[chico20854]

April 25, 1997

An IPA unit assigned to evacuate the Iranian Crown Jewels from Esfahan to Shiraz arrives and loads the loads the cargo. As they finish loading the trucks, Soviet forces surround the city. Other units of the Iranian II Corps fall back under heavy pressure.

The 44th (my 20th) Armored Division is declared fully operational. Each of the division's constituent brigades have already completed a rotation at one of the National Training Center sites; the division headquarters staff has just completed a two-week long command post exercise intended to forge it into an organization ready for combat. The division's troops and equipment begin moving to East Coast ports for deployment to Europe.

Unofficially,

The Victory ship Wayne Victory arrives in New Orleans carrying a load of munitions returned from Argentina.

The Ulster Defense Regiment, a part-time British Army formation composed (despite years of effort) almost exclusively of Protestants, is fully mobilized. The UDR's nine prewar battalions are increased to 11, reversing reductions made in 1984. They gradually take over responsibility for security in Northern Ireland, releasing British regular units for service on the continent.

In Ulsan, Korea, the iron ore carrier Berg Nord is delivered. The large ship - capable of carrying over 220,000 tons of cargo at a time - is designed to carry iron ore from Quebec to Rotterdam to feed steel mills in the Ruhr.

In the Gulf of Alaska the three Soviet destroyers try to escape the location of the prior day's sinking. They succeed in doing so, but are spotted by the American trawler Nichole B. The fishermen call the Coast Guard, and within hours a S-3 Viking from the USS Constellation has located the destroyers.

The combined German Navy reactivates an inactive formation, the 2nd Landing Squadron. The force is made up of three former East German trailer-carriers, the former Iraqi naval transport Al Zahraa (renamed the Bochum) and the former Soviet barge carrier Alexy Kosygin, captured in Norway in December and re-named the Glückstadt in German service. The ships begin a short period of training together in preparation for amphibious operations in the Baltic, supplementing the 12 remaining former East German Frosch-class ships.

Allied troops in Poland continue their grinding advance, blasting through seemingly endless series of defensive lines, each protected by minefields and fanatically defended by well-motivated Polish and Soviet troops.

The US Sixth Fleet dispatches the John F Kennedy and America carrier battle groups back into the Mediterranean, to strike Libyan targets en route to the eastern Mediterranean, where they are ordered to locate and sink the Slava-class cruiser detected yesterday.

In the Persian Gulf, the Soviet Sierra II-class submarine K-534 launches a trio of conventionally-armed SS-N-21 cruise missiles at the US 5th Fleet command center ashore in Bahrain. The attack, launched from a distance of less than 20 nm, gives the American command only a few minutes of warning. It is enough time to get the staff to bombproof shelters (allowing the command to weather the attack without loss of life) but the headquarters building is left a smoking ruin. The loss of the structure disrupts fleet operations, and the command is forced to reorganize as the command moves aboard its flagship, the Aegis cruiser USS Yorktown, which has considerably less space available for the headquarters (which had inevitably grown ever more bloated). The surprise attack also serves as a blunt warning of the threat posed by submarine-launched missiles.

A KGB Alfa Group commando team is dispatched to Leningrad in preparation of a raid on the SAS safehouse when it is located.