Christian Nation (37 page)
The official history of what else happened during the balance of that summer and autumn is, unfortunately, mostly true. Sanjay was correct: Jordan tackled one of the big states next. California hosted thirty-seven military bases, and the majority of active-duty personnel on those bases were conservative Christians from the old red states. He calculated that they would follow orders, and he was correct. Although Democrats had a substantial lead over Republicans in voter registration statewide, the inland areas of the north, the Central Valley, and Southern California outside Los Angeles all were heavily conservative and would not require a substantial dedication of resources to secure. The difficulty for Jordan was the cities.
The “liberation” of California, as it is now called, took only a week and signaled a tougher approach by the administration. It started when the state Capitol building and main state office buildings in Sacramento were obliterated in nighttime bombing runs, which not only effectively disabled the opposition administration but terrified the half million people of the city, who largely remained inside as Army units secured the city and captured the governor and nearly all opposition members of the legislature. The large California National Guard was already split, with some units remaining loyal to the governor and others accepting the call to federal service. With the governor and state-level command structure removed, even loyal commanders had difficulty coordinating their actions, and the California Guard failed to mount an effective defense anyplace in the state.
What followed the next day in San Francisco shocked the nation. Marines landed at San Francisco International Airport and quickly established a perimeter across the peninsula from the airport to Pacifica. The Golden Gate and Bay Bridges were closed. As a result, there was no way on or off the peninsula. That night, at 2:00 a.m., a single air force plane dropped a dozen MK-77 incendiary bombs on the Castro. In the resulting conflagration, the historic neighborhood burned to the ground within an hour. Given the time of night, we estimated that about twelve thousand people, mostly gay men, died in their beds. More people were murdered that night in San Francisco than were killed in the attacks of 9/11 and 7/22 combined.
This single act had profound repercussions. The people of San Francisco, horrified and feeling trapped and vulnerable, acquiesced to the inevitable. F3 and other evangelical leaders, freed from even the minimum degree of restraint that had previously governed their remarks about homosexuals, celebrated the attack as an act of divine justice. The rest of the world reeled in disbelief as a United States senator justified the incineration by the United States of twelve thousand of its citizens as an act of “sanitation.” Others referred to it as a “cleansing fire” unleashed by God.
The bombing of the Castro was the act that fully and finally turned this country into a pariah in the eyes of the world. Many nations recalled their ambassadors in protest. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and a dozen other countries offered refugee status to any homosexual or transgender American. Few gays outside New York risked remaining in the country. Many traveled to Vermont, and then fled north on foot and by car across the open border between Vermont and Canada. The Canadian people were particularly generous in welcoming these refugees into their homes and giving them support, medical care, and shelter pending relocation to the country of their choice. In one of TW’s last acts, Sanjay issued a report estimating that 4 percent of the US population had accepted refugee status in various countries before the borders were closed.
I
WILL NOT
recount the many Holy War battles that followed, most of which are now studied by schoolchildren as highlights of modern American history. Jordan and the military were methodical, carefully consolidating their position in each state or region before proceeding to the next. Resistance to troops on the ground was fierce, with many thousands of Sec militiamen and -women dying as they bravely attacked tanks and armored personnel carriers with bulldozers, trucks, and buses. But federal air power proved irresistible.
After Hawaii, Minnesota, and Illinois fell, there was a hiatus before the government attempted to take the Northeast. It became increasingly difficult to obtain reliable news from the West. We knew that in San Francisco and Los Angeles, as much as 40 percent of the adult population participated in guerrilla-style attacks on the centers and symbols of federal power. Sympathetic nations and citizens around the world offered to re-arm the resistance, but federal control of sea and air was such that very few weapons found their way into the occupied cities. When weapons and ammunition were exhausted, the guerrilla attacks died off. Tens of thousands of citizens in California alone were killed in violent confrontation with the Joshua Brigades sent to maintain order in the principal cities.
By mid-autumn, the feds took Boston from the water and began an overland march to the north and south, slowly securing Vermont and Maine, and then Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut. By October, they drove north through Philadelphia, pausing along the Raritan River in New Brunswick. Most people thought the Holy War was nearly over.
10. When thou comest nigh unto a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace unto it.
11. And it shall be, if it make thee answer of peace, and open unto thee, then it shall be, that all the people that is found therein shall be tributaries unto thee, and they shall serve thee.
12. And if it will make no peace with thee, but will make war against thee, then thou shalt besiege it.
—Deuteronomy 20
W
E ALWAYS BELIEVED
THAT
, one way or another, the Sec resistance in America would make its last stand on the island of Manhattan. But eighteen months before, working late in the office on the interposition strategy, I was genuinely startled when the governor pulled me aside and asked me a strange question.
“Greg,” he said, “you studied history. What do you know about the Siege of Leningrad during World War II?”
I was silent for more than a few moments, struggling to remember something interesting or useful. In a war filled with so many dark moments and impossible horrors, I knew that the Siege of Leningrad was one of the worst.
“All I know, sir, is that there was terrible suffering, including mass starvation. And also, of course, heroism. Do you know the famous story about the seed guy?”
“Seed guy? Nope.”
“Before the war,” I explained, “a renowned Russian botanist had made discoveries that revolutionized agriculture and the ability of Russia to feed its people. He was a hero to all of Russia. I can’t remember his name. But, there in Leningrad, he had amassed the largest collection of seeds in the world. The collection was carefully protected during the siege, as they believed that it was the key to avoiding starvation once the war was over. During the siege his staff died of starvation one by one. Finally, the last scientist sat in the laboratory surrounded by these seeds—all edible. All he needed to do to survive was to start eating the seeds. He didn’t. He starved to death rather than eat a single one. Can you imagine? Sitting surrounded by food and having the willpower to starve. Funny, it’s the only specific thing I remember about the Siege of Leningrad. Sieges, I think, are all about food.”
The governor then asked me to undertake some research—discreetly—about the history and conduct of sieges. He wanted to know what we might expect should the Holies decide to blockade New York, and what we could do to prepare.
I turned first to the Bible and was soon gripped by the notion that a siege of Manhattan might be too tempting for the Holies—obsessed as they were with the Old Testament—to resist. Siege was one of the main punishments that the Hebrew god Yahweh would use against His people as punishment for their disobedience; and disobedience, in evangelical eyes, was the main characteristic of our city. I soon discovered that the Old Testament was filled with examples of siege and contained detailed instructions about how to conduct them and how to defend against them.
We believed that Jordan and the feds would understand that an outright assault on Manhattan would come at a very high cost to the nation. The high-rise nature of the island and the extraordinary density of building would make conventional attack strategies difficult. And then there was the symbolic and political aspect. Would even the most ardent fundamentalist believe that the American people would tolerate the US government
itself
reducing the new World Trade Center building or other New York landmarks to rubble? We also hoped that the feds would realize that the United States was simply too dependent on New York—financially, economically, and culturally—to destroy it. And so, even without the biblical mandate, a siege seemed to us to be the preferred military strategy: surround Manhattan, blockade all goods and travel on and off the island, and wait. Starve the decadent city folks into submission. And if submission never comes, then a conventional amphibious assault, to subdue the city without destroying it, would be far easier against a weakened population. The Bible, in this case, really did have all the answers.
Within two weeks of my first conversation with the governor about the Siege of Leningrad, he had appointed a clandestine working group dedicated to siege preparation. Our first insight was that the outer boroughs of the city could easily be taken by ground troops employing conventional methods, and a blockade or siege, were it imposed, would almost certainly be limited to Manhattan. Then, to our great relief, our engineers advised that short of dynamiting the three massive tunnels that fed the city’s water system—a step that would render New York uninhabitable for decades—there was no practical way to cut off all the water inputs to Manhattan.
Electricity was a bit less clear. We had only one small power plant on the island, but multiple cables supplied the city from the north, east, and west. The good news was that the grid supplying Manhattan was complex and interconnected and not designed to be switched off from a location outside Manhattan. As a result, shutting off all power to the island was not a simple matter of flipping a few switches. But with effort, it could be done. We settled on two steps to make this more difficult. It turned out there were only five engineers capable of executing a deliberate shutdown of large portions of the grid in Manhattan. Each of these men was brought into our planning and moved with their families into Manhattan. The grid diagrams, shutdown procedures, and other materials necessary for others to figure it out were quietly lost and erased from the Con Ed computers.
Our second strategy was far riskier and more expensive. Using Bloomberg Foundation money, in only five months of work three new super-conducting cables were installed in unusued conduits under the Hudson and East Rivers. They appeared on no system map or diagram and were unknown to the rest of Con Ed’s personnel. Unless they were found and physically destroyed, these new cables would automatically route power from Westchester, the outer boroughs, and New Jersey into Manhattan if the existing feeder cables were disconnected. We were not completely certain they would work. Nor could we be sure that this major piece of engineering had escaped the notice of the federal authorities. But it was the best we could do under the circumstances.
In a biblical siege, if the wells could not be poisoned or fouled, the principal purpose of troops surrounding the besieged city was to deny it supplies of food, and starve the citizens into submission. My study of Leningrad and other modern sieges yielded key strategic guidance for our preparations. First, we would attempt to stockpile as much food as possible before the siege commenced. I learned that virtually all the food stockpiles in Leningrad became targets for German bombing and arson, so we decided that ours needed to be made as secure as possible. We chose the largely empty workrooms and storage facilities adjacent to almost every subway station in Manhattan, and they were quietly adapted for food storage. But stockpiles alone would not feed Manhattan.
At my recommendation, the governor hired the charismatic doyenne of urban agriculture, Annie Novak, who ten years before had pioneered large-scale, for-profit vegetable farming on the rooftops of Brooklyn. Her job was to develop plans to quickly convert every available patch of land in Manhattan—and every rooftop that could take the weight—to the production of vegetables and other food should a siege be commenced. Under her guidance, hundreds of thousands of yards of green-roof soil mix began to be stockpiled at every sanitation garage in Manhattan. No one except a few bemused sanitation workers noticed that the sanitation trucks that usually hauled road salt were now loaded with a custom mixture of sterile light soils and pure compost. Annie also established extensive collections of vegetable seeds and seedlings at every public library branch in Manhattan and organized a small army of community organizers and urban farmers who would be ready—at the governor’s signal—to fan out across the island and teach the population of the world’s most densely populated place to become self-sufficient in food. As far as we could tell, the federal authorities never learned of these efforts.