And the population stumbled out into the zone of death. When I’d been a kid, I’d walked eight miles with Uncle Billy and thought it a great achievement. It had been petty compared to what I’d had to undergo to become a Marine and even smaller compared to some of the forced marches we had pulled in Iraq. The civilian population, eating their way through their sometimes-contaminated supplies at an incredible rate, fell out into the countryside and stripped it bare. They thought, as our own population thought, that farms equalled food. They raged out across the landscape like a pack of wild locusts and stripped it bare. Sometimes, the farmers successfully defended their farms, but mostly the population ate…and then starved anyway. Civilisation had collapsed completely. Apart from the King, who had taken shelter in Ireland, and the lucky survivors who made it to Ireland or one of the other islands, the vast majority of the English population was wiped out.
The Scots fared better, marginally. The lowlands of Scotland were devastated, but the highlands had been barely touched, directly. Indirectly, there were plumes of fallout drifting northwards, poisoning far too many crops, or sheep. The only places in the United Kingdom that could be said to have fared well were the Hebrides. Despite the best efforts of successive governments, enough remained of the island sprit to allow them to hold on, struggling to survive. They, like us, developed a ruthless attitude to refugees. They had no choice.
Across the Channel, the story was worse. The French had been the victims of most of the Russian medium-ranged weapons, not least because they’d been the ones who’d nuked Moscow. They might have had a bigger country, proportionally speaking, than the British, but they were hit worse. The French government actually managed to survive – having decamped to a bunker when the balloon went up – but they only made matters worse. They, like the British and us, simply didn’t have the tools to enforce their will. What little resources they did have were consumed in ethnic war as refugees swarmed across the Mediterranean and into France. The Spanish, who had only taken a handful of nukes, fared better, but not by much. They had a massive refugee problem to cope with…
The Germans, Poles and Russians were effectively destroyed. The Germans had taken the brunt of most of the tactical nukes that had been deployed in the early stages of the exchange. The Poles had been unlucky enough to have Russian forces on their soil that were targeted by NATO tactical nukes as they marched eastwards, after having had said forces looting their way across Poland. Their government had been in exile during the later stages of the war and never returned to Poland. They’d been hit too hard to survive. As winter drifted across Europe, most of the survivors froze or tried to reach safer climes. Very few made it.
And the Russians? We’d spent years and trillions of dollars planning how we would destroy them if we ever had a nuclear war with them. We’d thought, back during the Cold War, that the Russians had a massive nuclear advantage. We’d been wrong; we had the advantage, not them. Our panic had been misplaced because we’d believed too much of the Russian propaganda about how strong they were. By the time we realised that we’d been played, we had amassed enough firepower to destroy Russia several times over, along with most of the Warsaw Pact. (To add insult to injury, the Russians also came up with a plan to destroy the Warsaw Pact. Unlike NATO, it was a forced association of slave countries – colonies, in all, but name – and the Russians had good reason to suspect their loyalty. Look how quickly they bolted when the Russian bear grew too weak to hold them.) The war saw the smooth execution of the war plans…and the execution of almost the entire Russian population. We hit them so hard that they never recovered.
Oh, they’d put more thought into civil defence than we had, but it wasn't enough. It couldn’t be enough. They could and did save thousands of lives in bomb shelters under Moscow, but once they ran out of supplies, they were dead. We’d destroyed all of their government and most of their army and what was left turned bandit. They’re still not back up as I write this book. They lost all, but five percent of their population.
The Chinese were in a slightly better state. The Russians had slaughtered most of their city population. Their farms had barely been targeted, so they managed to hold out under a handful of warlords until the death zones had completed their grizzly work. They had another advantage. Taiwan had largely survived the war and managed to coordinate recovery operations. They also ended up helping Japan and Korea, although the latter was suffering the largest proportional die-off in the entire war. North Korea had never worked. It fell apart as soon as the nukes started to fly and almost the entire population died.
And then there were the Arabs. I’m not that fond of Arabs, as a general rule. Back when I was in Iraq, I found that I tended to like the insurgents more than I liked the civilians, although that feeling sputtered out when the first bunch of insurgents – former regime loyalists and army soldiers who’d been dumped onto the streets – faded out to be replaced by terrorists, criminals and fanatics. There’s no biological difference between Arabs and any other human race, but most of them are raised in a way that makes it very difficult for them to become good and productive people. They’re good soldiers when the battle plan is working, but when the battle plan falls apart, so do they. They are not taught to take individual responsibility for their own actions, let alone show initiative on the battlefield. Their governments encourage this and I suppose, if I were an Arab tyrant, I would encourage it as well. An Arab army that thinks is a dangerous army. They might start thinking about how easy it would be to launch a coup. It has happened on occasion.
The Arabs had been hit badly by the Israelis and lost most of their cities and military bases. Their societies just came apart. There was almost no trust in their systems outside the family – look at Saddam’s most trusted people and you’ll find that most of them were related to him, poor bastards – and their governments had never believed in their duty to their people. They’d built their cities on sand – quite literally – and when the nukes went off, most of the population died. Matters were not helped, in Saudi Arabia, by the Shia rising in revolt. They won, largely because the Army and National Guard were dying a slow and painful death. The only Middle Eastern group to actually come out ahead were the Kurds. The Turks had too much else to worry about. The Russians, who didn’t like them very much, had hit them with a dozen nukes and their country was falling apart. Peace with the Kurds was better than war.
Israel might have been all right, apart from Palestine. There was an immediate collapse in Palestine as foreign aid dried up and news spread of the nuclear strikes. When it was realised that Mecca, the holiest city in Islam, had been nuked, the religious fanatics started preaching death to Israel – again. The population rose up and marched on Israel, fired on by the ranting of their preachers and, as is almost traditional in modern-day Arab societies, the presence of guns at their backs. The factions that had refused to make peace on terms everyone could swallow, if not like, were screaming for blood. They knew that if their patrons had been destroyed, their rule wouldn’t last long, even if the Israelis were destroyed.
It was like something out of the First World War. Wave after wave of humanity poured against the Israeli defences, who found themselves pushed back by sheer weight of numbers and forced to deploy everything from gas to napalm to keep the crowds back. Hamas and Hezbollah fired thousands of rockets into Israel – you know, the rockets that didn’t exist for the western news media – in hopes of breaking Israeli resistance. It didn’t break. There was enough footage of Israelis who were caught by surprise being torn apart, or raped to death, to keep them fighting. The slaughter went on for days and consumed almost all of the Israeli ammunition. They found themselves being pushed back and back…and they almost lost. General Hunger and General Thirst had won the war Israel came so close to losing. The Arabs simply couldn’t go on. They melted away on the verge of victory and died in their tens of thousands. The Arab-Israeli Conflict was over.
(Today, Israelis won’t speak of their role in the Fin
al War. I think they’re ashamed of it. That’s not uncommon among those who survived the Final War, doing whatever they had to do to stay alive. Greater Israel is at peace with her remaining neighbours and long may it stay that way.)
And then there were the plagues.
No, I don’t know where they came from. I’ve heard hundreds of theories, but as most of them were comparable to ‘the white man invented AIDS to keep the black man down’ I tend to disbelieve them when I first hear them. Personally, I think most of the plagues came from the thousands upon thousands of dead bodies lying around, although there are other explanations. My own personal favourite, the one I think might have an element of truth, is that they came from the Russians, or perhaps the Iranians. The former had kept a massive biological warfare program online – despite solemnly promising not to keep one going – while the latter was looking desperately for some way to even the odds between us and them. Saddam, too, strove to create biological weapons, although after the Iraq War everyone knew that the weapons didn’t exist. That was partly true. His program had been disassembled. The plagues might even have been a belated revenge.
But it doesn’t matter. More effort has been put into determining the origin of the plagues than any other issue, but it doesn’t matter to us, not now. All that matters is that, somehow, one of them got loose, or someone deliberately spread the disease. I could see the Russians doing that. They’d already started a nuclear exchange, so why not go for the rest of the taboo weapons? What more did they have to lose?
It could have been worse. It would have been worse if normal air and sea traffic had still been functioning. One of the more boneheaded problems with Protect and Survive was its assertion that after a nuclear war, the survivors could resume normal activities. Come on! They’ve been nuked out of health and home. They have barely any food. If they were too close to ground zero, they may have radiation poisoning as well. They’re not going to be getting on the buses – which have all been destroyed – and travelling to work, which might also have been destroyed. It was sheer idiocy! As it happened, the diseases didn’t have a chance to spread…
I’ll need a slight digression here. Biological warfare is not quite as easy as films and horror stories make it out. A disease that kills its host before its host can pass it on to other people will burn itself out very quickly, simply by exterminating the pool of carriers. A disease that goes too far in the opposite direction, one that doesn’t kill its hosts, is useless as a weapon. The ideal is to strike a balance between timing – so that it has a chance to spread – and lethality. It is much harder than it is in the movies.
And the plagues spread throughout the death zones, and Africa. Africa had been barely touched by the Final War – although North Africa took a hammering from Israeli nukes – but the plagues were no respecter of neutrality. They raced down from the north to the south, killing as they went, before they burned out. Africa was almost uniquely vulnerable. They didn’t have a real vaccination program in many places, while many more had bad governments and depended on outside aid, all of which had been cut off. The plagues only made a bad situation, with millions on the verge of starvation, worse. Rumours ran wild; it was a Jewish weapon, or an Afrikaner weapon, or an American weapon, or even the anger of Allah. Religious strife and warfare followed in its wake. The plagues didn’t care. Places that didn’t or couldn’t instigate a strict quarantine were touched and suffered hundreds of further casualties.
It would be nice to say that things were settling down, but in many places, it was only the silence of the grave. Entire populations had been wiped out. The handful of survivors in Europe and the Middle East were surviving by holding out against thousands upon thousands of desperate refugees. Those that were broken were exterminated and thousands more died. Ireland, the only major European country not to suffer a nuclear attack, had problems of its own. They were swamped by refugees from Britain. There are hundreds of stories from the time of chaos and most of them end badly.
We’d been lucky. The Russians simply didn’t have many long-ranged weapons, although they had been able to fire hundreds of nukes at us. We also had more space between the cities and the countryside. Many – but not all – of the nukes had gone off away from civilian population centres. We had a chance to survive and rebuild, provided only that we held out for long enough.
It wasn't going to be easy.
The next few weeks showed us how grim it was going to become.
Chapter Ten
I also think there are prices too high to pay to save the United States. Conscription is one of them. Conscription is slavery, and I don't think that any people or nation has a right to save itself at the price of slavery for anyone, no matter what name it is called. We have had the draft for twenty years now; I think this is shameful. If a country can't save itself through the volunteer service of its own free people, then I say: Let the damned thing go down the drain!
-Robert A. Heinlein
I don’t like using conscript soldiers any more than Heinlein did.
When I’d been in the Marines, I’d volunteered and yes, there were times when I cursed that decision. It was a hellish time, in many ways, and yet…I had volunteered to allow the Drill Sergeants to break me down and rebuild me into a Marine, or at least the larvae of one. (I didn’t understand that until I’d actually been under fire.) It was my own choice, even if it had been a stupid one, and by the time I had completed the course, I knew that it wasn't a stupid choice. Looking back, I wonder how I could ever have been so naive.
But the same wasn't true for the conscripts. Ingalls had a high school with roughly four hundred pupils of military age, with a little fiddling. Some of them were unfit and would have to be put through heavy exercise to make them slim down, although there weren't as many of them as there would have been in a city. Country life doesn’t tend to lead to fatties, although the stereotype of the jolly fat farmer’s wife is still with us. Some of them had intended to seek a career in the military, or at least go see the elephant before being discharged, but others hadn’t wanted anything to do with the military. At least two of them had rebelled against parental pressure to join the military and had embraced a radical lifestyle instead, although they hadn’t really gone that badly off the rails. They wouldn’t have lasted long in the really dark places in New York. It didn’t matter. The point was that few of them had volunteered to be turned into soldiers.
I didn’t like that. I’d fought conscripts in Iraq and most of them had been piss-poor soldiers. They’d had to be driven into battle at gunpoint. The British had done better, back in the First World War, with conscripts treated the same as volunteers, once they had been called up to battle. They hadn’t had such a finely-tuned training program as the modern-day USMC, but by the end of the war, the BEF had been the most powerful force on the planet. The Arab armies that relied on conscripts had often proven nothing, but broken weeds. The Arab armies that didn’t use conscript labour often had manpower shortages. The Chinese came up with the saying ‘good iron is not used to make a nail, nor a good man to make a soldier’ but I’d have been surprised if there wasn't a comparable Arab saying. Conscripts who didn’t want to be there and weren't properly supported could turn into disasters.
And the last thing I wanted was to be shot in the back by someone who resented training, or that I’d put him on the front lines.
There was little choice, as I said, but I still wasn’t comfortable with the decision. I’d mainly put training in the hands of other veterans from the town – it might have been a mistake, in hindsight, but it wasn't as if I could recruit training officers from Texas – and supervised as best as I could. We’d left out most of the training that a regular American soldier would undergo, not least because we represented about a dozen or more different services or combat units between us, but we focused on the important issues. They learned how to shoot – most of them already knew – and they learned how to follow orders. Their appearance was a joke – God knows, if we actua
lly did go to war, they certainly wouldn’t look like soldiers – but they were learning. They did have some problems learning to salute at the right time, but I could forgive them that, as long as they did their duty. Besides, it can be dangerous to be saluted in a combat zone. A watching sniper might see that you were in command and put you out of play, permanently.
“Hey, boss!”
I turned to see Rose coming up behind me. Like many of us these days, she wore body army, with a mask covering most of her face. A great shame, in my view, but the last thing I wanted was for people to start breathing in fallout if the winds changed sharply. I’d had Sergeant Isaac Chang give everyone a tense lecture on the realities of fallout, as opposed to the myths and legends, and some people were starting to relax. I wasn't sure if I approved of that, but…
“Rose,” I said, cheerfully. I’d barely seen her in the last two days, in between organising the training periods and supervising the defences. We’d had to shoot several people who had tried to force their way into the defences and drive away several hundred more. We’d also taken in forty men with experience or skills we needed and their families. Several of their sons had been added to the training soldiers. “What’s up?”
The Living Will Envy The Dead Page 9