A House Divided

by Adam Yoshida

  "I'm afraid that it will require more than that," the Solicitor-General spoke up quietly, "for I do not feel that we will be able to raise a force of the sort required for the restoration of regular order with simply promises of the Confederation-that-was. The Canada that emerges from this is going to be a new and, frankly, different country that existed when this began. After all, what can we promise to boys from Ontario to drive across the country and fight their cousins? If we're going to do this, than this is going to have to become a genuine sectional war, with all that that entails."

  "I understand what you're saying," replied the Prime Minister, "but what is the alternative to that? To give up the country and all that we built together over the course of generations to a bunch of... Redneck yahoos from the West? To give up everything that my father built here?"

  Members of the Cabinet began to shift uncomfortably in their chairs.

  "My father brought in the Charter – and with it genuine Constitutional protections for the human rights of all of the Canadian people – for just an occasion such as this. Our mission... No: our destiny is to stand up, during this time of challenge, in order to protect the rights of all Canadians, across all regions of this country."

  The Joint Resolution introduced by Rickover, "clarifying" the meaning of the law for the President, passed through the House and the Senate without much difficulty – the primary bar to such a resolution, the threat of a filibuster, having been removed by the actions of the Vice President. The Republican leadership had chosen to go with the Joint Resolution rather than a revision of the law itself for two reasons, first that doing so would concede that the President's action was founded upon a reasonable interpretation of the current law and, second, that the President would be able to veto any amendment to the law and that such a veto, being likely to be sustained by the Congress, could reasonably be interpreted as a legal endorsement of the President's actions.

  The lack of any legal effect notwithstanding, the President nevertheless proceeded to symbolically "veto" the resolution, an act that had essentially the same effect as the resolution itself.

  "Well," said Rickover as he watched the President grandstand some more on television with the volume muted, "at least we've set a redline now, even if he doesn't want to acknowledge it."

  "The key is going to come when the next Continuing Resolution comes up for a vote. Now we can add language to it forbidding the President from doing exactly what he's doing."

  William Thomas Jackson had always detested the summer climate of Vancouver. While it was neither particularly warm or humid by the standards of those who had grown up in hotter places, it consistently struck him as unremittingly unpleasant. Of course, the General had not – in all of his travels around the world – found a single climate zone that suited him year-round. He preferred the temperate days of a mid-spring or early-fall Vancouver and, failing that, his second choice was always to remain indoors in a climate-controlled environment. However, even the unpleasant warmth of a ninety-three degrees heat was not enough to detract from the charms of this particular day.

  The command of the First Armored Brigade had, after some wrangling, been given to Colonel Anthony Wayne, a former Canadian Forces officer who actually had experience with commanding armored forces in the field. As a means of consolation, Jackson had been granted a brevet promotion from his more-or-less self-assumed rank of Colonel to the official (if theoretically temporary) rank of Brigadier General and granted the official role of Deputy Chief of Staff of the Western Republic Army. Some had objected to the granting of a General's rank to a politician who had never previously served in the regular military, but others had pointed out that is was in conformance with practices of previous wars where a new army had to be raised by an insurgent force and, in any case, much of the resources of the Western Republic were being provided by the company that he and Augustus King controlled. The matter of finding King, who did not claim to be (nor did he seek recognition as) as citizen of the Republic proved to be somewhat thornier. Following some debate, the Western Congress had voted to, after certain precedents from the Revolutionary War were cited, appoint King as the Inspector General of the Army.

  Jackson and King stood side-by-side watching as their carefully-acquired Merkava tanks were fueled and prepared for combat. Their crews consisted of a motley mix of Canadian veterans and volunteers, and groups of American and Israeli soldiers motivated by some combination of politics and money. Even with several months worth of training, they hardly consisted a coherent field force but, under the circumstances, they would have to do.

  "Well," said Jackson, "I guess this is it."

  Colonel Wayne's tanks began their steady progress at shortly after 4AM on the 11th of August, crossing from their positions in North Vancouver over to the rest of the Lower Mainland via an improvised bridge thrown across to Belcarra before rushing forward at high speed through the communities of Anmore, Port Moody, and Coquitlam and then wheeling towards the city of Vancouver itself. This allowed them to thread between the supply base established at Pitt Meadows and the Federal forces actually in Vancouver proper.

  The movement of the rebel forces came as a surprise to the Federal Army. During the months since the First Battle of Vancouver the forces under the command of Brigadier General Francis Cauchon had grown to nearly five thousand men and women, but they had continued to be relatively lightly equipped and had suffered through near-constant IED and sniper attacks launched either by the Western Army itself or by supporters both sanctioned and unsanctioned.

  General Cauchon was at the Pitt Meadows base, now designated as Camp Pearson, when the attack began. The first notice that the General received of the attack was when an explosion rocked his tent and woke him up.

  Major Landry, his aide de camp, stuck his head into the tent.

  "More mortars, it would appear, mon General," he announced just as another explosion nearly rocked him off his feet. Cauchon steadied himself.

  "Those don't feel like mortars. The blasts are too big," he said quietly as he stood and grabbed his uniform jacket.

  Captain Max Julian watched carefully as his Company moved down Highway 7A. So far it appeared that the Western Army had caught its Federal counterpart entirely by surprise with the First Armored Brigade having encountered not the minimal resistance expected during the early part of its mission but, in fact, no resistance whatsoever.

  The Captain had no real expectations of his this particular plan would turn out. On paper it seemed to be solid enough, but it was more-or-less in defiance of any kind of standard military doctrine. The limited number of soldiers available to the Western Army as well as the limitations placed upon the shipment of supplies to it meant that the First Armored Brigade was nearly unsupported in its thrust. Conventional doctrine would have required substantial air, artillery, infantry, and general logistical support before a regular army attempted such a movement. Also, in his opinion, it would have made more sense for the Brigade to be sent against the Federal army logistics hub at Camp Pearson than into the City of Vancouver itself. A fully supported combined arms operation, even with the limited resources at hand, would have sufficed to overcome the Federal forces there and, with that mission complete, a bloodless surrender of the rest of the Federal army in British Columbia (or at least in the Greater Vancouver area) might have been obtained.

  As the Company passed from Coquitlam into the neighboring city of Burnaby, Julian continued to marvel at the lack of resistance. His tanks made good time, moving at twenty-five miles an hour along good roads.

  Camp Pearson had plenty of infantry. It had a team of staff psychologists and medical professionals of every kind. It had a cook who specialized in producing gluten-free meals demanded by one of the senior Federal officials who had stationed there. It even had, following sporadic mortar assaults, two batteries of good mortars to engage in counter-battery fire. What it did not have, (despite my frequent fucking requests, thought General Cauchon) was any Goddamned artillery
.

  Everyone was now under good cover and, so far, thirty or so 155mm artillery shells that had fallen on the base hadn't killed anyone. That was good, so far as Cauchon was concerned. However, without any artillery or air support, he lacked anything to shoot back at the distant howitzers with and that left the General with a deeper feeling of frustration than he had ever experienced in his life.

  "How the fuck," he berated his intelligence staff from within his bunker, "did we miss the fact that they were armed with fucking long-range artillery?"

  "Look: we've been warning Ottawa for weeks about what might be coming in terms of cargo," noted the Brigade's S-2, "it doesn't take too many cargo ships rolling into one of the ports that they control to bring in just a little bit of this sort of gear. I mean, the rate at which they're firing – half a dozen rounds a minute – doesn't suggest that they have a huge quantity of shells or of platforms to fire from. They might have as few as one or two Howitzers. How were we going to be able to detect that without having the ability to conduct blanket surveillance?"

  "Do we have a fix on where they are, yet?" Cauchon asked his Operations officer, effectively conceding the point by moving on.

  "Our best guess is that they're up in the hills, over somewhere in the Tri-Cities. Perhaps up on Burke Mountain or the area that the locals refer to as the Westwood Plateau. We'll know more as soon as we can get a spotter up into the air."

  "Ok then. Let's get some guys ready to move and take them out. Has there been any word on air cover?"

  "Ottawa is looking into if they can get us some of the planes that they've been using to hit insurgents in Alberta. But they're concerned about our lack of a decent air base."

  Throughout the long months of the occupation, a low-level guerrilla war had occurred throughout the Greater Vancouver region. Sniper and mortar attacks, combined with the damage done during the first battles, had proven to be more than enough to keep both the Vancouver and the Abbotsford airports closed to military traffic for the duration. An informal agreement had allowed both sides to use Abbotsford, Vancouver International having been too badly damaged, for limited civil traffic and each side cheated slightly by using it to smuggle in some military personnel and supplies. However, the ever-present threat that the use of military force could easily severe that last civilian lifeline had prevented either side from even seeking to convert it to entirely military purposes. Within the cities themselves, soldiers had waged a constant battle against the occupying forces. However, for reasons of both humanity and prudence, they had avoided attempting to fight a pitched battle on the streets of the city of Vancouver itself. Now, however, with the big push on all of the irregular forces of the Western Army were called into regular service in an effort to clear the path of the tanks.

  Anthony Wayne, Max Julian, and the rest of the First Armored Brigade were more than prepared to sweep away the opposition that could be offered by a handful of armored personnel carriers. Far more concerning, so far as they were concerned, was the threat posed by infantry in all of the tall buildings of the city itself. Tanks fighting in built-up areas were incredibly vulnerable to anti-tank missiles fired without warning from close quarters. The normal response to this threat was an indiscriminate use of both air power and artillery but, in the case of the Western Republic, this was not an option for both practical and political reasons.

  As the Western tanks reached the edge of the city, five hundred irregular infantry – some of them veterans of many battles, some of them fresh recruits with practically improvised weapons – began to move around the city.

  Second Lieutenant Evan Dunford checked his watch. The Federal army had been using the old Sun Tower – once the tallest building in the British Empire – as an outpost since the first days of the occupation. Not only did it provide them an excellent vantage-point from which to observe movement into the city from the east but it also, as an older building, was better-suited to standing up to the occasional stray bullet or rocket than a newer building. His platoon was assigned to take the building.

  Dunford checked his watch again. He silently prayed that the distant sounds of gunfire, combined with the reports of battle elsewhere, had caused all civilians to take shelter. He hesitated for a fraction of a second. Well, he thought, it has to be done. He pressed the "Send" key on his phone.

  Half a block away, a car bomb detonated with incredible force. The target was a building that had been taken over by the Army to serve as cafeteria for soldiers in this part of the city. Even with battle imminent, his last intelligence had shown there were some soldiers getting coffee from the place. Never mind those who staffed it. The bomb – a standard nitrate fertilizer/gasoline job – simply tore the place apart. Several people were killed but, more importantly from the perspective of the battle plan, more were wounded.

  The Western platoon was broken into three squads. One of them, supplemented by a few crack shots, was quietly deployed around the site of the bombing.

  Dunford watched as people screamed in the aftermath of the bombing. A man, his leg torn apart by shrapnel, dragged himself pathetically across the ground. Another man came running across the scene, running towards the injured soldier. The Lieutenant continued to watch and wait as others came to the scene. He waited another second as he continued to watch the first man charge towards the scene. It was brave, he thought, but it was the bravery of peacetime. After satisfying himself that the people charging to the aid of the wounded were themselves ordinary solders and not marked medical personnel, he silently gave the order to fire. The first soldier to be struck was hit directly in the chest and blown backwards by the force of a sniper's bullet. Another was stuck in the head and, having been initially driven backwards by the hit, was carried forward another few steps before the forward momentum of their bulk sent them crumpling forward. As an outcome, the Lieutenant reflected for not the last time during his service, it was legal without being moral.

  The initial resistance encountered by the First Armored Brigade had been, in a word, pathetic. A handful of infantrymen had attempted to fire Rocket-Propelled Grenades at the first Merkavas in the line as they moved down Hastings Street. It was gallant enough, but about as effective as Polish cavalry attempting to assault Nazi Panzers with their sabers. Julian's company hadn't even stopped to deal with them, leaving the mopping up instead to be handled by the infantry coming in the second echelon.

  For the sixty-third time that day, Captain Julian thanked God that the Federal Government had failed to move any of the Canadian Army's Leopard II tanks to support the occupation forces in Vancouver. They had had logistically sound reasons for coming to this decision - the length and fragility of their supply lines requiring that the forces in British Columbia be supplied almost entirely by the air primary among them -- but it now left them without a force capable of seriously challenging the Western Army in a direct head-to-head battle.

  Resistance intensified as the tanks began to approach the Downtown core itself. A squad at the corner of East Pender and Main had managed to fire an anti-tank missile that disabled one of the Western tanks. This, combined with the fighting being reported over their radio network as going on all along the streets of the city to the west, required the entire column to be slowed.

  As infantry moved to attempt to clear nearby buildings with support from the armored vehicles on the road, a second anti-tank guided missile streaked through the air and narrowly missed.

  "First Platoon hold," Julian spoke into his radio as he began to key instructions into his computer for the tanks of his Company.

  "Engage the enemy forces in the building on the left that I have designated with direct fire," he ordered his tanks. Eleven functional Merkavas turned their barrels and began to unleash 120mm High Explosive rounds against the squat, ugly, and old building that the missiles had been fired from. Later Julian would take special delight in offending the particularly squeamish by describing his battle in the Downtown Eastside as, "A form of accelerated and concussive urban
renewal."

  By the time the soldiers from Camp Pearson reached the mountain, the artillery fire had ceased. The pair of howitzers had already decamped for somewhere. General Cauchon himself had accompanied the two Infantry companies sent out to attempt to hunt down the forces attacking the Federal base with indirect fire.

  "Fuck," he cursed, leaning against his Humvee as he and other soldiers examined the area where, based upon the tracks and debris surrounding them, the Western soldiers clearly had been.

  "General," his aide announced with great solemnity, "our forces in Vancouver report that they are under attack by heavy armor. First reports say that there's a whole armored division overrunning their lines. Colonel McLean reports that, given the lack of heavy weapons at his disposal, he will be compelled to surrender in short order."

  "Jesus fuck!" shouted Cauchon, "there's no fucking way that they've concealed a whole Goddmaned division from us! Some heavy weapons, sure. That's why we managed to bring in the ATGMs and the rest of it. But a division? He's fucking panicking. Signal Brigade HQ – tell them that Colonel McLean is relieved, effective immediately and that I will be taking personal..."

  General Cauchon never got to finish his sentence. As it turned out, the rebels had one final surprise up their sleeves on that day: they'd purchased a single ex-American M270 Multiple Rocket Launch System together with a significant quantity of munitions for the same. Further, they'd carefully sighted the area from which they had fired upon Camp Pearson in the expectation that there would be a major movement of forces into the area – forces who had still not adjusted to the idea that they were fighting a war rather than acting as a police force and who would therefore respond to an attack by charging to it as if it were a crime scene rather than a battlefield. At that very moment the first of 7728 high-explosive submunitions began to detonate over the spot where the General was standing and moments later continued to detonate over the spot where he had been standing.