They know that the coup has managed to link up every satellite in space, but they don’t know how. They know the rogue soldiers are using the satellites in conjunction with the earth’s magnetic field to shut down most means of modern communications. They’re also pretty sure that the coup has figured out how to focus electromagnetic pulses into laser-tight beams. How they manage either is a mystery. The short attack on the world’s energy grids revealed something rather perplexing. Based on the anecdotal evidence from CENTCOMM’s own grid, the attack did not shut them down as they had initially thought. Instead, the energy put out by the grids was somehow drawn out of the power lines and up, presumably into orbit. How that was done is anybody’s guess. They know that the coup broadcast the Catholic Mass from DC all around the world. They don’t know why. After the Mass, the satellites began playing ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’ repeatedly. Again, they don’t know why. They know the rebels have a countdown ticking away. No one knows to what.
Thousands of rogue troops are occupying DC while some have seized the UN Tower in New York and its bases on the border. Still more are holed up in Mount Weather with the President, a congressman and some others. Rough estimates put their exposed numbers at twenty-five to thirty thousand. There is no telling how many are in Mount Weather. The installation can comfortably hold two thousand; ten thousand, if they can stand the coziness. There could easily be more renegade troops lying dormant. They could be anywhere, here at CENTCOMM, in the Situation Room with him or in any number of other bases, waiting their turn to strike. There is just no way of knowing whether all the insubordinates are accounted for.
What bothers General Alan Stone the most are the names on the airliner’s phony manifest. One hundred and eight of the names are exact matches for the soldiers and civilians killed during the Tea Party riot of 2010. The other three names are exact matches for the three soldiers given up to the Afghan authorities by the Department of Peace for their alleged burning of a Koran. For General Stone, the names on the bogus manifest bodes something menacing in the works.
The other big burr in the General’s saddle: he does not know who is running the show. All they have is theories. There are thirteen photographs taped to the top of the center whiteboard representing Central Command’s best guesses at who the possible players might be. At the top of the board is a picture of Earl Forrester. He was last seen entering Langley. He and the sniper disappeared into thin air minutes later. He is the only player that they are sure of and the prospect of going up against Forrester gave everyone at CENTCOMM much pause and a good chilling of the spine. The man is legendary in the Military-Intel complex; his ruthlessness well known outside of it thanks to the disclosures and leaks to the press by those who opposed his nomination to Chief of Homeland Security. The General knows however that Earl’s stints in the Green Berets and CIA Black Ops amassed heaps of more dead than even the smear campaign against him let on. Forrester’s next two decades were spent rising through the labyrinthine ranks of the CIA until his sudden resignation in 2006. He then spent ten years away from Washington before returning to serve as Chief of HSA.
There is next to nothing known about those ten years. The General doesn’t like it. It would be considered an ominously large hole in the history of any cloak and dagger type.
Four photographs are spread directly beneath Earl’s picture. Beneath those four, there are another eight. Together, they represent the twelve officers charged with war crimes by the Department of Peace. The four men on top are the Catholics in the group. The two on the ends of the quartet, Major General Aaron Faulkner and Colonel Miguel Pereira are retired. Pereira left the Rangers right after he was acquitted of all charges. Faulkner left two years later in protest of the budget cuts and the military downsizing that reduced his beloved Marine Corps to an Army division. Both men dropped out of public life after leaving the military. On the board between them are the pictures of Captains Gilbert Giles and Hector Omar. They are still on active duty. Omar is accounted for and under a watchful eye at Fort Hood. Giles however, is AWOL. The eight pictures beneath the ‘Catholic quartet’ are evenly split, four men retired and four still on active duty. Three of the latter are also AWOL.
General Alan Stone knows eight of the twelve men. Faulkner and he graduated from The Citadel together. Giles and Pereira served under him in Iraq. The other five fought in the Afghan campaign and conferred regularly with Stone and other officers of the Coalition Forces. All twelve were good soldiers treated abysmally by their country. None of them, the General knows, deserved the abuse heaped on them by the sham trials their government held at the end of the war. Any or all of them could have easily been embittered enough by the experience to turn on their nation. General Stone hopes that is not the case. He knows that every man on that board would make for a formidable adversary. Working together they could raise a whole lot of cane to the nation’s hide. And there would be many to cheer them on and even join in, he guesses.
He would find it difficult to blame them, the General admits to himself with a heavy sigh. He has never known morale in the military to be lower. Stone can’t remember the last meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that didn’t end with an officer or two grumbling. The old timers tell him morale is even lower than it was during the Viet Nam era. The causes are mostly similar: a humiliating defeat, snatched from the jaws of victory by an inept civilian command, a hostile press and a virulent anti-war movement. There are also newer, more novel and exacerbating causes for the present doldrums of the esprit de corps.
In their desperation to save money, Congress has cut the military budget every year since 2008. By 2012, research and development of new weapon systems became a thing of the past and downsizing the wave of the future. As a result, only a handful of bases remained open abroad and more were beginning to close at home, whittling away further at troop numbers. The Law of the Sea Treaty signed in 2014 has not only shrunk the Navy to a mere two hundred and ten ships, it has forced it to fall back from international waters. Except for humanitarian missions, they are kept hemmed in the Western hemisphere. The military’s concerns about response readiness and homeland defense are summarily dismissed as ‘old reactionary reflexes.’
The Director General of the Department of Peace shrugged it off recently as “…so much twentieth century thinking.”
“In the twenty-first century,” she went on to say in her address to the last Armed Services Committee. “America’s foreign policy is no longer about America. It is all about the world! Save the planet and serve the people. That’s our mandate at the DOP and the heart of the administration’s foreign policy. Pursuing such a policy will allow us to get by with a smaller military because such an approach renders us less threatening to others and therefore less inviting for attacks.
“We are determined to be an ally to all the world’s peoples. So we must get busy at winning the world’s trust. That can’t be done with an oversized military. We are still too big and powerful for many of our would-be friends out there. I believe we will find that the less bristling with troops and armaments we are, the more approachable our global neighbors will find our nation to be.”
In pursuit of ‘trust winning,’ the DOP convinced the Federal government to unilaterally halve the nation’s nuclear arsenal. Secure installations were opened up for ‘goodwill tours’ to many a ‘would-be friend.’ Many once-guarded technologies were being shared because ‘America believes in leveling playing fields.’ The Department of Peace also has a domestic policy that curled many an epaulet and sent scores of good officers scrambling for early retirement. Sensitivity training courses were added regularly and expanded frequently. They infuriated many a good soldier, dropping re-enlistments. Even the General’s usually unflappable aide, Captain Benson balked when ‘Transgender Appreciation’ was added to the DOP’s syllabus of sensitivity classes.
“I’d sooner be court martialed than watch that disc, General,” he said when Stone showed it to him last year.
General Sto
ne snapped the disk in his hand into two pieces and dropped them in his waste basket. “I don’t know what disc you’re talking about, Captain.”
That was the end of it at CENTCOMM but the General knew the filth was peddled at other bases, further demoralizing his shrinking army.
Alan Stone rubs his tired eyes. He has only allowed himself a three hour nap since the crisis began. He woke up from it half an hour ago, hoping to be fresh when the clock ticks its last tock. It didn’t work. He feels no fresher than before the nap. His eyes sting and the low grade headache behind them is still with him. His ears still ring from the hours spent on the phone listening to all the threats and pleadings, chest thumping, saber rattling and whining of various world leaders.
It’s all on him, the General knows. The President is kidnapped. The vice-President is MIA. The car belonging to the Speaker of the House was found abandoned, key in the ignition, on the side of the road in South Carolina. He is presumed kidnapped as well. The top three tiers of the Executive are out of the picture and Congress is scattered across the country. It’s all on him.
General Stone has two thousand troops surrounding Mount Weather. Twenty thousand soldiers are amassed west of the Potomac against the occupiers of the capital. The rebels at the UN Tower and each of the border bases have two to three hundred troops facing them. His troops are under orders not to fire except in self-defense. Dependent as they are on old landlines for communications, the General fears that his command of troops is a tenuous one, possibly even temporary. He suspects the rebels could fry the lines with the electromagnetic pulse weapon they’ve made of the satellites.
Alan Stone makes another quarter turn in his swivel chair and pours himself a cup of coffee from the thermo on the shelf behind his desk. He’s glad to find it is still steaming. Stone takes a small sip, savoring its heat and bitterness for a moment before swiveling around to face the Situation Room outside his office. The large oval room is quiet. The soldiers at their stations are mostly still though he notes a couple of them chewing on the ends of pens and a few restless legs bouncing under the consoles. They stare absently at the wall of screens where ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ is playing for what has to be the eighth, maybe even the tenth time. The General glances at the screens to see Jimmy Stewart playing George Bailey during the movie’s World War two montage. He is standing behind a rations ticket counter.
“Now hold on. Hold on. Hold on now,” Bailey yells over the rowdy crowd swarming him at the stand. “Don’t you know there’s a war on!?!”
General Alan Stone takes another sip of coffee, puts the mug down and plucks another cigar from the box his wife gave him for Christmas. The General bites off the end and spits it into his waste basket. He promised her that he would cut back to one stogie a week, but this is already the third since the crisis began. Lighting it up, he tells himself that she will understand. To his annoyance, his eyes steal a glance at the clock as he exhales.
Seven minutes and seven seconds to Zero Hour.
00:07:06
Annie Cooper would never deny that Joe Corelli is a gifted analyst. He has a Masters in computer science and is fluent in Arabic, Farsi, Spanish, Italian and French. The combination makes him invaluable to the NSA. He uses his command of the subjects to great effect at The Agency spending long hours going from one chat and web site to another in what he like to call ‘psycho hunting.’ And he is good at it too. None of it, however, makes him a likeable person. To his credit, she will grudgingly admit, Joe knows he is obnoxious. He considers it the ‘unavoidable side effect of holding his fellow man in so low a regard.’ And nothing earns someone Corelli’s opprobrium more assuredly than subscribing to what he calls, ‘herd-think.’ Joe has identified all kinds of herds and attributes to them all that’s wrong with the world. He explained his whole cockamamie world view to her recently after one scotch too many. In contrast to mere human herd-lings, Joe sees himself, he confessed proudly after two scotches too many, as a lone wolf. It is his job to thin the various herds of their psychotic, more feral members.
After working with him for the last six months, Annie believes the only reason the ‘wolf ’ is a loner is because the pack, considering him an insufferable know-it-all, disowned Joe. She dismisses his abrasiveness as that species of arrogance too often found in men of his stunted stature. However, Joe’s Napoleon complex only exacerbates Annie’s antipathy for the man; it is not the source of it.
Cooper and Corelli first crossed paths two years ago when she was still in the San Francisco office of the FBI. His was just one of three names at the bottom of weekly threat analysis dispatches from the NSA office in DC. In one of those weekly assessments, Corelli’s team sent her office a request to investigate a number of gay activists groups in connection with a series of church burnings up and down the West coast. The report forwarded, as possible leads, snippets of communications gleaned from gay websites and chat rooms applauding the fires. Annie replied that she believed the church burnings to be the work of arsonists and best left for the local police and fire authorities to deal with. Cooper struck the suggestion from her office Watch List as unworthy of the FBI’s investigative resources. She added, in an email to Corelli and the other two, that their evidence was thin at best and no reason to target a community that had no ‘militant instinct.’
Joseph Corelli fired back an email that accused Annie of allowing her prejudice for her community and their politics to color her analysis and cloud her reason. She had never set eyes on him and so she was taken aback by his knowledge of her politics and sexuality. It was not something she hid, quite the contrary; but still, she could not believe that he went there. Corelli made pointed references to her sexuality and her volunteer work to help pass the Marriage Equality Act through Congress as reasons enough to question her judgment in the matter. Joe attached twenty links to the email, all of them stories of homosexual ‘bullying’ of dissenters to the Marriage Equality Act. He lambasted her claim that the homosexual community didn’t have a ‘militant instinct’ as both a ‘moronic, self-serving opinion’ and as ‘all the proof ’ he needed to realize that she could not be trusted to be objective about the matter.
“In our line of work,” he wrote her “Everyone is guilty until proven innocent.”
He closed the letter by openly taunting her.
“I have talked to your superiors and they agree with my assessment. They promised me that they will insure that you will put your allegiance to your sexual minority aside long enough to do your job as instructed.”
She was livid but her boss insisted she carry out the investigation. Months later, the wound was salted when Corelli was proven correct. Seven gay men who called themselves the Krewe of Thebes were found to be responsible for the acts of arson. To make matters worse, she was paired up with Joe six months ago when she was assigned to the joint task force investigating the military. He never brought up their past, except obliquely. It was there all the same, however, in his sneering regard of her.
Things will be different now. She was right about the Christians. Joe was wrong and she was right. Corelli’s sneer is gone, she notes. He is sitting silently on the bench a few seats from her, sullen and sulking. He is staring out across the cavernous control room, the fingertips of his right hand resting lightly and seemingly absent-mindedly, a few inches below his sternum. Maybe not so absent-mindedly, Annie thinks suddenly. Joe does wear a small, gold crucifix around his neck. The cross hangs at about the sternum. It is a keepsake from him grandmother, Joe explained when she asked about it months ago. Regardless of its source, it now fed Annie’s suspicions. President O’Neill seemed to believe Corelli’s account of his relationship with Captain Castillo. Congressman Reed did too. Annie is reserving judgment. There is no telling how deep these lunatic Christians have infiltrated government. Annie decides that she would be foolish to trust Joe.
Corelli could easily be one of them.
Annie Cooper has fought them, Christians, all her life. They were hostile to eve
rything she is and believes in. Starting with her own parents, Christians have antagonized Annie from the beginning. She never forgave her mother and father for what they put her through those last few years she lived with them in Joplin Texas. They made a living hell of her high school years, but that was the least of their crimes against their only daughter. Annie would always hold her parents responsible for the untimely death of her first love, Alicia. She would never forgive them for it.
Annie and Alicia became friends in Tae Kwon Do class halfway through junior high. By the first year in high school they were inseparable, and that is how her parents found them in bed. It was their first time. They hadn’t even gotten all their clothes off when Annie’s mother opened the door unexpectedly and screamed as if she had walked in on a murder scene. Her father raced up the stairs and stood for what seemed an eternity in the doorway, his face frozen in a mask of disgust and contempt. Together, Annie’s parents separated the two of them violently and Annie’s father beat her in Alicia’s presence, humiliating the two of them. They told Alicia’s parents, who in turn, not only beat her severely, but also sent her to a special church summer camp in the hope of ridding her of the ‘demons’ of depraved sexuality.
Poor Alicia, sensitive as she was lovely, was never the same. Cowed and her spirit broken, she was too ashamed to seek Annie’s company again. Alicia dropped out of Tae Kwon Do and avoided Annie at school. She rarely left the house at all, not wanting to face the cruel taunting of fellow students and did her level best to keep her nose buried in the Bible as her parents insisted. Alicia threw herself into the Bible studies and other church activities, trying to win back her parents’ affections or maybe even purge herself of desires that were not going to go away. Annie Cooper didn’t know. The two were reduced to communicating only in the most perfunctory of manners at the Pentecostal church where their parents attended. As much as she hated the weekly services, Annie went faithfully and even happily as it was another chance to feast her eyes on Alicia. Every week Annie arrived at the church hoping to see in her eyes some sign that she still wanted her, still loved her; but every week she left disheartened and angry.
The House of War: Book One Of : THE OMEGA CRUSADE Page 33