Arsharvin’s office was actually two rooms joined by a door. Bondarev walked in on a scene that looked like the one he had just left; tired men poring over maps and screens. It also looked like he had walked in on an argument, but they jumped to attention when they saw him.
“At ease,” Bondarev sighed and pointed at the door to the inner office. “The boss in there?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but walked over and tapped on the door with the neck of the Scotch bottle he was carrying.
“Come in!” Arsharvin boomed, and Bondarev pushed the door open to find his friend leaning back in his chair, boots up on his desk, staring at the ceiling with a telephone to his ear. He grimaced at Bondarev and pointed at a chair, then a tray with empty glasses, holding up a finger to show his call was nearly finished.
Bondarev unscrewed the cap of the bottle and poured a generous measure into each glass as Arsharvin put his phone down. He got up, closed the door and then took the bottle Bondarev was holding, nodding appreciatively, “Macallan 25?”
“Might as well enjoy it while we can still get it,” Bondarev said.
“It will be worth twice as much on the black market a week from now,” Arsharvin pointed out to him. “After the US slaps on sanctions.”
“Yeah, but what good is a full bottle of whiskey to a dead man?” Bondarev said, slumping into a chair. “I have a bad feeling about this.”
Arsharvin parked his backside on his desk. He was tall, still annoyingly fit, with broad shoulders and a square jaw; he even had a dueling scar on his left cheek below his eye from his days as an elite fencer. “I won’t lie,” he said. “You could be on the front line of World War Three in a week’s time and we could all be dead in two.”
“Cheers then,” Bondarev said dryly, throwing down his scotch and letting the taste dwell in his mouth before he poured another. “What the hell Tomas?” Bondarev asked. “The polar shipping route is so important we’re willing to risk nuclear annihilation for it?”
Arsharvin leaned in, so that he couldn’t be heard in the office outside, “This isn’t just about Saint Lawrence Island Yevgeny.”
“I knew it.”
“We are going to annex the Bering land bridge.”
“The what?” Bondarev frowned.
“Western Alaska. The whole of the Alaskan peninsula from Koyuk and Buckland, west to Nome. Two hundred square kilometers with Saint Lawrence Island in the south, giving us control of the entire Bering Strait.”
“Why in the name of…”
“It’s the new Panama Canal, Yevgeny!” Arsharvin said. “Do you know how many ships took the polar route through the Bering Strait ten years ago? Five hundred. This year so far, that number is five thousand.”
“And so? We are already building up Anadyr, Lavrentiya. We have the biggest ports in the whole North Pacific. What more do we win by militarizing the seaway?”
Arsharvin drew two lines in whiskey on the table, then a single line across the middle like he was cutting a throat. “If we controlled the entire Strait and charged a toll at the same rate as they do down in Panama, the tolls alone would be worth a billion dollars a year.”
“That is pennies,” Bondarev scoffed. “It would cost us that much to keep it free of ice, blockade and police it.”
“Pennies now,” Arsharvin tapped his nose, “With five thousand ships moving through. But when it is fifteen thousand, twenty thousand ships? Would you scoff at three billion dollars? Five billion? Control the Strait and you control the polar route. It’s not just the money, it's trading leverage, geopolitical leverage…”
“World war…” Bondarev added. “Nuclear Armageddon.”
“Anadyr is already three times the size of Nome, Lavrentiya twice the size, not just in population, but economically. The population of Nome is falling! We are investing in the North Pacific; the US is sleeping. Did you know they no longer have a single icebreaker of their own? The US Coast Guard rents Russian or Canadian ships to keep its sea lanes open! They have ignored development in Alaska for half a century, they have ignored Alaska’s defenses, there has never been a better time for us to move!” Arsharvin grinned and raised his glass in a toast, “To the new Russian Panama.”
Bondarev finished off the last drops in his glass and then reached forward tiredly. He poured a final shot for himself and his friend. “I salute your patriotism, but I don’t share your conviction. America will not just sit still and let us create a new Panama Canal controlled by Russia. And our leaders in Moscow are not fools, they know this. You must have your orders but you are not telling me the whole story Comrade Arsharvin.”
Back at his quarters an hour later Bondarev lay in his bed, still wide awake. Were they insane? No matter how weak the backbone of the Americans when it came to intervening in other people’s wars, they would nuke Moscow to glowing green slag before they would let Russia walk into Alaska. The thought convinced Bondarev this was about more than polar trade routes. Seizing Nome was the act of a desperate State that had decided it had nothing to lose.
There was a chance, just a small one, that the Russian action would be so swift, so unexpected, that the US would have no time to react. Arsharvin had revealed the broad strategic strokes to him. First, they would take Saint Lawrence, which would send the US politicians into apoplectic fits. They would mobilize their reserves, of that there was no doubt. But the bulk of their expeditionary armed forces were engaged in the Middle East and Asia — so the reserves they could call on at short notice were less effectual national guard units with older equipment. If the American politicians bought the cover story of a crisis over international shipping rights, they would spend most of their energy on pointless diplomacy. By the time they realized they were dealing with an invasion, Saint Lawrence would be in Russian hands.
Alaska was a barely populated State, with a token military presence. The Russian plan relied on surprise. Using the emergency in the Bering Strait to justify pre-positioning forces and raising its alert level, Russian troops would in short order leapfrog from Saint Lawrence to neutralize US military installations in Alaska and secure the westernmost city in the USA, Nome. The critical point, the one on which the plan would stand or fall, was the ability of Russian air and sea transport to land sufficient ground troops in Western Alaska to enable them to control events on the ground.
Moscow would not threaten the major Alaskan population centers of Juneau, Fairbanks or Anchorage, it would not use nuclear weapons and it was banking on the weak, indecisive US leadership to blink before resorting to its own nuclear arsenal, both out of moral weakness, but also out of the fear it would be killing its own citizens.
Within a week, perhaps two, Russia would have secured Nome and the Bering peninsula and would be negotiating a cease-fire.
Bondarev cursed, switched on his bedside lamp, and sat up. He pulled his tablet over and turned it on, calling up the latest report on the disposition of his 6983rd Air Brigade. On a screen in Moscow, it no doubt looked formidable — under President Navalny the Russian military was as strong on paper as it had been at any time since the cold war. The report in front of him told a slightly different story.
His command comprised several regiments, but one was a rotary winged command transport unit, and another was a strategic bomber ‘graveyard’; a parking lot for obsolete Tu-22m Backfire bombers.
Of the other six, one was a regiment of 48 Sukhoi Okhotnik drones attached to his personal command based at Kurba. The Okhotnik or ‘Hunter’ was a stealth drone based on the same platform as the piloted Su-57 but with an avionics suite optimized for ground attack. In that role it was designed to be operated by ‘near-line-of sight’ communications, in which radio signals from a ground station were relayed to the drones via an orbiting Airborne Warning and Control System, or airborne control aircraft. Only in the case of loss of the airborne control link would an Okhotnik fall back on slower satellite links. It meant they had an operational radius of only 600 miles from their base, but it also meant their pilots could control them manually with almost no input lag. Theoretically the drones could be used in air-air combat, or beyond a range of 600 miles if executing an autonomous AI directed attack, but these applications fell outside Russian drone doctrine orthodoxy. The Okhotnik was a close air support platform, and close meant close.