First Citizen (39 page)

“Topside,” I answered.

He looked up. The crane and hoist had rolled out
under
the blast doors; no way it could lift the warhead
above
the doors. The man shrugged.

Just then one of my trucks arrived, right on schedule. Our second team had bought or stolen a fleet of auto wreckers in Houston, painted them with plausible colors and signs, changed the plates, and started north from Texas the day before. The wrecker driver lowered his wheel cradle, hand-cranked it down below the lip of the silo, and cupped the warhead hanging beneath the hoist. When he had raised it above the surface, his helper rolled the bomb—gently—into the truckbed, strapped it down, and flung a tarpaulin over it. Then we pulled everyone out of the hole, climbed back into the Stomper, and got the truck out through the fence and onto the road. By radio I confirmed that the other eleven teams were just finishing up. We cranked up and roared off in two different directions.

For the trip back to Houston, all the teams spread out across Kansas, heading more or less south by twelve different roads and air routes. So far as I know, none of them even came close to being stopped. It was a perfect G.V. commando operation. Corbin was furious.

“I was hoping you might not hear about it,” I admitted when he called me up to his office to chew on my butt.

“Oh? Right! And how did you figure that?” His face was twisted in that snotty, pouty, upper-middle disdain he did so well. “When there’s only one military force in the States right now that could have pulled off that raid
and
had a reason to. The newsats were linking my name with it before you were halfway across Oklahoma. If the FSF had its own air force, or maintained better liaison with the Kansas National Guard, you never would have reached Texas soil.”

“You could claim it was one of the State militias that did it.” I felt the heat rising to my face.

“I’ve already played that lie,” he snapped. “For all the good it does … Hell’s hinges! The State units have to
live
here. I’m—we’re—just passing through. Don’t you understand? We’re
vulnerable.”

“Not any more, Granny. You got nuclear teeth now. Your enemies will have to think twice about mobbing you. Or betraying you.”

“Oh, sure! We’ll just do a little nuclear blackmail. … ‘Mad Dog Corbin’ they’ll be calling me. Wonderful!” He ran his hands through his hair, what was left of it. “And just how did you plan to
use
those warheads, without launch vehicles?”

“Put them in stripped-out Stompers, wired for remote control. Fly in at hedge level like the old cruise missiles. They would be real hard to knock down.”

Corbin stared at me, hollow eyed, for a whole minute. “Not bad,” he said at last and grudgingly. I was proud of this idea and could not help smiling. “At least you haven’t taken total leave of your senses. … How many megatons are they?”

“The casing codes say forty—”

“And you bounced them halfway cross the Southwest in the backs of tow trucks? You crazy Indian!”

“But—”

“Now listen carefully,” he rode right across my objection. “If you ever pull a crazy stunt like that again, I will break you. Worse, I will have you shot and toss your worthless body out for the coyotes to gnaw on.
Entiende?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Very good. Dismissed.”

I about-faced and marched out. As I went, a smile was growing on my face. I had accomplished my mission. Granny was not as angry as I expected him to be. And he did not order me to return the bombs. We would soon need them.

Within a week of our landing in Houston, the country fell apart. I had expected the rest of the States to rally against us, sending armies in a wedge that would split Texas and California and drive us back into the deserts of Sonora. But not at all. Instead, it was like watching a beakerful of clear chemical solution suddenly turn cloudy and rain down crystals after you added a catalyst. The catalyst, of course, was Granny Corbin and his defiance of Congress.

The political outcry started with the formalists and legal purists who objected in principle to our “invasion.” But they were soon joined by every political and economic faction that hated the Mexican War and all it represented—the stain of military adventurism, the trend toward non-neo-isolationism, the Hispanicizing of America, the new marketplace of cheap labor and abundant energy. Their objections were raised to boiling point—it took about three-fifths of a second—when they learned Corbin’s private army now had nuclear capability.

Those bombs changed the situation for the TENMAC, too. Many local politicians had thought they were only protecting a native son who had got himself into a squeaky place in the corrupt East and so earned a price on his head. Now they saw clearly that he was forcing them into civil war.

When the secession pact was signed, I saw tears in the eyes of representatives from Arizona and New Mexico. These were States that had entered the Union just over 100 years ago. They were people whose parents had crossed the border on foot and fought hard for their citizenship.

War makes hard choices.

The initial split of the country was along the lines of Sun Belt versus the Rust Bowl and Heartland. The West was progressive, independent, and inclined toward Corbin and self-determination. The East and Midwest were traditional, formalist, and sided with Pollock and the Congress as representing the “legitimate” government.

However, the New England States came in on the side of the Sun Belt, largely because of their independent attitudes and their revitalized economies, a legacy of the Silicon Revolution.

New York City remained neutral and offered to bankroll any State, political coalition, army group, or corporation that looked like it could survive two consecutive quarters and pay out the going rate of twenty percent. Upstate New York, on the other hand, sided with the rest of the agrarian Heartland.

The Old South also came in with the Heartland, largely because of its prejudice against importing anything, even a new country.

“Ecotopia”—that is, Northern California, Oregon, and Washington State—aligned themselves with the Sun Belt largely because the people could not bear to be thought anti-progressive and anti-Hispanic. The Rockies sided with the Rust Bowl because of their energy and water reserves—and they feared any pattern of forces that might try to realign the national wealth.

Louisiana declared itself a Free State and tried to become a duty-free port of entry serving both sides in the civil war.

Of course, any analysis of the Second Civil War would fail if it ignored underground economic interests. Each State had its own unofficial position—intolerant or tolerant—on the trafficking in pele, crack, and cochineal; on the trading in shady securities and unclean cash; on insider investing and corporate buccaneering; on moonshine liquor revenues and the trade in girlflesh. And that position helped decide whether it leant toward the Heartland-straight-Anglo side of the war, or toward the Sun-Belt-hip-Hispanophile side.

The strength of the States was everything. Repudiation of the national debt in the 1990s and the Money Warp that followed had strengthened the positions of State and local governments: They still could levy taxes. Then, with the pay-as-you-go society, the Federal government got wealthy—but did not necessarily regain the dominant economic position it had held in the sixty years following the Great Depression. What the States won, they kept.

This centrifugal tendency was abetted by the Hundred Lost Days. The muddle at the top and the evolving power struggle with the Speaker created a vacuum in which each State of the Original Fifty developed its own power, special interests, and political alliances. Finally, Corbin’s break with the Special Executive and his violation of the G.V. charter, bringing troops back into the country to defend himself, gave each State the option of siding with Congress to hold the Union together—or not.

At first, those other regions which chose against union did not so much secede as wander off. Corbin did not press them into confederation with him, he just offered to defend them. If and when. On the other side, Pollock and Congress were desperate to attack Corbin in the TENMAC. But without a standing army, they had limited options. Pollock appealed to each loyal State to send its militia into the Southwest. But it was a long way to go. The threat to State interests was not clear. The lines of communication and supply were scrambled. And, as we knew, Pollock was no general. The States on both sides of the secession expressed a towering apathy. So, right after the TENMAC split off in January 2018, the conflict entered a Phony War phase that lasted until August.

During this time, there
was
a group of top military men who were waiting to be asked to the dance: the G.V. generals and their private armies in Mexico. Granny and I had thought many would sympathize with our position as a former G.V. unit and come in on the side of secession. Of course, we were forgetting the cussedness of the entrepreneur. Some of the generals were sitting on the fence, trying to predict the winning side; most, however, were simply waiting for bids backed by cash. Pollock had a lot of cash.

General Clayton Poniatowski, whose division controlled Neuvo Leon and Coahuila, entered secret negotiations with Congress in June. We never would have learned about them if Granny, before his flight from Baltimore, had not thought to bury a few tapeworms on time delay in the congressional net. These automated spies gave us just enough hints to look south across the Border Strip late in July.

The human observers we sent in mufti to Piedras Negras and Ciudad Acuña reported back that, yes, quartermasters from the 22nd Illinois, Poniatowski’s group, were in the Strip buying passage rights from the local gang lords. An army of 9,000 airmobile infantry was poised less than an hour away at Allende, Morelos, and Zaragoza. If they crossed over, we could expect them to fly northeast and strike directly at our strength in Houston. H-hour was maybe a day away.

“What are we going to do, Gran?” Mike Alcott asked. The three of us were closeted with the reports from our observers. We sat on the top floor of the Galleria, looking out over the dusty greens and browns of Houston baking in the summer heat. Not a breath of wind came up from the Gulf.

“They got us outnumbered,” I said. “We can fly, fight, fuck, or die. And that is about all.”

“Can we intercept and take them in the Strip?” Corbin asked.

“Our people are stood down all over Houston. If we had beeped for assembly and moved out twelve hours ago … But that would just be picking the spot we die in. We cannot match 9,000 troopers with equal equipment, no matter what the ground.”

“What about the Texas militia?” Alcott asked.

“If we are spread all over the city, they are all over the State. It would take a week to call them up, point them south, and start them marching. By that time, Poniatowski will be here.”

Corbin’s eyes took on a hooded look. “Colonel, do you have three old STM-4s you can spare?”

I looked at my hands. “We have some hangar queens. They fly, but two have glitchy armament circuits, one has a busted fan—insufficient thrust to hover with a full rifle squad aboard.”

“They won’t need to carry any troops. Or defend themselves.”

“Are you thinking of a one-way trip?”

“I am.”

“I will give the orders, General.”

“Do so.”

Alcott was looking from me to Corbin with a puzzled expression. He could not know that Granny was giving me the go-ahead to incinerate three Mexican cities. As far as Mike was concerned, our meeting broke up in mystery, deciding nothing that needed a decision.

Was Corbin crazy, really the “Mad Dog”? That thought did cross my consciousness as we walked out of the meeting. At first, when I had captured those nuclear weapons, he did not want them, even for strategic purposes. Now, he was willing to use three warheads to stopgap what should have been a purely tactical confrontation. Crazy? No … But … “Erratic” was the word that came to mind. In the overview, putting his actions in perspective, what we were doing could be both a military necessity and political suicide.

Within two hours, I had the drones in the air, flying with one-quarter of our stolen nuclear warheads. I handled the remote controls on the lead ship, the one for Allende, myself. My two best pilots took the others.

We flew the Stompers low, as always, and fast. It was a wild ride, streaking diagonally across the field rows, contouring the hills, dipping into ravines, blasting leaves off the upper layers of bramble bushes.

These video images, compass readings, and flight data were telemetered through a signal scrambler. Our enemies probably could not have done anything if they had intercepted the signals and read them correctly—but why should we leave a probability wagging out there?

I was flying compass headings and contour maps. From the city library we had tried to get ground and air views of Zaragoza, Morelos, and Allende. We found some prints taken in an aerial survey of Allende forty years ago, when the population was a tenth of what it was in 2018. However, our maps told us the cities were laid out in a line ten miles long, northwest to southeast. So our strategy was to fly a spread until one of the planes crossed this pattern, then we would circle back and home on our selected targets.

Allende, coming up under my right wing, looked like a shanty city, a sprawl of tin shacks and adobe blocks. A million poor city people living on the edge, waiting for their chance to slip into the Strip and find their fortune. Somewhere in the center of this mass were a few thousand
norteamericanos
armed and aimed at us. For expediency’s sake, we were going to take them out at a civilian kill rate of a thousand to one.

So be it.

Watching the video monitor with one eye and the horizon repeater with another, I pulled back on the joystick for a wingover and dove at the center of this huddled mass. With my left hand, I typed in the code sequence that would detonate the forty-megaton warhead strapped into my cargo bay.

The screen flickered once and broke up in carrier snow.

I lifted my hands off the controls. Whatever was to happen now in America, we had sealed our back door behind us. With the outcry that would follow this bombing, there could be no retreat through Mexico. And no exile in South America. Whatever the war brought, we would live and die in the north.