“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.
Bondarev seemed to exist in a twilight of blurred grey light for eternity. Was this death? Just as it seemed it must be, features around him started to come into sharper relief. A window showing a bleak snowy landscape outside, a bed with rails on both sides, curtains around him. A hospital then, not quite the Valhalla he had been hoping for.
“Welcome back. It is a miracle you didn’t go into cardiac arrest,” the base physician said as he realized Bondarev was awake and watching him. “You lost more than a liter of blood.”
“Yes. I was trying to do the math on that,” Bondarev admitted. He looked up at the IV bag next to his bed, then down at his bandaged leg.
“Otherwise, it’s not too bad,” the doctor moved down to the end of the bed and pulled the bed cover aside. “Wiggle your toes for me.”
He did so, wincing as something felt like it was tearing in his calf. “OK, that’s enough, stop now,” the man said. “Just rest.” It sounded like a grand idea.
He was wide awake the next time the physician called past.
“Good, you’re looking more alert now. The shrapnel sliced through your gastrocnemius, opened up a vein, but didn’t sever the Achilles. We’ve stitched you up, you just need to rest.”
“How long?”
“Six weeks,” the doctor said. “Maybe five if you can stay off it. Then you can start physiotherapy.”
“No, doctor, I need to fly,” Bondarev said.
“Not with that leg. Not happening.”
Bondarev sighed, “Comrade Doctor, in world war two the British had an ace, Douglas Bader, who had no legs at all. He flew Hurricane fighters; big, stinking, gasoline-powered metal and wooden beasts without fly-by-wire, without dynamic control surfaces, without the help of a combat AI.” Bondarev lifted his leg off the bed, trying not to wince, “So put a splint and a bandage around it, give me a crutch and sign me out. I need to find out what is left of my 4th and 5th Air Regiments.”
The physician held his foot, and lowered it back onto the bed, “There is no rush Comrade Major-General. Your men won the air battle, but American cruise missiles exterminated almost all of our troops along with half of their own citizens on that island. Our governments have agreed a cease-fire. The genie has been put back in the bottle. For now.”
Despite his bravado, his leg was throbbing and his vision blurring again. Bondarev laid his head back on the pillow, “Tell someone I want to see Lieutenant Colonel Arsharvin please.” The man did not instantly react. “Now!”
He needed to find out how many men and machines he had lost. This hiatus wouldn’t last long, of that he was sure. The American attack had been expected, had in fact been needed. With or without him, Operation LOSOS would be moving into phase 2 by now. Leveraging global outrage over the US attack on Russia, on its own citizens, the invasion of Nome would soon begin.
SUBTERRANEAN
“There is no way to sugar coat it Major-General. We got a lesson in air power,” Arsharvin said. He watched as Bondarev put his hands on the wall in front of him, one leg straight and heel to the ground then crossed the other leg in front of it and stretched until it seemed like his Achilles would snap. “I bet that exercise gives you buns of steel.”
“Air power?” Bondarev stretched again. “We faced an enemy greater in number and claimed two of theirs for every one we lost.”
“We claimed two aircraft, not two pilots,” Arsharvin pointed out. “Most of the machines you faced were drones. This was the first real test of Russian fighter doctrine against American and the results were not… compelling.”
“Two for one is not compelling?” Bondarev asked bitterly. “Tell me comrade, what is compelling. Three for one? Five for one?”
Arsharvin held up his hands, trying to calm his friend, “Let’s just talk numbers. I’ve sent you the report but perhaps you didn’t read it. I wrote it, so I know the math.” He held up his hand and started counting off his fingers, “Firstly, the Americans sent up a force of 97 fighters, 80 of which were F-47 Fantoms, 17 of which were piloted F-35s. You faced them with a force of about 54 Su-57s and Mig-41s. You fired first, though that was moot, as the enemy drones reacted with counter fire as soon as they detected your missiles launching. I’ll save you the blow by blow commentary, get straight to the final result. You lost 14 aircraft destroyed and 8 damaged. The Americans lost between 30 and 35 machines destroyed, and 15 damaged.”