The acrid taint of burning still hung in the atmosphere.
Dempsey looked at the Commandant of the Marine Corps.
“No, sir. I have not had that honour.” He and the Marine saluted, before shaking hands.
For Dempsey, who had retired from the ‘real’ Army several years ago and been a Colonel on the reserve list in command of the de-activated 307th Mobile Cavalry Regiment on the night of the October War, to be in the company of two honest to God American heroes, was actually a little daunting. Fifteen months ago he had been running his family’s lumber business; now he was attending a council of war in the basement of the Pentagon just days after an insurrection which had rocked the country to its foundations.
“LeMay says you lined up most of the scumbags you captured at Bellingham and machine-gunned them, Dempsey?” Shoup inquired brusquely, eyes narrowing a fraction.
“Yes, sir.” Dempsey was not about to start apologising for eradicating vermin.
“What did you learn from the prisoners you took back to Olympia for interrogation?”
“Nobody mentioned ‘Red Dawn’ or any of that baloney, sir,” the junior man replied respectfully. “The people at Bellingham weren’t political or religious they were just the scum of the earth.”
Johnny Johnson sighed.
The three officers were standing next to a situation table showing the current ‘state of play’ in the District of Columbia and the surrounding designated ‘Military District’. Areas of the capital city were still marked as ‘no go zones’ where the military was permitted to ‘fire at will’, many roads were still shut because of the activity of lone snipers or the suspected existence of improvised explosive devices or undetonated munitions, or booby traps. Less than two-thirds of the District of Columbia and approximately half-the surrounding ‘Military Zone’ were directly under the control of the Military Governor.
It was estimated that as many as a thousand suspected ‘insurgents’ were still at loose within the ‘Zone’.
Dempsey studied the table sidelong for a moment.
“The people in Bellingham were at war with several of the groups holed up in the foothills of the Cascades. Some of those groups appear to have stolen military vehicles from National Guard depots, or maybe from across the Canadian border. My information is that the Canadian authorities have big troubles with ‘hold out’ and ‘survivalist’ groups who tend to hideaway in the backwoods and mountains unless they need supplies. My assumption is that the groups holed up in the foothills of the Cascades east and north east of Seattle probably raid across the border into Canada most of the time. The pickings around Seattle and south most of the way to the Oregon state line won’t be good and these guys tend to avoid large military garrisons; which means they stay well away from Hanford.”
Colin Dempsey tried and failed to keep the exasperation out of his voice. The giant Hanford nuclear facility had a permanent post-war garrison of equivalent to three to four battalions of mechanized infantry supported by two companies of Air Mobile cavalry with about thirty helicopters, Hueys mostly. If a small part of that force had been made available to him he could have snuffed out the obscenity of the Bellingham ‘occupation’ months ago.
The Acting Chief of Staff of the US Army grunted noncommittally as if he was reading his subordinate’s mind.
“I think things will be different in the weeks and months to come, General Dempsey,” he murmured thoughtfully. “Today we asked you to join us in our discussion as to how best to ‘wrap up’ out current local difficulties in the DC area. However, it is much on our minds how we should proceed to resolve the ongoing ‘issues’ elsewhere in the Union.”
Dempsey met the level gaze of the fifty-one year old North Dakotan. Johnson had been with the 57th Infantry at Fort McKinley in the Philippines in 1941, falling into the hands of the Japanese after the fall of Bataan in April 1942. He had survived the infamous ‘Bataan Death March’ and over two years bestial imprisonment at Camp O’Connell and at Bilibid Prison, survived the sinking of the Oryoku Maru by American aircraft in December 1944 while being transferred out of the Philippines and another nine months of inhuman captivity in the Japanese home islands before being liberated on 7th September 1945. As if the accolade ‘hero of the Bataan death March’ was not enough, Johnson had commanded the 3rd Battalion of the 8th Cavalry in the Defense of the perimeter at Pusan in Korea five years later.
At the time of the October War Johnson had been Chief of Staff of NATO’s Central Army Group in Germany. But for an unresolved mechanical problem with one engine of the C-130 Hercules aircraft detailed to fly him back to his headquarters at Mannheim-Seckenheim following an emergency conference in Northern Italy, his aircraft would have landed at about the same moment Mannheim was bracketed by a salvo of three one megaton warheads.
The best generals were lucky generals.
“The FBI thinks the rebellion was whipped up by communists, deserters and the Mormons,” Johnson observed laconically.
General Shoup guffawed contemptuously.
“A proportion of the rebels we captured claim some kind of quasi-religious motivations,” he conceded. “Most of the bastards talk about having lost ‘people in the war’. There seem to be a smattering of recently discharged military people but most of those guys were probably malcontents during their military service. The worrying aspect of this is that we don’t seem to be capturing any of the organisers, the main movers in this thing. Prisoners talk about their ‘officers’ and ‘leaders’ and ‘preachers’ but we don’t actually have any of these people in our hands.”
“At Bellingham,” Colin Dempsey put in, “and one or two places we had to clear first to move our armour up the road from Seattle, the men running the show tried to hide in the ranks. That’s probably happened here, only on a much bigger scale, sir.”
“That’s what we figured,” Shoup grunted.
“I had to authorized exceptional measures to identify the leaders,” Dempsey went on. “We have to accept that we are at war with these people.”
Shoup sucked his teeth.
“Now that the present emergency is over the President has mandated that the constitutional rights of suspected rebels and prisoners in our hands be respected,” he declared disgustedly.
“With respect, sirs,” Dempsey observed, “the emergency is not over. I understood we had snipers on rooftops, rioting and looting in certain parts of DC and large areas of the city were effectively lawless no go zones?”
The Acting Chief of Staff of the US Army put a stop to the discussion.
“The President has spoken on this matter.”
Dempsey, the oldest man in the room — separated by a matter months from the Commandant of the Marine Corps but by over nine years from the US Army Chief of Staff — very nearly deferred to the two, vastly more senior officers.
However, in the forty-eight hours he had been in the nation’s half-wrecked, still smouldering battlefield capital he had seen and heard things that made his flesh creep. The Navy had damned nearly lost control of its Polaris boats! The Navy had lost control of elements of the Atlantic Fleet for Chrissake! The idiots had sunk one of their own nuclear hunter killers! And as for the fucking Air Force trying to start a war in the Mediterranean! The fact that there had been an attempted coup d’état — fortunately not very well executed, that was the only reason they were actually having this ‘conference’ rather than any exceptional feat of arms by the great American military — and nobody had seen it coming was as criminal as it was incredible!