Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War

by Thomas Hobbes

  John Ross and his Marines had led the column that created this pocket. I found him on I-90, just west of the blown bridge that cut the road back to Boston. In our army, he wasn't surprised to find the Chief of the General Staff arriving on a dirt bike.

  “How's it goin', John?” was my formal greeting.

  “It's goin' good, best I can tell,” Ross replied. “From what I hear on the net, the rest of the Arabs are either caught in pockets like these guys, or are running for the harbor, where they'll find their ships sunk.”

  “It's over for the Islamic Expeditionary Force,” I said. “All that's left is for us to cut up their U.N. blue berets and use 'em as toilet paper. But it's not them I'm worried about. It's the local blacks. How are they reacting to you?”

  “None of them are shooting at us, and I've made sure we don't shoot at them,” John answered. “The black civilians have welcomed us and given us some good intel. Of course, most of them are Christian. You see the markings on our vehicles?”

  I hadn't. John took me over to the Dodge pickup he was using as a command vehicle. Painted on the side was a white shield with a red Crusader cross. “You'll find this on just about every vehicle in our army. The men came up with it on their own, as we waited in our jump-off points,” he said. “The cross tells the locals we are friends.”

  “But the black troops are Black Muslims,” I said.

  “I think most of them are galvanized Muslims,” John replied. “And they all know what their Muslim brothers have been doing to fellow blacks who wouldn't convert. I think many of them would come over to us, if we could talk to them.”

  “Why don't we try?” I suggested.

  I broke a whip antenna off a vehicle, tied my handkerchief to it and started walking forward. John Ross came with me, as did a Catholic chaplain, Father Murphy.

  The Black Muslims had built a small barricade of trucks and overturned cars between themselves and us. Beyond it, further west on the pike, they had a larger barricade built the same way between themselves and the Arabs. Periodically, the Arabs sent a tank shell into it, and the blacks responded with light weapons fire.

  As we approached the smaller barricade, we could see weapons pointed at us. “Stop,” a voice called out. “What d'ya want?”

  “We want to talk with you,” I replied. “The white flag means parley, not surrender.”

  After about a minute of silence, another voice called, “Who do you want to talk with?”

  “All of you,” I answered.

  Again, silence. Then a black man in cammies carrying an AK stood up on the barricade. “OK, come on,” he said.

  We climbed over the barricade and found a couple hundred Black Muslim militiamen gathered in front of us. Their faces showed uncertainty, not hate. They were caught between one enemy and one might-be enemy, which was not exactly a comfortable position. The man who had told us to come on said, “I'm Captain Malik al-Shawarma. What do you have to say to us?”

  “What's your real name?” I asked.

  He hesitated a moment, then answered, “John Ross.”

  Our John Ross grinned, then said, “I'm John Ross too. Glad to meet a cousin I didn't know.”

  That got a few chuckles, which was a good sign. “Captain Ross, I've got two things to say to you and your men,” I said. “First, you've been had. You've been conned, you've been swindled. This Nation of Islam stuff was made up by a guy in Detroit. You're not Muslims and we're not devils. The whole Black Muslim bit itself is just Father Divine and the Reverend Ike and the Kingfish all over again–a few folks who get rich by selling you their shit.”

  “Most of you, maybe all of you, became Black Muslims not because you believed it as a religion, but as one more way to ‘get Whitey.’ Well, it's been almost 200 years since Whitey was selling you as slaves, like your new Arab friends are doing with your real friends and family members. In your hearts you know that what your mother or grandmother taught you is true: Jesus Christ is Lord. He's the One sitting up there, the One we'll all meet some day. It's not some damn camel-driver who sits at the right hand of God.

  “We all get conned on occasion. I got conned by a car company once. I bought a Saab, which is what you do when you own one. You got conned by Louis Farrakhan and a bunch of rug merchants, and you bought a false religion. Once you realize that and dump this Black Muslim garbage, we have no quarrel with you, nor you with us.

  “So second, we don't want to fight you. And I don't think you want to fight us either. If you do, you'll lose. The whole Islamic fleet is now on the bottom of the bay. Our aircraft will sink any new fleet that comes within 250 miles of Boston. You've got no way out–except to join us instead of fighting us.”

  “What do you mean by ‘join you?’” one militiaman asked.

  “First, renounce Islam. Then, turn in your weapons and go home,” I replied.

  “Most of us know we was had by Islam,” Captain Ross said. “Anything that makes slaves of black people is our enemy. But we want to kill these Arabs. They sent my own grandmother into slavery. Can we keep our weapons until that's done?”

  “No,” I replied, “because we don't want to kill the Islamic Expeditionary Force. We want to capture them all, then trade them for the black Christians who chose slavery over renouncing their faith.”

  “You mean you're gonna get our people back?” Captain Ross asked, his eyes wide with surprise.

  “That's exactly what I mean,” I answered. “Anyone who is strong enough to accept slavery rather than renounce Christ is someone we want as a citizen, we don't care what color he is. We care about what a man believes and how he behaves. The black Christians of Boston are our people, and we want them back too.”

  The militiamen looked at each other in astonishment. They'd been told what the white devils wanted was to put every black they could lay hands on in the kind of camp where they only came out through the chimney. And here we were telling them we wanted to bring back the blacks the Arabs had enslaved.

  As usual, the moral level of war was the strongest. A voice came from the crowd, “You got a deal.” The rest nodded their agreement.

  “OK, start stacking your arms over here,” I said. “I need volunteers to team with my men and talk to the rest of the Black Muslims in this city. Our deal is open to everyone. Who's willing to help?” More than one hundred hands went up.

  After tossing his AK on the pile, one militiaman came up to me. “When we accepted Islam, or thought we did, they had us say, ‘The only God is God, and Mohammed is his Prophet.’ What can we say now to become Christians again?”

  I turned to Father Murphy for an answer. “You've already been baptized, son?” he inquired. The militiaman nodded yes. “Well then, you're still a Christian. Jesus Christ sees your heart. He doesn't need any magic formula to know you are His.”

  “Isn't there anything we could do to give up Islam?” asked another from what had become a growing group around the priest.

  “Well, I suppose there is,” Father Murphy replied. “Are you willing to take Communion from a Catholic priest?”

  Again, the nods said yes. And with that, Father Murphy took some crackers from an MRE and a half-drunk bottle of Ripple found among the rubble and said Mass. As he intoned the Words of Institution, more and more of the former Black Muslims gathered around him, until he had them all. Both John Rosses and I knelt with them to receive the Body of Christ. I still don't know how the crackers from one MRE provided the Host for all those people, but they did.

  The battle was over in one day, and thankfully, our casualties were light, as was the additional damage to Boston. By the 11th, the encircled elements of the Islamic Expeditionary Force knew their fleet was destroyed and their exit closed, so they asked for terms of surrender. We assured them they would be treated as POWs and exchanged for Boston's blacks, provided they left their equipment undamaged. They agreed, and we inherited a huge park of the latest tanks, artillery, and air defense weapons. For real war, most of it was inferior to the older, si
mpler gear we already had, but we still found ways to use it. 70-ton tanks work fine as coast artillery.

  With the revelation of the Islamic trade in black slaves, the Black Muslims essentially ceased to exist. The vast majority turned Christian, and were welcomed back by the church ladies as prodigal sons. “General” al-Shabazz became Willy Welly again, and took up his sax in the cause of the WCTU. Some people wanted to hang him, but the consensus in Boston was that the Martyrs of the Common would rather have a convert than a corpse.

  Boston again became the capital of Massachusetts, and Massachusetts, now shorn of its long-standing liberal illusions, was accepted into the Northern Confederation. Connecticut and Rhode Island came in, too, giving us a solid, defensible block of the old northeastern United States. Again, I had hope of demobilization and peace.

  But our war wasn't over yet. The next battles would be against poisons within.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  On September 15, just after lunch, I was finishing packing up my to move back to Augusta when Gunny Matthews stuck his head in the door. This time, he was smiling. Not only had he played a central role in liberating Boston and saving his fellow black Christians from slavery, his own pastor had backed me up in telling him he had been faithful through it all.

  “Come on in, Gunny,” I said. “Pardon the mess, but General Staffs live on paper. Even this short operation has generated plenty for the archives.”

  “Don't you use computers, sir?” the Gunny asked in wonder.

  “Just as paperweights,” I replied. “The only electronic security in the age of computers is not having any computers. The only computers in our army are in the Agency, where we have a nest of nerds who hack the other side's computers.”

  “Retroculture again, sir?” the Gunny asked jokingly.

  “Ayuh, that's what it is,” I replied. “I never did trust any machine that wasn't run by steam.”

  “Well, sir, I guess it's Retroculture I came to talk to you about, in a way,” the Gunny said. “At least Retroculture may be a solution. I came to talk to you about a problem, maybe a big problem, facing the Confederation.”

  I could tell Gunny Matthews had a piece to say, so I leaned back in my chair, put my boots up on the desk and reached for a fresh cigar, a good Connecticut Valley maduro. The Gunny knew from old times that meant he had the floor.

  “Sir, let me put it to you straight. The biggest problem I see facing the black community is bad blacks.”

  “Now, you know we have a lot of good black people. You saw that in the Corps, and in the Battle of the Housing Project. Everybody saw it in Newark. The problem is, in most places, it isn't the good black people who run the black community. It's the bad blacks. It's gang leaders and drug dealers and drug users. It's muggers and car-jackers and burglars. It's pimps and prostitutes, beggars and plain-ol' bums. It's people who just won't work for an honest living.”

  “Sir, you know and I know the Northern Confederation isn't gonna live with this. It's not the old United States. The Northern Confederation is for people who want to live right, by the old rules. They won't tolerate having little pieces of Africa all over the place. And they shouldn't. Africa's a mess. I'm thankful for that slave ship that brought my ancestors over here, cause otherwise I'd be livin' in Africa, and I don't think there's a worse place on earth.

  “Sir, I'm not talkin' to you just on my own account. I've been speakin' with a lot of folks, back in Boston, in the churches. We don't want to go on livin' like we have been, surrounded by crime, drugs, noise, and dirt. We know that if we don't clean up our own act, the white folk in the Confederation are gonna clean it up for us. We want to do it ourselves, to show folks what good black people can do.

  “What I'm here for, is to ask if you can help us find a way to do that,” the Gunny concluded.

  “Hmm,” I said, “Do you have any ideas about solutions?”

  “Yes, sir,” Gunny Matthews answered. “We've had a group working on some ideas. But we don't know what to do with them.”

  “OK, let me see what I can do,” I said. “Give me a few days, then call me.”

  The Gunny took his leave, and I followed him down the stairs to pay a call on Herr Oberst Kraft. He'd been expanding his political network into the new states, and he'd know who to talk to.

  The smoke from my cigar mingled fragrantly with that from Kraft's pipe, and he offered me a glass of Piesporter Michelsberg Spatese '22 to wash down both. I laid out what Gunny Matthews had said to me, and asked if he could help make the political connections. The Northern Confederation didn't have any real central government and didn't want one, so what we needed to do was present something to the governors of the states.

  “Your black friend is perceptive,” Kraft said when I concluded. “In fact, at the political level we have already recognized the black problem as the first thing we have to face, now that we have an interval in the war–and no, the war is not over yet. But this can't wait. No one in the Confederation has any intention of tolerating disorder in our black inner cities. It represents everything we revolted against when we left the United States.”

  “We have some ideas ourselves about how to solve it, and we have no hesitation in taking whatever measures are necessary, however harsh,” Kraft continued. “The will is there. I'll tell you, quite frankly, that some well-placed people simply want to expel every black from our territory, and I think a majority of our citizens would agree.”

  “I could understand that, and I think Gunny Matthews could too, given the black crime rate,” I replied. “But I also know there are good black people, good enough that they'll work and even fight for the same values we believe in,” I continued. “Don't forget the blacks in Boston who chose slavery over renouncing their Christian faith. I read Gunny Matthews’ effort as a message from the same kind of people that they're now willing to do what it takes to get back their own communities. If they can do it, then the blacks could become an asset to the Confederation.”

  “I don't know,” Kraft replied. “Perhaps you are right. The black community was an asset as late as the 1950s. But we cannot allow it to remain what it is now: a burden the rest of us have to carry.”

  “Are you at least willing to hear what Matthews and his people want to do?”

  “Yes, we can listen. But remember, das Wesentlich ist dem Tat. We will only be satisfied with actions and with results, not intentions.”

  “Agreed,” I said. “Will you set it up so they can make their pitch to the governors?”

  “Yes,” Kraft answered. “But not to the governors alone. This matter is too important for that. The meeting will be carried live on radio, so every citizen in the Confederation can participate.”

  On the afternoon of the first Sunday in November, the governors of the states in the Northern Confederation met in Albany, New York, to hear the leaders of the “Council Of Responsible Negroes” present their proposal. Even our Governor Bowen attended, though he looked like death warmed over. The session had been scheduled for a Sunday afternoon so the Confederation's citizens could gather around their radios without missing work or church.

  Since the liberation of Boston, what to do with the Confederation's blacks had become the number one topic of public discussion, thanks to my promise to bring Boston's black Christians back out of slavery. The deal was not a popular one. For too long, “black” had meant “criminal” to too many whites. Fortunately the governors realized I had made a military decision, one that had allowed us to re-take Boston with a minimum of fighting. Our troops, who for good reason did not relish combat in cities, understood it too, and they explained it to their families and neighbors. Otherwise, I might well have been in for some tar and feathers myself.

  Anyway, it was clear that Gunny Matthews, the director of the Council Of Responsible Negroes, or CORN, had a tough row to hoe. The question was, could he and his people come up with something this late in the game that would change both black behavior and white attitudes?

  The m
eeting was chaired by the governor of New York, since it was meeting in his state. Meetings of the governors had no authority to make decisions for the Confederation; each state had to decide matters for itself. After throwing off the heavy hand of Washington, we had no desire to create much in the way of a new central government. Such sessions were held, infrequently, purely for purposes of gathering information and sharing common concerns.

  Facing the row of governors were the four leaders of CORN from the four states that had significant black populations: New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. Gunny Matthews represented both Massachusetts and CORN as a whole; he was the organization's president. In fact, he had put CORN together in the few weeks since Boston was re-taken, building on work a handful of blacks had been doing since the 1980s. These pioneers had realized the black community's problems were mostly of its own making, and while they took a lot of crap from the cultural Marxists, they had persevered and slowly grown. Now, many blacks had turned to them for help and hope.

  The governor of New York opened the session with a few remarks that reflected what most people in the Northern Confederation were thinking:

  “Your Honor, we are here today to discuss the most urgent matter facing our Confederation, now that the United States no longer exists and our borders are, at least at the moment, quiet. Within those borders we hold people, black people, who are a threat to the rest of us. Blacks threaten to be what they have been for many decades: an economic burden and a source of disorder, crime, violence, and even, as we saw in Boston, war. Unlike the United States, the Northern Confederation will not live with this threat. A state's first responsibility is to maintain order, and we will. However, if blacks themselves can successfully end the threat and permit all citizens of the Confederation to live in harmony, that would be the best possible outcome. We have come together today to hear from you, as representatives of the black community, proposals to that end. You may proceed.”