Freedom's Sons

by H. A. Covington

  “Unless that lunatic Wallace decides to nuke us when he sees he’s losing,” said Leach sourly.

  “Or unless the ching-ling-dings decide to send something more than helicopter and jet fighter pilots,” said Basquine.

  “Any chance the Chinese might try to get involved with a major ground force commitment?” asked Morehouse.

  “No chance, Red, we’re certain of that,” Barrow told the group. “For one thing, the Celestials may be inscrutable, but they aren’t stupid. They saw how America got bogged down in foreign conquests when they went into lands where they were never meant to be, and they don’t want the same thing happening to them. Nor do the enemy want them here. The Triple Alliance of America, Canada, and Aztlan, as we have named them, think they can take us on their own, and none of their governments are nutty enough to invite a major Chinese ground force into North America. They know once that happens they’ll never be able to get rid of the chinks. They remember what happened when America kept invading Muslim countries and staying, staying, staying for decades on end.”

  “So why the naval task force, if not to invade?” asked Morehouse.

  “Air support from the carriers for the three-pronged ground invasion we think is coming, to try and destroy our manufacturing and infrastructure and population centers along the old I-Five corridor,” replied Morgan. “Looks like they’ll be sending troops against us from Aztlan in the south, from the east through Montana towards Missoula, and from Canada in the north, down into Idaho or Montana, or both. Plus airborne drops all over the country on the first day to secure crucial points.”

  “Not go long and slash straight down from Vancouver towards Seattle?” asked Morehouse. “The would seem to be a logical fourth prong to an invasion.”

  “We don’t think so, sir,” said Garrison. “For one thing, they simply don’t have enough combat troops. For another, they’re afraid we will retaliate against Vancouver. Prime Minister Simoneau is very twitchy about that possibility. The tell on this is that they’re not rebuilding and reinforcing the roads all the way into B.C. Our prognostication at the moment is they will concentrate their naval air assault on Seattle and Portland and points west of the Cascade mountains, to try and bomb us back into the Stone Age, as they like to put it, and the northernmost strike force will cut down east of the mountains towards Coeur d’Alene and Kalispell, then maybe try and do some kind of convergence with the eastern invasion force against Boise.”

  “Why not Wyoming first?” asked Leach.

  “We think that will come in the second wave, so to speak, once hostilities have begun,” said Morgan. “Wyoming has always been the Republic’s hinterland, our own odd man out. Kind of a frontier preserve. Very hard, old-fashioned and independent people. The Party minds its own business out there and they tolerate the Tricolor over the post offices, that kind of live-and-let-live thing. Wyoming folks understand the need for national service perfectly, they agree with it as good for young people’s character, and we’ve had less trouble with draft-dodging out of Wyoming than anywhere else, but beyond that we’ve walked softly out there and let the cowboys roam the range, and I think we’ll find that will pay off now that trouble’s coming. The cowboys don’t want to go back to the bad old days any more than anyone else in this country does.

  “As to the invasion, Wyoming sort of juts out there on the map, and it looks like a vulnerable appendage that can be severed from the Republic, true, but our war gamers believe that for the Americans to concentrate a major initial attack on Wyoming would be a mistake, and they understand that. They don’t want to lop off a limb, they need to go for the vitals right away. It’s a big place, with an implacably hostile population and terrain that make it ideal for guerrilla warfare, almost like America’s Afghanistan. It would be very easy for the first wave invasion force to get bogged down out on those plains, far from any of their major objectives. Trying to come through Wyoming would increase the distance they have to travel to reach the major eastern cities. Most likely they’ll try to roll up Wyoming in a second wave of less than front-line troops, maybe use National Guard and these Operation Chain Link baboons, once they’ve captured their major objectives elsewhere in the country.”

  President Morehouse spoke. “Getting back to naval defense, Admiral Leach, can we do anything about this American armada that will be coming in at us from the Pacific?”

  “Depends on how far out to sea the carriers are when they launch their aircraft, Mr. President,” said Leach. “My guess is that will be fifty miles, at least. They’re leery of our shore batteries; our Russian friends have given us enough Yakhonts missiles on mobile launchers to make them skittish. We can and we will try and get at them with our missile destroyers, with TAC boats, and U-boats, and punchies, and everything else we’ve got. But even with our souped-up marine engine technology, sea travel is a lot slower than air, and they’ll know we’re coming. Our navy will have to slug it out with their ship-based copter gunships and dodge surface-to-surface missiles, and once we get close there’s the chain guns and computer-directed guns that can hit anything on the surface with pinpoint accuracy. Fortunately, we’ve spent the past twelve years concentrating on quantity rather than quality, so while we don’t have any battleships or carriers or much of any kind of a blue water fleet, we’ve got six Sunburn-packing missile destroyers, over two hundred TACs, fifty-four U-boats, and about eighty punchies.”

  “Punchies?” asked Jackson.

  “Small, fast hydroplane boats carrying a three-man crew, and one stubby little Nova missile with an effective range of five miles that can breach up to 18 inches of armor plate and hit with a concussion that can also blow out the watertight compartments on most known vessels, including in my opinion an aircraft carrier if they hit her in the right place,” explained Leach. “Kind of a nautical version of the old NVA shoot-and-scoot. Zip in, slam a missile into the enemy’s side, zip out, back to base or the supply vessel and load another missile, repeat. They’re light and very fast, and if only a few of them can get close enough, they can wreak havoc. Get a good square hit on the waterline of a destroyer or even a frigate with one of those Novas, and she’s off to Davy Jones’ locker in ten minutes. Trouble is getting close enough. Their hulls are mostly fiberglass, and they’re unarmored. We deliberately sacrificed everything to speed and mobility and that one hellacious punch, hence the nickname. Plus their range is short. They’re purely for coastal defense against just this kind of situation, but we really need for the enemy fleet to get in as close as we can lure them, to cut the time and distance necessary to deploy our vessels.”

  “Sounds like what we’ve done with the Songbirds and Starfighters,” commented Basquine. “Don’t even worry about standing up to the big boys on the block, just a lot of small craft that can move fast, hit hard, and then escape and evade. Can the TAC boats take down a carrier?”

  “The Torpedo Assault Craft? Absolutely, once again with the proviso that they can get within effective range,” Leach assured them. “That’s the rub. Depending on how many jets and helicopter gunships the Luftwaffe can let us have, we will have some air cover against enemy copters, but we know you’re going to be stretched thin, Billy. And there’s just not too much we can do about missiles and fighter jet attacks. Mr. President, the best contingency plan we have been able to come up with for a scenario like this is to let the enemy fleet get as close as possible to our shore, then we swarm them like a pack of piranhas, all of us, so that we will overwhelm their radar and chain guns and missile defenses and at least some of us can get close enough to stop them. We have the firepower to sink those ships, if we can just bring it to them. Piranhas are small, but they have very sharp teeth, and enough of them can strip a man or a cow to the bone.”

  “One mass suicide mission and then that’s our whole navy gone?” demanded Morehouse in horror.

  “If that’s what it takes to stop those carriers from launching bombing missions against our cities and our children, yes sir,” said Leach. “There
will be no Hamburgs or Dresdens here, Mr. President.”

  “General Basquine, will the Songbirds conceivably be any good against the carriers?” asked Morehouse.

  “Sir, the Songbirds are tactical ground support aircraft, tank-killers and anti-transport hunters,” said Basquine. “Their purpose is to make sure any enemy army invading the Northwest Republic does so on foot after the first 48 hours or so. They’re prop jobs, since we could never afford any significant number of jets, based on the old German Stuka but twin-engined, plus some refinements of twenty-first century technology we’ve added. The Songbirds are fast as hell from the viewpoint of anybody on the ground, but slow as molasses to a computerized radar fire-control system. They’re very maneuverable, which is good for dodging ground fire and evading enemy radar, but I have to recommend against sending them on long flights over the ocean where there is no place to hide and no place to evade radar and satellite surveillance. In fact, if Rotfungus can’t take out the enemy satellite system, then we’re going to be royally screwed. The Songbirds are nimble when flying low to the ground, like I said, but they’re still tortoises compared to F-15s or F-22s, and they can be easily tracked from space. Like Admiral Leach’s missile and torpedo boats, range and armor were sacrificed to speed and maneuverability and one big punch. Our Valkyrie helicopter gunships we must have to slow the enemy ground advance. The Republic will be fighting on three huge fronts, and there simply aren’t enough of the Ladies for that, never mind a pitched battle at sea where they will be knocked out of the air like pigeons by computer-controlled chain guns.”

  “Okay, now we get down to the nitty-gritty,” said President Morehouse. “Our three we-hope-to-hell-they’re-secret weapons. First off, how does it look on Rotfungus, John?”

  Morgan nodded. “Technical Warfare Division and Doc Doom himself assure me it can be done, that the virus will work and it will take out the entire American, Chinese, Japanese, European, and old Israeli spy satellite system all at once and about half the world’s communications along with it, plus fucking up their ground control servers like a dog’s dinner. That will leave only the Russian orbital communications network intact, as well as our own few Lazarus Birds, so we cross our fingers and hope that Big Bear decides to stay mellow and not sell us out to whatever desperate and extravagant deal the Americans offer them for use of their eyes in the sky. But it’s kind of like swallowing gasoline and then a lit match and blowing yourself up. Spectacular trick, but we can only do it once. Any attempt at a test run for Rotfungus beforehand will alert the Americans to the fact that we have the virus, and their cyber-geeks will have time to work up countermeasures.”

  “Not to mention the fact that if the Russians won’t allow us access to their satellites, we will be almost as blind as the Americans, even with our handful of Lazarus Birds,” said Morehouse with a sigh.

  “Will Moscow dare to take our side openly?” asked Jackson.

  “Big Bear has been of immense help over the past twelve years, for which they have been well compensated in Northwest paper and pulp, Northwest manufactured products, Northwest booze, Northwest marijuana and Northwest meat and grain which they have then sold on to other countries to maintain their position as a food-producer,” said Morehouse. “To what degree all of those things earn us actual military assistance in a time of existential crisis has always been a very obscure point which we have been unable to get the Bear to clarify.”

  “Why not take down every damned satellite in the sky no matter who it belongs to, rather than let anyone use it against us?” asked Leach.

  “That idea has been floated, Admiral. We may have to go that route if it looks as if our Russian friends are turning two-faced on us, but Russia was the first country to recognize us out of only four in the whole world to do so thus far, they have been of serious material help to us and comported themselves as friends, and I don’t think we need to kick them in the balls without provocation. The Republic will need all the friends we can get. Now for the most important maybe of all. Carter, what’s the story on Bluelight?”

  “Same as Rotfungus,” said Wingfield. “Joe Cord assures me it will work like a charm, but then a man who habitually refers to God as an esteemed senior colleague doesn’t strike me as having a too pragmatic point of view.”

  “Yes, I know, Doctor Cord’s ego tends to cast Mount Rainier in the shade on sunny days,” responded Morehouse dryly.

  “Well, he did at least refer to the Almighty as a senior colleague,” replied Wingfield sourly. “To give Cord due credit, there’s no question that the Bluelight plasma weapon works, and it will bring down an aircraft. It works in the lab, and the prototypes worked in the few tests we’ve been able to do out in the Olympic on propeller-driven drones, on nice cloudy days when we hope to hell the satellites couldn’t pick up on what we were doing. But short of bringing down an Air Northwest liner, we’ve never been able to test it out on jets at high altitude. The tracking and fire control unit works on the simulator. As risky as it is, we’ve fired a few test beams into the stratosphere, and the instrumentation shows they can reach 45,000 feet with only a ten percent power loss, which will destroy any plane or missile the Americans can throw at us like a mosquito in a bug zapper, if only we can hit the damned things. But you’re talking about hitting an aircraft moving miles above the earth at anything up to twice the speed of sound, probably doing evasive maneuvers and possibly equipped with Stealth radar cloaking, with a plasma particle beam the diameter of a pencil. The key is the radar tracking and targeting unit. Does it work? The only way we’ll know is when these bastards make their move. If the bombs fall on us, then it didn’t work.”

  “Won’t the American planes’ onboard defenses lock onto the Bluelight’s radar signal and hit the unit with a missile?” asked Jackson.

  “That’s why each battery consists of three projectors mounted on separate vehicles,” explained Wingfield. “One to fire on the attacking aircraft, one to take out retaliatory missiles, and a third weapon as backup to either one as needed.”

  “How many batteries are ready for the field?” asked Morehouse.

  “Two hundred or so,” said Wingfield. “Just barely enough to cover our major urban areas and other potential targets. If we really do have until June, we can double that number by then with our crash program.”

  “Air Defense is starting the next training intake tomorrow, in fact, right here in Centralia,” put in General Basquine. “All hand-picked men who will be confined to base until they’re through and they have been deployed to army and Luftwaffe posts around the country, ready to roll when we get the word that the balloon has gone up.”

  “Keep me posted down to the last detail, Bill,” said Morehouse. “Finally, the V-3s and the gas and bio warheads?”

  “Olene, Lakeview, Cave Junction, and Siskiyou have about one hundred Type One V-3s each, and can fit phosgene, mustard gas, or sarin warheads on your order, Mr. President, as well as a small number of anthrax warheads,” said Carter Wingfield. “Plus a simple HE warhead loaded with Semtex. You can cram a lot of Semtex into a thousand-kilogram warhead, if all you want to do is make a big hole in the ground in Sacramento. They need at least twenty-four hours’ notice so they can get the warheads fitted and prepare the platforms for firing.

  “For much the same reasons as apply to the naval and air forces, i.e. overwhelming them with low-tech in sheer numbers before they can get their high-tech toys focused, I recommend that once the invasion commences you order an immediate launch of all the rockets from those four platforms I just named. Type Ones are relatively simple, and by the standards of most modern weapons systems they’re affordable to manufacture, given our military budget, at least. But they’re slow and vulnerable. The Mex have no air defense system worthy of the name, but we have to assume that the Americans or the Chinese will give them some kind of cover, possibly from that naval fleet offshore, Patriots or some other kind of anti-aircraft system, or F-15 and F-22 jet fighters that could knock the V-3s down ou
t of the sky like badminton birds. A mass launch would mean more chance that enough will get through to cause serious enemy casualties. Another reason is that those stations are right down on the border, to get as close to their targets as possible, and if the Aztecs move fast enough they will be overrun pretty quickly. The main base at Crater Lake has over five hundred rockets, including one hundred and twelve Type Twos which can hit Los Angeles.”

  “These people are coming to destroy our nation and kill and enslave our children,” said Morehouse. “We have done nothing to them except demand the right to live among our own kind in our own land, the same demand they themselves made of the United States twelve years ago. But they refuse to accord us the same right, they want to take what we have, and that has been going on for way too long already. So they’re going to suffer. These weapons won’t be decisive—hell, we can’t even hit any substantial non-white target in the United States with them, their range is so short and they’re so inaccurate—but they will make sure that if this Republic perishes from the earth, we will take a lot of mestizos with us, and if we survive we will make an example that will deter them from ever trying anything like this again. I know there are whites remaining in California as well, but if they’re still there after twelve years and they have not come to our own racial Homeland then I assume they’re nothing but liberal shits who love diversity so much they can damned well die in it. The minute the first Mexican soldier sets foot across that border, I’m giving the order.

  “Each forward firing base will lay half their weapons on San Francisco, so we can eradicate as many bugger boys as possible in addition to mestizos, and the other half will drop on Sacramento so we can hopefully take out as much of their government as we can, including those fucking white traitor politicians in the Partida Criollo. All the Type Twos from Crater Lake head for Los Angeles, and never mind niggers in Compton or mestizos in East L.A. They’re just cockroaches and their species is immortal; we’ll never get rid of them all. Insofar as the V-3s can be aimed, which I understand isn’t very accurately, I want them aimed at Hollywood, Malibu, Santa Monica, Brentwood, Beverly Hills, and Fairfax, so we can take out as many goddamned movie stars and Israelis and general Jews as we can. Carter, you and General Basquine come and see me tomorrow at eleven a.m. and we will work out the exact firing and targeting protocol. I also want to see if we can double our stock of both classes of V-3 Flying Bombs by D-Day and set up a couple of more forward firing platforms, maybe even with some Type Twos so we can drop a little death on Fresno and San Diego as well.”