by Billy Roper
Richie Edgars, a State Department undersecretary in Kabul, was contemplating trying to use his diplomatic credentials to get a flight to Athens, and from there frog hop it to the U.S. forces evacuating from Europe, when he got the weirdest call. At first he thought that it might be some weird Machiavellian joke. A test of his loyalty. People must be cracking up and seeing spies everywhere. Some Second Lieutenant was going outside the normal chain of command, if such still existed, but he claimed that he was speaking on behalf of “Ferocious Ferguson”. The General wanted Richie to go visit the Russian Federation embassy. Today. Okay, why not? It was an interesting enough curiosity to delay his packing. He wouldn’t make it home for Christmas with the folks, this year. Oh well, Athens could wait, they still had flights every other day.
Gregor Petrovich Surov had not been named Ambassador to the dirty little cat’s litter box of Afghanistan as a favor. He had been sent here as a punishment for questioning President Putin’s delay in sending in adequate forces to help the pro-Russian rebels in the Ukraine. He had also been chosen for this station because he was a mean, ugly man with a broad Slavic face and beady brown eyes. He was from peasant stock, and not ashamed of it. Of course no one could grow anything here, except for more filthy brown beggars and terrorists. He was of the generation which had been embarrassed by defeat here, and so mixed with his contempt for the Americans was a tinge of sympathy for their plight. Their mission had been impossible before. If Russia had been unable to squash these camel-loving fleabag Mohamed worshipers, right next door, how could the soft and compassionate U.S., from the other side of the world? Well, maybe the Americans were getting tougher. His intelligence agents reported that they had begun removing blacks and browns and yellows from their command and control structure, quietly, and were planning on segregating their forces. The Americans now had no way of getting home, and not much of one to go back to, from what he could tell from Moscow. Some oldschool cold war hardliners celebrated and laughed and back-slapped as Uncle Sam fell. Others wondered what would fill his emptied shoes. Surov, for one, wanted revenge. He always had gotten even for every personal slight, every insult, real or imagined, and on everyone who had ever gotten in his way. He had seen the Americans begin to fall. Da, that was good. Now he wanted to see these Afghan sub-humans suffer.
He would listen to what the American General, who did not seem so “Ferocious” in person after their first meeting, had to say when they met again tomorrow. The embassy staff were planning their Christmas party all around him, making it hard to think through his vodka headache. We would see. There was an old Arab saying that a falling horse attracted many knives. His were sharpened, just in case.
Edgars met with Ambassador Surov and General Ferguson three times over a six day period. At the end of that week, a tacit agreement was reached. As the Gerald R. Ford fired up both of its’ reactors and pulled away from Naples, U. S. and coalition units began withdrawing on all fronts in Afghanistan. The movements began so quietly and so suddenly that the Taliban had little time to react to the realignment of forces. Kandahar Province, the disputed area in the south of the country, was the first to be emptied. When Taliban forces and foreign-born jihadists cautiously opened the first of the hangar doors at the abandoned Kandahar Airfield, they were astonished to find the bodies of forty black American servicemen who had been left ziptied on the floor, and succumbed to the heat. Each of the other hangars held an equally grim prize for the victors.
And The Camel You Rode In On
Fahran had watched truck after truck and helicopter after helicopter leave Camp Leatherneck in the Helmand Province, and heading northeast. For three days it had buzzed with activity, and now it was silent. He had sat on his heels with the men from his village, and pretended to be bored, instead of excited. He was nearly seventeen, he was ready to kill his first infidel. Every time the unclean pigs had given him a candy bar half melted in its wrapper or a lukewarm can of soda from their forbidden left hands while their right hands held a gun trained on him, he had learned to hate them more. They thought that kicking a soccer ball at him had made him forget they had invaded his homeland. He wanted to make his father and his uncles proud. He wanted to make the girls of his tribe bat their eye lashes at him and smile. He was now a proud fedayeen for the Prophet. He wanted to be a mujahideen.
The first intrepid Afghani ‘freedom fighters’ to enter the ghost town of the base thought that it was completely empty. Fahran was not among them, but the base was so big that he was able to walk as fast as he could without running, and get there soon after. Building after building was empty, with just a few odd bits and pieces of material and equipment that the other boys his age began to argue and fight over. Fahran knew that there were plenty of war trophies to go around, and would be more, before the fighting was through. He wanted to kill. He wanted to be a man, Praise Allah.
The secret he most hated was that he had enjoyed the American run school they had made the children in his village go to. The Prophet understood why, and forgave him. It had saved him from working in the goat herd, and given him his first taste of air conditioning, the one good thing that the Americans had. Fahran had wanted to get to know his enemy, so he could hurt them. That was what his father had told him to keep in his mind when they sent him to the American-run school. Know your enemy. And so, he had learned to read and write some of their broken up English script, enough to get by. That is how he knew that the sign he was standing in front of said “Regional Command Southwest Memorial Chapel”. It was a church. A church where they worshipped the prophet Jesus as if he was Allah. What better place to find infidels to kill! But the door was solidly blocked by steel beams that had been piled in front of the entrance, and was locked with a chain, underneath. He shot at the door in anger, then jumped back in surprise when many voices all shouted back at him from the other side.
“Hey, Let us out, dawg, don’t shoot!” “ Who are you?” “We’re marines, just like you! Come on man, let us out!” “ Muhfuhs be trippin’. We ain’t doin’ no lootin’, we’s all green up in heah”. “Come on, dawg, you know how it is…” “Hey, you ain’t RACISS, is you? What’s the mattah, don’t you like black people?” “it be Kwanzaa! Let us out foah Kwanzaa! It’s our RIGHT to celebrate our religion, muhfuhs!” “We be cool, dawg…Come on, it be hottah than muhfuh up in dis shees…” ”Gone leave us to DIE up in heah? I know you didn’t. I know you didn’t.” “Come on, you feel me, dawg?...” “Shut up, fools, I’se tryin’ to hear them sose I can talk to these muhfuh..” “Who you callin a fool, fool?” “Niggah I’ll bust a cap in yo ass!” “Shee, you ain’t got no gat, no moah than the res’ of us do.”
On and on they went, most of their words and phrases Fahran could not understand. They spoke differently than the White soldiers who had always been giving out candy and medicine. The tribesmen had learned that the black soldiers didn’t give out anything but beatings for the men and rapes for the women. They were the worst of the infidels. It didn’t take Fahran long to find a full tank of diesel fuel, and buckets to fill, and strong young arms to help him douse the building and set it on fire, while the screams of those trapped inside were offered up to Allah as a sweet sacrifice. That is the story of how a young Taliban wannabe named Fahran became the hero of his village, a servant of the true faith, and a future leader of his tribe.
The British operated Camp Bastion nearby had also been left, with the gates standing open and all of the lights on. Loud Rock and Roll music played on the base speaker system. The Beatles sang on, over and over on autorepeat, about getting to the bottom and going back to the top of the slide, then stopping, and turning, and going for a ride, then getting to the bottom and seeing you again. Yeah, Yeah.
From Herat to Jalalabad, the coalition lines constricted, covering each other’s flanks from the air and the ground, as unit by unit converged on Kabul, and Bagram Airfield. After a lengthy conference between the allied commanders under Ferguson, convoy after convoy formed up. They were shadowed by s
treaming flights of helicopters overhead, while jets circled slowly to forestall any sneak attack on the historically massive column. Twenty-two thousand American servicemen and women had made the cut, and like the British, Dutch, Danish, Polish, Bulgarian, and other European contingents following them out, they were now 99% White.
Kyrgyzstan was a nation caught between two stones, and one was yielding to sand. The former US air base at Bishkek airport, since then a civilian airport, now hosted several gleaming Russian Federation fighter jets on the tarmac. It was only twenty miles from the official Russian air base in Kant. When Colonel Yuri Fyordev received orders direct from Moscow to help provide air cover to an AMERICAN column travelling up through Uzbekistan, which was uncertain territory these days, more than ever, he was speechless. That was quite an accomplishment, considering his personality. His briefing had convinced him that Putin had finally lost it. Either that, or the master manipulator has entered into a diabolical scheme with the Yankee imperialists.Why was he allowing the trapped Americans to evacuate Afghanistan north, towards Russia herself? And why would the crazy Americans try that route, in the winter? With nearly It made him think of Hitler’s attempt to fight on his Eastern Front in the same weather conditions, and the same time of year. Fyordev gave the orders anyway. His planes would fly a westward pattern, refueling as needed, while the coalition convoys under their own air cover, as much as they were able to refuel them and keep them in the air, leapfrogged north. Ultimately, in a few days, they could come under the air cover of Dnepr. Those who made the trip.
Chapter Seven
Revelation 3:9
King James Bible
“Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan, which say they are Jews, and are not, but do lie; behold, I will make them to come and worship before thy feet, and to know that I have loved thee.”
Jack Be Nimble, Jack Be Quick…
The U.N. Christmas Party was a bust. Gerta and U.S. Marine Col. Mark Smith, even together, couldn’t get the Chinese ambassador to the United Nations to calm down long enough to understand that yes, U.S. forces were operating under the auspices of the U.N., and no, the American regime (‘what regime?’, she thought) was not trying to reassert its’ imperialist power (even though this WAS their own soil). She sighed, wishing that was the case. The elected Vice President, Perry Bellefont, was a native Texan, and he had flown home three weeks ago to declare himself the President of the Republic of Texas. A month of bombings and air strikes from the sorted out Dyess and Goodfellow air force bases had stopped the advance of the Mexican army along I-10 in the western side of the state, but Houston had been declared an open “sanctuary city” in the east, as had San Antonio. Some kind of whack-job evangelical theocracy was solidifying along the coast north of Houston, but Bellefont was ignoring them while he used the armor and troops who had won control of Ft. Hood to try and push the Reconquistadores out of Austin. Unless or until he retook the former state capitol, he was stuck headquartered on the base. He had ordered flights from Sheppard to bomb the hell out of Dallas, which had declared itself a free city, and opened up the Red River Depot to the Second Battalion, Alpha Company of the Texas State Militia, who were now augmented with eighteen newly refurbished Bradley Fighting Vehicles, along with more than enough retired former armor jockeys from the depot who had volunteered to man the tanks alongside them. The armored militia was even now rolling west towards Dallas, picking up other militia units and volunteers along the way.
Gerta had seen the reports on some of these militia groups. Many of them, like the Southeast Michigan militia, had stepped in to fill the vacuum when local and state law enforcement collapsed. Now, with nobody to protect White citizens, they busied themselves carrying out dirty-handed ethnic cleansing operations in their area of operations, such as in the refugee flood plain south of Detroit. Others were little more than looters or warlords, while some were legally deputized posses taking orders from County Sheriffs or local Mayors who were holding things down in their own necks of the woods. Was that ‘neck of the wood’, or ‘necks of the wood’? English, even for her, had its challenges, at times.
Her meandering line of thought was broken by Col. Smith banging his fist on the table and demanding for the thousandth time, it seemed like, that he and his men be allowed to secure their nation’s capitol, such of it as remained. Having him around was certainly different from the herds of displaced politicians. The V.P. had taken half his staff and many of the surviving Secret Service with him. Gerta had been grateful for the relative peace and quiet for all of the four days which had passed before the quite reasonable Speaker Of The House slipped his security detail and walked uptown, alone, to a visit a specialty prostitute who ended up stabbing him to death and robbing his corpse when he dozed off. The foreign press corps, especially the British tabloids, had a field day with that story. It was still front page news in London.
The Colonel was red in the face now, and shaking, by the time she got the two men separated. She took the Marine officer to the side. “Colonel, the German delegation appreciates the sensitive nature of your position, and the U.N. welcomes your cooperation in our joint mission”.
“Cut the crap, lady, that slant eyed gook just wants to make sure I’m not headed out west to knock their yellow butts back into the ocean and hold them under with my boot until they stop bubbling. My parents were in San Mateo. WERE. Well, I’m not able to do that, not yet, so I’m going to secure my nation’s capital, first.”
Gerta blanched. She was never good with those who had suffered personal loss, and that was so many, these days. “Colonel, surely you know that the French Expeditionary Forces have been assigned the responsibility for security in the District of Columbia?”, she said, pointedly ignoring his insinuated threat directed towards the Chinese.
“Those frogs can jump back in the pond and take that big bad idea out there w ith them”, Smith snarled, pointing vaguely to the south. It took the interpreter a few seconds to realize that he meant the Statue of Liberty. She was glad that the French ambassador was drinking himself into a stupor across the room, trying to chat up a waitress. “We have enough of our own tired, our own poor, our own huddled masses. We always did. That open door is what got us into this mess, ma’am, and I’ll tell you another thing”, he steamrolled on, “from what I saw when we were leaving, the French better get back quick if they don’t want to be praying five times a day. They need to go put their own house in order, and most rickeytick.”
“I understand how you must feel, Colonel,” Gerta began…
”No ma’am, with all due respect, I don’t think you do. When you get rotated back home and see what your own country is turning into, with the Deutsch bank system collapsing under the weight of the E.U. beggar nations and the stock market closed and thousands of Muslims protesting until curfew, then maybe you will begin to, just a bit. But now in the here and now, no, ma’am, you don’t.”
Gerta could only think of one way to calm the Colonel down. She might be pushing forty, but she always tried to look her best. She put on her most winning smile. “Okay, fair enough. Maybe I have been isolated here. Things have been moving so fast. Let’s go back to my office, and you can tell me what’s really going on, and what you and your men plan to do about it. Then, before he could object or beg off, the German translator took Smith by the elbow of his uniform jacket and turned him about face, then steered him down the hall by putting her arm in his. Behind them, the Chinese ambassador continued to whine and mutter like a cat whose tail had just got stuck under a rocking chair.
Two hours was an eternity these days, the way her schedule ran. When what turned into a working dinner had ended, however, she had to admit that she was disappointed to see Col. Smith go. His bold plan, lacking an intact chain of command, was to lead his six re-formed companies of U.S. Marines in pacifying the capitol and the buildings of the Federal government, as a symbolic gesture to the Air Force that holding Omaha didn’t mean holding every card in the deck. It also would
help deny them legitimate executive authority. Technically, that still rested with the rogue Vice President, who had not resigned his office before declaring himself the President of a just-made up Republic. That was why so many soldiers and Federal law enforcement had gone with him, despite the confusion over Texas’s stated nationhood. Gerta had found herself agreeing to help him supply and transport his jarheads and coordinate as a liaison with the German Expeditionary Force. She would put Col. Smith in touch with Major Strosser in Philadelphia. He planned that private citizen militias in Northern Virginia, who had created a White enclave there with the help of a few dozen local skinheads, could protect his southern flank. So now, the racists were the good guys. White hats, instead of White hoods. What had she gotten herself into?
A Gaze Blank And Pitiless As The Sun
Major John W. McNabb, the latest media darling in a world where media and celebrity had both been truncated, fidgeted in his seat. Delegates from Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho, and both Dakotas debated joining the coalition of Midwestern states now coalescing into a military and economic Confederation. His goal was to turn the mutual defense pact into something more, something tighter. In the four weeks since he had been in St. Louis and reassigned as the conference’s delegate from Indiana, he had questioned that order, more than once. It was a little late to call it a reConstitutional Convention halfway through it, but more than one of the other representatives were using those terms. Of course, the former high school history teacher knew that the first Constitutional Convention hadn’t been intended as such, either…at least not by most of the attendees. Since being pulled off of counter-insurgent operations in St. Louis and declared a politico, he had gotten halfway used to sleeping indoors regularly again. And running water. And electricity. Hot meals. All of it. But he couldn’t help but feel a little guilty that his sister and brother and their kids, as well as his mom, didn’t have it nearly so easy, back in Warsaw. He also felt bad that he hadn’t been able to celebrate Christmas with them. It was the first time he had missed the family event since…well, ever. Not that he had been the life of the party, when his team had dragged him out to eat on the 25th. So much guilt. He even felt guilty that they had all pitched in to give him a matching set of Colt Combat Commander .45s with pearl handles, like Patton. He hadn’t given them anything but a hard time. Compared to the other gnawing guilt that he choked down every moment of every day, though, that one was minor.