Bondarev scowled, “We need to initiate the attack on Nome now!” he said. “Get it underway before the Americans stop dithering and do something stupid.” He grabbed his uniform jacket off his chair. “Where is Lukin today?”
Arsharvin looked at his watch, “Right now? He’d be airborne, én-route to Anadyr,” the man said. “I was told he has a meeting with the commander of the 573rd Air Base. What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking I have to persuade him the air supremacy window is open now. We need to act before it closes. I’m flying to Anadyr.”
If she was flying a jet off the deck of a carrier at sea Bunny would be engaged in a carefully choreographed dance right now. As Air Boss, Rodriguez would have cleared her for take-off and she’d be watching her yellow-shirted flight deck controller as he directed her with hand motions up to the catapult. She’d be holding up her hands to show she wasn’t touching the controls while checking the red-shirted ordnance guy as he loaded weapons or drop tanks. Then she’d be looking back at one of the yellow shirts again as they pulled her machine forward and into the shuttle. As he swept his arms back and forward and they ratcheted up the tension on the Cat, she’d be applying full power, putting her stick to all four corners and cycling the rudders to show the deck her controls were free and clear. The yellow shirt would then point her attention to the shooter and her life would be in his or (in the case of Rodriguez, her) hands for the next few vital seconds as she waved you off the deck.
Down under the Rock it all had to be much simpler. With a full crew, Rodriguez would have had her green shirted technical crews under the command of Stretch Alberti, yellow-shirted plane handling crew and launch officers under the command of Lucky Severin and a few red and blue-shirted fuel and ordnance personnel working away from the flight deck in the storage hangars. With just the two of them under the Rock now, she and Bunny had to do all the grunt work getting their Fantom’s wings down, locked into the shuttle for launch and booted up and once that was done, Bunny ran to the trailer for the launch.
They already had one Fantom in the air. They’d prepped two of the machines the night before when they’d got their orders and had taken just 20 minutes doing a final pre-flight check and launch of the first drone. Now they were ready with the second. Rodriguez had told NORAD there was no way the two of them could get a hex of six drones in the air in anything like the time needed for combat operations, but a flight of two — that they could manage. Bunny had set the first to hold position at wave-top height about ten miles north of Little Diomede. They were both terrified it would be spotted by overflying Russian aircraft, but so far the little fighter’s stealth defense was holding.
They’d also had to come up with a new version of the standard launch checklist, with only Rodriguez down on the flight deck and Bunny up in the trailer.
"Flaps, slat, panels and pins,” Bunny called over the internal comms.
“Green,” Rodriguez replied, roles reversed. Usually it would be her running the checklist.
“Man out.” Referring to Rodriguez, crouched down at the catapult shooter’s panel behind a blast protector.
“Man out aye. Thumbs up.” Rodriguez did a visual check to be sure there were no leaks of fuel or hydraulic fluid. “Scanning the Cat, Cat clear.” She bent to the shooter’s console. “Cat to 520 psi.”
“520 aye,” Bunny replied, confirming the catapult launch power from a readout on her heads-up display.
“Ready for launch.”
When she was satisfied, she gave Bunny the green light, “Pilot, go burner.”
“Lighting burner, aye,” Bunny replied.
“Launching!”
Rodriguez punched the button to fire the Cat. On full afterburner the Fantom leaped off the catapult, down the chute and out of the maw of the cave. It sped north to link up with the first drone, and soon the two of them were outbound.
In the belly of each Fantom were two GBU-43/K ‘mini-mothers’ or Massive Ordnance Air Blast bombs; GPS assisted iron bombs filled with 40 % RDX explosive, 20 % TNT, 20 % aluminum power and 20 % ethylene oxide. Cut down to fit the weapons bay of a Fantom, they were a smaller but still deadly version of the bombs that had wiped the radar station off the surface of Little Diomede. The mini-mother had been designed to destroy large concentrations of enemy vehicles or troops, or in this case, the large number of enemy transport aircraft, fuel, anti-air defense emplacements and command and control facilities at the Russian forward airfield at the port of Anadyr.
Anadyr had been chosen by US war planners for political shock value — an air strike so deep behind the Russian air perimeter that it might cause them to re-evaluate their strategy and pull assets back to protect their mainland bases. It was also intended to give Russia pause for thought — the US fighters were armed with conventional weapons, but what if they had fielded nukes?
Bunny and Rodriguez knew their chances of successfully charging directly across the Bering Strait and down the throat of all the radar energy Russia would have pointed eastwards was almost zero. So Bunny would be sending the Fantoms at nap of the earth height along the coast of Russia northeast to Polyarny then take a sharp southerly route along a river valley and across rolling hills and low ranges to Krasnero, about 50 miles inland of Anadyr, in the direction of Moscow. The Fantoms would then bank hard to port to follow the contours of the Anadyr River, coming up on the Russian airfield at the height of about 100 feet from a vector the Russian defenses would, hopefully, least expect.
For a human pilot, dropping a bomb that didn’t have a timed fuse from that low an altitude would be suicide, but for these Fantoms it wasn’t an issue. Theirs was a one-way trip. The long loop northeast and then south would be a journey of about 1,000 miles, it would take a couple of hours and the route Bunny had plotted had 132 distinct waypoints. It was a route no cruise missile could possibly execute. And there wouldn’t be fuel for them to make it home.
But with luck, they could give the Russian commanders a shock that would set them back on their heels.
If they pulled it off, it was a fitting payback mission — one Russian base in exchange for the attack on theirs — and the only thing Bunny could have wished for was a full crew and a hex of drones instead of just two.
But she would make do.
Oh, yes.
Private Zubkhov looked at the syringe in his hand with a little surprise. The soldier with the wounded foot had taken less than ten minutes to go from injection to a gasping death. It seemed he had the man’s bodyweight about right — he’d just looked up a dosing guide online and tripled it.
He lifted the man’s sheet and covered his face with it.
Then he walked around the room to each of the other seven men, injecting each with a freshly loaded syringe. For some — those who had untreatable abdominal wounds, already in the grip of fever and delirium — it was a pure mercy. For the others, well, if they had ever made it out of here it would be to a life as crippled and limbless outcasts, so Zubkhov didn’t actually feel that bad about it. One had woken from his drug-addled sleep and watched in confusion as Zubkhov injected him, but he didn’t protest. Zubkhov had simply held a hand under his head, lowered him back down to his pillow and held his hand until he fell asleep. It was very peaceful actually.