2034: A Novel of the Next World War(52)
For about five stairs.
Then the front of the box caught the sixth stair. It pitched over, violently. Wedge went face-first into the floor. The crash landing split his lip open. He still had the scar, ever so slight, on the inside of his mouth. He ran the tip of his tongue over it now.
“Can I help you, Major?”
Wedge glanced over the side of the cockpit, to find a senior chief with an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth. He introduced himself to the senior chief and explained who he was. As he was the new commanding officer of the Death Rattlers, these were, in fact, his planes, so there was nothing to worry about; he could sit where he wanted.
“Your planes, Major?” said the senior chief, gazing out at the Hornets. The ten aircraft were gathered nearest the elevator that led to the flight deck, in the ready position, and crowding out the dozens of F-35s that had proven useless. The senior chief laughed to himself incredulously as he pulled a ladder up to the side of the cockpit. “Your predecessor thought these were his planes too. Admiral Hunt didn’t much appreciate that.”
Wedge had an in-brief with the admiral scheduled sometime in the next week. At the evocation of her name, he chose to listen a bit more closely to the senior chief, who introduced himself only as “Quint” and who Wedge suspected might possess some shred of wisdom to keep him in the good graces of his boss, or at least from meeting the ignominious fate of his predecessor. Quint then powered on the avionics in the cockpit. Any interface with a computer, a GPS, or that could conceivably be accessed online, Quint had disabled. Munitions would be deployed via manual weapons sights and manual releases. Navigation would be performed off charts, with flight times calculated using a wristwatch, pencil, and calculator. Communications would be handled via a custom-installed suite of VHF, UHF, and HF radios. For Wedge, who already knew that his Hornets had undergone some modifications, the tour Quint gave of their streamlined cockpits both under-and overwhelmed him.
It underwhelmed him because—even though he should’ve known better—he couldn’t believe the bare-bones nature of the onboard systems. It overwhelmed him because he couldn’t believe that he would have the chance to fly how they used to fly, before pilots became technicians, which was to say on instinct.
Inadvertently, Wedge succumbed to a heedless smile.
“You all right there, Major?” Quint asked.
Wedge turned toward him, the expression still stamped to his face. “Fine, senior chief. Just fine.” He ran the tip of his tongue on the inside of his lip, tracing the outline of his boyhood scar.
* * *
10:37 July 03, 2034 (GMT+2)
Gdańsk Bay
The destruction of the undersea cables was accepted with equanimity, if not a measure of outright enthusiasm, by Farshad’s old colleagues in the Revolutionary Guard Corps. Major General Mohammad Bagheri, chief of staff of the armed forces, was somewhat more taciturn. A dispatch directly from the general arrived on Farshad’s encrypted laptop within hours. It gave a single instruction: Continue to keep us apprised of all developments. Farshad couldn’t help but wonder what the Russians would come up with next.
The following week, the Rezkiy, Pyotr Velikiy, and Kuznetsov altered their course southward, toward Kaliningrad. Farshad didn’t believe this merited notification of Bagheri’s staff in Tehran. They would, he assumed, be returning to their home port. But when the Kuznetsov held fifteen miles short of Kaliningrad and began preparing for flight operations in Gdańsk Bay, Farshad knew they weren’t returning to port, at least not yet. When the first sorties of Su-34 Sukhoi attack aircraft catapulted off the deck of the Kuznetsov, their wings drooping with munitions, Farshad disappeared into his cramped quarters and quickly fired off another dispatch to his superiors, notifying them of developments but providing no analysis of his own. Farshad knew enough to know that an incorrect analysis of the situation could only be used against him later and that a correct analysis would gain him little. Before he could shut down his laptop, a cursory reply arrived from the General Staff: Acknowledged. Continue to monitor.
Farshad returned to the bridge to find Kolchak in command of the Rezkiy as they circled the Kuznetsov, screening for threats to the much larger carrier, close as they were to the coastline. Farshad could see the shore through his binoculars, a ribbon of dark rocks in the hazy distance. He estimated it was perhaps a dozen miles off. Not even an hour had passed since the first launch of Sukhois and already they’d returned across the coast and were “feet wet,” safely over the water. Farshad observed them through his binoculars: their wings were empty. The Sukhois had dropped their munitions. When the aircraft came a little closer and entered the flight pattern to land on the Kuznetsov, he could make out soot-darkened smudges on the gun ports at either side of the cockpit. The cannons within those gun ports had been firing.
Kolchak saw it too. With his binoculars raised he watched the Sukhois as they landed. “Looks like they got in pretty close,” he said, and then called out a new heading and speed to the helmsman before smiling triumphantly at Farshad, who struggled to know how he should react to his ally’s apparent victory, given that his Russian counterparts had not as of yet taken him into their confidence as to their mission.
As the first sorties landed, refueled, and rearmed, all within sight of the Rezkiy, Kolchak explained to Farshad that aircraft from the Kuznetsov were flying close air support for an invasion force that, at this very moment, was “reclaiming ancestral territories that connect the Rodina to its northern ports on the Baltic Sea.” That these ancestral territories were part of present-day Poland mattered little. Weeks before in the wardroom, Kolchak had foreshadowed Russia’s interests in seizing a ribbon of land that would connect its mainland to its Baltic port at Kaliningrad. While the world’s attention was diverted to the Far East, they would use that crisis to their benefit. “Who will object?” Kolchak now asked Farshad rhetorically. “Not the Americans. They’re hardly in a position to lecture us on ‘sovereignty’ and ‘human rights,’ particularly not after Zhanjiang. As for the Chinese, they understand our actions intuitively. In their language the word for crisis and opportunity are one and the same. Look at the map.” Kolchak fingered it while his cigarette smoldered between his knuckles. “We carve this slice from Poland and connect it to us through Belorussia. The Poles will complain, but they won’t really miss it. And it sews up a tidy ribbon around Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia. They, too, will soon return home to the Rodina.”