So he put his phone away, bit his lip and stayed glued to the saddle of his ATV. But he turned it on again, kept the engine running. He wasn’t sure why, it just seemed the smart thing to do.
As the fat black insect shapes converged on the airstrip Perri suddenly realized what he was looking at. Just six months ago, one of the men from the village had got into trouble in the seas northwest of Saint Lawrence when his outboard gave up on him. He’d drifted toward the Russian coast and been spotted by a freighter headed south. The ship hadn’t stopped, but the crew had radioed the Russian Coast Guard to report the Yup’ik fishing boat as a shipping hazard. The man had been plucked from his boat and dropped back on Saint Lawrence by a huge Russian Mi-26 T2V heavy chopper. The whole of Gambell had gone down to look the chopper over, and Russian media had made a huge deal about it on the internet, telling how they had rescued an American citizen because his own Coast Guard hadn’t responded to his call for help. A call he hadn’t actually made of course, but that wasn’t the point.
So Perri pretty quickly worked out the bug-like shapes of the choppers now flaring over the runway a hundred yards away were Russian Mi-26s. And he was old enough and quick enough to realize that was Not A Normal Thing. Before the first machine had settled on its wheels and the rear cargo bay doors began opening, Perri had opened the throttle on his ATV and was racing back down the runway toward Gambell!
Out of the corner of his eye he saw men dressed in white and brown camouflage suits come tumbling out of the door of the chopper and fan out before throwing themselves down on the ground, facing out. More men jumped out behind them. Perri cursed. He was still halfway along the spit, because the Amazon drones usually put down midway along the runway. He had his throttle turned all the way back, but the old ATV couldn’t do more than 40 mph, and that was with a good tailwind.
If there was any warning shouted, he couldn’t hear it above the clatter of helicopter rotors and whine of his engine, but there was no mistaking the crack of a heavy rifle and the sideways shove he felt as the round from a Spetsnaz AMR 12.7mm rifle slammed into the rear of his ATV and his engine shat itself. He felt the bike and sled scissoring dangerously, and turned into the skid, trying desperately to avoid flipping over, but even as he tried he could sense the ATV begin to tilt and realized with a lurching stomach it was going over. He launched himself into the air so that he didn’t get two hundred pounds of rolling metal and plastic landing on top of him, hit the dirt beside the runway in a welter of gravel and rolled with his hands over his head. The ATV flipped twice and stopped, the sled behind it cartwheeling free and flying over Perri’s body to land on the other side of him with a scraping crunch. His first thought as he looked at the wrecked ATV was that he was so, so, busted. Then he saw Russian troops up and running along the runway toward him and realized that was the least of his worries. They had shot at him!
The Russian soldiers were still a hundred yards away, and he saw one of them waving at him to lie down. Or that’s what it seemed like. They all had guns, and at least two were down on one knee with rifles pointed at him, with another laying on his stomach, feet spread wide, a huge long-barreled rifle on a tripod pointed right at him.
Forget this, Perri thought. He scrambled to the sled and threw himself over it, putting it between himself and the Russian troops. The sled was on its back, so he quickly felt underneath it for the rifle wrapped in a sealskin blanket that had been tied to the grill at the back. Thank god, it was still there! He took a quick look over the sled, and saw the nearest soldier was fifty yards away now, and sprinting hard.
The guy had his rifle in his hands, but it was on a strap across his chest, not pointed at Perri.
Perri looked desperately down the runway. It was a hundred yards more of open ground. He knew he wouldn’t make it twenty yards before he was crash tackled, or worse, got himself shot. Looking behind him, Perri saw that the crash of the ATV had thrown him across the ground beside the runway toward the rocks lining the spit. On the other side of them was the bay, and on the other side of that, Gambell township. Perri put a loop of the rope tied around the rifle around his neck.
His thick fur-lined jacket was shredded, but it had probably saved him from getting his hide scraped off in the crash. It hung in tatters from one shoulder, so he pulled it off. Without hesitating another second, he rose into a crouch and then sprinted for the sea. He ignored the shouting behind him, shoulders hunched, expecting to feel a bullet slam into his back any second, as he jumped from the shore onto one rock, then another, hopping like a demented Arctic fox and then threw himself into the waters of the bay.
Private Zubkhov of the 14th Special Purpose Brigade, 282nd Squadron, covered his comrades with the anti-material rifle until they gave up chasing the man who jumped into the bay. He had been the one who had fired the shots that had brought the guy down. When it was clear there was no other target, he ran over to where the man jumped into the water, and resting his barrel on one of the rocks the man had used to make his escape he sighted down at the figure splashing through the water. The man was a strong swimmer, but he hadn’t made it across the bay yet. It was an easy shot.
A hand pushed up the barrel of his rifle, and he lifted his face away from the sights, to see his commanding officer, Captain Demchenko, standing beside him, also watching the man swim away.
“Let him go, private,” the officer said. “Minimal casualties, either military or civilian, remember?”
“Yes sir,” Zubkhov replied, folding up the bipod on his barrel and slinging the rifle across his back. He watched the man slice through the water. Shame. Zubkhov looked back at the runway. He saw the other men of his unit doubling down the runway in the direction of the road to the village. They had estimated it would take fifteen minutes to reach by foot.
“Permission to re-join the squadron sir?” Zubkhov asked.
“You won’t catch them,” Demchenko said. He looked back at the ATV. “You made that mess, you can clean it up. Pull that wreck further away from the runway and check the compartment under the seat for anything useful. Papers, maps, whatever you can find.”
Zubkhov looked ruefully at the backs of his comrades as they reached the road at the bottom of the runway and wound around to their right and out of sight. “Yes sir,” he said, disappointed to already be out of the fight. Such as it was.
“When you’re finished you can make yourself useful unloading the choppers,” his Captain said, adding insult to injury. He saw the private’s face fall, and clapped him on the shoulder. “Cheer up man. That was a nice takedown you made there. If it makes you feel better, I suspect it was the only shot this whole squadron will fire today,” he said.
Bondarev joined his second section at 50,000 feet over Eastern Saint Lawrence and they fell into formation briefly behind him, while he reviewed their dispositions and then ordered three of the six Su-57s to set up a combat air patrol to the northeast while he took the southeast, the most likely direction from which enemy fighters would approach. He expected a probing reaction from the Americans at first, giving him time to scale his response.
The leader of his second flight was a combat veteran, but his other pilots were not battle tested, whereas all three men in Bondarev’s flight were veterans of Syria, men who had flown with him for years. He set up a combat air patrol that gave them control of a two hundred mile bubble of airspace, and then contacted the Beriev A-50W early warning aircraft that was coordinating the airspace over Saint Lawrence. Its Active Phased Array Radar (APAR) could detect airborne targets out to 600km and warships out to 400. Although Russia bragged the A-50W was capable of detecting stealth fighters, Bondarev knew from experience that at best it could give a general vector, not a precise lock. The A-50W was supplemented by ground-based long-range radar and saturation satellite coverage as well though, so Bondarev was not worried they would get jumped without warning.