“Sir, looks like we’ve got some kind of enemy radar tracking system locking on to us,” said Isfahani, pointing to one of his instruments. “It may be anti-aircraft. Should we launch… ?
Then the aircraft was struck at the speed of light by a high-energy plasma ray, energizing all the subatomic particles it came into contact with, be they air or metal or human flesh, and channeling those particles all into a one-directional flow along the line of the beam. It sheared off the port wing of the B-52 like scissors cutting a sheet of paper in half. The overbalanced aircraft went into a spin at six hundred miles per hour and plummeted toward the ground. The centrifugal force caused the entire crew to black out, and so they were unconscious when the plane hurtled into a mountainside in the Beaverhead Forest. Within forty seconds, all five of the other B-52s were falling out of the sky in flames and pieces. Georgia’s childhood home was safe for now.
* * *
At noon Eastern Daylight Time, President Hunter Wallace addressed the nation from behind the desk in the Oval Office. He looked grim yet elegant in his Armani suit. “My fellow Americans,” he said. “Almost eight years ago, you did me the honor of electing me to the highest office in the land. You did so on the strength of my promise to you that I would bend every effort of my being toward the sublime goal of righting a cataclysmic error of history that has shattered our beloved country and shaken the very roots of democracy. I refer to the loss of three and a half states of this indivisible union of ours to a racist military dictatorship controlled by a murderous criminal conspiracy…”
From the NAR command center at Fort Lewis, President Henry Morehouse and the full Council of State were watching the address. Morehouse had a phone in his hand. “Initiate Rotfungus,” he ordered. He set down the phone. “Right, comrades, the upload has begun. I am told that this should take about ninety seconds, and then we will know whether or not we have a chance to win this thing on a level playing field.”
On the screen, President Wallace was droning on. “Throughout the entire history of this country, we have had a problem with hatred. Racism and sexism and homophobia have been the curse of American society. These evils have stained this country’s past and they stain its present, but I have come here today, my fellow Americans, to tell you that stain is about to be erased for all time. This morning I gave the order to all branches of the United States military to…”
The screen froze. Hunter Wallace sat behind the desk, caught with his mouth wide open, like a big-mouthed bass snared by a fishhook, and a soundtrack that consisted of a barking little dog, possibly a Chihuahua, filled the room. “What the hell is that?” asked Morehouse.
“It’s kind of a screen-saver for Rotfungus,” said Frank Barrow. “It tells us that the virus is still active and functional. It also resolves for all time the question of whether or not Doctor Joseph Cord has a sense of humor. He does, sort of. From now on every time anybody on earth turns on their television set, unless they’re in Russia or serviced by Russian satellites, or unless they have direct cable access, they will see and hear Hunter Wallace barking at them. Since most cable services rely on satellite feeds as well for various programming, that’s going to cut down American television viewership considerably. The whole country will probably go into withdrawal.”
“Any word on Bluelight, Bill?” asked Morehouse.
“The bad news is that it’s not one hundred percent effective,” reported Air Marshal Basquine. “There were some unit malfunctions and our techs are stretched, flying all over the eastern frontier trying to troubleshoot and debug them. There were some bomb and missile strikes within the Republic in Spokane, Boise, Kalispell, and some of the military targets. There have been a couple of dozen casualties that we know of so far. The next bit of bad news is that the bombing wave from the naval task force hasn’t hit the west coast yet.” Basquine took a deep breath. “The good news is that the first wave of bombers took something on the order of eighty percent casualties, with over four hundred enemy aircraft down, and a number of those who escaped did so because they panicked when they realized their planes were going down all around them, and they simply dumped their bombs, turned tail and ran. We think some of the hits around the east may not be actual bombs or Cruises, but falling debris from the destroyed enemy aircraft, and frankly, there’s not much we can do about that. Basically, Mr. President, Bluelight works. We have broken American air power!”
Cheers and applause rang out in the room from the assembled ministers and officers. “And it appears that Rotfungus has worked as well,” said Barrow with a smile, nodding toward the television screen where Hunter Wallace still barked. “Our own sky is no longer our enemy. The bastards are still coming, but this time they’re going to have to fight us blind and on foot, hand-to-hand, man-to-man. And whenever Americans try that, they lose.”
XIV
D-DAY
(June 19th—12 years, seven months, and 27 days after Longview)
“The great questions of the day are not decided by speeches and majority votes, but by blood and iron.”
—Otto von Bismarck
The air raid sirens went off in Missoula, Montana, at around nine forty-five on the morning of June 19, but the civil defense radio and television had been warning the citizens of the Republic for several hours beforehand that the long-awaited American invasion was on its way. There was no panic. The streets were a hive of orderly and purposeful activity as all but essential personnel evacuated the city and went to their assigned military or civil defense posts or other SRPs, Secure Retrenchment Positions, where they would hopefully be out of immediate danger and they could not only survive, but keep NAR society functioning. The Northwest Republic had been preparing not just its military, but its people for this event for many years. Virtually every adult citizen had some kind of part to play in Plan 17.
The public call for reserve mobilization had gone out early that morning, but many of the military reservists for Missoula County were already in uniform and with their units in various places around the country. The call-up had in fact begun months before, covertly and in small numbers, with selected reserve units being activated on a variety of excuses for “special exercises,” firefighting, equipment inspection or some other pretext, and then not sent home but kept on active duty.
A more extensive callup throughout the country had begun almost a week before, but quietly and without public fanfare, the citizen soldiers being notified by telephone and personal contact. Over the past three months, the NAR had managed to mobilize almost a million men, get them under arms and into the field without the Americans picking up on it, a testimony not only to the enemy’s lack of human intelligence on the ground throughout the Republic, but also to the limitations of satellite surveillance. Most of the Republic’s major weaponry, aircraft and helicopters, artillery and tanks, and the few precious batteries of Russian-made missiles the country had been able to afford to buy, had been dispersed and was now in position. Large numbers of inflatable dummies and a lot of apparently motiveless troop movement back and forth across the landscape had added to the confusion of the American intelligence analysts, many of whom were negro or Third World affirmative action employees who were poorly trained and had little aptitude for the task. In cubicles in the Pentagon and at Langley, they peered at the blurred satellite footage half the time without any idea what they were looking at.
The Americans were already beginning to trip over one solid and inescapable biological fact: the races of Mankind are not in fact equal in cognitive intelligence and reasoning capacity. White people really are the sharpest knives in the drawer.
The University of Montana’s chancellor, Jason Stockdale, had reverted to his reserve military rank of colonel on receiving his mobilization orders. He was now on the staff the NDF’s Fourth Army, the force responsible for squaring off with the American Combined Group South of army, marines, and air force that was expected to cross the border within 48 hours. The Fourth Army was led by Major General A. J. Drones
, an NVA veteran who had been the commandant of the Missoula Brigade during the War of Independence; it would not have seemed right for Jason to outrank him. To the north, the Second Army under Major General Zack Hatfield of Oregon Wild Bunch fame was covering the Flathead region of Montana out of Kalispell, and preparing to confront the enemy’s Combined Group Center, while the Third Army under SS General William Jackson was centered on the Coeur d’Alene and Spokane areas, preparing to repel Group North coming down from Canada. The First, Fifth, and Sixth Armies were deployed in Oregon and Idaho, along the Republic’s southern borders with California. Utah, and Nevada, to deal with the Mexicans who would be invading the country from Aztlan. The Seventh Army under General Conrad Baumgarten waited in the wings in Wyoming, poised to launch an attack on the enemy’s left flank.
All of this looked very neat and logical on paper, as if the war was laid out like some kind of board game, but this was not the case. In actual practice, it was as the American general Scheisskopf had predicted: the invaders would not be confronting one or two large concentrated forces that could be designated by flags or pins on a map, but hundreds of smaller ones that would nip at their heels like a pack of wolves chasing caribou.
Alone among the Northwest ground forces, the Special Service or SS was formed into divisions. The regular army was based on the older formation of the regiment, comprised of self-contained and self-supporting battalions, all of which were now at full strength, or would be within a matter of days. Certain regular regiments of professional soldiers, such as the International Brigades, which consisted of such outfits as the German Panzer Grenadiers, the Scots Guards, the Irish Guards and the French-speaking Régiment Charlemagne, etc. had no reservists. They moved and fought with their three battalions only, all together in a unit, small enough to move quickly and large enough to strike like a hammer. With support personnel a regiment of regulars only, sans reservists, mustered almost two and a half thousand men apiece.
The headquarters column of each army consisted of a core force of between twenty and twenty-five thousand men, most of them regulars. The headquarters column was the hive, so to speak, while the battalions were the bees. All of the strength was spread out over the landscape for miles, so never was there any huge concentration of men and materièl for the Americans or the Mexicans to attack, from the air or otherwise. Even had they maintained their satellite surveillance and air superiority, the Americans would have found it difficult to inflict debilitating casualty numbers on the NDF. The overwhelming number of NDF regiments of the line were comprised of their three regular battalions and at least six or seven each of reservists, on the average about 5500 to 6000 men per regiment. (Scheisskopf’s estimations had been high, another example of poor U.S. intelligence combined with WPB disinformation.) The battalions moved, billeted, and fought separately, although often brigaded together into perfectly coordinated and highly trained regimental strike forces.
Finally, like jokers in a deck of cards, there were the three élite Special Service Divisions of twenty thousand or so men each—the Viking Division, the Florian Geyer Division, and the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. The SS division of handpicked men, each trained to the level of an American Green Beret and beyond, was an army on its own, with their own armor, artillery, and air wings. Even the Pentagon’s generals admitted (out of range of the president’s eavesdropping devices) that the SS were arguably the finest infantry in the world, albeit so far untested in full-scale battle. The three SS divisions were poised just outside Spokane, Boise, and Eugene, with orders to change positions once the word came down that Rotfungus had worked and the Zionists were blind in the sky. Indeed, there would be major troop relocations all across the fronts, to render the Americans’ last snapshot of the Northwest military dispositions invalid. The SS divisions would act as floating reserves to be thrown in wherever there was a threat that the line units might give way, or more likely, wherever a weak point was detected where a breakthrough could be made. The overall strategy of Plan 17 was indeed similar to that of attacking wolves: vulnerable sections of the enemy would be cut from the herd, run down and bled to death, and when the whole beast was sufficiently weak, the SS would be sent in for the kill.
Just before the air raid sirens went off, Jason Stockdale was helping his wife Jenny load onto buses her personal contingent of over one hundred small children, ranging in age from five to eleven years, along with the support staff she would need to keep them safe.
Jenny’s particular reserve formation was an adjunct of the Civil Guard called the Emergency Family Protective Service, comprised almost entirely of women, who had become known as Mama Bears. The EFPS was a formation created with this very day in mind. Before Bluelight, when it was feared that the Republic would have to stand the full might of the American bombers and missiles, it had been decided that the nation’s greatest asset, its children, would not be sent down into holes to huddle in fear in underground shelters while the bombs thundered overhead, risking burial alive by American bunker-busters or asphyxiation in a firestorm. There would be no Dresdens or Hamburgs in the Northwest. In addition, the fact was that almost all the fathers and many of the mothers of the Republic’s infinite growing brood of kids would be needed at the front or on various military and war-related duties. The EFPS not only meant that the kids would be safer, but the men in uniform who were fighting off the invaders could be more confident that their kids were out of harm’s way and being looked after, in many cases by their own mothers and relations, who had formed community and church groups through EFPS for the evacuation and relocation of untold multitudes of children.
The EFPS children would be dispersed in groups into the countryside, to special locations and facilities built in forested areas under as much cover as possible, and near small towns in more remote areas of the Northwest Republic. Each of these camps was equipped with cabins, kitchens and sanitary facilities, stockpiles of food and water, generators, medical supplies, a small infirmary, and so on. There school could continue, the children could play and be fed and cared for properly, and they would hopefully be traumatized as little as possible beyond the separation from their parents. There were special crèche refuges for infants and toddlers, but Jenny Stockdale’s group consisted of older kids who were potty-trained and of sufficient maturity to obey adult instruction, insofar as kids that age ever did. Participation in the program was voluntary, but it was estimated that in time of war almost half the young children in the NAR would be thus protected from the near-certain American bombardment of the cities and larger towns. The British and Germans had done largely the same thing with their own young during World War Two.
Someone had once asked Jenny Stockdale if, after her experience as an NVA guerilla during the War of Independence, she didn’t consider such babysitting duty in a time of national crisis to be degrading, or at least something of a comedown. Wouldn’t she rather be doing something more exciting and swashbuckling like her exploits from the old days? She replied, “Not at all. The Fourteen Words say that we must secure the existence of our people, which is what I did during the revolt, and also a future for White children, which is what I will be doing when the Americans come to try and take that future away.”
Now Jenny got onto the first bus and placed her Kalashnikov in the rack by the driver’s seat, then stood in the doorway and shouted, “All right, kids, let me have your attention! We’ve all practiced for this in our after-school drills and our weekend camp-outs, and now we have to do it for real. Sannie Van Reenen, when the grownups are talking, you are doing what?”
“Listening, Mrs. Stockdale,” said the little girl.
“That’s right, so listen and don’t talk,” Jenny told her. “Now we are going to get on the buses. Your counselors will assign you your seats, and you will not leave them unless you need to use the toilet in the back of the bus, in which case you will raise your hand and ask first. There will be no horsing around or general monkeyshines on the bus. Remember, the counselors are bringing
guns to use against the Americans, but we also have a couple of paddles in our packs for any of you who can’t behave yourselves. When we get to camp, you will collect your evacuation bags that your parents made up for you from the luggage compartment, and we will give you all your cabin and bunk assignments, and no switching or messing around. Kids, I mean it—it is very, very important that your counselor knows where you are at all times. I also want to remind you of the rule about no touching or messing with any of the counselors’ guns or ammunition.”
“I can shoot an AK!” called one boy. “My dad taught me!”
“I’m sure he did, David, but you won’t need to shoot any of these. Now start boarding your assigned buses. Miss Winwood, please make sure Mister Christopher Benbow is seated where you can keep an eye on him and he can’t pester any of the girls.”
“Yeah, Christopher’s gross!” yelled one of the girls.
“We’ll see how you feel about that in about eight years, Nicole,” said Jenny. “Alright, everybody on the buses, quietly and in single file!” They began boarding, herded by the counselors. The kids were not wearing their usual school uniforms, but comfortable outdoor clothing and strong shoes provided by their parents. Jenny got out of the doorway and stepped to Jason’s side.
“Well, it could be worse,” said Jason tightly. “They could have attacked in the middle of winter.” All of a sudden the air raid sirens went off all across town, the low wailing up and down that had been the signature theme of so much of the past hundred years of glorious democracy. It was not a new sound to the children, since the sirens were tested every Saturday at noon and they were all used to it. Only a few of the older ones understood what the sound meant, and glanced apprehensively at the sky. “Christ! I never thought we’d have to hear that sound in this country!” hissed Jason. “Looks like the bastards are already on their way!”
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