First Citizen

by Thomas T. Thomas

  New York City remained neutral and offered to bankroll any State, political coalition, army group, or corporation that looked like it could survive two consecutive quarters and pay out the going rate of twenty percent. Upstate New York, on the other hand, sided with the rest of the agrarian Heartland.

  The Old South also came in with the Heartland, largely because of its prejudice against importing anything, even a new country.

  “Ecotopia”—that is, Northern California, Oregon, and Washington State—aligned themselves with the Sun Belt largely because the people could not bear to be thought anti-progressive and anti-Hispanic. The Rockies sided with the Rust Bowl because of their energy and water reserves—and they feared any pattern of forces that might try to realign the national wealth.

  Louisiana declared itself a Free State and tried to become a duty-free port of entry serving both sides in the civil war.

  Of course, any analysis of the Second Civil War would fail if it ignored underground economic interests. Each State had its own unofficial position—intolerant or tolerant—on the trafficking in pele, crack, and cochineal; on the trading in shady securities and unclean cash; on insider investing and corporate buccaneering; on moonshine liquor revenues and the trade in girlflesh. And that position helped decide whether it leant toward the Heartland-straight-Anglo side of the war, or toward the Sun-Belt-hip-Hispanophile side.

  The strength of the States was everything. Repudiation of the national debt in the 1990s and the Money Warp that followed had strengthened the positions of State and local governments: They still could levy taxes. Then, with the pay-as-you-go society, the Federal government got wealthy—but did not necessarily regain the dominant economic position it had held in the sixty years following the Great Depression. What the States won, they kept.

  This centrifugal tendency was abetted by the Hundred Lost Days. The muddle at the top and the evolving power struggle with the Speaker created a vacuum in which each State of the Original Fifty developed its own power, special interests, and political alliances. Finally, Corbin’s break with the Special Executive and his violation of the G.V. charter, bringing troops back into the country to defend himself, gave each State the option of siding with Congress to hold the Union together—or not.

  At first, those other regions which chose against union did not so much secede as wander off. Corbin did not press them into confederation with him, he just offered to defend them. If and when. On the other side, Pollock and Congress were desperate to attack Corbin in the TENMAC. But without a standing army, they had limited options. Pollock appealed to each loyal State to send its militia into the Southwest. But it was a long way to go. The threat to State interests was not clear. The lines of communication and supply were scrambled. And, as we knew, Pollock was no general. The States on both sides of the secession expressed a towering apathy. So, right after the TENMAC split off in January 2018, the conflict entered a Phony War phase that lasted until August.

  During this time, there was a group of top military men who were waiting to be asked to the dance: the G.V. generals and their private armies in Mexico. Granny and I had thought many would sympathize with our position as a former G.V. unit and come in on the side of secession. Of course, we were forgetting the cussedness of the entrepreneur. Some of the generals were sitting on the fence, trying to predict the winning side; most, however, were simply waiting for bids backed by cash. Pollock had a lot of cash.

  General Clayton Poniatowski, whose division controlled Neuvo Leon and Coahuila, entered secret negotiations with Congress in June. We never would have learned about them if Granny, before his flight from Baltimore, had not thought to bury a few tapeworms on time delay in the congressional net. These automated spies gave us just enough hints to look south across the Border Strip late in July.

  The human observers we sent in mufti to Piedras Negras and Ciudad Acuña reported back that, yes, quartermasters from the 22nd Illinois, Poniatowski’s group, were in the Strip buying passage rights from the local gang lords. An army of 9,000 airmobile infantry was poised less than an hour away at Allende, Morelos, and Zaragoza. If they crossed over, we could expect them to fly northeast and strike directly at our strength in Houston. H-hour was maybe a day away.

  “What are we going to do, Gran?” Mike Alcott asked. The three of us were closeted with the reports from our observers. We sat on the top floor of the Galleria, looking out over the dusty greens and browns of Houston baking in the summer heat. Not a breath of wind came up from the Gulf.

  “They got us outnumbered,” I said. “We can fly, fight, fuck, or die. And that is about all.”

  “Can we intercept and take them in the Strip?” Corbin asked.

  “Our people are stood down all over Houston. If we had beeped for assembly and moved out twelve hours ago … But that would just be picking the spot we die in. We cannot match 9,000 troopers with equal equipment, no matter what the ground.”

  “What about the Texas militia?” Alcott asked.

  “If we are spread all over the city, they are all over the State. It would take a week to call them up, point them south, and start them marching. By that time, Poniatowski will be here.”

  Corbin’s eyes took on a hooded look. “Colonel, do you have three old STM-4s you can spare?”

  I looked at my hands. “We have some hangar queens. They fly, but two have glitchy armament circuits, one has a busted fan—insufficient thrust to hover with a full rifle squad aboard.”

  “They won’t need to carry any troops. Or defend themselves.”

  “Are you thinking of a one-way trip?”

  “I am.”

  “I will give the orders, General.”

  “Do so.”

  Alcott was looking from me to Corbin with a puzzled expression. He could not know that Granny was giving me the go-ahead to incinerate three Mexican cities. As far as Mike was concerned, our meeting broke up in mystery, deciding nothing that needed a decision.

  Was Corbin crazy, really the “Mad Dog”? That thought did cross my consciousness as we walked out of the meeting. At first, when I had captured those nuclear weapons, he did not want them, even for strategic purposes. Now, he was willing to use three warheads to stopgap what should have been a purely tactical confrontation. Crazy? No … But … “Erratic” was the word that came to mind. In the overview, putting his actions in perspective, what we were doing could be both a military necessity and political suicide.

  Within two hours, I had the drones in the air, flying with one-quarter of our stolen nuclear warheads. I handled the remote controls on the lead ship, the one for Allende, myself. My two best pilots took the others.

  We flew the Stompers low, as always, and fast. It was a wild ride, streaking diagonally across the field rows, contouring the hills, dipping into ravines, blasting leaves off the upper layers of bramble bushes.

  These video images, compass readings, and flight data were telemetered through a signal scrambler. Our enemies probably could not have done anything if they had intercepted the signals and read them correctly—but why should we leave a probability wagging out there?

  I was flying compass headings and contour maps. From the city library we had tried to get ground and air views of Zaragoza, Morelos, and Allende. We found some prints taken in an aerial survey of Allende forty years ago, when the population was a tenth of what it was in 2018. However, our maps told us the cities were laid out in a line ten miles long, northwest to southeast. So our strategy was to fly a spread until one of the planes crossed this pattern, then we would circle back and home on our selected targets.

  Allende, coming up under my right wing, looked like a shanty city, a sprawl of tin shacks and adobe blocks. A million poor city people living on the edge, waiting for their chance to slip into the Strip and find their fortune. Somewhere in the center of this mass were a few thousand norteamericanos armed and aimed at us. For expediency’s sake, we were going to take them out at a civilian kill rate of a thousand to one.

  S
o be it.

  Watching the video monitor with one eye and the horizon repeater with another, I pulled back on the joystick for a wingover and dove at the center of this huddled mass. With my left hand, I typed in the code sequence that would detonate the forty-megaton warhead strapped into my cargo bay.

  The screen flickered once and broke up in carrier snow.

  I lifted my hands off the controls. Whatever was to happen now in America, we had sealed our back door behind us. With the outcry that would follow this bombing, there could be no retreat through Mexico. And no exile in South America. Whatever the war brought, we would live and die in the north.

  Chapter 19

  Granville James Corbin: Civil War

  My decision to bomb those three cities in Coahuila raised a public outcry that gave Gordon Pollock the leverage he needed to raise his armies.

  As I had feared, the politicians and the video people called me “madman,” “public enemy,” and a dozen other clichés of contempt. They demanded that Pollock personally unite the State militias and march into Texas and California to clean up “that scum.” They screamed for “justice.” They wept for the “poor peasants of Zaragoza.” They honored Poniatowski as another Eisenhower, but one cut off in his prime. The hysterical bullcrap clogged the satellite channels for days.

  Pollock could have cut through that—and saved himself four years of bloody war—if he had followed my example and called for a strategic strike on Houston. Just one bomb, a ten-thousandth part of the FSF arsenal, would have finished me right there. He might have gotten away with it, too. But Gordon cared more for his image than for strategic necessities. And the direct approach was never his style, anyway.

  Perhaps he was smarter than I give him credit. In the public reaction to my strike, there was a calculated measure of racial prejudice. To everyone with the entré or wit to pick up a microphone or stand in front of a camera, the civilians I had sacrificed were “and-of-course Mexicans.” They were “innumerable peasants,” uncounted because they weren’t worth counting. They were just a bloody rag to wave at me.

  I am indeed a bad man. I will probably go to Hell. But my errors do not make a saint out of anyone who mouths that brand of biased crap.

  Pollock must have known this in his guts. If he were to use nuclear weapons on Texas, on “home soil,” on—shall we say it?—white people, he would never recover. His closest allies in Congress would frog-march him to the nearest wall. His own Federal marshals would draw their own sidearms to shoot him.

  So he had to whip me the old-fashioned way, the messy way, the way of Hannibal, Caesar, and von Clausewitz. He had to march down and get me. Which meant that he would make mistakes. And he could lose.

  Pollock had no training for this. He had no Federal military men with active experience whose judgment he could trust. And he dared not turn the job over to any general in the State militias. Besides which, the best of them were running the G.V. forces in Mexico, and I had already shown how I could deal with that threat. The tenuous political hold Congress had on the country demanded that he, Gordon Pollock, Speaker of the House pro tem, personally whip the rebel babykiller Corbin.

  So he did what every politician and modern manager does when sailing into unknown and possibly dangerous waters: He made a great show of his preparations. He sent the States’ generals off to the hastily re-established War College outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to learn “unified military tactics and communications.” He called in consultants. He ordered a feasibility study. He ran the computers through every possibility and approach to the problem while he took various militia units on joint maneuvers through Lancaster and York counties. In a word, he delayed.

  Maybe he hoped I would get bored and give myself up. Or die of some rare disease.

  Well, I felt fine. I wasn’t bored. My staff and I were well along with integrating the militias of the TENMAC and the California 64th under my command. And I had no need of feasibility studies: When the alternatives are win or die, you don’t waste time exploring the possibilities.

  Which is not to say that I didn’t plan and prepare.

  When I was in Japan, studying karate with Takusan Matsu, I learned to play go, the game of black and white stones on a board of intersecting lines. It’s the best way to learn strategy and tactics without taking whole armies on maneuvers or getting people killed as an amateur general in a for-real war.

  One of the principles of the game is that position is power. A blocking move is better than a pitched battle. A trap, laid out for all to see, both warns the enemy off your territory and saves stones—which is to say, lives. And a commander who wastes lives on either side has lost control.

  With a neophyte like Pollock, the easiest trap would be to push him before he was ready. While he prepared his mind and his men for an assault on Houston, I could march out and force the issue on ground he had not chosen or studied for. Better, I could pick the ground myself. As our armies approached, I could speed up or slow down my airmobile units so that the clash came where I wanted it.

  I chose Tennessee, the eastern end, around Knoxville. It was on a direct line of march. It was the psychological “danger distance” for a man who considered the East his home. And it was deep in Appalachian river valleys that ran northeast-southwest: They would funnel our armies together, forcing the battle in a way that might spook a new general like Pollock. I wanted him nervous.

  Billy Birdsong and I went over the maps and he had a few suggestions. “Lot of lakes in those valleys, Gran. Wet ground. You might have to fly by Pollock’s forces just to avoid a dunking.”

  “So much the better,” I said.

  “You might get a more decisive victory by holding back. Take him on in the north of Alabama, say.”

  “Yes, but then we’d have our whole left flank closed by Lakes Wheeler and Guntersville on the Tennessee River, our right barred by that dribble of lakes on the Coosa River.”

  “All right, maybe there is no dry ground. But in those valleys around Knoxville, your flanks will also be blocked.”

  “Our flanks, Billy. We’re in this together, right?” Lately, since leaving Yucatan, the colonel had occasionally needed his spine stiffened.

  “Yes, ours. Now, maybe we could find ground a little more open? Somewhere we can get a pincers or an encirclement going?”

  “Look at the maps. Tell me where. We’re in hill valleys or wet lowlands from Arkansas all the way to Baltimore. Unless you want to feint west into Iowa or Nebraska …?”

  “Nobody would follow us, of course.”

  “No. Then we’ll fight where we fight. At Knoxville.”

  Birdsong made a shrug, his face closed off. “Your game, General.”

  At two minutes after sunrise on Sunday, August 12, 2018, we assembled the fire teams beside their Stompers, a field full of ships with their nacelles canted for takeoff, posed for the video crews. We had waited for a little light in the sky to accommodate the cameras. It was good planning to take off on Sunday because news is usually slow on the weekends and we could be sure of the first pickup Monday morning.

  I personally shook hands with the men and women on the five nearest flights, again for the video crews, before climbing into my own machine with immediate staff. Birdsong had arranged landing zones and refueling points for the 800-mile journey, especially the critical one, just before we were calculated to meet the Federal armies around Knoxville.

  We had allowed two days for the advance. That was enough time for Pollock to learn of us, mobilize his forces in an indecent hurry, and get in the air and moving toward us. All worked out by computer.

  A jumbo wing of 1,500 Stompers took off from Houston. A thousand of them were loaded with the full complement of troops; that is, a fire team of nine plus one noncom or officer. The other 500 ships carried either air-to-air or ground suppression weapons.

  That gave us a strike force of 10,000 men and women. By modern standards it wasn’t very large—well, even by antique standards. In Caesar’s armi
es, we would have filled about two legions. In Genghis Khan’s, we would have been a single horse column. But we were the biggest single armed force afield in our time in our country. That would be big enough. We hoped.

  Leading reconnaissance for this army was a wing of the 83rd Texas Air. They were pushing fast jets, the new Seimens-Cessna F-33 Gyro Bat, out in front with two fighter groups.

  Would it have been better if we’d had access to the satellite observer networks? Of course, but they were still under FSF control. And did it hurt us that Pollock thereby did have access? Not really, because we wanted him to watch our approach and be alarmed.

  We might have sent up a high-altitude radar platform, something like the old AWACS—but why give the Federals something big and slow to shoot at? Besides, the Gyro Bats saw almost as much as the satellite net and they were a lot closer and more maneuverable in case we wanted them to do anything about what they saw.

  That turned out to be crucial in the Battle of Knoxville.

  What everyone had missed—my computers, my strategists, me, and probably everyone on Pollock’s side, too—is that it had been seventy-five years since two modern western armies had met in battle. In that time, while our theories of war had been sharpened for a presumed final conflict with ICBMs, Trident submarines, XB-6 strategic bombers, and a tank invasion in Europe, our actual experiences had shaped our weapons and expectations toward a single, and much more limited, mode of warfare. Air mobility, tactical fighter-bombers, ground control techniques, communications, all had been developed to fight the kind of unequal little brushfire wars we had fought in Vietnam, Nicaragua, and Yucatan. That is, go in from the air, secure a landing zone, spread out, and capture or control a radius against native guerrilla forces which were using technologies anywhere from twenty to two thousand years out of date.