a border skirmish. But, Alaska?”

  “I know, right? They have a billion acres of unoccupied land in Siberia they could build on if they were looking for icy wasteland real estate, so it isn’t living space they’re after. HOLMES, list the main natural resources of Alaska.”

  “Yes Carl. Alaska has commercially developed or potentially viable deposits of oil, copper, silver, mercury, gold, tin, coal, iron ore, borax, chromite, antimony, tungsten, nickel, molybdenum, sand, gravel, and limestone,” the British voice intoned.

  “Supplement. Does Russia have significant shortages of any of these resources?” Williams asked.

  “No Carl. Russia is either an exporter or is self-sufficient in all of these resources.”

  Williams dropped his pencil on his desk, “Nah. This scenario doesn’t make sense HOLMES. Russia needs a reason to want to mount a ground invasion of Alaska. You’ve got all the other pieces, but you’re missing motive my man.”

  “Thank you Carl. I will weight motive higher in future analyses,” HOLMES said. Devlin couldn’t help smiling, despite how she felt. The voice of the great detective sounded distinctly miffed.

  “HOLMES, continue speculative analysis with full focus on the broader implications of the Russian Saint Lawrence operation please, disregard all other tasking,” Williams said. “Find me a motive, HOLMES.”

  “Yes Carl.”

  Williams reached out and pulled the lid of his laptop down.

  “He’s annoyed,” Carl said. “That is programmed. It forces him to revisit all of his analyses and broaden his search for data to support high probability scenarios.”

  Devlin stood. She had called in a report of her conversation with Kelnikov but still had to write it up, and include some of what Williams and his silicon sidekick had shared with her. She sat down again.

  “How reliable is this AI of yours?” she asked.

  “Only as reliable as the intel he can access,” Williams said. “But don’t worry, he’s not the only one working this on our side. NSA has three systems like HOLMES. All of them are learning systems and they share their analyses and test hypotheses with each other. When they agree on something, it’s usually rock solid.”

  “They talk to each other?” Devlin asked, sounding dubious.

  “In code, yeah. At quantum speeds. They’re like brothers, argue a lot,” Williams said.

  “Brothers.”

  “Yeah. And HOLMES is the big brother,” Williams said proudly. “He was the first, and he’s learned more. I’ve got him doing stuff the other two systems are years away from being able to mimic.”

  Devlin shook her head, “Look, can you send me a report on the top three most likely scenarios you are working on and the intel you have backing them? I am going to send a note to State saying Kelnikov’s reaction makes me think their theory about ‘testing our mettle’ is bogus, but I need to be able to put an alternative or two forward.”

  Carl laughed, enjoying hearing an Ambassador talking about a concept being ‘bogus’. He was starting to get a feeling she was going to be his kind of Head of Mission.

  “Bogus, right. Like invading Alaska for no reason we can see?” he asked, and Devlin realized as he spoke, that HOLMES’ scenario also sounded a long way from plausible.

  “Like that,” Devlin said. “Thank you Carl.” She stood to leave, then hesitated. The man intrigued her, the whole setup with the NSA AI system did too. “Can I ask you something?”

  “You’re cleared for it ma’am,” his whiskery Father Christmas face smiled at her.

  “Not for this. If all you need is broadband and a laptop, you could probably work from anywhere in the world, but your last posting was China and now you’re here in Russia. Why?”

  He looked around him at the bare walls and sparse furniture and shrugged, “I like to travel to exotic locales?”

  SIGHTSEEING

  “We’re going back in,” Halifax said. “Target identification.” He had called a meeting in the trailer to brief Rodriguez and O’Hare and get their thoughts on how to execute the mission he’d been given.

  “What targets?” O’Hare asked.

  “Gambell,” Halifax said. “We know the civilian hostages at Savoonga are being held in the radar station cantonment at Savoonga. Don’t ask me how we know, probably signals intel. But we don’t know where they’re being held in Gambell.” He saw the look on Bunny’s face. “I know, it’s where we lost those two Fantoms. They got lucky, but this time we know what we’re up against.”

  “Don’t we have satellite coverage now?” Rodriguez asked.

  “Thick cloud down to 1,000 feet for today and expected into the next week,” Halifax said. “We have synthetic aperture coverage but that will only let them triangulate what they already have. Plus Ivan is trying to blind our satellites with ground-based lasers.”

  “They can do that? I didn’t know they had the capability,” Rodriguez said, surprised.

  “Me either. Seems they had a few surprises up their sleeves. Satellites are functioning at 1/3 nominal I’m told.”

  “Infra-red?”

  “As well as the laser interference, Russians have lit fires all over both Savoonga and Gambell; probably just smudge pots, to mask the heat signatures of their emplacements and any buildings they’re using. You’ll go in tonight with recon pods, low-light, infrared and synthetic aperture radar. There are nearly 200 people in Gambell, they must be using some sort of heat to keep them warm. If nothing else you can identify those smudge pots and decoy fires and we’ll locate the hostages by process of elimination.”

  “We are 24 hours out from the deadline we gave the Russians to withdraw,” O’Hare said. “Is there any sign they are packing up and bugging out? Signals intel, air traffic, that kind of thing?”

  “I haven’t been advised. But if they are, you get a Fantom over Gambell, we should be able to see it. Primary objective though is to identify the location of the hostages at Gambell.”

  “We’re going to send in a Seal Team, try to get the hostages out before we hit the Russian positions?” Rodriguez asked hopefully. She hadn’t been briefed, but she had a good idea of what was coming, and if she had family on Saint Lawrence, she wouldn’t want them covered by Russian guns when it happened.

  Halifax shook his head, “I haven’t been told, and probably wouldn’t be. But I’d doubt it. By the time we get the intel back to ANR, it would probably be too late and in any case, there are hundreds of Russian regular troops on that island with some heavy duty air cover. It’s not like Seal Team Six can just buzz in there in their helos, take out a bunch of jihadis and save the day.”

  “Speaking of which, I’m going to need someone to pull that air cover away somehow,” Bunny said. “We got in underneath them last time while they were distracted. We try the same this time, and I’m going to get swatted from above again, and that’s assuming I can blow through that data-linked Verba anti-air coverage.”

  Halifax smiled a grim smile, “Oh, I can promise you they’ll be distracted.”

  After the tense first 24 hours of the takeover of Saint Lawrence Island, during which Bondarev ha
d flown three sorties with his men, the last few days had been surprisingly quiet. US aircraft had kept to their coastline, respecting the Russian imposed no-go zone, even though it technically crossed into US airspace. As far as he was aware, there had also been no US recon flights over the island since the first intrusion, in which the Americans had lost two of their drones. Bondarev wasn’t naive, he knew the Americans would have satellite coverage and may have managed to sneak one of their smaller recon drones in under his nose.

  American recon drones weren’t his big concern. His real worry was if they managed to get a flight of unmanned combat aerial vehicles, or drones, in under his fighter and radar screen. Six of the compact Fantom fighters, loaded with the new US Small Advanced Capabilities Missile, nicknamed the Cuda, could bring down an entire squadron of his Su-57s if they were lucky. He had argued with General Lukin about even putting piloted aircraft at risk in the air over the Bering Strait once the initial need was past, but Lukin had turned it around and pointed out to Bondarev that his Okhotnik drones were still missing trained pilots and system operators and it would be at least another two weeks before crews moved from other units could fill the gap.

  Modern Russian air war doctrine called for the use of piloted aircraft for critical operations. While Russia had matched the US in the capabilities of its piloted fighters and weapons in recent years, it had chosen a different strategy on drones than the USA. The winning designers at Sukhoi had successfully argued that Russia needed a drone optimized for air-to-ground operations to match the capabilities of the US Fantom, and given the limitations of the Okhotnik platform, that meant two crew sitting in a trailer on the ground – a pilot and a systems officer. The US however was more advanced in terms of combat AI, meaning that a lot of the tasks of the traditional systems officer could be handed off to onboard AI, freeing the US pilot to both fly and target weapons.

  Combat experience in the Middle East had shown that Russian human-crewed fighters still had a higher kill to loss ratio than American unmanned fighters. But America had dramatically increased its use of armed drones much earlier than Russia and had run into exactly the same problems as Bondarev was faced with now around crew availability. That had forced a major revision of US drone doctrine and the requirements issued for the competition to design the platform that would become the F-47 Fantom, had included the capability for ‘autonomous AI’ in combat and an ability to ‘slave’ the Fantom to any compatible NATO system so that one pilot could fly up to six drones at a time - the now infamous US drone ‘hex’. Once the bugs had been ironed out of this system, and faced with both a resurgent Russia and assertive China, America had put its energy into optimizing drone pilot training and aircraft production capacity, so that it could field enough pilots and drones to support a ‘two-front’ doctrine again: the ability to once again fight a major war in two theatres at the same time, just as it had done in World War II.

  Bondarev and his men had only seen American drones in small numbers over Turkey and Syria though, and even then, usually only the unarmed reconnaissance version, the Fury. NATO air forces in the region had not been armed with the latest US frontline drones and the US had not been willing to commit, and risk losing, its much-hyped Fantom. The Russian pilots assured themselves it was because the pilotless robot planes were not the threat the US made them out to be, and they were afraid to lose face by committing them against battle-hardened Russian fighter squadrons.

  All of this was going through Bondarev’s mind as his squadron wheeled through the sky in the narrow air corridor between Saint Lawrence Island and the Alaskan mainland. Yes, he could have stayed warm and safe on the ground in Lavrentiya, but he was the kind of commander who liked to fly the front himself. And he wasn’t so vain as to think himself irreplaceable. If he died up here, there were a hundred men able and more than willing to take his place.

  His eyes flicked across the threats on his heads-up display without alarm, as the situation had not changed greatly since day one of the operation. The US was moving a huge number of aircraft into Eielson and Elmendorf-Richardson air bases and had mobilized its national guard to protect those bases and the population centers of Fairbanks, and Anchorage. Centers which Bondarev knew Russia had no designs on. It was Nome Russia was interested in, and so they would be drawing a red line across the state of Alaska from Fort Yukon in the North East to Bethel in the South West, just short of the bigger Alaskan cities.

  If all-out nuclear war did not erupt (and that was a big ‘if’ in Bondarev’s book), the US was expected to focus on fortifying its population centers against an attack that would not come. Nome would be taken - Russia needed some geopolitical leverage after all, and would need an administrative capital in its new Yukon territory. But to the outside world, it should look exactly like Russia had kept its word. Its stated intention in the attack on Nome would be that it simply wanted to create a buffer zone, a demilitarized area between Russia and the USA - a response that had been forced on it by rampant US aggression in the Bering Strait.

  By the time the US realized that Nome was in Russian hands, it would be too late.

  To Bondarev, what had seemed like a suicidal gambit a week ago, was suddenly looking like it might, just possibly, pay off. Confusion clearly reigned in Washington about how to respond to the Russian intervention. NATO was crippled by an indecisive EU, not interested in going to war over a ‘minor border shipping dispute’. The US military was being held in check by an administration that was full of bluster, but no bite.

  “Gold 1 from Gold Command, vector 045 degrees, altitude 35,000 please, we have business for you,” he heard as the voice of his A-100 AWACs air controller broke his reverie. At that moment he cursed his overconfidence, knowing it had almost certainly jinxed him. “Patching through data now,” the Airborne Control aircraft said. “Vectoring all available support to your sector.”

  He looked down at the threat screen in his cockpit and took a deep breath. The Airborne Control aircraft was sending through data from ground and air-based long-range radar sources. The screen showed huge numbers of US aircraft forming up over Eielson and Elmendorf-Richardson. The numbers beside the swirling vortex of icons indicated he was looking at two elements of at least 50 aircraft in strength, each.

  “Gold 2 to Gold leader,” his wingman called, a slight note of panic in his voice. “Are you seeing this!?”

  “Roger Gold 2, standby.” His first reaction was that it didn’t make sense. This had all the hallmarks of the prelude to a major attack, but there were still nearly 24 hours until the US deadline for Russian troop withdrawal from Saint Lawrence. Were they trying to take Russia by surprise, by moving early? It was hard to see what the tactical advantage would be, and there would certainly be no political advantage. It would only serve to confirm how hawkish and erratic the US leadership was. But if this was the ‘fire and fury’ that the US had promised, surely Bondarev would have already received warning that the US had also scrambled elements of its strategic bomber force or moved naval assets within missile range?

  Of course, if the US Stealth Bombers had sortied from Guam several hours ago, they may not yet have been detected.

  Perhaps it was just a feint, to test Russian readiness in advance of the real attack. Or a PR stunt, intended to reassure a restive US media and public that its armed forces were ready for action. He checked his watch. It was 0200 at night in Alaska, which made it 0600 in Washington. That made sense - perhaps this was just smoke and mirrors, timed to make the morning TV shows on the US East coast. He watched carefully as the circling icons over Eielson and Elmendorf-Richardson coalesced into a single ‘aluminum cloud’ of at least 100 aircraft that no stealth systems in the world could disguise. Definitely a PR stunt or feint. Multiple smaller attacks would have been much more effective.

  The Russian command and control system throwing data onto Bondarev’s screens sorted the electronic signature and radar returns it was getting from the enemy formation and assigned different icons to each air
craft type to let its pilots know what they were looking at. As his eyes scanned the screen, a chill went over him.

  The spearhead of the huge enemy formation comprised almost exclusively aircraft with the designation F-47.

  Fantoms. These were not National Guard reserve units. As one, they began moving toward Saint Lawrence Island.

  This was no feint.

  If Dave was cold before, he was both cold, and tired now. They’d retired to the tank to warm up, eat and get some rest. Perri had cleaned the barrel of his rifle. He was still annoyed he hadn’t been able to zero the new sight on his Winchester, and he hadn’t been able to find any army surplus armor piercing rounds in the loot they’d taken from the general store. On the other hand, they had hundreds of steel tipped 180-grain magnum rounds with an anti-fouling coating, and even at a couple of hundred yards range he was sure they would slice through the aluminum carport roof without trouble. The steel tipped, copper jacketed Winchester rounds were popular for hunting reindeer stags – anything less risked not being able to penetrate the animal’s thick skull, and the less confident hunters could aim at the shoulder or haunches; the steel tip letting the bullet slice through the thick hide while the copper jacket and lead core would spread on impact and shatter a leg or hip joint.

  It also left a smaller entry hole in the valuable reindeer hide.

  A little metal on metal probably wouldn’t hurt for his upcoming ‘hunt’, as he was trying to trigger an explosion in the ammo inside the carport. He wanted some friction or sparks to set the ammo off. He was pretty sure that even without having zeroed his rifle, he’d be able to hit something as big as a carport roof with his new precision-guided scope. Hell just using iron sights, he could plug a seal in the head from a hundred yards as it was coming up for air, and that in a raging blizzard, so he had no excuses for missing a stationary carport.

  Dave had tried to argue he wasn’t even needed on the trip. But Perri had insisted he needed to come along to keep an eye out for Russian patrols. Perri wanted to be sure there were no foot or vehicle patrols near the dump when he set it off. He was pretty sure any buildings near the ammo dump were empty now, with all the residents being held at the school a few hundred yards away, but he didn’t want to accidentally kill any Russian soldiers and give them an excuse to retaliate against the townsfolk.