The old man had seen the worried look on his grandson’s face and had pulled him over to the table as he sat there. “There will be war now, Yevgeny,” his grandfather had said. “Not like you have seen before. I will be called away, and you will…” he had patted his shoulder, “You will do your duty too.”
His grandfather had been right. Following the Syrian civil war Turkey had refused to yield Syrian Kurdish territories it had overrun, ironically with Russian military support, and after several years of cross-border skirmishes, Syria and Russia had declared war on Turkey. Attacking that country from the south in Syria, from the Black Sea, and from airfields in the Caucasus, Russia’s action served several goals. To show the West that it was once again a military power to be reckoned with, and to show its allies or those in its shadow that they would need to choose sides for the second part of the 21st Century, as divided loyalties were no longer an option. And, Bondarev realized now, to test the resolve of the United States when it came to meeting its many treaty obligations.
Russia had achieved all of those objectives and more. Turkey alone was never going to be a match for the Russian Navy, Air Force or special forces troops. And Turkey was very quickly left alone to deal with Russia. After years of antagonizing its European neighbors and throwing their overtures of friendship back in their faces, it had metaphorically burned all bridges across the Bosporus leading to Europe. Neither could it rely on US support, having been unilaterally expelled from NATO by the US after continued aggression against US Kurdish allies. Turkey quickly found that its own push toward independence from Europe and the West, and embrace of Islam, made it very vulnerable. Cut off from Europe, faced with an angry Russia bearing down on it, it cried for help and found itself in an echo chamber.
But Turkey was no military lightweight and Russian overconfidence had seen early victories in Syria and Turkey met with some unfortunate reverses: a war that planners had foreseen might take one year to 18 months before Turkey was forced to capitulate, was still raging two years later. While the fabled Blue Mosque in Istanbul was shown on Russian television still standing, as proof of both the discipline of Russian forces and the precision of its missiles and bombs, it stood almost as the only surviving building amongst the rubble of Istanbul.
By the second year of the conflict, the young Yevgeny Bondarev had earned his fighter wings. Bondarev’s first combat mission had been in the skies over Istanbul, as he followed his flight in for a strike on anti-aircraft positions along the river dividing the city between Asia and Europe. They had blasted in at sea level, popped up over the first ruined bridge at Besiktas, and loosed their anti-radiation missiles at the targets that had been identified by high flying Airborne Control aircraft and drones. Yevgeny had not seen the missiles strike. His flight had headed for the nap of the earth again as soon as their missiles were away and were headed back to Sevastopol by the time they detonated. Russia had no need, nor appetite, for losing valuable pilots over enemy territory.
It was also the first time Bondarev had seen Okhotnik drones in action. As he had followed his flight leader away from the release point, he had seen a flight of nine Okhotniks, like small triangular darts, sweep in from his nine o’clock high to deal with the inadequate Turkish air force response to their attack. Turkish air defense satellites and radar had identified Bondarev’s flight as it had popped up, and two outdated but well-armed F-18 Superhornets had been directed to pursue Bondarev’s flight. He was picking up their search radars as they tried to get a lock on the fleeing Russian flight and watched as the Okhotniks flashed past his wing, loosed two AMRAAMs each at the Turkish jets and then immediately transitioned into an impossible full thrust vertical climb that would have turned a human pilot’s brain to mush. Within seconds the entire flight of Okhotniks was gone, surfing the stratosphere and no doubt looking for new targets even as their missiles swiped the Turkish Superhornets from the sky.
Bondarev saw the kills confirmed on one of the screens in his Su-57, and heard a grunt from his flight leader. “This isn’t war,” the man said. “It’s a video game and other side is still in the Nintendo age.”
“That silicon can sure as hell fly and shoot though sir,” Bondarev said.
“You looking for a transfer Bondarev? Your idea of war is sitting on your ass in a trailer in Georgia looking at a video screen, where the worst thing that can happen is spilling your coffee if you get a woody?”
Bondarev had instinctively run his eyes from controls to instruments, across his wing, the sky-high and low around him and then back to his controls. A hill was rushing toward them and as one, the flight rose and then fell to avoid it. He checked the position of his wingman and felt the machine respond as he pulled back gently on his stick, felt the pressure of his seat against his back as he slid back into formation, the hill receding quickly behind him.
“Not likely sir,” he’d said.
But with a fabled name like Bondarev he wasn’t going to be allowed to live out his days as a simple pilot. And despite their technological superiority, Russian losses were mounting as the second year dragged into a third, and then a fourth. A quick campaign had turned into a problematic, drawn-out intervention and occupation facing an asymmetric enemy, with Turkish forces maintaining control of vital oil reserves and a newly guilt-ridden Europe coming in late with material support; if not with troops, then at least with weapons systems. With two air and 15 ground kills against his name Bondarev had been given a Nesterov Air Medal, promotion to Captain and command of his own Su-57 flight of six fighters.
He wasn’t ready for command, but he had learned quickly and the first thing he had learned was to build alliances with the right people, like the then Lieutenant Arsharvin of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence arm. Arsharvin had been head of a combat intelligence unit, but to Bondarev, his greatest value wasn’t intelligence about the Turkish enemy. It was his network within the Russian air force, the Voyenno-Vozdushnye Sily Rossii or VVS, which had meant there wasn’t a single political maneuver Bondarev wasn’t forewarned about. When Arsharvin had learned about a near insurrection about to erupt in 6983rd’s 8th Air Regiment, Arsharvin had handed the names of the plotters to Bondarev, and he had taken them to Lukin personally, afraid of trusting the information to anyone else. When the recriminations died down, Lukin had demoted the commander of the 8th, and put Bondarev in charge of the unit’s 12 fourth generation Su-34s. It was an inglorious command, with none of the glamour of one of the new Okhotnik regiments, but it was based in Khabarovsk with high visibility. He leveraged his time there to eventually achieve command of the 5th Air Regiment, an elite unit composed of the latest Su-57 and Mig-41 fighters. From there it was just a matter of not screwing up, and he was handed command of the 6983rd Air Brigade: nine regiments, 200 fighters or attack aircraft, 100 rotary winged attack and support aircraft.
After the heat and dust of Syria, the move to the 6983rd’s base in the Russian Far East had been welcome. Bondarev was no stranger to snow and ice. Loved, in fact, the biting cold of a cloudless night, salt tears in his eyes, lips numb. His mother, dead five years now, had taught him there was no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.