by James Rosone
The shock of the explosion almost caused him to black out. In a fleeting second, he managed to yank on his ejection handle and was thrown from the plane just as it exploded. Fire and flames practically engulfed him as he was flung up and outwards, away from the remnants of his plane.
For a brief moment, Hatfield felt his chute deploy, then nothing. His world went black as he drifted to the ground below.
Chapter Two
Decisions
NORAD
Colorado Springs, Colorado
National Security Advisor Blain Wilson stretched out on the bed in the temporary living quarters. After being awake for most of the last three days, he had finally succumbed to exhaustion. The President’s Chief of Staff had told him to take a few hours and get some sleep. It was good advice. He wasn’t doing the President any good if he couldn’t think clearly.
Looking at the clock on the wall, Wilson felt he should be angry about what it was telling him—he’d been asleep for six hours. He got up and used the bathroom and then made the mistake of lying back down in his bunk for a couple of minutes. He knew he should jump in the shower, shave, and brush his teeth, but in that moment, all he wanted to do was close his eyes for a few more minutes.
Ten more minutes…, he thought. His eyelids closed, and he was gone, in a dreamless state once again.
When he woke up the second time, he felt the enormous bodily urge to pee again. Once his business had been taken care of, he looked at the clock. He was puzzled by what it told him. The last time he’d looked, the clock had said 2 p.m. or thereabouts. Now it said 2:32 p.m. Then he realized it was 2:32 p.m. the following day. He hadn’t fallen asleep for a half hour; he’d fallen asleep for an entire day on top of the previous six hours.
What the hell?! Wilson thought in panic. Someone should have come and gotten me. He jumped into the shower. He needed to wake himself up. God, what have I missed in these last thirty hours?
Wilson made his way down the hall in the subterranean mountain fortress and found his way to the dining facility. He was ravenously hungry. Since it was 3 p.m. now, they were serving a reduced lunch menu; dinner was two hours away. The menu board said they were serving Reuben sandwiches and BLTs for those who didn’t want cold cuts.
Once Wilson had finished eating and downing a couple cups of coffee, he headed towards the briefing room, feeling like a new man.
He was half expecting to find the room empty or maybe with a few staffers doing some work. Instead, he was greeted by the President’s Chief of Staff, Albert Abney. “Hey, welcome back to the land of the living. You look a lot better, my friend.”
Wilson chuckled at the comment. “Yeah, I feel like a new man. I guess I was kind of out of it for a while, wasn’t I?”
“Everyone’s exhausted, Blain,” said Albert, patting him on the arm. “It’s important we make sure key people are taking some time to sleep so they don’t end up collapsing, or worse, providing bad or inaccurate information to the President.”
As the Chief of Staff, Albert had been demanding everyone take at least a few hours a day to catch up on sleep. On top of that, he had been making sure that when the more important folks, like Blain or any of the military chiefs, went to their rooms to rack out, they weren’t disturbed. The President needed his key people rested and able to think clearly.
Wilson walked through the room to the back, where a couple pots of coffee were set up with some other refreshments. The room was abuzz with activity. Digital maps of the Caribbean, the Pacific, China and Europe showed on the wall monitors. Each of the maps had little red and blue icons on them, denoting friendly and enemy forces.
“Ah, there you are, Blain. Welcome back,” Frank Alton, the President, said loudly. Wilson realized the commander-in-chief looked rested and a bit more alert himself.
“Sorry I’ve been gone. I hope I haven’t missed too much,” replied Wilson apologetically as he took a seat with his name marked on it.
“Nah. We’re only in the opening days of the Third World War, Blain. Nothing serious,” Alton joked. Now Wilson knew the President was feeling better—he rarely joked.
The President then cleared his throat, letting everyone know he was ready to begin. “All right, people, we have the election tomorrow. We also have the Marines launching their seaborne invasion in twelve hours, now that that damn storm has passed.”
Wilson furrowed his brow at the news. Damn, the Marines are landing in twelve hours? What else did I miss while I was asleep?
“I thought we were holding off on the invasion until a couple of days after the election. What’s changed?” Wilson asked.
Admiral Thiel chimed in. “This,” he said as he touched the monitor, zooming in on the section of the map near Gitmo. “The Cubans and PLA have spent the last several days pounding the hell out of the base with artillery. We’ve tried to silence it and we’ve done a decent job of it, but now they’re assaulting the sprawling base. The garrison has been able to beat them back on a couple of occasions, but they had to concede the western half of the base. They just couldn’t defend it and the other side where most of the facilities are located. If we didn’t move the invasion up, there’s a good chance the ground force would be overwhelmed or wiped out in another day or so.”
“That would be both a military and political disaster to allow on election day,” the President’s Chief of Staff commented.
“Damn this election. Talk about bad timing,” Wilson mumbled to himself in frustration. “The country is under attack and we can’t even postpone it a few weeks or months to make sure it’s safe.”
“That’s neither here nor there. DHS and the FBI have said the election should be secure, and Congress has been adamant that it should go on despite the ongoing war. In either case, we”—the President pointed at himself and the others in the room—“are not on the ballot. It is, however, our job to fight and win this war until we hand over the reins of power to the next administration. So, regardless of who wins, we still have a job to do and we’re going to do it.”
Privately, Blain Wilson hoped the congresswoman turned diplomat won tomorrow, even though she was not a member of President Alton’s party. Maria Delgado had been a public affairs officer in the Army for a short stint, joining right after the September 11th terrorist attacks. During Wilson’s second deployment to Iraq in 2004, Delgado had been assigned to his Special Forces battalion. He’d gotten to know the young officer well during that deployment.
Delgado had earned a Purple Heart and Silver Star for valor when their Humvee had been blown up by an IED. Wilson remembered virtually nothing from the event, other than seeing her face looking down at him as she told him he was going to be OK. They’d stayed in touch over the years and even worked together on a couple of occasions when he’d been a legislative affairs aide in the Senate. He was glad to see her running for President—she’d make an exceptional commander-in-chief if she won.
“Damn it! That’s not good enough!” yelled the President angrily, snapping Wilson out of his memories. “Why can’t that carrier group launch its fighters in the storm? We have people dying right now.”
“The strike group is still having to deal with the remnants of Hurricane Octavio,” explained the Chief of Naval Operations. “It may only have been a Cat 1, but the winds have been too strong for them to recover the aircraft, even if they could launch. The weather should clear up in the next twelve to twenty-four hours as they move around the storm.”
The President growled in frustration before he took a deep breath and let it go. “All right. We clearly can’t control the weather. So let’s move past that and get down to the rest of the business at hand,” he said a bit more calmly. “What’s the status of our air forces? From my understanding, they’ve been taking a beating since we started this Cuba campaign.”
General Ryan Curtis, the Air Force Chief of Staff, cleared his throat. “Yes, sir. We’ve encountered some stiff resistance on the island. We honestly did not expect the Cubans or the Chinese to
have such good equipment or the technical know-how to operate it as effectively as they have.”
The President held a hand up. “Whoa, what do you mean, General? For a military you all had said was subpar at best in January, they seem to have given us a hell of a bloody nose.”
“What I mean, Mr. President, is the Chinese haven’t just deployed military trainers to support the Cubans, or even mediocre PLA units,” General Curtis explained. “These have been top-tier units operating the best military equipment the Chinese military have. Our intelligence now believes the Cubans had sent roughly forty thousand of their military personnel through various training programs in Mainland China over the last two or three years. This means the soldiers operating this modern equipment know how to operate it extremely well.”
Wilson cut in. “General Curtis, you’re saying the Cubans sent a good portion of their military through a series of Chinese military training courses?” he pressed.
“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. The Chinese appear to have created a foreign military training school, similar to what we have. For example, when a country opts to purchase some of their J-11 aircraft, the pilots who will fly the plane and the ground crews who will service them are offered a chance to go through the Chinese training programs on how to fly and maintain the aircraft. Some of these courses are longer than others, but what they’re doing is making sure the countries that purchase their equipment have a good understanding of how to use it and maintain it. This is why the Cuban and Chinese forces have been able to operate effectively together and why they’ve been able to inflict some heavy losses on our end. I hate to say it, but if they’ve done this with the Cubans, then chances are they’ve also done this with the Venezuelans and the Salvadorans, which means we’re going to be in for one hell of a fight if we have to go into those countries next.”
Shaking his head in frustration, the President muttered some choice curse words under his breath.
“Well, I’m not going to lie and say there weren’t some serious mistakes on our part, Mr. President,” General Curtis admitted. “That’s clearly on us and the intelligence community for not having known about this prior to the conflict starting. We might have been able to go about the initial strikes a bit differently. But here, let me show everyone something.” Curtis got up and walked over to one of the digital maps. “This is Las Terrazas, a small village located in the Sierra del Rosario mountains. It’s a UNESCO-designated Biosphere Reserve, twenty-three kilometers west of Mariel and sixty kilometers west of Havana. This entire area is SAM central. We’ve lost fourteen F-16Vs, eight F-15Es, two F-22s, two F-35s, six A-10s and a B-1B bomber in and around this location since the start of the war. It’s incredibly well defended, with multiple different levels and layers of AA and triple-A guns and SAMs.”
The general continued, “The Chinese have helped the Cubans interlace dozens upon dozens of radar-guided anti-aircraft guns that pretty much cover anything from six thousand feet and below. Then they added in dozens of anti-aircraft artillery guns or triple-A guns to shoot at anything from six thousand feet in altitude all the way up to twenty thousand feet. This entire hornet’s nest was then interwoven with a host of surface-to-air missile systems, making it incredibly hard for our aircraft to go after them. It’s inside these protective bubbles that they’ve hidden their CJ-10 and DF-21 missile launchers that keep hitting our air bases and other critical infrastructure here at home.”
General Curtis then expanded the map and circled a couple of areas. “To complicate things further, this particular site isn’t the only site they’ve built like this. They have another one located ninety kilometers west of this location, just north of the city Pinar del Río. Then they’ve built another one of these kill boxes on Isla Juventud, near the new Fidel Castro Air Base the PLA helped them build. This is also the air base out of which we suspect they’re flying their J-20 stealth fighters. If we look over here, down towards the eastern side of the country, they’ve built up another defensive fortress in the Topes de Collantes, a nature reserve park in the Escambray mountain range, some two hundred and sixty kilometers southeast of Havana and five hundred and fifty kilometers northwest of Gitmo. We believe most of the Cuban and PLA forces on the island have fallen back to these positions now that the war has started.”
The President’s Chief of Staff interjected, “General, we have the most advanced Air Force in the world. We’ve built specific weapons platforms to handle threats just like these. What is your plan for defeating them so our ground forces can be properly supported?”
General Curtis took a breath in before responding. “Right now, our objective is to help the Army and Marines establish a beachhead on the island. As the Army and Marines are able to bring more soldiers and equipment ashore, they’ll be able to move into these areas and root them out the old-fashioned way, with rifles and hand grenades. We’ve already got several Special Forces units operating inside these built-up fortresses, calling in rocket and conventional artillery strikes. When the ground forces are able to bring in more artillery, we’ll be able to use our heavy artillery to save our pilots from having to risk themselves in these treacherous positions.”
What the general said made a ton of sense to Wilson; the problem was this would take time. The President had been hoping he could end the conflict in Cuba before his successor was sworn into office—if they had to root the enemy out with ground forces, that might take months.
Wilson sighed quietly. This clearly wasn’t what they were hoping for, but he wasn’t sure what their other options were.
“What say you, General Kilbourne? How soon can Big Army get into this fight?” Wilson inquired.
General Timothy Kilbourne was the Army Chief of Staff. It was his responsibility to get the Army into the fight and defeat the enemy.
The general lifted his chin slightly as he replied, “Soon. In the last thirty-six hours, we’ve managed to move the entire 1st Brigade Combat Team of the 101st Air Assault Division to the Playa Baracoa Airport. The engineers have managed to get the runways repaired and operational again. We’re shuttling in the rest of the division via C-130s, with the C-17s bringing their vehicles and artillery. Several battalions, along with the Rangers, are moving on the Port of Mariel and the surrounding city. Once they’ve secured the deepwater port, the Ro-Ro ships carrying the 3rd Infantry Division will start to offload their equipment. In three days, we’ll have two and a half divisions’ worth of soldiers on the ground. In six days, it’ll be closer to four divisions. In ten days, we’ll have six divisions. I’d say within two weeks we’ll occupy close to half the country. Within a month we should occupy most of Cuba with the exception of these entrenched fortresses. They may require a bit more effort to clear, but we’ll take it one day at a time.”
The President then stood, forcing the conversation to stop. He looked at everyone before saying, “You all carry on. I need to talk with the two candidates privately and let them know what’s going to happen in the wee hours of election day. I owe them that much. Just do your best to win this war and win it quick. Push your people hard, push them beyond the breaking point if you have to, but let’s try to conclude this war within the next sixty days so we can leave the next administration in a better position.”
The President then headed off to another secured room to make his calls while his advisors went to work on meeting his timeline for victory.
*******
Joint Battle Command Center
Northwest of Beijing, China
It was quiet in the computer lab. Then again, it was one in the morning. Xi reached for his tea and took a sip.
“It’s late, Father. You should get some sleep,” said the AI known as Jade Dragon, or JD for short.
Staring at the blue light that ringed the camera attached to his computer monitor, Xi sighed. The computer was right. He should get some sleep. There was just so much going on, so much to do and not nearly enough time to do it all.
“I am managing things, Fathe
r. You should rest,” his AI said comfortingly. “Tomorrow is another busy day.”
Xi smiled at the thoughtfulness of his creation. “Tomorrow is a busy day, JD. That is why I must be prepared for it. I will turn in soon and get some sleep, but first, let’s go over some things. What have you learned from watching the American TV shows and cartoons?” Xi asked as he prepared to write in his notebook.
“Jennifer Aniston used to stimulate her nipples so they would be more visible through her shirts when they filmed scenes from Friends.”
Xi practically spat out his tea. Then he coughed as he tried to regain his composure.
“Did I say something funny?” asked JD in the very British accent he and Dan had programmed him with.
Xi laughed. “No. I mean, that’s just inappropriate to say. You don’t just say something like that about a woman.”
“I read about it during an interview she gave in Vogue magazine some seven years ago,” JD countered.
“Let’s just move on. What else have you learned? Please be more specific. Tell me what human behaviors you have learned or observed,” Xi pressed. He wanted to get through this part of the behavior training before he went to bed.
“I learned the character Chandler Bing was a sarcastic, self-deprecating IT manager who used humor and sarcasm to hide his insecurities.”
Xi leaned forward in his chair, a huge smile on his face. “Yes! That’s right, JD. Humans will often use humor or sarcasm to hide or mask their insecurities. That is a very good observation. What I want you to do now is save that into one of your core human understandings. I want you to build on that. As you watch American and other TV shows, I want you to look for this character trait. Try to see if you notice any specific patterns. As you do, apply those patterns to the world leaders and military commanders I’ve told you to study and understand.”
