Freedom's Sons

by H. A. Covington

  “Even I can see there’s something wompy-jawed here just by looking at the map,” said Morehouse, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “They’re not directing anything against Wyoming, which will be sitting there on their southern flank?”

  “Not really, sir,” said Garrison. “Air strikes at military installations in Cheyenne, Casper, Sheridan, and Cody, but that’s about it. It’s like they’ve almost forgotten it exists, which I admit is easy to do. Hell, sometimes we forget Wyoming exists.”

  “What is our fully mobilized reserve military strength in Wyoming, all arms?” asked the State President.

  “With the Civil Guard, almost two hundred thousand men, including four armored and four field artillery regiments. By way of regulars we’ve got the Preobrazhensky Regiment and the Don Cossacks at Sheridan, and the First Mountain Brigade at Yellowstone, and about a hundred V-3s at Laramie and Cheyenne we can use to hit Colorado Springs and Denver, but we were going to move those up to North Bend so we could drop ’em on Vancouver if need be.”

  “Continue with the relocation. No point in pissing off the folks in Colorado when their sector is quiet, and besides, they’re still mostly white down there. John, did you work up those figures I asked you to last time?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Morgan. “On your order, as soon before D-Day as you think we can do it without tipping them off, we can have at least another thirty thousand regulars down there, including a lot of our tanks, the Panzer Grenadiers and the Ninth and Twelfth Panzer Regiments.”

  Morehouse nodded. “Good. Send warning orders to the regimental commands to get ready. We’ll start sending them in now, a battalion at a time, at night, covered freight cars. Make sure you replace the missing tanks with blow-ups at their home bases, again by night, so the satellites don’t pick up on it, or at least they’ll be confused as hell. Are we moving the real tanks into Wyoming, or are those the inflatables? Keep everything as much under cover as possible. Then when that American Group South moves into Montana, we slice in behind them, cut them off, and hit them from the rear.”

  “Brava and Scheisskopf can’t see this coming?” wondered SS General Billy Jackson. “Don’t they teach map reading at West Point and Annapolis any more?”

  “They think their almighty air power will prevent any major troop deployment on our part. Admiral Leach, you want to fill us in on the enemy seaborne attack?”

  “Bloody Dave” Leach spoke up. “At H-Hour, from the west, the Republic will simultaneously be hit from the air by what they call Naval Task Force Soaring Eagle, probably from a distance of around a hundred miles offshore, which gives them plenty of water to see our own navy coming, such as it is. This will be within range of our Yakhonts shore batteries, so those will presumably be the first targets they aim for, possibly the very first shots fired at the Republic. To be blunt, even if we can get off all our Russian missiles from the shore, most of them may not make it, because the U.S. Navy’s defense systems are designed to take out just that kind of high-tech attack. We’ll have to see how it plays out.

  “Soaring Eagle consists of five carriers, two missile subs, eight frigates, and twenty-one destroyers. They will be convoyed together and a direct attack on them, which is our only option once we’ve fired the Yakhonts, will result in massive naval casualties on our side no matter what the outcome. They are also armed with HELs, high-energy laser weapons, designed specifically to combat small attacking surface craft, so they know what to expect. We haven’t been able to come up with any plan other than a flat-out full attack with everything we’ve got, concentrating on the carriers. We have to stop those bombers, and we can’t rely on Bluelight to do it. We just don’t have enough of the projectors and trained crews to fire them, and those we do have need to be concentrated in the east where the bulk of the American air power and above all their paratrooper drops will be coming at us. We have to take out those goddamned carriers and missile subs on the sea.”

  “The Luftwaffe will be placing our entire force of jets at the western defense command’s disposal for the purpose of dealing with the attack from the sea,” spoke up Air Marshal Billy Basquine. “That’s not much, about sixty aircraft, almost all of which are converted private business jets, pre-Longview. We simply haven’t been able to afford to compete in an arms race with the major capitalist powers and their huge budgets, not without crushing our own people with taxation of the kind our Constitution forbids. Our best planes are the Aerions, converted into the missile assault fighters we call Skyhawks. We have sixteen of them. They can cruise at Mach 1.6, and our engineers have souped them up and reinforced them to where they can do a Mach 2 missile run, maybe a little faster. They’re armed with Exocet Fives, which we have renamed Mjolnirs. The problem is that any attack on that fleet is going to run into a concentrated mass of firepower from computer-controlled chain guns, surface-to-air missiles, and laser weapons, not to mention F-22s and F-35s from the carriers themselves that will be able to swat down anything we’ve got like flies. It’s an integrated air defense system to which Mach 2 is as slow as molasses in wintertime. The enemy’s anti-aircraft defenses are designed to deal with high-speed jet attackers in just this kind of situation.

  “The Skyhawks carry two Mjolnir missiles whose warheads detonate at over eight thousand degrees Fahrenheit, and can melt through a steel hull like butter in a microwave. No question at all they can sink a carrier if our guys can just get one or two lucky, well-placed hits. We have handpicked and briefed the two-man Skyhawk crews, and explained what they’re going to have to do. They are all young men, mostly unmarried, mostly National Socialist. They know most of them won’t be returning to base, and they’re up for it. The plan is to concentrate the Skyhawks on one carrier, most likely one of the two big ones, the Kitty Hawk or the JFK II, and then they all make their missile runs at once from three different angles and try to overwhelm the ship’s defenses in one mass attack. I think we can guarantee that at least one carrier will go down that way, Mr. President. Beyond that, it’s in the lap of the gods. Our other jets will attack at the same time, of course, but they’re converted Lears and Airbuses, and frankly they probably won’t be able to accomplish much except to run interference and draw fire away from the Skyhawks. Okay, let’s look on the bright side, maybe they can sink a couple of frigates. But we’re going to lose most of them, may Hunter Wallace burn in hell.”

  “We decided against an attempt to use our propeller-driven planes?” asked Morehouse.

  Basquine shook his head. “This isn’t Midway in 1942, sir. Our pilots are all willing and fully committed to defending the Republic, giving up their lives if they have to, but I simply can’t order that kind of pointless suicide attack. We will need the Songbirds and Starfighters and all our combat choppers on the eastern and southern fronts dealing with the ground invasion.”

  “Who expect to meet no resistance at all, apparently,” said Morehouse.

  Barrow said, “Oh, they figure we’ll resist, but since our forces are almost completely infantry, they think they will simply brush us aside and then we’ll run off into the woods and take up the guerrilla insurgency again where we left off, like we’ve always threatened. Like the Iraqis did in ’Ought Three. Apparently, the Pentagon is good with that. Hunter Wallace is looking for a quick morale victory so he can get that third-term resolution through Congress and get his weak little ass re-elected as the Fearless Leader who re-unified Amurrica.”

  “Their strategy is to seize control of the Republic’s population and infrastructure centers, if the bombing leaves us any,” said Wingfield. “They know that we simply do not have the kind of high technology and heavy armored weaponry that they have. Our individual soldiers usually don’t even wear personal body armor except in a few special units. We can’t afford it. They actually aren’t worried about conquering the Republic. It’s always been one of their givens that they could do that any time they want. It’s something everybody has always assumed, including us during the first few years of our existence. The rea
son they haven’t done so up until now is that we’ve successfully used their fear of the one thing that America cannot sustain and which always defeats them—a long-term, low-level and low-tech guerrilla campaign in hostile country by a people who don’t want to be occupied by nigger and beaner soldiers. They’re more concerned with getting Operation Chain Link’s army of occupation properly trained at Fort Bragg and getting them up here and lording it over us so as to look good and have Amy Lieberman reporting live from Seattle again on CNN, that kind of crap. Apparently, Wallace has now decided that a long and low-level guerrilla war is preferable to the humiliation of a white nation in North America that consistently shows up the mighty United States in every sphere of human endeavor. In a way he may be right; now that America no longer has the immense overseas military commitment it had during the War of Independence, maintaining the Northwest in a state of subjection is a lot more financially feasible.”

  “Any idea at all on H-Hour?” asked Morehouse.

  “Brava wants 0600 hours on June 21st, and his people are using that as their presumed H-Hour, but Wallace still won’t give the final okay,” said Frank Barrow.

  “So what can we throw against these bastards?” asked Morehouse.

  “Almost five million men and women under arms, including our regulars, who are the best trained and most highly motivated individual soldiers in the world. Enough to kick their asses, if we can accomplish three things in the first couple of days,” said Morgan. “First, we have to blind the sons of bitches. We have to take out their eyes in the sky with Rotfungus. Then we have to take out their air power with Bluelight. Finally, we have to take out the bulk of the motorized transport in all four invading columns with Songbirds, Starfighters, 75s and 88s, any way we can, and make the bastards slog in here on foot. Take away their toys and the shields they hide behind. Make them get down and dirty, man-to-man and hand to hand with armed and angry white men. Especially the Mexicans coming from the south, get them all tangled and strung out along those mountain roads and along the Pacific Coast Highway, where we can set an ambush around every bend and in every valley.”

  “What we have to bear in mind is that this force they’re sending against us comprises virtually the entire effective combat strength of the United States military,” said Wingfield. “We will oppose them with approximately four hundred thousand regular soldiers of the NDF, including twelve SS regiments in three divisions, who in my opinion are literally equivalent to ten times their number of any Americans you care to name, and who will be kept back as a mobile reserve and thrown in wherever it gets the hottest. Add to that around fifty thousand Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe personnel, forty thousand Civil Guards, and a little over four and a half million reservists of all types, including ancillary formations such as the Young Pioneers and the Category B Special Reserve of men from age 50 on up. It will be their small core of heavily armed and technologically supported professionals versus an entire white nation in arms. The microchip against the human spirit. A battle that has been a long time coming.”

  “World War Three versus World War One, as someone once put it,” said Barrow sourly. “We outnumber them like hell, and they’re counting on their high-tech gadgetry to slaughter us like jack rabbits.”

  “You got it,” said Wingfield. “These people are throwing professional mercenaries against an entire nation, and if it’s any consolation, it would appear that they are shooting their whole wad on this attack. If we can defeat and disable the American forces invading us, they have virtually no combat reserves to back them up or to resist Plan 17’s counterattacks into California and Canada. There are well over a million people in the U.S. Army and Marine Corps alone, but only a few of them have anything to do with actual fighting. The American military was always top-heavy with support personnel—it still requires something like seventy people behind the lines in various capacities to keep one combat soldier in the field. Our ratio of support to combat personnel has always been kept as close to one-to-one as we can make it. We’ll have the bastards outnumbered, and we’ll be on interior lines.”

  “They will have massive heavy equipment and high technology to beat us with,” said Morgan. “We have a few techie tricks up our sleeve that might or might not work, but our boys will damned sure have some good rifles and light artillery, and the ability to hit what they aim at. This will get interesting.”

  * * *

  United States Army Lieutenant General Albert Scheisskopf, the buzz-cut Chief of Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, thought so too, only interesting wasn’t the word he used. “This is going to be a cluster-fuck,” he bluntly told Admiral Hector Brava, in a closed-door meeting of the top brass in Brava’s Pentagon office. They didn’t dare use a formal conference room for fear of attracting notice, and Brava had taken the precaution of using a discreet private security firm to sweep his office and his home for surreptitious listening and video devices. They had found two sets, one from the Department of Homeland security and one of unknown provenance but most likely from the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, which was now the operational arm of the former Israeli Mossad. “We are underestimating the enemy and we are approaching this whole operation in a sloppy and unprofessional manner,” Scheisskopf went on. “I have repeatedly pointed out that we will be outnumbered almost five to one, and the Doughboy babbles on about how we were outnumbered in Iraq and Iran and Afghanistan as well, so forth and so on.”

  “Wars we eventually lost,” pointed out Brava sourly.

  “You try to tell the Doughboy that,” said Air Force Lieutenant General Norwood Bellows. “I can understand him not knowing any history. Most Americans don’t. But Iraq and Afghanistan and Iran aren’t Valley Forge, they happened when he was a Congressman, for fuck’s sake! We know they have some kind of special anti-aircraft weapon they’re planning on using against our pilots, but nobody can get any take on what the hell it is, unless you believe that ridiculous Knight woman’s babble about alien ray guns. We presume this Bluelight thing is something similar to our own High Energy Laser weapons, in which case we could be in for some trouble, but we haven’t been able to mount any effective intelligence effort inside the Republic for—wait, can I say Republic in here without getting court-martialed?” he interposed bitterly.

  “I think you’re safe,” said Brava. “I think you’re safe. I think my guys got all the bugs out of here and nobody has come nosing around trying to plant more yet.”

  “The point is, why in God’s name are we attacking anybody with this kind of lack of reliable intel?” whined Bellows. “For Christ’s sake, we didn’t go into pissant countries like Grenada or Panama this blind!”

  “The president thinks the satellite surveillance is all we need,” Brava told them. “Sure, it’s impressive. We can watch what goes on anywhere in the NAR like we were looking over our back fence—when it’s daytime, and when there’s no cloud cover, and when we know where to look to see something interesting, and when we have halfway intelligent analysts to figure out what we’re looking at. And when the Nazis aren’t misdirecting us with inflatable tanks and weird machines that turn out to be International Harvesters with fake weapons glued onto them.”

  “They’re not all Nazis,” said Selkirk.

  “I know that, and you know that, but our political bosses don’t seem to know or care,” said Brava. “We don’t even really know the people we’re going to be fighting, and that’s incredibly dumb, believing one’s own propaganda. We know that some of the tanks and aircraft we see are blown-up inflatable dummies. We know that some of the troop movements we see are the same guys marching in and out and here and there just to confuse us—hell, those tricks are as old as Quaker guns and Jeb Magruder marching his men around the mountain. The president doesn’t understand that we need actual human intelligence on the ground so that we know what the hell we’re looking at and why. The CIA is useless, it’s run by a—well, we all know who it’s run by. Our external military intelligence arms are limited by
Congress and by rules and regulations as to what we can or can’t do, by jurisdictional squabbles and budget and every other goddamned thing, plus it’s just plain hard to get actual physical spies on the ground in the Republic with any kind of serious training or skills and get them positioned to be of any use. Either the goddamned BOSS catches them and they disappear, or else they disappear on their own. You know we found one of our naval intelligence agents who had been missing for five years? He simply walked into BOSS one day and turned himself in; they wrung him dry of information and let him go. He’s living in Tillamook, Oregon, now, working on a fishing boat, he’s married and has a couple of kids. By definition anyone we use has to be white, and white men seem to be subject to—well, temptation.”

  “I can’t believe that Herrin woman actually used the word ‘cakewalk’ the other day,” said Marine Corps Commandant Louis Battaglia. “These are the same men who defeated and killed Delmar Partman and eight thousand United States Marines, only now they have a properly trained professional military of over five million. What fucking planet are those people in the White House living on?”

  “I find it difficult to believe that the Northmen are going to shoot down all our aircraft with alien death rays, never mind Kanesha Knight’s demented ramblings,” said Scheisskopf. “If this Bluelight thing is some kind of HEL they have been able to convert to anti-aircraft use, although we could never do it, then yes, we may lose some planes and missiles, but they won’t be able to take down enough to affect the actual turn of events. The first forty-eight hours of shock and awe from the air will make it impossible for them to resist the occupation of the Northwest. We occupy the main population centers and bring in the Stability Force to gradually return American authority, American courts, and the rule of law to the rural areas, and then finally get them back on the dollar and paying twelve years’ worth of back taxes, which will go a long way to solving the country’s financial problems. But that’s the simple part. We could have done that three months after that disgraceful Longview sellout, and we should have. But as things are, we’re going to be dealing with millions of people who have gotten used to going walkies whenever and wherever the hell they want without the leash, and they have to be re-conditioned in their minds to civilized thought and behavior. There will be resistance for years, and it will probably be a generation before it’s really safe for an African-American or a Hispanic-American or a gay or lesbian American to live in Seattle or Spokane again.”