“You got her, Twelve,” came Lieutenant Emily Brock’s voice.
“Where you at, honey? Come back.”
“I’m up on top of the I-Five bridge here checking out the spectacular view. You’ve got some Clintonista anti-aircraft weapons moving up the 99 on-ramp onto the interstate, couple of Humvees with twin fifties and one with some kind of missile weapon. Looks like they know you’re coming. Better get them before they get you. Over.”
“Gotcha, sweet thang.”
“Yewww, that’s gotta be a Texan,” said Nightshade.
“Broken Bow, Oklahoma, actually,” replied the pilot. “Little Dixie feller. Name’s Roy. What’s yours, besides Nightshade?”
“Back off, Cletus. I’m a newlywed. Just make sure you don’t drop anything nasty on the wrong side of those barricades,” demanded Emily. “My blushing groom is down there somewhere.”
“Sounds like he’s a lucky guy, Nightshade. We’ll give him a hand and see if we can’t get you two lovebirds back together.”
“This is Sunray,” interjected Wingfield. “I know NDF training isn’t up to speed yet, but didn’t anyone teach you guys proper RTO procedure? Over.”
“Sir, this time last month I was hauling plastic crap up from Mexico in an eighteen-wheeler for Houston Mighty Mart,” chuckled the pilot. “Don’t worry, we’ll get ’er done. Luftwaffe Twelve out.”
“Here come the flyboys,” said Cody down on the bridge.
Over the noise of the shells and the small arms fire they could hear the rumble and thrum of engines. Looking to their right, the marching men could see a flight of several dozen small propeller-driven aircraft shooting upriver toward them at speed, some painted in camouflage with NDF roundels on their wings and fuselages and some still in their civilian colors. There were Cessnas, Beechcraft Bonanzas and Musketeers, Pipers, twin and single engines, anything the fledgling Northwest air force could convert into a bomber or strafer for ground support. They bore crudely clamped and spot-welded machine guns on their wings and all carried some kind of Semtex or gelignite bomb under their belly, sometimes a matched pair. These were homemade ordnance hastily turned out in improvised munitions factories in the Nationalist-held areas to the north, made of anything from steel and cast iron pipe to PVC to old aluminum beer kegs. Some of the bombs were so heavy that the small aircraft lugging them wobbled in flight; hopefully they would at least detonate on impact. The planes were flying low, whipping over the burning and smoking rubble of the railway bridge and heading straight toward the Oregon end of the I-5.
From her perch on the steel beam, Emily Brock got on her radio. “Luftwaffe Twelve, this is Nightshade. You’ve got more problems, Roy. Here come the gunships. Looks like Apaches. Three of the bastards. Over.”
“I see ’em, Nightshade,” answered the Oklahoman. “Keep your head down up there, honey. The shit is about to hit the fan.”
The USMC Apache helicopters swung slowly and lazily over the Oregon end of the bridge and opened fire with their 30-mm chain guns; several of the NDF planes simply melted into shards, and the pieces shot over the bridge and plummeted into the river. The Nationalist aircraft kept on coming, and in the blink of an eye a Cessna 177 detached itself from the flight and hurled itself headlong into one of the Apaches with a crash and a deafening roar. Both aircraft exploded like a second sun, and the whole inferno dropped like a stone onto the Union side of the interstate; from the bridge, Cody and Stockdale saw a column of fire shoot up into the sky and even over all the other noise they could hear the screams of burning men.
The TV screens in the NDF command center showed it all clearly. “My God, sir, that was a suicide pilot!” cried Jenny Campbell in horror.
“Negatory, Lieutenant, that was a drone,” Wingfield told her with satisfaction. “There are thirty aircraft in Flight Twelve, but only twenty of them are manned. Ten of those planes are remote-controlled drones being flown by the co-pilot in one of the other aircraft, kind of like a giant kid’s toy. We didn’t fancy trying to take on gunships in a full on dogfight with nothing but civvie prop jobs, so we gave ourselves an edge. A brainchild of Doctor Joseph Cord and a young techie Volunteer type who uses the name Doctor Doom, I believe.”
The massed planes of Luftwaffe Twelve shot over the bridge and headed eastward following Nightshade’s directions, straight for the Union gun emplacements beneath the bridge. Some of their bombs released and dropped onto the golf course and the Arboretum, crumping and echoing as they exploded. Several more drone aircraft, including a Beechcraft Musketeer and an old Piper Cub, were hurtled into the earth and exploded in columns of fire. “How are we doing down there, sweet thang?” demanded Roy over the radio.
“It’s a mess, and it’s hard for me to see, but looks like you got two of them at least,” she told him, peering through her field glasses. “One in the Arboretum lit up like a Christmas tree, and one on the golf course looks like the barrel blew off.”
The two remaining Apaches whirled and gave chase as the Northwest flight continued heading east, their chain guns and rocket launchers spitting and hissing. “Bow to your partners, bow to your corners, now it’s time to do-see-doe!” yelled the Oklahoma flight commander into his radio. The remaining airplanes split into two smaller squadrons, shot up into the air on a sharp climb, and one after another performed an Immelman roll, leveling out and racing westward back downriver. They roared over the top of the I-5 and over the smoking wreck of the railway bridge, and then about a mile downriver, they did the same thing, climbing and rolling, reversing direction and leveling back eastward to make their second run. “Hot damn, it worked!” yelled Roy into his radio with glee. “Those sheet metal guys back in Chehalis who beefed up our struts and wings knew their shit! Doesn’t look like we lost a single plane!”
The Apaches tried to follow, but their pilots were confused. They had never fought against massed fixed-wing aircraft before. One squadron of NDF planes attacked the helicopters with their wing-mounted machine guns, filling the sky with a curtain of bullets. The Apaches’ armor held up well against the round strikes, but even so, helicopters that are flying evasive maneuvers find it hard to fire their own weapons. The other wing zeroed in on the American positions behind the Bremer walls barring the bridge. A dozen bombs hurtled onto the enemy behind the barricade, and two more drone planes were crashed right into the moving anti-aircraft vehicles, the explosions hurtling fragments of men and equipment into the air. The Apaches whirled about and opened fire again with their thirties, and more Luftwaffe planes came apart or caught fire and spun out of control, but a second drone smashed into a gunship and the two flaming wrecks went spinning down into the river like a fireworks cartwheel. The last remaining Apache’s pilot apparently decided he’d had enough of this sudden hornet’s nest. He banked sharp left, turned on a dime, and ran.
Then up ahead at the end of the bridge, the armored bulldozer reached the Union barricade and slammed into it, revving its engine and trying to push the concrete Bremer wall aside. The driver did not succeed, but he did knock the berm over onto its back, and he came to rest perched on top of it at roughly a 30-degree angle. “Sunray, zis is Eisenkreuz!” shouted the Panzer Grenadiers’ Colonel Baumgarten into his radio. “Ve haf contact mit ze enemy position!”
“Right, then, let’s play Delmar Partman a tune on Stalin’s Organ!” snapped Wingfield back in the command center. “Tell the Katyusha batteries to open fire!”
Cody and Jason Stockdale could hear noise and shouting ahead, and the sound of more grenades going off. Then dozens of flaming rockets from the Washington side of the river screamed past them on both sides of the bridge and overhead. From somewhere up the line came the command, “Down! Everybody down!” The column of troops crouched down on their knees as rocket after rocket slammed into the Oregon side, all along Swift Highway and Martin Luther King Boulevard, a curtain of fire and smoke and debris, shaking the bridge under their feet. “Holy shit!” yelled Jason Stockdale in awe. At the barricade, Conrad Baumgarten
stood up at the head of his men and roared “Stürmabteilung vorwärts!”
The PGs had a company of Stormtroopers, in the old sense of the term. Even before the National Socialist Kampfzeit, during the First World War, there had been soldiers in special units of the German army, specially armed and trained, who had been first over the top and first into the enemy trenches. It was from these that Hitler had taken the name of his own SA. The Panzer Grenadiers had developed such a unit of almost 100 men especially to go over the top in this one crucial operation, and they now executed a maneuver they had been practicing for a week. Several Grenadiers leaped up on top of the stranded Caterpillar armed with RPGs and an M-60 machine gun, and began firing along the top of the Bremer walls at the Americans crouched on some kind of parapet behind them, while others hurled grenade after grenade over the walls. Six-man squads ran out forward carrying long rectangles of plywood and rubber matting they had lugged with them across the bridge, which they hooked together with steel brackets at each end, thus producing three long ramps. These they humped forward and mounted against the top of the Bremer walls. Then the rest of the Germans charged up the ramps and leaped over the barricades, shouting and shooting.
“Up! Up!” the shout came relayed up the line. “The PGs are over! Forward! Move out!” Cody Brock and Jason Stockdale stood up and signaled to their own men, moving back in among them to count heads and make sure they were all still together and on their feet. “Foxtrot!” shouted Cody, “Listen up! Our German comrades are over the wall! Let’s go give ’em a hand!” The men yelled and cheered in excitement. He found his CSM. “Snowy, how are we doing?”
“We’re in pretty good shape, sir, all things considered,” said Snow. “That kid Kenny Burgess took a round in the head. He’s gone.”
Cody turned around and shook his fist at the smoking carnage on the Oregon side of the river. “You killed Kenny! You bastards!” he yelled. “Anybody else?
“Something fell on Robek, he’s gone too,” said Snow. “Landers and Potocki got hit, but they fell out and should be on a medevac by now.”
“Okay, when we get over the barricade and we cut through whatever they’ve got waiting for us, our battalion guides right and goes down the Pier Street off-ramp to the street, then east into Delta Park to take out any of those guns that are still firing, and after that we go with Donner’s corps to move on the airport,” Cody told him. “Bresler’s people are driving toward City Hall. If I go down you’ve got Foxtrot. You take my radio and report to Captain Hatcher. His handle is Redeye and we’re Tigger.”
“Got it,” said Snow.
“Let’s move out!”
“Papa Golfs are over, sir,” said Jenny Campbell back in the command center. “Colonel Davis has breached the northbound barricade. Their bulldozer pushed one of the Bremer walls over the side of the bridge and into the river, and they’re getting into it hand-to-hand now. Davis says there’s no actual military behind there, just those goddamned Loyal Leaguers and Oregon Watchmen.”
“No Marines or Rangers?” asked Wingfield in puzzlement. “Partman left an important position like that to half-assed amateur auxiliaries?”
“From what it sounds like just from the chatter, sir, he’s using most of his Marines along Sunset Boulevard,” said Jenny.
“Hmm, yeah, I guess that makes sense,” said Wingfield, ruminating. “Bobby Bells and the whole Third Army are going right for his throat at City Hall, and I guess he figured any old scumbags sitting behind those Bremers could just sweep the bridges, and in a narrow field of fire like that they could hold us. Like Thermopylae. Trouble is, those John Wayne wannabe yay-hoos ain’t no damned Spartans.”
On the southbound I-5 the column lurched forward again at a slow but steady walk. Cody caught up with Jason Stockdale again. “How’s Golf Company doing?” he asked.
“Three men dead and six wounded. You guys?”
“Two dead and two wounded. Is it just me or is the ground fire slacking off?”
“It’s slacking off,” replied Stockdale. “The planes and the rockets did a number on those jarheads.” The NDF planes were still buzzing and whirling overhead like a swarm of angry hornets, swooping in and strafing at unseen targets on the Oregon end of the I-5 and along the shore below them.
“Damn!” swore Cody, looking up. “More choppers!”
“Yeah, but look, they’re ours!”
The bridge barricades and enemy positions along the shoreline were now being attacked by the second Nationalist airwave, a mixed bag of helicopters sporting blue, white and green roundels, with M-60 gunners firing from the doors or from weapons mounted on the skids or the belly of the choppers. There were two commandeered American Blackhawks, with door gunners blasting away, and another two Seattle police helicopters, but most were civilian models, including Portland’s own Channel 7 news and traffic copter with its original TV logo.
The First of the Fourth reached the concrete and sandbag barricade, and Cody swore softly to himself as he saw at least a dozen dead German troopers in tiger-stripes and coal-scuttle helmets lying on the ground or sprawled on top of the Caterpillar and over the top of the Bremer walls. They mounted the ramps, and when they reached the top, they saw that the Americans had built scaffolding parapets along the south side to use as firing positions. Before them stretched the elevated Interstate 5 going into Oregon, a hellish scene of burning vehicles and wrecked aircraft, oily black smoke, and on the asphalt a carpet of dead bodies. They clambered down from the parapets and kept on moving forward, stepping over the burned and mangled remains, sometimes slipping in the blood. “Wait a minute,” said Stockdale, staring down at the ragged enemy corpses. “These aren’t jarheads!”
In front of them was a dead black man, his head covered with a blue bandana and clenching a short pump shotgun. Stockdale kicked him over on his stomach. The corpse was also wearing a black hoodie with the iron-on letters, P.O.C. “Portland Oregon Crips!” exclaimed Cody. “These are goddamned nigger gang-bangers!”
“Looks like the mighty United States of America is really scraping the bottom of the barrel,” said Stockdale with a sneer.
As they continued to move forward off the bridge, the two young officers looked over to their right, where they saw a platoon of 30 or 40 SS-tabbed men in tiger stripes hooking ropes into their waist harnesses, preparing to rappel off the guardrail of the interstate and down to the ground. A tall officer whose headgear was missing was shouting and gesticulating at his men. He bore an odd resemblance to former President Bill Clinton, although a much younger version. He seemed to be shouting in a mixture of Italian and pidgin English. “Avanti, ragazzi!” he yelled. “Lessa go, we no gotta alla day! Liberta!”
“Who the devil is that?” asked Cody curiously.
“Hell, who knows?” said Stockdale. “We got all kinds of white folks coming here looking for a homeland. Speaking of which,” he added, nodding to their left. There they saw Colonel Conrad Baumgarten of the Panzer Grenadiers, standing to attention in the middle of the bullet-and-bomb-shredded highway, the handset in one hand and a broom-handled Mauser pistol in the other. One side of his body was soaked with blood; they couldn’t tell if it was his own or someone else’s. Baumgarten was on the horn with the NDF command center in the Marshall House. His voice rang through the control room. “Sunray, zis is Eisenkreuz. I haf ze honor to report zat se First Army of ze Republic is now in Portland!”
Wild cheering and applause broke out in the command center, and then again, when Lieutenant Jenny Campbell shouted out, “Sir! General Morgan reports his corps has stormed the barricades on the 205! They’re moving off the bridge and into the city!”
Wingfield spoke up when the noise finally died down. “Right, send this to all units, and make sure you use frequencies and online channels that all the goddamned news media can pick up on as well. Inform them that we have defeated and overrun the enemy on the bridges, and that we are advancing on all fronts into Portland. Remind them of my Operational Order Number Five iss
ued at dawn today. White Unionists, military or otherwise, are to be given one chance, and one chance only, to throw down their weapons and surrender, if the tactical situation makes it possible to do so without endangering NDF personnel. Anyone, man, woman, or child with skin the color of shit is to be shot on sight. They had their chance to leave over the past five years, and it’s time the Northwest Republic made it clear that we goddamned well mean what we say. This land is now whites only.” Deafening cheers rang through the command center. He turned to his adjutant. “Come on, Shane. Let’s take ourselves a little constitutional over there in the City of Roses.”
* * *
By midnight that night it was effectively over, although the mopping up would take several more days. General Carter Wingfield and Captain Shane Ryan stood on the street in front of the blackened and bullet-shattered four-story Italian Renaissance façade of Portland’s City Hall. Around them stood most of the generals who had taken the city: Robert Gair and Billy Basquine from the Second Army, Robert “Bobby Bells” DiBella and Zack Hatfield from the Third Army, Big Jim McCann and John Corbett Morgan from the First. They were staring down at four dead U.S. Marines lying on the sidewalk in front of them.
“It happened about fifteen minutes ago,” said Zack Hatfield, who was wearing his famed and photogenic broad-brimmed hat and his long gray duster from his guerrilla days with the NVA out on the north Oregon coast, with his Winchester rifle of Sunset Beach fame slung over his shoulder. “I just missed it. Partman and these other guys, his staff officers I guess, must have known that Amurrica’s number was up, and so they did the old Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid trick. They came charging out the door with their weapons blazing, and our German comrades returned the favor.”
“Stupid damned jarhead,” muttered Wingfield, nudging the bullet-riddled corpse with his boot toe. “Now the Americans have a legend of their own out of all this mess. The only one they’ll be able to conjure up out of these last five sorry years of torture and tyranny, I think, but they’re a sorry bunch and they shouldn’t even have this one. They don’t deserve it.”
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