The Su-57 was a magnificent airplane, but it was big and intended to kill airborne enemies at long range. It was not optimal for close range combat. The smaller American F-47 was less deadly at range, but much more maneuverable in a knife fight because there was no pilot to black out. The thrust vectoring nozzles on his Sukhoi however gave him one spectacular trick for an opponent who was close on his six o’clock and he was willing to bet that whether he was up against a drone commanded by a ground-based pilot, or operating on autonomous AI control, he’d catch it unprepared. As he leveled out at the top of his turn he could almost feel the gun pipper on the heads-up display of the machine behind him settle on his tail. He bunted the nose of his Sukhoi down, keeping his speed at 450 knots, trying not to give the other pilot too easy a shot. Tracer blasted over his wing.
He checked his airspeed. Good. Now! He hauled back sharply on his stick, pulling it all the way back until it rammed into the stays and couldn’t go any further. To the American behind him, man or machine, it must have seemed as though the Sukhoi had simply stopped in mid-air and pointed its nose at the sky. The American machine nearly lost control as it tried to avoid colliding with the Sukhoi that was skidding through the air on its tail, like the cobra the maneuver was named after.
“Come on you fat-assed bastard!” Bondarev yelled at his Sukhoi, pushing the nose down before it pitched over backward and increasing his engine to full burner, regaining forward momentum. This was the moment Bondarev was most vulnerable, recovering from a virtual stall, hydrogen fire pouring from his afterburner like a small sun, he knew he was a sitting duck if there was more than one F-47 behind him. He hunched his shoulders waiting to die, but grunted as he saw the exhaust flames of the American fighter wallow through the night sky ahead of him, having failed to keep the Sukhoi in its sights, fighting against a stall itself. It pulled an ugly looping turn across Bondarev’s nose and his guns fired automatically as soon as they had a radar lock on the American. The machine fell apart in a glittering rain of metal shards.
Bondarev had control over his own aircraft again, and scanned his threat display for another target. He tried desperately to get a grip on the situation. Where were his pilots, where was the enemy? He was at ten thousand feet again, swinging wildly around the sky to avoid the trap of being the legendary sitting duck. “Gold squadron, report your…”
At that moment he heard a missile launch warning scream in his ears. The enemy must have been close, because even as his automatic countermeasures of flares and chaff fired into the sky behind him, the Sukhoi’s combat AI took control of the machine from him and flung the Sukhoi into an inverted dive that pulled all the blood from his head. His pressurized combat suit inflated, trying to keep the blood flowing to his brain, but it wasn’t enough! He was pulling too many G’s, and his world went black.
What happened next wouldn’t matter to Yevgeny Bondarev. He was out cold.
It was designated ‘Hunter’ for a reason. Like the F-47, the unmanned Okhotnik drone was a multirole platform, with a range of more than 4,000 miles. It could stay airborne for 20 hours at cruising speed, carry a payload of two tons, and while it was able to pull data from multiple sources to assist its own air-to-air targeting, and engage enemy aircraft with both long and short range missiles, its real talent was stealth delivery of air-to-ground ordnance.
Like the 1,500 kg thermobaric fuel-air explosive precision guided bomb. Comprising pressurized ethylene oxide, mixed with an energetic nanoparticle such as aluminum, surrounding a high explosive burster, when detonated it created an explosion equivalent to 49 tons of TNT. That was why it was unofficially called a MOAB — Mother of All Bombs. It couldn’t be mounted on a cruise missile — an aircraft had to penetrate enemy air defenses to be able to deliver it, which was a drawback. But just one could flatten a small town, render a harbor unusable and sink all the ships in it, or destroy every hangar, aircraft and living person on an airfield inside a radius of about 1,600 feet.
Stealthy delivery of the MOAB was a talent that had been honed in the deserts and mountain ranges of Northern Syria by pilots and systems officers of the 575th Army Air Force, and they were exceedingly good at both the stealth, and the delivery. Further, while Bondarev’s 6983rd Okhotniks had been held back from the battle for Saint Lawrence, no such restriction had been put on the Okhotniks of the 575th.
At the same time as Bondarev received his order to engage, a squadron of 575th Okhotniks in a low level holding pattern in the middle of the Bering Strait split like a starburst, with four three-plane elements departing to attack US ground targets within the no-fly exclusion zone. One flight headed for targets around Nome and Port Clarence. Two flights headed for Saint Lawrence, to be ready for tasking should close air support be needed against US ground targets on the island.
The fourth flight headed for the only other US installation inside the no-fly zone. It wasn’t a target on which you’d usually use thermobaric bombs — something much less powerful would have been sufficient, but sometimes you just had to use what you had to hand.
And at least there was complete certainty they would no longer have worry about that annoying US long-range radar installation on Little Diomede Island.
Alicia Rodriguez had trained her whole adult life to go to war. But now that she was, she found all that training suddenly failed. The world under the Rock had descended into a noisome chaos, turning her perfectly ordered flight deck into a mass of personnel from the 712th Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron all looking for somewhere to park backpacks or backsides, and for someone to answer their big and small questions. That person should have been their CO, Captain Ali Aslam, but Aslam was still topside with Halifax getting his men down from the station above in the goods elevator that held only 15 personnel at a time. Men and women were also pouring out of the emergency stairs beside the elevator shaft.
Bunny wasn’t helping either, trapped in her ‘cockpit’ growling at anyone who came within twenty feet. Her recon drones had been parked in a sea level orbit ten minutes south of Saint Lawrence and hadn’t been re-tasked or recalled. She only had about ten minutes fuel left before she would have to call them home anyway. Rodriguez had just finished ensuring her recovery team was ready to recycle them when it landed, despite all the chaos in the cavern.
Rodriguez pulled open the door to the trailer and stepped inside, closing the door behind her and taking a breath. She pressed her forehead to the door. Come on girl. You can get a pair of drones into the air through a hole in a rock inside ten minutes, you can land a measly two kites and deal with 100 worried base personnel and their stupid questions. Right?
Right. Question of the moment. The head of base security, Master Sergeant Collaguiri, had been ordered down under the Rock by Halifax, but insisted his place was topside with the CO. He had tried appealing the case to Rodriguez, and Rodriguez had promised him she would call up to the CO and see what he wanted to do about it.
She sighed and picked up the comms, punching in the number for the radar installation control room, assuming that was where Halifax would be. It wasn’t a long call.
“Rodriguez, we are currently tracking about a hundred friendly and enemy aircraft in combat over the Bering Sea, tell the Master Sergeant he can…” The line went dead.