Major Alekseyev knew exactly what warheads had been loaded on his Tsirkon missiles, but his crew and the crew of the other aircraft flying in formation with him did not. He did not consider it necessary that they knew. If they had known, several of them might not have been able to perform their duties. Alekseyev had no such issues.
He had known every time he took to the skies for the last twenty years, that the day may come when he was required to fire nuclear weapons at an enemy of his motherland. He trusted that if he was asked to do so, it would only be in a situation of national survival. Literally of life or death, at the risk of total national oblivion. As he kept his flight of two Tu-162’s on station off the coast of Alaska and waited for the go codes that would confirm his mission, he couldn’t help but reflect that he probably felt exactly the same right now as an American called Paul Tibbets had felt, nearly 100 years ago.
When he had been asked to drop a nuclear bomb on 350,000 unarmed civilians.
In a city called Hiroshima.
Bunny had pushed the Fantom high, tail on fire all the way. She had to trust what her screens were telling her, namely that the Russian Major-General really was pulling all of his aircraft out of the OA. Not just those escorting the Tupolevs, but every damned bird over the Bering Strait and Alaska. She knew NORAD would be looking at the same feed she was, and had no doubt hundreds of US fighters down south were currently getting airborne to fill the vacuum the Russians had left in the sky behind them.
Within minutes she was within Cuda missile range of the Russian bombers. For all their stealth technology, the bombers were too big to hide from satellites and ground stations that knew exactly where to look, and there wasn’t a single inch of air over the Operations Area that wasn’t covered by US eyes in the sky right now.
Bunny kept radiation from her Fantom to a minimum, taking data from NORAD and Skippy, and assigned missiles to each of the two targets, but held her fire. She had never taken on a TU-162 bomber before, either in a sim or in real life, and had no idea what kind of countermeasures, physical or electronic, it had up its sleeve. So she planned to let her missiles go at the absolute inside of their effective range, giving the bombers the least possible time to detect and evade the active radar and laser guidance systems of the Cudas.
That window closed quicker than she liked, but as warnings began to appear within her heads-up display that she was about to breach the operational envelope, she lit up the targets with her own radar and launched four of her eight Half-RAAMs. Her voice betrayed her as she nearly shouted, “Target locked: Cudas away!”
One thousand eight hundred and sixty miles away, in the North Pacific sea west of the Kuril Islands, the USS Columbia rose to launch depth. Only one of the hull doors for its 16 missile launch tubes was open, and that had only been opened after its escort of three SSN(X) Virginia class attack submarines had ensured there would be no unwelcome visitors trying to disturb the launch.
At precisely four minutes to three pm, US Eastern Time, 120,000 lbs. of sea water was flash vaporized inside the launch tube, blasting the HSSW Waverider missile out of the water and into the air above the sub. There it hung for a moment, as its upward momentum faded and gravity tried to pull it back down into the sea. Until its first stage MGM-140 ATACMS solid rocket booster ignited and drove the missile five hundred feet into the air on a diagonal trajectory that quickly took it to 3,000 miles per hour.
Unlike in an ICBM launch, it only burned for a few incandescent seconds though, before the rocket burned itself out, and the missile nosed back toward the earth. As it did, it ejected its outer shell, revealing a dolphin shaped head fixed to a conical booster. Small, stubby wings sprang out of recessed grooves at the back of the missile, and its second stage Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne SJY61 scramjet accelerated it to 4,000 miles an hour.
It covered the 400 mile ‘safe distance’ to the west of the USS Columbia in just six minutes.
The HSSW was fitted with a 200 kiloton W89 thermonuclear warhead, otherwise known as a ‘tactical nuke’ for its relatively modest size. It was only twenty times the power of the bomb that had destroyed the Japanese city of Nagasaki. The W89 armed HSSW had never been tested under operational conditions and it was in fact the first ever such test of a thermonuclear weapon mounted on a hypersonic missile. A second missile had been queued in case of a launch failure but it wasn’t needed. It flew true.
When it detonated, the flash of light was clearly visible from the Russian city of Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula, and within minutes vision of the weapons test had been broadcast around the world.
When the Tupolevs’ escort had radioed Major Alekseyev that they had been ordered to return to base, he had not been overly concerned. He knew the 3rd Air and Air Defense Forces Command had achieved total air superiority over the Operations Area since the early days of the conflict, when several older Tu-160M2 bombers had been lost in the successful attack on Elmendorf-Richardson and Eielson air bases. The men of the 21st Guards had drunk many a toast to the memories of those brave men.
Alekseyev was entirely focused on the small box mounted on his dashboard, right at eye level, that would light up with the go codes if his mission was authorized. He had a wingman with him for redundancy, but there had been no threat to their mission and he didn’t expect one now.
“Captain, news outlets are reporting that the Americans have detonated their nuclear weapon!” his systems officer reported.
“Very well. Be alert.”
He heard a tone in his ears, and then saw six red figures appear on the box in front of him. He turned to his co-pilot, “Authenticate please Lieutenant. One nine five four three alpha alpha.”
His co-pilot tapped an icon on a tablet and read out the figures there, “Confirming. One nine five four three alpha alpha.”
“Turning to heading zero nine seven. Weapons, you are clear to engage the target with a single 3M22 missile,” Alekseyev said.
“Yes sir. Clear to fire Tsirkon missile.”
The Tupolev’s weapons bay doors opened and the rotary launcher lowered into the slipstream.
Alekseyev compensated for the drag by lifting the nose a little.
“Launcher down and locked. Missile system check complete…” his weapons officer intoned.
Alekseyev felt as though he should say something a little more momentous, given this was the first time in history Russia would be firing a nuclear weapon outside a test environment.
But the moment passed and anyway, his crew wouldn’t understand what he was talking about.
Until their weapon struck Anchorage in about 13 minutes.
Suddenly an alarm screamed in his ears. “Missile alert!!” his systems officer yelled. “Initiating defensive protocols!”
In an instant, Alekseyev felt the stick of the Tupolev rock to starboard as the defensive combat AI took control of the bomber from him!
“Never seen this before,” Bunny muttered. Her missiles had been tracking faithfully toward the flight of Tupolevs, when the bombers had suddenly broken port and starboard, accelerated dramatically and fired clouds of decoy devices. The decoys spoofed two of her four AMRAAMs, but the other two kept tracking. Until suddenly they went haywire and began spiraling through all points of the compass and lost their targets completely. They self-destructed, but Bunny could see they were nowhere near the bombers. Four shots, four misses. She only had four short range all aspect missiles and guns left.