Miranda had never heard of either Tomah or Dubuque but knew that Gregory had atlases in his bookshelves. Her brother had started to build himself a rough and ready ‘study’ at one end of the main deck house.
As one the two women abandoned Walter Cronkite and headed forward from the lounge. Soon they were searching intently through the pages of a small, much battered and dog-eared former school text book about the geography of the states east of Lake Michigan.
“There’s Tomah,” Miranda exclaimed. She roughly approximated distances. That’s another eighty miles northwest of Madison. Dubuque?”
“Iowa,” Darlene said helpfully.
The women found Dubuque on the western — Iowan — bank of the Mississippi River, which marked the border between Iowa and Wisconsin, some hundred miles southwest of Madison.
The sisters-in-law stared at the small maps.
“They say the ‘rebels’ are bad people,” Darlene offered hesitantly. They’re doing all the things they say they did in Washington, except worse. They treat women bad, real bad… ”
Miranda put her arm around the shorter woman’s shoulders.
Unlike her Darlene knew exactly what it was like to be treated ‘real bad’.
“That will never happen here in California,” she said, hoping she sounded confident. “Besides,” she added, brightening, “if it did Greg would hoist the sails and take you off to a desert island, or something!”
Darlene giggled.
“Naw,” she sighed fondly, “we’d only run into a rock.”
Both women snickered like naughty schoolgirls.
The rebellion had spread two hundred miles from Chicago across a great quadrant of two, perhaps three states. What sort of battle was going on at Madison tens of miles behind the storm front of advancing ‘insurgents’?
What was the Army doing about all this?
They heard footsteps on the deck.
Gregory stood in the door. The grin on his face faded.
“We were listening to Walter Cronkite on CBS Evening News,” Miranda explained.
“He was talking to this General out in Joliet and there was a bang and then he wasn’t talking to him anymore,” Darlene informed her husband stepping into his arms and exchanging the sort of kisses that only newlyweds usually swap.
Miranda did not think the happy couple were going to stop being newlyweds any time soon.
“They’re talking about rebels heading for the Mississippi at Dubuque, Iowa,” Miranda re-iterated for her brother’s benefit, “and way past Madison. It sounds like Madison is going to be the Wisconsin Alamo.”
She had tried to say this lightly, as if she was being tongue-in-cheek; the only problem was that immediately the words had escaped her lips she realized that if what she had just alluded to was even half-true then a part of her country had already descended into a state of full scale civil war.
Chapter 35
The camp fires of the horde besieging Madison flickered and glowed evilly in the night. The summer days were broiling hot, or sultry with short, violent thundery squalls, at night the skies cleared and towards dawn the temperatures plummeted. In the distance fires periodically flared and flashed as freezing rebels splashed kerosene on damp logs. It was an eerie, old world sort of scene; the fires of a barbarian army burned in the night encircling the city, while the defenders and thousands of terrified civilians awaited the next assault at first light, and the sack and pillage that would surely follow.
It had been a slow, excruciatingly painful climb up to the observation gallery beneath the dome of the Capitol Building but one that Major Norman Schwarzkopf had had to make. The wound to his left thigh was a through and through which had missed bone and artery; he might be classified as ‘walking wounded’ but that did not make him any less capable of leading men in battle. Besides, there were other men — many other men — more deserving of a hospital bed than him.
‘If you can get yourself up to the machine gun platoon at the top of the Capitol,’ his former Battalion Commander, now the de facto Commander-in-Chief of all US forces inside the ‘Madison pocket’, Lieutenant Colonel Harvey Grabowski had said once he got used to the idea that Schwarzkopf was not going to say no for an answer, ‘you can take over the Redoubt Company.’
Stumping up the steps to the upper gallery of the State Capitol Schwarzkopf had been passed by relays of men carting boxes of 50-caliber ammunition. In the middle distance a mortar round went off. The enemy had brought up tanks and 105-millimetre howitzers in the last couple of days; if the rebels ever figured out how to shoot straight the 90-millimeter rifles of the M-48s and the howitzers would be a real problem.
Not that the defenders of Madison did not already have enough problems already. There were possible as many as three thousand people sheltering in the basements and inner recesses of the Capitol Building; old, young, infirm, mothers with babies and there was no food or clean water. There was a casualty clearing station in the west wing; but medical suppliers of every description were running low.
Every morning the rebels probed the perimeter, not as before in insane, berserker waves, now they came in countless marauding bands, shooting and moving, probing for weak spots along the increasingly sparsely defended trenches and barricades. The enemy was wearing down the defenders; the garrison of Madison was dying a death by a thousand cuts.
Everybody in Madison understood the end game.
That was why the Capitol Building had become the heart of the last redoubt. Sooner or later the lines would break and the rebels would pour into the heart of the city. With Lake Mendota to the north and Lake Monona to the south protecting its two long flanks and readily defensible urban street lines to the east and west the Madison Isthmus would be a tough nut to crack. Engineers were mining and booby-trapping the ground behind the outer perimeter trenches, and each night more heavy equipment and men bled back into the Isthmus to man the ever more convoluted defense works at its extremities. The 32nd could not hold the whole city of Madison but it could hold the Isthmus forever.
Or if not forever, or at least as long as the ammunition lasted.
Schwarzkopf swung his field glasses to the east where the camp fires flickered throwing a faint orange glow into the darkness. How many fires were there? Hundreds? Thousands? Was this what it was like inside Magdeburg in the weeks and months before its sack in May 1631 by the forces of the Holy Roman Empire and the Catholic League?
His men already talked about ‘the Alamo’ but that was not an army out there in the night. Whoever led that great ravening horde was not Antonio López de Santa Anna desperately trying to forestall the manifest destiny of Mexico — New Spain’s — acquisitive northern neighbor.
Anyway, the word was that unlike the Alamo, First Army was not about to let Madison fall. There were plans to intensify the airborne re-supply of the garrison, and new men, ammunition, medical supplies and food would be dropped into the Isthmus redoubt.
Besides, militarily this was nothing like the Alamo; this was more like Bastogne had been in the Ardennes in December 1944, and while the Union held it the Midwest was not lost.
Schwarzkopf turned and eyed the spotlights, filtered red and blue on the ground a quarter of a mile west of the Capitol Building, straining his ears to catch the first thrum of engines.
The Air Force was using hurriedly modified C-130 Hercules four-engine transports, pushing huge pallets with giant parachutes straight down the loading ramps of the aircraft as they hurtled low over the city. Last night the cargo had been replacement barrels for the M2 50-caliber machine guns — if the M2 barrels were over-used they got so hot they drooped, deformed — 105-millimetre howitzer fragmentation reloads and mortar rounds. A further consignment of medical supplies and emergency ration packs had mostly gone down in Lake Mendota.