by Billy Roper
She discovered that most of the m embers of ‘Americans Abroad’ were from the East Coast of the United States, and had fled before the major cities there were destroyed. Now, they felt like they couldn’t go home, and weren’t accepted in England, either. Hope tried during one conversation to inquire about whether they had considered returning to North America and living in New America, where there was plenty of room for new citizens of the right ancestry. Invariably the response was that they would, if they could be assured of a future there. Only the three or four thousand blacks, Hispanics, and Asians among them were unenthusiastic about that option, of course. They knew they were ineligible for New American citizenship. Their primary goal was to convince European nations, England included, to renew their previous peacekeeping efforts in the Mid-Atlantic States.
France seemed to be doing a bang-up job of nailing down New England, but for their own and the Quebecois’ interests. As February began, shiny ships once again came to the new world from the old. French colonists landing in Portland, Maine, and coming ashore for the first time, were surprised at how normal the city looked. Electric power had been restored, at least for several hours a day, and many of the citizens who had left the city during its three years of near abandonment were returning. Unlike Boston to their south, Portland had been spared the worst of the ‘Da Trots’ superflu pandemic that had ravaged the East Coast killing millions even before Providence, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore had been nuked. And, as its name implied, it had a port going for it. Best of all, here they could escape the crowded cities and bad memories of France, where the long and bitter struggle to round up and drive out the Muslims had been exhausting, in every sense.
The former megalopolis strip from Boston to D.C. was a spottily radioactive, ruined, depopulated, savage wasteland. The East Coast south of D.C. was even worse, a pastiche of tribal territories ruled by gangs, warlords, chieftains, and neo-feudal black racists. Almost all of the Whites had either fled the southeastern coastal states, or been killed. Not only was there not much worth reporting on in New Africa to draw the international media there, there wasn’t much to salvage there, either, to draw in the U.N. for another risky mission. If they wanted to see flies crawling on the skinny faces of starving children, there were a score of places in the world where they could find that.
Virtually none of the ‘Americans Abroad’ expats were Mormons, so Deseret’s theocracy held little appeal for them. A few, a relative very few, were attracted to the promise of a new egalitarian, multiracial lifestyle in Rev. Ike’s Church of the New Dispensation territory, and arranged passage via private yacht and cruiser across the Atlantic to Houston. Half of the nonWhite Americans eventually chose that route. This went on for some time, until three months later, after making all of the inquiries she could to look for Nigel with no luck, Hope told the leader of the group her real name. From that moment on, the focus of ‘Americans Abroad’ changed.
Britain’s North Sea platforms provided enough oil , and with their refinery production increased, enough petrol, for domestic consumption. Aside from the economic depression that they had suffered along with every other European nation with the collapse of the U.S. system, they had muddled through pretty well. Terrorist attacks and a multi-faceted global war had led to the British National Party winning a majority of the seats in Parliament, and appointing a nationalist Prime Minister. After the intifadas had led them to emulate Germany and France in deporting their significant Muslim population, they decided to do the same with the rest of the back-colonizers from India, Jamaica, and other former British possessions in the third world. Their Scottish neighbor was reluctant to do the same, but a few more months of protests and riots drove them over the edge, and they followed the British example.
With much of the dead weight off of the dole and unemployment lessened, Britain began to focus on rebuilding their manufacturing base and improving their overall selfsufficiency. By the beginning of year two, an active intercontinental trade with the fledgling New America began, and England quickly became the new nation’s largest trading partner, followed by Greater Germany and the Republic of Quebec. As Hope herself had discovered, there was regular transAtlantic traffic. If the 128,000 Americans (of White ancestry, who were eligible for New American citizenship) who had fled to England via boat and plane just before or after Cinco Day chose to return to their native land, Hope knew how to get them there. It was a fortunate thing, logistically, that the U.S. economy and the dollar had been in such decline in the months leading up to the collapse. There usually would have been a lot more American tourists stranded in Europe, otherwise.
In the meantime, however, a member of the ‘Americans Abroad’ group trying to curry favor with the New American leadership told a BBC reporter who Hope was, and within a week, the Speaker of the House had been informed. He responded by sending a letter to the New American Ambassador in England, a man who’d served with Gen. Smith on both sides of the pond. The letter apprised the Ambassador of the situation, and asked him to offer whatever assistance to Hope was at his disposal, as well as the assurance that she was sorely missed at home. Hope responded that she was well and would return, but with a surprise. Her stepdad decided to let her grow her wings and learn to fly a bit.
Six months later, the ‘Americans Abroad’ campaign to appeal directly to British voters to remove the 125,000 White American ‘guests’ from their soil, almost all of them on public assistance because they were not allowed to work, led to the ‘Quantum of the Seas’, ‘Ovation of the Seas’, and ‘Anthem of the Seas’ cruise ships being refurbished (at ‘Americans Abroad’ expense, collected from private donations and charities throughout England). The three ships, with a collective capacity to carry 13,000 passengers, were lent to ‘Americans Abroad’ by the owners of Royal Caribbean International Cruise lines, who wished to win a British government contract to purchase their smaller ships as transports for the rapidly rebuilding Royal Navy. With the collapse of the United Nations peacekeeping mission to North America after the destruction of the U.N. headquarters, a large part of the former U.S. navy’s Atlantic fleet had been placed under ‘joint British command’ by its surviving officers. A few hundred of those sailors and airmen chose to remain with the Royal navy and their ships in exchange for British citizenship. Several thousand wanted to go home, and were among the ‘Americans Abroad’ clients, however. Those ships, including a supercarrier and four destroyers, along with three submarines and several missile cruisers and support ships, even without their full crews, gave Britain back decisive control of the Atlantic for the first time in two centuries.
Following the pattern used so many previous times since Cinco Day when moving large numbers of people, the cruise ships were the answer. It had worked when evacuating U.S. servicemen from the Middle East and Europe, and when evacuating Jews making Aliyah. It worked again. The trip from England to Chicago took twelve days, each way. It took ten trips, using Royal Caribbean crews, to carry all of the 122,000 White American citizens who wanted to return, home. Three thousand of them, in the end, opted to stay in England. Some of them just couldn’t embrace the idea of leaving the known, for the unknown. Another two thousand spouses and girlfriends and boyfriends and children they had accrued during their four years in Britain made the trips, as well. Inspired, Royal Caribbean began contracting with other European governments to return Americans who fit the criteria for New American citizenship. Over the next three years, shiploads would arrive from Ireland, Scotland, and the continent.
Hope had forewarned John that the repatriated Americans were coming, so preparations could be made. Many of them ended up staying in Chicago, making it the largest city by far in the young nation. Others eventually filtered out to other areas, or other cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, or St. Louis. Hundreds of the former sailors helped build up the New American Navy on the Great Lakes, retrofitting civilian craft into military vessels. Hope remained in communication as she supervised the scr
eening of the re-immigrants and the separation out of those with nonWhite ancestry or who were homosexuals. She had not forsaken her father’s teachings. Sixteen months after she had left, Hope came back to Chicago on the last ship, an older and wiser woman. Before they had finished unloading and refueling for the return trip back, Kip was there to pick her up. He did, quite literally, and gave her a kiss right there on the dock that was decidedly unPlatonic. He had already asked for her dad’s permission.
Chapter Seven
“ Most of you know what it means when a hundred corpses are lying side by side, or five hundred, or a thousand. To have stuck it out, and at the same time — apart from exceptions caused by human weakness — to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history, which has never been written and is never to be written.... We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people, to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us.” –Heinrich Himmler
Well, I've been afraid of changing 'Cause I've built my life around you But time makes you bolder
Even children get older
And I'm getting older too…
General Scott Hampton knew when the President didn’t want to be disturbed, but this news that the Mexicans were withdrawing from San Antonio was worth risking his wrath to wake him up for. There seemed to have been another coup d’etat by the army in Mexico City, and this time the new bosses seemed to be waging war against the cartels. How this would affect their interests in terms of driving out Rev. Ike’s forces was still a mystery.
Perry rolled out of bed at the insistent knocking, knowing that only one person would dare wake him up before dawn unless the house was on fire or another assassination attempt was being made. He sure didn’t want Scott to wake up his wife, though. She wasn’t exactly a morning person, at best. The leader of the Republic of Texas slipped into his bathrobe and slippers and shuffled to the door to quieten the knocking. Ten minutes later he was dressed and headed downstairs to the situation room for a full briefing. She would just have to get over it. She was young enough to not need much sleep, anyway. One benefit to robbing the cradle, he thought to himself as he stepped into the meeting.
President Bellefont’s ground forces nearly had the Mexican defenders of San Antonio encircled. General Hampton had advised him to leave one avenue of escape open to the reconquistadore fighters, so they could have the choice of retreating instead of standing and fighting to the death. Highways 37 and 35 had been left open to them, and from the flyover reports, they seemed to be taking 37. Not all the way back to the old borders, then, but to Corpus Christi. That jibed with Scott’s theory that the new ruling junta in Mexico, D.F., was taking on the cartels and all of their coastal cities used for import and export. Traditionally the cartels had moved drugs and guns, but in recent years they had moved everything from canned food and liquor to tobacco and fresh produce. Whatever people wanted and would pay for, the cartels profited from. Of particular interest to Texas was the cartel’s financing of Rev. Ike Huckeberry’s gulf coast multiracial theocracy and his growing Church of the New Dispensation.
Having so many of the former Federal government come over with him when the Vice President left the refuge of the United Nations headquarters in New York shortly before it was bombed to declare the Republic of Texas was both a blessing as well as a curse. Sometimes they forgot that they weren’t bureaucrats any more. Texas was a mighty big country. There was room enough for just about anything, except bureaucrats. In ten minutes, Perry had found important tasks for them all to do somewhere else and pared the meeting down to himself, General Hampton, and three junior officer couriers to carry orders once they’d decided what they were going to do.
That took a bit of thinking on. The situation was more complex that it first appeared. As their view, augmented by more overflights of the ground fighting and troop movements, cleared, the development became multifaceted. There was no quick fix, but rather the beginning of a grueling campaign. In order to avoid fighting on two fronts, Republic of Texas advances in New Mexico had to be called to a halt north of Alamogordo where they’d bogged down fighting the Mescalero Apaches. Texican mounted infantry was designed for taking country, not holding it, so adapting to a defensive footing on the western front meant pulling back out of the mountains and establishing a line between Roswell and Artesia, on open ground where they could maneuver.
While the regular Mexican army and their Republica del Norte auxiliaries withdrew from San Antonio to Pleasanton and Victoria, Gen. Hampton sent his armor from Fort Hood forward to occupy the city where Travis had fallen before they could change their minds and return. The Mexican forces then seemed to redeploy to their coasts, obviously assaulting cartel positions. Heavy fighting was observed in Port Lavaca, Freeport, and Galveston. In a strange twist, Republic of Texas F-16s from Goodfellow and Dyess Air Force bases supported Mexican naval bombardments of cartel positions at Port Bolivar by dropping repressive fire on the MS-13 command and control center in Texas City. Fearing that the Mexican high command might not have the stomach for an extended fight against the cartel, or could even face a counter-coup, Texican mounted infantry were sent in a spearhead formation around the southern suburbs of Houston with orders to drive to the sea and secure R.O.T. control of that line. By the end of the week, Houston had been encircled.
As the Mexican navy and, in two cases, the Mexican marines, assaulted Bay Town and La Porte to weaken cartel units there, a life and death struggle was taking place in Mexico City, Monterrey, and Matamoros. At the Battle of La Playa Bagdad, Zeta cartel boats defeated the Mexican navy, sinking three patrol boats and badly crippling a frigate through the use of swarm tactics on jet skis armed with explosives and RPGs. This ensured the cartels would maintain control over Port Isabel. Port Aransas, the chokepoint for Corpus Christi, fell to the cartels three days later when the Mexican conscripts abandoned their positions and allowed enemy boats to enter the bay unopposed. The Mexican Capitan Segundo in charge of the defenses of Corpus Christi turned over his arsenal to the leader of the Zetas the next day, after first negotiating for his life.
It became clear to President Bellefont that they needed to grab as much territory back as they could, as quickly as possible, before the cartels won. To that end, everything in Eastern Texas that the army had which rolled hit Southwest Houston in a blitzkrieg against the still huge city. Careful not to undertake any military actions from the north or west, they followed the successful tactic used in San Antonio, and left Rev. Ike an out. After token resistance, the officers of his Faithful units must have realized that Houston was too big and spread out to defend. The withdrawal of Church of the New Dispensation forces, followed by a horde of their civilians, began on a Saturday morning. They did not pause for church the next day, but Huckleberry came over the radio urging all true believers to fight the unGodly, and resist the temptation to surrender. ‘He that has no sword, let him sell his cloak and buy one’, was the title of the message.
General Hampton suggested that, considering how massive the population of Houston was, and how many of them were Hispanic, every one they allowed to leave before advancing further into the city was one less they would have to fight or deport. Bellefont agreed. When bombers from Dyess began walking bombardments northwards from the south side towards the center of the city, most of the civilians took the hint. As tens of thousands clogged Highway 90 and I-10 walking north, word came that a cartel hit squad had successfully bombed the Presidential Palace in Mexico City. The President and his family, along with two top loyalist generals, had been hunted down and assassinated in Puebla, attempting to escape. The ripple effects of this act, for Texas at least, took days to reach the front lines of the far north. While local Mexican commanders were tentatively trying to feel out if their lives were forfeit if they surrendered to the cartels, Republic of Texas Abrams rolled into downtown Houston. The Mexican commander of the garrison in Laredo hesitated for too long, and was killed by a mutiny of his men, many of w
hom were cartel affiliated gang members of the Mara Salvatrucha. Similar incidents within the region cemented the transfer of power locally to the gangs and cartels. With the sole exception of the provincial Governor of Arizona, whose Company in Phoenix remained loyal, most of the political leaders immediately fell in line and supported the change.
If it wasn’t for Perry Bellefont and his romantic ideas of Texas, he would be happier than a pig in slop right now, Rev. Ike thought to himself as he personally oversaw the preparations for the defense of Beaumont. The cartels were winning, the Mexican army and navy would no longer be a thorn in his side, and his allies were going to end up on top. Just when he was losing his biggest donor base. The refugees from Houston continued to dribble in, two weeks after its evacuation. It had just been too big to hold, as all of these people demonstrated. Beaumont, though, was smaller and not so wide, and here, with his back to the water, he would stand and fight. It wasn’t heroism which inspired the leader of the Church of the New Dispensation, or courage. He was a physical coward, and he knew it. What he calculated on was that with resupply by the sea from his allies, and a narrower front, his Faithful zealots could hold off the Texicans until the Mexican army realized what side their tortilla was buttered on and hit that old buzzard Hampton from behind. They’d make a sandwich out of them, and crush them like a grape between two millstones, he told his satellite tv and radio audience. Then, they’d find out who was the smartest.
Even with Houston being emptied of eighty percent of its population, there still were thousands of Hispanics to round up and herd south to the Mexican lines just north of Victoria. That operation took nearly a month, and during that time the Republica del Norte made the transition to cartel and Mara Salvatrucha rule. From San Diego through southern California, Arizona, and New Mexico, as well, local commanders who had been too eager in their arrests of drug runners or mules were placed in front of firing squads and shot. The holdout Arizona Governor was accused of carrying out unauthorized negotiations with, and making illegal concessions to, the Mormons in the northern half of his province, and recalled to face trial. He never returned. In Mexico proper, virtually every officer above the rank of Teniente Coronel either fled their posts, or were arrested. This internal chaos caused a lull in action on every frontier.