[chico20854]

December 8, 1997

In New York, Harbor Pirates leader Manuel Diego*Huerra is killed by one of his lieutenants in a knife fight over a woman. A power struggle within the group ensues.

Unofficially,

The coroner in Bakersfield, California determines that the bodies in the mass grave discovered a few days ago were executed with military-caliber firearms after being tortured. Despite the mutilations, local authorities have been able to identify several of them - local peace activists, union officials, outspoken college professors and Mexican immigrants - that had been disappearing for the past several months.

Soviet and North Korean troops reach the last Allied positions along the DMZ, completing the reconquest of North Korea. Months of conventional and tactical nuclear warfare have left North Korea an even more backward and impoverished country than it was at the outbreak of the war. Millions of its people have fled (either to the USSR or to South Korea) or been killed.

Finishing off what Operation Steel Bandit had started the prior winter, two TLAM-Ns fired from USS Hue City detonate over the airfields and southern tip of the peninsula at Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam.

Afraid that the last of the boomers in port may slip away, the Soviets strike remaining American missile submarine bases, hitting the Charleston, South Carolina and Kings Bay, Georgia naval bases and nearby port facilities. The Russians are too late, all available SSBNs are at sea and their backup crews (each boat has two crews) dispersed across the region assisting with food distribution.

The 337th Security Police Group, a US Air Force unit that had performed rear area security duties in Poland and East Germany, comes into its first direct contact with Soviet troops, outside Goerlitz. Fortunately, the Soviet forces were as worn down as the NATO armies, so the unit’s lack of fire support or anti-tank weapons is not a recipe for disaster.

The Canadian Navy commissions the patrol-minesweeper Whitehorse in Nova Scotia. While originally slated for deployment to the Pacific, the needs in the Atlantic are so great that it is pressed into service locally, hunting for rumored Soviet submarines positioning themselves for cruise missile attacks in the Gulf of St Lawrence.

In Iran, XVIII Airborne Corps' has gone over to a general offensive, while to their south III MEF has increased its pressure on the 40th Army, forcing the Soviets to fall back deeper into the Zagros Mountains. The 24th Infantry DIvision is reinforced by the 48th Infantry (Mechanized) (Georgia National Guard), which is brought back into action after a brief period of rest in Saudi Arabia, where it received most of the few replacement tanks and AFVs arriving from the US. (With a month-long voyage to the region from East Coast ports, the flow of supplies to CENTCOM has yet to be disrupted. This allows Third Army logistic officers to begin taking planning for the disruption that is to come.)

To ensure that the SS-24 missiles from the 46th Missile Division at Pervomaysk in the Ukraine are unable to be used again, a pair of B-1B bombers from Dyess AFB, Texas cross over the Balkans (their path cleared by fighters from the USS John F. Kennedy, which is making a rare foray into the eastern Mediterranean) and into Ukraine. Once within 50 miles of the ICBM field, they each dispatch ten SRAM-II missiles, set for ground burst, against the Soviet missile division's command post and regimental control facilities. One SRAM fails to detonate, so one of the B-1s, loitering nearby, fires a second round that eliminates the headquarters of the 309th Missile Regiment. Both bombers expend their remaining missiles as they egress over Turkey and northern Iran, where they pick up an escort of F-15s from the 1st Tactical Fighter Wing.

Meanwhile, a MX missile from the 400th Strategic Missile Squadron at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming retaliates for the strikes on the Gulf Coast the day before, destroying the command and control structure of the 41st Guards Missile Division at Aleysk in southern Siberia with ten 335-kiloton MIRVs set for ground bursts.