STANDOFF
As Bunny was bringing her Fantoms home, Bondarev was finishing his mission debrief. It had been an entirely successful mission — on paper. US fighters were patrolling impotently up and down the Alaskan coast, but so far had not dared to test the exclusion zone around Saint Lawrence. The Russian President had persuaded his counterpart they were doing their utmost to contain the sub emergency but needed unfettered access to ground staging facilities on Saint Lawrence and undisturbed freedom of navigation in the sea and air around it.
Russian troops had rounded up the few hundred residents of Gambell and Savoonga without great drama. They had found fewer than 50 US military personnel at the radar station at Savoonga, only 12 of whom were security personnel. A short firefight had broken out when one of the radar station personnel at Savoonga who had camped out overnight hunting reindeer in the hills to the south had returned and decided to engage the encamped Russian troops, but he had been subdued with a non-lethal gunshot injury. The brief firefight had not impacted the operation. In Gambell they had herded the residents into the school gym. The population of Savoonga, including the military personnel stationed there, was considerably larger, so they were being kept in barracks inside the US military cantonment.
It couldn’t have gone more smoothly, but Bondarev was not happy, and he was letting Arsharvin know it.
“I want to know how the Americans managed to get a flight of drones under our long-distance radar, through our Verba coverage and fly them right down the damn runway at Gambell!” His voice was so loud it rattled the windows of the hut and he saw men outside look in, before deciding it was probably better they found somewhere else to be.
“We shot two of them down Comrade Major-General,” Arsharvin pointed out, carefully. “A Verba unit claimed one, your pilots the other.”
“My pilots reported possible returns from at least four, and up to six different stealth aircraft operating at a low level while we were engaged,” Bondarev continued. “We were just lucky they either weren’t armed or didn’t have orders to put a fistful of missiles up our asses.” He took a breath, tried to speak more slowly. “I have reports of American drones overflying both Savoonga and Gambell. We had a brief window of time on Saint Lawrence to get our troops and aircraft down and out of sight before the Americans got satellites in position to see what was happening, but those drones got it all! There is no value in a no-fly zone that the enemy can penetrate with impunity!”
“With respect Yevgeny,” Arsharvin complained. “You should be chewing out the air defense commander, not me. If he’d got his Verbas networked quicker…”
“I have chewed him out,” Bondarev said. “But now I’m looking at my head of operational intelligence, and I’m asking him to tell me how American drones managed to get into position over Saint Lawrence so quickly. The nearest US military airfields are Eielson or Elmendorf-Richardson, 600 bloody miles away! My strategy was based around identifying and protecting us from threats from that quarter and we succeeded. So where did those drones come from?!”
Arsharvin was struggling. He put his hands behind his neck, looking up at the ceiling. “Nome is the most likely launch point, but we have no reports of military aircraft or personnel being stationed there. We know they have been experimenting with truck-mounted launchers. It’s possible they have positioned several of these at Nome, I suppose. Or at the Coast Guard station at Port Clarence? They are both only a hundred and fifty miles away,” he offered.
Bondarev calmed a little. It did make some sort of sense. Drones, truck mounted or otherwise, could easily be hidden in a hangar at the civilian airport, maybe even launched remotely if they were unarmed. And the Coast Guard base at Port Clarence was a US Navy facility — he probably hadn’t paid it enough attention. “Then check that Port Clarence is on our targeting list for the first ground strike,” he told Arsharvin. “And before we go in, get me some updated imagery. Show me some truck-mounted drones refueling, or empty truck-launchers lined up on the side of a runway in Nome and I will relax.”
If Bondarev was unhappy, Rodriguez was even more so. Bringing their birds home had not been a smooth process this time. One of the Fantoms had lost forward vision as it approached the Rock, meaning Bunny had to bring it in blind. A software kludge had been needed to get it to ignore its collision warning system as it autopiloted itself towards the Slot, and they had wasted precious time and fuel while O’Hare and a programmer hammered out the workaround, debugged and uploaded it. But it had made them realize they needed the software update applied to all of their drones, because any one of them could end in the same situation and they had to have a way to tell it that it wasn’t about to wipe itself out on a cliff face. As the Fantom had glided into the opening, Bunny had grabbed manual control as soon as she had a visual, but it was rough. The drone had slapped onto the water hard, bending its ski support gear. Rodriguez figured two days, maybe more, for her small maintenance crew to replace the supports and forward video system and get it airworthy again.
There was not a lot of jubilation under the Rock that night, even though they had delivered on their mission objectives. It had cost them two Fantoms down, one damaged and out of play. Halifax picked up on it as he walked into the ready room that doubled as a duty galley down by the deck. He looked around him, seeing a distinct lack of laughter and teasing, and a whole lot of tired people slumped on their elbows spooning food into their mouths and not really even talking with each other. He walked over to Rodriguez, who was going through an inventory checklist with one of her ordnancemen.
“Officer on the deck!” she announced as he approached, and she snapped to attention.
“As you were Boss,” he said. “Can we have a word?” She dismissed her aircrewman and looked at him expectantly.
“Why the glum faces?” he asked.
“Two dead, one wounded, sir,” she replied simply.
Halifax blinked. “They’re machines, Rodriguez.”
“And we know that. But if we have this attrition rate on every combat mission, this base will pretty quickly be out of business. It’s supposed to be a covert center of operations, so we can’t be flying new drones in here every few days or we’ll get found pretty quickly. Could bring in the airframes by submarine, put them together here again, but that would be too slow for combat conditions. And we’d need double the personnel. The ambition is for this facility eventually to be fully autonomous if we can one day solve the problem of how to automate the aircraft recovery — right now we can’t even guarantee to keep it operational when manned.”
She was right, Halifax knew that, but he had expected to see a little more optimism among his people. They’d lost two drones, yes, but they’d also gotten vital intelligence and showed what they were capable of under combat conditions. He’d told them they needed to launch faster than they had, but O’Hare and Rodriguez’s people had managed to get four drones into the air averaging five minutes between launches, off a single catapult. They needed to shorten the time from a launch order to the first launch, but he couldn’t fault their performance once they got the first cartridge on the Cat.