Soviet Domination - A Red Dawn story

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December 1984: San Antonio

El Paso was the centre of KGB and other Soviet political activity inside occupied parts of the United States though San Antonio was where military command was centralised. The Soviets and their allies – with the former in the ‘guiding role’: dominating the others – were making use of military bases they had taken over inside the latter city. These sites were well-defended and all around them were civilian areas where those present were forced to stay in-place. Local security would have been improved if those civilians were gone, yet without them there, the military sites would certainly have been targeted far heavier than they had been from the air. Since significant use had been made of Brooks AFB and Fort Sam Houston, few air strikes had come and none of them doing much damage. That changed when the Americans put a laser-guided bombs into each of them early in the month. These came from aircraft undetected by air defence radars near and far and therefore not fired upon by the anti-aircraft guns & S-300V surface-to-air missiles. Those aircraft were F-117s who made accurate hits, killing many and causing great destruction. Try as hard as they might, the US Air Force still inflicted civilian casualties though because high-tech magic bombs were still bombs falling from the sky after all. Soviet propaganda was fast to make much out of this. The numbers of dead and injured were inflated greatly and the KGB brought across the American media teams under their complete control to cover the ‘atrocity’ and see the ‘hundreds of casualties’. Flown in from El Paso, a camera crew from the NBC network snatched by the KGB in the war’s early days – a well-known television journalist, a cameraman, a sound technician, the producer and a production assistant – broadcast images of American children killed by American bombers. As to the strike itself, propaganda issues aside, the US Air Force considered it a success. They had used their few radar-deflecting F-117s elsewhere earlier in the war and seen two of them lost: one over Arizona and the second above the Gulf of Mexico. A stand-down had occurred afterwards where investigations were conducted into how they were lost and there was also a big counter-intelligence operation within the F-117 planning set-up too with the result being an arrest made of someone suspected of working for the GRU. One traitor hadn’t caused both aircraft to be lost though. It had been bad tactics, overconfidence in the capabilities of them to avoid detection and also some rotten luck. The F-117s were back in action through December with the San Antonio mission joining others made in Texas against less high-profile military sites and also seeing them sent over both Cuba & Antigua too. Things were done differently with them and this paid off. The reports of success from the San Antonio attack came from the fact that both aircraft involved weren’t engaged and post-strike reconnaissance done which pointed to near-perfect hits upon the targets selected. Electronic eavesdropping also pointed to snippets of conversations made unguarded over the radio which suggested that someone very senior in the enemy command set-up had been killed.

A pair of generals had been killed in San Antonio, one from the Nicaraguan Army and another from the Soviet Army too. Neither was of any real importance though: American snoopers had misunderstood what they heard. Someone whom the Americans would have really liked to have seen killed would have been the newly-appointed operational theatre commander who’d not long arrived here. General V. N. Lobov (he wanted his marshal’s stars: he’d get them if he won the war here in America) had been sent to replace a man who’d failed and paid for that failure with his life. The raid missed Lobov because he was rarely there in San Antonio. When he came to the city, it was for the shortest time possible before then he would travel back up again into the Texas Hill Country and the hidden network of smaller and mobile command facilities there rather than what he saw as the massive target which was San Antonio. Fort Sam Houston was used for propaganda anyway. It was not somewhere which could be a command facility of any great use. Lobov’s predecessor had used it much, overseeing the extensive defensive preparations and those would stay in-place under the new theatre commander too: showing the Americans that move elsewhere would be rather silly. Revolutionary Mexico’s president, Tirado López himself, the man who was first a plaything of the Sandinistas then Castro before finally answerable to Moscow, was someone who came to San Antonio in December. His country’s capital was a radioactive hole in the ground, millions of his people were dead and his nation was ravaged by war, yet he came to play tourist. Tirado López visited The Alamo. Promises made to him before the war referred to ownership of that historic site as well as San Antonio, Texas and the wider American South-West. These were promises that only a fool would have believed would ever be honored. Tirado López was that fool, at The Alamo posing for pictures and making a bombastic speech. Other Mexicans were in the city too. There were forced conscripts everywhere on security duties along with officers in pretty uniforms promoted to non-important roles in the military administration. They were at the bottom of the pile of contempt that the Soviets had for all of their Latin American allies. Warm bodies to soak up American bullets anywhere they could be used for that purpose was what the Soviets used the Mexicans for and this was a method which their other so-called allies had been copying too as the Cubans, Guatemalans and Nicaraguans did the same thing with Revolutionary Mexico troops as well. More Mexicans arrived every day, trucked over the border and spread throughout the war zone after transiting through San Antonio.

Lobov was forced to meet with Tirado López when the latter was in San Antonio though at the meeting there was nothing of any substance to it. This was during one of the general’s rare visits into the city. A following briefing given at Fort Sam Houston – the Mexicans were eager for the facility to be renamed – the same day was the reason for Lobov’s appearance. Stavka’s second-in-command came to San Antonio along with a pair of admirals from the Soviet Navy. They discussed with Lobov the ongoing shortages and how the air route for supplies had come under recent immense strain due to American action taken in West Africa. The sea supply route using the South Atlantic was in grave danger of being fully lost too. The only resupply & reinforcement route where there was any success being seen remained the North Atlantic routing and this had seen only occasional shipping come recently. Lobov was waiting on major reinforcement let alone resupply for forces already under his control. His orders were to win the war come the Spring, starting at the beginning of March though earlier if possible. Going up onto the Great Plains, he intended, and head north and east to beat the Americans on the battlefield. This couldn’t be done, not with all the will in the world, if his armies weren’t issued with supplies and new forces. The visitors from Moscow told Lobov that he would be seeing what was needed come the end of the month. The admirals had some news for him, something of a surprise. A good surprise but still something unexpected. They afterwards began their – long-winded – journey back home and in the days following the visit, Lobov was skeptical of what he had been told. How was the North Atlantic going to be fully opened and not one but two major convoys, each with dozens upon dozens of heavily-laden ships which were all escorted, going to get through and reach the Caribbean by the first days of the New Year?

Coming back to San Antonio on New Year’s Eve, Lobov discovered that the optimism from those visitors (apparently the flight with the admirals aboard didn’t make it home; the marshal from Stavka did though) was more than that. They had been confident and that was paying off. One of the two convoys was clearing the passage between Cuba and Haiti. The other was taking the longer way around, coming through the island chain of the Lesser Antilles. The pair of them were both heading for Texan ports – avoiding the battered remains of those harbours in Cuba – at full speed. Lobov and the armies he led would be getting their resupply and reinforcement. What had happened during December out in the North Atlantic to see this occur?