“The school was five hundred yards away, no way.”
“No. What about Russians?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t look. I was too busy running and getting crapped on by auklets.” They laughed again.
“Yeah, at least someone was more freaked than us,” Dave said.
Perri reached over and checked the rifle he’d thrown down the ladder ahead of him. It had landed on its stock, but he quickly checked the scope, turning it on to see if he’d damaged it. No, it was okay. It was built to take some tough love.
“They’re going to start hunting us now,” Dave said, watching him as he jacked out the remaining ammunition and started pulling the rifle apart to clean it.
“For sure.”
“We should stay down here a while eh? Stupid to go out the next couple of days.”
“Like we agreed.”
“I know. We have to pull that old sheet of tin across the hatch cover though.” They’d found an old sheet of corrugated iron and worked out how to lean it up and over the hatch covering the tank and then pull the hatch down so the tin covered it over. It was light enough they could lift the hatch and the tin at the same time from below, but heavy enough it wouldn’t easily blow away. It wasn’t much, but it hid the hatch from plain view and looked like the hundred other pieces of junk lying around the gas station.
“So do it,” Perri said. “Better to do it now while it’s dark, then we can bunk down.”
“Yeah, right.” Dave disappeared up the ladder again. Perri heard him fooling around outside and pulling the cover shut a couple of times before he was satisfied it was good enough, then he came back down and collapsed on a mattress next to Perri. He grabbed a water bottle off a shelf and took a long pull. “Damn, I should have taken a whizz while I was up there,” Dave said, and Perri laughed again.
After a few minutes Perri laid the parts of his rifle aside. He heard heavy breathing and looked across and saw Dave with his head cradled onto the crook of his arm, asleep.
Perri suddenly realized he was exhausted too. He drank some water, then reached over Dave to cut the power to the lights. Blackness consumed their small cold cell deep under the dirt and he lay himself down, pulling a sleeping bag over himself.
“Sniper team,” Dave said somewhere to his right. “Deadly, eh?”
“You did great brother,” Perri told him.
“I did, right?” Dave said. “You too.”
“Sleep Dave.”
Private Zubkhov had rolled out of his bed and found himself crouched on the floor beside it before he’d even realized he was awake. From somewhere outside, maybe out by the airfield, he heard the unmistakable whoosh of a ground to air missile.
Then as a second explosion rocked the air, he realized what had woken him. A few blocks away, it sounded like a full-on war was raging. As the men around him had tumbled out of their bunks, he’d grabbed up pants and a jacket, found his anti-materiel rifle against the wall and staggered out into the freezing dark night.
Across the other side of town, explosions lit the night sky.
“What the hell?” he asked no one in particular
Captain Demchenko took control, sending half of the men to the airfield where they’d been digging sandbagged emplacements all afternoon. He pointed at Zubkhov, “You, and the rest of you, with me.” And with that he’d started running toward the explosions, which seemed to Zubkhov to be the complete opposite of what they should be doing. That opinion was confirmed five minutes later, as their squad rounded a corner to see half of the houses on the next block on fire and at the end of the row, a volcano of white fire spitting shrapnel and 7.62mm rounds at them.
“They hit the ammo dump,” Zubkhov said to himself.
“Who did?” asked the man next to him.
Zubkhov looked at the dark sky around him, as another ground to air missile leaped off its rails and sped away into the night.
“Who you think, dumbass?” Zubkhov replied.
The other soldier had a quick comeback ready, and he was about to throw it back at Zubkhov but never got that far. Something whizzed past their ears.
Zubkhov watched in horror as the smile on the man’s face was replaced with a gaping hole through which Zubkhov could see his brains. Then he crumpled to the ground.
The emergency lighting kicked in, bathing the cavern below the Rock in a ghostly red light. People had frozen in place, with the exception of the few still in the water, kicking to keep their heads above the freezing waves.
Bunny pulled another woman out of the Pond and hauled her up onto the dock. The water was flooding out of the cave again now, dragging debris and bodies with it as though it was pouring into a bottomless hole somewhere outside the cave.
Tsunami. Rodriguez was thinking. She’d seen a movie once about a tidal wave hitting Asia. One thing she remembered — the water pulling away leaving fish flapping on an empty beach. Then it came back. She realized people were standing watching in fascination as the Pond emptied.
“Everyone! Up to level two, higher if you can!” she yelled. She bent to help up an aircrewman beside her and pushed him up the dock.
“I have to get to the trailer,” Bunny panted beside her. “I have to bring those Fantoms down somewhere.”
“If the trailer has power.”
“I’ll try the backup generator,” Bunny replied. “Or we can patch it into the emergency grid.”
“I’ll get everyone up above the old waterline,” Rodriguez said. “I don’t care if you get those Fantoms down in one piece or send them to Nome, but I want you to get vision of whatever the hell happened topside.”
“Yes Boss,” Bunny said before sprinting away.
From the direction of the cave entrance she heard a sound like a steam engine blowing, and felt the air pressure inside the cave start to build. A boiling wall of water appeared in the darkness at the other side of the Pond.
Her stomach fell as she realized it was twice her height and still fifty feet away.
She had just turned to run when it hit her.
The US Air Force Pacific Command did not hesitate when the shooting started. Their President had promised ‘fire and fury’ and though Operation Resolve was intended to be a simple show of force in advance of the approaching deadline for Russian withdrawal, they were prepared for belligerence.
Analysts had rushed Bunny O’Hare’s recon images into strike planners who added her data to satellite imagery and then quickly identified the likely location of the hostages at the school in Gambell, the Russian HQ and anti-air emplacements there and the presence of Russian troops, air defenses, US personnel and civilians inside the US cantonment at Savoonga.
The 36th Air Wing had already prepositioned six of its B-21 Raider stealth bombers at Elmendorf Richardson and two of them were on patrol east of the US base when the first of Bondarev’s air-air missiles left its weapons bay east of Saint Lawrence. Each of them carried 12 second-generation Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff — Extended Range missiles, capable of putting a 1000 lb. warhead onto a target the size of a minivan. It had a range of nearly 300 miles and it didn’t matter that Russian laser weapons were effectively jamming satellite coverage over Saint Lawrence, the JASSM-ER had its own inertial and optical based navigation and onboard target identification system.
There had been a lot of talk in the early part of the last century about whether the strategic heavy bomber still had a role in the age of the drone, but no US drone or attack fighter could field the larger standoff stealth weapons and it took eight drones to match the payload of a single B-21 Raider. By the time the first US fighter pilot was ejecting from his F-35, 24 of the deadly stealth cruise missiles were on their way to targets at Saint Lawrence.