Ride of the Valkyries Read online

  Thailand had occupied Cambodia in 1940, but in their case they had the justification that the parts of Cambodia they'd occupied had been Thai territory 30 odd years earlier. A convincing case had been made that the Cambodian claim had devolved to Thailand. India had a weak claim, one based on the use of the Islands as a traditional fishing ground by deep-sea fishermen. Even the most devout Indian nationalists had to admit that was a pretty feeble pretext. Even Australia had a stronger claim than that, one based on Royal Navy exploration of the islands. However, Thailand, the Philippines and Australia had ceded their claims in favor of the Indians; Indonesia hadn't formally ceded its claim but had asked India to act for it. So numbers made up for strength and the consensus was that India had a reasonably supportable claim.

  Just to add a final ingredient to the witch's brew, the Caliphate also had a claim to the islands. A very weak one, but enough. One of the stranger parts of maritime history was that the Sultanate of Oman had once been a significant force. Its power had extended to Zanzibar, other parts of the eastern coast of Africa, and portions of the southern Arabian Peninsula; the Omanis had operated a small fleet of ships of the line and a worldwide trading fleet. Oman had been absorbed by the Caliphate almost a decade before but some traces of that heritage remained.

  One was an area of the coast called Gwadar. Now the seat of the Omani Government in exile, it was a thorn in the Caliphate's side that the Indian Government twisted with grim relish. The other was that Omani trading ships had used the Paracel Islands as an anchorage and trading post. The Omani Government in exile had ceded its claim to the Paracels to India as well, but the Caliphate had simply stated that they owned the islands and there was no more to be said upon the matter. Anybody who said differently could expect a string of terrorist attacks on their cities.

  The Indian Government had decided to resolve the matter. In cases like this, possession was, in the final analysis, ten points of the law. They had decided to set up a weather station and a naval anchorage along with a landing strip and a garrison on the largest of the islands. Two regiments of Indian Army troops would land on the islands and secure them for construction to start. The First Division of the Flying Squadron would provide cover against potential interference.

  It was a high risk operation, nobody doubted that. The Indian Government's assessment was that the Chipanese Navy had neither the capability to interfere nor the desire to exert naval force over any distance. Chipan, they said, was totally involved with land operations and the Chipanese Army dominated planning to such an extent that no significant naval operations could be mounted.

  Dahm had heard assessments like that before. They all boiled down to one primary assumption. That the other side would cooperate by doing exactly what they were supposed to do. There was only one small, insignificant problem.

  They never had.

  Defensive Area Simone, French Algeria/Caliphate Border

  When somebody discovered they had cancer, they had three courses of action open to them. They could ignore it and hope it would go away, they could scream insults and blame the doctors who'd discovered the condition or they could get surgery to cut out as much as possible and then try to bum out what was left.

  General Marcel Bigeard believed France had cancer.

  He hadn't realized it when he'd been a youth, growing up "between the wars." The worship of the past, the presumption that past glories guaranteed future power and influence, all seemed so normal, so accepted. That had been his first reaction to the cancer that had been eating away at France's national spirit. He'd ignored it, pretended it wasn't there, disregarded the nagging uncertainty in the back of his mind. He'd hoped that it would go away.

  Then, the Second World War had started, the army had been beaten and France lay prostrate. He'd been sent to prison camps where the doubts echoing in the back of his mind had been reinforced by the sound of other prisoners justifying the surrender on the grounds that the ‘rosbifs' had collapsed too. He'd been moved from prison camps in Germany to some in Czechoslovakia and there, one day, he'd heard the war was over. Germany had been destroyed; blasted off the map by a vast fleet of huge American bombers. He'd been able to go home after seven years as a prisoner of war.

  His first response to France's cancer had ended the day he'd stood in the shattered wreckage of the Champes Elysées, looking at the road plowed to ruins, the destroyed buildings either side and the rubble of the Arc de Triomphe at the end. Looking at them with tears streaming down his face and a treacherous wish in his heart that he was still a prisoner so he wouldn't have to look at such things. He'd raged and screamed at the Americans, the vandals, the barbarians who had so contemptuously cut the heart out of Paris. That had been his second response to France's cancer. He'd added his voice to the barrage of contempt and mockery that had poured out of the French establishment, echoed their claims and accusations. Today, he looked back on that time and cringed within himself; for now he knew the truth.

  After two years in Paris he'd been sent to join one of the new parachute regiments training in the countryside. That's where his second response had ended. The first night in the mess, he'd repeated the party line about the criminal American acts that had defaced France and insulted its honor. The other officers had all started playing imaginary violins, their voices imitating the sobbing strains of a bitterly ironical ‘hearts and flowers.' He'd been mocked; derided as an apologist for all those whose failures had doomed France to humiliation.

  When the other officers had torn him down, reduced him to nothing, they'd built him up again. They'd shown him that France's failures were all due to worship of the past, that the memories of France's glories had become a substitute for achievement in the modern world. They'd filled the void in his soul with their own mission, to recreate France, to build a new French Army that took its pride in the achievements of the present. When visitors from one of the traditional cavalry regiments had spoken of their achievements at Austerlitz and Marengo, the paratroopers had chorused "Good. But what did you achieve today?" And then burst out into jeers and catcalls.

  They'd won the battle and the French army had been reborn in their image. The complacent, self-satisfied ‘poilu,' the conscript who served his term doing as little as possible and then thankfully returned to civilian life had been replaced by the hard-bitten long-term professional ‘paras' whose lizard-camouflage uniforms and caps had become the symbols of a different kind of Army. When the poilus had voiced "we are betrayed," their cry of defeat when things went wrong, the paras had replied "So what? We'll win anyway. Or die trying."

  The new army had gone to war here, in Algeria. In 1960, Algerian nationalists, the FLN, had started a campaign to eject the French and regain independence. The war was a classic insurgency, combining military action in the countryside with terrorist attacks in Algiers itself. The paras fought them on their own terms in a brutal campaign that answered fire with fire. Only, it wasn't enough for the French settlers. They'd formed their own group, the OAS, to answer terror with terror and a two-cornered war had become a three-cornered one. Bigeard had commanded a regiment in the Battle of Algiers and had made his name there. What sort of name, well, that depended on who one spoke to.

  The war had ended in an unexpected way. Throughout the 1960s, the rising power of the Caliphate had washed ever-closer to Algeria. Italy had pulled out of its North African colonies in 1966/67, granting them "independence" and seen them absorbed into the Caliphate shortly afterwards. That had brought the green tide of Caliphate fundamentalism to the borders of Algeria and what had happened next was strictly by the playbook. In 1968, Caliphate agitators had slipped into Algiers and fomented religious riots intended to bring the country into the Caliphate's grasp. It should have been easy, shouldn't it? Algeria was already racked by civil war, it was a plum ripe for the picking wasn't it?

  As it had turned out, it wasn't. The FLN had been a creation of French left-bank "intellectualism", nationalist certainly, socialist certainly, Islamic c
ertainly, but in that order. Their leaders, for all their Algerian nationalism had attended French universities and their political outlook had been formed there. They wanted an independent, socialist Algeria, not to become a province in a fundamentalist, feudalist Islamic Empire. They realized that if Algeria fell to the Caliphate, any hope of its independence would be gone forever. The OAS wanted Algeria to remain French of course; that meant fighting off the Caliphate. The FLN realized that their only hope of independence lay in fighting off the Caliphate.

  So, the OAS and the FLN had buried their differences and started work burying the Caliphate agitators. The FLN and OAS had been hardened by years fighting against each other; when they combined to turn their guns on the Caliphate's rabble-rousers, the results were terrifying. In the Second Battle of Algiers, riots were answered by car-bombs, arson by murder, incitement to riot by disappearance without trace. The mosques taken over by Caliphate supporters were burned to the ground, frequently with their congregations still inside. The Second Battle of Algiers became known as "the Savage War of Peace" and its atrocities filled European newspapers with tales of horror. It took months and over 150,000 dead but by 1969, the Caliphate offensive in Algiers crumpled and collapsed.

  Out in the Algerian countryside, the paras had mounted campaigns of their own. For all their hardness and cynicism, their officers were the intellectuals of the French Army. They read Thai manuals and counter-insurgency doctrines from the Burma and Isaan Campaigns and Australian descriptions of the Mindanao fighting against an enemy very much like the Caliphate. They'd read, with grimly ironic enjoyment, of the way the Viet Minh were running rings around the Chipanese forces in what had once been French Indochina.

  Bigeard had moved on from commanding a regiment; he now commanded a full division and was deployed along the Algerian border. Already he had published eight books on military thought and philosophy, two of which had achieved the rather remarkable distinction of heading the best-seller lists. Between defensive blocking operations and offensive sweeps into hostile territory, Bigeard was writing another one. A book that described exactly how the tactics that had spread the Caliphate across the Middle East could be accommodated, countered and then defeated.

  Compared to the highly publicized horror of the Savage War of Peace, the paras fought their war in silence and in secret and that was the way they wanted it. When the Caliphate tried to infiltrate the country, their formations were ambushed and sliced up by the paras.

  Then the remnants were pursued across the border and harried for days inside their own countryside. Something Bigeard had noted was that the fighting quality of the Caliphate's troops had plummeted as the surviving troops trained by Model's Janissaries were killed off and replaced by barely-educated tribal levies. They had the equipment certainly, Chipanese for the most part, but the skills to use it were rudimentary at best. They were no match for the paras.

  Something else had been achieved in the four years since the Caliphate had launched its assault on Algeria. Defeated inside the country by terrorists more skilled and ruthless than their own and defeated on the borders by the paras, the Caliphate's aura of invincibility had gone. It had very publicly vanished.

  It wasn't over of course. At best, the civil war would start again once the Caliphate threat had gone, everybody knew that. Even now, victory against the Caliphate wasn't certain. Algeria was small, the Caliphate was huge. What was certain was that Algeria and the paras wouldn't surrender. At the meetings between the FLN, OAS and the para commanders, meetings that everybody denied had ever happened, the toast was to the "Last Man Standing". Algeria might fall to the Caliphate but if it did, it would only be after the last man went down.

  "Infiltrators in the wire." The lieutenant spoke as much for his own information as for that of the general who stood behind him. That was another difference between the new paras and the old poilus. In the past, French generals had lived in chateaus far behind the lines, worn immaculately-tailored uniforms and discussed the virtues of rival fine vintage wines. The para generals wore the same baggy lizard-suits as the lowliest private, preferred the rough red wine ration issued to their men and ate the same food. And they lead from the front.

  There was a series of coughs as the light mortars went off, then starshells exploded over the section of wire in question. The men struggling with the wire froze, their positions starkly revealed by the glaring white magnesium light. Then, the claymores went off; directional anti-personnel mines that spewed thousands of metal cubes at their targets. The infiltrators in the wire didn't collapse so much as dissolve in the fury of the light and fire. The machine guns in the French defense position started raking them with short vicious staccato bursts. They would be providing cover the for the pursuit group who would harry the enemy. Also, they would collect the weapons from the enemy dead and bring them in, weapons that would find their way to the OAS and FLN. Listening to the machine guns do their deadly work, Bigeard grinned from ear to ear as he recognized the cadence of the bursts.

  Brrrp-Brrrp-Brrrp - pause - Brrrp-Brrrp. Brrrp-Brrrp-Brrrp - pause - Brrrp-Brrrp. Brrrp-Brrrp-Brrrp - pause - Brrrp-Brrrp. Al-ge-rie, Fran-cais Al-ge-rie, Fran-cais Al-ge-rie, Fran-cais

  Main Conference Room, National Security Council Building, Washington D.C.

  "Good morning, President Johnson, President-elect Nixon. Welcome to the National Security Council."

  "Pleasure to be here, Seer. I'm going to miss the Friday Follies." President-elect Nixon looked confused. "Richard, the Friday Follies are the classified briefing on what is going on in the world, as assembled by the NSC. As National Security Advisor, The Seer presents it personally, with his staff available to provide any additional data required."

  "Don't I get to appoint my own NSA? I should have my own people in here."

  "The whole purpose of the NSC is to provide an outside, independent viewpoint, one that is free of any perceived institutional bias, if you like. Believe me Richard, when I got this job I thought the same way you did and wanted my own people everywhere. It took time but I learned just how dangerous that is. You end up seeing the world though a very narrow tube. You need to have NSC looking at things with different eyes. Even if you don't agree with what they say, the fact that they say it is valuable in its own right."

  "How do I know I can trust them? Same for my ‘executive assistant,' Naomi? I'd rather have somebody I know I can trust in that position."

  "Mister President-elect, it's Naamah. And you can trust me because I'm paid to be trustworthy. If I held this position because I agreed with you, I could change my mind. Since I'm paid staff, I can't do that; the only thing I can do is resign and this job pays far too well for that. It's the same for NSC, Sir. The organization is paid to be trustworthy."

  "Suppose somebody offered you a better deal?"

  "Sir, if we reneged on a contract, nobody would ever hire us again. So it's in our interest to be loyal to our employers."

  Nixon frowned somewhat resentfully. "Very well, I suppose I can live with that. I think." He didn't sound convinced.

  Johnson laughed at his demeanor. "Richard, another thing about these contractors is that they tell you things that aren't what you expect to hear. I think you've had an example of that. It gets to be refreshing after a while and, believe me, you'll get to treasure the times they tell you things you don't want to hear. Naamah, I'm really going to miss you."

  "And I you, Mister President. Here's your copy of the briefing book. If you could just sign in the usual place. Mister President-elect, please sign here, at the bottom of the front cover. This book is for your eyes only, when you've finished with it, return it to me and I'll bring it back here for filing."

  "Gentlemen. You'll be pleased to know the world has been relatively peaceful this week. The major conflicts in progress include continued Triple Alliance activity against Islamic terrorists in Mindanao and more border fighting in Algeria. The Viet Minh insurgency continues to expand in Chipanese Indo-China and Chipanese forces in Tibet
continue to run into heavy resistance. South African forces have launched some of what they call punitive raids into the areas to the north of their borders. In South America, we're picking up signs of tension between Argentina and Chile over the Beagle Channel dispute - again. Another potential dispute is in the South China Sea; both India and Chipan claim the Paracel Islands and they are both getting assertive over who actually owns that bit of real estate."

  "What is our position on that issue. Seer?" Nixon's voice cut into the flow of the presentation.

  "The policy of the present administration, Sir, is that the United States doesn't have a policy on it. The United States doesn't have a claim itself and it's a matter of disinterest to the U.S. who occupies those islands. There's reputed to be oil and gas down there but U.S. supplies from domestic drilling and from Siberia are firm and abundant. We're studiously not getting involved and the current administration has decided not to take sides. The position taken by your administration is for you to decide. Now, looking at these hot-spots in more detail .... "

  The Seer spoke for almost an hour, running over the various international complications and the issues that threatened the peace. Listening to the fluent presentation, Johnson felt pangs at the knowledge of how few such briefings remained open to him. In a few weeks, he would be out of office and this wealth of insight would be denied to him. "Seer, what are the problems likely to hit the new Administration?" Johnson decided to give Richard Milhous Nixon a helping hand. The Friday Follies were new to him and he didn't know which questions to ask.

  The Seer thought for a few moments. "At the moment, French Algeria is the most dangerous situation we face. It shook everybody when the French held on there and even more so when they actually beat off the Caliphate assault. The Caliphate has cultivated an image of invincibility; that all they have to do is start the ball rolling and the rest follows naturally. It isn't true of course, in the early days the Turks slapped them stupid while Caliphate attempts to expand into the Russian southern provinces were a disaster. Since then, they've been picking off the low-hanging fruit; countries that were unstable anyway and likely to fall at a well-placed kick. Egypt was their most difficult target and once that fell, it opened up the Mediterranean littoral. Algeria is a blow to all that. Not just because it didn't fall at the first stroke but because its Moslem population are as anti-Caliphate as the French colonists and military. That's a second stinging blow; it's a sign that the Caliphate isn't the unique voice of the Moslem world as it claims.