The Second Civil War- The Complete History

by Adam Yoshida

  “General Mackenzie?” asked General Wesley.

  “Yes, and I assume that you are General Wesley,” replied Mackenzie.

  “I am,” said Wesley as he took Mackenzie’s offered hand and shook it.

  “I suppose that we should go inside and talk,” said Mackenzie.

  XII Corps Headquarters, Near Buffalo, New York

  “Fuck him,” raged General Jackson as he threw a tablet across the room and into a wall.

  “Fuck that motherfucker,” he said as he clutched his fists and turned red.

  “…they’ve told us to stop our advance, given the presence of General Mackenzie and his staff in the area,” said Colonel Benson.

  “That fucking asshole. That fucking, Goddamned, piece of shit asshole,” said Jackson, “I should order the strikes to go on regardless. Fuck him. He’s the one who decided to step into a fucking combat zone.”

  “I think that would be unwise, General,” said Colonel Benson.

  “Why? We could say that it was an accident. Bad shit happens when you decide to take a Sunday fucking drive into the middle of a fucking combat zone.”

  “I don’t think that that would fly,” said Benson softly.

  “Motherfucker,” said Jackson, the volume of his voice dropping slowly as he tried to catch his breath.

  “Should I issue the orders to stop the advance?” said Benson.

  Jackson sighed deeply.

  “Yes,” he finally said, “and get me the White House. I want to speak to the President directly.”

  The White House, Washington, DC

  “This action is in direct contravention of the policy established by this Administration,” said Acting President Rickover, his voice filled with a cold fury.

  “As the commander on the ground, General Mackenzie has the authority to respond to any emergent situation,” replied General Monroe.

  “This isn’t the War of 1812, General,” shot back Secretary Preston, “if he wanted clarification of his orders, he could just have called the Department of Defense. After all, he had enough time to fly off to meet with the Goddamned enemy. We could have him shot for it.”

  “If you want to run the war from the DOD, you’re welcome to attempt it, Mr. Secretary,” said Monroe.

  “What is the latest word from General Mackenzie?” said Rickover.

  “He sent a message to the Department stating that he was attempting to negotiate a “human surrender” of the Unified Army Group. Whatever that means,” said Preston.

  “But there’s still fighting going on in Buffalo?” said the Acting President.

  “In some areas, Mr. President,” replied General Monroe, “as General Jackson said earlier, the movement of General Mackenzie into the combat zone has required that XII Corps halt combat operations across a wide swath of the front.”

  “I should interject at this point, Mr. President,” said the Secretary of State, “and tell you that the situation in Buffalo was being received very negatively internationally. All of that footage of our soldiers seemingly mowing down soldiers who wanted to surrender…”

  “If they wanted to surrender, they could have fucking surrendered!” snapped the Acting President.

  “Only if they wanted to die later,” said General Monroe quietly.

  “That’s enough from you,” said Secretary Preston sharply to General Monroe.

  “Mr. Secretary, Mr. President,” replied General Monroe, “I am here to give military advice. I already stated that the FNASA force was defeated in the field and could have easily been induced to surrender by our offering reasonable terms.”

  “Yes, you’ve been very clear on that point General. We don’t need to hear it again,” said Rickover.

  Ira Skelton came bursting into the room.

  “He’s on CNN,” said the White House Chief of Staff.

  Someone manipulated the controls to the primary monitor in the room and brought up a streaming image.

  “I can’t believe that fucking CNN survived all of this,” said Secretary Preston as the image of General Mackenzie and General Wesley filled the screen.

  “General Wesley has offered the surrender of the Unified Army Group upon the condition that his men be treated as prisoners of war,” explained General Mackenzie from a podium that had been dug up from a storage locker and set up in the school’s gym, “and I have, on behalf of the government of the United States, accepted those terms.”

  “Fucker,” said the Acting President.

  “…General Wesley concluded, as I did likewise, that no purpose was served by the further effusion of blood here. I am very glad to have it be over. I have no further statement to make, beyond to offer my profound prayers that peace will soon be restored to our land. Thank you, and God bless the United States of America.”

  “Turn that shit off,” ordered Rickover as he turned to face the men and women in the Situation Room.

  “That man is to be relieved of duty, effective immediately. I want him to be investigated for insubordination and court-martialed if at all feasible. Is that clear?”

  “Mr. President…” General Monroe began.

  “There will be no debate on this matter,” said Rickover.

  “You need to look at the whole picture here, Mr. President…” said Monroe.

  “You are relieved, General,” said the Acting President, interrupting the Army Chief of Staff.

  “Sir, I think…” said Monroe.

  “You are relieved, sir,” said the Acting President, “now get the fuck out of the White House.”

  The General looked around the table for a minute and then, without saying a further word, gathered his papers, got up, and left the room.

  “Can we do anything about this bullshit?” the Acting President said, breaking the silence.

  “In a timely fashion? I have no idea,” said Preston.

  “I think, if that was any indication of what you’d face, that we’d have to fire about half of the officers in the armed forces if we tried to overturn the terms of the surrender and proceed against the ex-FNASA soldiers,” said Ira Skelton.

  “We could just pretend the surrender didn’t happen and go on shooting the bastards,” suggested the Acting President, at least half in jest. No one responded.

  “Well, fine,” said Rickover, “someone get me General Jackson.

  XII Corps Headquarters, Near Buffalo, New York

  “Mr. President,” said Jackson curtly as the image of Terrance Rickover filled the screen in front of him.

  “General, I have ordered the relief of General Mackenzie for insubordination,” said the Acting President directly, “you are to take command of the former Army of Northern Virginia and, leaving behind only such forces as are required to guard the prisoners that you now hold, you are ordered to immediately advance on Chicago and take it by storm.”

  “What are we do do about the prisoners, Mr. President?” asked Jackson.

  “I’m afraid that we’ll have to live with what General Mackenzie wrought,” said Rickover.

  “Understood, Mr. President.”

  “One more thing General,” said Rickover.

  “Sir?”

  “No mercy, General, no mercy.”

  “You don’t need to worry about that, Mr. President.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  The Final Push

  Democratic Union, Temporary Office of the American Commissioner, Chicago, Illinois

  The High Commissioner looked blankly at the signage on the wall. He supposed that he ought to have it removed, insofar as the Federation of North American States was really no longer a part of the Democratic Union. Of course, he reasoned that if he did that then even more people would wonder about his own position as the “High Commissioner” to an organization that no longer had any effective presence in North America beyond a handful of prisoners of war who would shortly be returned to Europe. Neither the Union nor the Federation needed to be durable at this point. They merely had to last long enough.

 
; “If this is going to work,” said the High Commissioner, “then everyone is going to have to fight. The Unified Army Group had 60,000 soldiers left in Buffalo and look how fast they came apart. If not for a lucky break, they’d have pretty much all ended up dead. As it stands, they’re all lost to us regardless. And our strength is being sapped here with every single passing day. Not only are we not going to get reinforcements from what was left of our army, but the size of our force is actually shrinking.”

  “Deserters are uniformly weak-willed people,” insisted the Minister of Justice, “anyone who can fight worth a damn is still with us and will be to the end. So are the true majority of the people. It may be trite to say so, but I will point it out anyways: the people, united, can never be defeated.”

  “Noble words, noble words,” agreed the High Commissioner, “but I don’t know that it fully accords with the situation that we are dealing with at the moment.”

  “Terrance Rickover is an evil and ruthless man,” said the Minister of Justice, “but his support remains shallow. That’s why he lost the election. As much as we may disagree with so many of the things that Mitchell Randall stands for, the truth remains that he has some core of fundamental decency and fairness. He is the coming power in the United States, not Rickover. Not only do we know that, but the people who do the actual work in America know it as well. A lot of them, like General Monroe and General Mackenzie, will stand in support of us before they allow Rickover to launch a ruthless and savage assault on a city of more than ten million people.”

  “What we need, is to make it clear to the people - and to the world - exactly why we are continuing to fight at this point in time. We need everyone to know why we are fighting and who is responsible for all of the death and destruction that continues beyond this point.”

  The Capitol, Washington, DC

  House Majority Leader Michael Nelson watched as the members shuffled into the hastily-refurbished building. The House Republican Conference that he led was, at least in theory one of the largest in history - fully three hundred and thirty-one of the members of the House were Republicans. Those numbers disguised the true state of affairs. Only half of the Republican members of the House had endorsed the Acting President’s bid to win a term in his own right. of the remainder about half had remained neutral and the others had outright supported Mitchell Randall. As the President-elect was keeping himself busy quietly staffing his Administration and otherwise trying to stay out of the public fray, the fracas created by the firing of General Mackenzie and the continued refusal of Acting President Rickover to compromise his demand for the unconditional surrender of the enemy even in the face of his own defeat for re-election had broken the fissures wide open.

  “Might I remind the House, Mr. Speaker,” said the Congressman from California’s Fourth District, “that the primary reason why we went to war in the first place was over a matter of principle: that the government should be accountable to the people and that the powers of the Executive Branch are not unlimited. I challenge my colleagues: how is the Acting President’s continued effort to push this war to his preferred conclusion, regardless of the will of the people or of the Congress, any different than what Henry Warren and Kevin Bryan did that forced us to rise in rebellion in the first place?”

  “Now, some may protest that the House and the Senate are not on the record with regard to the need to bring this war to an immediate and reasonable termination, but that is not a reflection of the opinion of the Congress: it is a reflection of the fact that the leadership of both houses have refused to allow any war powers-related resolution onto the floor. If a vote were to be taken on such a measure I am certain that it would be overwhelmingly in the affirmative. If that is not the case, Mr. Speaker, I challenge the Republican leadership - my leadership: let us have a vote.”

  The Majority Leader stood and exited the chamber. The moment he stepped off of the floor he found Representative Theresa Rowan waiting for him.

  “You can’t hold them back much longer,” she said simply.

  “Look,” he said, “they’re not united around one cause or one leader. I don’t know exactly what Mitchell Randall is doing but, by refusing to speak, he’s doing us a huge favor. As it stands now, they’re a leaderless mob blowing off a lot of steam. I understand what the President is trying to do. If we simply pardon everyone who fought on the other side and allow them back in, they’ll be back here after the next Goddamned election and then what exactly will the point of all of this have been?”

  “Leaderless mobs can do an awful lot of damage,” she replied.

  Chicago, Illinois

  The first thing that viewers noticed was that there was an American flag behind the former President of the United States. The ex-President and possibly ex-High Commissioner appeared gaunt, especially to people who hadn’t watched him closely in the years since he’d left office. This was largely a result of his natural tendency to respond to stress by retreating into himself, spending hours chain-smoking alone. At the moment he was driving certain members of his staff crazy because he was going through nearly a full carton of almost-impossible to obtain cigarettes each day.

  “My fellow Americans,” he began his speech, “I come before you tonight with a plea for mercy. For two years we have all suffered together because of the political divisions that have driven our country apart. Fierce partisanship spilled over from the world of words to the real world. Several hundred thousand Americans have died as a result of this. Millions more have lost loved ones. Almost every American has felt the economic consequences of this failure of our political system.”

  “I do not wish to dwell at length on the past. Those issues have, for the time being, been decided on the battlefield. The question now is not who will win, but whether or not the American people - regardless of their political values - will be losers as a result of the outcome. We are a people with a tradition of mercy and of kindness yet, at the moment, we do not see those principles in the conduct of the present Administration.”

  “Why does this war go on? Why are people fighting to this day? I have, throughout my time both as a private citizen and in my temporary capacity as a leader of the Federation of North American States, always sought nothing more than the right of all people to live according to their own conscience. When a group of radicals sought to overturn the expressed will of the American people and seize the Presidency, I offered my support for those who attempted to defend the rightful President. When the Constitutional government of the United States collapsed as a result of an armed rebellion, I supported the creation of - and agreed to lead - a new government that would provide a refuge for those who did not wish to continue to exist in a radicalized and changed new United States.”

  “It is now clear to me that that effort has failed. Even though tens of millions of Americans - for Americans we remain and have always been - want no part in the transformed political order created by Terrance Rickover, we have no real choice in the matter. Our best hope is that we will be allowed to participate in the ordinary political and judicial process and to preserve our own rights through that.”

  “This would appear to be the desire of all of the American people, as expressed by the results of the most recent Presidential election. Terrance Rickover, however, has chosen to reject this. He is instead pursuing a radical policy that seeks to deny the fundamental human rights of all of those who opposed him. He is following a policy of vengeance and hatred that has already caused the deaths of thousands of people and threatens, quite literally, the lives of millions more.”

  “Tonight I repeat to you what I have said many times already: those of us who continue to resist seek nothing more at this point than the assurance that we will not be jailed or even executed for trying to defend ourselves and our rights against armed attack. In particular, we do not wish to surrender so long as the Acting President refuses to provide us assurances that he will not order our summary execution or put us before some unusual and extraordinary for
m of court.”

  “Our requests are reasonable and moderate. The alternative is that we continue through nearly two more months of combat, during which tens of thousands - and perhaps even hundreds of thousands - of people will certainly die. Unless we get additional food here, it is certain that people here in Chicago will be hungry and some may even starve. We should be working on fixing problems like that instead of pursuing a political vendetta to the very end.”

  The White House, Washington, DC

  “What would it hurt, at this point, Mr. President?” said Ira Skelton as soon as the ex-President finished his speech.

  “It would hurt in two ways,” replied Rickover, “first, it would allow them to tell future generations that they weren’t really defeated, but that they made a sacrifice to preserve human lives. I want them to know that they lost - totally and utterly. Second, even if we’re not going to have time to oversee the entire process, we still have - barely - enough time to put the leaders of the Federation before special tribunals and deal with them quickly. Likewise, even if we don’t have the time to give every single Federation soldier we capture a trial and figure out whether they should be shot or not, we at least have enough time to put the criminals back into jails and to put the illegal aliens on planes back home. The alternative is a mass pardon of hundreds of thousands of violent traitors and I won’t have it.”

  “Mr. President,” said the House Majority Leader, his voice made heavy with sadness, “I do not believe that you have the backing of the Congress necessary to enact such a policy. The House would certainly vote, if it had the chance to do so, for a resolution to cut off funding for any final assault on the remaining areas held by the Federation, or whatever they are at this point.”

  “Do they have two-thirds in both Houses of Congress?” asked Rickover.

  “I don’t think so, Mr. President,” replied Nelson.