Eagle Guardian: The War of 2010

We decide on who is going to cover what updates then write and post them; in some cases, where we are unsure about what we've written, we'll PM it, but normally we don't bother. 


Just to be clear about the latest update, the goings on in Italy especially are not a permanent fixture. Without getting into spoilers, Berlusconi will faces the consequences of his actions and Italy will have its moment(s). 

Wonder what'll happen to a certain New Yorker with the initials DT...

Seriously, though, good updates; for the third time in 100 years, Europe is being plunged into a bloody war...

Waiting for more...

Good comparison to 1914 there.

Popcorn is in the microwave.

I wonder if the FSB will come up with "evidence" proving that the explosion at Aleysk was caused by CIA-funded provocateurs.

It actually would present an admission of weakness: how could the West strike so deep into Russia and do this to our army?

Forty-One – Interlude One: The tension in the air

1930 Local Time, August 6th
Four miles west of the Russian-Estonian border

And there’s me, in my slouch hat, with my SLR and greens/God help me, I was only 19

Captain Jack Hastings, United States Army, sat on his sleeping bag, his back slumped against a tree. The Estonian woodland in which he and his men were positioned lay directly opposite the Russian border, and the men of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 325th Parachute Infantry Regiment had a direct view of the highway down which Russian tanks were soon to come swarming. He was chewing tobacco – a habit which he had kicked after his second tour in Afghanistan and only slipped back into last week – as he wrote a note to his wife. Sandy was back home in Georgia, sitting in their apartment outside Fort Bragg and waiting for news from her husband. She was a teacher, meaning that there was little work for her to do, as the schools had closed up for the summer. Hastings reasoned that the schools probably would have closed anyway due to the crisis.

Moments before Jack had left leaving he’d talked to her about spending her summer tutoring kids from school; she’d been outwardly receptive, but he suspected she was just trying to put on a brave face before Hastings left. This wasn’t the first time he had deployed; there had been two gruelling trips to Afghanistan, once as a platoon commander and then again as a staff officer attached to the headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force, which commanded NATO troops in that war-torn Asian country.

He’d been returned to the airborne back in June as the crisis with Russia worsened. Things had changed since Afghanistan; this time, the threat briefings and field exercises were focused on countering a so-called ‘peer-level’ threat, an enemy with tanks and artillery and helicopters, rather than an opponent who hid amongst civilians and popped his head up to shoot you in the back. Captain Hastings still didn’t know which one was the worse type of enemy to be facing.

“Evening, sir,” a confident voice, one that commanded attention, said beside him. First Sergeant Tanner, the senior non-com in Charlie Company, appeared. Tanner had nearly two decades of experience in the 82nd, having fought in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and both Gulf Wars. He still had shrapnel from a Serb mortar lodged in his thigh to prove that.
“Master Sergeant,” he greeted, looking up from his notepad and nodding curtly. There were to be no salutes exchanged this close to the border; Russian snipers, or more likely ethnic Russians living in Estonia and supported by Russian advisors, could use them to identify officers as targets.

There had already been attacks by Russian and Russian-backed elements on NATO forces in Estonia and Latvia, with some of those strikes leading to a significant number of casualties. Members of the US Army’s 10th Special Forces Group were mounting armed patrols along the regions of both Estonia and Latvia that bordered Russia or Belarus, working with forces from both of those Baltic countries to do so.
“How was the border, sir?” Tanner queried.

Earlier that day, Captain Hastings had accompanied one of those twelve-man ‘Alpha Teams’ surveying the Russian border just north of the town of Narva, which was located right on the borderline. They’d hidden on in woodlands much similar to those his company was dug into now, watching tanks and armoured vehicles moving into pre-attack positions while supplies of ammunition and fuel were delivered by huge Gaz trucks. Though Hastings and his Special Forces companions had been on the Estonian side of the border, they’d been able to witness all of this taking place to the east with their binoculars. What he had seen told him that the Russians would inevitably come storming over the border towards Hastings and his men.

“We saw what expected to see, top.” The patrol had reported what they had witnessed up to the 2nd Brigade Combat Team’s tactical operations centre to the west, and that information had been passed back down to officers and NCOs at company level. Tanner knew what had been spotted along the border; he was asking what his company commander specifically made of it. Hastings continued. “At least a brigade is coming to come towards us, probably under heavy air and arty support.” The company first sergeant new that already from his various briefings in past couple of days, but he hadn’t seen what had been on the other side of that border for himself, unlike Captain Hastings.

“And the Russians now how to use it,” Tanner answered, “not like Saddam’s boys.”

“I don’t like how isolated we are either. Any reinforcements have to fight their way through the Baltics or come to us by sea.” Hastings, as a company commander, had a general idea of the military situation around Eastern Europe, but to know much more than he did was way above his paygrade. He had no idea how NATO planned to reinforce his cut-off brigade.

He suddenly began to feel very isolated indeed. His men were good soldiers; virtually everyone above the rank of specialist was a veteran of at least one tour in Iraq or Afghanistan, with some of the NCOs having as many as four or five. The privates were green, eighteen and nineteen year-olds, many of whom were fresh out of airborne school; they were still tough as one could be without having fired a shot in action before. They were well dug-in, with the whole 1/325th PIR being positioned in these difficult-to-navigate woodlands in a network of dugouts and slit trenches, with machine guns and light anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons pointed directly towards the border. The captain presumed the Russians would send dismounted forces to clear the woodlands while sending their armour down the highway that ran through the forest. What he feared most was their helicopters. Much of the NATO airpower being moved into Eastern Europe as the alliance mobilised was going to Poland, Denmark or the Czech Republic, with little being sent into the Baltic States for fear of those aircraft being destroyed on the ground or being shot down by long-range surface-to-air missiles just over the Russian and Belarusian borders.

Attack helicopters would be a lethal foe for infantry, even infantry armed with anti-aircraft missiles; he’d witnessed just how effective the US Army’s AH-64D Apache gunships had been against the Taliban back in Afghanistan, and the prospect of being on the receiving end of something similar sent shivers down his spine. He smiled darkly to himself as Tanner moved down the line, talking to the squads of infantry in their foxholes.

The Russians were the least of his worries, he realised. Sandy was going to kill him when she found out he’d started using that old bad habit again.


2125 Local Time, August 6th,
South East London

Our little group has always been/And always will, until the end

“You think it’s going to kick off?” Alex asked, slurring his words slightly as he raised his fifth Pabst Blue Ribbon to his mouth and took a swig from the can.

Riley nodded morbidly. His own hands were clasped around a bottle of the cheapest wine he could find in the dodgy off-licence.

“Yeah, I do. I mean, we studied history…You know what it was like 1914, the July Crisis and all. This is just like that. Maybe worse.” There were five of them gathered below a clear summer sky in the park in what was supposed to have been a celebration of Alex’s eighteenth birthday. The whole shindig had turned out to be a rather morbid affair. They were all old enough to understand what was happening.

Emily looked up. She sat leaning against the support-pole of the park’s swing-set. “My dad’s thinking of taking me and mum to my aunt’s place in Wales. Might be safer and all if…if…”

They all knew what the ‘if’ was in reference too. Somebody tried to crack a joke, but it sailed flatly over the group of friends. A dark, nervous silence fell. The tension in the summer air was thick enough to choke on. The news had been a constant cycle of bulletins about the catastrophic conflict that seemed inevitable now. First there had come the footage of British soldiers, many of them not much older than kids themselves, boarding and disembarking from flights to Europe, and then there had been the testing of the BBC’s emergency radio channels. “The time has now come to make sure that you and your family are ready in case an air attack happens. This does not mean that war is bound to come…" Riley could have quoted the whole speech by now.

“I’m going to join the Army,” Alex finally said. “You know, if and when the war starts.”

Riley looked taken aback, betrayed even. “I thought we were going to do that together?”

“Well, if it starts before you’re eighteen, there’s no way in hell your parents would let you sign up.” He took another drink. “I just don’t want to have to say I watched it all on television, you know?”
A pair of aircraft roared overhead, appearing as but distant dots in the sunset to the west. They had to be military, Riley reasoned; all commercial flights had been stopped a few days ago as Britain prepared for war, and the two jets were flying so fast and so low that they couldn’t have been airliners anyway. It was yet another sombre reminder of just how bad things had gotten. Most of the kids’ parents had stopped going to work within the last few days, and yesterday Riley and his mother had spent hours in the supermarket stocking up on tinned food.

Not that it would make much difference; Riley could see the London skyline from where he lived.

“I get it.”

“Look, why are we just moping around about all this?” Somebody else interjected drunkenly. “There’s nothing we can do. If we all get nuked, then we’re dead; we might as well life to the fullest until then!”
“By living life to the fullest, you mean getting drunk in a park, right?” Emily responded snarkily.

“Well yeah, isn’t that what we always do though?” The drunk kid replied. “I mean…I always wanted to travel.”

“Travel where?” She replied.

“Somewhere safe. I dunno, the Sudan maybe?”

“Funny.”

Again they were quite. The few minutes of clear, empty silence were interrupted by bursts of police sirens and then by the sound of a lighter clicking as Riley lit another B&H.
Emily finally blurted, “It’s not fucking fair.”

“What do you mean?” Alex replied.

“You know what I mean.” She took one long, painful gulp from her own drink. “I want to go to uni and get a job and get a house and get married and have kids and a dog that annoys me. I…I don’t want to die, you know, if the worst happens, and I don’t want my friends to die. You know, all they have to do is fucking walk away! Just back down! But…”

Riley had seen his friends nervous about exams and dates, and he’d seen them fight or argue; he hadn’t seen them truly scared before. Not like this.



2304 Local Time, August 6th
Somewhere in the Baltic Sea

Lightning flashes across the sky/East to West, do or die

Nastoychivyy was a beast of a warship. Bristling with weapons, she was a Project 956 destroyer, a Sovremenny-class vessel as NATO would call her. Captain Second Rank Dmitri Mikhailovich Golovko, her commanding officer, had nearly twenty years’ experience at sea. He had begun his service during the darkest days of the Russian Navy, serving aboard as a surface warfare officer aboard a frigate that was barely afloat before transferring to the Russian Navy’s sole aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov.

After that, Golovko’s career had taken him on numerous staff and liaison tours and then for a time he’d been a military attaché – in the employ of the GRU, of course – in Vienna. He had finally gotten his first command when he had been assigned to captain the destroyer Nastoychivyy late last year. Numerous officers were being dismissed for corruption and incompetence back then as all branches of the Russian Armed Forces sought to turn themselves into a more modern, effective fighting force.

Even with the countless missiles and guns at his disposal, Captain Golovko doubted his ability to complete this particular mission. He stood on the bridge of his vessel, looking proudly at the young men seated around him, totally focused on their individual tasks.

Golovko and his executive officer had opened their sealed written orders an hour earlier. Golovko’s warship was one of three escorting several more landing ships loaded with naval infantry, and just southeast of their location were six NATO warships.

There was a Royal Navy frigate, an American destroyer, a pair of Polish frigates and a German frigate, and another destroyer, this one also belonging to the Germans. Reports from Kaliningrad also reported the probable deployment of a trio of German and Polish diesel-electric submarines somewhere in the Baltic Sea, as well as land-based airpower to the north, west, and south, from Norway, Denmark and Germany respectively. Those NATO warplanes were outnumbered by what Russia had in Kaliningrad and Belarus and around St Petersburg though. Golovko was to coordinate his actions with the Air Force and Naval Aviation Fencers as they hit out at NATO shipping.

For the sake of his crew, and for the thousands of Marines crammed aboard the landing ships steaming towards their target, he uttered a series of silent prayers, hoping against hope that the shock of the initial strike would be enough to knock the NATO warships off of their guard, to ‘rock them back on their heels’, as his instructors at the Kuznetsov Naval Academy would have said, spouting endless theories and philosophies about the nature of fighting a war such as this one.

Back when Golovko had been training, the wall had only just fallen, and the Russian Navy was focused on anything but competing with the US Navy. Only after the Georgia War had Golovko seen training scenarios switch suddenly to the prospect of fighting against the Americans and their lapdogs. During his time in Austria acting under the command of the GRU, Golovko had faced some mildly nerve-wracking moments as he took part in intelligence operations; though he had diplomatic immunity, his official title was as a desk officer at the Russian embassy and not an intelligence officer. There had been no real risk to his safety there though, and like all of his men he had never seen combat.

Though he had great faith in their ability to fight as bravely and as boldly as the Rodina demanded of them, and although his warship was a greatly sophisticated and well-armed one, Golovko doubted that he or his crew would survive the next week. There was simply too much NATO firepower in his way for his task to be accomplished without losses.

Soon, very, very soon, the time would come to carry out the orders pre-drafted back in St Petersburg, and Nastoychivyy, her captain, and her crew of men – boys, really – in their teens and twenties would be at war.