First Citizen

by Thomas T. Thomas

  “I can’t tell you what kind of opposition we’ll find in Texas. If the State militia comes out against us, we’ll have to fight our way up from Galveston Island. Pound for pound and round for round, they can probably outgun and outmaneuver us.” He looked from side to side at his volunteers—a gesture that must have been invisible to the back of the field. “But can they outfight us?”

  “No!” they roared back at him.

  “I didn’t think so.” He shook his head with a huge grimace that would carry, at least into the front ranks of the crowd, as a smile. “You are all free men and women. It’s your choice to follow me. Choice is something not many people have these days, in the machine society they’ve built for us in Baltimore. It wasn’t meant to be that way, you know. But even the best designs can be brought to nothing by small men. Now, it’s your choice to help me change history. Can you do that?”

  “Yes!” they roared.

  “Then, you Homeless Bastards … the adventure begins tomorrow!” He left a pause for them to cheer. They did. “Your officers will have your wave assignments in the order of battle. Good luck. I know you won’t let me down.”

  Corbin turned off the microphone then, intending to end it there, simply, with dignity. He began climbing down the pyramid’s steps, a hundred of them and more. They were steep shelves of cut rock, which forced him to take long, careful, jackleg steps. However, the troops would not let it end. They began to call his name: Gran, Granny. At first it was scattered, said barely above a normal voice. But they soon found a rhythm, with each step he took: Gran—ny, Gran—ny, Gran—ny, GRAN—ny.

  In response, Corbin paced himself, step by step, letting it build, then raising his hands over his head. Their voices rolled up at him. They pressed forward to the base of the Pyramid of the Sorcerer, took him onto their shoulders when he reached the bottom. Still chanting his name, the soldiers carried him off the field. And into glory, they thought. …

  We worked the crossing in reverse of our invasion of Yucatan. The ships left first, with the assault forces. When they were almost a hundred miles out from the target, one of the steamers that carried the third wave broke off and stationed itself to begin refueling the Stompers from a bladder on deck. The rest of the ships crept to within five miles of the gap between Galveston Island and the Bolivar Peninsula. We could only hope the harbor authorities’ navigational radar would not ring any bells because five assorted cargo ships stopped to dump garbage or fuel oil or whatever this close to port.

  There at 0620 hours on Sunday, with more than an hour to dawn, they began mounting the KK-4 turbines on the boat shells, firing them up, blowing up the skirts, and putting the craft over the side with cargo cranes. Then a hundred troops swarmed down nets and began mounting weapons and settling in, while other crews went to work on the remaining shells. The honk and whine of those jet engines starting up echoed mournfully across the black water.

  Or so I am told—this time I was in the air, leading a wing of the Stompers. With no reconnaissance, no spies, not even a media scan at the target, we had no idea what the reception would be. I wanted to be high in the air and moving from the start for this one. Gran was going to be on one of the air boats, he said, somewhere in the first wave. We had shaken hands in Progreso on the nineteenth, before the ships moved out, and known that we might never see each other again. It was one of those dry-mouth moments. Not much to say.

  Now I took the Stomper high, looking down on the sleepy, minimal glow of the city. Behind me was the great black of the Gulf, and ahead the raggedy, patchy glow of street lights and buildings lit on Sunday morning with only safety lighting. Houston is unlike any other American city. From the air, most of them look like concentric circles: a big, splashy center city, then congested inner ’burbs, spaced outer ’burbs, radiating interstates, and farmland satellite villages. The Houston downtown by comparison was a pimple—maybe a dozen tallish buildings huddled together, surrounded by greenery and subdivisions. The ship channel, the docks and refineries were far removed from the city itself. Beltways ringed Houston, connecting a dozen isolated office-hotel-shopping complexes which were an architect’s dream: glass and steel shaped and set in their own spaces. Like a futuristic chessboard.

  The city was shaped by its laws, as most were. Houston had no zoning ordinances, reflecting a Texas tradition of inde-goddamn-pendence. A man could build on his own property whatever the hell he wanted, pard! So an office building might go up right next to a residential complex, a gas station right beside a single-family mansion. Owners’ property rights were supreme, restricted only by the covenants written into their title or lease documents.

  I flew over this web of spider light, seeing mostly the red gems of aerial beacons on the tall, wide-spaced buildings. No other air traffic rose to meet me. Air Control queried me on the radio, and I made up some trash about being a private aircraft with a flight plan forty-eight hours old. That would keep them pawing through back paper. The rest of our air force was five miles out and low to the water—below the controllers’ radar horizon, I hoped.

  The city was asleep, or so it seemed from up here.

  From the air boats, it was a different city. They moved up the ship channel, seeing the yellow-green sodium lights of the docks and cranes draw closer. Then a dozen, twenty, a hundred similar lights were between Granny’s flotilla and the shore. They swarmed, crossed, raced around, forcing the air boats to dodge and cross their own wakes.

  Then, from a clear black sky full of stars, it started to rain, great lashing gusts that almost swamped some of the boats

  Granny’s talkers had a lot to say about all this, calling to each other, jamming up communications. He told me later that it was some minutes before the lead boats identified the source of the rain as a tugboat-looking thing, or possibly two of them, that bore down the channel toward the air boats.

  As the sky grayed with dawn, Gran could see it was a pair of fireboats, waving their lacy veils of water back and forth. “As a weapon against our hovercraft, those pounding streams were almost ideal,” he told me later.

  But they were not a weapon. The fireboats and small pleasure craft—which is what all the little lights were—had come down the channel to greet Corbin and his forces in friendship. A large police launch carried the mayor of Houston and a joint delegation from the States of California and Nevada to welcome him to the city and offer him the support and protection of the TENMAC, or at least half of it.

  “Did you arrange all that?” I asked him, after we had linked up at his temporary HQ.

  “When would I have done that?” Corbin grinned at me.

  “When you were in Vegas, say, on your devious way into Mexico?”

  He made a swimming motion with his hand. “Let’s say I dropped some hints. That, and my reputation as a member of the Special Executive, which preceded me. No one has forgotten what happened in Chicago.”

  With the mayor and the delegation was Mike Alcott. He had a bundle of messages for Gran, most of them secret agreements from members of Congress who were unhappy with the rule of Pollock and, already fading into the shadows, Cawley. Alcott had stayed in Baltimore as long as he could. Then he had been impeached in an electronic vote that lasted fourteen minutes. A new record.

  Now both Corbin and Alcott had prices on their heads. Literally. Pollock had convicted them in absentia of high treason and was offering a million new dollars, apiece, to anyone who returned either them or verifiable pieces of their bodies, no questions asked, to Federal authorities in Baltimore. So the war was on in earnest.

  Corbin moved his troops into Houston. He adopted the old Galleria center, in the city’s Southwest Corridor, as his headquarters. We grounded the Stompers in the parking lots on one side of the shopping center, put a small ammo and weapons dump on the other, at some distance from the hotel and office towers. Granny commandeered the top floor for his immediate staff.

  I did not see Carlotta anywhere around and thought it was just my good luck. I wondered abou
t her. Walking barefisted into Texas with a price on your head was definitely not Carlotta’s style.

  While Corbin was settling in and soldering up the political situation, I put into action the plan that had come to me in Merida, the one to get us some teeth.

  One of our cyber sergeants, a woman named Alice Tanno, had once worked as a systems integrator in the maintenance section of the Federal Strategic Forces. This tiny cadre of pushbutton soldiers kept the missile silos, which were the country’s loaded gun to the heads of the Russians, the Chinese, the Middle Arab Jamahiryat, and every other power bloc that might want to march into North America. Tanno had admitted to me that she knew the locations, entry points, and access codes for the Central Kansas Complex.

  At 0300 hours, I took off from Houston with a wing of twelve Stompers. We filed bogus flight plans for California with the Air Control radar scan, then flew north. Aboard each plane was a fire team of eight troopers and a two-man specialist team that Tanno had trained in Merida. For a group working in complete secrecy, we had been amazingly thorough: Tanno had set up maps, models, and cyber mockups for these teams to work on. They cracked codes, popped circuits—even fired off a simulated multiple strike. The team had everything to play with except real live guards in FSF uniforms to garrote.

  Our formation split up over Oklahoma and diverged for three separate points in Kansas. Dawn was still two and a half hours away on our right wings when we dove for the deck, flying radar-low and only rising over the field breaks of trees. My string of four flew east towards Wheaton in Pottawatomie County, the others headed more west to Abilene and Concordia. Three miles out from our target sites we split again, one plane to each of the fenced reservations in this strategic group. To confuse everybody later, we came up on them from opposite points of the compass, low and fast.

  On the first pass over the ground, we knocked out satellite dishes, domes and antenna arrays, anything that looked like communications. We also hit the powerlines we could see, forcing the sites onto backup generators.

  At the end of that run, we did a climbing turn, wing over, and went back for more. On the second pass, we released the heaviest nerve gas I had been able to buy on the arms market. I was not interested in secondary effects—whether it killed the victim, made him dizzy, knocked him cold, caused him to swallow his tongue and choke on his own vomit, or just mutated his kids in the nth generation—so long as it met two simple criteria. One, it had to incapacitate anyone who got even a trace on his pinky, put him out of action immediately and totally. Two, it had to be dense enough to settle quickly into ventilation ducts, stairwells, and elevator shafts. To protect against this poison, our fire teams, specialists, and pilots all wore fitted suits and gas masks that filtered incoming air through a neutralizer specific to this gas. I remember the product we used happened to be made in France.

  After that pass, we were on the ground inside the fence and pouring out of the Stomper. No one was alive aboveground where my ship set down. It happened to be our luck that there was not much wind—let alone a blizzard—blowing that morning. The gas hung in yellow streamers in our flashlight beams. Our educated specialists popped electronic locks and released hatches. The gas puffed and swirled downward. There were no alarms that I could hear, but that did not mean much. Then down we went, following a trail of sagging, twitching bodies into the earth.

  Alice Tanno had been right about the controls: The team recognized the layout of the control pod and all the access panels. They immediately began throwing switches. Somewhere in the fabric of the underground complex, I could hear heavy motors rumbling, the blast doors opening.

  One of the site’s duty technicians regained control of his muscles long enough to draw and aim his pistol. His first shot went wide of my neck by two feet. He never got another shot because I took off the side of his head with the butt of my carbine.

  As soon as the locks were all released and the circuits open, my team was out of the pod and into the silo. There they began working on the missile’s side covers. The work was both electrical and mechanical, to isolate the warhead both physically and sensorially from the booster mount. They had taken the equivalent of a six-month tech course in two weeks with Tanno. Actually, they had only half the course—the disassembly part. After twenty minutes’ tickling and tweezing, they rolled over the silo’s bridge crane and hoist, latched onto the freed nose cone, and lifted it off the rocket.

  “Where do you want it, Colonel?”

  “Topside,” I answered.

  He looked up. The crane and hoist had rolled out under the blast doors; no way it could lift the warhead above the doors. The man shrugged.

  Just then one of my trucks arrived, right on schedule. Our second team had bought or stolen a fleet of auto wreckers in Houston, painted them with plausible colors and signs, changed the plates, and started north from Texas the day before. The wrecker driver lowered his wheel cradle, hand-cranked it down below the lip of the silo, and cupped the warhead hanging beneath the hoist. When he had raised it above the surface, his helper rolled the bomb—gently—into the truckbed, strapped it down, and flung a tarpaulin over it. Then we pulled everyone out of the hole, climbed back into the Stomper, and got the truck out through the fence and onto the road. By radio I confirmed that the other eleven teams were just finishing up. We cranked up and roared off in two different directions.

  For the trip back to Houston, all the teams spread out across Kansas, heading more or less south by twelve different roads and air routes. So far as I know, none of them even came close to being stopped. It was a perfect G.V. commando operation. Corbin was furious.

  “I was hoping you might not hear about it,” I admitted when he called me up to his office to chew on my butt.

  “Oh? Right! And how did you figure that?” His face was twisted in that snotty, pouty, upper-middle disdain he did so well. “When there’s only one military force in the States right now that could have pulled off that raid and had a reason to. The newsats were linking my name with it before you were halfway across Oklahoma. If the FSF had its own air force, or maintained better liaison with the Kansas National Guard, you never would have reached Texas soil.”

  “You could claim it was one of the State militias that did it.” I felt the heat rising to my face.

  “I’ve already played that lie,” he snapped. “For all the good it does … Hell’s hinges! The State units have to live here. I’m—we’re—just passing through. Don’t you understand? We’re vulnerable.”

  “Not any more, Granny. You got nuclear teeth now. Your enemies will have to think twice about mobbing you. Or betraying you.”

  “Oh, sure! We’ll just do a little nuclear blackmail. … ‘Mad Dog Corbin’ they’ll be calling me. Wonderful!” He ran his hands through his hair, what was left of it. “And just how did you plan to use those warheads, without launch vehicles?”

  “Put them in stripped-out Stompers, wired for remote control. Fly in at hedge level like the old cruise missiles. They would be real hard to knock down.”

  Corbin stared at me, hollow eyed, for a whole minute. “Not bad,” he said at last and grudgingly. I was proud of this idea and could not help smiling. “At least you haven’t taken total leave of your senses. … How many megatons are they?”

  “The casing codes say forty—”

  “And you bounced them halfway cross the Southwest in the backs of tow trucks? You crazy Indian!”

  “But—”

  “Now listen carefully,” he rode right across my objection. “If you ever pull a crazy stunt like that again, I will break you. Worse, I will have you shot and toss your worthless body out for the coyotes to gnaw on. Entiende?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Very good. Dismissed.”

  I about-faced and marched out. As I went, a smile was growing on my face. I had accomplished my mission. Granny was not as angry as I expected him to be. And he did not order me to return the bombs. We would soon need them.

  Within a week of ou
r landing in Houston, the country fell apart. I had expected the rest of the States to rally against us, sending armies in a wedge that would split Texas and California and drive us back into the deserts of Sonora. But not at all. Instead, it was like watching a beakerful of clear chemical solution suddenly turn cloudy and rain down crystals after you added a catalyst. The catalyst, of course, was Granny Corbin and his defiance of Congress.

  The political outcry started with the formalists and legal purists who objected in principle to our “invasion.” But they were soon joined by every political and economic faction that hated the Mexican War and all it represented—the stain of military adventurism, the trend toward non-neo-isolationism, the Hispanicizing of America, the new marketplace of cheap labor and abundant energy. Their objections were raised to boiling point—it took about three-fifths of a second—when they learned Corbin’s private army now had nuclear capability.

  Those bombs changed the situation for the TENMAC, too. Many local politicians had thought they were only protecting a native son who had got himself into a squeaky place in the corrupt East and so earned a price on his head. Now they saw clearly that he was forcing them into civil war.

  When the secession pact was signed, I saw tears in the eyes of representatives from Arizona and New Mexico. These were States that had entered the Union just over 100 years ago. They were people whose parents had crossed the border on foot and fought hard for their citizenship.

  War makes hard choices.

  The initial split of the country was along the lines of Sun Belt versus the Rust Bowl and Heartland. The West was progressive, independent, and inclined toward Corbin and self-determination. The East and Midwest were traditional, formalist, and sided with Pollock and the Congress as representing the “legitimate” government.

  However, the New England States came in on the side of the Sun Belt, largely because of their independent attitudes and their revitalized economies, a legacy of the Silicon Revolution.