“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 blown 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.