“But with the ports of Mobile, Gulfport, and San Diego fully functioning,” Elizabeth Sobo read from her briefing book, “they’re landing over four hundred thousand troops per day. They’ve landed seven million men in the South, one million on the West Coast, and a half million in Hawaii. And from estimates of troop strength in Cuba and the Canary Islands staging areas, and the number of transports our submarines have spotted in the central Pacific or rounding the Horn of Africa, they can sustain that landing rate for some time to come.”
“But not forever,” Cotler objected. “That’s where our fixed defenses affect the equation. The ratio of our KIAs to the Chinese is one-to-fifteen overall, but at the Savannah and Santee Rivers it was over one-to-fifty. And from what Dr. Leffler reports, the Chinese domestic political will to sustain those casualties will break long before their theoretical military limit is reached.”
“Is that your plan?” Sobo asked. “For Chinese domestic political dissatisfaction after ten years of war to grow so great that they just give up? If that’s your plan, General Cotler, you’d better inform the president, because it seemed to me that we have all along been talking about winning this thing militarily, not politically!”
Cotler was not in a good mood. He was the senior general in the United States armed forces being called to task by a former trial lawyer turned Congresswoman. But he knew his place in the democratic system. Or does he? Bill wondered as he saw the man’s jaw grind. “Madam Vice President,” Cotler said, pausing to wring the animosity from his tone, “to kill one million Chinese soldiers in mobile, open-country warfare, we would sustain losses something on the order of one-to-five, one-to-four, or one-to-three. That’s assuming we can give ground and fight defensively!” His ire was bubbling over again, and he took a deep breath. “Instead of 67,000 dead and 192,000 wounded, we’d have lost two or three hundred thousand dead, three times that number wounded, and half our stocks of armored fighting vehicles. And we’d be in exactly the same positions we find ourselves in today. But by forcing the Chinese to breach those defensive lines through Atlanta and along the Savannah and Santee Rivers, we’ve made the best use of the terrain and of the current state of military technology.”
“And if making the best use of terrain and current military technology isn’t enough?” Elizabeth asked.
“Then we lose,” Cotler answered with finality.
A chill descended on the room that left Bill Baker fighting quivers. He steadied his voice before he opened his mouth to speak. “But just like the Chinese have a finite number of troops they’re willing to expend, we have a finite amount of territory that we can trade. Mile by mile, they’re seizing our land, our resources and our industrial base. About five percent of our population — thirteen million people — got trapped in traffic jams and are now in Chinese hands. Some of those traffic jams, I might remind you, were caused by American MPs blocking roads so that our combat troops could escape the Chinese pincers.” But Bill didn’t need to tell Cotler. The scenes of fleeing civilians pleading to be let through road blocks had been replayed repeatedly on news networks. Bill yielded the floor to the general to respond in whatever way he chose.
Cotler heaved a deep sigh, looked around him at army staffers, then spoke with hands lying on the table clasped as if in prayer. “Mr. President, to withstand and decisively defeat a frontal assault by the entire Chinese army, we would first have to attrit them substantially, extend their supply lines from the Gulf Coast, and found our defenses on an impregnable line. That line would consist at a minimum of three heavily engineered defensive belts several miles in depth, each supported by preregistered, massed artillery. They would be linked by interconnected communications trenches running from line to line for rapid, covered reinforcement, resupply, and redeployment. There would be lateral defenses prepared along the natural terrain to channel Chinese penetration into killing fields as they advanced from the first line to the second, and the second to the third. The cost in materials and months of labor — the engineering, the concrete, the steel, and the millions of tons of earth to be moved — would require a commitment of resources greater than that ever expended by this nation or any other. And more than that, Mr. President, it would require the commitment — body and soul — to hold that line of every man and woman from the lowliest private to the commander in chief.”
Cotler again looked around the table, but this time at the senior officers from the navy, air force, and marines. “It is the recommendation of the Joint Chiefs, Mr. President — with one exception — that we build that line. That we man it. And that we hold it no matter what the cost.”
There were no challenges from the vice president. It was the president’s turn to speak. “Which one of you disagrees?” Baker asked the senior officers.
“I do,” air force General Latham replied.
“And how do you propose to win this war?” Baker asked.
“By the annihilation of Chinese forces with nuclear weapons,” Latham answered unflinchingly.
Baker nodded and forced himself to revisit the option he rejected nearly every night as he lay in bed with a soundly sleeping Clarissa. He had seen so many maps and computer simulations of the nuclear campaign that it was easy to play the Wagnerian drama out in fast forward. Red pock marks along the coastline of the United States proliferated within weeks to number in the tens of thousands. The plague dug ever deeper inland as missile defenses were eroded away by nuclear fire. In the end, two or three months into Armageddon, “America” consisted of little more than a federal government redoubt — currently under construction in Omaha, Nebraska — protected by her remaining few thousand surface-to-air missiles. Baker imagined rising to the surface of that bastion to view the nighttime sky from some medieval turret or battlement. In his mind, the horizon would glow red from a hundred artificial dawns. The ring of fire from nuclear-tipped defensive missiles and nuclear-tipped attackers would contract ever nearer by the hour until “America” finally ceased to exist.
The president turned back to Cotler and asked, “Where do we build that defensive line?”
Cotler nodded at a technician, who put a map on the wall screen. “Even with maximum effort, it’ll take us two or three months to build,” he said. Baker was focused on the triple strand of thin blue lines that ran up the Potomac and Occoquan Rivers through the Civil War battlefields of Manassas. They looped around Dulles Airport before again tracking the Potomac along the Maryland-Virginia border west from Whites Ferry.
“Can we hold the Chinese south of Washington for three months?” Baker asked.
Cotler could only shrug.
“Let’s bring III Corps back to the east,” Baker proposed.
“But their stores just arrived in Southern California,” Secretary Moore pointed out. “The 1st Cav and 1st Armored are two days away from step-off on an offensive designed to pin the Chinese on the coast.”
“Bring ’em back,” Bill ordered. “I and II Corps will just have to hold. If they need help, take it from X Corps farther up the coast.”
Clarissa lay in Baker’s bed, watching the press conference on TV and eating popcorn.
“As I said,” Baker replied to a reporter’s question, “the army’s plans for fighting this war from fixed defensive positions are undergoing a thorough, bottoms-up review. I would expect that we will soon shift to a battle plan that places greater emphasis on our forces’ superior mobility.”