by Billy Roper
Following the revelation that domestic terrorists possibly under the direction or influence of a foreign government had falsified the test results of nearly a hundred young men over the last decade, virtually an entire generation volunteered for D.N.A. reassessment, as a matter of honor. The system was nearly overwhelmed, but by the time Sur Moerdani announced that Carolyn McNabb had been arrested and was going to be put on trial for espionage a week before graduation, all of the results were in, and less than one percent had failed.
“…A long, long time ago, but I can still remember, how the music used to make me smile…”
For Hope, the news that her mom was alive was both a shock and a cause for celebration. Her joy quickly dissolved into anger at the thought that the Indonesians had dared to hijack her plane, force it down, and take her hostage. God only knew what she had been going through, for weeks on end. And that also meant that they certainly were involved in, if not solely responsible for, her dad’s death, and the deaths of Gen. Harrison and Gen. Smith…along with so many other good men, and who knew what else!?! It was so Harolded. Knowing that Kip was organizing the political coalition that would unite New American, the Russian Empire, Australia, and New Zealand, all of the Pacific powers, against the Javan Caliphate, made it worthwhile for him to be away from her and the kids. Hess wanted to go help his dad kick some raghead butt, for his grandpa. She was so proud that they were going to DO something, and hoped that it came soon enough to help Carolyn.
Mary came yelling for her to look at the satlink one morning, to hear the news. Hope turned off the water in the sink where she had been washing the breakfast dishes and dried her hands on the towel by the stove before grabbing the remote and tapping on the plasma screen in the corner of the ceiling. Czar Vladimir II was giving a speech to the Russian parliament, while a corner of the screen showed a map of Russian Empire territory in the Pacific, from the Chaobai River at the edge of the Beijing dead zone, over to the Sea of Japan. The kids were fighting over whose turn it was to walk the dog, so Hope had to tap the volume up to hear what the elaborately costumed ruler was saying. The auto-translator was a bit slow this far below the equator, where the satellite feed originated, but what she got was that he had been in consultation with the New American ‘Diktator’, ironic that the app used the German translation for ‘Speaker’, Hope thought.
Czar Vladimir II said that Balderson had asked for help from the great Russian Empire and the powerful Russian people, and the Patriarch of Moscow, the Primus Inter Pares, had given the blessing of the Holy Church to strike against the anti-Christ infidel Muslim devils in their last remaining den of evil. Therefore, as Czar and ruler of all the Russias, Vladimir II was announcing a Holy Crusade against the Javan Caliphate, beginning with an expedition to secure forward naval bases on the Japanese archipelago…
Wow. Hope had to admire the way Randall had worked this out. Without a Secretary of State, he had done a pretty good job of dangling Japan in front of the Russians as a prize they could keep in exchange, with no competing claims from anyone else, for providing the top half of a vise to crush Moerdani in. Well, it wasn’t like the three or four thousand Japanese farmers and fishermen left on Hokkaido were doing much with it, any ways. Raised in the world of geopolitics, she could see the dilemma. New America COULD just sit back and use a few of their remaining SSBMs fired from submarine platforms to turn the whole island of Java into black glass and lava. Of course, that would defeat the purpose of trying to rescue Carolyn alive, as well as annoy the heck out of their Australian allies with a lot of lethal fallout, once the clouds and rain rolled south. So, it would be a conventional conflict, it looked like. She understood that.
From what Kip had told her, the New Zealand Navy was just powerful enough to patrol its own coasts and little more. They had gotten used to relying on Australian and New American protection. The two N.A. carrier based fleets, with their air wings and support ships, would be supplemented by a dozen battle ships and destroyers flying the Royal Australian Cross. If the Caliph’s naval forces tried to outflank them, another carrier group from Oahu would be coming West from Pearl. It looked neat enough. But what many might overlook was that the Russians had a long ways to come South, to be in the game. Doubtless they would swallow up as much strategic territory, particularly ports, as they could, along the way. It might be months before the trap closed. Clearly, her mom couldn’t wait that long. Something had to happen, fast.
Hope tapped down the volume as the BBC commentators prattled on about the ramifications of this Crusade on Europe, would rising oil prices due to increased demand with a war on increase English reliance on Republic of Texas imports to supplement North Sea production…she had his number somewhere, in the little black notebook she always kept somewhere easy to find. Now, where was it?
Josh was pretty surprised to hear Hope on the phone, especially at 11:45 p.m., and on a school night, when the girls loved any excuse to stay up, or wake up. He handed the receiver to Kelly and rolled out of bed to tell them to go back to sleep, because yes, they DID hear the phone, actually, thank you.
Kelly sat up when she heard who was on the other end. Yes, it was awful, so Harolding awful, well, she was glad she’d gotten the flowers, how were the kids holding up?....it took a good ten minutes before Hope got to the meat of the issue. It took twice that long to convince Kelly that was no way she could get around the request, without seeming unreasonable. As Josh went to the bathroom and came back into the bedroom and tapped on the wallscreen just in time to catch the rebroadcast of the Czar’s speech, the two girls came to an understanding.
Later that morning , Prophet Walker requested a live interview on Salt Lake City’s only legal morning news program, LDSTV’s ‘Saints Alive!’. Long used to starting her day without the benefit of coffee, she seemed chipper enough as she announced, without bothering to consult the Council, that the mission fields of Africa would once again be opened to Mormon Brothers and Sisters who were called to witness to the Gentiles there, beginning in the Orange Free State and then working their way into the less populous regions of the continent.
As Kelly left the studio, her phone was ringing. A Senior member of the Council from the faction which was less than excited about having a female Prophet, Sorenson was nearly in tears that she had made such an announcement without a full discussion and consideration of the expense and potential liabilities…she let him work himself up into a lather and then down into a breathless gasping rattle as she got into her car and nodded for her driver to go ahead.
“Very well, Councilman Sorenson. I ‘m not going to call the Orange Free State President and tell him that his offer to allow LDS missions into his nation, under his protection, has been rejected. You can do that.” Sorenson sputtered and dialed it back. Kelly listened for a minute more, as she neared her office. “Of course, I’m sure that you can take the lead in influencing our Brothers on the Council to understand that such a glorious opportunity for the Church simply could not wait, and I knew they would be as joyous as I am at this opportunity to expand our missions.” Sorenson muttered that he would do his best, and let her go. None of them would want to publicly call her bluff on this. The Council would go along because to not do so would be against the best interests of the Church. The Orangers would go along because Hope and by extension the New American ambassador would convince them that their big brother really wanted them to, and because it had already been announced that they would. When the time came that everyone realized that the planes carrying LDS missionaries would be flying through Indonesian claimed airspace to get there, and need fighter escorts, well, by then it would be too late to do anything but go ahead and do it. Sometimes she wished that Hope had been born a man. She would have made one heck of a leader.
Lt. Col. Jerry Harbin of the LDS Air Force had never spoken to the Prophet directly before, but he recognized her voice when it came over his encrypted satlink to his command center just north of Angels City. The commander of all Deseret air defenses
on the generous strip of coast the Church held normally had his hands full, but he waved off his adjutant and gave Kelly his full attention. He quietly listened as he was told to assemble two companies of the specially equipped Gull division they had trained as paratroopers for the practice drop on the Channel Islands last year. Prophet Walker advised him that they were going to be called on to commit themselves to a top secret mission, an air assault on a heavily populated hostile urban area with the objective being a hostage rescue. He did not flinch when she told him the target. When the line closed, he turned to his adjutant. “Better go kiss your wives goodbye, Zeke. We’ve got some water to cross.”
“When ends life’s transient dream,
When death’s cold sullen stream over me roll…”
The distress call from the inbound English tanker came just as it was being surrounded by the pursuing pirates. Unlike most of the smaller vessels they had boarded and taken, the NeoBahamans couldn’t get a grappling hook up and over the side of the higher ship’s railings. It was kind of pathetic, in retrospect. The eighteen man crew was armed, so they kept the three old pleasure craft at a distance, while they circled like toothless sharks. Finally, the pirates left in frustration before the flight of refurbished F-16s from the mostly antique Republic of Texas Air Force arrived on the scene. The two fighter planes circled higher, saw their prey, and hammered them to bits with their 30 mm gatling guns before they could get to a protected bay. Then they circled back to the tanker and wagged their wings as it followed them into Houston to fill up with Texas’s biggest export, that light sweet crude.
The newer F-22s were assigned to combat-ready roles, while the older pre-Balk fighter models were relegated to this kind of coastal defense, 1st Lieutenant Charles Morris understood. That still didn’t make it any easier to be pulling this scut duty in these scrap piles, just because some cocky German officer in charge of updating their plutonium pile weaponization program’s latest software wanted to make disparaging remarks about Texican women. And get his front teeth knocked out, for it. Besides, everybody knew that dangling the nuclear carrot in front of Texas in exchange for cheap oil had been a constant German game since he was in Cub Scouts. Back when he could remember singing ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ instead of ‘The Eyes of Texas’. That memory grew fainter every year, though, as did his chances of making Captain, if he couldn’t rein in his temper, or find a way to avoid the idiots who pushed his buttons.
Still, he wasn’t the only one who noticed that every year the Greater German scientists and military attache’s and diplomats kept saying that they were closer and closer to helping the Republic of Texas achieve a ‘parity of deterrent’ with her two nuclear neighbors on the continent. The Germans had nukes, that they could give them if they wanted to, or they could sure buy some from Russia or salvage some from the Middle East’s ghost towns…heck, Texas had nukes, unofficially, but using them would kind of give the game away. They needed people to know that they had them, officially, without using them…then they could feel free to use them. That’s the way Charles understood it. Just two small low-yield blasts, one each over New Orleans and Freeport, would sure make transAtlantic shipping a lot safer, both ways.
Truth be told, it seemed to him like the new regime in St. Louis could kick butt and take names on the Church of the New Dispensation, if they wanted to, badly enough. After all, they had mopped up the last pathetic black resistance within a couple of years after New Africa had imploded in mass viral pandemic. Then they had salvaged the cities and reclaimed huge swaths of fertile agricultural areas in the SouthEast for farming, and even colonized new settlements in strategic areas with displaced White war refugees from other parts of the continent where ethnic cleansing had occurred in the other direction. Towns such as New Peoria in southern Arkansas, Matthews City in Alabama, and Butlerville in Mississippi had grown into busy cities of agricultural production, trade, and commerce. The New American front lines were right up to the edge of the water at Lake Pontchartrain. If they had Rev. Clearly bottled up so tight, why didn’t they just finish him off?
The Lieutenant felt confident that he knew why. The C.N.D. and their Neo-Bahaman allies choked down Texican foreign trade, and helped keep his Republic from achieving its’ true destiny as a great nation. Keeping Texas weaker made New America stronger. He knew how things worked at the top. It was all about money. Just the bottom line. Some days he was tempted to simply commandeer one of the not too secretly hidden tactical sized atomic devices the Republic of Texas Air Force kept in their ordnance facilities at the R.O.T. Armed Forces H.Q. at Fort Hood, and taking a flight out himself, just to get things done. That’s what was needed, a man of action to take charge and quit all of the pussyfooting around. It was high time to stop dancing with these evolutionary throwbacks and their supporters and finish this b.s.. One of these days, he just might do it, too.
Charles had grumbled more than once, over a beer in the junior officer’s corner of the base bar, about how weak the politicians were, letting St. Louis push them around all the time. Always Harolding them when they should be letting them do their jobs. A couple of other guys had started sitting next to him. When he talked, people listened. The onearmed veteran of the fighting to take back Austin back during the Balk, the Quartermaster Sergeant with all of the keys, had connections, too, and so did his other buddies on the second-string flight line. They all were less than content with their career paths and trajectories, and found it easy to blame the weak politicians and their New American bosses. The Sergeant ran the local ‘surplus’ black market, too.
That n ight, after he’d finished the after-flight paperwork and accounted for the ammunition expenditure and made a post-combat report to his half asleep Captain, Lt. Morris began making a list of the people he could count on, and how they could help make his dreams of a truly free and strong and proud Republic of Texas come true.
“…Bow down before the one you serve, you’re going to get what you deserve…”
Ray Ray was tired of losing boats because his stupid boys couldn’t hit a lick and jump back before they got caught out in the open, or were just too stupid to understand that a small boat coming out of a port is a better prize than a big boat going into one. He missed the old days, when things seemed simpler. Of course, back then he had gone from a high school dropout to a wannabe gangster, then been drafted by the New African army. These young kids these days, born since the EBT quit, they didn’t know what real thug life was all about.
As he waited for the bearers to bring his Queen in on her chair, the former General who had defeated Ike Huckleberry and led his tribe to salvation eyed the serving girls. That one light-skinned girl looked like she might have some White in her. Ray Ray had travelled from Louisiana to Georgia to Florida to the Bahamas, and seen the world. He had never seen enough girls, though. Not yet.
Taneisha caught him looking when they carried her in, but she didn’t say anything. These days, she was content to have plenty to eat. And she ate plenty. The spread tonight included fish as always, but also imported roast pig from Cuba and jerked chicken from Jamaica. Ray Ray’s boys kept their queen fat and happy.
As he dug into the communal bowl in front of him, Ray Ray remembered the hungry times, when they’d first gotten here from Florida after whipping the Cubans and found almost no food left in Freeport. As tired as they had been, they had been forced by their bellies to use the same boats that had gotten them here to take Abaco and Nassau. Eventually, using the bigger and better yachts and ocean cruisers they took as loot, they had spread out to conquer and raid from Haiti to the Mexican coast. They’d probably have been stuck in the Bahamas years ago if it hadn’t been for the fuel and repairs provided by those crazy rainbow church folks in The Big Easy, Ray Ray grudgingly admitted. He slathered a piece of fish in some pig grease.
It had helped that by the time they got to Nassau, the brothers there had already killed all the White devils that hadn’t sailed away when the throat-cutting started, and just ne
eded some leadership. All the action, the trade and imports of salvage and loot, happened there, but Ray Ray stayed at Freeport, where he could keep a closer eye on people. He kept a place on Paradise Island for the weekly trips he had to take across to stay in charge. Even though he was showing some gray, he still was always hustling. That was the only way to keep these young bucks in line.
When they had first been approached by a black Deacon from the Church of the New Dispensation, shortly after they had finished taking control of Nassau, he had seen an opportunity. First, the Bible thumpers had offered them gasoline and diesel for their boats, in trade for fresh fruit and any other food they could spare and bring to New Orleans. Then they had given him a few radios and generators so they could keep in touch and have some electricity for his royal use. His and Taneisha’s, that is. She kept music playing all the time to prove she was in charge. After a while they had started being given lists of other stuff the lilly-White cracker Preacher Clearly wanted. Havana and Miami had a lot of the engine parts and tools and such he’d asked for. In exchange the church fixed the boats when they broke down and set up a doctor’s office in Nassau, then a hospital, for free.
Of course, the last few years he had lost one ship in five coming in or out of New Orleans to bombings by the Emerald Coast based New American Air Force, or torpedoes by those sneaky submarines of theirs. So, they couldn’t go too close to the coast to the North, and they couldn’t go too close to the Texican coast without risking the same mistreatment from those cowboy honkies. He kept telling Rev. Clearly that stuck his people in a narrow path the New Americans could patrol with their planes and spot more of his shipments, even at night. The fat cracker just wouldn’t listen. He just wanted more, more, more. Ray Ray was running out of places to loot boats from and incentives to offer his men to get them to do convoy work. There were only so many girls you could throw at them before they…