The Belgian F-16 arced across the hazy desert sky, flashing all grey and silver against the early morning sun. The plane was alone, and unchallenged. It carried a reconnaissance pod slung under its belly, and the plane, almost lazily wandered across the morning sky. Above a few last stars, and the faded ghost of a moon. Below the desert was already hot, and the horizon was blurred and red.

The pilot adjusted the calibration of the navigation pod and throttled forward, a little, pushing the fighter a little faster towards her goal.

"Coming up to target area now," she said, tiredly.

"Oh goodie," came the voice of the AWACS controller.

"This is Flight Two-Five-Niner-Bravo, am descending to Angels two."

"Carry on." Said the AWACS pilot. The flight had lasted 25 minutes so far, and both controller and pilot were getting very irritated with one another.

The F-16 rolled inverted and swept downward through a light smattering of clouds and heaved towards the ground. Then, seconds later, the plane righted itself and levelled. The pilot smiled. That felt good.

She wasn't really alone in that early morning sky. 200 miles behind, a RAF E-3 Sentry circled, itself surrounded by four Tornado F.3s. Somewhere to the Southeast, a flight of four Kuwaiti F/A-18s was on patrol. Somewhere to the west, there were three groups of RAF Tornado Gr.1s, armed with ALARM missiles. If she was threatened at all, then the NATO response would be sudden and violent.

Of course, if anything were to happen, she would be dead fairly quickly. The plane only carried two Sidewinder AIM-9Ls and its cannon load. The wings carried only fuel tanks.

She didn't care.

Two minutes until visual range.

The AWACS controller relaxed a little and watched his in-theatre assets. There were 17 allied planes up at this hour, and that, he felt was perhaps enough. He was worried though. Very worried.

"Descending to angels one." The F-16 pilot said.

"Good luck," the AWACs controller said, biting his lip.

The F-16 was old, a mid life update version, converted to use as a recon plane. It handled a lot differently to the new American models, but its European pilots liked it that way. Being lighter, it was a better dogfighter, and more responsive. It avionics were new, and sometimes they were less than perfect. So, the pilot had to continually check the readings it gave her.

She wanted to believe the first images were wrong.

The desert was made of glass. For perhaps a mile in either direction, the sand was scorched to glass, cupped into a dark, ugly scarred crater.

"Merde," she whispered in her native French. "This is… you know who I am, fuck it. Its true, its true."

"Clarify," the AWACs controller said, even though he knew what she meant.

"This is Belgian Air Force flight 259B, ATO number 12. I am on station at Bullseye plus 12 miles, heading 12 degrees. Visually confirm crater damage. Suspect nucflash. Over."

"Shit," the AWACS controller breathed, then opened the channel again.

"259B, we are getting your images now via JTIDS. We concur. Fucking big hole, over."

"Great," said the pilot. "Can I go home now?"

"In a second. We are getting a U-2 tasked to go in and have a gander in a few hours. Anything else to report?"

"No…, yes. Wait. About two miles north, I can see… tanks. Unknown make, suspect T-72s, thrown, thrown about the area. Oh god. Scattered like child's toys….

"SHIT! EWR picking up SAM radar, SA-10? Due East. Faint, but increasing."

"Flight 259, abort, and exit the area via Gate 10," the AWACS controller said trying to sound as calm as possible. He was bothered now.

The F-16 bowed down again, into the very crevices of the desert below, hugging the ground, engine pushed to full military power. The EWR system in the cockpit flashed on and off occassionally, but the frequency became lower. Eventually it stopped chirping at all. She was safe.

Adrenaline in her system and sweat on her brow and fingers, she headed home.

The AWACS controller opened a channel to a ground station in Saudi Arabia.

"Nucflash initially confirmed." Was his terse message.

At 3am, local time, another AWACS tracked what appeared to be a FROG-7 surface to surface missile launched from the Iranian border, fired at a concentration of the Iraqi republican guard at Basra. There was a large explosion and one of the pilots was permanently blinded in one eye. NATO satellites suspected a nuclear detonation. At first light 3 hours later, they sent in a plane to see if this was true.

It was. The FROG-7 can be loaded with tactical nuclear warheads.

The Russian General smiled, grimly. His radars were working, he thought. They had tracked the F-16 at a distance of 90 miles, intermittently. Building a new IADS system was working well. He himself had designed the computer controlled system. A Russian A-50 over the mountains connected flights of new Su-30s on CAP linked to GCI and SAM radar guidance systems over a thousand mile front.

Well, the time was coming, he thought.

He waved to the Iranian general, a liaison officer sent from Tehran. They had fought together in Afghanistan, in that vicious, endless bloodshed that had finally destroyed Russian democracy. The Taleban had been defeated; an exhausted Russian and Iranian army had marched to the borders of Pakistan. Casualties had been enormous. The costs had been enormous. Both countries, economically battered and impoverished, cast about for ways to save themselves.

The Afghanistan campaign had begun in the dead of winter in 1999. Yeltsin was falling, the new US president was weak and inexperienced. The last few Nationalist strongholds in Afghanistan had fallen. Smuggled BBC pictures showed images of obscene killing fields. The Taleban and their Pakistani backers had then moved north towards Uzbekistan.

Yeltsin, desperate to save face and his fragile democracy, flew himself to Tehran and proposed a plan of action to Khatami. The Russians would aim for Kabul, the Iranians for Khandahar. The Russians would provide air support and armour, the Iranians, men and machinery and logistics. It was to be a quick campaign. They imagined it as an Eastern Desert Storm. They planned, later, for such eventualities as strict press controls that Schwartzkopf exercised, with boring briefings followed by "spectacular" gunsight camera pictures and smart bomb TV recordings. During the Gulf War, they noted, no allied soldier was seen to be killed. No real battles, merely cinematic shots of MLRS, of aircraft taking off, of ship radars. They would follow that lead.

Iranian MiG-29s and Russian Su-30s established immediate air superiority. Afghanistan's tiny airforce was depleted within hours. Pakistani Q-5s and F-16s were engaged and destroyed. The war went well. The Americans, no friend of their own mistakes, and too busy trying to unravel and locked congress, did not interfere. Some would later suspect that the US may have purchased arms and supplies from China on the coalition's behalf.

In two weeks, the main objectives were met. Afghani armour and troop concentrations were destroyed. Pakistan had removed itself from the conflict.

They told themselves they had won the war.

They were wrong.

They had not secured the mountains, the mazes of rock and stone and ice. They could not hold the wild countryside. They could not control a famine stricken population. Then the Taleban fought back.

Click to continue . . .

As with the Americans in Vietnam, as with the Russians in Afghanistan a decade before, the guerrilla tactics sapped the strength of the coalition. Bodies began coming home to Russia and Iran. Tales of atrocities on both sides.

The situation was sliding out of control. The Russian economy collapsed under the weight of the war, Yeltsin resigned and was put under house arrest. The Russian military created a rump parliament under Zhirinovsky and Gennady Zygunov. The new parliament announced the beginning of Operation Bright Knife, a vicious series of raids deep into Taleban territory. One by one the Taleban strongholds fell. The new Russian leaders engineered Khatami's fall from power. A Russian backed military government took power.

The coalition forces, finally, during a broken summer, reached the borders with Pakistan, and a DMZ created.

The west, which had hardly noticed what was going on, suddenly became interested.

But there was nothing to be done.

A few half-hearted sanctions, perhaps, but that was all.

Both Iran and Russian were broken by the conflict. They were bankrupt. They needed western money, money not forthcoming because of the sanctions.

Oil prices were perilously low. Another winter was coming. Oil prices must rise, otherwise disaster would occur.

At the huddled staff meetings in Moscow and Tehran, they saw an option.

Re-arm Iraq, some suggested. Threaten the oil fields, drive prices up. The west will thank us, eventually, they said. Inflation in the west and in Russia will fall.

No, Iraq cannot be trusted, others said. We need to neutralise it.

The first plan was to create a pan-arabic alliance, supported by Russia, which would be seen as militaristic in nature. It made sense, they said. We can posture, we can achieve our goals, and if posturing does not work, we will have the wherewithal to fight on our own terms.

But the key is Iraq, they all said.

Hussein was weak, the world could see that. He was running out of cards to play. His republican guard was becoming mutinous. He had no one left to kill, others joked. In October, the Russian foreign minister flew to Baghdad. He held negotiations with the Iraqi president. His terms were simple: you must leave power, and settle into a nice, happy life of a multi-billionaire in Switzerland or South America, or you will be forcibly removed.

Hussein consented. Citing ill health, he stepped down from office. He left no successor. The head of the Republican guard declared himself president. He began massing troops at the border with Iran.

The Russians could not allow this.

On the first of November 1999, an An-225 transport plane carried a battery's worth of men and supplies from the Heavy Artillery Corps from Khabarovsk touched down at a military airfield outside Tehran, and from there taken by Mi-26 Halo to the border.

At 3am local time, the Russians fired a single R-70 Luna-M rocket from a Zil-135 truck. The 25 Kiloton warhead was new, a small tactical nuclear weapon. Its target was a Republican guard staging area north of Basra.

"What do you think, my friend?" the Iranian asked.

"I think this was unwise," the Russian answered.

"I know. Effective, though."

"Yes. It is that."

"What…what do you think will happen? What will the Americans do?"

"I do not know."

Both officers spoke English. Both were young and eager men. Both wanted to see their countries survive and prosper. They were products of their time, westernised. During the long nights, they had sat awake and spoke about their favourite western pop music. They did not hate the west, they merely saw it is a dancing partner.

"Do you think we will win?" The Iranian asked.

"No, of course not!" the Russian laughed.

"Pavel?" the Iranian scolded.

"No, Abdul. We cannot win. We can not win. Not against NATO. If we merely posture, now. If we merely scare OPEC into reducing oil supplies, we win. But the Americans….you see the Americans do not need Middle Eastern oil. They have their own oil fields in Philadelphia, in Texas, in Alaska, in Canada, but they still import oil…

Why? Because they use it in such vast quantities.. waste it in such vast quantities. To use their own fields they would have to be like the Europeans, conserving and ensuring that all oil users make the most of what they have. The Europeans are far from perfect, but a damn sight better than the Americans.

"In the last few years one in every two cars sold in America have been sports utility vehicles. Have you seen these things? Big ugly cars, designed apparently for driving out to the countryside for "adventure" sports. But that's not what they are used for. They are status symbols. Look at me, I can afford this! They make eighty miles an hour, tops. They use fuel in vast gulps, even without loads. I am told that if one accelerates, you can watch the fuelometer go down faster than the accelerometer goes up.

"Using their own stocks will be a blow to their vanity. Imagine, having to rebuild their cities so that pedestrians may use them again? Imagine, imagine having to buy German engine parts for their big obnoxious cars?

"The nineties have been too kind to them. Oil prices have been the lowest since OPEC was formed. Countries such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are oil economies. They are holding on by their finger nails. Iraq is being starved to death due to these super low prices. There is simply too much production. And America can posture and threaten and hint if OPEC starts upping prices.

"We are tugging the tiger's tail here. They care little about a few thousand dead Iraqi thugs, they care little for our decimation of the Taleban, but they will care about our threatening their flabby economy. We can expect them to come."

Abdul remained silent. Then, tiredly, wearily, he said.

"I am tired of fighting," he said. "I am tired of killing. But this is just the beginning, isn't it? Just the beginning."

"Yes…," the Russian closed his eyes, and tried to stop remembering. He failed. The images there made him ill. His memories were terrible things. He felt ill and weary and broken. He knew how powerful the coalition was, how strong it was, how much machinery of death and destruction it had..

He thought of the vast airfields dotted with Sukhoi-27 fighter-bombers. He thought of the armour pens of T-90 tanks. He thought about the men, and women, he amended, who repaired and drove and fought in those machines. He thought of their deaths.

"We shall have to fight like lions," he said. We are here, we cannot back down. Defeat is unthinkable."

"Warzones" is part of a series of hypothetical war scenarios. The idea being that sims, generally, have notoriously dubious plots, with such amusing titles as: Columbian Drug Dealers buy Russian airforce!!

The obvious exception is Janes, who have a wealth of geopolitical intelligence to deal with. This series could become a resource for those of us who enjoy creating custom missions for our favourite sims. [The format should probably be a lot different from this: perhaps news paper reports, intel document style things.] We hope you enjoy it.