A House Divided

by Adam Yoshida

  "Look," replied King, "there's almost no financial downside to this. Since the war began in the Middle East and the screws were put to the Israeli, Egyptian, and Syrian militaries, we've been able to lay our hands on a huge surplus of military equipment and well-trained personnel at extremely low prices. I know that the plan was to use these in Africa and elsewhere, but they can be easily re-directed into here. And the upside we're talking about here, if we can pull this off, is not in the millions or even the billions, but possibly in the tens or hundreds of billions. We're going to get in on the ground floor of the greatest energy bonanza in the history of the world."

  The former Secretary shook his pixelated head across the Skype video link.

  "I still think that this is incredibly reckless," he stated.

  "Well, Mr. Secretary," replied King, "we're already doing it. And so I advise that you and everyone else listening who wants not only to preserve their investments, but to reap the rewards that this offers, gets to knocking doors in Washington to try and make it safer."

  The first sign that the Federal Government received that something had gone wrong in the West was when the Canadian Broadcasting Company went off the air. Jackson, who had managed to secure himself an appointment as a Colonel in the Army of the Western Republic, had decided that the storming and seizure of the building would be the first step in establishing the AWR as the primary force in British Columbia. He had been painstaking talked out of a plan to burn the building to the ground and to salt the earth where it had once stood on the eminently sensible grounds that half of the building that contained the CBC's Vancouver headquarters was a residential structure and, so far as anyone knew, there was no practical way to burn down half the building. Jackson's proposal that the evacuate the residential side of the building before burning it down was rejected on the grounds that it may not serve to win hearts and minds over to the cause.

  In a development that would astonish outside observers, there was – aside from a handful of militia – essentially no military presence in the whole of the Province of British Columbia outside of the naval installation at Esquimalt. The army that the Western rebels possessed, tiny as it initially was, faced essentially zero armed opposition as it seized vital installations around the greater Vancouver region. The Provincial Government ordered local detachments of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police not to resist by force, an order that was generally obeyed. In the city of Vancouver, which had its own police force, the pro-rebel Chief of Police took a position in support of the uprising and ordered his men and women to recognize the provisional government as a legitimate authority, an order that was also largely obeyed.

  As he prepared to address the cameras, Howard Eagleton was already beginning to reconsider his partnership with the impressive-if-impetuous young man pacing in front of him. The logic that had propelled him to this step was inexorable, yet his emotions still drove him to feelings of resistance and distress. Once the Federal Government had moved against Alberta, he realized, the choice was between either open rebellion or abject surrender. With the Albertan Government essentially supplanted by a Federal occupation and the threat of the same hanging over both British Columbia and Saskatchewan, it made sense that the Western Congress ought to organize a provisional government to serve as a nexus of resistance. All of this was logical. Yet, at the same time, he was forced to ask himself who this William Jackson character was and what exactly he wanted.

  The basics, of course, could be gleaned from an internet search. He was a lawyer who had made a fortune serving the interests of private military contractors around the world, eagerly defending them to the hilt. This unique field of practice had made him very rich and won him countless friends. This, no doubt, explained where he had managed to produce an army from virtually overnight and where he had acquired so many very illegal weapons. He'd even managed to gift the West with a tiny air force, a very expensive luxury that they'd managed to scrape together from God-knows-where.

  Was this man, Eagleton wondered, genuinely a patriot, or was he something quite dangerous? Certainly, that he seemed to possess the loyalty – perhaps because he was their paymaster – of the only military force of significance in the West was a cause of indigestion to Eagleton.

  "Sir," said Jackson, focusing Eagleton's attention, "we must take the airports. And we must do it immediately."

  "Those airports," interjected one of Eagleton's advisors, "are the property of the Federal Government and I believe that they will defend them."

  "So be it," shot back Jackson, "our forces here are very limited. If we do not act to cut off their avenues of ingress, they will cut us to pieces. If we can take the airports, given their relative lack of airlift capacity, we can stop them from bringing in forces in any simple fashion. They'll have to either drive across the Rockies or come in via the sea, either of which will take a very long time and which we will have options to act against. If they come in by the air with a secure airhead, they'll be all over us in a matter of days, before we can begin to train or organize any sort of a volunteer force."

  "No," repeated Eagleton, "so far we have managed to avoid having anyone killed or even shot in doing what we have done. We won't be able to do that if we try and storm YVR."

  Jackson slammed his fist into the desk.

  "Damn you, you're going to fuck this whole fucking thing up," he said as he stormed from the room.

  Augustus King slumped wearily in the seat of his rented Toyota Camry as he drove into the center of Vancouver. Over the last few days he had travelled from Somalia to Saudi Arabia to Beijing and then finally to Seattle before driving the last leg of the trip. He'd worried somewhat that the border guards at the Aldergrove Border Crossing some forty miles to the east of Vancouver might detect that the Canadian passport he was traveling on was fake but they, in spite of the situation in which their country found itself, seemed to be as relaxed as ever. They had waved him straight on through.

  Jackson had damned well better be right about this, he thought as he crossed the viaduct that ran into the core of the city. It was often a mistake for private military contractors to become involved in business that touched upon their personal affairs. Yet, at the same time, the promised lucre of being in on the ground floor of a Western Canadian republic were simply too tempting to pass up.

  He turned on the radio.

  "Nothing would please me more than to report to you that there had been a happy and full reconciliation between ourselves and the government in Ottawa," Howard Eagleton droned.

  There had better fucking not be, King thought. He had not travelled halfway across the world and invested the better part of a hundred million dollars into this project to have it all fizzle.

  "Nevertheless, I must warn the Federal Government that we will not allow a repeat of what has happened in Alberta or, for that matter, in Ottawa. We must insist upon a full and robust defense of our rights. If we must exercise force in order to assure that then, most regrettably, we will do so."

  "Why the fuck haven't you taken the airports yet?" bellowed King by way of greeting to Jackson when he stepped into the suite of offices that Jackson had leased to serve as his temporary headquarters.

  "There are political considerations in play," responded Jackson.

  "Ok," said King, instantly calming down, "tell me about them."

  "Even with the previous acts of aggression by the Eastern government, most of the public here is not sold on war. In fact, technically speaking, the government of this province – located on the adjacent island – considers our actions and those of the Western Congress to be criminal, even if they are hedging by taking no action against us. Also, there is the position of the American government to consider. The present Administration is hardly in sympathy with us and, though they are obviously heavily engaged elsewhere, they might be moved to intervene if our actions were to become provocative enough."

  "Anyway, nothing is going to be landing on those airfields if we don't want them to," added Jackso
n, "we have artillery sighted on the runways. If they try and land soldiers there by air, we'll open up, orders or not."

  "Still, I would feel better about our prospects if we had those airfields in our hands," said King.

  "I agree," replied Jackson, "but it would be unwise to act without political support, even if it costs us in a military sense."

  "We know that they have artillery and infantry positioned around the major airfields," noted the Chief of the Defense Staff as he briefed the Prime Minister, "flying into those without preparatory action on our part would be absolutely suicidal."

  The Prime Minister nodded, flipping through the pages of his briefing.

  "We have precious little in the way of professional airmobile forces. Still we have some," continued General Yarmouk, turning to the next slide.

  "Special Forces and drones would be used to attempt to clear a path into Abbotsford and Vancouver, hunting down the forces deployed against both airports. We believe, especially with local assets already in place, that these could be inserted without detection. Now, we shouldn't underestimate the opposition that we may face. By all accounts, these forces recruited by the Western Army are largely veterans, many of them Special Forces vets themselves from all over the world. They're arrayed in strong defensive positions. Even if we add in our – sadly relatively limited – air support options, they're going to fight tenaciously."

  "We've managed to put together the equivalent of a reinforced battalion that can be delivered and supported by the air for the rest of this operation, added Yarmouk, continuing through his carefully planned briefing.

  "The airfield in Pitt Meadows, in suburban Vancouver, isn't large enough for major transport aircraft, but it is suitable for our C-17s. Our very limited force of parachute-qualified soldiers will drop in and secure it overnight. It doesn't even appear to be patrolled, let alone defended. I don't think that the Western Army believes that we're capable of the sort of air mobility operations being contemplated. They think that we'll need a major transportation hub, and so they're focused on keeping us out of those – out of both international airports, the Port of Vancouver, and off the Trans-Canada Highway. We believe that the opportunity exists to capture complete surprise."

  "What about rebel resistance?" asked the Minister of Foreign Affairs.

  "Well," said Yarmouk contemplatively, "we don't want to make the mistake of underestimating the rebels. We know that they're well-trained and we ought to expect that they would be well-equipped, thanks to their international connections. Regrettably, we have seemingly been unable to make progress in convincing our American friends to take the sort of action necessary to effectively resolve that problem."

  "The White House, the State Department – they're all a little busy these days with what's going on down there," the Foreign Minister stiffly replied.

  "Quite so," said Yarmouk, "but that means that the private military contractors that the rebel army is affiliated with – that are the rebel army, in effect – almost certainly have a significant number of anti-tank and surface-to-air missiles, as well as other serious military gear."

  "Ok, ok," said the Prime Minister, waving his hands, "we all get it. Once this force lands at... Pitt Meadows, then what happens next?"

  "We'll move swiftly down Highway 7A directly into the city of Vancouver itself. Given that events in Alberta are relatively controllable, we expect that occupation of the rebel capital will swiftly bring events, other than scattered guerrilla fighting, to an end. The rebel Congress hardly seem the type to fight like Vietnamese peasants."

  "Doesn't that seem," asked the Solicitor-General, who was typically silent during such discussions, "as little obvious? Won't the rebels being, as you said, well-armed and well-trained be prepared for just such an eventuality?"

  "That's not what our intelligence indicates, Minister," replied Yarmouk, "they seem to be pretty focused on the airfields. Also, while they're trained and they're armed, they're not really equipped to fight a stand-up battle against an army. If they fight – and given that this is a mercenary force at least partially driven by the profit motive, I wouldn't take it as a given that they will – I don't believe that they will be able to stand up against a real army."

  Operation Release began a little after 4AM Pacific Daylight Time on the 11th of July. Most of the soldiers of the Canadian Special Operations Regiment had remained with the unit in spite of the fact that they were now being called upon to fight fellow Canadians. They had, after all, sworn an oath of loyalty and, in any case, few really expected the rebels to put up a serious fight. The first part of the unit – essentially, after resignations by some Westerners and others with reservations about the mission – a light battalion in total – made a parachute landing in good order and without facing any opposition. Once the first paratroopers hit the ground they immediately went about securing the immediate area as a stream of further C-17s and C-130s, both capable of rough and short-field landings, began to deliver additional soldiers and equipment to the ever-expanding airhead.

  The first word came to Colonel Jackson via Twitter. He woke, as he often did, to the noise of his chirping phone.

  "@ColWTJackson paratroopers over Pitt Meadows. for real."

  "@ColWTJackson lots of planes landing"

  "@ColWTJackson a steady stream. look like c130's and c17's"

  In less than three minutes, having hastily dressed, the Colonel was out the door.

  By 8AM, the first mechanized platoon – forty-two riflemen mounted in six LAV IIIs delivered by C-17 cargo planes – was already fitted out and had reinforced the perimeter of the base being established in Pitt Meadows. The other fragmentary reports being delivered to Jackson, Eagleton, and King in the basement of the Hotel Vancouver painted a similar picture.

  "I would guess," said King, rubbing his temple, "that they've already got a thousand soldiers on the ground."

  "This isn't a bluff then. This is a full-on military operation," said Eagleton, with a heavy heart.

  "We knew that this was a possibility from the start," said Jackson, seeking to radiate optimism, "and we have always planned against it."

  There had been no point in throwing the military force that the Western Army possessed against that being assembled by the Canadian Army in the suburbs. Even with half-trained volunteers thrown in, the Western Army had no more than a thousand soldiers in its ranks, while the Canadian force was rapidly growing to the nearly the size of a brigade. And, to make matters worse, the Federal army had drones and other modern military equipment that would make any approach across open ground practically suicidal. Still, Jackson and King had not built a multi-billion dollar military conglomerate through passive and derivative thinking.

  No time existed, Jackson and King had told Eagleton in a private meeting, to gain the consent of the rest of the Congress – which was not even really organized as a true provisional government in any case. If they waited for that consent – which might not even come – then they would expose their secret to the Federal Government that might, in turn, be able to neutralize it. At length Eagleton, tears streaming down his cheeks, had nodded his assent.

  "The rest of them," said Jackson, gesturing in the direction of the hotel where the Western Congress was still meeting, "are going to be pissed."

  "Well," said King, thoughtfully lighting a cigarette, "fuck them."

  Avi Stern took in his surroundings, enjoying the light breeze that flowed through the late-summer air.

  This, he thought as he examined the rough field that had been set up for the squadron of Syrian surplus MiG-23s that had been set up on a rough field in suburban Vancouver, is a trick that they'll only be able to pull off once. Still, with the Israeli Air Force effectively out of business since the arrival of the American Expeditionary Force in Israel and the rest of the Middle East, there were only so many exciting jobs for combat pilots out there.

  It would not have done to allow the Federal force to continue its build-up indefinitely. Though the Canadi
an Army was not nearly as large or well-armed as a country the size of and with the money of Canada ought to have been able to afford, it was nevertheless both effective and deadly. It did, however, have one serious weakness: its leaders had never taken seriously the possibility that the Westerners would actually fight.

  "Are we really going to wage war against our fellow citizens?" one member of the Western Congress was plaintively crying as Jackson re-entered the room where they were meeting.

  The men and women turned to face Jackson as he stepped in.

  "I have always maintained," announced Jackson, "that the West will fight and the West will be right. No one can say that our friends in the East were not warned what the consequences of their actions would be. Further I must say that no one, not even myself, quite expected the extremes to which certain elements of the Federal Government would resort in seeking to exert their will upon us."

  "Arrests – quite illegal arrests, I need not add. The usurpation of the legitimate rights of the Provinces. The overthrow – again utterly illegal – of a duly-elected provincial government by the Federal power. And now they have landed soldiers on our lands with the clear aim of using force as a means of coercion against us as well."

  "None of us ever aimed to start a war. But, if we must have one, then let it begin here."

  "In that spirit, I must inform you that, in light of the invasion of our territory by Federal forces, it has become necessary to resort to certain extraordinary measures utilizing resources of which you have not been previously informed..."

  Stern took his Russian-made aircraft in low and made his approach as quickly as he could. His goal was to get back on the ground and return to relative safety as soon as humanly possible. Not only was this not really his war, but he also had a less-than-total trust in the Praetorian technicians who had dismantled and hastily re-assembled the beat-up Syrian warplanes. To be sure, as well-paid professionals, they would want to do their best but, at the same time, these planes were all at least forty years old and had been through as much in their lives as Stern felt that he, practically now a man without a country, had.