by Billy Roper
At first, the relations between the Americans and the Aussies had been awkward. For the locals, it was kind of like watching your big brother get his butt kicked on the playground. You were embarrassed for him, and disappointed, but he was still your brother…just not so big in your eyes, ever again. As the weeks turned to months and then years, both sides had adapted. The fleets kept their machinery and weapons systems limbered up and operational, and helped earn their keep from time to time. The Australians learned to cope with over twenty-three thousand ticked off and resentful Yanks. It all worked out.
More than a few American servicemen requested discharge when it came time to sail. A surprising number had found time to meet ‘Shelias’ and start families. Their past lives seemed a long time ago and a world away to them. Something better left in the past. They weren’t considered deserters, under the circumstances. They were granted honorable discharges and wished well with their new lives. As many as eight hundred who arrived never got back on board, and felt happier for it.
The 5th and 6th weren’t leavin g the Australians completely in the lurch, however. Two destroyers, three frigates, and a cruiser with support craft would be left behind as a continued ‘joint command’ stationed in Perth. Most important to the Royal Australian Navy, five attack submarines would remain, to help patrol the coast. Another destroyer and two frigates would be left in Auckland, to help the Kiwis. Since the fleets had arrived topheavy with Marines and U.S. Army Infantry they’d picked up from Bahrain and Kuwait and Iraq, they also left four companies of each in Perth. The plan was to drop off another regiment of Infantry at Robertson Barracks in Darwin, on the way out.
In the final briefing before boarding, they had been told that the entire combined fleets would churn NorthEast to Honolulu, to reconnoiter the situation there. No communications had come out of Hawaii in over two and a half years. They had no idea what they would find. But, it had been theirs, so they were going to stop and check out Pearl-Hickam, as their first stop. For all of them, it would be their first time on American soil since Cinco Day. However, one of the carrier groups would be diverted West for a different mission of an extended nature, they were advised…
Matt’s wingman peeled away with him as he turned inland over Darwin, leaving the startling green ocean behind. His flight group spread out to cover more ground, but stayed in visual range of each other. They throttled back, knowing the target they were seeking was going to be hard to see on the ground in the built up city. He wished he could plug his IPod in and listen to a little inspirational heavy metal. Smoke rose from dozens of fires, some accidental and some deliberate, around the urban landscape. One of the smoke plumes, ahead and below, had the dark and oily look of burning fuel. That would mark their prey. In seconds they were there, swooping in. Lt. Ball flipped up the cover and gently tapped the switch, sending half of the 570 rounds from his 20 mm gatling cannon chirping out to chew up the road in a line leading up to and through the crowd pushing against the stalled APC trailing smoke. His wingman and another Super Hornet followed his lead, widening the path of destruction. Zipping past the scene of carnage, they turned as tight as possible for another pass.
George couldn’t believe his eyes or ears. A whine and roar had come up on them and tore away the black horde from one side of the Badger like a cat swiping its paw at a litter of mice. The survivors scattered, shrieking, as the jets passed overhead. The driver wasted no time wondering who had been their deliverer, or why. He simply cranked the steering wheel around and said a silent prayer of gratitude as they bounced over two lanes of still moving bodies and off the shoulder through a parking lot, out of the rapidly evaporating crowd. Pieter bit his lip as they bounced over the culvert and into the open field, but they didn’t stop until they had crossed the field and reached the safety of a grove of trees. There they braked hard and took a look at Sam’s injuries. While they gave him a shot of morphine to get him home on, the silver jets with the fake cockpits painted under their bottoms made a fourth pass over the ambush area. Dipping their wings, they turned away and headed South. It looked like somebody up there liked them, after all.
After a brief shelling of the waterfront by the big guns onboard the Eisenhower Carrier Task Force’s ships, and vicious bursts of missiles from the two cruisers, the Amphibious Landing Crafts grated to a stop on the sands of North Beach and South Beach. The black residents of Durban fled before them, on foot and on bicycles and even in wagons. The Marines met no resistance that first day, and occupied the city by dusk. Two days later, the last of the blacks had been herded out of town, and they reached Pietermaritzburg. The next morning, having made radio contact, Orange Free State commandos met the Marines at Lake Howick. By the end of the first month after the American’s arrival, the Orangers had occupied and held a wide channel to the sea stretching between Lesotho and Swaziland. They were no longer a landlocked nation, and there was nothing that the SADF or the Zims could do about it.
Chapter Three
"I have given my life to alleviate the sufferings of Africa. There is something that all white men that have lived here must learn and know; that these individuals are a subrace; they have neither the intellectual, mental or emotional abilities to equate or share in any of the functions of our civilization.
I have given my life to try and bring them the advantages which our civilization must offer, but I have become well aware that we must retain this status; white, the superior, and they the inferior, for whenever a white man seeks to live among them as their equal, they will either destroy him or devour him, and they will destroy all his work; and so for any existing relationship or for any benefit to this people let white men from anywhere in the world who would come to help Africa remember that you must continually retain the status; you the master, and they inferior, like children that you would help or teach. Never fraternize with them as equals, never accept them as your social equals; or they will devour you; they will destroy you." - Dr. Albert Schweitzer
With the lights out, it's less dangerous Here we are now, entertain us
I feel stupid and contagious
Here we are now, entertain us…
She’d been almost all the way to Klamath Falls, pedaling ferociously through the rain and the mud and practicing having conversations without using the words “Brother” or “Sister”, when Kelly saw electric lights in the distance. Swerving through every puddle on the side of the road to avoid the fast-moving trucks that roared by every five minutes was tiresome. She’d hitched a ride with a Deseret DPS Patrol to the border, then hopped out, drug her bike out of the back of the truck, and gotten into character. Now, on day three, Kelly had all of the character she could stand. And then some.
Jimmy, for some reason, had really wanted to find out if New America was arming the Afrikaners. Maybe Prophet Rammell and the Council of Fifty were worried about being marginalized by the competition. Whatever it was, he’d tasked her with checking on the smuggling operation, personally. The three South African expats in Ogden had been arrested for espionage and possession of an unlicensed shortwave transceiver once it had become clear that their role in the arms deals was over. That had left the only trail to follow all the way up here in Oregon.
The lights turned out to be the airport, which seemed to be the focus of all the truck traffic coming and going. It looked like this part of Oregon was busy, at least. Maybe if there were that many new people in town, one more wouldn’t be noticed. They might even have some pace where travelers could buy a hot meal and get out of the rain. She’d passed a Vietnamese restaurant a ways back, coming into town, that had been burned out, and a closed down mom and pop pizza joint. After what seemed like another hour of wet pedaling, even her blisters had blisters. She almost missed the hand-lettered sign advertising a road house. It said ‘BBQ’ and ‘Open’. That’s all that mattered to Kelly.
The place had electricity and a solid roof going for it, but it was about as redneck as you could get. Kelly winced at the loud acoustic country band sc
reaming and thumping in the corner, but she was glad to be dry. She shed her shoes and coat at the door like it looked as if everybody else did, and squelched over the bare wood floor to a booth in her wet socks. As soon as the band finished their set, a short-haired waitress with a prominent mole on her cheek came over to take her order.
“Hey! How are you doin’? It’s been just rainin’ cats and dogs out there, hadn’t it?” she asked rhetorically. Kelly smiled, nodded and wrung out her hair. Hopefully, her cover legend as a private mail courier was convincing. That sack of fake letters she carried was heavy enough, that it’d better do some good. The waitress ran through the specials while she pulled it back into a dangling damp bun against her neck. There were no menus here. The choices were limited. More than anything else, Kelly needed something hot. She ordered hot coffee, taking advantage of not being in Deseret, and the BBQ plate special, not asking too closely about what it was they had barbecued. Hopefully not anybody’s pet or road kill that had lain in the rain for too long. Barbecue could cover up a lot of smells and flavors. Kelly noticed that every table said ‘grace’ over their food before digging in, so she emulated them.
Halfway through her plate, having used the bathroom and changed into some dry clothes from the waterproof backpack bungeed to the back of her bike, Kelly was becoming pretty sure that it was deer meat. That’s what she told herself, anyway. As she sipped her second cup of coffee, the whole road house grew quiet, as if at a hidden signal. People shushed the few people still talking, and the waitress made a production out of making a ‘hold it down’ motion with her hands, before reaching up above the bar to turn on the shortwave receiver there. It was time for the news, she realized, and the news really meant something, these days, to these people. It meant hope, and it meant their future. That was something to think about.
After a minute of crackle and squawks, the strains of “America the Beautiful’, New America’s national anthem, strengthened, then swelled to fill the room. First one, then another, then the rest of the restaurant patrons rose and placed their hand over their heart, just like in the old days. One table held four soldiers, U.S. Marines, by the look of them, except for their shoulder patches. They were New American Marines, and crisply saluted. Probably they’d flown into the airport. That was worth remembering. Kelly noticed, as she stood up to play along, that the road house actually had a New American flag in one corner. She couldn’t get used to the starless blue field in the upper left, but it held the focus of everyone in the place. It was hard to keep track, as her tired legs didn’t like to keep standing there, but Kelly believed she counted all eight verses, sung by a choir. A few of the people tried to sing along, at least the first two verses that they knew, already. The last words came, more softly, as the music quietened, but somehow more urgently, for it, as if you were supposed to have to listen harder…
’”America! America!
God shed his grace on thee Till nobler men keep once again Thy whiter jubilee!”
The tired, wet, worn looking folk tried nobly to scoot their chairs back into place and sit down without making any noise. They were really into this, and didn’t want to miss a word, obviously. The broadcast began with the familiar voice of the announcer:
“Good evening, my fellow Americans, and welcome to the Post Dispatch Radio Network. On tonight’s broadcast, we bring you a press conference, uncut and unedited, held this morning at the Old Courthouse building in St. Louis. The capital press corps was received by Carolyn McNabb, the Press Secretary to the office of the Speaker of the House of the New American Congress. Here are her remarks…”
After something about discussing with Maine their desire to seek annexation to Quebec, and a fluff statement about how healthy everyone was with the extra exercise and the lack of processed foods (or very much food at all, for many people, and the sick folks had all died off, Kelly thought uncharitably), Carolyn apologized for being late to the press conference, quipping that she had been mildly sick this morning, but it was nothing very contagious, she felt sure. Kelly had never met Carolyn in person during her time in St. Louis, but her husband had mentioned her often. Too often, really.
A reporter from the London Daily Times apparently raised his hand and asked a long question prefaced by stating that the population of Florida had dropped over 60% since Cinco Day due to the high number of retirees dying off from a lack of medicine or health care Then he asked how the administration felt about the Cuban Army bypassing the White enclave in the panhandle in order to lay siege to the New African city of Jacksonville. Carolyn reminded him that starvation and mass genocide, by both the New Africans and the Cubans, had brought down those population numbers in the Sunshine State, too, but that aside from a deep and abiding interest in the well-being of the Whites in that enclave, the administration had no comment on the conflict in Florida.
Some of the people around her began to eat again as they listened, so Kelly felt safe to finish her barbecue, too. The next question came from a young girl with a twangy drawl who identified herself as representing the Dallas Morning News. She played off the previous British reporter by asking Carolyn if New America would accept King William’s invitation to a summit of all diplomatically recognized North American states, to be held in London. Kelly could just imagine that. La Republica del Norte, Mexico, The Republic of New America, Deseret, and the Republic of Quebec, all at the same table with the Republic of Texas? Even not inviting New Africa or the People’s Republic of California or Nunavut, that would be crazy. She had a sudden vision of the Michael Corleone in the restaurant bathroom scene from one of The Godfather movies. She snorted into her coffee, earning a sharp look from the waitress. To cover, she held up her cup for a refill. She had really missed caffeine, yes siree.
Carolyn demurred that no date for the proposed summit had been set, but of course in theory, New America was a peace-loving nation who wished to get along with all of its neighbors on the continent. That brought a stifled blurt that was acknowledged as Carolyn recognized a journalist from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung who exclaimed “How can you say that when you have admitted to arming rebels in South Africa?”
Kelly actually spit a bit of coffee, that time, for real. A few disjointed thoughts popped into her head at once. One, absurdly, was that the reporter must not have voted for the NPD. Second, that she really, really needed a way to stay in touch with the home office, or at least stay current with the news, when she was sent on these secret squirrel missions. And thirdly, it was going to be a long, wet pedal of puddles back home.
Flustered, she barely caught Carolyn’s answer, just enough to learn that the New Americans had actually landed Marines and bombed and virtually invaded South Africa on behalf of the Orangers. That was way beyond the pale. Then the press secretary pulled the kind of ace in the hole political trick that only works once or twice, and only if the conditions are right, by telling the assembled reporters that she had an announcement of a personal nature to make, then pausing dramatically, then telling them in an excited voice heard around the world that she was pregnant. ‘What a drama queen!’, Kelly thought, but it worked, as the entire press corps erupted into ‘awwws!’ and congratulations, then applause.
Just when the conference seemed to be over, a different voice was heard. It was a voice that caused a tightness in Kelly’s stomach. She had heard that voice during her months of confinement and interrogation. It belonged to a man who had brought her shame, disgrace, humiliation, and nearly cost her her life. He had also brought her hero status, a promotion, and taught her a bit about forgiveness. The Speaker must have been backstage while his wife and press secretary fenced with the journalists, she imagined. Kelly pictured him pushing through the curtain and grinning that goofy grin she had only seen once, on the day he had come to tell her that she was free to go. She imagined him taking his tiny little waif of a pixie wife into his arms and hugging her. All she actually heard the voice say was “I love you, sweetheart!”, but her mind could fill in the blanks.
Being trained in psychological operations, Kelly recognized Stockholm Syndrome easily enough, even in herself. That didn’t make what was going on inside her any less real, though. She couldn’t coldly intellectualize it away. She was jealous. Knowing that really, really made her angry, at everybody involved.
Her good mood ruined, Kelly paid two New American gold-backed dollar notes for the meal and a generous tip, and another note and two pre-1965 silver dimes for a small but clean and warm and dry room in the back of the road house. She was so exhausted that she slept hard until they woke her up for breakfast. It was still raining, and getting chillier, as she headed back south, all alone.
Dawn is breaking everywhere, light a candle, curse the glare Draw the curtains I don't care 'cause it's alright
I will get by, I will get by, I will get by, I will survive….
The desert can be as cold at night as it is hot in the daytime. That was especially true in early October. The Twenty-third mounted infantry, Company B, didn’t need any army field manual to tell them that. The Republic of Texas hadn’t gotten around to printing any field manuals, so that was a good thing. If your sergeant didn’t tell you something, you didn’t need to know it, especially not from a book. Most of the men in B Company were from West Texas, anyway, so they were aware of the desert also getting cold as much as they were used to riding until the horses’ sweat turned frothy. Truth to tell, some of them had been a little saddle sore when they first signed up, but that wore away fast. By the time they rode into New Mexico, they were all walking like John Wayne, when they walked at all. The Texican mounted infantry had a general rule: ‘don’t lay when you can sleep, don’t sit when you can lay, don’t stand when you can sit, and don’t sit on the ground when you’ve got a perfectly good horse made for it’. They dry camps they’d made the last few days, up until this morning, had been rough, though.