The Second Civil War- The Complete History

by Adam Yoshida

  The Democratic Senator from New York, appointed to fill the seat after her predecessor had been caught up in a scandal that had somehow managed to involve cocaine trafficking, homosexual prostitution, and inter-city bus services run by Chinese immigrants, had previously managed to earn herself two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives by spouting liberal platitudes and looking good on television. Indeed, the thirty-seven year-old Senator’s good looks, blonde hair, and astonishing figure – especially when combined with her initials – had managed to earn her more than a few derisive (and, let’s face it: often sexist and bordering upon misogynistic) comments from her opponents. She played this for maximum advantage, both using her looks for maximum advantage while using proxies to accuse anyone who criticized her for anything she had ever done or said of being a woman-hating bigot.

  Indeed, those who accused her of being a person of average or below-average intelligence who had managed to succeed in politics based upon her looks alone rather missed the point. Dianne Dawson could have easily used her natural assets and talents to gain a life of ease without effort. Senator Dawson had chosen a life in politics because she was smart and ambitious: she chose to speak primarily in liberal platitudes because it allowed her to avoid being pinned down on policy specifics and to cast moderate votes without ever being called to account for it by her left-wing constituents or the national media. This, she knew, would be of tremendous assistance when she sought to fulfill her ambition of becoming the first woman to become the President of the United States.

  “What’s the latest from Seattle?” she asked Melanie McCullough, her Deputy Press Secretary and close alliterative compatriot as soon as she stepped off the Senate floor.

  “More window smashing. A little bit of tear gas. The police tried to arrest some people, but they turned them back.”

  The Senator shook her head.

  “This is getting dangerous. I don’t know if the passions that are being unleashed here are so easily controlled.”

  “A President was murdered. So was another innocent man,” said the aide.

  “I know. I know. Anything from back home?”

  “The NYPD have the city locked up pretty tight. I don’t think that they’d let anything get out of control like it did in Seattle.”

  “Alright,” replied the Senator, walking three steps ahead of her aide, “this is another day. What’s next?”

  The Oval Office, The White House

  The President was watching himself on television.

  “We all regret this awful act. But this is not the way for anyone to vent their anger. A full review is being conducted by the Department of Justice...”

  He turned off the set and turned to the man in front of him.

  “Mr. President,” said the man, turning his eyes from side to side, “usually these things are done at arms-length, for obvious reasons.”

  “I know... But I don’t know if I have any intermediaries that can be trusted with the sort of work that you do. This really is the most lonely place in the world.”

  “Have you had this place swept?”

  “We keep it pretty clean,” said Bryan.

  “No. No. For listening devices.”

  “Umm... I suppose so. I mean, there are people...” said the President, but before he could finish his sentence, the man had pulled an electronic device out of his bag and began to walk around the edge of the room, waving it in the air.

  Then-Governor Bryan had first met the man, who went by the name Jack Deckard, at a campaign stop in New Hampshire nearly six years earlier. Deckard was an ex-CIA operative who had written a best-selling book discussing how the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community had been used to enhance corporate profits, rather than to serve the interests of the American people.

  Deckard had been an early and eager volunteer for the nascent Bryan campaign and had somehow quickly obtained control of the campaign’s security apparatus. The intelligence community, he had explained to the Governor, was a tool the corporate interests that really ran the country and were out to sabotage him as they had done to every other true progressive candidate for more than half a century. The hidden government of America would do whatever they could to stop a genuine progressive like Bryan from reaching the White House: they would blackmail him, they would drug him, they would poison him, they would even fabricate records and use them to destroy him. As the campaign’s self-appointed chief of security Deckard made it his mission in life to uncover all of the myriad conspiracies that were directed against his candidate.

  Once the campaign had begun to take off and real money and operatives had begun to flood in, Governor Bryan had been convinced to quietly shuffle Deckard, who was generally an unsettling presence off the stage. But once he had lost and gone off into his Vice Presidential exile, most of those moneymen and gone astray, but Deckard had remained forever faithful. Now that he had genuine power, President Bryan remembered who his genuine friends were.

  “Thank you for your help with the Seattle business,” the President said after Deckard was finally reasonably satisfied that the room was clear of detectable listening devices.

  “Let’s not talk about that here,” said Deckard.

  “Alright. But it helped. Without that, we wouldn’t have had the impetus to really act.”

  “I know, I know,” replied Deckard hurriedly, “but now they’re really going to come for you. And soon.”

  “I know,” said the President quietly, coming to a sudden stop and gazing out the window, “and that means I’m going to need to ask a great deal of you.”

  U.S. Courthouse, Seattle, WA

  “This is fucking bullshit,” Seth McLean whispered to his attorney as he was led into the courtroom.

  Two days earlier, barely a week after King County had declined to prosecute him for murder or any other offense, a Federal Grand Jury had indicted him for “Use of a Weapon of Mass Destruction” on the grounds that the gun that he had used to kill Harris Folsom had a barrel with a diameter greater than one-half an inch, which allowed it to qualify as a “destructive device” within the wording of the applicable statute.

  “Just keep quiet, Seth,” whispered the lawyer in response.

  “I can’t believe that a Grand Jury went for this,” said McLean.

  “This is Seattle, Seth, are you really shocked?”

  As they sat down, the Clerk began to speak.

  “The United States District Court for Western District of Washington is now in session, the Honorable Malcolm Jackson presiding. The case of U.S. v. McLean will not be heard. Will counsel please identify themselves for the record?”

  The Assistant U.S. Attorney stood up.

  “Good morning, your honor. Casper Gillian for the United States.”

  “Good morning your honor,” said McLean’s attorney, “Jesse Watkins for Mr. McLean.”

  “Mr. McLean,” began the Judge, “you are here today to make an initial appearance before this court. You have been charged with violation of Section 2332(a) of Section 18 of the United States Code, the use of a weapon of mass destruction. The maximum penalty attached to this charge is death. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, your honor,” replied McLean.

  “We waive the reading of rights,” said Watkins.

  “Very well,” replied the Judge, “now, as to the question of bail...”

  “The government requests that the defendant be held without bail, your honor,” announced the Assistant United States Attorney.

  “My client is a respected member of the bar and a noted political activist,” replied Watkins, “and these charges are not remotely likely to result in a conviction. We believe that he should be released on his own recognizance, your honor.”

  “Your client is charged with terrorism, Mr. Watkins,” said the Judge by way of an answer.

  “Bail is set at $10 million,” said the Judge.

  CHAPTER TEN

  A Hedge Fund With an Army

  CNN Headquarters,
Atlanta, GA

  “Within minutes of the end of the initial appearance, Mr. McLean’s bail was posted by the controversial Praetorian International, a private military contractor which has been accused of war crimes in the Middle East, Africa, and the Canadian Civil War,” replied the anchor.

  “Indeed,” intoned the legal analyst, “this is a surprising development on multiple fronts. While Praetorian has been active in opposing the present Administration, they’ve avoided being tied too closely to any particular political cause as, of course, they are a lightning rod for criticism.”

  “The CEO of Praetorian issued a statement a few minutes ago,” continued the anchor.

  “Praetorian is committed to the principles of fundamental justice,” read the anchor as the words were splashed across the screen, “and the prosecution of Seth McLean is a travesty. The full resources of the Praetorian Corporation are available to support Mr. McLean and any other individuals who are victims of the tyrannical abuses of the so-called justice system instigated by this President.”

  “How rich is the Praetorian Corporation?” asked the anchor.

  “For the answer to that question, we turn to our CNN Financial Analyst, Mischa Barton.”

  “Praetorian is a privately-held corporation, so it doesn’t have to publish regular reports in the same way that a public one does,” explained Barton, “but we can estimate the size of Praetorian, to some degree, from the amount of money that it invested in the Western Republic during and after the Canadian Civil War. For example, organizations linked to Praetorian purchased more than $25 billion – that’s billion with a B – worth of Western Republic Bonds.”

  “So, $10 million is a trivial amount of money to them?” asked the anchor.

  “That’s putting it mildly,” said the analyst, “because we know that a number of those investments paid off handsomely. As have other investments they have made, for example in the nation of Equatorial Guinea.”

  “Some have argued that the description of Praetorian as a Private Military Company is inaccurate,” said the anchor, “that a better way of describing it would be as a hedge fund with an army.”

  “That’s fairly accurate,” admitted Barton, “insofar as Praetorian has a long history of making large and often very high-yield investments in unstable nations where its combination of private military forces and international political connections are then called upon to intervene.”

  “Is it significant, then, that Praetorian is becoming actively involved in politics here in the United States, or is this just an example of the personal agenda of Praetorian CEO, Augustus King?”

  “Well, that’s the billion-dollar question,” replied Barton.

  U.S. Central Command Forward Headquarters, Jerusalem

  General Dylan Mackenzie was leading his senior staff through the latest table-top exercise. His skillful deployment of strategic airpower over the previous months had blunted the region-wide assault on his forces by Islamic insurgents, but the arrival of additional oversight from Washington in the aftermath of the media playing footage of the damage done by his B-52s had left him, in effect, as little more than a ceremonial leader. In that aftermath of that humiliation he had considered resigning his command, but then he had been convinced that there were other available avenues of resistance.

  “Again!” he shouted, slamming his fist down upon the table.

  “We’re going to do this until we get it fucking right,” he insisted.

  Operation Deluge imagined the full-scale deployment of all of the forces available to Central Command against a general uprising by Islamist forces across the whole of the region. Given the continued pace of attacks against the American forces that had been deployed, even Ambassador Nathaniel Archer, the President’s personal representative in Jerusalem, could hardly object to it as a planning exercise.

  “If we execute this,” explained Mackenzie, speaking deliberately slowly, “we’re going to have to do it perfectly, because we’re only going to get one chance to do it.”

  “General,” replied Major General Fredrick Kahn, the commander of the Fourth Infantry Division, “I think that we’re having trouble with this because of the strange parameters that are imposed upon us in the exercise. Normally we would have significantly longer to divide targets and we would have the luxury of more time to take them out sequentially, instead of practically simultaneously.”

  “I understand that there is an element of vagueness in what we’re practicing here,” replied Mackenzie, “but war is naturally ambiguous.”

  “Run the exercise again,” he ordered before stepping out to a nearby office where both Israeli Lieutenant General Avidgor Aronov and Praetorian International CEO Augustus King were waiting for him.

  “They’re frustrated,” Aronov gruffly commented as soon as Mackenzie closed the door.

  “I don’t blame them. We haven’t told them what they’re practicing for or why they’re being forced to run the same scenarios over and over again but not being allowed to share what they’re learning on down. Also, I suspect, a few of them have figured out that there are obvious holes in the plan and that there must be a reason why we haven’t patched those.”

  “The security is necessary,” replied King, “we don’t know who can be trusted. Even extending this as far as you have is a risk.”

  “You can’t order divisions and brigades to turn and execute a major operation without any preparation whatsoever,” said Mackenzie.

  Deluge was originally conceived as a “break-in-case-of-emergency” plan to be executed when all other options were exhausted. However, it was becoming increasingly clear to Mackenzie and the rest of his inner circle that it might be actually necessary to execute the plan and that it could be used in an offensive rather than defensive context. This was being withheld from Ambassador Archer and almost everyone else in the universe because the details of how such a contingency might play out offensively included details that would conflict with the political agenda of the Administration.

  Lieutenant General Aronov, officially simply the liaison between the Israeli Government and Central Command, but actually the most respected senior official in the whole of the State of Israel, was key to those plans. The theoretically non-partisan “caretaker government” that had been formed in Israel in the aftermath of the nuclear attacks on Tel Aviv and Haifa as part of the price of American intervention in the conflict was unpopular among the Israeli public and the acceptance of the American demands for Israeli disarmament and de facto occupation by the United States by the previous government had destroyed much of the credibility of that nation’s political class.

  “My men will be asked to execute more with even less time to prepare,” he pointed out.

  “A risk that we must run, General,” replied King.

  Vancouver, British Columbia, United Western Republic

  Lieutenant General William Thomas Jackson saluted the soldiers of the Airborne Brigade as they marched down Robson Street in their brand-new dress grey uniforms. The three newly-issued stars glistened on the General’s shoulders alongside the fresh gold U.W.R. pin that had been issued to him and every other soldier in the Army. The stoic General could not disguise his pride as he, for not the first time on this particular day, glanced down at the four (of five possible) campaign medals that had been issued to him. It had taken weeks to settle on the names. Jackson had been awarded the Western Rebellion, Liberation of Vancouver, Trans-Prairie Offensive, and Invasion of Ontario campaign medals, missing out only on the Albertan Insurgency campaign medal given to those who had participated in combat action in Alberta against Federal forces before the arrival of the official Western Republic Army.

  The Grand Review of the Army had taken months to organize, as troops had been required to remain in Ontario and in other parts of the West for some months in order to enforce the armistice that had been agreed to first between the Western Republic and the Province of Ontario and then between the Republic and the Federal Government in Otta
wa. It had also been stalled because, once the final victory was won and the independence of the West had been secured, the pacifistic anti-military tendency that ran strong in certain quarters in the West, which had been largely suppressed during the fighting, immediately resurfaced. The Vancouver City Council had actually gone so far as to attempt to assert that it had the right to refuse to issue the proper permits for the event, to which Jackson had tartly replied that he hadn’t needed a permit to enter Winnipeg, either. After that exchange was reported in the press, President Eagleton had stepped in and smoothed things over as best as he could.

  Behind the Airborne Brigade came the highlight of the day: the First Armoured Division. The division’s Merkava tanks had been freshly painted and then polished to a high sheen. The men and women in the Army in general, but this Division in particular, viewed themselves as nation-makers and were extraordinarily proud of their service. After all, the Division had been the mailed fist that had smashed the Canadian Army at Thunder Bay and thereby one the freedom of the West once and for all. While even Jackson recognized that the Army could not be maintained at wartime levels, he was determined above all other things to ensure that this particular formation survived.

  The crowds cheered wildly as the tanks, when they crossed the corner of Robson and Burrard where the first Federal officer to die in the insurgency in Vancouver had been shot, turned their turrets towards the platform in a salute. The tanks were followed by wave after wave of proud men and women who marched across the pavement for more than two hours.