Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War

by Thomas Hobbes

  “This racist white-boy society of yours has dissed the black man big-time. You've throw’d ‘em in jails and cut off their tails. You've put AIDS in their veins and cocaine in their brains. You've made black mean slack and crack, Jack, and we ain't gonna take it no more!

  “And now the black warriors of our black 42nd Division, which I will rename the 1st Division, will teach these racist, sexist, Yankee crackers what happens when they mess with the black man,” Ms. Mowukuu concluded. “And they don't need no help from nobody!”

  President Warner was torn. His mind told him the Joint Chiefs' plan made considerably more sense, militarily and otherwise, than that of his Secretary of Defense, but he had long ago conditioned himself to turn off his mind whenever the magic word—racism—was mentioned.

  “Thank you for that helpful contribution,” he replied. “I am sure all of us respect what a black woman has to say.” The Joint Chiefs’ heads nodded in unison. “Would the Chiefs care to comment on the Secretary's proposal?”

  “Mr. President, may I make a suggestion?” said the Army Chief of Staff, General Wesley. “We all deeply appreciate the Secretary's brilliant remarks. But the Army already has a 1st Division, with a long and distinguished history. May I recommend that the 42nd Division be renamed the Numero Uno Division instead? That would avoid any conflict and also honor its members from Spanish Harlem.”

  “Ms. Mowukuu, is that agreeable to you?” asked President Warner.

  “I believe deeply in multiculturalism, Mr. President, as you know,” replied the Secretary of Defense with a gracious nod. “I am prepared to accept that modification.”

  “Are there any other comments?” asked the President. There were none.

  “The Secretary's proposal is therefore unanimously approved,” he said. “I think we have seen here how we can all learn if we open ourselves to what our sisters and brothers from diverse backgrounds can offer us. Ms. Secretary, you have the deep respect and gratitude of your country.”

  The gratitude of what remained of America was small compared to that offered by the General Staff of the Northern Confederation, once Ms. Mowukuu’s plan became known to us.

  That took all of about 24 hours. One of the Massachusetts State Police who was a Christian Marine had a brother on the White House Secret Service detail. He was in charge of the electronic security of the Oval Office.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  As usual, we gathered around the coffee-stained, ring-marked back table at Mel's. The General Staff had grown somewhat with the addition of men from Vermont and New Hampshire, but the Operations Section was just twelve officers, which was the most who could fit at the table. I made sure Mel didn't get a bigger table.

  We had Washington's invasion plan. The question was, how could we take advantage of it? Once everybody had downed their buckwheat cakes and venison sausage, I asked for ideas.

  “I know the 42nd Division,” said one of the new guys from Vermont, Fred Farmsworth. “Our Marine Reserve unit played against them in an exercise a few years ago. It was a joke. When we attacked, they broke and ran – and everybody knew we were just shooting blanks. I could keep the 42nd Division out of Vermont with a couple of Boy Scout troops armed with slingshots.”

  “Do we want to keep them out?” I asked.

  The old hands smiled; they knew we had an opportunity to use the “let ‘em walk right in” defense, and on the operational level too. Seth Browning, who had traded his Army National Guard rank of Lieutenant Colonel for a captaincy in the General Staff and a pay cut, laid out the obvious. “The 42nd Division can only come on two routes,” he said. “They can come up I-91, or they come up via Whitehall and the east shore of Lake Champlain. I'd bet on the Champlain approach, because I-91 is hemmed in by mountains and they'll be scared of our infantry in the mountains. They're flatlanders, and the land east of Champlain is fairly flat. Plus, they can get into Vermont directly from New York state, and they'll be more comfortable with that. If we guess wrong and they do come up I-91, our militia can keep 'em on the road and our mobile forces can shift quickly and cut them up with motti tactics.”

  “A good analysis,” I replied. “What should our intent be if you're right and they attack via Whitehall?”

  “That's easy,” said John Ross, who I had dual-hatted as commander of our motorized forces and member of the General Staff. “We let them come well in, then pocket them with their backs to Lake Champlain. Being Army, they'll see water as an impassable obstacle rather than a highway. Once we have them trapped with their backs to the lake, they'll cave.”

  “What about the folks in Vermont between West Haven and Burlington?” said Sam Shephard. “They'll take this kind of hard.”

  “Sadly, that is war,” said Father Dimitri, now the informal Imperial Russian advisor to the Northern Confederation General Staff. “We Russians know well the cost of letting an invader come. But we also know it can bring decisive victory to the defender. Their sacrifices will be well-rewarded. The Tsar has authorized me to tell you that he will follow your first major victory with diplomatic recognition of your country. I think the destruction of the 42nd division will count as such a victory.”

  “OK, then, we know our intent: pocket the whole 42nd Division against Lake Champlain and wipe it out. The Plans section can lay out our deployment accordingly. What else do we need to decide here?” I added.

  “What if they try a naval blockade? Our report from the White House meeting leaves that unclear,” asked Don Vanderburg, also a recruit to the General Staff; he'd shown earlier that he could make decisions. “And what if they go through with the JCS proposal for an air campaign?”

  “Our satellites indicate they may attempt to intercept the next Russian ship bringing arms into Portland,” answered Father Dimitri. “They have stationed two American destroyers and an Aegis cruiser off the Maine coast. If they try to stop our ship, the Imperial Russian Navy will uphold the principle of freedom of the seas. You do not have to worry about that.”

  “An air campaign does face us with some problems,” I added. “They can unquestionably do serious damage to civilian targets. History tells us that will just make our folks fight harder, but of course we want to prevent it if we can. Militarily, an air threat is only significant if we have to move operational reserves fast, by road or rail. I don't anticipate that here. Plus, our anti-aircraft guns and shoulder-fired SAMS will make most of their pilots fly too high to see or hit much.”

  “I think we may have some operational, not just tactical answers to their air,” said Captain Ron Danielov, a former Marine Corps Scout/Sniper sergeant who was in charge of special operations. “As you know, a special operation is an action by a small number of men that directly affects the operational or strategic level. I think we may be able to do one targeting their air power. I'm playing around with some ideas, talking with Ross’s guys and a couple of the trash haulers from the Air Guard.

  “Fine,” I replied, “but we need to move fast. How soon will you be ready to pull something off, or tell me that you can't?”

  “One week,” Ron answered.

  “In war, one week is a long time,” I said. I allowed my subordinates to come up with their own solutions to problems, but I insisted they be quick about it.

  “Sorry, but that's what it takes,” Ron responded. “We're not just doodling and day-dreaming, we're rehearsing some stuff to see if it works. You can't make a special operation up as you go along; it's too fragile for that. You've read McRaven's book too. You know that.”

  I had and I did. His reference was to a book by a U.S. Navy SEAL officer, Bill McRaven, The Theory of Special Operations, published way back in 1993 by the old Naval Postgraduate School. That and the U.S. Special Operations Command's Pub 1, Special Operations in Peace and War, were good guides to a kind of war where smarts could make up for numbers and equipment. I knew Ron was right.

  “OK, you've got your week,” I replied. “If they start bombing before then, we'll just suck it up and take it
.”

  The first bombs fell three days later, on June 19, 2028. Cruise missiles came in just before dawn, targeting the State Houses in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, National Guard Armories, and power plants. The damage was extensive but largely symbolic. The State Houses and armories were empty, and the power plants were down for lack of fuel. Three waves of bombers hit us after the cruise missiles, going for bridges, rail lines and railway shops, fuel depots (also empty), and the Portland docks. In Washington, President Warner announced “the beginning of precise, surgical air action to compel the northern rebels to surrender to lawful authority.”

  In Augusta, a precise, surgical cluster munition dropped by a U.S. Navy F-35 hit the schoolyard of St. Francis Elementary during noon recess. Thirty-three children died, along with seven teachers and the parish priest.

  We had expected the hits we got, other than the schoolyard. Railroads are easy to blow up but also easy to repair, and we had the trains moving again by midnight. Engineer bridges were ready to go in strategic places, and those were up quickly too. Railroad rolling stock was hard to replace, but we had scattered it around the country and didn't lose much.

  Video of the St. Francis schoolyard was on the internet within forty-five minutes of the attack, and the images broadcast around the world brought further air attacks to a screeching halt. Japan said in no uncertain terms that if there were further civilian casualties, there would be no more yen.

  We also had an amazing stroke of luck–or perhaps something more than luck, since St. Francis was involved. The F-35 that dropped the cluster bomb was shot down. Our few anti-aircraft weapons were deployed to protect our mobile ground forces, not our cities. But a Russian instructor happened to be showing some of our troops how to use the SA-l8 shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile at a small base just south of town. They heard the bombs hit Augusta, and when one of the American jets screamed overhead on its way home, the instructor took a shot and got it. The pilot came down alive.

  I immediately sent one of our few helicopters to pick up the U.S. Navy pilot and bring him to St. Francis. Pilots seldom see their handiwork up close. They pickle their bombs, run for home, and its Miller Time at the club. It's all a video game for them. Unlike infantrymen, they're not prepared to see the other guy's eyes bug out when you twist a bayonet into his guts.

  I called the school and stopped the removal of the bodies. Then I went over there myself and met the helo as it came in. The helo crew had told the pilot what he'd hit, and he was already shaking when I met him at the bird. With a video camera stuck in his face, I forced him to walk through the blood, guts, and tiny severed limbs, lifting each sheet and staring at his handiwork. He managed to maintain his composure until the third kid, a little blond girl whose torso was ripped half away. He had a little blond daughter about the same age, and he came unglued. The camera caught his face in an unforgettable image of horror and agony, just before he puked himself dry. By the tenth kid, he was begging me to shoot him rather than look at any more. I made him keep looking. When he'd stared into the eyes of every tiny corpse, I ordered him locked up in the town jail under close watch, not so he couldn't escape but so he couldn't kill himself.

  I got back to headquarters to find a message from Governor Adams, asking me to meet him down at Mel's as soon as possible. When I got there, I found the mayor, a couple of the Governor's advisors, and Bill Kraft already with him. The subject of discussion was what to do with the Navy pilot. The two most popular alternatives were putting him on trial as a war criminal or hanging him that afternoon in the St. Francis schoolyard.

  “Well, what does the General Staff advise in this case?” the Governor asked me.

  “Waal, I don't know,” I said in my best Maine accent. “Since we seem to be deciding to hang him now or hang him later, I guess I'd as soon hang him now. It'd make the people of Augusta feel a little better, anyway.”

  “It sure would,” the mayor added.

  Bill Kraft had been sitting to the side, smoking his pipe, looking into a book and making it clear that he didn't much care for meetings like this. I expected he'd also favor a prompt hanging. Instead, he gave me a look of icy contempt and said, “I would have expected at least an attempt at military reasoning from someone in the uniform of a General Staff officer.”

  After that face shot, I knew I was going to get a lesson in military reasoning. Bill's lessons were usually good ones, even if they sometimes felt like a cut glass suppository wrapped in sandpaper.

  “Here as elsewhere, the correct question is, how do we use this situation to strike most powerfully at our enemy?” he went on. “Merely doing what makes us feel better betrays a lack of self-discipline. Our object is not to feel good, but to win.”

  “I thought we'd already done that by putting this guy on YouTube as he cracked up,” I replied.

  “That was an excellent start,” Kraft said. “But why not carry it further?”

  “How?” asked Governor Adams.

  “Send him home,” Kraft replied.

  “You mean just let him go after he killed our kids?” the Mayor asked.

  “Exactly,” Kraft answered.

  “How does that help us?” the governor inquired, knowing Kraft well enough to realize he was probably on to something.

  “The Chief of our General Staff should be able to answer that question,” said Kraft. “Regrettably, in his hurry to get here he seems to have left his brain in his wall locker, so I will explain.” There was the suppository.

  “If we send the pilot home, we toss a hot potato into the lap of the federal government. They have three choices, all bad. They can let him out in public, in which case he will tell a story of horror that will undermine public support for the war. They can arrest him for war crimes, which will let all their military personnel know that if they make a mistake, their own government will sacrifice them. Or they can send him back to his unit, where he will undermine the will of his fellow pilots to drop bombs anywhere but in the ocean or open fields. Whatever they do helps us, while the pilot is no further help to us if we keep him here. So we should send him home.”

  As usual, Bill was right. We all saw that, and we all knew he was right about self-discipline as well. As the weaker party, we had to do what would hurt the enemy, not what would make us feel good.

  So that’s what we did. We announced that as a humanitarian gesture to the pilot's family, we were releasing him, and we invited the federals to send a plane under a white flag to pick him up. That made us look like the good guys to the world, and the video of a U.S. Air Force transport coming into the Augusta airport with its insignia covered by white patches didn't hurt either.

  The pilot gave a weepy interview to the press on his departure on June 20, saying that the war was a terrible thing and he hoped nobody would drop any more bombs.

  He said the same thing to a bigger clutch of newsmen when the plane landed at Andrews.

  Then, to our delight, facing three unpalatable choices, the federal government did the worst possible thing. It chose all three.

  First, it let the pilot appear on all the TV talk shows to cry about what he had done. Then, it arrested him. When the military screamed, it dropped the charges, so it looked like it was condoning war crimes. Finally, it sent him back to his unit, where he spread his horror story to everyone he could talk to, so those pilots dropped their bombs in the ocean from then on.

  It was not the end of the air campaign. For several days the sky was quiet. Then, on June 23, federal aircraft began buzzing our towns at night with sonic booms, not dropping any ordinance but reminding us they still could. On the 25th they hit two bridges with laser-guided bombs, after warning us well beforehand so all traffic could be stopped. On the 26th, they began hunting our locomotives with anti-tank missiles We didn't have many engines; we needed every one of them and couldn't let this continue. I called in Ron Danielov. He'd had more than his week, and it was time to see if a special operation could help us out.

  “Waal, w
hat've you got for us?”

  “I've got three operations set up and ready to roll. You can use any of them or all of them,” Ron replied.

  “What are they?” I asked.

  “The first, and most powerful, is aimed at Washington itself. We've got six moving vans sitting in southern Virginia, each with about 10,000 pounds of explosives in it. The drivers are our men. On signal, they will take those trucks on to the six bridges that connect Washington with Virginia, park 'em, set the timers, and dive into the Potomac. They're all good swimmers who can reach the Virginia shore. When the bombs go, they'll take several spans out of each bridge, cutting Washington off from the south.”

  “What about civilian casualties?” I asked. “We can't ignore that problem without giving the feds license to ignore it too, and it's our best air defense.”

  “The trucks have powerful loudspeakers that will play a recorded message, ‘This is a bomb. Get off the bridge immediately.’ That starts as soon as the drivers punch out, and goes for fifteen minutes before they blow. If anyone tries to enter the truck or move it, the bomb goes off automatically, so the delay won't effect the operation.”

  “How long will the bridges be down?”

  “A few days, but that's enough. As soon as the Confederate government knows they're blown, Confederate forces will enter Virginia and the governor will proclaim the state's secession from the Union.”

  “Holy shit, you set that up?” I replied, astounded.

  “Well, I pushed it over the edge, anyway,” Ron replied. “Virginia has wanted out, and the Confederates have wanted Virginia in, so the ground was already laid. When I told them we'd cut Washington off from Virginia long enough for them to move, they decided this was the time. Remember, that's what special operations are about: hitting on the strategic level, or at least the operational level. Blowing the bridges would just be tactical, and that's not a special op.”

  “If Confederate forces are on the Potomac opposite Washington, the feds' capital will be untenable. They'll have to move it which will be an enormous problem for them, given the size of that government. It will effectively incapacitate them for months,” I said, thinking aloud.