Stupid like an Arctic fox perhaps. Politically, it wasn’t so crazy. Let Russia be the aggressor. Force them onto the diplomatic back foot. Create the rationale for a major assault to retake Saint Lawrence on the basis of Russia invading and then shooting down American aircraft over American soil? Maybe that explained why the bulk of the approaching force were politically expendable drones.
“Gold Leader, we have orders from General Lukin directly,” the voice of the A-100 controller said. “Only if US fighters cross the no-fly perimeter, are you free to engage, repeat, you cannot fire until the perimeter is breached.”
“Gold Control, if we wait that long, we will be within Cuda range,” Bondarev said. “We will have no tactical advantage. That may be exactly what they are trying to achieve.”
The voice that came back was stone cold, and Bondarev recognized it immediately. He should have known General Lukin would be monitoring comms and he flinched as the man broke in on the radio traffic, “Are your orders unclear Gold leader?”
“No sir, perfectly clear. Gold leader out.” Bondarev hammered the perspex over his head in frustration. It was a typical political compromise. His life and the life of his men put in the balance so that politicians or diplomats could claim a moral high ground, before abandoning it completely. “Gold and Silver flight leaders, keep your targets locked, await my order.”
Bondarev rolled his shoulders in the tight confines of his cockpit, and flexed his fingers. He had a feeling the dying was about to begin.
Perri sighted down onto the town below.
It was damn dark. The glowing display in the scope showed very little wind, but a surprising amount of elevation if he was going to put any rounds through the roof of the car park below. He had to check what the scope was telling him against his own instincts. The copper clad bullets were heavier than the polymer tipped varmint rounds he usually used, but would the bullets really drop that much over this distance? He’d had to input the rifle and ammo type into the scope manually — had he screwed it up?
He cleared the target and put the small glowing red pipper over the dark black rectangle that was the carport roof, and pushed the button near his trigger again. It showed the range as 230 yards, wind at about 3 feet a second from the northwest, but the crosshairs telling him where his bullet would go were way under the roof. He lifted the barrel until the crosshairs were centered on the middle of the roof, and it felt to him like he would be shooting into the sky.
Damn. He’d rushed it. He should have been patient, should have hiked up into the rocks on the bluff, out of earshot of the town, fired a bunch of test rounds with the new ammo and the new scope until he was satisfied he had it zeroed.
Damn damn damn.
“What’s the matter?” Dave asked him. “Shoot already! Let’s get out of here.”
Perri bet on his instincts. He was the best damn shot in Gambell, he knew that. He had a sense, a feeling for wind and elevation, for the movement of his target. He had a way of knowing just when a seal or walrus was going to breach, when a bird was going to dip right or left. And right now what the scope was telling him — the windage felt right, but the elevation didn’t.
He took a breath and held it.
He steadied the crosshairs just above the outer lip of the roof. If he saw his shots hitting the sandbags, he could correct.
OK Perri. Ten shots, as fast you can pull the trigger, or until the damn carport blows up.
And then run like hell.
“Every Russian aircraft in the sky near Saint Lawrence just lit their burners and headed east,” Bunny said, visor down, nestled inside her virtual-reality helmet inside the trailer. “Care to share why Sir?”
“Well, you’re going to see it on the morning news anyway,” Halifax said. “The media name for it is Operation Resolve. The idea is to show the Russians just what will happen tomorrow if they don’t start withdrawing.”
“Whatever it is, it’s giving us clear air over Gambell,” Rodriguez noted. The late-night launch of their two recon Fantoms had been a routine affair, and she’d been locked in the command trailer with Halifax and O’Hare for nearly an hour as Bunny got her one of her drones into position to make a run over the target while the other stayed in reserve. Satellite synthetic aperture radar images had shown a lot of hardware lining the side of the landing strip, and intelligence analysis had identified at least four Verba sites, two bracketing Gambell and two bracketing the facility at Savoonga. The way the Verbas had engaged outside optical range showed they were fully networked, pulling targeting data from airborne control aircraft, satellite and aircraft overhead. There were also older less lethal SAM systems on the Russian navy ships circling the island, but Rodriguez had a feeling their crews would be looking east right now, because whatever ‘Operation Resolve’ was, something big was brewing there. The imaging also showed concentrations of vehicle traffic in a couple of places in the township, one that had been identified as the ‘town hall’ and was speculated to be a military command post, and the other identified as the John Ampangalook Memorial High School. If the 200 plus townsfolk were being held anywhere, it was probably there, but the tell-tale heat bloom that would come from a mass of people packed into the school buildings there was being confused by a number of other heat sources burning in and around the school and the outskirts of town. This was what Bunny had to investigate. It was possible Russian troops were torching houses to drive people out, but more likely they had just lit fuel-oil ‘smudge pots’ to confuse infra-red imaging.
Bunny’s Fantoms were carrying no weapons except guns this time. In the load bay were dedicated reconnaissance pods that sported a suite of low light, infrared and radar imaging capabilities. If she could just get one good run the length of Gambell, they would get a wealth of data. If she could get two, they might have a real chance of identifying where those hostages were being held so that they had a hope of surviving the coming metal storm.
“Starting ingress,” Bunny said. She had a suite of recon flight routines at her fingertips, leaving the AI to run the surveillance systems using a low-level full spectrum target ID algorithm that directed it to both map the entire target area at wide angle, and zoom in to try to identify military equipment and targets based on their physical or electronic signal properties. “No nosy Sukhois around,” she observed, “Thank you Operation Resolve!”
“Gold leader to Gold flight commanders, prepare to… hold! Safe your weapons, repeat, safe your weapons!” Bondarev nearly yelled into his mike.
He had just gotten a report from both his Airborne Control aircraft and the ground-based air defense commander that the enemy armada would be crossing the no-fly perimeter any second. He had been straining his eyes, looking for any tell-tale light or exhaust trail to show on the horizon, while flicking back and forth between his instruments and the threat display showing the mass of icons that was the American aircraft headed straight for him and his fighters. He had six missiles, and a target locked for each of them. He knew his pilots would also have their targets designated, the offensive assault distributed across all of his aircraft so that every US plane had at least two or three missiles allocated to it, arrowing at it from various angles, both high and low.
If that gave him any confidence, then the knowledge that the enemy had nearly a quarter as many missiles again targeting the Russian aircraft took that away. There would be very few aircraft left flying a few minutes from now.
But why hadn’t they engaged at long distance missile range? Why weren’t they trying to jam Russian radar? What were they waiting for?