Almost 75,000 U.S. Army soldiers and Marines, the bruised and exhausted remains of the U.S. Combined Military Group South that had so proudly rolled out of Billings several weeks before for what they thought would be Baghdad Boogie, were dug into an area of about nine square miles of Anaconda, Montana, where they hunkered down in whatever cover they could find and crawled through the rubble of the town. Their lines of trenches, earthworks, barricades and hasty fortifications ran roughly along Cable Road to the north through the old golf course, and along the Stumptown Road to the south as far east as Smelter Road. Everything in between was a kill zone for the NDF and the Luftwaffe.
The mining and steel processing town of Anaconda, the only important Northwest industrial and administrative center to fall to the American enemy, was set in a heavily forested, mile-high valley in Deer Lodge County, surrounded by the Pintler Mountains right on the Continental Divide. Anaconda’s 15,000 inhabitants had been evacuated in time. The Americans had captured an empty town with the electrical and communications grid disabled and the water and sewer mains blown to pieces by the NDF troops who had just left hours before. The stores and private homes were stripped of virtually everything to eat and drink, except for the odd bottle of beer and spring water left lying around, some of which were poisoned and some of which weren’t. The bewildered Americans had captured their first objective all right, but almost all of them were now on foot and exhausted after a hellish march in heavy kit and body armor through baking Montana heat, and they barely had time to get their bearings when the first shells from the Fourth Army’s artillery batteries concealed in the Lost Creek and Deer Lodge ranges began dropping on them.
It took the Americans only a short while to realize that they were surrounded by an army that outnumbered them three to one, that there would be no re-supply by air, and that there was no food and above all very little water, while their enemies could draw as much water as they wanted from Georgetown Lake, Warm Springs Lake, and a hundred other small lakes and streams scattered throughout the nearby mountains. Their commanding officer, U.S. Army Major General Bentley G. Logan, immediately ordered a breakout attack to the east, back the way they came. He led the U.S. Army’s First Cavalry Division, the First Mechanized Infantry Division, and two battalions of the Fifth Marine Division in a drive for Bowman Field, the local airport, where they hoped to establish an air supply point and a medevac point for their wounded, even if getting planes and copters through would be the next problem. They captured the airfield, if it is possible to capture an open expanse of potholed concrete wherein every building had been dynamited or burned to the ground. Then the hail of artillery shells cut Logan off completely from the rest of his command; he and the remnants of his force were still dug into trenches they had hastily slashed into the ground around Bowman Field.
Morehouse and the Fourth Army commander General A.J. Drones had not hesitated for an instant to order the destruction of one of the Republic’s own cities that was defiled by the presence of a single armed nigger or Mexican. The NDF had been bombarding Anaconda for almost five days now, with over two thousand artillery pieces and multiple rocket launchers, hundreds of Starfighter and Songbird aircraft, and mortars beyond counting. What was once the downtown area of Anaconda was now a burning slagheap, which even now as the State President watched was being churned up by the slow pounding of the shells. All along the siege lines, the Northwest cannon were firing in slow sequences to conserve ammunition; they had all the time in the world. Each battery dropped ten shells on a certain grid coordinate called in by the forward spotters, or in some cases the rear spotters high on the wooded ridges of the foothills above the valley, which afforded a better view. Then the next battery down the line did the same on another coordinate, until the wave came back around again. The result was an almost lazy but constant rain of explosives and incendiaries on the town, twenty-four hours a day, all day and night, for five days straight so far. The Americans were not only short on food and water; they had to be getting very little sleep. The barrage had slowly and leisurely disassembled the entire town; barely one brick remained standing on another, and the Americans were huddled in trenches or cellars or gutted ruins with no way to fire back and silence the constant thudding guns.
The lack of their air power and satellite surveillance had allowed the poor quality of the American troops and the low caliber of officers and leadership, for many decades always hidden behind a screen of high-tech razzle-dazzle, to come to the fore. Now the U.S. military paid the price for generations of political correctness, tactical laziness, and moral corruption. Low-tech in sufficient quantity and with guts behind it was trumping high-tech manipulated by monkeys. Man was triumphing over machine, courage over the computer. World War One was indeed defeating World War Three.
Most of the trees throughout the valley had been knocked down by various kinds of ordnance over the past few days, and large numbers of troops from the 350,000-man Fourth Army weren’t even engaged in combat, but were on firefighting duty putting out the dozens of brushfires that threatened to spread from the battle zone. The sight spread out below Morehouse now resembled a shell-blasted moonscape that shimmered in the July heat even through the smoke and the dust thrown up by the NDF artillery shells. “How long before those poor bastards run out of water, you think, General?” Morehouse asked A.J. Drones, a wiry man with a drooping blond moustache laced with gray who stood at his side.
“No telling, Mr. President, but they’re starting to get desperate,” said Drones. “Some of the white soldiers are starting to crawl out of their positions at night, trying to surrender. We shoot ’em down as per order. I would imagine a shortage of food and water is largely in play with that.”
“Any chance of reconsidering your deguello, Mr. President?” asked Security Minister Frank Barrow, also standing beside Morehouse with a pair of field glasses. “Those men down there are our enemies, granted, but a lot of them are of our own race.”
“Not with this lot,” said Morehouse. “Frank, believe me, I’ve lost sleep over that, and I’m going to lose more now that I’ve seen what those men are enduring, no matter what color they are. But the United States of America has sent three invading armies into our land, and we dare not show weakness or hold our hand. We have to completely destroy at least one of those armies in order to make our point, so that when we do show mercy to the white men among the other two, the world will know that’s what it is, mercy and not weakness. If we can, we’ll offer the white soldiers of Group Center and Group North a chance to live—but to do so, they’ll have to acknowledge their own blood, maybe for the first time in their lives, and abandon their niggers and their mud-colored allies. That’s the political point we have to make, and make them understand. We have to force them to accept their lives at our hands as white men, and not as soldiers of an illegitimate interracial tyranny. That’s what history must record, that we showed mercy not to Americans, but to our own blood brothers. So what have you come all the way out here to tell me?”
“This is sufficiently sensitive so I didn’t want to entrust it even to a secure line, sir,” said Barrow. “We’ve got word from Station Cesspool. Major Cardinale says he’s worked out a plan to take down both of Wallace’s Hofjuden, but he warns us that Belladonna herself may be compromised, and he’s very twitchy about that, as well he might be. We can’t afford to lose her. He’s asking for confirmation to proceed.”
“Those two Jews are urging the President of the United States to use nuclear weapons against the Northwest American Republic,” said Morehouse. “Hunter Wallace is a clever politician but a weak man. He thinks only in terms of political expediency. The morality of slaughtering hundreds of thousands and maybe millions of his own race at the behest of Jews is something that simply will not enter into his calculations. I can’t take the risk that he will allow himself to be persuaded by those hebes. We must not only remove him from their sphere of influence, but we have to let him know through their death that we know what they’
ve been up to, and if he even so much as thinks about pushing that button he’s next, and not the entire might of the United States can save him from our wrath. The man is a personal coward and we have to hope that the death of his two little Jewish handlers will concentrate his mind. I realize the risk to that brave young woman in the White House, but I have a whole nation and a whole new generation of white children to think about, children whom I will not allow to die of nuclear incineration or radiation poisoning. No more Dresdens, Frank. No more Hamburgs or Colognes, no more Wilhelm Gustloffs, not ever, at least not without an Aryan revenge that will shake the very heavens! But we don’t want revenge, we want live white children, and that means we have to stop it before it can happen. Tell Cardinale he’s got my okay, and I don’t mean just the two Jewish advisors. From now on he’s got my okay to take out Wallace himself if the opportunity offers.”
“You want to turn Belladonna from an intel to an assassination mission, sir?” asked Barrow.
“Yes, if it’s feasible, and if there is at least a chance to extract that girl and get her out of there alive beforehand,” said Morehouse with a nod. “In the past two weeks I have had to order thousands of men to their deaths, but I won’t do that to her. That would be a damned foul way to repay what she’s done for us, and I still intend to maintain at least some shred of pretense that we’re better than they are. Tell Vince it’s a go on taking out Wallace, but he prioritizes Belladonna’s safety and her extraction, with her child.”
“Wallace would kill you without a second’s hesitation if he could, sir,” offered Drones.
“I know, Andrew, but that’s not why I’m giving this order,” said Morehouse. “The thought of using those nukes has now crossed his mind, and no American president who has ever had such a thought even so much as cross his mind can be allowed to live. It’s like a dog that starts killing chickens or savaging sheep. It doesn’t matter how well behaved such a dog is normally, once he understands that it can be done, he has to be put down.”
* * *
“We’re go on Herrin and Schiff, and we also have a green light to kill the president if we can do so and still save the Lady,” Vince Cardinale told his Belladonna team several hours later. They were gathered in Birdie’s basement computer center in Arlington. Byrd had proven himself to be loyal and invaluable since the war began, and Cardinale had taken the chance of bringing him up to speed on the main operation itself, although he withheld the actual identity of the WPB’s spy inside the White House from him. “It’s simple, Vinnie,” Birdie had told him. “Beatings, buggery, and waterboarding I can take, but when the electrodes go on my balls, that’s when I start singing like a canary. Those are your parameters, so work within them.”
Byrd had provided the team with two electronic devices, micro-global positioning indicators the size of a thumbnail that had to be planted somewhere on Angela Herrin and Ronald Schiff’s person so the WPB hit teams could locate and track down their targets. “Doc, were you able to move her head-tuning appointment up?” asked Vinnie Skins.
“Yes, it seems I had an unavoidable scheduling conflict. She’ll be there for her weekly therapy session at six p.m. tonight,” said Shapira. “Or as soon thereafter as the Leader of the Free World gets through with his afternoon orgy. I don’t like doing it, though. It’s a break in pattern that the Secret Service might notice, especially after the fireworks tonight, but I know we have to give her these tracking devices and hope to God she can plant them.”
“So she can be back in the White House by what? Twenty past seven?” asked Cardinale.
“Yes,” said Shapira.
“The late briefing in the Situation Room for their War Cabinet always starts at nine, and it’s usually over by ten-thirty or eleven, then the staff generally leave the buildings for sleep or for dissipations elsewhere,” said Bob/Richie, reciting from memory some of the wealth of information and White House gossip he’d picked up from Georgia. “Neither of the targets overnight much at the White House, although they do have guest bedrooms assigned in the residence for that purpose. Angela Herrin generally goes right home to her pad on 12th Street Northeast in Brookland, where a couple of nights in the week she receives whatever lover she’s getting it on with at the moment. She runs through them like a dose of salts. All white, all gentiles, everyone from low-level lawyers to baristas to garage mechanics, guys who have credible deniability and won’t be missed if she decides to cut their throats during sex play or whatever she does. Apparently, she’s quite the black widow. These guys either leave by two a.m., or in some cases they don’t leave at all. According to West Wing gossip, she’s supposed to be fucking her bodyguard as well, some Israeli thug named Mordecai Kravitsky, who helps her dump the bodies of her other toy boys up in some landfill in Prince George’s County, where they never seem to get found until they’re too decomposed for forensics, as if anybody would investigate anyway.”
“White bodies turn up all over Maryland all the time,” grunted Cardinale. “The cops are all niggers, so no one gives a damn.”
“This guy Kravitsky is ex-Mossad, and he’s usually her sole security,” Bob went on. “Ronald Schiff, the White House chief of staff, either goes home, or he calls in to his wife in Georgetown claiming he’s working late and then he goes clubbing along with a couple of his Secret Service detail who also like to boogie. We might be able to catch him and take him down in Muldoon’s Pub or the Wiley Coyote. Sometimes he picks up a shiksa and he ends up in the Watergate complex in one of those special fuck-pads various power élite types maintain there.”
“Yes, I know about them,” said Shapira. “They’re in a different part of the complex and the whole area is not only monitored but guarded by top-end, armed private security. It’s a lot more locked down than the office area where I am. Our lords and masters want to make sure they’re not interrupted in mid-debauch.”
Bob went on: “The thing is, Georgia’s supposed to be kicking back in the residence upstairs in the East Wing at night, while she waits for her second shift, so to speak. Not wandering around the West Wing schmoozing or chatting with people, especially not cabinet people and senior poobahs like the press secretary and chief of staff. Especially not during a war crisis when the place is on full security alert. Remember, for all her technical status as an employee and her full-access ID card, everybody knows who Georgia is and what she’s there for, and she’s considered to be maybe one cut above the help. Some of them probably think she’s lower than the help, and our two hose-noses seem to be in that category. Georgia may be able to get next to the president on a regular basis, but so far as she can recall, neither Herrin nor Schiff have ever even acknowledged her existence or addressed a single word to her. She can’t just walk into their offices for a conversation. She just plain might not be able to do this for us, even if she’s willing. She might not be able to find a way to get close to the targets.”
“We have to see if she’s willing first,” said Cardinale. “That means you three have a whole hour to persuade her to plant the tracking devices.” He nodded at Shapira, Bob Campbell, and Betsy. He was sending in the whole crew who were known to Georgia to persuade and reassure her, because the mission was now being taken to a new and dangerous level. “Is she going to go for it?”
“I think she will,” said Betsy confidently. “She’s packing a lot of resentment, right back to the time when that bitch mother of hers kidnapped her. When people treat a woman like the inhabitants of this toilet have treated her, she’ll do anything to hit back any way she can.” Bob reflected grimly that in light of his newly acquired knowledge of her past, Betsy undoubtedly knew what she was talking about.
“Richie?” asked Cardinale.
“I’m not sure, sir,” Bob said in a worried voice. “She’s on edge, and this wasn’t what she signed up for.”
“Tell her I know that,” said Cardinale. “Tell her whatever you have to, but you’ve got to get her to do it. Or at least try. Otherwise, we’re going to have to intercept bo
th of those Red Sea pedestrians and pull off two floats right in the Green Zone. We’ll do that if we have to, in order to stop them from whispering sweet nuclear nothings in the president’s ear, but it’s going to get dicey under the best of circumstances. We’re taking anti-tank weapons that can breach the armor in their limos, but if we have to take them on the fly, our own E&E will be problematic.”
Bob knew that the CO was understating the case. Two spontaneous and bloody attacks against the White House press secretary and chief of staff right on the streets of Washington, D.C., in the middle of the ESMA and under the surveillance cameras, would set off the capitol city’s entire emergency response protocol and bring down on them everything from the FBI and D.C. Metro Police SWAT teams, to the special Delta Force unit standing by at Fort Belvoir. The city would be locked down tight within three minutes, any escape from the spy cameras on every corner would become impossible, and the whole thing would become even more of a suicide mission than it already was. The Circus operatives had to have some way to track and locate both targets, so they could plan their strike and work out some kind of getaway that might give them a chance. Byrd had promised to do what he could to hack and take out the surveillance cameras in both immediate contact points when it went down, and to cover the gunners’ escape and evasion. But in order to do that he had to know where it was to happen, he needed some idea of the getaway route, and he had to receive at least a little advance notice. “You said you’re authorizing us to promise her extraction after tonight, sir?” asked Bob keenly. “You don’t want to use her to set up Hunter Wallace himself for assassination?”
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