Bondarev glowered, “More of your damn ‘mobile Fantom units’? You still can’t find the trucks they’re launching off?”
“Analysis of the wreckage confirms they were Fantoms,” Arsharvin said. “But they weren’t truck launched.”
“What the hell? The enemy has an operational airfield somewhere in this theatre and we can’t find it?”
Arsharvin had a photograph on his tablet, and he pulled it up, pinched to expand it and showed it to Bondarev, “We’ve solved the mystery. They aren’t flying them off the ground.”
“What is this?” Bondarev peered at what looked like a bent ski attached to a piece of aircraft fuselage.
“Landing ski floats,” Arsharvin said. “This is an F-47 variant we haven’t seen before. Some sort of top-secret prototype I imagine.”
“A sea-plane?” Bondarev frowned. “The Americans haven’t fielded a combat version of a seaplane since… when?”
“The 1950s, the Martin P6M Sea Master,” Arsharvin said, having expected the question. “But it makes sense, yes? You could launch it off just about any ship the size of destroyer or bigger, land it alongside when it returned and recover it by crane. They’re already doing it with recon drones — this gives them a strike or air defense capability, extends a ship’s eyes, ears and teeth by hundreds of miles. You don’t need static airfields, or a big carrier to fly them off — the smallest guided missile destroyer could carry it. Same concept as putting them on trucks, just sea-borne.”
Bondarev had to reluctantly give his enemy credit. They were a generation ahead of his own country not only in the capabilities of their drones, but also in their application.
“Very well. Find me the damn ships these things are launching off,” Bondarev said. “Compared to finding a few trucks hidden in the Alaskan wilderness, finding a ship launching drones in the open sea south of here has to be easy, right comrade Intelligence Chief?”
Arsharvin gave a wan smile, “If you say so, Comrade Major-General.” He stumped out the door again.
Bondarev called out to his retreating back, “And attack options! I need a way to disable or sink that damn ship without starting world war three!” He swung around in his chair and looked out of the window as one of the ubiquitous local four-wheel electric bikes that had been commandeered by his security group hummed past. They were slowly getting Savoonga airfield organized for the upcoming operation to land troops in Nome. The American cruise missile attack had devastated its long-range radar facility, no doubt because they were worried about what Russia could learn from it after it had fallen so easily and so intact into their hands. It was a state of the art long-range early warning facility, with radar arrays dotting the hills of Saint Lawrence all the way down the spine of the island to the site of the old North-East Cape base it had abandoned nearly half a century earlier. With the improvements in communications achieved in the intervening years, the Americans now no longer had to have their command and control facility located right next to their radar arrays, so they had chosen to build up the airfield at Savoonga and create a small base comprising about 50 personnel just outside of the new village.
The base had given a big boost to the island’s economy, provided civilian jobs and made a posting to Saint Lawrence a little less like a prison sentence than it had been when the facility had been located hundreds of miles to the south-east. The USAF 712th Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron had been recommissioned under NORAD, a strike hardened cantonment was built, with the command center and personnel barracks inside. New businesses and infrastructure sprung up in Savoonga to service the small air force detachment — a bar, a supermarket, a new school with fast satellite internet links and even a new hotel to serve the needs of families flying in to visit the personnel stationed there. Savoonga had pulled younger people from Gambell, which is why there were more than 500 residents there when the Russian airborne troops arrived.
And why the most secure facility in the area to hold the residents had been the Savoonga cantonment, which US forces hit with enough high explosive to decimate the facility. And a large proportion of the personnel in it, including their own troops, who they knew would be there. And the civilians, who they claimed they didn’t.
Bondarev couldn’t imagine what the scene had looked like as the Russian troops who were left unscathed at the Savoonga airport had made their way into the ruins of the cantonment. They were only able to recover about 200 of 500 civilians alive, 15 with serious wounds and five with minor wounds. Since then five more had died. The Russian airborne commander had estimated nearly 600 dead including civilians, his own, and US troops caught inside the cantonment. Bondarev shuddered at the thought. The Americans had been lucky at Gambell that they had not hit the civilians there too. What sort of nation was it that would treat its own people with such callous disregard?
One to be feared, Yevgeny.
And yet their air forces were happy skulking down south, leaving their population in Alaska at the mercy of Bondarev and his pilots. They couldn’t know he wasn’t interested in attacking their population centers, and had been reading reports of the National Guard ground forces in Fairbanks, Anchorage and Juneau hastily building defenses against a Russian ground attack that would never come. Bragging in fact about the fact they had downed several Russian aircraft, trying to bolster morale, when in fact Bondarev wasn’t even flying missions over populated and defended areas like Fairbanks, Juneau or Anchorage. His only interest was to keep the western Alaska skies clear of US fighters and attack aircraft, not to terrorize the local population.
Let them pile their sandbags as high as they wanted, let their SAM sites ring their cities. Right now, there was only one threat to his dominance of the skies over Alaska and that was these damn pinprick attacks by sea-launched Fantoms. Anadyr had cost him both in men and material, and serious political capital. The Kremlin didn’t seem to care about the numerous US probing attacks he had stopped in the south and east and they were ignorant of the strike on Lavrentiya that had been thwarted. All that seemed to matter to them was that the Americans had gotten through at Anadyr and that had been enough to cause political knees to further weaken.
The Americans had been lucky once, and not since and he intended for it to stay that way.
All he had to do was hold them back for another two days. Looking out the window he couldn’t help a small swell of pride at the activity he saw. These were his forces, these aircraft, these men and women.
With the death of General Lukin he had lost a patron, but he had not been relieved from his position, yet. Gathered at Savoonga and Lavrentiya under his command now were more than 150 aircraft of the Russian 3rd Air and Air Defense Forces Command of the Eastern Military District. In Lavrentiya, and dispersed through nearby towns, were nearly 10,000 airborne and special forces troops, and the material needed to support the operation to take Nome.
He realized he shouldn’t let the pinprick attacks of the American drones bother him. A major air or ship-launched cruise missile strike was a greater threat and the one which his 14th Air Defense battalion at Lavrentiya was in place to prevent. Then there was the overhanging risk of a tactical nuclear strike against a target either in the Operations Area, or against an unrelated target on the Russian mainland. The US had the assets in place to effect it, and Bondarev had the strike on Anadyr and the command vacuum it created to thank for the fact he was able to convince his superiors they should move on Nome as quickly as possible before it came. They may not care about the lives of a few hundred citizens on Saint Lawrence, but with the 4,000 citizens of Nome under Russian control, the US would have to start negotiating.