FicWad

The Republic of China, Taiwan, the South China Seas
0317 GMT (11:17 AM Local), 10 December 2001

The last three days had been the best so far for the Coalition forces in the area, just rolling back through the territory they had been force to give up and most were on medical detail transporting the surviving Chinese troops to Tsoying, where military physicians treated them for heavy radiation poisoning. The ROC was back in control of their island and they were proclaiming it loudly for the entire world to hear, that they had defeated their long-time adversary with the help of cherished allies. However, now they had a new problem to focus on, one much more dangerous than even the Chinese hoards from across the narrow channel: the repercussions from the magical world, heavily hit by the neutron weapons, and what forces they could muster up. Early reports showed an enormous grouping of bomber-sized radar contacts taking off from sites all around coastal China, with imagery from the Collins space station and some heavily modified U-2Rs from Diego Garcia confirming the data and giving an approximate number of 420 contacts. Thirty minutes after SPY-1c, 1d, and 3a radar sets from the various navies in the area first picked them up, the targets entered the FAADEZ, the Forward Area Air Defense Engagement Zone and then the real party got started. Taiwanese F-16C/D air defense fighters scrambled from bases all over the island, and American F-14As, Cs, and Ds, joined them, and all of them carried the most technologically advanced air-to-air missiles the United States had to offer. The first unit to meet up with the bandits was VF-321; the Wild Bunch, a group of F-14D Tomcats launched from the USS Nimitz flying Combat Air Patrol seventy miles from the Chinese coast and nearly one hundred thirty miles north of Taiwan, and as soon as they saw the opposition, some of the veteran combat pilots nearly wet their pants in abject fear.

Over four hundred dragons, Chinese Fireballs as a magical creature expert later confirmed, were on a definite warpath, but the baffling thing was this was completely unprovoked by either the Chinese or the Coalition forces in the area. So far, the command echelon had been very careful not to provoke any of the sentient or semi-sentient creatures much larger than themselves without good cause, as that could be very, very bad for their health, and would most likely make their life insurance premiums skyrocket. The Squadron leader of VF-321 quickly called out HOOK RIGHT and the six Tomcats went into full afterburner screaming towards the main bulk of the airborne forces, all the while relaying requests for more forces. Very quickly, they had left the 400+ two-story tall flying reptiles far behind them, met up with some freshly launched F-15H Eagles from a ROC airbase, and began to head back to the contact point, their confidence bolstered by the new wing-mates. The Tomcats locked on first with their AIM-54E Phoenix II and BIM-154 Anaconda ALRAAM (Advanced Long Range Air to Air Missiles), and launched from more than fifty miles away. The missiles dropped into the slipstream and the solid-fuel engines lit, propelling the missiles to speeds upward of Mach 3.2, and as soon as the independent seeker heads in the missiles activated, the flights readied their next shots. The missiles moved at over 2200 mph towards the dragons, but trying to shoot down a target flying toward you at appreciable rate of speed with a nose-to-nose shot is almost impossible even against non-moving targets. Most of the missiles missed their targets, some because the targets dodged them at the last moment, others because they tried to engage too many of the dragons at once, missing many by more than 40 meters. The few missiles that made it within detonation distance of the dragons had little effect on the 12-ton Godzilla wannabes, the glowing fragments of steel ricocheted off their thick hides, although some fragments lodged in the soft fleshy parts of the exterior, i.e. eyes, inside the mouth, etc.

When the dragons came within 35 miles, the Eagles opened up with AIM-120 Scorpion AMRAAM missiles flying off the rails and swiftly closing with the massive herpetological aerial threat. The AMRAAM shots had better luck because the of a software upgrade to make high maneuverability targets easier to hit and therefore much easier to disable or otherwise neutralize, and their slightly larger warheads did not hurt any. Several of the missiles struck dead on into the faces of the reptilians, causing the others to scatter over several kilometers and hundreds of meters of altitude, making the next missile volleys much less successful. By that time, the Taiwanese Kang Ting class frigates Hsi Ning and Kun Ming/, numbers 1203 and 1205 correspondingly, had locked onto the closest section with their Sea Chaparral missiles, and the American /Ticonderoga class cruiser USS Cowpens had done the same with its SM-3ER missiles and phased radar array. When confirmation of the go-ahead order received from Vice Admiral Porter's administrative center in Manila, a massive volley of fire was unleashed from the ships, springing into the sky slowly but quickly accelerating deadly payloads into the sky. While the two frigates could only fire four missiles respectively, the Cowpens could fire one hundred and twenty-two SM-3ER missiles, which it did with deadly speed, exactitude, and perspicacity. The Standard Missiles fired by the cruiser were slower in their initail flight phase than their air-launched cousins were, but with the slower speed came greater accuracy, greater range, and a hit to kill kinetic energy warhead, which, needless to say, meant much more bang for your buck. The missiles only made it to Mach 2.1 during the cruise, but during the last leg of the flight, they accelerated to over 6000 miles per hour, and when they hit the effects were both instantaneous and awe-inspiring due to the effectiveness of the defensive shots and the power of man over nature. The hailstorm of missiles nearly decapitated a third of the incoming fleet and the shoot through fragments destroyed many more of the dragon's ability to stay aloft, causing them to plunge several thousand feet into the cool waters below at more than 180 miles per hour. At 180 mph, hitting water is almost as bad as hitting solid concrete, because when water is struck suddenly, it will naturally resist any further movement, making the normally fluid substance momentarily into something as hard as a foot of granite. Regardless of the inch-and-a-half-thick scaled armor plating their enormous hides strong as wrought iron, the force of 12 tons hitting the water at around 180 mph nearly blew the dragons apart like a rotten tomato striking the floor, staining the sea with green blood and the remains of the fire-gizzards.

Even with the massive amounts of anti-air fire, almost half of the dragons made it through the defensive screen surrounding the island, causing the air raid and rocket attack sirens to sound in an attempt to warn the remaining civilians of the impending attack. The dragons swept in fast and low, torching anything and everything that looked even remotely flammable, and they had a great time chasing the two leggers around trying to stop their handiwork. Left over T-80s from the invaders set alight and left to explode, their ammunition cooking off and flying in every possible direction with no possibility of stopping it, caused near catastrophic damage to the infrastructure of the JTF (Joint Task Force). What remained of the civil infrastructure was completely demolished in the firestorms that followed the attack, and more than 8000 Taiwanese died because even the basic social services were off-line, and many thousands more died in the aftermath. Firehouses, police stations, hospitals, schools, libraries, museums, all targeted and attacked indiscriminately with a single result in every case: the complete and utter destruction of the structure in question. The 5000+ degree Kelvin fires immolated dozens of military vehicles, and one by one the fuel tanks exploded, the ammunition cooked off and the metal plating converted into a molten slag, glowing red, yellow and white with heat. Several gasoline tankers, waiting to have their volatile wares pumped out of their steel bellies, caught by the flames and ruptured from flying shrapnel, and they exploded with the force of 25 tons of TNT each, spreading flaming bits of metal over 3 square kilometers, adding to the firestorms in progress. When the dragons touched down, the infantry surrounded them, firing away with assault rifles, rocket propelled grenades, recoilless rifles, auto-cannons, tank cannons, AA artillery, and anything else that could fire and hit from a distance. After fifteen minutes of fighting, the ground forces received assistance from the navy air forces, who had been refueling and rearming aboard the Nimitz, and were now set in a mix of anti-air and anti-ground weaponry.

The A-6 Intruders swept into the area in a tight V-formation and when the leader called out tally ho on the bandits, the squadron of eight split into four groups of two and went off to engage individual targets. The first group took out two dragons just from lucky shots to the head, but before they could move on to the third, a tower of flames 20 meters wide engulfed the pair, causing the JP-8 in their tanks to self-detonate, which blew them to steaming bits. The second flight had much better hunting than the first and when they returned to the carrier, their kill tally came to four dragons' dead plus two wounded by secondary explosions from the gas tankers they had bombed. The third survived by the skin of their teeth when a couple of Stingers locked onto them and not the thirty foot tall dragon that it had been pointed towards, so it took some pretty fancy and slick maneuvers as well as a couple of flares to avoid the missiles. The fourth and final pair had the best tally of all those concerned, with nine downed and three more severely wounded by the secondary explosions caused by the many flammable substances inside the dragons. When the AGM-65A Maverick had buried itself in the dragons' midsection, the warhead ended up only a few inches away from the enormous gizzard where the many combustible chemicals that create the marvelous fire breath are held, consequently when the high explosive detonated, so did the rest of the dragon. The next three waves of fighter-bombers forced the dragons to retreat, but this victory was obtained through heavy losses of lives both in the air and on the ground, an estimated 3400 military personnel dead and more than 2000 wounded and/or missing. On their way back to the mainland, the Fireballs set fire to the upper decks of any of the naval warships that they passed over, which meant they caught both the Cowpens and the Nimitz/, nearly capsizing both of the ships. The /Nimitz was out of commission for several months undergoing repairs to the partially melted flight deck, and the ammunition storage areas, damaged in a secondary explosion caused by burning jet fuel, but thankfully not ignited themselves. The /Cowpens/, however, was in dry dock for nearly fourteen months while hundreds of ship-builders worked day and night to restore the gutted ship to its former glory and its wartime readiness, although the repairs cost over two-thirds of what it did to actually build the damn thing.

Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan
0944 GMT (3:44 PM Local), 10 December 2001

The Russian Space Shuttles Buran and Ptichka were being hastily prepared to carry the last pieces of a Russian strategic defense satellite constellation into the Molniya orbit so that it could protect Mother Russia. Unlike the prosperous Americans who could afford to run two dozen or more separate space projects at once and not even worry if most of them failed, the Russian Federal Space Agency was held to much higher standards by both the military and the main governmental body. If there were a failure here, the person or persons 'found' to be the most responsible would disappear into the night, into the modern version of the Black Maria's, just as so many innocents had during the Purges and the Great Terror during the 1930's. In some ways, the new government was much worse than the Stalinist regime of the 1920's to the 1950's, and with the ex-KGB lackey Putin and his greed in office, there was no doubt exactly who was in control of the internal policy. Ever since the sudden privatization of the Russian held companies, the individual corporation heads had been paying millions of rubles to any promising zhopa who had any modicum of influence and political promise, all the while whispering in their ear the actions they should take to keep the cash flowing. However, they did not give a single kopeck to alleviate the economic black hole that had formed in the wake of the collapse of a state command economy, nor did it seem they would do so any time soon. It had taken years for the Ministry of Defense to secretly divert enough funds from various civil projects to make the required launches, and even more to convince the Ministry of Commerce not to destroy the only space shuttles the nation possessed. Now with the American laser defense system online, the Russian Federation could wait no longer, for, by their reasoning, it would be only a matter of time before some nuclear capable country decided to lash out at Russia. The arms race had started up again, and even between allies, this would definitely cause more than a little strife, because although the Russian Bear had gotten a new owner, it was still a wild animal with baser instincts as the primary commands and very sharp claws.

The launch of Buran went off without a hitch, except for some fluctuations in the fuel flow manifold and the gimbaled pressure system that nearly sent to shuttle into a high-G spin and a quick trip back to ground going tail first. The Ptichka however, suffered a much more tragic fate; Chechen extremist rebels, discontented with the new pro-Moscow regime installed in Groznyy, decided that a fitting way to get a point across would be to 'interfere' with a major military operation or undertaking, luckily they were not stupid enough to make an attack on a military base, as they had been on Condition Red for the past twelve days. They had paid some of the Kazakh guards nearly 1500 rubles each, which when converted into Tenge was more than half a years pay for him, and they let them onto the base while looking the other way at the long packages and assorted weapons they were carrying. The rebels hid in a copse of trees near the second launching platform where the Ptichka awaited the go-ahead, and quickly took out the stolen weaponry they had brought along so they could assemble the launcher. The guns they had with them were several assault rifles of the infamous Mikhail Kalashnikov line, more specifically ten AK-74s, 12 AK-47Ms, 2 RPK-74s and 4 silenced 7.62mm Dragunov sniper rifles to silence any would-be heroes that might end the mission before the fat lady sang. The other weapons the group of twenty carried with them were an AGS-17 automatic grenade launcher, three Carl Gustav M2s, ten RPO-As with thermobaric warheads, five dozen grenades of assorted types, one NVS 12.7 mm heavy machine gun, and eight modified 9K310 Igla-1s man-portable anti-air missiles, formidable weapons all and every one loaded with live ammunition. The had come knowing that as soon as they fired their weapons, the full clout of the armored battalion stationed here would be brought down upon them like the angry hand of God, and they would probably not live to see the next sunrise. With twenty in their group, every sweep of a searchlight made the Chechens go prone, and each time they thanked God the distracted base interior guards did not pay more attention to their duties.

As Ptichka's main engines revved up, the band of Chechens readied the Igla-1s and locked onto the large fuel tank that held dozens of cubic meters of pressurized liquefied hydrogen, the area where the shuttle would be most vulnerable to any incoming fire. A single puncture by any hot shrapnel would blow parts of the shuttle as far away as Hawaii and Glasgow in Scotland, and such a strike would virtually destroy the Baikonur facility's ability to function in any form of spaceport. Two things happened simultaneously: the Ptichka's main rocket engines ignited and the trigger on an Igla, depressed by a trigger-happy terrorist, shot the missile out of the aluminum tube and soon it was racing toward the shuttle and the highly flammable fuel tank attached to the aforementioned spacecraft. Less than a second later the other rebels fired the other missiles, and in just over four seconds after the first missile launched, it struck the massive Energia-like booster on the left, causing an O-ring to slip slightly out of place. The other missiles struck the hull in many places, but only one struck the intended target, and while it did not directly rupture the fuel tank, several of the welded rivet heads that held the massive sheets of metal flush with each other popped off and allowed the sheets to come loose. The liquid hydrogen in the tank was stored at over 7000 PSI, as such even a hole only one millimeter in diameter would soon blossom into a major breach, and these holes were approximately 1.5 centimeters in diameters. A torrent of the flammable gas rushed out through the 30-odd holes, quickly igniting from the heat of the booster rockets, knocking the Ptichka nearly 20 degrees off the intended course, and nearly destroying the right booster. By the time the rest of the fuel ignited, the Ptichka was already over 4 kilometers from the launch pad, so the effects on the Cosmodrome were not as bad as they could have been, but almost two-thirds of the base was flattened by a 3000 PSI overpressure, enough to make the few remaining missile silos on the base cave in.

As predicted, the remaining base security forces and the armored battalion came down on the rebels like a hammer, rolling in with obsolete BTR-152's and the new BMP-3 Infantry Fighting Vehicles, and at least three platoons of infantry, all armed with the latest in CIS weaponry. The Chechens had been smart, setting up their equipment before they had started shooting, so when the infantry came upon them, they opened up with the full fury of an insurgent infantry unit and a people willing to die for their cause. The NVS ripped the still air with the staccato cracks and bright tracer flashes, chewing into the black beret quality soldiers coming inexorably, relentlessly towards them with more than enough firepower to leave no trace of them but a large grease spot. The two men operating the AGS grenade launcher focused on the BTR half-tracks, shooting holes the size of baseballs into the 12 mm frontal armor, killing every singular person inside the troop carrier and making the vehicle look like Swiss cheese. Once the grenade launcher destroyed the half-dozen or so half-tracks, the AGS gunners turned their attentions to the infantry and quickly began depleting the numbers of enemy forces. The RPO-A operators focused on the BMP-3s, firing the fuel-air explosives straight at the moderately armored, light tanks, but what they had not taken into consideration was that the BMP-3 had much more improved protection than its predecessors did, and thus it was much harder to neutralize. Add to that the fact that the main armament was a 100-mm cannon, the secondary gun was a 30 mm auto cannon, and that it had several 7.92 mm machine guns, and they had decided to perform a fool's errand, one that would most likely get them all killed. A few lucky hits near the exhaust vents on the back of the armored vehicles made three of them explode from the inside out, but most of them survived until the were in firing range with all of their weapons. The thermobaric warheads had much more effect on the infantry that was near the vehicles, simultaneously charring the exterior of their bodies and bursting the interior organs out any available opening from the extreme overpressure.

When the rebels saw the 100 mm cannons atop the IFVs traversing towards them, they decided unanimously that discretion was the better and probably much smarter cousin of valor, thus they scattered in every conceivable direction, including up into the trees. The ones who went into the trees didn't get very far before their bodies had been thoroughly riddled with lead from the Kalashnikov series rifles and machine guns, and several APERS rounds from the IFVs didn't help their situations any either. The copse the insurgents had scattered into was far too dense for the IFVs to navigate, so the crew and men inside dismounted and began the spec-ops maneuvers they had trained for, and from then on all communication would be from hand signals. The remaining men split into six or seven squads of about twelve men each -numbers are not known exactly due to varying reports from the personnel involved- and they began to move almost silently through the dense fir trees. Most of the groups met with total failure, but we do know that two of the squads became engaged in heavy firefights with the remaining Chechens, one of which the rebels completely slaughtered. The second squad came upon the group of Chechens as they were finishing wiping the floor with the comrades of the spetsnaz quality soldiers, and they had even begun to desecrate the bodies, which understandably made the newcomers quite irritated. A small detachment of four men, wearing stolen uniforms, of the now sixteen strong rebel forces headed off in the direction of the main compound with what looked to be some anti-tank missiles and their launchers, and a bag of what looked to be grenades. As soon as they were out of sight the squad of loyal Russian troops wearing the signature, rust red helmets of the Interior Ministry Special units, moved in for the most gratifying kills of their long careers. Even with the advantage of a superior number of weapons, the Chechens were doomed from the very start, as their force had just split and the Russians had the element of surprise, something that could easily tip the scales in any battle. After less than ten minutes of an intense firefight, all but two of the terrorists were either dead or dieing, and the two that weren't were going to the new Gulag system, supposedly 'kinder and gentler' but in actuality it was all the same as it had been in the 1940's.

The final free Chechen soldiers had made their way back to the area where the Russians had parked the BMP-3s, and began setting up their final stand, using the grenades they had brought along, and some tripwire. The quickly made the booby-traps, stringing the tripwire at thigh and ankle heights, so that one could not step over nor could one crawl under the wires with out setting off the grenades. As soon as they finished the explosive welcoming committee, the insurgents moved to the vehicles, carefully placing jerry-rigged time bombs made from what investigators later identified as bedside battery-operated alarm clocks and several anti-armor grenades to all but one of the vehicles. The single IFV they did not attach any explosives to, they staffed, starting the Gazpromez made 500 horsepower diesel engine and checking to make sure that they had ammunition for all the guns on the vehicle. After three minutes, the time bombs detonated, sending white-hot shrapnel into the fuel stores and ammunitions bins of the other IFVs, causing massive explosions, which caused those in the woods to swiftly return to the vehicles. Two of the squads reunited just before attempting to move out of the woods, so when some of their members stepped on the near invisible tripwires, almost three quarters of the entire force downed from serious shrapnel wounds. The rest of the incoming Russian were cut down by the 7.92 mm shells firing from the PKT machine guns mounted on the side of the BMP, and some rounds from the 100 mm gun were fired to prevent identification of the bodies and to wipe out any survivors of the last barrage. The Chechens quickly called out on the R-173 tactical radio for support in destroying these rebels, who they reported to be wearing the uniforms and colors of the Interior Ministry Special units, and then they requested more armor and possibly an air strike. The regional command nixed the air strike, but the several heavy mortar teams pounded the indicated forested area so badly that almost nothing identified during the subsequent investigations held real value, although some evidence of the Chechen fraudulence did survive in the two captured soldiers. After ten minutes of shelling, there was nary a thing living in the affected area, so pockmarked that it looked like the dark side of the moon and hostile to all carbon-based life forms. When the armored vehicle reinforcements arrived, the Chechens relayed a fabricated story about how the terrorists had some how acquired incredibly realistic uniforms that signified them as belonging to one of the MVD Special brigades, which would allow them access to even the most secure areas of the base. When the vehicles made an about face to leave, the rebels from Chechnya, ensconced safely in the armored belly of the appropriated IFV, just followed the convoy of heavily armed troops until they quietly slipped away, stymieing the plans for a long grueling interrogation.

West (Israeli) Jerusalem, Israel
1745 GMT (7:45 PM), 10 December 2001

The Palestinians and Israelis were at it again, fighting over the land they both claimed belonged to their gods 'chosen people', all because of ideological differences brought on by belief in something that is no truer than the Easter bunny or the tooth fairy. Belief in any supreme being only causes the onset of idiocy, such as the belief that any land can truly be claimed for the 'chosen people', or that any deity whose followers espouse the virtues of peace should gladly kill non-believers. It all started because of the attacks on the makeshift medical centers throughout the region, committed by Hamas, Al Qaeda, rogue members of the Palestinian Liberation Front, and a half-dozen other organizations with mostly Muslim membership. This caused many people to paint the entire religion of Islam with a black brush and to just write off the members of said religion as the commonplace nutcases and fundamentalists, incapable of neither seeing reason or following it. This, when coupled with some belligerent statements from the Palestinian National Authority caused many in the Israeli military to take an even more aggressive posture than they had before, and many politicians to irrationally condemn the Palestinians as being part and parcel in the planning and execution of the terrorist events. The Palestinians, however, tried to make the Israeli command see the logic in the argument that the entire culture could not be involved with the planning of major terrorist attacks, and neither would most of them want to be involved. Unfortunately, one can lead a politician to a fully explained and reasonable theory, but one cannot make the few neurons left in his cranium start firing to let him accept the reasonable explanation and what the aforementioned explanation implies. Thus, it was a series of political moves, which caused the outbreak of violence in both the Gaza Strip and West Bank, but it was a series of retaliations, which escalated it from a minor squabble, seen almost daily, into a full-scale war, not seen in this part of the region since the Six-day War of 1973.

The siege of West Jerusalem began with four synchronized suicide bombings, three on crowded marketplaces and the fourth at a school near the geographic centre of the city; all of the attacks occurred near the middle of the day to inflict maximum casualties. When the Associated Press released news of the school massacre, thousands of furious Israelis took to the streets and began to perform summary executions on any suspected sympathizers or 'known threats', which could include anybody that a mob member had a grudge against. Firebombs, sledgehammers, bulldozers, anti-tank weapons and many other implements of destruction ripped apart hundreds of Palestinian homes during one of the worst riots the world has ever seen, and more than 3500 men, women and children lost their lives during the riots. The next day, insurgents from the West Bank attacked several synagogues around the city of Jerusalem and several suicide bombings took hundreds of lives from both sides, but with a majority of Israelis in the casualty statistics. This became the pattern for about three days, with every day bringing new escalations and more casualties, and each day the two sides came ever closer to taking that ultimate irrevocable movement that would change the temperament of the situation into one of open war. That paradigm shift occurred when a 'stray' shell from an Israeli howitzer struck the apartments of Yassir Arafat, cremating Arafat and much of the Palestine National Authority leadership, creating a titanic power vacuum that any belligerent idiot and his brother could and probably would fill. With the death of Yassir Arafat came a whole slew of new diplomatic problems, such as the Iranians wanted this person to take over as President of the PNA, while the Syrians wanted this person, and the Americans wanted still another person, which made the entire process that much more difficult. The option to go along with the Iranians was right out because of the slight problem that most Palestinians are Sunni rather than Shiite, the Saudis and Syrians were looking for another stooge to follow their policy with no questions asked, and the Americans were doing the same thing only less forcefully. In the end, the person selected to be the new head of the Palestinian National Authority turned out to be a nobody from a town near Nazareth, Ahmed Ali, who became the leader by a happy accident, at least for him. He was the type that really was not supposed to be the president of anything, for he possessed barely even mediocre skills in politics, public speaking, law in any form, or foreign relations, so he was mostly controlled by his deputy, a much more forceful man by the name of Saif Al-Adel, an Egyptian.

Al-Adel happened to be a known terrorist, hiding out under one of his many aliases as Mohammed Nazar, and the United States Federal Bureau of Investigations wanted him for ties to the 1998 Embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. He had a death mark on his head if he were ever handed over to the Tanzanians or the Kenyans, and it was given that in the current political climate that the death penalty would be the least of his worries if caught by the United States. He had been working for over two and a half years on personal orders from the Director on assisting the glorious struggle of the 'oppressed' Muslims and to help destroy Israel, the puppet of the evil empire of America, the Jews and the Zionists who controlled that puppet and America herself. Now he was in a position to accomplish one of those goals, and through this, he knew Allah would reward him with a paradise beyond mortal comprehension for causing the deaths of the infidels who had contaminated the Holy Lands. He had helped cripple the evil empire in the Gregorian calendar year of 1998, and that had guaranteed him that Allah would grant him his seventy-two virgins, the endless prosperity described to the Prophet, and all the other honorably earned rewards in Jannah. The first thing he did to weaken the Israeli position was to have Ahmed denounce the accidental artillery strike as a deliberate plot to destabilize the Palestinian nation as well as to murder a beloved leader and devout Moslem in cold blood. With the recent tensions between the two neighbors, the suspension of disbelief was running at an all time high, making most of the people more suspicious and nervous than Tweek after a few gallons of high-octane coffee with a pound sugar mixed in. This also meant that all sorts of bizarre and highly improbable conspiracy theories were coming out of the woodwork, such a very popular one stating that the person who actually killed Arafat was the long-dead American president John Kennedy; hey don't look at me like that, I don't make the news, I just report it. Most of the people were ready to believe the first plausible explanation for the recent events in the world, and more than few listened to and accepted the insane as both fact and the probable reasons for the outbreaks of war that sprung up over the last two weeks, which made a dangerous cocktail.

The real trouble started when a militant faction of the Palestine Liberation Front decided that the new government was being too reactionary for their tastes, and thus they took martial matters into their own warmongering hands. They numbered only a few more than a thousand, but with the guerrilla warfare tactics they used and the funding from numerous terrorist organizations they could purchase any weaponry in the world with no problems, which meant they could rival a full battalion of Green Berets in combat effectiveness. They took it upon themselves to complete the "liberation" of the Palestinians, quite happily ignoring the fact that over the past decade, Palestine had gained several hundred square kilometers thanks to the so-termed enlightened Clinton administration and its efforts at making a lasting peace within the region. What President Clinton and his Secretary of State Madeline Albright failed to take into account, however, was the reality that this was an all or nothing deal for both sides, with neither party giving an inch, for once that happened, well there goes a mile. Neither nation would willingly agree to terms that looked to favor the other side, so they were all too happy to allow negotiations to stagnate and eventually wither away into insignificance while they locked horns in an endless succession of tit-for-tat retaliations for attacks that the other committed in retaliation. The splinter group first began spreading shameless propaganda leaflets that showed the Israelis doing appalling things to the prophet Mohammad, and they marked them with the insignia of the Israeli government along with a forged signature of Ariel Sharon on the leaflets, authorizing their dissemination. This naturally stirred up both the Islamic portion of the nation and the non-Moslems who became offended at the sheer irreverence displayed by the pamphlets, and this strengthened the convictions of the war hawks. By the time, Ariel Sharon issued a public statement denying the complicity of the government of Israel in the conception, design or dissemination of the leaflets, it was far too late to matter. The populations were ready for war, and they were steamrolling towards a path that could only be entered into, but once one starts walking the path, you had better have the guts to walk the whole damn thing, because there is no easy out.

The siege officially started when a force of more than 150 terrorists took over the forward offices of the Israeli defense Ministry, holding several of the highest-ranking military officials, including the three persons needed to activate the Israeli nuclear arsenal. Also among the hostages was Condoleezza Rice, the Deputy Secretary of State of the US, Jonathan Marlstone the deputy Foreign Secretary of the UK, and Moshe Katsav, the president of the State of Israel. The first thing the terrorists did was to round up all the high-ranking foreign nationals, military leaders and other persons of strategic value and place them at strong points through out the complex, and position several sentries around the aforementioned strong points. Next, they confiscated all cell phones, pagers, BlackBerries, digital cameras, Wi-Fi capable notebooks and just about any other communication device that could relay unapproved messages and useful tactical information to the outside world. They then began confiscating as many weapons as possible, such as the personal sidearms most of the military personnel carried with them and the various other implements of pain that they found, including such things as melon ballers, staplers and computer keyboards. Finally, a small detachment activated the internal defense systems of the building using the controls in sub-basement C, essentially locking everyone inside, in addition to making unauthorized movement beyond difficult. After the setup was finished, they sent a video message through the internet to several news agencies including Al Jazeera, FOX, NBC, the BBC and CNN, to ensure that the world understood the cause for their extreme and somewhat illogical actions. Within minutes, every television station on the planet was delivering the classic "We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming to bring you this important news bulletin" message and showing the video with a running commentary on the events in the video. The pictures of the various foreign dignitaries forced the United Nations to send in one of the quick response negotiation teams they had set up in the mid 1990s just in case something like this occurred, although their true effectiveness remained unknown. The video the group had sent out had made some of their demands clear, vis-à-vis Ariel Sharon stepping down as the PM of Israel, and the total dissolution of the State of Israel to make way for the Islamic Republic of Palestine, and several other outrageous demands. The United States considered the course of action taken by the UN to be the cowards' way out, as the US had never negotiated with terrorists and thus far had come out unharmed, or at least with no visible wounds worthy of actual mention.

The President of the United States personally delivered a statement to the terrorists, one filled with righteous anger at the brazen attempt at intimidation, particularly when cooperation would let you live oh so much longer. When he was off the air, the first thing he did was to activate an extreme deep cover agent who was a prisoner along with Miss Rice, and who was posing as a bodyguard assigned to her by the Israeli government. His training was some of the most extensive in the world, making him probably the most lethal man on the planet as he could think of more than sixty ways to kill someone with a Popsicle stick, and more than a hundred with ten feet of string. When the Defense Intelligence Agency inserted him more than ten years ago, he had thought that they would never actually call upon him to use the skills they had taught him at the special section at Quantico, nor the spec-ops tactics of the Nightstalkers taught at Fort Campbell. Now agent BARNSTORMER activated, and he had to get to the internal defense grid and shut it down, to make the way at least semi-clear for the Israeli special operations team that surely was waiting outside with enough firepower to take down a full company. He quietly killed the single guard watching over him and several other personal bodyguards by snapping his neck when the guard turned to examine a picture on the wall of the office, and then he picked up the M-16A4, ammunition cartridges and the security pass card that the former terrorist had been carrying. He slipped out of the office with two men and one woman, sending the other group of four the opposite direction down the corridor, while his group moved in a crouching position towards the emergency exit stairwell. They met only three sentries on the way to the stairwell, and all quickly disposed of by a rifle butt to the head, and their weapons, ammunition and pass cards found themselves swiftly appropriated by the unarmed members of the group. When they arrived at the stairwell, a problem presented itself in full glory: when the internal defenses activated, all of the emergency exits locked down from the far side, making escape for any would be spies and saboteurs much more difficult. Combined with the fact that the doors were made of one-centimeter thick steel, this meant that the only way to get into the stairs was to shoot the lock out, and this would obviously draw unneeded and unwanted attention to their actions.

After two minutes of heated intra-group debate, the lone female, one Ivanova Katrasmiov, pointed out that eventually the terrorists would discover their little enterprise, and she would rather fight on a battlefield of her choosing than one chosen by the enemy. She raised her stolen Desert Eagle AE .50, squeezed off six rounds, three into both the top and bottom security devices, and the door swung open revealing the stairwell, light sparsely with emergency lighting, which gave them a serious tactical advantage. As soon as the first shot rang out, several insurgents came running towards the source of the shots with guns cocked and locked, ready to fire at even the slightest provocation and aiming to kill with every move. The group of four hastily made their way into the semi-darkened staircase, heading down towards the main levels where they would have to cross the lobby to get to the staircase that would take them to their final destination. As they were making their way down the stairs, BARNSTORMER heard the distinctive pings of a metal fragmentation grenade bouncing on concrete, causing him to shove the rest of the group down the six remaining stairs onto a small landing. Just as soon as all of them had gotten into the prone position, the grenade detonated on the landing above them, deafening both the bodyguards and the men who had thrown the frag grenade. Shrapnel from the grenade caught some of the terrorists in their faces, as they had forgotten that it is easier for shrapnel to travel unimpeded than it is to travel through several inches of solid concrete. As soon as possible, the three bodyguards and one deep cover agent got up off the landing and began running towards the bottom floor, barely stopping to catch their breath or to check behind them for pursuers. When they reached the last landing, they quietly undid the locks and checked the lobby after opening the door slightly; finding to their amazement and relief the lobby was nearly completely empty, with only six men stationed at the strategic points overlooking the entrance, main doors out of and the elevators. They moved as quietly as possible to places hidden from the gaze of the on-edge and heavily armed guards, each attempting to find a way to the door on the opposite side of the lobby without alerting the six muscular sentinels covering the large open space, making it a target range for any who ran across.

When they found no such route, BARNSTORMER signaled the others to open fire on the count of three; they readied their weapons, and carefully took aim at the best shot they could take. When his third finger raised a hail-storm of lead-cored, copper jacketed bullets flew, taking down two of the guards immediately and spewing their brains upon the floor behind them, while another guard was struck in the thigh by a through and through shot. The four remaining guards opened fire with their assault rifles and one M60E3 machine gun on a tripod mount, tearing into the decorative marble that covered the concrete columns, sending hundreds of rocky projectiles flying into the air. After about thirty seconds of uninterrupted fire, the guards held their fire and began to move towards the area where the shots came from to discover whether or not they had neutralized their attackers, and if needed to mop up the survivors. They found to their intense displeasure, that they had not managed to take down even one of their attackers, a fact that two of them found out when daggers, shoved into their throats, completely cut off the airflow to the lungs and severed the jugular and the carotid artery; they were dead within two minutes. The last two were killed swiftly by Miss Katrasmiov, who had managed to sneak around to their back and shot them, execution style in the back of the neck twice, what some term a 'double tap'. Katrasmiov uncoupled the M60 from the tripod and retrieved the ammo boxes from underneath the desk, giving them to Richard Broxton, another personal bodyguard of Miss Rice, to carry, giving him the following detailed and somewhat macabre forewarning. "If you drop these, or misplace them, I will personally hang you with your own intestines while they are still attached to the rest of your innards, international incident and Geneva Convention be damned, capisce?" As you would have thought, he was exceedingly vigilant in both handling and keeping track of the ammo boxes, for he and the others in their little group had no doubt that the five foot six inch tall Russian expatriate could and would very gladly do exactly as she had said, no matter that said actions went against the Geneva Convention. She once again opened the door with her Desert Eagle, except this time there was no hurried rush for the safety of the staircase, as now they were the ones going into the dragons den, and whatever hazards that might reside there would be free to assault them at will.

They made it past the basement and sub-basements A and B without so much as a scratch, but when they came to C, they found out why the lobby had been so empty and relatively undefended. When they got to the door of the sub-basement, they looked through the small identification window usually used by a sentry just inside the door to make sure that only authorized personnel made it through, but what they saw inside the corridor was beyond frightening. Positioned just on the other side of the door was several hundred kilos of C4, with wires running back to an intersection and then disappearing around a corner, which obviously meant that they connected to a detonator switch far deeper in the complex. The amount of explosive could have easily created a fatal structural instability in above levels, which would most likely lead to the complete collapse of the twelve levels above them and the death of almost everyone inside the building. They used one of the stolen pass cards to open the door, then they very cautiously made their way towards the corner that the wires went around, and cautiously peeked around the corner, and they saw several unhelpful things. The first thing they saw was another M60 on a bipod mount, and two men staffing as the gunner and loader, and the second unwelcome thing they saw were three other soldiers with very powerful automatic weapons. Luckily, Broxton thought of an ingenious solution to their problem; he went back to the large pile of C4 and unwrapped one of the 2.2 kilo blocks, which he then lit on fire and through around the corner towards the five enemy soldiers. After only a few seconds, they heard panicked shouting, and then a terrific explosion, which was exactly what he was counting on, as one of the cardinal rules when working with C4 is never ever stamp on a lit brick of the stuff unless you have a death wish. As soon as one of the panicked terrorists attempted to put the flaming explosive out by stamping the fire out, the final piece of the C4 explosion equation added into the result, and the result is predictably a great big boom. A subsequent glance around the corner revealed that Broxton's plan had worked, and all the soldiers were either dead or dieing from both the concussive energy of the explosion and the intense flash of heat produced by the explosion. Unfortunately, the blast drew out the rest of the insurgents, more than twenty in all, from the various rooms along the corridor, and soon a firefight had erupted, with quite of bit of friendly fire killings occurring. Since the corridor was comparatively narrow, only three insurgents could actually be in the front line of fire at one time, which gave the advantage to the group of four, and since they had been acquiring ammunition from the various forces they had killed, they had several tricks up their sleeves.

Katrasmiov threw a M67 frag grenade into the fray, and since the group was so tightly packed, the grenade actually caught between two of the Palestinian 'freedom' fighters, nearly blowing them apart when it detonated. Slowly, the hordes of terrorists thinned until there were none standing, and the small group made their way forward, their trigger fingers twitching at the slightest movement, and listening intently for the slightest sound that might mean an ambush. Just as they were moving into the defensive grid control room, one of the few terrorists alive raised his SiG Sauer 9 mm pistol and shot Broxton three times in the torso, making two through and through and one bullet that severed his spinal cord at the L3/L4 junction. Katrasmiov quickly shot the offending man, hitting him just above the superior temporal line on the skull, which caused the bullet to shoot through the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain, annihilating any chance he had of living. They quickly pulled Broxton inside and tried their best to cleanse the wounds with the liter of Schmirnoff vodka they found stashed behind some books, but their efforts were in vain. Richard Broxton departed this world at 10:47 PM on December tenth of the year two thousand and one, leaving behind his mother, three brothers, a sister, a wife and two children, one of whom had yet to be born; his last words were "Ivanova, I didn't drop the boxes". The rest of the mission was easy, but the death of one of their now cherished comrades loomed over everything like a heavy black shroud, making all they did seem worthless by comparison, but they completed their assignment with the professionalism trained into them by years of service in various militaries. The grid deactivated and soon after the Sayeret Duvdevan had cleansed the area of the militants, with more than thirty prisoners taken, and almost all of the high-ranking foreign dignitaries alive, with the exception of Jonathan Marlstone who had been tortured before shot to death. Moshe Katsav was among the living, mostly because he was able to reason with the young men guarding him, and promising them amnesty if they would make sure that the situation did not fly any farther out of control than they already had. Thankfully, the young militants listened to reason and made sure, that most of the command echelon was left relatively unharmed, and that for the most part the foreign dignitaries were treated with the respect their station commanded. When the entire episode was over, the death toll was 137 civilian employees dead, one high-ranking foreign dignitary dead, 29 minor foreigners' dead, 103 terrorists dead, and more than four hundred persons wounded.