“Uh, sir…”
“Right, I seem to be having difficulty getting to the point, probably because I don’t really want to,” said Randall with a sigh. “Wallace goes through women on a regular basis about every six months, most likely because that’s all most women can stand. Our D.C. Station is able to monitor internal White House communications via e-mail and phone—a lot of them, anyway—and we know who Hunter Wallace has set his sights on as his next conquest, I guess you’d call her, only in his case it’s more a command performance. She’s twenty-two years old. She’s got some half-assed patronage job as a publicist at some K Street political consulting firm, one of those American gigs where liberal birds with the right connections can draw three hundred grand a year for doing bugger all.”
“And she has the right connections?” asked Campbell.
“She does. Prominent Washington family, liberal Democratic pedigree going all the way back to Hubert Humphrey. Wallace saw this Sheila at some political drinky-do and apparently fell head over heels in lust. If he follows his regular pattern he’s got about a month left with his current ‘personal services assistant,’ which is the term they use at the White House for the boss man’s bit of all right on the side, so he should pension her off with a cushy job at the Pentagon or the EPA or something and make his approach to this new girl in about four weeks, say mid to late April. Before then we need you to approach this woman, connect with her, and persuade her to work for us, to pass information to the Circus from right inside the White House itself, literally pillow talk with the president. If he talks at all, which we don’t know. We need you to act as this woman’s handler, collect her raw intel and pass it on, keep track of her progress and keep her focused, keep her morale up, and keep her from going off the rails in the light of what this bastard Hunter Wallace will be doing to her in bed, which I repeat will be bloody abnormal and enough to make a dog vomit.”
“Yes, sir, you’re right. It’s a repulsive assignment, and yet getting an informant right next to the President of the United States is clearly something the Republic has to do. I’m in. And now the big question,” continued Robert, “Sir, why on God’s green earth do you need me of all people to do something like this?”
“Because you know the girl,” Randall told him steadily.
“Huh? I mean, sir?” asked Robert, gaping, uncomprehending.
“Her last name is Halberstam, but that is her Jewish stepfather’s name,” Randall told him. “She was born in Montana and you knew her as a child. You knew her as Georgia Myers.”
VIII
WORLD WAR THREE VERSUS WORLD WAR ONE
(12 years and five months after Longview)
Ten soldiers wisely led will beat a hundred without a head.
—Euripides
The Northwest American Republic’s government had long pondered how best to establish a War Room to respond to any existential threat. The problem was that any such locale would be an obvious priority target for an enemy strike, with the subsequent risk of decapitating the NAR’s defense command. The government vetoed suggestions regarding a bunker, because of its obvious negative historical connotations for National Socialists.
In the long run, the Northwest military decided that the best defense was to have as little centralization as possible, and to train every unit in the Northwest Defense Force to function independently within certain overall strategic parameters, right down to the squad level. Every Northwest soldier, sailor and airman knew his part of the overall war plan, the latest version being Plan 17. If they were cut off from command, they would do their best to implement it, with whatever came to hand. The NDF had a number of tricks up its sleeve to maintain command communications during an invasion, but it would not set up that one single head that might be cut off. The United States had never been able to defeat the Afghan freedom fighters, in part because there was never any head to cut off. The Taliban’s command structure consisted of nothing more than a couple of bearded old men sitting on mats drinking tea in a hut somewhere in the mountains. The NDF was more technologically advanced, but it aimed for the same effect.
Until the enemy bombs actually started falling, though, a special War Cabinet group had been established. It met regularly in the capitol building in Olympia, at Fort Lewis, or at various military installations. This special inner circle consisted of the State President, the Minister of Defense, the Minister of Security, the NDF Chief of Staff and the Heads of Service from the army, the Kriegsmarine, and the Luftwaffe, plus whatever other ministers of state, military officers, or specialists needed to be included.
In late March, there was one such meeting at the Air Defense Command in Centralia, Washington. It actually did take place in a bunker, one which had been built in order to monitor test launches of the Republic’s rocket-propelled V-3 Flying Bombs. The meeting site had been chosen because it contained a small guest lounge inside it that looked like somebody’s oak-paneled basement rec room, with a working fireplace: the Northwest in late March was still cold and wet. This afternoon the officer’s mess had sent round a large tray of sandwiches and an urn of coffee, and eight men sat on sofas and armchairs in a haze of smoke that would have gotten all eight of the participants severe prison time in the United States, since tobacco was completely prohibited now in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. In addition to Morgan, Leach, and Basquine, there was President Henry “Red” Morehouse; Security Minister Frank Barrow, who was the longest-serving cabinet minister in the same position; Defense Minister Carter Wingfield; the General of the Army, Billy Jackson, and Colonel Jeffrey Garrison from Combined Military Intelligence.
“How’s it looking?” asked Red Morehouse hopefully, opening the meeting in mid-munch. “Any chance we’ve misread the signs, that we’re just paranoid and overreacting about all this?”
“I’m afraid I still have to agree with Colonel Garrison’s assessment, Red,” said John Corbett Morgan grimly. “Looks like this time they really are coming.”
“Well, we all knew that someday they would,” said Morehouse sadly. “And yet somehow I’d always hoped against hope… God damn them all to hell!” he suddenly shouted angrily. There was a short silence. “I apologize, gentlemen. That wasn’t helpful. Tell me what we know so far.”
“We have a name, Mister President,” said Colonel Garrison. “They call it Operation Strikeout.”
“They don’t see the obvious double edge in that?” asked Morehouse with a grim chuckle. “What if they’re the ones who strike out?”
“They seem confident they won’t, sir,” said Garrison soberly.
“Yeah, they’re confident, all right,” confirmed Morgan. “Goddamned arrogant, in fact. Well, they always were. The tech warfare boys are now hacking and tapping every satellite and computer server they can, we’re accumulating a mass of ground-level intelligence off field agents from both CMI and WPB, and they all tell the same story. This is it. We just don’t know exactly when and exactly how, although a very nasty picture is shaping up.”
Garrison nodded. “Training and preparation at a dozen bases from Fort Bragg to Fort Sam Houston, from Fort Riley to Huachuca and Castillo del Pueblo in Aztlan, a number of small and apparently insignificant troop movements on various pretexts that always seem to slide in a general northwesterly direction, materials and supplies and support services being moved and concentrated in certain areas, big consignments of weapons and ammo and equipment churned out of the defense contracting factories and vendors, gasoline and diesel fuel being stockpiled, all kinds of secret meetings and coded communications and lights burning late in the Pentagon and across Washington, D.C., in both the literal and figurative sense. A whole pattern of activity that can’t be explained away. Stuff they really seem to be trying to keep secret, like the degree to which they’re beefing up the Canadian highway system parallel to the NAR border. They’re now using the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to stay on schedule with the construction, with the men dressed in tattered civvie overalls and all
their bulldozers and vehicles painted bright fire engine red. Trying to pretend they’re ordinary Canadian road crews, eh?”
“How many troops do they figure to move through Canada against us, and where do we think they’ll strike south?” asked Billy Basquine.
“We figure at least one hundred and fifty thousand, sir,” replied Garrison. “Three full army corps, including at least two armored divisions and one airborne division to jump in ahead of them and secure key points in the Kalispell and the northern Idaho Panhandle area. Then once their beachheads are secure, they’ll move south to Boise or west to Spokane.”
“Do they really think they’re fooling us?” asked Morehouse, shaking his head in wonder. “Frank, are you getting any chatter from La Cesspool Grande that indicates just what the hell they think they’re doing? Why now? Why not ten years ago when we were newborn and couldn’t possibly have defended ourselves against a full-scale invasion?”
“A number of factors were in play back then,” said Barrow. “The United States was in utter turmoil, remember, reeling from defeat after defeat. First there was the violent loss of the Northwest, then the quasi-legal loss of the Southwest when Chelsea folded like a lawn chair in exchange for the votes of six Hispanic senators in her impeachment trial, then the loss of their oil empire, and finally the loss of the very fly-blown jewel in Zion’s crown itself, the so-called Second Holocaust when Israel went down. Plus they lost the only really strong leader they had, Hillary Clinton, when our guys went all loup-garou in that hotel in Denver. The Sea Hag’s sudden demise left America rudderless for a while, which was good for us. It’s taken Wallace almost eight full years to get the country stabilized and returned to some semblance of normality.
“The American military was in even more terrible shape than some of us remember it back in the day when we were kicking doors in Tikrit or chasing Mad Maxes in Libya or whatever we all did,” continued Barrow. “It took time for the U.S.A. to pull itself together, and let’s give him his due, that nutless wonder Hunter Wallace managed to give it more than a lick and a promise. Through a razzle-dazzle combination of charisma, bribery, and backstabbing, Wallace’s One Nation Indivisible movement and his so-called national unity government have gotten all the other Amurrican shitheads from across the spectrum, everybody from the Delmar Partman Society on the neocon right to Hillary’s Heirs on the loony liberal left, to pull together in their common interest and make sure the United States of America didn’t completely fall apart, as it most likely would have if left to its own devices. Now Wallace wants re-election. He’s already had his two regular terms, and he’ll get his Congressional resolution suspending the Twenty-Second Amendment just like Hillary did. He’s pulled the country away from the brink, and what’s left of the U.S.A. has now returned to a faint semblance of the old time of abundance, with massive inflation, true, but at least good enough to keep up appearances. It won’t last, though, and Wallace knows it. America still doesn’t manufacture hardly anything it needs, nobody has any real jobs any more, and the U.S. dollar is now essentially worthless because the régime keeps the printing presses over at the Federal Reserve running night and day. Inflation in the U.S.A. is starting to approach Zimbabwe standards. His mortgage moratorium, which the pasty little bastard copied from us by the way, wrecked the banks to the point where he had to pump them up with the Federal Reserve’s printing presses for the umpteenth time.
“Now gas is twenty-one dollars a gallon in the States, and a loaf of bread is fourteen bucks. Wallace saved a lot of people’s homes by shitcanning their crushing mortgages, true, but in most of those homes these days, the fridge is empty. Even if meat wasn’t banned now in the States, nobody could afford a pound of hamburger in inflated dollars. The economy is set to crash again, worse than it did in 2009, and it could happen any time now. Wallace urgently needs a rabbit to pull out of a hat, and it’s time he fulfilled his last and ultimate campaign promise, recovering the lost states of the Northwest, so people will be so busy cheering that they won’t notice the fact that the American economy is finally, at long last, about to go down for the count. He needs to do it before the ONI convention in August, or at least look like he’s doing it, with an ongoing military campaign. Add to that the presence of three million Israeli Jews who have all been given automatic citizenship right off the jumbo jet from the burning ruins of Tel Aviv, and who are screaming for revenge, and I think we can see why he’s decided to go ahead and make his move.”
“John, what kind of preparations are they making now, that we know of?” asked Carter Wingfield.
“The thousand or so Chinese helicopters that they slipped into Aztlan, or tried to slip into Aztlan without our knowing about it, are now being dispersed all over the northern counties of California and Nevada, to small airfields and forward military bases they may think we don’t know about,” said Morgan. “Those Taipans have a long range, and they can strike pretty much anywhere up and down the western seaboard and most of the eastern interior as well. Worse still, we have received confirmation that at least six American aircraft carriers and their escorts of destroyers and frigates are now converging on the west coast of North America out of their bases in Hawaii or coming up from the Panama Canal, ultimate destination unknown. Our crystal ball boys like Jeff here think they’ll be assembled into a naval task force and then head north.”
“Christ, it’s not going to be a seaborne invasion, is it?” asked Morehouse. “They planning on hitting us from every angle?”
“Maybe we ought to put Zack Hatfield on coastal defense and see if he can pull off another Battle of Sunset Beach,” said General Billy Jackson with a smile. [See The Brigade.]
“No, the Americans don’t have the troops for that, Mister President,” said Colonel Jeffrey Garrison. “Remember back twelve years ago, when Chelsea Clinton was facing impeachment after Longview? One of the trade-offs she was forced to make to survive, in addition to agreeing to the establishment of Aztlan, was that the United States abolish the draft for the second time since World War Two. It was a politically popular move and also an astute one. The simple fact is that the United States of America is a society that no longer dares to conscript an army. They don’t let civilians have guns any more, and the power élite aren’t too thrilled with the idea of millions of draftees of all colors and weirded-out mindsets learning to use them. Too many of the patchwork of minority and special interest groups they have to draw on are of dubious loyalty. They don’t trust white conscripts because they might be secretly sympathetic to the Northwest Republic, they don’t trust Hispanic draftees because they’re probably secretly loyal to Aztlan, and they don’t trust the blacks because nobody trusts niggers with guns, just on general principles.
“The upshot of it is that we’re facing an enemy military which is much smaller than it was twenty years ago at the height of the Oil Empire, higher quality and better trained to be sure, but at least they can’t overrun us with a mass horde of twenty million cannon fodder like they were Persians or Chinese. We believe that the entire American combined invasion force will number somewhere around four hundred thousand men, including the naval attack group and their air force, and in addition there may be as many as half a million Mexicans attacking from California and Nevada in the south, but the Hispanic troops are very much inferior by way of arms and training and morale.”
“That’s still almost a million men invading our country. Any possibility of active Canadian participation?” asked Wingfield.
“Maybe, but their army has never been that big, and they may try and sit this one out until we counterattack into Canada,” said Garrison. “On the upside, I think there’s no question that we can win this. For one thing, during the first stages of the war, we’re fighting defensively on interior lines, and the perceived wisdom is that an attacking force needs to outnumber the defenders by at least four to one to have any hope of success. Either that or have some extreme technical or logistic advantage, which with the Americans for the past century has tr
aditionally been overwhelming air superiority. If Bluelight pans out, the Americans will lose that in the first forty-eight hours. On our side, the population of the Republic is now up to around twenty-one million people, many of them refugees from the United States and other politically correct countries who remember what life under PC was like, and who understand what it will mean for them and their families if we’re conquered. The Republic is a nation of soldiers. If we mobilize our entire active reserve and everybody who can hold a rifle, from the Civil Guard to the B-Specials to the Young Pioneers, we can field almost five million combatants. We’ll have the bastards outnumbered, and we’ll be on interior lines.”
“And they will have almost all the high-tech weapons systems and gadgets, like we’ve never been able to afford to acquire,” sighed Carter Wingfield. “If Bluelight can’t bring down those damned jets from where they hide in the sky at thirty thousand feet, then it will be World War Three against World War One.”
“They will be counting on their high-tech toys to give them the edge, yes sir,” agreed Garrison. “But remember, we have some tricks up our own sleeve, like Rotfungus and Bluelight, and I’m convinced both of them will work. We have the Sunburn missiles to deal with their naval assault force. Plus we have enough V-3s to drop some nasty choky stuff on California that will disincentivize the beaners real quick. Not to mention the fact that the people of the Northwest Republic have lived free and white for over a decade now, and they’ve acquired a taste for it. I know part of General Barrow’s remit as Security Minister is to keep track of the national mood for the government, and I don’t know what he will say, but my guess is that the Americans will find themselves invading a very large country with a well-armed and very pissed-off population, who will fight to the death rather than return to the slavery and the poison that was the United States. I don’t mean to go all mystical on you here, gentlemen, but this will be a war of the human spirit against the machine, and I’m just mushy enough to believe the human spirit will triumph. It’s going to be a bloody mess, comrades, but we’re going to win.”
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