Freedom's Sons

by H. A. Covington

  What Birdie came up with was a way to rig Georgia’s SuperPod, her personal music player, so that she could load up to five terabytes of data onto the drive and conceal the fact. At some expense, the Office purchased for Georgia the deluxe Ayatollah Rockandrolla model, a pre-programmed SuperPod that contained every rock-and-roll, rockabilly, soul, Motown, heavy metal, grunge, ska, and any other popular music recorded in the last century, starting with Buddy Holly and the first Elvis. Everything except racist Skinhead rock music, Oi music, White Noise, and Northwest rebel songs like Third Brigade and The Boys of Elk River, of course.

  The tens of thousands of songs amounted to quite a bit of compressed data, but this drive was partitioned by Birdie on two levels in some manner that Bobby could not understand, and Georgia didn’t even try. There were thousands of songs on the upper drive, and Georgia could create her own playlists and listen for hours, as could anyone else if they wanted proof that the SuperPod did indeed contain music. The lower partition was programmed in some voodoo-like manner so that when Georgia connected the Pod to a source computer or inserted a chip or flash drive, the new data uploaded onto the lower partition of the device’s drive and overwrote the existing data there without adding or increasing the overall content. Georgia’s SuperPod went through the Secret Service scanner in the afternoon when she reported for Seventh Inning Stretch and showed 5.2 terabytes of data, and out again the next morning showing 5.2 terabytes—just not all of it the same data.

  It was risky. At the slightest hint of suspicion, the SuperPod drive could be seized and accessed with a password-cracking program, and the true contents displayed. There was an emergency code Georgia could text onto the pad that would wipe the drive so clean that Christ and all twelve apostles couldn’t recover a single byte, but to do that was in itself as good as a confession if she were caught. But now not only did she have a way to bring actual confidential data out of the White House, but she had something to take out.

  At the conclusion of seventh inning stretch in the executive lounge, President Wallace always ducked quickly into the shower to spruce up before resuming his official duties. Georgia needed a more leisurely time in the bathroom to clean up, shower, and sometimes to apply any necessary ointment or bandages to her body. This evening she had used the president’s shower time to rifle through his pockets, and she had found a flash drive with the clear plastic handle labeled “SR Conference May 20.” That was today’s date, and SR had to be Situation Room. Taking advantage of the absence of spy cameras in the Oval Office love nest, Georgia whipped out her SuperPod and copied the contents of the flash drive onto it, then carefully replaced the drive in Wallace’s inner jacket pocket where she found it just as he stepped out of the shower.

  She was curious as to what she’d gotten. Now alone in the only other surveillance-free place in the building, she opened the file and picked a point at random to start playing. She saw Hunter Wallace’s face and heard his voice: “We will flatten everything west of the Cascades from Eugene to Bellingham; Seattle and Portland and Olympia will be nothing but burning trash heaps in a junkyard, and our ground-based planes and missiles will blast Boise and Spokane and Missoula into powder until not one stone remains on the other, and racism will be but a bad memory in the world…”

  Georgia texted an apparently innocuous message to a girlfriend at her old job that was relayed to Bob Campbell’s phone, and told him she needed a meeting next morning at a certain bar and grill downtown, where the security cameras had been carefully turned aside so that one side entrance and a couple of tables at the back were in a blind spot. Georgia thought of her father and her brother in Montana, and the little baby boy she had seen when Bobby played their messages, and of what she was doing every night with the man who meant to murder them. She cried for a while, and then she got herself cleaned up. Her lover had told her he’d be up to bed early tonight.

  Twenty-four hours later, the Northwest American Republic’s Council of State sat in the conference room in Olympia and watched the whole previous day’s meeting of their opposite numbers in the White House situation room. They heard Hunter Wallace say: “We will flatten everything west of the Cascades from Eugene to Bellingham; Seattle and Portland and Olympia will be nothing but burning trash heaps in a junkyard, and our ground-based planes and missiles will blast Boise and Spokane and Missoula into powder until not one stone remains on the other, and racism will be but a bad memory in the world.”

  Wallace did not hear his counterpart, State President Henry “Red” Morehouse as he spoke aloud, to no one in particular, “No, sir. You won’t.”

  XII

  PLAN 17

  (12 years and seven months after Longview)

  All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.

  —Sun Tzu

  State President Henry “Red” Morehouse arrived at Fort Lewis with his entourage on a morning in late May, ostensibly for a routine inspection tour during the day and a formal reception in the officer’s mess that night. As part of that inspection, the president disappeared indoors at the base commander’s office for several hours under the watchful eye of the American surveillance satellites hundreds of miles out, during which time he was taken through an underground tunnel to a building a quarter of a mile away that was officially the base laundry, and which emitted sufficient quantities of steam every day to prove it for the benefit of the enemy watching from above.

  In a sub-basement beneath the laundry, Morehouse was shown to the General Staff’s new command center, which had been established to meet the present emergency. “When the actual invasion comes, Red, this will be too dangerous a target, and we’ll have to keep you on the move,” Defense Minister Carter Wingfield told the president. “After H-Hour, tactical command will be delegated down to the individual units. You and Vice President Brennan will be in separate mobile communications centers, moving around the Republic as dictated by events, to keep you one step ahead of any air strikes, and hopefully confuse any satellite surveillance they have left after Rotfungus. But most individual decisions will have to be made by field grade officers on the ground.”

  “There had better not be either any air strikes or any satellite surveillance for us to worry about,” Morehouse told him grimly. “Both Bluelight and Rotfungus have to work! We can’t fight against our own sky.”

  In the command center President Morehouse met with the Special Planning Group, as the floating mini-War Cabinet and team of attached staff had been named, to receive one of his regular briefings on the constantly evolving details of Plan 17. Ever since the first year of the Northwest Republic’s existence, at least once a year the General Staff of the Northwest Defense Force had reviewed and put together an updated plan for dealing with just this contingency, a full-blown American attack against the nation in an attempt to re-enslave it. The first plan had been called Plan One, and this was the seventeenth update in twelve years, hence Plan 17. In the NDF’s center, there were none of the fancy blinking lights, plasma screens, and electronic gadgetry that could be found in the White House Situation Room. There was just a simple room with a table and chairs, large maps on the wall, a single satellite-linked TV for monitoring CNN, a small bank of radio and computer gear, and some dedicated phone lines.

  General John Morgan chaired the briefing. “We are now certain we have a pretty full picture of what they’re planning,” he told Morehouse. “Our information comes from human intelligence sources, of course, including that incredible Belladonna project, but also from dozens of other agents positioned in various places in the enemy’s infrastructure. Charlie Randall hasn’t been sitting on his hands for the past twelve years, I can tell you. In addition to our spies, we have info from hacked enemy satellites and computers as well.”

  “First and biggest question,” said Morehouse. “Frank, do they know that we know for sure they’re coming? If they do, if they understand that they’ve lost the element of surprise and
there won’t be any Northwest Pearl Harbor, that might cause them to move up D-Day or change their plan.”

  “As nearly as we can ascertain, no sir, they don’t know for sure that we know,” said Frank Barrow, Minister of Security, through whom all the intelligence efforts of the Special Planning Group were being coordinated. “Oh, they know we’re skittish, and we’ve spotted some disinformation and concealment attempts on their part. They’re assuming that we have enough sense to sniff something in the wind, but they’re hoping that we won’t guess the magnitude of it. As always, they’re underestimating our intelligence in every sense of the word. Amazing as it seems, the government of Amurrica still seems to have the same kind of hubris that lost them the War of Independence in the first place. Jews simply can’t wrap their minds around the fact that they are not smarter than everybody else. They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.”

  “Go on,” said Morehouse.

  John Morgan picked it up. “We now can break down the enemy order of battle as follows: Operation Strikeout begins with the massive war game called Operation Blast Furnace, in eastern Montana and the Dakotas, and that’s getting underway this weekend as the 82nd and 101st Airborne do a lot of spectacular show jumps over Fargo and Billings, a few military parades in small prairie towns with bands and nice shiny tanks, all very out in the open, oh-no-we’re-not-hiding-anything, you get the idea. It is the most massive exercise ever conducted by the American military, comprising almost sixty percent of the entire United States armed forces, and it involves all of the land and air forces that will comprise the invasion. Even their field grade officers, major generals and below, have been kept in ignorance of the fact that this is not a drill, and I suspect that may backfire on the Pentagon. Generals don’t like being treated like children to be sent out of the room when the adults are talking. They’ll feel resentful, and it’s bound to show in their response.

  “This kind of monkeyshine has been something they do every couple of years as a form of rattling their saber. Basically, they get almost all their combat troops as close as they can to our frontier and cut a swagger, play a little grab-ass, pop a few shells over the border, kind of like a gorilla beating its chest. They do this either to the east of us, like this time, or else down in Colorado on the Wyoming border. They’ve done it four times prior to this, causing us to call up at least some of the first-line reserves as a precaution. Then they use their satellites to study our reaction, to see how we’ve positioned our men and equipment to repel an attack if it turns into the real thing. By now, they figure we’re getting a little blasé about it, and they think they can catch us off guard. They’re counting on their attacking across the Canadian border to surprise us, since Canada’s always been quiet. Lots of nasty rhetoric from Ottawa, but never any military provocation. Vancouver is too close and we could do too much damage to the mansions of the wealthy Chinese ex-pats who are some of the main supporters of Simoneau and his Liberal party government.”

  “So in other words, the Americans actually expect us to mobilize our reserves, and they will be allowing us time to do so?” asked Morehouse. “That’s their first mistake right there.”

  “They really have no choice, Mister President,” spoke up Colonel Garrison from Combined Military Intelligence. “They know that any complete element of surprise can’t be achieved, and the closer they get to D-Day, the more likely we’ll be able to twig to what’s up. They want to razzle-dazzle us with smoke and mirrors, and they think they can pull it off. In practical fact, in this technological age it is simply impossible to conceal that kind of major troop movement on either side in a built-up and surveilled area like North America, without somebody in someone’s intelligence analysis unit spotting it from space. They’re not total idiots, and despite the hubris that their political leadership displays, they have sense enough to get that we’re not completely stupid either. They have known for years that we hack into their spy satellites and use their own gear to spy on them. They’re relying on misdirection, rather than deception.”

  “Oh, they know we watch them through their own eyes in the sky, all right,” said Frank Barrow. “There has been a quiet little cyber-war going on for a long time, where we try to wipe out one another’s ground computers with viruses.”

  “Not the on-board computers?” asked Morehouse keenly. “Frank, can we get any kind of take on whether or not they know about Rotfungus?”

  “I don’t think so, Red,” said Barrow. “Nothing in the chatter we can pick up indicates they’re worried about a super-virus, although one can never really know what the other guy really thinks. There’s always the chance that we’ve been bluffed and stroked, or we think we’ve bluffed and stroked them when we haven’t. That’s the nature of the spying game. Our intel indicates that the Americans have considered the possibility of something like Rotfungus, sure. Obviously, any time there are computers involved you have to worry about viruses. They periodically update the firewalls and the AV and security software for the onboard drives in space, but they’re not really concerned with that, because they believe what we want to do is actually hijack the spy satellite system by reprogramming the on-board software and then use it ourselves, while denying them access to it. We did that a few times with the Lazarus Birds, so that makes sense to them. I wish to hell we could figure out more ways to do that, but they’ve already cracked the programs we used and secured their satellites against them. Apparently, they consider any attempt on our part simply to destroy the whole orbiting communications network up there and blind everybody on earth except our Russian friends to be a long shot. Just because they wouldn’t wipe out billions of dollars’ worth of expensive equipment, much of it the private property of big multinational corporations, they think we won’t either. Rotfungus specifically seems to be a secret still; none of the AV programs they’re uploading so far appears designed for it. I once spent an hour with Doctor Joseph Cord wherein he explained to me in great detail why Rotfungus is so special, something about it not attacking the programming on the on-board drives themselves, which will be heavily firewalled and guarded, but the BIOS on all the operating devices and peripherals on the satellite. I couldn’t understand a word he said.”

  “Join the club, but Doctor Frankencord has never failed us yet. I think we can take it from him that Rotfungus will work,” said Morehouse. “It had better work; otherwise this will be a really short war.”

  Morgan took up the thread again. “Getting back to the assembly of the invasion force on our eastern border, around the middle of June, presumably under the illusion that they are still fooling us, the Americans will divide into two groups. The Americans’ Group North will attack through Canada with something on the order of one hundred and seventy-five thousand men, including three army corps, three full Marine divisions, six armored brigades, and three airborne brigades they intend to use as spearheads and drop into the Republic first, in order to seize key points in Montana and Idaho. The ground invasion force will slash down into Idaho and take Coeur d’Alene, Spokane, and keep on heading south.

  “The remaining enemy forces will in turn divide and attack us through eastern Montana in two columns, Group Center coming more or less down old U.S. Eighty-Seven, and Group South will come down old Interstate Ninety-two hundred thousand men, divided into five army corps and including seven armored brigades and two field artillery brigades. It will be what they call a Baghdad Boogie, based on the original dash to Baghdad in ’Ought Three from Kuwait. Both columns will be completely mechanized, and the Pentagon has allocated twenty-four hours before they will be entering Butte, Helena, and Great Falls, then another twenty-four hours to take Missoula and Kalispell. They will turn southwest and link up with Army Group North in Boise, and then start sending columns westward to places like Bend and other places east of the Cascades. Immediately following the front line troops will come the first elements of their Northwest Stability Force, which is what they call that FATPO-like army of occupation they’ve been training at
Fort Bragg, in order to hold down what the actual military takes. That is when the bad part will start for our civilian population on the ground.”

  “Mechanization is their key weakness,” said Carter Wingfield. “The Luftwaffe and our best Partisan Ranger units have to take out their vehicles and fuel supplies first, put the bastards on shank’s mare. Then once we’ve slowed them to a crawl we begin the counterattack with our main ground forces. This is assuming our own vehicles and forces aren’t plastered all over the landscape or pinned down due to the enemy’s control of the air.”

  Morgan continued grimly: “In the meantime, Aztlan’s Fuerza del Ejército del Norte will attack from California and Nevada on a broad front, but mostly up the I-Five corridor, four hundred thousand men in eighteen divisions, three of them Assault Guards who have been trained by the Chinese and North Koreans. Most of the Aztec army is just mestizo peons, not very well trained and armed with whatever they’ve been able to beg or borrow from other countries’ military surplus, but those Asaltos are bad news. They’ve not only got better training and equipment than the mestizo conscripts, but they’re more ideologically and racially motivated. Complete the Reconquista, death to the gringos, Viva La Raza, you get the idea. The Aztecs have over one thousand combat helicopters with Chinese crews, which will be valuable in the kind of mountainous terrain they’re going to have to cover at first before they can get down onto the coastal plain or up into the high desert. They also have at least seven hundred tanks in various stages of obsolescence. Counting U.S. Air Force and naval personnel from the seaborne task force, the combined Mexican and American force which will be invading the Northwest Republic approaches one million men.”