Chapter I- Origins
A/N: A few notes I thought I'd add. The Admiral Yuri Borodin is a fictional Admiral Kuznetsov-class aircraft carrier, a Chief Starshina is equivalent to a Master Chief Petty Officer, and a Midshipman in this case is equivalent to an Ensign. Krov, Moya Krov means "Blood, My Blood" in Russian.
It was mid August, and not far away in the continental United States, many thousands of Americans were enjoying the gradual end of a hot summer, the days now subsiding to a more pleasant warm. Schoolchildren were dreading their inevitable return to school in less than a month, and one school in western Maryland had put on its announcements sign the words RESISTANCE IS FUTILE.
But out on the North Atlantic, the story was very different. The wind whipped across the decks of a fleet of gray warships, and more than once over the past few days freezing rain had indifferently lashed the ships and those crewmen who had to be above-decks. Today, however, the men of the Northern Fleet had been lucky. The storm that they'd passed by the edge of was behind them, and good weather lay ahead. In fact, the morning of August 10th, 2016, the weather was almost perfect. It was still somewhat cloudy, and a gray fog masked the fleet's steady approach. Enormous additions had been made to the Northern Fleet in the past few months; men and officers had worked overtime to accommodate the massive expansion suddenly witnessed by every arm of the Russian military, as reserves were called up and new recruits rapidly trained.
Thanks to the ultimate triumph of the ultranationalists in the late civil war in Russia, military spending had been restored to what it had been in the old Soviet days. In fact, not only that, but the USSR was essentially being brought back in all ways but name. The Russian Federation was no more; instead, it had become the Russian Democratic Union as of a year ago, and Kazakhstan had already knelt again beneath the new banner of red, black and white. Patterned the same way as the old RF flag, the RDU's used new colours that were more clearly reminiscent of the glory of the old Soviet days. Russian aircraft and tanks now carried red stars on their armour with a pride not seen for decades.
Russia had needed someone to make her strong again; gangsters and corrupt capitalist politicians had overrun the Kremlin after the fall of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. The Russian people, despairing in the face of rampant gangsterism and corruption, had cried out for a hero- and Imran Zakhaev had answered. Killed for his fearless devotion to the Russian people- for his selfless vow to avenge the injustices done to them by the West and restore the Motherland's honour- Zakhaev had finally seen recognition for his heroism after the ultranationalists' ultimate victory in the Second Russian Civil War. A monument stood before the Kremlin in Moscow: it showed a life-size Zakhaev riding a rearing horse, holding aloft a bared sword. On the side of the statue's base, a plaque held the words: IMRAN ZAKHAEV, HERO OF THE NEW RUSSIA.
For his part, Andrei Kriegman couldn't understand why the West was so hell-bent on ruining the glory and strength of Russia- and of her highest achievement, the unconquerable might of the worker's nation, the Soviet Union. He'd read the history books, looked over the news articles and political memoirs detailing the American "triumph" in the Cold War, a triumph that had ruined the Russian people completely. It puzzled Andre to no end that the Americans worshipped that one president of theirs- was his name Raygan?- as much as they did. Andrei had pored over books about him- and gotten a hearty laugh when he found an American journalist's 2005 book, a book that tore that actor-turned-President a new one. Ultimately, Andrei seemed to find that the Americans worshipped this man because he had "won the Cold War". By that, they apparently meant "simply got lucky and took credit for the work of every past President since Eisenhower". Yes, that certainly made sense that the Americans would do that. Easier to tell people just enough to make them "good Americans", and no more.
Andrei was a Russian citizen; as a matter of fact, he was a Midshipman in the Russian Navy, selected to fly with the elite 126th Independent Helicopter Squadron- first in the Russian Navy to be given the new Mil Mi-45, the "Super Hind" as the West had taken to calling it. It had been a great honour for Andrei, one he'd been given after graduating 4th in his class at the Moscow Flight School in May 2016. It was an even greater honour when one considered Andrei's German origins.
Vizeadmiral Hendrik Kriegman had been the youngest three-star admiral in the history of the Volksmarine, the navy of the German Democratic Republic- to the West "East Germany". He had dedicated his career- his life- to serving the DDR, to proving that it deserved a respected place not only in the Warsaw Pact as a trusted ally of the USSR, but among the family of nations. He had achieved so much of what he'd set out to do- and then 1990 had happened. The fall of the Berlin Wall had happened.
Suddenly, Vizeadmiral Kriegman had become a desk clerk in the office of a West German admiral two ranks his junior, and even then only tolerated for a few weeks as the Bundesmarine took over the Volksmarine's offices and facilities. There had been no retirement ceremony for any of the Volksmarine's admirals, or for the Nationalvolksarmee's or the Luftstreitkräfte's generals. Instead, these life-long servants of the East German state, fully expecting a well-earned retirement, saw not only their rank but their retirement and even the very nation they'd served vanish overnight. Hendrik Kriegman had given more than thirty years of his life to the East German state, and now it was gone, blown away like smoke in the wind.
"And what have we now in Germany?" Andrei's grandfather had asked him once, bitterly watching a reporter's comments on the "deplorable" state of the former DDR, its infrastructure, industries and economy, on the West German TV and the West German news station it was tuned in to. That had been in 1999; Andrei, barely five years old, hadn't quite understood, but his grandfather went on, "A land of bankers and car-makers. The Army has gone soft; soldiers wear beards and question orders. And us in the East? We're the losers. Everything's our fault."
Taking a drink from the glass of beer clenched firmly in his hand, Hendrik Kriegman had muttered something- he seemed to be drawing a comparison between the people of the East with the "damned Jews", saying the former had essentially replaced the latter as the scapegoats of Germany. Andrei's father- Hans- had ushered Andrei out of the room then, and the two men had had a rather heated discussion afterwards.
But the Kriegman family had plainly been ruined by the DDR's vanishing into the night like it had. Their old tradition of being soldiers and statesmen had been 'tarnished' by their service as East German soldiers and policemen, as well as elected officials- nobody wanted to hire a former Volkspolizei officer, fearing he would fall back on his old training and simply break every protest up with force. Nobody cared if a man had been an admiral in the Volksmarine, or an Oberstgeneral in the Luftstreitkräfte- they were all communists. Dirty, nasty communists. The suddenly negative image of being a "good socialist" broke Hendrik Kriegman's spirit a little more every year, and when he finally passed away in 2000 he'd been a shadow of the powerful man he'd once been. He'd lost his way, and had simply not known how to find it again. Soon after, Andrei had heard his father say, "That's it. We're going to Königsberg."
And so they had.
It was called Kaliningrad since 1945, but some Germans had not quite gotten used to it; even families that had embraced the DDR- like the Kriegman's- had slipped and used the old name once in a while. The Kriegman family had left Andrei's original home of Rostock in 2000, and each year since the family had gone a little more Russian, working hard to learn the ways of their new country.
Surprisingly, Hendrik Kriegman's many old comrades from the navies of the Warsaw Pact had heard of the Kriegman's departure from Germany, and a handful had shown up, paid visits and offered assistance. Tanya Kriegman had been able to reach an old Soviet Navy friend of Hendrik's, who had used his connections with the former KGB to ensure that the Kriegman family was recognized as what they were- Germans, yes, but East Germans. Good socialists like anyone else who had been unfairly treated- a gross understatement- by the excesses of the capitalist West. Life was hard for Andrei growing up; as much as they wanted to help, even Hendrik Kriegman's old friends from the Soviet military had been unable to spare much. The years since the Cold War had been unkind to them, too, and there was little money to go around.
Hans Kriegman had joined the Russian Air Force, and in spite of his German name had managed to make a decent living as a bomber pilot, eventually gaining enough trust within the Air Force to be assigned to a unit flying the Russian Federation's elite strategic bomber, the prop-powered Tupolev Tu-95 "Bear". Taking to his new country with a passion, Hans had seen that his wife and sons- Alexei had been born in 2001, the first Kriegman given a Russian name from birth- learned Russian, followed important development in Russian news and, above all, that his family began to think of Russia as their country. Naturally, when the Second Russian Civil War broke out in 2011, the breaking point of long-building tensions between pro-Soviet and pro-democratic factions within the Russian Federation, Andrei's father had flown for the Ultranationalists, swiftly gaining their trust as he flew over a dozen missions, bombing all manner of government targets in his relentless pursuit of Ultranationalist victory.
Then the war had been over; for a time, it had actually been bafflingly difficult to determine who had won. Then Andrei, an eighteen-year-old Naval Infantryman who had guarded the Mayor of Kaliningrad throughout the war, had been summoned by his father, along with his mother and younger brother, to Moscow- Colonel Hans Kriegman of the Russian Air Force was soon after presented with the decoration Hero of the Russian Federation for his loyal and tireless service throughout the one-year civil war.
The officer presenting the decorations had been the legendary Vice Admiral Alexei Stukov, an iron-tough, hard-line naval officer who had ended up being half the reason the Loyalists had next to no control of the Russian Navy at the end of the war. It wasn't just Admiral Stukov's tactical and strategic brilliance that made the difference, though he had been unmatched by any naval officer belonging to the Loyalists throughout the war. No, it was Stukov's fiery, bigger-than-life personality that made him so feared and respected. Men under Stukov's command would rather die than disappoint him, and there was, throughout the civil war, a growing conviction among the sailors, airmen and marines under Stukov- a conviction that they could not be defeated under his leadership.
The war itself had been a stalemate; in some places the Loyalists had been the victors when the fighting ended, while other regions of the country were solidly held by the Ultranationalists. When the war was declared over, though, and everyone started to calm down and go home, the facts had begun to become clear. Imran Zakhaev had not been some murdering psychopath, a man who had for no reason but spite supplied Wadiyan extremist Al-Asad with the nuclear weapon that Al-Asad himself had used to destroy his country's capital. Nor had Zakhaev been an opportunist in the post-Soviet days, a black-market dealer whose favourite item was nuclear weapons. Andrei, admitted to the Moscow State Aviation Institute through his own back-breaking work in school and in recognition of the patriotism of his father, had told his fellow cadets of this.
He'd even argued with instructors, declaring that if Imran Zakhaev, of all people, had been some post-Soviet-era gangster just like all the rest, then there was little hope for Russia at all. His impassioned arguments won over not only cadets but even instructors, and the Moscow State Aviation Institute had gradually become a place where the Ultranationalists knew they had people they could count on.
Andrei had been one month from graduation when the Zakhaev International Airport Massacre had occurred on April 19, 2016. When the news had come out that the attack had been carried out with American firearms and explosives, and that the dead comrade they left behind had clearly been an American, outraged protests had exploded across the vastness of Russia. Andrei and a few other cadets nearly lost relatives in the attack; Andrei's mother and Alexei, his little brother, had been flying in to join Andrei's father in Moscow so they could be there for Andrei's graduation.
The pilot of the airliner had actually been touching down when the shooting had started, and upon receiving an alert from the control tower, the crew had swiftly gunned the engines and simply taken off again. They'd landed in another of Moscow's airports, a secondary one that many flights were forced to divert to once ZIA was shut down. Andrei was one of the lucky cadets; tense and pale, many cadets who'd had family at Zakhaev International had slept poorly for days until they heard the news. Andrei had been fortunate- his waiting ended with the best possible outcome. His whole family was safe. Not all of his classmates- and not just in the senior class- were as lucky.
Morale and motivation in the RDU's armed forces had gone on a sharp climb after April 19th. The massive buildup and modernization of the Russian military had suddenly paid off. It soon began filtering through the armed forces, and the service schools of the military, that vengeance was coming, and on a massive scale. The West would have a fight of they wanted one. It was a rumor only, but everyone knew it was just a matter of time. When the cadets of the Moscow State Aviation Institute had heard about it, the regimental commander, a personal friend to many in the senior class, had begun banging his glass on the table in the mess hall that evening. The chant was started by him and Andrei- the regimental executive officer- and picked up first by the regimental staff table, then by the rest of the senior class, and finally every cadet in the mess hall. Banging their glasses and stomping their boots, Andrei's class had shouted above all the rest, in one savagely joyful voice: "We're going to war! We're going to war! We're going to war!"
In response, the Colonel-General in charge of the Institute had solemnly stood, raising his glass to the cadets in salute. Too old to join the fight himself, he could only envy the dozens of young men before him who would be going at the best possible time- right in the prime of their manhood. They were young, strong, and brave- and the Colonel-General (a Lieutenant General, the Americans would have called him) knew he had trained them well.
Andrei had opted to commission as a Naval Aviation officer, a Midshipman- for the Navy, the most basic officer rank. Assigned to the 126th Independent Helicopter Squadron aboard the Admiral Yuri Borodin- the Northern Fleet's mightiest aircraft carrier, Andrei had quickly proved himself. He was young and had only just commissioned into the Russian Navy, but his youth made it easy for Andrei to be daring as a pilot- and it helped a great deal that he was also damn good. Hearing about how pilots of the older Mi-24 had managed to make it do such maneuvers as a barrel-roll- something the Crocodile was supposed to be too heavy to do- Andrei had done tried the same thing with his new Mi-45 on one of his first training flights. The instructor had yelled at him once they were back on the carrier's deck, yelling at Andrei to never do that again… and then he'd smiled, turning to the commanding officer of the unit and telling him, "This young man is just the kind we need".
The Mil Mi-45, known to its pilots as the "Lightning Crocodile" for its powerful weapons yet surprisingly graceful way of flying, was the elite of the Russian aviation forces' attack helicopters. The Kamov Ka-50 and Ka-52 might have been swifter, more agile, and the Mil Mi-28 "Havoc" was certainly better designed to duel air-to-air with the American AH-64 Apache.
But the Mi-45 was not the big, clumsy aerial opponent the Americans were used to reading and drilling about. They knew all of the older gunships, what fine tank-killers they were but how clumsy they tended to be when fighting other helicopters. The Mi-45, built with lighter and stronger materials and improved in many ways, still kept the essential design the same. Its job was to destroy targets on the ground, first and foremost, and to act as a casualty-evactuation helicopter and troop transport if need required, since the troop bay rear of the twin-bubble cockpits could hold a squad of infantry.
The Mi-45 differed from its predecessor in that it could not only carry air-to-ground and air-to-air ordnance in a given flight, but it was agile enough now that it stood a solid chance of using them. Andrei loved the Crocodile in any form. Big, powerful, and surprisingly fast even in its older forms, the "Hind" as NATO called it was a dangerous opponent. Against tanks and infantry there was nothing it could not do- no enemy it couldn't overwhelm, no target it couldn't destroy. Pilots loved the big, fierce-looking gunships, and the Mi-45M- the blue-gray-painted Navy version- was received just as well by the Navy as the Mi-45 was by the Air Force.
Andrei was 5' 11'', perfectly average for his age of 22. He had short-cut black hair, gray eyes, and a lean, athletic figure. He wasn't especially imposing at first glance, but Andrei had grown up in a family very much down on his luck; he'd learned to win fistfights the hard way at school, and had endured the excruciating hazing imposed on freshmen at the Moscow SAI manfully. He never listened to anyone when he'd made up his mind to do something, and was as daring a pilot as anyone else in the squadron.
This morning, the 40 Mi-45's of the 126th were all lined up on the flight deck of the Admiral Yuri Borodin. The Naval Infantry- better known to the West as Russian Marines- hurried about in their own camouflage uniforms, carrying a multitude of machine guns, assault rifles, and packs stuffed with gear. Mechanics and air crew busied themselves under the gray sky, knowing their target- New York City- was not very far away.
Andrei peered into the morning mist, looking far down the Admiral Yuri Borodin's flight deck and off past her bow. He knew the so-called "Big Apple" was out there somewhere. He almost felt like he could see it- and very much looked forward to taking a nice, big chunk out of it.