The complaint rang out.
We train, we carry guns, we walk every day, for what? Nothing.
That sentiment was echoed and hundreds by hundreds the troops abandoned posts.
Callahan estimated it would take six months to reorganize.
To make matters worse, many poured west. As if we had something more to offer.
They poured into the West. They set up their own homesteads.
The Society fell apart.
Within a month, Bertha placed a call to Joe, a cry for help.
Joe was going to just let it go until she told him the numbers.
Did we have any idea that the Society housed, fed, trained and worked over seventy-three thousand men and women? Not including the three hundred children that had been born. Infants.
We had no idea.
Joe Slagel suddenly went from Leader of Beginnings, to President of the UWA, and finally President of the United States.
George died in March.
By May, we were scrambling to put the country back into some order.
We had to.
It was going to be like starting all over again.
Joe was a big enough man to know he couldn’t do it alone.
He put Frank in charge of all military. Hal was Secretary of Defense. Three hundred UWA soldiers were sent out to locate and find where lost people had gone.
I was bestowed the highest honor.
Vice President.
Joe sent me to the East. Being that I was Mr. Organizer, Joe sent me out there to be his eyes and ears and to help Callahan reorganize.
Many of their farmlands were ravaged by the desperate, so we had to start agriculture and food production again. Luckily the greenhouses were protected. Immediately we worked the ocean.
We found fifty men who knew about fishing and they were our deep-sea men. We then had plenty of fish as a source of food.
June rolled around, crops were planted, food was growing. We were on our way.
Things were looking up.
13.
Invasion
Did I tell you I wanted to go home?
I did. I just wanted to go back to Beginnings. Cross-country travel was easier with the use of the trains. I had visitors during my two months with the Society, but I still hated being away from Beginnings.
Joe promised me time off as soon as the summer was over. Okay, I could deal with that.
But, unfortunately, that never happened.
Mid June I was down in Norfolk, Virginia. We had four main hubs where our fishing boats were stationed. Norfolk was one of them.
I got a call.
“We have problems,” was all Callahan said.
She received the call first then called me. I of course placed a call to Joe.
In an attempt to get the incentive we offered, one of our fishing boats went out way beyond where they were supposed to.
It was a Maryland fishing boat.
Good thing they did.
They hurried back, and requested a secure channel for radio communication.
They weren’t spotted, they didn’t think. But they did however spot and counted, thirty-seven ships, positioned and not moving, a hundred and fifteen miles off the coast of the United States.
The ships were all large and of various types. Cruise ships, freight carriers, air craft carriers.
I recall getting that information and feeling that shock wave shoot through my body.
When I called Joe the first words I spoke were, “George may have been right.”
I informed him what was going on and Joe then told me to get a hold of our other hubs to find our boats the furthest out and send them out further.,
The satellite scan in Beginnings didn’t pick up the ocean, so we had to rely on old fashion navigation.
Fuck that.
I did send out the boats east into the ocean, and then I began working on the radar on one of the old ships docked at Norfolk.
It worked, but it was useless. I saw a blur; it might as well have been a sea monster.
Within five hours our ships reported I. Ten hours after that, we had the entire eastern seaboard scanned.
Like first reported, the ships were sitting there. Just sitting there. Anchored. Waiting.
When the final count came in, it was frightening.
Ninety-eight ships formed a wall from north to south.
“I want every available pilot to man a plane. George’s plan is here,” Frank said. “I want a surveillance of the south. The gulf. The Florida Keys. Anywhere we have water.”
I wasn’t physically there at that meeting. I was present over the phone and the intercom.
“Anything by radio?” I asked.
Joe answered. “Nothing. We’ve tried every frequency we know.”
“Same here," I said. “I sent a boat out for surveillance. ”
“Good. Good.” Joe said. “Let us know as soon as soon as you hear anything.”
Frank interjected. “Danny, gather all available men together. I’ll be faxing you meeting points. Training points. I have men on their way. Plus, we need the lost ones ASAP.”
“Every available man for training?” I asked with a chuckle of disbelief. “You think that’s necessary?”
“Without a doubt,” Frank replied. “Ninety-eight ships. All of them big. If there’s five hundred people on each one. We have a country arriving.”
It wouldn’t take long. It also wouldn’t take long for Stewart Lang to come forward again. He came out of hiding when he heard the news to reveal a big secret.
He didn’t think it was important when George was in charge. Now he did.
The reason George wanted Beginnings was because deep within the communication room was a link up to a satellite that could scan the air, land and sea.
We located the manual and sent it to Henry to work on. We needed him to get it up and running, praying that it wasn't too late.
We figured out where they were coming from. The Fredrickson hit the far east. The surviving population knew the mini ice age and destruction was not conducive to survival, so they had migrated here.
To say we didn’t have a good military strategy would be lying. We did. We did the best we could with the tools at our disposal.
Surveillance from aircraft determined the military strategy Frank and Hal used.
From Maryland to South Carolina, ninety ships lined up. Groups of five. Down in the gulf seven war ships and one submarine sat and waited.
A hundred plus miles north of the Montana border were two thousand soldiers. A foreign military camp. We located it through our surveillance.
We were able to round up close to sixty thousand of the Society soldiers. They were easy to convince once they heard the ‘George theoretical invasion’ was imminent.
Frank moved two thousand of our men to the Canadian border, twenty-thousand of the troops south and scattered twenty thousand down the east coast. He then positioned the remaining troops near civilization and agricultural areas inland.
Joe called him nuts.
I remember that fateful day well.
We were all in an office in Norfolk.
“I don’t understand,” Frank said. “Danny and John Matoose have this system up and running. We can lock in the coordinates of those ninety ships. We have one hundred and three viable scuds. We lock on and take out those ninety ships, and concentrate hands on for the war ships down south. We hit them with what we can and deal with the ground invasion. If we gas the troops we can wipe them out.”
You would have thought Frank was Attila the Hun. Or Hitler. The faces in the room were aghast. Myself included.
“Did you see the report, Frank!” Joe blasted. “You’re treating this like it is an all out hostile invasion.”
“Dad, they have movement north of us. Ships to the south and east. Uh, yeah, I’d say it’s an invasion.”
I intervened. “Frank, these people lost their homes. I think the reason they have the war ships is in case we d
on’t let them in. Just in case they need to get tough. But I don’t think they came all the way over here to start a war.”
“I do.” Frank replied. “Without a doubt. For the first time you’ll hear me say, George is right. We are not letting them in.”
“The hell we aren’t,” Joe said. “Those ninety-ships. You heard the report, they have civilians on them. A lot of women and children.”
Frank nodded arrogantly. “Dad. Take them out.”
“What! You’re out of your goddamn mind. We need to concentrate on those war ships. First try to make contact, see what they want ….”
“No!” Frank blasted. “I think it’s pretty clear what they want. Hal … tell him.”
“Dad,” Hal stepped forward. “Frank has a point. I think we should go with his suggestion.”
Joe nodded with sarcasm. “Wipe them out. All of them. A peaceful movement? Frank, move your troops, position them more south. Send out an air surveillance and a ship to try to make contact …”
“Dad, no. The gulf movement is a feint. The civilians are the decoys. The ninety ships are the threat.”
At that instant, Joe tossed photos on the table. They flew about. Pictures of the ships. Indigent people, looking straggly lined the decks. Children. Women. No soldiers.
“This is not a war movement. Look at these faces, Frank.” Joe blasted. “Women. Children. Elderly. They aren’t invading us.”
“They are decoys, my gut is telling me Dad.”
Joe huffed and shook his head.
Hal stepped forward looking at the pictures. “I hadn’t seen these. .. Frank maybe …”
“No.” Frank said strongly. “Listen to me and listen to me good. Ninety plus ships. If these fucking people were so organized as to get together fuel and resources for ninety fucking ships, then they sure as hell had the resources to let us know they were coming. Radio. A single boat. Something. But they didn’t. They just showed up. Trust me on this one, Dad. Take out the ninety ships. We can do it in one push of a button.”
But they didn’t listen to Frank.
They should have.
14.
Attack
Here’s how it was supposed to go. Robbie Slagel, Joe’s youngest son was to lead a four plane squad into the gulf of Mexico to do closer surveillance. Ground troops and equipment were positioned inland about twenty miles.
Three days after it was determined, three days after Frank pleaded to take out the ships to the east, the battle plan began.
Robbie led the squadron. It was a non aggressive mission.
He was shot down.
The first act of war was delivered upon us. They fired first.
Within seconds, literally seconds, boats were launched from the ships.
War erupted.
But that wasn’t all. In a way, that was what Joe expected.
He didn’t expect his youngest son to be shot down and lost at sea.
Which he was.
It was a devastating blow to the Slagels.
It was the starting gun. When Robbie’s plane went down, the worst was yet to come.
Over half of those ninety ships had been redesigned and reequipped with launch capabilities. They slammed us, simultaneously firing off at once, 76 SLBM low yield nuclear weapons to land randomly upon our soil.
The landed more toward the Midwest.
The bombs were designed to cause turmoil and chaos. They did.
The enemy ships did exactly what Frank wanted to do to them.
Frank wanted to unload on them all at once. But three days later they unloaded on us.
We couldn’t intercept.
Random areas exploded in the worst ever surprise hit on U.S. soil.
We could have avoided it. We could have stopped it.
We were so concerned with what looked like an attack down south, we failed to realize the obvious invasion was indeed the feint.
In the middle of massive upheaval, over one hundred and fifty thousand men, women and children, stormed our beach, invaded our home with the single intent to make it their own.
The UWA soldiers were able to stave off the southern determined troops positioned in Canada.
However, we were not prepared.
It took seven days, impressively, to regroup and redirect.
Over radios not taken out by EMP pulses, survivors were instructed to retreat west. After all, the invasion came from the east.
Four states were not affected.
Montana. Colorado. North Dakota and Wyoming.
Beginnings was abandoned, and so was most of Montana. Only a few stayed behind and that was to link up communications and the satellite.
We secured what people were left behind a front line wide and far.
There wasn’t much left to do. Surrender or fight.
We decided to fight. It was our land, our home.
But we were outnumbered by a long shot.
A unilateral decision was reached and unanimously voted upon.
We back tracked our people into the NORAD compound, which held everyone, and waited.
Dean Hayes went to work.
Within weeks Henry had the Satellite link up and running and it pin pointed where the invading troops were located.
As I said, Dean went to work.
We launched our retaliation.
We took everything we had. We pinpointed their locations and hit them.
We hit them with nuclear weapons upon our own soil and with chemical weapons created by Dean.
When the air was safe to breathe in the chemically hit areas, we swept through cleaning up.
When the dust settled in the radiated areas, we doused them with chemicals again.
Double dose.
We had to. It was the only way to defeat the great invasion upon our land. They had already hit us, we were only hitting areas again.
That’s not to say, there still wasn’t a ground war. There was. For months. For months the enemy fought for what they came for. But they lost.
While most of our land had been destroyed, the One Year Great War had taken its toll.
We were victorious.
But not without terrible loss.
But we had the strength, will and determination to go on.
And that’s what we had to do.
15.
Rebuilding
Within six months of the war’s end, we started rebuilding. But we did it in pockets, keeping our civilizations isolated and at a distance from the radiated areas.
We burned a lot of bodies and suffered a lot of casualties.
However the percentage of our losses didn’t equal the losses sustained by our enemy.
When it was all said and done, when the dust settled and the surrender was finalized, we had acquired over twenty thousand refugees. Some of them were women, but most were either too old, too young or too weak to fight.
Our farming areas were in good shape and the war left us with lower temperatures, but we were rebounding.
We had to leave Beginnings. The enemy managed to pollute our water supply which was derived from a nearby lake.
Dean estimated it would take a decade before the water was drinkable.
We’d do better settling elsewhere.
We salvaged our crops, moved what we could, emptied Beginnings and moved on.
Remember the killer babies I spoke of?
They were genetically created to withstand the elements.
Most were located outside of Beginnings.
Frank had them under control despite the fact that their internal animal instincts made them predators.
They could withstand the elements, but not without food. Any stream that fed from that lake was contaminated.
Further south, contamination was still found but the water was able to be purified.
The animals didn’t know the difference.
Every animal in that region died.
Without wildlife, the killer babies were unable to survive.
Hence th
e end to them. Or so we thought.
Bottom line was we were all on the survival path. We were building, growing and surviving.
A country united once again with people and technology.
16.
Formative Years …
A hundred years before they were referred to as the roaring twenties. Funny, we were giving the ‘twenties’ the same name, only this time in the twenty-first century.
A lot occurred in the twenties.
The start of the Great War.
The end of that war.
The rebuilding.
Utopia, or rather Beginnings, laid to rest.
Many others were laid to rest as well. The hardest being originals of Beginnings and members of the Slagel family.
Robbie Slagel was the first casualty of the Great War. He died in 2020. He was something like thirty-seven.
The Great War was swift but it took a year to finalize. A few more for the dust to settle.
Jimmy Slagel passed away in 2027, from complications of radiation. He led crews going into the cities, cleaning up, sweeping for survivors. It took its’ toll.
Johnny Slagel had a daughter. She was fourteen when she passed the same year as Jimmy. She got ill and left us.
Probably because Dean Hayes wasn’t around anymore.
He and Ellen, Frank’s wife, both died toward the end of the Great War.
After the nuclear and biological weapons, during the ground confrontations, Ellen and Dean, both great doctors, traveled to many camps MASH units to do surgeries and help the injured. They, like many other doctors, were on the go constantly.
In one of the very last ground battles, just outside the Texas Oklahoma border, the small isolated medical camp they visited was hit by a large pocket of enemy gorillas.
In a sneak attack they mortared the camp, then went in and took out the rest. It was in the middle of the night when there was minimal security. Why would there be a lot of security? After all, in every instance of the battles, never had a field hospital been hit.
We cared for enemy ill and injured too.
It was always speculated that someone knew the great mind of Dean Hayes was there.
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