“Lieutenant Colonel Arsharvin?”
“Yes, he will confirm the order.”
“Yes sir. I will have Lieutenant Colonel Arsharvin confirm your order and recall all patrols.”
“Captain?”
“Yes Comrade Major-General?”
“There is a flight from the 4th or 5th Air Regiment escorting two Tu-162 bombers from the 21st Guards on a classified mission. We will not be recalling the bombers…” I don’t have the authority over units of the 21st Guards Heavy Bomber Aviation Regiment, he thought to himself. Or we would. “But you will recall their escort. Is that clear? The commander of the 21st Guards will deal with the recall of his own aircraft.”
“Yes sir!”
The man cut the line. Bondarev had no way of being sure if Komarov would comply. But he knew the man, and he knew he had never counteracted an order in his entire career, no matter how facile, so Bondarev had to hope he would not start now.
The two Americans had kept their weapons trained on Bondarev the whole time he had been speaking, and the younger one lifted hers slightly now, “Spetsnaz,” she said.
“You need to launch that Fantom,” Bondarev told them, failing to keep the urgency out of his voice.
“Spetsnaz,” the pilot said. “We won’t be launching anything if someone sends some sort of sick chemical gas grenade down that chute.”
He couldn’t disagree with her logic. He quickly put through a radio call to the Sergeant in charge of the remaining Spetsnaz troops topside. The man was unsettled by the lack of contact with Borisov since they had breached the US base.
“Communications have been blocked by the depth of the rock,” Bondarev lied to him. “The situation here is under control. The enemy force has been neutralized. We will soon be finished here, maintain your positions until you hear from me again.”
That satisfied the two Americans. They bound him hand and foot again and pulled him over to a side wall, within speaking distance and where they could easily keep an eye on him. He saw the pilot disappear into the blasted corridor in which they had been hiding, while her commanding officer moved to a console and hit a sequence of keys which triggered the drone loading system to extend the gantry holding the drone out over the launch catapult and lower it into place.
The two allied aviators soon began a ballet of activity that left the air force officer in Bondarev completely awestruck.
It wasn’t foresight, it was pure bloody-minded optimism. One of the last things Bunny had stowed in the ‘keep’ was a mil-spec laptop, a portable set of flight controls and a wireless uplink that could log into the central servers still running deep within the base. The servers were the last thing Bunny was supposed to blow if they were bailing on the base, but even with the Spetsnaz knocking on the door, she hadn’t done it. Call her crazy, she just had this hunch if she got through alive, she might just need an uplink. And if she didn’t, what the hell difference did it make?
As Rodriguez ran the boot sequence on the Fantom and checked that it wasn’t reporting system errors after the beating it had taken, Bunny closed the catapult bridge, then one-handed, pulled some crates and boxes behind the blast shield and created a makeshift cockpit for herself. With only the virtual screen real estate of her virtual-reality headset to work with, and with her joystick and throttle clamped to a stack of boxes, her ass parked on a collapsible chair and her feet on a pair of hot-linked rudder pedals held to the ground with two heavy iron bars lying across their plastic feet, she felt like a 14 year old again, flying flight sims on a gamer rig in the basement of her parents’ house. Those sims had been her refuge from all the BS happening upstairs between her parents, and she had to bite hard on the memories to hold them back as she got herself set up and online. It only took her about five minutes though. It was a routine she could run in her sleep.
“Ready to boot!” Rodriguez called over to her. “You mission capable there Lieutenant?”
Bunny gave her a bloodied salute with her mangled paw. “Let’s lock and load ma’am!” she called, putting her virtual-reality helmet down and running over to the Fantom. Between them they bullied the drone onto the catapult rail and got it locked into the shuttle.
Bunny headed back behind the blast shield and pulled on her helmet.
“Booted!” Rodriguez called. She dropped into the shooter’s chair. The boot system told her the Fantom’s flight and weapons systems were online and ready for launch. The boot system check had reported no faults. But there had been no time to check the Fantom’s physical integrity. There had been a lot of metal and stone flying around the Fantom in the last few hours. It wasn’t unlikely some of it had struck the Fantom in its cradle. She just had to hope its hardened alloy shell hadn’t been punctured anywhere fatal.
Or it could be a very short flight.
“Bridge locked and Cat clear?”
“Locked and clear aye!”
“Man out?”
“Man out aye!”
“Light her tail.”
“Afterburner aye!”
The Fantom’s engines screamed to full power. Her shooter’s console lit up green.
“Launching!” she called.
Despite herself, she flinched as the fighter rocketed down the catapult, across the bridge and out of the chute, expecting to see it explode into a spectacular fireball of hydrogen fuel and liquid metal at any moment. It was almost with disbelief that she watched its silhouette disappear out of the mouth of the chute, and bank away south for the 120 mile, ten-minute journey to the bomber intercept point.
“Systems green boss, good launch,” Bunny said from inside her rig. Her left hand flew over the keyboard but she winced as she stabbed down with her right index finger and thumb, the only digits on her right hand she could use for anything. “Hey, ‘Skippy’ is still on the air!” she said in surprise. “How you doing out there little buddy?” It was an unexpected and welcome advantage. Linked to NORAD, its data-net covering an area two hundred miles around Little Diomede, the grounded Fantom was working like a seaborne-WACS. It would help bring down the lag time between Bunny’s control inputs and the drone response dramatically.
Looking over at their Russian hostage, Rodriguez saw him watching them intently. OK, so NCTAMS-A4 had no more secrets to keep. She walked up behind Bunny. She couldn’t see on the laptop exactly what Bunny was seeing inside her virtual-reality rig, because it was showing Bunny both a virtual cockpit instrument panel and heads-up display, the view out of the drone cockpit simulation cameras, and data being downlinked from NORAD satellite coverage. But Bunny had set the laptop to show the tactical map of the Operations Area, and Rodriguez could clearly see the icon for their Fantom heading south from Little Diomede. She also saw with some satisfaction the red icons of other enemy formations moving south and west from the Bering Strait and Alaska toward Savoonga and Lavrentiya. It seemed Bondarev’s orders were being implemented after all. At least until someone further up the chain asked what in the name of Stalin’s Sainted Son was going on.
Major Vasily Ivanovich Alekseyev of the 21st Guards Heavy Bomber Aviation Regiment was one of the first frontline pilots qualified on the new generation Tupolev Tu-162 strategic bomber. Essentially a large flying wing made of stealth composite materials, it was able to carry up to 88,000 lbs. of fuel and ordnance, but its normal loadout was two rotary launchers each holding 6 hypersonic cruise missiles capable of carrying either conventional or nuclear warheads. The Tupolev itself was already a treaty breaker, because its development had specifically been banned under at least two bilateral US-Russia arms treaties. The Tsirkon 3M22 hypersonic missiles it carried were also banned by several treaties. So it mattered little whether they were armed with conventional or nuclear warheads.