2024

The BeginningThe day it began, a Tuesday, in San Francisco, was cloudy, a little foggy, clammy, depressing to many. The day it began in Phoenix it was 105 degrees, air conditioners were running full capacity, people were running from malls to their cars to avoid the heat, starting their cars remotely with the air conditioning running if they had that capacity, waiting in the car with open windows as the cooling began if they did not have that capacity. The day it began in Miami, Florida there was a downpour early in the morning from a localized thunderstorm that went out to sea nearly as quickly as the rain stopped falling, leaving a partially cloudy day that was warm, humid, and getting warmer as it went along. In Moscow, Russia, the day it began there was a beautiful bright day in progress, but there was some fear as well because the press was so preoccupied with the difficulties in the Ukraine that had been going on for years. In Beijing, China, a new moment of crisis was occurring in the economy. Though the government had been increasingly allowing capitalist enterprises, many of them had failed leaving large numbers of the population without work, hungry and many even without housing. Those without housing had begun to move into the abandoned cities and buildings that came from the failures. And they were restive, uncontrolled in large measure despite the monolithic Chinese Army. But all those places and most others on this great Mother Earth were much more peaceful in the ultimate moments than was Baghdad. For ten years the ISIS groups with various names had been warring with the government. For five years the Shia and the Sunni had warred with each other pretending to be warring about anything but religion. But the root, the actual basis for the war was their age old dispute over who should have taken the caliphate on Muhammed's death. And there were those on both sides that wanted to extend the caliphate to the entire world by whatever means could be used for accomplishment of that lofty goal. For more than five years, the intensity of the war had grown while the rest of the world watched from afar. And for more than five years a small cabal of Shia had been paying for the acquisition and transport of a weapon, a weapon they thought would have consequence in the war, from Pakistan to the West where it ended up in Donetsk. The transaction had been highly secret and was known only to three men in the entire world, Abu Kalil Al Ghantrous, Falik Saleem, and Pasha Hashimi were the names of those three. Even those who transported the weapon along with Falik did not know what they were carrying. It came in components that Falik had trained to assemble. When he and the two other men who transported the weapon to Donetsk arrived there he shot both of them in the head, dumped their bodies in a culvert well east of Donetsk and went on to the city. He assembled the weapon and engaged the very sophisticated timing device that would set it off on a Tuesday afternoon. Hashimi was a Colonel in the ISI of the Pakistani Army. It was discovered by a subordinate that he was selling weapons to people in other countries. The subordinate wanted a cut of the profits. Hashimi refused the request and made plans to kill the man. But before he could do that, the man turned Hashimi in to the ISI. His interrogation was brutally intensive and physical; he was left with no fingers on his right hand. It would have been lopped off by a sword in time anyway, since he was declared a thief. His injuries, inflicted during the interrogation, caused his demise. Hashimi confessed to many crimes, but his interrogators didn't have sufficient information to understand the largest and most dangerous of his crimes. Pasha had been able to sell one smallish nuclear weapon to the group in Iraq headed by Kalil. The group was known as the Sword of Fallujah. Its name derived from the city of Fallujah, of course. But it also came from the brother, Benji, that Kalil had lost to the Sunnis in the early battles there in the period of 2014-2018. Kalil made arrangements for the weapon he purchased from Pasha to be delivered with Falik overseeing its transport, albeit by an extremely circuitous route, to Sevastopol, a port city on the coast of Crimea. From Sevastopol it was taken across the Crimea into Ukraine where it was placed in Donetsk. When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 Kalil began to think of a way that he could entice the filthy infidels into war which might enable his group and groups like it to re-establish the caliphate throughout the central part of the Near East. At the same time, Kalil purchased the nuclear weapon from Pasha at a cost of over $100,000,000.00, he also purchased a smaller but equally deadly weapon from a group of separatists in the deepest and most un-inhabited jungles of Kenya. This weapon, somewhat unsophisticated in nature, but deadly as it could be contained a vial of Ebola virus. The virus held in the vial had proved to be aerosol borne in Kenya. It was encased in a simple explosive device which would rupture the tube of Ebola and let it free in the air at the moment desired by the user. The explosion causing this to occur would be no louder than a person passing gas. But it would be far deadlier to anyone within a short distance of the release of the virus. All these things coalesced with the events in Ukraine leading to over a hundred dead Ukrainian soldiers and incursions into Ukrainian airspace by the Russian Air Force. Several air to air battles were fought between the older Sukhoi-30 fighter jets of the Ukrainian Air Force and the more advanced and capable Mig-39 jets of the Russian Air force, with predictable results. Just as it had occurred once before in Georgia, in Putin's first incursion into the states formerly constituting the Soviet Union, the outnumbered Ukrainian pilots were brave and capable but outgunned and out flown by the Russians. The current state of affairs in Israel, always a source of unrest in the Middle East in general, was not much better. The Sunni forces in the ISIS groups and others of similar names had made very large inroads into Jordan. While there, they recruited thousands of new Jihadis from the camps. The desperate Alouites and Sunnis pushed out of Syria in the period prior to 2015, and who were among the Palestinians, also mostly Sunnis, had been spoiling for a fight with the “EESRAEELEES” for a long time. The swollen Sunni forces of ISIS, armed by Hezbollah, Hamas and by Assad of Syria, swarmed toward the Israeli border while the Russians began to occupy the eastern areas of Ukraine. Of course the Israelis were not going to sit and do nothing while an invading army threatened their borders. For once the country of Jordan showed some military sense as well as political sense. Despite it having a majority of Sunni Muslims as its primary population, and when the Israelis made their initial, predictable air strike on the ISIS units, the Jordanians attacked with tanks and artillery as well. The result was much the same as the destruction of Saddam Hussein's army on the “Highway of Death.” Thousands of the ISIS force died instantly in Hellfire missile attacks, artillery shelling and cluster bomb attacks launched by both the Israelis and the Jordanians. The remaining members of the attacking force, seeing they were being destroyed in wholesale numbers, fled across the desert back into the friendly confines of Iraq and Syria. The Israelis, undaunted by the bellicose statements from Egypt, Syria and other nearby nations, including the fighting groups of Hezbollah, maintained their attack until literally thousands more died. The Jordanians defended their borders and left the arena to the Israelis. Then the Jordanian Air Force began to sortie against the Israeli Air Force. It was not authorized initially by the government, but it happened and both Jordanian and Israeli jets went down. Jordan backed away instantly knowing it did not have the capability to fight an air war with the Israelis. Then out of Syria a flight of nearly one hundred fighter/bomber aircraft, mostly Sukhoi 30's that had been purchased from the Russians, were spotted on a course that could only mean an attack on Israel. By the time all this happened the U.S. Sixth Fleet, the Mediterranean Sea Fleet maintained at all times, was about three hundred miles off the shore of the extreme northern part of Syria. It was closer yet to Lebanon. From several airports in Lebanon the fleet detected the firing of missiles which could only be directed at the ships of America. The missiles, all older and less stealthy or more capable of being dealt with by the fleet, were destroyed. The fleet immediately went to a status of general quarters combat readiness. The runways of the airports in the eastern part of Lebanon that had launched the attack on the fleet were destroyed by cluster bombs dropped from cruise missiles fired from the protective cruisers surrounding the two nuclear powered aircraft carriers of the fleet. Aircraft were launched repeatedly and in staggered formations, time wise to protect the fleet. Some of the Syrian jets came too close to the fleet, and were destroyed without ado by the protective ring of FA-18 fighter planes that had been launched the minute the missiles were seen by the fleet. The Jordanian Air Force saw the Syrian launch of aircraft toward Israel. But they did nothing. The Israeli Air Force was outnumbered initially but fought brilliantly and destroyed virtually the entire group of Sukhois. The Russians watched this from Sevastopol knowing that some of the Sukhoi pilots were their brethren. The Russians sent a group of Mig 39's southward, armed to the teeth. The Americans misunderstood. They shot down half the Mig fighters from long distance with missiles capable of being destructive at a distance of over a hundred miles from launch. The remainder of the Israeli Air Force launched their fighters in the general direction the Russians were coming from. The Russians, when their planes started falling from the sky as a result of the missiles fired from FA-18 fighters, turned tail. But they too loosed their missiles. The result was several American and Israeli planes were lost as well. Again the telephones between Washington, D.C. and Moscow were nearly worn out with the constant usage. Again the president tried to persuade Premier Putin the entire thing started as a result of ISIS attacking the Israelis. Putin, whose arms industry was making billions arming the Syrians, the ISIS groups as well as the Shia militias with more modern Russian weaponry, dismissed the assurances of the President and at one point even threatened to attack the Sixth Fleet as a result of the air battle in which all had lost assets. Putin finally seemed to relent and back off his belligerence. The truth was he didn't think the Russian military was quite ready to engage the U.S. As was the U.S. military, the Russian military might was stretched a little thin as it sought to annex Ukraine with standby forces. It guarded its eastern borders with divisions devoted entirely to checking any Chinese incursions. It prepared constantly for the potential of nuclear war, preparing both offensively and defensively. Kalil watched all these developments carefully, plotted his timing with great glee. He thought the Ebola virus a perfect response to all this. In an area of Crimea controlled by the Russians, where there were massed Russian troop formations near the Ukrainian border, the ebola was let loose. The effects were incredibly monstrous. Thousands of troops died of hemorrhagic fever. It was days before the nature of the fever was diagnosed properly. The small device had been carefully placed in a Russian encampment in Crimea. Of course the Russians immediately blamed the Ukrainians, and then the Americans, in the press. But the real difficulty with the situation was the Russians blamed the Americans diplomatically. The Kremlin sent several messages to the President of the United States in outrage over the use of weapons of mass destruction which could only have been marshaled through the efforts of the United States. It was at the very least a frightening moment in history, a moment of great wonder from the American side. The Americans had no understanding of what could have happened. The Russian military was quite convinced the U.S. was responsible.