“We can’t just leave the wounded behind,” Private Zubkhov protested.
The Sergeant looked at Zubkhov for a long moment, “You’re right son. It can’t look like I just abandoned this post. So you’ll stay here with the wounded and the elderly civilians to make sure they’re properly looked after. How’s that?”
It was the first vehicle they looked in. A big Humvee-like jeep with a long aerial on the roof, it had just seemed natural to start with that one. It had been blown onto its side by a missile strike, and its underside was a tangle of gutted metal. The fuel tanks had caught fire, apparently without exploding, the tires had burned away and the underside was covered in an oily soot. Someone had been through the inside of the vehicle and emptied all of the lockers and compartments lining the interior. There wasn’t even a stray packet of cigarettes or random piece of paper left behind.
But they hadn’t taken the radio receiver out of its mount under the dashboard.
It took Perri twenty nerve-wracking minutes to free it and uncouple the cables leading into the engine compartment. While he worked, Dave was under the hood, pulling out one of the hydrogen fuel cell batteries. They weren’t sure if the radio would run off the same voltage as the battery they had down in the tank, so while Perri lugged the surprisingly heavy radio with him, Dave dragged the battery on a makeshift sled fashioned from a truck door and some electrical cables he’d scrounged from the wreckage around the airfield.
Back inside the tank, Perri had hooked the battery up to the radio, guided by photos he’d taken of how the wiring had been organized when it was still connected inside the jeep.
It was dead, and stayed dead, no matter what he did.
“Russian piece of crap,” Dave decided after about an hour of watching Perri mess with it. “Can’t even take a hit from a bomb and keep working.” He reached down to Perri’s feet and held up something that looked like a small pair of tweezers with one blue arm and one red. “Better keep all this stuff together, we might be able to use it for parts if we find another one.”
“Give me that,” Perri said, taking it and turning it around. “Did this fall off it?”
Dave looked at him strangely. “No, you took it off, together with a bunch of wires, and you put it down on the ground. You’re the techie, I figured you’d decided you didn’t need it.”
Perri held the small metal clip in one hand, and began turning the radio over with the other, looking for somewhere to fasten it. On the backside of the radio he found two copper studs that looked just the right distance apart, and slid the clip onto them to see that the blue arm was held by one stud, and the red arm by the other. He clipped the power wires to the battery again.
A small hum filled the tank as the radio sprang to life.
Someone else springing to life, was Senior Lieutenant Bunny O’Hare.
“Please say again ma’am,” Bunny said slowly. “I was almost sure you said you wanted me to stay behind in a cave full of explosives after everyone else has left.”
“I’ll stay as well, of course,” Rodriguez said. “We’ll wire the base for remote detonation before we pull people out, but I’ve asked CNAF for permission to fly our aircraft out rather than leave them in situ. There are two billion dollars’ worth of hardware in those hangar bays, so I’m expecting to get a yes rather than risk Russia walking in and taking it. When the last Fantom is on its way home, they’ll pick us up and seal the base.”
“Two people can’t launch 24 drones,” Bunny pointed out. “You’ll have to keep a bunch of people back.”
“Actually that’s not right. One person has to fly them out. But it only takes one person to load and launch them. This system was designed for truck mounted launch using a crew of one driver/mechanic, and one launch officer. It’s fully automated, from fueling to pre-flight checks, loading the cartridges and firing the Cat.” She grinned. “And I’m the best damn shooter in the navy.”
“So if you only need one person to run the launch system, why do you have two crews of ten people each?” Bunny insisted. “What am I missing?”
“Speed,” Rodriguez said. “With more people we can do things in parallel, rather than in sequence, shorten the time between launches. Plus, I’m only talking about launch; recovery is completely different. Truck mounted launchers are ‘one and done.’ They can launch, but they can’t recover and relaunch — a truck launched drone has to land at an airfield after its mission. Down here it takes several people to recover the drone, do the post-flight system and damage check, reload ordnance, slot it into a new launch cartridge and port it back to the launch bay.”
“Are you serious ma’am?” Bunny asked, close to exasperation. She lifted her nose in the air, and sniffed. “You smell that? This place reeks of death now. It would be different if we were going back up there, getting some payback, but we’re not, we’re bugging out and rigging the roof to blow. You’re talking 24 drones. How fast do you figure we can pre-flight, load and launch, all on our own?”
“Twenty three — we don’t have time to fix the bird with the bent leg. I don’t know… say one airframe every two hours?”
“So we fire one out the chute, I set it on its way to either Eielson or Elmendorf-Richardson and program the AI to bring it home,” Rodriguez saw she was at least thinking it through now. “We’ve got to eat and sleep or we’ll screw up. So 23 kites, 12 hours on, six hours off, that will take us…”
“Three days, if we push through,” Rodriguez said, having already done the math. “They may not be able to turn around a sub or surface pickup that quickly though. So we might be down here a week or so.”
Bunny looked out the trailer at the grey concrete and rock walls, “All just to save your Great American Taxpayer a few dollars’ worth of hardware.”
“It’s not the money. I just figured that’s what might appeal to ANR strategists. I’m actually thinking if this fight heats up again, we are going to need every one of those machines or the next generation of kids in Alaska might be learning Russian instead of English.” Rodriguez let a little desperation creep into her voice, “I know this isn’t your fight. You aren’t American, you aren’t even Navy. So, you want to get on that sub when it docks, I won’t stop you.”
Bunny leaned forward, elbows on her knees, face just a foot away from Rodriguez’ face. “Ma’am, my great grandfather was Royal Australian Navy. He stood on the deck of the HMAS Napier in Tokyo Harbor when the Allies took the Japanese surrender. He told my father, and my father told me, that if it wasn’t for the US Navy, I’d have grown up speaking Japanese. So I guess I owe you one.” She reached out, and grasped Rodriguez’ fist in hers, pulled it toward her and held it there. “Besides, when people drop thermobaric bombs on my head, I tend to take it personally.”
THE PHONY WAR
There were times when it was right to ask for permission, and times when it was better to ask for forgiveness. Devlin figured this was one of the latter. She knew that Carl Williams’ intelligence report was on its way to NSA. She’d made sure it was also copied to the CIA and FBI heads of station in Moscow, and her own channels in State. She wanted it widely read, and well understood. HOLMES analysis had convinced her this wasn’t a fight about the Ozempic Tsar or a small island in the mouth of the Bering Strait, it was just the first move in a plan to take western Alaska.
That was a whole other war than the one they were preparing to fight. Devlin wasn’t privy to the plans the Pentagon were putting together, but she was pretty sure they just involved putting a few hundred Rangers or Airborne troops in the air, landing them on Saint Lawrence and taking the island back. It wouldn’t be easy, they’d have to win air superiority to get the troops in, which also meant dealing with Russian naval assets in the Strait. But that was the purpose of the Enterprise task force, now on its way north from San Diego. At the same time she was due to meet with Kelnikov, a media announcement would be going out announcing the task force’s intention to reinforce ‘freedom of navigation’ in the Strait, but the signal to Russia should be clear. ‘We are going to take back our island.’ Knowing what she knew, Devlin realized Russia was not likely to be spooked by the approach of the Enterprise. They probably already had a plan for how they would deal with it.