by Billy Roper
Gathering three of the flyers in his clique as he left the bar, he quickly dialed the number of the Quartermaster Sergeant who had helped them hide the tactical nukes in with a pallet of conventional ordinance, after they had been ‘accidentally’ transferred from Fort Hood to Ellington Field. Within a half hour they were being loaded onto his squadron’s F-16s, which were fueled and primed to fly. The other two pilots were at the tarmac, waiting for them. Three of them would carry the tactical nukes. One would have a load of air to air missiles, just in case anybody tried to get in their way. The other two would fly escort, just to see the show.
Charles ignored the queries from his own control tower at takeoff, then ignored the demands from the New American flights buzzing around them as the perimeter defenses of New Orleans were pounded from above. He hummed ‘Silent Night’ out loud as his plane hopped the short miles to the combat area. Lacking the distance of a cruise missile, the comparatively crude tactical nukes would have to be manually armed and dropped from the bomb bays with live timer triggers. Even at high altitude, they could only set them for twenty to twenty-five seconds. It was going to be close. He made the mental calculations as they came in, and relayed the orders to the other two nuke carriers. Climbing together to their top ceiling, the targets he had selected for maximum effect were almost immediately in sight. One-handed, he armed the detonating device and placed the bomb for release. The mental song playlist switched, gratefully, to ‘O Holy Night’, and he sang it nervously, to bolster his courage. Charles authorized individual release as he punched his own button, then turned hard to the left as he felt the bird lighten. “Ho, Ho, Ho! Here comes Santy Clause, losers!” he muttered under his breath. His wingman did the same turn, moments later. Then the third, a few seconds after. He was driving North hard and fast when the three overlapping thunders struck behind him.
The first bomb, from Lt. Morris’s F -16, had been close to its target, wrecking the main outlet canal where it fed into the Mississippi and making it impossible to move any shipping in or out of New Orleans. Since it was nearly a ground burst, the damage was maximized. The second bomb took out the Industrial Canal further North, but was an airburst that also destroyed the three lower-flying planes in the operation, knocking them out of the air like a flyswatter batting flies. Two New American bombers were also damaged by the blasts as they delivered their much tamer payloads. The third and final bomb, dropped a few moments too late, detonated after it had splashed into Lake Pontchartrain, sending a large and highly radioactive cloud of steam up that immediately cooled and fell back as deadly rain into the stricken city. The Church of the New Dispensation had still been struck a fatal blow.
In St. Louis and Austin, Scott Hampton and Randall Balderson were both screaming for someone to tell them what had happened. Who had given the orders to attack? Where had those nukes come from? Who was responsible? A near panic of scrambling and confirming orders and counter-orders ensued. It took hours for both sides to stand down, and assess the situation rationally. In the meantime, Sur Moerdani monitored the satellite radio transmissions, hoping that one side would attack the other in the confusion. He was disappointed. Still, he had his diversion, and more infidels were dead. Allah would be pleased.
“…hush little baby, don’t say a word, momma’s gonna buy you a mocking bird…”
The girls understood that Santa Claus, like the angels Joseph Smith had allegedly talked to, were a myth. They didn’t mind not having a traditional family Christmas, even though it was a big event in Salt Lake. Their mom was busy. Kelly had the Imperial Russian ambassador to Deseret by the short hairs, and she liked to watch him squirm. Diplomats hated being asked direct questions, and he must know why she had come calling without an appointment or an official invitation. Ever since the Chinese bombing of New York had forced the final evacuation of the U.N. headquarters there, international diplomacy had been a game of brinksmanship. Even though a rump United Nations continued in Brussels, using that name, they functioned more as an emasculated E.U. government, than as a truly international body. When several new European nations seceded and balkanized, the old Union had become moot. With only a handful of nonEuropean nations remaining in the field of international actors, the focus of the international diplomatic and peacekeeping agency naturally became focused more on European affairs.
These days, the Republic of Texas, along with the Orange Free State and Argentina and Mexico, had less of a voice in the U.N. than the Republic of Quebec did, simply because the latter nation was attached to the French delegation. The Australians and New Zealanders barely even bothered with their ‘observer’ status. Now, though, that would all change, because the Texicans had publicly joined the elite club of nuclear powers, with Deseret, New America, The Russian Empire, Greater Germany, England, and France.
She couldn’t help but shake her head at such a turn of events. So Harolding cr azy. Three Republic of Texas Air Force pilots were undergoing a public trial for treason, even though most Texicans polled considered them heroes for stealing tactical nukes and laying waste to New Orleans. With Rev. Clearly trying to reconsolidate the Church of the New Dispensation in the Bahamas, Gulf shipping was free from piracy, for the time being. And three dozen New American officers, following the arrest of a coterie responsible for ordering the unapproved conventional attack which began the battle, had defected to Clealry.
From the vantage point of the Council, this was none of their business. From Kelly’s, since they shared a border with the Republic of Texas, anything as big as their neighbor becoming an acknowledged nuclear power needed to be addressed. That’s why she sat here in the small strip mall embassy office, sipping strong tea. She suggested, half jokingly, that Ambassador Gregori Stetzmenov must have really ruffled some feathers back home to get assigned this position, in a country where alcohol and tobacco were illegal, and the moral compass of the nation was just a bit to the right of the Taliban…back when there had been a Taliban.
His hands shook with the tremors of a secret drunk trying to drink something other than vodka as he rattled his cup down into his saucer.
“Yes. This is so. You see, Madame Prophet Walker, His Holiness, the Patriarch, also feels that more discipline is needed in Russian culture. A generation spent swallowing up central Asia and northern China has made us a bit like your American wild west, da? Everybody is a cowboy, doing his own thing.”
“I take it you weren’t the best team player at home?” Kelly teased. The hooded eyes of the graying man blinked, as his mind translated the phrase.
“The Czar of All Russias had already filled the embassies to the Han tribes in the Yangzi Valley, although I was afraid that I would end up there, since I found myself part of an army unit removing Chinese nuclear weapons from their bases, just after the Turkish Flu.” Stetzmenov smiled bleakly at her. “Salt Lake City is not the worst place.”
“So, you understand how important it is that the civilized nations of the world keep an eye on newer nations acquiring this destructive power,” Kelly verbally lunged. “The Germans, for their own reasons which I cannot understand, have helped the Texicans acquire this power. As a rational counter-balance to Greater German spheres of influence, I hope that the world can count on The Czar to take action to limit the further proliferation…”
“Madame Prophet, forgive me, but I must be blunt and interrupt. It is true that in Europe, the Russian Empire and Greater Germany do not always agree on how, for example, the Ukraine or Poland or the Baltics should be governed, even though these are all obviously historically regions of the Slavic peoples, and so also of the Russian Empire.”
“Obviously.” Kelly deadpanned, leaning back in her little wooden chair carefully.
“What I mean is, though not all of Eastern Europe has yet formally acknowledged the sovereignty of the Czar, as have the more progressive states such as Bulgaria and Serbia, Germany does not interfere with our, as you said, ‘sphere of influence’. Just as we do not meddle with their affairs, in what was A
ustria, or Croatia…or Texas.”
Kelly’s eyes narrowed. “Just to be clear, for us, The Republic of Texas publicly having nuclear weapons is a problem. Now, what I want to know, is, is this my problem, or Russia’s problem, too?”
“Here,” Gregori said resignedly, “have some more tea. I know that it is illegal for you Mormons, too. But in this room, you are on foreign soil, so let us share our diplomatic immunity and our tea for a moment together. You see, Madame Prophet, for Russians, there are not so many problems.”
Two days later, Josh Walker was bringing the girls home from the park when he noticed a delivery truck parked in front of their house. Karen was out front, arguing with one of their security people over whether it should be opened and checked for explosives, before it was taken in the house. Josh asked the guard if it had been x-rayed yet, and the brown-bearded man confirmed that it had been, immediately, with a hand held unit which also detected no chemical explosives in the narrow box. Reassured, the former Texican ambassador asked the guard to park the car in the garage while he took the car inside. Karen rolled her eyes at the excess of security and smiled at John as he shrugged and took the package, addressed to him, into his study while the girls all had a snack.
As he sat at the computer desk fishing through drawers for a letter opener, he could hear them laughing about their day in the kitchen. Karen had them making a list of New Year’s Resolutions. Finally, even though he hated to ruin the edge, Josh used his folding tanto blade to slit open the box flaps. The story of how the ducks in the park had eaten all their bread and followed them around for more faded into insignificance as he read the old ballistics report, buried and marked ‘Top Secret’ for fifteen years, which matched his wife’s sidearm to the bullets which had killed President Bellefont.
On another continent, an identical package had arrived at the New American embassy in Johannesburg, addressed to Hope. In addition to the ballistics report, it contained a letter, unsigned, claiming that Kip in his capacity as Chief of Staff had helped John McNabb in his plot to use a hypnotic-suggestion induced assassin to kill the founder of the Republic of Texas. The letter listed the motivations of the conspirators as being to replace the independent Bellefont with the more malleable Hampton, and to subvert the Executive branches of both Deseret and the Republic of Texas to the influence of New America, namely her dad. Hope blinked away tears as she read the vile slander. Then she read it again. The third time, something sunk in.
“O beautiful for pilgrim feet, Whose stern impassion'd stress A thoroughfare for freedom beat Across the wilderness!”
Mrs. Bellefont-Hampton wished that her kids would call more often. Especially with a New Year starting. She hadn’t even heard from them over Christmas. Just lousy cards, like always. She understood that they had their own lives, now. Her oldest son was the frontrunner to be the next Mayor of Dallas, following in the political tradition of his father, the former Senator and Vice President. The girls were active in the Republic’s cultural and social circles for the elite, practicing politics of their own. Meeting the polished young men they brought home to meet her as if they were being given an audience with the Queen reminded her of how she had first met Perry, when he was working on his second Congressional campaign and she was a naïve socialite from a wealthy Houston oil family. Well, maybe she had never been quite as naïve as people expected her to be, but that was the role she had played for him.
Standing in front of the mirror, the pile of clothes gave silent testimony that nothing looked sexy on her, any more. Wasn’t this supposed to be the most depressing time of year? Every gown in the former governor’s mansion was too tight. What was it Marilyn Monroe had said about diamonds not losing their shape? Well, she was finally losing the war against gravity, and even the best cosmetic surgeons in St. Louis had told her that any more visits would do her more harm than good. It was enough to make a girl have a mid-life crisis, but she was about ten years too late for that.
Menopause hadn’t bothered her, in fact it had kind of been more of a relief than anything else, so much less trouble and less to worry about, every twenty-eight days. Empty-nest syndrome likewise, had just been a slight pang followed by the realization that she finally had more time to shop and travel, at least within the confines of Texas, where Scott trusted his Rangers to keep an eye on her. She wished that she could travel to Europe. All of the wealthy German ladies who accompanied their husbands and boyfriends on trips to Houston looked like they were on top of the world, in every sense of the world. Texas, by contrast, was a decidedly second rate power. It was embarrassing.
All of her life, she had been second best. The second prettiest daughter in her family. The second in her class, at the prestigious girls’ finishing school she had graduated from. Wife of the Vice President, instead of the President. And now, the First Lady of a Second World country. Her life had been Harolded to hell.
She knew that if Perry had been President, he could have stopped the hyperinflation, saved the dollar from collapsing, and somehow kept America united. He could have saved the United States, if he had just been given the chance. If he had just taken her advice and declared the President unfit and taken power, he could have pulled it out, right up until the end. But he had been too weak, too afraid, too hesitant. That was so long ago, and so far gone, now. She knew she should forgive him, and let it go. But she felt that she had been robbed of her destiny. It was a hurt she could never heal. He had died before she could make it right.
For many years, she had hated John McNabb, and even though she had known, right from the start, once she had heard the details of what he had known and when, she had hated Scott, too. She thought of herself as Hamlet’s mother, marrying her dead husband’s killer brother, or as Elvira Hancock, Tony Montana’s wife, leaving with him after he’d killed Frank. But no, she misremembered the movie. Tony Montana hadn’t killed Frank, just like he’d promised not to. Scott hadn’t killed Perry. But it had happened. She was sure of that. It had happened.
She m ade a New Year’s resolution of her own. It was quite funny the kind of actual power that a wife has. The access to her husband’s files, where some men hoarded the most incriminating things as if they were nostalgic war trophies, was all she needed, along with some international postage stamps. Mrs. Bellefont-Hampton wanted the woman who had killed her Perry to pay, even if the revenge was served cold. She hadn’t implicated Scott, directly, but anybody else who fell by the wayside was just collateral damage. Including herself.
The private doctor who had prescribed her the sleeping pills she overdosed on was given a public execution, by firing squad. To quell the public mourning over his wife’s death and the rumors surrounding the details of her passing, a sincerely grief-stricken President Hampton had the sentences of the three renegade pilots commuted, and granted them pardons. The damages done by her trips to the post office elsewhere wouldn’t be so easy to gloss over.
“In the days of my youth, I was told what it means to be a man. Now, I’ve reached that age, I try to do all those things the best I can…”
The first Deseret flight bouncing from Brigham Beach to Oahu to Brisbane to Pretoria for the resumption of LDS missionary work in southern Africa was intercepted by Javan fighter/bombers who demanded they land in Surabaya. After a flurry of discussion up and down the chain of command, the fresh-scrubbed and smiling young men in their starched white shirts and black ties were quickly sent on their way with their cargo hold full of copies of the Book of Mormon, before the infidels could contaminate any of the faithful with their cultish Jesus worship. Thereafter, the rules were that LDS flights could cross Javan airspace, so long as they didn’t land, for any reason. Ever.
The fourth and fifth flights, the next weekend, didn’t land there, but they did release one hundred and eighty of Harbin’s paratroopers onto the island. The nighttime passages meant that Caliphate air defenses didn’t see the chutes blossoming until the first reports of gunfire were received, from the area around the Caliph’
s palace and the prison. Both were attacked by storm before the garrison could be mobilized.
The sound of running boots on marble jarred Dr. Moerdani awake from a dream of virus-infected zombies climbing out of the water, to face a more real threat. Excited voices called his name in Javanese, and answering orders from his officers came back in Bahasa. He unrolled from the silk sheets and dressed quickly, leaving the lights off to save his night vision. In the distance the steady drum of automatic rifle fire was punctuated by single shots which silenced the machine gun as he pulled on his boots to see what was going on.
Corporal Timmons waved the rest of the squad forward past the taken out machine gun post while he changed magazines and radioed Captain Howell to report that the SouthEastern side gate of the prison had been taken. A few guards continued to return fire from the towers, but the block buildings were being overrun by LDS troops. After his Lieutenant and Sergeant had went down in front of the heavy bullets, Timmons had face planted and belly crawled to the side where he could snipe the gunners and render the machine gun useless.
Two of the five remaining men he had motioned across the prison yard went down to fire from the towers, so the Corporal grabbed the hot gun and lifted it out of its brackets and out of the emplacement. He swung it level with his hips, at waist height, towards the enemy. Bracing himself against the low concrete wall, he pressed the trigger and let the slugs chew chunks of concrete up the wall of the nearest tower until the windows blew out the other side at the top, and the firing stopped. Searching every cell of the prison would take longer than the primary assault group could afford right now, so taking and holding the prison was their first priority. The secondary assault group was facing tougher resistance at the palace.