First Citizen (40 page)

Chapter 19

Granville James Corbin: Civil War

My decision to bomb those three cities in Coahuila raised a public outcry that gave Gordon Pollock the leverage he needed to raise his armies.

As I had feared, the politicians and the video people called me “madman,” “public enemy,” and a dozen other clichés of contempt. They demanded that Pollock personally unite the State militias and march into Texas and California to clean up “that scum.” They screamed for “justice.” They wept for the “poor peasants of Zaragoza.” They honored Poniatowski as another Eisenhower, but one cut off in his prime. The hysterical bullcrap clogged the satellite channels for days.

Pollock could have cut through that—and saved himself four years of bloody war—if he had followed my example and called for a strategic strike on Houston. Just one bomb, a ten-thousandth part of the FSF arsenal, would have finished me right there. He might have gotten away with it, too. But Gordon cared more for his image than for strategic necessities. And the direct approach was never his style, anyway.

Perhaps he was smarter than I give him credit. In the public reaction to my strike, there was a calculated measure of racial prejudice. To everyone with the entré or wit to pick up a microphone or stand in front of a camera, the civilians I had sacrificed were “and-of-course Mexicans.” They were “innumerable peasants,” uncounted because they weren’t worth counting. They were just a bloody rag to wave at me.

I am indeed a bad man. I will probably go to Hell. But my errors do not make a saint out of anyone who mouths that brand of biased crap.

Pollock must have known this in his guts. If he were to use nuclear weapons on Texas, on “home soil,” on—shall we say it?—
white
people, he would never recover. His closest allies in Congress would frog-march him to the nearest wall. His own Federal marshals would draw their own sidearms to shoot him.

So he had to whip me the old-fashioned way, the messy way, the way of Hannibal, Caesar, and von Clausewitz. He had to march down and get me. Which meant that he would make mistakes. And he could lose.

Pollock had no training for this. He had no Federal military men with active experience whose judgment he could trust. And he dared not turn the job over to any general in the State militias. Besides which, the best of them were running the G.V. forces in Mexico, and I had already shown how I could deal with
that
threat. The tenuous political hold Congress had on the country demanded that he, Gordon Pollock, Speaker of the House
pro tem,
personally whip the rebel babykiller Corbin.

So he did what every politician and modern manager does when sailing into unknown and possibly dangerous waters: He made a great show of his preparations. He sent the States’ generals off to the hastily re-established War College outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to learn “unified military tactics and communications.” He called in consultants. He ordered a feasibility study. He ran the computers through every possibility and approach to the problem while he took various militia units on joint maneuvers through Lancaster and York counties. In a word, he delayed.

Maybe he hoped I would get bored and give myself up. Or die of some rare disease.

Well, I felt fine. I wasn’t bored. My staff and I were well along with integrating the militias of the TENMAC and the California 64th under my command. And I had no need of feasibility studies: When the alternatives are win or die, you don’t waste time exploring the possibilities.

Which is not to say that I didn’t plan and prepare.

When I was in Japan, studying karate with Takusan Matsu, I learned to play
go
, the game of black and white stones on a board of intersecting lines. It’s the best way to learn strategy and tactics without taking whole armies on maneuvers or getting people killed as an amateur general in a for-real war.

One of the principles of the game is that position is power. A blocking move is better than a pitched battle. A trap, laid out for all to see, both warns the enemy off your territory and saves stones—which is to say, lives. And a commander who wastes lives on either side has lost control.

With a neophyte like Pollock, the easiest trap would be to push him before he was ready. While he prepared his mind and his men for an assault on Houston, I could march out and force the issue on ground he had not chosen or studied for. Better, I could pick the ground myself. As our armies approached, I could speed up or slow down my airmobile units so that the clash came where I wanted it.

I chose Tennessee, the eastern end, around Knoxville. It was on a direct line of march. It was the psychological “danger distance” for a man who considered the East his home. And it was deep in Appalachian river valleys that ran northeast-southwest: They would funnel our armies together, forcing the battle in a way that might spook a new general like Pollock. I wanted him nervous.

Billy Birdsong and I went over the maps and he had a few suggestions. “Lot of lakes in those valleys, Gran. Wet ground. You might have to fly by Pollock’s forces just to avoid a dunking.”

“So much the better,” I said.

“You might get a more decisive victory by holding back. Take him on in the north of Alabama, say.”

“Yes, but then we’d have our whole left flank closed by Lakes Wheeler and Guntersville on the Tennessee River, our right barred by that dribble of lakes on the Coosa River.”

“All right, maybe there is no dry ground. But in those valleys around Knoxville, your flanks will also be blocked.”

“Our flanks, Billy. We’re in this together, right?” Lately, since leaving Yucatan, the colonel had occasionally needed his spine stiffened.

“Yes,
ours.
Now, maybe
we
could find ground a little more open? Somewhere we can get a pincers or an encirclement going?”

“Look at the maps. Tell me where. We’re in hill valleys or wet lowlands from Arkansas all the way to Baltimore. Unless you want to feint west into Iowa or Nebraska …?”

“Nobody would follow us, of course.”

“No. Then we’ll fight where we fight. At Knoxville.”

Birdsong made a shrug, his face closed off. “Your game, General.”

At two minutes after sunrise on Sunday, August 12, 2018, we assembled the fire teams beside their Stompers, a field full of ships with their nacelles canted for takeoff, posed for the video crews. We had waited for a little light in the sky to accommodate the cameras. It was good planning to take off on Sunday because news is usually slow on the weekends and we could be sure of the first pickup Monday morning.

I personally shook hands with the men and women on the five nearest flights, again for the video crews, before climbing into my own machine with immediate staff. Birdsong had arranged landing zones and refueling points for the 800-mile journey, especially the critical one, just before we were calculated to meet the Federal armies around Knoxville.

We had allowed two days for the advance. That was enough time for Pollock to learn of us, mobilize his forces in an indecent hurry, and get in the air and moving toward us. All worked out by computer.

A jumbo wing of 1,500 Stompers took off from Houston. A thousand of them were loaded with the full complement of troops; that is, a fire team of nine plus one noncom or officer. The other 500 ships carried either air-to-air or ground suppression weapons.

That gave us a strike force of 10,000 men and women. By modern standards it wasn’t very large—well, even by antique standards. In Caesar’s armies, we would have filled about two legions. In Genghis Khan’s, we would have been a single horse column. But we were the biggest single armed force afield in our time in our country. That would be big enough. We hoped.

Leading reconnaissance for this army was a wing of the 83rd Texas Air. They were pushing fast jets, the new Seimens-Cessna F-33 Gyro Bat, out in front with two fighter groups.

Would it have been better if we’d had access to the satellite observer networks? Of course, but they were still under FSF control. And did it hurt us that Pollock thereby did have access? Not really, because we wanted him to watch our approach and be alarmed.

We might have sent up a high-altitude radar platform, something like the old AWACS—but why give the Federals something big and slow to shoot at? Besides, the Gyro Bats saw almost as much as the satellite net and they were a lot closer and more maneuverable in case we wanted them to do anything about what they saw.

That turned out to be crucial in the Battle of Knoxville.

What everyone had missed—my computers, my strategists, me, and probably everyone on Pollock’s side, too—is that it had been seventy-five years since two modern western armies had met in battle. In that time, while our theories of war had been sharpened for a presumed final conflict with ICBMs, Trident submarines, XB-6 strategic bombers, and a tank invasion in Europe, our actual experiences had shaped our weapons and expectations toward a single, and much more limited, mode of warfare. Air mobility, tactical fighter-bombers, ground control techniques, communications, all had been developed to fight the kind of unequal little brushfire wars we had fought in Vietnam, Nicaragua, and Yucatan. That is, go in from the air, secure a landing zone, spread out, and capture or control a radius against native guerrilla forces which were using technologies anywhere from twenty to two thousand years out of date.

This was a mentality suited to old Rome: invade the barbarians’ territory and suppress their disorganized hordes with superior weapons and tactics. Then hold your new borders against the next set of unwashed crazies over the ridgeline, while exacting tribute and exploiting tribal intrigues among the newly conquered peoples.

But now, two of these modern air cavalry charges were rushing toward each other. And what were we going to do? Land, deploy, and begin shooting up the citizens of Knoxville and surrounding suburbs?

Tumbling through the lower stratosphere in their erratic, radar-evading flight, our Gyro Bats made their first firm contact with Pollock’s army in West Virginia. He was twenty miles and two hours ahead of schedule. They estimated his force at 2,400 planes, about a third larger than ours. His force wasn’t all Stompers but mixed in a fair number of antique Apaches and A-l0s. Not quite as versatile as out little STMs, but the Apache had a lot of bite for a helicopter, and the A-10 was still good in a roughhouse. He also had a supply of fighter jets, the F-25, a sissified version of the temperamental X-29. The fighter plane’s everted wings were stiffer and the canard larger, which slowed its instability to the point that it might survive ESM scrambling of its fly-by-wire systems in combat.

With all this data in hand, I ordered our front to expand slightly and pick up the pace. We moved the refueling ahead by ninety minutes, which was a good thing, because it took longer than we had calculated. ETA was 8 p.m. Monday evening, twenty miles east of the city.

With the delay, we were just coming into visual contact with the enemy at 8:45, a good ten miles
west
of Knoxville. The Gyro Bats were mixing in at our altitude, about 9,000 feet, looping and diving through our front ranks like circus acrobats cartwheeling and handwalking through a marching band. Ahead, the Federal forces were spread across the width of two valleys, flying in three echelons vertically separated by a thousand feet. Behind them was the green-yellow sodium glow of the city.

I had hoped to have some sun still behind us. Instead we had dusk, only the sky’s red and purple shadings. It was probably better than nothing.

The opposing lines speeded up, shedding altitude, both diving for the same patch of … water. It was the surface of Lake Fort Loudoun. We had almost meshed with their lead elements when the same thought must have occurred to both Pollock and me: Why fight on the ground when he, the other guy, the hovering, descending, spiraling mass of planes, is so vulnerable in the air?

“Red Guns Leader, take them in the air, in the air!” I interrupted on the tac freqs, speaking English because our combined troops weren’t all drilled in Malay. Other orders went out as fast as I could push the radio’s frequency buttons: reverse the descent, climb for advantage, assault ships hang back, air suppression ships move to the forward center, Gyro Bats lock on and fire at will. It took me a minute and forty seconds to get all that out. Those on the listening end relied mostly on the sound of my voice for the authority to change the battle plan. Bad military etiquette, but it saved us the minutes that hacking through channels and response codes would have cost.

Our alternative wing of Stompers, deformed with rocket pods and cannon snouts, cut across from the right flank, bending their head-on intercept course into a strafing run across the Federals’ front line.

Maybe Pollock hadn’t thought to change tactics. And maybe the Federals, working other frequencies, hadn’t heard my orders in English and
en clair.
Their front line was still descending, into the darkening valley, with dark water below them. We could see by the wobble of their flight that the pilots were suddenly confused on finding themselves assaulting a pond. And that’s when Red Guns hit them.

A dozen Federal Stompers took rocket bursts and fell out of the sky. Half a dozen more put their nacelles over and went into controlled dives, hoping to make the shoreline.

“Get over them! Alpha, Bravo, move in! Mob ’em! Keep ’em low!” I was shouting into the radio, hoping to reach as many of our pilots as possible on the common frequency. Our own front line surged back, above the confusion near the lake’s surface. On my order, our pilots who were mixed into the fray put on their running lights, hoping to separate friendlies from bandits in the deepening dusk. I also ordered our lowest echelon of Stompers to pop the side hatches and spray the planes below them with rifle fire, even with mortars and flares, anything to keep up the pressure and confusion.

The Federal’s F-25s tried to rip up our formation, coming in from overhead. But they were too few, moving too fast in a straight line, with the wrong kind of munitions—laser-guided, not heat-seeking. They took out less than five percent of my top echelon.