“The rest of you are dismissed, Lieutenant Colonel Arsharvin will remain,” Bondarev said. When the other officers were gone, they sat again.
“I share the burden of those deaths too my friend,” Arsharvin said quietly. “Wherever this attack came from, we will find them. You have my word.”
Bondarev span the map of Alaska thoughtfully. He stopped, pinning it with his finger on Nome.
“General Lukin gave me two weeks to show we have control of the airspace over Western Alaska,” Bondarev said. “He said he was being pressured by a faction in the Council of Ministers to abandon the plans for a ground assault and consolidate our presence on Saint Lawrence as a bargaining chip.”
“Bargaining chip for what?” Arsharvin asked, frowning.
“That is what I want to tell me, Tomas,” he said. “I deserve to know the real reason 200 of my people died.”
Arsharvin stared at him for a moment, then stood, went to the door and locked it. He returned to the table and sat.
“Alright. This isn’t about us monopolizing the polar shipping route,” Arsharvin said.
“No new Panama Canal? Give me some credit, I already guessed that much. What then?”
Arsharvin leaned back in his chair, “To answer that, I have to take you back to a meeting I attended a year ago in Vladivostok.”
Bondarev groaned, “You’re going to tell me how you met President Navalny again.”
“Yes and no. I told you I met him, I didn’t tell you why.”
“A briefing on Far East resources I think you said. ‘Pivot to the Pacific’ blah blah blah. Sorry, I fell asleep while you were explaining.”
“And you thought the President would travel all the way to Vladi-bloody-vostok for a boring briefing on Far East resources?”
“I don’t recall thinking much at all except how tiresome it was listening to you name dropping about your top secret Far East intelligence committee meetings again.”
“Russia is dying my friend,” Arsharvin said. And he said it with such surety that Bondarev stifled the laugh that was forming in his throat.
Bondarev waved his hand dismissively, “Moscow is corrupt yes, but it has always been. Our economic partnership and trade pacts with China mean our economy has not been stronger for a hundred years. Chelyabinsk is now the third biggest city in Russia. Anadyr will soon be bigger than Vladivostok. What do you mean, ‘dying’?”
“This is different Yevgeny. I’m not talking about trade, I’m talking raw human survival.” Arsharvin reached over Bondarev’s desk, picking up a bottle of water. He uncapped it and slowly poured himself a glass, then held it out to him. Bondarev picked up a glass, confused. Arsharvin filled it, poured one for himself and then clinked his glass against Bondarev’s before drinking the water down. He held his glass up to the light, “Enjoy it. Because it’s soon going to be more precious than your 25 year old whiskey.”
“I don’t get you,” Bondarev admitted.
“Remember at military college, you and I, we used to argue about peak oil?” Arsharvin asked.
“Sure. You said the next world war would be over oil, and I said that renewables would solve the problem before it got that bad,” Bondarev said. “And I was right.”
“You were. But we were arguing about the wrong thing,” Arsharvin said.
“So what’s the right thing, if it’s not peak oil?”
“Peak water. And Russia passed it ten years ago without the world even knowing it.”
“This country is covered in snow, rivers, lakes. Plus…” Bondarev pivoted and pointed out the window. “Head that way to the coast. You’ll hit the Sea of Japan. East of there is the biggest body of water on the planet, the Pacific Ocean. Follow that far enough, you’ll hit the Atlantic. This planet is 70 percent water Tomas.”
“Russia has poisoned its lakes and rivers. The snow melts into empty aquifers. And the sea is saltwater my friend. Salt. I am talking about peak freshwater.”
Bondarev reached over and poured some more water into Arsharvin’s glass. “You never heard of desalinization? What do you think you have been drinking the last 20 years? Mountain fresh spring water? Every city lives on desalinated water — Moscow pipes it from Saint Petersburg since Lake Kljasma dried up, but so what?”
“That’s the whole point!” Arsharvin said. “We can supply the big cities, but the smaller cities and towns, they have been living off whatever they can pull out of poisoned rivers and lakes, or suck out of the melting permafrost. The meeting I was at, it had the title, Coming water shortages.”
Bondarev scoffed, “Since I was a boy there have been water shortages. Then they bring another desal plant online, and everyone relaxes again.”
“Not like this. Within ten years Yevgeny, 40 out of 150 million Russians will be facing water rationing. If we built a new desalination plant every month for the next two years, we couldn’t provide for that many people, and that’s if we had the time and money to build all those plants and pipelines, which we don’t.”
“There was talk of a pipeline from Scandinavia,” Bondarev said, trying to absorb what Arsharvin was saying. “I thought that…”
“Will buy us five years, and is already accounted for. Plus it puts us at the mercy of Europe, which could bring us to our knees just by turning off a tap. The Middle East is already tearing itself apart over water, did you think we were immune?”
Bondarev was quiet, staring into his glass. Water? Seriously? “Wait, what does the Bering Strait have to do with this? Polar ice or something?”
Now it Arsharvin’s turn to laugh. “Polar ice? What polar ice?” he asked. “It’s melting at an exponential rate. That’s why we can sail the northern route even in winter now. But you aren’t completely wrong.”
“What then?”
“As that ice cap melts, all that beautiful freshwater goes somewhere. Into the sea, most of it, raising the sea level. Some into Canada, a little into our northern territories — not enough of it though, we are too far from the pack ice now. But there is one place where the glaciers reach down from the pole into mountains and valleys and canyons and become huge raging rivers and lakes of pure, fresh water.”
“Not Saint Lawrence Island, I’m guessing,” Bondarev said.
“No, but close. Alaska accounts for more than forty percent of US freshwater reserves. The Yukon River alone delivers six thousand cubic meters of fresh water into the Bering Sea near Nome every second! That’s close to the flow of the Volga, three times the flow of the Nile River. With a dam on the Yukon feeding our Far East expansion, we can save Russia and rule the north.”
Bondarev felt his fist tightening on his small glass, and realized he was in danger of crushing it before he relaxed his grip.
Arsharvin saw his white knuckles, “That’s why your men are dying Yevgeny. Nothing less than the survival of their homeland.” Arsharvin shifted in his chair. “Now, Lukin is dead. You are the most senior commander in the 3rd Air Army until a new General is named. For all intents and purposes, you are leading this air war now. What is our next move?”
Bondarev sighed, tapping his finger on the map of the region around Nome again.
“I leave for Savoonga tomorrow to see if the airfield there can be used to stage a squadron or two more for the attack on Nome. I can’t afford to have so many aircraft concentrated in Lavrentiya, and Anadyr will take precious days to rebuild. My two weeks is running out my friend,” Bondarev said. “I have only days now to show Moscow that the Americans cannot repeat what they did in Anadyr. And from today, it gets harder. They have moved new satellites into position.” He reached over, and patted Arsharvin on the shoulder. “I can keep the two US airbases in Alaska out of commission, even without the Okhotniks of the 573rd in reserve. The Sukhois and Migs of the 4th and 5th, and the Okhotniks of the 7th can fend off their probing patrols and degrade their mobile anti-air capabilities as fast as they get them up and radiating.” He fixed Arsharvin with a cold gaze, “But I need you to find whoever killed my people at Anadyr, so that I can kill them before they hit us again.”