[chico20854]

April 13, 1998

Nothing official for today. Unofficially,

Another incident occurs along the Mexican border, when an armed militiaman (the Texas State Guard denies that he is a member of any of their units, being a Kansas resident) opens fire on a family crossing the Rio Grande River northwest of Laredo, killing both parents and three of their four children, all under the age of 10.

In Alaska, the 10th Mountain (my 11th Airborne) Division makes slow progress, reaching the lower slopes of the Alaska Range (the mountain range of which Mount McKinley is the highest) after the Soviet 25th Corps is pushed back after weeks of fighting.

RainbowSix reports that a riot breaks out at Albany Prison on the Isle of Wight. Many of the prisoners are suspected subversives arrested by the Security Service at the start of 1997, who now find themselves sent to either Albany or Camp Hill, dependent on which Category they are classed as (medium risk prisoners at Abany and low risk at the Camp Hill prison). The Parkhurst prison remained Category A (high security), and received a number of prisoners who were transferred there from other facilities after the nuclear exchanges. Built to hold just over 1700 prisoners, over two thousand four hundred men are now confined in the three facilities. The rioting quickly spreads from Albany to Parkhurst; although they are armed with a variety of weapons, the warders are heavily outnumbered.

Two additional troop trains arrive in Salzburg, Austria from Moldova and Ukraine, carrying (unwilling, poorly trained and equipped) recruits for 1st and 2nd Southwestern Fronts.

A fierce winter storm slides south from the North Pole towards the Kola Peninsula. The storm is accompanied by extremely cold temperatures and heavy snowfall (it is fierce by pre-war standards, but the nuclear detonations of the prior six months have made the cold winter of 1997-8 much worse than normal). The mutinous sailors from the Soviet submarine Barrikada, who have travelled only 8 of the over 200 miles to the nearest settlement, huddle together for warmth in the lee of an ice ridge. Seven die of frostbite.

Near Esfahan, pro-NATO guerrillas, under the leadership of Sirjan Khorrasani, shoot down another aircraft, an AN-24 transport carrying the Chief of Staff of the 45th (my 32nd) Army, using the second of two SA-14 MANPADS they captured some weeks before.

The Hungarian 53rd Mechanized Brigade, which has escaped the Irkutsk area, receives word of its next obstacle, the crater created by an American nuclear warhead at Taishet, a small Siberian town that derived strategic importance from the junction of the Trans-Siberian and Baikal-Amur Mainline Railroads, the only two routes across Siberia.