First Citizen (35 page)

We took the text of our own response from a series of isolated incidents occurring in the late ’80s of the last century.

In one case, a group of political activists—evidently sympathizers with the struggles of an African country named Symbio—had been tracked by the FBI to a small house in the Los Angeles suburbs. The group was “armed and dangerous.” Over the preceding two years, they had kidnapped a newspaper heiress and involved her in several bank robberies. In the final action, Federal agents and local police blockaded the house and provoked a shootout during the course of which the building caught fire. They made no attempt to put the fire out because, the police said, the outlaws inside the burning house were still shooting at them.

A later incident, in Philadelphia, expanded on this example. The police were trying to evict a radical political group, which formed some kind of guerrilla community, or an extended family complete with small children from the tenement they were occupying. When a police helicopter dropped a dynamite bomb on the roof to discourage a sniper’s nest there, the roof started burning. The fire department claimed it could not fight the blaze properly because of shooting from that same rooftop. A whole neighborhood was burned out.

Clearly, those in authority were free to use massive force so long as the people on the receiving end could be shown as the vicious and stubborn sort who preferred burning to death instead of surrendering. Of course, nothing was mentioned—in the police reports we could find, anyway— about the conditions into which the outlaws might have surrendered. One can realistically assume the choices were burn or get shot in the crossfire.

The point remains: So long as we maintained the appearance of options, and publicly regretted the consequences, we could eradicate the insurrection with a minimum of political fallout. The American public does not really love a martyr.

Pollock and Cawley were all for issuing tactical nukes and a fill-in-the-blanks news release to the local PD. Then they would stand back and wring their hands.

I argued for a measure of subtlety. We should pick our targets for maximum lesson value, I said. Give the greater number of guerrillas a chance to lay aside their weapons and fade away. The words “surgical strike” even found their way into my argument.

Cawley pursed his lips like he’d bitten into a lemon. “You think we’re going to make converts, Granny?”

“Ah, no … But what you and Gordon are heading for is a slaughter. That’s a strategy for cattle. We’re dealing with people—supposedly the same ones this country is governed of, by, and for. If we can set an example with the hardest cases, the fellow travelers won’t stay to test it.”

“But you’re missing the whole point,” Pollock said impatiently. “Our aim has to be elimination. Total suppression. We’re removing garbage—a business I think you have some familiarity with? You don’t clean up a city by letting the little scraps go with a stiff lesson, do you? We will, of course,
seem
to be offering them surrender and amnesty, but we cannot have anyone ‘running away to fight again another day.’ We don’t want to stop the riots; we want to win the country back.”

“Too right!” Cawley crowed. So, in the end, I was overruled. Checks and balances, again.

By emergency order, Congress created auxiliary units of the Gentlemen Volunteers with a charter for operations
inside
the country. It was a total break with precedent. Further, these units had no State affiliation or support; they were called simply “Federals.” It had an unpleasant ring to modern ears.

Praising my exploits in Mexico, Pollock and Cawley offered me command of them. I declined, explaining that it was illegal for a general in the G.V.’s to accept a commission with more than one division at a time. This actually was the law, although most patron-generals were ignoring it by now. However, Pollock and Cawley accepted this argument and gave the appointment to a Pentagon planner named Willoughby. He was a programmer by training and a poodle by disposition. You have to work with what you’ve got.

The new units were technically airmobile infantry, but for urban operations they would go in by troop transport. The combatants carried the new 440T nuclear grenades, which gave each man roughly the firepower of a main turret off the USS
Missouri.

Soldier’s joke of the time: What’s the only problem with a nuke grenade? Answer: Throwing it far enough!

The launcher, which even the manuals called a powzooka, was ballistic. That is, instead of holding it level like a carbine, the G.V. trooper had to fire it up at an angle, like a thumper or a mortar. The only danger was in getting the angle too steep and having the shell come back down on top of him. An alarm system on the barrel was supposed to warn against this. But when the bullets are snap-cracking all around, who’s listening for that little E-flat buzzer?

If you think I hated these things, you’re right.

The new G.V. units went into their first action on the Loop in Chicago. The tactics were simple: feint and fall back, and when the rioters come out to play, plaster them. Not as elegant as the “Oops, look at the building burn” that was our model, but then, times change. For one thing, most of our buildings were fireproof.

For another, these were not the baby political fronts which had sprung up in the last century, long on Marxist theory and short on firepower. These were nine-tenths street gangs who had been knocking over sporting goods stores for decades.

And if you haven’t been in a gun exchange or sports shop lately, they’re worth a look. The hardware they sell is a lot closer to the jungles of Nicco than the deer country of Appalachia. It’s amazing how much camouflage clothing and high-velocity, speed-loading, anti-tumble ammo a hunter needs for shooting woodchucks. A semi-automatic rifle with a filed-off cam seems to be
de rigueur
for deer, because they’re quick and you might miss ’em with the first shot. And cleaning game evidently requires a nine-inch sawback knife, balanced for throwing, with spikes on the guard. Just in case the carcass wakes up and decides to charge, I guess.

Willoughby and his boys were up against a force that was better armed than any of the peasant brigades we fought in Mexico. And, like a nest of wasps on a hot summer morning, the Black Widows, Los Cuervos del Oro, and other gangs in the area were just waiting for an eager pushbutton soldier like him to come poking his finger into the inner city.

Oh, they knew he was coming, all right.

These wasps were also better coordinated than the
campesinistas.
Willoughby thought he was going to shoot down a blind charge by a bunch of screaming teenagers with zipguns. Instead, they were tracking him before he even got the ground carriers stopped along the lakefront. They let him unload his men and advance across the perimeter of burned-out and bulldozed buildings that defined their territory. Worse, they let him walk the streets unopposed and poke his guns into empty doorways. And the more inside he got, the more outside—and above—they got. Until these children had ten Federal companies, almost 1,400 soldiers with a collective firepower of almost 600 kilotons, right under their sights.

Willoughby had penetrated too far, letting the street fighters close the gap silently behind him. But that wasn’t his first mistake. He should have worked his way into the downtown from the west. Our tactical consultants, who went over the ground eighteen months later to analyze the action, all agreed on that. The element of surprise he hoped to gain by approaching from the lakeshore was a very small potato. It was far overshadowed by the limitations of the ground: You can’t “feint and fall back” when you’re standing at the edge of the water. You don’t have the lob-range to use your 440Ts effectively.

If Willoughby had gone in from the west or south, he would have spent a week negotiating the passage of every two or three blocks with rival gangs that hated him and the Widows about equally. He would have had to pay them indemnities as well. But those gangs on the perimeter would have kept his secrets. It’s a good bet, too—maybe sixty/forty?—that they would have let his units withdraw without swamping him. And they would certainly have stopped the
centrociudados
when they counterattacked. The gangs stay bought, especially when their territorial instincts are on the side of the agreement. Willoughby never paid off Lake Michigan.

It really didn’t matter. When the trap was tight around Willoughby and his 1,400 Federal troops, and the first burst of autofire came down from the rooftops and upper windows, his men forgot all about tactics. With the tracer streams coming down and the ground pocking all around them, they did the natural thing and fired back. With the 440Ts. Maybe only one or two hundred soldiers made that mistake, but they were in a panic and they all made it at the same time.

Our consultants estimated the combined force of the primary blast at about 85,000 tons of TNT. They arrived at that number by sifting the area, studding how the walls went down, working backwards from structural analysis, and so on. The force of that explosion would have been enough, they said, to ignite the grenades still in their launchers. It was the secondary blast that made the crater.

“We ought to give Willoughby a commendation,” Pollock cracked, “for innovative thinking and initiative under fire.”

“Give it posthumously?” Cawley cackled.

They could afford to laugh. Willoughby had destroyed the insurrection for them—in Chicago, anyway. We could even gloss over the political situation: We claimed to know nothing of the blast and opined that “terrorist and insurgent groups” may have built or stolen a nuclear device and tried to use it. That raised a useful specter on our side. And anyone who claimed to have seen a convoy of troop carriers with Federal markings driving up the lakeshore that day we dismissed as a crank or a co-conspirator. But as a military operation it stank. The cost in lives and usable real estate, not to mention the blind stupidity, sickened a soldier like me. I was almost ready to do something rash, like offer to take the field myself, when Pollock and Cawley agreed not to undertake similar military action again. They argued, sensibly, that the States would probably object to another Federal force leveling one of their cities.

So, instead, we authorized all sorts of new police weapons. We put a bounty on the head of every radical leader we could identify. And, as an emergency measure, we proposed suspending about half the Bill of Rights for a period not to exceed one year. Congress voted enthusiastically for all this. Our rumor that the street gangs were toting atomic bombs cleared away a lot of the political deadwood.

Within that year, December 2015 to November 2016, we broke the quasi-military power of the gangs in the cities. We couldn’t eliminate them. The kids still owned the streets, moved their drugs, and ripped off whatever caught their eye. But they no longer invaded the police precinct houses, erected barricades, issued deeds to property, or bankrolled their own wholesale credit operations.

Enclaves like Denver Free State, Taos Colony, the Memphis Xone, Empire of East Oakland, the Century City Badlands, and Inner Houston were dissolved. But in Miami—there was nothing we could do with Miami, not for the past forty years and not today.

Our overall success against the insurrection cemented the Special Executive’s position in Congress. Everyone had been sure we would fail—that had been the point of setting us up in the first place. But we had not failed and it was too late to cancel the arrangement now.

The elections of 2016 completed our control in the House, as each of us brought in a few more supporters. I called Mike Alcott north to run for a seat from his home district in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. With the right backing, he won easily. I took one or two others from the 64th’s officer pool, knowing that Colonel Birdsong could always train up replacements.

At about this time, the pecking order in the S.X. seemed to settle into a regular groove:

Step one, Cawley would do something stupid on his own or refuse to do something intelligent that we wanted—it always came out the same in the end.

Step two, Pollock would complain about it to me, not because I was a sympathetic ear but because Cawley’s slow smile and thick head were complaint- and idea-proof, and Pollock knew it.

Step three, I would try to keep the peace between them by suggesting a middle course or occasionally by divining Cawley’s point of view. (I never managed to step off this path and avoid the trap.)

Step four, Pollock would privately take offense at my support for our camel-faced friend.

Step five, like the workings of some Rube Goldberg contraption of gears and levers, about 2.5 days later Pollock would find a petty and spiteful way to cross me up.

We were like three sides of an old marriage, knowing where to gnaw at the open places until the blood flowed again.

Over those months, I was satisfied with the decision to take my nephew, Gabriel Ossing, into the page system. The Special Executive formed the most closed society within Congress and a friendly ear down in the cellars was serving me well. Time and again, he brought me news of a plot or a coalition that might have upset our triangle, usually by cutting into my side of it. With enough warning, I could always wiggle out of the knife’s way.

All of this is not to say that the S.X. never accomplished anything, or that the only thing we did achieve was the half-megaton destruction of the Chicago Loop. Our years were not all war and deception. Pollock endowed a magnificent theater in Baltimore, the New American. We underwrote the production of new plays and symphonies in many cities. We built new road systems and finally began work on an orbiting anti-ballistic-missile defense, based on plans and broken technological leads that were left over from the last century. We finished construction of the first commercial Troikamak mirror-loop fusion reactor at Syracuse. We even, in a small way, began a commercial program for distilling fresh water from brine domes in Louisiana.

But still, that pattern of squeaks and chafing spots persisted. In 2017, we went to a new plane of animosity and angst. Cawley and Pollock were then engaged in a subtle war of political blockade. One would propose a bill, say to raise the tariff on coffee beans, and the other would launch an opposing measure to lower that particular tariff, or all the tariffs with that particular trade group. It was done with a lot of courtesy and secret smiles, but Gabriel told me that anyone in or near the Congress could sense the lines of force building up between them, like a static charge growing between two electrodes.