Power Games: Operation Enduring Unity I (17 page)

No. Three weeks of prep time was a blessing. Three more weeks of waiting will cause this whole pyramid scheme to fall apart. The worst thing the president could do to us would be to do nothing to us.”

“The capacity of the human mind for swallowing nonsense and spewing it forth in violent and repressive action has never yet been plumbed.”

– Robert A. Heinlein

Ten miles inside Florida

5 March: 0600

The invasion of Florida, or liberation depending on your version of history, began with a whimper rather than a bang. The internet loved to call it the “Wet Firecracker War.” No cruise missiles swarmed the state. No rolling artillery barrages or hordes of strategic bombers flattened anything.

A handful of stealth penetrators did conduct some ultra-surgical strikes on a few airfields, but far from the cameras. Ferocious tanks with names like “death dealers” stenciled on the barrels and thousands of other armored vehicles surged across the border with safeties off. They slammed right into the rebel’s defenses and overran…nothing.

Not a shot was fired. After 20 miles, a reconnaissance platoon made contact with the first Florida Defense Force position. Perhaps “contact” was too strong a word. This handful of BDU-clad old timers, armed with a motley mixture of shotguns and bolt-action hunting rifles, hardly qualified as a threat. They fired a single shot, probably by accident, before chucking their weapons to run away faster.

 The war was off to a good start.

*

US General McDowell drove his staff crazy by his excessive attention to every little detail. He endlessly questioned everything. Hell, he even personally monitored the radios. It had only been four hours since the ground offensive kicked off, but his team had spent every second unnecessarily stressed out by their fearless leader.

Not that he doubted the loyalty of his command staff. At least not anymore. Military intelligence carefully vetted every person in the headquarters. The handful of questionable characters were transferred somewhere far away, usually overseas. McDowell even went so far as to transfer anyone originally from Florida, of any rank, to units far on the West Coast.

It didn’t help the division’s unit cohesion to replace hundreds of team members randomly and at the last minute, but he couldn’t afford any hesitation on this mission. It definitely pissed a lot of soldiers off, to have their loyalty doubted without a chance to defend themselves. Oh well. They’d sort that stuff out after the fight.

McDowell’s real problem rested with his figurehead position. His large staff handled the details, while he was responsible for…well, everything. His primary job was to serve as a scapegoat if things went bad. It’s frustrating when everyone above him held him accountable for things he had so little control over. All that responsibility, but so little direct power.

Now to be fair, the general spent every second of the invasion harassed by his higher ups. A round dozen senators and congressmen invited themselves to tag along with the invasion. Most of the associated riff-raff following the Army, from kooks to celebrity kooks, his troops could keep outside the perimeter with little trouble. Regrettably, the politicians were immune to weapons. They ate up his day with one unreasonable demand after another. The White House had already called three times to add more contradictory commands on top of the confusion.

At any rate, the sheer size of the federal force should give room enough to make mistakes and still ensure victory. The amateurishness of the resistance helped as well. They cleared out every little sniper or roadblock lightning fast, without suffering any casualties. The Air Force apparently even delivered on their promise of grounding the Florida air wing. Not a single hostile aircraft was spotted all day.

The only frustrating part was that so little had been seen. The last aerial recon reported Florida’s main body digging in around Ocala, in the middle of the state. Uplinks to the spy satellite that should have passed overhead an hour ago to give him the enemy’s latest position were somehow cut. His Air Force liaison officer tried to explain several ways this high-tech state might’ve pulled off such a stunt, but the general wasn’t interested.

High winds and some suspicious radio interference caused problems with his UAV component as well. Two surveillance drones already lost communication with their controllers and were assumed lost. Just one more blind spot.

The president even decided, for whatever brilliant random reason, that his long-range reconnaissance patrols were unnecessarily risky. Since he was forced to pull them back, the Army resorted to old school methods for operational level recon. How wearisome to wait for a recon flight to fly overhead and the photos to be analyzed, but really, it shouldn’t matter in the long run. The exact location of the enemy couldn’t change the overall strategic picture. The rebels were trapped on a peninsula and vastly outnumbered. What chance did they have?

50 miles east of Daytona Beach, Florida

5 March: 0630

The marine gunnery sergeant had never seen mutiny on the high seas before. He’d always fantasized there’d be more swashbuckling and less, well…sitting around. Clearing out 30 or so “redshirts” simply relaxing in the carrier’s hanger bay and refusing to load any ordinance was work for an outraged chief petty officer. Disciplining lazy seamen shouldn’t be his problem. How demeaning to send two squads of armed marines to deal with strikers! Embarrassing as the mission was, he still had a reputation to maintain. If this was what the captain called a mutiny, well, he wasn’t going to let a bunch of squids make him look like a jackass.

The young marine mulled ordering his men to “fix bayonets,” but found threatening to gut your fellow messmates for slothfulness a weak bluff. On the other hand, getting whipped upside the head by their Shore Patrol-style batons wasn’t an empty threat. It was just a matter of time if they kept up this crap.

To up the mind-fuck factor, because fighting is a matter of psychology and psychology is just mind fucking the enemy into not fighting, if he remembered Sun Tzu correctly, the marine charged the handle on his M-4. He yelled at the armed squad of riflemen behind him. “Too much live ordinance here. Don’t shoot them unless you’ve got a clean shot!”

Several sailors grew pale, while a surprising number seemed only more resolved. Not a single one of the unarmed men or women moved however. A small part of the marine’s mind could respect that courage, if not their commonsense. Some white-haired, senior petty officer he hadn’t noticed before rose from the hippy circle.

“Gunny, stand down. Everyone, just relax. Son, I’ve been maintaining and loading these things onto strike craft since the first Gulf War. I know, and you do too, that these bombs aren’t half as smart as the manufacturer claims. Never mind how you feel about the president or that other guy, if we drop so much damn firepower as the admiral plans, civilians will die. Our civilians! Goddamn Americans, man!”

The marine wagged his baton and forced his doubts down.

“That call ain’t yours or mine to make, Chief. That stuff is way above our pay grades. Now, you all are relieved of duty and confined to your bunks until further notice. You’ve got three seconds to get your asses moving or we’ll assist you the only way we know how.” He counted down without any more blustering.

The petty officer stuck out his hand, palm first, as the gunnery sergeant reached “one” and immediately advanced. “Wait, damn it! We always used the excuse that, ‘we’re fighting over there so we don’t have to fight over here.’ Well, what excuse do we use now? Do you want to be a part of
this
shit? The only thing our country needs defending against is itself!”

Even through the poker face, it was clear he had a hook in the marine. “Just give us a little more time, Gunny. That’s all we’re asking. You don’t have to do anything except do nothing.”

“Time for what?” The other marines could have sworn there was a note of admiration in their sergeant’s voice.

A rebel yell in the distance answered him. Whatever siren song of reasonableness the petty officer sang shattered when some other sailors, kids really, catapulted the first 1,000 lb. JDAM bomb out the starboard aircraft elevator door and deep into the blue below. They whooped a bit more before grabbing another weapon cart and sending that bomb flying even farther out to sea. It didn’t matter that the fuses were removed. This nonsense was way beyond regulations.

With the marine’s sense of order and discipline desecrated, he gave a hand signal to his men. They put an end to the amateur mutiny inside of five minutes. Shortly, they had every non-cooperating sailor, man and woman, either in Zip Cuffs or on a stretcher. The captain even came down to congratulate the “brave Gunny” personally on his decisive and levelheaded response. Only a couple of sailors had to detour by the infirmary on their way to the brig.

There were fewer than a hundred non-locked up witnesses to the whole fiasco. Nevertheless, the whole ship knew the story within minutes, or a version of it at least. The captain decided to extend his news blackout even further. He went so far as to block the ship’s internal television, newsletter, bulletin boards…everything. Of course, just like his ban on external news outlets, it didn’t do a thing to help morale. In the absence of real news, even the wild speculation mills on TV that billed themselves as “news,” gossip reigned supreme.

By the time the story reached the engineering decks the death toll had climbed from none to ten. When the tale reached an extremely homesick Floridian engineer in a certain central compartment, the story turned darker. He gazed in horror back and forth between the douche bag next to him laughing his ass off about some chick from Miami getting her skull caved in and the fuzz from the wall-mounted TV. The nuclear reactor watch crew always reveled in their macabre sense of humor, but this time the jokes hit a little too close to home.

Some would claim he was a wannabe terrorist. Others, a hero. The judge at his court martial would later call it the most dangerous and egregious breakdown of discipline he’d ever seen. What everyone failed to realize was he never made a principled decision either way. If you look at it from his limited point of view, what else was he supposed to do?

His family lived in Florida. If the Navy was willing to do all the terrible things the scuttlebutt claimed to their own, what would they do to the so-called enemy? When his chief turned his back, he stood up and shuffled to the center of the control wall. With a shaking hand, he hit a series of giant red “Oh Shit!” buttons. The sweating engineer made neither speeches nor excuses when alarms blared and the rest of the watch came running. After what he just did, words were superfluous. Simply sitting down and staring at the wall stunned his mates enough.

Modern nuclear reactors are equipped with multiple emergency shutdown controls intended to halt a melting reactor core in seconds. Now, to avoid lasting damage, they are employed one at a time and in only the direst situations. The hasty mutineer simply activated them all at once. These controls were last-ditch tools to prevent another Chernobyl, manual overrides in case the automatic processes failed. As such, there was no way to abort them.

The nuclear chain reaction stopped instantly after little explosive bolts dropped several neutron-absorbing control rods into both cores. Not finished yet, the system then dumped a load of boric acid, so called “nuclear poison,” into the coolant system. Flooding the containment unit with seawater as a final touch was really over the top. It would take weeks, at least, and millions of dollars before either reactor could be cleaned, repaired, inspected and safely started up again.

The
Gerald R Ford
was the most modern aircraft carrier in the world. Her designers chose an ultra-reliable, but energy intensive, all electric catapult launching system. Without the endless supply of power from the ship’s twin reactors though, her 90 next-generation combat aircraft weren’t going anywhere. Until that power plant could be reactivated, this technological marvel was $9 billion and 100,000 tons of scrap metal.

The ship’s captain got the mutiny he feared.