First Citizen

by Thomas T. Thomas

  This was a mentality suited to old Rome: invade the barbarians’ territory and suppress their disorganized hordes with superior weapons and tactics. Then hold your new borders against the next set of unwashed crazies over the ridgeline, while exacting tribute and exploiting tribal intrigues among the newly conquered peoples.

  But now, two of these modern air cavalry charges were rushing toward each other. And what were we going to do? Land, deploy, and begin shooting up the citizens of Knoxville and surrounding suburbs?

  Tumbling through the lower stratosphere in their erratic, radar-evading flight, our Gyro Bats made their first firm contact with Pollock’s army in West Virginia. He was twenty miles and two hours ahead of schedule. They estimated his force at 2,400 planes, about a third larger than ours. His force wasn’t all Stompers but mixed in a fair number of antique Apaches and A-l0s. Not quite as versatile as out little STMs, but the Apache had a lot of bite for a helicopter, and the A-10 was still good in a roughhouse. He also had a supply of fighter jets, the F-25, a sissified version of the temperamental X-29. The fighter plane’s everted wings were stiffer and the canard larger, which slowed its instability to the point that it might survive ESM scrambling of its fly-by-wire systems in combat.

  With all this data in hand, I ordered our front to expand slightly and pick up the pace. We moved the refueling ahead by ninety minutes, which was a good thing, because it took longer than we had calculated. ETA was 8 p.m. Monday evening, twenty miles east of the city.

  With the delay, we were just coming into visual contact with the enemy at 8:45, a good ten miles west of Knoxville. The Gyro Bats were mixing in at our altitude, about 9,000 feet, looping and diving through our front ranks like circus acrobats cartwheeling and handwalking through a marching band. Ahead, the Federal forces were spread across the width of two valleys, flying in three echelons vertically separated by a thousand feet. Behind them was the green-yellow sodium glow of the city.

  I had hoped to have some sun still behind us. Instead we had dusk, only the sky’s red and purple shadings. It was probably better than nothing.

  The opposing lines speeded up, shedding altitude, both diving for the same patch of … water. It was the surface of Lake Fort Loudoun. We had almost meshed with their lead elements when the same thought must have occurred to both Pollock and me: Why fight on the ground when he, the other guy, the hovering, descending, spiraling mass of planes, is so vulnerable in the air?

  “Red Guns Leader, take them in the air, in the air!” I interrupted on the tac freqs, speaking English because our combined troops weren’t all drilled in Malay. Other orders went out as fast as I could push the radio’s frequency buttons: reverse the descent, climb for advantage, assault ships hang back, air suppression ships move to the forward center, Gyro Bats lock on and fire at will. It took me a minute and forty seconds to get all that out. Those on the listening end relied mostly on the sound of my voice for the authority to change the battle plan. Bad military etiquette, but it saved us the minutes that hacking through channels and response codes would have cost.

  Our alternative wing of Stompers, deformed with rocket pods and cannon snouts, cut across from the right flank, bending their head-on intercept course into a strafing run across the Federals’ front line.

  Maybe Pollock hadn’t thought to change tactics. And maybe the Federals, working other frequencies, hadn’t heard my orders in English and en clair. Their front line was still descending, into the darkening valley, with dark water below them. We could see by the wobble of their flight that the pilots were suddenly confused on finding themselves assaulting a pond. And that’s when Red Guns hit them.

  A dozen Federal Stompers took rocket bursts and fell out of the sky. Half a dozen more put their nacelles over and went into controlled dives, hoping to make the shoreline.

  “Get over them! Alpha, Bravo, move in! Mob ’em! Keep ’em low!” I was shouting into the radio, hoping to reach as many of our pilots as possible on the common frequency. Our own front line surged back, above the confusion near the lake’s surface. On my order, our pilots who were mixed into the fray put on their running lights, hoping to separate friendlies from bandits in the deepening dusk. I also ordered our lowest echelon of Stompers to pop the side hatches and spray the planes below them with rifle fire, even with mortars and flares, anything to keep up the pressure and confusion.

  The Federal’s F-25s tried to rip up our formation, coming in from overhead. But they were too few, moving too fast in a straight line, with the wrong kind of munitions—laser-guided, not heat-seeking. They took out less than five percent of my top echelon.

  Pollock’s reserve gunships, mostly Apaches, were closing in, climbing to get altitude above us. They almost made it, too. But out of the sky, from a fast arc to 20,000 feet, the Gyro Bats came down like sharks feeding on a school of sea bass. God, those planes could roll, yaw, and fire while in a two-gee vertical drop.

  That broke the Federals’ formation. With full dark closing down, the lines of assault ships split and dove for the ridgelines where they could flee in the shadows. It looked as if the greatest mass went off to our left, toward the northwest.

  “Guns to break and follow. See where they go. …”

  I sent my gunships on a long tail chase. At best, they could harry the fleeing pilots, push them far away, use up their fuel, and keep them from regrouping—after all, the enemy’s planes still outnumbered us. The rest of our force I set down on the west side of Knoxville and ordered the troops to bivouac. My thought was that our unloaded Stompers, being lighter, could follow and fight this air war better than the Federals, who had flown off with their full complement of troops.

  It turned out not to be necessary.

  Pollock’s planes never regrouped but instead split into five masses that fled west into the mountains. They did not slow down until they got into the Mississippi River bottom lands, somewhere in Missouri. By that time, near midnight, they were too scattered and exhausted. The Federals kept moving west, across Missouri, trying to link up. Which they never did. Finally, they settled down for the night, giving each colonel or general in command of his own piece of the army time to think. Apparently, they were all thinking mostly about what a mess Pollock had made of his first battle and what their chances were for an honorable peace.

  My own gunships put down at the Cape Girardeau County Airport about two o’clock in the morning to collect themselves. Then, an hour before dawn, they went into the air again and continued moving west. As they went, they received radio signals and position coordinates from the Federal stragglers. The signals were almost all petitions for surrender. Pollock and his immediate staff, however, were not reported in. Neither were their bodies among the wreckage we took from the lakes.

  The Battle of Knoxville had taken less than twenty minutes and ended in rout. Two days later in Kansas City, the “City of Fountains,” I accepted the surrender of the Federal officers and their company units. We mustered them in the city’s broad avenues, marched them up to the plaza at the Crown Center, built with the glad money of greeting card sales.

  These troops presented us with a legal, or perhaps the word is “diplomatic,” problem.

  “I want to absorb them and their precious equipment into our army, Mike.” Alcott and I were closeted in a suite at the stately old Hyatt Regency, the morning of the surrender. From the windows, we could see the Federal troops forming up. The streets around the hotel went dark with bodies. “I want to win by winning,” I said, almost petulantly.

  “Not possible, Gran. They all have State loyalties, as well as their busted allegiance to Pollock. They can’t legally come over to you, not while their home States still oppose you.”

  “Well then, the next best alternative is to execute them, the trained officers at least. That would remove them from the playing board.”

  “Yes, but—putting the morality and ethics aside—how would you do it? Take them into a cornfield and shoot ’em one at a time? One whiff of that and you
’ll cause a riot in the streets out there. Plus, it would scotch any further surrenders in this war.”

  “I know. … Just thinking aloud.”

  Finally, we made them they all sign a paper swearing their peace with the forces of the TENMAC and pledging not to take up arms against me in the future. And if they did, then I would execute them. It was the best Alcott and I could work out on the spur of the moment. After all, I never expected to have 18,000 men and women at my feet, baring their necks and asking what I would do with them.

  With the plaza fountains surging and splashing behind us, Alcott and I took 1,500 signatures, with verbal promises, spoken in cadence, from the rest. The sun went high and came down the other side of the sky while this ceremony went on. Name after scribbled name, verify the signature against the enlistment papers, raise hands, swear, salute, about face, next! The fountains were a white sea noise I can still hear in my head today.

  We did keep the Federals’ weapons and planes. We also offered generous contracts to their technical ranks: pilots, cybers, comm tenders, armorers, and so on. About 2,000 volunteered to change allegiance.

  It was ten days later that we learned Pollock had fled north into Illinois and raised another army from the legislature in Springfield. I don’t know what line he fed them, but it must have been good. It worked for him again and again in the years ahead.

  The situation was really unfair. Pollock could keep on raising armies, sending them against me, and losing them until he ran out of glib words, the Rust Bowl States ran out of money, or the Heartland ran out of patience. And supplies of all the above seemed inexhaustible. I, on the other hand, had to lose just once. Then it would be a solitary cell in Baltimore and bullet in my skull. My only way to win was to see Gordon Pollock personally dead. One thing at a time.

  To oppose this new Illinois division, I split our forces, giving Alcott an aircav wing under independent command. I also gave him a field promotion to general. General of what, I didn’t explain. My authority was shadowy at best, but it was good policy to grab all I could and then give it out with both hands. The historians would justify it all later, or they would scorn me in Hell. No matter. Alcott was to contain Pollock in the Midwest while I returned to our main column and took up the march into the East, toward Baltimore.

  While I was in Missouri, the bivouac in Knoxville had been attacked by a mixed division of the Kentucky Rifles and the Nashville Guard. They were defending Old Southern turf more than allying themselves with Pollock and the Union. Birdsong rolled them back into the hills. For thirty days, we owned the City of Knoxville, but we tried to make peace with the mayor’s office and keep off the flowerbeds in the parks.

  On arrival, I discovered that Carlotta had filed for divorce, Nevada style, with a fourteen-page telex sent through a judicial cyber. The text of her filing itemized and claimed for herself one-half of my financial holdings, which at the time were something over forty billion new dollars. The half, that is. Her grounds were noted simply as “incompatibility.”

  Poor Carlotta. She was so smart about other people’s affairs and so dumb about her own. I don’t know where she got the idea to make a grab for a man’s balls while he was in the middle of a war to save his life and, by the way, take control of the richest, most complex nation on Earth. And to think she could do this by legal means! When you boiled it down, my word was all the important law there was between the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf, including Nevada.

  I sent off a one-page memorandum asking Governor Wade Winston to put Carlotta under arrest. Treat her gently, I wrote, but make sure she got on the first plane to Salt Lake City or Denver, her choice, with only hand luggage and no financial paper. She was to understand that, if she returned to any State that I controlled, she would be arrested as a spy, tried, and executed. So much for the law in this matter.

  One result of the exchange was that my nephew, the real Gabriel Ossing, left Vegas on his own and traveled through nominally hostile territory to join me at Knoxville. This was my first look at Clary’s boy since he was about four, and I liked what I saw. Not the hulking farmhand that our impostor was, he was slender and serious-faced, a young man just turned twenty. He had eyes that took you up—I remember them even as a baby. His glance would thoughtfully rub the weave of you this way and that, then set you back down without seeming to pass judgment. A quiet boy. He was fortunate to have missed my nose and chin, but he had the curly Corbin hair, though not quite in my shade.

  “I can do recon work for you, Uncle Jay,” he said after a thoughtful pause. “I was an Eagle Scout in the Truro troop. They gave me twelve merit badges and four electronics projects, before Mother sent me down into the States.” I tried not to smile. A Boy Scout in my front ranks!

  But I was to learn that the new unisex Scouting organization in Canada had sharpened their training, making it almost a younger version of the British National Service. No more badges for tying knots and starting fires. One of Gabe’s represented a black belt in judo, another a brown in aikido. His “electronics projects” were one senior dissertation in transcomputability and three summers of full-time work at a laser spectroscopy lab in Halifax, starting at the age of fifteen. Standing right before me, he could probably field strip a comm scrambler and reset the codes with his penknife. I put him on my immediate staff, but I smiled and told him to keep out of trouble. I almost patted him on the head.

  Colonel Birdsong and I regrouped our column, adding reserves from Texas and New Mexico, before continuing the advance on Baltimore. We had 22,000 combatants moving on the ground, with a rolling headquarters complex in eight armored vans. The route grew complicated here. We wanted to avoid the Washington Crater, which was on our direct line. And the governor of Virginia had sent us a stiff little note saying he would oppose us at the State line with every means in his power. Hubert Garrison was a one-man dynasty, twenty years in the making. He had gotten into the Norfolk Naval Base during the government auctions in ’99 and started building the State National Guard into a personal army. In the events of the last few weeks, Garrison had backed Pollock with everything but troops. Those he reserved for a last, private effort against me, as now. So our planned line of march took a wide swing, through Morgantown, West Virginia, and then east through southern Pennsylvania. The only way we could go.

  While Colonel Birdsong took the Army of the TENMAC north on the ground, I went in search of a diversion.

  My financial broker in New York City had arranged a meeting for me with Dr. Henry Lee Voles, the Supreme Vice Lord. It was to take place on his ten-acre estate at Sea Cliff, on Long Island. The negotiated arrangements specified one aide, no side arms; so I took Gabe along. It would be good for the boy to see real grass-roots power.

  Voles, a Ph.D. in nuclear physics and former member of the New York State Education Commission, was heir to the nominal organization that had grown up around the little plastic card with my signature on it. From street gangs and housing project hoodlums, Voles had built the Lords into a political party, a community voice, and a private army. He had at his command not only the muscles and minds of the East’s young Blacks, but also the minds and money of a spectrum of Black professionals and political caucusers. A remarkable man.

  He met our car in the driveway with an old pointer dog dancing paw to paw by his knees. Voles was dressed in rubber boots, a watch jacket, and a deerstalker on his head with the flaps pulled down. Picture Santa Claus, short and round, with twinkling eyes, a tight gray beard, and skin the color of antique mahogany.

  “I was just going on my October ramble, to see how the fields are turning,” he said with a smile, all bright cordiality, the professor turned landed squire. “Will you come with me? We have boots in the garden shed. …”

  Gabe and I went around back with him and tried on musty rubber galoshes until we had our feet covered. Then the three of us and the dog, with no bodyguards or watchers in evidence, went out by the back gate into a screen of beeches or aspens or whatever whose leaves were just goin
g yellow. Voles set the pace with short, purposeful strides. The two of us hurried to keep up.

  “Let me guess,” Voles said drily, businesslike, when we were out of line of sight from the house. “You want an army on the other side of Baltimore, a nutcracker around Mr. Pollock’s power base. You want my boys, who are just now, for the first time, learning to walk tall without interference from white men anywhere in their lives. And you think you can call in a ‘chit’ to get them. What chit did you have in mind, hmm, General?”

  I let us move forward eight or ten paces in silence. Then: “Some people would say you built your whole organization on a piece of paper I once signed.”

  Voles laughed quietly. “An accident of history,” he said. “Most of the people who, ah, look up to me have never heard of you.”

  “Your accident of history eventually cost me a Federal impeachment.”

  “You would have found other reasons for breaking that stupid triumvirate, you know. The Vice Lords were merely convenient.”

  “We also have common interests,” I pushed ahead.

  “Really?” Voles turned with a face of comic surprise, his eyebrows arched high and his mouth forming an O of wonder. “A rebel’s army out of Mexico by way of Texas, and an East Coast social organization for oppressed peoples? What common ground can you see there?”

  “It would serve us both to see Gordon Pollock dead. If I remember correctly, he has in the past caused some interruption in your local activities.”

  “Would serve you. Not me. I’m very pleased to have him occupied with political intrigues in Baltimore, or haring off to points west chasing you—in either case proving just how useless a Federal government really is. Besides which, those untimely interruptions were initiated by the Special Executive. Your work too, General.”

  “But, among us, New York was Pollock’s home turf, his personal preserve. And besides, I am no longer—”

  “Ah! You are going to tell me that you had nothing to do with the urban riot controls? With abrogation of the Bill of Rights? That they were the reason, perhaps, that you left Baltimore? You are going to stand in my meadow and rewrite history with your tongue?”