“Sir, it’s the middle of June, the longest days of the year,” said Brava desperately. “The sun doesn’t set out there until almost ten o’clock, midnight our time, and that means the 101st Airborne, the 82nd Airborne and the 75th Rangers will be dropping in daylight onto targets surrounded by large concentrations of enemy troops who have not been softened up by so much as a single bomb, ready and waiting for them on the ground! The Northmen, or whatever the hell Janet wants to call them, will be able to see them all floating down, with the western sun at their backs and mostly in the eyes of our own men. It will be a slaughterhouse!”
“Then get the second wave of bombers and Cruises in the air and soften them up!” shouted Wallace. “Jesus Christ, man, I know I’m commander-in-chief, but does that mean I have to micro-manage everything and tell you your job?”
“Night jump, Hector,” suggested Scheisskopf quietly. “Sir, with your permission, we’ll hold off on the jumps until after dark, to give the second air attack wave time to do whatever they can in the face of these ray gun weapons or whatever they are. The darkness will shield our men from ground observation to a large degree, and at least let most of them hit the dirt alive without their chutes getting shredded in the air by small-arms fire.”
“Night drops are always hard, especially if the drop zone is blacked out, and there’s always disorientation and more difficulty in re-assembling on the ground,” pointed out General Battaglia.
“I know, Lou,” said Scheisskopf. “But better that than our boys drop right into a hornet’s nest in full light.”
“Fine, send them in at night, then,” said Wallace. “In the meantime, we need to bend every effort and put every technical geek we have working for the U.S. government to work on finding some way to kill that damned virus and get our satellites back up and running. It’s not just the military aspects we need. These racist motherfuckers have screwed up civilian and commercial communications throughout the entire industrialized world, except of course for the Russians. The economic damage will be incalculable.” He looked over at Secretary of State Modlin. “Dave, could you track down Ambassador Nichevsky, apologize for the lateness of the hour and the suddenness of this request, but ask him to come and see me at nine o’clock tonight?”
“Will do, sir,” said Modlin with a nod
“I’ll at least begin the process of bringing pressure on Big Bear to let us have access to their own military surveillance satellites, which despite their denials are mostly turned on us, I’m sure. Well, us and the Chinese border, but I’m sure they have enough capacity to make up for our lost eyes in the sky, if we can persuade them it’s in their interest to do so. No doubt they’ve cut some kind of deal with the Northwest—sorry, Janet, the racist entity. We’re probably going to have to make them a better offer and buy their help, the damned vodka-sodden pigs.” Wallace looked at his watch. “Well, gentlemen, I have some things I need to take care of. We will reconvene here at ten o’clock tomorrow morning, and by then I expect to hear much better news about our progress.” Wallace got up, the rest of the people around the table rose as well out of courtesy. Angela Herrin, Janet Chalupiak, and Ronald Schiff followed the president out the door.
“What the hell does he have to take care of that’s more important than a war we’re ten hours into and already losing?” wondered Brava aloud.
“Missed his seventh inning stretch,” said Secretary of Defense.
“The hell you say!” snapped Scheisskopf. “The situation on Operation Strikeout is already critical, we’ve lost our satellite intel and a lot of our communications as well, the Jerries have some kind of fucking Star Wars light saber that’s sweeping our planes from the sky like a broom, he just tossed off a couple of casual orders that will result in the death of thousands of American pilots and soldiers when they hurtle headlong into an enemy of unknown numbers, location, or capability, and he’s taking a slut break?”
“You obviously haven’t met the fetching Ms. Halberstam,” said Modlin with a dirty leer.
Hunter Wallace was in bad mood, and so his session with Georgia in the executive lounge off the Oval Office was more than usually kinetic. The president had just stepped out of the shower with a towel wrapped around his waist when his personal phone beeped. He picked it up and glanced at it to see who was calling, then opened it. “Yes, Dave?” He listened for a bit. “On his way? Good. I’ll see him in the Oval Office in ten minutes, then. Is the Rooski bastard sober, could you tell?” He listened again. “Okay, well, maybe it’s better if he isn’t. Tell housekeeping to send up a bottle of our best vodka and put it on the sideboard.” He closed the phone. “Hey, babe, I’ve got an ambassador I need to see in there and get liquored up before I start twisting his arm. Would you mind going on up to the residence and using the shower up there?” One of Wallace’s little oddities was that outside of their multifarious deviant sexual acts, he was unfailingly courteous and considerate to Georgia.
“Okay, sure,” said Georgia, easing herself painfully up off the sofa and picking up her clothes. “Duty calls and all that.”
Wallace’s phone rang again, and he answered it. “Yes, Admiral? Good. How soon will the paratroops follow the second wave? Yes, I understand, they have to drop in after dark. All right, that’s good. I’m seeing Nichevsky now and I’ll check in with you for a progress report in a couple of hours.”
When Georgia got up to the presidential bedroom and out of range of the in-house spy cameras, she whipped out her phone and brought up Birdie’s latest home-made program, one she had been given that morning in the Zombie Master’s office. She quickly texted, Second bombing wave on the way. Paratroop drop to follow after sunset Homeland time, don’t know where. HW meeting with Russian ambassador now. She punched in a code number and a color photo of a white iron garden table surrounded by greenery appeared. There were plates of food and a large glass of iced tea on the table. The photo blinked and flickered as her text was coded and inserted between the individual pixels of the image. Then she texted again. Hi, Talia. Got to eat supper in the Rose Garden tonight. Fajitas from the WH mess, yum yum! I stay with this gig too long I’m going to get faaaat!
Georgia hit send, and then went into the bathroom to clean up and shower. The image went to Talia Halberstam, and was copied to Robert Campbell’s phone. Campbell was at Birdie’s place in Arlington, where he loaded the image onto a laptop and used a second program to decode the hidden message. He read it, swore out loud, coded the information into another program, encrypted it and sent it off to WPB headquarters in Olympia via a special uplink to a Lazarus Bird, one of the American spy satellites that the Republic’s Technical Warfare Division had hijacked and turned on its makers, and which was still operational. Within minutes, the news was headed for the Northwest Defense Force General Staff, and thence to the NDF military commanders in the field. Many of them knew that the airborne troops were on their way before the officers of the 101st and 82nd themselves received their orders from the Pentagon CENTCOM.
Another order to the NDF went along with the intelligence of the impending airborne assault: “No prisoners.”
* * *
The sky over Wolf Creek, Montana was deep blue and melding into purple as the sun finally set after the long June day; a few stars were now visible. HH Battery of the Technical Warfare Department’s new Special Antiaircraft Weapons regiment was set up on a hilltop overlooking the old Interstate 15, now known as Border Highway. There were three short flatbed, half-tracked Mercedes trucks, bearing blue, white and green roundels on their doors. Each truck carried a Bluelight projector and the radar tracking and targeting system. Beside each flatbed was a smaller truck carrying the alcohol-fueled generator that powered each unit. Behind them were several more trucks used to transport the crews and miscellaneous gear and spare parts. Deployed in the brush all around the Bluelight weapons and crew was a full company of NDF riflemen and a battery of 75-millimeter fieldpieces to guard the Bluelights and their crews and prevent their capture; the Blue
light trucks themselves were equipped with explosive charges to destroy the machines rather than let them fall into enemy hands.
“Bogies coming in at twenty-two thousand feet from the northeast, sir,” called out the primary radar operator, Sergeant Marla Thompson. “Thirty miles out and closing.”
“Firing positions!” called the battery commander, Captain Billy Ray Downing. His crews jumped off the ground and out of their vehicles and clambered up onto the flatbeds. Downing was a lean and weather-beaten Texan from Amarillo who had done five years of a ten-year jolt in Huntsville for using a forbidden racial word in public during a fender-bender traffic accident, before he escaped and headed Northwest. “How many and how fast, sarge?”
“Ten of them in a cluster at mach two, sir. From the speed and individual mass looks like Cruise missiles,” she called out. “Judging from their course I’d say they’re headed for Missoula.”
“Charges?” called out Downing.
“Full bars here!” called out each of the three gunners behind their SAW projectors.
“Lock on targets!” ordered Downing. “Take ’em out in incoming sequence, closest ones first.”
“They’re splitting up and taking what looks like evasive action, sir,” called Sergeant Thompson.
“Probably detected our radar,” said Downing. “Distance?”
“Twenty miles and closing, sir.”
“Okay, boys and girls, wait for it. Give me a shout when they’re about six miles out, sarge.” Downing lit a cigar and puffed on it for a while.
“Six miles, sir!” called out Thompson after a minute.
“Start zapping ’em,” ordered Downing. Blue needles of light cut through the sky. The plasma beams crackled again and again. Blossoms of flame appeared high in the air to the northeast, and the rumble of explosions rolled down like far-off thunder. “How are we doing, Marla?”
“Seven down!” called out Thompson. “Eight down! Nine!”
“Number one gun’s dry, sir,” called out one of the soldiers.
“Three’s dead as well, Captain!” called out another.
“One bogey still in the air, sir!” reported Thompson. “Almost overhead.”
“Lieutenant Farina? How’s your charge?” asked Downing, walking over to one of the flatbeds.
“Two bars, sir,” said Farina raising his muzzle almost perpendicular to the ground. “One more shot.”
“Make it count, son,” Downing told him. “That bogey might be the one loaded with anthrax.” The projector crackled, the blue thread hissed upward, and a bright light like a flashbulb exploded overhead. Cheers and rebel yells arose from the troops all around. “Good shooting, Lieutenant!” Downing picked up his radio. “Elvis, this is Hound Dog One,” he said. “Got your ears on?”
“I’m right here, Captain,” called out the infantry company’s CO, trudging out of the bush in full field gear. “Congratulations to you and your crews on an outstanding performance.”
“Duly noted and appreciated, Captain Banks,” said Downing. “Those bad birds may have been carrying bio-weapons or degraded uranium warheads, and some of the crap may be coming down with them, so you’ll need to get your boys to do some sweeps with their detectors. Most of any fallout will come down over the road on their side, but the wind might blow it over into the Republic.”
“I’ll get my men on it,” said Banks. “You got our next bug-out?”
“A deserted ranch a couple of miles south of here,” said Downing. As a precaution, the Bluelight batteries always changed positions after every firing sequence. “CMI says their satellites are still down, but those bogeys may have been tracked or alerted their bases to our position when they detected our radar.”
“I’ll start getting my guys packed up and ready to move,” said Banks.
“Any sign of movement over the road?” asked Downing, jerking his head to the east.
“I sent a couple of patrols over, and all they saw was a few jack rabbits. Other than that, not a soul stirring. We were at least expecting some Ranger Recons to leg it over, but apparently that hasn’t happened yet.”
“The more fools they, then. We need to un-ass this area and get set up in the new location ASAP, so we can get charged up,” said Downing. “Let’s hope the Americans haven’t figured out yet that it takes almost an hour to fully recharge a Bluelight projector.”
* * *
By dawn, the news began to trickle into the Pentagon War Room, and it was unbelievably bad. The second wave of bombers and missiles had been decimated, this time losing almost three hundred aircraft and as many Tomahawks and Predator drones. The third wave from the aircraft carriers off the Pacific coast was hit even worse; the Hornet and the Hillary Rodham Clinton had not one single plane return to the ship. A few of the Stealth bombers had gotten through and hit their targets, but even without further losses, American air strength was now crippled for the rest of the war. Not only that, but large numbers of people were now known to be keeling over and dying from phosgene gas poisoning in the streets of Sacramento and San Francisco.
Details were sketchy, but the majority of the airborne assault troops sent to secure rear positions behind the NAR lines and draw troops away from the main invading columns died in the flaming C-130s that now littered the prairies, the forests, and the mountainsides of the inland Northwest. The transports had tried to evade the Bluelight projectors by coming in low, almost at treetop level, and by zigzagging and other evasive maneuvers. But that had caused its own problems: at least some of the Hercules transports had crashed into the ground due to pilot error in the dark. Others had fallen to extensive ground fire from artillery, shoulder-fired missiles, and small arms, and the closer they got to their designated targets, the more likely they were to run into a Bluelight battery concealed in a gully or behind a rise in the terrain.
Some of the paratroopers had indeed reached their drop zones, or somewhere near their drop zones. The evasive maneuvers had confused navigation, and in many cases, whole sticks of paratroops jumped and ended up falling into the Douglas firs of the Northwest forests, or simply miles away from whatever road or rail junction or small town they were supposed to occupy and hold. The scattered NDF battalions all over the countryside homed in on the invaders wherever they hit dirt, surrounded them, and killed them all. Sometimes companies or larger units of Americans were able to seize a hill or small crossroads town and dig in a bit, but the dawn brought NDF troops and tanks and the deadly 75-millimeter and self-propelled 88-millimeter guns to blast apart whatever defenses they were able to erect. By noon on June 20, every single unit of the 101st Airborne, the 82nd Airborne, and the 75th Ranger Regiment were out of contact, and without satellite surveillance the Pentagon had no idea where they were or what was happening. The Northwest had swallowed them up.
“Jesus wept!” moaned Vice President Jenner. “Tens of thousands of casualties on our side, and we haven’t even laid a glove on these racist motherfuckers yet!”
A rumor went around that the distracted General Albert Scheisskopf was wandering the corridors of the Pentagon, ranting and raving to himself, shouting out, “Hunter Wallace, give me back my divisions!”
* * *
D-Day, 0800 hours June 19th-0800 hours June 20th
NDF military casualties—32 dead, 84 wounded
NAR civilian casualties—27 dead, 112 wounded
United States military casualties—4,677 dead. 2,940 wounded
United States civilian casualties—212 dead, 811 wounded
Aztlan military casualties—890 dead, 1,366 wounded
Aztlan civilian casualties—7,598 dead, 13,000 wounded or gassed
XV
THE SECOND DAY
(D-Day plus one)
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
—Tennyson
“Have they crossed any of our borders ye
t?” asked President Red Morehouse. It was late in the afternoon of June 20. Morehouse and his staff were sitting in an air-conditioned mobile command vehicle pulled into a camouflaged position just outside of North Bend, Washington, a converted 18-wheeler escorted by a small convoy of heavily armed SS vehicles from the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler’s Presidential Unit, including a full Bluelight battery to intercept any American Predator drone or other aerial assassination attempts.
The president was maintaining communication with his military commanders and the rest of the nation through encrypted radio and cyber-communications, using a number of concealed underground fiber-optic lines that had been laid over previous years, with terminals spaced all around the Republic in anticipation of the present crisis. Morehouse was also keeping an eye on the enemy through the Lazarus Birds, the dozen or so satellites that the NDF’s Technical Warfare Division had skyjacked and converted to the Republic’s own use prior to Operation Strikeout and Rotfungus. The whole mobile command post concept was a throwback to the War of Independence when the NVA Army Council had moved in separate and nomadic cells around the Northwest, directing operations and generating propaganda, etc. Morehouse himself was a former guerrilla leader, and he always opted for mobility over sheer numbers and firepower. “I mean have any of the ground troops crossed our borders, other than the paratroop drops?” he added.
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