Tidal Rip

I
n mid-2011, Boer-led reactionaries seized control of the government in South Africa in the midst of social chaos and restored apartheid. In response to a UN trade embargo, the Boer regime began sinking U.S. and British merchant ships. Coalition forces mobilized, with only Germany holding back. Troops and tanks drained from the rest of Western Europe and North America, and a joint task force set sail for Africa—into a giant, coordinated trap.

Then there was another coup, this one in Berlin, and Kaiser Wilhelm’s great-grandson was crowned, the Hohenzollern throne restored after almost a century. Ultranationalists, exploiting American unpreparedness for such all-out war, would give Germany her “place in the sun” at last. A secret military-industrial conspiracy had planned it all for years, brutal opportunists who hated the mediocrity and homogenization of the European Union as much as they resented what to them seemed like America’s smug self-infatuation. Big off-the-books loans from Swiss and German money-center banks, collateralized by booty that would be plundered from the losers, funded the stealthy buildup. The kaiser was to serve as the German shadow oligarchy’s figurehead, made to legitimize their New Order. Coercion by the noose won over citizens who had not been swayed by patriotism or the sheer onrush of events.

This Berlin-Boer Axis had covertly built small tactical atomic weapons, the great equalizers in what would otherwise have been a most uneven fight—and once again America’s CIA was clueless. South Africa, during “old” apartheid, had a successful nuclear arms program, canceled around 1990 under international pressure. Preparing for new apartheid, and working in secret with German support, the conspirators assembled many new fission devices: compact, energy-efficient, very low-signature dual-laser isotopeseparation techniques let them purify uranium ore into weapons grade in total privacy.

The new Axis, seeking a global empire all their own, used these low-yield A-bombs to ambush the Allied naval task force under way, then destroyed Warsaw and Tripoli. France, in shock, surrendered at once, and continental Europe was overrun. Germany won a strong beachhead in North Africa, while the South African army drove hard toward them to link up. The battered Allied task force put ashore near the Congo Basin, in a last-ditch attempt to hold the Germans and well-equipped Boers apart. In both Europe and Africa the fascist conquest trapped countless Allied civilians: traveling businesspeople, vacationing families, student groups on summer tours. Americans and Brits were herded into internment camps near major Axis factories and transport nodes, as hostages and human shields. It was unthinkable for the Allies to retaliate against Axis tactical nuclear weapons used primarily at sea by launching ICBMs with hydrogen bombs into the heart of Western Europe. The U.S. and UK were handcuffed, forced to fight on Axis terms on ground of Axis choosing: the midocean, using A-bomb-tipped cruise missiles and torpedoes. Information warfare hacking of the Global Positioning System satellite signals, and ingenious jamming of smart-bomb homing sensors, made the Allies’ vaunted precision-guided high-explosive munitions much less precise. Advanced radar methods in the FM radio band—pioneered by Russia—removed the invisibility of America’s finest stealth aircraft.

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