The Air Force was going to try again tonight.
A radio crackled unnaturally loudly in the darkness behind Schwarzkopf.
“ONE MINUTE!” A man shouted.
Last night the enemy had attempted to interdict the air drop runs by laying down a curtain of fire across the eastern end of Lake Monona. Tonight the Redoubt’s M2s and the mortar sections along the Yahara River line at the north western end of the Isthmus had been tasked to lay down ‘a storm’ of suppressing fire.
Schwarzkopf lowered his glasses, pictured the grid of streets around the Capitol. To the south west was the city’s industrial and commercial heart, to the north west low rises, housing blocks either side of the three main roads feeding into the grid of streets from the east; East Gotham, East Washington — Highway 151 — and Williamson Streets. Few of the streets were blocked with rubble as yet and the city retained many of its older open spaces.
Open spaces…
Unrestricted fields of fire…
Insurgents attempting to come across Lake Mendota or Lake Monona on small boats and makeshift rafts were sitting ducks for the trip wire pickets stationed along each shore. The western flank of the Isthmus was the more vulnerable, the lines over-extended in places and there was no natural water barrier like the Yahara River. The enemy seemed weaker in the west, more spread out but that would not last. Sooner or later it would dawn on whoever was in charge over there that if Madison held out it was going to be a thorn in the side of the rebellion. Once the insurgents ran into the barrier of the Mississippi it was suddenly going to become important to bring forward supplies and booty from the south and east and Madison lay across most of the key road links back to Milwaukee, Lake Michigan and down to Chicago.
Or so the theory went…
Schwarzkopf prided himself on being an avid scholar of military history.
Hannibal had lived off the lands of the Roman Republic for twenty years during the Second Punic War, fought several of the greatest battles in the old world including Cannae, without ever seriously troubling to threaten Rome itself. Rome had been not just a thorn in his rear during all those years but the nexus of economic and military power in the whole of Italy. Beleaguered, half-starved Madison was nothing in comparison but then, all things considered, whoever was leading the insurgency was probably no reincarnation of Hannibal, the greatest of all the Carthaginian generals either.
That somebody was leading the rebels — somebody or some guiding hand — was not in doubt. The enemy had systematically closed the noose around Madison after the first attempts to storm the city’s eastern defenses by force majeure. The enemy had learned from what had happened around Sun Prairie; now he was bypassing strong points, bringing up heavier weapons, cordoning off Madison. Elsewhere in Wisconsin columns were rushing towards the Mississippi, dispersed by day to negate the threat posed by the ever-present Skyraiders and National Guard F-86s and F-100s.
The military side of the insurgency was fast maturing.
Its game plan around Madison was one of infiltration, slow erosion and only occasionally suicidal frontal attacks. The women and children, the human shields had been expended, or perhaps, pragmatically employed in roles less profligate than as sacrificial lambs to the slaughter. Although Madison was surrounded by a guerrilla army equipped with tanks and artillery; regardless of the paraphernalia of modern weapons the insurgency retained a fundamentally barbaric soul, it was as if the greater part of the civil population of Wisconsin had been brainwashed, coerced or converted into participating in some dreadful medieval crusade.
“INCOMING!”
There was a low whistling sound and then mortar rounds were creeping down East Washington Street. Somewhere below Schwarzkopf’s feet a shell crashed into the Capitol. The enemy was learning about artillery by trial and error; that hit felt like a 90-millimetre armor piercing solid shot from the gun of an M-48, possibly at extreme range. Still, the beauty of artillery was that all you had to do was point and shoot; sooner or later you hit something that mattered.
Another shell buried itself in the facade of the Capitol.
“OPEN FIRE!” Schwarzkopf bellowed. “FIRE AT WILL!”
Chapter 36
The Wharton Forest was the largest remnant of the Pine Barrens which once spread across most of southern New Jersey. It lay on sandy, acidic, nutrient impoverished soils which had discouraged widespread clearances and cultivation of the area by successive waves of settlers. North of Hammerton and straggling across three counties — Burlington, Camden and Atlantic — less than forty miles from Philadelphia the western boundary of the one hundred and eighty square mile forest had been wilderness before the October War. In the intervening twenty months refugees, the dispossessed, the forgotten of society, and the disaffected and the ‘city-scared’ had formed dozens of encampments, communes, and small ‘cabin communities’ inside the Wharton Forest and the nearby woodlands, Lebanon and the Bass River Forest.
A stranger wandering in the forests of New Jersey might as easily stumble upon a dangerous biker hideout, a survivalist sect or a pacifist Christian communion camped out or in freshly built log cabins. There were fugitives, deserters, runaway children in the woods living feral, and many, many men and women who had sworn never to set foot in a big city again.
In summer the forest buzzed with insects, birdsong filled the branches and the close-packed pines regulated the heat of the day and the cool of the night. In the shade the hottest day was bearable, in the shelter of the woods the coldest night often balmy. In winter the unpaved roads and tracks turned to ice rinks, or muddy swamps.
The forest was the watershed of the Mullica River which drained the whole Pine Barrens into the Atlantic at Great Bay. The Mullica and the other streams in the forest had been fished out long ago, and few crops would grow in the unfriendly earth so practically everything required to sustain normal life had to be brought in from outside. Gangs from the forests roved the settlements on the Jersey side of the Delaware River, and roamed up and down the coast. Most of the inhabitants of the forest lived decent, working lives. Many communities sent workers into Philadelphia, Camden or Atlantic City to find work during the week, others depended on the charity of churches and civic welfare programs elsewhere in the New Jersey and the surrounding states. There was a FEMA office — several ugly prefabricated buildings and warehouses — in Shamong Township on the western edge of the forest, and now and then traders ventured further off the beaten track. By and large law enforcement kept out of the forest.
The forest was a world apart from Philadelphia, Camden and Atlantic City each within less than an hour’s drive from its heart.
Dwight Christie had parked his stolen beaten up Chrysler off Atsion Road — more a dusty, rutted single track dirt track than a road — as far into the trees as he could drive, made a cursory effort to hide the car from anybody who was not really looking for it, and had set off on foot for his destination late yesterday afternoon. He had wrapped himself in a blanket and stayed awake most of the night. He had a lifelong phobia of snakes and had not slept out at night since he was a kid. The forest was nothing like his Ma and Pa’s back yard; every noise shouted danger, the trees creaked and swayed, seemed to breathe softly even when at rest and the branches rustled endlessly…