The launch schedule wasn’t exactly regular either. Unless they wanted to blow their cover completely, they could only launch when NORAD was showing cloud or mist cloaking Little Diomede and no nosy Russian aircraft overhead. Luckily most of the Russian air activity was centered further south.
With 12 hours on and six off, at the end of their second 12-hour shift, Rodriguez had lost track of whether it was night or day. Her watch was telling her it was 1430 in the afternoon, but her body was ready for food and bed. They could afford to take it a little easier now. With 15 kites away, they only had eight remaining Fantoms to get home. Their lift out of here was the same sub that had ferried the walking and the walking wounded out of here two days ago, and it would be back six days from now to pick them up. Rodriguez wanted to get the job done, but they didn’t have to kill themselves doing it. They could fall back to their planned six launches per day, take two days to launch the rest and spend the last four days making sure there was no accessible data left on any of the local systems and the demolition charges were set to blow.
Rodriguez slumped down at a makeshift mess table in one of the empty hangars, where Bunny was flicking through a digital girlie magazine on a tablet. She smiled, “Sorry to interrupt.”
“Just checking out the competition ma’am,” Bunny said. “They got nothin' on us.”
“Speak for yourself O’Hare,” Rodriguez said. “I’ve got bow legs and a big ass and everything topside is heading south.”
“With respect, I’m calling bullshit on that ma’am. Anyway, these girls, it’s all silicon and implants — me and you are the real deal.” Bunny ran her hand over the fuzz on her head. “I am a bit jealous of their flowing locks though.” She turned her head like she was looking for something. “You think anyone left their hair dye behind in this joint? I’m thinking of dying my stubble black.”
Rodriguez lowered her head onto one arm and looked up at her, “You seriously have the energy to worry about what your hair looks like?”
“We’ve finally got the place to ourselves, no damn men spraying their testosterone everywhere? Hell yeah. I’m thinking a hot bath, paint my fingernails and toenails black and die my hair to match. Might even do the next shift naked, just because I can. What do you say ma’am? You in?”
Rodriguez laughed at the image that popped into her head; a huge, exhausted laugh.
Devlin got back to her apartment in Spaso House, threw her keys on a table near the door, dumped her bag, kicked off her shoes and poured a cold glass of white wine from her refrigerator.
She had unanswered messages and texts to deal with, the US west coast was just waking up with worried business people and congress members wanting to talk with her, and in her bag was a pile of code-word paper ten inches thick that people wanted her to read by morning. She turned off her phone.
Five minutes, just five minutes. She would have a glass of wine, and then get back to it. She sat on her sofa, and turned on the TV news.
She saw the tickertape across the bottom of the news anchors’ desks first; ‘FLASH update…’ and expected it to be about Alaska. It wasn’t. She watched with horror as she read the text rolling across her screen. “Syrian troops enter Lebanon. Government ministers arrested. Hezbollah seize power. Israeli armed forces placed on high alert.”
It was a strategy as old as time. Use your alliances to occupy your enemy with a crisis on two fronts. No ally could demand US support in a crisis like Israel, and providing military support to Israel would mean committing, or at least reserving, significant assets that could otherwise be brought into play against Russia. So creating an existential threat to Israel through Syrian intervention in Lebanon was a masterstroke. It divided focus in Washington, in the Pentagon, in the armed forces, intelligence and security services and in the State Department.
It told her with certainty this intervention in the Bering Strait had not just arisen out of the sinking of a single autonomous freighter. The speed with which Finland jumped into bed with Russia on the Barents Europe Arctic Council and their probable involvement in the sinking already told her that. But mobilizing an ally, even a vassal state like Syria, to effectively invade a neighboring country and depose its government, on your timetable, not theirs… that took long-term planning, and significant negotiation, pressure, compromise. Syria would have seen an opportunity while the US was distracted by events off Alaska, but it must have been offered something big, and it wouldn’t surprise Devlin if they saw Iran weighing in soon too. With Saudi Arabia and the Emirates weakened by the collapse of oil prices, with Turkey licking its wounds after a bruising border war, suddenly the whole power balance in the Middle East was at risk.
She stood, and found herself in front of her hall mirror, just staring at herself. She was going to break. In two, right down the middle. She felt like she was standing outside herself, watching someone in crisis. She wanted to help, but there was nothing she could do. The woman in front of her was drowning but there was no life preserver to throw, no ladder to help her up. She imagined the water closing over her head, and disappearing without a ripple.
She put a hand on the mirror and pushed herself away.
SUPPRESSION
As Syrian tanks rolled across the border into Lebanon, Bondarev’s 110 Okhotniks re-opened the air war over Alaska.
The machines themselves staged out of roads and highways around the large air base at Lavrentiya on the Russian mainland, but Bondarev didn’t need to collocate his pilots and aircraft — in fact, it was wise not to do so. They had to be within 200 miles of the target area, but otherwise he was free to place their container sized trailers anywhere with fast data links, a good supply of juice and enough food and water for 200 plus crew.
So while he had the drones based at Lavrentiya, he had put his Okhotnik pilots, their command trailers and those of the 573rd into quarters at the port of Anadyr, well back from the Operations Area but still within operational range when linked to their drones by Airborne Control aircraft.
Two days after the briefing at 3rd Air and Air Defense Forces Command HQ, 60 Sukhoi-57s and Mig-41s of the 4th and 5th Air Battalions took off from Lavrentiya as though moving into what had become routine patrol positions in the air over Saint Lawrence and the Bering Strait. What was not normal was the high number of aircraft Russia had scrambled.
When they reached what would have been their normal stations inside the Russian no-go zone, they pushed east toward the Alaska coast.
Waiting for them just outside the air exclusion zone were the F-35s and older F-22s of the Alaska air national guard. Behind them, at five-minute readiness, were pilots of the USAF 90th Fighter Squadron and 525th Fighter Squadron under the control of an Airborne Control aircraft from 962nd Airborne Air Control Squadron. As soon as it detected the large Russian formations approaching Saint Lawrence, the Airborne Control aircraft scrambled its Air Force fighters. Within minutes, the US force facing Russia numbered 36 fighters, and 20 more were another 20 minutes out. Pulling data from a combination of its own radar, NORAD and satellites, the US Airborne Control aircraft handed off targets to its flock of defenders and put ground to air defenses around Elmendorf-Richardson and Eielson on alert.
NORAD was also tracking a squadron of 9 Russian Tu160-M2 Blackjack strategic bombers that was returning from what had now become routine trans-polar ‘provocation’ flights.
Ceasefire or no ceasefire, there was no ambiguity in the US aviators’ orders. If the Russian fighters closed on Alaskan coastal airspace, the US fighters were cleared to engage.