SOME DAYS YOU EAT THE BEAR
Private Zubkhov couldn’t bring the base radio and its range finding scope with him, so he had to track the ghost radio the old-fashioned way. He knew whoever was carrying it was following the column of prisoners along the coastal track to Savoonga. So he would do the same. They had a one day start on him though, so he had to hustle.
He had moved the Captain into the relative comfort of the school master’s offices, sat him in a chair and set him up with a bottle of water, cold tea and biscuits with some cheese. The man was able to eat and drink, take himself to the toilet and lie down when he needed to sleep. Anything more complicated seemed to befuddle him. But he would be okay for a couple of days.
He sat in the school master’s chair, watching as Zubkhov got himself ready.
Zubkhov had decided to travel light. A half-sized backpack, water, dry rations, a knife and a folding stock VSS Vintorez silenced sniper rifle with a few magazines of 9x39mm. He had his winter camouflage uniform on, mottled brown and white, with just a utility belt across his waist and the backpack strapped tight to his shoulders. The Captain was watching him as he pulled on his gear and adjusted the strap on the rifle so it sat comfortably on his back.
“I know what you’re thinking Sir. I should be taking the Dragunov,” Zubkhov said, talking as much to himself as to the Captain. “Better range, hits harder. But I need to move fast to try to catch up with this guy, and the Vintorez is lighter and quieter.”
The Captain actually appeared to be considering. “When there is no God, everything is permitted,” he quoted.
“Amen to that sir,” Private Zubkhov said, checked his sidearm and ammunition one last time, holstered it and headed for the door. He had a damn good idea who was out there, following that column with a stolen Russian radio. He’d shown the guy’s jacket and air force patch to the Captain when the man had gotten away from them, their first hour on the island. And that shadow he’d seen on the hillside just after the first missile hit? That was no coincidence. The US soldier must have called in the strike.
Zubkhov should have shot the bastard when he had the chance. He wouldn’t make that mistake twice.
The last remaining officers of the last remaining US offensive air asset in the Operations Area were trying to work out what the hell had just gone wrong.
They had been tasked to hit a Russian supply depot at Lavrentiya where it looked like the enemy was stockpiling a significant cache of supplies outside the military airport for some sort of offensive. The base itself was assumed to be heavily defended, but their target was a warehouse and munitions depot on the outskirts of town.
It was an industrial town with a small harbor and what was now a disproportionately large airport. A single five-story administrative center and not far from it, a six-story hospital. Four or five factories belched foul black smoke into the air over the town.
It was a perfect target for the Joint Air-to-Ground JAGM missiles they had already loaded aboard one of their Fantoms. They had a drone already on the Cat configured for air-to-air escort, so they put that into the air first, then bullied the second Fantom into place and sent it up the chute.
The JAGM had a warhead similar in hitting power to its predecessor the Hellfire, and the four missiles carried inside the weapons bay of the Fantom were more than sufficient to destroy the weapons dump at Lavrentiya. The only problem with the JAGM was that the Army and Navy had never been able to agree on its final design, with the Navy in and out of the program a couple of times over the years. In the end, it was a compromise between the longer range standoff weapon the Navy wanted and the shorter range missiles wanted by the Army. Guided by semi-active laser and multi-band radar, the JAGM was a fire and forget weapon, but with a range of only about ten miles.
There was no back door into Lavrentiya as they had found for Anadyr. The city lay abreast of a wide sweeping bay on a flat permafrost plain. Low hills skirted the city to the north, but they weren’t suitable to provide any sort of radar cover. Electronic intel showed the base was covered by short-range SAM surface-air systems, but stealth and the Fantom’s onboard electronic warfare suite should enable them to get in under the base defenses.
“We blow in low from the south with the sun behind us, pop up, jam, lock and shoot, then bug out,” Bunny had decided while they were planning. “We’ve got no intel on what missile systems they have in place, but it’s the main Russian offensive air base, so there must also be some ugly-ass anti-air protecting it. Fantom 1 goes in first, tries to draw any fire, helps me identify what they have hiding there. I can use one missile for suppression, two for the depot, still leaves me one for a target of opportunity, if we’re lucky.”
They were going to try to bring their drones home this time. Neither Eielson nor Elmendorf were ready to receive them yet, while Nome and Port Clarence were covered by standing Russian fighter patrols. They had got the heavy lift crane working again, after a fashion, and decided they could land the drones on the Pond, tie them up, then pull them out by crane and refit them when they got a chance. Yes, it increased the chances of their being discovered twofold, but with only ten aircraft left, they couldn’t treat every mission as a one-way trip.
They made a careful plan. But they didn’t get a single missile away.
What Rodriguez and O’Hare couldn’t have known was that unlike Ugolny, Bondarev had made very sure indeed that his front line base at Lavrentiya was well protected.
Sitting on a low rise overlooking the bustling town, was a Nebo-M 3-D anti-aircraft/anti-missile system and it was just about to come online. Mounted on four 24-ton trucks, it featured a command module and three radar arrays, arranged to provide 360-degree area denial defense of the airspace around Lavrentiya. The Nebo-M battalion at Lavrentiya controlled 72 launchers over a 100 square kilometer area, fielding a total of 384 missiles. In ‘circular scan’ mode the Nebo-M battalion could track up to 200 targets at a distance and at altitudes of up to 600 kilometers. In ‘ICBM killer’ sector scan mode, a Nebo-M could track 20 ballistic targets at ranges of up to 1,800 kilometers and at an altitude of up to 1,200 kilometers. They were Russia’s equivalent to the US HELLADS system, but based on older, more proven technologies.
If Bondarev had had such a system at Anadyr, the Americans would never have gotten through, but he’d seen his assets at Lavrentiya, closest to Alaska and Savoonga, as being the higher priority and the Nebo-M was a precious resource. Although Russia had once had grand plans to install Nebo-M systems all over the country to provide an effective anti-missile shield, teething problems had delayed their introduction and they were only now being deployed, with a focus on providing protection to the major population centers, so it had taken a bureaucratic catfight and the personal intervention of General Lukin for Bondarev to get the only two Nebo-M systems in the Eastern Military District moved from Vladivostok and Khabarovsk to Lavrentiya and Savoonga, to protect his fighters for LOSOS.