by Adam Yoshida
"They know what they're doing," Stern quickly responded, narrowing his eyes and subtly leaning forward as he attempted to block everything but what was in front of him from his mind.
The MiGs continued their flight, dodging and weaving as intermittent anti-aircraft fire began to fly into the air around them. Finally, with an almost-agonizing slowness, the targets came into full view. Stern banked his Fulcrum to the right and, arcing upwards to avoid being caught in the blast, released his bombs.
Dunford had taken over the gunner position in his Merkava and was loading the gun himself, diving from one crew position to another. The gunner was dead, killed by a piece of shrapnel that had caught him after a 120mm shell had directly impacted the tank. The loader and driver had both fled, at his orders. Whether they made it through the maelstrom around them or not, he had absolutely no idea.
He fired another round at one of the incoming Leopard tanks and looked around again. The forward battalion was swarming his company. He wouldn't have time to load and fire again. He wanted to be a hero but had no desire to be a martyr. He popped that hatch and emerged into the fiery world that surrounded him. A machine gun bullet struck him in the chest, sending him falling the ground. He crawled a few feet before he turned over onto his back, when he caught sight of the MiGs passing above. Dunford rolled himself into a neighboring slit trench, landing with a splash. He laughed as the world around him dissolved into flame.
"I don't think that there's anything left of the advance company," Colonel Raleigh, the commander of the 1st Brigade who was now the de facto second in command of the Division, announced to Jackson over their secure video chat.
"Not from what those drones are showing," Jackson glumly replied before perking up slightly and adding, "but they really let us tear those fuckers in their tank regiment a new asshole."
"Yeah," agreed Raleigh, "I don't think that they're moving forward at all."
"Total disarray," General Price's aide repeated his assessment of the situation along the front.
"I understand what the general plan of the defense for this area was – forward strong points with an armored reserve and reserves in the city to be re-deployed as necessary, but they've simply taken our defenses at a run. They cut up some of those trenches, fucking buried them in dirt – and they really slammed our tanks. They paid for it, but that's a pretty Goddamned small consolation, if you don't mind my saying. I don't know what we can do now."
"Fall back," said Price softly, "save whatever can be saved."
"Not fight for the city?"
"Without our mobility, it's pointless. They can bypass our infantry and leave us to wither on the vine if we don't have protection against their tanks and fighters. They'll simply hammer our strongpoints."
The people around the table nodded.
"Sir," another aide entered the room, "we have a call from the Prime Minister's office."
"I would have thought that they'd have pulled back immediately. Our tanks are mauled enough that, though they'd have had to abandon a lot of stuff, we probably wouldn't have been able to pursue immediately," Colonel Raleigh observed, circling the positions still held by the Federal army on the interactive map that was being broadcast across their video chat.
"If they hold the town behind us, they'll still be a threat to our rear areas," noted Jackson quietly.
"Only if they're mobile. They're pretty dug in and I don't see them sallying forth anytime soon. They're pretty new, I don't think that their discipline would hold up through that."
Jackson looked thoughtfully at the screen.
"No..." he said, "I think you're quite right about that."
Second Lieutenant Gerri Wagner had been a student at McGill when the war had broken out, majoring in Human Geography. Never, in all of her life, had she imagined that she would end up as a soldier. But, when the Prime Minister had called for volunteers to counteract what he described as – and what she agreed was – a "right-wing coup" not even so odious an institution as the Army had been too hateful for her to join in defense of her country. The men who had cried about women being unsuitable for front-line combat in the infantry had never met Gerri Wagner. Lean, fit, and five-foot-ten, she'd been able to score well above the average of all recruits – regardless of gender – on her Canadian Forces Fitness Test. That was a legacy of fourteen years worth of soccer. She'd never touched a gun in her life before she began Basic Training, but she had also qualified as an expert marksman.
Now, she was in command of a platoon of young men and women and stuck holding a building in downtown Thunder Bay, Ontario – a place that, in her opinion, made her native Calgary look cosmopolitan. In the interest of expediency, the volunteer units had been largely allowed to remain together in regional or other groupings. As a result, most of the brigade that she belonged to and the platoon that she was in charge of consisted of young students from around Montreal. They'd spent many days and nights together talking through why they were here and about the kinder, gentler, and better Canada that they hoped would emerge on the other side of the war. Now, though, having heard whispers of what had happened to the mostly-veteran soldiers in the first trenches and having smelled and seen some of what happened when the Armoured Regiment had charged forward, they were all frightened. Together they'd been sitting for hours, carefully watching the windows and gripping their rifles as they waited for their first taste of combat.
Minutes ticked by as Wagner walked up and down the line, talking to her soldiers.
"It'll be ok," she told one of them, "they'll probably bypass us anyway at this point."
Then the first shell began to burst. The windows around them began to shatter from the concussion of the nearby blasts. Soldiers backed off and hit the deck. A few of them, wounded by flying glass and splinters, began to call out for medical assistance. Wagner held back, cooly watching as events played out all around her.
"It's not just that we only have a limited supply of shells here," Lieutenant Colonel Abernathy, the acting commander of the Corps' artillery, told Jackson, "it's that we don't have a lot of shells anywhere. They're still offloading them in Vancouver, at the very end of the tail. They can fly us in some more, but that'll only mean that we'll be getting a dribble of the things."
"I understand that, Colonel," replied Jackson, "and, to be frank, I don't care. Pour it on, as long as you can. We'll worry about the rest of it as we need to. It's not like we're about to fight an artillery engagement here."
Around Jackson and Abernathy, the 155mm howitzers boomed almost continually as they continued to bombard the Federal positions within the city itself, expending ammunition at a furious rate.
The shelling had gone on for nearly an hour, leaving buildings all along the city's main streets in smoldering ruins. Wagner had done her best to comfort and prepare her soldiers, but she could tell that they weren't all with her. Some were looking straight at the ground, dazed even after they had found better shelter in the basement of the building. Some were crying quietly to themselves. Others were openly weeping. Explosions continued to move the earth all around them. Then it stopped.
"There's enemy infantry incoming," her radio croaked out, its signal distorted somewhere.
"This is it," she announced to everyone around her in the shelter. She was greeted by silence.
"This. Is. It," she announced again, this time slower and more deliberately. A few people turned to look. She caught the eyes of one of them.
"Look," she said, "I know that you're tired and I know that you're frightened. I understand all of that. But they're tired too. And a lot of them are an awfully long way from home. If we give them a good and solid punch back, like all bullies, I expect that they'll fall right apart. That's what we're here to do."
Wagner looked around. There were no cheers. But there were nods. There was quiet resolution. That was enough.
The platoon fanned out across the ground floors of a handful of squat downtown stores, taking improvised firing positions and waiting.
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"Only fire when you have a clear shot," Wagner ordered, lifting her C7 Rifle to her shoulder as she waited for the enemy to pull into view. From a distance, she could make out the roar of a vehicle engine.
"Missile crews, at the ready!" she shouted, as a half-dozen men and women began to fumble to put their anti-tank missile into place. The sound got nearer and nearer.
From around the corner, a sixteen-ton LAV-III vehicle raced into view, coming in at nearly one hundred kilometers per hour. As her missile crews turned to engage the infantry fighting vehicle, it raced down the street, wildly spraying machine gun bullets without bothering to attempt any exact targeting. One of the crews fired a missile that flew wildly off target as the others continued to fumble with the controls. A 7.62mm round struck Gerri in the chest, sending her instantly collapsing to the ground. It clipped her right lung, which began to fill with blood, leaving the Lieutenant wheezing and struggling to speak. As the world around her faded into eternal blackness, Wagner could see her men and women begin to drop their weapons and run, leaving her behind to spend her final moments reflecting upon the utter futility of it all.
Back at his apartment, Mark Varro sat flipping between the reports of the fighting in Canada and the local news. From monitoring the local police radio, he knew that the body had been discovered within minutes and that the Washington, DC police were on the scene. However, to his profound disappointment, the local media was reporting the incident as a "bizarre crime" rather than giving his action a full hearing.
I signed the fucking note "Osawatomie Brown", thought Varro, surely there's someone there who took a high school history class at one time in their lives.
"Of course," the local reporter droned on, "some are asking what role the media – and our overheated political environment – played in this terrible crime."
"I have to wonder too," the local anchor asked the reporter, "just why anyone would ever need to own a 'Braveheart-style' sword? I mean, it can't really serve any purpose other than to kill people, can it?"
Varro sighed. Next time, he vowed, they would get the point.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Pathways
Most of the media might have been too distracted to pay attention to what had happened to Professor Anderson, but it certainly had gotten the attention of the Vice President, who had demanded an immediate Oval Office meeting to discuss it.
"The man never did anything in his life, other than struggle in the cause of peace and social justice," he quietly told the President.
"So I've been told," Warren replied quietly.
"Mr. President, I know that we've never quite seen eye-to-eye on all of this," Vice President Bryan said, "but you must see – between the obstructionism, the violence, the mass accumulation of wealth – which is really just another form of violence – that something must be done.
"Something will be done," said the President. The Vice President smiled.
"That's all I've ever wanted," he said.
"I'm holding this economy together with duct tape and twine, Mr. President," Daniel Hampton told President Warren during his morning videoconference from New York to Washington.
"I understand that the situation is very grave," the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors conceded, "but I don't think that it's quite as bad as that."
"Then you fucking come up here and deal with it," Hampton pointedly shot back over the feed.
"Ok, ok," the President waved his arms, "I don't think that sniping is going to get us anywhere. We just need to get beyond our present troubles, and then we can begin to make some real structural changes."
"Capital markets are frozen, Mr. President," Hampton emphasized, "there's no real underlying activity that isn't, at this point, being driven by the Fed. The Fed is underwriting and, really, conducting by proxy all interbank transfers. The Fed is driving all interbank lending. People are buying commercial paper only when we're guaranteeing the transaction and lending the money for them to do it."
"I think that we all understand the problems, Mr. Hampton," Raul Emerson interjected.
"Do you?" he asked.
"Ok," said the President, "I don't think that we're going to solve any of these problems at once or overnight. I certainly don't think that this is accomplishing anything productive. Let's come at this with fresh eyes tomorrow, folks."
Colonel Stern didn't like his latest orders, even if he saw the sense of them.
The Federal soldiers fleeing Thunder Bay were no longer an organized force. They were a rabble. Many of them weren't even armed in any real sense. Striking them, he felt, might actually prolong the war by arousing an even-greater hatred of the West throughout the East and thereby motivating them to continue the war even longer. Of course, he wasn't a policy-maker and this wasn't even his country. On a personal level he was simply being paid to shut up and fly. On a deeper level, he knew, somewhere a deal had been struck that would ensure not only that he was paid, but that his actual homeland was compensated as well.
Drones had sighted a column of five hundred soldiers, some on foot and some in vehicles, on the move twelve miles to the east of the city. Without proper air defenses, they were sitting ducks. It was entirely without joy that Stern swung his MiG into place and dropped two five-hundred-pound bombs right on top of them.
The Prime Minister, having witnessed the collapse of the army on the battlefield, now turned to General LeFluer, who responded to his e-mail within minutes with a reply which contained as an attachment a detailed plan for the conduct of non-conventional operations against the Western Army designed to serve as a delaying action until "external forces" (meaning, in other words, American military support) could be brought into play.
"We still possess tremendous resources, many of which may be used to our advantage," a visibly excited Prime Minister told the Cabinet.
"At this point, what we're talking about here is guerrilla warfare, waged across all of Ontario, for the purpose of restoring a Canadian federation with a radicalized West and where very large promises have been made to both Quebec and our aboriginal population in order to gain military volunteers from those communities. I don't know that that is a cause worth the tremendous losses contemplated," the Finance Minister sourly declared.
"I think," the Leader of the NDP declared with a heavy pause, "that some from of conciliation is the only realistic option left open to us at the present moment in time."
"You mean to allow the Western Provinces to bolt the country with trillions – yes, trillions – in wealth that properly belongs to all of the Canadian people? To shirk debts that are as much theirs as they are ours?"
"I think that the debt matter could be settled reasonably in final negotiations. Likewise, I think that we'd stand a fair chance at holding the North – it's more occupied by Western forces than it is an active part of the separatist movement," the Finance Minister said calmly.
"There will," the Prime Minister jumped from his seat as he spoke, "...listen to me. There will be negotiations with separatists and traitors so long as I sit in this chair. I will never concede what generations built – what my father built..."
As the Prime Minister continued, the Cabinet began to look less at him and more at each other.
"Goddamnit!" shouted Lieutenant General William Jackson as he slammed his first into the table. After Thunder Bay and the death of General Wayne, Vancouver had had little choice but to give him the overall command of the Western Expeditionary Force and a third star to go along with the billet. However, as a military commander, he was emphatically not being consulted on the political questions of the day.
"They're going to fucking negotiate!" he shouted to the staff members who had turned to face him, started by his outburst.
The new Prime Minister was actually a Westerner – a Liberal MP from British Columbia who had kept their seat in the Federal Parliament even after succession. They were moderate and fairly popular with all sections of the country. What they proposed – as he had had t
o learn from the media – was a treaty that would concede a form of Western independence that would maintain a form of economic federation between the East and West, including an equal sharing of the debts. Further, it was reported that referendums would be allowed in all of the northern territories to determine their final status. This process was sure to end up with the north in Ottawa's hands.
"No. Fucking. Way," declared the General, followed by a further slam of his fist into the desk.
An aide walked into the room.
"General, this has been passed to us by a Federal officer under a flag of truce," he said as he handed Jackson a piece of paper.
In light of the imminent commencement of negotiations between the Federal Government and the de facto authority in the West, I believe that it would be in the interests of humanity for an immediate cease-fire to be declared across the entire front.
The tension in the room increased as the General read the message. Most of the staff was prepared for a real explosion this time. Instead, the General laughed.
"Does anyone have a pen?" he asked.
A Captain who specialized in public affairs was tasked with ensuring that Jackson's response to the Federal commander be transmitted to the media immediately.
"I will not order any cessation of hostilities except on the terms of the immediate and unconditional recognition of the independence of the Western Republic and the surrender of your force. My tanks can be in Toronto in forty-eight hours."
After handing copies of the statement to the reporters waiting outside of the WEF's headquarters in Thunder Bay, he took a CTV reporter aside and pulled out another piece of paper on which he had written down some quotes that he released to her to be attributed to a, "high-level source within the Western Army."
"There are no organized forces available to defend Toronto. We expect resistance from within the city itself, but we'll be able to use artillery to simply smash that. The political leadership and the soldiers of the Western republic are not particularly concerned about the condition of Toronto, of all places, when we're done," the white-faced twenty-something reporter read aloud as CTV broke into its programming for an urgent update.