Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War

by Thomas Hobbes

  “So you think the world’s future will be decided in Asia?”

  “Yes. Asian culture is superior to Western culture, and in the long run, culture determines everything else. The West had its day in the sun, but that day is over. The future belongs to those who eat rice.”

  “I agree culture determines whether a society works or fails. We learned that the hard way. But at least in the Northern Confederation, we are recovering our old culture, and it does work. What makes you think Asian culture is superior to Western?”

  “Because you believe the individual is everything, and we know the individual is nothing. It is the group that achieves, not the individual. Oh, I know you will point to what Western individuals have done: Newton, Napoleon, Einstein. Even your religion is built around an individual, Jesus. But in recalling the few who were great, you pass over the millions who were not. Yet each of these little Western men, ignorant and foolish, still thought the world should revolve around him. To the degree he could, he made it do so. In the end, these little people achieved nothing on their own, and because they were working only for themselves, they left behind no achievement but disorder.

  “In Asia, we are all little people. But we know that. So we devote ourselves to the group, and the group accomplishes what no one person could. I will give you your few great men. In the end, millions of little people working together, anonymously, will achieve vastly more than your handful of heroes.”

  Tomo then offered me a haiku:

  “I watched a colony of ants

  Efficiently

  Strip a butterfly.”

  Looking down at the intricately fitted stones of the path in front of our bench, I saw an ant wending its way home at the end of a hard Japanese ant day. I stepped on it with the toe of my hiking boot, grinding it under the lugs until there was nothing visible left of it. Then I looked at him.

  Tomo only smiled. “The colony will not notice the loss.”

  “Perhaps,” I replied. “But perhaps that ant was bringing the word about a wounded butterfly.”

  We left the ryokan at 03:30 two days later. The whole staff in their best kimonos were lined up outside in the darkness to bow us farewell. I always hoped someday I’d go back there, but I never did. It’s probably for the best. Nothing is the same the second time around.

  We drove over back roads for a couple of hours until we came down a mountain into a small fishing village. One of the big Kawanishi flying boats was anchored in the harbor. A sampan rowed us out, we boarded through the side door, and the plane took off straight into the sun.

  After a couple hours in the air, Tomo told me the pilot had something to show me. We went up to the cockpit, where everybody was looking at me and grinning. The pilot motioned for me to watch the wing, then pushed a button on the dash. As I looked, the big orange Rising Sun insignia vanished and in its place appeared the Northern Confederation's Pine Tree. Apparently the insignia were all on some kind of LED display. Sovereignty now changed at the push of a button.

  About an hour before we were due at the rendezvous, I changed into my admiral’s uniform. It made me feel like some organ-grinder’s monkey, but the Jap aircrew aft all bowed deeply.

  It was hard to remember that America’s military leaders had all been in love with this kind of crap too. Maybe that is as good a sign as any that a nation’s days are up.

  Just after 16:00 hours the fleet came into view from the aircraft. It was all drawn in tight as if for a photo op, the two carriers just a few hundred yards apart and the escorts not much further out. Japanese ship handling was good enough to do that without much risk of a collision, but one tac nuke would have vaporized the whole lot. I wondered how good Chinese military intelligence was.

  The sea state was moderate, but we landed to the lee side of the Zuikaku anyway, which gave us a duck pond with minimal wave and wind action. A launch met the flying boat and we transferred to the ship the old way, missing only the oarsmen. I was piped aboard and escorted immediately to the bridge. There, in a brief ceremony, the Japanese flag was hauled down, the Northern Confederation ensign was hoisted and the fleet passed to my nominal control. I saw Japanese seamen being lowered over the side to paint out the characters for Zuikaku and paint in NCS John C. Adams. I was relieved to find they still used paint instead of electrons.

  From the Japanese standpoint, I was an honored passenger, nothing more. Tomo had made it clear the fleet would remain under Japanese control while performing the agreed mission. But I’d grown up in the school that said a military problem is a military problem, and somebody has to solve it. The tight grouping of the fleet was dangerous.

  I had relieved the two-star Japanese admiral as commander of the fleet, but a Japanese rear admiral remained in real command. With Tomo in tow as interpreter, I headed below to the CIC.

  The Japanese sentry at the CIC hatch came to a smart salute, put his hand on the hatch handle, then looked at Tomo. His question was implicit but obvious: am I supposed to let this gaijin in here? Tomo nodded imperceptibly, and the sentry swung the hatch open. Inside, everybody immediately froze in rigid attention, regardless of what they’d been doing. I’d have to remember not to enter the CIC in the middle of an emergency.

  The man in charge, Rear Admiral Juichi Tanaka IJN, came over, bowed deeply, and through Tomo thanked me for the honor of my presence. Would I do him the further honor of leaving immediately? It wasn’t put that way, of course—“Would I join him in the senior officers’ mess?” was the line—but I understood what was going on .

  “Tell Admiral Tanaka I would be delighted to join him in the mess, just as soon as I have had the exquisite pleasure of being shown what is going on in his honorable CIC,” was my message back through Tomo.

  Tomo hissed and translated. The Admiral hissed in return, and his staff officers hissed in succession, like a fleet of ships-of-the-line wearing. The admiral motioned toward the hatch. I started to move deeper into the CIC. The staff officers formed line abreast to block me. I bowed deeply to them, which meant they had to bow more deeply to me. While their heads were down, I went around the left of their line and headed toward what the wall chart told me was probably their G-2 section.

  At this point there was a lot of rapid-fire jabber between Tomo and the admiral. As Tomo explained later, he told Admiral Tanaka they had to let me into my own flagship’s CIC, they just didn’t have to tell me much. That compromise did the trick, and Tanaka was soon hurrying after me, alternatively bowing and hissing.

  I’d guessed right and found myself in the G-2 section, Intelligence. The electronic map had some units in blue, others in red. The icons were recognizable as subs, aircraft, and surface warships. Guessing that blue meant friendly, a quick map recon told me no Chinks were where we were headed. “It looks as if we’ve got clear sailing,” I said to Tanaka.

  “Hai” was his reply after Tomo translated–“Yes.” OK, I knew how to play Twenty Questions.

  “Are we under Chinese satellite surveillance?” was my first.

  “Hai.”

  “Do the Chinese have ballistic missiles that can target a moving fleet?”

  “Hai.”

  “Do some of those missiles have tactical nuclear warheads?”

  “Hai.”

  “Would a single nuclear warhead wipe out a fleet as concentrated as this one?”

  “Hai.”

  “If you were the Chinese, would you drop a nuke on this fleet right now and solve your problem?”

  This brought a new round of hissing. After a lengthy back-and-forth, Tomo said, “The Chinese would never dare attack a Japanese fleet with a nuclear weapon.”

  “This is no longer a Japanese fleet. Legally, it is a Northern Confederation fleet. Would the Chinese dare attack that?”

  More hissing, a lot more, and a lengthy conversation between Tanaka, Tomo, and the G-2. At the end of it, Tanaka turned to me, bowed very low, and through Tomo said, “The fleet will be dispersed immediately.”

  “Please tell
Admiral Tanaka that I would be delighted to join him in the mess.”

  From there on out, I was no longer just the Honored Passenger.

  Chapter Forty

  If you overlook the occasional typhoon, the Pacific usually lives up to its name. So it did for us. The fleet had calm winds and a following sea all the way. About 500 miles from the Cascadian shoreline, we split up. The carriers, amphibs, most of the escorts and two submarines headed for Portland, the Cascadian capital. The rest of the destroyers and subs established the blockade, the tin cans as visible agents and the subs in case the Chinese navy tried anything. Two of each were stationed off Vancouver and one pair went to Seattle. Two more DDs made up a roving patrol, and we left one sub about 300 miles out to ambush any Chink interlopers.

  By August 15, everybody was in position. That morning, back in Augusta, the Northern Confederation government proclaimed the blockade of Cascadia. It was a bold step. Under international law, a blockade is an act of war, so in a sense we were now at war with Cascadia. That technically went beyond what the referendum had authorized and risked another referendum to force our withdrawal. Just two days later a group began gathering signatures to put the matter on the ballot.

  But Bill Kraft had calculated well. He reasoned that once people saw no actual Northern Confederation forces were involved beyond myself, and our flag was mostly a fig leaf for the Japanese, they would understand. The press, which was fathoms more serious than the media in the old American republic, presented the facts thoroughly and without any slant. The public considered the matter thoughtfully, free from the old assumption that their leaders were scoundrels with a hidden agenda. Everybody knew what was going on in Cascadia, and there was a consensus in favor of helping Christians there and elsewhere so long as we didn’t get in over our heads. People knew they could pull the plug whenever they wanted through a referendum and recall leaders who failed. So for the moment, most folks decided to wait and see. The petition drive stalled.

  Back with the fleet, I officially informed the Cascadian government their coasts were under a blockade. There wasn’t much they could do about it. The gods of the Palaeopitus had put all their resources into suppressing their own people and had neither air nor sea defenses. Aircraft from our carriers dropped leaflets telling the Cascadian people what we were doing and why. We sought to create conditions under which they could liberate themselves.

  All Chinese ships already in Cascadian harbors were allowed to leave, with their cargoes. That didn’t stop Beijing from denouncing the blockade as piracy. On August 17, we stopped the first Chinese ship attempting to enter a Cascadian port and ordered it to turn around. Beijing’s rhetoric got hotter. Tokyo referred the Chinese protests to Augusta and the Chinese played along, holding the Northern Confederation “fully responsible for acts of war against China.” That worried me, because it was a smart move. China was going for the weakest link in the chain.

  One of the things I learned from John Boyd is that war is waged more in time than in space. At this point time was not on our side. We needed to wrap things up quickly in Cascadia before Chinese reaction overwhelmed us. But the realities on the ground in Cascadia forced us to move slowly. We needed time for the Cascadian people to understand what was happening. We needed time for the Resistance to get its act together. Above all, we needed time for the Cascadian government to run out of money and stop paying its mercenaries.

  So, we waited. But waited actively. By August 21st, we had established regular contact with the Resistance all along the coast. Our reconnaissance aircraft roamed freely through Cascadian skies, but what they brought back had limited value. This wasn’t a conflict where you could count armored divisions. The important intel was about people and could only be learned from people, and for that we depended on the Resistance.

  On the 24th, we began flying in Resistance troops who had gathered in Idaho. They numbered just under a thousand men, giving us a one-battalion landing force. It wasn’t much, especially in view of Resistance reports that gave the government more than 30,000 mercenaries. I figured that number was probably high by at least one-third, because most people overestimate their opponent’s strength. Plus, the government’s troops were scattered throughout Cascadia. But intel from refugees suggested the gods had retained about five thousand mercs around Portland as a Praetorian Guard. That meant we would be pitting a battalion against a brigade. I knew the old Lanchestrian rule requiring 3:1 superiority for an attack was bullshit, but 5:1 against was cause for concern.

  Another concern was that the Cascadian government would flee Portland and hide inland where we would have trouble finding them. The Resistance told us that was unlikely, because the gods were too afraid of their own countrymen. The more rural the area, the more dangerous it was for anyone connected with the Cascadian government. The guerrillas already controlled the countryside. It was our job to bring about the fall of the city.

  A question the Resistance could not answer was how much money remained in the Cascadian treasury. The mercs demanded payment in hard currency, and we had to wait for the government to run out of it. Usually, once a war is on, money is flowing out as fast or faster than it comes in, and the Palaeoptus had been hard pressed by the Resistance for some time. My guess was that they didn’t have much of a financial cushion, but we couldn’t know.

  By early September, the Resistance was reporting a noticeable slacking off by the mercenaries. Whenever they could, they avoided action. Nobody wants to be the last man killed in a war, especially a losing war, and that went double for mercenaries.

  As usual in this kind of war, neither side had taken prisoners, unless it was to torture them to death for information, or amusement, or both. At my demand, the Resistance changed that policy. On September 9th they announced that any mercenary who surrendered would be treated well and returned promptly to his home country. By mid-month, they were getting deserters. On September 20, the entire garrison of Yakima came over. Desertion by whole units was an excellent sign, and the commander of the garrison, a Dutchman named van Leeuwin, told us they hadn’t been paid since early August. With Tokyo’s approval, on the 23rd I announced that any mercenary coming over would be paid all his back wages plus a bonus. We also began putting deserters on the Cascadians' tac nets to confirm to their former colleagues that we kept our word. The pace of desertions picked up. By the end of September we were averaging more than a hundred a day.

  A blockade is a form of siege, and like any siege, the question is who runs out of time first, besieged or besieger? On the ground, time was now working for us. But our problem wasn’t the Cascadians. It was the Chinese.

  Through the month of September, Chinese rhetoric became steadily more shrill. Both Tokyo and Augusta assured Beijing privately that China would not be cut out of Cascadia, that she could still trade for Cascadian resources like anyone else. The assurances seemed to have little effect. Each day the Chinese media whipped up the public further, presenting the issue as one of China’s Great Power status. Our blockade was denounced as “humiliation by foreign devils.” China was an authoritarian state without a free press, so the stuff appearing in the papers was there because the Chinese government wanted it there.

  It took the Chinese Navy about a month to react, but by mid-September its deployments were increasing steadily. Three submarine squadrons of ten boats each were in or on their way to the mid-Pacific. A carrier task force was assembling off Tsingtao. Amphibious transports from as far away as the South China Sea were moving to northern ports, where troops were gathering.

  Tokyo quietly told Beijing that a Chinese attack on a Japanese warship would be met in kind, regardless of what flag the Japanese ship was flying. The Imperial Japanese Navy was not about to be pushed around by its Chinese counterpart, for which it had complete contempt. Japanese subs deployed across the lines any Chinese task force would probably take. The Japs had figured out that a sub’s worst enemy is an airship, and Japanese ASW flying boats and dirigibles began tracking the Chi
nese submarines in the Pacific.

  From my standpoint, all this was good news. The more the contest was between China and Japan instead of China and the Northern Confederation, the more confident I was of the outcome. Both China and Japan were nuclear powers with full arsenals, which meant that in the end neither would do anything to provoke a direct confrontation with the other. As Martin van Creveld wrote long ago, nuclear weapons are stabilizing. Not only did mutual deterrence prevent nuclear war, it made conventional war between nuclear powers impossible. In the end, all this dispatch of sub squadrons and trailing with zeppelins was mostly kabuki theater.

  Not only did logic tell me this, so did the Chinese themselves. By the end of September, we were reading the message traffic between Portland and Beijing. The Chinese had not given the Cascadian government its best cyphers, and in about six weeks the Japanese broke the code. The messages from the Palaeopitus to Beijing were increasingly desperate: guerrillas controlled most of the countryside, the mercs were deserting in droves and the Cascadian treasury was almost out of hard currency.

  More important was the Chinese response. China told Cascadia that no warships or troops were coming. Chinese merchant ships had been ordered not to attempt to break the blockade. China would not risk a crisis with Japan for Cascadia. All the Chinese pledged was “increased pressure” on the Northern Confederation. Exactly what that meant wasn’t clear, but so long as it was restricted to ranting and raving, we could take it.

  Instead of Liman Von Sanders, I spent most of my time playing von Steuben, training the Cascadian battalion on our amphibs. They were good material and potentially good light infantry, but they needed a lot of work on weapons skills and tactics. We could drill live-fire with most of the weapons on the ships, shooting over the sides, but we had no ground on which to practice tactics. Instead, I ran them through TDGs and refereed commercial board war games, of which Advanced Squad Leader was still the most useful for infantry tactics. Gradually, they became accustomed to making military decisions. I even did squad-on-squad freeplay exercises on the ships, which made adequate substitutes for urban terrain. By the end of September, I was gaining confidence in them and they in me.