Europa Reich 03 Triumph by James Philip

Author:James Philip [Philip, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-10-27T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 20

The White House

“I know all about Galland, everybody does,” the President reminded the room. “Tell me more about this character von Hirschfeld?” He demanded with the quiet intensity of a man who had just authorised Strategic Air Command to assume alert level DEFCON 2, Codename FAST PACE.

Joe Kennedy had not held up his hand and sworn his oath of office that January to blow up the world; this being the case, he was not a happy man to now find himself ordering the armed forces of the United States to prepare to go to war at less than six hours’ notice!

And he wanted his people to understand as much.

A week ago, the readiness level had been DEFCON 5, appropriately termed FADE OUT mandating the ‘normal’, peacetime preparedness of the forces under his command.

The first reports of the post-Olympiad disturbances in Germania had ticked the clock up to DEFCON 4, DOUBLE TAKE, requiring an intensification of intelligence operations and a general beefing up of base and other security arrangements, including an augmentation of the standard Secret Service watch on the Commander-in-Chief.

At around midnight last night, DC time, he had authorised DEFCON 3, basically the first step to war, ROUND HOUSE. US forces around the globe on land, sea and in the air were warned to be ready to defend themselves and to take offensive action as per the relevant Regional Command War Book, leave was cancelled and notices of recall were prepared to be sent out to reservists, normal restrictions of training and other operations were rescinded and Defence Department budgetary and accounting protocols temporarily suspended at the discretion of field commanders. When the latter happened, fighting men knew things were about to start happening at a hundred miles an hour!

Now the US military was at DEFCON 2, literally on the verge of waging a nuclear war, the only higher alert-readiness level was DEFCON 1, transparently described as COCKED PISTOL because at this point the men in uniform were just waiting for their President to press the button…

What happened in the Europa Reich mattered as much to a US President as what happened in downtown DC. Well, actually, rather more, because the average well-healed citizen of Georgetown did not have his finger on the trigger of a nuclear arsenal that to all intents, was every bit as lethal as that at Joe Kennedy’s disposal. And thus far, hard information about what was really going on in Europe was almost impossible to get hold of!

That German was killing German was strategically speaking, incidental; that was their business. However, it was known that there was intense fighting going on in the monumental, gothic surroundings of the post-war Nazi capital, and that there were still thousands of Americans – tourists and athletes in the main - trapped at Brandenburg International Airport and in the Olympic Village, which presently or in the near future, might or might not be a battlefield. Moreover, from telemetry plots recorded by the ships of the Montana ‘Goodwill Squadron’,

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