DEFCON Year One

Chapter 2

Three weeks after what the press called the Shotdown Incidents, President Biden and his advisors decided to take a strong stance against Russia, Iran, China and their allies while strenghthening the US Military and its readiness. President Biden and his advisor also decided this due to numerous other skirmishes involving US troops against Russian, Chinese, North Korean, Iranian, Venezuelan and Burmese troops. Even if US forces were always winning those skirmishes, the writing was now on the wall. The world was now sliding towards World War III.

Therefore, President Biden has asked his generals and admirals to raise the US Military's readiness level to DEFCON 2 in response to the aggressions of US Military personel by Russian, Chinese and Iranian ones, even if it always ended with American forces winning these skirmishes. Needless to say, the Shotdown Incidents gave new reasons for a whole new generation of Americans to volunteer for military service while the US Government and the Pentagon raised readiness level to DEFCON 2.

And the Joint Chief of Staff also stated that the DEFCON 2 level was raised on a global scale, meaning that every US forces, wherever they were stationed, whatever their deployment, whatever their component and regardless of their command, were now ready to go to war within six hours.

Meanwhile, in an orchard in Poland, a young US Army tanker named Amy Pollard was sitting in the gunner station of her M1A2 SEPv4 Abrams tank, which was named "Big Bastard", near the Kaliningrad region. Suddenly, the commander stiffened. Amy turned her thermal sight on and spotted a group of Russian T-72B3M tanks heading straight for them. But the Russians didn't notice the Americans were actually hidden in a orchard, giving Amy and her fellow tankers a huge advantage over the Russian tankers. Her commander suddenly regained composure and turned his own thermal sight on, seeing there were actually fifteen Russian tanks heading for the four Abrams in the platoon.

"Target, tank. AP load." The commander said.

The loader then opened the ammunition storage of the tank and took a 120mm armor-piercing fin-stabilized discarding sabot round and inserted it into the main gun. The whole process took just five seconds before the loader finally close the breach and yelled "Up!", meaning the gun was loaded and ready to fire.

Amy then sighted the lead Russian T-72B3M tank just as the US tank commander did. Suddenly, the Russian tanks came to an abrupt stop after driving straight to the Americans for a while. But the Americans had turned the auxiliary power unit on, thus making the Abrams nearly invisible to the Russians' Sosna-U thermal sight.

"Fire!" The American tank commander suddenly yelled.

"On the way!" Amy responded while pushing the trigger.

In a couple of seconds, Amy saw the 120mm shell fly off the barrel of Big Bastard and sail straight for the Russian command tank. The 120mm APFSDS round hit the T-72B3M at the bottom of the turret, penetrating the armor and hitting the ammunition carrousel. This in turn caused the power to burn and detonate the 125mm shells. And this internal explosion was funneled into the turret of the T-72B3M, blowing up the tank and sending the turret flying up to 15 meters in the sky before falling behind another T-72B3M, which was also hit and blown apart by a second US Abrams tank. Two other Russian tanks were also destroyed before Big Bastard's loader finished inserting a shell into the 120mm cannon.

The "Up!", "Fire!", "On the way!" words echoed through Amy's headset once again as she fired the main gun and destroyed a second Russian tank while three other Russian tanks were destroyed by the rest of the American tank platoon. Amy then fired off another round, destroying another Russian tank five seconds after her second kill, then a fourth one after her third kill before finally stopping upon seeing all of the Russian tank company had been all but wiped out by her tank platoon.