by Adam Yoshida
“Fox Three,” called out Miller as soon as her F-16 entered maximum range for her AMRAAMs. She was quickly followed the first missile launch with a second, then paused to allow her colleagues to join in before making a sharp right turn, attempting to maintain distance with the attackers while also pulling them away from the strike run headed towards Oceanside.
The California Air National Guard F-16s moving to intercept the Rebel strike were forced to evade the actively-guided missiles, breaking their formation and slowing their progress in the direction of the twelve bomb-carrying fighters that were rapidly closing in upon their target. Seven of the Loyalist aircraft managed to evade the incoming missiles, but the eighth took a direct hit and blew apart in mid-air.
Whoever was in command of the Loyalist aircraft made the decision to ignore Miller’s section and, as soon as the immediate threat of the first wave of Rebel AMRAAMs had dissipated, resumed their formation and turned to pursue the dozen aircraft preparing to make their attack run.
Miller led her three compatriots as they turned to engage the intercepting F-16s. The Loyalists, however, had the advantage of being significantly closer to their own base and therefore had far fewer concerns over fuel. The Loyalist F-16s kicked in their afterburners and rapidly accelerated to more than two times the speed of sound. Miller could not hope to do the same and plausibly bring her charges home. Instead, she fired two of her remaining four missiles as maximum range. Rather than break off to evade, the Loyalist commander opted to order his own aircraft to continue on a straight and fast course. This was a brave decision: the anti-aircraft missiles flew at four times the speed of sound, more than double the maximum speed of the Loyalist fighters. The decision was a matter of simple math: if the interceptors broke off to evade, they would have no possibility of engaging the Rebel attackers before they reached their targets. The Loyalists, evidently, hoped to reach a firing position and then break off to evade at the last possible moment. From within her own cockpit Miller watched as the Loyalist gambit paid off, but with a terrible cost.
The Loyalists managed to scrape within range of the Rebel F-16s and began to launch their own AMRAAMs en masse, firing thirty-one missiles (one of the missiles carried by the Loyalists was a dud) in seconds at the twelve attacking fighters before attempting to break off and evade. This, however, left the Loyalist fighters in a position where they were more or less required to thread a needle. Three of the F-16s managed to avoid the incoming missiles fired by Miller’s escort fighters while five were struck and destroyed instantly. The success of this salvo was, however, little cause for celebration on the part of Miller as the missile spasm launched by the dying flight of interceptors managed, in turn, to claim four of her own precious Falcons.
Still, even with the loss of four of the almost-irreplaceable aircraft, the Rebels still carried with them a great ability to visit death upon the Earth.
Camp Cesar Chavez, Near Oceanside, California
Alvaro Ramirez has been in his tent doing paperwork when the first alarm had sounded. This, he had rapidly learned, was the great bane of the existence of any officer in any army at almost any period of time. There were always forms to be filled out. Some of the forms existed only for the purpose of requisitioning other forms. Even in the age of computers and the internet, somehow, the Army managed to make getting a load of ammunition delivered a task equal in complexity to applying for a well-documented mortgage.
In the aftermath of the use of the Air Force to smash Rebel infrastructure a renewed effort had been put into reinforcing the air defenses of major military installations. Those efforts, however, had done very little for hastily-prepared or improvised locations such as Camp Cesar Chavez, where most of the buildings were temporary structures and little heavy equipment or supplies for building bunkers or other structures were available.
Instead, he and most of his men were forced to reside in hastily-dug trenches and other extraordinarily basic shelters. Some of them did not even have that, instead being advised to remain indoors if possible and to practice ducking and covering to avoid being injured by splinters or other debris. It would avail them of little, of course, if they were the victims of a direct hit. Presumably whoever had issued the orders had prudently decided not to dwell for too long on that particular point given how little could be done to change it.
Of course, as later inquires and investigations would reveal, the people who had developed the hastily-devised air defense measures for bases like Camp Cesar Chavez had been thinking largely about the threat posed by conventional bombing attacks. The bases, like the “Triple C”, rapidly thrown together for the purpose of housing and training a million new recruits to the new Army of the United States were generally dispersed over wide areas. Even if they were vulnerable to attack, they hardly appeared to be particularly attractive targets in that the losses sustained in pressing attacks against such facilities were judged to be too high to make such attacks worthwhile. A thousand pound bomb here or there would shatter a building or two and perhaps kill a hundred or so raw soldiers, but trading even a few hundred potential infantrymen for a Strike Eagle struck the planners at the Pentagon as a good deal.
What the young men and women who worked at the Pentagon - all of them raised in an age of surgical warfare - failed to think about was how much and the sort of destruction that a particularly creative mind could create through improvisation. In particular, few had ever stopped to think that Acting President Rickover had written his thesis for his MA on the work of General Curtis LeMay.
To many people in the 21st Century General LeMay, the driving force behind the Cold War-era Strategic Air Command, was little more than a cartoon villain, chomping at his cigar and demanding that President Kennedy nuke Cuba back into the Stone Age. Lamentably, this caricature held true even among many military professionals, having grown up in a world where even the noblest of souls could not avoid being contaminated by the scourge of political correctness. People, even soldiers, were raised to admire soldier-scholars and humane warriors. Even at such great institutions as West Point more time was often devoted to teaching cultural sensitivity than to devising new and superior methods of slaughtering the enemy.
Curtis LeMay’s greatest contribution to his country had not been turning around the faltering Strategic Air Command and making it into an efficient instrument of American national power. Certainly, that was a magnificent accomplishment and one worthy of being memorialized and celebrated, but his greatest accomplishment had come several years earlier in a different war.
When General LeMay arrived to take command of the XXI Bomber Command in the Mariana Islands early in 1945, the unit’s B-29 SuperFortress bombers were proving to be ineffective in long-range attacks against Japan. Flying high and attempting to bomb targets with precision had proven costly to the United States and was inflicting little damage against the Japanese. Quickly grasping this, LeMay opted to change tactics. Instead of flying high, carrying large loads of defensive weapons, and attempting to hit precise targets, he had his SuperFortresses fly low and conduct area bombing of Japanese cities and industrial areas with incendiary bombs. This change of tactics instantly transformed the effect of the American air campaign. One Japanese city after another was burned from the Earth, crippling the ability of the Japanese to make war.
Now, at the written orders of Acting President Rickover, the United States Air Force was replicating LeMay’s achievement on American shores. The training camps thrown together to train the million soldiers raised by President Bryan’s proclamation might have been worthless targets if attacked with precision weapons, but instead the Acting President had directed that these rambling facilities - filled with wood structures and other flammable materials - be attacked with every single Mk. 77 bomb that the Rebels could lay their hands upon.
The Mk. 77 bomb was a five hundred pound munition consisting of a large quantity of specially-mixed gasoline surrounded by a thin aluminium skin. On impact, the aluminum shell burst and spread burn
ing fuel all over the surrounding area. Technically speaking, the fuel mixture contained within the bombs was not Napalm but, for all intents and purposes, the distinction was largely academic.
On the ground at Camp Cesar Chavez it took Ramirez and the others on the ground a few moments to figure out exactly what was happening. When the first bomb’s explosion, occurring in the far distance, was significantly quieter than he had expected the Lieutenant temporarily took it as a hopeful sign. Perhaps, he thought, the bomb was a dud as he surveyed the distance. Then more bombs had begun to fall, one after another - seventy-two in all. And then Ramirez saw the flames, heard the screams, and began to smell the effects before he saw them.
The eight surviving F-16s of Miller’s squadron fell upon Camp Cesar Chavez with a fury, dropping one of the incendiary devices after another. The bombs fell and burst upon the ground with a characteristic sound, spreading death and misery that multiplied with every passing minute.
A wooden structure a few hundred feet from Ramirez was wholly in flames. The burning gasoline from each bomb had splashed out across a radius spanning hundreds of yards. The jellied material stuck to surfaces and simply burned through them until they lost their potency. Quite certainly human flesh was not excluded from the general category of such materials.
“Jesus Fuck!” screamed one of the soldiers near Ramirez as he watched a man - or what Ramirez supposed was a man at any rate - emerge from the building doused from head toe in flame. It was nothing like the pyrotechnical spectacles that he had seen in movies. The intensity of the flames and the quantity of the fuel was enough that the man was only able to move forward a few feet before he collapsed altogether, seeming almost to melt into the Earth.
All around Ramirez there were people running and shouting. A select few, mostly wholly unwounded, fell to ground and wept or froze with fear. Another F-16 swept in low above coming close enough to Ramirez that he was able to observe its markings through the increasing haze that obscured the sky. No more than half a mile from where he was standing the F-16 released two of the canisters. They burst in mid-air, exploding with a flash followed by a splash that spread yet more misery.
Ramirez held his position. The Rebel F-16s were criss-crossing the practically defenseless camp, dropping their bombs anywhere they saw unsullied ground. There was no point in running - the bombs could land just about anywhere and he and the soldiers around him were far away from anything that could be convincingly described as shelter.
“Hold your position!” ordered Ramirez as the soldiers around him looked frantically for an escape route.
“Running won’t do any fucking good,” he explained, “they’re just dousing the place in fucking napalm. Stay put.”
The trenches that they were sitting in, of course, would do precious little good in the event that they were impacted by - or even splashed with - all of the flammable material that the Rebel aircraft were dropping, but it was better, Ramirez reckoned, to keep everyone in one place and try and maintain calm than to have them running around in disorder.
A man who had escaped one of the burning buildings ran towards the trench. Even from a distance of over a hundred yards Ramirez could see that he was at least partially alight.
“Fuck,” he said to himself before turning to the rest of the soldiers in the trench, “does anyone have a First Aid kit?”
“I do,” said one of the soldiers, a fresh-faced nineteen year-old illegal from Nevada, if Ramirez recalled correctly.
“Well, get the fuck over here,” he said.
The man on fire made it to within a dozen feet of the trench before he tripped and fell to the ground, howling in pain. Ramirez got up and scrambled over the edge, sprinting forward as he gestured towards another soldier to follow him. The man on the ground was howling in pain, making sounds like those that Ramirez had heard as a boy when animals had been wounded in the wooded area behind his home.
Ramirez and the other men moved carefully as they reached the wounded soldier, turning him over and brushing against his wounds. The man screamed with every movement.
“Do we give him morphine, LT?” asked a young soldier. Suddenly Alvaro Ramirez, all of twenty-three, realized that he was the oldest man there.
“Fuck yes,” he ordered as he looked at the man’s wounds. A large chunk of the side of his body - skin and flesh both - had simply been burned away. Ramirez hadn’t ever been particularly political, but from that moment on he hated the Rebels.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Ceremony of Innocence
The Situation Room, The White House
“How many?” cried out President Kevin Bryan at the Army Brigadier General who stood at the front of the room.”
“22,514 confirmed,” replied the man, “plus another five thousand missing or unaccounted for - and we have to presume that most of those are dead as well. Additionally, over 40,000 are wounded, many of them severely. A significant number of those won’t make it, especially because the scale of the injuries has overwhelmed or capacity to care for the wounded. The shortage of burn specialists is particularly acute.”
“Jesus,” said Secretary Ransom, taking off his glasses and setting them down on the table.
“I don’t understand how something like this could even begin to happen,” said the President, slamming his fist down upon the table.
“Mr. President,” said General Hall, his eyes sad and cast downwards, “I accept full responsibility for everything that has happened. The truth is that we were frantically improvising to try and move these scores of volunteers into the Army of the United States and, while our studies recognized the possibility that the Rebels would attack them and our bases, we never imagined that we would see an attack of this nature and this scale.”
“It is worth noting,” said Secretary Ransom, picking up his glasses and placing them back on his face, “that no one has ever attempted the sort of mass mobilization that we have undertaken in an environment with modern air threats. Further still, the pure viciousness of this was wholly unanticipated.”
“It was an almost perfect target for this sort of attack,” continued the General conducting the briefing, “with plenty of wood-framed and temporary buildings around. There was also a notable lack of fire-fighting equipment and, as I have already noted, trained medical personnel.”
“Plus, of course,” added the Defense Secretary, “there was the structure of the attack itself.”
“Motherfuckers,” said Jamal Anderson at the reference.
“Yes,” confirmed the Brigadier General, “at least half of the casualties inflicted in the attack were a result of the second wave of the attack: the so-called “double tap.””
The initial strikes against the Loyalist training bases had been followed up, just minutes later, by a wave of Tomahawk Cruise Missiles that had scattered cluster munitions almost at random, severely disrupting initial rescue operations, followed by a smaller final wave of aircraft dropping addition incendiaries that had not only killed and injured many would-be rescuers, but that had also caused severe casualties on the part of those attempting to escape the renewed chaos who were killed and wounded by mines and delayed-release munitions scattered earlier.
“I cannot even begin to fathom how we respond to something like this,” said Jamal Anderson sadly.
“We’ve taken a good and close look at the Rebels’ own training bases. They are very well-defended,” said Ransom, “of course, that’s to be expected: most of them used to be our own training bases and they tend to be located at major military facilities.”
“I don’t think that we would do such a thing, even if we could,” said Anderson.
“War means making terrible choices,” said General Hall quietly.
“There are other targets,” Secretary Ransom pointed out, “we’ve already begun drawing up a list.”
The President stood up and walked towards the screen at the end of the room.
“They want us to zag,” he said, “and so we need to
zig.”
“Mr. President?” asked Ransom quizzically, wondering if the often-confused President was losing focus yet again.
“Why did they choose the Army of the United States as a target?” asked the President, sweeping his arms behind his back.
“Because they were vulnerable,” said General Hall, with more than a hint of self-pity running through his voice.
“That was part of it, I know,” said the President, “but there’s something deeper to it than that. Go back a few slides.”
As the President stood, puffing his chest into the air, the briefer turned back to show pictures of some of the worst of the damage.
“They did this,” he continued, stabbing his finger into the air, “because they hate what the Army of the United States represents. They did this for the same reason that they started this war. They realize that, all other things being equal, demography equals their destiny. They are tired, white, and old. Our new army is energetic, multi-colored, and young. They hate the diversity and the progress that our new force represents.”
“With all due respect, Mr. President,” said General Hall, “while I’ll grant you the politics of the thing… I don’t know that that has any bearing upon military operations.”
“This is all politics, General,” said the President.
House of Commons Chamber, Palace of Westminster, United Kingdom
“The Honourable member for Broxbourne,” intoned the Speaker of the House.
Alexander Amery, the Leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party and deputy leader of the opposition Coalition, stood and carefully buttoned the top button of his jacket before he began to speak.
“Number One, Mister Speaker,” said Amery.
Across the aisle, the Prime Minister rose to the dispatch box.
“This morning I had meetings with ministerial colleagues and others. In addition to my duties in the House, I shall have further such meetings later today,” he said formulaically.
