Freedom's Sons

by H. A. Covington

  “What?”

  “He says they were robots with blinking lights on their heads, and he says he also saw a female alien wearing a wedding dress,” Lyons informed him, deadpan. “Kanesha Knight says the same thing. She says the female alien was a princess from beyond the stars who gave her a message for planet Earth.”

  “Holy mother of pearl!” muttered Wallace. “Do you think your men were killed by E.T.s?”

  “Bullshit!” said Lyons succinctly. “Space aliens don’t carry automatic weapons and stun grenades. The FBI extracted nine-millimeter slugs from the bodies that their ballistics lab says are from MP5s, not the ones our guys were packing, so they didn’t shoot themselves. It’s true that three of the casualties were killed by some kind of laser, but we’re working on weapons like that ourselves.”

  “So who could pull something like this off?” asked Wallace.

  “You never fought the NVA, Mr. President, or you’d know the answer to that,” said Lyons. “I was a Federal Anti-Terrorist officer in Spokane for two years, sir. The goots used to hit us like this every damned week. These motherfuckers were WPB or CMI or some kind of special squad out of the NAR. They knew we were hitting the Knight woman tonight, and they knew why, and they decided to monkey-wrench us. They know about Operation Strikeout, and my guess is when our military moves on the Republic, they’re going to be ready and waiting for us.”

  “What rank were you in the FATPO, Lee?” asked President Wallace.

  “I was a captain, sir. Two years in Spokane, and then I was in Portland with Delmar Partman.”

  “Not a general, then? Not qualified to advise the commander-in-chief on strategy and other big-picture stuff?”

  Lyons had finally had enough. “No, sir. Just a soldier who has fought these men before. Just someone who can tell you from personal experience that if you underestimate the Northmen, the United States will pay in more blood than you can imagine.”

  Wallace was silent for the remainder of the ride back into Washington.

  Owing to the late hour of his retiring, President Hunter Wallace gave orders that he was not to be awakened until nine a.m. on June 19, but at eight, his bedside phone rang. He woke up and picked up the phone. “Yes?” he said groggily.

  “It’s me,” said the voice of Angela Herrin. “Turn on CNN.”

  “What?” asked Wallace. “Why?”

  “That meshugah schvartzer Kanesha Knight!” screamed Herrin in rage. “That shitskinned bitch! She’s on TV making a fool out of herself and fucking our whole pooch right up the ass, God damn her! Turn on fucking CNN now!”

  “Okay, okay.” He set the phone receiver down and fished around on his nightstand for the television remote. Beside him, Georgia stirred sleepily.

  “Morning, handsome,” she said. “What’s up?”

  “Angela’s got her panties in a twist about something,” said Wallace grumpily. “You seen the remote?”

  “Don’t you remember what you were doing with it last night?” she giggled. “Where did you put it? Hey, babe, I’d kind of like a cigarette. You mind?”

  “What?” he asked. “Oh, yeah, sure.” He took a key off his nightstand, reached over and unlocked the handcuffs behind Georgia’s back. She rubbed her wrists and fished a pack of cigarettes and a lighter out of her purse on her own nightstand, and lit one while Wallace groped around on the floor beside the bed. He found the remote and clicked on CNN. He saw Kanesha Knight’s chocolate face on the screen. She looked dazed, disheveled, and possibly drugged, her eyes puffy and her normally exquisitely coiffed and straightened hairdo was frizzed out, giving her a wild, Buckwheat look. The tag line read, “CIA Director Kanesha Knight” and the kicker read, “Talks About Last Night’s Assassination Attempt.”

  Her enunciation was even more clear and elegant than usual. “I have been appointed by the Quantum Lords of the Galaxy to deliver the message of Princess Ha-Tonna of Alpha Centauri, and I speak now to President Hunter Wallace. He must immediately cease his plans to invade the Northwest Republic. Instead, we must win the hearts and minds of the Northwest racists. We must approach with the universal gesture of peace, reconciliation, and perfect knowledge.” Kanesha Knight then held her thumbs up to her ears, opened her palms, and waved them. She looked like she had monkey ears.

  “Jesus Christ on a raft!” screamed Wallace in horror. He picked up the phone. “Angela, what the fuck?”

  “She checked herself out of the hospital, and she’s holding her little press conference in the parking lot,”

  “Well, do something!” Wallace demanded of his press secretary.

  “I did,” snarled Angela. “I dragged Judge Weinberg out of bed and I got him to sign an involuntary committal order on her, and I just faxed it over there. I’m sending the U.S. Marshals to grab her and get her ass over to St. Elizabeth’s—oh, okay, looks like the hospital got the committal order.” Wallace looked at the screen. The director of the Central Intelligence Agency was now fleeing down a row of parked cars, pursued by two burly young men wearing white coats. The assembled media crews were pelting after them, and the picture was jumpy and confused, but every now and then Kanesha turned and waggled her palms beside her ears at her pursuers.

  “Sweet Jesus!” moaned Wallace. “Now what?”

  “The cat’s out of the bag, Hunter,” said Angela Herrin. “Call the Joint Chiefs and tell them to initiate Operation Strikeout, right now! The Nazis have been warned now, and we have to move fast!”

  “Yeah, looks like we have no choice.” Wallace hung up and dialed the phone. “This is the President of the United States,” he said to the Pentagon. “Track down Admiral Brava and get him on the phone to me, now!”

  “What’s up, babe?” asked Georgia, laying back on her pillows and dragging on her cigarette. “That Knight woman sounds like she’s cuckoo for cocoa puffs. What was she saying about invading the Northwest Republic?”

  “Well, I suppose there’s no harm in mentioning it, since now everybody in the whole goddamned world knows,” said Wallace in a sullen rage. “Unless you already know because you’re a spy. Lee Lyons thinks you’re a spy for the Northmen. Are you?”

  Georgia gave a silvery laugh. “Yeah, I know, Agent Lyons is paranoid about me because I’m from Montana. No, Hunter, I’m not a spy, and if I was, I wouldn’t be a spy for the same bastards who broke up my family. I hate them. I explained that to Lee, but he probably didn’t believe me. That’s cool. It’s his job to be suspicious of everybody. Now France, them I might spy for, so I could go and live in Paris afterwards.” The phone rang and Wallace picked it up.

  “Admiral Brava?” he said. “You saw that lunacy with Kanesha on CNN? Well, then, you know why I have to tell you to initiate Operation Strikeout right now. What do I mean by right now? I mean five minutes ago. Yes, well, readjust your damned schedules. Jesus Christ, man, it’s only two days early! Use computers if it’s too hard for your clerks or whoever to do it in their heads! That’s what they’re for. Yes, I know they’re not in position yet, which is why you have to get a fucking move on and get them into position. So what if it’s in the daytime? The planes will be thirty thousand feet in the air, and don’t give me that horse shit about how the Nazis have got ray guns! Christ, man, you’re sounding as crazy as Kanesha Knight with her aliens!”

  While Hunter Wallace argued and expostulated and shouted at the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the phone, Georgia rolled over in bed, fished in her purse for her cigarette pack, and came up with both the pack and her phone in her hand. Shielding the phone from Wallace’s view with her bare back, she texted out a message. Like all American girls, in her teenaged years Georgia had acquired the skill and dexterity to enter long and complex text messages quickly and accurately, and it stood her in good stead now. Hey, Talia, want to catch a late breakfast? I feel like some green eggs and ham. Oh, sorry, you don’t eat ham, do you? Just the green eggs for you, then.

  Two minutes later Bob, who was sitting in an Arlington diner with Vinnie Skins a
nd Duke and Betsy, heard his Belladonna phone beep, and Betsy’s did the same. They opened their phones. Cardinale looked up and saw Betsy staring at the phone with tears welling from her eyes. “What is it?” he asked.

  Bob held up his phone. “Green eggs and ham,” he said dismally.

  Cardinale buried his face in his hands. “We’ve failed,” he said in an exhausted voice. “This is what we were supposed to prevent. It’s why they call us the War Prevention Bureau. It’s the whole reason we exist, and now we’ve failed!”

  * * *

  “He’s insane!” shouted Brava in the emergency meeting of the Joint Chiefs in the bowels of the Pentagon. “How is it that somebody who can wrap those yea-saying leeches in Congress around his little finger can’t wrap his mind around the basic facts of logistics? How is it that somebody that smart doesn’t grasp the fact that real war is not a computer game, and that moving hundreds of thousands of men, vehicles, aircraft, and all their equipment is not something that can be done with the click of a function key?”

  “Did the commander-in-chief give us an order or not?” said buzz-cut Marine Corps Commandant Louis Battaglia. “If he gave us an order to move two days early, then we move two days early. It’s that goddamned simple. It’s the Delmar Partman way. It’s the Marine way.” Nobody bothered to remind the jarhead that Partman had been defeated and killed while mutinying and disobeying an order from his commander-in-chief.

  “The first and second bomber groups are ready at Minot, and we can launch the third and fourth groups directly from Wright-Patterson in Ohio within an hour,” said Bellows from the Air Force.

  “That’s the B-Fifty-Twos, right?” asked Brava.

  “Check,” confirmed Bellows. “Third and fourth wings have already got their ordnance payloads loaded on board, and they were just about to lift off for dispersal to their forward fields at Buckley in Colorado and Campo Maldonado in Aztec Nevada. It would be simple enough to have them make their first mission runs over the NAR, sorry, the racist entity, and then return to those fields. Plus we can hit them with the Tomahawks on a few hours’ notice.”

  “What about the Stratofortresses’ fighter cover?” asked Brava.

  “Not necessary,” said Bellows confidently. “The enemy don’t have any real fighters except some jerry-rigged civilian jets that are no match for a Fifty-Two, and I think the alien ray gun story is crap. It’s Nazi disinformation, is all. This will be a milk run. A lot of milk runs.”

  “Task Force Soaring Eagle is still off southern California,” said Brava. “They can launch their planes and missiles from further out, I suppose, but it’s still going to take some time to get them within optimum range of the enemy coastline while still staying out of range of those damned Russian missile batteries on shore. We calculated all our fuel and other requirements based on kickoff at oh-one-hundred hours on June twenty-first, to make sure we hit the bastards in the dark for psychological warfare purposes. General Scheisskopf?”

  “The three main invasion columns are now in the process of coalescing in eastern Montana, as Operation Blast Furnace transmogrifies into Operation Strikeout, like Desert Shield did into Desert Storm,” Scheisskopf reported. “Combined Group North was scheduled to begin crossing into Canada at twenty-two hundred hours tonight. We can speed things up, I suppose, although it will still give the Jerries a lot more warning time than I’m happy with. But Battaglia is right. An order from the commander-in-chief is an order. How about our gallant allies from the Latin world?”

  “I will telephone El Presidente as soon as we finish here and tell him we’re moving early, and could he oblige us by moving up his country’s own assault from the south?” said Brava with a scowl.

  “And what reason will you give him?” asked Scheisskopf. “That our director of Central Intelligence experienced a psychotic breakdown because an assassination attempt scared her shitless, and she went on worldwide TV babbling about messages from a princess from Alpha Centauri, and at the same time blabbed out the secret of the most hush-hush American military operation since the Normandy invasion? And that our commander-in-chief jumps whenever his press secretary says frog?”

  “I think the Jefe will know all that,” said Brava dryly. “They do get CNN in Aztlan, you know.”

  * * *

  Hunter Wallace was not the only president who was awakened by an early morning phone call, although it was only a bit early, since State President Morehouse of the Northwest American Republic in Olympia usually got up at 6 a.m. anyway. He picked up his bedside phone. “Yes?” he said.

  It was Frank Barrow, Minister of Security. “Red, I just heard from Charlie Randall, who in turn just heard from our man in D.C., and he just heard from Belladonna. It’s green eggs and ham, sir. They’re coming, two days early. Hunter Wallace has scheduled a worldwide telecast for noon EDT, so we figure the first bombers will be on their way in a couple of hours.”

  “Thanks, Frank. Plan 17 is in effect as of now. Alert Doctor Cord and tell him we need to prepare to hit them with Rotfungus, and tell John and Carter to begin the reserve call-up.”

  “Already done, sir,” said Barrow.

  “Good. Can you track down Charlie and ask him to give me a call?”

  “Will do, sir.” Barrow hung up. Morehouse got out of bed, pulled on his robe, and walked down the hall in Longview House to one of the guest bedrooms. His secretary, Ray Ridgeway’s daughter Annette, and her husband, one of his aides-de-camp named Colonel Eric Sellars, were staying in the presidential mansion to be close at hand when he needed them. Their children were already in one of the designated safe areas for the families of top government and Party people. This was not the matter of privilege it might have seemed; the Republic’s leadership had to have their minds as clear and free of worry as possible, and the Americans were notorious for victimizing and retaliating against the families of those they hated. Morehouse knocked on their door. “Annette? Eric?” They opened the door. Eric Sellars was in PT shorts, and Annette pulling on a nightgown.

  “Good morning, Mr. President,” said the youthful colonel. During the War of Independence, he and his wife had been teenaged NVA Volunteers with the Party’s intelligence apparatus, the Third Section. [See The Brigade]

  “Good morning, Eric.” Morehouse said. “Sorry to get you up so early, but it looks like the Americans have jumped the gun on us. We need to get up to Fort Lewis right away.”

  “They’re coming?” asked Annette.

  “The bombers are probably already in the air. Annette, I hate to ask, but could you go to the kitchen and whip up some sandwiches real quick? We don’t know when we’ll get a chance to eat.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said.

  Back in his own bedroom, Morehouse was pulling on his own clothes when the phone rang. He answered it. “Hey, Charlie. Green eggs and ham, is it?”

  “I’m afraid so, sir,” said the Australian.

  “You got that from Belladonna?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Randall.

  “Is she all right? How exposed is she?” asked Morehouse.

  “There was an incident last night. One of their goons was following her and Cardinale had to take him out. I’ll give you a full report when I see you up at Lewis. They may be onto her, but our lads pulled off a neat little hat trick last night that I hope will distract them. Ever seen a CIA director lose her marbles on worldwide telly?”

  “I beg your pardon?” asked Morehouse.

  “Turn on the news before you leave and check it out,” said Randall with a chuckle. “I asked Cardinale about Belladonna and as of eight this morning eastern time she was still in the presidential sack. He says she’s holding strong and keeping her cool.”

  “Tell Vince that the very second she looks to be in any danger, extract her and get her and that baby somewhere safe,” said Morehouse. “We may be about to lose everything, and maybe we can’t prevent that, but we can damned well prevent those monsters from getting hold of at least one more white woman to torture and degrade.
I remember what they did to Cathy Frost.”

  “So do I, sir,” said Randall.

  * * *

  At 0945 hours Rocky Mountain time, Major Edwin Browder of the United States Air Force, and his fully armed and loaded B-52 Stratofortress bomber out of Wright-Patterson AFB, became the first hostile American aircraft to cross into the Northwest Republic’s airspace, somewhere over Deer Lodge Pass, Montana. They were headed for Missoula along with the rest of Flight 95, a total of six B-52s whose mission was to reduce the city to rubble with bunker-buster and incendiary bombs. Specifically, they were to level the University of Montana and its pioneering scientific research and development facility, where for the past twelve years flocks of eggheads and science geeks and inventors had been working on all kinds of projects, everything from studying the true biology and genetics of race, which was forbidden everywhere else in the world, to allegedly making secret weapons out of supposed extraterrestrial technology, if the CIA could be believed. In an interesting bit of irony, their bombing run on UM would almost certainly involve destroying or damaging the house on Daly Avenue where Georgia Myers had lived as a child.

  “ETA to target fourteen minutes,” said the navigator in Browder’s headphones. “Any bogies or flak yet, sir?”

  “Nothing at all,” laughed Browder. “What are these peckerwoods gonna do? Catapult a grizzly bear at us? The few planes they have are prop jobs, for Christ’s sake! Don’t worry, guys, the only thing we have to be concerned about is how good the chow hall will be down at Buckley. We’ll drop our load and be there in time for lunch.”

  A strange blue light flickered up through the cloud cover, but the sun at 30,000 feet was so bright that Browder wasn’t even sure he had seen anything. “What was that?” he asked his co-pilot.

  “What was what, sir?” replied Captain Isfahani, an Iranian-American.

  “Nothing,” replied Browder with a shrug. But then it came again, a thin pencil of blue light that appeared and disappeared in front of him. “No, that! Did you see it?”