Fight To The Finish - World War Three, Round Two

Six – Decoys

February 21st 1990
In the skies above Europe

With just a short interruption during the ceasefire, NATO aircraft had been active on combat missions in the skies above Europe for more than two weeks. Even during that stand-down they hadn’t been inactive due to the then tense situation of everyone waiting for the war to restart again. For the aircrews of all of the multi-national aircraft taking part in offensive and defensive flight missions there were no longer any surprises to be had. This was the war which they had so long trained for and taking part in it meant the very real risk of death at any moment, in the air or on the ground, yet at the same time they put everything that they had into it.

To lose the control of the skies in World War Three meant to lose the war.

Day and night NATO aircraft fought their Soviet and Warsaw Pact opponents. There were counter-air missions to be flown to guard against the offensive actions of enemy aircraft. There were close-air support and tactical strike missions to be flown in support of the ground war. Maritime air missions were flown around the nearby seas and then there were overland reconnaissance missions of both a tactical and strategic nature. Deep strike missions meant hunting for enemy aircraft far beyond the frontlines to break up enemy air strikes before they could commence as well as going after transport and communication aircraft. There were too strategic strike missions to be undertaken against more targets on the ground from enemy command-&-control to supply bases to transport links to airfields. All of this went on twenty-four hours a day with no respite.

In the early hours of this morning, again during the terrible flying weather at this time of year, NATO was continuing to do what they had done since the Soviets had first struck at the West at the beginning of the month.


The United States provided the largest number of aircraft and personnel to the ongoing air war above Europe, though the Americans were not in a majority there due to the high numbers of participation from their NATO allies. Regardless, the Americans had many aircraft and supporting personnel active. The regular United States Air Force (USAF) had pre-war Europe-based forces active in the fighting along with plenty of reinforcements flown in from bases back home during REFORGER. There was too a high proportion of USAF Reserve assets as well as the Air National Guard (ANG). Furthermore, training units had been deployed too before aircraft had come from storage and aircrews found to man those. The very latest technology was taking part in the air war along with many older pieces of equipment as well. When it came to manpower, the Americans like their allies had made full use of reservists and sent them across the North Atlantic too so they could join the fighting above Europe.

For combat missions the USAF, the USAF Reserve and the ANG made use of a wide range of aircraft. There were A-7s, A-10s, F-4s, F-15s, F-16s and F-111s as their primary combat aircraft. Different variants of all of these aircraft were in use and were employed in all combat roles where they defended against the enemy, intervened on the battlefield and struck deep into the enemy’s rear. Some of these were very old – especially those which had come from ‘the Boneyard’ in Arizona while others were only recently built. To assist with strategic strike missions, there were B-52s and FB-111s also made available to fight the air war in Europe with F-117s also joining those though focused more in a tactical fashion than the bombers released from Strategic Air Command (SAC).

Aircraft deployed in combat support were involved in the air war as well. There were defence suppression aircraft like the EF-111s and electronic attack aircraft such as Wild Weasel versions of the F-4. Kept further back from the actual fighting though just as vital were EC-130s and EC-135s: aircraft with a more stand-off role. Airborne radar aircraft for command-&-control in the form of E-3s were being flown by the USAF. High-flying, updated versions of the U-2 were deployed to Europe and urgent efforts were being undertaken to get SR-71 aircraft back operational as well to add to additional strategic reconnaissance support like what the U-2s offered.

There were tankers too flown by the Americans. SAC had released a whole host of airborne refuelling aircraft to support the air war in the form of newer KC-10s and many older KC-135s. The ability to refuel aircraft in flight during their combat missions meant a great increase in strike capacity with those tankers able to meet heavily-laden aircraft on the way to or returning back from combat missions. The European NATO members had a few tankers, and the Soviets even less, yet none could compare with how many the Americans flew in such a role which they led the world in. In addition, there were aircraft and helicopters deployed to Europe which flew combat-search-&-rescue (CSAR) missions and others to infiltrate and ex-filtrate special forces teams. These were all armed with offensive and defensive weapons and were vital parts of the American commitment to the air war too. Saving the lives of aircrews so they could fly again as well as putting commandos on the ground behind enemy lines was of great importance.

The USAF, USAF Reserve and ANG all provided extensive ground support assets as well as aircraft. There were aircraft engineers, technicians and armourers to support American aircraft but also to assist in the efforts of their NATO allies as well. Security units were provided to defend airbases and then there were command staffers… in addition to medical personnel, signallers and meteorologists to name just a few of the additional roles which personnel were needed to support the air war. So many men, and women too, were deployed to Europe to take on these important roles away from the aircrews themselves and their aircraft which they flew against the enemy.


Canada and European NATO countries provided generally the same as the United States did to the air war over Europe. They too had combat aircraft for all sorts of roles along with combat support aircraft for electronic warfare and stand-off reconnaissance. There were some tankers and CSAR assets, though not as many as the Americans. With personnel on the ground there were extensive numbers of men and women deployed too whom preformed all of the roles undertaken by Americans as well.

The Canadian Forces’ Air Command, the Royal Air Force, the Royal Norwegian Air Force, the Royal Danish Air Force, the Luftwaffe, the Royal Netherlands Air Force, the Royal Belgian Air Force, the Armee de l’Air, the Spanish Air Force, the Portuguese Air Force and the Italian Air Force were all involved in the air war. Some of these organisations had aircraft deployed overseas before the hasty mobilisation which occurred less than forty-eight hours before the war started, including Dutch & West German aircraft deployed abroad in the United States and British & French aircraft stationed elsewhere in the world. Most though had been positioned within their home countries or on the territory of their NATO allies when the conflict came.

A wide range of aircraft were flown by these other air forces. There were those manufactured within the own nations, others as part of pan-European efforts and then more built in the United States and exported. For combat roles there were Alpha-Jets, G-91s, Mirages and Tornados in addition to A-7s, F-4s, F-5s, F-16s. F-18s and F-104s. The British flew Buccaneers, Harriers, Jaguars and Tornados. The French had plenty of different variants of the basic Mirage design which had progressed over the years into the latest strike-fighter versions. The West Germans had their Alpha-Jets, F-4s and Tornados. Several NATO nations flew European-built versions of the older F-104 and the newer F-16. The Canadians and Spanish had land-based version of the F-18 which the Americans used as a carrier-based aircraft. The list went on…

In supporting roles there were too so many different aircraft flown in various colours of NATO air forces. The British, Dutch and French all had their own (if few) airborne tankers and there was a NATO-wide programme for fielding E-3s with multi-national aircrews. The Italians had some electronic warfare-rolled G-222; the Spanish had C-212s tasked for the same mission. Again, the list went on… For ground personnel it was much the same as with the Americans with only a few differences. There were more non-US NATO security units around airfields including those engaged in anti-aircraft protection with missiles and guns. European NATO countries didn’t have quite as many specialists in certain fields as the Americans did with intelligence analysis and satellite-to-earth communications.


As they had been during the whole war, NATO aircraft were again taking part in their centrally-controlled missions throughout Europe. They were over friendly territory, above the frontlines and deep into the enemy’s rear area. So much was going on as was always the case with hundreds of aircraft in the dark skies fulfilling taskings given to them through multiple headquarters.

Up in the northernmost reaches of Europe, above the last portion of Norwegian territory still occupied by the Soviets and close to their border, Norwegian and USAF Reserve aircraft were engaged in attack missions against the invader there. The Soviets had lost the battle for Norway with their airborne/airmobile and amphibious troops lost some time ago further to the west along the shores of the Norwegian Sea, yet those in eastern Finnmark were still occupying Norwegian territory. Attack missions were flown to bomb the Soviets where they could be found. There remained little offensive potential left with the occupying Soviets so the air strikes were just to keep them in-place and under attack. No offensive air missions were undertaken further east into Soviet air space or down into neutral Finnish skies. NATO air power here was just deployed over a small area doing as much damage as possible to a static, immobile and generally impotent enemy. Through the Baltic Exits, NATO combat operations conducted by air forces were combined with those from naval aviation units of several navies. With the Soviets making a second attempt to take Denmark, this time via land rather than from the air and the sea, NATO was responding to this by shooting down enemy aircraft in the skies as well as bombing the enemy on land. At the base of Jutland was where the enemy could be found and NATO came at their opponents from the west, the north and the east. These were contested skies though, unlike those up in northern Norway. The Soviets fought back and weren’t about to make things easy for NATO’s air efforts here.

Across West Germany and the Low Countries, there were a far greater number of air operations being flown compared to Norway and the Baltic Exits. There were fighter operations above friendly territory and over the parts of NATO countries occupied. Strike missions were flown close to the frontlines and beyond them into the enemy’s rear areas. There were AWACS aircraft in the skies and strand-off electronic warfare missions undertaken. Further eastwards, NATO was taking the air war to the Soviets hitting targets inside East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Bombs were delivered, missiles launched and guns fired. Pre- & post-strike reconnaissance missions were made. This was full-scale air warfare being undertaken. Down in the Alps above Austria and on the Italian border, again NATO was fighting the air war here as well.


The air war was proving costly for NATO.

In terms of aircraft, aircrew and ground personnel there had been an immense toll taken. Enemy action was the prime cause of those losses though there had been accidents too due to mistakes made with fatigue and, on occasion, stupidity where ego came into play. The political crisis proceeding the West German unilateral ceasefire and then during the period of that partial collapse of the West German war machine had brought about other loses. Even now with the Munich Government gaining strength and the Aachen Government falling apart, there were still problems there.

Aircraft losses couldn’t easily be replaced. Once aircraft had been taken from storage and others reassigned from training units, the available pool of replacements for those destroyed either in the sky or on the ground – even in a few cases captured when airbases had been overrun – started to run out. This wasn’t World War Two were aircraft could be built in a couple of weeks. All of the complicated electronics, weapons systems and powerful engines that came with a modern aircraft were just too complicated to so easily manufacture. Moreover, the enemy gave interference to the process of NATO starting to try to build replacement aircraft despite knowing how long that would take. Aircraft factories in Europe had faced air and missile strikes while even those far afield in the United States and Canada had faced attacks in the form of sabotage, arson and bombings by specialist KGB teams operating in very dangerous territory. Aside from that, supply chains were disrupted and key workers had refused to attend their places of work under the threat of being maimed or killed.

Substituting trained manpower wasn’t easy either. Reservists, retirees and trainees could all be brought to use and had been by NATO to fight the air war. Yet they suffered at times losses even higher than the regular professionals which they replaced. Morale was another issue which NATO suffered from as losses in terms of territory and other men were known about by those fighting against an enemy which it seemed couldn’t be stopped from advancing onwards. The crisis with West Germany was another factor in doing damage away from just the physical effects.

When it came to weaponry, NATO air forces used up their pre-war stocks of bombs, missiles and bullets at alarming rates. Rates of expenditure were far higher than all peacetime studies had shown which they would be; there was also the issue of targeted enemy attacks upon storage sites for ammunition. To stop, even slow down the enemy, NATO aircraft were through again and again into battle deploying every weapon available apart from their stores of tactical nuclear bombs. Further stocks from the United States were shipped across the North Atlantic and munitions factories there were instructed to start immediate manufacture of more. Again though, there were small but effective attacks launched against such ‘safe’ sites inside America while arms factories in Europe were blasted in more conventional manners. There was furthermore the issue of smart weapons: laser-guided bombs and specialist missiles. There was a massive early demand for these weapons to be employed against the enemy in the first few days of the war and they were put to use with the desired effects in most cases… but then follow-on enemy forces appeared and there were no more wonder weapons left. Again, there were efforts to hastily manufacture more, which endeavours came under enemy attack at source, but that left a period where there were no more available and NATO air forces were stuck using ‘dumb’ munitions.

NATO’s air war faced other problems apart from losses taken in combat, serious morale issues and the supply difficulties. There was organised command-&-control through long-term established procedures for NATO to work with in peace and war. Everyone knew what they were supposed to be doing, who they were supposed to be reporting to. National priorities were meant to be put aside and everyone was meant to work together for the common good. Surprisingly, in the main this actually worked when the war commenced. Every air force did their bit with NATO fighting together and co-operation being in most cases stellar. Over time though, difficulties occurred. When West German resolve fell apart on a political level first and then reaching downwards into the military units, the Luftwaffe suffered from mutiny and defections. Other NATO air forces scrambled to fulfil missions undertaken by West Germans who weren’t doing as ordered by NATO commanders and were instead listening to their own politicians… or their own consciences too. The ceasefire came soon afterwards yet once that was broken those issues surrounding what occurred with the Luftwaffe were brought to prominence again. Some officers within certain NATO air forces gave priority to their own national concerns where their fellow countrymen were fighting on the ground and their own countries in imminent danger of invasion. What West German forces which remained active within NATO’s command structure weren’t trusted to fulfil the tasks set for them in case they suddenly decided that they didn’t want to fight. Airbases in the Netherlands and Jutland were evacuated with the threat of Soviet tanks overrunning them and there were arguments over where aircraft from those abandoned facilities were to be redeployed too.

This was all in addition to enemy activities.


The Soviets regarded the air war as just as important as NATO did. They aimed to win it and stop NATO from doing what they aimed to achieve: control the skies above Europe.

In active measures the Soviets flooded the skies with their own aircraft. They brought up training units and took older aircraft out of storage. The air assets of their allies came under central control with greater discipline than NATO showed because they didn’t have to concern themselves with the internal politics of the Warsaw Pact nations. Losses hurt them too and they couldn’t exactly manufacture new aircraft and munitions with great speed, but their facilities to do so were generally untouched by NATO efforts to strike at them so they could at least make a start. Air defences in the form of SAMs were deployed and made use of more than NATO did. What the West called ‘double-digit’ SAM systems in regard to the latest models – the SA-10 Grumble, the SA-11 Gadfly, the SA-12 Giant / Gladiator and the SA-15 Gauntlet – were made extensive use of in protecting the skies above Europe. These were mobile systems and incorporated the latest technology. Quite often to supply these SAM units with missile reloads, helicopters were used to fly missiles to their deployment sites therefore avoiding delays caused by NATO air attacks. When NATO attacked these SAM batteries, they of course fired back and took their toll on attackers yet the real benefit from them which the Soviets saw was how much effort was expended by their opponents in trying to avoid them at times or on other occasions use everything against them. There was the effect upon NATO morale from their lethality that was yet another bonus of the extensive use of such air defences too. NATO aircrews were known to believe that they could defeat Soviet aircraft in the skies but they were frightened of such advanced SAM systems which shot down so many attacking aircraft.

In terms of passive defences, the Soviets had further methods of winning the air war away from their active defences and general offensive warfare efforts elsewhere. Pre-war spying and wartime reconnaissance efforts allowed them to understand their opponents command-&-control as well as planning. They sent commando teams and rockets towards NATO airfields. Powerful jammers were deployed to take control of the electromagnetic spectrum when NATO technology in that field was put to use; the Soviets tried everything to jam radars and targeting systems aboard NATO aircraft. Captured NATO aircrews were interrogated and eavesdropping on enemy communications was made.

And the Soviets littered their rear areas with decoys too.

Bridges, airfield, airfields and command bunkers were built to look like the real thing from the air. Some were surrounded by defences lying in wait whilst others were left without protection. They were built by specialist Maskirovka units to fool those studying the fakes from the air using photographic means but also infrared and radar detection. In some cases the decoys were constructed in such a manner where even someone on the ground would have to walk right up to them and touch them before they would realise these were real and not just magnets from NATO bombs and missiles. The decoys were made even more realistic by where they were positioned and what surrounded them. The aim was to get the enemy to waste effort against these and to be engaged while attacking. Furthermore, there was the added strategic benefit aimed in a psychological manner against NATO: when they discovered that many of the sites they had targeted were fake they would doubt intelligence on real targets in case those were decoys as well… information on the scale of decoys was slowly let out to gain enemy attention to bring forth that goal.


Despite everything, NATO aircraft were active again this morning. The losses being taken, the problems that they had and the actions of the enemy all mattered, but the air war was still being fought. NATO hadn’t lost control of the skies yet and there remained the majority of whom believed that they weren’t going to. There was a certainly among most – the aircrews, their commanders and the politicians – that despite Soviet successes on the ground the air war could still be won and the tide of the war turned by such a victory.

To not believe in such an outcome would mean that all the death and destruction so far was for naught. If the air war had already been lost, or was soon to be, then NATO might as well just give up and surrender. It was in the air, along with the stunning victories achieved at sea, which was how they were able to effectively fight back against Soviet armies that continued to mercilessly move forward.





February 21st 1990
The Kantei, Tokyo, Japan

Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu had remained in his official residence throughout the entirety of the ongoing war. The Emperor was still in his own official residence in Tokyo as well. Both men had publically declared that they would remain in the Japanese capital come what may.

Some would say it was a bold decision, others would declare it a foolish mistake.

Other ministers in Kaifu’s government were located elsewhere away from their ministries and residences, outside Tokyo too, in secure locations where they would hopefully be physically unaffected should the worst happen and August 1945 was repeated upon Japan, though on a far deadlier scale then forty-five years ago. Kaifu was able to keep in contact with them through encrypted communications links which connected his residence with those bunkers and oftentimes with the private homes of several prominent members of the Diet as well who might not have been officially in the government but at this time of national crisis were serving their country as best as they could. There was security deployed around the Kantei, the Imperial Palace and many other locations to guard these senior Japanese political figures as they each generally remained in one place rather than on the move as contemporaries abroad were doing to stay safe.

Early this evening (Japan was eight hours ahead of Europe) Japan’s government was dealing with yet another crisis since a conflict which had erupted due to causes half a world away had seen them dragged into full scale war. This time though, Kaifu and those whom he was in communication with believed that what was now occurring was far worse than North Korea invading South Korea & attacking selective Japanese targets whilst doing so, air & sea engagements with Soviet military forces all around the country’s shores and the ever-real threat of nuclear warfare breaking out.

There was a plague starting to ravish Tokyo.


Biological warfare was the term which had been used in relation to what was happening in Japan’s capital city to Kaifu and his ministers. Both domestic Japanese and foreign American military scientists were now declaring that lethal germs, none of which were known to be naturally occurring, had been unleashed upon the people of Tokyo. The flu-like initial symptoms that hundreds upon hundreds of people were already suffering from in tight clusters all around the city would soon turn into something far more deadly. Just as those thirteen thousand South Korean civilians in Pusan had had their internal organs rapidly fail after first being diagnosed of suspected influenza, Tokyo’s citizens had been infected too. The numbers of ill Japanese would rapidly rise and those with the infection would soon start to die: the time-frame of first appearance of symptoms to death was between thirty-six and forty hours.

Using intelligence gained from the Pusan Incident a week ago, the biological attack upon Tokyo was fast being seen for what it was. The plague which had been unleashed hadn’t been delivered in aerosol form from a bomb, missile or aircraft-dispenser but rather at ground level in tightly-packed residential areas. Food or water spread the infection as it wasn’t an airborne contagion. Those affected would die quickly and in fast numbers but weren’t spreading the disease to others beyond those directly affected initially. Samples of the germs from Pusan came in many forms and fast-track testing showed they matched those of some of the most gravely-ill victims in Tokyo.

Thousands of people were going to die with the city very soon and there was nothing which could be done to help them at this stage.

Already aware of what had previously happened in South Korea and somewhat immune to asking so many questions about the disease after being given the cold hard facts by their advisers, the ministers with whom Kaifu spoke had only one enquiry: was this the work of the North Koreans or that of the Soviets?


As expected, Japan’s leaders were fuming at the use of biological weapons against their civilians. They understood the strategic implications of such an attack too; they listened to the Americans patiently explain about how biological warfare was far worse than chemical attacks, in their opinion anyway. There was as well the issue of the death toll that would occur and the panic within their capital city. All of this was understood for the seriousness of the matter and such weighty issues had been discussed and were in their minds as well.

Yet, they wanted to know who had struck at Japan in such a manner. The response which would be given depended upon who was behind the evil plague that had befallen helpless Japanese civilians.

Were the North Koreans behind the attack in Tokyo like the Americans had been certain had were responsible for the Pusan Incident?

The North Koreans had invaded South Korea at the beginning of February simultaneously with the first round of fighting which had erupted in Europe. They had sent their armies across – and under – the DMZ. Aircraft had filled the skies along with rockets above Japan’s neighbour. There had been missile-boats and small submarines active at sea off the Korean Peninsula. American forces stationed there had been attacked just as the South Korean military and people had been. Eventually, to stop the North Koreans in their tracks from inflicting a catastrophic defeat, the Americans had used a trio of small nuclear weapons on South Korean soil. Further American military reinforcements had arrived to join the fully-mobilised South Koreans and there was currently a successful effort underway driving the North Koreans back to the DMZ… those which were retreating fast enough anyway and not being overrun like so many of their unfortunate comrades were.

When the initial invasion had occurred on the Korean Peninsula, the North Koreans had also struck against military targets on sovereign Japanese soil. Their attacks had been directed against the Americans with commando raids and rocket attacks on their military installations – on Okinawa mainly but also in select locations on Honshu such as Yokota Airbase and Yokosuka Naval Base, both near to Tokyo – though those had seen Japanese lives lost. The careless disregard for Japanese sovereignty and civilian life had shown North Korea’s war ambitions for what they were: an attack upon Japan too. This had brought about military action in support of American and South Korean defensive moves authorised by the Japanese government. Aircraft and warships fought against the North Koreans and there was other assistance in the form of movement of military supplies across to the Korean Peninsula.

Japanese troops had stayed at home though… that wouldn’t be the case if North Korea had struck at Japan with biological weapons.

Or were the culprits of such a dastardly, evil attack the Soviets?

When World War Three started, Soviet forces had attacked Japan. Pre-war hopes from some of Japan’s leaders, Kaifu included, had hoped that the Soviets would leave the Japanese mainland unmolested. His advisers, and the Americans too, had said that that was a forlorn hope especially since American aircraft and warships would be operating from Japanese bases against the Soviets… there wasn’t a request made, just a reminder of their interpretations of the US-Japanese 1960 Mutual Security Treaty.

The Soviets had struck at airbases and naval facilities which the Americans used in Japan. Instead of commandoes and a few Scuds which the North Koreans had made use of, the Soviets made full-scale attacks with more conventional weapons. The moment Japanese Self-Defence Forces fired back then Japan was engaged in wartime operations against the Soviet Union. There was no declaration of war but a state of war existed. The military forces of Japan were very modern and the Air & Naval Self-Defence Forces assisted the Americans in fighting for defence of their country as was their sworn duty. Japanese fighters, warships and submarines were engaged in furious battles with the Soviets just as they were with the North Koreans. Losses were taken in battle and there were some civilian casualties at home, yet the latter were rather low. Following the initial Soviet attacks against military bases in Japan were civilians were killed in collateral damage, the fighting moved away from Japan itself to the Sea of Japan and above the Soviet-held islands to the north of the country.

Japan had feared that its cities would be bombed or agents would sabotage nuclear power plants: that hadn’t occurred. The Soviets had been more focused upon defending themselves as the US Navy and USAF started sinking their own naval forces of the Soviet Pacific Fleet and launching selective attacks against a few military bases on Soviet soil: Japan had no part in the latter. Following the use of nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula, Kaifu and his ministers had feared that nuclear war might spread to Japan too. They hadn’t gone down the route of the West Germans and attempted to give in though. During the short ceasefire Japan had taken the time to lick its wounds and get ready to start fighting again while trying to understand why the Americans had done what they had in ‘respecting the ceasefire’, apart from in South Korea though. Then there was Flensburg and Paris before the Soviets restarted the war in Asia just like they had done in Europe too. Japan was left unmolested at home though its air and naval forces had been engaged in combat with the ever-shrinking remains of Soviet aerial and maritime power available near to their country.

Had the Soviets now decided that they were going to add a biological level to the ongoing war to frighten Japan into making a decision to stop fighting? Or was the plague in Tokyo the North Koreans as Japan’s American allies were certain that it was?

If the North Koreans were responsible then the line of thinking which Kaifu and his ministers had was that Japanese troops would be sent to the Korean Peninsula. Political differences with the South Koreans would be moved aside, adding to the later woes which would come from those at home seeing Japanese troops fighting abroad, to respond to the North Koreans if they were guilty by fighting them directly and possibly joining an invasion of that country should the military and geo-political situation be favourable to that.

Should the Soviets have conducted the biological strike, for whatever reason they had chosen, even if to provide a distraction & a decoy for further action elsewhere, then Japan’s leaders would start to have serious discussions about those islands to the north of the Home Islands. They expected that their American allies would be up in arms if Japan were to move to occupy what was regarded as sovereign Soviet soil. Japan didn’t see the legal situation of ownership of those islands in the same manner though: those islands were Japanese and Japan had the troops to take them especially with the Americans blasting apart the Soviets as they were.

Japan needed an answer as to the nation guilty for the germs now killing civilians in Tokyo.





February 21st 1990
Boca Chica Key, the Florida Keys, Florida, the United States

Circling above Boca Chica Key, where the Cuban-held NAS Key West was located, and seemingly without a care in the world as it flew in plain sight this morning, was a lone propeller-driven aircraft. Cuban paratroopers, naval commandoes and a whole load of military specialists who had arrived here several days ago all looked up at the aircraft. Some wondered whether it was about to deliver paratroopers; others pondered over whether it was on conducting reconnaissance against them.

Many more wondered why no one was shooting at it… before remembering that the last of the SAMs had been used up yesterday and there had been no resupply.

Then the aircraft attacked them. The cannon aboard opened fire first followed by the mini-guns mounted as the aircraft got closer. The noise was terrific and the sight, even while terrifying, was spellbinding. It was truly something to witness and several Cubans on the ground beneath spoke of the aircraft as a dragon as foretold in mythical stories while running for shelter from the aircraft flying around above in a circle still even when firing.

Knowing it wasn’t a dragon, but rather something real, a Cuban military intelligence officer on the ground at Boca Chica Key was able to make a shout of ‘Spectre’ before his voice was drowned out. A dragon was fictional; a Spectre was very real indeed.


The AC-130A Spectre was a converted C-130 Hercules. Retired from active frontline service with regular elements of the US Air Force after being replaced by more modern AC-130H versions, this particular Spectre was home-based at Duke Field in the Florida Panhandle. The 711th Special Operations Squadron operated the aircraft with aircrews from the USAF Reserve manning those which had been detached in Flights across the world due to the ongoing war to forward bases in Norway, Turkey and South Korea.

One Spectre had remained behind at Duke Field due to a long-standing maintenance issue. For a time it appeared that the aircraft might not fly ever again and there had been pre-war talks of scrapping it. However, with the urgency of the war and then the invasion of the Florida Keys by the Cubans, the luck and skill of aircraft technicians – dedicated men and women – had finally managed to get the Spectre back into the skies where she belonged. From Homestead AFB the Spectre was now flying and the Cubans occupying American soil were who it and her aircrew were sent after.

Those on the ground beneath this unexpected American air attack had been bombed and strafed by many aircraft. There had been those flying high and those which had come in low. Day and night air attacks had come to deliver well-placed munitions against the Cubans here and the military base which they occupied. The city of Key West, where there were also Cuban troops but many American civilians too, had faced nowhere near the same level of enemy attention coming from the air. It was Boca Chica Key that the Americans were blasting away with their aircraft and the Spectre this morning was just the latest unpleasant surprise for those this far from home.

NAS Key West was a large airbase which covered almost all of the island which was Boca Chica Key. When the Cubans had taken it in their late evening airborne / airmobile assault on February 17th they had fought hard to seize it from the admittedly-surprised but still very tenacious defenders. There had been men from the US Navy – aviators and ground personnel – present as well as others from the US Air Force and the US Army; no US Marines had been encountered. NAS Key West had been being used as a transit facility for personnel moving about through the US Southern Command region and not a proper defensive position. The vast majority of the US Navy aircraft usually based here had been deployed elsewhere in the world at the time and those who ended up fighting for the facility had all been previously eager to leave to go and join the fighting elsewhere in the world.

No one had expected the Cuban paratroopers and then the light transport aircraft making forced landings before disgorging men. Plenty had gone wrong with that assault. The Americans had fought back furiously. Paratroopers had been dropped into the ocean to drown. Two of those aircraft laden with airmobile-rolled troops had exploded in flames on the runaways. It had been a risky mission yet overall success had been attained. There was damage to many parts of the facility and men lost but the Cubans had taken NAS Key West.

Then afterwards the air attacks had started. The Americans apparently didn’t understand what the Cuban troops on the ground had been told: that the United States was busy losing a war in Europe and wouldn’t, couldn’t fight at the moment for the Florida Keys.


Logistics win wars, not tactics or strategy or even political alliances. The ability to supply combat forces in the field is what gains military success in the long-term. A daring coup de main might gain a major operational advantage (NAS Key West a case in point) but to win more than just an isolated battle and instead a war there has to be an effective logistics effort. Fighting men need to be fed & watered, they need medical care provided and they need ammunition to replace what is expended. What supply links are established need defending against enemy moves to cut those.

There were no supply links that the Cubans had established to their forces deployed to the Florida Keys. Those fighting men who had reached there were sent with what they had brought with them when they first arrived by aircraft. The supplies which they carried with them were all that they had to use. No more aircraft laden with food, water, medicine and ammunition were planned to be sent their way, let alone ships either.

No one had told them that though. Back in a bunker beneath the Cuban countryside outside of Havana – one which had already taken a near miss from an American laser-guided bomb – the headquarters staff for what had been the Grupo de Asalto del Norte (Northern Assault Group) had already been disbanded and officers assigned to other duties. The commander, General de Cuerpo de Ejercito (Army Corps General) José Luis Mesa Delgado, a noted Raul Castro loyalist, had returned to supervising the defensive efforts of the city. His task had been to put men in the Florida Keys and he had done just that. The Grupo de Asalto del Norte had made their assault in the north. Those men couldn’t be supplied and so wouldn’t be.

They were decoys: they had been sent to the Florida Keys to attract the attention of the Americans and soak up attacks which would otherwise come against Cuba itself. Those men, many of whom were elite troops, were expected to fight well and to the very end. They would serve the Revolution by where they were. Messages would be sent promising resupply, even reinforcement, but none would come.

Cuban blood would stain US soil but so too would that shed by the norteamericanos too.


Back at Boca Chica Key, eventually the Spectre flew away. It had been immune from the few antiquated anti-aircraft guns which had tried to engage it and there were no more reloads available for the man-portable SAMs. Damage had been done, fires started and Cubans killed by the lethal fire from that aircraft. None of the Cubans knew it – because they didn’t have a functioning radar – but in a few minutes time a flight of four A-7 Corsair attack-fighters laden with bombs would be making an appearance in a follow-up strike to catch defenders which exposed themselves in the open afterwards.

Just as the Americans had anticipated, there was activity before then.

Men rushed out of their trenches and others from whatever hasty shelter that they had taken. Many officers and sergeants quickly called them back and told them to leave the casualties whom they had rushed to try to aid alone, yet on many occasions those orders were ignored. Discipline issues were becoming rife here with the men thinking of their fellow comrades rather than what their superiors said. Efforts had been made to try to curtail that – executions for disobedience had occurred – but there was general failure. The men had talked among themselves and disbelieved what they were told that they weren’t on their own here and help would soon be coming their way.

Some of the more astute officers feared a widespread mutiny. If that occurred, they planned to find a way to somehow surrender to the Americans rather than face their own men. Or worse, make the long swim home through shark-infested waters!

One officer, a DGI Colonel, purposely led a group of naval commandos out of shelter and towards a pack of dead and wounded bodies next to one of the taxiways. He had ignored the shouted ‘suggestions’ from Cuban military officers to stay put and had decided to deal with those defeatists afterwards. Meanwhile, he took the men with him towards the group of forced labourers who’d been caught out in the open. Friendly fire had killed and injured these men and women he came upon to see who was left alive. They were men and women, all able-bodied civilians rather than POWs, brought across from Key West under DGI control. Their task had been clearing rubble from previous American air attacks but now they had been killed accidentally by their own side.

The Colonel started shooting those who remained alive, injured or not.

Fidel Castro had broadcast last night from Guantanamo Bay. On the radio, the Colonel and others at Boca Chica Key had heard the proclamations made (officially-neutral Nicaragua had aided in broadcasting the messages across the Caribbean and to other parts of the world too) from there with their country’s leader stating that Cuba had been finally reunited after the liberation of that imperialist outpost of tyranny. He had extolled Cuban military forces deployed at home and abroad to keep fighting against the norteamericanos. Victory would come at a cost, he had said, but could be achieved. A less-public broadcast had come to the Colonel’s attention only: DGI chief Luis Barreiro Caramés had spoken to him over a shaky radio link-up. Be cruel, he had said, and give the Americans no mercy.

The Colonel was busy doing as he was told – for reasons unknown – when the A-7s (in markings denoting them from the Iowa Air National Guard) arrived overhead and unleashed more bombs.





February 21st 1990
Outside Neustadt an der Weinstrasse, Rhineland–Palatinate, West Germany

The Soviet First Guards Tank Army had been stopped from making a successful effort to reach the Rhine.

Through yesterday and most of today, that field army with all of its attendant changes make in organisation since before but also during the war, had been unable to tear open a gap in NATO lines. The French III Corps and US V Corps – both with large numbers of West German units among them – hadn’t allowed the seam between them to be torn open. Soviet tanks hadn’t been able to drive to the western end of Hessen, push the French back into the Lahn River valley, force the Americans to fall back into the Taunus Mountains outside of Frankfurt and get to the Rhine somewhere between Koblenz and Mainz as intended.

It had been a close-run thing though. The Soviets may have been stopped cold eventually, but they hadn’t been driven back to their start-lines nor enveloped by pincer attacks on the flanks in a series of counter-attacks. Neither French, American and especially not West German forces on the left hand side of the operational area for CENTAG had been able to manage such a feat despite initial efforts during the later hours of today to try to do that.

Both sides were worn out afterwards. Fighting men were tired on a physical and emotional level; many others who had seen combat today were dead. Military equipment was left burning, broken apart or abandoned across a wide area. The countryside and many abandoned towns which had been in the way when the opposing armies clashed were all left in ruin. There was particular devastation, along with thousands of bodies needing recovery afterwards, around the West German towns of Bad Camberg and Idstein: they lay near to the route of Autobahn-3, which ran lateral across the battlefield and generally was where the new frontlines ended up after the fighting stopped. The defending NATO forces and the attacking Warsaw Pact troops had fought themselves to a standstill there… but soon expected to be doing all again, and soon too.


CENTAG – NATO’s Central Army Group, consisting of ground forces in west-central parts of West Germany – had long ago moved its headquarters away from the peacetime location in Heidelberg. Various isolated and protected sites across on the other side of the Rhine, far back from the frontlines, were being used to control the NATO forces under command. The geographical area of operation was smaller than in peacetime though there were far more troops assigned. NORTHAG was to the north and the French First Army was the overall command for NATO units to the south, this side of the Alps. General Crosbie Saint – a US Army four-star general officer – led CENTAG and he had had a difficult war with all of the losses in terms of men and territory taken as well as having his command badly disrupted by the wave of desertions from the fighting before and during the ceasefire by West German units. Many of those men had returned following the restarting of the conflict but the Bundeswehr was not what it was beforehand. There had been the addition though of the French and the Canadians to his command and also large numbers of American reinforcements which had arrived. Saint’s men were deployed (north-to-south) from near to the Belgians under NORTHAG command around the Kassel Salient down across Hessen in a south-westerly line to the Lahn valley, now across to the high-ground of the Taunus’ covering Frankfurt and around that northern and eastern side of the Main valley there, over the Spessart into the northern reaches of Bavaria and across to where the French First Army was between Wurzburg and Nurnberg.

Saint’s current field headquarters was near to Neustadt an der Weinstrasse, a considerable distance back from those forward locations, and it was here that General Galvin – his superior – had come this evening.


SACEUR was another senior US Army officer, again with the responsibility for multinational forces engaged in combat operations. However, General Galvin had far greater obligations upon him and weighty considerations to keep in mind than his younger colleague. If he had been in the position to, then he would have oftentimes during this war – before, during and after the interruption of the three day ceasefire – preferred to have been in-charge during the fighting for the middle of West Germany. There would have been the same difficulties involved for him as there had been for Saint, yet he still would have chosen to take part in this theatre than some of the political battles which he had fought while being the supreme commander of NATO forces spread throughout Europe from the North Cape to the Black Sea.

Alas, he had taken this appointment three years ago and was doing his very best…

Having been attending a meeting in France with French military chiefs, General Galvin had come to Neustadt rather than returning to his own field headquarters in the Belgian Ardennes after being informed that the Soviets had been brought to a firm stop from charging on the Rhine. There had been difficult discussions with those French generals when he was with them about their stated national policy when it came to a situation with the Soviets getting over the Rhine and he had been more than greatly relieved to hear that those outcomes which they had spoken of weren’t about to be possibly brought into play with CENTAG’s stopping of the First Guards Tank Army.

Saint and his staff now gave General Galvin a briefing on the overall battle. The strength of the enemy attack was discussed with all of the mass formations employed by the enemy: a total of seven combat divisions, some at full-strength and others markedly not, had been under First Guards Tank Army command for their ultimately unsuccessful offensive. What exactly the Soviets had tried in their attack, how they had gone about it, was covered along with all of the identified problems that CENTAG intelligence efforts had been able to show. The enemy had suffered from major maintenance issues with their tanks and other armoured vehicles, their command-&-control had often fallen apart and their engineers hadn’t been able to get forward in strength to assist the fighting troops in clearing obstructions. There was mention too of the intelligence coming in that not just the Polish units involved but the East Germans too assigned to the attack had suffered from lack of discipline and badly affected the overall enemy attack by not fulfilling assigned tasks.

How CENTAG had fought back was then summarised. The fighting withdrawals and tactical counterattacks made were standard tactics employed by the combat veteran units within the French III Corps and the US V Corps. Air power and plenty of artillery had come into play to an acceptable degree though, as was now seemingly always the case, there still wasn’t enough of the former for the liking of commanders on the ground due to enemy aircraft filling the skies as well. Starting from midday today, to finish the battle and finally bring the enemy offensive to a halt, the US XVIII Airborne Corps had been employed and it was news of them which General Galvin was very interested in.

Throughout the first week and a half of war, the US XVIII Corps hadn’t been put to use and its highly-trained men not seen action. The corps headquarters, combat support assets and half of the assigned peacetime strength of this command had been deployed to West Germany during REFORGER. There had been concerns expressed in high places throughout the US Army about how and where they could have seen action on a Central European battlefield and this had been shown to be true. The 24th Infantry (Mechanized) Division had been detached to the US III Corps on the North German Plain, the 10th Infantry (Light) Division sent to Norway and a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division employed in urban fighting in South Korea. The rest of the 82nd Airborne Division and the whole of the 101st Infantry (Air Assault) Division had remained inactive, kept in reserve west of the Rhine. They had been joined by the 9th Infantry (Motorized) Division – part regular, part Army National Guard –, which had gone to Britain en route to Denmark but later redeployed to join the US XVIII Corps in addition to an armoured cavalry regiment from the Ohio Army National Guard. All of these troops, and all of their supporting assets including so many combat & assault transport helicopters as well, had not seen combat while the rest of the US Army in Europe had been bled. The thinking had been that should the light troops which made up the majority of the US XVIII Corps been sent into battle against Soviet armour they would have been massacred… as evidenced by the fate of several other NATO airborne / airmobile troops that had done so and suffered that fate.

CENTAG had seen the coming Soviet attack developing through. Forward-deployed Special Forces teams, aerial reconnaissance and electronic interception interpretation had identified that a massive attack was to be launched towards the Rhine right where it had been. There had been fears over a Soviet Maskirovka being made yet all the evidence was there and the detected coming attack made sense where and how it was to be launched. Both the French III Corps and the US V Corps moved forces into place and then parts of the US XVIII Corps had been deployed into ready positions as well; the latter had units in ambush places to help break-up and counterattack.

General Galvin himself had been one of those of the opinion that the US XVIII Corps should have gone to Northern or Southern Europe rather than the decision seemingly made in panic to send the light troops to West Germany. They had done well today though, fighting in Central Europe against enemy armour. The 107th Cavalry Regiment had assisted the French, the 9th Infantry Division had fought up in the high-ground of the Taunus’ and the 101st Air Assault Division had (carefully) assisted in the US V Corps’ flanking attacks to break up the Soviet advance from behind them. Only the 82nd Airborne Division had missed the battle: Saint had wanted to keep those elite paratroopers ready to fight in the general Frankfurt area should a surprise Soviet attack move against that city, its airport or transport links in addition to the main drive upon the Rhine. There had been the inevitable losses taken, as was the case in any engagement, but those were far lower than expected due to the care taken in employment of them.


After that briefing, General Galvin had one of his special advisers travelling with him – he had several from various NATO countries, all of whom were undertaking a career-enhancing role – give a short summary of other matters. There had already been intelligence given through regular channels yet SACEUR wanted to be present when Saint as CENTAG commander heard it again so any questions could be addressed.

The Soviet war machine was not invincible. That was again being seen, just as it had been before the short ceasefire.

At sea, the Soviets had been utterly defeated and there had been major losses that they had taken in the air too. In addition, when Soviet assault troops, their paratroopers and naval infantry, had seen combat on NATO’s strategic flanks they had been crushed. The mass armoured force of tanks and mechanised infantry that was the Soviet Army had been devastated countless times when moving forward: they had attacked defended positions with losses disregarded to take objectives. Their equipment broke down on a constant basis, their men were ill-disciplined and their command-&-control was left ineffective when faced with NATO attacks as well as political interference.

Behind the still-moving Soviet Army, NATO deep-strike forces were causing devastation. Road & rail bridges over every major river had been targeted and so too had rail switching yards and harbour facilities along the Polish Baltic coast. These attacks were aimed at eliminating Warsaw Pact strategic supply links running west from the Soviet Union towards its deployed forces at the front. All evidence pointed to those having hurt so much of the transport network that further large numbers of Soviet reinforcements coming west would be seriously impeded. However, it appeared that for now, the Soviets had already brought what troops they were going to bring west already through Eastern Europe before NATO could do all of that damage. Moreover, there was the issue of supply too. There was no evidence from multiple intelligence sources which pointed to the Soviets doing things differently and not as hurt from those air attacks on their logistics links either. Their stores from warehouses across East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia had been pre-war much bigger than expected. Yes, those were a finite source, but there wasn’t a dependency in the short- and medium-term on what was coming from back in the Soviet Union.

Lt.-General Fred Franks, the US VII Corps commander, was present at the briefing for he had been meeting with Saint when General Galvin arrived. Franks’ command was still holding its own in northern Bavaria against Soviet flanking forces and he had been here at Neustadt to discuss the transfer of parts of his command further west to free-up US V Corps units. It was he who had a question posed to SACEUR; Franks was unimpressed with what he had heard.

Was this just another one of those Maskirovkas?

Franks spoke of all of the deception employed by the Soviets during the war. They employed trickery everywhere, including often lying to their own men up to general officer rank. Some of their plots and schemes were simple decoys, others were immensely complicated. He spoke of what he had been told about all those decoys bridges and command posts which NATO air power had supposedly hit and according to reports from certain Special Forces teams were fake. How was NATO to know that the Soviets weren’t up to this again? They could easily be providing the ‘evidence’ that they already had enough men and supplies at the frontlines or immediately behind them and didn’t need their fixed links running back home. Why would they do this? Franks suggested that maybe they wanted NATO to send their air power elsewhere and needed to get to work repairing those logistical links. Too much faith was being put in intelligence gained when it was well known how often the Soviets were employing their trickery.

General Galvin’s usually unflappable staffer was stumped for a moment at that; SACEUR didn’t blame him because that was something he hadn’t considered until now either.

Saint followed up by mentioning the so-called Soviet Twenty–Second Guards Combined Arms Army. Several days ago, CENTAG had been warned about this field army – the designation was given by NATO because its actual Soviet name was so far unknown – coming through the Thüringenwald and towards them. Apparently three combat divisions and a lone brigade were with the Twenty–Second Guards Army: the 2GMRD (the Taman Guards), the 4GTD, the 50GMRD and the 27th Independent Brigade. Those elite units and that reserve force (the 50GMRD) were meant to be charging forwards ready to roll down the enemy-held Fulda Gap and towards Frankfurt. Aircraft and Special Forces teams had hunted for them ready to slow them down while part of the US V Corps was readied to move to stop them. All evidence had pointed to the Twenty–Second Guards Army approaching CENTAG. Where was that field army instead?

Those Soviet troops were currently moving across the North German Plain heading for the Netherlands behind other Soviet forces currently stalled there outside of Fortress Holland where it was as if every Dutchman who could carry a rifle was located. What the Soviets had done in that instance was a basic tenet of military tactics: simple deception. US Army forces with CENTAG had been doing it since the beginning of the war and that was one of the major reasons why there still were American troops active and fighting when faced with the overwhelming numerical odds which they opposed. They had a technology advantage and had conducted a fighting withdrawal all the way from the IGB yet also played the Soviets at their own game with trickery. Franks’ opinion was that all the enemy was doing was taking that to a strategic stage.

With such comments in mind, as General Galvin set off to leave Neustadt, he started to ponder over not just whether Franks and Saint were correct, but whether there was more that NATO could do itself when it came to their own Maskirovka efforts…

Eight – Occupation

February 23rd 1990
The western portion of the North German Plain, West Germany

Operation Eagle Fire commenced at 0300 hours local time. American elements of NORTHAG forces, on the left of the army group operational area, struck northwards aiming to make a second attempt to undertake a massive multi-corps counter-offensive. The initial objectives of the operation were rather ambitious: seize many of the enemy crossings over the Ems to the west, do the same along parts of the Weser to the east and reach Bremen in the north. Ultimately, getting to the sea far ahead of them and therefore cutting off Warsaw Pact forces in the Netherlands was the long-term goal. Lessons learnt from the failed attempt coming down from the Wiehen Hills three days ago were to be put into practise.

Just like before there was a determination to succeed, but this time many of those involved believed that they really had a strong chance of making the counter-offensive work… as long as everything went as planned.

*

Both the US I Corps and the US III Corps were involved in Eagle Fire. These two commands controlled a significant number of US Army, US Army Reserve and Army National Guard troops shipped over from the mainland United States to Europe over a period of more than three weeks. There were those that had arrived during the early stages of REFORGER (and taken casualties while landing in Western Europe), more which had come across the North Atlantic during the first round of fighting and then further numbers that had come during the short ceasefire. The majority now had already seen action and been bloodied whilst doing so; there were plenty of combat veterans now. At the same time, other men who had come with these veterans lay dead spread across the North German Plain, in enemy POW camps which littered open fields across Poland or had been evacuated due to being wounded and were now far away from the battlefields where they had been injured.

There were fighting soldiers and support personnel with the two corps’, tens of thousands of them. Men came from across the United States and all of them were volunteers: those who had signed up some time ago to serve their country, not those among the several million Americans who had in recent weeks volunteered at home without any need for a universal draft to be yet arranged. The reasons behind the service which those in uniform had chosen to give were as diverse as the backgrounds of the men themselves. Some were extremely patriotic, others victims of circumstances. It didn’t matter though: the general understanding wide among them was that they were here to fight for their nation’s liberty even if it was on foreign soil. They had seen what the enemy was and what he could do here in West Germany… it was apparent to many that if the enemy wasn’t beaten here one day soon he might be standing ready to invade the United States too. Impossible, some others said; possible, many believed.

Along with the soldiers, there was all of their military equipment. The formations under command here were well-equipped, sometimes lavishly so. Thousands of tanks and tracked armoured vehicles were present. There was a lot of artillery and engineering equipment. Trucks and jeeps had come from the POMCUS sites as well as being shipped over on freighters that had made the dangerous voyages across hostile waters. This mobile military hardware was alongside everything else that the Americans had brought here too.

And there were helicopters, what the US Army liked to call ‘Snakes’. A particular shortcoming identified as being crucial to past lukewarm success when fighting in earlier battles across the North German Plain had been the shortage of Snakes. Those POMCUS weapons dumps in the Rhineland and the Low Countries had had almost everything else but those stored at them. Combat helicopters, transport models and others for MEDEVAC & communication duties weren’t kept in storage in Europe but rather at home. They had been truly missed. The 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment and 2d Armored Division, who had fought the III Corps’ first battles, had only a few with them which were sent initially on USAF transports. Size restrictions, rather than weight considerations, had limited the number which could be deployed aboard C-5 Galaxys and C-141 Starlifters. The Snakes were present now after an immense deployment of so many helicopters aboard aircraft and as deck cargo on ships too.

The I Corps was almost exclusively manned by Army National Guard soldiers in combat roles while the III Corps had mainly regular US Army forces though also US Army Reserve and Army National Guard detachments. In terms of officers, there had been many cross-postings so that regulars and reservists were working together in command positions. Outside of the two corps’, the Americans had many of the command and headquarters positions within their parent formation now: NORTHAG had many Americans in occupation of roles formerly held by West Germans. There was still a British general in command yet his deputy was now a professional US Army officer. Some voices had called for the replacement of General Sir Peter Inge himself with an American to take over due to the fact that the Americans outnumbered the British in terms of a manpower commitment to NORTHAG, yet that had not come to pass due to not just political considerations but also because SACEUR believed that General Inge had done a good job in spite of a very difficult situation. There were still personal opinions aired about how the US Army would have done things differently had it been in the position of the British in the Hannover Salient during the first round of fighting – a drive to the sea then was that idea raised – yet those arguments were quickly silenced by superiors as stern reminders were given to obey the chain of command.


In preparing for Eagle Fire, the Americans had resisted attempts to strip assets away from them to support the fighting in the nearby Netherlands. The Allied II Corps there – with Belgian, British, Dutch and French troops; many of who were reservists armed with older equipment – were in a lot of trouble as the Soviets poured forward deeper into (the misnomer which was) Fortress Holland. NORWESTAG was practically screaming for help and for tank forces from the Americans with the nearby US I Corps to either be transferred across to them or, failing that, to assault the flanks of the Soviets to relive the pressure on them.

With approval from SACEUR, General Inge denied those requests. He understood the importance of conserving the strength of the Americans for their counter-offensive. It might not have been his operation – despite being titularly under his command – but he more than approved of it and worked to assist it as a commander of fighting men should. His other corps’, the British I Corps and the Belgian I Corps, both falling back from the middle reaches of the Weser as the Soviets continued to slowly move forwards in those areas too, weren’t given any further assistance than what they had at hand either. The Americans were kept together and with ammunition stocks built up.

The Soviet forces ahead of the Americans considered of combat veterans too. There was the Soviet Second Guards Tank and Twenty–Eighth Armys, both of which had seen even more fighting than the Americans had. These troops had earlier in the month beaten the Dutch and the West Germans while holding off British and American counterattacks. They had driven to the Weser and then come over that significant water barrier too. A few days beforehand, the latter of the two field armies had managed to blunt the US III Corps’ push forward; the former had stood ready to intervene while also keeping the US I Corps in check. However, from all of the available intelligence which the Americans had – supported by the efforts of their NATO allies too – the enemy was weak. They had taken up defensive positions, but all evidence during the war had shown how the Soviets couldn’t defend ground. They could launch their own counterattacks, and especially make extraordinary counter-counterattacks when necessary, but they couldn’t hold back when fixed to static position. It wasn’t in their training nor military doctrine, even in the state of mind of their officers to hold fast. No mass fortifications in terms of earthworks, serious mine-laying and creating natural obstacles were in the path of the Americans preparing for Eagle Fire. There were tank detachments scattered throughout the rear as well as strategically-placed towed anti-tank guns, but those high-powered guns were meant to delay an offensive force operating in the Soviet rear so that they could be held up by tank forces on the counter-counterattack. To achieve an overall defeat of an enemy when facing a penetration into their rear, the Soviets would hit it hard and fast near the scene of the counter-offensive with their troops at the front and those smaller forces in the rear where meant to mop up stragglers who might gain some ground.

The Soviets drove further forward in the Netherlands every hour. They continued to push the Allied II Corps back in the general direction of Rotterdam while keeping the Dutch I Corps – a mix of shattered Dutch and West German forces – on the defensive in the northern Netherlands. This exposed their rear open to an attack. The Americans watched with glee as the Soviets dug themselves into what they regarded as a grave by pushing further west. A division with the Twenty–Eighth Army was diverted away to the fighting there in the Netherlands, the Americans were happy to see it move. There was also that follow-up Soviet field army that the enemy had moved fast across the North German Plain and was by now across on the western side of the Ems preparing to enter the frontlines against the Allied II Corps: the Twenty–Second Guards Army with those elite divisions from the Soviet interior.

A massive area of enemy-held territory was only lightly held. The Americans regarded the portion of the North German Plain between the Ems and the Weser, beyond where they had their own troops near to the Mittellandkanal, as theirs for the taking. They could cut off an immense number of enemy troops inside the Netherlands and seize not one but two major water barriers between them and the remaining parts of occupied West Germany east of the Weser. The Soviets would have one hell of a job turning their field armies in the Netherlands around and coming back east. The situation was seen as perfect. The timing of the attack would be beneficial because of the weakness of the enemy: past those weak forces at the frontlines and enemy tanks and anti-tank guns poised to delay a counter-offensive were supply forces and occupation troops.

Eagle Fire was destined, its proponents claimed, for stunning success. They said that initially, breaking past where the Soviets had their men and tanks near to the Mittellandkanal, it would be bloody but afterwards the US I & III Corps would run riot.

*

To start the counter-offensive were air operations.

The USAF, US Air Force Reserve, US Air National Guard and the US Navy with aircraft flying from the USS Saratoga in the North Sea threw hundreds of aircraft into the attack. They flew a plethora of offensive air missions all over the North German Plain after coming from three directions. There were fighters in the sky and strike aircraft with them. Close air support missions were flown near to the frontlines as well. Those US Navy aircraft coming from the rear caught the Soviet air defences by surprise and so did a trio of F-117A stealth aircraft on strike missions that delivered precision bombs onto ground control stations.

Then the ground attacks started. Eight combat divisions, six brigade-sized combat units (brigades and armored cavalry regiments), seven field artillery brigades and two combat aviation brigades (with Snakes) were assigned to the US I & III Corps. The tanks and infantry started moving forwards in the darkness and engaging the enemy with all of the available fire support which they had on-hand.

To the left, the US I Corps struck with the 30th & 39th Infantry Brigades and the 278th Armored Cavalry Regiment first and then the 35th & 40th Mechanized Infantry Divisions behind pushing for gaps opened up. These Army National Guard troops shed a lot of blood, as expected, but they defeated enemy units where needed and pushed others back in a panicked retreat. The Second Guards Tank Army was down to just two understrength divisions – a mix of battalions and regiments merged from shattered pre-war parent units – and unprepared to be struck with such force. They couldn’t stop the Americans nor get a counterattack underway either… and then the 49th & 50th Armored Divisions started edging forward ready to tear forward as the front opened up almost everywhere along the US I Corps’ operational area.

On the right, the Twenty–Eighth Army came apart even faster. The US III Corps hit them with the 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment and the 2d Armored Division. The assigned Army National Guard brigades (48th & 256th) were held back along with the 1st Cavalry Division for flank support along the Weser, which left the 5th & 24th Mechanized Infantry Divisions to charge forwards. They went over crossings secured over the Mittellandkanal in brutal fighting where many assaulting troops and combat engineers lost their lives, and then broke free soon enough and into the open ground ahead.

Both corps were advancing clear of the defeated enemy long before it started to get light.


When on the move, there were multiple engagements all around the advancing troops. Orders were to keep unit cohesion together and not to have divisions and brigades break apart fighting battles all over the place which would slow down forward progress. It was strenuous work for command staffs to keep that momentum whilst fighting took place. Soviet, Polish and East German tank groups were met everywhere. There were those towed MT-12 anti-tank guns to deal with. Supply troops, men assigned to transport units, engineers and anti-aircraft gunners were met in short, violent battles.

Snakes filled the skies.

There were AH-1 Cobra and AH-64 Apache gunships aided by OH-58 Kiowa scout helicopters; the gunships blasted apart the enemy using their cannons, rocket pods and Hellfire missiles. UH-1 Hueys and UH-60 Blackhawks moved around men and commanders. Just as the planners of Eagle Fire wanted, those helicopters did the job needed of them. There was a strong anti-air threat present and some helicopters were shot down. The Snakes were fast and agile, but they were immune to well-directed enemy fire. Some West German armed helicopters joined with the Americans in the air but the Snakes found the skies alongside themselves mainly full of ‘Fast-movers’: attack aircraft such as A-10 Thunderbolts. These tank-killers had been held back for a few days and thrown forward now. They had their own cannons, the huge 30mm Avengers, and Maverick missiles to go after ground targets as well.

Past the frontlines, American troops moving north, northwest and northeast came across occupation forces. They ran into armed men who either engaged them or tried to flee: if they weren’t surrendering then they were shot at. These wore all sorts of uniforms from various paramilitary and intelligence services from across several Warsaw Pact nations, with most being Soviet and East German. The current occupation of parts of West Germany came with all that could be expected from armed control exerted by a totalitarian power over a population which previously lived under a liberal democracy. It wasn’t just the killings and the rapes and the looting, but organised terror, forced population transfers and deliberate destruction as well.

The leading American troops blasted apart those who wanted to stand in their way; behind them would come military police units as well as men from NATO intelligence services to better address the issue.

In addition, in the early stages of Eagle Fire there had been a mission undertaken by a detachment of US Army Rangers who parachuted into action to seize a POW detention centre near Diepholz. Troops from the 24th Infantry Division arrived a few hours later – they had come very far, very quickly – to find that the Rangers had a few prisoners of their own… though also a rather lot of dead enemy soldiers on their hands too. Those POWs were mainly all armed now from captured weapons and declared an intention to fight, though the attacking tanks and armoured infantry rolled onwards without them due to the difficulties of bringing such a mix of men under command at no notice. Regardless, NATO intelligence officers would want to talk to those prisoners anyway and would find out afterwards that the released men really went in a fit state to fight anyway after their detainment. Moreover, this mission particular mission was a test-run for further ones planned latter elsewhere so what the ex-POWs had to say was very important.


The US Army was on the move and not stopping. With the sun up on this surprisingly bright day, they were rolling towards their objectives and confident that the enemy wasn’t going to be able to stop them.





February 23rd 1990
Key West, the Florida Keys, Florida, the United States

Key West was proving exceptionally difficult for its occupiers to keep control of.

It was the locals on the ground which were causing all of the problems for the Cubans rather than enemy action in the form of air power – see Boca Chica Key – or special forces raids, such as was the case at Marathon. American civilians who called the little island at the end of the Florida Keys home refused to accept hostile foreign control over them. They dared to try and fight the occupiers. They died doing so in such an uneven battle, but they took many Cuban soldiers with them and therefore slowly lowered the number of men assigned to control Key West. Rather than being able to spend all of their time constructing their improvised fortifications for the sure-to-come American invasion, the Cubans were instead fighting a small-scale guerrilla war here. It was one which they should have been able to win due to the island’s small size and the terrain which should have made that impossible, but they weren’t able to bring to an end resistance here.

After five days of being in occupation, other losses incurred from landing operations aside, the Cubans had lost one hundred and twenty-seven men either shot, blown up or slaughtered by rather cruel means that they regarded as verging on the inhumane. That particular number wasn’t that large in the grand scheme of things, say in comparison to Cuban losses elsewhere in direct combat. However, only fourteen hundred men had been assigned to the operation to take Key West – not all of them soldiers either – and more than three hundred had died during that assault. Every man killed here, when there had been none of the promised reinforcements, truly was an irreplaceable loss when the number of civilians on the island along with the Cubans was upwards of twenty thousand.


A composite regiment was created to take and hold Key West as part of the assigned forces for the Grupo de Asalto del Norte. An understrength parachute battalion, a reinforced airmobile infantry battalion, a company of military police, another company of combat engineers and then platoon sized detachments of air defence, signals, medical, artillery observation and mechanical engineering troops had been sent by the Cuban Army. A mixed squadron from the Cuban Air Force of specialists to set up an airhead at Key West Airport had joined them along with operators for several small radars which were meant to be deployed to the island. The DGI had sent men to Key West as well, though those intelligence officers were not under the regular military command structure.

Not all of this assigned force made it to Key West.

Several Antonov-26 Curl and -32 Cline tactical transport aircraft had been shot down during the invasion. They had fallen victim to American fighters and men being transported aboard them had been killed, in particular the second wave of troops in the form of those specialists. The paratroopers who had jumped over Key West had lost more men too when landing in the sea rather than on land, while at the naval airbase on nearby Boca Chica Key two transport aircraft had been bombed just after landing with infantry aboard meant to come across to Key West and those men killed.

The Cubans who had survived the landings made had travelled from home light.

They had personal weapons, ammunition and rations; what they carried on their backs was what they had when it came to bullets and food. There were radios as well as a few light anti-aircraft guns and air defence radars too, but no heavy equipment. The unit commanders for the assault troops had been told that when the second wave arrived to reinforce them – the time-frame for that follow-up deployment kept moving – they would bring in heavier equipment and far more supplies, including armoured vehicles and even a few tanks. None of that came though. The rations ran out and medical gear was used up fast. Even the ammunition ran short soon enough when acts of resistance from the local population was met with massed gunfire and more bullets were expended as well as the few reloads for man-portable SAMs against high-flying American aircraft: the Cuban officers couldn’t stop their men from firing their rifles skywards even when no direct air attacks were made against Key West.


The Cubans had expected resistance to occur, though had underestimated the scale of it while also overestimating their own ability to control what would come. There was an understanding that there were only a few armed American military service personnel at Key West. In addition, it was known that there would be civilians in Key West who had personal weapons… America was a country in love with guns after all. Access to information on the numbers of weapons in civilian hands especially was something that the Cubans didn’t have. Key West wasn’t a crime-ridden city with armed gangs roving the streets and nor was the local police department configured like a military force to deal with that; this the Cubans knew, propaganda aside. Yet they failed to grasp that so many law-abiding citizens who lived in Key West kept weapons at home with them. Florida’s gun laws were as controversial as the rest of the United States and in the Sunshine State it was illegal to keep lists and counts of weapon ownership; there was therefore no intelligence on the matter which the Cubans, nor even the Soviets had they been asked to assist, could get their hands upon.

Taking on and forcing the surrender of American military personnel on Key West and then going after the civilian police while they were still organised meant that the Cubans gathered up a stockpile of guns and ammunition soon after arrival on the island. This weaponry was quickly realised for the value which it had in terms of being able to provide further armament for the Cuban occupiers in the face of an American invasion to retake Key West…

….if it could be distributed properly with the right bullets with the correct guns, no easy task at all.

To get more guns out of the hands of private citizens – including a large number of police officers who simple melted away – meant entering the homes of American citizens and searching them for weapons. No one had expected this to be something easily done and it certainly wasn’t! Gun battles erupted everywhere. People fired rifles and handguns at the Cubans who invaded their homes demanding weapons. The Cubans would fire back only when fired upon initially, but soon took to opening fire first on many occasions as they conducted their house-to-house searches. The local civilians knew their communities and their way around, unlike the Cubans who hadn’t been issued with maps below the company commander level, and evaded capture. Key West was a small island so a prolonged guerrilla conflict was out of the questions, and the urban population would be unable to sustain the privations of that regardless, but the majority of the island’s citizens just weren’t going to stay at home and do nothing while Cubans poured into their homes and shot at anyone they could as well as looting and taking part in a few other nasty incidents too with rapes occurring.

Key West was, like everywhere in the United States, home to military veterans. Many of these had their own personal weapons as was their Constitutional right and others quickly gained access to the weapons from the fallen. A few former retired servicemen also had the knowledge in their head as to how to make small explosive devices from everyday materials. They threw improvised grenades and constructed small bombs; a favourite target for both being the civilian vehicles which the Cubans were using to move around.

Key West wasn’t somewhere about to be pacified, especially not with so few Cuban troops present and no more on their way.


The best method for the Cubans to bring to an end the resistance to their occupation – apart from shooting everyone in sight, of course – would have been to follow the example set by the Warsaw Pact in the territory which they had taken in Western Europe. There were far fewer guns in private hands there, yet they still had faced resistance especially from NATO stragglers armed and alone behind the frontline. What the Soviets had done was to round up civilians, search them and concentrate them together under guard away from the frontlines. Terror methods including public killings and then a heavy dose of propaganda to frighten them had been what had been done in Western Europe.

The Cubans on Key West certainly didn’t have the manpower to do that. They had no troops who were assigned for occupation duties; every man here was meant to be manning outward-facing defences. More and more of those were dragged into trying to combat resistance, but that was in a haphazard fashion rather than organised as was the case with the Soviets. The Cubans also didn’t want to, let alone had the capability to, move the civilians away from Key West. Their orders stated that the civilians were to be generally left to their devices and spread out across Key West. As long as they were everywhere, then the Americans wouldn’t blast Key West apart from the air with their bombers for fear of killing those non-combatants. Should that mass hostage taking of an entire city’s population been the case, then where would the Cubans have move the twenty thousand people too? The only large enough place where that might have been doable would have been the airport. That was to be kept open for the supposedly-arriving follow-up forces to use. The few soldiers there were covering it against an American assault and couldn’t guard tens of thousands of resisting people, nor could the Cubans get all of those civilians there either.

Only the DGI detachment which had come to Key West did anything like the Soviets were doing in the parts of Western Europe which they occupied. These men had come to the island to try to pre-empt resistance in the long-term… by dealing with enemies of Cuba who resided here. The DGI had some intelligence on the personalities whom they were after and when they caught those people they shot them with firing squads being used at Fort Zachary Taylor. These were Cuban exiles born in Cuba as well as those born in the United States, the DGI didn’t care for the distinction when they were all enemies of Cuba. There was no prolonged interrogation or holding of them preparing to ship them back home eventually: they were just lined up and shot with their bodies being thrown into the sea.


The killings would continue until the end of the occupation came, in whichever form that would take. Civilians armed and fighting the occupiers or those caught up in the crossfire would be killed by a dwindling number of Cuban soldiers who were slowly starting to realise that they might just be cut off all alone here. At the same time, more targeted murders would be occurring too by the DGI eliminating enemies of their country’s regime here on foreign soil.





February 23rd 1990
Arnhem, Gelderland, the Netherlands

Two comrades-in-arms, a pair of men who shared a long-standing professional friendship, ran into each other this afternoon in Arnhem. Lt.-Colonel Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin spotted his KGB colleague from varied assignments in Finland and Leningrad and called out to Lt.-Colonel Sergey Borisovich Ivanov to get the other man’s attention.

They managed to catch up over the next ten or so minutes, talking informally to one another as they related their personal and professional experiences during the war so far before having to return to their duties on behalf of the Rodina.


Putin wore a pressed uniform and regarded himself as looking the part of a KGB officer doing an important job. He commented upon the almost bedraggled appearance of Ivanov who was also in a KGB uniform yet looked as if he had been wearing those clothes for the past several years.

“Vova,” Ivanov responded with a hearty laugh and used the short, informal version of Putin’s given name, “I am a simple soldier now!”

“I refuse to believe that, Seryozha.” Putin knew that that would be far from the case at all.

“It’s been a long journey here and I’ve had little time to worry about appearances. Leningrad to Arnhem, by way of Poland and Germany, is quite a trip. We’ve been living in the field.”

“Whose staff are you on?”

“I’m with the Forty-Fifth Guards Motorised Rifle Division headquarters staff. I’m a political commissar now, Vova: something old and something new, as I believe they say here in the West.”

“And something blue?” Putin gave a laugh of his own, one of ironic amusement. “That is for weddings. Your bride back home will not be happy.”

“I do not understand.”

Putin smiled rather than explain what he meant. Ivanov’s English came from books yet he knew rather few common idioms. Regardless, that didn’t matter. What was important was what he had described himself as.

“Are the last of the zampolits gone, Seryozha?”

“Those with the Forty-Fifth Guards were reassigned out of the division before we left the Karelian. There are no more political officers, just new commissar’s like me.”

“None of them shall be missed.” Putin gave a dismissive shrug at the fate of zampolits, those half-policemen, half-soldiers who were all being relived of duties across the entire Soviet Armed Forces in the midst of war. “Yet I think you have been busy since, yes?”

“I’d rather be back in Helsinki.”

Ivanov gave a wide smile with such a comment, as if telling a joke of his own, though he actually appeared to be rather serious. When he and Putin had served for many years together in the Finnish capital, assigned to the large embassy staff there, they had done true intelligence work on behalf of their country. It was what both had been trained to do and had excelled at. Now, both were back in the West again, though in vastly different circumstances.

“Yourself, Vova? You are assigned where…?”

“I’m back with Ivan Yurievich,” Putin named an old acquaintance of the two of them, “though we are here in Holland not to recruit agents but rather to oversee the transfer of power from military control to friendly local civilian authorities as the Army moves further onwards. The old order here is to be replaced and, as expected, that will not be an easy process. There will be resistance to what must be done. This Kingdom of the Netherlands is to be broken up and a socialist republic established here in Holland instead. We are locating and screening candidates for when that occurs and making sure that we decisively deal with those who will cause problems.

Some of it is rather distasteful, but it must be done this early in the occupation.”

With such an explanation, Ivanov thought that Putin told him far more than was needed. It was as if his friend was defending himself against charges so far unmade. Everyone in the service of the KGB at the moment was on their guard with fears for their future as Chairman Kryuchkov back in Moscow – who now led the Soviet Union in addition to the KGB – made all of his changes, yet Putin really didn’t seem comfortable with what he said he was doing here in the Netherlands.

“Have there been other problems too? With our comrades in the Army?”

“I see that some rumours might have reached you when travelling, Seryozha.” Putin didn’t wait for an answer before carrying on. “Yes, there have been clashes with those who believe in many of the old ways and aren’t willing to accept the new reality. They still think that they can do as they did under Gorbachev.”

“Grachev?”

“That particular general from the Airborne Troops could not, would not understand that personal enrichment – in wartime too! – will no longer be tolerated. I had no involvement myself in his arrest, court-martial and the deliverance of justice… yet I am more than satisfied at the outcome.”

“There are large parts of the Armed Forces, Vova,” Ivanov shared his own opinion on this following his friend’s lead, “where corruption is endemic, but that is the least of it. There has been talk that there is in many places a wide defensive mindset which has caused the slow progress of the advance westwards. I still think that remains: after all, the first strikes against the West commenced without strategic weapons used where they really should have been. Gorbachev’s so-called reforms and restructuring…”

“I understand, I really do.” Putin had had this conversation on many occasions during the war with others and was too tired to do so again. He agreed with all of that, yet that was in the past. The Armed Forces had shown marked recent improvement in attitude. Senior officers who had lacked the necessary offensive spirit had been removed and there was work underway among the junior ranks to improve the discipline problems which had occurred; especially among conscript soldiers in their fourth, final six month period of enlistment. It wasn’t an easy process, but was slowly being done. The zampolits were gone too, and now the KGB, the true guardians of the Rodina rather than too many fools with too many guns, were finishing up taking the Armed Forces to task… with the resultant body count which had come from that. When in West Berlin early in the war, Putin had seen the failures and worked as part of the solution. He hoped to do more to assist that when here in Arnhem, especially since the operational remit of his superior was so vague.

There was another Airborne Troops senior officer here in the Netherlands, one General Lebed, who was causing other problems…

“Tell me about the journey which you had, Seryozha.” Putin changed the subject some.

“Long. Troublesome. Stressful. We went down from Leningrad, through the Baltics, across Poland, and then through the two Germanys. I have never been a fan of rail travel, Vova, especially over such long distances. We were rerouted several times too, especially the further west we moved. NATO has bombed bridges and rail yards throughout Poland and the German Democratic Republic. There should have been a much earlier point where we came off the trains and moved forward with our own vehicles.”

“Was their trouble in Poland?”

“From NATO?

“No, from the Poles.”

“Surprisingly not. There was tension, an atmosphere, but that country remains calm at the moment.”

“I fear that situation may not last, Seryozha.”

“I would agree.”

For a moment, neither of them had nothing to say. They each considered what to discuss next, with each wanting to seek information from the other yet without overtly doing so due to the ethics of their service responsibilities.

Putin heard an aircraft in the distance and looked up briefly at the skies above the Netherlands. He considered asking Ivanov about how bad the NATO air attacks in Poland had been, whether they had been as bad as he had seen in both Germanies, but then realised that Ivanov would have travelled through Poland with haste and not had the time nor the training to evaluate those.

Ivanov pondered over how to ask about this General Lebed character…

“The Airborne Troops here in Holland, Vova. Are they under Front command or attached to a field army?” He found a roundabout way of asking.

“They answer to the Netherlands Front at the minute. They come from multiple units who saw fighting across the Federal German Republic throughout the past few weeks and the survivors of many fights merged into one. They took Arnhem when the front was broken open, yet failed to exploit that breakthrough.”

This was far from the reason behind Putin’s agitation with the commanding officer of those paratroopers and airmobile troops; the KGB man was concerned little with those fine details of the military campaign. The Soviet Army was still driving forwards and while the part of the Rhine Estuary hadn’t been crossed here it had been a little further westward. The Fifth Guards Tank Army was now operating between the Nederrijn / Lek and the Waal. They were driving for the North Sea up ahead while also pushing against the southern two of those rivers which formed the estuary here of one of Europe’s biggest rivers.

“The Twenty–Second Guards Army shall be in the fight by tomorrow.” The division which Ivanov was with was part of that newly-created field army. “We’ll go south, I think, rather than across to Rotterdam.”

“Do you know that it is no coincidence that the Taman Guards, the Kantemir Tanks and the Forty-Fifth Guards are all here in the Netherlands, Seryozha?”

“How so?”

“Three combat divisions of ‘Category A’ troops home-based around Moscow and Leningrad make up the force sent such a great distance ahead of many other formations and into battle right at the frontlines. Why would that occur? Who do you think gave the order, a personal order for the deployment of those elite formations?”

Ivanov gave an answer to the latter question: “Chairman Kryuchkov.”

“Correct.” Then Putin gave his opinion to the first question he had put: “To make sure that if the Armed Forces decide to act against the new regime, the last of their supposedly elite units of a significant number are far away fighting in Western Europe.”

“The poor Dutch will face the consequences of such paranoia then, Vova.”

“Yes they will, Seryozha, they will. And all of the other NATO reservists here in the Netherlands. Your division will see action against third-rate, even fourth-rate troops from various NATO countries here.”

“Where are their best troops?”

“Still back in the Federal German Republic, Seryozha.”

“If they manage to make a strong counter-offensive, Vova, then…”

“I’ve been assured,” Putin cut in, “that any attack there is doomed to failure. The Americans won’t get far if they try and the British and the Belgians with them – yes, the Belgians have almost all of their professional army on the Weser of all places at this fateful time for their country! – try to join them it will still result in failure.”

“I hope that you are correct.” Ivanov was a little more concerned hearing this and didn’t share the confidence of his friend.

“I’m certain of that. The Twenty–Second Guards Army will soon go down into Belgium and we’ll see the end of the war not long afterwards.”


Afterwards, Putin and Ivanov said their goodbyes; for now, not for good… or so both hoped. The former went back to his occupation duties and doing the intelligence work which was befitting the status of the professional which he believed he was while the latter went back to playing at being a sort-of soldier.

All the while, what Putin had said wouldn’t occur on the North German Plain – NATO’s American-led counter-offensive having success – did.





February 23rd 1990
University of Munich Campus, Munich, Bavaria, West Germany

The politicians meeting this evening in central Munich were now the de facto government of the Federal Republic of Germany. They were not the de jure, legal ruling administration governing West Germany yet they were the ones who now had power in their hands.

Well… as much power as the French wanted to allow them to yield anyway.


New Chancellor Theodor Waigel didn’t owe his position to the French nor had any allegiance to them. He was a German and his allegiance was to his people. There was a significant French military presence throughout southern parts of West Germany and all NATO forces there – including what elements of the Bundeswehr hadn’t collapsed when the short-lived ceasefire came about – were under French command. Regardless, Waigel and his government weren’t puppets of the French despite what the naysayers said.

There were quite a few of those; people who claimed that the Munich Government had no mandate and was only in place because of the French. It was France after all which had dealt with the Aachen Government and whom had troops in Munich protecting Waigel and those politicians with him who had fled here following events that had brought down the government which had acceded to those Soviet demands earlier in the war. It was yet another occupation of West Germany, it was said, this time by the country’s neighbour rather than the Soviets.

There was no disputing the French military presence nor the reasons behind France’s despite to keep as much of West Germany free from Soviet occupation: of course they didn’t want the Soviets on their own borders. However, Waigel and those in his government were unequivocal in their denial that Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg – as well as parts of Hessen north of the Main Valley where the Americans were – were under French occupation. French troops were giving their lives every day for the defence of West Germany and it’s people, people whom the Munich Government represented. Moreover, all of the remaining parts of West Germany were the French were not significant in number when it came to men on the ground, up through the Rhineland and into the Ruhr as well as Ostfriesland, had local West German authorities recognising the Munich Government’s rule. Much of Bonn was a ruin after repeated Soviet efforts to demolish the little city as part of their propaganda war, Flensburg had been destroyed in nuclear fire and Aachen was associated with where those who were prepared to give up the fight for West Germany had been based at.

Munich was therefore where the new government would be headquartered. It was Waigel’s home city and not immediately endangered by enemy occupation. Furthermore, Munich had been recognised early on in the political crisis which had engulfed West Germany as where continued resistance would be met to the Soviets. Waigel had his people inform all of those who voiced opposition that once the war was over and the Soviets pushed out of the country, the Munich Government would probably relocate too, to somewhere more centralised. At the moment, with so many West Germans dead (many at their own hands too when they gave up all hope) and many more either living under the horrors of foreign occupation or whom had made themselves refugees in neighbouring countries, there were far more important matters to be concerned with.


Waigel had been the Finance Minister in Helmut Kohl’s cabinet. He had been in the wartime bunker for the senior members of the West German government underneath the Rhineland when the Foreign Minister had launched his putsch to have a vote made against Kohl and depose him. Waigel had been on the losing side of that vote, arguing that it was illegal and abstaining, and then been dismissed like so many others from the government. He had been unsure of the intentions that others claimed Hans-Dietrich Genscher had and didn’t think that the man was acting for Soviet interests, but instead believed that the man was naive fool who shouldn’t have been allowed to do what he did. Other senior ministers had gone to Flensburg, Britain, France or even tried to get as far away as the United States when they feared for their own future yet Waigel had gone to Munich. His intention had at first been to work with the Bavarian state government, not to lead a new government.

Genscher – whose wife had been missing since the war and might have been kidnapped, Waigel later discovered – had then made error after error and couldn’t even keep his new government together let alone work out any sort of deal with the rest of NATO as he had tried to do so that West Germany could be free of foreign troops. Waigel had always known that that would fail but hadn’t been sure that he could do anything about it. Joined by others who also came to Munich in the following days, ministers who weren’t prepared to run away from their responsibilities to their people, he had been convinced that he could do something about it. The Munich Government was formed before the ceasefire broke down and while it was technically not the legal government for West Germany, neither were those operating from either Aachen or Flensburg. A vote of his colleagues had put Waigel at the head of the new administration.

At the top of the Munich Government were several other senior members of Kohl’s cabinet. Justice Minister Hans Engelhard, Economy Minister Helmut Haussmann and Transport Minister Friedrich Zimmermann had all resigned rather than serve under Genscher. They had all returned to their home regions in the south of the country where they represented their local areas in the Bundestag: Engelhard and Zimmermann were Bavarians and Haussmann was from Baden-Württemberg. They were among Waigel’s early supporters and were joined in Munich by Martin Bangemann who came to the Bavarian capital from Brussels after leaving his European Commission post. These politicians were from the CSU and FDP political parties, those who were in the pre-war governing coalition of Kohl’s ruling CDU party. To give the Munich Government more legitimacy, they added Hans-Jochen Vogel to their ranks making Waigel’s administration more representative. Vogel, the leader of the left-leaning SPD, had narrowly escaped being trapped in West Berlin – his local constituency – when tensions erupted and the East Germans closed the air corridors. He had been wholly side-lined first by Kohl and not even consulted by Genscher; the Munich Government brought him in for more than just appearances, yet his political stance helped.

A day after the Munich Government was formed, the Soviets struck at Flensburg where former Defence Minister Gerhard Stoltenberg (another one who had resigned rather than give in to the Soviets) and eliminated the government there by their nuclear attack. Waigel had at that point had representatives there in that unfortunate town on the Danish border talking with Stoltenberg about joining them in opposing the Aachen Government. Further representatives from the Munich Government were in Paris too when Soviet commandoes started their slaughter. Luckily for them, the NATO Secretary-General Manfred Wörner – a fellow West German who was furious at what he called the ‘traitors in Aachen’ – was hosting their meeting with American diplomats in another part of the French Foreign Ministry complex and they all managed to escape. Wörner gave plenty of assistance to the Munich Government in making sure that the rest of NATO moved to recognise them rather than the Flensburg Government… agreeing to work with the Aachen Government was something that no NATO country had been willing to do.

Immediately following the resumption of hostilities, Waigel and the Munich Government had been browbeaten by the French into leaving the Bavarian capital. They set themselves up outside the city at Dachau but none of them wanted to be known as the Dachau Government for all of the historic connotations with regards to that town. Moreover, Waigel wanted to be back in Munich among those West German civilians there; he wanted it to be known that his government wasn’t running away. Helmut Kohl was in the United States and Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker (not a sinecure post but at the same time not a head of government) was in Brussels. Those two men were regarded as having fled their people at a time of need in addition to putting Genscher in power. Such assertions weren’t in fact the case with Kohl leaving at CIA insistent and von Weizsäcker only agreeing to recognise the vote to replace him with Genscher because he feared that Kohl was incapable; the president hadn’t intended to see West Germany surrender, rather the opposite. Still, both men were out of the country and not with their fellow citizens.

Security was paramount for the Munich Government though. In the days before the war commenced a trio of West German senior ministers had suffered unfortunate fates. Social Affairs Minister Norbert Blüm had just plain disappeared, Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble had been killed when his government car was blown up with him inside of it and Minister for Special Affairs (a minister without portfolio) Rudolf Seiters had been detained by agents from the domestic security service BfV before he died in mysterious circumstances while in their custody. In addition, other politicians such as the Minister-President of North Rhine-Westphalia – West Germany was a federation with the states having their own governments – and senior SDP figure Johannes Rau had been shot dead while his CSU counterpart from Bavaria Max Streibl had survived an assassination attempt conducted against him. Precautions had to be taken by the Munich Government for their own personal safety and the French had provided much of that. Large elements of the BfV and the foreign intelligence service BND had seen acts of treason and desertion with worries over the rest of those organisations left intact being able to do their duties. There were West German soldiers in the south of the country who hadn’t given in and whom answered to the Munich Government yet they were all needed at the frontlines.


Now, with the second round of fighting fully underway following the brief interlude which had been the ceasefire, southern West Germany faced Soviet-led Warsaw Pact efforts to conquer it and drive to the Rhine. This would mean the destruction of all that Waigel and his government represented: a free, democratic West Germany who would fight for their own sovereignty and alongside their allies. Wörner was still trying to convince the rest of NATO that his fellow countrymen could be trusted and they only had to look at the Munich Government and the actions of the Bundeswehr across Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg to see that the West Germans could still fight. There were Warsaw Pact forces inside Bavaria along the Danube after crossing from Czechoslovakia and more whom had penetrated the Alps through the West German-Austrian border.

Waigel was at the head of all West German efforts now to resist the invaders, and not just here in the south where the French were certainly not in occupation. He had personally secured the support of Ernst Albrecht, the Minister-President of Lower Saxony who had taken over authority from the vanquished Flensburg Government in controlling West German forces spread across Ostfriesland, in working with NATO there and also had telephone conversations with both Bush and Thatcher to assure those two leaders that the French were correct to have faith in his ability to lead. West Germany was aiming to give full support to the war and there would be no more betrayals of its NATO partners who were fighting and dying for his country’s survival. To give proof of his commitment to NATO, Waigel had told the leaders of Britain and the United States just as he had told the French when it came to the Aachen Government: do with them as you wish.

Genscher and the former junior ministers he had promoted to senior positions in his attempt at a government, along with figures from the military & the security services, who had all set themselves up in Aachen were now in French custody. They were somewhere in the south of France, Waigel hadn’t asked exactly where. He knew though that the French weren’t about to kill them or anything like that, yet they were certainly not be treated in a manner which a lawyer would like. The French were trying to get to the bottom of why Genscher did as he did and the motivations of his co-conspirators in deposing Kohl too. What West Germany’s new leader wasn’t happy with though, yet kept silent on the issue for now, was French behaviour in other matters concerning another two prominent politicians and fellow countrymen of his. Waigel had been alarmed at how Saarland Minister-President Oskar Lafontaine and the Green politician & activist from Hessen Joschka Fischer had both been detained by the French and remained in their custody. Neither Lafontaine and Fischer had been supportive or Genscher’s Aachen Government nor were agents of the Soviets; Waigel saw them as misguided in their attempts to speak out against current French influence in their country rather than traitors.

The French were holding them though, which regrettably gave credence to those others who said that West Germany was under foreign occupation in the south as it was in much of the north too. Waigel wanted to change that opinion that was gaining traction, but for now there were still more pressing matters such as the war to be focused upon.

Ten – Parley

February 25th 1990
The Grand Banks, near the Newfoundland coast, the North Atlantic

‘Shoot first and ask questions later’ was not a Royal Navy operational procedure in peace or war. The North Atlantic was an active war zone and HMS Boxer had already seen much action. When the warnings came of reported enemy submarines or aircraft – the Soviet Navy’s now-sunk surface fleet hadn’t been on this side of the ocean – everyone aboard stood ready to open fire at a moment’s notice though there had always been thought and consideration given by Commander Tim Laurence (Boxer’s captain) first as to what he was about to do as per his training. There was always the chance that a friendly, allied vessel or aircraft had been misidentified. Yes, there was danger in pausing to confirm before opening fire, but to open fire without thought and on impulse was not how officers such as he in the Royal Navy had been schooled to act.

It was this calmness under pressure by Commander Laurence which allowed the Soviet submarine K-60 to surface three hundred odd yards away and her blinker light to start flashing at the Boxer instead of the vessel being blown to smithereens the moment that it had been detected. Of course, there had been the temptation to launch the torpedoes which the frigate carried then as well, with the submarine certainly having no chance of escape, but again there had been a wait given to see what was actually happening first.

The blinker sent a message through the early morning light that the Boxer’s bridge crew was able to understand as it was a lone word in English repeated many times in Morse code.

That word was ‘parley’.


Back to the west, about forty miles behind where the Boxer was now, there was a convoy of thirteen ships out of Halifax en route to Europe. The cargoes carried by those civilian vessels varied from vehicle & aviation fuel to ammunition to military equipment spare parts to countless other smaller military items many of which for use by soldiers fighting for NATO. The British-crewed frigate was one of several escorts assigned on the surface with air support in the form of land-based aircraft flying from Canada, Bermuda, Iceland and Scotland also assigned to provide coverage during different parts of the voyage. The convoy was one of many at sea and the majority of ships which formed it already having made at least two crossings over the North Atlantic beforehand during the war.

The Boxer was operating out ahead, looking for submarines, and had found one.

It was a Type-627A vessel (known to NATO as the November class) and in service with the Soviet Navy’s Northern Fleet based out of the Kola Peninsula. The nuclear-powered vessel was more than twenty-five years old and even back when new in the Sixties had never been a serious technological threat to the navies of NATO. This morning though she had surprised the Boxer by surfacing fast and only then being detected. The weather conditions were rather bad and the Lynx helicopter carried by the frigate had been stuck aboard by the wind and rain, but the K-60 should have been spotted far earlier than she was with all of the noise she made.

There would be time for recriminations later for the hydrophone operators, Commander Laurence reminded himself when he came up to the bridge to see the submarine for himself. In the meantime, he used the low-light binoculars to look at the surfaced vessel up ahead that his frigate was closing in upon and he himself read the Morse code. As he’d been told when down in the Operations Room, over and over again the same series of flashes came.

Dot Dash Dash Dot space Dot Dash space Dot Dash Dot space Dot Dash Dot Dot space Dot Dash Dot Dash Dash.

Parley.

Commander Laurence presumed that there was meant to be a question mark at the end.


Before the Boxer had set sail from Devonport – not an hour before the war commenced – Captain Lawrence had been issued with a whole series of direct orders and general operational guidelines for her wartime patrol. He had been told that the Boxer was assigned to protect the sea-lanes which provided lines of communication with North America and that he was to operate all across the ocean guarded trans-Atlantic convoys during their runs to Europe but also going back the other way to the United States and Canada too; returning ships were just as important as those fully-laden. Soviet ships, submarines and aircraft were to be engaged when spotted and identified as being hostile. NATO’s established chain-of-command for North Atlantic operations were to be followed and the Boxer was to work with Britain’s allies.

Commander Laurence and his crew had done just that. They had made three runs across the ocean and were just starting out on their forth one. In doing so, the Boxer was officially claiming credit for the ‘kill’ of one Soviet submarine on the war’s sixth day and an ‘assist’ in the elimination of another on the eleventh day (hours before the ceasefire) when an American P-3 had dropped a torpedo on the frigate’s acquired & tracked target.

In the guidelines given, Commander Laurence had been told that there were moments where he would probably have to use his own judgement in tricky situations. The Boxer might come across a ship flying the flag of a neutral when it was clearly not. There might be an incident of a mutiny aboard a vessel where the crew or elements of decide that they might no longer want to fight. In addition, there had been instructions to him to make his own decision if he came across the Soviet vessel which might want to surrender… or talk about doing such as the K-60 appeared to be doing now.


No black flag had been run up from the conning tower – the internationally-recognised and traditional signal of parley – from the submarine which the Boxer now reached. Parley was the only word being used over the Morse code, not truce or surrender. Parley itself meant to talk about a truce, to discuss the terms.

Commander Laurence could only assume that this was the one solitary English word known to cover the broader definition of what those aboard the K-60 meant. He still had his frigate’s weapons trained upon the submarine but he wanted to believe that that signal which they were sending actually meant that there were intentions of the submarine giving up the fight. It felt right; those aboard the submarine surely would no longer want to keep fighting.

He was with this belief, though there was the issue now of how to arrange that without the Boxer having a Russian-speaker aboard and communications at the moment only going to happen in this weather via visual signals.

It was certainly going to be an interesting experience indeed!





February 25th 1990
Israeli Defence Forces Headquarters, The Kirya, Tel Aviv, Israel

All through this morning, General Shomron had been receiving news about the activities of the Defence Minister who was up in Syria near the frontlines outside Damascus. Each time something new came into the communications centre here at the IDF Chief-of-Staff’s command bunker, he would be further outraged at what Ariel Sharon was up to.

Again and again, General Shomron sent out firm instructions that the Defence Minister was to be escorted out of the area and back to the Golan Heights at least, into Israel itself preferably. His orders were being ignored though. Sharon himself had interjected himself inside the chain-of-command and was telling those local commanders on the ground that his authority override that of military in the situation which he found himself in. He wouldn’t talk himself on the satellite-radio link-up with The Kirya and had the IDF personnel there repeat what he said instead. The Deputy IDF Chief-of-Staff, Major-General Ehud Barak, was currently on a helicopter heading that way to personally intervene. Southern Syria was still an active war-zone with no ceasefire, truce or armistice underway and the Syrians still had the capability to strike despite the series of defeats which they had taken in battle.

If Sharon was hurt or killed – maybe even taken prisoner! – then…

General Shomron had no choice but to place a call to the Prime Minister of Israel and gain his intervention.


Prime Minister Shamir was informed of what was going on. He was told by General Shomron that overnight the Defence Minister had made an authorised visit to the Golan Heights and met with the Northern Command staff operating at a forward location near Ani’am. It was supposed to be a morale-boosting trip lasting a couple of hours where he would meet with service personnel at the field headquarters and also attend a briefing on the overall military situation in Syria. Major-General Yossi Peled and Sharon had then a private meeting before soldiers from Peled’s personal guard escorted the two of them down to the edge of the Golan Heights and into occupied Syria. They had visited a battlefield six miles past the pre-war frontlines in the early hours where Israeli armour had smashed apart the Syrian Army.

That initial excursion was unauthorised though General Shomron had only been a little concerned when first told about that. He could easily foresee how that could have happened with a man like Sharon and his forceful personality riding roughshod over the worries of others. The Defence Minister would have wanted to go there and Peled would have been browbeaten into accepting. What happened afterwards, and was continuing to occur, was unacceptable though. General Shomron informed the Prime Minister that at the moment Sharon was on his way to Damascus International Airport. He was travelling in a convoy with junior officers – acting against Peled’s orders too – on their way there on a resupply mission to the IDF troops which held that wrecked facility. Roadblocks manned by units sent firm orders to halt and turn back the convoy had been intimidated by Sharon and he’d had The Kirya informed that he wanted to make a visit to the troops there to boost their morale as well.

General Shomron asked the Prime Minister to contact his Defence Minister himself and get him to come back. The danger to his life, and the blow which that would bring to Israel, was far too great. The Syrians had been beaten in battle after battle but they could still fight back when and where they wanted, often in foolhardy yet deadly attacks. If they got wind that Sharon was in that convoy they’d throw everything that they had at it; more lives than just Sharon’s were at stake.

There had been no questions from Shamir as he’d been told all of this, only silence on the other end of the connection. When he finally did make a response, he spoke with haste and told General Shomron to ‘let Arik do what he must’.

Further fury boiled inside the IDF Chief-of-Staff when there came the sound of laughter over the telephone. He realised that there were others on the connection and recognised the voice of Moshe Arens; the Foreign Minister said the name ‘Assad’ to someone else with him and the Prime Minister. General Shomron, who was meant to be the commander-in-chief of ongoing current military operations, realised that he had been cut out of the loop. The politicians were up to something and he hadn’t been told. As was his right befitting his position, he should have been though.

Politely, but firmly, he told them that he needed to be informed of what was happening.


Shamir, Arens and Shavit (the Mossad director) each gave partial apologies to General Shomron over the telephone for leaving him out of the loop. Furthermore, Shavit said that one of his top people was already on his way to The Kirya to brief General Shomron even before the IDF Chief-of-Staff’s call: there’d been an unforeseen delay. Regardless, what was going on in Syria at the moment with Sharon was a secret of the highest levels and only those who needed to know had been informed. With reflection, General Shomron should have been told long before now, but, alas…

The Defence Minister was going to meet Bassel al-Assad, the eldest son of the Syrian President and his nominated successor.

What the two of them would be discussing would be the initial terms of an official ceasefire to come into effect across Syria and Lebanon. Their clandestine meeting – at the airport where Israel was in control of – needed to be kept secret for the time being because there would be many opposed to any form of an ending of the war in Syria. The Soviets would surely try to intervene and so too was the possibility of rebellious Syrians as well.

Only Sharon could go to Damascus and meet Assad’s son. The Defence Minister hadn’t been given such an important, prestigious position in the government following the pre-war reshuffle at the beginning of the month – when hostilities broke out in Europe – for nothing. He was a national hero in Israel and an able (if retired) military commander. The Syrians would respect him and his word when meeting with Sharon as opposed to someone of lesser standing. He could bring the Syrians the negotiating table to first discuss parley before anything else where others might fail to achieve that.

Arens reminded General Shomron of the fears that they all had about an end game to Israel’s current wars with both Iraq and Syria. Saddam might be dead and Assad’s forces beaten in battle outside of their capital, but the immediate future was uncertain with regard to both countries that Israel was fighting. They each were known to maintain stocks of chemical and biological weapons. In such a nightmare scenario where those might be used, Israel would ultimately ‘win’ an exchange of weapons of mass destruction – thermonuclear warheads trumped nerve gases or germs – but that win would follow a Second Holocaust of the Jewish people. Israel needed to bring to an end the war now. The Americans had dealt with Saddam and how Israel would address the issue of Assad being able to get out of this war pretending that he had some pride left.

While still angry at not being told sooner, and not willing to forget that, General Shomron gritted his teeth and only gave the politicians his full agreement as to their actions and goals. Of course he wanted to see an end to the war. He understood the danger from it continuing to go on and Israeli soldiers were still dying on the frontlines even if there had been no more great battles. He ended the call with them after saying that he’d recall his deputy Barak at once…

…yet still couldn’t believe how they hadn’t intended to tell him all of this until it was done. There were some secrets that people couldn’t understood needed to be shared further than they were. He told himself that he was dealing with amateur great schemers!





February 25th 1990
Revolutionary Armed Forces bunker, south of Havana, Cuba

Comandante en Jefe Raúl Castro had listened to rather than watched another one of Fidel’s broadcasts from Guantanamo Bay. His brother had told the world – at least those able to hear anyway – that Guantanamo Bay belonged to Cuba and always would. A great injustice had been set right and the Cuban nation was reunited. After thirty-one long years, the final goals of the Revolution had been achieved with Cuba as one and the norteamericanos banished from the island never to return.

He’d also stated that Cuban forces who held American soil weren’t about to leave anytime soon either. The United States could have the Florida Keys back (he spoke as if all were under Cuban occupation) and their captured prisoners of war when a public apology had been made, an indemnity paid and there no more of their cowardly air attacks being made against Cuba.

Until those conditions were met, there would be no weakness in the fighting spirit of the Cuban people. There’d be no parley, no talk of a ceasefire or armistice and no peace conference. Cuba would fight until it got the victory which was deserved, even if that meant that each and every Cuban had to give his and her life for that victory.


Jefe Castro thought it was a good speech, all things considered.

He’d heard Fidel make better ones and also worse ones too. Perhaps it had been better to view it on the television rather than listen on the radio. A couple of those here inside this bunker said so, though he wasn’t sure of their honesty on that matter. For far too many, undying loyalty to everything Fidel said and did was the natural order of things. However, there’d been the look on the faces of some of those men which Jefe Castro had seen when the bunker had shaken last night after American bombs had fallen to the ground up above: those had been expressions of pure terror as they realised how close the B-52s had come to killing them all.

Fidel had spoken an hour ago though, long before his brother had received the updated intelligence summary that he just had… which meant that everything which had been said from Guantanamo Bay was meaningless.


The norteamericanos were far from on the verge of defeat. They weren’t about to lose the war against the Soviets and their allies in either Europe, the Middle East or East Asia. Everything had gone wrong for the cause of Moscow in those wide theatres of warfare. Furthermore, their military forces which could be employed against Cuba were stronger than initially thought. All of the earlier intelligence had all been wrong, especially on the latter matter.

There had been an overestimation – to put it kindly – in how much US military power had been sent far overseas. Cuban intelligence efforts had either been faulty or they had been deceived. The norteamericanos had deployed their majority of their full-time, regular assets far away to Europe and Korea along with a significant portion of their reservists that had moved afterwards. Yet, there had been some regulars and a great number of reservists who had not gone so far away from the United States. Some of those were kept back for regional emergencies or needed extensive training while being mobilised in-place.

The result of this was that the belief that Cuba had operated under where the United States could be attacked as it was and little done in retaliation was wrong. The norteamericanos showed no sign of letting up in their strategic bombing of Cuba and were marshalling forces to retake the Florida Keys. The pre-war assumption that the United States would struggle to do either of those – and focus upon the latter rather than the former should they have some strength – was false. They were doing both!

Jefe Castro had personally ordered the updated intelligence study to be conducted and had his own loyal people involved. He had been concerned that what Cuban military intelligence as well as the DGI had said earlier hadn’t been wholly truthful and now he was seeing that that fear had been correct. They’d earlier reported what they had for other reasons, ones which he was working on getting to the bottom of, and those were wrong.

The B-52s were not going to be redeployed elsewhere and would remain available for bomb-runs against Cuba. There were fully-trained light infantry troops that had come up from Panama and weren’t going to the Korean Peninsula. Warships which had been in reserve or repairs and not initially available were not going out into the North Atlantic now but rather to the Caribbean. Maritime trained commandos from a whole host of units spread throughout the United States were gathering together after refresher training not to go to the Arctic but rather being consolidated in Florida.

The norteamericanos were assembling their military forces ready to win the war here. They were still fighting elsewhere around the world yet were at the same time ready to act decisively against Cuba. Jefe Castro could see all of this, he had evidence to the effect. Fidel though had just told them that he wasn’t giving in.

What, his brother asked himself, was he to do now?





February 25th 1990
Near Dinklage, Lower Saxony, West Germany

The key to a successful operation as a senior military commander is to have an effective personal staff. General Galvin had long ago been taught – through first-hand experience himself as a staffer – that the man in charge at the top needs to be surrounded by those who will allow him to do his job. He doesn’t need the most brilliant of minds, strategists and tacticians need not apply, but rather those who will support his ability to command. The posting of SACEUR brought with it the choice of picking his own staff officers from a wide talent pool and General Galvin believed that he had done well in that regard. He had staff officers, his Chief-of-Staff especially, who controlled the access of information and people to him. They made sure that he wasn’t overwhelmed with detail nor constantly bothered by visitors. It was a difficult task with the price of making a mistake being high indeed; an error could cost a war.

He didn’t blame any of his staff for what he was having to deal with this evening though. It wasn’t their fault that the Canadian Chief of the Defence Staff was making contact ready to get busy chewing his ear off. The man couldn’t be ignored and he had a legitimate reason to be making communication over the satellite link-up all the way from the other side of the world. General Galvin was making a visit to the headquarters of the US III Corps, which had torn deep into enemy-held territory in an offensive which they would later right about in the history books, but General John de Chastelain had to be heard.

de Chastelain called from the Canadian military bunker at CFS Carp outside Ottawa using a link provided by the US military to make contact with SACEUR in the field. Canada’s representative on the NATO Military Council had already made the point which the Chief of the Defence Staff wanted to press yet in the interests of Allied unity, as well as professionalism, General Galvin was prepared to take some of that flak too.

Once the call was connected, de Chastelain was polite but firm. He made clear how unhappy that he and his country’s political leadership were with regard to the usage of Canadian military forces committed to NATO and under SACEUR’s command. The incident this morning at the Leda River crossings near the town of Leer was only the latest in a long list of disappointing events where Canadian lives had been sacrificed needlessly. Canada was committed to the NATO cause, de Chastelain was at pains to point out, no matter what yet there was only a finite number of young men that Canada could send overseas to be killed like they had earlier in the day. The reports which had come back to CFS Carp were of twenty-three men killed in the blink of an eye… and all for no reason at all other than carelessness, maybe stupidity. Canada had suffered several thousand military losses already, as well as hundreds of civilians killed at home, and would mourn every one of those. Many of those deaths had been avoidable too, though this accident was rather upsetting. A shrug and a comment of ‘friendly fire’ had been given in response to those deaths to the men on the ground who had just seen a NATO aircraft from an ally drop a series of bombs on their comrades. de Chastelain himself understood, and had made his Prime Minister and War Cabinet aware as well, that in the head of the moment and in the midst of battle things could go wrong. There were certainly arrogant Canadian flying officers like that American aviator too who failed to understand what they had done and made stupid, off-the-cuff remarks. Yet… this was the Canadian Airborne Regiment which had been again attacked by its own side. They’d been shelled by a Norwegian artillery unit when fighting with their allies near Bogen early in the war and then the US Navy had bombed them yesterday in a signals mix-up as they approached Leer and the Lower Ems Valley.

The Canadian Airborne Regiment was a national symbol for the Canadian Armed Forces. There were professional soldiers fighting with reservists from units across the country in an elite force that had been committed to action alongside their NATO allies in the mixed ACE Brigade–Group. They’d shed blood in Norway fighting with those allies and were doing so again down in West Germany now too. Could something be done to please stop the incidents where they were attacked by their own side? Canada was pained by the loss of every man, those fighting across Europe and in the North Atlantic, but to have their men killed by their own side and then a fool disregarding their deaths was getting too much to bare. If de Chastelain could please ask a small favour of the busy SACEUR? Would he be able to draft a short message to the Canadian Airborne Regiment stating that their service was valued and they’d done very well in assisting in the closing of the great NATO pincer move down on the North German Plain? The commanding officer would read it out to the men; it would help with morale. The men would still fight for their unit, their country and their allies – of course – but… the symbolism would go a long way.

General Galvin promised to grant the Canadian his wish before offering his personal apologies. None were needed, de Chastelain said, as these things happening in war as well as emotions which would run high, but he was grateful for the kind words.


Following the conversation, General Galvin moved back to why he had taken the dangerous trip forward up to Dinklage. The nearby small town was a ruin – like so very many in West Germany – but he was outside of it in the countryside through which American tanks had torn through earlier. The forward elements of the US III Corps were far away to the north and the northeast now where they had linked up with those light forces that had come into West Germany through Ostfriesland. The command problem with the Allied I Corps, fresh from Norway and including the Canadians, was still in need of resolution and so what advances southwards by them had been limited but still firm contact had been made almost everywhere. The US III Corps was also on the outskirts of Bremen too and pushing for the Lower Weser near there. He was here to meet with the corps commander and talk with him before moving to the west some and attending another meeting with a victorious commander, the general in-charge of the US I Corps which had been on the left flank of the advance north. The pair of commanders had done more than was expected of them and he wanted to congratulate them; they’d shut the escape route of the enemy forces across in the Netherlands faster than expected and eliminated all enemy forces thrown in their way to stop them. Four field armies – three Soviet and one Polish – lay defeated on the field of battle and another three were now surrounded with no chance of relief or the ability to flee. An enormous amount of occupied territory had been retaken, many of the enemy captured and large numbers of recently captured POWs liberated. Real celebrations could come post-war, when more victories like this had been won across West Germany, yet the corps commanders deserved to be shown that the efforts from them and their men had been amazing. Lt.-General Waller (US I Corps) had his national guardsmen drive across such unfriendly territory full of defences and with counterattacks coming against them continuously but got to Leer regardless. US III Corps commander Lt.-General Graves had taken his undefeated men back north and across the ground they’d previously retreated from through one field army, smashing into a second and facing off against an attempt by a third (admittedly a weak one) to strike at the base of their offensive.

In addition, General Galvin wanted to hear from both Waller and his counterpart Graves about the experiences of their men inside occupied territory so he could confirm some of the intelligence which he had received from other sources.


There had been ‘issues’ throughout the war with regard to the quality of the intelligence which NATO would gain on tactical, operational and strategic levels. It was known that the Soviets would use maskirovka efforts to a great effect plus there would always be the fog of war too, but on so many levels what SACEUR had been told was true just wasn’t. So many factors were involved in that from simple mistakes to enemy disinformation to stupidity: the latter where those involved tell their superiors what they think they want to hear.

General Galvin, inside a command tent where Graves’ staff was covering a short briefing concerning the progress of meetings with small surrounded Polish units throughout the corps occupied area to get them to surrender, could spend all day listing those errors made. So much that had gone wrong for NATO in this war, from how far they had been driven back westwards to the near elimination of the West Germans, had come from intelligence that had been off. A relevant case in point when here with the US III Corps would be two of those field armies that they had taken on in the past few days. Before Operation Eagle Fire had restarted after an initial setback, there had been another one of those which had slipped past them and gone into the Netherlands by NATO intelligence only to be spotted at the last minute; the Twenty–Second Guards Army was fighting in the central Netherlands but could have easily been in-place with those top-grade troops it possessed when the US I & III Corps broke free and started moving north. When intelligence said that all transport links across East Germany and into Poland – bridges, coastal ports and rail yards – were smashed to uselessness following NATO air attacks, those enemy forces had just rolled forward regardless and only just been avoided. Afterwards, the Soviet Sixth Guards Tank Army – four combat divisions with twelve hundred tanks! – had appeared from nowhere, or somewhere unseen, and charged towards the Lübbecke area. Those were understrength units with badly-led reservists fielding old T-55s with only some better T-64 tanks, but the whole field army shouldn’t have just appeared like it did under the nose of NATO intelligence efforts. Then there were those Polish reservists following them as well from the Polish Fourth Army. Aircraft in support of the US III Corps advance had been urgently re-tasked to first hit the Sixth Guards Tank Army in the field as well as to blow apart the crossings over the Weser which the Poles just put up overnight across the Weser to try to get over in number. Almost a fifth of the attacking ground forces with the US III Corps, as well as nearly half of the assigned air support too, had been redirected with urgency. Delays and casualties which shouldn’t have been incurred were.

If those had been better troops, like the Twenty–Second Guards Army which had preceded them…

General Galvin was being told that this time there were no more Soviet forces coming west. All identified major operational headquarters commands for field armies were in Western Europe now. He’d heard that before. Moreover, it was hardly comforting news. The Soviets and their allies had brought troops forward again and again past transport links which were destroyed and moved without the use of those fixed bridges and railway installations. It would take another two weeks, SACEUR was now being told, for the Soviets to bring forward a whole mass of mobilised troops from lower-grade reservists into Western Europe and flood the occupied regions with them. If he was to believe that, it gave him two weeks to win the war here. The Soviets were having as many problems with reservists as he was with intelligence, but when those troops came – no matter what the quality – there’d be no more operations on the scale of Eagle Fire again. Only the western part of the North German Plain had been recaptured. The majority of the Netherlands and Jutland, whole chunks of West Germany and most of Austria were under Warsaw Pact control. General Galvin’s task was to liberate those areas while smashing apart the enemy forces in occupation – and stop them from advancing any further forward too! – and to do so meant having accurate intelligence on the matter.

Surely an easy task, no?


Captured POWs were what General Galvin now spoke with Graves about. His subordinate – another US Army long-serving officer – had finished being told about those Poles being convinced to give in so SACEUR could discuss prisoners already taken.

The commander of the Sixth Guards Tank Army was one of the men in custody. A Troop of the 348th Cavalry, national guardsmen from Georgia protecting the flank of Graves’ men, had gotten lucky and taken that general and his smashed command group; General Galvin reckoned that they’d probably gather some well-deserved post-war fame from their exploit if the tales that came with that incident were true.

There were more POWs than just that one general though. Officers of all ranks and conscripts were in NATO custody after being captured in battle on the North German Plain. They were from many nationalities too: Soviet, Polish, and East Germany POWs had been taken. Military police units from multiple NATO armies reported up the chain of command to Graves’ headquarters and he now spoke when questioned about what recent intelligence had been gained from those captured. SACEUR asked about morale and the fighting spirit of them and was told that there was still little change as to what had previously been seen throughout the war. The Warsaw Pact soldiers were still sure in most cases that their side was winning. Even when surrounded and forced to surrender, the general feeling was temporary and soon enough the West would win the war and the situation the POWs found themselves in would be reversed. There were some of who held opposing views, as would be expected, but generally the belief upon the POWs was one of long-term optimism. There was no great relief to be free and mass attempts to defect to the West or even form exile armies or anything like that. Pre-war certainties from established thinkers that this would occur were showing again to be false.

Loyalty had been brought by the Warsaw Pact for their soldiers. Many did desert and asked for their freedom yet that was the exception not the rule. There had been a mass indoctrination conducted by the Soviets on their own troops and those of their allies and it was still holding sway over them: still, after all of this time! General Galvin knew already that the least loyal to the Soviet cause, those who were more likely to not believe the propaganda about the evils which the West had done and eventual Warsaw Pact victory, were Hungarian forces. Next in line were Czechoslovak forces (the Slovaks more than the Czechs), then the Poles before lastly the East Germans… then Soviet troops themselves. Warsaw Pact troops had rampaged throughout occupied territory as they robbed, raped, stole and murdered on a massive scale when discipline had been terrible. Overall though, orders were obeyed in the end and the troops still remained loyal. Graves was just as shocked as General Galvin was and declared that his military intelligence people were pointing to the continued loyalty coming from KGB efforts. They were doing their job of identifying, arresting and shooting troublemakers early and spreading lies throughout the ranks of the fighting men. Sometimes they made errors and paid for that, but wide success was being seen.

The US III Corps had run into many obstacles during their advance where the enemy wouldn’t yield when they should have. In a few cases there had even been outrages where parley talks were interrupted by KGB ‘actions’ yet in the main trapped forces wouldn’t surrender when beaten. They had to be blasted into submission with overkill used before, finally, after everything, the last survivors would give up… while ready to be later liberated themselves from captivity far much better than NATO POWs were being kept in.


SACEUR moved on afterwards to see what Graves was doing next.

The US III Corps commander reported that, acting under NORTHAG’s control, he was to pivot the bulk of his forces eastwards now and close up to the Weser. The British forces around Hameln were getting ready to push back the Soviets ahead of them too and a general advance, supported by Allied I Corps airborne units, was to be made to retake the whole western bank of the Weser. NORWESTAG behind was focusing upon a general effort to squeeze Soviet forces in the Netherlands – who held an area defined by the points of Groningen to the Port of Rotterdam to Arnhem – with the US I Corps to be freed up from that soon enough.

General Galvin had already spoken to those two army group commanders as well as those of CENTAG and the French First Army. An even bigger general counter-offensive, larger than Eagle Fire, was to soon get underway. To go east was the objective. It wouldn’t be easy, but with about a quarter of enemy forces now crushed or trapped in this offensive and enemy reinforcement assured to SACEUR being several weeks away, the time was now.

Victory wasn’t yet on the cards and there remained that threat that the Soviets would resort to their nuclear demonstrations again, but the only option was to attack. To try to sit back and defend when the Warsaw Pact held all of that NATO (and neutral Austrian) territory wouldn’t and couldn’t be done.

No, attack east was what it was.





END OF PART ONE

Twelve – Digging-In

February 27th 1990
Dordrecht, Zuid-Holland, the Netherlands

The divisional commissar had been told to keep his head down. General-Major Alexander Ivanovich Lebed told him personally that there were snipers active. Yet the arrogant, foolish KGB man new to the 106th Guards Airborne Division (also known as the Tula Division) had refused to listen. He had never seen a war zone before and wouldn’t take heed of what had happened to others who walked around seemingly without a care in the world.

The Chekist was dead now: half of his head was missing and his corpse splattered with skull, brain matter and blood.

Lebed was unfazed by the departure of the man in such a manner. He had been an evil bastard, a fascist in the making. More than a dozen junior officers assigned to Lebed’s command had died at the hands of the deceased Chekist and his equally dead predecessor. Lebed wished that the next one assigned to him – and there would be another – could be killed before he arrived in the occupied Dutch city and started shooting Soviet Airborne Troops officers under his command for imagined crimes rather than afterwards.


Once he’d finished taking a brief look at the body, Lebed ordered him to be taken away. He had other tasks to attend to and many more people, those whose lives were valuable, would be killed today. His troops were busy digging-in inside and all around the city here with defences facing southwards towards the water there as well as in key locations to make retaking Dordrecht impossible for NATO without them shedding too much blood. He needed to continue overseeing that in addition to finding out when supplies would finally arrive. Those were to be time consuming tasks and in comparison the death of that KGB murderer mattered little.

Yet, Lebed continued to think about him as he came out of the building where the divisional commissar had been killed when up on the flat roof looking across the waterway known as the Hollands Diep. If that fool had spent time with the Tula Division during training and operations before the war down in the Caucasus or when seizing Schwarmstedt in a parachute assault or when taking Arnhem in an armoured attack using their BMDs, then he wouldn’t have done what he had. The Chekist’s role had been performed then by a Political Officer – a whole different role from the reestablished position of a commissar – who was trained in combat and had seen it for himself. The political officer had acted as a deputy commander for the Tula Division too (allowed to overrule Lebed if necessary) but the Chekist shot this morning instead just wanted to shoot those he decided were defeatist, disloyal or dangerous to morale.

It was people like him that he was being sent to Lebed rather than what he needed: ammunition, food and medical care for his soldiers.


The Tula Division had come to Dordrecht from Arnhem.

The physical connection that was maintained back to there ran through the Rhine Estuary, around all of the wide rivers that ran through the southern parts of the Netherlands. On both sides there were NATO troops pressing against the flanks, there were aircraft operating above and within there were stay-behind units & special forces active. The Twenty–Second Guards Army along with the 76th Guards Airborne and Tula Divisions were inside that corridor that consisted of flat terrain that was heavily urbanised and surrounded by waterways: natural and manmade. The entire focus when the order had come to advance towards the sea beyond had been to get tanks and combat troops forward. The necessary logistics support trailed behind them yet units for supply, maintenance, communications and medical assistance had been pushed aside going over bridges by those combat units. At the time, NATO forces with the weak Allied II Corps had been withdrawing with haste and were being chased with the aim of destroying them and there had been many who had been comfortable delaying support forces from following those in combat.

That mistake was now being seen for what it was.

Fixed civilian crossing links were downed and combat engineers who had put up pontoon bridges had been targeted by NATO just like the former. There was debris and even floating mines in the various waterways to stop further crossings being put up. Using helicopters for resupply had been suicidal with the corridor being so narrow and ground-based attacks taking place against any aircraft in the sky.

Promises had been made to commanders like Lebed that efforts were being made to get supplies through. Massive artillery barrages were being unleashed north and south of the corridor to eliminate guns and missiles being fired against those trying to move through it. More engineers would lead the way and put up crossings over the water everywhere possible while at the same time sappers would disable improvised defences to stop those. High-flying transport aircraft would parachute in more supplies as well. Everything was being done, the message was passed on, to not just support those in the Rhine Estuary area but throughout the whole of the Netherlands. Moreover, enemy propaganda being broadcast that all those who had made it this far west were actually cut off by a NATO counter-offensive on the North German Plain was a lie.

Hold on and dig-in: that was what Lebed had been told.


The men and the officers of the Tula Division would fight no matter what. Even the activities of a Chekist – as long as one didn’t go too far – wouldn’t brake the morale of the men whom Lebed commanded. These men had won victory after victory where they had fought in West Germany and into the Netherlands. They had fought infantry, tanks and attacking aircraft – winning every engagement and fulfilling their assigned tasks. The Airborne Troops had a fantastic esprit de corps, one which Lebed encouraged all of the time among those he led. Those missions which they had been given and achieved had led to breakthroughs made through enemy lines.

However, the Tula Division could only keep fighting after initial assaults were made if it had access to supply links.

The resistance being put up in isolated spots across Dordrecht came from a few men with rifles, pistols and improvised explosives. Those Dutchmen were brave but doomed to be hunted down and brutally killed by Lebed’s soldiers. The Tula Division was able to do this because there remained plenty of ammunition for their own rifles… and they had their bayonets and digging spades as well should the worst happen.

To fight against regular NATO forces other ammunition was needed. There had to be a resupply of SAMs for their mobile air defence systems, high-explosive & smoke shells for all of their mortars & towed howitzers and rounds for the cannons mounted to the BMDs. Moreover, the men needed rations, not spoils which they had liberated from the city which they were in. Equipment had broken down or was damaged and parts needed replacing or major repairs undertaken. New radio transmitters were needed to replace those so carefully targeted by NATO. Then there were all of the wounded men who needed medicines and evacuation.

Lebed’s men wouldn’t be able to fight a battle to defend Dordrecht should NATO make a move against the Tula Division. There was a good chance that maybe they would be bypassed when or if an offensive was undertaken in the general area, yet if a real attack came against them they wouldn’t be able to effectively respond to enemy firepower unleashed against the positions which he had them digging themselves into.


The overnight rocket strike which had hit the radio transmitters had come from a multiple-barreled rocket launcher. Lebed knew that the barrage had come from the south and killed eleven of his men, but more than that he had no information on the specific weapon and whether it had been a targeted or ‘lucky’ attack. Either way, he had no way of securely contacting the Twenty–Second Guards Army headquarters staff. There was a new commander of that field army, replacing the previous man whose death he had heard disturbing rumours about yet not believed himself, and he had yesterday passed on word that resupply was coming today. No specifics had been given, much to Lebed’s fury, and so he needed to talk to his senior command.

Runners were to be sent, two men assigned to physically visit that headquarters. Lebed left the specifics to his chief-of-staff in choosing the men to go as well as arranging for the necessary documentation (so they weren’t shot as deserters), giving them instructions, securing their crossing off the island on which Dordrecht sat and making sure that they knew who to speak to at the Twenty–Second Guards Army. He went to see them before they left.

The runners would cross by boat from Dordrecht to Zwijndrecht on IJsselmonde Island. The Oude Maas was in between the two locations with the connecting bridges destroyed. A small wooden boat was to be used to get across the water and cover given by the fog present this early in the day.

Yes, this was the state of things that Lebed was facing just to talk to his higher headquarters. It was 1990, for Goodness sake, and he was inside the Netherlands leading an elite unit of the Soviet Army. And he was using messengers to communicate who were forced to cross a very narrow stretch of river in a wooden vessel requisitioned because it wouldn’t attract mines feared to be in that water.

It was not a good situation to be in at all but this was what he had to deal with for the time being. Assistance would come eventually with resupply and reinforcement. As a soldier, even a one-star general officer, Lebed would accept it… as long as those promises were kept of course.





February 27th 1990
Revolutionary Armed Forces bunker, south of Havana, Cuba

The norteamericanos had dropped their bombs on Cuba for ten nights in a row. Havana had been targeted every one of those nights, far more than anywhere else on the island. Government and military sites in and around the Cuban capital city had been struck along with transport links, power & water infrastructure and telecommunications systems. Once the city’s permanent air defences had been eliminated in the first few nights their replacements had failed to stop the ongoing attacks and been targeted themselves too.

Aircraft coming southwards from the United States had continually dropped their bomb loads over Havana during the hours of darkness.

There had been an emphasis on the part of the norteamericanos to hit their targets well rather than flatten the whole city. Their bombs had fallen upon the selected installations which they wanted to hit with a good degree of accuracy, then more aircraft came back the next night to bomb the same target again even if it was wholly destroyed as those sites were pulverized under such a furious and repeated bombardment. However, as was the case in any war, there were always unintended consequences due to military action. Some bombs went off target due to malfunctions, bad guidance, weather interference or just plain bad luck. Civilian losses were incurred in the city, directly and indirectly by the bombing. There was a breakdown of civil order at times where the security situation following the bombing that wouldn’t cease for even one night drove the people of the city to distraction.

Gunfire had followed those riots and each time the morning came an eerie silence came to Havana as the fires from the night before continued to pour smoke into the sky but Havana was quiet with people asleep afterwards. Between first light and late morning hundreds of thousands who couldn’t sleep during the night due to the explosions and shooting did so, surprising themselves at the ability to do so so easily.


Jefe Castro was not one of those sleeping this morning.

He came up and out of his bunker along with aides and bodyguards to get some fresh air after spending another one of those ten long nights underground. Around him, those with the Defence Minister smoked cigarettes, talked among themselves quietly or looked towards the city surrounded by clouds of black smoke. Jefe Castro did the same: staring at Havana and wondering what was burning there.

Oil tanks, maybe?

He knew that if he wanted he could very quickly find out what was alight in such a manner. He would issue orders for the information to come to him and those beneath him in the chain-of-command would jump at his instructions and report back with speedy haste. They’d sugarcoat the news though, as they continually did, even while being fully aware of the consequences suffered by others when doing so. Jefe Castro had got rid already of many boot-lickers who wanted to tell him only good news, lying to him in the process, in the belief that their own careers would be furthered by doing so. Those dismissed had ended up in penal units after being stripped of their rank when they fell afoul of him yet more would show up. Posting to his staff was considered too much of a good opportunity by those within the officers ranks of the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces to pass up and so there was never a shortage of volunteers.

Boot-lickers were better than traitors though.

Jefe Castro had plenty of the latter to deal with. There were those who were serving within the ranks of the military and the intelligence services who had decided that they would fulfill the wishes and aims of foreign powers. It was not for the norteamericanos that they betrayed him, his brother and the Revolution, but for the Soviets. The KGB had penetrated Cuba by establishing men into influential positions within the Revolutionary Armed Forces and the DGI who dared do their bidding rather than that of their own country. Cuba had gone to war after being manipulated into a situation where the truth hadn’t been told and was now paying the consequences for that. Jefe Castro had his own ego, his brother a far larger one, and he could admit to himself that it was the decision made by him and Fidel to go to war, but that was the final decision after ‘evidence’ and ‘intelligence’ had been presented to them showing that they would take part in winning a short war against the norteamericanos. Moreover, once hostilities opened, those same traitors continued to carry out their deception by further manipulation as well as sending out orders to certain subordinates of theirs engaged in battles with the United States.

Cuba was going to pay for the activities against civilians in Florida, not the traitors or the KGB.

Having spoken to Fidel and explained what he had been able to find out, Jefe Castro had been told by his brother to arrest and shoot such people. It had been done after the Revolution, Fidel had said, where his brother had acted in such a way against those who had betrayed Cuba then and it should be done again now. Meanwhile, Cuba was at war come what may and there needed to be a concentration on winning that conflict rather than navel-gazing about previous events. This was the war that would finally win the Revolution once and for all: that, Fidel said, was all that mattered.

The telephone call from here at the bunker near Havana down to Guantanamo Bay – where Fidel still was – had ended after that.


Jefe Castro remained without a notion of how to get his country and the regime which he and his brother led out of this mess. The norteamericanos were going to keep bombing Cuba and were getting ready to invade at a later stage. There were troops in Florida, aircraft in the Yucatan Peninsula across in Mexico and many warships at sea in the waters surrounding Cuba. Elsewhere in the world, if he read the situation correctly, the Soviets were fighting the United States to a draw where he feared that the only eventual solution would be nuclear warfare to end it all. If, when that occurred, before or after an invasion of Cuba commenced, Jefe Castro feared that the use of thermonuclear warheads would spread fast to Cuba. It would be military targets first, then the cities. All of the Cuban troops digging-in around Havana and down near Guantanamo Bay, and those isolated in the Florida Keys too, would have no part to play in that endgame for his country.

Cuba couldn’t be defended against conventional attacks, let alone those of a nuclear nature. Those aircraft which bombed Cuba were almost unchallenged. Six had been brought down over Cuba with apparently another dozen seen crashing into the sea when flying away damaged. Of those confirmed destroyed, only one was a B-52 bomber: the aircraft which were hitting Havana with such frequency and with devastating effects nightly. The rest were tactical aircraft with the few surviving aircrews from them joining all of the military hostages which Cuba was holding, those from Guantanamo Bay who weren’t being treated as Jefe Castro knew prisoners of war were supposed to be.

In exchange for those few aircraft, Cuba’s air defences had been massacred. There were no more MiG-29 fighters left and the fleet of MiG-21s and -23s were at less than a fifth of pre-war strength. SAM-launchers and anti-aircraft guns were bombed when stationary and when on the move: the missiles and shells they fired had barely hit anything. Cuba’s naval force, not much to speak of before February 17th, was no more either. Troops were out of their nationwide barracks and deployed into defensive positions to fight off an invasion – and to not be in fixed known locations during a nuclear war – but they had come under attack too with the norteamericanos having watched their movements and bombing them when they were meant to be under cover. Some communications out of the country were still open, including links to Moscow, but not many at all. It was clear to him that for years this had all been planned by the United States Military and they were doing what they had so long wanted to do: smash the combat forces of Cuba and prepare the way for an invasion.

The Soviets had sent urgings for Cuba to continue to fight. Fidel had promised them and everyone else that Cuba would do just that. No real help had come to the country from their supposed allies though. The Soviets had actively poisoned the chances of any sort of truce, ceasefire, armistice or peace between Havana and Washington – Fidel wouldn’t have allowed that and Jefe Castro probably wouldn’t have either – and done nothing else. Only Nicaragua was offering any form of assistance to Cuba and that was just in the form of being able to help get Cuban propaganda out. The Nicaraguans would go no further than showing images of a hospital in Havana alight after being hit by ‘American bombs’ (an out of control SAM had actually struck the building) and calling for an end to the fighting. Every other country in Latin America had either declared neutrality or was supporting the norteamericanos. Outside of the Western Hemisphere, there was no one else who could, let alone would help Cuba either.


Back down into the bunker, Jefe Castro went. There were meetings to attend to and orders to give. His entourage followed after him with several preparing to speak up in such a way that would hopefully show their loyalty and bring further advancement.

High above, far above the smoke from Havana and low clouds too, the bomb-bay doors of a B-1B Lancer opened and two dozen 2000lb bombs started falling. These were fitted with non-nuclear warheads deployed from a usually-exclusive nuclear-platform. Those bombs were Mk.84s with BLU-109 warheads, which would be finding out how well protected the bunker was where American intelligence had pointed to Jefe Castro was hiding inside.

Those bombs fell towards the ground below with the B-1B and its distant fighter escorts turning back northwards heading home straight afterwards.





February 27th 1990
Amman, Jordan

General Shomron had left Tel Aviv and his command headquarters there for the first time this month and taken the short flight across to the Jordanian capital. His visit was secret and he was well-protected. Later today, the IDF Chief-of-Staff would be heading back home though first he was taking part in a little bit of military diplomacy.

Following a ceremony remarkably short on the usual formalities for such a high-profile visit, but the reasons behind which he well understood, General Shomron met with those he had come across to Jordan to see. There was his opposite number, Lt.-General Fathi Abu Talib who was the Chief-of-Staff of the Jordanian Armed Forces, and also King Hussein’s National Security Adviser and Talib’s predecessor Field Marshal Zeid Ibn Shaker; both of whom welcomed him in a stiff and formal manner. The necessary respect for his position was shown by them and he returned that, but there was no friendliness given nor expected. That just couldn’t be done.

Meeting at a command post for the Jordanian Armed Forces, General Shomron was briefed by junior men serving Talib on the state of the ongoing fighting within Jordan. General Shomron had his translator tell him what was being exactly said though with the maps he was shown as the briefing went on he was able to follow what was said in Arabic to him even without the use of the young IDF major assisting him. The Jordanians were using symbols on their maps in the NATO standard formula, which he could understand. These would not be what they usually worked with, he was sure, as those wouldn’t be shown to a foreigner such as he.

The Jordanians had their 3rd & 4th Divisions engaged in battle since yesterday with those two formations driving northeast and north respectively. Reinforced by many reservists, the divisions were retaking Jordanian sovereign soil held by the Iraqis. It was a difficult fight for them as they were engaged in operations on their own soil with Jordanian civilians still in-place, but they were making good progress. Talib’s man stated with firm assurance that the Iraqi’s in north-central Jordan would be completely eliminated by this time tomorrow…

…when the 3rd & 4th Divisions linked up with Israeli forces which remained inside Jordan too.

Another one of Talib’s junior officers started putting markers on the map. They were placed at certain points south of the Jordanian-Syrian border and he asked one of General Shomron’s traveling party whether those were the correct locations of Israeli Army units. After a quick check, that was confirmed. Talib then had his staff officers talk with those of General Shomron about the procedures both sides would work with for establishing communications in the field so as to make sure that when the link-up occurred, there was no shooting between them: only the invading Iraqis were to be engaged. What radio codes would be used, which flags would be hoisted in case of electronic jamming and the formalities of handing over to the Jordanians all Iraqi prisoners captured in battle inside Jordan were discussed. More details were then covered concerning the staged withdrawal from Jordan of Israeli units after firm contact had been made with the Jordanian Army so that there could be no gaps which any more Iraqis could escape through and also to make sure that there weren’t any instances of gunfire exchanged. Israeli forces had entered Jordan by coming down from Syria but weren’t to withdraw north, but rather northwest and into Israel proper. There would need to be an establishment of a security corridor which could be used to make that transit so that it could be done securely and with haste. In addition, General Shomron had his officers pass to the Jordanians intelligence gained on where other Iraqi forces were located away to the east, those beyond the scope of the ongoing fighting and stretching back to the Iraqi border. Talib was to send his army that way afterwards and General Shomron had his translator explain that by using such intelligence he hoped that Jordanian casualties wouldn’t be too severe in finally ridding their country of the Iraqi invaders. The Iraqis had been digging-in, drawing a line in the sand there beyond their recognised border.

Shaker had one of his aides address General Shomron afterwards. He told him that the Jordanian Army would reach the Iraqi border within a few days and his king would be relieved that by then all foreign military forces would be off Jordanian soil: General Shomron clearly understood what he meant. In addition, Shaker informed him that Israeli military personnel who were ‘guests of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan’ were today to be returned. These were mainly pilots of downed aircraft and a few Israeli Army stragglers who’d ended up in Jordanian custody. They had been treated well, not abused nor interrogated. All thirty-five of them were being brought to the military airport from where General Shomron would be flying home from after this briefing.

Thanks were given to Shaker for the treatment he said that Israeli soldiers and pilots had received. General Shomron wished the Jordanian Armed Forces well in their ongoing battles and those to come afterwards in driving out the Iraqis. He told Shaker and Talib that the Iraqis were paying dearly for how they had betrayed their ally and he also wanted to unofficially pass on his own hopes – beyond those made by diplomats – that there could be better Israeli-Jordanian relations following the recent fighting here. Only the Soviets, not even the Iraqis, had gained by the war which had taken place: differences between Arabs as well as Arabs and Israelis should be settled by themselves as they were here, not by those outsiders.

No response came to such remarks, yet General Shomron was certain that Shaker agreed with him on that point. No one in Jordan had wanted to see their country made a battlefield as it had been with all the losses that had come to civilians and soldiers alike: certainly not for Soviet goals either.

Afterwards, it was back to his aircraft for the head of the IDF.


Once he returned to King Abdullah I air base, located at Marka outside of Amman, General Shomron found that Shaker had been as good as his word. Those missing Israelis were there, though the Jordanians clearly hadn’t put enough thought in to how difficult it would be to get them all aboard his aircraft. There would be room, General Shomron would make sure of that, but he did wish the Jordanians had mentioned this earlier so better preparations could be made. Regardless, those men were coming home with him.

He felt that he had done well in Jordan. Much of the initial ground work had been done before he had come to Amman, but he knew that how he behaved and what he said would be of great importance into making sure that not just short-term gain for his nation was achieved but medium-term objectives were met too.

He had been acting the role which he was told to do and believed that he had achieved that. General Shomron had been reminded that the national security of Jordan was of great importance to Israel and assisting the Jordanians in reestablishing control over their country aided Israel. He was to treat them with respect and dignity for they would be naturally sensitive at times like these to anything which they regarded as patronising. Remind them of how they had been screwed over by their supposed ally, Defence Minister Sharon had told him before leaving Tel Aviv, but don’t push it: they will already know that very well. General Shomron had also been told to make sure that it was clear that Israel was just as eager to have its troops off Jordanian soil as the Jordanians were too.

He hadn’t questioned those orders. He agreed with them certainly and those had come from Sharon. Sharon, who’d recently shown what diplomacy was all about with his time in Syria and getting them to drop out of the war. General Shomron had doubted that such a thing could be achieved, especially with such a man as the Defence Minister personally involved, but he had been oh so very wrong. He’d wooed Assad’s son with courteous behaviour (yes – really!) and got the Syrians to understand that they were defeated in battle. Sharon had promised them a fast withdrawal of Israeli forces from their soil, a commitment of non-interference in Lebanon by Israel to Syrian activities (the Israeli Army had already withdrawn from there) and given them a firm assurance that Israel was willing to open talks on post-war joint sovereignty of the Golan Heights. All Syria had to do for that was to stop fighting Israel. If they wanted to, Sharon had told Bassel al-Assad, the Syrians could expel the Soviets from their base at Tartus. Should that be a step too far – especially in light of the nuclear attacks upon Belgrade and Sofia where those who were about to turn on Moscow had been struck at – then there was always the Iraqis which Syria might want to settle some old scores with.

General Shomron had learnt that the Defence Minister had put a lot of effort into trying to convince the Syrians that they had been betrayed by the Soviets. As the Jordanians had found out, the Iraqis had been favored by Moscow in giving Saddam the green light to roll into Jordan like he had done. If Iraq had been successful in Jordan, where would that have left Syria, Sharon had asked Bassel al-Assad. They would have had their long-term enemy, one whom they shared a more bitter enmity with than more than Israel, surrounding them on two sides. In future, should they want allies, Sharon had recommended that Syria look to Turkey or the Gulf States or even Pakistan; any of those nations would be better partners for Syria than the Soviets.

In the long-term, whether all of this would work, Sharon in Syria and his visit to Amman, General Shomron wasn’t sure if all of his country’s objectives could be gained. Jordan was more important that Syria he felt, but he wasn’t certain whether his nation’s leaders understood that. Regardless, for now and in the immediate future, Israel was no longer at war. They had won their fight against an outrageous attack, and won that with devastating effect.

Furthermore, despite the Iraqis having troops still inside Jordan, their home country was in chaos due to internal conflict of which further reports of new outbreaks of violence came to Israel’s attention every day. Surrounded by enemies and running fast out of military supplies, Israel had once again escaped destruction. General Shomron was proud of the role he had played in that fight.





February 27th 1990
Fort McPherson, near Atlanta, Georgia, the United States

The headquarters of the United States Army Forces Command (FORSCOM) was located on the outskirts of Atlanta. General Edwin Burba, FORSCOM’s commanding officer, had absolutely no objection at all to having his headquarters down in Georgia rather than up to the north in the wider D.C. area. He had a job to get on with and didn’t want the physical interference to that which would certainly come with being located in Washington, Maryland or Virginia. Being safety tucked out of the way down in Dixie meant that those who wished to impose themselves and their opinions on the conduct of the ongoing war would truly have to make the effort to bother him and his duties: his command wasn’t seemingly within touching distance for all of those so-called power-brokers who were active up north.

Burba was tasked to concentrate on having United States Army, Army Reserve and Army National Guard forces assemble and be transported overseas to where they were needed to engage in combat operations either at the frontlines or behind them. To do this was difficult enough in the face of the numbers available and enemy intervention at times. However, it would be far worse should he have faced the barrage of interference that many wished to give to such a task. Up at Fort Lee in Virginia, where the leadership of the US Army was now located after leaving the Pentagon on the eve of war, there were politicians who wanted to have their views heard on the conduct of the war. It was the same with influential ‘concerned citizens’, retired military officers, lobbyists & those from think-tanks and also the media. The Chief-of-Staff, General Vuono, was away with the Joint Chiefs at Raven Rock and so the responsibility for fending off all those who wished to call and visit Fort Lee fell upon the Vice Chief-of-Staff General Robert RisCassi. The military presence at Fort Lee was meant to be a secret so that it couldn’t be targeted by enemy action or intelligence-gathering. Burba was alarmed at how widely-known the knowledge of the presence of the headquarters staff was: no one was meant to know, but that was far from the case. Many of the same people knew about his headquarters, but they concentrated upon Fort Lee because it was regarded as where their influence could be better felt and in the main closer to where they themselves were too.

When speaking to Burba last night on the telephone, RisCassi had said that he had requested that he move back with his staff to the Pentagon rather than stay in Virginia: there was far more security there and better control could be maintained to keep back those who were hell-bent on disrupting him and his staff as they went about their work.

Those who were causing RisCassi all of the problems which he was having were generally well-meaning, but that wasn’t always the case. There were those who wished to offer advice when it came to the deployment and growth of the United States Army; others who wanted to make sure that soldiers weren’t killed due to problems which they foresaw occurring. Some wanted to secure appointments to important positions for certain officers (with or without the knowledge of those involved) over others; elsewhere there were people who were trying to get loved ones out of harm’s way while asserting it was being asked for the greater good. The media had questions and they believed that they had the right to know and broadcast everything that was going on with the United States Army while it was engaged in warfare. There were efforts being made by certain people to try to sell their products or services – valuable or not – in the middle of the ongoing war. Retired soldiers, high-ranking and lower down the chain, who hadn’t already been recalled to the colours wanted to know why this wasn’t the case and were wanting to present their case right to the top when all other efforts had failed.

For many of those people, Burba should have been those whom they should have contacted in they wanted to get what they were asking for, but thankfully they focused their attention upon RisCassi. Being out of the way, being thought of as not important enough therefore suited Burba fine!


FORSCOM had been busy since before the war started, engaged in moving troops and units around ahead of REFORGER and even the New Year. It had been under Burba’s orders that following events late last year in Eastern Europe there had been an increase in readiness throughout forces which would eventually go off to war like they had done so. Formations tasked for REFORGER deployment to NATO had been sent for hasty cycling through Fort Irwin so to prepare them for possible action. Meanwhile, mid-ranking and senior officers who had been slated for retirement (early and at the required end of their commission) had seen that deferred for the time being had been reassigned due to instructions coming from Burba’s staff; this had caused a minor political scandal when later revealed though forgotten once the war begun. Once REFORGER finally got under way, too late for many and so close to the outbreak of hostilities, the changes to the deployment schedules of many units were all done under orders from FORSCOM.

Worldwide, active combatant commands – Pacific Command, European Command and Southern Command – had received those troops sent to them under REFORGER and other strategic deployment plans. There were the initial and follow-on forces dispatched to them with regulars and reservists. Afterwards, FORSCOM then oversaw the fast mobilisation of the third-wave of units which were deployed: mainly from the Army National Guard but a few units from both the Army and Army Reserve too. This was the long-established Total Force policy which had been a mainstay of planning for World War Three since the end of Vietnam where regular forces would fight alongside those reservists trained to do so.

All eighteen regular divisions had ended up in wartime positions (fourteen going to Europe, three to South Korea and one in Alaska) along with independent brigades and combat regiments. In addition, FORSCOM had then issued orders to those divisions of national guardsmen as well as their individual brigade-sized units to begin deploy once they had been mobilised for federal service. There were ten Army National Guard divisions organised pre-war with five of those having REFORGER missions and a sixth, then a seventh too, gaining late orders to join the others in Germany.

The dastardly attack conducted by the Cubans against Guantanamo Bay and Florida immediately upon the termination of the ceasefire came as a strategic surprise for the United States. There were some troops that FORSCOM had sent to Southern Command (the unified combatant commands were organised to control joint operations of all US armed services deployed into their theater of operations) but more were needed there. The fighting in South Korea was also demanding upon FORSCOM, those troops sent to Alaska were seen by many as being wasted and there was also the issue of none being deployed to the Middle East and Central Command there. The Joint Chiefs under General Powell’s command and following instructions from the President, the Secretary of Defence and the National Security Council made the overall decisions but it was down to Burba and his staff to put those strategic decisions into practice with where units were deployed to. Moreover, combat replacements and equipment to supplant what was used up / destroyed was also ordered to move where they did from Fort McPherson.

Combat soldiers were not just whom FORSCOM sent overseas.

Fighting men were vital, but so too were all those who supported them in the field. This mean everything from artillery gunners and combat engineers to truck drivers and dentists. There were so many men, and women too, who needed to be deployed to various worldwide locations to keep the war going. They all did vital jobs even if their lives weren’t directly in danger by being at the frontlines. Those troops who were fighting for their lives against Soviet tanks across battlefields of West Germany wouldn’t be able to do so if there weren’t all of their fellow soldiers behind them providing them with all of the services and equipment which they needed to have. Burba worked extensively with the United States Army Material Command (AMC) under General William Tuttle out of Fort Belvoir – located between Washington and Quantico in an extensive facility there – in making sure that what those who were being sent off to war got what they needed. Again, it wasn’t just tanks and guns but everything else too: ammunition, trucks & other vehicles, rations & medicines and so on through a list that seemed endless.

The behind the lines support network within West Germany was something which Burba and the AMC led by Tuttle had lately put a lot of effort into reestablishing there. Before the ceasefire and significant parts of the West Germany military falling apart like it had, there had been a massive local logistics network in-place there. West Germany had more men in non-combat roles than those at the frontlines so that they could support themselves and their NATO allies too in the fighting. Men and units simply melted away when West Germany was engulfed in political crisis. When the war restarted, the majority of West Germans – those who hadn’t been taken into custody by the Soviets or deserted further afield than just their own homes – returned to their units… or tried to anyway. The destruction caused directly and indirectly was widespread though and other NATO countries were joining with the American forces in West Germany in trying to repair that network for supplies, transportation, communications, medical support and rear-area security. More than just logistical units went to replace West German units that had fallen apart though. FORSCOM was assigned responsibility for working with SACEUR’s staff in Europe for the replacement of West German commanders and staff who were superseded in many places by those in American uniforms: other NATO countries were doing the same too following the collapse in faith of West Germany loyalty to the war to defend their own country.


In Western Europe, a total of twenty-two Warsaw Pact field armies were identified as seeing action up until this point: sixteen Soviet, three Polish, two Czechoslovak and one Hungarian (the East Germans had theirs broken up pre-war with units deployed individually). Each of those consisted of between three and five combat divisions along with all of their supporting arms. They fought from Denmark down through West Germany and into Austria and the Italian border. Those came in three waves, one after another thrown against NATO forces. Burba had been informed that transport links connecting Eastern Europe with the Soviet interior where more field armies were to come from as part of a fourth echelon reinforcement were cut by air power. However, FORSCOM had learnt that SACEUR had been told that those same air strikes should have stopped the third echelon: those troops had reached the frontlines regardless of how many bridges were downed and railway yards blown to pieces.

All NATO countries were deploying as many troops from their reserves as possible to fight all of the Soviet-led forces on NATO territory, the United States among those. FORSCOM was currently engaged in the process of sending second-line Army National Guard forces to Europe though at the same time needing to deploy units elsewhere to South Korea and Florida as well. As before, those decisions were made elsewhere and it was Burba’s task to make sure that they went where they were needed.

Co-located at Fort McPherson was the headquarters of the United States Third Army. In peacetime the staff were here in Georgia with a wartime mission to command combat forces sent to Central Command. There were supposed be one or more corps assigned (a NATO corps was equivalent to a Warsaw Pact field army, the Third Army would equal a Front organised by the Soviets) to fight there in the Middle East should the situation require it. Third Army headquarters already had some men on the ground in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, but Lt.-General John Yeosock had remained at Fort McPherson. The decision had come that the realities on the ground didn’t call for any United States Army forces, nor reservists or even as it seemed those US Marines already there in-theater, to be needed to fight in the Middle East. Instead, the Third Army was to be sent to West Germany to command American forces fighting on the North German Plain already and more which FORSCOM was to deploy. General Schwarzkopf as Central Command commander was not best pleased; more so Lt.-General Shalikashvili who was in West Germany. The internal politics of all this were supposed to be something which Burba was to have nothing to do with, but he did regard the decision to send Yeosock to effectively take over in northern West Germany from Shalikashvili as rather unfair. Yeosock had been up at Raven Rock before Powell cut the orders and Burba believed that post-war something would come out of all of this.

Yeosock was a damn fine officer but so too was Shalikashvili: the latter had on the ground combat experience there already and was effectively commanding both the US I & III Corps as part of the British-led NORTHAG. Now he was to assume command of just the newly-arriving US II Corps which was to come with Third Army. It was a demotion dressed up as a sideways move. Third Army would therefore fight on the North German Plain with a trio of corps under command, two thirds of which contained Army National Guard troops. The I Corps was almost completely made up of units from multiple states across the nation and there were more national guardsmen with the III Corps. Now to join them were three more combat divisions, plus supporting assets, in the II Corps. One of those was a pre-war established division and two more had been created by attaching separate formations together (the 28th Infantry Division was joined by the 30th Infantry & 31st Armored Divisions). Overall, the II Corps had none of the effectiveness yet that the I & III Corps had, but Burba was confident that once they saw action they would make a good show of themselves for there had been much training done as well as additions of experienced officers and newer equipment. There were other politics at play there beyond those US Army officers with the Third Army being deemed the NOREASTAG (North-Eastern Army Group) alongside NORTHAG: Seventh Army fighting in central West Germany was CENTAG. British sensitivities about playing an important role in the command structure were soothed over by this designation, Burba had been told, and they controlled their own, Belgian and other European NATO forces in NORTHAG’s former area of operations.

He wasn’t so sure about how all of that worked with allies there, but that was far beyond the scope of his responsibilities.

Two more pre-war divisional headquarters were to remain in the northeastern and mid-western United States with more national guardsmen who had been at a lower readiness undergoing refresher training before later deployments. Other national guard units which FORSCOM had recently had sent to Pacific Command and Southern Command had seen merging into new higher formations where they were. General Louis Menetrey had the 2nd, 7th and 25th Infantry Divisions under command within his Eighth Army’s IX Corps as well as a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division. There were four Army National Guard brigades too with the headquarters for the 41st Infantry Division formed to command three of those (those from Hawaii, Illinois and Oregon) and the other (from Montana) left separate. The 41st Infantry Division had a glorious history from World War Two action in the Pacific and was now engaged in the fighting to push the North Koreans back to the DMZ. FORSCOM had sent those national guardsmen there and the two regular divisions as well. Moreover, with the 7th Infantry Division being short one of its three brigades, the headquarters of the peacetime stood-down 174th Infantry Brigade was sent to the Eighth Army to reinforce that division with the sub-units attached to it: Army Reserve combat battalions from Colorado and islands across the Pacific were joined by a regular battalion detached from Alaska.

The ill but determined General Maxwell Thurman – affectionately known as ‘Mad Max’ or sometimes ‘Maxatollah’ – who commanded Southern Command had the task of preparing to liberate the Florida Keys, retake Guantanamo Bay and possibly later lead an invasion of Cuba. The United States Army South (his subordinate command under Major-General Bernard Loeffke) had a total of seven separate combat brigades sent by FORSCOM or in-place before the war: two regular and five from the Army National Guard. There were men in Panama and Puerto Rico though his troops were generally concentrated in Florida. Any later landing in Cuba would require far more men than this, with external support from the US Marines needed for that too. Liberating the Florida Keys was the first priority though so when three of the brigades of national guardsmen in Florida were brought together into the 27th Infantry Division (units from Michigan, New York and Oklahoma) the other pair of brigades slated for smaller-scale operations against Cubans on US soil stayed independent. FORSCOM oversaw the deployment of special forces teams and helicopters down to the United States Army South. In addition, FORSCOM made sure that sufficient training in-theater would take place for the brigade from the 7th Infantry Division and the Florida national guardsmen who were set to enter the Florida Keys very soon.

The deployment to Europe of both the 173d and 177th Brigades was undertaken by FORSCOM. The former was created from the ground up and the latter reinforced from the existing formation. There was too the 4th Cavalry Brigade to become part of the 82nd Airborne Division: national guardsmen manning HMMWVs carrying TOW-missile launchers were grouped together and sent to replace the missing third combat-maneuver element that that division was lacking with its other brigade being in South Korea.


Away from complete combat formations (as well as those in supporting roles too) sent overseas by FORSCOM, individual men were deployed through orders coming from Burba’s staff.

The fighting in Europe and on the Korean Peninsula had been brutal as immense casualties taken. Some thinkers pre-war had speculated that combat in modern combat the lethality of modern weapons would mean that American soldiers fighting would all be killed and the numbers of wounded would therefore be lower than in previous war: this theory was shown to be false. Soldiers were wounded indeed, but medical care at the frontlines and in the rear was in-place to treat and evacuate the wounded. Men were killed too though, so very many of them. They were killed in direct combat on the frontlines and behind them. Soviet-built multiple-barreled rocket-launchers in their own armed forces’ hands, those of their Warsaw Pact allies and the North Koreans took the lives of many and hurt plenty too. Then there were the casualties from nerve gases, thermobaric weapons and artillery-delivered mines.

The losses kept mounting and they all needed replacing.

Enlisted men and officers on training courses left those to take the places of those killed and wounded. So too did others from staff positions back in the United States where it was judged that their places could be filled by others. Army Reserve and Army National Guard soldiers who were not directly needed with deploying formations from those services – as judged by FORSCOM – were directed to take the places of those who were unable to carry on fighting.

Yet, there was only a finite number of replacements already in uniform who could be sent from the available pool of men. During three weeks of war interspersed by two days of the ceasefire – which hadn’t been wasted at all by Burba or anyone else – so many losses were taken. Casualties were unreasonably high among the replacements who were sent overseas, just like in previous wars. SACEUR commented when Burba spoke to him that there were cases where men sent to his units in the field might not last an hour!

Using pre-existing legislation, when Congress declared war on the Soviet Union and its allies late on February 4th, the Selective Service Administration was authorised to begin the process of mobilising draftees. There would be a lottery following established procedures and men aged between eighteen and twenty-five called up for military service. Everything was in-place to do this just as had been done in previous wars which the United States had fought and so it had begun. Technical problems had come with personal details not being up to date and other men unable to attend registration. Regardless, there were already a wave of volunteers who presented themselves ahead of being drafted.

The Draft meant that millions of men would be in uniform serving their country… in six months.

There were talks ongoing at Raven Rock between the Defence Secretary, the Joint Chiefs and an army of advisers as to what to do about this situation. Could there be a shaving of the time which it took to train those men? Would that result in more unnecessary deaths where those men would very quickly be killed or wounded? Would the war last that long? If it did, would there be any non-draftees left still able to fight by that time if the casualties continued to mount as they did? In addition, those engaged in combat action needed a rest eventually and couldn’t fight continuously as they were without burnout resulting in more casualties – when could that occur when the Soviets and North Koreans kept on coming forwards no matter what?

Burba didn’t know the answers to those questions and the ultimate solution to the problem. All that he could do for now was to try to give refresher training to all those sent and work with the combatant commands in the field to do anything possible to lower casualties.

This all tied into the situation with REDBEARD. Certain intelligence information, tactical and strategic and of excellent quality, was being sent to SACEUR, Thurman and the commander of Pacific Command Admiral Hardisty under that codename. Powell and the Joint Chiefs sent it out after it came to them from the CIA and Burba wasn’t on the list of those who received it; he only heard about REDBEARD unofficially and had kept his mouth shut. The specifics hadn’t been told to him, but he was aware of the general idea. That intelligence given had allowed for select military operations to take place against the Soviets bringing successes in the field. Whoever was sending it – or maybe it was more than one person? – was establishing their bona fides though before the bombshell that they had dropped on the United States.

The Soviets regarded the conduct of the war at the minute where they had suffered serious reserves as only a temporary setback. They intended to keep the war going in a fight to the finish where ultimate victory was their goal. Burba didn’t know what that ‘ultimate victory’ was, and also whether this REDBEARD intelligence was all some sort of game for smarter people than he, but he did know that the latest word from Europe and South Korea too was that the enemy was digging-in everywhere and showing no sign of believing that they might have lost.

The war, if that intelligence was to be taken as truthful, might last six months – or longer – and those draftees could see action. Burba tried not to think about that in terms of how many casualties would mount up by then, but it was a dread that he couldn’t remove from his mind.





February 27th 1990
The White House, Washington D.C., the United States

Security through Washington and especially in the political core of the city – the general area around National Mall, the Houses of Congress and the White House – remained extremely tight. Armed police officers, D.C. Army National Guard soldiers and US Marines remained out in force and a visible presence. The White House was an armed camp with Secret Service men carrying weapons openly and above them helicopters with snipers aboard.

Professor Condoleezza Rice was driven once again through all of those ready to shoot to kill at what might have seemed like the slightest provocation. She was taken in an official vehicle onto the White House grounds and then escorted through multiple checks. Those who questioned and searched her did so gently and with respect, but with utter thoroughness. She’d been informed that there had been another ‘incident’ here or close by before coming to see the President again, but not the specifics. Whatever had occurred had ramped up security here to a near overwhelming degree. This was her fourth visit in the past couple of weeks and there had been heavy security beforehand, but nothing like today. Her FBI bodyguard was treated just like her: with manners but questioned and searched like he’d never been here before and only had malicious intentions.

Before moving to Colorado aged thirteen, Rice had grown up in Alabama. She knew what intimidation was and what too was a state of siege. Those were present here at the White House and to be inside all of this security would sooner or later affect those within negatively as well. The very real need for paranoia and to be kept safe would only be increased to an alarming degree to those – or, to be honest, just one person – protected like this.

Going through all of the security checks, she worried about the resulting mental state of President George H. W. Bush.


Rice was on unofficial leave from her post at Stanford University in northern California since last October and the beginning of the Bloody Winter in Eastern Europe. Civil strife and the resulting diplomatic crisis’ which originated in East Germany had spread to Poland first and later both Hungary and especially Romania. An expert in international relations throughout her political science teaching career, and with recognised expertise on the Soviet Union, Rice had long been associated with US Government work when it came to the Soviets. She’d worked for the State Department in the Seventies and throughout the Eighties been assisting in arms control and diplomatic strategy with many influential Washington figures: chief among those former Secretary of States George Shultz and current National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft. Scowcroft had brought her into President Bush’s circle when it came to dealing with the Soviet Union since Eastern Europe erupted in bloodshed and she’d become one of his chief advisers on the mindset of the Soviets, not so much the inner workings of their state.

When she spoke, he listened.

Rice was with the National Security Council (NSC), a body which remained working chiefly at the White House though with functions undertaken too at Raven Rock. The top people, those key to advising President Bush during the war were here in Washington though. Officially, he was here constantly and wouldn’t leave the nation’s capital during the war; in reality he was out of the city more than being in what had to be the #1 target for Soviet missiles should the very worst occur. However, when he met with his advisers for meetings President Bush was back from those other ‘undisclosed locations’ while others would attend remotely via telephone links. She herself was working underneath R. Nicholas Burns, the Director for Soviet Affairs on the NSC, and he met with her before those attending this evening’s meeting gathered down below the Executive Wing in the Situation Room.

Burns told her the bare-bones of the latest security threat where an armed intruder had been spotted trying to get into the White House grounds last night and subsequently shot dead. In addition to a pistol, that man had apparently been carrying a rucksack with a bomb inside. He knew no more details that, but the further increase in security here was to do with that. There was an external security situation ongoing in West Virginia which might be related as well. Moving onwards, the two of them spoke about who else would be attending the briefing soon to be underway and Rice was surprised that there should be so many attendees who weren’t currently directly employed by the US Government in the Bush Administration. She was one of those as well, someone who usually advised President Bush personally (with a few others present) rather than a large gathering. Burns replied that the current situation called for it.

The Secret Service then came and collected the two of them and checked their names off the list approved by White House Chief of Staff John Sununu as well as Scowcroft before they were led downstairs.


In recent months, Rice’s security clearance had been upgraded multiple times at the direction of Scowcroft. The FBI, Secret Service and probably the No Such Agency would have repeatedly assessed her background and current contacts. Her time in Moscow in 1979 would have been looked into along with her childhood split between Alabama and Colorado. Everything she’d done, said and written that had any hint of a political connotation would have been examined from Birmingham to California. She knew damn well how to keep a secret and be aware of those who might be interested in what she knew; how someone with hostile intentions towards her country might try to influence her was something she was also conscious of too. Coming to the White House and talking with President Bush, Scowcroft and the late James Baker had been one thing as they listened to what she had to say and read what she wrote. Now she was here for a different reason though, to attend a briefing down in the Situation Room: her clearance would have been upgraded again to have her in this room.

Elizabeth Dole, Baker’s replacement as Secretary of State, met her once Rice entered the room which was smaller than she expected. Dole had moved across from the Department of Labor and there had already been whispers which Rice had heard that even with Jim Webb having assumed the role of Vice President after Dan Quayle’s murder, Dole was being considered to run for office on President Bush’s ticket in two years time. Rice had heard it said that Webb had only taken the Oath of Office as an interim measure at a time of national crisis and Dole would eventually replace him come that election which was in Rice’s opinion very far away and something which no one should really be considering at the moment. But this was Washington after all…

Scowcroft was present along with mid-level Administration figures such as Wolfowitz, Hadley and Rowen. Rice was told by Dole during a quick chat, where the Secretary of State assured her that her input at the White House was something that she had fast come to value during her short time in her new position, that Webb was in London with Gates and CIA Director Webster was absent too. Rice saw that aside from President Bush, who would arrive when he did – this was his meeting and it would start when he got here –, others she might have expected to see were missing: Cheney foremost among those. The Defence and (especially) the State Department’s both had few officials in attendance and instead there were others like her: advisers not on the Government payroll but serving their country at this time of grave need.

Among those were people such as the ex-Senator John Tower and several from the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board: Anne Armstrong, Philip Zelikow and the towering figure (reputation-wise) of Zbigniew Brzezinski.


Scowcroft, the retired USAF Lt.-General and serving National Security Adviser, led the briefing which started off the meeting once President Bush arrived. He spoke about the general situation of the war with regard to the current state of affairs. The Soviets and their allies were on the back foot and in retreat almost everywhere. The Rodina was under attack itself from the coasts off the northwest, the Crimea and the Pacific Far East. There were widespread revolts underway across the Caucasus and in isolated incidents in the Baltic’s and Central Asia. North Korea had been beaten in battle and Cuba cordoned off. On the all-important battlefields in Western Europe, the Soviet Army’s forward-most penetration deep into the Netherlands had been cut off and across West Germany their armies were pulling back to shorten their lines. NATO’s strength grew there every day and on the Korean Peninsula the armies of the Allies were getting stronger too. The Soviets were reported to be digging-in and attempting to create massive defences, but the current trends pointed to NATO’s armies rolling over those if everything went as planned. Countries worldwide were with the Allies or neutral: the Soviets had no significant allies.

The question was what to do next.

Dole took over and explained that the NSC and President Bush were seeking opinions and viewpoints from those present. There had been discussions already with allies aboard concerning whether to advance into Eastern Europe – liberating West Berlin key there – and also to invade North Korea; the ultimate end-game with Cuba had already been decided and wasn’t to be talked about here. The United States wished to fight the current war to a conclusion so that it was won in a decisive manner and the Soviets wouldn’t be able to restart it again like they had already done once. Several European allies wished to see Eastern European regimes toppled and East Asian nations fighting with the United States as part of the Allies on the Korean Peninsula certainly wanted to see the North Koreans brought down. But, there were voices of opposition too from those allies on those proposals.

Moreover, a decision needed to be made here in Washington as to the direction which the United States would take.

The risks of moving into Eastern Europe were clear, Scowcroft affirmed. This could bring about a Soviet nuclear strike, one dwarfing Flensburg & Belgrade & Sofia. They could fear that American and NATO forces driving on Berlin and Prague, then maybe Warsaw afterwards, would ultimately follow that up by the crossing of Soviet borders. In such a situation, where they were unwilling to see a Second Barbarossa, the missiles would fly. Was this thinking justified? Could the Soviets be made to understand that NATO’s armies weren’t to try to emulate the aims of Hitler’s? Was there anyone there capable of rational thinking on that matter? With regards to North Korea, was the price that would come from occupation be worth it for the United States?

President Bush asked to hear what those brought here thought.


Rice was no shrinking violet. She wouldn’t have achieved all that she had in her life, including being here, by keeping her head down and her opinions to herself: that wasn’t her. Yet with people such as Brzezinski, Tower and Wolfowitz present to articulate what she wanted to say was difficult. They had their own strong opinions and clashed among themselves. Rice tried to explain the thinking of Kryuchkov and those close to him – what she had been able to interpret of those – but several times was unable to finish.

Scowcroft and Dole didn’t lose control of the meeting but there were heated debates and a frank exchange of differences. A lot of the talk went off subject in her opinion too. There was speculation as to the cause of the war and what Kryuchkov aimed to get from it. No one, not her or anyone else, here or aboard, had been able to give an adequate explanation as to why he had launched the war which he had. To not know this, and to have so many with different ideas as to what they were, made the debates as to what endgame to the war should be complicated. The assertion from Brzezinski that an invasion into Eastern Europe would bring about a nuclear response, Tower’s push for West Berlin to be liberated to win the war and Wolfowitz’s claims that unless Eastern Europe was overrun there’d be another war this year or next were all lost in that. Rice’s unfinished points where she cautioned about pushing the Soviets too far but also making them realise they had lost the war, and having surviving moderates in Moscow get rid of Kryuchkov and his dictatorship, weren’t listened to enough as far she was concerned.

When the hour-long meeting ended, following contributions from others too, which included Sununu’s promise that the American people would demand a victory following the unprovoked and terrible war unleashed against them in what was effectively a trio of surprise attacks (the first and second Soviet attacks and the Cuban action), Rice was left rather dissatisfied.

Sununu told Rice as she was getting ready to leave that President Bush would like to see her afterwards. Burns went upstairs with her into the West Wing where she talked with him for a few moments about their shared frustration. There had been too many voices, all clashing together in trying to get their opinion heard. Burns was sure that there would be no more meetings like that and Rice agreed.


Rice met with President Bush in the Roosevelt Room. Scowcroft was there, so too was Sununu and Richard Kerr who served as the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence. There was a wait for another attendee but General Powell soon arrived and they were all asked by their president to sit close to him at the head of the room so the meeting could be informal.

President Bush asked his guests if there was someone in Moscow who’d met with Kryuchkov and claimed credit for the recent violence which had taken place in several American cities: New York, Los Angeles, St. Louis and Oakland. Powell asked what he meant and the president explained that the riots which had rocked those cities where looting, arson and mayhem had taken place due to what was criminals taking advantage of police shortages would be claimed as a success by someone from the KGB? Would Kryuchkov be told that political violence was taking place in the United States and that the KGB had fermented it? Scowcroft was polite but firm with his answer when he told the president that there was a difference between events which were known about in parts of the Soviet Union where there was civil disturbance and what had happened here at home. Kerr – here in-place of Webster – stated that he had seen firm intelligence that that violence inside the Soviet Union was not criminality like it was in the United States.

Rice spoke up and stated that she understood what the president meant. President Bush was cautioning them that if someone wanted to look at something one way they could, especially if it suited their own aims and agenda, despite all evidence pointing to the opposite. After an appreciative smile, President Bush told the others that he wanted to include Rice in elements of RAINCOAT intelligence to gain her insight into some of that.

Nods came from all around.

Kerr told her that RAINCOAT was one of the codewords being used for intelligence of the highest calibre gained by the US Intelligence Community coming from an external source. When shared, it was deemed other names: REDBEARD and REUNITE among those. The CIA was being sent military and intelligence information by an external source whose origin they weren’t sure of; the transfer to the CIA wasn’t going to be discussed here because neither Rice nor even Powell and Sununu had the necessary security clearance. Anyway, the source was unknown. It could be someone from the GRU or serving on Stavka, the Soviet General Staff… or maybe several people cooperating. It would be surprising if RAINCOAT intelligence came from the KGB. What was being sent was all sort of useful nuggets of information that had been put to use in hurting the Soviet war effort. However, despite Soviet Armed Forces and GRU assets catching ‘friendly fire’, it was truly the KGB ultimately losing out as their plans and schemes were scuppered.

There was a Soviet commando team massacred when landing on the Yorkshire coast of the UK who had been betrayed. A Soviet commanding general in the Netherlands had had his location given away for a kill mission. There was a submarine armed with land-attack cruise missiles steaming towards the Panama Canal from the Pacific side that the US Navy had been able to ambush and kill. Soviet commandos active in West Virginia were being hunted and engaged at the minute by Delta Force and the FBI’s HRT as they moved upon The Greenbrier where Congress was. Powell told of these successes with pride though with a caution too that Rice was sure she could detect. The ultimate aim for whomever was sending RAINCOAT intelligence was for the United States – for it was to the CIA it came – to strike at KGB-led operations before they could get going even if that meant Soviet military deaths.

What RAINCOAT was saying now, Rice was further informed, was that Kryuchkov was starting to understand that the war was being lost. In public, the Soviets were still claiming they were winning, but in private their leader realised that defeat was more than possible. He was ordering troops to start digging-in but more than that had looked at the possibility of using nuclear weapons again. This time it would be on the borders of the Warsaw Pact states in tactical form ahead of NATO armies, maybe even lethal biological weapons too. RAINCOAT intelligence said too that Kryuchkov, when presented with that option by several top advisers, had himself spoken of the blow-back which would occur against the Soviet Union in the terms of fall-out from those nuclear weapons – Chernobyl writ-large! – and also germs infecting Soviet citizens before diseases getting out of control.

Those reports only spoke of the effects of Soviet weapons upon themselves, not in addition to a NATO retaliation.

What did Rice think of all of this? Not so much the intelligence game someone was playing, but whether Kryuchkov and his senior people would see sense from such reports shown to them. President Bush told her that he was already considering advancing into Eastern Europe and he had Webb in London now, Paris next, trying to bring the leading Western Europeans on-side. Would Kryuchkov believe what he was told? Could he keep a-hold of power? Was the monster which was the war which had unleashed be something he could keep control of?

Scowcroft told Rice that an answer wasn’t expected now from Rice, though there wasn’t too much time to waste. Again, the president would be speaking to others, but her opinion was valued. President Bush told her himself he wanted a response that was wholly honest, cold and analytical and not something that she would think he might want to hear. However, Sununu did add that the wishes of the American people to see a just finish to the war would ultimately weigh on that final decision. This brought about a side discussion between Sununu, Scowcroft and President Bush where they talked politics while Kerr, Powell and Rice all remained aloft from that until they would get back on track.

Rice was aware of the polling numbers which they discussed. Public support for the war was most recently shown to be between ninety-seven and ninety-nine per cent in favour. She wasn’t a politician, but those were amazing numbers. There would always be some opposition to war… but 97-99% was very high. There were other numbers for recent domestic political polling: public approval for President Bush and his Administration’s conduct of the war was between seventy-five and eighty per cent. Again, 75-80% was huge, but not 97-99%. Both Houses of Congress had voted to declare war on the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact nations, North Korea and Cuba with no opposition at all apart from one abstention in the House of Representatives. There were no peace rallies of any significance, thousands of potential draftees weren’t running off to Canada and the country wasn’t torn down the middle. The United States was united behind the war. Rice listened though as Sununu told Scowcroft that this all mattered. Politics needed to be factored into the course that the war was to take and it really couldn’t be ignored.

While keeping her counsel on the matter, Rice did agree that Sununu had a point. The American people would want a successful conclusion to the war which they deemed as worth the lives lost and treasure expended. If they didn’t get it they would blame President Bush. Scowcroft wasn’t an idiot and he explained that he understood that, but domestic politics couldn’t drive strategic military policy. President Bush wasn’t acting as a peacemaker when he stated he shared both points of view and would take it all under consideration; Rice knew he was just being realistic.

Not long afterwards, her president wished her a goodnight as the meeting broke up. It would be one to be continued later, Rice knew, especially as she had been asked to return with a conclusion to the conundrum which her country faced.

Fourteen – Defection

March 1st 1990
Geneva, Geneva Canton, Switzerland

A man had called the British Consulate-General in Geneva and asked to speak to the Second Assistant Passport Officer. His English had been terrible and difficult to understand over the telephone when the call was taken and he had refused to listen that there was no person with such a title working within the diplomatic compound. Nonetheless, in spite of such an answer he wouldn’t get off the line. He carried on by stating that in fifteen minutes he would be at the main entrance to the Consulate-General and he wanted the Second Assistant Passport Officer to meet him there, one Richard Dearlove. He himself would be at the gate and would require the man he asked he to see to be there then; no, he wouldn’t call back at a later date or be willing to meet anywhere else.

A quarter of an hour later, two men met at the gate in the early morning fog.


The foreigner was putting a brave face on the whole thing, in the opinion of Dearlove. He was pretending that he was calm and confident though in reality he was nervous and scared. Once Dearlove came out to see him, the man who said that his name was Vladimir rushed what he had to say where he continued to speak in broken English. He said that he was an officer with the KGB, working for Line X and assigned to Paris. He wished to defect to the United Kingdom and wanted to do that right at this moment. He wanted safety and the promise of a reward for all of the information which he could give, information that he affirmed would be of vital importance to Britain. But it had to be done now, there was no time to wait.

His left hand was bandaged and his face looked swollen as if he had been in a fistfight recently. He fidgeted and couldn’t keep still. He stunk of cigarettes and maybe alcohol too behind the mouthwash. His clothes were disheveled – as if he’d slept in them for several days – and he gave off an unpleasant air of someone whom good company wouldn’t come from. Dearlove could have turned him away, maybe might have but…

…he clearly knew a lot. He knew the real name of the MI-6 man who had come out to meet him, not his working name which he used when abroad, and when calling he had requested that he speak to the Second Assistant Passport Officer: there was no official duty named as such within the diplomatic missions of Britain abroad but instead it was a tongue-in-cheek term used by MI-6 officers abroad amongst themselves to describe what they didn’t do. Moreover, at times like this, with the world at war and Britain intimately involved in that, this man who said he was from the KGB and wished to make a defection was someone that Dearlove should at least talk to.

If the man was someone whom Dearlove considered he and his country had no use for than he would always eject him from the compound and hand him over to the Swiss. With fighting raging among all of Switzerland’s neighbours and a heightened sense of security across their nation, they would take care of this foreigner who Dearlove reckoned didn’t have the correct papers on him to be in their country at this time.


Once on the grounds of the Consulate-General, Lt.-Colonel Viktor Alekseevich Oshchenko – ‘Vladimir’ – let out a sigh of relief.

He was safe!

He would live!

Following the British spy through the building, Oshchenko went upstairs with this Dearlove character and into an office. No words were exchanged between them and he noticed that several other people present all averted their gaze from him. He was aware of his physical appearance but knew that it wasn’t that. Instead, those here had been trained to mind their own business and look away. They were professionals here, just as he’d known, and only professionals could keep him safe.

Soon enough, he’d be taken to Britain. There he’d talk, he’d tell them everything that they wanted to know and more. He would reveal to them so much so that there wasn’t even the thought of getting rid of him. Sending him back to his own country nor to France, which from both nations he was fleeing, wouldn’t be considered once he started talking to the British. He hoped that they’d take him to a country manor somewhere in the English countryside. Somewhere nice and relaxed, far away from danger. He would like that.


Dearlove brought the Russian into his own office deep within the building which was a small windowless office. He sat the defector down and offered him some tea. A recording device was activated and so too was the open telephone line which he had set up back to his supervisor in the Swiss capital Bern where the senior MI-6 man in Switzerland’s capital at the Embassy had been alerted and was waiting so he could hear what was said. This whole odd occurrence was so unlike how things would usually be done but with the war almost a month old and Switzerland a battlefield of diplomacy and intelligence work rather than armies, Dearlove and MI-6 were working with what they had been given not what they had sought out in the usual manner of courting contacts and defectors.

Getting down to business, Dearlove asked the man what his real name was, what was his rank & assignment and what did he expect from his defection here.

The Russian gave a name and then told him that he was a lieutenant-colonel within the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, it’s foreign intelligence arm. He stated that he was with Line X, which dealt with obtained military technical intelligence. He was currently assigned to the KGB staff in Paris and had gone undercover on the eve of war where he had been tasked to support ‘special operations’ within France conducted by others. In undertaking his defection, he expected that the British would be grateful for all that he could tell them about the various intelligence related matters he knew: not just during the war, but beforehand when he was in France and previous to that when he was assigned to work in Britain. He invited Dearlove to check with his home office back in London. Oshchenko stated that he was sure that his picture was on file along with some intelligence about him and that by checking that they would be able to see that he was who he said he was.

He wanted to go to Britain and to go there fast. He would talk here in Geneva, but he would be able to talk more when he was safe in Britain. When Dearlove asked who he’d feared was after him, Oshchenko gave him an incredulous look before telling him that the KGB would be after him. He had abandoned his comrades and they might have guessed by now that he was defecting. They would be looking for him in Paris but soon would be widening their search. Geneva wouldn’t be safe, he declared, because nowhere in mainland Western Europe was safe: the KGB still had an active presence with NATO intelligence forces having failed to detain all of its operatives on their soil here on the Continent. Back in Britain he’d feel safer though.

There was a lot more to all of this, Dearlove could see, but once Vladimir aka Oshchenko started talking, he realised that this man was a prize catch. He wasn’t saying everything and maybe telling lies in places, but there was still a lot about him that was genuine. His mentions of being in Paris and hiding out there to support ‘special operations’ was interesting of course – the commando attack at the French Foreign Ministry – and so too was his time he said he’d spent in Britain. What could he tell Dearlove about KGB operations in the United Kingdom?


There was an art to all of this, Oshchenko knew. In the game which others had played before him, certain information would be revealed slowly by the defector to those who he was running to in a careful manner with the promise of more to come later. The defector would allow it to be teased out of him when he was safe away from danger and those who had questions would always have more. There wasn’t the time to play that game now though.

He told the British spy that he knew the names and occupations of traitors in his country who had willingly or unwillingly betrayed their nation. There were those he had worked with and those ran by other KGB people. He could inform the British about shipping agents used for moving people and equipment about. He knew where safe-houses where located as well as dead-drops. He knew about bank accounts used and safe deposit boxes by KGB people and British traitors. Maybe the British had all KGB people in their nation under arrest, maybe they had missed some: either way he could help with that giving rank structure and details of the KGB presence in Britain.

It all came out fast and hurried.

He knew that he was tired and stressed and wasn’t playing the game how it was supposed to be but after all that he had been through Oshchenko was tired and his artistic strategy for making this defection perfect which he had planned out on the way here fell by the wayside. He had traveled overnight though on a difficult journey where had had faced the danger of being caught by the French on plenty of occasions and then had to get past the hardly passive Swiss either.

He tried to read the face of the British spy to work out how all of this was going but found that impossible as well. All that he himself could do was to talk and when not talk sip at his tea while the man whose life he had put his hands in stared at him and tried to read him. He was sure that he’d given this man enough to get him safely away from here. His own people would eventually look in Switzerland, searching for a traitor who’d ran. So too might the French, even the Americans – both would be out for vengeance because he was sure by now that both nations knew how he had played a major part in supporting the efforts to kill their diplomats – but the British should be able to get him out of here for their own selfish ends.

That’s why he’d come here, not elsewhere.


Dearlove left the Russian alone and went into the next office where he was quickly on the telephone. He spoke to his superior in Bern (who’d swapped phones) and got the permission he expected from him: Oshchenko would be accepted and they’d arrange to get him out of Geneva as soon as possible.

His defection might be odd and there had to be so much more to it, but for now he would be valuable. There would be a great deal more that he could tell them when he was in a better state than he was now. Professional interrogators would be able to sort out the truth from lies or exaggerations. Moreover, Oshchenko would end up telling them things he didn’t want to say or even wasn’t fully aware that he knew. All that would be done when they had him back in Britain. They’d get him somewhere he could see he was safe, let him wash and be fed before sitting him down and talking to him nice and slowly.

Dearlove went back into the other office to tell him the good news.


Freedom!

Oshchenko tried very much to try to control himself but couldn’t help himself. He stood up and shook the hand of the British spy. This man would allow him to live, not die at the hands of his own furious countrymen nor be tortured by the French or the Americans.

He’d made it. He’d got away. His running had paid off. The deaths he’d caused on the way to get here – unfortunate, unlucky people who’d been in his way – were justified in his mind because he was going to live.

He’d tell the British all that they wanted. Once he was in Britain though.

How soon exactly was that to occur?





March 1st 1990
Manama, Bahrain

General Schwarzkopf received confirmation that it was Tariq Aziz who had fled from Iraq and landed in Kuwait, not someone claiming to be him. Iraq’s foreign minister was inside the small country which neighbored the bigger Iraq after making a desperate dash there to save his own life. The defection would be a great political coup, one for diplomats and politicians to savor.

To Schwarzkopf, it really wasn’t important.

Tariq Aziz might be rolled out for the media and he could make statements all he liked, it didn’t change anything for Central Command (CENTCOM) and the American military presence in Middle East… as little as that was. He’d been told that the mad Qusay Hussein was running around Iraq personally executing people himself, even his father’s own cousin Ali Hassan Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti: such a person had the unfortunate sobriquet of ‘Chemical Ali’. It didn’t change a thing here in Bahrain though for Schwarzkopf. That defection nor the murders of Saddam’s former circle mattered not as far as his immediate responsibilities were concerned.

All he was concerned with was the opportunities missed that CENTCOM could have shined due to if things had gone differently. Now, he was not going to war but effectively packing up and preparing for CENTCOM to go back home to Florida.

Against his advice as the senior man on the ground here in the Middle East, because there would be no major combat operations within the region that the United States would take part in here there was no need for CENTCOM. Iraq’s armies had been defeated in Jordan and their country was left in chaos following Saddam’s assassination. The Soviets weren’t going to attempt to seize the oil fields around the Persian Gulf due to the troubles which they were experiencing in the Caucasus and the commitment of elite assault forces elsewhere. Pakistan’s war in Afghanistan was slowing down now that they controlled Kabul. Here in Bahrain and the other Gulf Arab states, the Peninsula Shield Force which they had put together would at the most maybe move into Iraq at some unspecified later date; when they did that it would probably be peacekeeping, not combat. Even if it was the latter, they wouldn’t be joined by American forces and Schwarzkopf wouldn’t be here to command the troops of the Gulf Arabs.

Most of his CENTCOM staff had already been redeployed elsewhere due to urgent needs for such skilled and experienced personnel in active wartime theaters such as Europe, the Far East or the Caribbean. The wing of US Air Force F-16s had departed for South Korea. The US Marines which had been here were moving through Egypt and heading for Italy. The US Navy still had their carrier battle group based around the USS Enterprise in the region, but many escorting ships of her once immense flotilla were already sailing away elsewhere. As to the US Army, his own service, there had never been any combat troops that had made it here and what service-support forces were present were to be redeployed soon enough. Then there was all of those unused munitions sent up here from Diego Garcia, some of which were now going to Israel and the rest to Europe.

It was all rather frustrating to be honest. Schwarzkopf had no desire to see any blood spilt from American servicemen but he had come here for a fight. That fight had been undertaken by others and he had been able to do nothing but observe from a distance. He and his staff hadn’t been needed. All of the preparation which they had undertaken had been for naught in the end because CENTCOM was unneeded to fight the wars of others here.

John Bolton and Richard Clarke, two assistant secretaries of state from the State Department who had come here like the Vice President and the deputy national security adviser before then – they’d been making a grand tour –, had told him when the news had come yesterday and they were meeting with him concerning relations with the Saudis that it was all for the best. Bolton had told him that ‘some of the greatest victories are won with the stroke of a pen rather than a fusillade of bullets’, or something like that anyway: Schwarzkopf hadn’t enjoyed the man’s company. Clarke, a more likeable man, had said that the American forces not required here were doing a good job of fighting the war elsewhere against the Soviets, the Warsaw Pact, Cuba and North Korea. To not have to fight here was a victory even better than anything that could have been achieved on the battlefield. Defence Secretary Cheney had sent a message to Schwarzkopf telling him that he had done well in getting everything ready for a war in the Persian Gulf to defend American interests there and it wasn’t something that would be forgotten…

…ah and could Schwarzkopf hurry up sending his staff to where they were needed as soon as possible, thank you.

Maybe Schwarzkopf could have argued the point. He’d heard there had been some voices back in the United States which said the transfer of forces out of the Middle East was short-sighted. CENTCOM was responsible for American interests further afield than just the Persian Gulf. Yet there had come a rapprochement of sorts between Yemen and Saudi Arabia. In Egypt the initial worrying situation with the failed coup d'état there had calmed down. Iran was showing no sign of invading Iraq or the Gulf Arab states. India wasn’t about to go to war against Pakistan to save the defeated Afghan regime at the behest of the Soviets. There wasn’t going to be a war here which CENTCOM needed to be present to intervene in anytime soon.

Major-General Pagonis, the logistics chief for CENTCOM, told Schwarzkopf that it was all a job well done. They’d been ready for a war and not had to see one fought in the end. Moreover, had there come combat what few American forces that would have been here would have had to rely far too much on the support of regional allies and their militaries: not something that he thought would have worked out well given the state of them which he had seen up close and personal. The Pakistanis had shown that they could fight and the Egyptians would have made a good show of themselves if called upon, but the armies of the Gulf Arabs… paper tigers with all of their fancy equipment that they couldn’t maintain themselves and there was no concept of logistics here either.

Schwarzkopf had orders for his return to his headquarters back at MacDill AFB; his executive officer was to stay here in Bahrain. There were CENTCOM staff who had already gone there before they had joined up with Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) and it’s subordinate headquarters in the region. He was to stay at his post though, playing a waiting game until called upon to serve his country elsewhere.





March 1st 1990
Near Leuven, Brabant, Belgium

Since before the war started, back at the beginning of last month, SACEUR had been facing political interference. It came with the job though, General Galvin knew. The role which he fulfilled was as much about politics, about keeping allies content, as it was about overseeing the war in Europe. His counterparts such as SACLANT (Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic) and the head of PACCOM (US Pacific Command) had to deal with similar situations such as he did with certain countries within the war-fighting alliances causing problems for them. General Galvin had been given the role which he had because he could handle the flak which would come when everyone couldn’t be pleased. In peacetime and now in wartime, he did his best to deal with problems caused to him – some with noble intentions, others without those – from those who believed that their own concerns overruled everything else.

The latest case of political interference causing him to be distracted came from the Netherlands. There were elements of the Dutch Government which continued badgered him directly and indirectly for their country to be liberated of occupying Soviet troops at the soonest opportunity, preferably yesterday. That was an administration of politicians who were all democratically elected and would usually be very reasonable people. Significant parts of their sovereign soil was under foreign occupation though with far too many civilians still behind enemy lines and suffering from the ravages of Soviet control; the details which they and everyone else knew all about in all of those horrors. The occupiers were cut off and surrounded on all sides with intelligence stating that they had been abandoned to their fate: that had been proved by everything seen so far. The Dutch wanted the Soviets finished off and their country and civilians freed. They pointed too to the number of POWs under Soviet control inside the pocket formed inside the Netherlands as another reason for the liberation. Moreover, Dutch troops would be taking part in the freeing of the occupied parts of their own country so it wasn’t as if the Netherlands wanted to sit the fight out and let everyone else do the work for them.

The timing wasn’t right yet though. SACEUR wasn’t going to give the order for the Soviets there to be finished off just yet. The Dutchman commanding NORWESTAG – a mix of Dutch, Belgian, British, French and West German troops; many prewar reservists but all battle-hardened veterans now – was complaining to General Galvin and his government was busy at the North Atlantic Council pushing for the liberation. The situation on the ground wasn’t yet right though and NATO needed to wait just a little longer.

Why was this the case?

Weakness was overcoming the Soviets trapped there and soon enough the time would come were they were incapable of combating an attack against them effectively. Not just SACEUR, but almost everyone in the know and with authority could see that the Soviets there were almost finished. Very soon they wouldn’t be able to offer any more meaningful resistance to the final assault when SACEUR gave the word for NORWESTAG to strike. There were the remains of three Soviet field armies there trapped in a pocket shaped like a backwards ‘L’. They had no resupply and no reinforcements for their position – and no hope of averting their eventual death or captivity. High-level intelligence games were still being played to seed or stir trouble within their ranks between the Soviet Army and the KGB forces within, but General Galvin believed that before – or if – that all paid off they would collapse on their own first.

The Soviets trapped within the Netherlands were running out of everything which they needed to hold their positions against a counterattack. They had little surface-to-air missiles left and not a single aircraft was left flying from the very few smashed air bases within the pocket. Anti-tank missiles, munitions for their multiple-barrelled rocket-launchers and shells for their heavy artillery were almost depleted. So too were basic war supplies like tank shells, machine gun bullets and mortar rounds. There was hardly any food and a dearth of medical supplies. The Soviets had rifle ammunition and their morale was still holding up, but they needed everything else.

SACEUR was planning to wait a few more days and then give NORWESTAG the word to strike. The Soviets would be blasted from their air and then the pocket cut in two around Arnhem by British and French forces. Dutch and West German troops would then eliminate the eastern side of the pocket over better ground for mobile operations. The Soviets to the west would then be slowly moved against because they were dug-in across better defensive terrain. It was a good plan, one which there was widespread approval of, even from the Dutch military.

Yet… the Dutch were watching part of their country burn. Fires raging for more than a week from Rotterdam’s port were moving eastwards. No one was fighting those fires in any organised way and while there had been heavy rain there was also wind too which had fanned the flames. The resulting inferno was driving politicians in the Netherlands to distraction, they weren’t even calmed by the news that Soviet troops were dying in the fires. There were civilians caught up there too and their country alight.

General Galvin came from Massachusetts and grew up outside of Boston, a long way from his role as SACEUR. He knew himself that he wouldn’t want to sit back and watch Boston burn if he would do anything about it. He had no choice though. He had to let those fires rage killing Soviet troops there and weakening them ready for destruction. Soon the time would come, just not yet. The Dutch did understand this – the government of the Netherlands didn’t consist of fools – but they were still trying to change the situation so the waiting game was over. His job was to make sure that didn’t happen and the greater good was all that mattered rather than a short term gain.

That was command responsibility.


There were other matters that the senior NATO commander in Europe was currently dealing with.

CENTAG – now being referred to a lot as US Seventh Army despite General Galvin’s misgivings on that matter of the sensitivity of allies – was in the final stages of planning for Operation Storm Chaser and nearly ready to go. The US XVIII Airborne Corps, led by the unused 82nd Airborne Division, was almost ready to be sent into action in a parachute / airmobile operation behind enemy lines in central parts of West Germany. The first drop zones for the 82nd Airborne Division would be in the valley of the Fulda River where hot on their heels the rest of the corps was to land at airstrips which the Soviets had built during their occupation of that area. It would be a daring mission, especially for those in the follow-up wave flown over enemy-held territory, but the chances of success were judged to be good. That success would come not from taking that territory but in getting the French III Corps and the US V Corps to lance forward and link up with the light forces ahead.

It had been made clear by the North Atlantic Council (Powell had contacted General Galvin personally as well) that there was to be no crossing of the nearby East German frontier during the operation. There would be no chasing the retreating enemy back over the IGB nor a reconnaissance-in-force. The French and American troops involved, as well as a West German panzer brigade, were to retake occupied territory there and trap those to the west of them. SACEUR agreed with that firm order which had been passed right down the chain of command because of the very real danger that if the IGB was crossed then there could easily be a nuclear response due to that. There were those above him who had made that decision, who were thinking of the big picture, and his agreement was that they had the right to be worried about that. It wasn’t as if the Soviets hadn’t used nuclear weapons before in this war…

SACEUR was looking over the latest plans now for Storm Chaser. It was a risk, a big risk, but the pay off if everything went as planned would be worth it. When CENTAG’s heavy forces started moving they were meant to hit the Soviet forces ahead of them at boundaries between field armies holding onto West German soil. The French would go through the gap between the Soviet’s Thirteenth and First Guards Tank Armys; Lt.-General Joulwan’s V Corps was to move between the Soviet First Guards Tank and Eight Guards Armys. Those avenues for attack weren’t initially ideal ground right at the frontlines, but beyond them there was good tank country for charging armour to roll across. General Galvin went over the preparations to break through the gaps by dumping artillery shells – conventional and those with chemical weapons – across them with infiltrators already in-place (in chemical warfare gear) to guide many of those shells in. Once the AMX-30s and M-1 Abrams’ got going they would soon reach their fellow CENTAG soldiers far out ahead. Flank moves once inside the enemy’s lines would envelope the First Guards Tank Army and parts of the other two as well, especially the Eighth Guards Army if Lt.-General Fred Franks’ VII Corps could achieve success with their related forward attack as well.

Those risks though were there. Operational security was damn tight but there was always the chance of the enemy getting wind – even late in the day – at what was coming their way. SACEUR was more concerned about tactical matters on the ground though: what would happen if the XVIII Corps made their drop successfully but the armoured spearheads coming to link up with them couldn’t make it to them in time?

General Galvin expected that he’d lose his position if that happened. The same could be expected for General Saint as CENTAG commander, maybe one or several of the corps commanders below him too. A failure like that would be too much and he’d have to be replaced. Of greater significance, naturally, would be the fact that the XVIII Corps would be cut off and surrounded on all sides by the enemy. It would be the same for them as it was for the Soviets in the Netherlands if that occurred. The defeat would be immense and have wide-ranging effects beyond West Germany too, he was certain of that.

So he was making sure that Storm Chaser was given everything it needed to succeed. He checked the details of the plan when it came to air support over those breakthrough areas, making sure that the French weren’t short-changed: if the V Corps got stuck then any success the French had would be of great importance. SACEUR focused on the infantry forces at the breakthrough points too. They would be hitting dug-in Soviet troops there, only afterwards would mobile enemy forces be met. In the past few days, NATO aircraft had blasted the Soviets all throughout their rears hitting those on the move with great effect. When the Soviets came to a stop though, which was what the air attacks were all about, they were hardly to kill though. The Soviets which were to be blasted as they were to allow CENTAG’s attack to rip through the front were going to be difficult to get past in the short space of time needed. After they were shelled and bombed they would have to be first pinned down by NATO infantry and then dug-out of their positions so they could fire at or call-in fire upon what came after the initial tanks driving east.

The infantry assigned to the breakthroughs were going to take heavy loses no matter what. It had been the same throughout the war, especially when NATO tactical counterattacks had been made early on and during the Eagle Fire counteroffensive on the North German Plain. Attacking defended positions and rooting out the enemy, especially in the high ground positions where those Soviets in the way of Storm Chaser were, cost men. There were West Germans – the 5th Panzergrenadier Brigade – with the French III Corps, which had been part of the 2nd Panzergrenadier Division that fell apart during the ceasefire in the middle of last month. The French were going to send them into the attack to root out defenders at their breakthroughs, but Joulwan was going to use men from a brigade of the US 42nd Infantry Division: New York Army National Guard soldiers. Those men had already shown their worth so far in this war but this would be different and a tough fight. SACEUR checked on the support given to the 1st Brigade of the 42nd Infantry Division (the infantry units were the 1/69 INF & 1/71 INF) and set about arranging for more air and artillery support to help them at the frontlines, while also making sure that there would be medical support readily available too. Everything was in order already, but he would make sure that word went down from him to Saint to Joulwan that everything that could possibly be done there would be because he had a personal interest. There was nothing unprofessional in this so he need not worry about that: he worried about those national guardsmen there.

When it came to the French attack using those West Germans, General Galvin saw what they were doing. The 5th Panzergrenadier Brigade was a ragtag force, almost the strength of a small division due to recent attachments. Many West Germans who’d given in when that ceasefire had happened had returned to the fight. They hadn’t just left their units behind previously though, but their weapons and vehicles. These returnees included so many men that NATO units were absorbing everywhere across their country; everyone was welcome apart from those who had attempted to make a defection to the Soviets beforehand. The French had many of them as light infantry and were sending them into the fight to allow their armoured breakthroughs as part of Storm Chaser though.

SACEUR saw the reasoning, understood it, but was uncomfortable with the unsaid implications of what the French were doing. They were supporting the West German infantry there with fire support, light armour behind them and everything else, but it was to be West Germans who’d previously given up before seeing sense who’d exclusively be thrown into a series of bloody infantry engagements. He’d have to let that stand because it made military sense.

Again, that was command responsibility.





March 1st 1990
The White House, Washington D.C., the United States

With the United States engaged in a global war with the fear that at any moment that conflict could go to the nuclear level, President George Bush was naturally a busy man and didn’t have the time to do all of the things everyday which he would before the war. He wasn’t often at the White House and when he was, his staff had no inclination for him to be doing meet-and-greets, holding long talks and attending press conferences. The Secret Service shared those concerns too and had made the White House grounds a fortress.

Regardless, there were still many daily meetings which required the attendance of President Bush. He preferred to have those at the White House, where he was able to come and go from so that tabs couldn’t be kept on his movements. Today, there were six official meetings which he took part in with visitors to his workplace and official residence, though not somewhere it could be said he was living at or working within full time as had been the case before World War Three started.


The British Ambassador Sir Antony Acland was first.

Acland came across from the British Embassy and into the White House through all of the intrusive security. There was politeness and respect for his position, but he went through the same checks as anyone else would. Others would have been – had been in fact – offended at the identity checks and search of his person, but he took it all in his stride and then went into a meeting with President Bush, Secretary of State Elizabeth Dole (who’d come from Mount Weather) and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft which took place in the Roosevelt Room rather than in the Oval Office, out there on the external facing of the White House. The usual diplomatic courtesies were undertaken and Acland gave congratulations to Dole on her position as well as offered condolences for the unfortunate loss for the United States of her predecessor James Baker several weeks ago.

Then he got down to business.

Acland explained that he was here in person to talk with his hosts about the situation with his country found itself in with the ongoing war. Britain was hurting, it was feeling the strain of the conflict. The staggering casualties which his country had taken went alongside physical damage to Britain that while not on the scale of World War Two were still very serious. Britain’s economy hadn’t and just couldn’t adapt to a wartime mode of operation. Food, fuel and munitions were flowing into Britain now that the majority of the submarine threat which had been encountered early in the war was over with but that couldn’t make up for everything that had come before it. The National Government was on the verge of collapse and there was no money left to finance the war.

This had all been explained to the Americans beforehand. Thatcher had spoken to Bush, Foreign Secretary Hurd had had many conversations on this matter with Baker beforehand and with Dole only yesterday. When Vice President Jim Webb was recently in London, the same message was sent to him: Britain was struggling to fight this war.

Acland was here to remind President Bush, Dole and Scowcroft of this once again, as per his instructions from London, but he also wanted to affirm something else too: despite the immense difficulties that his country was facing Britain wasn’t about to drop out of this war. Whatever had to be done would be done. Britain had been attacked just as the United States and the rest of NATO had been by the Soviets who had launched a wholly illegal war of aggression. British troops had faced chemical weapons attacks like American troops had. Civilians in Britain had been killed like American civilians had been. The two countries were in this together and Britain was prepared to see it through to the finish.

Furthermore, Acland told his hosts that there were unfortunate rumblings from some of his countrymen which they might be aware of here in Washington. Yes, Britain was facing all of these troubles. In addition, there was a desire to see an end to the conflict as soon as reasonably possible to stop all the deaths occurring and to see that happen before any more nuclear weapons were employed. At the same time, there were those who didn’t speak for the British Government making the assumption that they did. Britain would raise issues and concerns through official channels, not outside of those. The matter with the Vice President and comments made in the House of Commons was something which he told them that they shouldn’t take too seriously. Webb and his position were respected by the British Government and that was something that the United States should believe.

Both President Bush and Dole spoke with him afterwards where they expressed their thanks for his candid comments and the British contribution to the joint efforts made by Washington and London in fighting this war. They underpinned their commitment to the Special relationship and a hope for an end to the war as soon as possible, but on the terms of both countries, NATO and the Allies.

All in all, once he left, Acland considered the meeting a success. Everything which had been said by him and his hosts had been satisfactory and he would report back to London as soon as he returned to the Embassy… once he got out of the White House that was, because all of the security to get in here had to be passed through getting back out again!


William Webster, the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), came to the White House not long afterwards. Scowcroft and Attorney General Richard ‘Dick’ Thornburgh were present along with White House Chief-of-Staff John Sununu: all of whom had security clearance to hear the details of what was said and also the dressing-down which Webster received.

President Bush had fulfilled the same role as Webster did back in the mid-Seventies. He was a politician not a career spook. He understood the world of intelligence at the strategic level though from his service then as DCI and positions held afterwards for his country. It was the latest revelations with the matter of CIA officer Aldrich Ames which President Bush made sure his DCI understood how angry he was at the repeated failings with this scandal. The espionage activities of this man against the United States had been going on for years and he should have been detected long ago: there were so many chances to do so. It had taken the revelations from a Soviet KGB officer who had undertaken a defection to unmask Ames’ activity and immediately after that had occurred, some of those in senior positions within the CIA had still tried to deny that they had a mole among their ranks. Ultimately, all of these people answered to Webster and he answered to his president.

Webster was informed that President Bush was ‘sorely disappointed’ with him.

All that he could do at this time was to make a promise that the damage done would be examined and efforts made to deal with that. There were people within the CIA, Webster stated, who had been asked to resign and others transferred to administrative posts for the time being while they were investigated for their failings to long ago spot what was right in front of them when it came to Ames. Webster was personally involved and was making sure that no stone was left unturned. President Bush was someone not known to like apologies but rather action taken and the DCI told him that he was to correct the failings at once.

Yet… Ames was currently in the custody of the FBI. Webster told those in the meeting – Thornburgh especially as head of the Justice Department and thus responsible for overseeing the FBI – that the CIA needed access to him if the damage he had done could be started to be undone. Frustratingly, President Bush just nodded at such a remark rather than said anything directly in response and moved to ask Thornburgh about others in FBI custody, American nationals who been spying for foreign countries currently at war with the United States. There was talk of two traitors who’d been working for some time for the Cuban DGI and now in custody: Kendall Myers from the State Department and Ana Montes from the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA). These were low-level people who the FBI had detained after tip-offs about their activities coming from those who knew about their spying and had previously allowed that to happen before having ‘an attack of the morals’ due to what Cuba had been doing during the war and turning on Myers and Montes.

Webster started to understand that his position as DCI was untenable in the medium-to-long term: President Bush had clearly had enough of him. He wouldn’t be relieved of his duties – asked to resign, even fired – with the war going on but afterwards he would be on the way out. There was anger at this, yet at the same time he appreciated that the responsibility for what had gone on with the scandal around Ames was down to him as DCI. Others had done serious wrong, but he was the man at the top who had overseen all of those failings even unwittingly. So, he’d be for the chopping block eventually and there was nothing that could be done about that.


Condoleezza Rice returned to the White House after leaving two days beforehand.

She met with President Bush, Dole, Scowcroft, Cheney’s men Wolfowitz & Hadley and Sununu’s deputy Andrew Card. Secretary of Defence Cheney and Sununu were both supposed to be in the meeting but they had two of their underlings here and Nicholas Burns under whom she worked for on the National Security Council was missing too. Immediately, Rice felt that there was something up. She knew that she was to be listened to – otherwise President Bush wouldn’t be in the room – but the lack of other top-level administration figures apart from Dole and Scowcroft told her that something was up.

Rice was asked to summarize the report which she had sent over earlier in the day. Her task set by her president previously had been to assist in the decision-making process as to the future conduct of the war from an offensive stand-point. At that meeting the other day in this same room where she returned to, President Bush had asked about her thoughts on whether it was the best course of action to invade the Warsaw Pact nations and North Korea too. She’d been told that others were being consulted too but that her opinion was valued. Those here – and not here too – didn’t seem to have shared her expressed viewpoints within the report she had written. There was their body language for one, the manner in which Card addressed her and (more tellingly) the knowledge that she had that between the two meetings which she attended there was already an invasion of North Korea underway.

She did her duty for her president and her country though.

It was not a good idea at all to invade either Eastern Europe nor North Korea. With the latter, Rice warned of possible Chinese intervention there alongside a guerrilla war which in the long-term could be equivalent to the Vietnam War. When it came to the Warsaw Pact nations, invasions directed into East Germany and Czechoslovakia, possibly afterwards Poland, Hungary or the Balkans, the risk was of full-scale nuclear war with the Soviets. They would see it as another Barbarossa, Rice stated, and the logical way (from a Soviet point of view) to avert another invasion of their Rodina was to use nuclear weapons. Maybe there would be weapons releases at sea or against a NATO country not armed with it’s own nuclear weapons. The most likely outcome, in her opinion, would be that the Soviets would use such weapons tactically to stop an invasion of Eastern Europe. In doing so, they wouldn’t repeat what they had done with Flensburg and strike where no American forces were to be found. They would do so with the belief that the United States and its allies wouldn’t retaliate to a first strike of a tactical level and retreat instead because they feared a quick escalation to the strategic use of nuclear weapons. The intelligence previously disclosed to her when it came to Kryuchkov’s consideration of doing this as well as what was known about (supposedly anyway) his own thinking of how the West would react led her to this conclusion.

Wolfowitz asked Rice about West Berlin. The current directive for NATO armies in Europe as agreed with the United States’ Canadian and European allies was to liberate West German territory up to the IGB. Afterwards though, regaining West Berlin would be the next objective. It was the logical step. How could West Berlin be left under Soviet and East German occupation? Moreover, to not cross the IGB – and the West German / Czechoslovak frontier too – would mean that Soviet forces which managed to withdraw would be sitting ready to invade again should they be reinforced. Surely this wasn’t the best solution…?

Rice repeated her belief that the Soviets would see it as the beginnings of a second Barbarossa and use nuclear weapons. Maybe not at once, but very soon.

When it came to North Korea, Dole spoke up. The new Secretary of State was in a major influential position and was already known to be rather close to both Bush and Cheney, not so much others like Webb, Scowcroft or the Joint Chiefs. She stated that the DMZ on the Korean Peninsula had been crossed to establish a ‘security zone’ on the other side to occupy positions where North Korean artillery continued to fire upon Seoul even after the battlefield victories won in South Korea. The guns would be destroyed and the territory held. There had been contact made with the Chinese through diplomatic channels, she continued, and they were showing no sign of intervening.

Rice had to stop herself from saying that the same belief had been prevalent when it came to the Chinese and the Korean Peninsula in 1950…

When her meeting came to an end, there was an outward positive, friendly atmosphere in relation to her. President Bush was his usual pleasant self to her and so was Scowcroft. In addition, Dole was again at pains to express her liking of Rice. But Rice could see the writing on the wall: her opinions on these all important matters weren’t the ones being listened to.


Robert Gates said hello to Rice as he went into his meeting with President Bush directly after hers. Wolfowitz and Hadley were leaving, while the Deputy National Security Adviser went into see his president who was there in the Roosevelt Room with Gates’ boss Scowcroft, Dole and Card.

He had arrived back from his overseas trip alongside the Vice President last night where they had visited East Asia, the Middle East and Europe. Gates had had some sleep though still was suffering from the effects of jet lag. There were things that couldn’t wait though, especially with his country at war.

First, Gates addressed the issue with Richard Armitage and his diplomatic-military party which had been in Belgrade when Yugoslavia was attacked by Soviet nuclear weapons. They had made it back to Italy after a troublesome journey and were safe and well. Behind them they left a country which had been cowed the outrageous attack upon them and was in no mood to enter the war against the Soviets as they had been flirting with. This was something that would be felt elsewhere too: Gates stated that while Webb had been in Paris, Brussels and London recently he had paid a visit himself to Stockholm. Sweden had been another country which there had been hopes might enter the war: that wasn’t going to happen now. Dole had a question when it came to Sweden as to what was the latest news with West German warships and aircraft which had gone there during the ceasefire. Gates told her that the Swedes had asked the crews and passengers aboard such weapons of war to leave if they wished to maintain that neutrality which they had spoken of, along with their vessels and planes. If those individuals wanted to claim asylum – not defect – then Sweden would process any claims from individuals, but not groups of military personnel. Internment was what the Swedes were talking about if the West Germans wouldn’t go back home or at least to a nearby NATO country such as Norway or Denmark.

Scowcroft told Gates that there would soon be another meeting – down in the Situation Room not here – went it came to the latest estimations on the Soviet nuclear posture which he wanted him to attend within the next few hours. As he responded to that by saying that he’d be there, Gates paid attention to President Bush. The reaction which he observed was something unexpected: there was extreme concern written all across the president’s face when it came to the talk of nuclear weapons pointed at the United States.

Naturally, like every American was President Bush worried about that. How could anyone not be? Yet, Gates believed that he saw something different. His president was a strong-willed man, a combat veteran of World War Two. He had fought for and gained the highest political office in the country. Nuclear weapons were frightful, especially since their use had already occurred in limited form already. But, what Gates saw…

He was worried afterwards, when Scowcroft was talking about Bulgaria and Romania, about the future. He tried to tell himself that maybe he had been mistaken, maybe he was overreacting. President Bush was about to fold; the man was a lion. He’d been upset over the murders of first Dan Quayle and then James Baker, the latter especially. The casualty losses from the war were something he was well-aware of too. This was all weighing on his mind and would be causing him more distress than Gates could imagine.

He didn’t like his own thoughts as to what came after that if the worst happened and President Bush came apart. It wouldn’t happen, Gates told himself, but if it did… they’d end up with Webb in the White House instead! Now that was something even more concerning.


Two US Representatives from Florida came to see President Bush at the White House: Congressman Porter Goss (FL-13) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (FL-18), both Republicans in their first terms.

Goss and Ros-Lehtinen had secured their appointment with the president due to pressure applied from the House Republican leadership. That had gone through Sununu who’d met with senior Congressional figures – Democrats and Republicans, Senators and Representatives – recently concerning the desires of many members of Congress to leave The Greenbrier and return to Washington. Sununu had been trying to handle that issue and as part of that had agreed that the two politicians from Florida should be able to have a meeting with President Bush.

Both Sununu and Card were in the meeting.

Goss was a former CIA field officer who’d been a local mayor before running for Congress. He considered himself a patriot and like all Americans was outraged at enemy action taken so far in the war, not least Cuban troops on American soil down in the Florida Keys. He spoke with President Bush in a respectful manner but was firm in his statement that the Cubans needed to be pushed off Key West and elsewhere very soon. Every day which they were allowed to hold on to what they had taken, was another shameful day for the United States. There were American citizens held hostage by those Cubans who needed liberating too. What was the delay? America’s armies were fighting across the globe and winning battles seemingly everywhere, so why were parts of the Florida Keys still under foreign occupation?

The Congressional district of Ros-Lehtinen included the Florida Keys. It was her constituents who were under foreign occupation. She joined Goss in telling President Bush that those islands needed to be liberated as soon as possible and asked like he did what was the delay. She spoke briefly of her birth in Cuba and her life in Florida: she had no hatred towards the Cuban people, just the communist dictatorship there. With Cuban soldiers in the Florida Keys doing those things to civilians which she was hearing about, under orders from the Castro’s, Cuban-Americans were facing a growing backlash that had turned violent already.

President Bush responded to their comments by telling them both that the war was being taken to the Cuban regime. Their military forces had been smashed over Cuba itself and their troops in the Florida Keys were cut off. Marathon had already been taken and operations against Key West and Boca Chica Key would commence when the military situation was right. He said that he understood the political need to act soon, and that had been taken into consideration, but military matters took precedence. The Cubans on the ground needed to be beaten down first. If they were able to offer a strong resistance to a counter-invasion then casualties for American troops going into battle would be unnecessary high. Moreover, there would be casualties among civilians caught up in a big fight where the Cubans could effectively fight back.

He asked the two members of Congress to bare this in mind and to have faith that the issue would be dealt with soon, very soon, but only when the time was right.


General James Lindsay, the US Army officer who headed the US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) came to the White House and went straight to the below-ground Situation Room. The ongoing situation with the Soviet Spetsnaz team on the run in the Appalachians was what he was here to brief President Bush, the Joint Chiefs and the NSC on.

Aides of the commander of the joint service combatant command which was the USSOCOM brought with them several maps of the West Virginia – Virginia state border area. General Lindsay had them put up on the projector screen and gave a briefing where he described the hunt for the remnants of the foreign commandos which had been ambushed long before they could get near The Greenbrier and were now on the run. He pointed out where active engagements had taken place by forces under his command and the Spetsnaz and told of the results of those firefights: two thirds of the Soviet soldiers were dead or captured. At the same time, he pointed out other locations where the Spetsnaz had been in action against other opponents rather than those under direct USSOCOM command.

Men of the West Virginia State Police, the Virginia State Police, the Virginia State Guard, the US Marshal’s Service and several country sheriff’s departments had fought against those commandos with devastating losses suffered by them. Moreover, there were cases where sheriffs had deputized locals into armed posses with the predictable results. Federal and State authorities had lost control at a local level and allowed those who shouldn’t have got into the fight to do so. It had been the same in Texas, out West in the Rocky Mountains and up in Alaska earlier in the war: a war which should have been between professionals had been joined by those not equipped nor trained for that fight and without higher coordination too. In this instance, there were eighty plus unnecessary deaths of law enforcement officers because of local interference in military operations. These were alongside the known deaths of thirty-four civilians (many more were expected) including members of the media: a local news team based in Roanoke affiliated to CNN was missing, presumed dead.

General Lindsay reminded those listening to him about the Spetsnaz. There were myths and realities when it came to them. They were not Supermen nor blood-thirsty maniacs who ate babies. These were soldiers trained with the Soviet Army’s Airborne Troops and in the service of the GRU though here in the United States acting on KGB orders. They knew how to fight and to fight well. The men were tough and resourceful, even when captured as a very few had been they were extremely dangerous. They hadn’t been respected enough as an opponent by those who had no idea who they were fighting against.

Now, that aside, General Lindsay turned to the map shown of Alleghany County in the west of Virginia. This was a heavily-forested area among the region of the Appalachians known as Ridge-and-Valley. This is where the remains of the Spetsnaz team, the last one on American soil, were located. Operation Blue Centaur was the code-name for the final showdown with them where they would be eliminated. There were a lot of troops assigned but General Lindsay explained that they were needed due to their opponent and the ground. The FBI Hostage Rescue Team units assigned previously had been released though leaving elements of the US Army’s Delta Force along with men from a company of the 2/11 SFG which was a US Army Reserve unit supporting them. Kill or capture was the mission, above all eliminate the opposition.

General Lindsay told those listening that Blue Centaur should be completed by the morning.

Sixteen – Special Operations

March 3rd 1990
The Florida Keys, Florida, the United States

The liberation of the remaining portions of sovereign United States soil in the Florida Keys – overall named Operation Golden Talon – began in the very early hours of the morning two weeks after the Cuban invasion.

There were occupying troops on Key West, its smaller a-joining isles and on Boca Chica Key. Golden Talon would see the destruction of those enemy forces and the liberation of the civilians and military personnel held hostage… with the result to be the elimination of the Cuban forces present. The USAF had struck from the air before the liberation got underway and would continue to support the mission. The US Navy was offshore maintaining a blockade and would be called in for naval gunfire support. The US Marines would generally miss out the fighting but there were a few of their number involved. It was to be the US Army which would do the bulk of the fighting with the enemy with Green Berets leading the way followed by specialised light infantry units.


De oppresso liber: to free the oppressed.

US Army Special Forces commandoes with the 7th Special Forces Group (7 SFG) were assigned to the Caribbean and Latin America. At the outbreak of World War Three back in early February, against the wishes of the commanding officer, one battalion (3d Battalion) from the 7 SFG was sent to Europe leaving two more in-place: one in Panama (2d Battalion) and the other at Fort Bragg in North Carolina (1st Battalion). There had been no sign then of active Cuban involvement in the war which had started in Europe and the Korean Peninsula and the hope was that it would remain that way. Fears were in some quarters that a conflict with Nicaragua might start as that country may invade a neighbour but that again hadn’t occurred. Cuba had then gone and done the impossible and struck as it had yet only after significant American military forces were very far away in active war zones. The 7 SFG had been preparing unofficially for a fight with Cuba though; unfortunately, it came where they didn’t expect it. When they did get into the fight, the Green Berets from Fort Bragg took on Cuban commandoes holding Marathon and its airport further along the Florida Keys from Key West. The enemy there was eliminated in violent combat which the 1–7 SFG commenced when surrounded by civilians – innocent Americans! – on Vaca Key. That had been a challenge indeed because external fire support couldn’t be called upon and they had to take care with every instance of gunfire.

They learnt from the fighting there and would use that when taking part in the sub-operation of Golden Talon which was to be the initial combat around Key West, Operation Burning Phoenix.

Broken down into small, mission-orientated teams 1–7 SFG and 2–7 SFG (coming up from Panama) assaulted the outlying isles around Key West itself. The island itself was still full of the enemy in number in fixed defences where there were a lot of civilians, but on the smaller Sunset Key, Wisteria Island, Fleming Key and Dredgers Key that wasn’t the case. The first two islands were empty of Americans and there were only a few in the second pair; Fleming Key and Dredgers Key (better known as Sigsbee Park) were military facilities part of the NAS Key West complex. There were Cuban troops on those isles though.

Fighting in the darkness after making assault from aircraft, helicopters and small boats, the Green Berets took on those defenders. They had plenty of assistance from above and on the water as well as access to plenty of intelligence. Where the enemy was, his projected numbers and what weapons the Cubans were manned was information which those taking part in Burning Phoenix had access too. Much of that was found to be accurate, but, of course, there were a few unfortunate surprises.

The residential and very exclusive Sunset Key had been emptied of civilians by the Cubans and the isle garrisoned by a company of paratroopers. These men had mined the beaches and the piers and retreated to fighting positions away from the shore. Sunset Key was tiny though and they had no covered shelter apart from the homes which they had taken over… and looted too. 2–7 SFG Green Berets enveloped the Cubans hitting them with stunning violence using an array of hand-held weaponry to come at them. Too many Cubans had been asleep and those who hadn’t and were meant to be on watch weren’t paying enough attention. The fight was over before it begun in all honesty with the defenders not standing a chance. Burning Phoenix was a complete success when it came to Sunset Key.

Wisteria Island was an uninhibited artificial isle. There were Cubans there, a platoon of them dug-in and in a sorry state. They were meant to be providing an outpost and to stop an attempt to surround Key West by the Americans. It had been far too long since the men on the isle had been bothered by the Americans as air attacks had concentrated elsewhere. Their lieutenant had died during the invasion (his parachute hadn’t opened and he’d fallen like a stone onto the surface of the ocean) and the senior sergeant had not shown much of an interest in making Wisteria Island a fortress. 2–7 SFG arrived from out of nowhere firing rifles, throwing grenades and slitting the throats of his lone pair of sentries. Again, it was all over before it started. Wisteria Island fell in a swoop, a letter-perfect operation where the correct use of force had been employed after expert surveillance.

Green Berets with 1–7 SFG assaulted Fleming Key. This larger island was part of the Trumbo Point United States military facility and there were many uses for it by the Americans before the Cuban invasion, including a training facility for Green Berets. 1–7 SFG commandoes who had spent time there were almost exclusively part of the assault force to help in making this element of Burning Phoenix a success. They were keen on retaking it, naturally, as well as freeing the POWs which were believed to be held on Fleming Key: US Armed Forces service personnel overwhelmed in that sudden assault on February 17th. When landing, the Green Berets were cautious in getting ashore but quick to start fighting the Cubans when they found them. They took the training facility and the bridge connecting the isle to Key West (cutting the wires to demolition charges while doing so) but got into a major firefight around the wastewater treatment plant where they took losses. Cuban paratroopers dug in there fought like lions in an unexpected development. Calling-in air support was considered but Green Berets reported observing DGI officers which could have been with the expected POWs. That air support – high-explosive bombs from a waiting flight of USAF F-16s would have been guided-in with hand-held designators – was called off and the rest of Fleming Key taken so that the Cubans could be surrounded. Once morning came and there was more light, the Green Berets would take on their trapped enemy and with hope rescue the POWs without incinerating them from above.

Sigsbee Park was always going to be the biggest challenge for Burning Phoenix.

The isle was a military housing facility (Sigsbee Annex part of NAS Key West) where many families of US service-personnel had been before invasion. Information on the fate of those dependents was worrying; there was believed to be a strong DGI presence there with mistreatment suspected of wives and children because of their POW husbands and fathers. Political pressure all the way from the top of the Defence Department’s wartime headquarters at Raven Rock had come to liberated these oppressed American civilians and to not have their lives lost. This put more pressure on the planners of Burning Phoenix than they had taken on themselves; they had all sorts of worst-case scenarios war-gamed with individual Cuban soldiers using civilians as direct hostages. At the same time, it was recognised by many – though carefully spoken of – that this would all be good practice for Key West itself where there were many more civilians who the Cubans were anticipated to use as human shields too. That was a harsh viewpoint to take but perfectly valid.

More than two hundred Green Berets with 1–7 SFG made multiple landings across Sigsbee Park. They came in carefully and tried their best to eliminate as many sentries as possible before any alert was raised. The identified location of the reaction force was assaulted too while defensive trenches were to be hit from behind rather than in front. There was much initial success but some failures too. Sigsbee Park was a hive of Cuban activity and there were too many defenders to be taken wholly by surprise. Gunfights erupted everywhere and explosions rocked the isle. Green Berets liberated many civilians but saw others killed. They took losses themselves from Cuban paratroopers who were demoralised by still knew how to fight. It was very difficult for some to maintain their discipline when they saw that the fears about what the Cubans might have been doing to hostages turned out to be true in a few places: some DGI men ended up having ‘accidents’ once captured. These were only a few isolated incidents but they did occur because the Green Berets were generally family men themselves and some of what they saw made several lose their heads for the briefest of time and react as they did.

By daybreak Sigsbee Park was taken joining Sunset Key and Wisteria Island in being liberated. Most of Fleming Key was in American hands too and the fight continued there with the available natural light to save as many captured POWs as possible before the Cubans might decide to start shooting them.


The aim of Burning Phoenix was more than just retaking those isles and liberating those there. Taking out the outlying defences – such as they were anyway – of Key West was the ultimate aim. The special operations undertaken here by elite troops were to start to surround the main body of the enemy. Observation points close up, as well as truly forward bases for raiding parties and intelligence forays into that island, were what Burning Phoenix was to achieve.

Next up, would be more sub-parts of Golden Talon when Boca Chica Key, where the main part of NAS Key West and the airbase was located, were retaken. Further 7 SFG elements would be with regular US Army troops who would do the majority of the fighting there against larger numbers of defenders.





March 3rd 1990
Kirchberg, City of Luxembourg, Luxembourg

The NATO summit was due to start officially tomorrow in the midst of the tightest of security following the massacre in Paris last month at a similar gathering. Senior politicians and diplomats were due to arrive in Luxembourg later tonight and the following morning they would begin a series of meetings.

The American Secretary of State would be attending, so too the Canadian Minister for Foreign Affairs. From all of the European nations which were part of NATO, including West Germany with their Munich Government, foreign ministers would come to Luxembourg. They would have their diplomatic parties with them: official functionaries, advisers, interpreters and bodyguards. Between the formal talks there would be some time for a little bit of relaxation, especially for those who had traveled far, but this was hardly to be a holiday for anyone. There would be plenty to talk about and the discussions were due to lead to a united approach to events ongoing and to come.

Ahead of the major figures and their escorts, others were already in Luxembourg preparing for the upcoming summit.


David Davis MP had been appointed to the junior minister role of Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State (PUSoS) for Foreign Affairs two weeks ago. His predecessor had been killed in Paris – one of the few British casualties there – and Davis asked to take on major responsibilities in comparison to those as an MP less than three years into his first term in Parliament. He had accepted because it was the right thing to do… and of course it would ultimately be beneficial to him in the long run in what he hoped would be the successful political career which he had ahead of him.

The role of a PUSoS was usually to provide support to ministers above him in Parliament such as Europe Minister Francis Maude and Foreign Secretary Hurd. He had been doing just that and had remained in London since his appointment and been unable to return to his East Yorkshire constituency. Usual politics at the moment in Parliament were supposed to be on hold with the ongoing war and the National Government presented a united front. That was far from the case out of the spotlight though and Davis had been involved in a few verbal scuffles with those opposed to certain aspects of how the war was being fought; that wasn’t all partisan as well as an outsider might have expected. When the Foreign Secretary had asked him to go to Luxembourg ahead of the Foreign Office party to assist in making arrangements there, Davis had at once said yes to that. He had only then asked afterwards why he would be needed there.

This morning, Davis went into a meeting with junior ministers from several Western European nations who were like him here ahead of their country’s main diplomatic parties. He had an interpreter with him along with a Foreign Office official and an MI-6 man. Davis told those who’d come from Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Spain that the rumour which they had heard was false, a lie spread by the Soviets: the Americans hadn’t made the decision to cross the IGB when the opportunity presented itself in the face of a Soviet threat to use nuclear weapons if that happened. Moreover, Davis also affirmed that Britain hadn’t secretly agreed to support that decision nor was the Foreign Office or Britain’s intelligence services already working on the Americans behalf to elicit support from other European nations for this.

None of this was true at all and it was all a propaganda effort being made by the Soviets to sow discord amongst NATO countries.

This apparent Soviet threat wasn’t true and there was already an agreed stop-order in-place among all NATO nations when it came to ground operations on the other side of the IGB, which no NATO forces were reasonably close to anyway. The supposed leak from Portugal and another that had reportedly come from Denmark where British diplomats and intelligence officers were active securing support for the so-called wishes of the Americans were further lies.

Davis followed his instructions from above in delivering these assurances to those listening to him. He tried to read the mood of those whom he spoke to but that was a difficult thing to do with no personal relationship to fall back on and also his limited understanding of Europeans. If he’d been meeting with Americans, Davis knew that he would have done much better; it wouldn’t have just been the missing language barrier but also his time spent in the United States before entering politics. He was only repeating what he had been told too and couldn’t be personally sure whether everything that he had been told and was assuring his country’s allies of was wholly true itself.

There was a sneaky suspicion, a concerned voice in the back of his head, which told him that the ‘lie’ might not be that at all…

Davis’ French counterpart hit him with a related issue, one which Davis had been planning to turn to afterwards as part of the informal briefing he was supposed to give. Was it true, the Frenchman asked, that the United States had been having talks with the Chinese where they were aiming to cut a deal to have China stay out of entering the war on the Korean Peninsula in exchange for lifting the post–Tiananmen arms embargo? Was Britain again supporting the United States in that with the aim of securing European support for that too?

The briefing given to Davis on that beforehand hadn’t been as extensive as the other matter but it had been discussed back in London.

Davis informed those with him that on this latter matter, part of what they had heard was true. Yes, the Americans had been talking to the Chinese. An intervention of theirs in the Second Korean War would be just as bad as in the First. It was in the interests of the Allies, not just the United States, to keep China out of the war there. Britain, France and the rest of NATO were part of the Allies: all united in fighting the Soviets and their allies worldwide. As to British support, there was a diplomatic effort underway by other Foreign Office representatives elsewhere in the world to assist in keeping China out of the war but none here in Europe. Britain wouldn’t take part in any effort to sell-out Europe’s interests in reaction to what had occurred in China last year – an event which preceded and probably inspired the East German crackdown on their own protesting citizens – despite what had been said by some. Again, Davis cautioned that the Soviets were still spreading their propaganda and being clever about it by disguising sources as well as mixing little bits of truth with many falsehoods.

Once again, Davis couldn’t be sure of how much of what he said was believed as well as not being sure of how much he thought he knew as true was only the official Foreign Office line with regards to Britain’s policy when it came to the conduct of this war. There was a lot of diplomacy going on which his government was taking part in as well as special operations taking part in the intelligence field which had diplomatic implications.

There were always going to be things that were kept from him as a junior minister and he understood the need for that. It wasn’t pleasant but it was the way things were done, had to be done. The Soviet intelligence apparatus was still active worldwide and so much of that was in the shadows with much use made of proxies. Their country was fighting a war with a wide alliance of many countries spread across the globe and they were currently on the defensive. Naturally, they were striking back and at the moment he was having to deal with that. They had really tapped into the worries of many with their latest efforts, especially the first matter which he had discussed here. Britain had been dragged into the game which the KGB – it had to be them – was playing in trying to cause division. Not experienced in the intelligence field himself, he still was able to see how clever that had been; the Soviets hadn’t just tried to cause a straight-up trans-Atlantic divide but added Britain into the mix to muddle the waters.

More importantly, the particular fear which the Soviets had brought in with the threat of further nuclear detonations would do damage no matter how hard Davis and Hurd following him would try to dampen that. Flensburg had been bad enough but Europe’s leaders now knew all about Belgrade and Sofia too.

He hoped that further efforts from the Foreign Secretary and others would shut all of this down as soon as possible. The division which the Soviets were trying to open up could be fatal if it was allowed to get out of control.

NATO couldn’t win this war if it was arguing amongst itself.





March 3rd 1990
KGB detention center, outside Clenze in Wendland, Lower Saxony, West Germany

The KGB was operating various detention sites all across Europe. There were locations for holding people throughout the Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe as well as those on occupied territory in Denmark, West Germany and Austria. The latter facilities were in-place due to reasons of convenience near the frontlines but also because the KGB didn’t want direct oversight and/or observation either from their supposed allies nor others within the Soviet Union.

The camp located in the Drewehn Hills, on the eastern edge of the Lüneburg Heath and very close to the IGB, was where it was due to several of those categories. From here the KGB could run several of their special operations undisturbed. There were sixty-three detainees held here currently; there had been as many as ninety plus at one point but the shallow graves nearby reflected the current lower number. These detainees were either being put to use at the moment or would be at a latter undetermined stage. There were those who had been in military service and civilians too. Most were men, but there were a few women too. Moreover, not all of those were from nations currently at war with the Soviet Union either.


Ursula von der Leyen was one of those being held here by the KGB.

The young doctor specialising in woman’s health had been working in Hanover when the war commenced. Against her wishes, she had been removed from the hospital there two days into the start of the conflict and taken away for her own safety by officers with the Lower Saxony LfV. This was due to who her father was, the politician Ernst Albrecht who was the Minister-President of Lower Saxony. During the late Seventies, when studying for her medical degree in London, Ursula had used the pseudonym ‘Roschen Ladson’ due to the threat to her from West German left-wing militants because of her father and the LfV agents had called her that when they had taken her. However, she had fast discovered that those who were meant to be saving her from kidnap were actually doing just that themselves.

Ursula had ended up in the hands of the KGB.

She had no idea where she was nor any news from the outside world for a long time. The guards here were all Soviet KGB men and were focused on enforcing isolation upon her and the few other prisoners; she saw glances of them and also heard their screams. Dogs barked continually as they prowled the grounds inside the barbed wire fences which she had once observed. When interrogated, Ursula was beaten and humiliated. She was tortured too with the most terrible methods employed in what was often just an effort to inflict pain not gain anything else from her.

What the KGB wanted from her was for her to make a videotape and to write some letters. She had exactly as they had wanted but still been beaten regardless. She pleaded for her life from her father and told him that if he didn’t do what the KGB wanted then she would be hurt further: in the video she was displayed with many visible injuries and being hurt some more.

There had been questions asked of her which had come with more abuse. Ursula was asked everything possible about her father and his life. There were questions too about her brother and her husband as well as threats made to find and kill her two very young children. She answered everything asked but again that still didn’t stop the beatings. She was accused of telling lies and more torture came so that she would reveal the truth. Trying to fight back or ignore the pain was impossible. She was weak from the lack of food and water, tired from the enforced lack of sleep and within hours of being at Clenze had had her will-power broken.

Ursula couldn’t see any time when all this would stop and today was another day where the suffering at the hands of the KGB was inflicted upon her.


A chemist from East Berlin was also being held at Clenze, one by the name of Angela Merkel.

Merkel was an East German national with an official ‘good standing’ despite not being within the political establishment. In her early years she had been active with the Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ) – the Free German Youth, a patriotic youth organisation which there was no choice but to join if one wanted a chance at access to higher education – and as far as the East German Stasi was concerned she had no known political affiliations. Merkel spoke Russian very well but with her age (thirty-five) and her academic profession, as well as being a woman, there shouldn’t have been any reason why she should have seen war. Nonetheless, when war came to Berlin with the incursion of West Berlin which the Stasi’s Felix Dzerzhinsky Guard Regiment had taken part in, many casualties had been inflicted upon Stasi personnel who spoke Russian and worked alongside Soviet units which had taken part in that operation. When afterwards the same elite unit was redeployed to West Germany following the ceasefire, there had been a need for more translators to be called upon. Merkel’s name was on a list which she knew nothing about and she also had a connection to where the Felix Dzerzhinsky Guard Regiment was sent to: it was in Hamburg where she had been born.

The very short time when she was with the Felix Dzerzhinsky Guard Regiment, Merkel was far back from the frontlines serving in the rear assisting in communications duty. She wasn’t in any way involved in anything directly combat related but rather working with Soviet military rear-area forces to secure the passage of the Stasi combat troops up towards Hamburg where they were to take the city. Merkel was far from happy at being involved in the war yet had known to keep her head down and do what she was told. Her country had gone crazy since events last October and the outbreak of state-imposed patriotism meant that everyone was expected to do their duty for the German Democratic Republic no matter what.

In doing something, an act which she wasn’t aware of, Merkel had attracted the unwelcome attention of the KGB. They had taken her away outside of Hamburg without any of her fellow East Germans coming to her aid. Why and on what reason she was held, she didn’t know. They didn’t tell her anything but just held her in a cold, dark cell in isolation. There was no violence: no beatings, no torture and no rape. She was asked many questions about her personal and professional relationships back in East Berlin as well as those when travelling with the Felix Dzerzhinsky Guard Regiment yet there was only the threat of violence rather than the act. Merkel was given no choice in nor information on the ‘medicines’ she was told to take either.

Pure terror ran wild through her mind at what her future held. Today, like each day she was here, she waited for her treatment to get as bad as it was for the others whose screams she heard. Merkel wondered when that attention would turn to her while at the same time having no idea why she was here in this place she knew nothing about.


Intelligence agencies of several NATO nations knew about the detention facility outside of Clenze like they knew about others too. The camp had been spotted by satellite and aerial reconnaissance while there was also some signals intelligence concerning transfers of prisoners referred to by number designators. On later piece of intelligence had pointed to the graves dug outside of the camp in the woodland.

But, as said, it was one of many facilities spotted and there was a certainty that there were more of them too.

There was a desire to see the camps dealt with. NATO wanted to know everything about them from who was held there, who was working at each and what exactly was being done inside. Yet this was one of many wishes for action to be taken against so much of the enemy’s current activities.

Rescue was not going to come any time soon for those being held at places such as Clenze and the KGB would carry on with what it was doing for now.





March 3rd 1990
Nörvenich Airbase, North Rhine–Westphalia, West Germany

Nörvenich Airbase was currently a center of activity for NATO special forces operations in the northern part of West Germany as well as in the nearby Netherlands too. Luftwaffe Tornado strike-bombers which had flown from here pre-war were either lost in combat or flying from elsewhere (many with either British or Italian aircrews now) and instead specialist transport aircraft and helicopters were calling the facility home. Hasty work had been done to commence expansion of the airbase through more of the Nörvenich Wald – cutting clearances among the trees in which the facility already lay – and there were plenty of air defences for the Nörvenich as well.

Lt.-General Peter de la Billière (often known as DLB) had made Nörvenich his operational headquarters. The British Army officer who had started the war commanding the regional South-East District back home before being named Special Operations Commander responsible for the NORTHAG area had chosen the site because of its immediate location within natural cover and its general position back on the western side of the Rhine. There would have been safer places, even further west, but Nörvenich had been available and was close enough to the frontlines without being too close: enemy interference in activities here had occurred yet thankfully not too frequently.

Supported by his staff and his deputy – Major-General William Garrison from the US Army – the operations of NATO special forces north of the NORTHAG-CENTAG boundary which ran across the middle of West Germany and south of the Danish border were commanded by DLB. These consisted of missions undertaken of a tactical and operational nature; those designated as strategic were beyond his purview and that line was often blurred too. DLB wasn’t in charge of Gladio operations nor big airborne assault missions undertaken in direct support of the ground war. What was under his command were those directly related to the fighting which remained underway on and around the frontlines. Commando teams deposited in the enemy rear, search-and-rescue of downed pilots and intelligence gathering efforts using watchers were commanded from Nörvenich.

DLB had British, American, Dutch and Belgian units under his command; the West Germans were a spent force when it came to special forces. The commandoes were from the regular SAS and the TA’s reserve-manned SAS formations as well. The Americans provided Green Berets who were from both the regular 10 SFG and the reserve 12 SFG. The Dutch had their Korps Commandotroepen men (of which many weren’t left alive) and the Belgians provided Equipes Spéciales de Reconnaissance commandoes. Both the RAF and the British Army had helicopters attached to the operations ran from Nörvenich and from the Low Countries there were some more helicopters. However, it was the Americans which were providing the majority of the aviation assets with plenty of specialised flying machines.


The operations commenced against Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces were wide and varied. Initially, before DLB had come across to the Continent and there had been a Bundeswehr officer in-place (who’d unfortunately been caught out by the sudden mid-February ceasefire and nearly captured alive when his men surrendered all around him with the end result being his sacrificial suicide to hide what was in his head) and many more stay-behind operations were then being run than there were now. SAS units had joined with West German Fernspähkompanie formations in hiding in selected areas and allowing the initial wave of main fighting to pass them by before they then emerged in the enemy’s rear areas. Harassment of lines of communication, the sniping at enemy heavy weapons set-ups and the calling-in of reports concerning mass movements of armour had been their role and they had done very well indeed. Unfortunately, the majority of those small teams had been tracked down as the Soviets increased their security and purposely hunted for them through forests, hills and valleys in occupied territory. Some men had escaped and linked-up with more NATO special forces arriving on the Continent and their experience was extremely valuable. Yet there had come a move away from those early missions. DLB had supported the decision made from higher than himself because more damage to the enemy was believed to be done by hitting them with raids where the men were inserted and withdrawn afterwards. The ability to snatch prisoners for interrogation by military intelligence teams was something more and so too insertion and subsequent extraction of targeteers. There was also the lesser number of lives that would be lost by no longer keeping men in the enemy’s rear unsupported for far too long.

The change of doctrine had been resisted by many, but there was an eventual flooding of the enemy’s rear by their own security forces. The East Germans in particular were used for that mission where as part of their occupation duties thousands of paramilitary soldiers were sent into West Germany to scour the countryside. They were not directly sent after the special forces stay-behind teams, rather instead regular NATO soldiers who had been left behind and also West German civilians who’d fled from their homes, yet there were so many of them and numbers started to overcome the cunning of the special forces teams with the predictable results of so many dead men who before they had died had spent too much time on the run to be doing anything effective. If it had been regular Soviet soldiers pulled from the frontlines who’d been after them, then it might have been different.

DLB had commando teams active all of the time.

His men did most of their work, caused their most chaos to the enemy, at night. Aircraft and helicopters would drop off men to undertake missions to strike at the enemy where the hope was most could be achieved. The majority of them would be soon picked up again either before it got light or the next evening. The days were still short and with what seemed like half of Western Europe still alight from raging fires – towns and forests – all of the smoke covered much of the moonlight. The Soviets and Warsaw Pact nations couldn’t keep their men awake and alert at night; DLB had enforced sleep discipline in the day time for so many of his. Explosions and gunfire erupted every night but on other missions commanded from Nörvenich there was less ‘action’ and reconnaissance done as well as targeting for more conventional warfare platforms than men fighting in the darkness. There was also plenty of activity to rescue NATO aircrews from downed aircraft; early in the war this hadn’t been done enough due to lack of resources and other commitments… such as Soviet tanks rolling as far forward as they had.

Losses came alongside the successes though.

DLB was a former SAS man who’d personally fought in Malaya, Oman and Borneo. He had also commanded operations worldwide including the Iranian Embassy storming in London and a failed mission into Argentina itself to eliminate the Etendard / Exocet threat during the Falklands War: the still-secret Operation Mikado. He knew what it was like to see men killed and had killed others himself as well. There were far too many fools, dreamers and schemers who had ideas about what special forces operations could achieve. Many of them had influence when they shouldn’t and it was those who he had to combat as much as the Soviets to shoot down their ideas about sending men under his command into battle on suicide missions for no appreciable gain other than to massage their ego. He and his staff made mistakes themselves, other times happenstance or an uncooperative enemy led to losses being taken. DLB had to accept the latter but wouldn’t allow the interference of armchair warriors to see his men killed or end up in the custody of the enemy.


There were enough, terrible stories which he’d heard – confirmed and not – of what had happened to NATO special forces soldiers when the Soviets got ahold of them.

In particular, one of Garrison’s aides, Major McChrystal had related the story of an American MH-53H Pave Low (an advanced combat helicopter) pilot by the name of Captain Marshall B. Webb. After his helicopter had gone down with casualties when returning from an extraction, Webb had been forced to run and evade the enemy: he’d seen and heard what had happened to some of the others who’d survived the crash, been unable to get away from the wreckage and who East German paramilitaries had come across. The commander of 22 SAS, Lt.-Colonel Cedric Delves, had been present when that news had come in – visiting Nörvenich because so many of his men were sent on operations commanded from here – and shut McChrystal up less too many people hear what he had been saying, but DLB had already expected that soon enough confirmation of such things that they’d only heard rumours about and suspected would come.

Knowing that, and then gaining other later information too, every time DLB sent out men he remembered that he had the fate of so many people in his hands and no matter how much he and his staff tried to cover every angle and make sure that the missions were a success, men were still going to die. That happened in war.


Tonight, with darkness all across Western Europe, men under orders from DLB were out on special operations. He had many missions underway on the North German Plain, across on the other side of the Weser. NATO ground forces were on the cusp of making a major assault over that river to launch an offensive with the hope of taking back West Germany up to the IGB. That was an ambitious task and wouldn’t be easy. The Soviets had been knocked right off balance but weren’t defeated yet. In support of this, preparing the way, commandoes were active in many places taking part in varied missions to hurt the enemy but also confuse the Soviets as to where and when the big ground offensive would come. Some aircrews downed last night and during today were also going to be gone after as well while there was too a snatch mission getting ready to go so that prisoners could be taken from a communications post in the general area of Hanover where internal signals from the Soviets were encoded and decoded for operational uses: such places could be bombed but DLB preferred, when possible, to raid them and grab men and documents to pass information extracted up the chain-of-command.

Then there were operations underway in the Netherlands: Scud-hunting.

Soviet forces cut off far to the west of the Weser, behind two major rivers and being slowly strangled from all sides, had brought with them tactical nuclear weapons. These came in the form of warheads for bombs and missiles to be fired from combat aircraft as well as further warheads for artillery shells and ground-launched missiles. Exactly what had come with the advancing field armies trailing behind them and what was still functional consisted of plenty of contradictory information. The Soviets hadn’t used any of those weapons but clearly had had some lost when the warheads were blown up (without a thermonuclear detonation) or fell to the ground when attached to aircraft trying to ferry them out of the encirclement. The whole issue was an almighty mess. DLB couldn’t imagine NATO attacking forces doing the same – dragging so many weapons so far forward with weak flanks open to counterattack and then losing track of some of those weapons – but the Soviets had done just that.

There was an effort being made by the KGB to regain central control over such weapons left within the encircled area; also to find out what happened to those missing including looking at those radioactive sites scattered everywhere. NATO was naturally concerned about this because of fears that when the end came for the Soviets trapped in the Netherlands there might be an unauthorised (or maybe authorised) effort to use or threaten to use them. Throughout the war, both NATO and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact, had targeted the nuclear weapons capabilities of the other side on a tactical level. Again, the lines between tactical and strategic were blurred, but no one was bombing ICBM sites in Siberia or sinking SLBM-armed submarines outside the naval bases of the nuclear powers. Hitting tactical weapons alarmed many people who feared escalation, DLB included, but those were his orders.

He had men tracking and targeting identified Soviet nuclear weapons and weapons personnel inside the Netherlands. There were no more aircraft-delivered bombs – aircraft couldn’t be based in Soviet-held territory because the airfields were destroyed or recaptured – but there were other nuclear weapons. Finding artillery shells was hard but it was easier to locate mobile missile-launchers: those designated by NATO as Scud systems especially. The Dutch whose territory this was occurring on, as well as the Belgians too and possibly the French from what DLB had been told, were not happy at all with this but it was being done after decisions made high up within NATO between heads of governments. It had been and was being done elsewhere – Soviet Spetsnaz had early in the war hit many Pershing missile sites in unoccupied West Germany while units under his command were doing it now east of the frontlines in occupied West Germany – and DLB had explained that when officers (British and others) under his command had respectfully questioned those orders for the dangers they posed.

That didn’t mean that it wasn’t very controversial though.


Something else that would be controversial when news spread was the result of the meeting that DLB was to have later tonight here at Nörvenich. Garrison and the visiting US Delta Force commander Colonel Peter Schoomaker would talk alone with DLB about that: others like McChrystal or Delves wouldn’t be involved.

The meeting would concern starting to make plans for operations east of the IGB. There was no official decision yet on that, DLB had been told and would make sure that he passed that on, but it was pending once wide NATO talks had covered it. Secrecy even from allies, from junior officers even was needed at the minute on this. DLB again had personal feelings on the matter but would keep them to himself. His orders were to make those high up in the chain-of-command like he was were prepared for those to come and were not blindsided by it.

He had also been told that it was possible that such a decision might not be made and there would be no later special forces operations in East Germany: another reason not to spread word fast. DLB didn’t believe that for a moment, not after all that the Soviets had done so far in this war.