A House Divided

by Adam Yoshida

  Government property, however, was another matter. Since the government of Manitoba had taken a hostile stance towards the Western Republic – one that necessitated the present actions being taken – the property of both the government of the province of Manitoba and the Federal Government were deemed to be fair game. Jackson didn't see why anyone would want to bother stealing the previous-generation computers and worn low-end institution furniture that characterized most government buildings, but it seemed a safe enough release valve to allow a frustrated army of mercenary soldiers.

  "You were offered every chance to honorably align yourself with the Western Republic and you have spurned our every offer of peace," he informed a delegation of Manitoba politicians who pleaded with him to end the systematic destruction, "and you instead elected to hazard all by siding with the treacherous politicians of the East. Having declined peace and thereby placed your own citizens at risk, I fail to see why the property of so reckless a government ought to be held sacred."

  At any rate, Jackson had his own target in mind.

  The CBC Manitoba Building was not nearly so fashionable as the one that the Western Government had refused to permit him to destroy in Vancouver, but it would have to do. Officially, in his report to the Western government in Vancouver, he declared that the building had been targeted because it was an, "enemy C3I facility" but, as he would later admit, "it was mostly all done in the spirit of fun."

  After two days of destruction, it hadn't taken much to convince the few hold-outs in the building to leave. No one doubted that the General was in bitter earnest when he proclaimed his intent to utterly destroy it.

  First teams of soldiers were allowed to loot the building, stripping it of anything of value. Even the vending machines were blown open and their contents eagerly harvested. Equipment was at random destroyed with both gunfire and grenades. After a two-hour rampage, everyone was ordered out of the building. With a little training from one of the crews, Jackson was able to fire half a dozen rounds from a Merkava tank into the building itself. Shortly afterwards, other VIPs were likewise invited to launch various ordnance in the general direction of the building.

  Finally, shortly before midnight, as an impromptu barbecue featuring fine steaks and ribs was held, a battery of 155mm self-propelled howitzers engaged the building with direct fire for two minutes, reducing it to rubble.

  "Well," declared General Jackson, raising his glass of Lagavulin to the sky, "I guess our work here is finished."

  The means had always been in place. Even if the U.S. Government had, for various reasons, refused to contract directly with Praetorian, that had not stopped Augustus King from putting a handful of men on the ground in order to prepare for future contingencies. Right from the beginning, he'd tasked what limited resources he could deploy in the region with the vital task of tracking down Majid Shahidi. Many had, of course, assumed that the Iranian President had died during the nuclear exchange with Israel, especially insofar as he hadn't been seen since the day before the commencement of hostilities, but King had known better from the start.

  Why, the senior analysts at Praetorian had asked, would Shahidi have chosen to die in the nuclear exchange? After all, the Israelis had deliberately avoided nuking civilian Iranian areas. If he had chosen martyrdom, they reasoned, he'd have made certain that the world knew about it in great detail, not gone about it anonymously. Yet, at the same time, it seemed doubtful that he'd have gone to one of the Iranian government's ordinary wartime facilities, for fear that their locations would have been compromised. After what happened to Bin Laden, especially given how much fallout had blown over Afghanistan and Pakistan, it seemed doubtful that he would hide there. The Saudis were grateful that he'd driven the price of oil up, but were none-too-happy about the rest of what he'd done. No great power would dare to hide such a man. It took a week of thinking about Iran's pre-war assets before the folks in the Praetorian intel shop had come to a consensus: Shahidi must have gone to sea on one of Iran's missing submarines, and then to God-knows-where.

  Within a few months, the Yunes had run out of food and been forced to come ashore in order to re-supply from a pre-positioned cache. Now, acquiring the location of those caches had required the capture and the enhanced interrogation of a number of members of the Revolutionary Guard. King hadn't known exactly what he would do with that information. But now, with the latest news out of the Pentagon, he made a decision.

  General Mackenzie wasn't sure of the exact source of the information on the location of Majid Shahidi. The CIA officer who had passed it to his staff had played coy. He only knew, based upon his briefings, that it ought to be regarded as of the highest reliability.

  Ever-so-quietly, he assigned stealth drones to watch all of the caches and kept rotating groups of tactical aircraft on standby and had the Navy bring in a couple of deep-sea rescue submarines. When, four days after the tip came in, his men were ready.

  The key, they knew, would be to strike the Yunes on the surface. If they accomplished that, there was a chance – a likelihood even – that they would recover Shahidi's body. Failing that, if they sank the submarine when it was well below the surface, the odds of making such a recovery – and thereby proving their coup to the world – were extremely low.

  When the moment came, there was no hesitation. As soon as low-flying Predator drone observed the surfacing of the Yunes on yet another supply run, two stealthy Avenger drones were signalled from afar. The drones swooped in and dropped four five hundred pound bombs directly on the Iranian submarine, shattering it and breaking it up on the surface.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Escalation

  Once General Mackenzie had become a national hero once more by orchestrating the killing of the greatest murderer in history, his relief had become an impossibility. That did not, however, mean that Washington was through making his life difficult.

  "I am not to use theater-level air support assets without explicit authorization from the Secretary of Defense," General Mackenzie theatrically read the instruction aloud to his assembled staff.

  "Further, I am informed by the President that he will be dispatching a Special Envoy," his face curled with contempt as he spoke, "in order to handle the political aspects of this operation."

  He carefully folded the paper that he had been handed.

  "Well, ladies and gentlemen, I've been a soldier for my entire life and have always been raised and taught to obey the lawful orders of my Commander-in-Chief. And I will, of course, obey all such lawful orders.

  "But I must say, that I fear – and wish it to be conveyed to Washington – that such political interference in our assignment here will imperil our ability to accomplish our assigned objectives."

  Ambassador Nathaniel Archer, newly appointed by the President to serve as his personal envoy to the Central Command, coughed nervously as the General continued to stare into his eyes.

  "The President feels, General, that it makes sense that there should be a clear division between political and military functions in the region, and that to ask any one person to deal with the whole thing all at once is simply to ask too much of any one man."

  General Mackenzie turned to face one of his aides.

  "It appears that Washington is something-other-than-satisfied with our conduct of the campaign thus far. Who knew?"

  An uncomfortable silence hung over the room for ten full seconds.

  "The President feels that military and political objectives must, if our operations here are to be successful, be equally weighted."

  "And what, pray tell me, Ambassador, is the political objective that here that is distinct from the military objectives that this command has been assigned?"

  "Well, if it's specifics that you are seeking, my function here is to work to broker a wider peace that will allow us to begin an orderly withdrawal of our soldiers from here. As I see it, you believe is that your objective is to forcefully subdue all opposition forces throughout the region."

  A
rcher was a rarity in Washington: a career State Department employee whose political skills and connections had allowed him to jump ahead in his career by becoming a political appointee. His time as the U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon, before the beginning of the current war, hadn't been notably successful but it had not been a disaster either. That had been enough to earn him a place on the bench of potential Democratic diplomats. A career specialist in human rights, he cordially despised the military in general and officers like Mackenzie in particular, but he was good at not making it show too much.

  "General," began Archer, setting a tablet down on the desk, "the first thing that we need to discuss are the rules that have allowed so much damage to mosques and other Islamic holy sites..."

  The Senate trial of President Warren had degenerated into an endless back-and-forth. Half of the witnesses explained that the actions of the President were flagrantly unconstitutional and that the President ought to have known that from the outset. The other half argued either that the evidence was ambiguous or that the President, in a crisis, had inherent powers under the Constitution to take such actions as Warren had.

  It was interesting to those who understood such Constitutional minutia, but it certainly did not seem to be about to change a great many minds.

  "This is going nowhere," Speaker Halverson declared as he disgustedly switched the television off.

  "I wouldn't say that," replied Rickover. "Even if the Senate won't convict – and I'll concede that, given that there hasn't been any new evidence, it seems unlikely – this has served to strip this President of a great deal of legitimacy."

  "But with his actions, arguably confirmed."

  "You don't get impeached by two hundred and forty-seven Congressmen and then have fifty-something Senators vote to remove you from office and have your standing come out enhanced. At least not immediately. Even Clinton was neutered when we impeached him, whatever standing he later picked up. Think of how Gore ran from him in 2000. And that was with Clinton able to play the cart of sexual liberation martyr or whatever that was all about," said Rickover.

  "You've heard the speeches that he's given," said Halverson, pointing in the direction of the White House. "He certainly thinks that this helps him. From the way that he's talking – and the whispers I'm hearing out of the White House – he practically views a failed impeachment as being as good a mandate as a re-election."

  "That's delusional," said Rickover. Halverson shrugged.

  "Perhaps. But that's what we're dealing with now. If he comes through this power grab intact – and he's going to – then who knows what he'll feel emboldened to try next. He already thinks that he's invincible. This will just confirm it."

  General Richard Hall was making one of his rare public appearances, in this case at the dedication of a convention of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans being held in Cleveland. As his C-20 made its final approach to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the General carefully reviewed the words of the speech that he had prepared for the occasion, struggling to concentrate as the chatty handler that the White House had forced upon his blabbered on.

  "...fight. I mean, I don't know... I do like him. Actually, I like him a lot and we've spent a lot of time together since I moved to Washington..."

  Caesar had a precursor, the General had written, before him came Sulla. Lucius Cornelius Sulla was an interesting fellow. He lived openly with a drag queen after his second Consulship and he surrendered power when he was doing reorganizing the republic, in the best tradition of Cincinnatus. But he was not Cincinnatus. The question is now how he gave up power – and it is commendable that he did – but how he took it in the first place.

  "Right, right," the General nodded as his White House aide continued to speak.

  "...but I don't think that I'm ready for that sort of commitment..."

  "Of course," replied Hall, his mind still focused on his speech.

  An hour later, the General was in the hall and he was in full-swing.

  "...but once that door was opened, where was it to be closed? Marius used force to displace the followers of Sulla and then Sulla in turn used force to rid Rome of Marius. Personalities dominated the day. Politics became degenerate – a contest of one mob against the other. It availed them of nothing that Sulla might have been right about the issues of the day because, once Sulla drew his sword against Rome and did so with success, he made it inevitable that the next contestant would do the same and that the process would repeat itself not once but many times over.

  "When the sword is unsheathed, republican government ends.

  "There is a story that is often told. When the Framers had finished the Constitution, a woman asked Benjamin Franklin what kind of government that they had given the people. 'A republic, if you can keep it,' he replied.

  "If you can keep it. That is the key. A republic can only be conserved so long as the citizens consent and so long as it is not haunted by forces more powerful than the people. That is why, so long as it remains the lawful government, the soldier must always be subordinate to the state. That is the proper order of things. Because when military judgement is substituted for political judgement, even – especially actually – when military judgement is superior to political judgement than the latter will inevitably give way to the former time and time again.

  "This great nation can endure, has endured, and will endure folly and foolishness in its politicians. That is to be expected. But this folly can and will always be corrected so long as regular government and regular order is maintained. Those who believe that we may preserve or restore liberty through overturning the state by the sword are embarking upon a very dangerous path from which there is no election and for which there are no guarantees as to the final outcome.

  "As a private citizen, I have, do and, will in the future disagree with policies of governments. As a soldier, however, I vow to you – as every true soldier must vow – that I will always follow the lawful orders of my superiors and that I will remember every word of the oath I took to defend this nation and its Constitution against all enemies, both those foreign and domestic."

  Mark Varro looked at the gleaming broadsword that he was holding in his hands with satisfaction. Shooting, he had decided, was too good for his enemies – and the broader enemies of America – to ever really get his message. This would be impossible to mistake, for what ordinary criminal act was ever committed with a sword? The sensationalism would be irresistible to a media whose eagerness to embrace the prurient at all turns would be its own undoing.

  His target was a man who, though he now styled himself as a teacher, had, in his youth, waged war upon the United States of America. It was only through a quirk of the modern justice system that he had escaped genuine justice. He allegedly taught "philosophy" now but, in his youth, he had posed for smiling pictures – pictures that could be found with a few keywords typed into any search engine – alongside North Vietnamese soldiers who had definitely killed Americans. Then he had come back and helped to bomb police stations. He would have bombed a military graduation ceremony too had not one of his compatriots – as foolish a bomb-maker as he was an ideologist – triggered an explosion that had resulted in what was left of three revolutionary soldiers being sprayed across and into the walls of a Hyde Park house. He'd gone into hiding after that, emerging only in the early 1990s, by which time everyone was glad for the '60s to be long over and therefore had been more than happy to look the other way as the charges against him had been quietly dropped due to alleged irregularities in the evidence.

  But, when it came down to it, Varro asked himself, was there really any doubt as to the man's guilt? Had he ever even expressed any remorse for his crimes? No and no. Well, his time of judgement, though long-delayed, had arrived at last.

  The Western forces, having taken Winnipeg, had continued to press on into Ontario. But the Federal Army was not yet ready to stop them, the Prime Minister knew. Sure, the Canadian government had plenty of foreign support – the propaganda campaign
against the idea of a "right wing coup" in Canada having gained nearly as much international and online traction as that of the Western cause as a revolutionary one that shared more than a passing kinship with the American founding. However, the supporters of the East had, in general, proven to be far less eager to volunteer themselves for combat than the supporters of the West had.

  "The army is not ready, but the army must be ready," the Prime Minister declared as he carefully studied the maps being projected in front of the Cabinet War Committee.

  "I understand that, Prime Minister," the Chief of the Defense staff carefully explained, "but these things take time. After the first battles in the West we began if not quite from zero than from something very close to it. We cannot simply generate an army, especially one that will effectively fight, overnight."

  "The economy is coming apart and it's getting progressively worse with each passing day," the Finance Minister noted.

  "The West can float itself on energy and resource exports – especially with the economic boost that occurred when people simply stopped paying Federal taxes – but the same cannot be said for us," added the Deputy Prime Minister.

  "Facts are facts, ladies and gentlemen," the Chief of the Defense Staff said, somewhat gruffly.

  "Then, perhaps, we need another set of facts," the Prime Minister pointedly responded.

  "We would do well to remember that the Western Army, as much as ours, is a scratch force. Yes, they're largely veterans and highly motivated, but they don't have a great deal of experience. And they're running a very long supply line right now," the Defense Minister, shifting uncomfortably in his char, volunteered.

  "That's why they committed the crimes that they did at Winnipeg and at other points along their march. They fear that they'll be subjected to a surprise attack from the rear," added the Finance Minister.