To Bondarev, the loss of a good commander like Lukin was tragic, but the politics were a sideshow and no one was irreplaceable. What was especially problematic was the strike on his drone crews. Among the 225 Russian armed forces personnel who died or were seriously wounded in the attack, were all 54 primary and reserve aviators and systems officers of the 573rd Air Base Hunter regiment.
His stomach churned and he resisted the urge to vomit. He also had to resist the thought, the primal urge, that was telling him he should step outside the ambulance in which he was lying, ask someone there for a sidearm, and shoot himself in the head. It was a number he simply couldn’t comprehend. Had any Russian officer since the second world war lost two hundred and twenty-five lives in a single attack?
Yevgeny Bondarev suddenly grabbed his shirt, tore it open and howled in mortal pain at the ceiling of the ambulance.
Dave was moaning again about the pain in his shoulders from carrying their radio, but he wasn’t getting much sympathy from Perri. They’d managed to catch the column of hostages because it wasn’t traveling as fast as them. Sure, there weren’t any old or infirm hostages among the prisoners, but there were some pretty young children and people couldn’t carry them on their backs the whole way.
Now a chill night had fallen and Dave and Perri had found the column easily, because it was winding its way along the ‘coast track’, the barely traveled west-east coastal path that led from Gambell to Savoonga along the cliffs and rocky beaches of the serrated northern shore. As the day had worn on and the route the column was taking became more obvious, Perri had to admit Dave was right. They were headed for Savoonga. He could only assume it wasn’t hit as hard as Gambell had been and the Russian survivors from the Gambell attack had decided to link up with their buddies in Savoonga.
As they had coasted a rise, Dave and Perri had been forced to drop to a crouch as they saw the circle of prisoners about a mile ahead, huddled around a couple of lamps. Somewhere in there were Perri and Dave’s mothers, fathers and brothers. There was no fuel for them to start any sort of fire, so they were pressed together in a circle like Emperor penguins, using their body heat to keep each other warm, with the kids in the middle of the press. It was a survival tactic as old as time, and though the temp wouldn’t drop much below freezing tonight, it was just a good idea to keep your body heat up and stay out of the drying wind. People who died of exposure often died of dehydration as much as they died of the cold. Every hour the people at the outside of the circle would hand over their blankets and sleeping bags, move into the center, and a new group would take their place on the outer circle. Perri figured that with about two hundred people in the huddle, that meant most would get five or six hours of nice warm sleep.
Which was more than he and Dave would get in their crappy little sleeping bags on the rocky ground.
They couldn’t turn on a lamp or even shine a torchlight, or they’d risk giving themselves away to the troops in the distance, so Perri had to fumble his way to getting power to their radio and tuning it so that they could fang the receiver in Gambell and get a signal through to Sarge. While he worked in his sleeping bag in the dark, Dave stood up in his sleeping bag, holding their makeshift antenna aloft until they got a lock on the Russian base unit in Gambell.
“Perri calling Sarge, do you read me? Hello? Perri calling Sarge.”
The Mountie had told them he would be sleeping by the radio and waiting for their call, and he was true to his word. Perri only had to call three times before he got a bleary voice on the other end.
“Sarge here Perri, just wait, OK? Out.”
“OK, Perri… um… waiting,” he said, shrugging to himself.
He didn’t have to wait more than about twenty seconds before the Sergeant came back on the line. “Perri, hey. Are you guys OK?”
Sarge had taught them how to use a ‘duress signal’ in case they were captured and the Russians forced them to make contact. If they were safe, they should reply, ‘We are just fine Sarge.’ And if they were not, they should say ‘Couldn’t be better.’
“We’re just fine Sarge,” Perri said. “We caught up with the Russian troops and the people from Gambell. We figure they’re headed for Savoonga.”
“They’re walking them out?”
“Yeah, they made about 12 miles today. Savoonga will take them another three or four days.”
“OK, look, Perri, the Russians are moving some heavy hardware into Savoonga and you are our best chance to get some up close and personal intel on exactly what they’re doing there. Are you safe where you are, can you talk for a few minutes?”
Perri looked up at his friend, “Dave’s arms might fall off if he has to hold the antenna in the air too long, but yeah, shoot.”
The Secretary of State had to listen to Devlin once she scanned the map that Piotr Khorkina had given her and uploaded it. To make sure it didn’t risk getting stranded on some analysts’ desk she took the Secretary at his word and called him directly on his cell. Even he had to admit the map clearly showed that the Russians planned to cauterize Western Alaska, separate it from the rest of the USA, at least by air, and this supported by the ridiculous fiction of establishing a ‘demilitarized zone’ to protect the shipping in the Bering Strait and the scared and huddled masses of the Russian Far East (all 290,000 of them) from the rampaging bald eagle across the ditch.
He also had to listen to her when HOLMES was able to show through accessing Moscow traffic CCTV systems that the car driving the rather handsome oligarch who had been the government’s intermediary had traveled directly from inside the Kremlin to the gates of the US Embassy compound, without even a minor detour. It removed the likelihood that he had come up with the map himself in a fit of geopolitical creativity.
And if there was a single doubter left in Washington after those two little snippets of intel, they couldn’t keep faith in their misguided de-escalation fantasy after Carl Williams’ highly motivated AI was able to pull down an intercept of the Russian Foreign Minister, Kelnikov, travelling with an unknown Foreign Service employee on a car trip to the Bolshoi Ballet the previous evening. Devlin had asked Williams and HOLMES to keep her apprised if there were any intelligence reports appearing on his radar involving Kelnikov, and they had struck gold.
The conversation had been captured using a Type 4193 Bruel and Kjaer software enhanced infrasound microphone mounted on a French intelligence microdrone paralleling the ring road beside him. The little microdrone was a bug in all senses of the word. About the size of a finch, it used pressure-field measurement to read the conversation in the car by picking up passenger side window vibrations, digitally filtered in post-processing for the rumble of the road. And it went a little like this:
Kelnikov: (Translator Comment (TC): indistinguishable, could be cursing) be there? And we are sure of his vote?
Unidentified Male (UIM) 1: He will support you.
Kelnikov: This is slipping out of control. That (expletive) submarine. Now that (expletive) woman is threatening nuclear war.
UIM 1: The Minister of Defense says this is the moment in which we will either secure the future of the Rodina, or we will throw it away.
Kelnikov: Burkhin is a fool.
UIM 1: I am not qualified to say.
Kelnikov: Then you are a fool. Did you read that situation report? An entire ground attack squadron out of action?