Джон Шеттлер: Condition Zebra: The Next War - 2025

The nuclear holocaust on the 2021 timeline involved the destruction of most major cities, terrible aftereffects caused by radiation and fallout, and a general collapse of civilization. All those nukes also lit firestorms, which raged through outlying areas, darkening the skies with radioactive smoke. Keeping in mind that the Demon Volcano had already thrown over 100 cubic kilometers of ash and gas into the atmosphere the resulting effect on the climate was profound. The winter of 2021 on that unfortunate timeline was the coldest ever recorded, and there was nothing resembling a summer the following year either.

The diminished sunlight from soot, ash, and other materials in the atmosphere quickly cooled off the planet, until the average temperature fell by eight to nine degrees Celsius. This persistent cold reduced precipitation by as much as 45% across the globe. Such a severe blow to the climate would cause worldwide crop failure. Without adequate sunlight or water, nothing grew or thrived, and rivers and streams were contaminated by radioactive fallout and “Black Rain.” It was estimated that it might take as long as ten years for all the soot aerosols in the upper stratosphere to clear, and during those years, the survivors of the cataclysmic event itself would cope with famine, disease, and the violence of a ruined society.

The EMP effects of all those nuclear detonations would have shut down anything electronic, and caused the collapse of all electrical power systems. So the survivors would be forced to a subsistence level of life, struggling to secure shelter, clean water, food, and a way to keep warm in the increasing cold. As burning wood only exacerbated the already polluted atmosphere, it became a vicious circle.

In such a scenario, what happens in the Baltic States, the Ukraine, or the East China Sea becomes irrelevant. The outcomes of these military engagements were seen only as the prelude to the real war, which was fought by the ICBM’s and their deadly warheads.

Yet there was one last effect, at least in this saga. We have all learned that these detonations affect more than space. They also impact time, or rather spacetime as Einstein defined it. The temporal condition of the world throughout this saga has been like a great pane of shattered glass, still holding together after the baseball called Tunguska plowed into it, but slowly being compromised. Webs of cracks and fissures spread out from that center point of impact, and our characters have been navigating them, and creating more cracks with each nuke they used.

So in addition to all these terrible physical effects, we also have catastrophic temporal damage when several thousand nuclear warheads all go off in the space of a few hours. Believe me, it is not a world you would ever want to spend any time in, and those that perished in the initial holocaust may have had the easiest fate.

Fedorov and Karpov saw this oncoming train wreck as inevitable, and so they made good their escape, along with Tyrenkov. The Fairchild group came forward on Argos Fire , and Ivan Gromyko followed with Kazan . So here they all are, together on the only future left to them, and yet still facing the dangerous scourge of war in 2025.

Here, in these altered states, nuclear arsenals are perhaps only ten percent of what they are now in our day, and so it is Fedorov’s hope that the conflict will remain a conventional war. After the initial clash that set off the war in the Pacific, Tangent Fire portrayed the alarming escalation that soon swept across the Med. There, China had just enough of a fleet to raise havoc, and bring the flow of seaborne commerce to a halt. Those events cut the maritime connections to Persian Gulf oil, and forced all that traffic to shift south around the Cape of Good Hope. Yet even that route is by no means secure, which brings us to the events of this volume, Condition Zebra.

Admiral Wells has been heavily reinforced with the arrival of the Prince of Wales carrier group, which will now join the two standing British carrier TF’s that were already there, centered on Victorious and Vengeance . The Royal Navy now moves around the Cape to Durban, and is about to begin operations aimed at clearing the Indian Ocean of enemy shipping, and opening the vital sea lanes to the Middle East. They will soon be joined by the US Navy Carrier Strike Group Roosevelt , which mustered at Darwin to reinforce Saudi Arabia after an ominous buildup by Saddam’s military on the borders of Kuwait.

The Gulf War that was never fought in this altered future history may now be another battle that cannot be avoided. While I refer to “Saddam’s” military here, it really belongs to his son Qusay, who led the Republican Guard for many years, and was named Saddam’s successor when the old man retired years ago. (Saddam still lives at the ripe age of 88 years, but now acts only as a figurehead advisor to his son Qusay.)

In our history, 2020 greeted us with an escalating situation in the Middle East. The US strike that killed Iranian General Soleimani was more significant than many realize. This is the man who invented Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the man principally responsible for exporting Iranian Jihadi mischief around the world. He was behind the design of ingenious armor penetrating IED’s to kill and maim US soldiers in Iraq. He was the builder of scores of Iranian “Shiite Militias,” whose only grace was that they set themselves in opposition to ISIS, which was a predominantly Sunni based movement. So no tears here for the fate he suffered, and good riddance.

While the man had a lot of blood on his hands, his death is equivalent to the assassination of the head of our own Joint Chiefs by a foreign power, and was a fairly clear act of war. That said, virtually everything he conspired to do was a fairly clear act of war against Western countries he targeted, principally the United States.

Yet every action of this magnitude in the Middle East has consequences. Amazingly, the attack was made right after the US embassy in Iraq had been under siege for the last two days. Its timing could not have been worse, but these target opportunities often present themselves at awkward times. Now we have had to rush a company of Marines to the embassy, and a battalion of the Ready Brigade of the 82nd Airborne to Kuwait, with the rest of the brigade following soon after. That’s about 4000 troops, and plans already exist to send as many as 120,000 troops back into that simmering cauldron of the Middle East if so ordered. Iran has a standing army of about 545,000 troops, including the Revolutionary Guards, and 350,000 reserves. So just what, exactly, is the Ready Brigade to do? It’s there for things like embassy or base defense, nothing more.

Iraq today has been vacillating between allegiance to the US, or embracing Iran, as they do here in my story. Many Iranian militias were actually helping kill off ISIS cadres in the region’s strange patchwork of odd alliances and rivalries. When ISIS went down, those cadres and militias remained in Iraq, the equivalent of another well-armed and trained political faction in the country now. They have been stirring the pot in Iraq, and when you bring in a good old Western enemy like the US, an attack like this does little to push Iraqi sentiment our way. Could we see a kind of alliance develop between Iran and Iraq as I portray here in this story? That remains to be seen.

Now to the consequences…. This assassination, carried out by US military assets, will certainly trigger a strong reprisal from Iran, a country that has already mined and commandeered oil tankers, shot down US unmanned aircraft, and launched a big drone attack that took 50% of Saudi Arabia’s oil production off line for weeks. What could we see from Iran in the weeks and months ahead?