Freedom's Sons

by H. A. Covington

  Almost twenty minutes later Lyle Waller looked up from his computer screen on board TAC-157. “Bogies, sir, an even dozen of them, coming in low over the water. Looks like an attack run.”

  “Tell the Bluelight crews to…” began Leach.

  “They already are, sir,” said Waller. Almost a full minute later thin pencils of blue light zipped and flickered from here and there among the TAC boats. Fireballs exploded on the horizon, one, two, three, four. Then the rest of the American planes were on them, screaming over them in the moonless dark, chain guns blazing and missile trails snaking downward. Firey flashes across the sea to the horizon told of hits and detonating methane tanks, although not many, and burning debris and hot metal from the demolished American aircraft rained down into the water, throwing up hissing columns of steam. “Casualties, Mr. Waller?” said Leach. A piece of burning airplane wing hurtled into the sea not twenty yards from them and hurled a geyser of water across TAC-157’s deck.

  “Four TACs and a punchy gone, looks like, sir,” said Waller after a while listening to the radio. “A number of boats hit and damaged but still seaworthy. Our vessels are searching the sea for survivors; hence the unavoidable use of searchlights, but the enemy obviously knows we’re here anyway. The bogeys are coming back around for another run.”

  “I didn’t know the United States Navy employed kamikaze pilots,” said Leach with a grin in the dark.

  Again, the blue beams nipped upward and the fireballs exploded in the sky, scattering burning and smashed metal and molten plastic all over the ocean. “No direct hits on our vessels this time, Admiral,” said Waller after a while. “The last three bogeys are heading for their roosts.”

  “Too bad,” said Leach. “I’d hoped to make a clean sweep.”

  * * *

  General Herb Smith was decapitated by a shell fragment in the Black Buffalo valley at about the same time Admiral Leach’s TAC boats were shooting down nine of the last dozen of the U.S. Navy’s F-series fighter-bombers over the Pacific, and from then on things deteriorated for the American 4th Mechanized Infantry Brigade.

  The battle for them to break out of the eastern end of the valley turned into a long extended mess covering many square miles, as the Americans at first tried to either overrun or outflank the 85th Regiment’s center, then finally realizing they were on the short end of the stick, attempted to break contact and retreat back up toward Dillon. Although the diminishing strength of the American 4th Brigade didn’t know it, the other two brigades of their invasion corps, amounting to almost 20,000 men, were pinned down in the town of Dillon itself by the French-speaking Régiment Charlemagne, the 43rd Infantry, and the 12th Panzer Regiment, aka the Rhino Riders after their new tanks. The NDF artillery was in the process of laying the entire town of Dillon, Montana flat, assisted by scouts and forward spotters from the townspeople themselves, who without hesitation called in NDF shellfire onto their own streets and homes rather than have those homes returned to the United States of America.

  Eddie Horakova and his 75-millimeter gun crew spent most of the night firing on coordinates provided by their various forward spotters, almost never knowing or seeing what they were firing at. They fired at longer and longer intervals between, as the battle moved away into the woods and hills on the eastern side of Grasshopper Creek. About dawn, the order came to stand down and give their guns a thorough clean. By then the string of burning American tanks and military vehicles, mixed with a few from the NDF, and the litter of dead bodies from both sides extended around the eastern side of Black Buffalo Bridge in a seven-mile arc. Some of the Americans escaped and evaded in small groups, and a few made it back to their side of old Interstate 15, but from then on the 4th Mechanized Brigade became known to American military history as the Lost Column, a kind of Custer’s Last Stand that kicked off a disastrous war.

  * * *

  “There’s one thing we still apparently haven’t mastered any more than the Americans have, Admiral,” said Lieutenant Torrance, at the wheel of TAC-157.

  “What’s that, Lieutenant?” asked Leach.

  “Meteorology, sir,” replied the TAC boat skipper. He pointed through the front windscreen up at the sky. “Our weather reports still suck sometimes.”

  Leach looked up and saw the clouds overhead breaking apart, and suddenly the sea was flooded with bright light from a full moon. “Damn!” he swore.

  “Damn is right!” replied Torrance tensely. “Look, sir!”

  Ahead of them, the American fleet rose from the sea in the moonlight like gray metal icebergs, or like skyscrapers in the case of the carriers that towered over the tiny TAC boats. The Kriegsmarine had known they were approaching their targets, of course, since their radar had told them, and Leach had wondered aloud why the Americans, who must in turn have detected the Northwest boats on their own radar, didn’t seem to be moving or attempting any evasive action.

  But seeing the enemy ships all spread out before him under the moon, across miles of ocean, the answer suddenly struck Leach. “Arrogance,” he breathed incredulously. “Pure American hubris. Even after everything that has happened in the Northwest since John Singer’s neighbors in Coeur d’Alene came to his aid with weapons in their hands seventeen years ago; these stupid sons of bitches still don’t get it. These men really believe that they are exceptional, that they are immune from the laws of history and nature, and that we poor wee pale peasantry can’t ever really harm them.”

  “So let’s harm them, sir,” said Waller.

  “Oh, do let’s,” said Leach. He picked up the radio mic and clicked a key that put him in touch with every vessel in the fleet. “This is the Big Skipper, boys. Operation Sea Lion, Phase Two commences now. This is the part where we send every last one of these scurvy dogs to Davey Jones’ locker. Do it!”

  Actually, Bloody Dave Leach was partially wrong about the American hubris. Vice Admiral Hiram Warner, Commander Larsen, and most of the senior officers in the American flotilla were not stupid men. They fully recognized that in the 21st century a small boat was capable of carrying and using a weapons system of sufficient power to sink a warship of any size, and that over three hundred such small vessels attacking them at once was cause for concern.

  Unfortunately for them, Commander Rufus Washington did not realize this. Washington was a large black man who had always towered over everybody else, including the skinny young computer geek whiteboys of his youth. He had the mindset of a typical black bully: small and white meant weak and contemptible. What had worked on the schoolyards of the expensive prep schools he had attended under affirmative action quotas would obviously work in combat against these racists, since Rufus Washington knew his whiteboys. The monkoid was constitutionally incapable of understanding that there could even be such a thing as a white man who was not afraid of him. He certainly had never met one. Plus he was the Resident Senior Minority on board, with a personal line to the President of the United States, quite literally, or at least to the Chief of Staff Ronald Schiff. A line he had used some minutes before evasive maneuvers preparatory to a return to Hawaii were to be implemented.

  Just as the moon broke through the clouds, Admiral Warner was informed by a female communications officer, “Sir, I have the President on the line for you.” As Warner took the phone into his hands, he looked out across the sea and saw hundreds of small dark shapes like a shoal of minnows moving towards his ships. Moving fast. Then faster.

  President Hunter Wallace’s voice was heavy with censure as he spoke from the bedroom of the executive residence in the White House, with Georgia Myers lying beside him, pretending to be asleep. “Admiral Warner, I have just been informed by my chief of staff that Commander Washington has felt it his duty to report that you are considering abandoning your position in the North Pacific for no other reason than…”

  “I’ll call you back,” said Warner, hanging up the radiophone on its cradle. The ship’s sirens were braying the call for General Quarters. “Open up on them with everything we�
��ve got!” roared Warner.

  Then the first torpedo slammed into his flagship’s side.

  * * *

  The politicians in the American War Cabinet who met in the White House situation room two days later were upbeat. They attempted to present the Battle of the Columbia Bar as a qualified success, or at least a draw. “It’s true that our fleet sustained some serious losses,” said Secretary of Defense Marcus Bagwell, desperately trying to spin the battle into a kind of 21st century Midway. “But the enemy losses were really tremendous. We estimate that we sank over a hundred of their torpedo boats. Some of our own vessels that were hit were merely damaged and are on their way back to Pearl Harbor, either under their own steam or else being taken in tow.”

  Admiral Hector Brava had the full casualty list in front of him, and he stood up in his seat, thrusting the papers at Bagwell. “You… call… this… victory?” he almost screamed at the Secretary of Defense. “Two carriers sunk, the Hornet and the Hillary Clinton! Three other carriers badly damaged! They don’t think the JFK II will make it to Pearl, they think she’s going to go under in a few hours! Three frigates sunk! Seven destroyers sunk! The Jesse Jackson driven to the surface and then rammed by one of those little fuckers, shot to shit with machine gun fire, the conning tower blown off with a missile and now under tow, and probably going to sink as well! The Harriet Tubman limping home on the surface, leaking at every seam from depth charges off those damned little Nazi boats and a possible reactor leak as well! Every other ship in the fleet without exception damaged! Damned near all of the task force’s aircraft, including the helicopters and the AWACs, shot down by those space alien death rays or whatever the fuck they are! Seven thousand six hundred-odd American sailors and pilots dead, and all we did was blow away a few little pissant torpedo boats with three and four man crews, using missiles and weapons systems that cost a hundred times more to develop and manufacture and install and operate than the stupid little shitboats cost the Nazis to make! They’re probably turning out more of the goddamned things in their shipyards now like lollipops, shipyards that we haven’t yet touched with a single bomb or Tomahawk! How in God’s name can you call this victory?” Brava roared.

  Vice President Hugh Jenner had CNN on the big plasma screen. They were now truly the Cable News Network again, since Rotfungus still had all the world’s communications satellites in its grip. They had been able to reach about 50 percent of their pre-D-Day audience capacity so far by using fiber-optic cable and good old-fashioned broadcast television. The news was uniformly bad. The meeting was interrupted while Jenner and the Cabinet members watched live in horror as the stern of the John F. Kennedy II heeled over and disappeared beneath the blue Pacific waters. They learned later that Vice Admiral Hiram Warner had supervised the last crew evacuation into the lifeboats and then climbed back up to the bridge, electing to go down with his ship, thus giving the U.S. Navy pretty much the last in its long and proud history of legendary heroes.

  Vice President Jenner cut away to Fox News, which was reporting that two Nazi U-boats had infiltrated San Francisco Bay, surfaced in broad daylight, and attacked the city. One had just finished shelling the crap out of several sections of the Oakland docks with his 2.5-inch deck gun, setting fire to a propane tank farm and several military warehouses at Carranza Barracks, formerly Oakland Army Terminal. The second U-boat commander proceeded in a leisurely manner to fire six torpedoes into ships tied up along the San Francisco piers, sinking two cruise vessels and one blazing tanker ship in their moorings. Then he shelled the Embarcadero for shits and giggles.

  Jenner cut to MSNBC, and they saw an aerial view of the mountainous twists of Interstate Five just past Yreka, where long columns of black smoke mounting into the sky from the hundreds of burning vehicles. “The Mexicans haven’t even crossed into the Emerald City yet,” the Vice President said conversationally as Janet Chalupiak snorted in contempt. He switched channels again. The MSNBC copter showed brief segments of whirling dogfights between Luftwaffe Starfighters, the lightning-fast propeller-driven fighter-bombers with the nitro-injected alcohol engines that could hit speeds of up to 400 mph, and the Chinese Taipan helicopter gunships. Then the view shifted to a ground camera that showed the MSNBC news copter itself falling out of the sky in flames, riddled with Luftwaffe bullets.

  “Those optics are terrible,” said Angela Herrin decisively. “It’s unpatriotic and giving aid and comfort to the enemy by making it look like they’re actual soldiers who can defeat the United States military. They’re not, of course, but perception is what counts. We have to put a stop to the bad optics.”

  “And here I thought we had to put a stop to the enemy,” said Admiral Brava. Angela Herrin ignored him.

  “I’ll call a meeting with major network heads as soon as I can get them all down to the White House,” she went on. “I’ll borrow Jimbo Hadding and some of his crew, in case I need some help persuading these media prima donnas who think they know what the truth is to remember their duty to their country.”

  “You know, Angela, you almost got sued last time you had Jimbo tune up a reporter,” Schiff reminded her.

  “But I didn’t,” said Herrin airily. “I had Agent Hadding tune up his lawyer as well, and Bob’s your uncle. When did you know a reporter or an attorney who could stand up to a little slapping around? Besides, we’re at war now and Hunter’s got the War Powers Act. He can do whatever he wants, and so can I.”

  “Speaking of which, where is our illustrious commander-in-chief?” asked General Albert Scheisskopf dryly. “Ah, speak of the devil…” he said as Hunter Wallace strolled in the door, the faithful, hulking and sullen Secret Service bodyguard Hadding behind him. Wallace was in a good mood.

  “Tell me some good news,” he commanded cheerfully. At that moment, Marcus Bagwell’s private cell phone number rang. Unbeknownst to any of them, the Zombie Master Dr. Shapira had obtained permission from Vinnie Skins to attempt to implement the repeated post-hypnotic suggestions that he had been implanting carefully in the mind of the Secretary of Defense for months. The Master was calling now from an untraceable number. Bagwell answered his phone. “Yes?” he said.

  “Foghorn Leghorn,” said the Zombie Master into the phone.

  Marcus Bagwell dropped the device, stood up, placed his hands in his armpits, flapped his elbows, and ran from the room shouting “Buck buck buck buck BU-GUUUUUUCK . . . . !!” The President of the United States, the War Cabinet, and the assembled Pentagon brass stared after him.

  Vice President Jenner spoke. “I don’t think any of us expected that,” he said.

  * * *

  Casualty summary : 0800 hours June 20th-0800 hours June 21st

  NDF military casualties—1,870 dead and 5,291 wounded

  NAR civilian casualties—418 dead and 1,907 wounded

  United States military casualties—37,412 dead and 8,630 wounded

  United States civilian casualties—20,226 dead and 12,348 wounded, gassed, or sickened from biowar agents

  Aztlan military casualties—45,445 dead, 17,275 wounded

  Aztlan civilian casualties—42,598 dead, unknown number wounded, gassed, or sickened from biowar agents

  XVI

  TIDES AND HURRICANES

  (D-Day plus 12 days)

  Never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone

  who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.

  —Winston Churchill

  Over the next two weeks of the steamy D.C. summer the war in the Northwest slowed to a crawl, while the United States government dithered, raged, recriminated, and intrigued.

  Military and civilian casualties mounted slowly and grimly for the embattled Northwest Republic, but soared spectacularly for the United States and Aztlan. American bombing and indeed all aerial missions
over the Republic ceased, at least until the U.S. Air Force could figure out how to deal with Bluelight. No solution was forthcoming either to the loss of American air power nor the loss of satellite surveillance; Rotfungus maintained its mysteries impenetrable in the face of efforts by every computer wizard the federals could throw at it. “I knew that lunatic Cord at Stanford,” explained one exasperated software engineer. “He gets his theoretical insights from the Bible and astrology. We used to call him J.C., he thought it meant Jesus Christ, and he took it as a compliment! He’s a fucking kook, so how could he come up with something like this that nobody can crack?”

  “Maybe he gets it from his Esteemed Senior Colleague,” replied a second man from MIT who had also known Cord.

  One of the more interesting conversations that Georgia Myers overheard between the American president and his staff, and subsequently reported back to Vinnie Skins and thence on to the NAR high command, concerned the apparent inability of the United States government to replace the hundreds of aircraft, the thousands of motorized vehicles, and naval vessels that had been destroyed by the NDF during the first two days of the war.

  Put simply, the cupboard was bare. After a century of squandering the greatest national treasure trove of wealth and resources in human history on politically correct social experimentation, the United States of America was finally plain old flat-out broke, and was led by people who were bloody stupid enough to start a major war when the country was broke. Not a good combination. The U.S. had already been put on final notice by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and by the world’s few remaining stable monetary systems: any more “quantitative easing,” or printing of money by the Federal Reserve in order to pay for the war would result in the complete blackballing and delegitimizing of the battered American dollar and its removal from all internationally traded currencies in London, Geneva, Moscow, Buenos Aires, Beijing, Tokyo, and wherever else there was a stock market or financial futures exchange. The U.S. floated a special war bond issue as they’d done in World War One and World War Two. The bonds fell flat on their faces and were withdrawn after three days in sheer embarrassment. Everyone knew that the promise of the United States government to repay wasn’t worth a bucket of warm spit. No one wanted to buy, sell, or trade in toilet paper.