The Second Civil War- The Complete History

by Adam Yoshida

  “Don’t worry about that,” said Wing Commander Hennessy, “I know these people who they’re sending with us. They have balls. So to speak.”

  “Speaking of which,” said the communications operator, “the commander of the Cape St. George, is on the line for you.”

  “I’ll take the call here,” replied Captain Welch.

  The face of Rear Admiral Olivia Collins (now, Rear Admiral (Upper Half), Olivia Collins, technically though it was never spoken that way) appeared on one of the monitors that was working on the bridge.

  “Captain Welch,” said Admiral Collins, “it was good of you to wait for us. We came as fast as we could. Wing Commander - it’s good to see you again.”

  “The same to you, Admiral,” replied Hennessy.

  “Well,” said Lieutenant-Commander Windsor laconically from his position along the side of the bridge, “now that the introductions are over with, let’s go free Britain.”

  Cleveland, Ohio

  Initially the Acting President had resisted calls that he spend more time campaigning. After all, he had a war to run - a war that required near-constant management. Moreover, he argued, wasn’t it really beneath the dignity of the Presidency to be engaged in petty politicking while men and women were still dying in the field?

  The Acting President’s advisors had held their ground. FDR, they pointed out, had gone on a campaign tour during the 1944 election. Indeed, arguably Roosevelt had managed to secure his abbreviated fourth term by that final burst of vitality, with moments such as his “Fala” speech convincing doubters that the ailing President had enough fight in him to serve out another term. Even if that had ultimately proven, like so many things about Roosevelt, to be a elaborate deception that didn’t invalidate the basic principle.

  Thus, Terrance Rickover had found himself on the campaign trail.

  “This election,” he told a rally in Cleveland, Ohio, “is about the survival of a free government under the most challenging of conditions. This is a change from where we were at when we began. Two years ago, when this fight started, the question was whether or not the country would survive. After the battles that we have won and the sacrifices that we have made, I no longer have any doubt on that front. Whatever happens, the United States of America will survive.”

  The Acting President stopped and raised his hands while the crowd wildly applauded the sentiment.

  “Yes,” said Rickover, “it is worth celebrating that, whatever may come to pass, there will still be an entity called the United States of America on the maps of the world and that there will still be future generations to talk of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln, and all of the others. That, indeed is a good in and of itself. Yet, at the same time, we need to ask ourselves: what sort of America will those future generations live in?”

  “I say to you that it is not enough merely that the country survives: it is the spirit of the republic that must be preserved as well.”

  “How can we begin an era of American renewal by condemning millions of our fellow-citizens to live under conditions that are not free? What will the price of such a betrayal be, not only in the short-term, but in the longer-term as well?”

  “Shall we become enemies? Shall we look at one another across across new borders with a spirit of suspicion and hatred and with the unique sort of acrimony known only by families that have been divided?”

  “And what shall, under such circumstances, become of our own country? Once we have betrayed our ideals, will we still be a nation of liberty, or will our future government be a parody of America? Will it be a place where we still have Presidents and Senators and a Supreme Court, but where the meaning of all of those things will have been twisted and warped beyond our ability to recognize such things?”

  “In other words: the question we have to decide, as a nation, in the days to come is whether or not America will still be America.”

  “Perhaps it is fruitless - and maybe it is even foolish for us to linger upon the question of what men who have been dead for centuries would think of what we have made of their creation today. After all, John Adams never saw an automobile, George Washington never even saw a train, and Thomas Jefferson never even conceived of, let alone used, something like the internet. They didn’t understand our times or our challenges.”

  “Yet, at the same time, I believe that there are things that are timeless. Honor is one of those things. Liberty is another. They don’t make for easy viral videos and they’re hard to explain in thirty-second ads. Yet, at the same time, we all know that they exist. And we all know that they can be lost.”

  Near Camp David, Maryland

  Colonel (Self-appointed) Sean Rimmer of the Maryland Volunteer Defense Force sat calmly as former President Kevin Bryan was dragged into the living room of the old Chevy Chase McMansion that now served as the “Supreme Command” of the MVDF. Before the war, Sean had been an insurance salesman and a moderate Republican who volunteered for campaigns and was also a Rotarian. Amidst the tumult of war he had, like many others, become something quite different.

  Maryland had been one of the first states to declare its adherence to the Loyalist cause and Sean, with a family to protect and feed and no family connections outside of Maryland, had ended up left upon the sidelines of the great war for American democracy. Then the war had destroyed his business, since the break-up of the nation had so ravaged the entire insurance industry that both governments of the United States had been forced to nationalize most insurance companies to keep them afloat. Then he’d discovered that his wife was having an affair, a development that she had blamed wholly upon him for his supposed “inattentiveness” and left, taking his son with him. Thus had Sean Rimmer found himself broke, alone, and also in enemy territory. By the time that he had come to this juncture, the borders between the sides had begun to tighten up and it was no longer a simple matter of getting into his car and driving into Virginia to join the U.S. Army. If he attempted to do that, he realized, there was now a very real risk that he wouldn’t even make it across the border before he was stopped, jailed, and maybe even shot.

  So, instead, he had initially elected to serve his country by posting on the internet.

  Of course, the war had resulted in attempts to censor the internet by both sides but, aside from those places that physically lost internet access as a result of the conflict, the attempt to suppress the online civil war had proven to be even more futile than the efforts of those who had sought conciliation with regard to the actual shooting war. A thousand flowers bloomed online and Sean Rimmer had been one of those. Rimmer was an elegant and aggressive writer and he found fans and followers, some of them more dedicated than the average. Thus, when Maryland purported to secede from the Union to join the new Federation of North American States and Rimmer had decided that the time had come for more than mere words, there were people willing to follow him.

  Rimmer wasn’t a soldier and neither were the people who followed him. Anyways, by the time that they decided to organize and take the field it had become clear enough to all of them how the war was going to end - provided, of course, that Mitchell Randall didn’t somehow manage to win the election and then snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The question, then, was of what sort of America would exist after the victory was won. After all, Rimmer pointed out to his followers, only a handful of people were actually punished in the aftermath of the First Civil War. Even Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee were allowed to go free. Perhaps, Rimmer conceded, that was reasonable given the nature of that war and the honor of those combatants, but it could not be the precedent that was followed here. The criminals who had brought such horrors upon the nation could not be allowed to go about free and unpunished. Something had to be done and, better still, they just so happened to be the people in the right place to do something about it.

  Rimmer brought down the gavel that had been acquired for him from somewhere.

  “This session of the Constitutional Court of the State of Marylan
d is now in session,” he said, “I understand that there is a matter to be brought before this court.”

  “There is your Honor,” said Peter Carrera, a grey-haired man who was wearing a very conspicuous grey three-piece suit in the midst of the crowd of camouflage -wearing militiamen.

  “You may proceed.”

  “I wish to bring it to the attention of the court the the people of Maryland now have in their custody Kevin Bryan, late the President of the United States before his impeachment and removal by the Congress of the United States, “who has been convicted by this court in absentia of crimes against the people of Maryland and of the United States.”

  “So noted,” said Rimmer, “I see that the convicted man is in the courtroom.”

  “He is, your Honor,” agreed Carrera.

  “Very well,” said Rimmer, “this court, having already rendered its verdict and pronounced its sentence upon this matter, directs that the appropriate punishment be carried out without delay.”

  With a broad smile, Rimmer brought his gavel down. It was at this point that Kevin Bryan, sweating and shaking, finally spoke.

  “What punishment?” he asked.

  “Why, death, of course,” replied Rimmer.

  .

  It wouldn’t be enough to allow those who had brought the nation to the brink of destruction to simply resume their former lives, Rimmer had argued, because they were all deeply-devoted and devious traitors. They might even go so far as to renounce their views in public, but they would privately hold tightly onto them and continue to spread the contagion that had almost killed America once. Who was to say what would happen if they are allowed to continue to spread their poison for another generation? The nation had only been saved by the barest of margins this time. Would it be the same next time? This had been a controversial proposition, but he’d found enough devoted and competent followers to allow for some direct action to be taken.

  At first they’d only gone for the smallest of targets, such as petty government bureaucrats who lived alone in fairly isolated areas. During those early days they’d developed a solid protocol: once they identified a target, they would put together a dossier of information on the individual and the crimes. When that was completed, they would try that person in absentia in their “Constitutional Court.” Once the predictable conviction was returned (though, in two cases, the “jury” had chosen to acquit), the target would be captured and appropriately punished. Rimmer’s preferred method of execution was to hang the individual in a semi-public place where they would later be discovered. This was partly a result of his natural cruelty and partly a matter of practicality: they didn’t trust that the government would not attempt to cover up all known insurgent activity and so, in order to make sure that everyone could see what had happened, they left the bodies in places where the public could find them. Rimmer preferred this to posting their activities on the internet themselves because, even with all of the disruptions caused by the war, the government’s surveillance of the internet continued to be both intense and thorough.

  After they’d tried and punished around a dozen people - mostly ex-employees of the IRS and Justice Department - they’d moved on to larger targets. The Loyalist Congress had ceased to exist with the creation of the new Federation. Some of its members had found jobs within the structure of either the Federation or the broader Democratic Union, but more than a few had not. This made them inviting targets for punishment. The former Congressman from Florida, for example, who no longer had a district to go back to and whose histrionic outbursts made him unwelcome in a new government that was trying to project a moderate image had been too tempting to pass up. He had screamed and howled as they took him from his home, first in puffed-up rage and then in genuine fear as he realized that the people who had taken him were in bitter earnest. Rimmer remembered how long he’d taken to die, his face slowly changing colour and the movement of his legs becoming rapid, then spasmodic, and then stopping altogether. They had left him swinging from the goalposts of a suburban soccer field.

  Rimmer only attended some of the executions. It was more common for his sentences to be carried out by just a pair of men in some quiet and anonymous place. But there was no way that he was going to miss this one. In fact, given the rapid movement of the Army of Northern Virginia, he was pretty sure that this would be the last such occasion. This made it all the more imperative that the sentence be carried out quickly, before the punishment of the criminals who had undermined the Constitution became a political matter in a renewed United States. The media and weak politicians, Rimmer knew, would damn him - at least in public. But more than a few would be secretly thankful for the work that he had done, for the favor that he had done for the people of the United States.

  “This is murder!” screamed Kevin Bryan as two uniformed men dragged him out the side door of the old Plymouth Voyager that had served as his final conveyance. Rimmer looked up at the Exxon sign. The old station had been out-of-commission for the better part of two months, yet another economic casualty of the war that Kevin Bryan and his friends had chosen to inflict upon the American people. Someone had already driven on ahead and affixed the noose around the top of the sign. As he stepped out of his own SUV, Rimmer wondered how many of the other people there got why he had chosen an Exxon station to be the site of such an important event. He briefly considered explaining it to the assembled men and women, but he stopped himself. He usually operated under the assumption that everyone around him knew less than he did and so was therefore often found explaining things that really did not require it. Stopping to give a speech on historical trivia, he decided, would spoil what ought to be a solemn and, in its own way, dignified moment.

  “Does the prisoner have any final words?” asked Rimmer as the men dragged Kevin Bryan towards the sign.

  “You have no right to do this!” roared Bryan.

  “What gives you the right!” shouted Bryan, thrashing his arms and legs about as the men pulled him forward, placed him on top of a folding table, and put the noose around his neck.

  “You’re criminals! All of you are nothing more than petty thugs and criminals!” he screamed as the noose was tightened by the two men who stood next to him on the folding table.

  “Very well,” said Rimmer as the two men finished their work and jumped backwards off the table, leaving Kevin Bryan standing on the aged plastic work table.

  Without any ceremony, the two men pulled the table out from under Bryan. The former President scrambled with his feet as the table moved, but it was quite futile. After a few moments he was left suspended several feet in the air. He attempted to look downwards and saw that he was no more than a few feet off the ground. For a few moments he attempted to struggle downwards, as if shifting his weight would somehow allow him to stretch enough to touch the ground. Within seconds he realized the futility of his position and stopped this effort. After that point his movements were limited to kicks and jerks, some of which might have been involuntary. When it was clear that he had lost consciousness altogether, Rimmer and the rest of his militiamen began to pack up. With a growing sense of unease, for they knew that they were in a place where someone who meant them harm could stumble on by at almost any moment, they sat, watched, and waited until they were certain that Kevin Bryan was dead. When that business was complete, one of the militia members walked over the corpse and taped a sign to it that read, “enemy of America” and then they drove off.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The St. Lawrence

  Bravo Troop, 2nd Squadron, 7th Cavalry, 1st BCT, 2nd Armored Division, Laval, Quebec

  Captain Andy Dumont watched as a mix of Apaches and A-10s cleared the road ahead of him. He took a moment, as yet another Thunderbolt swept low above his Stryker and engaged the FNASA force ahead of him with cannon fire, to thank God that the Air Force had managed to get itself into at least halfway decent shape before the final phase of this campaign began. The leading elements of a FNASA brigade were barely a mile ah
ead, attempting to erect roadblocks that would prevent the continued movement of XII Corps towards the coast and therefore force the sort of decisive battle that the enemy desperately wanted to fight and that General Jackson continued to seek, with all of his power and energy, to avoid.

  “We’re going to need to dismount up ahead,” ordered Dumont, as he began to quickly check over his own body armor with his hands, seeking to ensure that everything was fully in place just in case.

  The enemy positions up ahead were held by nothing more than conventional infantry backed by artillery. As one of the units at the vanguard of the advance, the 2nd Squadron had been given access to the full air support assets of the entire Corps. Those assets had been enough to smash most of the defending artillery and to damage the positions held by the enemy, but they hadn’t been enough to send them running. They were still stubbornly holding onto trenches that they’d hastily built in front of the city and from which they could harass and damage any force that attempted to use the main highway. Given this, once all of the expensive fireworks had finished going off, it was going to come down to Dumont’s cavalrymen and around two thousand other men like them to actually force them from their positions to allow for the passage of the rest of the Corps.

  “We’re launching our attack,” called out Dumont to the Squadron commander over his radio, “call off the artillery and air support in this area if you don’t want blue-on-blue.”

  “Roger that,” called back Major Olafson.

  The back door of the Stryker opened. Dumont had to suppress the urge to charge out the back himself, but he knew that - as the Troop Commander - he was obligated to hold back and keep himself out of the line of fire as best as he could. Indeed, all of his platoon commanders likewise remained in their Strykers, leaving the tactical command of the advancing infantry to squad commanders as they used their vehicles in support.