The Hasten the Day Trilogy

by Billy Roper

  “What’s the disposition of enemy forces, currently?” Smith asked. John and Fred both started to speak at the same time. Chuckling, McNabb gave Grace the floor.

  “They had no air power left except for a few prop engine transports and a couple of helicopters, none of their jets or bombers were even operational, and their navy had already been reduced to speed boats and barges that would make a Somali pirate go home in embarrassment.” General Grace explained. “Now they don’t even have those. No armor, either. Just truckloads and cartloads of skinny black devils with AKs and M4s.”

  “During my diplomatic discussions with the leaders of the Orange Free State, they indicated that they feel confident that they can handle anything anybody within a thousand miles of them can throw their way, now,” the Speaker added. They’re driving every black out of the northern half of South Africa. With our Marines and air support helping, of course. Everything above the Orange River, really. And, I bet they’ll hold it, this time.”

  General Harrison sat down and reached his arm over the map, to cover the southern tip of the continent with his hand. “Okay, so that’s got them covered. I’m sure that in a few years they’ll be strong enough to make good friends. Our losses were minimal, less than a hundred casualties, and those all on the ground. I’m making this call. It’s time to reel in our air assets back to the Eisenhower, and disengage from their cleanup operations. Let the Orangers grow their teeth and claws by finishing the job by themselves. It’ll strengthen their pride. We’ll leave a company of Marines to serve as advisors, but no more. We have other fish to fry.” The other three officers all nodded solemnly. That’s why Harrison was the Commander in Chief. He knew when to fish, and when to cut bait.

  “Now then,” he continued. “Let’s talk about the next step. I want the Fifth to go up the Mozambique Channel, and stay close enough to the coast that everybody in Dar es Salaam, Mogadishu, and the fly traps of Ethiopia sees for themselves that Americans are not extinct. They’re gonna retrace their retreat from four years ago, in reverse, right through the Gulf of Aden and up the Red Sea. They oughta remember the way back.” He smiled mirthlessly. “If they see anybody looking at them sideways, they’re to take them out, from Port Sudan on. Constant air overwatch, too. Jeddah might be dicey to get by. Mark, do we know anything about the state of the Suez?”

  “Actually, the canal’s eighty miles from the radioactive zone of Cairo, so that’s not gonna be an issue,” the Secretary of State responded. “An Islamic State backed militia holds Ismailia, halfway through. They charge a toll to any non-Muslim shipping that comes by, but the waterway is still open and navigable. It’s non-negotiable, but we can either bluff or blast our way through. Now, Said, at the other end, is its own Caliphate, gone fat and soft from tariffs and tolls from that side. I figure we tell them that we’re coming through, and if they don’t like it, we’re gonna be coming back in a week with 11,000 homesick Marines that aren’t gonna be half as nice we are about it.” They all shared a laugh over that imagined scene.

  “Excellent!” Harrison remarked. “Like you set up with Athens when you met that Golden Dawn lady, the Greeks will help with air cover through the Aegean. Then is the hard part. We’ll be on I.S. turf. The Cannakale to Gallipoli strait. It’s wide enough, but remember what happened to the Aussies there in W.W. I.. “ McNabb and Smith nodded. They remembered the old song ‘Waltzing Matilda’ song, even if their military history expertise had a few blind spots. General Grace scratched behind his ear, then spoke up.

  “Too bad that we have to come out the same way, or we could blow them to hell and back on the way in. That’s what makes it so hard.” Fred noted. That had been on all of their minds. It was on Vice Admiral Davidson’s with the fleet, too. “Then, phase two, right through Istanbul, to the Black Sea. Man.”

  John coughed. The other Generals looked at him. He’d sat back and let them carry the conversation most of the way. “Maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s the answer. “

  Harrison shook his head, not understanding. “It’s late, or early. I’ve been up all night, and I’m old. What do you mean?”

  “Well, Mark has been wracking his brain to find a diplomatic solution to not having to fight our way in and out, that’s his job. Fred has been trying to figure out a military solution to pointing the gun at the Islamic State. That’s his job. And you’ve been thinking about when to pull the trigger. That’s your job. I just remembered what my job is,” the Speaker said matter-of-factly. They all waited. “My job is to do what we need to do and keep our German and Greek allies happy, at the same time. They want a diversion in Western Turkey ? Something to keep refugees from running that way when Ferguson hits them in the East?” He paused, pointing at Istanbul. “Well, why not give them one!?!”

  The pain of war cannot exceed the woe of aftermath…

  In over three and half years, no shipments had come into Hawaii. No flights, either. Not from the States, and not from the Chinese, who had briefly occupied the islands. The only visitors during that time had been a few intrepid Japanese traders in fishing boats. Them, and the slavers. Hawaii had nothing to trade. The Chinese occupation had only really affected the survivors in Honolulu, but it was an unlivable ghost town of falling buildings and rotting trash. In those sandy streets starvation had led to cannibalism, once the invaders left. It had been a hungry time, even before they’d come.

  After the first year, when the Chinese had gone, the first slavers arrived. At first, they were drawn by the hope of looting the outer fringes of fallen American civilization. When they saw just how far it had fallen, they lured surviving White women by the dozens onto their ships with the promise of food. Some of them, perhaps, didn’t even mind being taken. The slaving expeditions ended after two crews were overwhelmed and slaughtered by a tribe of former surfers. Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you. Kowabunga, dude. Gnarly.

  By the second year after Cinco Day, long after the last boat had left and the last plane had flown out, the population bottleneck hit bottom. Out of the nearly one and a half million Hawaiians in the islands before the collapse, less than twenty-three thousand were still alive on Oahu when the Supercarrier Gerald R. Ford, the heart of the Sixth fleet, pulled into Pearl-Hickam. Those survivors had the hard and angry stares of people who had eaten their pets, then eaten their neighbors’ pets, and then eaten their neighbors. There was a wildness, a nervous flightiness, in their faces, even when they smiled. None of them were really all there. Part of their souls had been lost, along the way. Those who didn’t quickly become dependent on handouts were the ones that really had to be watched. Three patrols went missing, widening the perimeter into the city.

  After warily setting up base security at Pear-Hickam and making contact with several tribes of survivors, the New American naval contingent discovered that the current population level was probably close to sustainable, given the rich Hawaiian soil. The tribes had separated out by race, then fought for the dwindling food supplies available. Because the Chinese had focused much of their animosity on the Polynesian natives, the Whites had a numerical advantage. While the Fifth fleet was strafing and bombing and shelling in South Africa, the Sixth fleet was planting the Navy Marine golf course in corn. The base had been trashed by the 7th fleet when they left it in retreat, and by the Chinese when they abandoned the islands, and by the local residents looking for anything edible or that could be used as a weapon. While two battalions worked to make the barracks livable and to reestablish electricity and potable water supply, another three reestablished order in the city and surrounding suburbs. Some of the survivors came begging, some were stand-offish after their experience with the Chinese, and some of them saw the Marines as meat on the hoof. By the time the Fifth was able to disengage from South Africa, the Sixth fleet had pacified the entire island of Oahu. They only had to kill half the survivors to bring the other half peace.

  In the aftermath of the pacification of Oahu, the Marines found that a percentage of the sur
vivors had not resorted to cannibalism, but had looted and scrounged and hunted and grown enough crops on small plots they could defend to make it. Hundreds had retreated into the forests, jungles, and rugged mountains, and eked out an existence, there. The island’s post reclamation population ended up being twelve thousand civilians and an equal number of military personnel. A handful of survivors from the Four Seasons Resort at Manele Bay on Lanai, the next to the nearest island, actually churned in on pedal-powered tourist paddle-wheel boats, seeing the reconnaissance flights from the Ford’s air wing overhead. They reported that all of the residents of Lanai City, and as far as they knew everyone on Molokai, were dead. The Navy established a strict doctrine of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ when it came to processing survivors. What happened on the island, stayed on the island. Too many dark deeds had been necessitated, or made possible, by the collapse of civilization. There would be no investigations, no prosecutions, no trials, and no retribution. Everybody got a clean slate.

  That turned out to be a difficult policy to enforce when they finally reached the island of Hawaii, and began to clear Hilo. The airport terminals were piled high with the skeletons of hundreds who had waited, hopelessly, for rescue. The cut marks on their bones told as much as the ashes of the cookfires on the runways. Signs of human habitation, such as smoke and new clearings, could be seen in the Hilo Watershed Reserve Forest, but nobody there wanted to be rescued, any more. The Navy left them alone.

  In the end, all of the White Hawaiian survivors interested in becoming a Territory of New America, numbering around fifteen thousand, were consolidated onto Oahu, without any crowding. The nonWhite population was peacefully relocated on the other islands. Secretary of State Smith made a deal with the Argentinians to ship cans of corned beef, canned meat, and bags of soybeans, wheat, and potatoes by the container load to Oahu until local agriculture could become more self-sufficient on the island. That deal had been surprisingly easy to make, despite the protestations of the powerful Jewish lobby in Buenos Aires, now the single largest population of Jews in the world. They hadn’t been too keen on Argentina making any deal with New America, but they’d been overruled by the military dictatorship’s concern that their war with Brazil wasn’t going very well. They’d already lost Rosario. The Brazilian front lines were staring at them, just across the Rio Parana. The examples of Paraguay and Uruguay after they’d capitulated to Brasilia convinced the Argentinians that they didn’t want to be next. The Argentinians were glad to send a container ship of food every week for a year to Hawaii, in exchange for six 10 kiloton tactical nuclear weapons. Especially with a New American destroyer escorting every shipment.

  I once was lost, but now am found. ‘Was blind, but now I see…

  She didn’t care how smart they were, or what they had been through, they just didn’t understand. It wasn’t fair. They didn’t know how she felt. She wasn’t a kid any more, she was nineteen years old. She was a woman, now. Nineteen was grown! She was definitely old enough to know what she wanted to do with her life. If she was old enough to move across country, live in Chicago, and go to the Art Institute, she was old enough to live her own life. It was her life, after all. Besides, Hope wasn’t like most teenagers. She had seen more and done more than most of the snoopy, nosey psycho stalker dudes her adoptive dad had trying to follow her everywhere she went. A lot of what she had seen and done she never talked about, because nobody would believe her, but she had seen some stuff. Done some stuff. Forgotten some stuff, on purpose. Tried to, others.

  A part of her hated to hurt John’s fe elings. Hope had never really caught onto calling him ‘dad’, much less ‘daddy’. She had been too old, and too far along in life, by the time she came to live with the Speaker and his wife in St. Louis. Hope had never really felt close to Carolyn, either, but her adoptive dad’s wife had been nice and tried to be her friend, which was good enough, she guessed. They were all the family she had left, so they had to do. She used his name. But, Hope felt that she just couldn’t be serious all the time, and so driven, so devoted, so disciplined, so stern, as her John was. He was, like, really OCD. Stressed out all the time, over everything. No fun. Well, sometimes he did things for her, and she knew that he tried. It was just that it was hard for anything or anybody to be as important to him as his cause. Even himself. He was way beyond driven. He was committed, or should be, like he’d always joked. Hope missed his lame jokes and puns, all the time.

  Then, there was the Klan group in Arkansas that had taken her in and helped her out. She hated to disappoint Jason or the rest of them, either. After all, if it wasn’t for them, she would either be dead, or still on the run, doing whatever she had to do to survive. That was no kind of life. Because of them she’d had a few years of normal life. A chance to relax and learn and draw. When it came down to it, she hadn’t been as into art as she had gotten older, but what else was there to do? Chicago was growing back and the place to be, she heard her friends at school say. So, she pretended to really want to go to the Art Institute. The only way that her adoptive dad would let her go was if a team of minders from his constantly growing private security force went with her.

  The weird thing was, Hope never really knew how many of the security people there were. Of course, there were the full-time staff ones, the half dozen who lived with them in The Warehouse, with the pilots for the helicopter he kept on the roof. They had become her good friends, over the last few years. Like the platoon of them that stayed next door to the Old Courthouse capital building, they wore the black uniform of John’s private bodyguard force. So did the platoon at the airport, and the one that officially travelled with her to Chicago. But she knew that there were more of them, because even though the uniforms stayed the same, they kept rotating in and out, different faces, same attitude. Like they were all her big brother, or something. Jeesh. They were always trying to get her in trouble, and tell their boss on her.

  Hope had really started slipping out, at first, just to see if she could get away with it. It was fun to see how long it would take them to find out she was gone. Sometimes she would hide and pretend to have run off, leaving a window open. The she would watch to see how often they checked on her, and how they kept tabs on her activity without being creepy. She also tried to learn their habits and routines, like when they patrolled, but they kept changing up the patterns on her. It was like they were trying to confuse her, or something. All this paranoia and heavy-handed security was a bit much. Just because of that suicide bomber, and a couple of sniper attempts to assassinate John since, that was no reason to think anybody would come after her. Gosh. Didn’t they understand, she wasn’t a politician or anybody important? She just wanted to have a life, without anybody telling her what to do.

  Most of the time the security goons found her pretty quickly. She knew they had cameras and microphones set up everywhere, she had found a couple of them. Not knowing where they all were was kind of weird and embarrassing to think about. Sometimes, after some practice, she was able to hide and watch them looking for her, that was fun. Then she would come out and act like she had been in the bathroom all along and had no idea why they were all so upset. She’d even tried to flirt with a couple of them, to test how professional they were, but they were just as serious as cancer, and ignored it. That’s when she started sneaking out, for real.

  Nigel wasn’t like the other guys she had known. He wasn’t a Nationalist, he wasn’t even an American, and he didn’t think her adoptive dad was a god. In fact, he didn’t even know who John McNabb was! Hope thought it was impossible that all British people were as cool as Nigel was. He was so brave, so adventuresome! She loved to listen to his story of how he had been an orphan, and unemployed like a lot of people in Yorkshire. He’d hitchhiked his way across Britain, riding on the back of army trucks to Liverpool. He’d been hungry and he’d seen things and done things, like Hope had. They had a lot in common. His parents were dead, too, killed in the mopups when the British shariatowns had lashed out against th
eir hosts, before being burned out. It was so sad.

  Hope was so glad that he’d quit his job on the ship bringing refrigerated insulin and aircraft parts across the Atlantic, and had jumped ship when it landed in Chicago. He wasn’t technically a student at the University, but he hung around there a lot with a small crowd of really cool, independent thinking freedom lovers. They liked to hang out in the Renaissance section of the Art Institute and have philosophical discussions about why the looters had destroyed the paintings but hadn’t gone to the trouble of breaking the statues. Hope still agreed with the Christian and Nationalist ideals she had been taught. She even still prayed, especially right before tests. But, she didn’t go to church in Chicago except for when her John came to visit and made her. She liked the intellectual discussions and the nihilist ideas Nigel and his friends had. Sometimes they smoked a little pot to think more freely, but that was all for the sake of art, and to expand their minds. Nigel was the kind of guy her John would definitely not approve of. Hope thought he was a hottie.

  She didn’t really like to smoke it, herself, it just made her feel dumb and not in control. She didn’t like that. She was depressed enough, naturally. But, they did party with some people who did other things. It seemed like the only time she ever heard from her John was when she got into trouble, so she made sure that she got into trouble a lot, and that he found out about it. A little spray-paint on a statue of some old dead guys went a long way towards getting his attention. When Nigel had first met John, neither of the men had been very impressed by the other, she could tell. Maybe someday they could get along, if she and Nigel got married. Her kids might even have a cute British accent, if they were around their dad growing up, she hoped.

  After she had to go to that dumb rehab place and learn those stupid steps, she decided to play it cool for a while. Carolyn was being such a you-know-what, threatening to force her to come home. Didn’t she realize that Hope was a legal adult? She could serve in the Unified Command Armed Forces, or vote, or get married and have babies, if she wanted to. But, if they stopped paying the tuition, or told the professors to kick her out, she’d be expelled. Of course if John told her professors to, they would. Everybody tried to do what the Speaker wanted, to make him happy. It made her sick. Plus, Nigel was busy with a new job he had, and couldn’t see her until it was finished. He’d had a courier deliver a letter to tell her about it. She wanted to see him, but he had been clear that he couldn’t, for a few weeks or so. That really bit. She missed him, and she was sooooo bored! There was nothing to do. Her life sucked. Why couldn’t she be with the man she loved?