by J. J. Holden
No, the only way to save America’s last representatives would be to directly notify them of the threat they were facing. Once they were aware of the plot against them, they could circle the wagons. They could reach out to the people they trusted, many of whom were very influential. In fact, if it came down to it, a lot of the people on Houle’s side would probably flip on him if they received a direct command from all the legislators themselves. It was a lot easier to commit treason when the people you were about to screw over weren’t looking you in the eye and giving you a direct counter-order.
The best one to start with, he decided, would be the Texas congressman. To Mark’s knowledge, Congressman Randall was just about the most popular person on the base and had the support of almost all the other legislators. He also had the support of many mid-level military officers on base and chaired several of the committees that interacted with Houle behind closed doors on a daily basis. He would probably be America’s next president, if an election could ever be arranged in this lifetime.
“Yes. I’ll go to Randall and make him see the truth. He has to believe me. He just has to.”
Mark stood and shuffled the papers back into the manila folder, then tucked it under his arm as he walked toward the door. He glanced both ways as he entered the hallway, but saw no one. He turned right and headed toward Randall’s quarters, which were at the far side of the base and up one level. Randall was a smart man, Mark figured, so he could be made to listen to reason and see the truth.
As Mark walked down the hall, an Army officer came around the corner and nearly collided with him. Mark’s first thought was that the man was there to arrest him, but logic quickly caught up and he realized that, if he were to be arrested, it wouldn’t be handled by a lone officer. No, it would have been done by a small group of enlisted men who could be counted on for their loyalty.
The officer’s insignia showed he was a major, and his uniform and hair were both in perfect order. To Mark, he looked like an ideal rear-echelon commander, but probably not much of a soldier. That made him dangerous—he would be loyal to Houle for his position, rather than relying on his experience and talent.
The major eyed Mark up and down, clearly evaluating what he saw and just as clearly found Mark wanting. “Watch where you’re going, Mr. Bates,” he said, his lips curled back. “Assaulting an officer here is a federal crime, no matter your position, civilian.”
Mark’s gaze shifted from the officer’s eyes to the floor, and he muttered, “My apologies, sir. I didn’t see you there.”
The major’s eyes narrowed. After a pause, he turned his head a little to look at Mark sideways. “And where are you going in such a hurry?” His gaze cut to the file in Mark’s hand. “Surely you’re not doing paperwork and running reports back and forth at this time of night.”
Mark stood frozen, struggling not to let his eyes widened as he stared at the officer, but he couldn’t think of what to say. His mind raced and he tried to force himself to say something, anything, just to stop standing there, staring like an idiot. “I… I am…”
There was a brief pause, then the major began to laugh, his head tilted back, the sound loud and harsh. It was a throaty laugh. “Oh God, you should see your face. Come on, Bates, you wouldn’t be stupid enough to try anything rash. You need to lighten up. If you stay so uptight, it’s going to give you a heart attack.”
Mark’s mind immediately seized on the opportunity to give the major a little misdirection. “Oh damn, sir. You got me good, I have to give you credit.” Mark forced a little chuckle. “You know, you military guys scare the crap out of us civilians. Hell, most of us are just glad you’re on our side.” He gave the major a huge grin.
The officer clapped Mark on the shoulder and then walked onward, chuckling as he went, and Mark was left standing in the middle of the hallway, trying to control his shaking. That was damn close.
He realized he was too shaken up now to try to convince someone as perceptive as Randall that Houle was a traitor. Mark would have to be at his best for that, and he was definitely not at his best.
He spun on his heels and walked back the way he had come, passed his office, went around the corner, and entered his suite. When he got inside, the lights were off and he didn’t hear any movement. His wife must’ve been out talking to one of the other socially important women. That was how she spent most of her days, actually. For once, he was glad not to have any company when he got home. He needed a minute to regain control of himself and get himself back in gear.
He went to the refrigerator and grabbed a beer, half of his daily ration. The less important civilians didn’t get any. He flopped down on the couch, shoved his shoes off, and put his feet up on the coffee table. He let out a sigh as he felt his feet breathing after spending all day in shoes. They weren’t the most comfortable things, those dress shoes.
He flipped open the file and skimmed through it again, hoping that maybe he would get more out of it, but no such luck. All the coded phrases he didn’t already know stubbornly refused to reveal their meaning to him.
As he kept reading, on page two, he noticed something odd. The second word written, “exacerbate,” was misspelled. Where there should have been an X, they had typed Z. That was surprising, because there weren’t usually such noticeable typos in these sorts of official coded communiqués.
He wondered who had written it, so he flipped over to the first page to see whether the transcriber was noted in the footer. Again, no such luck. That wasn’t surprising because, by leaving out the transcriber’s name, if the orders became public knowledge, no one would know who to subpoena. Or grab and torture, depending on who benefited.
Then he noticed something else unusual. On the first page, the second word was “offices,” as in, the offices of General Houle, but the word was misspelled. Where the second letter F should’ve been, there was instead a lowercase L.
In the back of his mind, Mark felt a tingle of alarm. Something wasn’t right with this.
- 7 -
0600 HOURS - ZERO DAY +615
JUST SHORT OF the hill crest, Jwa Dae Geon dismounted from his horse and crept forward until he had a good view of the village below. Just as his scouts had reported, the tightly clustered domes with their encircling walls were organized in a very specific pattern. Five domes per cluster; five such clusters were likewise arranged in the same pattern; and the assembly had its own, larger wall. The pattern continued, from there, with five of these bigger clusters neatly arranged the same, with yet another wall surrounding it.
As he had suspected, this must surely be a Clan village—one of the many Clanholds. Intel estimated the super-cluster of domes could house as many as five hundred people, but scouts had only counted two hundred and fifty people. It turned out that many of the buildings were used for other purposes, such as storage, work areas, and even indoor kitchens—though the central outdoor kitchen was large enough to feed a small army.
From Jwa’s point of view, the arrangement presented a terrible challenge to his mission. Reports from earlier battles said those domes couldn’t be breached by mere bullets, nor even by the light mortars an earlier army had tried to use against the Clan. He suspected these dome dwellings were somehow built out of sandbags, beneath their adobe exteriors, though he couldn’t imagine how they could have been constructed.
To add to the challenge, the concentric rings of walls made any direct assault difficult. He remembered hearing from some disgraced soldiers of the New York cantonment, who had straggled their way south, that assaulting these Clan clusters was like trying to navigate a labyrinth. The people who dwelled there knew every twist, turn, nook, and cranny. It put any assault at a severe disadvantage, especially since the damn Americans had launched EMPs over U.S. soil a second time last year, purely out of spite, just to make the Great Liberation more difficult. That had come as a terrible surprise, and it had worked.
Well, their feeble and spiteful actions may have made the Mission more difficult and del
ayed the outcome, but the final resolution was inevitable. The Great Leader’s plan could not be stopped, it was simply the evolution of mankind, the next great leap in civilization. The dying carcass of capitalism would resist its final demise, but it couldn’t stop it. They could only make its death take longer. Capitalism’s time was done—it just didn’t know it yet.
Jwa backed down the hill toward his waiting men, then approached his Taewi, or Captain as the Americans would call him. Jwa quickly told his captain and his fellow sergeants about the situation on the other side of the hill. The residents were already awake and working at their chores, and it seemed that even the children carried a pistol. Anyone in their mid-teens and older carried rifles. The residents were, however, scattered all over the village rather than clustered together, and many were out in the fields to the north and west of the village, not near its formidable defenses.
The Taewi’s Intel reports suggested the villagers would gather for breakfast in about two hours, but until then, they were more vulnerable. There was no way the residents could organize an effective resistance or organize a response, if the Koreans launched a surprise attack at this time of day. Which, of course, was why the captain had chosen this time to attack.
He felt his pulse begin to speed up as he anticipated beginning the assault and resuming the Great Mission. His only regret about the new offensive was that the higher-ups had decided to begin the campaign with a barrage of raids all along the Confederation’s southern border. He would have preferred a courageous and righteous full attack to conquer this feeble ‘Clan’ outright.
He was confident, however, that his betters had more information than he did, and were wiser. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be his superiors. He didn’t know what the other two companies and the command platoon would be doing during the assault, but he didn’t need to know. He trusted his commanders. They had kept him alive this long, after all. Jwa took pride in the fact that he had never second-guessed his commanding officers, and was quick to tell complaining soldiers that they didn’t need to know every detail in order to know their places within the great machine.
Jwa was handed his orders and learned that his platoon was to flank the hill and assault from the southeast, a coordinated attack from several directions, involving the entire company. The captain spent the next ten minutes organizing each squad, getting them into perfect place. Perhaps his captain was secretly a Buddhist, Jwa mused, because he always paid great attention to patterns and alignment when arranging his troops. Jwa had once asked why he did so, and he had only replied that “harmony in formation brings harmony in the hearts of men. Only this way can we all have harmony with the Great Leader’s will.”
Jwa’s company received its orders to move out and marched around the hill’s base, moving stealthily toward their launching point. Then it was a matter of waiting, waiting to hear the glorious whistle blast that would sound the assault’s beginning. That was always the most difficult part of any mission, for him. Certainly combat was frightening, but once he was in it, adrenaline took over. Adrenaline and training made the fear of battle easier. No amount of training could make the waiting easy.
Ten minutes later, four short, sharp blasts from his captain’s whistle resounded, bouncing off the hill much like bullets soon would be. It was the moment Jwa had been waiting for, the removal of his leash. He screamed his battle cry, and it was taken up by all his men. As one, they charged forward, surging around the base of the hill and sprinting toward the village. Within moments he could hear the glorious sound of many AK rifles firing.
Up ahead, people in the village began to drop, and he could only imagine with joy the surprised looks on their faces as they died without knowing why or even how. Many fell before they even reacted to show they knew they were under attack.
His unit reached the compound’s outer wall and slid to a halt in the shelter it provided. He did a quick head count and was beyond pleased to see he had lost no men on the approach, yet. That would change, probably, but he urged them on regardless. They wasted no time before going up and over the wall, surging into the very heart of the enemy’s village. Jwa grinned the entire time, and he felt absolute certain that victory would soon be theirs. It was just too one-sided to end any other way.
The killing wouldn’t begin in earnest, he knew, until the battle had been won—then they would deliver their message to the Confederation with bullets, not diplomats.
Today was a glorious day.
* * *
0800 HOURS - ZERO DAY +615
Hasa Jwa Dae Geon went down his line of men, examining each in turn. His four Korean brothers, of course, were squared away with all the right gear, in all the right places. His eight ISNA soldiers… less so. The dirty savages, with their unruly facial hair and their disgusting hygiene, couldn’t be trusted to carry their ammunition where it was supposed to be. Some had even discarded their ammo pouch to carry their magazines in their cargo pockets.
Jwa turned to his translator, an Arab, and explained what was wrong with the man’s uniform and gear, then dragged his translator down the line to explain to each of the other soldiers what was wrong with their gear. It took fifteen minutes, a completely stupid waste of time that was totally avoidable if they were only smart enough to follow simple directions. How many times, over the past almost two years, had he explained this to them? He was sure they did it only to annoy him. Sand-eaters biting their thumbs at their betters.
Once he was sure his men were finally in order, he put his black whistle to his lips and blew two long blasts to let his Taewi know his platoon was in order. Then came the return whistle, alerting the whole unit that they were about to move out.
Jwa ordered his men to turn right-face, and they were on the march moments later.
To Jwa, it was a beautiful sight—his platoon, just one of ten in the battalion strung all along the road, heading north again. It was finally time to begin the Great Mission again. He had absolute faith that the swine Americans living in the feeble Confederation would soon know the glory and honor of dying in service to the People, though misguided. They would be easily defeated—everyone knew that, as his superior officers so often told him.
The North Koreans, of course, would be at the top of the resulting food chain. After all, someone had to be in charge.
* * *
1100 HOURS - ZERO DAY +617
Cassy stood inside her office, looking out the window to where dozens of people had gathered. They weren’t shouting, but the mood did look ugly. She recognized many of them as high-ranking leaders of various Clanholds. “They ought to be yelling at you, Frank, not sending you in here as their representative.”
Frank shrugged. “Trust me, they have yelled at me. But it is what it is. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel the same as they did.”
“Don’t they all answer to you? They are your subordinates, after all.”
“Yeah, but the Clan answers to the Confederation. And this is one of those things.”
Cassy turned away from the window to face him. “What do they want me to do, tie all those soldiers up and refuse to let them leave?”
Frank slowly shook his head, his lips pursed and eyes narrowed. “You and I both know these people outside are important, Cassy. I rely on them to carry out my instructions, to be good leaders of their various Clanholds. It’s important to work with them.”
“But they’re not our soldiers, they’re Taggart’s. He’s the one they owe their allegiance to.”
“The truth is, they are the Clan. Ever since you brought them in and set up all those new Clanholds it has made the Clan into something more than just Clanholme itself.”
Dammit if Frank wasn’t right. Of course he was right—she just didn’t want to deal with this problem. As far as she was concerned, they were Frank’s responsibility. “So tell me again exactly what it is they would like me to do. Could you send your top five figures?”
Frank began to pace, and said, “Look, they need to be reassure
d.”
“Reassured about what?”
“How many of our most remote southern holdings were raided, Cassy? Half a dozen? One of them was almost finished, ready to become a new Clanhold. We’ve lost four hundred people or more and tons of supplies—half from just that one holding that got razed to the ground.”
“We can’t expect anything else from the invaders.”
“Worse yet, while we know it was the ’vaders, we don’t know why they chose now to attack. I thought things were going well enough with them, and some members of the Confederation had even begun to trade with them.”
Cassy nodded. It was true that even the Clan had begun trading with the invaders in Maryland, often through intermediary merchants, but a few traded directly. It looked like the Maryland invaders were there to stay, after all, and they had things the Clan needed. And needed things the Clan had. “I don’t know why they’re attacking us now any more than you do. They haven’t sent any messengers. We sent an envoy, but she hasn’t yet had time to get there and back.”
Frank frowned. “So we don’t know what’s going on?”
“No, but it’s your job to keep these people out there calm. We can’t panic now, not when the enemy is acting up just when New America is demanding its troops back.”
