by Gene Skellig
The one bit of good news was the nearly complete devastation that American and Australian naval and air defenses had inflicted on the air assaulters and the follow-on sea-transported forces of the 13th and 14th Group Armies. Adams and Ferebee had known that three waves of air assaulters had been decimated before reaching their landing zones. But when the CJOC Naval LnO passed on reports of dozens of civilian ships loaded with Chinese military personnel heading for the Australian north and west coasts had been sunk by surviving US, Indian, and Australian naval units in the region, they grimly celebrated the terrible loss of life that had been delivered to the enemy soldiers who were just hours from reaching their sea-port destinations in Northern Territory and Western Australia, with tens of thousands of enemy combatants and their war-fighting material having been sent to the bottom of the eastern Indian Ocean and Timor Sea.
But the considerable success on the west was lost on General Adams, who was focused on the heavy losses his country had taken, and the disastrous situation unfolding in Queensland and New South Wales. What really got to General Adams was the speed at which the situation was changing. He had been optimistic when hearing reports of Australian units that had stood up and reported being in place in blocking positions, well entrenched and ready to thwart the enemy’s advance. The battles had then taken place, fast and furious, and then all hope had been lost when it became clear, time after time, that the Australians had been destroyed. It was the speed with which the Chinese forces cut his boys to pieces that had destroyed all hope in General Adam’s heart, and was behind his next comment to Colonel Ferebee.
“Maybe we should reconsider our setting up here in Katherine, and move farther south – maybe all the way down to Alice Springs and your Pine Gap facility?” General Adams asked. “I mean, if they hit Darwin, we’re now just 300 kilometers from there. That does not buy us much time. We’re facing total defeat here. I don’t think we can last a second week. There are just too many of them coming, and they’re moving so damned fast!”
Looking appraisingly at the General, Colonel Ferebee took the man’s defeated look into consideration. If the rest of his men are this beaten already, there’s no hope. I’ve got to do something, thought Ferebee, and then he drew on the inspiration of Sam Houston, that he had reflected upon during the opening hours of the war.
“General, I agree with your assessment that things are desperate. But this thing is not over, not by any means, General.” Then in a quiet voice, which only the General could hear, Ferebee spoke to him: “Listen, Braeden, you’ve got to snap out of it. Your officers are watching you. How you act here and now will have an effect on your men. They, and a few of my Marines,” Ferebee said, far more modestly than he felt of the contribution his men were going to make to the coming battles. “They are the only thing that can stop these invaders from achieving total victory, but you’re getting them all killed, throwing them up in these little blocking actions of yours in Queensland. You’ve got to abandon most of that sector, and think on a longer time horizon. Your men want to fight, but you have to be their leader, and you have to hold them back from these pointless, suicidal skirmishes. You’ve got to tell them what to do, not just sit here and let them run the show, sitting here like this, listening to them die.
“You’ve got to grow a pair of balls, take charge and stop making defeatist comments. Maybe then you can lead your men to having something of a strategic plan, a plan for victory, rather than attempting to simply slow them down. God knows you have enough territory to work with. So pull your men back towards Cloncurry, have them cache any excess weapons and provisions laterally off the axis of advance for later use. Have them travel light, and fast, and disappear into those cattle stations and remote villages off-route. They’ve got to avoid engagement for a while.
“Let’s suck the Chinese out to the west. Then, when we’ve got the right conditions – at a time and place of our choosing – when the enemy has become over-confident and over-run their logistics, we’ll cut their throats and turn them back.” Ferebee said, with increasing energy.
Ferebee could see that he had gotten to the Australian General. The man’s face had turned positively purple, first out of shame and anger, and ultimately out of the hot blood of combat. Even a General, thousands of kilometers from where the action is taking place, can be either in, or out, of the fight. And with the new energy that Colonel Ferebee had stimulated, the image of taking the fight to the enemy being so contagious, something had changed in the General’s frame of mind.
Before Colonel Ferebee’s eyes, the Australian General swung into action.
“Major Blakely, Captain Thorne, come over here and tell me again that idea of yours. I want Colonel Ferebee’s take on it. It may be just the right idea, after all,” commanded Adams, surprising the MAGTFA Liaison Officer and the intense Captain from 1 Cdo Regiment, who he had both been shut down hours before when they had first tried to run their audacious plan past the General.
15
RUN FLAT
Weeks after the war broke out, Wisconsin, USA
He knew it would not go as smoothly as planned, but when Owen MacInnes slammed on the brakes, with adrenalin suddenly rushing through his veins, a sudden wave of panic took hold of him. While his senses told him that he had put his group into a dangerous situation, his intuition told him run!
He was just about to throw his pick-up into reverse, and do a five-point turn to head back towards Ian and Beth in the Range Rover XL, some 500 yards behind, but something inside him told him to calm down! Play the situation out like you and Ian agreed.
It was the first time they had encountered a full-on road block, and they were still only a few hundred miles out of Madison, Wisconsin, USA.
The goal was to reach St Charles, Illinois, where Ian had coordinated safe lodgings with his cousin over the amateur radio network. Ian had used some of his precious silver coins to buy a hand-held UHF system from a disaster response coordinator they had met in Verona, Wisconsin. The man had not only coordinated their passage through the sector, but had also put them up for the night. He showed Ian his radio shack, and suggested that he use the amateur UHF radio network during their travels. He had a variety of fixed and portable UHF equipment in his radio shack, and showed Ian how to use, and he explained some of the basic Radio-Telephony, RT, procedures and call signs.
The portable UHF device came in handy from the start, allowing Ian to seek out safe harbor along the way as they picked their way around the devastation of the cities and military bases that had been nuked. Ian used the call sign: “W9XZ2/P”, the WPXZ2 borrowed from the friendly disaster response coordinator in Verona, WI, and the “Slash-P” to indicate that he was using a portable transmitter. Ian quickly got more comfortable with the jargon and R/T protocols used by amateur radio operators, and Owen contributed the social connections and networking skills.
Once they reached St Charles, the plan had been to work with Ian’s extended family to negotiate safe passage to Gary, Indiana, where Ian helped Owen make radio contact with people who knew some of his friends from his six year stint in the Army. The idea was that a contact in each successive community would help them parlay safe passage past the road-blocks and ambush sites. Then, once safe and sound for a night’s rest, they could plan the next leg. Provided they were able to gather good intelligence at each safe haven along the way, and they had names of well-respected locals at their destinations, they would be able to leap-frog their two-vehicle convoy all the way to Altoona Pennsylvania, where Catherine’s large extended family would have a place for them.
Owen did not really like his in-laws all that much, but he had no reason to dislike them. To Owen, the problem had always been one of insecurity, and he knew it. Catherine’s father, the retired General Upton, had seemed dismissive of Owen’s choices in life; that he had not continued his career in the army, nor even acquired a formal education for that matter. As the old General had put it once in a private conversation with his daughter, which Owen
had surreptitiously overheard: “Catty, the man is shiftless. The best he’s ever done for himself was to reach Master Corporal in the Army Reserves, and then take his release? For what, to be a construction laborer? Or what is it now, mechanic’s apprentice? He’ll never amount to anything, the man has no ambition. You would do far better with Gideon James, from your high school days. Why, I’ve heard –“
“Knock it off, Dad. Owen is my man. Period. You better treat him better, Pop, and stop your little comments all the time, making Owen feel unworthy of YOUR family. He has proven himself to me, time after time, and that’s what counts. And I love him, Pop, just the way he is. So if you ever want to have grandchildren to play with, or have any sort of relationship with me for that matter, you better start treating him like a son. He’s your only shot at it!”
Owen had withdrawn from his post by the barn window, and had made it to the far side of a line of hay-bales before Catherine had exited the barn, but he later admitted what he had overheard. From his point of view, hearing his lover tearing into her old man like that proved her love for him in a way that really mattered to the young man.
For the General, his daughter’s comments had really hit hard. The old warrior had always wanted a son, and had just the four daughters to show for his efforts. Of his girls, only the eldest, Margaret, was married. Her husband, Matthew, was a Warrant Officer serving in a highly classified position at the Mount Weather Emergency Operations Centre, just over the state lines near Bluemont, Virgina, which the General knew to be the primary evacuation bunker for the President of the United States. But despite his best efforts, he had been unable to forge any close bonds with his son in law, other than the polite, respectful comments you would expect a retired General to receive from a professional, serving member of the Armed Forces. The General put it down to the gap that traditionally existed between senior enlisted men like Warrant Officer Blakely, and senior officers, even retired ones like the General..
Maggie and her husband were infertile, so the General’s only other hope for a grandson, and for a son-in-law he could talk with at family dinners, now rested with his only other married daughter, Catherine, and her loser of a man, this MacInnes boy.
But despite his dashed hopes, upon the realization that his daughter had chosen her lover over her father, the old General began to feel better. The more he thought about it, the more he felt pride in his daughter’s strength of character. If she loves him that much, maybe there’s more to the man than I realized.
That had been two years ago. Since then, Owen and Catherine had been married, back in Richland Center, WI. It had been a simple ceremony, what with Owen not having any family. There had just been the couple’s best friends, Ian and Mary, as best-man and maid of honor, and a small number of guests.
On the Upton side of the family, a full contingent had driven up from Altoona, and even Warrant Officer Blakely had taken some annual leave to be there with his wife, Maggie, for her little sister’s wedding.
The old General had still not fully made up his mind about MacInnes. However, judging by the way his daughter behaved, it was clear that the young man was treating her fairly well. And the fact that Owen had completed two full years of apprentice training with Randy’s Auto was a positive sign.
Unfortunately for everybody, the General did not show any signs of his softening stance on MacInnes, showing only his stony, cold, and unreadable face to the young man.
He had intended to open up to the young man the next time the MacInneses – and it was so hard to see his daughter as anything other than an Upton – showed up at the family farm in Altoona, PA.
And then the nuclear war had broken out. All forms of normal communication had rapidly ceased to work. Despite their best efforts, Owen and Ian had been unable to make UHF contact with anybody in the Altoona area, but they kept trying. And with each passing day as they progressed from Wisconsin to Pennsylvania, Owen’s group found the atmosphere at each small town, roadblock or civil defense post to be more and more desperate. It was as if they were moving towards some ultimate doom, the way it got worse the farther east they travelled.
In the six months since Madison Wisconsin had gone up in smoke, along with pretty much every other major city, military base, international airport and major critical infrastructure or industrial installation, the world had gotten much smaller and meaner.
The effort to survive had become very personal. Each individual was out for themselves and their loved ones, often fleeing in panic as far as they could from the dangerous after-effects of the blasts and the radiation carried in fallout, in the furious first hours and days at the start of the war.
But when the missiles had stopped coming and the truth of the massive scale of destruction had become clear, individuals turned to their neighbors, friends, and local communities to seek and to offer help.
Where a community was strong, or had some degree of functioning, especially when outside of the danger zones, there were initial successes, where the entire population cooperated in a spirit of good-will, community service, and patriotism. However, as grocery and other supplies had dwindled, the attempts by civil defense authorities and FEMA to control the distribution of food, water and medical supplies had quickly become strained to the breaking point. Even the most well-managed communities soon began to fall apart.
It was in this context, in early June, less than two weeks after the war broke out, that the young newlyweds in Richland Center, Wisconsin, met with their close friends to discuss their options.
The MacInnes couple hosted what would be their last dinner in Richland. Their close friends, Beth and Ian Morgan, brought their last two bottles of wine to contribute to what they all knew would likely be their last ‘normal’ evening together. With the increasing violence, home invasions, and increasingly desperate situation in Richland, they all knew that they had to do something.
Thankfully the power was still on. The thirty megawatt coal-powered electrical power-plant that served Richland Centre and dozens of smaller communities in the area still operated as if nothing had happened, however with the arrival of coal supplies now permanently interrupted and with increasing demands on the power-plant, there were already rumors of systemic failure. With the influx of refugees from Madison and other cities into town, and with the increased electrical demands for the emergency hydroponics operations being set up by local officials, the rationing of electrical power and eventually total black-out was inevitable.
The lights were sure to be out before winter. On top of that, the rumor was that with all of the dust and debris thrown up into the atmosphere as a result of the nuclear war, the early onset of winter was a harbinger of not only an early chill, but of a much longer nuclear winter that was expected to plummet temperatures in the continental United States to colder than twenty below, and to last for years, perhaps a decade or longer. To the MacInneses and their friends, that meant that they would be faced with extreme cold in apartments with no electricity, no wood stove, trapped in the mountains of western Wisconsin with no way to escape the accumulating snow.
While the two couples made pleasant conversation about the meal, putting off the serious discussion to come, surprisingly it had been the most fragile of them who had broached the topic, and in such a forceful way.
“Listen,” began Beth, “I overheard something at work, and you all have to hear it,” she said, surprising even her husband, Ian.
It had long been her habit to never discuss what she overheard at the Armory, with her husband, or any other civilian, for that matter.
Beth Morgan worked as a civilian Administrative Assistant to Lieutenant Colonel Hurdman, Commanding Officer at the Detachment’s headquarters at the armory just outside of Richland Center. She often overheard the military personnel of the First Detachment, 829th Engineering Company, 32nd Brigade, Wisconsin National Guard Richland Detachment, talking about things as if she weren’t there. For the most part they seemed to be obsessed with personnel issues, their own
careers, and other forms of military gossip that was of no interest to her.
But with the suddenness of the war breaking out, the military was the best source of information as to what the war was all about, what was going on in the world, and how bad things had become in the United States.
Since the war began, she had shared everything with her husband, and, more and more, even with their best friends. But she had avoided sharing any operational information, such as what the 829th Engineering Company was doing in terms of organizing for operations.
That is, until today.
“What is it, Beth?” her husband, asked, concerned by the fearful expression on her face.
“You can’t tell anybody this. I’m sure I will be shot,” she said, ominously.
The others looked shocked, but remained silent.
“They are talking about abandoning their post.”
“Who are? The entire formation?”
“No, just the senior officers. The Lieutenant-Colonel and the Major, you know, the Operations Officer? I overheard him and Lieutenant Colonel Hurdman talking about how many of their personnel had gone AWOL or had not returned from their assignments recently. It’s all confused, with Martial Law in effect. They just don’t have enough resources to man all of the sites, and there have been more and more mutinies, like when the Reservists sent to guard some warehouse or other piece of critical infrastructure loaded up truckloads of supplies and took them away to who knows where.”
“You mean the military is looting the food supplies they were supposed to be guarding for the town council?”
“Yes, Owen, but not looting for the 829th or the military at large. They’re taking it to their families and organizing themselves into little bastions, to protect their own. There was nothing like that going on at first, but when the CO briefed everybody about how the local food supplies would run out within about six months, and that there was going to be mass starvation as the nuclear winter deepened, a lot of soldiers panicked, desperate to take care of their loved ones. That’s why so many simply don’t come back to report in on the next Monday’s parade. And the unit lost even more personnel when they sent out squads to investigate. Some of them got ambushed by deserters, others just disappear without report. So now it is clear that the Wisconsin National Guard has lost control of the situation.”
