“Try another boot unit!” Bunny yelled back. “It might not be the drone.”
Running back to her shooter’s console, she pulled out a reserve boot unit and turned it on. For safety’s sake she took a spare magnetic connection cable too, in case it was a cable problem. Bunny took the chance to swig some water. They had gotten seven Fantoms into the air now, but had no idea what was going on above them. What they were doing was the equivalent of firing arrows blindfolded into the air, one after the other, at a target they weren’t even sure was still there. Except of course that the arrows had brains and reflexes of their own. And if the enemy was out there, they would find them. What happened after that, that was a question of man against machine.
Rodriguez slapped the magnetic connector onto the port on the side of the drone, and hit the boot command. An error code flashed up.
“Fault in fuel cell, access port 23a!” she called. “Where the hell is access port 23a!?”
Bunny put her water bottle away and ran towards their engineering supply room, “I’ll get another fuel cell!”
“Goddamit…” Rodriguez said, going back to her console and pulling up the drone service schematics. “Port 23a, 23a… where are you?” She punched in a search string and a wire diagram came up on her screen, the battery port highlighted in pulsing blue. It was on the port side fuselage, under the wing root. Grabbing a pistol grip screwdriver she ran to the drone, ducked under the wing, located the port and screwed it open. The hydrogen fuel cell inside was held fast in a metal brace and she had to free it before she could pull it out. As she turned to drop it on the ground, Bunny jogged up, holding a new cell and she jammed it into the bracket, closed the port door and Rodriguez screwed it into place.
They had wasted valuable time. Bunny turned to Rodriguez, about to say something when a huge explosion threw them off their feet and fire roared out of the chute.
Bondarev never saw his machine hit the cliff. He had centered the nose of the Sukhoi just above the hole in the cliff face to allow for the last few feet of descent. He’d judged it was 500 feet above sea level, or about 500 feet below his safe ejection height. About a hundred feet from the cliff face, he pulled the ejection lever. His canopy flew away and the ejection gun hammered his seat out of the cockpit, then a rocket booster blasted him into the cold air at 200G per second. In any ejection there was a one in three chance the pilot would break their back, but when the alternative was to end as a red smear on a cliff face in the middle of the Bering Strait, it wasn’t something Bondarev had even thought about. His immediate problem was whether his chute would even deploy in time to retard his fall at this low altitude. The Sukhoi was equipped with a ‘zero-zero’ ejection system, designed to be safe even if the pilot ejected at zero altitude, zero speed, but while he was about 500 feet above the sea he was still ejecting below ground level if you counted from the top of the cliff face.
The solid fuel rocket boosters on the bottom of his chair burned white hot for 0.2 seconds, lifting him 200 feet into the air over Little Diomede. Having taken altitude data from the dying Sukhoi, the seat computer calculated it should dump the chair immediately and deploy both the drogue and main parachutes. Bondarev was still moving forward at about 500 miles an hour as he started to drop!
He felt himself being jerked out of the chair — if his back hadn’t been broken by the kick out of the cockpit, there was another chance it would be snapped by the chute deploying — and he saw the lip of the cliff face disappear below him in a blur. He was still wearing his helmet, so he registered the explosion of his aircraft as a bright flash somewhere below his legs, but didn’t hear it; then his chute opened and swung him forward like a child on a swing. His legs kicked out in front of him and then he swung back down, the black rock and ice of the island rushing up to meet him. He braced for a hard impact, but the ground was a little further away than he had first sensed. A second went past, then another, then he hit… hard!
Colonel Artem Akinfeev, Bondarev’s second in command and leader of the Mig-41 Oak squadron had heard his COs shouted missile warning as he came under attack over Little Diomede but he hadn’t acted on it. It wasn’t that he doubted the sanity of the order, questioned the tactical wisdom of committing his aircraft before the source of the threat was identified, or was arrogantly overconfident about the capabilities of his Gen 6 Mig stealth fighters.
He hadn’t heeded Bondarev’s warning, because by the time he could have reacted he was already dead.
Having dispatched most of Bondarev’s squadron the remaining S-FAD had immediately moved to engage the incoming Sukhois and Migs. An American missile had struck his machine from a low portside aspect, detonating inches from his fuel tanks, causing an explosion that incinerated both the Mig and Artem Akinfeev in milliseconds. Akinfeev’s wingman, Lieutenant Igor Tzubya, had also heard Bondarev’s warning but luckily he had time to respond and had evaded the missile that had been aimed at him.
“Oak 4 to Birch leader, we are engaged over target,” he said to the Okhotnik commander, pushing his machine down to sea level to try to recover stealth capability as his sensors showed American Aegis ground-air and Fantom air-air radar sweeping across the skin of his fighter. “Hold your current position, do not approach the target. Repeat, do not approach.”
Igor Tzubya’s call sign was ‘Yeti’ because of his coolness under fire, and he showed it now, his voice giving no sign of the stress he was feeling, either mental or physical. As he recovered his stealth profile he swung his aircraft around toward the source of the Aegis radar and was looking for a surface ship when far ahead of him, he saw two sea-launched missiles leap from the empty water. A submersible anti-air system! He had no air-ground weapons other than his guns, but he knew exactly how to respond. He locked the rough position of the S-FAD on his nav system and sent the data to the other Russian aircraft.
“Oak squadron, get down on the deck,” he said. “We’re being targeted by sub-launched missiles. Converge on my coordinates!” Tzubya commanded. Tzubya and his men were trained in how to counter an S-FAD attack. The S-FAD had to be stationary to launch and the trick was to stay as close to the launch point as possible. After clearing the surface of the sea and being kicked out of their canisters the SM-6/E missiles would accelerate straight up and then start homing on their targets, but if the targets were below them and close, the American missiles would be forced to try a radical 180 degree reverse to get back down to sea level to hit a circling aircraft. It was a maneuver they weren’t optimized to achieve and the chances of a miss were greatly improved.
Assuming there was only one S-FAD out there firing at them, of course!
He had no option. In moments he was joined by the remaining five fighters of Oak squadron and they began tight banking turns over the last known position of the S-FAD. He tried desperately to get a visual on the submersible drone but that was impossible. The water below glittered with sunlight, the reflections blinding.
“Missile launch!” one of his men called and he saw to port one of the missile canisters exploding out of the water, the rocket booster igniting and sending the missile out of sight overhead.
“Hold your positions unless they get a lock!” he called sternly, knowing the pressure to break away would be almost irresistible to many pilots.
He counted the aircraft swimming through the air behind him. So few. But that must mean the enemy S-FAD was growing short on missiles.
He just had to hold his nerve!
If Rodriguez and Bunny had been in any doubt about whether there was a war going on outside, it disappeared in the gout of flame that spewed out of the chute at the end of the catapult. Having been standing off to one side, locking the wings of the disabled Fantom, the flame spewed out of the chute between them and they scrambled aside, Rodriguez on all fours, Bunny almost comically crabbing backward on her butt.