Because something was happening down there in Gambell and it didn’t look good. All yesterday, they’d watched the Russians go house to house with sacks, looting. Not televisions or computers or jewelry, though they probably didn’t hesitate to help themselves to anything shiny that was lying around… they saw one guy with a shopping trolley and it looked to Perri like they were loading up on food. OK, so there hadn’t been any helicopters flying in supplies for weeks now, they were probably running low, but what had been low level scrounging the last couple of weeks seemed like planned pilfering now.
Then they heard shouting down by the school. Perri and Dave were up on the bluff, and looked down on the town with scope and binos.
“They’re pulling people out of the schoolhouse,” Dave said. “Lining them up.”
“I see your brothers,” Perri said. “Shit. I think they’re going to shoot them.”
“Do something man!” Dave said, “You’ve got the gun. You’re the sniper!”
“Shut up!” Perri hissed. He knew he was too far away to take a shot. Sure, he could spray a few downrange, and he might disturb whatever was going on, but he wouldn’t be doing any more than making the troops down there aware he was up here. Maybe a few of their people could get away though…
“Wait, no. The Russians all have backpacks. Our people have got packs on too, coats and boots! Would you load people up and then take them out to shoot them?” Dave asked, confused.
Perri watched down the scope a minute more. “They’re moving them somewhere. They’re all heading out.”
“Where the hell…”
“I don’t know, but everyone down there is kitted out like they’re going cross country,” Perri said. As he spoke, he saw his family in the lines of townspeople. His brothers and father, his mother. She looked so small. And pissed. She was yelling at a Russian soldier who was trying to push people into line. Yeah, that was his ma.
When they finally had the 200 townspeople lined up in two long lines, the Russian soldiers formed up ahead and either side of them, with a few at the rear, and they headed off down toward the road out of town that went along the airstrip and then skirted the bluff — after that it went nowhere in particular. Only bird watchers and hunters, or berry pickers, used the tracks out that way. In ten minutes though, it was clear they were quitting town.
“I can’t see my grandma,” Dave said, running his binos up and down the line of hostages. “I can’t see your grandparents either. None of the elders are with them.”
“Kids are with them though,” Perri said. He ran the scope back through town and stopped at the school, where he saw a solitary Russian soldier standing on the school steps, watching everyone leave. He didn’t appear in a hurry to join them. Perri watched as he finished a cigarette, ground it out under his boot, and went back inside the schoolhouse.
“They split them up,” Perri said. “I bet they left the elders back in Gambell, took the adults and kids with them.”
“Human shields,” Dave said. “That’s what they call it, right? Can’t get a missile up your butt if you’re walking next to a bunch of civilians.”
Perri thought about it. “Yeah, but walking where? We’ve got to decide; do we follow the group, or stay here, see if we can somehow get the kids and elders out.”
They looked at each other. Without speaking they knew what they had to do.
Ask Sarge.
Devlin also knew what she had to do. She had to have a shot of bourbon.
Just a little one. Medicinal.
She swirled it around her mouth. It was a John J Bowman single barrel, and five-time winner of the World Whiskey Best Bourbon award. A fine example of American craftsmanship, and every glass she poured for a guest was trade promotion, right? She put the bottle back on the tray beside the gin which was the favored end-of-day tipple among the diplerati. And it was the end of a very long day.
Her people had been working their networks in Embassies and Consulates across the city, testing support for a coming UN Security Council resolution rescinding the recognition of the Barents’ Council of Nations. It couldn’t succeed, not with Russia and probably China abstaining, but it was the first step to a full vote in the UN chamber to have the Council delegitimized so that Russia could no longer hide its aggression behind a veil of international probity. State wanted to get that done to take one of Russia’s threatening pieces off the chess board.
They were also drawing up a ‘skins and shirts’ list of who would be with them, who would be with Russia, and who would try to stay neutral, if the shooting war started again. It didn’t look good. The US had its traditional steadfast allies behind it: the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Also looking like it would fall behind Team USA was Turkey, still worried about continued Russian influence in neighboring Syria. Russia could be sure of the support of its newly won Baltic ally, Finland, and the ‘Stans’: Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan. Russia could also muster Middle East support from Syria and Iran. But there was a depressingly long list of countries declaring this was a bilateral ‘maritime dispute’ between Russia and the USA, including most of Europe.
Devlin had spent the morning with the Swedish Ambassador, impressing on him in diplomatic double-speak that if he wanted to keep selling Volvo motor cars in the USA and Swedish arms like Gripen fighters and Bofors cannons to US allies the US would be expecting Sweden to get off the fence and vote in the UN to de-accredit the Barents Council at its next meeting in two days. “Abstaining again is not an option,” she’d told him. “I suspect it would annoy Volvo’s Chinese owners mightily if they weren’t able to sell their cars in the US anymore because of a political miscalculation?”
The reason she needed a drink was not because it was the end of a hard working day — she’d had plenty of those. It was because she feared all her efforts, all her people’s efforts, were like firing buckshot at a hurricane. She had called Washington at midnight the night before to follow up on her report about the imminent Russian attack on Alaska, only to be told it was regarded as ‘interesting but unlikely’. It did not concur with intelligence from other sources, or reports from other embassies. Russian military movements were consistent with defensive preparations or the proposed ‘no-fly’ zone over Alaska, but not consistent with what would be needed to mount a full-scale invasion. That would require the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of troops, the transport of armor and material, and there were no indications that was taking place.
“They’re mobilizing their Far East fighter Brigades, air defense batteries, airborne troops and special forces Ambassador,” a State Department analyst in the Secretary of State’s office had told her in a patronizing tone. “Not the Divisions of troops, main battle tanks and the ships they’d need to land them. They’re getting ready to defend themselves and their position on Saint Lawrence, not go on the attack.”
She didn’t have the stripes to be able to ask anyone in the Pentagon what specific preparations — beyond sallying forth with the Enterprise strike group — the US was making to either challenge the Russian occupation of Saint Lawrence or defend against an attack on Alaska, so she had turned to an alternative source. An old Canadian friend from her days as a junior officer in the embassy in Ottawa. He sat on the Canadian Foreign Ministry Joint Intelligence Committee now, and she asked him if her communique had reached his desk, or had it been buried.
“Oh, I got it,” he said. “Or a filtered version. Under the five-eyes agreement they couldn’t exactly bury it, they had to share it, but they 'contexted' it with five other reports indicating this business was all about Saint Lawrence Island and needling the USA, and nothing to do with trying to land troops in Alaska.”