At first it was conceived as a missile launch platform with ground to air ordnance concealed under the large radome and an autonomous anti-shipping missile system hidden in the cavern, covering the eastern approaches to the Strait. Navy solved the question of how the island would be covertly supplied, by dredging the floor of the sea cave, widening it, and putting in a submarine dock.
But it was with the widespread adoption of unmanned aircraft that Little Diomede came into its own. Plans were soon laid to base 30 aircraft under the Rock, a mixture of reconnaissance Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs), commonly known as drones. Little Diomede wasn’t intended to be a manned military base. It was to be a ‘second strike’ facility. In the case of full-scale nuclear war, or even a major regional conventional war, it would wait out the first strike, or first wave of attacks and then strike back, its thirty fully autonomous attack aircraft in range of all major Russian military and civilian targets in the Russian Far East and unlike ICBM silos, able to carry out multiple strikes thanks to automated landing, recycling and relaunch capabilities. The only personnel who would remain on the base when it was operational would be a handful of service technicians, staying topside in the radar facility during peacetime and deploying under The Rock in time of war.
Except the whole automated landing, recycling and relaunch concept was still just that, a concept.
The challenge the Navy threw at the planners for Little Diomede was seen as impossible at first. New aircraft variants had to be developed and systems just didn’t exist that would allow drones to be landed, refueled, rearmed and relaunched without human assistance. The first phase of the project, before they did a full build-out of the base, was to prove that it was even viable to stage drones out of The Rock. And that meant that during the pilot phase, they needed humans to launch, land and recover the machines. Navy had done as much as it could ashore in Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) test facilities to automate the loading of fuel and ordnance and transport of the drones from hangars to launch ramps but the litmus test was whether those systems would function at all in extreme environments like the Bering Strait.
The Rock was essentially supposed to operate as a concealed aircraft carrier, but where an aircraft carrier had hundreds of personnel dedicated to aircraft operations, the cavern under Little Diomede could take no more than fifty. It wasn’t that the enlarged cavern wasn’t huge, but once you took out the existing dock infrastructure, added hangar space for thirty drones, storage for parts and fuel and the machinery needed for getting the aircraft airborne and recovering them after a water landing, there wasn’t much left over for all the humanity needed to service the robots. Everything that could be automated was. They could draw a lot on the systems that had been developed for the latest generation of supercarriers, but tailor-made kludges were needed for multiple systems.
So where on an aircraft carrier you had separate teams for aviation fuel, plane handling, aircraft maintenance and ordnance just to name a few, under the rock all those functions had been boiled down to Air Boss Alicia Rodriguez and her small team. They were no ordinary assemblage of personnel. She’d had to put together a tailor-made team of launch/recovery specialists, air traffic controllers, machinist and electrician mates, plane captains for aircraft maintenance, aerographers for weather forecasting and ordnancemen to fit the weapons into the auto-load magazines. They’d pulled Rodriguez off the USS Trump, where at 26 she’d been one of the Navy’s youngest ever ‘mini-bosses’ or Assistant Air Commanders, and told her she could have her pick of personnel from any vessel she named. She’d drawn up a shortlist of personnel who had served in at least two functions aboard a carrier, preferably three. They’d given her 20 bodies, and she’d argued for 30, ending with 24. She split them into two shifts, and all of them had to understudy a different function so they could back each other up. She didn’t have enough people for redundancies.
The drones that Rodriguez and her crew were put on the island for service had been designed for carrier ops and didn’t need a long runway; they were built to be launched from a catapult and needed significant modifications so that they could fly right into the mouth of the cave and drop down onto the water to be retrieved with a crane and sling. Rodriguez had heard it had taken Northrop Grumman Boeing two years to work out how to fit retractable skis to their machines instead of wheels, and another two years to work out how to avoid them sucking seawater into their air intakes every time they splashed down.
Fuel for the drones wasn’t an issue, because a purification and catalyzation unit was installed that could supply 200 liters of liquid hydrogen and 400 liters of potable water an hour. A repurposed S8G nuclear power plant from a decommissioned Ohio class submarine provided power to the entire base.
Being as it didn’t officially exist, the drone wing under Little Diomede didn’t have a typical Navy designation; in organization charts it was buried deep under Naval Network Warfare Command and was simply known as ‘Auxiliary Unit 4 of Naval Computer and Telecommunications Area Master Station, Alaska’ or NCTAMS-A4, but to the aircrew and officers based there, Little Diomede airbase was just ‘the Rock’.
Rodriguez had been an aviator, most recently a ‘shooter’ or launch catapult officer before she’d been promoted to Mini-Boss, but in the role of Air Boss under Little Diomede, she doubled as squadron CO. Normally she would have had to ‘fleet up’ through a squadron department head role, then XO, before being assigned a squadron command, but things under the Rock were far from normal.
Besides which, there was only one pilot on Little Diomede right now and none of the aircraft had yet been certified for operations. So her only pilot was going stir crazy waiting to get one of the machines onto the Cat and into the air so she could fly it back in through that cave mouth and try her skill at ‘threading the needle’ as she called it. A drone pilot could theoretically fly their aircraft from anywhere in the world with a fast satellite link, but with NCTAMS-A4 they were trying new tactics with line of sight comms and that meant a pilot co-located with her fighters, at least in the test and certification phase.
The lone pilot’s name was Lieutenant Karen ‘Bunny’ O’Hare and Rodriguez had not had a part in choosing her. For a start, the woman wasn’t even American. She was Australian, and had come across from the DARPA Joint Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle program where she had been the lead pilot testing and perfecting the water landing capabilities of the Northrop Grumman Boeing F-47 Fantom fighter. On paper, it made perfect sense that the pilot who had led the testing of the seaplane version of the F-47 would also lead the establishment of the unit for which they were designed, but Rodriguez soon learned there was more to Bunny O’Hare than appeared on paper.
She had cut her teeth on F-35s in the Royal Australian Air Force before an ‘attitude problem’ got her assigned to an Australian coalition unit trialing drone modded F-22s in the Turkey-Syrian conflict and she found herself sitting in a trailer ‘flying’ via virtual-reality goggles, rather than in a cockpit. But she acquitted herself so well as a drone pilot that she came to the attention of recruiters at DARPA and was headhunted into their dedicated J-UCAV program, which had delivered a new weapons platform to specification, but now needed a new breed of pilot to fly it. DARPA was looking for pilots whose flying and social skills were less important than a talent for continuous partial attention and an ability to contribute to AI coding and development. For the first time in her life, Bunny’s attention deficit disorder was actually an asset.