by Adam Yoshida
“The evidence that will be presented,” he declared in making his case to the assembled Senate, “will show that the President, with flagrant disregard for the Constitution that he is sworn to uphold, deliberately issued orders in contravention to the law and to the separation of powers between the branches of government. He has sought, in effect, to render the Congress subordinate of him.”
“The question before the Senate today is not a partisan one. It is transcendent. The question is whether we will defend the Constitution of the United States or whether we will allow the President and a small circle around him to obtain unlimited powers over the affairs of the people. This is not hyperbole. If we permit the President of the United States to simply print and then spend money citing one pretext or another under Federal law, we will have ended the power of the Congress. If the law may be stretched as far as this, there is nothing that this President - or a future President - may not find somewhere in the vast cornucopia of laws enacted by all of the Congresses that have ever been summoned to justify some action or another.”
Samaria, State of Israel
Abu Fayed had spent his whole adult life - actually, even prior to that - in the service of the Palestinian cause. His affiliations had been mutable but his core loyalty had always remained. It was enough that when the phone had rung - while he was in bed with Adela in Ramallah that he had actually answered the phone, as much as he might regret it now.
As his men worked around him he thought about Adela. Her soft skin. Her gentle laugh. The subtle scar on her leg, which she always tried to hide but which he adored, from when she had fallen on the playground as a child and cut herself on some jagged metal.
Muhammed, Fayed’s best friend since they had been boys, tapped him on the shoulder. Normally Muhammed was jovial, always laughing and joking. He loved the American cartoon Family Guy, even though many around him neither got it or approved. But now he was serious.
“Everything is ready, brother,” he said. Fayed nodded. Muhammed signaled the rest of the men. With a whoosh, the first Katyusha rockets began to race across the sky.
Overhead, an orbiting Predator drone picked up the distinctive visual signature of the launch of the rockets. Normally the drone’s remote pilot would use this as a trigger to call other drones into action but, today, they had special orders.
Major Martin Rasmussen had spent nearly a decade flying for the Air Force following his graduation from the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. Where the majority of his classmates - and indeed most of the people who joined the Air Force - came in with dreams of flying fast and glamorous fighters, Rasmussen had always had always dreamed of being a bomber pilot.
It still hurt a little bit that the old Strategic Air Command - what he would have given to have flown in the days of LeMay and genuine strategic air power - had been essentially folded into the old Tactical Air Command under the auspices of the Air Command Command. Lately, the bomber force had regained some of its old identity under the new Air Force Global Strike Command but, still, Rasmussen couldn’t see why they simply couldn’t have re-established the old SAC that he might have been given the right sort of shoulder patch to wear to war.
“$20 can buy many peanuts,” Rasmussen announced to no one in particular.
“Explain how?” he blithely continued.
“Money can be exchanged for goods and services!” he cheerily replied, followed by a “woo-hoo!” A handful of crew members indulgently laughed as Rasmussen began to study the latest updates on his HUD.
“Well boys,” he declared, “it looks like we’re going to get some action to-day!”
The rockets finished their grim arc, landing somewhere in Israel - Fayed had never bothered to figure out exactly where any of them landed, so long as they hit something that belonged to the Jews he figured that he was doing right by Allah. The men were professionals and working to quickly pack up and move on before some Reaper or Apache came by to assault them with Hellfire missiles.
“Let’s go, let’s go!” he encouraged the men.
He’d come back to the fight for these operations - with nuclear bombs going off all around him what sort of man could not? - but when it was all over with he was going to go back to Adela and stay with her. Someday, he vowed, there would be no more war for him.
Muhammed strode towards him, carrying a heavy bag.
“Listen, do you want to get a beer---”
Muhammed never got to finish his thought. The more religious among the rocket crew, had they lived, might have speculated that Allah himself might have opened the skies in order to punish him for his blasphemy. The credit for the fact that they never did find the time to think such uncharitable thoughts about their friend must be jointed shared between Major Rasmussen and the rest of his crews, their ground support crews, those associated with the two other planes in his cell, the good people and Boeing, and the noble men and women responsible for the manufacture and distribution of the Mk. 84 General Purpose Bomb. Fayed’s remains were never identified because the only group of people capable of sorting out the mess that the “Arc Light” mission left on the ground worked at the FBI Crime Lab in Quantico, Virginia and no one, not even his dear sainted Adela (who had already invited another man into her bed before the day was finished) really cared all that much about the details of the situation.
The White House, Washington, DC
“They did what?” the President asked, his face flushed with anger.
“Apparently CENTCOM called upon the B-52s tasked to them as theatre support assets. They had them orbiting and, when the next round of rocket attacks began, they called them in - targeted by Predators - and dropped nearly two hundred tons of explosives down upon the Palestinians. Early estimates say around two hundred civilians died... Though, I’ll add, that count came from the Palestinian Authority itself and might not be entirely reliable.”
“Jesus Christ,” pronounced the President before slumping into his chair.
“Well,” he said after a pause, “now what do we do?”
“I don’t think that we should do anything immediately,” Raul Emerson said tentatively.
“He just violated his orders and murdered several hundred civilians,” replied Alexis Jensen.
“I understand that,” said Emerson, “but you know what the hue and cry from the right will be - that they were responding to terrorism, that we’re soft on terror, that we’re cover Muslims, etc, etc - and I just don’t think that we need that right now. Not with the trial in just a few days. Better to slow-play this one. Have DoD announce an investigation or some such. Then, once we’re clear of the trial, we announce the results of the investigation - and then we move.”
“They’ll all get theirs soon enough,” the President darkly muttered.
“Well…” volunteered Alexis Jensen from the corner of the room, “perhaps we might make it a little bit sooner than that, even.”
“How so?”
“My sources in the Pentagon tell me that the Chief of Staff suspects that General Mackenzie is transferring supplies, off-the-books, to what’s left of the Israeli Defense Force.”
“Why is this the first I’m hearing of this?”
“It is only a rumor.”
“Get me General Hall, now,” said the President.
Winnipeg, Manitoba
The last time that William Jackson had been in Winnipeg, he had been a child. His last memory of the city was of mosquitoes the size of a quarter practically eating him alive during an attempted picnic. To take the torch to some cities would have been a melancholy duty - to do so to a city that he had always despised and that now presented a danger to his cause was actually kind of fun.
All around him the air was filled with acrid smoke as every major source of aviation and motor fuel in the city - those that the Western Army could not appropriate for themselves at any rate - was allowed to burn. Another crew of 1st Armored Division soldiers - all of whom had some special expertise in the matter - had been allowed
to volunteer for the special duty of tearing apart every facility of significance at the Winnipeg James Armstrong Richardson International Airport.
Some of the soldiers had gotten a little bit carried away and begun to loot private businesses. Jackson drew a firm line at that. All private property not considered to be of potential military value to the enemy was placed firmly off-limits with soldiers being warned that those who stole from private citizens would be tried and then shot. Two soldiers who were convicted, following a quick court martial, of raping a local girl were actually shot.
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.
U.S. Central Command Forward Headquarters, Jerusalem
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
U.S. Central Command Forward Headquarters, Jerusalem
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 theatre-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 somethi
ng-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.”
Archer 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 Capitol, Washington, DC
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.