Foreign Enemies and Traitors

by Matthew Bracken

  “How are you set for food, without your parents?”

  “I’m okay. My father stocked us up pretty well. We’ve—I’ve still got food left over from before. There were six of us. Now there’s only me—and you.”

  “How do you get drinking water?”

  “We have a hand pump in the backyard. Our own well. Every day I pump water into a gravity tank. Filtered rainwater goes into it too.”

  “Your father was smart.”

  “Yeah, that’s for sure. But smart wasn’t enough. It didn’t save his family, or him.”

  “Zack, do you have a mirror? I’d like to see my wound.”

  “Not yet, it’s all bandaged up. Don’t worry, it’s not infected, or you wouldn’t be talking right now. You’d still be out of your head. I’ve seen what happens. You know, this was my little brother’s room. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but you wouldn’t be the first to die in that bed.” Zack began to tear up, but pushed the display of emotion from his face. “Your wound is clean. I used a real suture kit and lots of antiseptic. There’s no infection, at least not so far. The miracle is you’re still alive after all the blood you lost.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It was Christmas Day. I guess I felt generous.”

  “I’m not a freeloader, Zack. I can pay you. For what I eat. For all your trouble.”

  “It’s no trouble, don’t worry about that.” Zack held up a gleaming coin the size of a dime between his thumb and index finger. “I’ve never seen these little gold ones before. They’ll come in handy—you can buy just about anything with gold at the free market down in Corinth. Gold is worth twenty times silver, that’s what they say. We had some old silver coins, but they’re all gone. Hey, don’t worry: I’ll only take what we need. I’m not a thief.”

  “You said you’re a Boy Scout.”

  “I was a Boy Scout. Eagle, in fact. But that was before all this. Now I don’t know what I am. The Last of the Mohicans, I guess. The end of my tribe.”

  ****

  Lieutenant General Lucian Armstead detested Bob Bullard. He would have preferred to sit on a filthy rug in a Bedouin’s tent for a luncheon of goats’ eyeballs than to share a table with the so-called director of rural pacification. Their eleven o’clock meeting had been requested by Bullard, who, predictably, would have his hand out. The general had agreed only because these meetings gave him some measure of oversight of Bullard’s civilian-run operations in Tennessee and Kentucky. These meetings were a bare fig leaf hiding the general’s lack of authority in the two states. The informal get-together was for the two of them only, with no aides in the room. The general deliberately wore his pressed ACU combat uniform. Wearing his blue Army Service Uniform would show too much respect for a man for whom he had no respect.

  Now Bullard was standing him up, already ten minutes late. This simply was not done to lieutenant generals!

  They had agreed to meet at the Cole Park Buffet, which in long bygone years had been the Fort Campbell Officers’ Club. “Classist” officer–enlisted rank segregation was no longer permitted in military clubs or dining facilities. The location was neutral territory and convenient for both of them. At least his general’s rank had allowed them to have a small private dining room set aside for their one-on-one meeting.

  The civilian club employees even managed to find a clean white cloth for his table, unlike the gray, stained ones in the adjoining main dining room. A dented stainless steel pitcher of sweetened iced tea was put on the table, along with two empty glasses, two glasses of tap water, and a basket of stale dinner rolls, without butter. Oh, how standards had declined over his long career! While he waited for Bullard, the general studied the military oil paintings hanging on the walls around him, depicting battle scenes from the Revolutionary War to Iraq. He wondered how much longer these unabashedly heroic paintings would escape the attention of the new commissars of political correctness.

  General Armstead had privately met with Bullard only a few times before, even though they both lived in Senior Officer Housing by Fort Campbell’s golf course, less than a mile away from where he was sitting. How had Bullard qualified for one of the few generals’ houses on Fort Campbell? Bullard was certainly no general, despite his Senior Executive Service federal supergrade position.

  Armstead liked nothing about Bullard. He disliked his cocky overfamiliarity, his lack of manners, and perhaps most of all his affectation of a faux uniform of khaki slacks and shirts. Bullard, who had never served in the military, liked to pretend he was some kind of mysterious CIA operative. In reality, he had only been a senior BATFE official before moving up to Homeland Security. Nevertheless, the general had been ordered to cooperate with this civilian “to the fullest extent possible.” This kind of non-traditional relationship gave General Armstead an ulcer. He had graduated from West Point fifth in his class, and had served his country for thirty-one years, across the globe from Korea to the Middle East. He had attended the War College and had a PhD in history from Georgetown, and now he was in the demeaning position of taking orders from a civilian thug with mail-order baccalaureate and masters degrees!

  General Armstead understood that this pitiful state of affairs was largely the president’s fault. It all came back to Jamal Tambor and his inner circle of crypto-communists and one-worlders. He was deliberately trying to hamstring the United States military, while entangling the nation in adverse treaties that served only to destroy what vestiges remained of American sovereignty. Lucian Armstead had considered resigning his commission a hundred times since Tambor’s election. Only his knowledge that many of the generals coming up behind him were left-wing perfumed princes, groomed and selected for their politically correct views, had kept him in uniform for the last three years. Under U.S. law, the president nominated generals for promotion, and the Senate approved them. It had traditionally been done that way, in accordance with the doctrine of civilian control of the military. But what happened to the very nature of the military when the White House and the Senate were dominated by Fabian socialists, America-hating internationalists who had even managed to overturn and rewrite the very constitution he had sworn to defend?

  General Armstead was the Commander of U.S. Army North, NORTHCOM, the Fifth Army, sometimes referred to as the Homeland Command. On paper, he was charged with responsibility for the defense of America, plus Canada and Mexico. In reality, his so-called Army had no permanently assigned combat troops to call its own. He was the leader of six hundred staff chiefs but no Indians. Active and reserve military units were assigned to NORTHCOM on an ad hoc basis as needed, the need determined by the president and the Joint Chiefs. He was a paper general with a skeleton command.

  This phantom army had been headquartered at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, prior to the ratification of the new constitution and the passage of the Aztlan Agreement. Then his virtual army’s staff headquarters had then been shifted out of Texas to Fort Campbell, on the Kentucky-Tennessee border. The logic of the move had been sound: Fort Campbell was half-empty after the last round of troop cuts had decimated the Regular Army once again. God had one hell of a wicked sense of humor was all General Armstead could think about the timing of the move, coming only seven months before earthquakes devastated the region. No matter. Command of NORTHCOM was meant to be a meaningless sunset tour for a soon-to-be-retired three-star general from the Old Army. At least that was how command of NORTHCOM had been seen, before the earthquakes and the virtual secession of the Deep South and the “free states” of the Northwest. Now, finally, his paper command was going to be fleshed out and called upon to deal in fire and steel in the American homeland.

  But not in the Southwest. The Aztlan Agreement took care of that. And not in the Deep South. His former colleague Lieutenant General Marcus Aurelius Mirabeau was effectively the unchallenged ruler from the Mississippi River to South Carolina, Georgia, and North Florida. NORTHCOM had no operational control in these Southern states, although General Armstead personally maintained cordial
relations with General Mirabeau. Of the quake-damaged states, NORTHCOM had a field presence only in Arkansas, Missouri and Illinois, consisting mostly of attached National Guard units. The general had genuine authority only in these three states, which had been the least severely damaged by the quakes and where central authority had not entirely collapsed.

  This certainly could not be said for Kentucky or Tennessee, which lay on either side of Fort Campbell. After the devastating back-to-back earthquakes that had practically leveled Memphis and wrecked the transportation and energy infrastructure in the area between Nashville, Little Rock and St. Louis, the National Guard had been the first responders. At least those who had mustered for duty. Almost a quarter of the Guardsmen had failed to report, and another quarter of them slipped away over the following weeks. Three months later, the remaining troops were ordered withdrawn by the president for “lack of performance.” His National Guard regiments had been sacked, fired for failing to demonstrate sufficient zeal at forcing the evacuation of the stricken areas. President Tambor had lost faith in the military’s ability to pacify the region, in particular Western Tennessee and Kentucky, between the Tennessee, Ohio and Mississippi rivers. NORTHCOM had been ordered out.

  Now the civilian administrator, Robert Bullard, was the person charged with restoring federal government control of Kentucky and Tennessee. Worse, he was using foreign soldiers to subdue and occupy the region. “Peacekeeping volunteers,” the president called them. Most of them belonged to the hastily formed so-called North American Legion, a ragtag passel of miscreants led by Americans more loyal to the United Nations than to the United States. The NAL troops had literally been picked up off the street corners of American cities. Until recently they were illegal aliens, who had been strong-armed into enlisting with the promise of citizenship and a homestead land grant. Many of the North American Legion recruits were convicted felons, taken directly from prison and put into uniform under the president’s “Operation Fresh Start” initiative. Their prominent gang tattoos didn’t lie about their origins, or their true loyalties.

  At best, the barely trained NAL troops could man checkpoints and conduct very basic cordon operations. The real hammers in Tennessee and Kentucky came from much further away than North America. The true enforcers were the “contract battalions,” recruited abroad from the militaries of Nigeria, Pakistan, Bolivia, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Albania and a dozen other nations. They wore their own uniforms and served under their own officers, attracted by the promise of United States citizenship and free land. Bringing in foreign mercenaries and calling them volunteer peacekeepers had been President Tambor’s idea. “A grand experiment in new levels of international cooperation,” he had termed it. “The first major test of the new U.N. military cooperation treaty.” Well, it was surely that.

  Considering the ongoing horror show that had evolved in Tennessee and Kentucky, General Armstead was in many respects glad not to have NORTHCOM involved in those two states any longer. It was an interesting case study in the development of an insurgency. From the first weeks after the earthquakes, a small percentage of the locals had developed the nasty habit of taking potshots at anybody that they perceived to be trespassing on their land—including uniformed members of the military. This had begun shortly after the first of the devastated counties were reached by emergency response units.

  Following the arrival of National Guard troops and out-of-state law enforcement teams, a strong effort had been made to enforce the new federal gun control laws. The reasoning was that ordinary citizens, living under conditions of hunger and fear bordering on hysteria, could not be safely relocated and fed if they were armed. The unintended consequences of this policy had been calamitous. Once the word spread that the government was collecting guns at every checkpoint, relocation camp and feeding center, thousands of Tennesseans had resolved to reject any assistance that came with the quid pro quo of mandatory disarmament.

  The situation worsened when ATF agents conducted confiscation raids on a few well-known gun collectors, using the National Guard for extra muscle and perimeter security. These raids had been intended to serve as draconian examples—and examples they had proven to be! The first raids had limited success, only because they retained the element of surprise. After that, they had been met with bullets, lots of bullets, from point blank to extremely long range.

  Being met with armed resistance by fellow Americans, Regular Army and Guard troops had in most cases refused to apply the necessary level of tactical firepower, and the situation had stalemated for three months. Everywhere the Army went in Tennessee and Kentucky, it was suspected of supporting firearms confiscation raids. The bond of trust between the local people and the military had been shattered. The result was invariably casualties lost to snipers, who typically fired one deadly shot from hundreds of yards away, and were rarely found. Without security, reconstruction teams could not enter the contested areas. Bridges over the Mississippi, Ohio and Tennessee rivers still lay in twisted wreckage, and the critical pipelines, power lines, railroads and highways that crisscrossed the region were still shattered in a thousand places.

  Instead of reevaluating the policy of gun confiscation, the president had invited the U.S. military to leave Tennessee and Kentucky, for, as he put it, “demonstrated lack of performance.” Tambor then put those two states under civilian control, most recently in the person of Robert Bullard, a DHS super grade. He was an SES-2, a member of the Senior Executive Service, the civilian equivalent of a two-star general. Bullard’s last federal posting had been as the Southwest Region Director of Homeland Security. Bullard and his ilk had done such a bang-up job there that the United States had lost the entire Southwest to the Mexican nationalist “reconquistas.” Naturally, this stunning failure qualified Bullard for another posting within the DHS. Shortly after the civilians were put in charge of Tennessee and Kentucky, the first foreign contract battalions had been brought in by President Tambor.

  ****

  Bullard finally arrived at the former Officers’ Club twenty minutes late. Armstead used the time to get some work done on his laptop. The general did not stand to greet Bullard. Even though he would have enjoyed the opportunity to tower six inches above the troll-like civilian, he did not want to show the respect that rising would convey. If Bullard noticed the slight, he showed no sign of it. He simply sat down and poured himself an iced tea, then took a sip while glancing around at the military artwork on the walls. His bodyguards (dressed all in black like the Gestapo), waited in plain sight, just outside the open double door to the main dining room. As the general expected he would, Bullard dispensed with pleasantries and launched directly into his requests for equipment and support. The man somehow had connections directly into the Tambor White House, and despite his lack of a military rank and his generic unmarked khaki pseudo-uniform, there was little doubt that in purely political terms Bullard outranked him.

  “General, we’re down to only sixteen operational Predators. We need at least a dozen more of them ASAP, to get our coverage up to anything like it needs to be.”

  General Armstead ignored the request. “Well, it’s nice seeing you again, Mister Bullard.” He refused to dignify the man with any other title. There was no “department of rural pacification” that he could find in any register of federal agencies or table of military organizations. He would not refer to this Robert Bullard as “director.” Director of what, exactly? In equivalent federal service terms, he was clearly senior to Bullard, but today he found himself the subject of demands from this subordinate in rank. To Armstead, this was reminiscent of the inverted power relationship between the Red Army and the KGB in the old USSR, a sorry state of affairs he had never imagined he would experience at first hand in the USA. Or perhaps under President Tambor, now it was the USSA?

  “Yeah, likewise, good to see you too. Listen, General, we need more UAVs. We can’t accomplish our mission—the president’s mission—without them.”

  “Well, you’re not going to ge
t them from me. Not without something in writing from the NCA.”

  “The NC who?” asked Bullard, popping a roll into his mouth. “What are you talking about?”

  Armstead sat fully erect, hands folded on the table, and stared downward at Bob Bullard. “The National Command Authority. That’s the White House, Mister Bullard. The president. Our mutual chain of command. I cannot honor your request. We are down to less than a hundred fully mission-capable Predators and Reapers for the rest of CONUS—that’s the continental United States—”

  “I know what CONUS means.”

  “I’m sure you do. Well, the military also needs UAVs. The actual American military. I’m not signing any more of them off to you on just your say-so. Particularly when you’re managing to lose one just about every week.”

  “This winter weather sucks around here for flying, as you well know. The terrorists don’t take time off. We need to push the weather envelope with the UAVs, otherwise the insurgents would have free rein half of the time. We can’t let that happen.”

  “Well, I won’t transfer any more Predators just on your word.”

  “I guess we’ll see about that, won’t we? And while I have my wish list out, I need more aircraft. Helicopters, to be specific. Blackhawks, Chinooks, Little Birds, Hueys: we need them all. At least thirty more, right away. With crews, maintenance, fuel—the whole package. I’ll send you a complete breakdown of what we need.”

  “There’s no chance of that.” General Armstead knew that all of the aviation assets that could be mustered were being readied for operations in the Northwest, to commence in the summer. Operation Buffalo Jump was the president’s top priority. Admittedly, securing Tennessee and Kentucky was more than a sideshow—it was a bleeding ulcer—but it was not the main event. Pacified or not, the Mid South was not going anywhere. And it was, blessedly, now Bob Bullard’s problem. This was one positive aspect of having Kentucky and Tennessee transferred to civilian control: General Lucian Armstead was off the hook for future success or failure in the region. Any more aircraft would be given to the so-called “department of rural pacification” only if the orders came from the president himself.