Dream Drive: Yuri Ch. 01

Both sides seemed to cotton on pretty quickly to the economic and propaganda values of the Exclusion Zone. It was the perfect excuse to keep their military-industrial complexes revved up and a great justification for increasing the defense budget. Wars in faraway places just didn't ring as urgent in the public's mind as an enemy right at the border.

"They have robotic insects that are smaller and faster and more sophisticated than ours," one side would say and get a budget bump to make even smaller and faster flying robot scouts.

"They have bigger guns than us, with greater range," the other side would say and be given the funds needed to create giant cannons that had to be mounted on railway lines to absorb their recoil. Or they constructed long cannon barrels on hillsides to create stationary supercannons that could fire clear across the Exclusion Zone. Those prompted the evacuation of the civilian populace so the Zone could be widened.

"Enough bunkers to house the entire population of the Earth." "Enough barbed wire to tether the Moon to the Earth." "So many surface-to-air missiles we can blot out the sun if we launch them all at once." "If all the mines that we've buried in the Zone were dug up and distributed to the population of Earth, everyone would get their very own mine with lots left over." "We will make so many artillery shells available to our defenses in the Zone that we'll have more explosive power focused on our border than what is contained in all the Earth's nukes put together."

At first, those were exaggerated threats made by generals and politicians, aimed at scaring the other side and instilling confidence in their own people, but they slowly became literal as the Exclusion Zone grew. Neither side had any illusions about being able to punch through the Zone. At least not without losing a million lives and getting trillions of dollars worth of sophisticated military equipment blown to smithereens.

And in the end, the grand prize for their sacrifice would likely be a nuclear strike to the face.

In view of all that, the GAU High Command planned their Caucasus campaign in utter secrecy. The Caucasus was filled with tiny, Bloc-friendly nations. In exchange for Mother Russia not occupying them, they had to keep the Caucasus locked up against any GAU intrusion as well as economically support her war efforts. If the Russian Federation got even one whiff of the plans, it would redeploy its forces and stop the campaign before it could begin. It was a risky business, right from the start, but GAU High Command thought the risks were worth the reward. If they could knock Russia out of the war, the rest of the Bloc would collapse.

GAU Intelligence selected nationalistic leaders it could back and then began a campaign of destabilizing the democratically elected administrations of the Caucasus countries. They used terror tactics and false flag operations, playing heavily against Russia's long-standing territorial pretensions towards those countries and their sovereignties. The local media, which GAU Intelligence had quietly purchased through third parties, blew the tiny incidents way out of proportion and created a state of fear among the people. The few isolated protests were again blown out of proportion and states of emergency got declared.

In the resulting chaos, GAU Intelligence managed to overthrow the governments and install the new, pro-GAU leaderships. The new leaders entered into an alliance with the GAU and allowed their troops to march into Russia itself.

The GAU brass was practically celebrating victory, although most must have been scratching their heads as to why Russia had not let loose with the nukes. No one had any illusions of restraint being the operative word in the Kremlin. The Russian leaders were quite loud as they talked about how America had bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki and that bombing America would be just desserts. Or how Phoenix had already been nuked and that a few more nukes wouldn't matter much.

Most could see that the Russians were suspiciously too loud, but the GAU had been converted into a collection of police states in the wake of the nuclear attack that had wiped out Phoenix. No one dared dissent publicly. The GAU was thrown for a loop by what came next.

The very same leaders that GAU Intelligence had hand-picked and elevated to supreme rule of those small nations on platforms of extreme nationalism, cut a secret deal with the Russians. At the same time as the long-planned Russian counteroffensive was launched, they turned on their GAU allies and became Russian vassals. In exchange for switching sides, they got named presidents for life of their little countries, now forever a part of the Bloc.

The GAU was so blindsided by this move that the results could only be described as a one-sided slaughter. Their forces were isolated by their former allies and defeated in detail by the surging Russian troops. The GAU's military presence was driven out of the Caucasus and Iran joined the Bloc, further securing Russia's south flank.

With their own territories firmly walled off from the war, the GAU and the Bloc returned to fighting their war by proxy, on foreign territory. Their navies guarded their coastlines like hawks. The threat of nuclear war seemed to fade, even though the Middle East and half of Africa were becoming hell on Earth.

Then the Chinese upset the balance of power by conquering Korea with a naval invasion that completely bypassed the Exclusion Zone which protected it.

South Korea had been a GAU ally with a terrible problem. Its capital, Seoul, was in range of North Korean artillery parked at the edge of the Exclusion Zone which separated the two countries. Everyone was so focused on dealing with this issue that they had failed to adequately prepare for the naval invasion which happened. They had merely sunk the North Korean Navy and called it a day.

By the time the GAU realized the scale of the assault, it was too late to stop it. Their only recourse seemed to be the nuclear option, but the Chinese Army had already intermeshed with the civilian populace.

Millions of Koreans fled to Seoul and were sheltered in the city's underground system, while their army was slaughtering the attackers on the streets above them. The city had been planned and zoned by the South Korean military with the exact purpose of making it as hard to conquer as possible. The Chinese Navy sailed up the river to try and split the city into two, but the Koreans sank their ships and later used them as improvised bridges.

The North Korean artillery was still stuck beyond the Exclusion Zone, which was being cleared of obstacles at a rate of fifty feet and hundreds of dead engineers per day, but that didn't stop them from raining thousands of shells on Seoul almost every hour of the day.

The civilians were safe underground and the soldiers joined them whenever the shelling started. Their armor and combat robots would take cover on the southern slopes of Seoul's mountains. They all emerged unscathed as soon as the shelling stopped. All the rain of shells accomplished was to force the Chinese to retreat every time it started, giving the defenders much-needed breaks, as well as reduce the city's buildings into rubble.

Ironically, this also helped the defenders.

The South Korean soldiers used the rubble as cover against the Chinese attackers. It blocked the streets and prevented the Chinese from bringing to bear their numerical and technological advantages. Instead of fighting across a city that was divided into buildings which could be isolated and defeated, one by one, the Chinese soldiers found themselves wading daily across heaps of cover, not knowing which pile hid a booby trap, or an angry Korean with a loaded gun.

For months, the South Korean government launched appeals for help from their GAU allies, but the situation was clear. A GAU counterinvasion would cost millions of lives and dollars. Lives and dollars they had not been ready to pay, particularly not so soon after the Caucasus campaign. The GAU wanted the Chinese to focus on Seoul, as it kept them from reinforcing their armies in the African theater of operations.

Besides, it looked like the Koreans could simply to run out of Chinese to kill at any given moment.

A particularly fat Air Force Major waddled through Yuri's field of view, his uniform's buttons threatening to quit at any time. Yuri sighed heavily. He couldn't help seeing, in his mind's eye, the Koreans in those vids again.

After the Chinese invaded North Korea and stopped them from interfering with the Battle of Seoul, months of globally televised, bitter, urban warfare followed. The battle only ended when starvation forced the South Koreans to surrender. While the Chinese were pulling the Koreans out of the Underground, the GAU had been shocked at seeing the entire civilian populace reduced to skin and bones.

The soldiers on the streets had always looked adequately fed in the vids, making the Korean frantic arguments of imminent death by starvation look like they were crying wolf. It turned out that the civilians had been subsisting on minimal rations to allow the soldiers to last long enough for help to arrive.

In the wake of the Caucasus Campaign disaster and the images of Korean living skeletons being broadcast alongside their desperate appeals for help, the GAU replaced its leadership, en masse. The new people firmly decided to use nukes to destroy a Chinese invasion fleet aimed at Japan, their only remaining ally in the west Pacific. Nuclear Armageddon seemed to be only minutes away.

The Chinese fleet again surprised everyone by slipping away from GAU oversight and rushing through the straights of Malaya. They sailed to Madagascar and landed an invasion force. The invasion went well, for a week, before a GAU fleet came in from the Atlantic, destroyed the Bloc fleet, and landed nine whole divisions of GAU Marines.

The fleet established a blockade of the island. The Marines on the ground fought a cautious, static battle of attrition with the aim of depleting the Bloc forces of their ammunition and supplies. Once that was accomplished, the GAU got a desperately needed morale boost, as well as a huge propaganda victory and nearly a quarter of a million prisoners of war. The Bloc lost all their craft and personnel that were specialized for large scale naval invasions. They never again attempted to project their power overseas like that, not even after they replaced their losses.

A Russian-led Bloc fleet had been sent to relieve the siege of Madagascar, but had been delayed fighting for the Suez Canal. They only captured it after the Battle of Madagascar was over. Still, Bloc control of the Suez threatened to have them achieve a naval linkup between the eastern Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean and the GAU moved to prevent that.

Their fleet invaded the Horn of Africa to secure ports that would support a naval blockade of the Red Sea. It was the second GAU naval invasion of the war and it went off without a hitch. The GAU was making a comeback.

The Bloc responded with a feat of logistics. They moved the bulk of their African Expeditionary Force across a thousand miles of jungle using waterways and barely serviceable railways. Thousands of leaky boats and hundreds of rusty locomotives moved almost a million men, even while they were bailing water and fixing rails on the fly.

The GAU's scout drones and satellites couldn't see through the thick jungle canopy and the Bloc's Great Green Express, as their propaganda later named it, caught them flat-footed. The GAU Marines were spread out, policing a large area in order to secure the logistical base their fleet needed. The Bloc forces swarmed them and sent them into a rapid retreat towards the sea. The Marines only stopped once they got inside the range of their offshore armada's weapons.

The GAU command had not planned for a retreat and there was a lot of dissent within the new leadership regarding how to proceed. Their amphibious and landing craft had been sent back towards ports on the Atlantic coast to be loaded for a complementary invasion of the Arabian peninsula and many argued against recalling them.

Hundreds of embedded reporters had been landed on the beaches with the Marines, all the better to document another GAU victory. The Bloc had propaganda battalions in the hinterland and many independent journalists from all around the world had already come to the region to report on the Olympic Games that had been supposed to be held there soon. They had stayed to report on the war, instead. The entire world watched the "Horn of Africa Crisis" unfold live on their vid feeds.

For two days, the tense stand off continued. GAU Marines holding the beaches and the Bloc staying put, just out of range of the Navy's guns and missile batteries. Then the Bloc's heavy armaments caught up with their infantry and the suddenly outgunned GAU fleet had to pull away. For a week, the world watched GAU Marines getting blown to bits as they scrambled onto anything that could float in an effort to escape the beaches. By the time the landing craft came back, there was hardly anyone left to be rescued.

The GAU's humiliation burned so hot that they had never even hinted at the possibility of another naval invasion again.

The Crisis was also the last time the world got to see unfiltered information on their vid screens. Ever since, all independent journalists attempting to enter war zones were detained and turned back. Ostensibly, this was done for their own safety. The only information about the war that regular people could receive was severely redacted by their governments. It was barely more than pure propaganda.

After the Horn of Africa crisis, the GAU's official line was that they switched from the idea of trying to find a way to break up and defeat the Bloc to a strategy of outlasting them. Strangely enough, the Bloc's propaganda also spouted phrases of outlasting the inherently corrupt GAU and emerging victorious one day.

Every now and then, an independent intellectual would say that both sides were deliberately perpetuating the global war for the sake of having an external threat that allowed them to cow their own populaces into obedience and maintain power. Such thinkers would rarely get to repeat their assertions. They would vanish from the public's eye in ways that undermined their credibility. Usually, they'd be arrested and charged with heinous crimes, like peddling child pornography. Sometimes, they'd slip in their bathrooms and break their necks.

Yuri agreed with those intellectuals and their assertions, suicidal as they were. He had seen both sides pass up huge strategic opportunities over the years. The biggest proof of the war being deliberately dragged out for as long as possible, was the lack of naval invasions. An enemy on distant shores is a truncheon that state propaganda can use to keep the masses in line. An enemy that invades your soil is a kick in the ass that makes people wake up and take stock of the situation. The governments on both sides seemed to fear that more than anything.

There were amphibious assaults happening worldwide to this day, but they were small affairs, mostly utilizing rivers and lakes and coastal waters. Just a few brigades landing behind enemy lines to make the defenders split their forces and wheel around to face the new threat. Then the ground offensive would punch through the weakened section of the battle lines and link up with the beachhead. Rinse and repeat as needed.

Both the Bloc and the GAU definitely had the ships, equipment and personnel needed to mount naval invasions. The GAU even kept its practice of maritime prepositioning of assets. If they had no intention of ever mounting a naval assault, then why would they hide ships laden with supplies in every ocean, but the Arctic? The thirteen year lack of actual naval invasions was not a valid reason to discount Yuri's findings. The invasion of the Caliphate could not upset the global balance in any discernible way.

What was the next thing Ali said?Is it because you were a double agent, for a time?

Yuri frowned. That couldn't be it. He had reported the contact as soon as it had gone down and General Houdani had personally handled the operation. Everything had been done according to established protocol. Yuri had played along with the American's idiotic scheme and handed over everything the boys from Counterintelligence had cooked up.

Prickling needles ran down Yuri's spine as he got a nasty thought.What if the invasion was in response to something I had handed over to the spy? Logically, the blame for it would lie with those that had conjured up those files and told him to hand them over, but he'd still feel responsible.

He sighed. The double agent thing just didn't feel like the smirk thing. General Houdani had praised his performance so much that Yuri was sure he'd get a promotion and a commendation, if only he wasn't on GAU Intelligence watchlists. They might think twice about the information he provided them if he got promoted soon after betraying his country.

The third thing Ali said sounded most like a winner.It's because you're Zibar. Yuri's mouth twisted. The historical record clearly showed that the Zibar people had lived in the mountains to the south of the capital ever since the Vandal invasion, but one wouldn't say they were natives of Africa just by looking at them. Like all Zibar, he had Caucasian features, straight hair and sparse facial hair, bordering on none. He kept his face neatly shaven and his hair closely cropped, so he looked like the tourists from Europe did, back in the days of the old kingdom, when they still vacationed in this part of the world.

Twelve years ago, the Caliphate had emerged from the brutal civil war that had torn apart the old kingdom. It occupied the majority of the old kingdom's territory and declared itself the winner. It had won because it had appealed endlessly to the Arab Muslim majority and decried the neighboring, also predominantly Muslim and Arab, nations as takfir. The neighboring countries had each taken a bite out of the former kingdom's territory as it was falling apart, under the pretext of "keeping the peace".

Ever since the end of the civil war, the Caliph had cracked down on anything that would make the Caliphate appear weak, or ineffectual. What had started off as an appeal to strength and unity, soon devolved into hatred towards those that were different in any way. The religious minorities, the infidels, the Jews, the Hindus and all the Arabs who wouldn't convert from Christianity to Islam had been chased out of the country.

About twelve percent of the Muslim Arab majority followed the minorities right out the door, stunning the Caliph and his government. They sealed up the borders as best they could, but even these days, people were trying to sneak across. The real trouble with crossing the border was when the other side caught you and deported you back into the vengeful hands of the Caliph's clique. After getting swarmed with over a million unwanted immigrants, all the neighboring countries passed strict laws that mandated swift deportation for all Caliphate citizens.

With no religious minorities left, the ethnic minorities were pushed into the spotlight. The Zibar were the most visible ones, so they presented a perfect target for the Caliph and his clique. A Zibar looked European and their language sounded vaguely European. To an Arab's ear, that is.

A propaganda campaign was concocted. It told that the Zibar were descendants of the women the Barbary pirates of old had kidnapped off passing Christian ships. It was perpetuated so much that the Arab population began believing it. Of course, it had been the Arabs of old who had kept those women in harems and interbred with them, but that part of history was officially declared "a pack of lies the colonial powers concocted to undermine the glorious work of God's chosen Caliph".