Beneath the picture of the scantily clad Georgian beauty in the Khabarovsk reading room the standby Klaxon blared. The Siberian pilots, including Sergei Marchenko, looked up at the computer screen and saw a cluster of X’s — enemy fighters and bombers rising up from Wakkanai out of Japan’s northernmost island, Hokkaido, 370 miles east-southeast. Too far for their Fulcrums to intercept and have enough fuel to return safely. The fighters out of Cape Krilon on Sakhalin Island’s southernmost tip would have to engage, but if the enemy got across the Tatarskiy Strait between Sakhalin and the mainland, the Khabarovsk wing would have to go up.
“We should have hit Japan with H-bombs on day one,” Marchenko’s wingman said. He knew he was talking rubbish — any nuclear exchange would be suicidal — the irony being that both sides had to fight the biggest conventional war in history. But the wingman was afraid. The American air force, though it could never win the war by itself against an enormous power like Siberia, over ten times the size of Iraq, had nevertheless already penetrated Siberia’s outer, Kuril/Sakhalin defenses. The best Siberia could hope for in the air was to slow them down, knowing that the truly decisive battles would be on the ground-across the vastness of Siberian mountains, taiga, and tundra.
There was another alarm: more American planes rising from a carrier 130 miles east of the Far Eastern TVD’s port of Nakhodka, just over fifty miles due east of Vladivostok. An air corridor fives miles wide and a hundred miles long from Svetlaya on the coast westward toward Khabarovsk was being blasted out by the largest air bombardment since the Iraqi war, the number of sorties in the first twelve hours — launched from air bases from Otaru to Wakkanai on Japan’s Hokkaido — surpassing by 508 the 2,000 flown by the USAF in the first twenty-four hours of the Iraqi war. The fighter-protected American bombers were dropping everything from Smart bombs on the reinforced early-warning coastal radar stations to FAEs and in particular runway-destroying cluster bombs.