“ I present to you.....The Alliance Aviation TSR-2”
The shroud was rolled back, exposing the gleaming white aircraft. A long fuselage, short, high mounted wings that bent down at the tips, two seats, a small nose. A dedicated, long-range low altitude supersonic strike bomber. There was a collective gasp and then a swelling round of applause. Under it, the Ambassador turned to one of her friends, “ Sir Eric, what was TSR-1?”
“ The Fairey Swordfish, Ma'am, an old biplane torpedo bomber used by the Royal Navy.” The Ambassador smiled her thanks. She'd had to bang heads together to get this program running. The Thai Air Force needed the aircraft and their experiences trying to keep their American-built F-104s and F-105s flying had convinced them of the need to build aircraft locally.
The Indians needed the aircraft even more to replace their ancient F-80s and F-84s. Then, the people who'd done the initial negotiations had wandered into a morass of calculations over purchase orders, workshare and a thousand other bits of administrivia. She had cut that Gordian Knot easily. None of the three members of The Triple Alliance could build this aircraft alone, they all needed it equally badly. So she'd forced through an agreement that saw the formation of Alliance Aviation as an equally-shared venture by the three governments. The workshare issue would be sorted out by open bidding on the subsystems and components; the best bid won the contract no matter who it came
from. That wiped out the workshare issue and the program had gone ahead from there.
There was more to come; The Triple Alliance had found out that Canada was about to follow Britain's example and drop out of the military aviation business. In doing so they were canceling a new and very promising long-range interceptor called the Arrow. Alliance Aviation was negotiating with the Canadian Government to buy the prototypes and production line, design art and everything else needed to build the aircraft here. It wasn't sealed down yet but the negotiations looked promising. If that went through, The Triple Alliance would be building world-class aircraft, the only better ones would be those in SAC's terrifying arsenal.
Falnja, Iraq Satrapy, The Caliphate
Janissaries, that's what they'd become. Janissaries. Walther Model, once a Field Marshal of the Wehrmacht, once the Fuhrer's Fireman, once the Baron of New Schwabia, was now the leader of a corps of Janissaries. Oh, it was a privileged position enough on paper. His community was the private and personal guard - and the striking force - of the Caliphate itself. Or, to be more precise, the Satraps who made up the ruling council of the Caliphate.
Model's people had also provided the expertise and support manpower for the Council's spy and covert services to keep the Satraps in line. Model had vehemently refused to provide the operational manpower for the new Caliphate secret service since it bore far too many resemblances to the infamous Hashishans for comfort. The original organization had terrorized the mid-east in the Middle Ages and their new equivalent looked set to do the same. Any of the Satraps were likely to think twice about defying the Ruling Council if suicidal, drug-crazed fanatics, convinced they were going to paradise, could be sent after them on whim. Effective yes, but Model wanted no part of it. He had too few of his people left to send the survivors on suicide missions.
Model was under no illusions about the people he was working for. They were a clique of dogmatic opportunists who had taken advantage of the chaos in the Middle East to carve themselves out an empire. Well, calling it an empire was putting it all too strongly. They had taken religious dogmatism, rhetoric and a level of brutal ruthlessness and imposed their regime on a substantial area of the Middle East. Imposed their regime, yes, but only as one contending power faction amongst many. It was an interesting situation, their survival depended on them holding absolute power and not letting that power slip even for a second. For if they did, the wolves would close in on them.
That's where Model's force had come in. The Caliphate might look imposing on a map but it was nowhere near as homogenous or unified as it appeared. In fact, the only thing that held it together was that the various sects and schisms all hated the outside world a little more than they hated each other, not that there was much in it. The Caliphate was in a perpetual state of near-civil war, a crazed morass of little better than random violence, with each group trying to expand its power at the expense of the rest.
Even now, after only a few years of formal existence, the boundaries of the Satrapies of the Caliphate looked nothing like the largely arbitrary national boundaries that had existed before it had emerged from the shadows. They'd already changed to reflect ethnic and tribal loyalties, and the differences in economic structures had modified them still further. They were still changing and would continue to do so.
Model suspected that the ruling council were very well aware that it was only external pressure from the outside that was holding the whole thing together. That would explain their truculence and aggression towards the rest of the world. The more the Caliphate provoked its neighbors, the greater would be the pressure on it. The Caliphate needed to be hated and reviled if it was to survive. The constant outward pressure was another example of the same line of thought. All the Satraps wanted to expand their influence within the Caliphate, but doing so meant they were facing a zero-sum game. Every advance made by one was a loss for somebody else and that increased the chance of others combining against him.
But if a Satrap expanded to areas outside the Caliphate, it meant he was adding to his own power without reducing that of his rivals - a much safer proposition. Of course, the fact his attention was focused outside meant the position of the ruling council was all the more secure. Model knew that the rest of the world believed the Caliphate was expanding as a result of some carefully-calculated master plan but he knew that was far from the truth. There was no master plan, just the opportunistic efforts by the individual Satraps to expand their own power and influence. The ramshackle, chaotic nature of the Caliphate allowed for nothing more than that.
Of course, the problem was that the Ruling Council itself could easily fall foul of the perpetual struggles inside the Caliphate. They had seen that possibility and Model's troops had been the answer to their prayers. Tough, hardened soldiers who answered only to the ruling council and gave it a devastating military edge over any rivals. Soldiers who had nowhere else to go, nobody else to serve. The Caliphate had been very generous in its provisions for Model's community; they had established it as a hereditary, highly professional standing army. That army would supplement the existing Caliphate forces that were mostly composed of tribal warriors whose loyalty and morale could not always be trusted. They were modern Janissaries, an old tradition recreated because similar circumstances lead to similar answers.
The catch was that Model knew his history; the first janissary units formed by the Ottomans had been war captives and slaves. Later, Sultan Selim 1 filled their ranks with conscripted soldiers, non-Muslim, usually Christian. Mostly they were Albanians, Bosnians and Bulgarians. Like the Janissaries of old, Model's community was being, at least, encouraged to convert to Islam. Some already had, even so, the others still enjoyed high living standards and lived more or less as they wished. Model knew why and it had nothing to do with hospitality. The Caliphate looked after its Janissaries because of the poison gas and biological warfare factories that they were building.