Eagle Guardian: The War of 2010

Indeed I did; his world will be very different ITTL.

I was wondering about this- what would the possibility be of NATO forming a "Free Russian Army" comprised of POWs and defectors to fight against Putin's Russia? Would this be problematic? 

Part Seven

One Hundred and Forty Five

Lieutenant Junior Grade Pete Buttigieg, 28, stood at the front of the briefing room that had been borrowed from the USS Enterprise's carrier air wing. The F/A-18s continued to roar into the sky from the deck of the massive, nuclear-powered supercarrier. Some laden with bombs and others carrying air-to-air missiles, few of the jets were left aboard the ship. Some, Buttigieg new, that had taken off earlier, would not be coming back. The purpose of this briefing, however, was not to plan targets for airstrikes. Instead, the fourteen members of the Navy SEAL platoon were now occupying the room besides Buttigieg, reporting back to him their findings while deployed on the Kola Peninsula. Sixteen of them had gone in aboard the USS Florida; fourteen had come out.

Buttigieg had not always been assigned to the Enterprise. As a reserve naval intelligence officer, he'd been called up at the end of July and sent out aboard the doomed carrier USS Harry S. Truman As a speaker of Norwegian, amongst other languages, Buttigieg had considered himself to be at home on that Nimitz-class aircraft carrier as she sailed northwards.

Buttigieg had been working with the intelligence staff aboard the carrier, collecting and analysing data on Russian troop movements in the region.

From the moment they had deployed, the movements made by Russian troops had concerned Buttigieg and the other intelligence staff attached to the Atlantic Fleet. First, reinforced amphibious forces hsd put to sea and then a pair of mechanised rifle brigades had followed them to the Norwegian border.

Those units had been easily identified and amongst the ongoing international crisis it was not hard to discern that Moscow was preparing for a war in the north, regardless of what was being said publicly.

For Buttigieg and the crew of the Harry S. Truman, the first taste of combat had come shortly after the fighting had broken out. There had been no immediate instances of ships launching missiles at one another. Instead, submarines and strike aircraft conducted those tasks, while more US Navy warplanes got involved in the fighting in Norway. The situation up there had been bad but not totally bleak. That was until the Truman had been sunk by a wave of cruise missiles from an Oscar II submarine belonging to the Russian Navy. Buttigieg had been in the combat information centre, or CIC, at the time and so he had been able to watch with horror as the missiles closed in. He was thrown from his feet with the force of the impacts. Fires had quickly broken out and then apread through the heart of the ship.

Buttigieg, himself lightly wounded, had carried or dragged several crewmembers from the CIC topside, making no less than three trips below decks to retrieve more of those injured. Finally, the fire had become to terrible to fight any longer. The fourth time Buttigieg returned to the doors of the CIC, he was leading several other survivors scrapped together in an ad hoc rescue force. By this time, the inferno prevented them from accessing the ruins of the CIC, forcing them to withdraw even as those wounded men and women trapped inside continued to plead for rescue.

When the orders had finally been given to abandon ship, the crew of the Harry S. Truman had wasted no time in carrying out those orders. The burnt-out carrier threatened to slink below the waves as sailors made their way to the liferafts. Many were caught without them, forced to paddle in the waters - cold despite the season - until rescue arrived.

Helicopters from escorting cruisers and destroyers had come quickly, plucking the sailors out of the water in clusters. Many life rafts had simply drifted into range of friendly shipping, but a few others, carried by the wind, had simply vanished after sailing into oblivion. It had taken time to recover from the loss of the Truman, but her crew was useful elsewhere in the absence of their warship. Buttigieg had eventually been assigned a similar task aboard the Enterprise. That had involved a couple of trips to Norway, landing him briefly in several ground engagements when visiting Marine Corps units fighting on land. He had stayed of of the fray for the most part, though; getting shot at by rifles and BTRs was for the Marines, not sailors.

The purpose of those brief visits was to get a better view of the ground for the Navy aircrews flying in support of the Marines. The commander of the Enterprise's carrier air wing had joined him in those trips. With the tide of the war turning, Buttigieg's task, and the tasks of his fellow intelligence officers, had likeqise changed. They now had to identify targets for airstrikes on the Kola Peninsula. That part of Russia was heavily defended with radar and mobile SAM sites. Hence, the decision had been made to send in American and British naval commandos to identify targets and take out SAM sites. That decision had won the intelligence personnel any popularity contests amongst the SEALs or SBS.

Kola was a huge place and was littered with enemy formations and security troops. The terrain was brutal and the weather unpredictable. The SEALs present now were missing two of their own. One man had drowned as they tried to approach the coastline undetected. Another, while acting as a rearguard, had died in a hail of gunfire.

Chepiga: Salisbury and poison.
Another nod too to Red Storm Rising with that Spetsnaz officer Chernyavin.

We will be back o to the majn story shortly. What dos aeveryone think of the charactwr updates?

Ezcuse the spellings, i ams hammered.

I agree.