Dave opened the hatch cover slowly and quietly, lifting it just a few inches so that he could look for any sign of Russian troops nearby. When he was sure they were still alone, he eased it a few more inches up and pushed the sheet of rusted tin aside before crawling out onto the cold ground. It was still dark.
They hadn’t slept long.
Crouching, they ran into the gas station office through the back door and peered out through the windows, onto a scene from hell.
Rodriguez wasn’t sure when she had passed out, but it must have been somewhere between when Stretch Alberti had pulled her up onto the flight deck and when they laid her out on the padded bench inside the command trailer. It wasn’t necessarily because she was the ranking officer under the Rock they thought she should be laid out in the command trailer. It was because there was no other space. Every bit of dry ground up above the high water mark was littered with the drowned and half drowned, bent, broken or shattered bodies of the personnel of NCTAMS.
Levering herself up onto an elbow and looking out the windows of the trailer above her head, she saw in the red-lit cavern maybe half of the complement had been taken by the surging water, caught in the fall of the crane or the explosion of debris triggered by the falling elevator. The other half were tending to them as best they could, with supplies from the flight deck sickbay.
Someone had apparently bandaged her head and decided Rodriguez just needed to sleep it off. She touched her head, feeling the bandage and the swelling on her face.
“It’s still all there ma’am,” Bunny said, leaning into view from the bench beside her. She held Rodriguez’s head gently, put a hand on her shoulder to stop her getting up and lowered her back down onto the bench. “Your nose is a bit flatter now, but it’s actually prettier.”
“Screw you O’Hare,” Rodriguez managed, wincing.
“Yes ma’am,” Bunny smiled.
“What’s our status? Collaguiri? I saw him…”
“He took five tons of elevator to the head, he’s gone ma’am. We’ve got about 13 dead, ten with serious injuries, fractures and the like.” She held up a bruised hand, “Dug two out of the stairwell, might be more in there. Another dozen walking wounded but still in the fight, twenty uninjured.”
Rodriguez remembered something, “Topside, did you…”
“Yeah, no. I couldn’t bring the Fantoms in and I couldn’t land them outside and risk they would be seen if the Russians did a bomb damage assessment overflight. I sent one straight to Nome. Had enough fuel left in the other for a few passes over the Rock before I sent it off too,” she took a breath. “I can replay the night-cam vision for you but it’s like…everything up there was just scraped into the sea. The dome is gone, and everything inside it. The cabins and huts down by the water are just ashes and splinters, floating around in the water with a hundred tons of wrecked boats and pontoons.”
“No survivors?”
“None moving, that I could see,” Bunny shook her head. “No IR signatures.”
“Do we have comms?”
“Drone comms, yeah. The cable to the undersea array survived, just like it was designed to do. But we’ll need someone to find a kludge if we want to use it to contact CNAF without putting a drone in the air.”
“What was it? Tactical nuke?”
“I don’t think so,” Bunny said. “I’m no ordnance expert, but the snow is only melted on top of the island and down by the accommodation, which makes it look like whatever hit us, hit the top of the island and the harbor at the same time. The rest of the island still has some snow and ice on it though. I’d have thought a nuke would melt it all.”
“I didn’t see a flash,” Rodriguez remembered, “Did you?”
“No lightning, just thunder,” Bunny agreed. “I’m thinking more thermobaric than thermonuclear.”
She looked down on Rodriguez’s frown. “You’re thinking what I’m thinking, right boss?”
“That this attack wasn’t about us?” Rodriguez said.
“Right. If they knew about this place, they’d have used some kind of deep penetrator, a bunker buster. Or flown a cruise missile straight into the mouth of the cavern. But they just wanted to scrape a barnacle off the Rock, so they went with thermobaric,” Bunny said. She waved a hand at the destruction outside the trailer. “This was all just collateral damage. They got lucky.”
Rodriguez looked at her watch, then closed her eyes. 0330 hours. So tired.
“Get me some drugs will you?” she said. “Painkillers and stimulants. We’ve got to tend to our dead and wounded, send a party out the cave entrance and check for survivors topside, then restore comms with CNAF and see if we can get this base back online.” She looked across the dock to the intact loading bays next to the catapult. “That was a classic ‘first strike’ if you ask me. We’ve still got hangars full of hardware capable of kicking some serious Russian ass and I would dearly love to get some orders and get it in the air.”
Bunny looked at her admiringly, “Hoo-bloody-yah Boss.’”
As the boys watched, a huge mushroom cloud was rising over the town where the town hall was. Over by the airfield there were three or four fires burning and what looked like fuel exploding. Several houses in the town seemed to be on fire too. Their eyes went immediately to the two-story gym at the school.
It was untouched. There were fires just a block away, a huge crater where the town hall had been, but the school gym and its outbuildings were still standing. If they could feel the bombs down in the bunker, he could only imagine what it had been like for their families, holed up in the steel-walled gym just a block or two away.
Perri looked at the town through his scope. He had expected to see Russian troops running around the streets, jeeps, maybe ambulances or something. But apart from a couple of soldiers standing around or picking themselves up off the ground, there was nothing except for flickering flames and rising columns of smoke.
“Our own side bombed us,” Dave said unbelievingly. “They bombed Gambell.”
“They never cared about us before,” Perri said bitterly. “Why should they start now?”
“Yeah, but… this is like, this is US territory. They bombed their own territory!”
Perri tapped Dave on the shoulder, pointing back to the tank, “Let’s get back down. Any Russian out there left alive is going to be looking for blood after this. Lying low is looking like an even better idea now.” Even as he said it, a shadow streaked across the harbor, straight for a Russian ship that had berthed there the day before. It struck with a muffled thump, a half second passed, then the ship, the harbor and everything around it lit up in a boiling, black and red ball of fire!
Private Zubkhov had been caught out in the open when the cruise missiles hit. He knew they were cruise missiles because he saw one of the bastards curl around the bluff at the end of town and head straight for the harbor.
It hadn’t even been an hour since the ammo dump had gone up. They were still looking for the Captain. It was kind of strange. Not like there was some big explosion there on the street that could have vaporized him. The guy next to Zubkhov had been hit with the base plate of a field mortar, that was what took his face off. And another guy, he took a ricochet in the leg. So they’d all ducked behind cover and waited until all of the ammo had cooked off and it was just a red smoldering mess down there, and then they stuck their heads up again.
But the Captain was missing. The Sergeant who had been sent to the airfield had finally come back after about thirty minutes, wondering why he hadn’t received any further orders and the Captain wasn’t on comms. He’d told them to start searching through the town, block by block.
“Could have been freaking partisans,” Sergeant Penkov said. “They blew the ammo dump, took the Captain hostage maybe.”
Zubkhov thought about the frightened Inuit families he’d helped herd into the school building, and didn’t think so. They were fishermen and women with kids. Grandmothers and grandfathers. He didn’t see an armed resistance in their faces, more like weary resignation. But then he remembered the flickering shadows of men running up on the bluff, and he wasn’t so sure. He was thinking about that as he rounded a corner behind some sort of warehouse and found the Captain.
The man was standing and staring out to sea. Just standing there, staring. He didn’t react when Zubkhov called out to him, and didn’t turn when he came up behind him. “Captain Demchenko?”
He was just standing with a strange smile on his face, watching the sea.
“Comrade Captain?”
Now he turned, eyes semi-glazed, looking at Zubkhov, or looking through him. Zubkhov couldn’t tell.
“I love mankind,” the officer said. “But I find to my amazement, that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man himself.”
Zubkhov stared at him. Demchenko stood there, as though he was waiting for an answer. Zubkhov was used to the vagaries of the officer class, and took the observation in his stride.
“Well, yes sir. There’s not a lot to love.” Zubkhov looked around himself. “Especially in a shithole like this, sir.”
The Captain frowned, like that was not the reply he had expected. “The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for,” he said, looking out to sea again.
The voice was so dead and even, it chilled Zubkhov. He stepped in front of his CO. “Sir, I think maybe we should just…” Then he stopped talking, because he saw a thin line of blood running down the man’s cheek, from the corner of his eyeball to the corner of his mouth, pulsing with every beat of his heart. The man’s tongue darted out of the corner of his mouth, licking at it.
“Sir, why don’t you just come with me,” Zubkhov said. He took his arm and started to lead him, unresisting, back to the poorly lit, smoky streets.
“You can be sincere, and still be stupid,” the Captain said, conversationally.
Finally Zubkhov realized where he had heard the words before. It was Dostoyevsky. The man was standing out in the ruined night quoting Dostoyevsky to himself. He stopped, and took a flashlight off his belt. He shone it in the face of the Captain, and the man flinched, but he didn’t ask Zubkhov what the hell he was doing, he just screwed his eyes shut.
Zubkhov looked carefully at the line of blood leaking from the man’s eye. It was still pulsing out of the eye in a tiny, red stream. On an instinct, he reached his hand up to the opposite side of the Captain’s head, and felt the hair there. There was blood there too.
“Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately in love with suffering,” the Captain pointed out.
“Yes sir,” Zubkhov agreed. “He most certainly is. This way if you please.”
And as they’d emerged from between buildings, with Zubkhov wondering where the hell in this chaos he might find a medic, the first cruise missile had hit. It exploded with enormous force, across the other side of town near the town hall; bracketed almost immediately by two more strikes out by the airfield.
Not partisans then!
Zubkhov had shoved his damaged Captain back behind a wall and then dived for the dirt. As he watched, he saw a dark deltoid with a tail of fire come screaming around the bluff, over the bay and head straight for him.