[chico20854]

April 29, 1997

The convoy of trucks assigned to transport the Iranian Crown Jewels is destroyed by an air strike while en route to Shiraz. There are no survivors; they were the last members of the detachment that were still alive. The Soviet command assumes that the jewels were evacauted while the Iran Nowin government assumes that they were captured by the Soviets. (The Iranian National Security Force's intelligence analysts consider that if the Tudeh had possession of the jewels that they would broadcast the fact in their propaganda.)

Unofficially,

The FBI Hostage Rescue Team and a detachment from F Squadron, 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta (the famed Delta Force) raid the Spetsnaz safehouse in South Jersey. The Spetsnaz team leader, Col. Oleg Tanatov and one member of his team are captured alive; the rest of the team (and three Americans) are killed in the predawn shootout.

The escort carrier Langley and frigate Connole join the escort of Convoy 136, now steaming towards Iceland, with longer-range protection from USN P-3s and the occaisional sortie by a S-3 carrier-borne ASW aircraft from the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, which has returned to sea after rebuilding its air wing from the losses suffered in the Battle of the Norwegian Sea in December.

Green Berets of the 10th and 20th Special Forces Groups launch a battalion-sized raid on Second Western Front headquarters in Poland, killing most of the staff, destroying the communications center and capturing the Front's chief of Staff. (The commander, General Boris Aliyev, was away inspecting troops at the front, saving his life.)

A flight of F-111s of the 48th Tactical Fighter Wing are vectored onto a train located by a E-8 JSTARS radar reconniassance aircraft south of Torun, Poland. The aircraft, which were circling over East Germany awaiting targets of opportunity, hit the train with general-purpose 1000-lb bombs, setting off the several thousand tons of ammunition that the train was bringing forward to sustain the Pact defense.

The American Victory ship Mayo Lykes, a reactivated Second World War veteran, is sunk by a Soviet submarine-laid mine in the English Channel. The Dutch Navy dispatches its Mijnenbestrijdingssquadron (Mine Countermeasures Squadron) 22, with three minesweepers, to search the area for other mines.

The USS Independence battle group resumes strike operations, launching a volley of conventionally-armed Tomahawk cruise missiles to accompany the carrier's attack aircraft in pounding the Soviet 94th (my 57th) Air Assault Brigade in Chah Bahar.

The USS Salem and its battle group (the guided missile cruiser Fox, destroyer USS Russell, frigates Samuel Eliot Morrison, Bradley and Nichols and oiler Cimmaron) round the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean.

Road and terrain conditions begin to deteriorate on the Kola Peninsula with warming spring weather. The melting of many meters of snow turn the dirt roads into running streams and the countryside into a half-meter deep layer of mud atop the permafrost, making overland travel extremely difficult. The changing temperatures and close proximity of the warm waters of the Barents Sea drape the region in thick fog, lasting between days and weeks depending on local wind and elevation. Those factors combine to nearly halt all military operations in the Northern theater.