[chico20854]

July 17, 1998

Another day with nothing in the canon. Unofficially,

The Butler, Pennsylvania-area biker gang the Blackhawk Bike Club, running low on food, attacks the "Akron " Refugee Camp outside of the hamlet of West Sunbury. Depending on the terror effect of his gang's screaming motorcycles, its leader Grunge McLeod is able to subdue the camp's ragtag defensive force and seize over a hundred pounds of food, enough to sustain the gang for several weeks.

2nd Brigade, 40th Infantry Division launches an armored raid deep into Mexican-held territory in Los Angeles. A battalion task force of the 2nd Battalion, 185th Armor Regiment (two companies of M60A4 tanks, a platoon of M728 CEVs and a M113-mounted infantry company from the 2nd Battalion, 160th Infantry) performs a "Thunder Run" - a slow but steady convoy movement forward through Mexican lines in Century City, through the ruins of Beverly Hills (destroyed in the rioting that followed the nuclear strikes in November) to the La Brea neighborhood, before turning west on a parallel course to return to its start lines on Interstate 405 near the UCLA campus. The raid is executed with guns blazing; the overwhelming firepower of the tanks unleashed at the slightest sign of resistance induces panic among the scattered Mexican Army and allied elements that dare allow themselves to be spotted.

Mexican Voluntarios assigned to Brigade Nogales detonate 100 kg of dynamite (seized from local mines and ranches), blocking Arizona highway 82 in the remote canyon northeast of the small town of Patagonia. Following the explosion they begin constructing defensive positions in the hills overlooking the rubble pile.

After a month of labor filling in the crater in a rail line created nuclear explosion in the remote hills of eastern Czechoslovakia Specialist Cutler has come to the very clear realization that the life of regimentation and work he led as a light wheeled vehicle mechanic in the 36th Infantry Division in Germany wasn't so bad and that he possibly made a mistake deserting his unit in the chaos of the Battle of Ansbach.

The Soviet Victor I-class attack ssubmarine 60 Let Shefstva VLKSM continues its rampage against shipping in the eastern Atlantic, attacking the French-flag freighter Antilles as its en route to resupply the Dakar garrison. The Soviet sub puts a single 21-inch torpedo into the Antilles, inflicting fatal damage. The crew manages to radio a distress call before the ship slips beneath the waves, giving a reasonably accurate location and relaying that it was hit by a submarine-launched torpedo.

SOCCENT (Special Operations Command, Central) dispatches a trio of A-Teams from the 7th Special Forces Group into the area along the Soviet border with Iran, instructed to infiltrate into the Soviet rear area and assess the status of a number of facilities that the CENTCOM G-2 has identified as potentially being vital to Transcaucasian Front's war effort. The heavily-armed teams are dropped individually in the early morning hours; despite their impressive firepower the teams are ordered to avoid engagement, instead radioing in status reports of their assigned targets. CENTCOM will assign other assets - mostly 9th Air Force aircraft, but also including the USS Salem's and USS Cowpens' Tomahawk cruise missile batteries - to strike the targets if warranted.