Nate Danaher got into his staff car and rode across the parking mat the two miles to base ops.
JR Hays was standing there in his camos. Danaher saluted, and it was returned. It felt a little strange saluting JR, who was ten years younger than he was and had been a newly minted major when he served with him, but he did it proudly, with a grin.
“It went well, sir,” he said. “Total surprise. We even got into the message center before they notified the Pentagon, which bought us a few hours, anyway.” Of course, with cell phones, everyone in Bossier City and Shreveport knew the base had been taken.
They walked into base ops and headed for the planning room as Danaher reported. “The commanding general was very unhappy when we stormed into his office and captured him.”
“I’ll bet he was,” JR said with a smile.
They stood in front of a large wall-mounted map and the two career soldiers examined it with practiced eyes.
“As you suspected,” Nate Danaher said, “most of the people here don’t want to fight anybody, but we have enough volunteers with the right skills to make up a couple of crews.”
“Fine.”
The primary reason JR had wanted Barksdale was to prevent B-52s from bombing Texas cities or military bases. Taking as many of the bombers as possible to Texas was not in the cards since the infrastructure and equipment to maintain and fly the planes, not to mention their weapons, was here. It would take weeks, if not months, to move all that to a new base.
Then there was the fact that B-52s, and B-1s for that matter, were essentially defenseless against modern jet fighters equipped with air-to-air missiles with ranges up to a hundred miles. They were dinosaurs and could only be used when one had absolute air supremacy. The B-1s had managed strikes yesterday on railroad bridges in the Powder River Basin and today on Fort Polk and Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri because there was no air opposition. In the future, there would be. Meanwhile the U.S. Air Force would be getting its act together, and strikes against Barksdale, as long as it was occupied, and Dyess and the other air bases in Texas would soon be forthcoming.
JR Hays and Nate Danaher knew that their window of opportunity would close as soon as Soetoro’s brain trust could slam it shut, so they intended to use the bombers while they still could.
“We hammered Whiteman,” JR said, jabbing at the map with a finger, “but of course we didn’t get all the B-2s. Expect a few to visit tonight.”
“We have four F-22s,” Danaher said. JR had already seen them as his ride taxied in. “But no one to fly them. One of the pilots shot up the instrument panel of his before he got off the boarding ladder. The other three aren’t interested in joining Texas.”
JR merely nodded. A competent F-22 pilot — if he had one, which he didn’t — might have been able to find B-2s in the night sky, but F-16 pilots certainly couldn’t. “At least those are four F-22s that can’t be used against us,” he said to Danaher.
JR went back to the map. “We are loading an armored brigade at Fort Hood onto a train. Tanks and troopers and artillery. They’ll be rolling tonight. At first they said it couldn’t be done. Anyway, they’ll be coming through here tomorrow morning. By tomorrow night I want them here.” He pointed to a position between Barksdale and Fort Polk.
“A flight of four F-16s will be along in—” he consulted his watch—“about an hour. Since we don’t have aerial tankers, we’ll have to refuel them, top them off. As soon as we can get some B-52s ready, assuming they aren’t destroyed by B-2s from Whiteman, launch them and their fighter escorts at the bridges.”
JR jabbed at the map, which only showed rivers, towns, and interstates. “They know their targets. I want every highway and railroad bridge across the Mississippi from Baton Rouge to above Memphis in the river by morning. Elvin Gentry says it can be done, and he swore he could do it.”
“How many bridges is that?” Danaher asked.
“I don’t know, but Elvin does. All he has to do is drop at least a span of each one into the river. He says JDAMs will do it. Any intact bridges left standing tomorrow will be attacked with F-16s, or any B-52s or B-1s we have left.” JDAM was an acronym that stood for Joint Direct Attack Munition. It was a guidance package that screwed into a dumb — freefall — bomb, enabling it to make a direct hit on a preprogrammed target.
JR took a deep breath and let the air out slowly as he surveyed the map. His strategy was simple. He didn’t want to fight in Texas, but Louisiana would do fine. If Soetoro’s army could get across the Mississippi River to fight. An opposed crossing of a big river was the most difficult maneuver an army could undertake, the equivalent of an amphibious assault against a dug-in enemy.
They had discussed this objective before, but now that they were on the cusp of trying it, they looked at it again, discussed logistics, roads, what the enemy might do.
“I wish we could get more B-52 crews,” Nate Danaher said, a tad wistfully JR thought.
“If you think we have problems getting people to fight, Soetoro’s forces have them worse,” JR assured him. “I suspect the U.S. Army and Air Force are on the verge of falling apart, and will unless Soetoro starts putting people against a wall and shooting them. Still, mutiny and mass desertions will certainly slow them down. Our edge is that our people are fighting for something, for a free and independent Republic of Texas. Soetoro is fighting to become an absolute dictator, and the people in uniform aren’t stupid. They’ll figure out the difference, if they don’t know it already.”
“You put a lot of faith in average, run-of-the mill people,” Danaher murmured.
“Average, run-of-the-mill people won their independence from Great Britain,” JR shot back, “and have fought in every war this country ever had. They were at Valley Forge and the Alamo, at Shiloh, Gettysburg, and the Wilderness. Not to mention Belleau Wood, Normandy, Iwo Jima, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. You and I spent our military careers leading them. They’ll fight for freedom, all right, to the last drop of blood. Barry Soetoro is on the wrong damned side.”
TWENTY-TWO
With the power out again in suburban Maryland on Friday morning, Lincoln B. Greenwood was a changed man. His adventures the previous day in the supermarket had shaken him to the core. To be in the midst of a mob of people savagely fighting for basic necessities — and fighting just as hard as anyone else — had given him a glimpse of the monster in all of us.
Eat or starve. Move or die. Kill or be killed.
Those monsters were waiting out there in the darkness now. Evil people, unrestrained by the bonds of civilization or religion. People willing to do anything to survive.
“We gotta get outta here,” he said to his wife, Anne.
“Where will we go?” she asked reasonably as she placed candles around the house for the coming evening.
He gestured vaguely. He hadn’t the foggiest idea, but here there was chaos, so instinct told him to leave. To run. To escape.
“What about Suzanne and her family?”
The daughter, the son-in-law, and the baby; Lincoln B. Greenwood hadn’t thought about them all morning. He glanced guiltily at the box of Similac powder and the baby food jars still resting where he had put them on the kitchen counter.
“She married that moron; they are going to have to take care of themselves.”
His wife glowered at him, but Lincoln didn’t notice. He walked around the living room looking out the windows at the darkness. He could see faint light in a neighbor’s window across the cul-de-sac. Candles, he figured. The other houses on the cul-de-sac appeared dark. Maybe the neighbors had already left. Maybe that was the smart thing to do. Get in the car and go. Somewhere. Escape.