Bondarev had a further 78 ground attack aircraft in the 3rd, 7th and 8th Aviation Regiments, but these were 4th generation Su-34s, lacking in any stealth capability.
His primary air defense units were the aircraft of the 4th and 5th Aviation Regiments, comprising 30 Su-57s and 32 of the newer Mig-41 air superiority fighters respectively, and he had just given orders to move these to the new 8th Regiment base at Lavrentiya, from where they could cover all of Western Alaska as needed. The remaining unit was the 6th Air Regiment strategic airlift squadron comprising 12 An-124 transport aircraft and four Beriev Airborne Control aircraft.
The reality was that his 6983rd Air Brigade was designed to fight and support a ground defense of Russia in a time before the current détente with China, and not an operation like LOSOS which would require him primarily to fight his enemy air-to-air. For that, he had only 62 Sukhois and Migs, and could press his Okhotniks into an air-air role if needed, but their weapon bays were optimized for air-to-ground ordnance; they could carry only four air-to-air missiles to the piloted fighters’ six.
There was another problem.
While his personal battalion of 48 Okhotniks was nominally at full strength, the Russian drones required two men to fly each. Unlike the US drones, several subordinate drones could not be slaved to a master drone flown by a single pilot. Each Okhotnik required one pilot and a weapons and systems officer, flying them from ground-based stations. Unlike the weaker command and control system of the US drones, which was over-reliant on vulnerable satellite communications for command inputs, the Russian drones were highly mobile — they could fly off almost any strip of dirt and be transported easily by train or truck — and they used encrypted digital shortwave for communications. His men and aircraft could be dispersed across hundreds of kilometers of front, and yet still be coordinated as a single attacking unit. It was a difference in strategy that had proven itself in combat on multiple occasions — it was easy for Russian forces to find and disable enemy airfields or depots, but almost impossible for their enemy to do the same, so widely dispersed were the Russian pilots and their drones.
If he had the pilots and weapons officers he needed, that is. The 6983rd Hunter Regiment was still in a build-up phase. Its aircraft were all on line, but only 80 percent of its aircrew were. He could use almost any pilot certified for one of the Russian fighter marques, but the weapons and systems used by the new drones were not widely used and the all aspect air-to-air missile system in particular was barely more than a prototype, its rotary launch system jamming if deployed at high speeds or high Gs. Too few systems officers had been certified to operate the Okhotnik and training was taking far too long. Too long by peacetime standards, impossibly long if they were going to war. Bondarev had only 38 crewed drones ready for what was to come.
It was why he had asked Lukin if he could call on the resources of Central Command, which he knew numbered at least 80 fighter aircraft, both Su-57s and Mig-41s. As importantly, he wanted access to its 6980th Air Regiment Okhotnik crews.
Bondarev was a realist, not an optimist, and that had served him well in his career so far. He would always try to under-promise and over-deliver, ensuring he had more than enough assets at hand for the task he was given. Right now, yes, he had the assets he needed to secure the airspace over Saint Lawrence for a few days. But to achieve air superiority over Western Alaska, if that was the long game? That, he did not.
That thought led him to speculate on the long game; occupying Western Alaska. He could see why Nome was the key, and the strategy for taking Nome included denying the small airfield at Saint Lawrence to the Americans. Built to service the US communications base at Savoonga, it was capable of landing both fighters and heavy aircraft and one to two squadrons could easily stage out of there. Denying it to the Americans meant they would need to fly out of their Eielson or Elmendorf-Richardson air bases, each 600 miles from Nome. And if the ultimate plan was to knock out Eielson and Elmendorf-Richardson, which is what Bondarev would do, then the US fighters would be forced back to mainland USA, with their nearest air force bases 1,800 miles from Nome in Washington State, making it almost impossible for them to contest the airspace over Western Alaska against Russian forces which were flying less than a couple of hundred miles to cover the same operations area.
The US might react angrily to events on Saint Lawrence, and Bondarev expected to lose good men as it lashed out. But when Russia moved against Alaska, personally he had no doubt the American Grizzly would wake from its recent hibernation and strike back with nuclear claws.
His hand jerked and he nearly dropped the tablet. He closed it down and laid it back down on the bedside table. Sleep. He should sleep while he could.
There would be no time for sleep a few days from now.
THIS IS YOUR WAKEUP CALL
On the deck of a carrier, everyone knew their place, and aircraft were launched amid the roar of jet engines in an elaborate dance of colored shirts, hand-arm gestures and precision movements. Under the Rock, they relied on tightly choreographed commands over their headsets.
Rodriguez stood in the trailer, looking down on the flight deck at her crew crouched around the Fantom.
“Flaps, slats, panels, pins!” she intoned.
The reply from the deck came immediately, “Green.”
“Man out.” Referring to the hook up petty officer who attached the drone launch bar to the catapult shuttle.
“Man out aye.”
“Visual.”
“Thumbs up.” A last check to be sure there were no leaks of fuel or hydraulic fluid. Her shooter turned, held his hand in the air, thumb up.
“Cat scan.” Asking her shooter to make a last visual check of the catapult. No foreign objects, foreign object damage or people where they shouldn’t be.
The cavern filled now with the roar of the Fantom’s twin jet engines.
“Cat clear!”
“Cat to 520 psi.”
“520 aye.”
“Pilot, go burner.”
“Lighting burner, aye,” Bunny replied, spooling up the Fantom’s jet engine and lighting the afterburner.
“Launch launch launch.”
Rodriguez watched with satisfaction as the big aircraft shot along the deck and down the rails, flung through the chute like a rock from a slingshot. She had started her career as a shooter on huge, roaring steam-powered catapults, crouched on the flat top, ducking under the wings of aircraft blasting along the deck. The electro-magnetic Cat system had had a troubled birth, and had nearly been scrapped. But it was one thing to fire a steam catapult on an open deck in a windswept sea. In the confines of the cave under Little Diomede, it would never have worked. They would have had to find a way to capture the steam or vent it out over the sea without it being visible for miles in the Arctic air. The hugely powerful magnetos driving a Cat didn’t need a steam compressor, but they did suck a ton of juice. On a US carrier that power came from the ship’s own nuclear power plant, and nothing less was capable of pushing out the wattage needed. Which was why they had a repurposed Ohio class submarine reactor buried deep under the Pond. Little Diomede was made possible by kludges.