Bering Strait Read online

  He wasn’t ready for command, but he had learned quickly and the first thing he had learned was to build alliances with the right people, like the then Lieutenant Arsharvin of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence arm. Arsharvin had been head of a combat intelligence unit, but to Bondarev, his greatest value wasn’t intelligence about the Turkish enemy. It was his network within the Russian air force, the Voyenno-Vozdushnye Sily Rossii or VVS, which had meant there wasn’t a single political maneuver Bondarev wasn’t forewarned about. When Arsharvin had learned about a near insurrection about to erupt in 6983rd’s 8th Air Regiment, Arsharvin had handed the names of the plotters to Bondarev, and he had taken them to Lukin personally, afraid of trusting the information to anyone else. When the recriminations died down, Lukin had demoted the commander of the 8th, and put Bondarev in charge of the unit’s 12 fourth generation Su-34s. It was an inglorious command, with none of the glamour of one of the new Okhotnik regiments, but it was based in Khabarovsk with high visibility. He leveraged his time there to eventually achieve command of the 5th Air Regiment, an elite unit composed of the latest Su-57 and Mig-41 fighters. From there it was just a matter of not screwing up, and he was handed command of the 6983rd Air Brigade: nine regiments, 200 fighters or attack aircraft, 100 rotary winged attack and support aircraft.

  After the heat and dust of Syria, the move to the 6983rd’s base in the Russian Far East had been welcome. Bondarev was no stranger to snow and ice. Loved, in fact, the biting cold of a cloudless night, salt tears in his eyes, lips numb. His mother, dead five years now, had taught him there was no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.

  His grandfather had been right about the war coming, but he hadn’t been there to see it end. He had died of an undiagnosed heart problem visiting an air defense unit outside Tbilisi; but he had seen his grandson decorated and Bondarev remembered clearly his words as he pinned on the medal. He had held him by the shoulders and then tapped the medal. “Each one of these is forged with the tears of mothers who have lost sons and daughters,” his grandfather had said. “Remember that, every time you wear it.”

  “Hey, I’m talking to you,” Arsharvin said, punching his shoulder and bringing him back to the present. Bondarev had just told Arsharvin it was his professional military opinion that Operation LOSOS was going to be just like Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. A fantastic military victory that would guarantee their ultimate defeat. “Saint Lawrence is not Pearl Harbor,” Arsharvin was insisting. “The US will react to our move on Saint Lawrence, yes. That is the intention - to create a provocation they simply cannot ignore. We will incur losses, inevitably. In fact, we are counting on it. In the face of continued US military aggression, we will move on Alaska and declare our intention to secure the west of Alaska as neutral territory, a bulwark between a militant USA and a peaceful Russia. Traditional US lapdogs like the UK, Australia, South Korea and Japan may react, but they are too weak and too far away to offer anything but political support. Our diplomats assure us Europe will not mobilize - there is little love left for the USA in Europe.”

  “Europe will respond when American ballistic missiles start to fly,” Bondarev said. “I guarantee you that.”

  Arsharvin took another glass, “It won’t come to that. If we move with overwhelming conventional force, take Nome quickly, the US will find itself in a hostage negotiation, not a war.”

  “They would hesitate to use their nuclear weapons against targets on US soil, I agree,” Bondarev allowed. “But sub-launched tactical nukes on our Far East airfields and ports would be my response. The battle for Alaska would be over before it started.”

  “And how would we respond to an attack like that?” Arsharvin asked.

  “Massively, and irrationally,” Bondarev sighed. “The sky would rain ballistic missiles. We would be looking at the end of all civilization.”

  “Yes. Or no. Say the self-absorbed US President and the weak-kneed liberals in the US Congress hesitate. The US does not need Nome, they do not care about Nome. America has twelve percent unemployment, its factories are rusting ruins, climate change has turned its farms from San Francisco to Kansas City into dust bowls, it relies on Chinese loans to fund a military on the edge of collapse. They will fight, yes, but not with nuclear weapons.”

  “You’ve been listening to your own propaganda for too long. And what makes you think we can even win a conventional war?” Bondarev asked.

  “Nothing, but what a glorious cause!” Arsharvin yelled, raising an arm in the air. “Let us toast to it! Victory over the main enemy, and a new age of prosperity for Mother Russia!”

  Bondarev lifted his glass, but put it down again without draining it. He needed a clear head for tomorrow. He was about to send four thousand men and women to war.

  SNOWFLAKES IN THE BREEZE

  Seventeen-year-old Perri Tungyan would rather have been fishing. His father and brother had taken their boat out earlier that morning to try out the new echo locator that had finally arrived from Nome. They already had the best boat in Gambell; the 16 footer was swift, with a twin-screw outboard engine that meant it could fly through the tight spaces between floes in pursuit of seal or whale. But the deep sea echolocator, that was the key to them finding new depressions, valleys and rock formations that might be hiding a nice big halibut.

  It had been three years since Perri’s brother pulled in a 180lb fish and their father made him throw it back in because anything over 70lb was a female, he said. Since then, the biggest they’d landed was about 40 inches or 30lbs. Still a good sized fish, but nothing like that monster from three years ago.

  He looked out from the shed in which he was sheltering from the wind, at the sea beyond the runway at Gambell Airport. He should be out there on the water. Instead he was stuck here, waiting to unload the weekly grocery flight from America. He didn’t do it for the money, the money was peanuts and there was nothing to spend it on here except cigarettes and liquor. He did it for the loot. A dropped case of canned peaches here, a missing box of chocolate there. Was it Perri’s fault internet orders had a habit of getting screwed up? He kept his pilfering at a low level though, so no one got too upset at him. Didn’t dip into the cargo every flight, just when he saw a choice shipment; little luxuries his family would never see otherwise.

  He clapped cold hands against his chest. He knew there wasn’t much chance of getting fired anyway, not when he was the only one stupid enough to waste a great fishing day like this hanging around Gambell’s deserted airstrip. This wasn’t Savoonga; there was no control tower here, no baggage handlers, no gate agents or ticket offices. Just the long dirt strip sticking out into the Bering Sea with water glittering on both sides, and Perri, his four-wheeler and his sled.

  When his older brother had worked here, there had at least been an aircraft maintenance engineer hanging around too, to refuel the light planes coming in, restock them with food or water, or attend to any mechanical issues. Pilots brought gossip with them, from Nome, Fairbanks, Anchorage. It had made America seem closer then. Now all the flights were automated, pilotless Amazon freight drones. They landed, he unloaded, plugged them into the grid with a cable that held itself on magnetically and when they were recharged they just took off by themselves as long as he’d shut the cargo bay door properly - he didn’t even need to be there. More reliable, sure (no drunken bush pilots to deal with), but so damn boring.

  He looked at the time on his phone and walked over to his all-terrain ATV bike. The electric engine purred to life on the second press of the starter and he left it ticking over while he checked the connector to the big sled hooked up behind it. All good. He checked the snow plow at the front was also pulled up – it had a habit of dropping into the dirt and sending him head over heels over the handlebars, stupid thing. He should just unbolt it. It was a long time since there was snow on the runway at Gambell this time of year. The last thing he checked was that his rifle was tied securely to the grill at the back of the sled. It had been seven years since any
polar bears had been seen on Saint Lawrence, but he didn’t want to be that guy who finally saw one again and wasn’t armed with anything except a mobile phone to take a photo of it. Plus if the drone didn’t show up, he could always set out a few cans along the runway and practice his distance shooting. There were markers every fifty yards along the airstrip so he could measure the distance pretty accurately. His best shot ever was with the rifle he was carrying now, his father’s Winchester XPR .300. A one hundred and fifty-yard headshot on a reindeer stag, in a slight crosswind too. Throwing his leg over the saddle, he gunned the bike out of the old hangar and onto the spit holding the runway.

  The drones were either on time, or they didn’t turn up at all, there was nothing in between. The weather over Alaska meant they might get canceled, but no one bothered to tell Gambell about it, so Perri had to go out there every time and just look up at the sky for the tell-tale small dot to appear high in the sky or drop out of the cloud base and fog. He pulled up halfway down the runway, and shaded his eyes against the sun. Great visibility today, he should be able to see it coming a ways off. You could always see them before you heard them - their small electric twin turbofan engines were almost silent.

  You never knew which direction they would come from though; it was something about the wind, but it seemed pretty random to him. He swiveled around, looking east, then west. Yeah, there it was. A tiny speck in the sky about ten miles out, if he had to guess.

  No. Two specks. As he watched, the single dot split into two. Then three. What? No one had told him to expect three delivery flights today. That sort of thing only ever happened in the holiday season. Except these weren’t delivery flights. The planes were closing way too fast. He leaned forward on his handlebars, eyes glued to the approaching aircraft.

  Could be Air Force, he guessed. Since the Air Force had rebuilt the radar base up at Savoonga ten years ago there were occasional overflights by US bombers and fighters which the Air Force said were using the base to test their navigation systems. Transport flights too; the big four-engined jets bringing in personnel and equipment occasionally overflew Gambell on their way in and out. But none had ever landed. The runway was probably too short for a jet like that anyway. Whatever these planes were, they were booking. Within no time the dots had grown to small dart shapes and were going to be over Gambell in another second or two.

  When the Air Force started appearing over Saint Lawrence again, Perri had quickly learned to identify their aircraft. Seeing one of them in the skies over his village was a welcome break in the monotony. Hard to tell yet, but these had to be F-35 fighters or F-47 drones. His money was on the older F-35s - the specks racing toward him looked a little too big to be the pilotless drones. One, two, three; he had barely finished confirming the count when the machines were blasting over the top of him, so low that the sonic boom nearly blew out his eardrums.

  He put his hand up to his ears. Shit that hurt! Assholes! That wasn’t funny.

  He watched the three jets zoom into a climb, spiraling up into the blue of the sky in perfect formation.

  They weren’t F-35s. They weren’t F-47s either.

  What the hell?!

  Bondarev pulled his Sukhoi onto its back at the top of his climb then barrel rolled to level flight at 10,000 feet over Gambell with his two wingmen staying in perfect formation behind and slightly above him. His radar warning system was screaming at him as the radiation from the early warning station at Savoonga painted his aircraft. It took all of his self-control not to target one his of antiradar missiles at the US installation, but the same heads-up display that identified the US radar for him was also telling him it was not actively tracking. His threat warning system was silent too.

  Which was what he was expecting, since the message had come through while his squadron was in flight saying that Russian special forces had been successful in taking the US radar facility at Savoonga without firing a single shot. Arsharvin had texted him a report saying they had fallen on the sleeping US forces in the night, finding only two dozy sentries, a duty officer and two radar operators awake. The other twenty personnel stationed there had been asleep and woke to find themselves the first prisoners of Operation LOSOS. The Spetsnaz had kept the radar station in operation so that NORAD wouldn’t raise an alarm at it going off the air.

  He cracked his knuckles and smiled. Against the wishes of his staff he had insisted on being in the first wave of aircraft over the target and he eased his Sukhoi into a lazy racetrack orbit over Gambell. “Swan 1 to Swan 2, I make it one civilian vehicle by the runway at Gambell airstrip, confirm?” The motorbike or buggy down below was too small for his IMA BK air-to-ground radar to pick up, but he pinned it with his optical targeting system. In the town itself, he could see a few people moving around, and something that was probably a pickup truck driving toward the small harbor.

  His wingman came on the radio within a couple of seconds. “Confirmed Swan leader, no military vehicles or signals identified.”

  Theirs wasn’t a reconnaissance flight. Operation LOSOS was already supported by intensive satellite and drone surveillance and the whole of Saint Lawrence was being monitored in real time by every eye and ear in the Russian Eastern Military District inventory. But Bondarev hadn’t survived 57 combat sorties over Syria and Turkey by trusting someone or something else to be his eyes and ears.

  That was why he was leading this initial sortie himself, and had split his squadron of 12 Su-57s into four sections, sending one over Savoonga in the north, two to the eastern end of the island where they expected the inevitable US response to materialize and he took the remaining element in over Gambell to reassure himself that the US hadn’t moved any mobile air defense assets there to give him a horrible surprise.

  Phase I of LOSOS was rolling. As he watched Gambell disappear under his wing for the second time, he canceled the lock on the small vehicle below, leveled his machine out and pointed it East, toward Alaska. “Swallow 1, this is Swan 1. Clear skies over the target, you are cleared for ingress.”

  “Swallow 1 acknowledges, beginning ingress,” came the reply.

  Perri was getting a crick in his neck from watching the fast moving jets circle overhead. He was still trying to work out what they were. They’d had an Air Force officer come to Gambell school a couple of years ago, and he had played a game with them, showing them silhouettes of American fighter planes, bombers and drones and having them guess what each of them was from a small recognition chart he had handed out. Perri had won the quiz, and got himself a 712th Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron patch to sow on his anorak. You can bet he did; it was one of his coolest possessions - a large hand-sewn cloth emblem with an image of a polar bear holding a globe of the world in one paw. He reached absently for his sleeve and fingered it now.

  As soon as he turned 18 he was going to enlist. Get himself off this island and see the world. He’d already been sent the papers and filled them out.

  As the three aircraft overhead stopped circling and sped away to the East, Perri had convinced himself these planes were not on the recognition chart he had at home. He watched them go. Some new sort of top-secret Air Force plane maybe? They could certainly move. In seconds they were gone.

  Or had they just circled around and come up behind him again? Damn, that was fast. He heard a sound in the air to the west behind him and swiveled his head. This time he saw a flat line of what looked like five or six large fat flying insects closing on the airstrip. As they got closer, the sound in the air resolved itself into the thud of rotors. A little like the sound made by the Amazon drones as they switched from horizontal to vertical flight for landing. But that was more of a buzzing sound, whereas this was a chest pounding syncopated thump.

  There was no doubt in Perri’s mind that these machines were planning to land. They went from a staggered line abreast formation into line astern, each one lined up five hundred yards behind the other, and they snaked toward the airstrip with unmistakable intent. Perri fumbled for his pho
ne. He should call someone. This was too weird. But who the hell should he call? Mayor Pungiwiyi? He was the closest thing Gambell had to a law officer, but the guy was definitely still sleeping off his birthday party from last night. His father? He and his brothers would be well out to sea by now, well out of range of the small cellular bubble around Gambell.

  He still had the card for the Air Force officer from Savoonga in his wallet. He’d call them. They’d know what the hell was going on. Fumbling with his wallet and phone in the cold air, he punched in the number and waited. It came back with a busy signal. He dialed again – same thing. It wasn’t unusual, cell coverage between the two towns was often patchy. Damn.

  So he put his phone away, bit his lip and stayed glued to the saddle of his ATV. But he turned it on again, kept the engine running. He wasn’t sure why, it just seemed the smart thing to do.

  As the fat black insect shapes converged on the airstrip Perri suddenly realized what he was looking at. Just six months ago, one of the men from the village had got into trouble in the seas northwest of Saint Lawrence when his outboard gave up on him. He’d drifted toward the Russian coast and been spotted by a freighter headed south. The ship hadn’t stopped, but the crew had radioed the Russian Coast Guard to report the Yup’ik fishing boat as a shipping hazard. The man had been plucked from his boat and dropped back on Saint Lawrence by a huge Russian Mi-26 T2V heavy chopper. The whole of Gambell had gone down to look the chopper over, and Russian media had made a huge deal about it on the internet, telling how they had rescued an American citizen because his own Coast Guard hadn’t responded to his call for help. A call he hadn’t actually made of course, but that wasn’t the point.