First Citizen

by Thomas T. Thomas

  “No …” I walked on in silence, finding myself forced to re-evaluate this jovial-seeming man. Gabriel had the good sense to hold his tongue perfectly still through all this.

  “This issue still remains,” I said at last. “Pollock is after total control. His intentions are easily read. Once he has mopped me up—if I can’t stop him—he will come after the independent power bases. Like yours. Especially yours.”

  “And you offer your friendship, your support … perhaps another piece of paper?”

  “Something like that.”

  “So that we can deal with Mr. Pollock now, rather than later?”

  “When he will certainly be stronger.”

  “Unless you can weaken him badly in the exchange, before finding your inevitable end.”

  “Don’t think you can skulk on the sidelines, then rush in to pick the bones of his carcass.”

  “We’re not jackals, sir. All we want is to be left alone, to go our own way, to grow in our own ways.”

  “In Pollock’s city? In Pollock’s world? He will not tolerate that.”

  “Yes … of course. And if the Lords will have sided with you and lost, what then? He is stronger than you or us, you know, with the resources he can command.”

  “Life is full of risks, Doctor.”

  “And some we can avoid. …” Now it was his choice to prolong the silence. Four paces, five, and turn toward me. “But not always and not forever. Would you be satisfied with this? My promise that, if Pollock brings troops into my area, say east of the Hudson River, I will not join with him or provide refuge. Nor will I fight against you. Not here. Not yet.”

  “I’d hoped for more. …”

  “Do you want a piece of paper?” He laughed. “For now, you may have to be content with mutual nonaggression between us. And see what chits you can bring me in the spring.”

  “I may not need you in the spring,” I said. “One way or the other.”

  Our path had unobtrusively looped around to the main access road, where our car was now waiting.

  “Oh, you’ll still be here, General. And so will I. This will be a long war.” Voles did not pause by the car but continued walking up the road, leaving us with no farewells, no handshakes. However, he did call over his shoulder, “Keep the boots. I have more.”

  And then he was gone around a curve, hidden by the red-yellow leaves of a stand of oaks. Gabriel and I got into the car and rode into New York City in silence. Voles was almost wrong about that last. Not the boots, the war.

  Birdsong had brought the column north, as we agreed, into Pennsylvania. He was moving our combined force on the ground, mostly in truck convoys, with only a fraction of the infantry in the air. To shepherd the trucks, he had a new kind of armored personnel carrier, or APC, that we called the Turtle. It was just now being turned out at our GM plants in Texas and California and a dozen had been flown in by cargo plane to rendezvous with the column at Morgantown.

  Unlike older, tracked vehicles, this was a low-slung, articulated shell with a twelve-liter, sixteen-cylinder diesel engine at either end. The wheel treads were spring-steel walking hoops equipped with hard-rubber cleats. By specification, the Turtle was all-terrain capable and could still reach 120 miles an hour on clear roads, although at that speed the rubber cleats flew off and the steel feet ripped up the road surface. It was no battle tank, being armed only with a cyber-track .90 caliber twin recoilless—a pop gun. Birdsong was taking the Turtles on this roll toward Baltimore as their shakedown. We’d know whether we wanted more when we saw how these worked in a real fight.

  Birdsong’s column wasn’t just an assault team, meant to rush the Federals’ main advance. We were planning to take Baltimore and hold her for the duration.

  The Eastern Coalition must have figured that out—and decided against it. We knew that Pennsylvania’s own militia might move to block our dash across the Commonwealth’s southern skirts. We did not know they had allied with Garrison and the Virginia National Guard, who were moving north parallel to our line of advance, a few ridges east of us. Nor that the Ohio regiments had been called out and were moving to intercept somewhere south of Pittsburgh.

  With Pollock occupied in Illinois, the Easterners had brought in their own general, a young instructor from the War College named Raynier. And he was good. He waited until Gabe and I had rejoined the column—how he knew that, we never found out—and let us bunch up in the Monongahela Valley around Monessen, Pennsylvania. Then he hit us with air power, our old trick, plus two fast-moving ground armies totaling 40,000 combatants. They were coming at us from the northwest, the Ohio units, and from the south and east, those of Virginia and Pennsylvania.

  The only thing that saved us from annihilation was the shape of the land. They had to bring their forces over the ridgelines. We could break and run up the valley. The Alleghenies aren’t steep mountains, not carved ridges like the Swiss Alps. But they were hilly enough that not all of those 40,000 could move into battle at once. Our main body was saved by maybe twenty minutes’ delay on their part. We had no choice but to move north, fast.

  It wasn’t a complete rout, but we burned out a slew of transmissions in our hurry. And when a truck stalled, we kicked it out of line. The troops aboard it we asked—not ordered—to hold our rear for an hour, then surrender quietly.

  We raced through Pittsburgh, across the bridges and up the highways, and on the other side of town dove into the Allegheny River valley, still moving north, toward Butler. It was no way to go, because all that lay ahead of us was upstate New York, probably a fresh army, and the muddy waters of Lake Erie.

  The best we could hope for was to wear out and scatter those 40,000 in the chase, regroup our own troops somewhere ahead, and get as many as we could out of the East. Somehow.

  Gabe was with me on that wild ride, in the forward pod of a Turtle at the head of the second square. Bracing himself with a hand on the fire control panel, turning away from the driver and toward me, he asked in a low voice: “Why don’t we call down one of your planes, get on it, and get out of here?”

  I thought about it for two minutes, still staring ahead through the armor-glass slit at the curves of the road coming at us. A cold rain had started, and I could see water flying up in little goblin drops from the Turtle’s blunt snout. We were sealed and heated against that miserable weather. The troops in our canvas-backed three-tonners would be a lot less comfortable—although the cloud cover was keeping off the next air attack.

  “Because these men and women are my responsibility. As long as I stay, they are an army, and I am their general. If I leave, we are all just criminals.” The boy absorbed this in his quiet way. When he understood, I imagined I saw the boyhood go out of him. Real actions have real results. One of them might be a copper-jacketed bullet spinning into your brain. And you take that bullet because somewhere, a thousand-thousand moves and words ago, you made a single decision and acquired this “responsibility.” Some things you cannot deny.

  For a hundred miles, as we dashed north, I was pulling the Turtles out of line and letting the unprotected trucks move ahead. I set Gabe to counting them as they passed, so we always knew our relative position. It was a dangerous ploy, bunching up the Turtles at the rear, because what would we do if a force was gathering ahead to cut us off? But the known danger was on our hindside and I wanted some armor plating back there.

  As the miles ticked off in the rain, we took regular reports from our own low-flying recon Stompers. When they finally said the troop strength following us had attritted and was now about equal to our own, we made bets on the pilots’ eyesight.

  “Your choice, Gran.” That was Birdsong, by radio from the first truck in the vanguard. “Turn and fight? Or—”

  Or go on until we met another army, were up against the lake, or crossed the International Bridge into Canada. And what then?

  We were almost at the New York Border, in deep pine forests with no place even to pull aside, about five miles south of a dot on the ma
p called Tidioute.

  “Next valley we come to, Colonel. You break right and left, circle back through the fields and close the road behind our last truck.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I changed frequencies. “High wing, give us a topo reading—the next open space down the road.”

  “About twenty-five miles,” my lead Stomper relayed back. “There’s a broad, shallow valley west of Youngsville. But with dusk coming down—”

  “So much the better.” Change freqs again. “Hit them at Youngsville. Lead with rockets, then walk up the road with mortars. See if we can bottle them. … Okay, count off by serials.” That was to get a hard tally on the remaining trucks.

  “One—AB66547.”

  “Check,” came from our surviving quartermaster.

  “Two—AB95203.”

  “Check.”

  It was a long twenty-five miles. The rain got worse; the evening light got dimmer. I could feel my stomach tighten, my guts suddenly heavy, my leg muscles singing to protest three and a half hours bent into this seat cradle. It would be worse in the trucks, where the troops had been quietly peeing down their own legs because we could not stop for the ritual bio break.

  We reached the valley on the odometer and knew we were there because of the farmhouse lights on either side.

  “Break and turn,” I ordered.

  One man in Birdsong’s number two vehicle was assigned to count off truck headlights, aloud on the radio. He got to us, number 287, then a gap, then two stragglers; we knew he’d spotted the end of our line.

  Our Turtle slewed around in the field mud and clattered to a stop with its pad anchors out. The driver dialed the cyber-track in on the road and popped the rear hatches for our troops to unload and set up their fields of fire.

  After a ten-count, we got another pair of lights. Let it pass down the road. Got three more. Then we opened up. Twenty or thirty rocket streaks, green flares of gas in the darkness, followed by cramped orange flashes when they hit. The thump of explosives and screech of metal came back to us, and over it all, like a drum beat, the sound of mortars. A steady death march. After the rockets, our soldiers were running forward, firing automatic bursts that looked like little strobe flashes across the field. That bloodied the Easterners’ noses. It also blocked the road to the main force that was still coming up from the south.

  We weren’t there to take prisoners. After the ambush had done its job, I ordered the troops back into the trucks and onto the next wide road going west into Ohio. With any luck, we could outflank the body of Raynier’s army, move off into the flat country, and link up with Alcott’s forces.

  Of the 22,000 troops that Birdsong had marched into Pennsylvania, I brought out 9,216. Pollock, the Federals, and even a contingent in the TENMAC called it a defeat. I called it victory, compared to what it might have been.

  So the war continued. For four years, 2019 to 2022, we seesawed back and forth, Pollock and I. We raised armies from the States where we happened to be bivouacked, if they were friendly to our first cause. We each ran through a couple of hundred thousand men. But we lost most of them in maneuvered surrenders and demobilizations—like the 12,000 I’d lost along the road from Pittsburgh—rather than in killed and wounded. However, we broke up and burned out more light-armored vehicles than you can pile in a hundred wrecking yards.

  Through it all, the country never got on a full war footing, not like during the First Civil War, both World Wars, or the Vietnam Cold War. Instead, the national economy dissolved into a patchwork of nation states, some in boom, some in bust, and some watching a parade of green trucks with haggard men and women driving through. The whine of Stomper turbines coming down at the county airport meant that a battle was about three hours away, pack your belongings and get out the claims forms. One side could usually be made to pay up.

  My wallet was crammed with folding money in a dozen different colors. Each State or region was printing its own by 2021, although they all took New York credit on plastic.

  The war seesawed because Pollock was a bad general. He never could quite put me in a box and kill me. He just never was fast enough. Nor smart enough.

  The war seesawed because I would not walk him into a bloodbath. Like an experienced go player, I wanted, first of all, to block and disadvantage my opponent. Better to intercept an attack than to rush two armies together. In the clash of battle, too much depended on luck and the weather. In the delicate thrust and parry of maneuvers, a general’s brains and experience counted for more.

  So we wrangled back and forth across the country for four years: St. Louis, Wichita, Denver, Omaha, Decatur, Fort Wayne. My army never again got as close to Baltimore as that drive up the Allegheny Valley. Pollock never even tried to attack me in the TENMAC. We were both too busy running, dodging, and standing to set up a proper diversionary front.

  Yes, Henry Lee Voles finally brought the Vice Lords in on my side, fielding an army of 4,000 teenagers armed with light weapons, Czech machine guns from the last century, which my agents helped purchase. But they were a city corps, not air mobile. They hardly counted in the balance.

  Pollock tried to buy Michael Alcott away from me. He had the right coin to do it, too: full command of the Federal armies, with Pollock’s promise to retire to the sidelines.

  “But how could I trust him?” Alcott told me later, after he had turned the offer down. “I’d be his lapdog for life. At best we could form another Special Executive. And look what happened to you.” Alcott stayed loyal because I made him no promises.

  With all this confusion and mayhem going on, why didn’t some third party, the Russians or the Chinese or the Canadians, walk in and take the country? I don’t know. I suppose the Pax Atomica still held, despite a few moth holes gnawed in the concept by past detonations in Washington and Coahuila. The little fight between Pollock and me didn’t really involve the boys hunching over their buttons in the silos or watching the screens under Cheyenne Mountain. And they were what really held off the international raiders.

  I also have a creeping suspicion that—after the dislocations of the Repudiation and the Money Warp, after the inward-turning focus of the Hundred Lost Days, the McCanlis Revision, and the annexation of Mexico—the Old U.S. was not a superpower anymore. From an international standpoint, we were a second-class, isolationist, troubled country, no longer the World’s Policeman, no longer the Prophet of the Capitalist Dream, no longer worth the effort of annihilation. But while the war Pollock and I were fighting might be for the revenant of a once-mighty country, it was our country and a deadly serious struggle all the same.

  The turn came in ’21. Arkansas sued for peace after the Battle of Little Rock and offered me command of their State militia. Oklahoma and Kansas joined in the terms of the peace, even though Wichita had been hotly fought eighteen months earlier. The two Dakotas claimed me for their own—that story of my being a “native son”—and subscribed to the peace. Indiana withdrew from further fighting because, they said with Hoosier wit, they were “tard of all the noise.” I was splitting the country.

  When Colorado and Utah closed ranks with the TENMAC, Pollock was caught in the north. He had his eighth army—counting serially the ones he’d lost—outside Fort Laramie, Wyoming, in May of ’22 when Nebraska began making fed-up noises. They sent him polite warnings that if he dragged another shooting war across their cattle ranges, they’d hang him for me. I obliged by sending an aircav unit west from Kansas City as fast as I could.

  There was nothing Pollock could do but retreat further to the west, into Idaho. To have gone north into Montana, which was wavering, would have meant eventually ending up in Alberta or Saskatchewan. And to cross the international boundary now would lose him the war for sure. So he went into Idaho, with Oregon—my part of the country—facing him on the other side of the Snake River.

  My army, with Alcott in tactical command, caught up with him at Shoshone and stripped away his ground forces in a dawn strike. The air component they chased anoth
er 120 miles and the rest of the day, finally bringing them to heel at Eagle, just west of Boise.

  Because most people don’t know where Eagle is, this clash went into the history tapes as the Battle of Boise River. However, given a map and three guesses, most people couldn’t have found that either without a key.

  Alcott had his orders: cut it short and clean it up. With the war going my way, at last I wanted either a high casualty count or humble prisoners to parade back to the East. No more daring escapes, no more lucky heroes.

  So the Battle of Boise River had to be an air war of attrition. It’s hard to surrender a Stomper or an F-25 convincingly. What do you do—promise over the radio to give up and then fly with your hands linked over your head? The only certain surrender had holes in it, with flames coming out. We littered a pretty little valley with burned-out birds.

  Two days after the battle, I walked the ground with Alcott “So, Mike, where’s Pollock?”

  He was looking over the aluminum cradle and starred plexi of a Stomper cockpit, one of theirs. Apparently the plane had hit the riverbank in a flat spin and come apart like a toy, without much fire. The bodies inside had already been tagged and removed.

  “We shot down everything that was flying that day,” he said after a pause.

  “And there’s nothing here in the wreckage.” I concluded the thought.

  “No—no papers, no prints, no teeth.”

  “And your observers didn’t track any low-flying bogies, no blips …?”

  “Not in this fight. But … right after we hit them at Shoshone, there was a lot of scrambling.” He said this with a tight grin, embarrassed by the professional sloppiness. “Pollock could have snuck off then.”

  “Abandoning his army in the first twenty minutes.” I made a face.

  “He was already losing.”

  “And he’ll never get another one. … Worse than a dead hero.”