She hoped.
She only had two shots on goal. Four, technically, but she had set the two bombs in each drone to release in salvo, so as soon as they had punched the ‘mini-moabs’ out of their guts they were done, there would be no go-around.
“Starting ingress,” Bunny told Rodriguez. It was a courtesy. Rodriguez could follow the mission on a tactical 2D screen over Bunny’s head, but with it just being the two of them under the Rock now, Bunny felt the need to share.
“They aren’t smelling you?” Rodriguez asked, rolling her shoulders and massaging the back of her own neck.
“No ma’am,” Bunny said. “I am chamomile and roses right now.”
Sure enough, as soon as Bunny spoke, a red alarm started flashing on her heads-up display.
“Damn. I’m picking up radiation in the higher-frequency C, X and Ku bands. I think they’ve got a DS-500 system pointed at us.”
“Which means?”
“Means they have a low 30 % chance of seeing us with this attack profile,” Bunny said. “And I’m already low and slow — if I got any lower, I’d be sucking river water.”
“Long way to go to get swiped out of the sky,” Rodriguez commented.
“Swiped my ass,” Bunny said. “I’ve got a 70 % chance of getting through any S-500 without even needing to jam, and I’ll take them odds.”
Rodriguez knew better than to bet against the aviator who had laid a hurt on Eielson by faking the flight profile of a civilian light aircraft. She watched intently as Bunny flew her two Fantoms within minutes of the Russian base.
“Five minutes to release,” the pilot said. Rodriguez saw that the newly dyed black stubble at her neck under her virtual-reality helmet glistened with sweat.
“SAM radar alert,” Rodriguez warned, seeing Bunny’s threat screen flash.
“No lock,” Bunny replied tersely. “Three minutes.”
Bunny was a good pilot, but she knew her limits. With only simulated real-time vision and an input lag of a half second, for the last two minutes flying into an uber-hot target zone there was no human who could fly it better than the combat AI with its instantaneous reactions. She punched a last command through to her Fantoms and lifted her hands into the air, “I’m out!” she called.
They both watched as a large airfield appeared in the split screw view of the forward nose cameras of the two Fantoms. Anadyr was made up of two long parallel runways, late summer grass and half melted snow between them. One of the Fantoms broke slightly left, the other slightly right. Their targets were the stationary aircraft and related command and control facilities. Bunny was counting down under her breath, “Three, two, one, release…”
The last thing they saw was a couple of parked aircraft on one screen, and on the other, a control tower; behind it several other aircraft and what looked like a container park. One of the drones dropped its bombs and made a kamikaze dive straight at the parked aircraft, the other did the same and made straight for the control tower.
In what was an inevitable anticlimax after such a tense mission, both of the screens in front of Bunny O’Hare flashed momentarily white, and then went completely blank.
“Holy hell’s bloody bells,” Bunny said, her hands still in the air where she had left them when she took her hands off the controls. “I think we actually did it!”
But she didn’t celebrate, not yet. Their primary objective had been to catch as many Russian fighters on the ground at Ugolny as possible. But it seemed to Bunny, for a forward airfield it had contained a heck of a lot of trucks and containers, and not a heck of a lot of Russian aircraft.
Strange though, one of the fighters parked on the airfield had been painted bright red.
The briefing room for the 573rd Air Brigade was in the basement of the control tower building at Ugolny airbase, Anadyr. It had been a combined civilian and military air base before the war had started, and CO of the 573rd, Major-General Artem Kokorin, had commandeered the baggage tracking center in the lower level of the control tower building for his operations facility. There was of course a perfectly functional operations room on the military section of Ugolny field, but the reality was that the former civilian facility, having long ago been privatized, had far superior comms links than his long underfunded military infrastructure. It also had the advantage of being two levels below ground, with multiple exits to the surface, so it was also better protected than the military command center up on the ground floor of the control tower.
Nevertheless he looked around at the peeled-paint walls and cursed. It was bad enough his group had been pulled out of their base at Khabarovsk to support LOSOS — an operation he didn’t fully grasp the political logic of — 2,500 miles here in the northeast. He had protested that it had left Russia without ground attack aircraft in the critical Sea of Japan border area. He had protested even louder when he had learned his regiment was to be made subordinate to Bondarev’s 6983rd. The man was a commander of fighters, with only one of his five squadrons made up of attack aircraft, whereas Kokorin led a dedicated ground attack unit comprising both Okhotnik drones and rotary winged close air support aircraft.
The reason he had been given for the fact his machines and men had been put under the nominal command of the CO of the 6983rd, was because he might be asked to commit his aircraft to an air-air defense role over Saint Lawrence if heavy fighter losses were sustained over Alaska. It was a role for which his machines were not suited, and his men not adequately trained.
Now that he had been repositioned to Anadyr, within range of Saint Lawrence, he should be getting ready to react to any attempt by US naval or airborne forces to retake the island and flying sorties over the island terrain to familiarize his men. Instead, he had been ordered to drill them in air-air combat. He had dispersed his aircraft and their maintenance techs to nearby roads and freeways but he was deeply uncomfortable that all of his pilots had been collocated at the same airfield. He had been told there was no excess capacity at Lavrentiya, and no other facility that could service his 50 crews and provide them with the bandwidth and electricity they required to function. It made a mockery of the ability to disperse his force and protect it from attack with his pilots crammed onto a single airfield, but he had been reassured by Bondarev that the risk of attack this far behind the air front was less than none. In the event of a cruise missile strike, he would have warning enough to get his men to safety.
Maybe, unless the Americans decided the situation warranted hypersonic missiles, he had mused uselessly.
And now he had Lukin dropping in. A snap inspection by General Lukin would normally have had him in a panic, but this time he had welcomed the news. No, of course the 573rd wasn’t at full readiness yet. He had just settled in all of his pilots and systems officers. He had one-third of his Okhotniks still in maintenance in hangars at Ugolny, with only two-thirds deployed to Savoonga and combat ready. But his men had done an admirable job getting their drone command trailers off the IL-77 transports, sited and linked into the base network. In anticipation of the General’s arrival, he had ordered all pilots to their stations, either running simulations or commanding the squadron of 16 operational Okhotniks he had scrambled. He had put them in the air over Ugolny a half hour in advance of the General’s arrival, patrolling overhead to give Lukin something to look at as they made their circuits, landed and were recovered. No, he wasn’t fully ready but the inspection would give him the chance to make his concerns clear to the General again.