On top of everything, he had just learned that Bondarev was crashing the party! Damn him. He must have people inside Lukin’s staff keeping him informed. To make things worse, Bondarev had contrived to arrive about twenty minutes before the General, so Kokorin had lost the chance to put his views to Lukin in private.
Despite being theoretically of equal rank, and with a longer service record, Kokorin had no illusions about who was the senior officer as Bondarev walked into the briefing room in his flight suit. Even without his dress uniform and service medals, the son of the hero of the Russian Federation reeked of privilege and that most critical of all attributes — political momentum.
As he reached out his hand to greet his fellow officer and girded himself for the meeting ahead he saw Bondarev hesitate and frown, looking up at the ceiling as a jet aircraft boomed low overhead, the noise penetrating even to their position two floors underground.
“Your men need not show off for my benefit Kokorin,” Bondarev said.
Kokorin frowned too, “That was not one of mine.”
Only one of Bunny’s Fantoms delivered its bombs with total accuracy — the other missed by more than 100 yards. The deviation was significant. The first Fantom dropped its two bombs right on target on the apron of the long concrete runway right near the maintenance hangars where three Okhotniks were parked on alert status, ready to give a demonstration to the General of how quickly they could get airborne. Two more were in the process of being refueled. Another three were in the hangars having engines and electronic systems maintained, but unknown to US planners, most had already been moved or were on their way to Savoonga. The air blast bombs from the first Fantom detonated together 50 feet above the hangar complex and the blast wave spread out over a radius of about a mile. Anything and anyone inside a few hundred yards was vaporized. Anything from 500 to 1,000 yards was atomized. Everything from 1,000 to 1,500 yards was pulverized. Everything flammable was set on fire. In the space of a millisecond the eight drones and their support personnel were no more. Bunny’s first drone added its fuel and momentum to the chaos as the pressure wave from its own bomb flung it into the maintenance complex and it detonated.
The second strike however missed its target. An extremely unfortunate observer, in their last few seconds of life, might have seen the approach of the Fantom. If they had, they would have seen two fat cylinders at the end of tiny parachutes tumble end over end out of the Fantom’s weapons bay just as it swept across the egg blue and yellow striped administration buildings at Anadyr. One of the cylinders floated briefly down right in the middle of the road between two large apartment buildings commandeered for military personnel. As it reached fourth floor level, it detonated. Every window in the street was blown in and the buildings, which had been made to withstand arctic storms but not the thunderous pressure wave of a mini-MOAB, collapsed instantly; killing nearly all of those inside.
The other bomb completely missed the administration complex which was its target and landed in the field beyond.
A field that normally would have been empty except for the hulks of a dozen abandoned cold war Su-15 Flagon interceptors deemed too far gone to salvage when they were decommissioned in 1993. A week ago however, these had been towed aside and piled together in a corner of the field, while the cleared space was turned into a parking lot for the 24 drone command trailers of the Okhotnik pilots and systems officers of 573rd Air Brigade. Plus a centrally located commissary wagon serving coffee, tea, hot soup and bread.
The timeline Bondarev had been given for LOSOS didn’t allow for optimal dispersion of the Okhotnik crews. The trailers holding the precious pilots, whose aircraft were now flying out of Savoonga, had been camouflaged and hidden among rusted shipping containers — so that the park looked like it had gone from a dumping ground for obsolete aircraft to a dumping ground for empty containers. They had been spread as widely as practical, but so many trailers and crew drew down a lot of power and needed hard wired data links so that they didn’t fill the sky with radio energy, and give themselves away that way.
The camouflage was ingenious, and the trailers hadn’t been spotted by ANR’s strike planners. But camouflage was no defense against an errant MOAB.
The parachute on the last of Bunny’s mini-mothers deployed a half second late, it overshot, and then detonated right on top of the commissary in the middle of the drone trailer park.
And in its last act, the Fantom that delivered the weapons zoomed into the sky, onto its back, and then speared back down on full afterburner toward the small control tower at the side of the air base.
It impacted at the base of the tower, two floors above Major-Generals Artem Kokorin and Yevgeny Bondarev. And, as he walked toward the control tower building pulling off his flight gloves, right beside Lieutenant General Yuri Lukin, who had stopped to watch in horror as the fireball of the first strike, across the airfield, lit up the sky and rolled toward him. He was dead before the thunder of its detonation even reached his ears.
SUPREMACY
The building above Bondarev and Kokorin collapsed as the pressure wave from the ‘mini-mother’ exploding above them flattened it like a boot landing on a house of cards. However the command and control complex was in a concrete and rebar reinforced basement two floors under the ground, and luckily the bomb that hit them was an airburst, not a bunker buster, or the Major-Generals would have suddenly and violently lost all personal interest in the future conduct of the war.
Their comms to the outside were not however completely cut, and once emergency crews had restored power, Bondarev managed to direct help to their location and get them shifting rubble and bodies so that they could be dug out.
He emerged after four hours to learn that the runway at Ugolny Air Field had survived the American attack completely unscathed. Using massive ordnance air blast munitions indicated the Americans hadn’t intended to shut the air base down, even though they had flattened some above ground infrastructure. As long as the paved runways were intact, mobile air traffic control, radar and communications could easily fill the gap. And most of the Okhotniks that were airborne at the time of the attack thanks to Lukin’s impending inspection also came through unscathed. Lacking command inputs from the ground, they had reverted to AI control, maintained a safe separation and kept circling until they were low on fuel before calmly landing themselves and taxiing to preassigned holding positions.
The lack of material damage was not relevant. The use of air blast munitions, coupled with the targets of the attack — the hangars, administration buildings, accommodation block and the drone trailer park — indicated that the US attack had the inhuman intent of achieving the maximum possible loss of life. And among those lost was the commander of the 3rd Air and Air Defense Forces, Lieutenant General Yuri Lukin.
It was hard not to conclude that the US airstrike, carried out as it had been by what seemed to be two stealth drones sent on a one-way mission, was a straightforward assassination attempt. Arsharvin had told him it was being treated as such, and there would be brutal repercussions for anyone found to have been careless regarding Lukin’s schedule. Bondarev could only imagine what machinations were going on back in Khabarovsk and throughout the VVS as other officers jockeyed to replace the dead Lukin as commander of the 3rd Air Army.