Bondarev had no intention of letting his piloted aircraft get within air-to-air missile range of the Americans. Not yet. Before the US fighters were within range, he turned his Sukhois back west and they withdrew to the Russian mainland.
The US air commander fell for the ruse. He misinterpreted the move as a failed attempt to provoke US aircraft into following and breaking the terms of the ceasefire. Now he had machines he needed to get down and refuel, and pilots who had been living on edge for weeks who needed their rest. He pulled half of his force back to Elmendorf-Richardson and Eielson once it was clear the Russian fighters were withdrawing too, and ordered the rest to keep station until they were at bingo fuel.
Timed to coincide with this, to the north and south of Saint Lawrence, Bondarev had scattered 60 Okhotnik stealth drones, configured for ground attack. He had ordered his drone pilots to fire at the extreme limit of the range of the Okhotniks’ Brah-Mos III supersonic cruise missiles. With two missiles per aircraft, as the last of the sortied US fighters was landing, within minutes there were 120 cruise missiles on their way toward Elmendorf-Richardson and Eielson!
The last time Eielson had faced a cruise missile attack it was from Bunny O’Hare, and that had not gone so well. But this time its HELLADS systems and crews were ready. They might not have anticipated when Russia would strike, but the two US air bases were targets too strategically vital for Russia to ignore and US war planners knew it. So additional units had been flown in from Stateside to ensure the critical US airfields in Alaska were bristling with anti-air systems.
Sixty vampires inbound? No problem.
“Ma’am, turn on your laptop!” Williams voice said over Devlin’s telephone line. She had just been getting ready to go to bed when the phone had rung. “I’m going to push something through to you.”
“Ok, just give me a minute,” Devlin said, cradling her telephone on her shoulder and pulling her laptop out of her bag. She hit the button to boot it up. “Always takes a couple of minutes, this old thing.”
“Two minutes, and it may be all over,” Williams said.
“What’s up? Lebanon?”
“No. Russia just broke the ceasefire,” Williams said. “HOLMES is tracking multiple cruise missile launches over Alaska towards our air bases at Fairbanks and Anchorage. I’m sending you the feed, you can follow the attack real time.”
“You can do that?”
“Already doing it, when you log on, you’ll see an icon of a pipe on your desktop. Click on that.”
“What?”
“Don’t ask me, HOLMES installed it. I think it’s an Arthur Conan Doyle thing. You’ll see what NORAD is seeing.”
She shook her head and clicked on the icon as it came up. A screen expanded showing a map of Alaska. It took her a moment to make sense of what she was looking at. A spider web of lines was lancing out from small icons that looked like inward facing double triangles with the letters A above them, while a bunch of other triangle icons milled around in the air over Alaska. “OK, I’ve got the computer open, but what am I looking at?”
“The icons with an A over them are Russian attack aircraft, HOLMES is saying mostly drones. They’ve already fired their payloads and are heading back to mother Russia on afterburner. The icons over Alaska, they’re our boys. Most are not close enough to take a shot at the retreating Russians, but they’re trying to engage the cruise missiles. Not much chance, their radar cross-section is too small, but they’ll try.”
“The missiles are headed for our air force bases?”
“Yep. They’re scrambling everything they can so that the fewest possible machines get caught on the ground if any missiles get through. But apparently we were caught refueling after a major defensive action.”
“HOLMES, what are the odds?” Devlin asked, knowing HOLMES would have already calculated them. “Of the missiles getting through?”
“23 % percent chance of one to six missiles getting through ma’am,” she heard HOLMES voice say on the line.
“How long until they hit?” She saw the lines seemed to be extending toward their targets very quickly.
“At 2,000 miles per hour with just fifty miles left to run, one minute thirty ma’am,” the AI replied. “I am showing 47 missiles still tracking. Correction, I am now showing 101 missiles inbound. 53 seconds to first HELLADS interception.”
“What?!”
Williams peered at the screen, “Uh, a squadron of Backfire bombers in international airspace north of Alaska just fired their full payload of six missiles each ma’am,” he said. “A suicide shot. They were being tagged by a flight of US F-35s out of Eielson. They’ve engaged the Backfires, and they’re unescorted. Those Backfires are toast.”
“20 seconds to HELLADS interception of the first wave,” HOLMES said.
Devlin watched in horror as the blue lines tracked toward the two US air bases. One by one, the lines winked out. Then red dots began to appear underneath the airfields. Inside five seconds, all the blue lines were gone, and a row of red dots appeared under each airfield.
“The red dots are strikes?” Devlin asked.
“Yes ma’am,” Williams said. “Four on Eielson, three on Elmendorf-Richardson. Damn good performance by the HELLADS.” He sounded pleased.
“There are dead Americans under those dots Carl,” Devlin said gently.
“Yes ma’am, sorry,” he said.
“Thirty-three seconds to the impact of the second wave of missiles. There are no air assets in position to intercept,” HOLMES said. “HELLADS batteries recycling.”
“Recycling?! What does that mean?”
“A single HELLADS battery can track and shoot down as many as 5 missiles simultaneously, with a half second between volleys. There are probably four or five batteries around each of those airfields, so they can target twenty incoming missiles all arriving at the same time, and handle multiple waves of missiles for up to five minutes, but working that hard overheats the optics. They need time to cool down — recycle. The second Russian launch was deliberately timed to coincide with the HELLADS’ recycling phase. They’ll be arriving just as the laser defenses are coming back on line, so until then, the base will only be defended by last-gen anti-air missiles and ballistics. It’s going to be close,” Carl said, pulling anxiously at his beard.
“Two batteries on line. Five seconds to impact,” HOLMES said. “Three batteries. Firing. Impact.” A blood-red bloom of dots appeared across the map at both airfields.
“I’m coming in to the embassy,” Devlin said hurriedly, and put down her telephone, reaching for her robe. She was in no doubt that what she had just witnessed was a declaration of war.
Between 2015 and 2022 Russia launched a series of small satellites it designated Kosmos-2499 to Kosmos-2514. Radar tracking of the small 100kg satellites showed they were highly maneuverable and shortly after arriving in orbit they executed what seemed to be a range of test maneuverers, darting away from and then matching orbit with various pieces of circling space junk including their own launch vehicles. They were also detected by amateur radio enthusiasts communicating with the ground using burst radio transmissions. At a year-end press conference, the head of Roskosmos, Tomas Olapenko, denied speculation that what Russia had launched were "killer satellites." Olapenko said the satellites were developed in cooperation between Roskosmos and the Russian Academy of Sciences and were used for peaceful purposes including unspecified research by educational institutions. After two years of apparent testing, the satellites were parked in permanent orbits and went silent.
Five of the satellites were in orbit over the North Pole. In the intervening years since 2022 they had been quietly mapping all known US and Chinese space-based military objects in their quadrants.