by Bart Gauvin
NORTHERN FURY
H-HOUR
Bart Gauvin & Joel Radunzel
Northern Fury: H-Hour
Copyright © 2019 by Bart Gauvin & Joel Radunzel
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the author.
ISBN 978-1-7338385-0-4 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-7338385-1-1 (eBook)
Published by: Ursus Rising
CONTENTS
Preface
Part I: Line of Departure
Part II: Area of Interest
Part III: Decision Point
Part IV: Approach March
Part V: Movement to Contact
Part VI: H-Hour
Part VII: Dagger to the Heart
Part VIII: Compass Rose
A note from the Authors
About the Authors
PREFACE
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
—quote ascribed to Mark Twain
ON 18 AUGUST, 1991, hardline members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) placed the president of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, under house arrest at his vacation dacha in Foros, Crimea. In the preceding years, the USSR had been experiencing a period of political and economic upheaval that was threatening the very integrity of the centralized Union holding the Soviet republics together. As president of that Union, Gorbachev advocated the New Union Treaty, which would have devolved much of the political power of the centralized Soviet State down to its subordinate republics. The hardliners, styling themselves the “State Committee on the State of Emergency,” intended to seize control of the Soviet Union’s government, prevent the passage of the New Union Treaty, and maintain the power of the CPSU over its tottering empire.
The Emergency Committee’s coup attempt, what came to be known as the “August Coup” or “August Putsch,” unfolded over three dramatic days in the streets of Moscow. It included notable acts of heroism by those opposed to the hardliners, as well as inexplicable blunders by the plotters. Those officials opposed to the Emergency Committee’s takeover congregated at the Russian parliament building—known as the “White House”—in central Moscow, where they were quickly surrounded by Red Army tanks and paratroopers, which had been brought into the capital by the hardliners. A standoff ensued. The coup plotters became increasingly hesitant to use military power to crush the growing popular influence of the dissenters inside the White House.
Then, in one of history’s dramatic moments, the president of the Russian Republic, Boris Yeltsin, arrived at the scene of the stand-off. Brazenly climbing onto one of the encircling tanks, he grabbed a megaphone and delivered a stirring, defiant address to the crowds of Russians who were beginning to converge on the scene. Yeltsin’s speech rallied popular support against the Emergency Committee’s actions. Within hours, ordinary Muscovites were pouring into the city center. There, they used civilian vehicles and their own bodies to block the passage of a column of Red Army armored vehicles moving towards the White House. These vehicles were carrying units of elite Soviet commandos, whose mission was to launch a belated night assault on the dissenters within the parliament building.
With resistance coalescing around Yeltsin, and the Emergency Committee’s best chance at military victory checked by the actions of ordinary citizens, the coup collapsed. Gorbachev, escaping from house arrest, returned to the Kremlin. Once there, he dismissed the plotters from government and charged them with treason. Within ten days the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was banned in the country it had ruled for seventy years. Within six months, that country had ceased to exist. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics shattered into its constituent parts. And with that, the Cold War, which had threatened the world with nuclear annihilation for nearly half a century, came to a close, “Not with a bang but with a whimper.”
More than a quarter century later, the failure of the August Coup, the collapse of the USSR, the end of the Cold War, all appear to have been inevitable, a culmination as it were of decades of economic and political mismanagement in the Soviet Union, of an inability to compete with the wealthier powers of the West, of an unforgiving geography. But were these events so inevitable? Did the coup have to fail? Did the USSR have to collapse? When one studies the actual events of those three rainy days in Moscow in 1991, the answers to these questions seem less and less obvious, the actual outcomes increasingly unlikely.
Indeed, the plotters of the Emergency Committee included a list of some of the most powerful men in the USSR, including the Soviet vice president, the defense minister, and the chairman of the KGB, among others. Couldn’t this impressive collection of officials, had they acted with greater decision and displayed less timidity, have succeeded in wresting control of the government away from Gorbachev and holding their faltering empire together? What if the plotters had arrested Yeltsin before he could rally support for the opposition (as they nearly did)? What if they had launched an assault against the White House a day earlier, before crowds of ordinary Muscovites could intervene?
Of course, no one can know for sure the answers to these counterfactual questions, but many of the potential alternate histories that they suggest are fascinating, and troubling. The story of Northern Fury takes place in one of those troubling, alternate worlds that could have resulted had a strong, charismatic leader taken control in the early hours of the August Coup and pushed it forward to a successful conclusion. It describes the hot conflict between East and West that could have erupted had the Cold War continued into the mid-1990s, a conflict in which the armed camp that Europe had become since the end of the Second World War erupted into one of the most dangerous chapters of history that the world would ever see.
One should note that, as the book’s title suggests, our story focuses only on the northern front of this potential global war (we hope to tell the stories of the other fronts in other books). Our intent with this book is not to issue a warning of impending doom to present-day policy-makers, or to pass judgement on the actions of past leaders, or to advocate for any particular political, military, or social policy going forward. Nor is our intent to simply take the reemerging antipathy between Russia and the West and project it back into the early 1990s, when the world was more heavily armed than it is today (though the reemergence of this centuries-old tension is a rather interesting rhyme of history). Rather, we wanted to tell the best, human story possible, against the backdrop of an alternate history that is both strange and familiar.
In telling this story, we realize we are walking in the footsteps of other authors who have used fiction to tell the “future history” of the very conflict we posit. These novels include General Sir John Hackett’s The Third World War, Tom Clancy’s epic Red Storm Rising, Harold Coyle’s Team Yankee, Ralph Peters’ Red Army, and Eric L. Harry’s Arc Light, to name the more notable examples. We would be lying if we said that these particular novels did not fascinate us and influence the writing of our own story of World War III. Northern Fury certainly does share many characteristics with these other works, and this is where the apocryphal quote from Mark Twain comes into play.
Why does history seem to rhyme? Why do John Hackett’s and Tom Clancy’s and nearly every other work of Cold War-goes-hot fiction seem to fall into the same familiar patterns? Why do we still see these patterns reflected in the current geopolitical tensions in Europe, where a coalition of Western European nations face off against a monolithic, fearful Russia? The reason is that while you can “make history” (and in Northern Fury, we do), you have to “li
ve with your geography.” The map on which the great game is played does not change nearly as quickly as we think it does. Indeed, the problems of geography faced by Vladimir Putin’s Russia today are essentially the same ones faced by Gorbachev’s Soviet Union a quarter century ago, and by Peter the Great’s Russian Empire two centuries earlier. It seems that whenever we humans begin to believe that we have escaped the bonds of our geography, as many westerners did after the end of the Cold War, it always comes roaring back with a vengeance to remind us of the tyranny of the map. So, readers of Northern Fury will certainly find some familiar themes at play if they have read any of these other works of World War III fiction.
But despite this, we think that readers will also find our story a new, unique, and fresh look at this potential conflict. Why? Because history doesn’t repeat itself. It only rhymes. The way human beings act within their geography is unique in every age, and far less deterministic than it seems in hindsight. And nothing brings out the worst—and the best—in human beings like that activity we call “war.” Perhaps this is why war has been such a compelling canvas for the stories we tell each other, from Homer’s Iliad to the present day. In war stories, as in war, the decisions the characters make really matter. And the decisions they make, ultimately, are a reflection of who they are, or at least who they want to be.
In the end, Northern Fury is the story of the people, on both sides, who would have had to fight the war that we here imagine. We have been careful to remain true to the constraints of reality and the details of the military organizations that existed at the end of the Cold War (when ships sink, they will not reappear; when squadrons and regiments are decimated they must be reorganized; one cannot conjure divisions out of thin air), and we think that those “grognards” who care about such things will be pleased with the depth of our research and attention to technical, geographical, and historical accuracy. But the drama of the story comes from the characters, the people, and from their struggles against each other, against geography, and against themselves. And in this respect, we think we have an exciting story to tell.
A word is appropriate here about how this story even came to be. Both of the authors (Bart and Joel) are career soldiers who have served in the Canadian and American armies, respectively. While this gives us a good depth of knowledge in the arena of land warfare, we are both amateurs when it comes to the naval and air operations that comprise the setting for much of the Northern Fury story. Nevertheless, we have both felt ourselves drawn to study air and naval history, as well as modern air and naval operations. Perhaps the sea and air domains of warfare are just different enough from our day jobs that they are able to capture our interest as hobbies without seeming to be too much like work. That shared interest, coupled with the game, are what led us to collaborate and tell this story.
The alternate history story of Northern Fury originated with Bart not long after the end of the Cold War, and he has been telling the story ever since, largely through scenarios created for naval warfare simulations. The most recent of these simulations, a game called Command: Modern Air and Naval Operations, developed by Warfare Sims and published by Matrix Games, is the first that was powerful enough to encompass the depth and breadth of the World War III story he envisioned. With the Command platform at his fingertips, Bart was finally able to begin crafting the Northern Fury story in game form.
Command is a remarkable program. It models in minute detail the complexities of modern technological warfare. The program does this so well, in fact, that the US military has partnered with Warfare Sims to use their software to model and train for contemporary tactical problems. Command has also been a major commercial success, a testament to the hard work of the developers at Warfare Sims who have crafted a game that is not only militarily and professionally useful, but also very fun for amateurs like ourselves to play and learn something about post-World War II naval and air combat. Moreover, we would be remiss if we did not give credit where credit is due. This book would not have happened were it not for Command.
In 2015, Joel began playing Bart’s Command scenarios, and was immediately hooked by the story that was unfolding on the map interface in front of him. The story was so exciting that Joel began writing up his experience playing the game in a series of fictionalized “after action reviews” online on the Matrix Games website. Bart liked what he saw of his story in Joel’s writing. He proposed a collaboration, whereby the Command scenarios and this novel would tell the Northern Fury story in tandem. What this means is that nearly every engagement in this book is “playable” as one of Bart’s scenarios in Command.
Now, in the interest of full disclosure, Northern Fury is not simply a recounting of Joel and Bart’s playthroughs of Command scenarios. On the other hand, we found that the tandem acts of building and playing through these engagements provided many of the dramatic moments that occur in the written story. According to legend, Tom Clancy and Larry Bond’s Red Storm Rising came to be through a similar process, utilizing Larry Bond’s tabletop naval simulation Harpoon. We hope our own storytelling proves a worthy continuation of this intersection of gaming and fiction.
So then, whether you fancy enjoying our tale in written form, or by diving into the Command simulation to see if you can do better than the characters of our novel, we hope you are as gripped by our story in “hearing” it as we have been in telling it.
PART I: LINE OF DEPARTURE
“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”
—Erasmus
Chapter 1
1525 MSK, Sunday 18 August 1991
1225 Zulu
Presidential Dacha, Foros, Crimea, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic
PAVEL IVANOVICH MEDVEDEV felt the weight of the pistol holstered under his arm as he strode into the expansive, red-tile-roofed dacha. Cool sweat dampened the shirt beneath his gray suit as he passed out of the balmy Crimean heat and into the air-conditioned interior. His right eye adjusted from the bright outdoor sunlight. His left didn’t, useless as always. The well-known Soviet hard-liner proceeded through the palatial residence’s entryway and foyer. Recognizing his stocky, bear-like build and thick head of white hair, several uniformed and plain clothes KGB agents quickly stood aside. Bits of angry conversation echoed from deeper in the dacha’s interior as Medvedev strode into the depths of the building. Entering the foyer, he saw three of his co-conspirators sheepishly huddled together.
“What’s going on here?” demanded Medvedev in the precise, educated Russian that betrayed his Moscow roots. Frustration hovered at the edge of his voice.
A thin, bookish looking man, Oleg Drugov, a junior member of the Politburo and Medvedev’s one true friend here, spoke first, “The general is in there with him.” Drugov inclined his head towards the open door of the president’s salon. “He…he is not being cooperative.”
As if to emphasize the point, Medvedev heard from the other room his country’s president shout, “Damn you, you’re going to do what you want! But report my opinion!”
The president is somehow still in control here, Medvedev realized. Are we really going to dither and let him stall our entire plan?
Seconds later the deputy defense minister, a general of the Red Army and the senior member of the committee that had flown to Foros to depose the USSR’s president, burst out of the room, red-faced and agitated. Seeing Medvedev he said, “There is no reasoning with that man. He refuses to see the chaos that is engulfing our country.”
Medvedev fixed the general in his gaze and asked, “Then why are we still talking?”
None of them sees what needs to be done. How can they be so weak? The weight of his pistol was nothing compared to the weight of responsibility that was settling upon his shoulders.
The general spread his arms in frustration as the nearly panicked words tumbled out of his mouth in rapid bursts, “He will not declare a state of emergency. He will not resign. He
will not even agree to stay silent to let us do what needs to be done! The man is…is…,” the general was breathing heavily now, raging against his impotence but, Medvedev noted, clearly ignorant of what to do about it.
Useless fop. Medvedev breathed heavily, allowing the smells of the sea from outside to calm him. He looked from the general to the room from which he had just emerged. “I will talk to him,” Medvedev said and started towards the door.
“You?” the general asked. “You’ve been his loudest critic! What makes you think he will listen to you more than any of us?”
Turning his head to look into the man’s wild eyes and seeing only fear behind the shattered veneer of strength, Medvedev said coldly, “Because I understand him better than you ever will. I will talk to him.”
The general dropped his gaze and stood aside as Medvedev brushed past him to the doorway. This is it, he thought, this is the great throw of the dice. Pausing to look back over his shoulder, Medvedev saw another of the plotters, the Central Committee Secretary of the CPSU, speaking into a rotary telephone in one corner of the sitting room, presumably talking to the other conspirators in Moscow. Two plain-clothes KGB agents were whispering to each other in another corner, looking uncomfortable. Only Drugov was silent, watching him intently from across the room. Rejecting the quiet buzz of inactivity behind him, Medvedev turned back to the door. There’s no going back now. How can the others not see that? How can they not see what must be done? How can they not see what will happen if we fail?
Silently, he entered the president’s salon, unbuttoning his gray suit jacket as he went. The room contained a sitting area with an ornate couch and chairs, two low coffee tables, and a wall-sized colorful painting set against the dark wood paneling that evoked the waves of the Black Sea beating against the cliffs outside of the dacha’s windows. Facing a couch with his back towards the newcomer, the President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics stood in his shirt sleeves, breathing heavily as he sipped water from a crystal tumbler. The top of the president’s bald head was bowed, almost as if the man was praying. After a moment Medvedev cleared his throat and the president turned. Surprise obvious on his face at the identity of this latest visitor.
