“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 had 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.