“You were going to track me down, Captain?” Carter asked, handing the flags to the clerk.
“I was hoping we could spend some time together,” she replied, smiling broadly while she studied his reaction to her boldness.
Cater hesitated. There had been an attraction between the two of them since they had first met, but he had tried his best to ignore it; feelings of that sort were for a time when the enemy was defeated and his country was not in such imminent peril. In the weeks they had been training together he, despite his best efforts to restrain his emotions, had found her presence to be a source of strength and comfort. Now it seemed that there was no way to avoid those feelings.
Looking at her face, he saw anticipation. For reasons he couldn’t fathom she really wanted to spend time with him. At that moment it seemed selfish and mean-spirited to deny her. It sounded egotistical, even to Carter himself, but Winters seemed to need him on a personal level. He could not find it in himself to say no to her invitation; finding that he liked being needed.
He returned her smile. “Can you meet me at the Lincoln Memorial at fourteen hundred?” he asked as he paid the clerk for the flags. “I have something personal I need to take care of.”
“I’ll be there,” she replied.
They left the PX walking side-by-side. “I managed to get a car; can I drop you off anywhere?”Carter asked.
Winters shook her head. “Sergeant Garba and I are sharing a ride into DC; I’m meeting her in a half an hour.”
“Have a good time, Captain,” Carter told her, allowing himself another long look at her face.
“Can you call me Monica when we’re alone?” she asked.
He smiled. “Monica,” he said, exhaling more than usual. That small reduction of formality seemed to relieve a tremendous amount of tension between them.
She stepped closer, looking around to see if they were being observed. When she was sure that they were not, she took his hands in hers, guided his arms around her waist, and kissed him; coiling her arms around his neck. They held the kiss for several seconds. When they parted, Carter was stunned into wordlessness.
“That was just to let you know what kind of evening I expect it to be tonight, Doug. We don’t have time for the usual preliminaries,” she said, still very close to him.
“So,” Carter said when his head had cleared. “Are you and I going to be each other’s dying wish?” he asked.
Winters touched his face softly. “If we do it right, we’ll be each other’s reason to live,” she half whispered into his ear.
[][][]
The sea of white monuments seemed endless. The grounds around them were still lovingly maintained by dedicated landscapers. As desperate as the United States’ situation was, Arlington Cemetery was still treated as a shrine. The men and women of the Third Infantry Regiment, the Old Guard, still watched over America’s war dead with respect and care.
Two small, recently purchased, American flags moved in the slight breeze; it decorated the grave of Mathew Carter. Douglas Carter had placed the flags at the base of the marker an hour earlier. Carter always became contemplative when he came to Arlington. He did not contemplate death, however. At Arlington he found himself pondering his life: the life of a soldier.
It had been a life of service. His parents were dead and he had no siblings. He had never owned a home, or lived in anything but military housing. The women in his life had been few; and his time with them short. He had few friends; partially because he was selective about his friendships, and partially because many of the friends had been taken by the war. Many of them were resting somewhere in the vast cemetery in which he currently stood. The one constant in his life had always been duty. Family and friends died or drifted away, lovers came and went, and places to live were temporary. Duty endured.
Arlington, and places like it, were not monuments to death Carter decided; they were monuments to duty. His father, and all of those resting with him, had made duty their first calling; setting aside their own concerns so others could live long, uneventful lives. Carter nodded to himself. After visiting his father’s grave so many times over the years, he finally realized why he found Arlington Cemetery to be comforting instead of depressing. When duty called it had always been answered by dedicated, selfless people willing to give up everything for what they held dear. In a world so bleak and corrupt that it made Carter question humankind’s fitness to survive, this place was a reminder that there were always people, like his father, who would stand and fight for what was right.
Carter had taken many lives over the years; he knew that many of those he had killed were lying in cemeteries much like Arlington. That did not affect the comfort that he felt when came to such monuments; those soldiers were doing their duty as they saw it. He had not killed them out of malice, but because of his duty, not only to his country, but to mankind as well. When he killed WCA soldiers, he did so with the conviction that he was trying make all people free. The enemy soldiers he had killed, and those he would kill in the future, were part of a military machine he was systematically trying to destroy, but sadly, they were also his brothers in arms. He fought and killed so that their comrades that survived the war and the generations that would come after them could be free.
Carter heard footsteps behind him. He knew, without turning around, who it would be behind him. “How’s your old man?” General Hick’s voice asked.
“Probably better off than we are, Sir,” Carter said, smiling slightly.
“I knew you’d come here,” Hicks said, standing beside Carter.
“This might be the last time I get to come here,” Carter said. “Mom is in the family plot in Maryland, I’ll go visit her next.
“You do know that I hated having to bring you into Seed Corn?” the general asked.
Carter faced Hicks. “I’d been pissed if you hadn’t, Sir. This project is important; it may be our only chance of winning the war, or even to survive it.”
“Do you think things are that bad?” Hicks inquired, studying Carter’s face intently.
Carter’s face softened. “You wouldn’t be risking the team’s lives like this if it weren’t,” he answered. “I’m just a Major, and I don’t have the whole strategic picture, but I can see defeatism spreading through the ranks. It hasn’t hit everyone yet, but a lot of people have already given up. They still fight, but without any spirit; they just go through the motions. A blind man can see that morale is on the verge of collapse.”
Hicks frowned. “What about your morale, Doug?” Hicks asked.
“Sir, the enemy can cut of both my arms, and I’d still try to kick them to death,” Carter assured the general.
Hicks took a step closer to Carter. “Doug, I’m going to tell you something that has to remain between the two of us,” he said. “Even if the enemy crosses the Mississippi and overruns the rest of the country, that won’t be the end. There is a plan in place to continue a guerilla-style resistance even if our conventional forces are defeated.”
Carter nodded. “I figured as much. The enemy is still having trouble with large scale guerilla resistance in Australia, and there are underground resistance cells in almost all of the WCA occupied countries. Ruling the whole world means policing the whole world, and that could overtax their resources and their will as well.”
“It still may not get that far,” Hicks assured Carter. “You, your team, and the other potential paranormals may turn it around before it does.”
Carter panned his eyes over the long rows of grave stones. “How did it get this far, Sir?” he asked. “I know the history, the sequence of events, but I never really understood how the people let it get this far. I mean the conditions that caused the war didn’t develop overnight; someone had to see it coming.”
Hicks chuckled. “Historians will write books by the hundreds trying to answer that question,” he said. “Personally, I think that we, the people of the United States, had lost track of what we are. The people who came over from Europ
e to colonize America were explorers and builders; they had vision and guts, and so did their offspring. They had drive and they used it to make the United States the greatest nation that ever existed. But, somewhere along the line, we lost our vision; we lost that drive to build and grow.”
Carter looked at Hicks; his face asking him to continue.
“Once the vision was gone, we stagnated,” Hicks elaborated.
“After that, we started to question ourselves; question our greatness and morality. From there, it got worse; we started to be ashamed of our greatness. Somehow a whole generation, in the mid twentieth century, got convinced that the United States, and all it stood for, was corrupt and evil.”
“That’s what I never understood,” Carter said. “How were Americans made to hate their country? How were they convinced to accept all the statist initiatives that congress past in the years before the war started? They pissed on the tenth amendment and state’s rights in general; destroyed our industry almost completely, and tried like hell to take away the most basic constitutional rights. As far I can tell, the people just stood for it. Right up until they saw foreign troops in the streets.”
Hicks shrugged."There was a well planned program of social engineering,” he said. “I think it started in the universities back in the nineteen sixties and then got into the public schools. Students who lived in a capitalist country were taught that capitalism was bad; that the industries that fed them, clothed them, and kept them warm, were destroying the planet’s ecology. They were taught to hate the nation and the political and economic systems that created more prosperity than any such systems in history.”
Hicks stared out over the fields of monuments. “They were indoctrinated to believe that democracy; representative republics in particular, were corrupt and oppressive by their very nature. Once they believed that, socialism seemed like a good alternative. And this didn’t just happen in the United States; it happened in Briton, France, and all of the western democracies of the time.”
Hicks saw that Carter was still listening intently and went on. “People were taught that society owed them the basics of life and that they didn’t have to work for them. The governments subsidized housing, food, education and just about everything else. To fund all of these social programs, they raised taxes, particularly on the wealthy and on small businesses. But, eventually, the wealthy couldn’t pay the taxes anymore and the businesses were taxed and regulated out of existence. The factories closed, transportation stopped, and no one could find work. With no one working, there was no one to pay the taxes and governments went bankrupt and started dissolving. Everyone was so busy arguing about, democrat and republican, left or right, and liberalism or conservatism that no one bothered to try and fix the problems. It was like fighting over what color to paint a house that was in the process of burning down. And, when the WCA was formed, declared all national governments dissolved, and took on governing the old nations itself, no one really cared.”
Carter interrupted him then. “But sir,” he asked, “Why didn’t all of that show people how dangerous allowing a government, any government, to become that out of control is? Like I said before, this didn’t happen overnight. Someone had to realize that they were heading for an authoritarian government, but there seemed to have been little or no resistance.”
“Doug, we’re talking about a program of systematic, scientific social engineering that had been going on for at least half a century,” Hicks said. “The educators, the news, and the popular media actually spun the economic disaster that global socialism caused as a failure of capitalism. They blamed the greed of the wealthy for the economic collapse. Since that was the only explanation that was readily forthcoming, most people accepted it.”
“I’ve read a lot about the last half of the twentieth century; about how socialist statism took hold in the west even though it was failing miserably everywhere else,” Carter said. “But nothing I’ve read explained how that happened. You said there was a social engineering program, and there certainly was, but who were the social engineers; how did they gain so much influence?”
Hicks chuckled again. “Doug, I’m not sure there will ever be an answer to that question. Some historians will tell you it was a conspiracy. They say that there was a cabal of elitists from academia, business, and government that deliberately plunged the world into chaos in order to rebuild it into their version of a true socialist utopia; with the cabal in charge of course. Other people will tell you that there was no conspiracy. They say that it was just a group of like-minded individuals who happened to have the right combination of power, money, and influence to move societal evolution in the direction they wanted it to go. That isn’t a conspiracy as much as it is a movement; a natural progression into global socialism led by the supposedly enlightened few.”
“And in order for socialism to be pure then it had to be global in scope?” Carter asked.
“Right,” Hicks agreed. “They reasoned that socialism had failed throughout history because nationalism, especially nationalism from capitalist countries, kept the socialist system from functioning properly. The logical solution, for them anyway, was to abolish nations. Since socialism depends on a political and economic collective, everyone had to be a part of the collective.”
“And, by that time, things were so bad economically that most people accepted a global government because they thought things couldn’t get any worse," Carter observed.
“Right,” Hicks confirmed. “But there were a few people in every country that didn’t accept it and resisted. In the United States that movement was small at first, But, once the WCA started rounding up slave labor for ‘labor Battalions’ so they could try and get the factories working, and started confiscating all private property, not just the property of the wealthy, riots broke out. The local WCA officials tried to use American military and police forces to stomp out the unrest. Some of those forces followed the WCAs orders and fought the rioters, but most refused to fight American citizens.”
“That’s when they brought in WCA troops from other countries.” Carter said. “I remember hearing about that on a pirate radio station. A WCA infantry regiment from Venezuela fired on unarmed protesters in Huston.”
“Over six hundred people were killed,” Hicks continued. “That was when it all came to a boil. The WCA troops found out the hard way that they hadn’t confiscated all of guns in private hands. Fighting broke out, all at once, all over the country. It was disorganized at first, but eventually the military and police forces sided with the American people and started fighting the foreign troops. After that, the war was well and truly on.”
Carter tilted his head. “That’s just it, Sir,” Carter said. “After all of that social engineering and propaganda, why did anyone resist at all? They had accepted being given into slavery by their leaders until that point; what made them decide to fight back all of the sudden?”
A slight smile formed on Hick’s lips. “Because, for all of their social engineering and propaganda, the globalist planners neglected one thing: the human soul.” Hicks affirmed, tapping his chest indicating his heart. “At the core of every human being are the need to be free; and the natural aversion to taking freedom away from others. No amount of propaganda can change that. There are people who enjoy hurting or enslaving others, but they are criminals and deviants to begin with. When push comes to shove, there is always someone who will stand up to tyranny, spit in its eye, and say no.”
“Besides that,” Hicks went on, “There always a few people that the social engineering doesn’t work on; people who love their country and hold fast to their ideals. There were a few people, like your old man, who saw that a war with the globalists was coming and tried to stop it and, failing that, they prepared to win it.”
“So the bottom line is that we allowed the United States to become complacent. We lost confidence in the principles the nation was founded on; began to doubt our own moral judgment. We lacked the confidence to keep building, to
keep advancing, or even to defend ourselves. Once that all happened, the American people accepted anything that the government did, no matter what it cost them. Is that right, Sir?” Carter asked.
“That’s about right, and it wasn’t just the United States, Doug,” Hicks corrected. “It happened to all the western democracies. Once national pride died out, then national sovereignty had to die too. The only thing that kept the power of the nations in check was the power of other nations. Without that balance of power there was no way that the WCA could be anything but tyrannical.”
Hicks touched the flag Carter had just placed in the ground. “That’s why so many people from WCA occupied countries fled to the States to join the FNF,” He said. “Hell, a lot of the FNF troops came from countries with governments that were already socialistic or even totalitarian. But they didn’t want to be citizens of the world; they were Polish, Japanese, Kenyan or whatever nationality that they claimed, and weren’t going to be told otherwise. The old school globalists were right; nationalism was the biggest obstacle to their goals. But nationalism, patriotism, is a thing of the soul; it’s not a love of a place, it’s a love of the character and of the spirit of the people who live in that place. It’s a part of a person that’s damned hard to remove. But the globalists are willing to kill as many people as it takes to remove it from everyone. With nations abolished, there is nothing to check the WCAs power accept the United States and the FNF.”
“And now the WCA has to crush us,” Carter concluded
“It has to try,” Hicks corrected. “It has to try.”
[][][]
The eternally annoying beeping of the alarm woke Carter at zero four thirty. Monica stirred next to him, snuggling against his back as he reached to silence the alarm. He lay back on the bed and she moved closer, resting her head on his chest. He hugged her to him and caressed her arm; reluctant to remove himself from her warmth. For the first time in his life, he was completely content. He closed his eyes and tried to write the moment deliberately on his memory. He savored her warmth, the smoothness of her skin, the smell of her perfume and, most of all, the sheer rightness he felt. In that moment, when they both faced probable death, he had found his first true contentment. Carter was sure that any poet of ancient Greece would have found inspiration in the in the irony.
The Fate Of Nations: F.I.R.E. Team Alpha: Book One Page 4