by Adam Yoshida
The Foreign Secretary stood up and buttoned his jacket.
“Those copies are for you, Mr. President. You may do with them as you wish. I assure you, there are many more. I do truly hope that you’ll reconsider my proposal, sir. It would do all of us some good.”
Wal-Mart Supercenter, Cedar Rapids, IA
Jake Hunter shivered as he warily-eyed the sign that had been hung near the entrance to the store.
“As part of the national effort to reduce the consumption of electricity, Wal-Mart has elected to reduce the temperatures in this and all of our stores. If you have any concerns about this policy, feel free to speak to an Associate or a Manager.”
Thanks, you real-echelon Motherfuckers, he thought to himself as he walked along the check-stands arrayed along the front of the store.
He wasn’t wearing a jacket, as many of the Associates were, simply so that he could use that fact in any conversation with someone who complained about the cold.
“Yes,” he would explain, “it’s definitely not as warm in here as it once was, but I’m not really cold - and I’m not even wearing a jacket.”
But he was cold. All that there was to keep him going on a daily basis was the knowledge that he was doing something that was, in its own way, in the national and public interest. Someone had to keep the people fed and clothed in these days. The Army didn’t even want more soldiers at the current time - they didn’t have the money to train and supply most of the ones that they already had. This was his national service. Someone had to stay at home and make sure that Bedford Falls was still around when things were over.
Still, when it was all over, what would he tell his children when they asked him what he did in the great Second Civil War? I stocked shelves in Iowa, was hardly a compelling answer.
“Alright,” he said, eying the clock that hung on the far wall, “open it up.”
The Associate near the door nodded and turned his key.
Already a flood of humanity had gathered behind the doors. More than a few of them were pushing and shoving.
Goddamned welfare Wednesdays, thought Hunter as the mob began to make their way on in. There were more Americans dependent upon government aid than ever in the midst of this war, as the severe dislocations caused in the global economy by the fighting forced more and more states - and both Federal Governments - to spend more and more on direct aid to people thrown out of work by the war and the disruption of international commerce. Iowa, like most states, was paying for people to obtain certain essential items by issuing its own temporary currency, or “scrip” for the purchase of certain items.
Still, the habits of some of the people were so degraded that even war could not break them.
“Manager to 6, Manager to 6,” came a call over the radio. Jake began to walk on over.
“What’s up?” he said as he walked over to the cashier, a tiny woman who was hunched over as though she was preparing to sprint away from the fuming customer standing a few feet away.
“Jake,” she said, “this customer wants to pay for this item with Iowan Credits, but it’s not on the list.”
“Look, money is money!” spat out the customer as he waved a controller for a video game system in the air.
“Sir,” explained Jake as he turned to face the customer, “I’m sorry, but Iowan Credits can only been redeemed towards the purchase of certain products.”
“You and your company are fucking rich,” said the red-faced customer, “and you’re telling me that you can’t just make an exception to let me buy one lousy X-Box controller?”
“We would be happy to accept Iowan Credits for any item on the approved list, but if we submit a receipt to the state that shows another item purchased with these credits, the store won’t be reimbursed.”
“That’s bullshit, I know lots of people who’ve bought items with ICs that weren’t on this supposed approved list. There’s no consistency in this. What ever happened to customer service?”
“I can’t account for what experiences others may have had,” explained Jake, “but here at Wal-Mart we are striving for consistency in the application of this process.”
“I just don’t see how this is fair at all,” insisted the man, sticking to his ground.
“Now,” said Jake, “do you want to purchase the controller? I can ring it through right now.”
“Yes, I want to buy it,” said the man.
“Ok,” said Jake moving to open up a register, “how do you want to pay?”
“With this,” said the man, thrusting his Iowan Credit card in Jake’s direction. Jake sighed deeply, his shoulders slumping downwards.
Grand Central Terminal, Manhattan
“That stunt you pulled was fucking dangerous,” fumed Moore and Dallas’ CIA handler as they sat at a table in the food court that was situated in the basement of the Grand Central Terminal.
“Look,” said Moore amiably as he stuffed a cupcake from the nearby Magnolia Bakery outlet into his mouth, “we needed to clean the operation somehow. No one’s going to sort out what happened to those bodies after all the nails that those bombs - the bombs they built - were driven through them. Especially with the shape that the NYPD is in.”
“You could have killed other people: innocent people,” insisted the handler.
“We did pull the fire alarm. And wait five minutes,” insisted Moore as he peeled back the paper from another cupcake, “and, anyways, no one was hurt. I mean, no one innocent. I think a few of the people we had in the townhouse might have still been alive at that point.”
The handler shot Moore a look.
“I mean, I’m not a doctor,” said Moore, “it wasn’t like I was checking pulses or vitals or anything like that. Not much point when you’re leaving someone adjacent to a hundred pounds worth of nails and twenty-five worth of shaped high explosive.”
The handler looked over at Dallas.
“We’re pragmatists,” said Dallas flatly.
“Well,” said the handler, “I’m just letting you know - officially - that C.S. isn’t happy. Not one bit. There was even some talk about pulling you out.”
“If there’s anyone else who could do this job more effectively, they’re Goddamned welcome to it,” replied Dallas, “I’m fucking sick of this place.”
“Like I said, there was talk - idle talk in my opinion,” said the handler.
“Let the REMF’s talk,” said Dallas.
“Anyways,” said the handler, “I have a new assignment for you. Command is trying to pull together what you’ve gotten so far. Our best guess is that the Loyalists are working to create a parallel infrastructure to the existing armed forces, perhaps to act in the event that they lose what remaining control that they have. We need to short circuit this. In order to do that, we need to put together a fuller picture of exactly what’s going on. That requires better human intelligence than we’re getting now. In other words, we need you to not kill everyone who gets into your paths. Can the two of you pull that off?”
Over Central Kansas
The tacit cease-fire in the air that had reigned ever since Pueblo - at least insofar as strike operations were concerned - was as much a function of distance and geography as it was a deliberate political decision. The major military facilities of the Rebel states were largely clustered in the Mountain West and the South, whereas those of the Loyalists were largely arrayed either along the Pacific Coast or in the Northeast. That meant that the ability of the rival forces to strike at one another in the air was actually relatively limited. For the sake of force protection, facilities that were excessively vulnerable - like Nellis AFB in Nevada and Whiteman AFB in Missouri had been largely abandoned. There were only a few places where Rebel and government forces were stationed in close enough proximity to wage a thoroughgoing air battle: over Virginia, Nevada, and perhaps portions of the Midwest. The ability of both sides to wage a sustained air campaign of long-distance strikes was very limited and high-intensity air battles in the few overlapping folds
of the contesting parties would have resulted in exceptionally high rates of attrition. Given this, both sides had felt it prudent to limit their air activities to counter-insurgency efforts. Now, however, the Bryan Administration was prepared to change that.
Major Jordan Beltran marvelled at the vagaries of fate as he carefully guided his F-15E Strike Eagle low over the Kansas ground. Just a year earlier he had being sitting on the ground below, an inmate of the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, sentenced to more than a decade for being a party to a conspiracy to smuggle cocaine using Air Force transport planes. His luck had begun to change with the onset of the Great Mutiny, when the command structure of the USDB had simply fallen apart, allowing for multiple inmate escapes - including that of Beltran - to take place. Now, thanks to the amnesty granted by President Bryan to those convicted of a long list of drug charges who were willing to take up the Loyalist cause in the second war between the states, Beltran was not only flying again, but he was flying strike aircraft rather than the lumbering C-130s that he had flown before his conviction.
The United States Air Force - at least the portion of the USAF that reported to the calls of Kevin Bryan - had seen its complement of long-range aircraft significantly reduced during the Great Mutiny. Loyalist forces had had little trouble in securing local facilities such as National Guard depots and the weapons that came with them, but elite units had tended to either join the Rebels or, alternatively, to tear themselves to shreds in cataclysmic spasms of violence. Here and there, however, the government in Washington had caught a few breaks.
Unlike most major overseas formations, the 48th Fighter Wing, based out of RAF Lakenheath, had managed not only to hang together but also had a higher command structure that supported the Washington government. With the assistance of British military personnel, the local efforts of the Rebellion to seize control or destroy the equipment of the wing had been stopped. In the months that had followed, the entire equipment of the wing had been returned to the United States and reorganized as the new 5th Fighter Wing (Strike), consisting of the forty-five F-15E Strike Eagles that the Air Force had managed to move intact out of England and to scrape together from elsewhere.
The 5th Wing had participated in the offensive that had culminated in the great battle at Pueblo, managing to inflict substantial damage upon the Rebel forces while sustaining only four losses during the fighting. However, as with the rest of the Federal forces, they had been withdrawn to a point distant from the front as soon as the outcome of the fight at Pueblo was made clear when the Rebels had thrown their strategic air reserve into the battle.
It was during the long winter months at Scott Air Force Base in Bellville, Illinois that Beltran and others had joined the wing. Beltran, flying as a pilot, had quickly proven to be a natural Strike Eagle driver. After all, he was a graduate of the Air Force Academy who had found himself regulated to the world of transport planes largely because he had incurred the displeasure of certain superior officers in the Air Combat Command at an early age. Not only was Beltran’s old rank of Captain quickly restored, but in almost record time he had been promoted to Major and assigned as a deputy squadron commander, with the unwritten but nevertheless explicit mission of serving as a mentor to the many others in his squadron and scattered throughout the Wing for whom this war represented a truly unexpected second chance.
No one spoke a word over the radio. All three squadrons of the wing were flying this particular mission, flying low and equipped with external fuel tanks in order to evade Rebel radar cover while maximizing their range. Even with the extra fuel, it had still been necessary for Beltran’s squadron to refuel while airborne over Missouri and they would have to either refuel somewhere on their way home or else ditch their aircraft and hope to evade Rebel forces on the ground.
“Gentlemen,” said the Wing Commander as he made the rounds among each squadron during its pre-mission briefing, “that is how critical this mission is to the war effort: all of your aircraft, each of which is precious and damned-near irreplaceable, is begin placed at considerable risk.”
Beltran’s 17th Fighter Squadron was assigned the mission of striking at railroad and highway bridges along the route between Colorado Springs and Albuquerque. Planners at the Pentagon had calculated that the destruction of such vital transportation links would seriously diminish both the flow of various supplies from Texas and other points south into Colorado and the rest of the West as well as make the passage of the Army of the Colorado slower and more treacherous.
The wonder boys at the Pentagon, Beltran knew, believed that the very boldness of the move would catch the Rebels by surprise. Intelligence showed that the Rebel air force, probably at least as desperate to conserve fuel and spares as the mainline USAF, was only flying minimal combat air patrols. Moreover, rock-solid intelligence suggested that they were not maintaining a complete set of airborne radar patrols, instead using their handful of precious E-3 Sentry aircraft to protect vital targets while relying on ground-based radar to survey everything else. The Air Force’s best planners back in Arlington believed that this provided a golden opportunity for the handful of aircraft still in their inventory with the range to do so to make their ingress and egress without real opposition. Please God, let them be right, prayed Beltran.
The Strike Eagles made a sharp turn to the southwest as they made their way past Wichita. The flight plan called for the squadron to fly fast and low over the Oklahoma panhandle before making a final dash for their targets in Colorado and New Mexico. The mission so far had been utterly uneventful. This did not surprise Beltran greatly, insofar as he and his colleagues had flown this mission more than twenty times over the course of the two previous weeks, rehearsing time and time again until some of the pilots could fly the planned route without reference either to their radars or their maps. If everything went right, they would get in and out so quickly that the Rebels would have no serious opportunity to respond. Losses on the attack runs themselves were not expected in any case. A major weakness of American forces was that, as a result of an air of air supremacy that had lasted for longer than most Americans had been alive, they had fairly poor ground-based air defense arrangements. Most American anti-air equipment, such as the ubiquitous Patriot and Stinger missiles, were designed to face threats that the American military had expected to face in the last century such as medium-range missiles and helicopters.
Slung under the wings of each Strike Eagle were eight 2000lb GBU-31C JDAMs. The newly-released weapons had been modified in the aftermath of the Great Mutiny and the ensuing loss of control of the Global Positioning System to the Rebel government. Instead of using GPS, whose reliability had to be considered doubtful so far as Loyalist military applications were concerned, the new guidance kits relied instead upon the European Galileo satellite navigation system. This operation would mark the combat debut of the new bombs.
The entire strike package was making good time, having made it the majority of the way to their targets without encountering any opposition whatsoever.
“Fuckers don’t see us coming,” said the WSO. Beltran kept his silence. The so-called “patriotic pardon” program was only supposed to let out those convicted of drug crimes and the like. However, very quietly, a number of individual “exceptions” had been made for those guilty of other offenses. His WSO, for example, was very good at what he did but also had a well-known predilection for young girls.
“Shut up, Humbert,” replied Beltran to the man in the backseat. As the squadron’s deputy commander he was stuck flying with the man simply because no one else in the unit would. That did not mean that he had to like him.
“Look sharp,” said Beltran as the Strike Eagles continued to make rapid forward progress, “we’re getting close now.”
“Almost there,” said the WSO as Beltran gritted his teeth at having to listen to the nasal voice of the man.
“Alright, let’s go for it,” said Beltran as the squadron finally approached their targets
. At long last he broke his radio silence.
“All units, you are authorized to attack.”
His Strike Eagle led the way. There was nothing dramatic in the manoeuvre. The target was a bridge crossing the I-25 some one hundred miles south of Pueblo and, given the lack of opposition, there was no need to manoeuvre. He and the rest of his squadron were able to simply sail straight on in.’
The 2000lb bombs flew straight and true, striking their target in rapid succession. The bridge below, which was hardly in ideal condition to begin with, gave way, crashing into the river below within seconds of the first impact. Beltran continued straight, scanning the skies ahead with his own radar as the other members of the squadron broke off and made their own attack runs against their individual targets.
Temporary Seat of the Government of the United States, Colorado Springs, Colorado
Acting President Rickover shook his head as the reports of the damage flooded in to the conference room. The messages indicator on his tablet below increased with each passing second, faster than he could possibly read.
“I don’t understand how we were caught so flat-footed,” said the Acting President, shaking his head sadly.
“It’s my responsibility, Mr. President,” said Mark Preston, “and I am prepared to accept full and public responsibility for this.”
“Jesus, no,” said Rickover, “you’re the one who pulled the entire organization of our Department of Defense together, Mark. I don’t think that we could spare you at all. We certainly can’t now.”
