At last.
Chapter Eleven
15:00 CST, 18 November 2331
Des Moines, Brotherhood Territory
As he stood on the stage in front of the microphone, General Lance Robertson mused over the situation he was in. Two strategic goals had been identified – one southern push to hold down and besiege the Enclave forces at St. Louis, and another – the most pivotal of them all – to take Chicago and its airbase, while the final force remained in reserve. He was to personally command the central thrust to make sure it was done properly (and retaining overall command), while his subordinates made the secondary push. He looked to his side, at Sentinel Henry Brandt – his counterpart in the Brotherhood, dressed in a loose set of grey robes.
“In three days, we embark on the largest military campaign the NCR has undertaken to date,” he stated, plain and simple. “To liberate the areas of the midwest held under the Enclave’s control.”
“We are fighting for the freedom – the true freedom – of many millions. We are fighting not to conquer or destroy, but to set a people free and to end a threat that has loomed over the NCR and all free peoples of North America for almost a century. We will not be enslaved or exterminated – we will be victorious, and we will rejoice in a continent once more, and finally, free!”
There was widespread cheering and Robertson allowed himself to bask in the applause. His speechwriter had prepared something longer, but he’d rejected that. I know I’m no politician, he mused. As if I’d want to be.
At such a high rank, politics though, was an essential part of his profession. One he could not ignore.
==*==
16:00 CST, 19 November 2331
Fort Nauvoo, State of Illinois
National Guard General Jack Bronson looked at the map of his designated defence sector. In his early 50s, the Louisianan remembered well the disaster the NCR had brought on his city of New Orleans. At the height of a category 5 hurricane, they’d attacked the city’s power supply and made critical breaches in the levees surrounding it while disabling the pre-War forcefield systems. The flooding had killed thousands, and thousands more had been rendered destitute and homeless in the aftermath. Both his parents had drowned. He remembered his last sight of them – being dragged away by a torrent of floodwater, reaching out futilely for him – as if it was just yesterday. He dreamed of it almost every night, the proof of the NCR’s senseless rage and hatred.
How, he had run over in his head countless times since then. How could the NCR do such a thing – we weren’t even reintegrated yet?! And after this atrocity – a sequel to their attacks on US elected officials and ambassadors – they claimed to be fighting for freedom! The sheer gall of it burned him.
Which was in large part why he was here at this base on the Illinois border – named after the village it quite frankly overshadowed – located on a spot where the river curved, roughly equidistant from the towns of Quincy and Burlington. As base commander, he had 10 regiments – approximately 10,000 men – of National Guard soldiers at his disposal to protect the region from invasion. It was vastly insufficient to the task, of course – his role was to delay the attack and hold out, with the assistance of bases governing other sectors, until the US Army arrived.
The recent blizzards had made that trickier than usual. First off, aerial and satellite surveillance was rendered largely ineffective – the weather blocked satellite photography outright and forced any planes attempting aerial reconnaissance to fly too low to be safe. Secondly, the roads were blocked and any reinforcements would be greatly delayed. The snowstorms still raging outside his command post also severely degraded his ability to effectively patrol the river, which was frozen over. That meant the USN Mississippi squadron wouldn’t be able to provide assistance north of Quincy.
==*==
17:00 CST, 20 November 2331
“Latest estimates have 80,000 enemy troops along the river from Dubuque down to Hannibal,” the intelligence analyst breathlessly explained. “40,000 at Davenport, and an additional 120,000 at St. Louis.”
“240,000 in total,” Gen. Robertson breathlessly mused. “But thinly stretched by necessity.”
He turned to his subordinates, Lieutenant Generals Ortez and Friedman. Good, decent, competent men – his best shot at beating the Enclave. I couldn’t have made my move at a better time, he thought. The extremely harsh winter conditions would severely damage their ability to co-ordinate their forces together against a crossing – and ultimately, all he needed to do was punch through the enemy defence line at one point to begin his attack. Then he could take out the garrisons piecemeal while the greater part of the enemy force was encircled at St. Louis.
==*==
4:00 CST, 21 November 2331
East Bank of the Mississippi River
The night was moonless and snow covered the ground. An owl hooted from the treetops. Grim-faced soldiers advanced through the falling snow, encased all over in titanium-and-steel composite fusion-powered armour. These woods abutting the Mississippi had once been farmland before the war – in the trees one could occasionally find the ruins of houses and of barns, where they hadn’t been stripped for building material.
Sergeant Royez walked forward through the swirling snow and ice, the spikes of his winterized power-boots finding solid purchase in the snow and frozen ground as he advanced. He could barely see six feet ahead of him – as it was, he only knew he was heading east by the magnetic compass set into his helmet. His unit were among the first to march into the Enclave’s territory – the first to strike back after the years of attacks and terror they had given the NCR. Having been born well after the survival of the Enclave was learned, Royez had never known a day without the threat of their invasion.
He saw them dimly through the mist of diamond dust and fog as they approached – Enclave soldiers. Barely visible in the darkness three hours before dawn, they were already moving to fire on his team – but their laser rifles would not nearly be as effective in the blizzard. Their range and power would likely both be halved. His own gun – specially deployed for winter weather – certainly wouldn’t be. It was of the design known in the NCR as a Marksman Carbine – its pre-War designation having been long forgotten – coloured in an arctic camouflage pattern. He fired a volley of shots – AP rounds, with tungsten penetrator tips - along with his team. The first few failed to penetrate, but the latter certainly did. Men fell and red blood stained the snow. They kept firing back, going to ground and hiding behind trees.
While their weapons were certainly not as effective in these conditions as the NCR soldiers’, the Enclave men were certainly no cowards, and were even advancing in the face of the NCR men’s rifle fire, against all odds. Royez was confused – where’s the pureblood leader?, he thought. There has to be a guy in power armour accompanying them, to make sure they don-
The sound of rapid-fire plasma split the night asunder, the cerulean glow of the Enclave’s plasma weapons swiftly followed with the yellow-orange glare of fire and super-heated metal. Royez went to ground amidst the confusion – the screams, the trees flashing into fire, the thuds of power-armoured bodies hitting the ground. He realised quickly that attack was coming from two dugouts to the south and north respectively – the enemy were cannier than he’d thought, intentionally waiting for him to move into their guns’ field of fire before launching their attack. He called in support from the heavy weapons team and mortar fire silenced the positions.
Four of his men were dead, two badly injured. At his best estimate seventeen dead enemy soldiers lay visible in the orange gleam of the firelight and the incandescent glare of his headlamp.
He gave the order to flush out the remainder and incendiary grenades from his squad’s heavy weapons man – carrying a grenade rifle – lit up the treetops.
They moved on through the forest, passing the ivy-covered shell of an old farmhouse, from whose windows came a volley of rapid-fire high-explosive grenades. Mercifully none hit directly, and the shrapnel was ineffective, as it usually was. Royez hunkered down and called in a barrage, levelling the building.
They met relentless resistance as they continued the advance. While they retreated in the face of the NCR and Bortherhood's power-armoured men, the Enclave soldiers never gave up. Gatling laser fire took down two more of Royez’s men, and suppressed him for thirty minutes before an incendiary missile took out that position. They moved in with combat helicopters that acted like mini-vertibirds, both unleashing fire from above and deploying men into combat – though they performed both tasks with rather less efficiency than the tiltrotor planes, and took heavy casualties from the NCR soldiers’ missile launchers. Brotherhood Lancers in their sleek Hellions and NCR pilots in Buzzard ground-attack aircraft moved in to launch their own air-strikes, helping clear the way for the power-armoured advance.
There were some losses from enemy heatseekers and hidden AA laser posts – why’d they even let their slave-soldiers have those?, Royez angrily mused – but the air support did the trick, though certainly at a greater cost in blood than they’d anticipated. At 7:08 AM, he and his men finally broke out of the embattled woodlands, the enemy forces in the forests having either retreated or surrendered. Ahead was a deserted plain – there were a few pre-War ruins around – in front of a wooded ridge approximately one and a half miles away. It loomed steep on its western face, like a rampart formed by the earth itself against invaders.
The Enclave artillery positioned on those heights opened fire almost as soon as the first NCR troops broke out of the woods – too early to be effective. Their light guns issued a rain of fire, but failed to make any hits. Some other units reported sporadic casualties, but Royez’s men were unharmed.
The Enclave’s fury was overwhelmed by the NCR’s scant minutes later – the artillery positioned on the other side of the river, out-ranging the Enclave guns, roared into furious life. The entire line of the hilltop vanished in flame and smoke, mingled with steam from tons of flash-melted snow.
The crossing of the Mississippi had unquestionably been accomplished.
--*--
The command vehicle was cramped, but General Lance Robertson made the best of it. Everything was stored efficiently, with fastidious neatness – an essential to effective command. He allowed himself a small smile as he considered the situation. The seven-mile area he had chosen as his point of crossing had been effectively secured. Furthermore, the engineers had completed their primary pontoon bridge, through which the mechanised and armoured forces of the operation – his own vehicle among the procession – were already moving.
Finally, the enemy had not effectively counter-attacked – yet. He had chosen an isolated, less-populated area to make this move – the few remaining bridges over the river were probably booby-trapped at any rate, and certainly heavily guarded.
His next move, most definitely, would have to be made swiftly. Every second he tarried represented a second the Enclave could use to counter-attack.
It took him short time to come up with a stratagem – in truth a slight modification of the war plan originally prepared in Shady Sands. 60,000 men would be deployed to encircle and overcome the Enclave base at Davenport, while the remainder of the two armies directly under him pushed east – after Davenport was taken, that force would regroup with the main unit and join the main push to Chicago. Elements from the two reserve armies – already in position for such a move, out of several potential offensives – would cross the river at numerous locations and overcome the enemy bases from Burlington to Hannibal, then once O’Hare was taken and his logistical position thus improved the full strength, of those units would strike at the industrial cities between Indianopolis and Pittsburgh as the victors of Chicago moved into Detroit and thence Ontario, eventually looping round through Quebec to hit Boston and New York City from the north, potentially threatening the Enclave’s “capital” of Washington itself.
And the two southern armies … the Defence Department’s initial goal, to take St. Louis by force, was too optimistic. To capture the fortress-city by assault would bleed them white. He would send orders to his prime subordinate there to besiege it. At any rate they would be well-placed there to secure his southern flank against whatever forces the Enclave would be able to redeploy from Texas.
==*==
9:00 CST, November 21 2331
St. Louis, State of Missouri
Thomas V. Maher had never trained as a soldier. And now, anxiously looking from a hastily-constructed barricade at the terminal entranceway of St. Louis Airport, clutching a milsurp plasma rifle tight to his chest, he wondered what difference it had made. The people of St. Louis, unlike the cities of the East Coast, had never been able to create the illusion that the United States was at peace. For the isolated fortress-city; surrounded by a ring of military bases, its buildings with windows designed specifically to provide cover for defenders to fire back at attackers, AA lasers not an uncommon site in its parks and on its rooftops; the war was a daily reality. Every few months the Brotherhood would send an expedition to test the defences – inevitably the scouting parties would be rebuffed, and a counter-attack sent out to strike at one of their feudal patrols in retaliation.
But this? This was no testing of strengths.
The airport was, unlike its pre-War counterpart, located on the west side of the river, right next to Poplar St. Bridge and I-64. It did not see much civilian traffic – mostly, it serviced cargo flights and handled the rotation of US Army and National Guard troops to and from the garrison. Seems like it’ll be a long time before that happens, Maher thought.
He gritted his teeth and thought back to what had happened. It had been 3 AM – more than halfway through the night shift – when he had first heard shelling to the west. Tired, he had taken some coffee to energise himself and not been halfway through his cup when military planes started landing on the runway – a mix of vertibirds and fighter jets. With terror he had realised what that meant – the airbase, on the site of the pre-War international airport, was being evacuated.
A regiment of Army soldiers had moved up on to the bridge and established control of the airport, cancelling all civilian flights.. A choice had been offered, quite bluntly, to all the civilians by their commanding officer – join the military in defence of the city airport or be evacuated. To those who had elected to assist them, they had handed out combat breastplates and old weapons from the surplus warehouses. Maher had chosen to join in the defence, and even now he was wondering if that had been the right choice.
If I die and leave her behind – no, leave me and my son behind, he thought grimly, he’ll never get the chance to see his daddy’s face.
At any rate, about three hours after he had received his equipment the attack had begun. Enemy aircraft had struck at the runway, rendering it a useless mass of craters. Though the USAF planes had already been moved into reinforced hangars, until it could be repaired they wouldn’t be able to take off except for the vertibirds.
They’d knocked down the control tower – now a pile of concrete rubble – though in their attack the AA lasers had taken out many of their planes – some of the wreckage was still smouldering.
Then they had launched their attack, moving in from all directions save the west. Maher hadn’t actually seen that portion of the battle – but he had heard noises, and seen flashes of explosions mixed with blue, red and green lasers and plasma bolts flying around. As far as he could tell, the attack had been blunted – even bombed and cratered, the flat expanse of tarmac that surrounded the airport offered little cover.
Which left him waiting, anxiously, for the next assault.
--*--
General Preston Blackwell, commander of US Midwestern Command Southern Zone, knew that his position looked grim, and had only gotten worse over the past nine hours. The enemy attack, launched at 3AM, had been overwhelmingly effective. With aerial and satellite recon being limited by inclement weather even so far south, they’d been able to move large numbers of troops almost on top of him. While there had been expectations of a major attack from about a year in advance, they hadn’t predicted its multi-pronged nature or its sheer size.
AFB Edmundson – the old international airport – had been attacked immediately at 0300 hours by overwhelming enemy forces. While the base had been evacuated of all its commanding officers and pilots – and all technical documentation, ammunition and spare parts for its planes destroyed – the enemy had killed or captured all the base guards, ground crew and support personnel.
At 0500 they had crossed the river via Mosenthein and Gabaret islands and swept south, while their primary forces. He had thrown back several attacks directed at the bridges – attacks that were in retrospect probes – and held the airport. Their attacks on this side of the river – the western one – had gone about as well for them.
After their defeats, they had not pressed on or retreated. Instead they were moving to besiege him, digging trenches and bunkers in parallel to the city’s own defences. He was glad with this – if the enemy force was held down besieging the city, it wouldn’t be able to attack without either abandoning the siege wholesale – hence leaving its rear exposed to his forces – or weakening itself sufficiently to allow a breakout, and from then on a counter-attack to their rear.
He mused on the situation. So much of his strategy depended on the weather. If the river froze over, he would be unable to maintain any new supply of food – that was what they must be counting on. But regardless, he would not surrender the city and the men under his command under any circumstances.
I won’t give this gang of deserters and rebels the honour of capturing a United States General, he mused. Not to mention the way they declared even the children of US military personnel to be dangerous war criminals.
If that was the way they saw things, he could certainly expect no favourable treatment in captivity.
