Categories > Books > Harry Potter > The Rise and Fall of an Empire
A/N: I would once again like to thank all those that have reviewed. My offer from last chapter is still up. As a thoughtful reviewer pointed out to me, I have this story listed in the Gabrielle Delacour character list on Fanfiction.net. So as a response to all those who are wondering when I plan to introduce her, it will be in the next few chapters. On another note, this story is already on a much larger scope than I had originally planned, and as such, I will not finish this story by the start of school so as of August 15, 2006, updates will be much slower in coming, so please be patient. In addition, just in case anybody is wondering, I am using actual military tactics, strategy, technologies, and vehicles, unless specified, for added realism.
Striking hot iron
Salem, Oregon, the United States
1245 GMT (4:45 AM PST), 1 December 2001
It was silent in the early pre-dawn hours around the forge of Jeff Strauser, save for the ringing of his hammer against the hot metal he was shaping. He was a blacksmith by trade, and this showed in his everyday life as all around his workshop there were halberds, daggers and swords of every type imaginable. He had also spent some time in the Green Berets at Fort Bragg so he was also trained in SpecOps combat. He was now shaping the breastplate for a suit of armor, and he still had a ton of orders to fulfill. The attacks may have spelled disaster for some people but for him it was a windfall of gargantuan proportions. Now, everybody and his brother were looking for any type of protection possible, and since sales of fully automatic weapons were still officially prohibited, they went to their local smithy for their protection needs. As he finished shaping the breastplate and set it off to the side to cool, he decided to take a break and begin on one of the blades for his personal collection, a design of his own based off a 16th century samurai sword. He retrieved a three-foot long rod of iron and put it in the immensely hot forge, and after it started glowing from the heat, he took it out and began shaping it on his anvil.
Just as he finished the first courses of metal shaping, he felt a tremendous ripple in wards he had erected around his workshop. He put a stasis charm on the red-hot metal, and went to investigate what could have made his wards react so violently. Still he was no fool, so he picked up two of his throwing daggers and a long sword which he sheathed on his back; he had met quite a few of his magical brethren who were unhappy that he choose to use his talents in a trade which the mundane people of the world used as well. As he walked out of his workshop and looked about, he saw nothing and that was precisely what made him exceptionally on-edge. As he turned back towards the door of his workshop, he had to duck quickly as a malevolent blood boiling curse hit right were his head had been only seconds before. He rolled for the cover of the nearby bushes, and from their safety, he looked around for the enemy.
One of his attackers passed right by the bush he was hiding in, so he tripped them with a sweeping kick, and then quickly slit their throat with one of his daggers. He leapt out of the bushes and came face to face with a six-foot tall figure in weighty black robes wearing a half-skull mask. He speedily took this person down with a rapid combination of punches and kicks he had learned from Tae Kwon Do. When the figure fell, he saw another behind it and he quickly threw one of his daggers, and the third Death Eater went down. He heard a sound coming from in close proximity to the door to his workshop and blindly threw the second dagger towards the sound. When he saw what he had hit, he was greatly disappointed as his dagger, now severely embedded in the door. As he looked at the dagger, the last Death Eater grabbed him in a stranglehold. He quickly broke the grip of the Death Eater, and disabled him by delivering a swift hammer-strike to the side of his neck, hitting the vagus nerve directly. As he looked around, he felt thankful to be breathing after that devilish skirmish, and he went inside to phone the police.
Lockheed Martin Skunkworks Site B, somewhere in the Midwestern United States, exact location classified
1322 GMT (6:22 AM CST), 1 December 2001
The first operational flight of the new SR-95 Aurora spy plane was only minutes away, and the techs and flight crew were exhilarated. More of a spaceplane than an aircraft, the vehicle was a masterwork, a divine creation that could fly at speeds in excess of Mach 7 and altitudes over 25 miles high, and covered in a radar-sensitive metamaterial which made it effectively invisible to radar. The new laser radar, or LADAR, system would identify and analyze anything larger than a meter and send targeting information to battlefield units through the Warfighter Information Network, WIN for short. The ground penetrating radar, or GPR, on the Aurora would detonate all non-US model mines on a battlefield and be able to identify tunnels and other subterranean structures such as bunkers. Finally, the order came, the skies were clear, and the Aurora quickly moved to the end of runway 5 Left. When the crew was clear of the jet wash, the Aurora's four robust Rolls-Royce Titan 990 pulse-detonation engines roared into life and the Aurora began rolling swiftly down the runway.
The plane leapt into the air and quickly climbed to thirty thousand feet where it hooked up with a KC-10 Extender so it could refuel. As soon as the tanker's boom was clear, the crew of the Aurora locked themselves into their seats and donned their bubble-like helmets, in preparation for the high altitude. They knew if the plane somehow caught any anti aircraft fire while at their operating altitude, ejection was not an option; if they got hit, they were dead, simple as that. As they climbed higher and higher into the stratosphere, they saw the blue sky deepen into a crushing black and in due course, they saw stars as moved into the ionosphere. Finally, as they reached Mach 4, the two new Pratt & Whitney HSJ-937L-3 hybrid scramjet/pulse-detonation engines kicked in with their 135000 pounds of thrust and they pushed violently back into their seats as the aircraft accelerated. They crossed the Atlantic in only an hour and a half, and then they headed straight for the Danish-German border where the services of the new covert reconnaissance aircraft were badly needed.
25 miles northwest of Kiel, Germany
1607 GMT (5:07 PM Local), 1 December 2001
In the slowly dimming light of the late afternoon, the evidence of battle was seen in the burning carcasses of German Lepard-2 and Danish-owned AMX 30 tanks. All around the field of combat, great plumes of smoke, fire, and dirt would erupt with no more warning than a piercing whistling before each sixteen-inch shell made impact. The shells were fired from the /USS Iowa/, BB 61, and were hitting as many friendly units as they were enemy units, so the artillery was as much a help as it was a hindrance. The German general, Generaloberst Günter Rommel, grandson of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, had been fighting the Danish forces for the past two hours, and even though the Danish army threw five divisions into the assault on northern Germany against Germany's three divisions, the offensive had been stopped cold. However, just then, the tide of battle shifted in favor of the Danes as almost fifty figures in the signature Death Eater cloaks apparated into the field of battle and started casting curses left and right. The German tank crews thought that they were safe inside their heavily armed and armored vehicles, but they quickly learned otherwise.
The lead Death Eater, a somewhat short figure with a silver mask that denoted a position in the innermost circle of power, shot off a red colored beam of light that struck the front of a Lepard and completely crumpled it. After the secondary explosions finished all that remained was a 55-ton heap of twisted metal, and then the true battle commenced. The Lepard crews frenetically attempted to contact their superiors over the battalion, division and corps radio networks but all the frequencies were jammed. Now they were in a losing battle with bent comms and no way to call in additional forces or artillery fire. As tank after tank exploded after hits from the destructive curses, it looked like the Danes would be able to break through Zeile Guderian, the German northern defensive line. As the hole in the German defensive line widened, Danish AMX 30s poured through the gap. It looked like the Danes would reclaim the northern state of Schleswig-Hölstein.
The crew of one Lepard reacted quickly and swiftly traversed their 120mm smoothbore main gun towards a large group of the black cloaked figures, and fired an HE round at the group. Most of them were caught in the blast, but the leader, the one with the silver mask, was knocked out. Soon after the crew turned tail and moved hastily back towards the concealed secondary defensive positions where reserve troops where waiting. The 142nd Infantry battalion occupied position Zweite, and was waiting for the enemy with Panzerfaust 3-T 600s, German-manufactured laser guided antitank missiles. As the Lepards rolled past the hidden defenders, the Danish forces recklessly pursued the fleeing German armor. When the Danish armor came within 700 meters of Zweite position, the 142nd locked onto them. As soon as the readouts on the Pzf 3s showed the careless Danish armor to be less then six hundred meters away, they opened fire and in a little more than a second almost two-thirds of the Danish armor went up in flames, and the rest began to beat a hasty retreat.
By then the Aurora, was soaring high above the battlefield watching all of this with their LADAR system, but they also saw something that the ground forces could not especially with the comms blackout. They saw three battalions worth of armor and what looked like two full brigades of infantry moving straight toward Kiel. Spearheading the force were two battalions worth of AMX 13/90s, Danish-owned light tanks bought from French stockpiles many years before. The main armored force was hugging the coast, while the infantry was moving towards the battle-weary troops of the 142nd infantry battalion, and what remained of the 3rd Panzer Guards. As the infantry reached the battlefield, they met with furious fire from both the remaining tanks and the 142nd. Just then, the Auroras crew activated the ground penetrating radar as they soared above the Danish infantry. They caused massive casualties as thousands of mines detonated no matter if they were in the ground or in a soldiers pack. Unfortunately switching on the GPR also caused casualties on the friendly side of the battlefield as well.
After the Aurora was clear, the effects of the GPR could be seen; most of the German left flank on the battlefield had collapsed but by that time, more reinforcements started arriving from the reserve positions. German IFV Marder 1A3s and BTR-60 APCs loaded with reserve troops rushed forward to strengthen the defensive line and to take on those of the enemy that been captured. The now much less formidable Dutch infantry were only a hundred meters away when the first of the armored personnel carriers and IFVs (Infantry Fighting Vehicles) roared over the ridge that the Germans were defending. As the Marder crews caught sight of the enemy, they opened up on them with the 20mm auto-cannons mounted on the tops of their vehicles. From only 160 meters, the effect was devastating; the shoddy Danish advance, just a large group of targets, was decimated, quickly and efficiently. As reinforcements strengthened the German line the Danish forces retreated quickly, leaving their wounded behind. The German forces pursed them mainly for show, and regained all the ground they lost earlier in the day.
When the APCs with the Geneva symbols on their sides appeared, the German infantry began searching the battlefield for anybody that was not dead. As they searched through the burned out hulks of tanks, two of them found one of the Death Eaters, the one with a silver mask, lying unconscious near the dead shell of a Lepard. They took the mask off the figure and they shined a flashlight on its face, they both got a happy grin. In the few days since the war started, they had taken to studying the magical enemy and memorizing faces of the key players; and they had just captured one of the most dangerous without a fight. They were sure that they would get the Iron Cross, First Class, for their actions, for these two men had just captured Ginny Weasley. From here, her path would lead to a super-maximum security medical facility near Munich, and then to a prison camp in western Siberia. If they won the war, then she would be tried before the world court in Nuremburg, Germany. If they didn't, then her fate wouldn't matter anyway.
Striking hot iron
Salem, Oregon, the United States
1245 GMT (4:45 AM PST), 1 December 2001
It was silent in the early pre-dawn hours around the forge of Jeff Strauser, save for the ringing of his hammer against the hot metal he was shaping. He was a blacksmith by trade, and this showed in his everyday life as all around his workshop there were halberds, daggers and swords of every type imaginable. He had also spent some time in the Green Berets at Fort Bragg so he was also trained in SpecOps combat. He was now shaping the breastplate for a suit of armor, and he still had a ton of orders to fulfill. The attacks may have spelled disaster for some people but for him it was a windfall of gargantuan proportions. Now, everybody and his brother were looking for any type of protection possible, and since sales of fully automatic weapons were still officially prohibited, they went to their local smithy for their protection needs. As he finished shaping the breastplate and set it off to the side to cool, he decided to take a break and begin on one of the blades for his personal collection, a design of his own based off a 16th century samurai sword. He retrieved a three-foot long rod of iron and put it in the immensely hot forge, and after it started glowing from the heat, he took it out and began shaping it on his anvil.
Just as he finished the first courses of metal shaping, he felt a tremendous ripple in wards he had erected around his workshop. He put a stasis charm on the red-hot metal, and went to investigate what could have made his wards react so violently. Still he was no fool, so he picked up two of his throwing daggers and a long sword which he sheathed on his back; he had met quite a few of his magical brethren who were unhappy that he choose to use his talents in a trade which the mundane people of the world used as well. As he walked out of his workshop and looked about, he saw nothing and that was precisely what made him exceptionally on-edge. As he turned back towards the door of his workshop, he had to duck quickly as a malevolent blood boiling curse hit right were his head had been only seconds before. He rolled for the cover of the nearby bushes, and from their safety, he looked around for the enemy.
One of his attackers passed right by the bush he was hiding in, so he tripped them with a sweeping kick, and then quickly slit their throat with one of his daggers. He leapt out of the bushes and came face to face with a six-foot tall figure in weighty black robes wearing a half-skull mask. He speedily took this person down with a rapid combination of punches and kicks he had learned from Tae Kwon Do. When the figure fell, he saw another behind it and he quickly threw one of his daggers, and the third Death Eater went down. He heard a sound coming from in close proximity to the door to his workshop and blindly threw the second dagger towards the sound. When he saw what he had hit, he was greatly disappointed as his dagger, now severely embedded in the door. As he looked at the dagger, the last Death Eater grabbed him in a stranglehold. He quickly broke the grip of the Death Eater, and disabled him by delivering a swift hammer-strike to the side of his neck, hitting the vagus nerve directly. As he looked around, he felt thankful to be breathing after that devilish skirmish, and he went inside to phone the police.
Lockheed Martin Skunkworks Site B, somewhere in the Midwestern United States, exact location classified
1322 GMT (6:22 AM CST), 1 December 2001
The first operational flight of the new SR-95 Aurora spy plane was only minutes away, and the techs and flight crew were exhilarated. More of a spaceplane than an aircraft, the vehicle was a masterwork, a divine creation that could fly at speeds in excess of Mach 7 and altitudes over 25 miles high, and covered in a radar-sensitive metamaterial which made it effectively invisible to radar. The new laser radar, or LADAR, system would identify and analyze anything larger than a meter and send targeting information to battlefield units through the Warfighter Information Network, WIN for short. The ground penetrating radar, or GPR, on the Aurora would detonate all non-US model mines on a battlefield and be able to identify tunnels and other subterranean structures such as bunkers. Finally, the order came, the skies were clear, and the Aurora quickly moved to the end of runway 5 Left. When the crew was clear of the jet wash, the Aurora's four robust Rolls-Royce Titan 990 pulse-detonation engines roared into life and the Aurora began rolling swiftly down the runway.
The plane leapt into the air and quickly climbed to thirty thousand feet where it hooked up with a KC-10 Extender so it could refuel. As soon as the tanker's boom was clear, the crew of the Aurora locked themselves into their seats and donned their bubble-like helmets, in preparation for the high altitude. They knew if the plane somehow caught any anti aircraft fire while at their operating altitude, ejection was not an option; if they got hit, they were dead, simple as that. As they climbed higher and higher into the stratosphere, they saw the blue sky deepen into a crushing black and in due course, they saw stars as moved into the ionosphere. Finally, as they reached Mach 4, the two new Pratt & Whitney HSJ-937L-3 hybrid scramjet/pulse-detonation engines kicked in with their 135000 pounds of thrust and they pushed violently back into their seats as the aircraft accelerated. They crossed the Atlantic in only an hour and a half, and then they headed straight for the Danish-German border where the services of the new covert reconnaissance aircraft were badly needed.
25 miles northwest of Kiel, Germany
1607 GMT (5:07 PM Local), 1 December 2001
In the slowly dimming light of the late afternoon, the evidence of battle was seen in the burning carcasses of German Lepard-2 and Danish-owned AMX 30 tanks. All around the field of combat, great plumes of smoke, fire, and dirt would erupt with no more warning than a piercing whistling before each sixteen-inch shell made impact. The shells were fired from the /USS Iowa/, BB 61, and were hitting as many friendly units as they were enemy units, so the artillery was as much a help as it was a hindrance. The German general, Generaloberst Günter Rommel, grandson of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, had been fighting the Danish forces for the past two hours, and even though the Danish army threw five divisions into the assault on northern Germany against Germany's three divisions, the offensive had been stopped cold. However, just then, the tide of battle shifted in favor of the Danes as almost fifty figures in the signature Death Eater cloaks apparated into the field of battle and started casting curses left and right. The German tank crews thought that they were safe inside their heavily armed and armored vehicles, but they quickly learned otherwise.
The lead Death Eater, a somewhat short figure with a silver mask that denoted a position in the innermost circle of power, shot off a red colored beam of light that struck the front of a Lepard and completely crumpled it. After the secondary explosions finished all that remained was a 55-ton heap of twisted metal, and then the true battle commenced. The Lepard crews frenetically attempted to contact their superiors over the battalion, division and corps radio networks but all the frequencies were jammed. Now they were in a losing battle with bent comms and no way to call in additional forces or artillery fire. As tank after tank exploded after hits from the destructive curses, it looked like the Danes would be able to break through Zeile Guderian, the German northern defensive line. As the hole in the German defensive line widened, Danish AMX 30s poured through the gap. It looked like the Danes would reclaim the northern state of Schleswig-Hölstein.
The crew of one Lepard reacted quickly and swiftly traversed their 120mm smoothbore main gun towards a large group of the black cloaked figures, and fired an HE round at the group. Most of them were caught in the blast, but the leader, the one with the silver mask, was knocked out. Soon after the crew turned tail and moved hastily back towards the concealed secondary defensive positions where reserve troops where waiting. The 142nd Infantry battalion occupied position Zweite, and was waiting for the enemy with Panzerfaust 3-T 600s, German-manufactured laser guided antitank missiles. As the Lepards rolled past the hidden defenders, the Danish forces recklessly pursued the fleeing German armor. When the Danish armor came within 700 meters of Zweite position, the 142nd locked onto them. As soon as the readouts on the Pzf 3s showed the careless Danish armor to be less then six hundred meters away, they opened fire and in a little more than a second almost two-thirds of the Danish armor went up in flames, and the rest began to beat a hasty retreat.
By then the Aurora, was soaring high above the battlefield watching all of this with their LADAR system, but they also saw something that the ground forces could not especially with the comms blackout. They saw three battalions worth of armor and what looked like two full brigades of infantry moving straight toward Kiel. Spearheading the force were two battalions worth of AMX 13/90s, Danish-owned light tanks bought from French stockpiles many years before. The main armored force was hugging the coast, while the infantry was moving towards the battle-weary troops of the 142nd infantry battalion, and what remained of the 3rd Panzer Guards. As the infantry reached the battlefield, they met with furious fire from both the remaining tanks and the 142nd. Just then, the Auroras crew activated the ground penetrating radar as they soared above the Danish infantry. They caused massive casualties as thousands of mines detonated no matter if they were in the ground or in a soldiers pack. Unfortunately switching on the GPR also caused casualties on the friendly side of the battlefield as well.
After the Aurora was clear, the effects of the GPR could be seen; most of the German left flank on the battlefield had collapsed but by that time, more reinforcements started arriving from the reserve positions. German IFV Marder 1A3s and BTR-60 APCs loaded with reserve troops rushed forward to strengthen the defensive line and to take on those of the enemy that been captured. The now much less formidable Dutch infantry were only a hundred meters away when the first of the armored personnel carriers and IFVs (Infantry Fighting Vehicles) roared over the ridge that the Germans were defending. As the Marder crews caught sight of the enemy, they opened up on them with the 20mm auto-cannons mounted on the tops of their vehicles. From only 160 meters, the effect was devastating; the shoddy Danish advance, just a large group of targets, was decimated, quickly and efficiently. As reinforcements strengthened the German line the Danish forces retreated quickly, leaving their wounded behind. The German forces pursed them mainly for show, and regained all the ground they lost earlier in the day.
When the APCs with the Geneva symbols on their sides appeared, the German infantry began searching the battlefield for anybody that was not dead. As they searched through the burned out hulks of tanks, two of them found one of the Death Eaters, the one with a silver mask, lying unconscious near the dead shell of a Lepard. They took the mask off the figure and they shined a flashlight on its face, they both got a happy grin. In the few days since the war started, they had taken to studying the magical enemy and memorizing faces of the key players; and they had just captured one of the most dangerous without a fight. They were sure that they would get the Iron Cross, First Class, for their actions, for these two men had just captured Ginny Weasley. From here, her path would lead to a super-maximum security medical facility near Munich, and then to a prison camp in western Siberia. If they won the war, then she would be tried before the world court in Nuremburg, Germany. If they didn't, then her fate wouldn't matter anyway.
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