The ideology of the ‘blood soldiers’ — so called ‘Revelation Soldiers’ — was incoherent, a bizarre echo from the Middle Ages or Europe’s sixteenth and seventeenth century wars of religion.
The ‘blood soldiers’ believed in the literal truth of the Book of Revelation; for them the October War had been a signal of God’s wrath. The ‘end of times’ was nigh and they were its heralds, the dark angels of the death of the World; nothing mattered but the purification of their eternal souls, and the merciless eradication of the unworthy, the unbelieving and the ungodly.
True ‘blood soldiers’ were fearless, suicidal, and fought like Viking berserkers of yore. What had begun as a tiny, insignificant — anonymous — sect in the ruins of Chicago had turned into a nightmare. While the US Army was attempting to restore the rule of law in the shattered Windy City, fighting in the main criminals and local war lords, the ‘elders’ of the Council of the Governate of the Great Lakes had dispatched a small army of emissaries, missionaries by any other name all over the Midwest.
They had preached a message of unremitting hate.
These were terrible times.
God was angry and perdition awaited anybody who failed to join the… crusade.
America had been smote by the vengeance of the God; if the righteous failed to carry on his work of destruction, allowing the fallen and the impious to continue to rule on Earth, His will in Heaven would never be done and both the faithful and the heretic would burn together in Hell.
Women were harlots, children innocents to be slain to save their pure young souls from the damnation to come.
The Army — the Revelation Army — of the Governate was nothing less than the sword of God manifest…
The nomenclature was still a little hazy.
Some rebels called themselves ‘blood soldiers’ or ‘warriors’. Other preferred to style themselves ‘Revelation Soldiers’.
The infantrymen attempting to stem the tide of insanity referred to the enemy as the ‘RS’, or just ‘crazies’.
All of which was incidental.
The rebels, insurgents, madmen — and women — ravaging and harrying eastern Wisconsin had carried everything before them. Those who were spared; men, women and children were swept up into its ranks. It was not so much an army that was sweeping towards Madison as a tsunami of dispossessed humanity driven ahead of unknown regiments of fanatics possessed with the moral compass of a conquering Mongol horde.
Governor Reynolds had been briefed — fully briefed — but he had either been incapable of understanding what he was being told, or had decided to ignore what it implied for the fate of the people trapped in the path of the oncoming storm.
There had been intelligence reports about the Council of the Lakes, its adherents — the term ‘blood soldier’ had been listed in many situation digests over the last few months — but until late February both the ‘Council’ and its ‘blood soldiers’ had been viewed as just one, essentially lesser manifestation of the violent fragmentation of the insurgency north of the Chicago ‘peace line’.
The idea that what, hitherto, had complacently been regarded as criminal ‘gangs’ and ‘clans’, and ‘religious cults’ might someday explode out of the great city and overwhelm Milwaukee — previously a wholly, undamaged, fully functioning, economically booming city, effectively cashing in on Chicago’s misfortune — had seemed too fantastic to be taken seriously. And yet that was exactly what had happened with terrifying speed in the first days of June. It had happened so fast and so unexpectedly that even had the Chicago Front Command known what was going on it would have had neither the time, nor the military assets in place to do anything about it. With the exception of small, scattered ‘holding forces’ south of Milwaukee and encamped at Madison and Janesville in Southern Wisconsin, and Rockford in northern Illinois — in total less than four thousand combat effectives — there had been nothing to stop the insurgents between Milwaukee and the Iowa-Minnesota state line two hundred miles to the west.
First Army, responsible for the whole Midwest was scrambling to concoct a drastically cut down version of April’s abandoned Operation Rectify which it hoped might ‘take the sting’ out of the enemy advance.
And buy time…
Bill Rosson was not holding his breath on that one.
Everything he had learned in the last few days told him that his enemy would ignore an attack on its former Chicago strongholds. The enemy had moved on; holding ‘places’ for the sake of it was not ‘his’ way of waging war. He was not fighting rational men; the people coming towards him were on a… crusade. The minds of his enemies were Medieval, pre-enlightenment. He was facing a holy war not an insurrection.
April’s aborted offensive — Operation Rectify — had envisage a general assault along the ‘peace line’ penetrating rebel strong points, sowing confusion in the ranks as the Marines came ashore at Waukegan, North Chicago and Evanston. By D+7 the ring would have been closing on the rebels; whom it was assumed would surrender or be comprehensively encircled and contained; allowing starvation and disease to eventually put the whole ‘Chicago problem’ to bed without the costly necessity of having to take back the ruined city street by street.
That plan had been drawn up by Major General Colin Powell Dempsey, the Adjutant General of the National Guard of the West Coast Confederacy; the man who had stamped out the Bellingham insurgency, pacified Seattle and systematically restored a semblance of law and order in the Cascades, the western Rockies and the Sierra Madre. Dempsey had been ready to go at the end of March; but men like Reynolds, Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago and Illinois Governor, Otto Kerner, had wanted to retain control, refused to give the military a free reign, and appealed over the heads of the Chiefs of Staff to the President.
The rest was history; the prelude to the present disaster.
Dempsey had been sacked, the military had been ordered to review ‘all the options’ so as to arrive at a solution which ‘reduced the hazard to non-combatants’, and troops earmarked for the Chicago Front had been siphoned off for peace keeping and civil order duties in the Deep South. Worse, ships and men previously detailed to strengthen the Great Lakes Bombardment and Marine Expeditionary Force had been redeployed to ‘show the flag’ in the Pacific when Carrier Division Seven — built around the USS Kitty Hawk, previously regarded as the ‘guard ship’ of Japan and the South China Sea — had been re-tasked to patrol the Indian ocean.
Governor Reynolds flinched as an explosion in the near distance rattled the windows of the State Capitol. As yet there had been no direct assault on the city; the enemy was content to lob random mortar rounds and occasional long range shells onto the Madison Isthmus. Closing the lines to refugees had dramatically cut the incidence of suicide bombings and ‘mad dog’ gun and knife attacks against the civilian population; and up until a couple of days ago as many as five or six snipers had been active. The Marines had killed three and driven the others underground but for the last thirty-six hours the area around the capitol had been in lockdown.
“Um,” the commander of the 32nd Infantry Division grunted. His temper was barely under control. “The reason I do not intend to attempt to re-open the northern ‘corridor’, Governor,” he explained with icy patience, “is that the military priority is to hold Madison. And that,” he added grimly, “is exactly what I will do… ”