Categories > Books > Harry Potter > The Rise and Fall of an Empire
De Opresso Liber
The war between Light and Dark has raged for years, and every day territory is lost to the Dark Lord. Then a string of events turns the world on its ear most violently...
?Blocked
A/N: I would like to thank all my reviewers, and those who continue to read this, even though it does not follow the normal fanfic pattern. However, I would like to know what you think of my work, so please review. By the way, this chapter has almost seven pages and over 3500 words of pure story, enjoy.
Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the United States
1130 GMT (6:30 AM EST), 3 December 2001
The commander of the United States Army Special Forces brigade, more commonly known as the Green Berets, was nearly at the end of his rope. The Army Chief of Staff and the President were asking the impossible, and this time the Green Berets could not pull off what they were asking the Berets to do. Most of the active duty units under his command had already shipped out to forward operating cases around the globe and the rest were severely under-strength. He had decided to put out a general call to all former Green Berets under the age of 55 and would ask them to return to the service; at least until recruitment numbers went up enough to replace the men that called back to active duty. The first of the calls had gone out in the early morning hours and confirmations from all over the West Coast were coming in droves. There were more than four thousand former Green Berets under 55 on the West Coast alone, and they would be called up in sections to provide for easier coordination of transportation. Even though the brigade was hard up for men and material, they would not relax their standards to allow just anybody in to the Greenie Beanies. They only took the best of the best, and the high standards of discipline and training would not be relaxed ever.
Makeshift hospital center, near Suffolk, the United Kingdom
1324 GMT, 3 December 2001
Hermione Granger had seen a lot of suffering in her career as a healer for St. Mungo's but the sheer devastation she saw now eclipsed all that she had seen before. When the British Army rescued her from the radioactive hell that had once been the city of London, she thought that she had seen the worst day of her life. However, life it seems likes to make all situations bad, then worse, and this was just par for the course. When the army heard that she was the equivalent of an MD, they enlisted her help in treating the survivors from the outskirts of London. She had seen people with their skin peeling off their bodies in huge sections, and she herself was already displaying some of the symptoms of radiation poisoning, namely her hair was falling out in large clumps. The radiation quarantine zone extended farther and farther each day, sometimes by miles, other times by no more than a single kilometer, but the constant influx of patients made all the doctors almost dead on their feet. However, the worst thing about the continuous moving of the quarantine boundaries was that mass amounts of equipment was misplaced or mislabeled and then not found until after it usefulness had passed.
Most of the pharmaceutical supplies that found in every town they passed would not be used because before anything was used, a Geiger counter was taken to the lot to see if there were dangerous levels of radiation about. This however made for a very sparsely stocked hospital and for a very poor medical center with little real capacity to provide emergency healthcare. As more and more refugees came to the quarantine tents, the logistical side of the equation quickly overwhelmed the side of practicality, and soon, only the most critical of patients could be treated. The doctors and healers who had survived the nuclear blasts did not like this one iota, as it went directly against their Hippocratic oaths, which were one thing that both worlds had in common. Although the understood the necessity of limiting the use of their supplies to those who truly needed them, the physicians natural empathy called them to help all they could. However, as half of them were themselves prisoners of the quarantine tents, the amount of help they could be was limited to those with severe radiation burns, but those were short in both number and lifespan. Their talents, if used elsewhere, at least in their opinion, might save countless lives, but until the Geiger counters indicated they were back down to a safe level of radiation, they were stuck in the quarantine.
Salem, Oregon, the United States
1532 GMT (7:32 AM PST), 3 December 2001
Jeff Strauser had been on edge for the past few days, not only because of the attack on his person by the sympathizers of the dark lord, but because of the threats, he had been receiving by e-mail. He did not recognize the senders address but the content was some of the worst trash imaginable. The person sending the mail, was apparently a stalker of his wife, Angela, and not just a harmless admirer, this person made it their business to know everything about his wife, right down to the style of underwear she bought. Normally this would not have worried Jeff very much, as his wife was well versed in the martial arts, and was a terrific swordswoman, and she was handy with a gun as well. However, he had re-enlisted back into the Army Special Forces brigade and he was naturally worried about his wife and their children. The emails sent to him detailed what the psycho would do to his children if he ever got his hands on them, and just the mental images made one want to throw up. He got ready to leave for the airport, for although he was a wizard, and a powerful one at that, he had never liked the magical transportation methods. Before he left, he told Angela to watch out for any suspicious characters and to keep a close eye on the kids, and he told her to read the emails in the evidence folder on the computer. After that, he hoped that Angela might be able to figure who the nutcase who was watching her was, and would get him locked up for good.
Dublin, the Republic of Ireland
1847 GMT, 3 December 2001
The nation of Ireland had not lasted more than a few hours after the nuclear blasts, as the Dark Lord had moved swiftly and seized control of the government and the Irish Republican Army. He had been in parlay with IRA leaders for some time now, but he had seen the attacks as the perfect opportunity for him to seize the first part of his grand empire. His forces, in the early hours of the war, were dispersed throughout the British Isles, but now they were mostly concentrated in the land of Ireland, and they were quickly making the island a fortress that would withstand the forces of both nature and the Coalition. The sheer magnitude of the constructions planned precluded the use of only magical manufacture, so an unconventional supply of labor became the primary assembly detail: slave labor. The non-magical peoples of Ireland quickly pressed into service, built the fortifications that would imprison them, from both the outside and from within. Thousands would die from the backbreaking labor forced upon them, and the conditions did not help any. They received rations of two pints of water a day, and an extremely thin soup for dinner, and if they were lucky, moldy bread and rotten fruit. It seemed that the dark lord had taken his lessons in prisoner care from the records of Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler, and he felt no compunction over the deaths of those under him.
Baghdad, Iraq
2059 GMT (11:59 PM), 3 December 2001
The relative peace and stability in the nine years since the ousting of Saddam Hussein shattered, and in its wake came a civil war of epic proportions. Baath party loyalists lead by Saddam and his sons had attacked the palace where President Omar Nasser and his family were residing, and killed them all in a bloody coup, something that had been happening quite often lately. The social progress in Iraq was set back centuries in only a few hours, and the human rights record of the Iraqi people became sullied once again. There had been relative peace in the last three years, after the time when Iraq had become a banana republic of sorts, and for once, it seemed that the Shiites and Sunni's just might get along for more then half an hour at a time. However, the Baathists caused all of that progress to disappear in only a few hours, and soon Saddam Hussein was back in power and Baghdad, after hiding out in Tikrit since his overthrow. His first order of business was to bring Iraq back to the 'good old days', meaning that in elections you either vote for him or you face the gallows. The council members that had run the Iraqi Islamic Republic in conjunction with the President since the banana republic days soon were executed with extreme prejudice and their families were tortured to death and back. It would be several days before the change in leadership became apparent and by then, the world had other problems to deal with.
Fort Campbell, Kentucky, the United States
0125 GMT, 4 December 2001 (8:25 PM, 3 December 2001)
The 101st Airborne Division was one of the frontline units that were leaving for the European theatre of operations, to protect American interests in the region. The first Brigade Combat Team was one of the few units of the United States military at full strength as it was participating in a series of war-games in the Georgia-Tennessee area. The 'Bastogne' brigade, as the men affectionately called it, would first be heading to France to help evacuate American personnel from the country and to give the French army a backbone. Some of the men of the 101st thought that the frogs could definitely use a force to keep them at the front lines, and to make sure that they did not decide to take French leave in the middle of the night. They would be going over in the Wasp class amphibious assault ships, Wasp, Kearsarge, Baatan and Iwo Jima, and they would dock in Cherbourg, where most of the evacuees would be herded. After the last of the evacuees were loaded onto the transports, then the 101st would head toward the front, wherever it would be at the time, and they would delay the invading forces. The troops hoped the French would put up more resistance than they did in June 1940 against the Germans, and they could avoid Paris being captured twice within a century, although the general sentiment was that the French were cheese eating surrender monkeys. Nevertheless, the men and women of the 101st were hoping that the French would be an effective fighting force, at least once their lives, and be able to keep most of France under French control.
Ulan Bator, Mongolia
0341 GMT (11:41 AM), 4 December 2001
The president of Mongolia, Natsagiyn Bagabandi, was facing a major problem; the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region, formerly a province of the PRC, had asked to rejoin the true Mongolian state. Normally Natsagiyn would have jumped at this chance, but with all the problems in the world, and the Coalition making an enemy of anyone that seems to use the war for their own gain, he hesitated to make a decision on the offer. However, his people had heard of the request and they were pressuring him to move in as quickly as he humanly could. What the people of Mongolia did not understand was how bad this would look to the nations of the world, and how it would paint his entire administration with a broad black brush. He would rather have just been able to tell the citizens that he had decided to reserve judgment, and that be the end of the matter. Unfortunately, elected by a democratic society, he could easily be fired by the same process he was elected by, and as most politicians, his priorities went him first, everybody else second. He could either move in and be called a warmonger, or wait and be called a coward, neither of which particularly appealed to his ego. As much as he would have loved to put a decision on hold indefinitely, the populace would not allow him the luxury of time. Most of the Mongolians still held to the conviction that land is the basis of all power, and such an immense accumulation of land would mean that they would be an impressive nation. The Mongolian army had already begun moving through the Gobi towards the border, where they would wait for the go-order from the high command.
Tokyo, Japan
0637 GMT (3:37 PM), 4 December 2001
Abe Shinzo, the Prime Minister of Japan, was in a teleconference with the United States Secretary of State Colin Powell, the Foreign Minister of the Republic of China, and the President of South Korea. The main topic of discussion was what would happen when the weather over the islands of Japan cleared up, and there was no real consensus on anything. The Japanese seemed to think that the North Koreans would strike hard and fast toward Tokyo, in order to take over the country as quickly as possible. The South Koreans had come to the conclusion that Kim Jong Il would focus instead on the South, and try to 'reunite' the wayward of the South to the 'glorious' North. The ROC tried not to take a side but they favored the Japanese opinion, much to the dismay of the South Koreans. The United States was trying to fit into its role as the keeper of the peace in the world, but without sheer manpower in the region, they were mostly ineffectual as peacekeepers. All four nations were pushing their own agendas, and none of them was willing to consider the validity of the others position, or the fact that the North might do something entirely unexpected. The Japanese and South Koreans were at loggerheads with each other, and they were both jockeying for position as the main concern of the United States, while the ROC was confidently self-assured that the US would put the most effort into helping them out of their pickle first. If the situation were not so serious, you would almost think it to be some kind of a skit on SNL or MADTV, but here no one was laughing.
After several hours of argument, the Japanese began to see that until the South Korean army, and the forces of Dongbei had been defeated, the North Koreans were certainly not in any position to invade the Japanese islands for at least six to eight months. The United States was very concerned about the ROC and the fight to keep them free, but they had already assigned the Abraham Lincoln carrier task force to the defense of the ROC. However, they would in an effort to placate the other two parties, send three Montana class battleships and an America class battlecruiser to the Sea of Japan. They would augment the South Korean navy and the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force, and provide a support to any amphibious operations launched while they were in the area. They would be under the command of the joint task force commander for the Sea of Japan region, a Japanese admiral. The US would also send over a Marine Force Recon battalion to act as defensive units, and the Air Force escalated in the coming months. It would take almost four months for all the troops and equipment to arrive in the Japanese bases.
At 980 feet long, the Montana class was the largest battleship class ever built, and they had enough firepower to tip the balance decidedly in the Japanese' favor. Their main armament were sixteen 18-inch guns, which could fire half ton shells almost fifty kilometers, and 12 dual 5-inch gun turrets for close in-support. The Montana, Maine, and Texas would sail from San Diego Naval Base and could be in the Sea of Japan in a little less than six days at their top speed of 40 knots. The America class battlecruiser was another WWII relic, but it could outgun almost any ship on the ocean. Its massive 20-inch guns sent shells flying over 50 kilometers and they had phenomenal accuracy even when firing at maximum range. The USS Valorous would be sailing from Pearl Harbor and would be in the area in just over three days and eight hours at its full speed of 37 knots. Both ship classes could attain such high speeds because nuclear reactors, put in during the Reagan administration as part of a total refit of both designs, powered them. When both groups were together, they would join with the Japanese navy for detached duty, and later reshuffle back into the US Navy deck.
Former Biopreparat laboratory, Sverdlovsk, Russia
0903 GMT (2:03 PM), 4 December 2001
The Russians were identifying where the smallpox pandemic that started in Ankara came, that is to say, who made the actual virus, for it was clearly not a wild strain. Within a day of the first confirmed cases, there were also the first confirmed deaths, and they were gruesome. Almost all of the cases seen by the Ankara medical staff described hemorrhagic smallpox, an extremely deadly type, perfectly, and the incubation time was extremely short for a smallpox virus, at only four days. The large ratio of hemorrhagic smallpox was one thing that sent a red flag, as that particular type of smallpox infection usually occurs only one time in 8000 infections, and almost ninety percent of the cases recorded so far were of this specific type. There were almost three thousand people confirmed dead in 17 countries and on three continents, and with every minute the disease spread to some new part of the world. The technicians at building 273 had a lot of experience working with diseases like this, as they had bioengineered almost 600 different strains under the orders of the Soviet government. What disturbed them more than anything else was that they had made a bioweapon with these exact properties almost thirty years ago, and it supposedly was destroyed on orders from the United Nations Security Council in 1982. They hadn't seen this type of strain since then, and they were glad of it; the work they did in those days gave them nightmares, both then and now.
When the genetic sequencers finished deciphering the complex RNA inside the viral capsid protein, the results made most of the older techs turn paper-white. They remembered every killer virus that came out of their labs, and this was one of the worst ever produced by human hands. This had been a masterwork, the Last Supper of bioweaponry, a virus that killed quickly, spread with every single breath and with no cure; it was designed to be a last resort weapon and the ultimate trump card. However, the existence of such a dangerous disease could not stay a secret for very long, and a Chinese agent told the world of the super bug developed by the Soviet Union. The world as a whole condemned the Soviets for creating such a thing, but all the while gazing jealously at the perfect germ and frantically wondering how they could make one. Thus is the duplicity of the world superpowers, they revile while reproducing what they condemn others for making. The Komitet Gosudarstvennoj Bezopasnosti, better known as the KGB, had confiscated the virus before the United Nations got their hands on it and had reportedly 'eradicated' the super bug. Now the techs and geneticists knew that the KGB had ferreted the cultures away somewhere and had in all likelihood forgotten where they where, and some radical had discovered them and was now using them for their own nefarious purposes.
The virus had been confiscated and 'destroyed' so quickly, that the biologists in charge of the project had not been able to create even a precursor vaccine, or try any form of treatment, except to verify that the usual drug regimen was ineffective. One drug seemed to have a mild effect on the virus, azithromycin, a macrolide antibiotic, but usually the change was only that the patient did not die, but lived in excruciating pain and died of complications, not the disease. Now, however, they had a mandate from Vladimir Putin himself, and they had to pull through on this one; they were to find some combination of antibiotics and other remedies that provided a potential prevention and/or cure. Unfortunately, right after the KGB confiscated the virus, they took all the records as to how the virus formed, so the actual changes made to the viral RNA were yet another mystery to solve quickly. The first thing done was to compare the RNA sequences to most of the major viruses and look for any similarities, which might help in finding a cure. When that was done, they would have an idea as to where to begin looking for a cure, or at least a treatment. With that in hand, they might be able to contain the outbreak before it mutated on its own into something even more deadly, or it escaped into the wild and made a happy home in some animal species, just waiting to spring up.
Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the United States
1130 GMT (6:30 AM EST), 3 December 2001
The commander of the United States Army Special Forces brigade, more commonly known as the Green Berets, was nearly at the end of his rope. The Army Chief of Staff and the President were asking the impossible, and this time the Green Berets could not pull off what they were asking the Berets to do. Most of the active duty units under his command had already shipped out to forward operating cases around the globe and the rest were severely under-strength. He had decided to put out a general call to all former Green Berets under the age of 55 and would ask them to return to the service; at least until recruitment numbers went up enough to replace the men that called back to active duty. The first of the calls had gone out in the early morning hours and confirmations from all over the West Coast were coming in droves. There were more than four thousand former Green Berets under 55 on the West Coast alone, and they would be called up in sections to provide for easier coordination of transportation. Even though the brigade was hard up for men and material, they would not relax their standards to allow just anybody in to the Greenie Beanies. They only took the best of the best, and the high standards of discipline and training would not be relaxed ever.
Makeshift hospital center, near Suffolk, the United Kingdom
1324 GMT, 3 December 2001
Hermione Granger had seen a lot of suffering in her career as a healer for St. Mungo's but the sheer devastation she saw now eclipsed all that she had seen before. When the British Army rescued her from the radioactive hell that had once been the city of London, she thought that she had seen the worst day of her life. However, life it seems likes to make all situations bad, then worse, and this was just par for the course. When the army heard that she was the equivalent of an MD, they enlisted her help in treating the survivors from the outskirts of London. She had seen people with their skin peeling off their bodies in huge sections, and she herself was already displaying some of the symptoms of radiation poisoning, namely her hair was falling out in large clumps. The radiation quarantine zone extended farther and farther each day, sometimes by miles, other times by no more than a single kilometer, but the constant influx of patients made all the doctors almost dead on their feet. However, the worst thing about the continuous moving of the quarantine boundaries was that mass amounts of equipment was misplaced or mislabeled and then not found until after it usefulness had passed.
Most of the pharmaceutical supplies that found in every town they passed would not be used because before anything was used, a Geiger counter was taken to the lot to see if there were dangerous levels of radiation about. This however made for a very sparsely stocked hospital and for a very poor medical center with little real capacity to provide emergency healthcare. As more and more refugees came to the quarantine tents, the logistical side of the equation quickly overwhelmed the side of practicality, and soon, only the most critical of patients could be treated. The doctors and healers who had survived the nuclear blasts did not like this one iota, as it went directly against their Hippocratic oaths, which were one thing that both worlds had in common. Although the understood the necessity of limiting the use of their supplies to those who truly needed them, the physicians natural empathy called them to help all they could. However, as half of them were themselves prisoners of the quarantine tents, the amount of help they could be was limited to those with severe radiation burns, but those were short in both number and lifespan. Their talents, if used elsewhere, at least in their opinion, might save countless lives, but until the Geiger counters indicated they were back down to a safe level of radiation, they were stuck in the quarantine.
Salem, Oregon, the United States
1532 GMT (7:32 AM PST), 3 December 2001
Jeff Strauser had been on edge for the past few days, not only because of the attack on his person by the sympathizers of the dark lord, but because of the threats, he had been receiving by e-mail. He did not recognize the senders address but the content was some of the worst trash imaginable. The person sending the mail, was apparently a stalker of his wife, Angela, and not just a harmless admirer, this person made it their business to know everything about his wife, right down to the style of underwear she bought. Normally this would not have worried Jeff very much, as his wife was well versed in the martial arts, and was a terrific swordswoman, and she was handy with a gun as well. However, he had re-enlisted back into the Army Special Forces brigade and he was naturally worried about his wife and their children. The emails sent to him detailed what the psycho would do to his children if he ever got his hands on them, and just the mental images made one want to throw up. He got ready to leave for the airport, for although he was a wizard, and a powerful one at that, he had never liked the magical transportation methods. Before he left, he told Angela to watch out for any suspicious characters and to keep a close eye on the kids, and he told her to read the emails in the evidence folder on the computer. After that, he hoped that Angela might be able to figure who the nutcase who was watching her was, and would get him locked up for good.
Dublin, the Republic of Ireland
1847 GMT, 3 December 2001
The nation of Ireland had not lasted more than a few hours after the nuclear blasts, as the Dark Lord had moved swiftly and seized control of the government and the Irish Republican Army. He had been in parlay with IRA leaders for some time now, but he had seen the attacks as the perfect opportunity for him to seize the first part of his grand empire. His forces, in the early hours of the war, were dispersed throughout the British Isles, but now they were mostly concentrated in the land of Ireland, and they were quickly making the island a fortress that would withstand the forces of both nature and the Coalition. The sheer magnitude of the constructions planned precluded the use of only magical manufacture, so an unconventional supply of labor became the primary assembly detail: slave labor. The non-magical peoples of Ireland quickly pressed into service, built the fortifications that would imprison them, from both the outside and from within. Thousands would die from the backbreaking labor forced upon them, and the conditions did not help any. They received rations of two pints of water a day, and an extremely thin soup for dinner, and if they were lucky, moldy bread and rotten fruit. It seemed that the dark lord had taken his lessons in prisoner care from the records of Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler, and he felt no compunction over the deaths of those under him.
Baghdad, Iraq
2059 GMT (11:59 PM), 3 December 2001
The relative peace and stability in the nine years since the ousting of Saddam Hussein shattered, and in its wake came a civil war of epic proportions. Baath party loyalists lead by Saddam and his sons had attacked the palace where President Omar Nasser and his family were residing, and killed them all in a bloody coup, something that had been happening quite often lately. The social progress in Iraq was set back centuries in only a few hours, and the human rights record of the Iraqi people became sullied once again. There had been relative peace in the last three years, after the time when Iraq had become a banana republic of sorts, and for once, it seemed that the Shiites and Sunni's just might get along for more then half an hour at a time. However, the Baathists caused all of that progress to disappear in only a few hours, and soon Saddam Hussein was back in power and Baghdad, after hiding out in Tikrit since his overthrow. His first order of business was to bring Iraq back to the 'good old days', meaning that in elections you either vote for him or you face the gallows. The council members that had run the Iraqi Islamic Republic in conjunction with the President since the banana republic days soon were executed with extreme prejudice and their families were tortured to death and back. It would be several days before the change in leadership became apparent and by then, the world had other problems to deal with.
Fort Campbell, Kentucky, the United States
0125 GMT, 4 December 2001 (8:25 PM, 3 December 2001)
The 101st Airborne Division was one of the frontline units that were leaving for the European theatre of operations, to protect American interests in the region. The first Brigade Combat Team was one of the few units of the United States military at full strength as it was participating in a series of war-games in the Georgia-Tennessee area. The 'Bastogne' brigade, as the men affectionately called it, would first be heading to France to help evacuate American personnel from the country and to give the French army a backbone. Some of the men of the 101st thought that the frogs could definitely use a force to keep them at the front lines, and to make sure that they did not decide to take French leave in the middle of the night. They would be going over in the Wasp class amphibious assault ships, Wasp, Kearsarge, Baatan and Iwo Jima, and they would dock in Cherbourg, where most of the evacuees would be herded. After the last of the evacuees were loaded onto the transports, then the 101st would head toward the front, wherever it would be at the time, and they would delay the invading forces. The troops hoped the French would put up more resistance than they did in June 1940 against the Germans, and they could avoid Paris being captured twice within a century, although the general sentiment was that the French were cheese eating surrender monkeys. Nevertheless, the men and women of the 101st were hoping that the French would be an effective fighting force, at least once their lives, and be able to keep most of France under French control.
Ulan Bator, Mongolia
0341 GMT (11:41 AM), 4 December 2001
The president of Mongolia, Natsagiyn Bagabandi, was facing a major problem; the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region, formerly a province of the PRC, had asked to rejoin the true Mongolian state. Normally Natsagiyn would have jumped at this chance, but with all the problems in the world, and the Coalition making an enemy of anyone that seems to use the war for their own gain, he hesitated to make a decision on the offer. However, his people had heard of the request and they were pressuring him to move in as quickly as he humanly could. What the people of Mongolia did not understand was how bad this would look to the nations of the world, and how it would paint his entire administration with a broad black brush. He would rather have just been able to tell the citizens that he had decided to reserve judgment, and that be the end of the matter. Unfortunately, elected by a democratic society, he could easily be fired by the same process he was elected by, and as most politicians, his priorities went him first, everybody else second. He could either move in and be called a warmonger, or wait and be called a coward, neither of which particularly appealed to his ego. As much as he would have loved to put a decision on hold indefinitely, the populace would not allow him the luxury of time. Most of the Mongolians still held to the conviction that land is the basis of all power, and such an immense accumulation of land would mean that they would be an impressive nation. The Mongolian army had already begun moving through the Gobi towards the border, where they would wait for the go-order from the high command.
Tokyo, Japan
0637 GMT (3:37 PM), 4 December 2001
Abe Shinzo, the Prime Minister of Japan, was in a teleconference with the United States Secretary of State Colin Powell, the Foreign Minister of the Republic of China, and the President of South Korea. The main topic of discussion was what would happen when the weather over the islands of Japan cleared up, and there was no real consensus on anything. The Japanese seemed to think that the North Koreans would strike hard and fast toward Tokyo, in order to take over the country as quickly as possible. The South Koreans had come to the conclusion that Kim Jong Il would focus instead on the South, and try to 'reunite' the wayward of the South to the 'glorious' North. The ROC tried not to take a side but they favored the Japanese opinion, much to the dismay of the South Koreans. The United States was trying to fit into its role as the keeper of the peace in the world, but without sheer manpower in the region, they were mostly ineffectual as peacekeepers. All four nations were pushing their own agendas, and none of them was willing to consider the validity of the others position, or the fact that the North might do something entirely unexpected. The Japanese and South Koreans were at loggerheads with each other, and they were both jockeying for position as the main concern of the United States, while the ROC was confidently self-assured that the US would put the most effort into helping them out of their pickle first. If the situation were not so serious, you would almost think it to be some kind of a skit on SNL or MADTV, but here no one was laughing.
After several hours of argument, the Japanese began to see that until the South Korean army, and the forces of Dongbei had been defeated, the North Koreans were certainly not in any position to invade the Japanese islands for at least six to eight months. The United States was very concerned about the ROC and the fight to keep them free, but they had already assigned the Abraham Lincoln carrier task force to the defense of the ROC. However, they would in an effort to placate the other two parties, send three Montana class battleships and an America class battlecruiser to the Sea of Japan. They would augment the South Korean navy and the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force, and provide a support to any amphibious operations launched while they were in the area. They would be under the command of the joint task force commander for the Sea of Japan region, a Japanese admiral. The US would also send over a Marine Force Recon battalion to act as defensive units, and the Air Force escalated in the coming months. It would take almost four months for all the troops and equipment to arrive in the Japanese bases.
At 980 feet long, the Montana class was the largest battleship class ever built, and they had enough firepower to tip the balance decidedly in the Japanese' favor. Their main armament were sixteen 18-inch guns, which could fire half ton shells almost fifty kilometers, and 12 dual 5-inch gun turrets for close in-support. The Montana, Maine, and Texas would sail from San Diego Naval Base and could be in the Sea of Japan in a little less than six days at their top speed of 40 knots. The America class battlecruiser was another WWII relic, but it could outgun almost any ship on the ocean. Its massive 20-inch guns sent shells flying over 50 kilometers and they had phenomenal accuracy even when firing at maximum range. The USS Valorous would be sailing from Pearl Harbor and would be in the area in just over three days and eight hours at its full speed of 37 knots. Both ship classes could attain such high speeds because nuclear reactors, put in during the Reagan administration as part of a total refit of both designs, powered them. When both groups were together, they would join with the Japanese navy for detached duty, and later reshuffle back into the US Navy deck.
Former Biopreparat laboratory, Sverdlovsk, Russia
0903 GMT (2:03 PM), 4 December 2001
The Russians were identifying where the smallpox pandemic that started in Ankara came, that is to say, who made the actual virus, for it was clearly not a wild strain. Within a day of the first confirmed cases, there were also the first confirmed deaths, and they were gruesome. Almost all of the cases seen by the Ankara medical staff described hemorrhagic smallpox, an extremely deadly type, perfectly, and the incubation time was extremely short for a smallpox virus, at only four days. The large ratio of hemorrhagic smallpox was one thing that sent a red flag, as that particular type of smallpox infection usually occurs only one time in 8000 infections, and almost ninety percent of the cases recorded so far were of this specific type. There were almost three thousand people confirmed dead in 17 countries and on three continents, and with every minute the disease spread to some new part of the world. The technicians at building 273 had a lot of experience working with diseases like this, as they had bioengineered almost 600 different strains under the orders of the Soviet government. What disturbed them more than anything else was that they had made a bioweapon with these exact properties almost thirty years ago, and it supposedly was destroyed on orders from the United Nations Security Council in 1982. They hadn't seen this type of strain since then, and they were glad of it; the work they did in those days gave them nightmares, both then and now.
When the genetic sequencers finished deciphering the complex RNA inside the viral capsid protein, the results made most of the older techs turn paper-white. They remembered every killer virus that came out of their labs, and this was one of the worst ever produced by human hands. This had been a masterwork, the Last Supper of bioweaponry, a virus that killed quickly, spread with every single breath and with no cure; it was designed to be a last resort weapon and the ultimate trump card. However, the existence of such a dangerous disease could not stay a secret for very long, and a Chinese agent told the world of the super bug developed by the Soviet Union. The world as a whole condemned the Soviets for creating such a thing, but all the while gazing jealously at the perfect germ and frantically wondering how they could make one. Thus is the duplicity of the world superpowers, they revile while reproducing what they condemn others for making. The Komitet Gosudarstvennoj Bezopasnosti, better known as the KGB, had confiscated the virus before the United Nations got their hands on it and had reportedly 'eradicated' the super bug. Now the techs and geneticists knew that the KGB had ferreted the cultures away somewhere and had in all likelihood forgotten where they where, and some radical had discovered them and was now using them for their own nefarious purposes.
The virus had been confiscated and 'destroyed' so quickly, that the biologists in charge of the project had not been able to create even a precursor vaccine, or try any form of treatment, except to verify that the usual drug regimen was ineffective. One drug seemed to have a mild effect on the virus, azithromycin, a macrolide antibiotic, but usually the change was only that the patient did not die, but lived in excruciating pain and died of complications, not the disease. Now, however, they had a mandate from Vladimir Putin himself, and they had to pull through on this one; they were to find some combination of antibiotics and other remedies that provided a potential prevention and/or cure. Unfortunately, right after the KGB confiscated the virus, they took all the records as to how the virus formed, so the actual changes made to the viral RNA were yet another mystery to solve quickly. The first thing done was to compare the RNA sequences to most of the major viruses and look for any similarities, which might help in finding a cure. When that was done, they would have an idea as to where to begin looking for a cure, or at least a treatment. With that in hand, they might be able to contain the outbreak before it mutated on its own into something even more deadly, or it escaped into the wild and made a happy home in some animal species, just waiting to spring up.
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