by Billy Roper
“Wasn’t there a book about something like this here, back in the day, Roy?” Joe Don asked over the music, to break the boredom more than anything. His Knighthawk laughed like that was the funniest thing in the world. Everybody knew that Oklahoma City had gone back to the Injuns, from what folks said, the whole state had, pretty much.
“Yeah, sure was”, Roy answered. “Just don’t go writing in your DIARY about it!” Joe Don guffawed.
“I won’t, so long as you promise to not take the dang old license plate off.” The Imperial Wizard of the West-Central Alabama Klavern joked.
Horace Slees had seen his eighty-second birthday come and go in style. The night before, he had hit the pipe and chased a teenage girl around his dining room table with a buzzing thingy, then later on he had kissed a young interning lawyer right where it mattered most. The young man had been very grateful. Well, that’s as it should be. After all, he knew who Horace was. The man. The myth. The legend. In this new world, a god. It was a heck of a lot better than selling birthday cakes in the mail, that’s for sure. Some of the staffers worried too much about being able to control the darkies now that they were really in power, but Horace knew he could keep them under his thumb. He always had. You didn’t get to be a multi-millionaire by being stupid. Just ask Richard. From the sixth floor polarized window he looked down at the memorial between his two buildings just southwest of the capitol, and saw Mayor Jarvis’s entourage and security marching around the corner. The anti-Semitic bastard was early, probably just to upstage him with the media and whip them into a frenzy, as he liked to do. If he made any more “Hymie’s Next” chants today, it would cost Horace a whole case of candy bars to keep Heidi from quitting. Those were getting harder and harder to come by these days, too. Candy bars, that is.
A few times, black mobs had come close to storming the doors of the Southern Impoverished Legal Committee headquarters, in the earliest days of the transition to black rule. Having the best ex-mercenary security that money could buy had really paid off during those hectic weeks. He had spent the first month directing things from his fortified estate, but eventually the situation had calmed down, when there was nothing left to loot and few Whites left to rob or rape or murder. Now he was living at the office, full time. All you had to do was ride these storms out, and you would end up on top, like he always did, Horace thought smugly.
The caterers had arrived just after dawn, dressed like Christmas elves, of all the ridiculous things, and began quickly setting up the breakfast buffet (no pork, he had specifically ordered them) around the fountain. Steamtrays were piled high with fried chicken and waffles, a nice touch, he thought with approval. He pushed a buzzer and almost instantly two armed guards appeared.
“It’s time to go pretend to care what this monkey has to say”, Horace told them. “Let’s go on down and get Pohtick. He shouldn’t miss this.”
Joe Don sang a song under his breath as he looked up at the high walls that hung over him to his right. “Inside of a room, in a square the color of blood…”. Snipers as usual, on the roof, scanning the crowd for any signs of weapons or hostile intent. Cameras freaking EVERYWHERE, not that they mattered. If this worked, nobody would be around to watch any tapes or freeze frame any faces. If it didn’t, he wouldn’t be leaving the scene, regardless. He and Roy each took an end of the last barrel, and waddled it off the truck, down the ramp, and into position under the buffet table, labeled as carbon dioxide. Right beside the other four, for the soda jets ready to launch grape crush soft drink through the memorial fountain, as the contract specified. The zebra-striped banquet-sized table cloths, also custom ordered for the party, neatly covered the apparatus from end to end, on three sides of the pool. Sometimes it was good to have a member in the catering business. Who’da thunk it?
Horace Slees and Mike Pohtick, a bobble-headed Jew-froed weasel, exited the S.I.L.C. building and entered the crowd of black dignitaries with fake grins and a flourish just a couple of minutes after the caterers had finished their setup, climbed back into their trucks, and discretely left the celebration area to their betters. Pohtick hated being up this early. He needed another cup of coffee. Where was that former skinhead serving boy? Oh, God!
“Hey, T.J., where are the waiters at? I saw them a minute ago. I want a java and a bagel, you stupid goy, and I want them now!” Horace growled at him to shut up, then plastered on a smirk as the Mayor stepped up to shake his hand. That’s right, you better pay homage, you dirty gorilla, Horace thought.
As soon as Joe Don made the left turn, Roy said a quiet prayer and pressed a button. They winced as the westside windows of the first Confederate Capitol cracked behind them. They made a right, going the wrong way up the empty King Street, before Roy said another prayer and pushed a second button. Two white buildings, with black men inside, began to give off gray smoke on both sides of Union Street. That should keep them busy.
Very little structural damage was done to either of the three buildings targeted by what local media called an obvious act of racist terrorism. However, the concave design of the first structure channeled the force of the blast, and its’ shrapnel, into a shaped charge. The explosion instantly killed Mayor Jarvis and five members of his entourage, as well as Horace Slees, Mike Pohtick, and eleven other members of the S.I.L.C. staff, including Heidi Biterich. She had come downstairs for the free buffet. Two dozen other attendees were injured, to greater or lesser degrees. In the state capitol building, the governor’s office was destroyed, as was his blackness and three “secretaries” who had been in consultation with the former pimp at the time of the blast. Across the street, the Speaker of the House and fourteen Representatives assumed room temperature, and the Speaker Pro Tempore and several others were wounded.
Two hours later, in the confused aftermath of the attack, three C-130s piloted and flown by White crewmen lifted off from Maxwell Air Base in northern Montgomery. They turned their radios off after the tower first asked them what they were doing, then ordered them back. The big planes angled northwest towards the aptly named Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, 500 miles away. The defectors, who had pretended to be subservient to their black officers after the takeover of the base, were jubilant. Inside the huge cabins of the C-130s were the West-Central Alabama Klavern of the Invisible Empire Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and their families. Joe Don’s daughter sat on her mom’s lap, holding her daddy’s hand. The kids sang “Jingle Bells” during the takeoff, as loud as they could, to overcome their fear. Also along were thirty-two of the remaining White Maxwell base personnel, including two of Joe Don’s cousins who had joined up for the free college. The cousins had arranged the ride. They would be out of reach of any reprisals. The same could not be said for the nearly four hundred Whites drug out of basements and attics and slaughtered in Montgomery’s suburbs over the next two weeks of frenzied rioting.
Chapter Five
Luke 22:36
King James Bible
“Then said he unto them, But now, he that hath a purse, let him take it, and likewise his scrip: and he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one.”
Shadows Of The Indignant Desert Birds
Standing beside their chairs awaiting his arrival were Captain Ming, Admiral Liu’s Chief of Staff, who served as the naval liaison to the civil authority, and two other men. Harry Lee was a second generation Chinese-American businessman whose parents had fled the enlightened rule of Beijing after Tiananmen Square. They had become wealthy fulfilling the restaurateur stereotype throughout the Pacific coast region. Their oldest son Harry, the most ambitious of his six siblings, had risen to a seat on the San Francisco City Council, thanks to an aggressive tiger mom upbringing. His next younger brother had taken over the family business, and another brother had went to law school after Berkeley and opened a private practice serving the Chinese expatriate community from San Jose to Sacramento. In Hu’s eyes, Lee and his whole family were traitors to the Party, and his nation. He was, however, a pragmatist, and
understood that Lee was necessary to insure the cooperation and grudging support of the population group which still served as the international justification for their presence there.
The third man, like Hu and Ming an only son, stared at the governor’s disheveled appearance and mussed hair with barely concealed disgust. General Jiang was the actual military commander of all of the People’s forces engaged in their humanitarian efforts throughout the United States and Canada. In actuality, that meant Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, and the Bay area, with their cordoned off environs. He lay claim to the pacification of the entire coastline and two hundred miles inland in his reports back to the Central Committee, but that was wishful thinking, to be generous. Hu also knew that Jiang had a harem of blonde American girls, all under the age of consent, at three different bases around the occupied areas. Either of those two nuggets would have led to his recall and retirement to a rice field, or worse, it they were known back home. That was why Jiang continued to defer to him, despite the fact that Hu was officially just a bureaucrat, just the Administrator of State Resources and the Acting Governor for the People’s Humanitarian Foreign Aid Task Force, and its liberated areas.
It was their custom to debrief over boiled dog, which led this night to a casual remark by Harry Lee that a few dozen ragged animal rights activists had begun protesting the menu changes at his family’s dining establishments. Captain Ming shook his head and sneered, with a mouthful of meat, then shared that he could never understand the barbaric American’s dainty appetites. Especially now that they were near starvation. Jiang settled the issue by telling Lee that he would have the protesters arrested and executed for creating a public disturbance if they repeated their performance the next day. Before Lee could pull back from his complaint and demur that such action was unnecessary, the fates of the P.E.T.A. and Animal Liberation Front vegans was sealed.
Hu changed the subject by asking Jiang for a casualty report from the last week. The official report sent back to Beijing listed three deaths and five injuries in a helicopter crash. Everyone at the table knew that casualties were cremated in a funeral home in Sacramento, instead of being shipped back home for burial. So, the General began ticking off skirmishes and ambushes. A group of White separatists operating out of Olympic National Park had hit a convoy just outside of Olympia: forty-eight dead, twice that many wounded, and several truckloads of food “lost”. A patrol in Salem had withdrawn under fire from suspected elements of the Oregon National Guard, working with a “patriot” militia group, leaving behind five dead or captured. A Chinese-American friendship office in Eugene had been blown up, and three secretaries and a guard killed, and another injured. In a dozen incidents, People’s army losses in the Bay area alone approached twenty casualties. The stupid Americans should be calming down and getting ready to celebrate their meaningless “Christmas”, not stirring up trouble for him and Jiang. Captain Ming wondered about reports he had heard of White Californians being resettled in Reno now rebelling. Jiang hesitated, then confirmed that yes, the rail line between Lake Tahoe and Carson City was ‘no longer viable’. That meant it was no longer under his force’s control. Lee and Hu exchanged glances, both wondering how bad that situation really was. Hu prodded Jiang gently for details on the obviously sensitive issue. The last relocation train, which had carried six hundred and eighty detainees and thirty guards, had rolled back into Sacramento two days earlier, empty. That was depressing, not only because of the depletion of irreplaceable troop strength, but because they only had been able to relocate around 110,000 Whites from their sphere of influence to the Nevada border. Now that operation seemed to be at an end.
Harry Lee inquired of General Jiang what he would do with the remaining hundreds of detainees they had already rounded up for deportation. Jiang just smiled. Hu and Ming did, too. Lee was so Americanized. Jiang responded that he was going to draft a few thousand conscripts from Chinatown to guard them. They all laughed except for Lee. Later, Hu thought back on it, and considered that it might not have been such a bad idea, after all.
It was quiet on the southern side of their shared demilitarized zone with the Republic del Norte. Fresno and the San Joaquin border were quiet. One Chinese soldier, less alert than he should have been, had been disarmed and killed by a large group of MexicanAmerican women and children his squad was escorting south. The reprisals had been swift and bloody enough to deter any repeat performances, since. The Republica side hadn’t dared make a peep about it. Captain Ming reported that the new Mexico territory had agreed to relocate the few naval assets they had bobbing around the Channel Islands further south to San Diego. They ought to, since it the naval base there had been evacuated by the U.S. Navy as they retreated up the coast, awaiting orders which had never come through. Ming’s primary concern was protecting their resupply convoys all the way across the Pacific from rogue U.S. sub attacks. A dozen troop carriers and two destroyers guarding them had been lost during the last week to them.
Their soup went cold as Lee complained about the acid rain pollution, the air quality, and his people’s dead gardens. Hu told him that he could thank the Mexicans for that, burning half of Los Angeles. They joked about Hollywood not making any more movies for a long time. The evacuation of the new People’s embassy had been impossible to hide from the Central Committee, and that hadn’t been funny, though. Admiral Liu had sent a flotilla both to pick them up, and intimidate the Mexicans. The mission was a success, on both counts.
Over dessert, which Hu barely picked at, their conversation turned to broader-ranging issues. Rumors that the Mormons in Deseret had control over nuclear arsenals left at Hill Air Force Base. Another shipment of fruit and rice from Manila being overdue. Reports of cannibalism on Oahu. And the biggest mystery: what was the U.S. Pacific fleet, still at around seventy percent strength, doing up in Alaska? How long before that particular problem came down on their heads?
Nobody worried about the block by block fighting in Vladivostok, or talked much about their families back home. Being only sons and raised by the state helped fend off that kind of nostalgia, at least in public. Inflation, unemployment, those problems seemed a universe away. But three of the men saw the same haunted looks in the eyes of their peers as they faced in the mirror each morning.
Did You Write The Book Of Love?
Oil still flowed to Valdez. Massive tanker ships still lined up to fill and creep away again. These days, they didn’t arrive empty, though. Ships ran the Chinese naval gauntlet from Australia and New Zealand, and from France and Spain and Italy, too. Pallets of canned foods and containers of fruits and vegetables arrived lashed onto decks as barter for the cheapest oil left on the planet. Especially now that the Islamic State had declared a fatwa of death on any Muslim nation which sold petroleum to the infidels. Once they reached the Gulf of Alaska and the protective ring of U.S. Naval forces there, they could offload their barter goods-which sometimes consisted of American citizens who had been left stranded in their countries when things fell apart and all flights to the U.S. had been cancelled. The population of Anchorage had doubled to nearly 597,000, now 98% White. That included fourteen thousand naval personnel and dependents now based on shore from the Pacific fleet. They had come, sometimes in two or three trips, from places like El Centro and Coronado, Kunia and Chinhae, and were adapting to the Alaskan winter as best they could. In addition to the naval personnel, four thousand Marines and their families, and fifteen hundred belonging to the Air Force, now lived in and around Elmendorf-Richardson. Spreading some of the more intact and independent units to Juneau, Homer, Wasilla, and even over the Alaska Range to Fairbanks had only helped so much. All throughout the late summer, chainsaws and sawmills had hummed, and all throughout the fall new barracks had been thrown up, as the entire Pacific theatre shrunk in on them.
Everybody was sick of fish, but nobody was starving. What they were, was bristling for a fight. Nothing could get at them, so solid was their naval line from the Aleutians. But all eyes turned south, t
owards home, and towards the enemy. Their radar was turned south, too, trying to get a good a read on the rapidly changing situation there. The U.S Strategic Command center at Offutt Air Force base in Omaha had tried unsuccessfully to bully the COMPAC officers in charge to knuckle under to SAC authority. Offutt might have enough nuclear weapons and strategic bombers under their command to give the Chinese or anybody else pause. The Pacific fleet, though, not only still had the fast attack Ohio class subs and their SSBNs, they had the sympathies of the U.S. Atlantic and Mediterranean fleets, too. Since both of those wings had temporarily signed over ‘joint command’ with the U.N. peacekeeping forces trying to keep a lid on the East coast, that gave them some cred with the blue beanies. What Vice Admiral Woods of combined Seventh and Third fleet command lacked was an intact chain of command, especially from a civilian authority, in the lower forty-eight. Because of that, and the Atlantic fleet sign on with the E.U. led faction of the U.N., U.S. Pacific Command Anchorage opened channels of discussion with the U.N. North American peacekeeping forces.
Specialist Tommy Bullens sat hunched at his radio station, huddling deeper into his bright orange parka every time some idiot opened the door on their wood-frame comm shack. Neither the coat nor the building were exactly standard military issue, but they kept out some of the cold. Who would have thought he would end up in Alaska for Christmas? He had signed on for beaches and bikinis. At the moment he was talking with another Specialist a world away in Guantanamo Bay, where the U.S. Naval station had clung on despite repeated mass human wave attacks. After the locals given up trying to eat them, they had emerged as the most successful and resourceful pirate base in the Caribbean. That was unofficial. What was official was their access to data that the Pacific fleet lacked. Data such as the readings on the radiation count in the plume from Pueblo to Denver where Cheyenne Mountain used to be, or in Browns Ferry, Alabama, and Hartsville, South Carolina, where nuclear reactors had melted down when their autoshutdown systems had failed. Tommy looked up in irritation as the door banged open again, then smiled to see his buddy Rick. Both had served on the USS Abraham Lincoln together before being ordered ashore, first for construction duty, and now for data analysis.