Intelligence
in WWIII 1946
0325
On a beach near
Vladivostok, the U.S.S.R.
Being this far north and east,
the Siberian winter had already set in, and it was bitterly cold. The soldiers
participating in this reconnaissance mission were from a very specially trained
Special Forces unit known only as Detachment 500. It was not a part of the
normal “Able” team structure, but completely insulated and self-contained,
operating outside the chain of command to give the Army the option of plausible
deniability, in case they were captured. They were inserted by a fishing
trawler, whose captain had been paid a large sum of money up-front, and would be
paid an even larger sum after he picked up the men for the return trip. The
soldiers did not know each other by their real names, only by their assumed
Russian names. They were all dressed and armed as Soviet officers and soldiers,
spoke fluent Russian, and had been instructed on current Soviet internal
events, as they were known at the time they were taught. These men were the
best and the brightest, and were driven to succeed in their mission. Failure
was absolutely out of the question for
them.
The men made their way to an
out-of-way beach in semi-rigid inflatable rubber boats, with muffled outboard
motors, speeding them toward their landing objective. As they hit the rocky,
barren, snow-covered beach, they struggled to bring their two boats inland, and
hide them for the return trip. They referred to maps of the area that were
surveyed back in 1919, when the American Expeditionary Forces were diverted
here, on their way home from France, to restore order. They were the first
American soldiers to arrive here since then, but no one but the Military
Intelligence Corps and the CIA would ever find out about this trip.
Their objective was to
reconnoiter Vladivostok, and its environs and other surrounding areas, make
detailed maps of what they had seen and what facilities were here, what Red
Army divisions and Red Navy Pacific Fleet units were stationed here, and what
the mood of the locals was. They had three weeks from today to secure the
information needed and make it back aboard the fishing trawler, or their
mission would be considered a failure and the operation that they were
collecting the information for would be cancelled. They were not about to let
that happen. The Vladivostok operation was as vital to the Allied war effort
now, as the Doolittle Raid had been in the last war. Their commander, known
only as “Markov”, was a true Spartan in mindset and determined to make this
mission a success. Markov and his men were prepared and proceeded on to their
mission.
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