“The President wouldn’t have done that.”
“No? We bombed British ships and bases last year?”
“Yeah, but that was traitors in the line of command… ”
Gretchen nuzzled his shoulder and bit him playfully.
“Owww… ”
“The Administration never gave anybody a straight answer about what had actually happened,” she reminded him.
“All the guys responsible were probably killed at the Pentagon during the rebellion,” Dan argued, he thought reasonably.
“Which was all very convenient, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, but… ”
Gretchen pushed him and Dan lay on his back.
In a moment she had moved on top of him and she was looking into his eyes.
“I hate this place too,” she confessed. “An apartment somewhere in the city would be perfect. Somewhere within walking distance of the Department of Justice, somewhere of our own; I happen to know just the place.”
She answered his next question without making him ask it.
“I’ll deal with Daddy.”
Dan hugged her.
“Did I tell you I love you, lately.”
“No, and that was very remiss of you!”
Chapter 10
The Corps of Engineers had begun fortifying the command complex in January soon after Major General Colin Powell Dempsey had taken command of the miscellaneous infantry and mechanized units then comprising the ‘Chicago Front’.
Dempsey’s first act in command had been to concentrate his scattered resources into highly mobile battle groups, institute ‘trip-wire’ picket lines separating the rebel-held northern two-thirds of the shattered city from the less damaged southern third, and begun rotating his by then exhausted men into warm, dry winter quarters knowing that the ice and snow would do his army’s work for it — literally freezing the front lines in place — until mid March. By the early spring the supply and ordnance depots at Gary Indiana, and around Joliet, a few miles north east of the small village of Manhattan, had been fully stocked ready for Operation Rectify involving simultaneous ground and air attacks designed to encircle and starve out the three main ‘enemy’ strong points in the wrecked city.
Then forty-eight hours before Operation Rectify kicked off — with three hundred tanks and ninety thousand troops moving up to the start lines — Dempsey had been sacked; the politicians had got cold feet and while US Army and Marine Corps units, Air Force squadrons, and half-a-dozen old destroyers hurriedly pulled out of reserve and sent down the St Lawrence Seaway to the Great Lakes waited for the postponed orders to go into action, the insurgency had blossomed out of west and north Chicago and spread like a virus. Thus far the contagion had seeded itself west as far as Rockford, and north along the coast of Lake Superior to swallow Milwaukee and at least five thousand square miles of southern Wisconsin.
Weak and demoralized National Guard garrisons had melted away before the terrifyingly well organized tide of ragged ‘soldiers’ sweeping out of the ruins of the Windy City in captured tanks, armored personnel carriers, trucks, pickups and cars. Across Wisconsin as many as a dozen towns and hamlets had already fallen to insurgents who had been living in the Chicago refugee camps built along Interstates 41, 43, 90 and 94. It was as if the whole eastern half of the state had been harboring exactly the same poison as the wrecked suburbs of the city all along. The catastrophe had broken without warning like a tsunami falling upon a sleeping coastal town; the seizure of Milwaukee was the headline news but militarily what was happening in the countryside was a disaster of barely unquantifiable dimensions. Several Army depots and two small air bases had already fallen to the insurgents virtually intact and the rebellion which had had the character of a mass criminal conspiracy the previous fall, now resembled a nihilistic, remorseless crusade conquering ground hand over fist in whichever direction it turned.
In retrospect the failure to attack the rebels before they broke out of their winter strongholds had been a monumental blunder. That had been the last chance to contain the uprising within the boundaries of the city; it had been lost and now, a cursory look at the developing situation on the maps in First Army’s operations bunker documented a humiliating rout with towns falling like dominoes before the onrush of the horde.
The whole thing beggared credulity; even now the Army had practically no idea who or what it was fighting. That the ‘who’ or the ‘what’ was threatening to run rampant across hundreds, thousands of square miles of Illinois and Wisconsin, that it seemed capable of materializing out of nowhere, striking and disappearing into the landscape at will behind US lines was simply an adjunct to the greater, all-consuming nightmare.
The berserkers coming at the soldiers manning the barricades or hunkered down in hastily dug trenches sometimes wore red crosses on their chests, more often than not a man, or a woman, emerged from a crowd of civilians with a gun or knife or a grenade. Even where a garrison survived, or mounted a rearguard, blocking defense, the night rang with gunshots and in the morning the bodies of men and women lay intertwined in a bloody dance of death on the ground. An ambush could happen anywhere, at any time.
Two battalions of the 3rd Marines had been flown in to reinforce the 32nd Infantry Brigade at Madison, eighty miles west of Milwaukee but it was only a matter of time before the rebels outflanked the city’s hurriedly thrown up defenses.
The Air Force was flying round the clock ground support missions; but how did you fight an enemy who never concentrated except in the hours before an attack? Any kind of competent commander could lose a whole Army out in that wild country and most of the time the Air Force had no idea what it was actually bombing.
The situation was so dire that elements of the 101st and 106th Airborne stood ready to drop into Madison; if the town fell there was nothing to stop the rebels surging all the way north to the Canadian border. Although Minneapolis was still calm the panic had already started in Rochester Minnesota, two hundred miles north east of Madison.
Contagion…
It was a thing sixty-two year old General George Henry Decker had never imagined — not in his worst nightmares — could possibly happen on American soil. What was happened in Illinois and Wisconsin was a thing that had not happened on American soil since 1865. Civil society had disintegrated in the ruins of Chicago, the traditional loyalties to surviving institutions of public authority had been subverted, become warped by the horror of the situation, and in the absence of strong leadership and — self-evidently — a will to use the required level of military force to rectify matters, it was now apparent that whole communities had gone over to the enemy. In Milwaukee and elsewhere National Guard units had deserted, defected, or mutinied. Because of political meddling and indecision the Chicago Front had become a text book example, an object lesson in ‘too little too late’.
The disgraceful Federal neglect of the ramshackle refugee camps scattered across Illinois and Wisconsin had — with the wisdom of twenty-twenty hindsight — been perfect breeding grounds for rebellion. There were stories of whole camps turning on camp administrations, murdering and torturing government staff and local police detachments. The inmates of several camps had stormed into nearby towns in the Wisconsin hinterland and begun to loot and rape, exact their revenge on the well-fed, fat, uncaring locals who had watched them — the dispossessed, the damaged and the sick, the new dregs of society — suffer in silent indifference. Civil order had not so much broken down in southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois as it had ceased to exist. Other than where isolated Army or Marine garrisons still held out, there was no law, no order, no civic decency…