by Adam Yoshida
“Those are our men, here to back us up,” he said, “let’s go and give them a hand!”
He then turned and, without a further word, began to move at a trot towards the sound of the fighting. The survivors of the day’s fighting followed him instinctively, falling in behind their own individual leaders.
The soldiers picked up momentum as they moved forward. With the sun having set, they found themselves moving through near-total darkness, guided largely by the sound and fire of the guns ahead of them. As they finally approached the enemy position, Colonel Henry charged forward, firing his rifle and letting loose a sound that no one had ever thought they’d hear on American soil under such circumstances again: the Rebel Yell.
U.S. Central Command Forward Headquarters, Jerusalem
“What the fuck?” said General Mackenzie after a long pause as soon as he and Augustus King entered his private office.
“Well,” said King, “basically, we sold Iran and Iraq to China.”
“Sold?” said Mackenzie incredulously.
“We’re playing for keeps here, General,” said King, “and it was never going to be merely enough to empower the Israelis and the Saudis. In fact, what we really wanted to empower them to do was to resist the Chinese. But, if we’re going to save America then we need a lot of things. We need ships. We need bombs. We need bullets. The dollar is pretty much worthless. We had to buy them with something.”
“That’s not the kind of thing that Americans do!” shouted the General, his face turning red as he got up and walked around the room, sweeping aside his uniform jacket.
“Do you know how many Americans have bled and died so that we could give freedom to those people?” said Mackenzie.
“I do, General,” replied King, “I might remind you that I was one of those soldiers.”
“…and what? You flew to Shanghai or Beijing or wherever, and you sat down with a map and said to the Chinese that you’d trade them the freedom of a hundred million people for a few shiploads worth of bombs and spare parts?”
“It came rather more dearly than that,” said King.
“That’s not the kind of thing that Americans do,” said Mackenzie.
“No, General,” said King, “that’s the kind of thing that Americans need to do now. I bled to liberate those Iraqis and, God willing, someday we will make certain that they are free again. I don’t know how, but I’d be for it. But I know what’s at stake today. If we lose liberty in America today, then it’s over. It’s not just truncated or reduced: it’s over. Perhaps for now. Perhaps for a thousand years. Maybe forever.”
“Perhaps you can’t live with that reality,” continued King, “but I can. I can and will sacrifice everything – everything in the entire world – so that we can preserve liberty at home. That means making hard choices and living with them. Perhaps it is and shall be the case that those who can make those hard decisions won’t be the ones who actually get to enjoy the future of freedom. But perhaps we’ll be allowed to step to the edge of the promised land and peek inside.”
General Mackenzie sighed deeply.
“Now what?” he asked.
“We pack up. Then we go home and liberate America.”
The Situation Room, The White House, Washington, DC
“General Walker reports that he is ordering a withdrawal across the whole front,” reported General Hall.
“Why?” snapped President Bryan.
“The rebel bombing assault broke both the 42nd Division as well as the French unit that was attempting to pass through its lines,” said Hall quietly, “they can’t possibly hope to break through now. And, furthermore, the 1st Division in the north is pretty badly shattered – they hadn’t expected to face an Airborne Division.”
“Fucking cowards,” the President slammed his fist against the table, “motherfuckers!”
“Mr. President…” said Secretary Ransom.
“The attack will continue,” emphasized the President.
“It just isn’t possible, sir,” said the Defense Secretary, “I have to concur with General Hall and General Walker.”
The President didn’t say a single further word. Instead, he got up and walked out of the room, leaving his advisors behind in an uncomfortable silence. Finally, the Secretary of Defense spoke up.
“I think,” he said, “we have to consider what kind of leadership will be needed to get us to the other side of this.”
United States Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, CO
Acting President Terrance Rickover was glad to be outdoors. In the month since the Battle of Colorado had been fought, the Loyalist forces had been forced to fall all the way back to Illinois. This had allowed the government of the United States to emerge from its secure facility at Cheyenne Mountain and begin the long process of reconnecting with the American people.
“There’s so much still to do,” said Michael Nelson as they walked the grounds of the Air Force Academy, now converted into office space for the Federal Government, “this is supposed to be an election year. Hell, they’re holding a New Hampshire primary right now – whatever that means under these conditions.”
“Yes,” said Rickover, “we’ll have to make sure elections take place and all of that.”
“It’s one thing for us to have survived,” said Nelson, “but we still control, at the most, half of the country.”
“In the Revolution,” said Rickover, “only about a third of the people supported the cause.”
“Four thousand six hundred and two,” said Nelson quietly.
“Hmmm?” replied Rickover.
“That’s the latest estimate of how many people died in the fighting here in Colorado. How many will die before this is over? How many lives is it worth?”
“I don’t know,” said Rickover, “I just know that we were presented with a choice between freedom and slavery and we made a choice. I don’t regret the one I made. Do you regret yours, Michael?”
“No,” admitted the House Majority Leader.
“Well,” said the Acting President, “then we can’t dwell upon the cost. We didn’t choose that. The people who presented us with the impossible choice made that decision for us and for future generations. Our great task now is to ensure that liberty is assured to all Americans. This fight will not be over until all of America is liberated. And then, when that is done, we will remind the entire world of who we are and what we’re for because, if there’s anything that we will gain from this experience, it is that we are going to have to relearn that for ourselves.”
“And how are we going to do that?” asked Nelson.
“Simple,” said Rickover, “we fight and we keep on fighting so long as there’s something worth fighting for.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Mere Anarchy
The Executive Residence, The White House
President Kevin Bryan folded his arms across his chest and wrapped his bathrobe tightly around himself as he dug through the desk drawers for the bottle that he knew was buried somewhere beneath the piles of discarded papers that he’d shoved into the compartment, filling it beyond capacity. Rifling through the papers, he felt a momentary surge of pleasure as his skin came into contact with something that felt like glass. Leaning over, he shoved one hand deep into the mess in order to create a temporary barrier while he used his left hand to scoop up the half-empty bottle.
“Fuckers,” he whispered to himself as he removed the cork from the small bottle of Grey Goose Vodka that had been smuggled into the White House for him by an obliging intern. The thought of it made him laugh for just a moment: not even a civil war could keep certain obsequious strivers from trying to climb the ladder of credentialed success. Pulling away the cork, he dropped to the ground, his back against the desk, and took a long sip.
He wasn’t quite certain exactly which set of fuckers to curse at more. The part of the country that had abandoned him and risen in violent revolt against his plan to speed up the rate of progress in America?
“Fuckers!�
�� he cursed, raising his voice slightly. He took a swift look around the room and then took another nip from the bottle.
Perhaps, instead, he should curse the military. That part of it that had not turned against him - tried to actually kill him - was almost as bad as the rest. Always hesitating, always slow. They weren’t loyal to him or to the cause of human equality: they were loyal to some piece of paper and its abstract values. In his more lucid moments the irony of that stabbed into him: the only reason he wasn’t hanging from a gallows somewhere was that some people were so loyal to a document whose restrictions he despised that, for its sake, they were willing to serve even him. This fundamental conflict of conscience, he was certain, was why they had so far singularly failed in their mission of suppressing the Rebellion.
“Fuckers!” he shouted, loud enough that someone was certain to have heard.
Well, he thought, fuck them. In a sense, he hated the people around him more than any distant foe. He was the President of the United States, yet he was reduced to inducing naive college students to smuggle liquor into the White House for him. They were always shitting all over every single idea that he ever had.
“I don’t know if that would be the most prudent course, Mr. President…”
“We have to consider the repercussions, Mr. President…”
“Fuckers!” screamed the President. He went to take another sip from the bottle. It was almost empty now.
Sure, he’d been distraught after Pueblo. How could he not have been? So many fine Americans - and so many Allied soldiers - lost. The best chance. It had been within his - their - grasp and then…
“Fuckers!” screeched the President, so loudly that he could be heard in Lafayette Square, loudly enough that he could barely speak for a moment. The bottle was empty now. He held it by the neck and attempted to hurl it violently at the window. Somewhere along the line, however, he botched the throw and so, instead, the bottle merely bounced off the bulletproof glass and landed meekly on the floor.
“Fuck,” muttered the President as he rose weakly to his feet, stumbling as he attempted to move, and walked over to where the bottle lay. Smashing it now seemed, somehow, less of a gesture of defiance. Instead, he made his way over to a trash can and deposited it, taking a moment to try and hide it beneath the other debris that filled it.
Falling backwards and landing on the floor, the President hesitantly stood back up and walked back over to the desk to begin going through the drawers again. This time his search was rapid and deliberately. He removed a scrap of paper that he had set there nearly one month before. After lingering on it for a moment, he re-folded it and put it in his pocket.
Temporary Seat of the Government of the United States, Colorado Springs, Colorado
When they had chosen a location for the temporary capital of the United States, reflected Acting President Terrance Rickover, they had singularly failed to consider the matter of climate. Colorado in February was cold. Even the people who had been born and lived their entire lives there thought that. For a transplanted Virginian like the Acting President it was simply Hell.
“…fuel is increasingly a serious problem,” explained Jarrod Huffington, the newly-appointed Secretary of the Interior.
“I don’t understand how that can be,” said House Majority Leader Michael Nelson, gesturing towards the map that was projected against the wall, “we control almost all of the oil-producing regions.”
“Yes, we do,” admitted Huffington, “but we don’t control nearly the same percentage of the nation’s oil-refining capacity, nor do we have anything like the capital to buy the sort of equipment that we’d need to get our refineries up to snuff.”
The Acting President’s eyes lingered on the map of the divided nation that was projected against the wall. The Federal Government in Colorado, sometimes known as the “Congressional” government or quite-commonly the “Rebel” government, depending upon one’s politics, controlled outright the South, the Mountain West, the majority of the Mid-West, and a variety of defensible rural communities throughout the rest of the nation. The Washington government, known as the “Loyalist” or sometimes the “Legacy” government controlled the Northeast, New England, the Pacific Coast, part of the Mid-West, and a handful of major cities, such as Detroit, in Rebel states where neither the State Government nor the new Federal Government had sufficient control. In theory the government of the United States out of Colorado controlled territory containing more than one hundred and seventy-million people and ought to have been, in terms of GDP, the world’s fourth-richest nation (with the territory of controlled by the Legacy government constituting the second or third-richest, depending upon how one reckoned such things). In practice, however, the sum of the parts had actually proven to be less than the whole.
“Even if we could buy some of this stuff abroad,” noted the Secretary of the Treasury, “trying to import it would prove to be hellish. I wouldn’t want to try and run billions in equipment across the Atlantic right now.”
Shivering slightly, the Acting President nodded. He wished that they could go back to Cheyenne Mountain, where they had made their first headquarters during the days after the Great Mutiny. It had been perfectly climate-controlled there. However, given the image problems that the Rebel Government already had thanks to the overwhelming identification with the Washington government by the media and entertainment industries, it had been deemed less-than-prudent for the new government to be based out of a mountain fortress.
“Look,” said Rickover, “we all know that we have huge economic and logistical problems right now. I think that this can be - and probably best is - handled at the deputies level and below unless any of you have some brilliant solutions of your own to these problems. We’re all so far removed from the day-to-day here that all we can do, in dwelling upon this, is to bring ourselves down mentally. What can we do?”
“Mr. President,” began Mark Preston, the Secretary of Defense, “I am reluctant to bring this up, because I know that it’s been shot down before… But if we want to talk about what we can do, I think it has to come back to the Pacific plan…”
Preston’s interjection set off groans around the room. The President held up his hands.
“Let him speak,” he said before setting his eyes on Preston.
“A minute, Mr. Secretary,” he said.
“We all know that the Army is in pretty rough shape after Pueblo,” conceded Preston, “but so are they. In fact, they’ve withdrawn practically all the way back into Illinois, or at least the Illinois-Missouri border. And we know that they’re having a heck of a time dealing with insurgent activity even in those areas that they hold over there. Every hour we get word of more snipers and IEDs in Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, etc - all along the front. They’re not coming back this way anytime soon, if ever. The Europeans are still there, but they’re hardly happy about the casualties that they sustained in the fighting here in Colorado and in Kansas.”
“What forces do they have in California? We hold most of the state outside of the coast. They’ve got some National Guard troops and some militia volunteers. We could punch our way to the Pacific Coast and link up with the Seventh Fleet. It’s a contest in the Atlantic, but the Pacific is ours.”
“And then what?” shot out Secretary Huffington, who had been a straight-shooting United States Senator from Montana before the war. Preston looked quietly at the table.
“Then we make the deals that we need to make,” said Preston.
“We already sold half of the damned Middle East to the Chinese,” pointed out Nelson, “what do you think that they’re going to want if they supply us now? All of Asia? The whole Motherfucking world?”
“I didn't put us in this position,” said Preston snippily, “my mission is to win this war and re-unite our country. So far as I’m concerned, if we can do that the whole rest of the Goddamned world can hang.”
“And what will your friends at Praetorian get out of this deal?” said Huffington.
“Our friends at Praetorian International are patriots who have served our cause well,” said Preston.
“And made billions in the process,” said Huffington.
“Well, they are capitalists,” replied Preston.
“Alright gentlemen,” the President held up his hands, “let’s get back to the main point. We can survive this winter - barely - with what we have on hand. But we know we can’t survive another. What are our long-range options here?”
“Third Army is preparing to embark. Once they make their way back here, I am convinced that they will bring these matters to a swift conclusion,” said the Secretary of State, Jon Simpson, speaking up for the first time.
“If they can make it back unimpeded,” said Preston, “and I don’t think that we can count upon that.”
“Why should we throw away lives on a spring offensive towards California - one whose entire purpose will require us to sell out a large chunk of the world to the Chinese? Especially if it will be unnecessary so long as the Navy can deliver Third Army to somewhere in the Carolinas or thereabouts and they can then march on and hold Washington from there?” asked Simpson.
“That’s putting all of our hopes on something that isn’t a sure thing,” said Preston, “how does our domestic situation - dire as it is today - look twelve months from now if we can’t pull this thing off in time?”
“Well,” said the Acting President, “obviously there’s a range of opinion here with regard to this. I think that our best course of action will be to move to formal proposals. Interior needs to figure out how we manage what resources we have, Treasury needs to figure out how we pay for it, State needs to figure out who can help us, and Defense needs to figure out how we can fight and win.”
Wal-Mart Supercenter, Cedar Rapids, IA
Nine months earlier, Jake Hunter’s best friend Allan had come running into the Wal-Mart Supercenter in Cedar Rapids.
