[BTS:RFC]: The Dawn Comes Softly

GreekAnalyzer · Jun 23, 2015

R.I.P. Orlov

Noyyau · Jun 23, 2015

Alas, we hardly knew him.

Tycho · Jun 27, 2015

Part IV: The Thunder Is Far, the Storm is Near

Spoiler :

In July of 1951, the United States of Mexico, embattled and facing internal strife and dissent, offered themselves up as a state in brotherhood to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The USSR, helmed by Premier Ivanov, gladly accepted the United Mexican States into the growing Soviet bulwark that was making up larger and larger sections of the world. Pundits, political figures, and scholars around the world paid close attention, observing that with the United States of Mexico voluntarily joining the Soviet Bloc, this gave the Soviets a huge amount of influence across almost all of South America, minus the Dutch city of Buenos Aires and the Portugese cities dotting the eastern coast of Brasilia. At the same time that this was going on, a sudden cooling of relations between the United States and the Islamic Turkish Democracy rapidly took place, caused by a seemingly small diplomatic incident of not presenting a gift to the aging Sultan, Mehmed XII, as is custom in the Turkish Democracy. This incident only ballooned in size and scope, until the Turks broke off their diplomatic cables with the United States of America, declaring thusly:

It is impossible to conceive that people who have been our stalwart allies for so long could be so blind to our customs and our practices... The United States of America, which stands as one of the greatest democracies of the world, has given us a slap in the face the ikes of which has not been suffered by any other nation before. America... may not have a king, or a monarch, or have felt the importance that such leaders have brought to us through their own ideas of freedom and democracy, but we cannot abide this. Effectively immediately... the Islamic Turkish Democracy declares that it shall no longer openly trade with the United States of America, and hereby cancel the deals set forth at the Pensacola Accords, including joint research efforts, defensive alliances, and open borders pacts.

While it may have seemed as a great overreaction, barely a week after the breakdown of communications between Istanbul and Washington, a spy belonging to the Central Intelligence Agency was discovered working high up in the Turkish government, leaking state secrets regarding thermonuclear weapons and fission reactors back to the United States. Caught early, the damage was minimal; the spy was given a quick and speedy trial, and then publicly executed by firing squad in the central square of Istanbul. While Istanbul was quiet on the matter entirely, it quickly became front page news across the majority of the world. From Cairo and Moscow, to Delhi and Beijing, London, Paris, Berlin, and even Washington, the shame and humiliation inflicted upon the agency was massive. General Dulles, who had been placed in charge of the agency, was stripped of his rank and removed from the Agency quickly, replaced by Arthur Donaldson, a man who was considered highly ineffective at the tasks he was generally given. The Agency had it's funding slashed five times in a matter of two years, having to work on a shoestring budget not seen since the middle of the 19th century.

internal memo distributed in the Central Intelligence Agency said:
Unprecedented... all of this is unf***ing precedented at a high level. We are the men who are supposed to be the sword and the shield of America and protect it's borders, and yet we have our budget slashed and nixed into almost near nothing. Three thousand agents quit last month, heading for private companies all across the States... unprecedented departures... the best talent of the Agency is fleeing for the doors, and I do not blame them one bit. The Bolsheviks are only gaining power in the East, building a nuclear arsenal that could end the world, and what are we doing? Nothing at all it seems, because we don't have the money in which to do anything at all!

[A long list of insults follows to the President of the United States, Congress, and financial administrators of the Office of Appropriations]

Spoiler :

Despite being under a huge amount of stress, America increased it's power abroad over the following years. Rome and Arabia had already been protectorate states (and some would say, puppets) to the powers that be in Washington, but in 1953, America added the former kingdom of Castille and Aragon to the growing portfolio of states allied with them, opening up diplomatic cables with the Republic of Japan and the People's Republic of China at the same time. Japan was already heavily affiliated with the USA, having traded much and expressing growing concern over the rumored Soviet arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons in the Kamchatka peninsula, but had not acted upon it. China, meanwhile, had been snubbed by the Russians indirectly at the meeting of the Fifth Comintern in Moscow in 1952. The Chinese government, already under internal pressures for reform (and suffering from dissent sown by American agents in the nation), was forced to open up to cables from the USA, and talk with them diplomatically.

The Democratic Republic of Kampuchea (which was not a communist nation, despite it's name), additionally opened up to conversations from the United Sates. The Khmer, long suffering from a stagnant, mercantilist economy, had been badly beaten in the worldwide markets by the trading of massive, Soviet State run corporations that trafficked huge amounts of resources abroad for their nation. Massive corporations like Alfa Group (which dealt in airlines and banking), Mechel (which dealt in coal, iron, and copper), Cherikozovo (which dealt in wheat, barley, and rice), and all the others did a huge amount of trading, flooding foreign markets like those in Kampuchea with cheap products designed to make people consider the utopic lifestyle of the Soviets, but which had only engendered hatred from the Kampuchean peasant class, many of whom were put out of business by the cheap goods. Nothing was as big as Gazprom, however; the Russian oil corporation dealt nearly 33% of the world's supply of the valuable liquid, trafficking petroleum from the Caucasus Mountains in Chechnya and from the oil fields only three hundred miles from Moscow.

Spoiler :

1956 rolled around, and so did the March Revolution; Mongolian patriots, many of them communists and socialists, expelled the Russian garrisons in their cities, and took over their nation once again. Premier Ivanov, despite words traded with his second in command Petrovich, his intelligence officer Kerensky, and chief of defense Volkov, elected to let them go, and applauded the creation of the new Mongolian state. The Mongols quickly set up their new government, known as the People's Democratic Republic of Mongolia, and allied themselves closely to the Russians.

Fearing that this would spark the Russians into action, now that Mongolia was restored to order under that nation, the USA began to apply a heavy amount of pressure to the Portugese Empire, under siege from the Khmer, the Japanese, the Chinese, and the Dutch, who had allied under the auspices of a new coalition of nations. America offered to shelter the Dutch and broker a peace treaty with the nations it was at war with, if they accepted American garrisons and American warplanes, on the offchance that a feared Bolshevik invasion of Western Europe was imminent. Portugal initially agreed to the terms, but backed off of the deal when the Americans attempted to use them as an access point for Russian technology, asking them to request Soviet missile technology and weapons that they had been receiving for years.

Spoiler :

For whatever, unknown reason, the Portugese felt hemmed in; America threatened to leave them out to dry on their own, or worse yet, allow Spain to invade from the east and tear through their nation, subjugating the Portugese like they had been during the 1600s. Portugal, fearing for itself and the sovereignty of it's own nation, chose instead to do the unthinkable; sell it's guns to the USSR and join the Soviet bloc. This would be tantamount to declaring war against the world, and would undoubtedly cause America to enter into the war on the side of the Chinese to stop Soviet power from expanding into Western Europe. Despite the threats and promises from the Americans, Portugal opened secret diplomatic cables with the USSR in an attempt to reach Ivanov.

Premier Ivanov, during the best of circumstances, would not have agreed to host the Portugese as a part of the Soviet Bloc. Their then leader, Jao Adalberto, had been a mainline supporter of fascism in his youth, and though he had switched when his political career came up, he was still heavily militaristic and acidic. The entire set of wars with the Iron Dragon coalition (which was China, Japan, the Netherlands, and the Khmer) had been sparked due to Jao's usage of foreign proxies to wage guerrilla campaigns for what he felt were massive slights against his name and his peoples. The unfortunate thing about using guerrillas, however, is that one typically needs to be strong enough to back up their guerrillas with more than just words and fiery tempers when it comes down to it; after a suicide bombing by a Christian radical working for the Portugese government in the Khmer city of Angkor, the Khmer declared war, and were followed shortly after by their allies.

Ivanov, however, was not at the post when the time came to talk to the Portugese diplomats, due to a massive heart attack that almost killed the Premier, and put him in the hospital on life support in a comatose state for nearly a month. Petrovich, his second in command, was also unable to attend any diplomatic talks, after the passenger plane carrying him, Maksim Sokolov (chief diplomat of Russia), and three hundred and sixty seven other passengers, crashed into a field outside of Sankt-Petersburg shortly after take off. Sokolov and almost two hundred passengers were killed in the fireball, and Petrovich himself was heavily injured, not recovered for three days in the wild, and suffering a massive concussion that prevented him from doing his work. Under growing panic in Moskva over the status of the government, Yuri Volkov stepped forward and talked to the Portugese, accepting them into the Soviet bloc against what Ivanov and the other members of the Council would have wanted.

The effect was immediate, and severe.

Spoiler :

The beginning of the Glass War had arrived.

Tycho · Jun 27, 2015

I've been slacking the past few days; I'll have some more stuff tomorrow, once I cook up another update.

GreekAnalyzer · Jun 27, 2015

Keep up the good work! I'm loving this story. :goodjob:

Tycho · Jun 28, 2015

Part V: All Part of the Plan

Ivanov woke up in the hospital to the sound of a beeping heart monitor sounding rhythmically in his ear; beep... beep... beep. He swallowed, tasting the inside of his dry mouth and running his tongue slowly in a pattern across his teeth, trying to moisten them and take the edge off. Guess I'm still alive, he thought, stretched in the bad. Bad move. His chest immediately began to feel inflamed, as if he had a handful of lit cigarettes pressed up against the inside of his chest somewhere where his left lung was. Ivanov grimaced in pain and rubbed the spot, taking slow and steady breaths. He could already tell it would be a long time before he was one hundred percent again.

The guard in the corner of the room adjusted his paper, taking a look at the Premier for a second, going back to his paper, and then doing a double take. He immediately stood from his chair, knocking it to the side in his haste, desperately trying to both straighten his crumpled uniform and snap to attention. "Premier Ivanov sir," he called out, "Corporal Vassili Markovic reporting, sir!"

Ivanov waved at him with a hand. "At ease, boy," he growled out through his teeth. He grimaced again, this time at how dry his throat was; it felt as if he'd been dehydrated for days, but that was almost impossible in a modern Russian hospital. "What the hell happened? Why am I in this bloody hospital?"

"You had a heart attack, sir," the corporal said, still at attention. His face was neatly shaven, his hair brushed to one side under the cap, and his eyes bright and wide as he stared at the wall above Ivanov's bed, unable to make eye contact with the leader of Russia and the greater Soviet bloc. "You were rushed from the Kremlin to the hospital the second you fell, sir; the doctors did not think that you would make it. They forecasted your odds of living after such a massive heart attack at maybe twenty percent, if they were generous to you. All of Russia has been waiting for the last month or so for you to wake up from your coma. Nobody really thought that you would make it."

"Where's Petrovich," Ivanov demanded. He'd been hospitalized twice before, one with a bad case of influenza, and the other with internal bleeding; Petrovich had shown up both times, and stayed despite the insistence of the guards and the doctors. They'd been tenacious, but the good natured Bear was even moreso. "Where is he?"

The corporal stood silent for a minute, as if chewing the words in his mouth before coughing them up. "Secretary Petrovich was in a passenger plane accident outside of Moskva," he said at last. "He was brought to the hospital only days after you were, sir, and when you were already in your coma. He suffered a very traumatic brain injury, according to the doctors; he was also put in a medically induced coma, and is scheduled for another surgery next week."

"Passenger plane? He was flying back from Sankt-Petersburg?"

"Yes sir," nodded the corporal, dropping his eyes to look at the Premier before straightening again. "Him and Mr. Sokolov sir, and a host of others on the plane."

"How are they doing?"

Markovic looked considerably uncomfortable at the question, but he answered anyways. "Mr. Sokolov died in the crash sir, along with some two hundred or so other passengers; Secretary Petrovich was considerably lucky, seeing as he got thrown from the wreckage and the fireball when the plane broke apart, but they didn't find him for a few days out in the forest. His funeral was three weeks ago sir."

Well, there goes the most competent man in Russia, thought Ivanov bitterly. "I'm guessing the Diplomatic Corps didn't fare too well, then."

The corporal shook his head. "Not at all sir; Sokolov's lieutenants were all onboard the plane for some reason that night, and all of them died. There has been an internal power struggle within the Diplomatic Corps over who should be leader; there hasn't been anyone who can win the support of any one person in the government as far as I know."

"Great," said Ivanov. He stretched again, and grunted. "Who handled the Portugese then? Maksim was supposed to do that, but if he's dead now..."

Vassili Markovic suddenly seemed to be very interested in the patterns of linoleum on the floor, and swallowed a few times. "I'm not sure if I can talk about that, sir."

"Why the hell not?"

"The doctors said that you weren't supposed to have any additional stress, and they said anything about current events-"

"What about current events?" He narrowed his eyes and bored holes through the corporal with his gaze. "I don't care what the bloody doctors say, what the hell happened to our diplomatic talks!"

Wordlessly, Markovic raked up his paper, and handed it to the Premier; slowly, he watched the face of the other man turn scarlet with sheer, unbridled anger and hatred.

It was a pleasant day in Volkov's office; the sun was shining intermittently throughout the clouds, casting a cool light upon the city, perfect for an early April stroll. Yuri loved that type of weather; it reminded him of May in Yakutsk, the happiest time of the year for him; everything always seemed to go right in the springtime for him. He got his first kiss from Natasha when he was fifteen, was accepted to the academy two years later on the same date, and formed his People's Front in the springtime as well. He sipped at his coffee and relaxed gently in his chair; it was a good month, despite all of the drama that was arising in the news corps across the world, and despite all the cries of doom and terror. Having the keys to the largest nuclear arsenal on Earth helped with that one.

Behind him, he heard shouting in the hallway, dim and muffled, and looked irritably towards the door. Shouting inside of the Kremlin was not something you were supposed to do, and he'd be damned if they started right-

"Volkov!" the shout came from outside. A heavy kick was launched against the door, causing it to swing open on the first hit, as men and women clamored outside.

Ah. Piss.

Volkov hardly realized how fast he'd leaped out of his chair to stand at his desk, saluting Ivanov as was custom for the Premier. Ivanov himself looked like pounded garbage; his hair was frazzled, his face ashen, and his hands ruddy colored and venous. His suit, while slightly crumpled, still held a powerful frame, unbowed by the heart attack he had suffered, and his eyes... his eyes glowed with fire and with fury. In one hand, he held a folded edition of the Moskva Times, which (as he walked towards Volkov's desk with long, powerful strides), he unfolded until he was clutching the bottom, propping it up with his hand. "What," he hissed, "is this, pray tell?"

"The newspaper," said the minister of defense, and flashed a crooked smile. "They give those to you softliners, right?"

In response, the Premier took his free arm, laid it down on one end of Volkov's desk, and in one powerful motion, swept everything onto it straight off and onto the floor.

"What," he screamed, "do you think gives you the right to call a de facto war on four separate nations?!"

Volkov stared blankly at his items on the floor; his pictures of him with the People's Front in college, with his family, his brothers, his family now, a broken glass figure that had been gifted to him by the university, his favorite coffee cup (now spreading his favored blend of coffee across everything he owned) smashed to pieces, and his beloved, gold, fountain pen that had been a gift from his father before he went to university. "I'm sorry," he said vaguely, perhaps still in shock from Ivanov's move. "What did you ask?"

Ivanov leaned across the desk, grabbed his counterpart by the lapels, and dragged him until he was forced to lean, blinking upwards at the Premier, across his own desk. "Did you not hear me once, you pathetic govnosos?"

"Well, I did, but it may have been forgotten when you raked all of my valuables off of my desk." He jerked a thumb at them. "Mind if I get those?"

Ivanov released him, and turned his face towards the newspaper, while men and women from the outside had begun to creep around the corner, peering in. They watched, openmouthed, as Volkov raced to pick up his stuff, feeling a bit sick to his stomach. The Premier, his fist clenched at his side, began to read.

"'Some would say that Minister of Defense Yuri Volkov is a definite hardliner, a take-no-prisoners sort of fellow that has gotten him in trouble before in the government of the motherland. His frequent clashes with Premier Ivanov have led many to think that his power would be checked absolutely in his rapid ascent into power within the State government, but through the midst of the terrible April Crisis, Volkov has remained resolute and a bold man. He accepted the Portugese Empire into the growing Soviet bloc that now extends from South America to the shores of Europe and Asia, as well as Africa. Despite what many would see as tantamount to betraying the Premier's policy agenda and political ideas, Volkov has been a strong pillar of support during these troubled times, leading the nation in a direction that it would have never thought it possible to go.'" Ivanov spit onto his counterpart, still crouched on the floor and raking up pieces of goods that had been dropped; shocked, the defense minister slapped a palm against the side of his face and pulled it back wetly.

"So," said Ivanov said, his tone acidic as he looked down at the defense minister. "I wonder how you'll be seen when you send millions of proud sons and daughters off to their deaths? My money's on absolute hatred for how much of a stupid, stupid, stupid prick you managed to shape yourself into."

Standing angrily to his feet, Volkov shoved the Premier angrily. "You have no right," he shouted. "You were in the hospital, in a coma, and Sokolov-"

Ivanov smashed his fist in a savage right hook into the face of Volkov, and hauled him to his feet again, holding him by a single, curled fist at the throat. Blood dribbled down from his nose and his mouth, and his eyes lolled for a few seconds, landing weakly on the Premier. "The next time you deign to preach to me about how you are in the right for what you did, make sure you don't betray your nation before you do so. You should count yourself lucky; you aren't going to be hauled off to a prison in Kamchatka for what you just did. Most leaders in other nations would have you sacked and delivered in a parcel to a prison."

"The hell was I supposed to do," burbled Volkov weakly. "Petrovich's on the verge of death, you are in a coma, Sokolov's dead, Corps Diplomatic's falling apart at the seams... someone had to act."

"And so you did," growled Ivanov, and released him, letting him fall back against his desk. He took the news paper and threw it down onto his chest as he spluttered. "Look at yourself," the Premier cursed. "You are a waste; you're pathetic. You betrayed your nation, and you betrayed me. Consider it lucky you aren't clearing out your goddamn desk right now."

Slowly, the premier walked out of the room, the crowd parting for him like the sea before Moses, their eyes wide enough to be mistaken for billiards balls. Volkov spluttered weakly on his desk, blood still trickling out from his nose and his mouth, feeling nothing but shame and humiliation.

"Hey, Heinrich?"

The German nodded at the phone, a tic he had developed from an early age. "Yeah, what is it?"

"Doesn't seem like it worked," said Navidson brusquely from the other end. You could almost hear the grin in his voice as he sat, twirling a pencil between his errant fingertips, smirking all the while. "The Premier woke up from his coma, and rumor has it he's on the warpath in the Kremlin right now."

"I miscalculated then. I had assumed that he would be weaker for a man his age than how he turned out to be." Heinrich jotted down a note on the pad in front of him in fine cursive writing. 'Adjust dosage and lethality, (scale back stealthiness???)' "Have you been productive at all?"

"I killed two hundred people friend, you ought to give me some credit at that."

"Not the man we wanted to kill."

"So? It incapacitates him, and if we're lucky, he'll be a goddamned cucumber for the rest of his miserable life. Didn't realize I'd throw the capital into such disarray with that little move there." He chuckled dryly, the sound crackling over the terrible Russian phone lines.

"Hmm," said Heinrich. "Maybe you are right. I do consider it amazing that you killed Sokolov and half of the Diplomatic Corps' leadership on your little maneuver there. Wasn't expecting that one at all."

"Best bomb maker in Boston, right here," the Norgie boasted. "It was too easy, really. They have no security whatsoever on their tarmacs, and I doubt that they'll beef up security after this one. They like the easy way too much for any sane person, in my opinion."

"True. How is your side of the plan going along?"

"Well," said Navidson, laughing. "I'll tell you more about it another day, in person. Gazprom is sending me down to Chechnya though, so I can start making more connections with the Islamists down there."

"That's good," said Heinrich, examining his fingernails. "For what it's worth, my side of the whole thing is going along well."

"You mean, aside from not managing to kill Ivanov."

"You win some, you lose some. Isn't that what you Americans always say?"

"Fair point. How is it going, then?"

"I'll tell you some other day," he said coyly. "You'll get to see what little funds the Agency has sent me have been put to use for. It's a real treat, if I do say so myself."

Tycho · Jul 7, 2015

Part VI: A Limited Exchange

Down in Red Square, the soldiers marched in columns and lines, coming to a halt and at attention in front of their respective commanders. Many of them were youths, barely out of college, or high school really, fresh faced, clean shaven, acne dotting some faces. The guns that they had been given seemed oddly out of place amongst the fresh, crumpled uniforms that had been unfolded that morning when the draft cards for thousands of men across the Soviet Union had been read aloud across the radio airwaves, the voices of women smoothly announcing which kids would be called up for the glory of the motherland. Their helmets, polished to perfection, were already given personal touches by some soldiers, who had put playing cards, foreign designs and spirals, and even slogans in Russian that bespoke patriotism for the particularly jingoistic. These men, the men of the 107th Rifles Division, were the newest of the Soviet's rapidly ballooning military in the face of the most modern war any of them had yet seen.

Ivanov watched them from his office in the Kremlin, a grimace attached to his face. Kerensky and Klaus Ludwig, the acting Chief Diplomat for the Soviet Union, were with him there, fidgeting in their seats while waiting for the Premier to turn around and talk to them. Volkov was also there, a bruised face and a splint across his nose clearly visible; his red rimmed eye glared at Ivanov hard enough to cause steel beams to melt, but the leader of the Soviet world didn't even dignify him with a look back.

"So many young men," he said softly. "About to go marching off to a war that could have been avoided."

Kerensky and Ludwig wisely said nothing, and indeed, leaned away from the Minister of Defense, who leaned his head against his hand in a languid position. Volkov too said nothing, only choosing to glare harder at the Premier.

"Our diplomats in the Netherlands, in China, Japan, across half of the world are being rebuffed. A dozen different nations want nothing to do with us for what we've done now. We are encircled by enemies." He glanced back at Volkov, narrowing his eyes. "What's the matter, Yuri? Don't you want to come see the young men that you have signed death warrants for? All those brave, young souls, called to action by your stupid, stupid decisions?"

"So what were we supposed to do? Let the Americans get another ally in Europe? In our own back yard?"

"Europe is not our back yard. They feel threatened by us, and I did not want to interfere with them at all. I have only the idea of peaceful, gradual, worldwide shift towards-"

Volkov slammed his fist down onto Ivanov's desk. Kerensky sidled over in his seat some more, trying to get whatever minuscule distance he could away from the angered man. "Your ideas are ," he hissed. "The Americans recruited fascists right out of Norway and Germany when they collapsed, because they fear us. They fear communism, they fear the Union, and they want no part of it. You know what they've been doing in South America, amongst our allies, for the past several decades, right? Arming fascistic and militant rebels, anyone who is against the idea of 'communism', anything that falls outside of their own version of democracy. They aren't interested-"

Ivanov turned towards him and leaned across his desk. "When I want you to lecture me about matters of state, I'll call you," he said coolly. "As it is, you had better be telling me how you intend to make sure that our southern border isn't overrun by the DRC and Japanese Empire."

Volkov reached into his pocket and pulled out a set of keys, jingling them softly in his hand. "This right here will solve all of our issues in a matter of minutes."

"No."

"Then what else do you want? It will take more than a few months to bring forth units from around the nation towards our southern border in Manchuko and Mongolia. You want us to split our men in the west so that they can defend a massive border?"

"Which is more pressing? The Dutch, already under siege by the Turks? Or the seven hundred million Chinese that press themselves at our borders and the borders of our allies?"

"The Chinese don't matter right now," snarled Volkov. "They are still trying to consolidate internally. They won't attack right off, and they definitely won't if we make an example out of their allies. That's how this works, comrade."

"You'd do best to avoid talking down to me."

"Or what? You're going to send me off to Kamchatka to die in some prison?" Volkov leaned back and laughed manically. "And how are you going to get rid of all of the loyal men that staff the silos and the nuclear arsenals in the East?"

"Loyal to you," muttered Ivanov. "And if it were up to me, disobeying direct orders from the Premier is punishable by death, according to laws set forth by Alexai Brezhnev years ago." He stroked his desk as he walked around it, smoothly gliding behind his council seated at the desk. "But Brezhnev also ruled through fear and tyranny. No one has enforced treason laws in years; if I did, you wouldn't be sitting here right now."

"Pick a new tune and sing it, Aleks," said Volkov in a bored tone. "This one's getting old and rusty."

Smiling, Ivanov circled back around to stand at his desk, and looked towards Yuri. "Get out of my office," he said in a placid manner. "And I'll either send Kerensky here to get you when you decide to stop being such a prick, or I'll send the Cheka to haul your miserable ass off to Arkangel'sk."

Shrugging, Volkov rose stiffly and hobbled out of the room, shutting the door with a loud bang behind him. The Premier waited until he heard Volkov's footsteps fade into the distance before looking at his intelligence minister. "How much of the officer corps does he control?"

"Officially?" Kerensky adjusted his spectacles and shrugged. "We estimate around fifty to sixty percent. But in all likelihood, it's probably more; that's the thing with men like him, to be honest. He finds others like him, and staffs them into his arm of the government to make sure that if he's removed, his ideals remain in place. Those men would die before they betray the ideas of the People's Front. That fifty to sixty percent is a conservative estimate by the way; there could very well be a whole hell of a lot more than we really think."

"Great," muttered Ivanov. "And if he controls the officer corps, he controls the military."

Kerensky nodded. "That's a hell of a snag, Ivan. We can't very well remove him, especially when his men staff the nuclear silos and the stockpiles. We could give them one set of orders, and they'd lie to us later and say that they were misinterpreted. We cannot trust them at all, unless we entertain Volkov's notions that he's actually a relevant and beloved member of the government."

"So let me get this straight," Ivanov said. "You want me to entertain and placate the man that wants to have a small scale nuclear exchange with several of the largest nations on Earth, because if we don't... he'll start it anyways."

The frail minister of intelligence shrugged, his spectacles quivering with every movement that he made. "I wish that there was another way," he confessed, "but truth be told, Volkov has too much power. He has a massive wave of public support from people who saw how well he supposedly led while you and Petrovich were in the hospital, and he's already stuffed the officer corps full to the brim with his own men. There's no way around him; executing, imprisoning, or arresting him will do nothing but anger those that support him, and we can't really afford to have an internal struggle right now."

"I can't allow him to have any power in what we do. Letting him dictate anything with the military would be a mistake."

"Let him have his small scale nuclear exchange," said Ludwig dryly. The elderly acting Chief Diplomat tapped at the arm of his chair in an unsteady rhythm. "He launches a few missiles, a few million people die in China and Japan, and we keep them at bay for a year or two as they try to figure out how to avoid it. It gives us enough time to quash the Dutch in the west, and advance our troops back to the east."

"This is human life we are talking about," said Ivanov incredulously. "How can you be so callous?"

"Why is it nobler to send millions of men to their death on the field of battle in a long and arduous campaign than to vaporize hundreds of thousands in a single instant?" Ludwig took out a cigarette and lit it, puffing slowly at it. "We don't have very many options, Herr Ivanov; if the Chinese roll in through the south, they will butcher millions of Mongolians in their path. Russians too, if they get the opportunity. Wei Zhou is unlikely to show mercy if presented with the potential for a rolling campaign in the north."

"So what you are saying is... we kill millions, to save millions more?"

"Indeed," said Ludwig. "That's the only way we can move forward like this. The army is split, and the east is well known for corruption. We cannot trust anyone east of Yakutsk to truthfully divvy up funds and to train troops properly to prepare ourselves against the Chinese. We must hold the line, and protect our own people."

Ivanov rose from his desk and slowly wandered back towards the window, looking down onto the square. Below, the men were marching off towards the train yards, off to go to Warsaw, where the troops were gathering on the front lines to make a push onto Berlin and the rest of the Republic of the Netherlands.

"When Kozlov was on his deathbed," he said suddenly, "he told me that there would be a time where I would hate my job. Not because of the stress of what I had to go through on an average day, nor because of the arrogant pricks that I'd have to make peace with to keep the nation running... but because I would have to decide between my ethics, and between the people that I lead." He clenched his fist and leaned against the windowsill, his head bowed before the grey, cloudy light pouring through the glass. "I always thought that he was wrong, and that I would always put my ethics first before the nation. I remember thinking in school when they had these supposedly impossible thought experiments about saving seven strangers or saving your mother, your sister, or your brother, that it was insane that people could even think about saving their own family over seven people that were a part of seven other families. But here I am, about to agree with what you are saying, Ludwig, that my nation and my people come first, before all of those people in the Democratic Republic of China and the Japanese Empire, before all of those men, women, and children that I'm going to order Volkov to vaporize and turn to ash."

A brief silence fell between all of them. "It wasn't meant to happen like this, you know."

"It never is," said Kerensky, soothingly.

"I always thought that my legacy would be something proud and grand. That when I die, people are going to look back upon me and think 'that man was a man of ideals, of ethics, of morality.' I hoped that people would look upon me as a visionary, and look upon communism and what we are doing here as something good and grand." He tapped his fist lightly against the windowsill, his back still facing towards the other men in the room. "But now, I realize that it's all going to go the other way. When they look back on me in history, they're going to think of a man that obliterated millions of people to save those that didn't even love him. They're going to think of me as a greedy, vicious man."

Silence resumed for a few minutes. From the window, the muted sounds of birdcalls and the sound of tramping boots from the soldiers could be heard. Ivanov remained bowed in front of the window as the quiet serenity that hung between the three grew heavier and heavier.

"Kerensky," said the Premier finally. "Fetch Volkov. We have much work to be done."

Spoiler :

"Man, I'm sure lucky that working for Gazprom has it's perks."

"Hmm?" Heinrich refused to take his eyes off of the chemistry equipment that he was slaving over, distilling new poisons and explosive compounds to use in the disruption of the Soviet Union. It was helpful that in the testing stages, no one really questioned why or how the homeless showed up dead from mysterious causes in dark alleyways, and chalked it up to drunken stupors and alcohol poisoning. "How do you mean?"

"Well, take this for example," said Navidson in a playful manner. "As one of the senior workers for Gazprom, I can do whatever the hell I want, essentially. I asked for five hundred pounds of plastic explosive for an operation the other day that they were doing to blast out mineshafts in the Caucus mountains, and they just handed it over at the logistics depot. No real checks on it; they didn't even ask for an ID or anything to verify. All I had to do was carry a damn hardhat and a clipboard, and they just loaded up a cart and said 'be careful' and away I went." He mimed himself strolling around, whistling cheerily as he leaned against the couch. "How's life for the government, by the way?"

"Simple enough," said Heinrich vaguely. "It was also stupidly easy to get close to the Premier and his coffee. Took three tries though."

"Three tries to do what? Poison him?"

"Mmmhmm. Nobody will miss the other two bastards though; they were old postal workers, a man and a woman, long list of health issues already. Can you believe that they get the Premier's coffee from the same room that they get the coffee for the postal workers here?"

"Hardly," said Navidson. "Though Ivanov is a humble man; he probably waived a bunch of security things so that he could seem like a man to the people."

"Of the people, you mean."

"Whatever," said Navidson languidly. "It doesn't matter at the end of the day, cause he's losing support to Volkov."

"Which is what we want him to be doing," said Heinrich, tapping on a beaker and examining the contents carefully. He placed it into a holder and jotted some notes on a pad of paper before continuing to examine his experiment. "He's also shafting Volkov in terms of affecting anything in the government. If he keeps it up, we may not have to pull the triggers ourselves; Volkov will do it for us."

"He's too loyal to Russia to throw it into a coup. Man like him? Nah, he's not interested at all in overthrowing his leader." Navidson yawned and stretched lithely on the couch like a cat, sighing deeply. "Met a cute woman at work the other day."

"You're married, and have a kid already. You wasted no time in hunting for one when you got here."

"Yeah, and do you think I care? I married her and she spat out a son for me so I could seem like a good little Russian convert. She's so madly in love with me, it's insane."

"You don't feel anything for her?"

"Not really," he said with a shrug. "I take her out to the movies, I take her out to the park, I give her roses on May Day and a ring every now and then, and sleep with her to placate her. Little Alexai's doing pretty well in school for a kid his age as well."

Heinrich rolled his eyes. "Men like you are all the same."

"Oh? And what makes you think you know about men like me?"

"Because my father was one of those men," said Heinrich, jotting more notes down. He looked sideways at Navidson and rankled his nose at him. "And I also loved one as well, that turned out to be just like you. Uses his partners to get ahead, all the while copulating with everyone else that he could get his hands on. He was always sorry as well whenever he got caught with some new kid."

Navidson rolled his eyes. "Oh hop off of it, mate."

"Hey, you don't want the truth? Don't live your life."

"We kill people for a living, I don't think I need a goddamned morality lesson from you."

"It's good to have ethics when you are killing people," said Heinrich with a sniff. "Aren't you supposed to have been called up for service by the military by the way? You did register with the military like a good little Russian."

"Waiver from Gazprom," said Navidson with a snort. "Does a lot of good, I tell you. You're more at risk of going to the front lines than I am."

"Mostly because I'm a doctor as well as a murderer and fake government agent."

"True. Gazprom is helpful though; like I said, the Caucus mountains are full of the Chechen extremists that they wrote about in Langley with shaking hands." He laughed and smiled dreamily at the ceiling. "Those men down there could give me a run for my money in some pretty terrible areas."

"Lovely," said the German with a snort. "More Navidsons; just what we need."

"You say that now, but that's exactly what we need. I met a guy down there, the Emir, trying to do business with him for his land because it sits on a wealthy, wealthy oil field, and holy crap, this guy has the craziest eyes you would ever see. He spits fire and vitriol at me for even attempting to take his land from him, and I back up, honest to god scared for my life for once."

"So how are you going to recruit them then? Gazprom lets you go down there, but you can't pull them if you keep up the sweet little Russian act."

"It's all about ideals," said Navidson. "I've already made inroads with a few of the guys down there, real radicals, but smart, crafty, and hungry to do something. I offer them cash, rubles by the thousands, and they offer me loyalty, and a chance to strike at the Russians in their own home. They've already bought loads of weapons off of the black market, and are recruiting kids by the day."

"Impressive."

"I'll say so," boasted the Norwegian man. "This is easily the best part of my job."

"It's a good thing you're embezzling boat loads of cash out of your company, otherwise this wouldn't be possible. Langley slashed the budget again."

"Great," said Navidson, rolling his eyes. "If only those stupid ostriches in Washington would get their heads out of the sand and start a real war." He snapped his fingers as a show. "That's how fast our budget would be tripled if we ever went to war with the US, and that's the plain and honest truth of it.

TheNoob · Jul 7, 2015

I love the writing in this story. Amazing.

Tycho · Jul 13, 2015

Part VII: Day of Arrival

They sat, quietly, in the war room of the Kremlin, arrayed around the great, circular table; Ivanov in the center, Kerensky to his left, Volkov to his right, and the host of thirteen generals and field marshals of the Russian military who were the highest men in the land when it came to military matters. Generals Vassili, Kurtz, Petrov, and others, grim, older men, shocks of grey running along the hairlines just under their military caps, all clasping their hands and looking at the small, boxlike projections in front of them, lifted up from the table at the press of a button. Each man had inserted his key, and sat, looking at them; the white, stainless room was painful to behold in front of them, glossy and clean. Sterile would be another word to describe it, like an operating room. Or a morgue.

When the first nuclear device had been built and constructed the USSR in secret, Ivanov had ordered these little boxes placed here. Only he, the lieutenants of the Council, and the highest generals had keys to them; technically, they needed only three quarters of their number of keys in order to fire, but Ivanov wanted them all to be unanimous in their decision. If it came time to launch, no man could abstain and act as if he was above the rest, and no man could be the sole voice of power in the room. All had to be firm, united in their decision, prepared to accept the consequences of their actions as they came through.

No one spoke a word. Ludwig sat off to the side, as did Petrovich, wheeled into the room in a mobile chair by an assistant, wearing a cast and an eyepatch over one eye. The normally genial Silk Bear was silent, alone in his thought as he leaned back in his seat and watched all of the men in their places, looking through them, not really seeing. Ivanov had no eyes for anyone else in the room either; the box in front of him, with it's unturned key, spoke louder than a million men ever could have. The only thing that could be heard was the quiet sounds of people tramping by outside of the room where fifteen men would decide the fate of two million Chinese citizens, and five million Japanese soldiers and people.

"Perhaps we should talk about it," said Kerensky quietly. "If we do this..." The sentence hung in the air, unfinished, and broken.

A moment passed before Volkov spoke. "It must be done," he said in a rough voice. "It is for the betterment of our nation."

"Please," said Ivanov in a bare whisper. "We all know that it isn't for that."

"'Does the bear question why it must slay the tiger, lest it's food run out?'" Volkov took out a cigarette from his pocket and lit it, his hands steady, his eyes reaching out ahead of him. "That's a proverb that my grandmother told me often when I was a child. If we do nothing, we shall lose the people."

"Please do not pretend as if you have the people's best interests in mind."

"But I do, Premier." He tapped out ash into a ceramic tray in front of him. "I have all of the best interests of the people laid out before me. This will save uncountable amounts of Russian lives... Mongolians as well. We could end the war in a matter of days, if truth be told, if only we would..."

"No," Ivanov said curtly, his voice strained. "We launch what we agreed to, no more, no less. These will be the only ones we launch during this war."

Volkov shrugged. "It isn't enough."

"You would destroy the whole world if you could."

"Perhaps," he said wistfully. "Man's nature is ultimately destructive. Even you, sir, are the sort that would kick down others and trample all over them."

Kerensky looked at his watch. "0830, gentlemen," he said softly. "It's time. Does anyone have objections to this?"

No one said anything, and Kerensky nodded. Petrovich looked away from the table, while Ludwig bowed his head. Ivanov kept his red rimmed, bloodshot eyes trained on the box in front of him, observing the shape of the silver key; Volkov smashed out his cigarette and nodded to General Monke at the end of the line. "Begin," he said gently.

Monke nodded, and turned his key gently. A buzzer went off in the room, loud and annoying. It sounded almost like an air raid siren in the volume and the general wailing quality of it. Petrov was next; he too turned the key, slowly, and again, the buzzer rang throughout the room. One by one, the generals turned their keys, until reaching Volkov, who turned his own, and finally, Ivanov.

He reached out to turn the key and thought. The Soviet premier could see them, millions of Chinese and Japanese and even more peoples before his eyes, weeping, and the fireball that would consume them all. For a few seconds, his hand hovered in the air; the other generals watched him closely, observing his undisturbed, almost thoughtful face. Slowly, he gripped the key, and slowly, he turned it. With a click, it locked into place, and the buzzer sounded out again. Ivanov bowed his head and looked at the surface of the table, unable to look at the others; nodding, Kerensky turned his own key, and nodded to the next general in line. One by one, they too turned their keys and locked them into place.

When the final key had been turned completely, silence fell in the room. A map on the other wall in front of them had several glowing blips on it; two yellow ones, one in Soviet Mongolia outside of the town of Khamul, hidden away in the Gobi desert in an underground missile silo, and another one in the swamps outside of Kisi. Three red markers showed the targets; a Japanese metropolis of some seven million souls, and a small Chinese border city of a million. A third marked the Japanese Third Army, approximitely three hundred miles away from Kisi, fortified at Kirgun.

"Make an end of it," said Ivanov.

"As you wish, sir," said Volkov. He stood up from his seat and bowed towards the others, before striding over to the red phone located underneath the map. He entered the numbers slowly in the rotary, letting it click back into place before selecting a new one, and then waiting.

"Bladewatch," he said. "You have your codes. Fire at the designated target."

So saying, he set the phone down and proceeded back to his seat. All of them sat, watching the screen as slowly, small yellow dots came away from the blips on the screen, and traced their routes towards their targets.

The Soviet R-33 was a modern piece of engineering; the smaller, tactical brother to the R-29, the R-33 was a mere twenty five meters in length, weighing at close to two hundred tons. An operational range of a mere five hundred miles was considered very short by the main Russian military command, but it was easier to disassemble and move than the larger R-29. It's primary purpose was a cloudburst, aeration dispersal system, which it would deliver through six, one megaton subwarheads. In layman's terms, the missile was of a short range MIRV design, created to fly up to high altitudes in the atmosphere, approach the target from the upper edges of the stratosphere, tip down, and dive. During the descent, the booster engines would detach from the main missile, the multiple warheads would detach and spread, and chaff would be deployed; a mere twenty seconds later, after falling through almost forty seven kilometers or so of airspace, the warheads would detonate in a cloudburst, or continue on for another seven-twelfths of a second to commense with a ground burst.

Engineers and guards watched as the bay doors of the missile silo slowly wound open, klaxons sounding across the bases that they were stored at. Slowly, gracefully, the ones at Kisi took off one by one; the first, launced at 8:34am, the second at 8:42am, and the third at 10:30am. They climbed away quickly, and disappeared high into the heavens. The missile at Khamul took off slowly at 9:01am, it's own launching sequence having technical difficulties, but it had a shorter way to fly, so it was perfectly fine if they took an extra minute or so. Nobody would know if they were coming or not anyways.

Toyohora was just waking up fully around 9:03am, Tokyo standard time, that crisp, clear, autumn morning. October 20th, 1958, was calm and peaceful for the wartime town, it's factories pumping out arms and weapons, and a small flotilla of transports and destroyers being built and refurbished in it's harbor. School children marched in lines with their teachers to their main class rooms, picking and fighting whether they were in elementary, junior high, or senior high; the college campus was a bit slower, noticeably less full than it had been earlier that year, prior to the restart of conscription for necessary wartime bodies. Shops bustled, housewives went about their lives to the market, and men went about their jobs, trading tales and stories, laughing at terrible jokes, and complaining about how their wives had given them the cold shoulder the night before, or how they hadn't had a woman in forever.

The first missile, designation RR-101, separated above Kisi at 9:04am. It had a descent path traced by long range scout aircraft launched from Kisi that morning, estimated to reach the detonation point in twenty five seconds. Slowly, the half a dozen warheads tumbled out of the sky, accelerating at some 6800km/h. At 9:05am, Tokyo time, they detonated above southern Toyohora; instantaneously, a massive fireball blossomed, consuming most of the southern half of the city. Three hundred thousand were killed instantly by the explosion, not even able to register pain through their nerves before the fireball enveloped them, vaporizing their bodies down to an atomic level. Another million people would be obliterated as they received a matter of a few seconds of warning before the heat and shockwave spreading out from the initial blast caught them. School children, old grandmothers on their way to the open air markets, housewives running errands, and dockworkers on Toyohora's docks, all were killed by the blast that rocked the city of nine million.

Spoiler :

One hundred or so miles to the west, soldiers at Kirgun from the Japanese Imperial Third Army could see the blast and only wonder what they were witnessing, while meanwhile, above their heads came the second missile. RR-182 detonated at approximately 9:10 Tokyo time, blasting out a tremendous set of craters around Kirgun; the fort was utterly destroyed, the three hundred thousand soldiers there that had been waiting for reinforcements from the homeland killed immediately. Not a single radio broadcast was transmitted from Kirgun before it was lost; the Japanese military would not confirm Kirgun to be destroyed until seven days later when a reconnaissance zeppelin from the Air Corps returned with the news that there was nothing left but black scars on the forest floor and trees blasted in every direction.

Spoiler :

The third missile, RR-097, bound for the Chinese border city of Yinchuan, detonated at 09:15am; the lightly defended city, sprawling and made primarily from mud brick and wood, was devestated. One and a half million people died in the tremendous blast that was recorded on seismographs in New Delhi and in Angkor Wat. Mongolian citizens living in Khamul could see the blast that rocked Yinchuan, wondering at the awesome power they were now privy to. Some whispered that it was the end of days come at last to the earth. Others, religiously clutching at their sacred ornaments, muttered about how the hand of god must have struck down Yinchuan; in some ways, they were right in that regard.

Spoiler :

The fourth and final missile, RR-313, detonated above Toyohora at 10:55am; the citizens of the city, thinking that the worst was over, had begun evacuations and a massive campaign to haul people out of the rubble. Because of this, more people than usual were active across the city, and therefore, not in cover; a few people had perhaps a second when they gazed up to see several small, dark, objects come silently out of the sky, going at supersonic speeds, before they were consumed by the newest explosion. This time, the losses were massive; the more scattered warheads launched by RR-313 dealt the most damage, inflicting almost five million casualties on the city, crying children, weeping women, and shocked and horrified men. The fireball did not care; Toyohora was reduced to rubble, 90% of the city destroyed utterly and completely, and the last 10% a heavily damaged and scarred section of the Central Ward, which had gripped onto the north shore of the peninsula since it's creation.

Spoiler :

When the final explosion was recorded on the screen back in Moskva, all of the Generals watched blankly for a moment. Monke was the first to rise, the old and battered German who'd seen the collapse of his former homeland in all of it's sadism adjust his military cap with shaking hands and excusing himself from the room. Petrov, Petrovich, Kerensky, and the rest of the generals were next, leaving Ludwig and Volkov and Ivanov in the room.

Carefully, the Premier pushed his chair back up and stood, cracking his knuckles absentmindedly as he did so. Wordlessly, he left the room, leaving Volkov to watch the map in front of him, a snake like smile sliding across his face as the door slammed shut behind the Premier.

Tomorrow's Dawn · Jul 13, 2015

Haha, oh man. Only a Tycho story could crush something so beautiful as a China and Japan on the same side like that with nukes.

Keep it up!

TheBman24 · Jul 15, 2015

I'm loving this. Definitely keeping an eye on it. :goodjob:

Tycho · Jul 21, 2015

Part VIII: Post-Mortem

October 27th, 1958
One week after Day of Arrival...

The mood inside of the Oval Office was grim, to say the least of it; President Eric J. Carter sat in the high backed leather chair behind the mahogany bulwark that was his desk, while scattered around the room were a host of men and women, watching the television at the other end broadcast it's message. Secretary of State Ethan Thompson, Generals Richard Goreman, Simon Westfield, and Alan Smith, Defense Secretary Matthew Bead, and the Central Intelligence Agency's chief, Arthur Donaldson, were the most prominent out of any others present. Diplomats from the Middle East, the Netherlands, Rome, Spain, and the English States were seated in the room; not a single soul spoke amongst them as they trained their gaze and their ears upon the large, cathode ray tube TV that now broadcast it's message to them.

"...we are receiving reports now that Dutch city of Hamburg has fallen, as the reports from early yesterday morning had indicated. The fighting for the second largest city in the Netherlands was vicious and brutal, part of a Russian lightning campaign that German military experts inside of Russia have termed 'the Blitzkrieg'. We have also received reports from eyewitnesses and several television correspondents in the northern Alps that this morning, Russia launched a small, tactical nuclear weapon with the explosive power of two megatons, detonating it outside of the Netherlands city of Frankfurt, and another outside of Chinese city of Lhasa, in Tibet. While we cannot confirm or corroborate the story from Lhasa and from our correspondents inside of the Democratic Republic of China, we can confirm through pictures and videos sent to us urgently by aircraft that Frankfurt has been badly hit by the resulting blast. Turkish forces are already advancing on the city, seemingly working in concert with the Russian army spearheading the campaign through the Northern Low Countries, with the two nations having agreed to a mutual defensive pact aimed at stopping 'Western aggression and unlawful Sinosphere retaliation'..."

Images flashed up onto the screen. A distant smudge from the mountaintops of some place, more than likely the alps, a rising mushroom cloud over the German city. In black and white, it seemed so peaceful, so unreal... like a dream that was already half forgotten. More pictures scrolled in, this time from the vicious fighting at Hamburg, and the Dutch army in widespread retreat, with sunken, hollow eyes, and skull like faces as they looked up at the cameras and the photographers. A distant shot could be seen of Russian soldiers and tanks advancing into the Dutch city, rifles raised in victory, while another shot showed the Dutch flag and statue to the ancient King of Orange, Wilhelm VI, being torn down in the city square. Slowly, the images dissipated, and returned to the cool face of the newscaster, unflappable and almost stern in his gaze.

Spoiler :

"We have just received more footage, this time of a state address given by Premier Ivanov and his Minister of Defense, Volkov, before the People's Parliament inside of Moskva. We go now to that footage.

Crackly and full of static, it shifted to a view of a packed and crowded room full of people at their desks, encircling the central podium, where a tall, powerful Ivanov, stood next to the thin specter of Volkov, right as his shoulder. Gripping the sides of his speaking podium with both hands, he adjusted his glasses slightly and gazed out at the crowd. As he began to speak, a translation ran on the bottom half of the screen.

"People of Russia, he cried. "Today, I have given the authority to again bring down the hammer of the skies down onto the Westerners and their Chinese allies. While I make this decision with a heavy heart, we cannot abide by pleasantries in this time of war. The Dutch have allied themselves with fascists in Washington, and people who have slaughtered and condemned many of our allies and our fellow political thinkers to death inside of China... and now they encircle us, from the East and the West, and call upon their allies in America, in Spain, and in a host of other nations, to save them from what they have started. They thought that we would not use every tool in our arsenal against them when they unjustly declared war upon us; they were wrong! Today, we mark the day that we say to the world that 'no, we shall never bend the knee'! We shall not surrender to fascists and to reactionaries that seek to claw apart our borders, who fear the spread of the Comintern across the whole world. We are united, stronger than ever, and we shall smite those dogs that ally themselves against us; from Paris to Beijing, Tokyo to Angkor Wat, they shall fear our wrath!"

Cheers broke from the assembly, many people clapping and shouting words of advice. Nodding curtly, Ivanov stepped away from the podium, allowing Volkov to take the stand.

"Brothers," he began sweetly, his words dripping with honey. "and sisters. Friends. Family. Comrades. Today is the day that we make our path throughout the world; today is the day that we shall declare that we can stride forward, with ease and with grace, against the fascists of the West and the traitors of the East. They desire nothing more than to claw apart our nation, to tear us down and our allies, so that way they may spread their perverted ideas of capitalistic degradation and decay into fascism across the world. They fear us, my friends, my brothers, my sisters of the Soviet Union. They fear us for what we are, and they fear us for the power that we have. Which is why today, we have declared that between ourselves and the Turkish People's Republic, that we shall not stand for this Western aggression! We shall fight them to the bitter end, we shall smite them all, and we shall do what we were always meant to do! We shall drive the Dutch into the sea, raze the Chinese cities, force Tokyo to bend the knee, and drive a knife into the guts of the American dogs!"

The people rose, cheering, raising their fists, as the camera swapped between them and Volkov rapidly, the eyepatched, scarecrow of a man raising his arms in triumph. Shouts and cheers, people slamming on desks with their hands, and shouts that were undoubtedly cries for victory, for war, for the world to end rang out throughout that room and into the one where they watched in the White House. Not a single person in the Oval Office said a word.

Slowly, the president stood. "Everyone, leave," he said quietly. "Except for Donaldson, the generals, and the key diplomats from your respective nations."

Once everyone had shuffled out of the room, the President bowed his head over his desk, the entourage he had called to remain sitting in uncomfortable silence. Carter, barely into his forties, looked as if he was fifteen years older than he actually was; gray hairs lined his temples, and his normally black hair had more than a few gray strands coursing through it. No one wanted to make the first move, and so for minutes, nothing stirred between them.

"How could it come to this?"

Donaldson looked down. "I'm not sure, sir," he said tremulously. "We had no idea that they would actually-"

The president slammed his hand down on the desk and glared across at Donaldson. "Then what the hell is your goddamned intelligence network good for," he hissed at the graying man. "You don't seem to know anything at all, except for the fact that the reason why Volkov has so much power right now, is because two of our own agents brought down a goddamned passenger airplane outside of Saint Petersburg. Who the hell are they anyway?"

"Wraith and Foxhound sir, and for the record, they aren't my men, they were put there by Dulles before he was sacked, so-"

"So what? Contact their handler and tell them to stop forcing the world towards the brink of war." The president stood from the chair, pacing irritably in front of the window. "Are you telling me that we can't control these men at all?"

"They've been out of contact with the agency directly for a while sir, all of their orders are going through their handler, Thunderhawk."

"So get him up here, then."

"Sir, Thunderhawk is actually-"

The door to the Oval Office opened with a silent click as the Secret Service ushered in a man. He was thin, ragged, a beard clinging close to his face, his hair white as fresh paper. His eyes flicked across the people in the room, landing squarely on Carter and the trembling Donaldson, who had his back turned to them. Reaching into his breast pocket on his suit, he pulled out a packet of cigarettes and extracted one, his eyes never moving from the two men that he focused on. The others in the room, all of the generals and the other politicians, looked down and away from him.

"So," said Dulles hoarsely. "How have you managed to screw all of this up, Donaldson?"

Donaldson said not a word, but Carter folded his arms and looked contemptuously at the former head of the CIA. "What are you doing here, Dulles? Furthermore, who let you into my office?"

"Nice to see you as well, Mr. President," he said, blowing the smoke out of his mouth in a bored arc. "You wanted Thunderhawk, right?"

"Aye, we did."

"Well," said Dulles, spreading his arms wide. "Good luck finding him. Last we heard, he was in Russia near Irkutsk. This was when I was sacked, sometime in '51 or so. Since you so rudely and unceremoniously dumped me on my butt with your little stunt, Mr. Carter, I completely fell out of contact. Wasn't allowed to use agency equipment to try and get him on the horn or anything of that sort."

The president narrowed his eyes. "Get out of my office."

"What, don't you want to find Thunderhawk, and by proxy, these men?"

"You let loose two mad dogs inside of Russia, without any concrete restraint-"

Dulles jerked a thumb towards Donaldson. "You would think after he fell out of contact with the agency after the first year or two that this one right here would have tried to figure out what the hell was going on. As it is, I left Foxhound and Wraith in capable hands, and-"

"They dropped off the map, we had no contact with them; we thought they got swallowed in Russia and that we'd never see them again-"

"They bombed a passenger plane; did you know about that?"

"Of course," said Dulles brusquely. "That was Foxhound's work I imagine. He was the best bomber in Peru during the 40s, helped us lead a hell of a guerrilla campaign alongside the some of the radicals in the mountains. I'm only surprised that Wraith didn't kill Ivanov."

"Kill him?" The president looked incredulously at the former director, his hazel eyes probing. "You mean that the heart attack-"

"Was Wraith's own work, and probably helped destabilize the government. Mind if I sit here?" Dulles took the seat beside Donaldson anyways, leaning over to the other man and blowing a cloud of smoke onto his face. "You know," he said, "I wouldn't have allowed it to deteriorate this far."

"Because you would have had the Turks invade us first," muttered Donaldson. "Considering your little operation almost cost us a hell of a lot more than it should have."

"My hope was that we could recover enough nuclear secrets to try and check Ivan and his forces before we got to a situation like this. It's not my fault things didn't work out according to plan." Dulles smashed the cigarette out in an ashtray on the president's desk, folding his hands on his chest as he leaned back again in his chair. "Although, I will admit, I didn't think that Ivanov would kowtow to a man like Volkov that easily."

"Because he's not," the President said, sighing deeply. "He's getting roped along by Volkov, and his People's Front. They've gained a huge amount of traction as of late, and are seen as the party defending Russia's borders. That's why Volkov has a seat at the table almost as high as Ivanov does. They might as well be sharing power; Volkov has the keys to the thermonuclear arsenal, and Ivanov wields a heavy section of the populace and the secret police through men like Kerensky and Alfons Kowalski."

"Ivanov won't lose power to Volkov. He's too powerful and has been at the seat of the high table for too long. Any attempt by Volkov to try and usurp his power is going to bring Russia crashing down around him."

"How so?"

"Think of this; if Volkov is gaining as much power as you think he is, he's going to grow extremely frustrated with Ivanov. The two are polar opposites. Ivanov's a more levelheaded man, cautious to almost a fault when it comes to planning things, and uneager to pull the trigger on what Volkov is doing. As for little Yuri... he's playing at being king right now; he wants more and more power, and a man like that is going to crave it. It's why he's put himself in such a good position with the nuclear weapons stockpile that Russia has, and undoubtedly seeded most of the officer corps of Russia with his own men and people loyal to the People's Front. To root out Volkov's support base, Ivanov would have to purge the entire military corp, something that he's not eager to do when atrocities like the ones perpetrated by Beria are still in textbooks across the world."

"So what? You think Volkov might go for a coup?"

"Not unless he's pushed towards it; he's loyal to Russia, no matter how much he may hate Ivanov for his politics and his indecisiveness, he will not stab Ivanov in the back." Dulles leaned forward at this point, turning to look at every man in the room before turning back towards the president, steepling his hands and focusing a sharp gaze on his leader. "If, however, it were to look like Volkov had gone for a coup, and perhaps used illegal means to try and overthrow the Premier... say, through bombings or something similar... people would suspect him, and his attempts to lead in the crisis would fall completely by the wayside, as now he has to fend off allegations from his peers and even from the Cheka that he is actually the one responsible for the coup, or even, dare I say, death of the beloved leader of mother Russia."

Carter was looking at Dulles carefully, like one would look at a very large and venomous snake at arm's reach, rearing back and flaring it's hood to hiss and spit at a man. "You are playing a very dangerous game, Dulles," he said at last. "One that could upset Russia and turn it on it's head, make it collapse, or make us face the worst enemy that we could ever imagine."

"Think about it sir," said Dulles. "With Volkov out of the way, and Ivanov dead or incapacitated, who is left to lead? Kerensky does not inspire confidence, they've lost a chunk of the government already, and the Silk Bear will sign any peace deal. We could push the goddamned Bolsheviks out of Hamburg and Western Europe without having to fire a shot."

"And what's your time frame on this then?"

Dulles shrugged. "I can't control it, and I'd have to get Thunderhawk on the line and get him to do something about this mess."

"Do it then," said the president.

Donaldson looked aghast at him. "Sir, you can't honestly be thinking of something like this, can you? We're supposed to gather intelligence, you said so yourself, not commit murder and assassinate people! If they were to find out they were our agents, we'd be condemned across the world for doing so while under the banner of peace!"

"Ah," Carter mused. "We are no longer at peace."

"What?"

The president turned, looking out of the windows of the Oval Office and down onto the dying, parched grass of the White House lawn. In the distance, he could see the Washington Monument, painful to look at under the late fall sun. "The Bolsheviks want war, and they've already proven that they will do what they can in order to make it. We cannot stand idly by on the sidelines and wait for our turn to die. They hate us, hate us so much for standing against them and what we've supposedly done, that they are willing to drop weapons of mass destruction on millions of people and evaporate them as if they didn't exist because they think that we are out to get them. We cannot afford to just sit around and exist while they come for us." He turned to General Westfield. "You have the authority to start drafting troops. Tomorrow, we declare war."

Spoiler :

Kerensky picked up the phone in his office, his trembling left hand holding a cigarette that trailed a jerky trail of smoke. He dialed quickly; this was the only line in the Kremlin that was secure to his contact in Irkutsk.

"Aye?" The cold, hard voice came over the line. "What do you want, Kerr?"

"Have you had any contact with Langley yet?"

"None. You sound worried."

"I'm worried to death," he said. He took a drag from the cigarette and let it fill his lungs. "The mood here is insane. I need out."

"You aren't allowed out until the plan is finished. Dulles agreed to the initial plan, and with him gone, I'm sticking to it."

So who cares? He wanted to scream through the phone at the other man, but held his cool, trying to relax. "I know that there are American agents in Moskva," he said. "I need to get out of here, friend. Volkov is insane, and Ivanov is not checking him like he is supposed to be doing."

"I fail to see how that is my fault."

"I can't do it anymore. The likelihood of being... of being..."

"Discovered?" The man on the end of the line gave a serpentine, slithery laugh that chilled Kerensky to his bones more than the cold outside. "You should relax, Kerensky. All is right with the world."

"Volkov gave the order this morning to destroy another two cities. Casualty figures are already rolling in. Five million dead near Frankfurt, four million near Lhasa."

"Why do you care if a few million Dutchies or Chinamen get the ax? It's not your skin boiling off of your bones."

"I'm complicit in this by being here-"

"And you're also complicit in the conspiracy. You are going to stay in Moskva until Dulles tells me that you can leave."

"I can't... I have a family..."

"You should have thought of that before you signed up with us. Let it be a lesson and a reason why you shouldn't mess up during these delicate and dangerous times." He could hear some form of background noise on the other end of the telephone, but couldn't make it out.

"At least tell me who I can go to if things go south," he begged. "What if Volkov and Ivanov discover what's going on?"

"Then you're already dead. If I tell you where the others are, it won't benefit them at all, and may even get them killed. You are with us until the end."

"I just need something, Hawk, I need something-"

A click signaled that the line was dead. Slowly, Kerensky put it back in it's cradle and stared at it.

I'm dead, he realized. There's no way out of this.

Tycho · Aug 6, 2015

Part IX: The New Sun

Paris sat silent the day that it's destruction was allotted. It had been marked, unmarked, adjusted, moved, rescheduled, rescheduled again, pushed back and delayed, rescheduled a third time, and finally pushed up. It was strange to think of, if you thought about it. Comically funny, really; a few men in a distant bunker of the Soviet Federation had meticulously planned the date for the thermonuclear obliteration of the sprawling, thirteen million resident city, teeming with the young, the old, men and women, it's streets thonged by the French and the Dutch, Americans and the English, Romans, Spanish and Roman expatriates, and foreigners hailing from around the world. Perhaps a few Russians were even in the city. It wouldn't have mattered, anyways, if there were or not. Paris had been slated to meet it's maker, set up by those few men who would pull the trigger that would end those thousands upon thousands, millions upon millions of lives.

They were ordinary men, as well. You'd think that those that sign up to be the ones to push the button would be the sort of sociopathic miscreants exiled from normal society because they intend fully to rip down the heavens and take everything with them if possible. But The Men Who Would Be Gods are not like that at all; they are squeaky clean, professional, get up early in the morning to have breakfast with their families before sending their children off to school and kissing their wives dutifully on the cheek and hugging them good bye. They ride the same bus as the garbage men, the office workers, the dry cleaners, the hairdressers, and the clothing store employees; they brush their teeth every day, rushing sometimes as they realize that it has become late, guiltily thinking about flossing as the deadline for their dentistry appointments come closer and closer. In other words, they are normal, sane, people.

Which is what makes their actions so strange.

These same, ordinary people that are just like you and me are fully capable of wiping out a city. Hell, they planned it out and meticulously laid out the date at which it would be vaporized. In a way, it's frightening to think that normal, ordinary people like you or I could be responsible for murdering millions, pushing a button to send the hammer of god arcing through the air, to land amongst the human masses that walk the streets of their own city, the only home many of them have ever known, and to lay waste to them so that at the end of the day, they may be paid, go home to their smiling wives and their children freshly home from school, listening with tired eyes to the stories that they have brought home, talking to their wives and conferring with what they need to do around their old, well worn house, with it's leaks and it's creaks and it's constant repairs and cleaning, maintenance that any man across the world would be doing in a normal, family home.

How strange is it to think that these same men are the ones that would kill millions on the order of a man like Yuri Volkov?

We refuse to believe that humans could be so callous towards human life. We believe that with every action that results in a human's death, that the other person responsible is a cold, calculating, heartless being that wishes for nothing more than the eradication of the others that exist beyond. We paint them as mad dogs, sinister and snarling in the night, at the fringes of society, picturing them as outcasts and ghoulish men who revel in the pain and suffering of others. They are the villains of the stories and the images that we paint in our heads, of men who laugh and joke shamelessly about the women and the children that they have slain, of the elderly and the sick and the infirm that have been turned into ash that shifts and howls across empty streets, where buildings on either side have been crushed, smashed, thrown to the sky and brought down with a thundering roar. These brutes, these madmen, they are the ones that we always picture pulling the trigger at the end of the day, the ones that would cause the deaths of thousands and thousands, millions and millions, all because they are sick and horrid.

But they could be your father. Your uncle, your grandfather, your cousin, your son, your brother or spouse, someone in your life that you look upon kindly across the table at family dinners and holidays, discussing politics as you pass the beans back and forth, breaking bread and drinking wine and beer. Maybe sports is a heavy topic; maybe he's saddened by the fact that his team from his city isn't doing so well this year. You both laugh at the jokes that are exchanged between the two of you, the small talk intensely focused upon and scrutinized, but you two are worlds apart from one another, even though you sit barely an arm's length away. You would never know that that day he had pressed the button, that which would end the world for an entire city and countless families like your own. You would hardly realize it at all, as you talk about your ailing parents, or your struggling health, or something similar that affects the two of you.

But who dares to win?

Paris. The city founded by the French a thousand years ago. Built upon culture and prestiege and power that had fallen silent in the 15th century when the nation had collapsed. A beautiful city. Filled with buildings that harkened back to long lost days and years that go by, the halcyon times that no one can really remember except dimly, faintly, sweetly, regarding it absently in their mind as they walk upon the sidewalks, next to cafes that never sleep, past performers that play their instruments and bus stops packed with people who blend and wash together in the great mural of life. The towers and the Parisian cityscape are beautiful to behold, hailed by the people who live there, who deride the American skyscrapers that dot their cities, holding their own elegant city to a higher place in the hierarchy of pride and respect.

Strange, really, how calm people could be on The Morning That It Happened. The Turks had drawn within a hundred miles to the east, the distant sound of war rumbling across the city and it's outskirts at night sometimes on clear and cloudless evenings. The Russian Third Army, numbering some one hundred thousand strong, had drawn within fifty miles of the city in the northeast, and while they were not bombarding the city, towns and farms had been raided. Despite the desperate situation that Paris and the Dutch Republic was in, the place still held some sense of quiet serenity, something rare to find in the midst of the horrible war that had gripped the entire world so far.

But all that would change.

Ready.

Steady.

Go!

A silo had been hastily made outside of the former Dutch city of Amsterdam, built and drilled into the Earth while the Russian army smuggled in another tactical device. Slowly, the doors slid back upon it's prison, the light of the dull sun an aching thing to feel beating against your temples, the sound of the klaxons and the alarms sounding, warning that this was for real. It was launch time.

Slowly, it's engines igniting, it slipped out of the silo. It's route to Paris was much shorter than the thermonuclear devices in the East had to deal with when they struck down at the Japanese and Chinese defenses and cities. A bare one hundred or so miles; with just the single press of a button from Moskva, a cadre of white coated, grim faced men bustled about with their lives, passing coffee and cigarettes around while they watched the timer tick down on the board in front of them. By the distance that they had launched from, it would take but five minutes to strike the Dutch city.

The spindle of the rocket's exhaust wound it's way across the sky, arcing upwards majestically into infinity before leveling out and cruising on it's way to Paris. British and American radar from London and from an American destroyer off of the coast detected it as it traced it's silent path down, moving fast enough that the bow of the sonic shockwave ahead of it would not betray that it was coming until it was too late. There would be no time to warn the countless Parisian citizens that their death was on it's way. There would be no time for anything now, as it came down, painted jet black, it's engines roaring and pushing it faster and faster, down and down, towards the former French capital, the jewel in the crown of the Dutch Republic, the last bastion of Dutch governance in the tottering state that was now threatening to buckle under it's own weight.

Paris was picked for a very specific reason. And as the multiple re-entry vehicles separated over the city and spiraled down, the reason why would remain unknown except to those in Moskva.

Spoiler :

Boom.

In one instant, Paris was there. It's populace was still alive. It's people still thronged the streets. The buses still ran, the trains did as well, the cafes were still open, diners sipped at coffee and tea under the open sky, the parks along the rivers were open and thronged with people and with tourists, the taxis honked at one another, dogs barked and children laughed.

In another instant, Paris evaporated.

And with it, was the Dutch Republic

Spoiler :

Tycho · Aug 6, 2015

Short update, I know, but I have been really busy lately (last vacation of the summer, prepping for college, and finally, XCOM), and so it's taken awhile to get this one out. I will be looking to get another update out by Sunday, and hopefully pick up the place with some of the minor characters this time.

Tlönitte · Aug 7, 2015

70 years

Tlönitte · Aug 7, 2015

Wonderful writing

Tycho · Aug 23, 2015

Things are still being written, but you can more accurately expect stuff at the end of the week (Friday/Saturday) in a double or even triple update when I get around to it. Thank you for your patience.

Moai_Spammer · Sep 8, 2015

subbed

Tycho · Oct 15, 2015

Part X: A Bleeding Sky

Spoiler :

Ninety seven thousand feet above the surface of the world, the slim, spoke-like ramjet soared at it's cruising speed, approaching Mach 3. It banked a little in the direction of the rising sun, while in it's undercarriage, cameras snapped pictures of the troop movements that were currently underway.

Greyhound sat in the cockpit in the front, manning the controls, while in the back, two black uniformed and frowning men examined the ground with their periscopes. "Could you perhaps bring us a bit lower?" The more dour one had to shout above the noise of the ramjet's engines howling in the background. "There's a hell of a lot of cloud cover out there today."

"Can't," called back Greyhound, rubbing his chin as he cocked his head towards the other man. "If we go any lower, it won't matter how small or sleek the aircraft is. Russian radar will catch us in a heartbeat."

"You're deluded if they don't already have us on their scopes," spat the man with dead eyes, not even caring to look up from his scope. "We can't take these pictures back Stateside if we have nothing really to show them but awful cloud cover."

"You'll have to deal with it," shouted Greyhound. "Or if you want a closer look, you can get off of my aircraft!"

That earned a look of fury from the dead eyed man, but he said nothing else. Up here while they were aboard, there were no gods and no kings; only the pipe smoking Greyhound who (theoretically, of course) decided life and death over them. He could easily lock them outside of the cockpit, flick the ramjet's engines off, and let the tiny, silver aircraft go tumbling down in a spiral towards Earth, spinning faster than a top before it plowed into a mountainside. He would be lying if he hadn't thought about it all the other times that he'd had to deal with these very same men on very similar missions with their snorts of derision and their snide remarks that percolated like the morning dew.

Spoiler :

"What are the Ruskies doing down there anyways?"

The dour one, perhaps a bit startled, jerked his head up and frowned, rubbing his neck nervously. "Looks like they're moving their armies east," he said. "We got the pictures of their Third Army approaching Toyohora from the west, and their Fifth Army is perched up in the Mongolian territories, digging in and fortifying. They seem to be preparing."

"For what?"

"Storm across the border, perhaps," said the dour man. "Just like they did to the Dutch. Their missile sites are getting readied as well."

"Damn," muttered Greyhound. "Does it look like it's going to happen soon?"

"Hard to tell, really. They might do it in a day, or a year. Depends on how many Chinamen they want to kill with their damned nukes, first."

"Jeez. Is it true that the President is authorizing an intervention force to help out the Chinese?"

The dead eyed man with the sour face turned his head up and shrugged. "Nobody knows for certain," he said, leaning back down over his periscope. "But in all likelihood-"

The sudden beeping and clanging of warning alarms at the helm of Greyhound's fingertips jerked his gaze away from the sour man and down at the radar. Fervently, he prayed that nothing would show up; the warnings were a thing that would sometimes happen, something that the useless eggheads described as being part of the magnetic fluctuations of the Earth, but perhaps-

"Dear god," he muttered.

A faint blip had appeared at the edge of his radar, and with each passing sweep, it grew closer and closer by an amount that could easily be described as hideously terrifying. With every passing, two second sweep, it came another tenth of the way closer to the source.

"What's the matter?" The dour man had leaned forward and was frowning at the screaming instruments. "Is something going on?"

"Yeah," said Greyhound grimly as he tightened his grip on the controls. "Strap in, right now."

Without another word, the dour man and his dead eyed companion found their spots and wound the belts around them, gritting their teeth together while Greyhound himself pushed the throttle up as high as it could go. The tumultuous cry of the ramjet's engines turned into a scream as it pushed it's way past Mach 4 and approached Mach 5.

Greyhound was on the radio almost immediately, trying to keep the fear out of his voice as the blip on the radar came closer and closer. "Jupiter, Jupiter," he hailed out, "I have a bogey on my tail up here, and he's closing in hot. Requesting an advised route, over."

Nothing but static on the radio. Perfect, thought Greyhound. Just want I wanted right now.

The sleek shape of the ramjet tipped it's nose down and began to dive; behind it, the Russian Shakal followed suit, diving in a hellish angle that pulled and tugged at the aircraft's protesting pieces that held it together. The pilot of that aircraft was truly a daredevil; such aeroplanes had not been built to withstand that sort of high pressure situation that would have ripped most apart, but true to the typology of his own murderous flying machine, he took a more jagged angle so that he might catch up to his quarry all that faster.

His aircraft's weapon tracking system, one of the best and finely made out of the Russian aerospace complex, acquired it's lock in a mere few moments; he fired two of them, one after the other, as he had been trained to do. The first one corkscrewed down past the the nose of the spycraft that he was chasing, exploding and wreathing it in smog and fiery smoke for a moment as it whined feebly in the howling air that surrounded it. It tumbled now, end over end, before the pilot at the helm righted the craft and spun it another way, firing off a sequence of flares and chaff to distract the second missile that had followed him. That one just barely missed the tail of the spy plane, colliding with chaff and detonating. The chase was still on.

Clutching the yoke of his aircraft with all the force in the world, the Russian pilot chewed his lip thoughtfully. Six missiles left on his interceptor; he was only supposed to wound the aircraft, and in his excitement, he had forgotten that if two slammed into it, it was likely to break apart in midair and cause a hell of a wreckage field for the recovery teams when they went to go try and salvage it. But who would care.

Certainly not him.

He slammed the plane's throttle up as high as it could go, watching the altimeter of his plane go roaring downwards; in the span of only a minute or two, they'd dropped around thirty thousand feet and were going only further and further as the spy plane desperately dipped and dived towards the harsh, Siberian tundra far below, trying desperately to shake off the craft that was following it. The interceptor followed it's every movement, sliding in and out behind it's tail, and trying to adjust a lock on the aircraft. It now seemed to be jamming him desperately, but it could only do so for so long.

The rapid beeping signaled another lockon, and he fired again two missiles that snaked out from under the aircraft, racing ahead even faster than he was going. Their white contrails behind them were already fading rapidly as they closed the increasingly small gap between the two planes, but the spycraft was clever; it banked hard to the right, in an almost ninety degree turn, looping around and around and dragging the interceptor behind it as well as the missiles, until it's belly rolled up to the sky and it plunged downwards again. The missiles, outmaneuvered, stopped their flight, and tumbled to the ground on their own now.

Interesting, thought the Russian pilot. But that won't save you.

"Don't we have any guns on this thing?" The shout of the dead eyed man could barely be heard over the roar of the ramjet's engines, but it was loud enough for Greyhound to hear him.

"No! This is a Goshawk! We don't have any arms on this damned thing!"

"Can't we do something then? We can't just let this man blow us out of the sky!"

"He's got four missiles left, if we play this right, we can make it out of here alive and intact."

"What do you mean 'if' we play it right?"

"There's a high possibility that the aircraft might rip apart depending on how I fly it at this speed," he shouted back. "It's not supposed to be going this fast! In testing, all the mechanical faults were exacerbated at Mach 4 and above!"

"There has to be something that can be done!"

Another warning sound came from the controls of the Goshawk, and Greyhound desperately yanked hard on the stick to drag it away from where he thought the missiles were going to catch up to him from. After a few seconds of frantic diving, the warning sounds of the missiles following them faded out, only this time to be replaced by the sound of something far more sinister; the mechanical failure alert was now howling as loud as the ramjet, screaming about the critical danger that the ramjet was now in, and how if they didn't do something now, it was all going to break apart.

"Piss," muttered Greyhound. "Only one thing left to do now."

The Russian pilot saw now how the ramjet was dropping speed; probably a failure in it's engines that prevented it from maintaining the frantic speed that it had been enjoying just a few minutes ago. A savage smile curled across his face, and he grabbed the radio to began triumphantly shouting for backup recovery teams to be scrambled. The lock on the spycraft sounded as he was doing this, and absentmindedly, he flicked the button that would send a pair of two more missiles chasing after it's quarry.

Away they went, chasing after the spycraft, when something strange happened; it shut off it's engines completely, and now glided on the air. At the same time, it began to turn sharply, beginning to face the interceptor that was now behind it. The Russian interceptor pilot hardly had time to react as the ramjet flicked it's engines on, climbing suddenly towards it at a high speed. Both of them screamed towards each other, and both pilots turned their aircraft as hard as they could to avoid one another. It wouldn't be enough.

The wings of both planes that glided near one another were sheared off at the supersonic speeds that they were traveling; the American ramjet, still carried by it's engine, would tilt and begin a death spiral down alongside the Russian interceptor, until the missiles that had been chasing the spycraft (and had turned to follow it's sudden change) slammed now into the tail section of the Russian interceptor. In a fraction of a second, the entire tail was blown off, and the interceptor pilot had only a brief moment to mutter the takbir before the entire craft was violently ripped apart and erupted into fragments showering down towards the cold tundra.

As for the American spycraft, it too now tumbled, right into hostile Russian lands.

In a moment, the smoky trail of the dying Russian interceptor, and the mournful wail of the ramjet's engine, were gone. High above the clouds and the distant Earth, the wind rose and sighed.

Tycho · Jun 13, 2016

Part XI: On a String

They had been streaming south for weeks at this point, along rail lines and highways, broad avenues and roadways cleared out to make way for the soldiers sent south to the Mexican border. Pershing, Sherman, and Patton tanks proceeded by in great columns, taking up both the sides going to and going away from their destination. Thousands of military vehicles, jeeps, armored personnel carriers with polished guns mounted to their tops were in the mix. The majority of the American soldiers that had been dispatched rode the rail lines that ran parallel to many of the highways the bulk of the army was taking to their destination.

They had been brought from a host of cities. Houston, Dallas, Washington, New York, Portland, everywhere that troops could be raised, they were. Selective service and chosen five million men to join the army. The state police and other bodies of authority made sure that those with the honor of going to war actually showed up. Martial law had been declared in several cities; riots had been cracked down on heavily. A sense of tepid grimness had settled down over the entire nation, flashing out brightly every so often in stories that were plastered across the newspaper headlines. Ethnic Russians lynched by fearful, native born Americans. The vast majority of others herded into internment camps in the burning Mojave and Sonoran Deserts, in blistering conditions, and watched over by American soldiers just like the ones now heading south to crush the Soviet backed regime in Mexico city.

A huge force had already been amassed at Coyuca, just past the Mexican border at the American enclave around the tiny city and its adjacent military base, Fort Independence. They had pitched a virtual tent city around the small town, while freighters and barges full of food traveled down the sound of Baja California, delivering weapons and munitions alongside of them. The mood in the camp was perhaps a bit brighter than it had been in the rest of the country; the Mexican army was known to be all but defunct, lagging badly behind in modernization, and propped up by huge subsidies paid for by the Soviets in Moscow. There was perhaps a sense of thinly veiled smugness in the mind's of the men who were preparing to storm across the border. It would be easy, they said. There were setbacks in Europe, yes, and the Reds were almost able to cross the English Channel and take London, but their southern ally that pressed so readily against their southern border was about to be destroyed.

Confidence that percolated among the ranks of the enlisted men didn't come from their superiors in the army, or even from the American government. It was hard to say where it was coming from, if truth be told. It had crept, insidiously, into the mindsets of the riflemen and the common GI on the front lines, the eighteen and nineteen year old boys excited to be far from home, fighting a war of freedom. The last war had been sixty years ago, and it had been a minor brush up, cleaning up the already rotten remnants of the German colonial empire in North America. Not a one of them had actually seen combat. Even fewer read the stories that were coming out of East Asia, where hundreds of thousands of desperate Chinese soldiers would charge forward in a massed line, only to be mowed down in droves by Russian tanks and Mongolian machine guns as they advanced south through Shaanxi and Heilongjiang, coming closer to being in striking range of Beijing. Few knew of the horrors reported from the glassed city of Toyohora, where the streets were still filled with corpses and packs of wild dogs that attacked men and women, and how at night, the countryside around the city would glow so bright, that even the full moon appeared to dim and quiver.

The enlisted men knew nothing about what their superiors were discussing. If they had, perhaps the mood would have been a bit more reserved.

Spoiler :

Our agents report that the strike is going to target Coyuca.

Can you be sure of this?

No, said the CIA director. He rubbed his bleary eyes and readjusted his glasses as he sat in the War Room alongside the other officials, military men festooned with medals jangling, narrow-eyed politicians who smoked cigarettes, and the weary president himself. If truth be told, it is the most likely target, and our belief is conjecture.

We cannot afford conjecture at this hour. We are risking thousands of lives here.

I know, sir. Russian counter-intelligence has been... difficult to surmount to say the least. We are running out of living informants the more that we try to needle them.

How is this possible?

Moles, possibly. Informants on our side.

What is our counter-intelligence situation like?

Alright, I suppose. But nothing compared to the Reds... they have their entire operation locked down tighter than anything else I have seen before.

The president looked down at the table, and rubbed his forehead. There was silence in the room before he spoke. All of you know just how deep into the mud we are right now, gentlemen. There's no way around it. The media is muzzled because of our explicit orders to do so, but the reality is, we are in dire straights... they are advancing through Europe alongside the Turks, China and Japan are collapsing like paper tigers. There are very few nations in this point that can stand up to them.

Silence greeted his words. He continued on. We need to turn this around promptly, and sharply. If we don't, we risk losing control of the situation. If they take London, we cannot stage our troops out of there in order to try and retake the continent from them. If the unthinkable happens, and China falls, they will turn every single one of their guns against us, and we can only defend for so long. We must act, and act quickly.

What do you have in mind?

The president, raising his eyes, looked at the CIA director. He couldn't remember the other man's name; they had been through so many men in that position since the beginning of the year, and it had only been three or four months. There was a plan organized by Dulles, before he left office under my predecessor. We destroyed the files upon his departure, but we did not recall his field agents. The two of them have been responsible for a string of known bombings and assassinations inside of Russia... but we need them now to do more than just target generals or Russian parliamentary members.

And what then do you need them... us... all of us to do?

Kill Ivanov, said the President. So maybe our war can be over just a little bit quicker.

The conjecture and estimates from the American CIA had been worthless as it turned out. Though they had correctly identified the shipment of a high yield tactical missile delivered to Mexico City two months prior, they had missed the planned target of the strike by almost three hundred miles. Instead of the American army stationed at Coyuca, they were planning something far different.

Coyuca was but a small town of around forty thousand people in total. North, though, just across the Mexican border, was the city of Tuitan, a metropolis of almost a million individuals, a key rail juncture in the southern USA for shipments of goods along the border, and most critically, had a n airfield that was being used to ship in paratroopers and more from across the nation for the planned invasion into Mexico. More than anything else though, Tuitan has been siezed by the US almost a century and a half prior; it was core, sovereign territory of the American people, and the makeup of its population reflected that. Less than a third were ethnically Hispanic, the the formerly bustling population of them repatriated south graciously over time, and then forcibly removed as Mexican independence movements, nominally funded by the Soviets in Moscow, began to gain ground.

It was then decided, on March 22nd, to fire the RR-693 missile slightly north of the city, not only as a way to halt the increase of American troops on the border, but as a political statement against the rest of the world.

The Americans picked up the signature of the missile the second that it had been launched, calling out warnings. Men in Coyuca were still desperately digging trenches and foxholes for themselves, not realizing the futility of it if the missile actually hit them, when word came through that the missile was not sailing towards them, but heading north. They were all relieved in some sick, twisted way; relieved that it would not be they who would die to the nuclear hellfire, but someone else, someone much different and apart from them. They were overjoyed, if truth be told, embracing one another, weeping, as three hundred miles away, the lives of some seventy five thousand American soldiers and thirty thousand civilians evaporated in an instant.

Spoiler :

[BTS:RFC]: The Dawn Comes Softly

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