This Mighty Scourge Read online

  Contents

  Copyright Notice

  Epigram

  Landfall

  Chapter One - The Western Gambit

  Chapter Two - The Excursion

  Chapter Three - The Crossing

  Chapter Four - The Clash

  Chapter Five - Unravelling

  Author's Note

  About the Author

  This Mighty Scourge: The Second Civil War (Book Four)

  Copyright 2014, Adam Teiichi Yoshida

  Cover Image, Copyright 2014, Sharon Miki

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  Also by the Author:

  The Blast of War

  A Land War in Asia

  A Thousand Points of Light

  A House Divided

  Robot General

  The Fiery Trial

  Shall Not Perish

  The Impeachment of Barack Hussein Obama

  "Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.""

  - Abraham Lincoln

  Landfall

  Type 69 Landing Craft, 1 Mile From Landfall

  The Lieutenant shuddered every time he heard a shell pass overhead, but he did his best not to show it. He'd been in the Army for fully a year and he'd been selected as one of the finest members of his cohort, but he'd never been somewhere where people were actually shooting at one another before. The fact that he knew that the vast majority of the fire was actually coming from the fleet offshore and was therefore directed towards the enemy did little to help settle his ragged nerves: it would only take one wild shot to wipe out the entire platoon.

  "The bastards aren't putting up much of a fight," he said, his voice filled with false joviality, as he slapped the knee of a Private who was doing a much-worse job of hiding his fears. He stayed hunched over - it would do the platoon zero good if their commander managed to get himself taken out by a stray shot before they hit the shore - and leaned towards the shaking teenager.

  "The fleet and the air force have been hitting them with everything that they have for days," he said reassuringly, "they can't have much fight left in them. Anyways - we're going to take the beaches, which they've hit the most. It'll be up to the tankers and others to take the fight further inland."

  The boy said nothing in response.

  "It won't be much longer now. It'll all be alright," he said, continuing to move along the line.

  As the landing craft approached the shore, the sound of the actual impact of the shells began to recede into the distance. The Destroyers and Frigates offshore were attempting to move their own fire to targets further away from the beach in order to avoid friendly fire.

  "Thirty seconds!" yelled someone from the back of the boat. They were almost at the edge of the shoreline.

  "Everyone get ready!" shouted the Lieutenant, raising his own rifle, "we've done this ten thousand times before."

  "Not for real," replied one of the Non-Coms. The Lieutenant shot him a glare: that one was always making trouble.

  "The door's coming down!" called out the voice from the back of the boat.

  "Let's go!" said the Lieutenant, pushing forward as the door of the craft dropped.

  The forces onshore immediately intensified their fire as the men of the platoon surged forward towards the shattered beach. Amidst the fires and wreckage created by the extensive bombardment there were still at least a few men alive and fighting.

  "Pillbox!" pointed out one of the soldiers next to the Lieutenant, pointing towards a concrete fortification that housed a machine gun emplacement.

  "Call it in!" suggested one of the other nearby soldiers.

  "It's too close," replied the Lieutenant, shaking his head, "if we try and hit it with something offshore, we're just as liable to end up dead. Just keep going."

  The platoon surged forward, even as men dropped dead into the water in every direction.

  At the edge of the water a pair of soldiers knelt down and attempted to aim rockets at the fortification. The first soldier was struck by bullets from the machine gun before he even managed to get his rocket raised to fire. The second was more successful. He fired one round that flew straight and narrowly overshot the position.

  Soldiers of the platoon continued to fall with each forward step that they took, but a particularly-cruel calculation required them to continue forward: there was only a single surviving fortified point along their stretch of beach and a single machine gun emplacement, as powerful as it might be, could not possibly hope to kill everyone in the platoon before they reached its location.

  Another soldier managed to fire another rocket in the direction of the fortification. This one struck the concrete structure. The small explosion was enough to silence its fire for precious seconds as the platoon surged forward.

  "Grenades!" ordered the Lieutenant as the soldiers rushed towards the fortification. When the leading edge of the platoon approached within fifty feet, they suddenly came under further fire from a group of soldiers who had emerged from the back door of the pillbox to launch a hasty counterattack. The Lieutenant tripped and stumbled to the ground amidst the combined fire of the machine gun and the enemy squad. It took him a moment to realize that he'd been shot in the side. He attempted to push the pain from his mind and got up, firing single shots from his rifle in the direction of the enemy counterattack.

  A handful of the soldiers of the platoon attempted to move up the left side of the fortification, laying down heavy satchel charges next to its wall. Watching them make their move out of the corner of his left eye, the Lieutenant focused on engaging the infantry force that was directly in front of him. He raised his rifle and fired a quick burst. The bullets struck a young man directly in the chest, sending him falling over backwards. As the infantry surged towards the Lieutenant and his men he grabbed a grenade from his belt and removed the safety clip.

  As he assumed the throwing position, the Lieutenant was suddenly knocked flat on his back. It took him a moment to realize exactly what had happened: a grenade had exploded within a few feet of his own position. Attempting to assess his surroundings through the flood of blood that was emerging from a wound to his forehead and now obstructing his vision, the Lieutenant noticed that his right forearm was sitting severed on the ground in front of him and that the advance of the enemy squad had not stopped.

  The Lieutenant crawled forward towards his severed first, which was still clutching the live grenade. Using his good hand he pried it out and lobbed it towards the onrushing force with as much force as he could. The Lieutenant's left arm was weaker than his right and, aside from that, he'd already lost a lot of blood. It was a weak throw. This, however, turned out to be advantageous under the circumstances: the grenade flew in a short ballistic arc and exploded over the advancing force.

  As the advancing men reeled from the explosion, the Lieutenant reached over with his left hand and pushed the selector on his rifle to the setting for fully automatic fire before picking it up, attempting to his the stump of his right hand to steady the weapon. His fire was wildly inaccurate, but from a range of just fifteen feet away it hardly mattered: he sprayed an entire clip into the advancing force. His own fire was joined by that of the other survivors of the platoon. In seconds it was over: none of the counter-attack force survived.

  The Lieutenant fell over onto his back, looking up at the bright morning sky. As he did this he realized that the sound of the nearby mac
hine gun has stopped altogether. Then he realized that several of his men were standing over him.

  "What are you fuckers staring at?" he barked, "it's not even time for lunch."

  Four months later, the Lieutenant (by then the Captain) would be awarded the Hero's Medal, First Class at a ceremony in Beijing honoring some of those who had participated in the liberation of Taiwan.

  San Diego, California

  The other leaders of the XII Corps - nick-named the "Devil's Corps" in tribute to the joint American-Canadian unit of the Second World War that served as its spiritual predecessor - stood next to Lieutenant General William Thomas Jackson and watched the long line of ships approaching the harbor. All of them, conscious of the fact that they and the people landing were being filmed for posterity, were immaculately turned-out in spite of the fact that most of them had been in combat less than forty-eight hours earlier. Even now the occasional gunshot could be heard in the distance and even a casual glance as the city's skyline showed that dozens of fires were still burning.

  "Jesus," muttered Major General Harold Byers as he surveyed the scene.

  "What?" asked Jackson.

  "I own a condo somewhere around here," quietly said Byers, who had been an investment banker before the war, "I still owe money on the damned thing."

  "Here they come," said Lieutenant Colonel Hannah Benson, General Jackson's aide de camp, pointing at a landing craft that was moving towards the shore. A helicopter could have served the same purpose, of course - and it would have been a damned sight faster - but the commander of the landing force, who was apparently a theatrical man, had insisted on a waterborne landing in front of the international press.

  "I wonder if they'll ever leave," said Colonel Menkin, the 200th Division's G-2.

  Colorado Springs' decision to accept international support in its war with the Washington regime had been bitterly contested both within the armed forces and throughout the rest of the political world. To more than a few the thought of asking for foreigners to come to American soil to assist in the killing of people who were, in the end, fellow Americans was one of the foulest to ever be breathed. In the end, however, pragmatism had won out: the transformation of the Loyalist states into the new "Federation of North American States" and its membership in the so-called "Democratic Union" had silenced all of the doubters for the time being.

  After all, the war between the states and the subsequent entanglement of Europe within the war had brought global trade to a virtual standstill and created an economic depression unlike any that the modern world had ever seen. Before the war trade with China had been essential to driving the engine of American prosperity, why could it not be so in this era of war as well?

  Still, a lot of people wondered what this meant for the shape of the post-war world. Certainly most Americans accepted that the arrival of the war meant it would be years before the United States could ever seriously be considered a superpower again - if it was ever to be so - but there was a considerable distance between that and minting a new and possibly hostile successor as the world's leading state. Certainly, the rest of East Asia had screamed when Acting President Rickover had signed the Treaty of Hong Kong. The best that American could offer its unsettled Asian allies was their own opportunity to send supplies and equipment to assist the war effort. To the surprise of more than a few, most of Asia - including Vietnam, Japan, and South Korea - had answered the call so as to curry what favor they could.

  And I'm sure that the Taiwanese would have done the same, had it been on offer , thought Jackson ruefully.

  Still, it was one thing to move a million tons of supplies across the Pacific Ocean: it was another to land it on the American coast in the face of tough opposition from the Mexican Army, elements of the California National Guard, and the Army of the United States. As willing to help as the allies of the new Federal Government had proven, they weren't going to conduct a trans-Pacific D-Day on the California coast. Instead Jackson and the rest of the U.S. Army had been forced first to fight off a spoiling attack launched by both the Loyalist Army and his allies and then to fight their way across the entire state. Once the back of the Army of the United States had been broken at Yuma, the collapse of the Loyalist forces in California had been surprisingly rapid. It had taken all of eleven days for the Army of the Colorado to make its way to the coast, where the U.S. Navy was waiting alongside the transport ships of America's Chinese allies.

  "Alright," said Jackson as the landing craft approached and he prepared to step forward to greet his visitors, "heads held high, shoulders up. Let's go."

  The landing craft stopped at the edge of the water and a six-foot tall men in a gleaming green uniform hopped off, the shallow water splashing into the air as it made contact with his boots. He bounded forward, his broad stride carrying him steps at a time as his aides scrambled off and swiftly followed him.

  The man walked directly towards Jackson and extended his hand.

  "General Jackson," he said in perfect and unaccented English, "I have read so much of your exploits. It is an honor to finally meet you."

  "Marshal Feng," replied Jackson as he accepted the man's hand, "on behalf of the government of the United States, I welcome you to America."

  "Ah, General," said the Marshal, "the pleasure is all mine. I only regret that we couldn't get here sooner."

  Temporary Seat of the Government of the United States, Colorado Springs, Colorado

  "How cheaply we sold our souls," said Secretary of State Jon Simpson sadly as he watched the footage of the ceremony in San Diego.

  "Not cheaply," said Secretary of Defense Mark Preston, his voice equally sad, "we made them pay quite dearly for everything that they got. Where else were we going to get fuel, ammunition, and all of the other sinews of war? How else were we going to get food to people's front doors before they started starving? We needed to open up the coasts and only the Chinese could truly do that for us, given our standing in the rest of the world."

  "I didn't say that we were wrong to do it, my friend," said the Secretary of State, "but rather instead that it was wrong in a cosmic sense."

  "Well," said the Secretary of Defense, "I can't dispute that."

  "I think we're ready to go," said a technician from the head of the table, his quiet a voice a reflection of his reluctance to interject.

  "Alright," said Secretary Simpson, "let's get to this thing."

  A few buttons were pressed and the face of Acting President Terrance Rickover appeared on the screen that was mounted in the front of the room.

  "I hope to God that this is secure," were the first words out of the Acting President's mouth.

  "Well," replied Preston, "my tech nerds all assure me that it is. And if they're wrong, well we can just shoot them for treason."

  The Defense Secretary mimed the firing of a shot from a pistol towards the tech at the side of the room. Everyone laughed nervously except for the technician.

  "How's the weather down in Texas, Mr. President?" asked General Xavier Monroe, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  "Too fucking hot, even for an old Southern boy like myself," said Rickover, "even though the Goddamned summer is nearly over."

  "You should try Houston in July, sir," replied General Monroe.

  "No fucking way," shot back the Acting President before adding, "is everyone there?"

  "We are, Mr. President," replied the Secretary of Defense.

  "Alright then," replied Rickover, "I'm sorry that I can't be there this morning, but my pollsters tell me that Mitch Randall is making this thing a bigger fight of it than I'd expected."

  "Should have just kept him off the fucking ballot," muttered Secretary Preston towards the Secretary of State.

  "And what? Have a one person election as if he was Saddam Fucking Hussein? Someone else had to run against him," replied Simpson.

  "It's done. No point in debating that now. Anyways," said Rickover, "where are we at this morning?"

  "Things are effec
tively over in California, Mr. President," replied General Monroe, "of course, the Army had pretty much torn through the Army of the United States in the first week after the end of the Battle of Arizona, but even the holdouts began to recognize that it was futile to fight on any longer when they saw that the Chinese coming ashore and resupplying XII Corps. It's pretty much down to San Francisco still holding out and they won't last for long. Dumb fuckers didn't have any guns of their own. Apparently they tried to buy them off of the gangs and at least half of the gangs ratted them out to our guys instead."

  "Good, good," said Rickover, "and the Northwest?"

  "There's some scattered resistance there - a bombing in Seattle yesterday - but the Marines that came ashore there are in good order and most of Washington and Oregon are back under the flag."

  "Yes," said Ira Skelton, the President's Chief of Staff from another line on the conference call, "we saw that. We saw Mitch Randall prancing around Seattle like he'd liberated the place himself."

  General Monroe shrugged.

  "Not much to be done about that, sir," he replied.

  "No, I suppose not," conceded the Chief of Staff, "but the bastard could stand to show a little gratitude."

  "All is quiet along the Mexican front," added General Monroe, "they've withdrawn back across the border and then some. They're arrayed on the far side of the Rio Grande, eying us pretty warily."

  "They were burning you in effigy in Mexico City again yesterday, though, Mr. President," added in Secretary Simpson.

  "Yes, I saw that on the local news here," replied Rickover, "I guess that's what happens when you blow up a lot of stuff that belongs to the richest man in Mexico."

  "We'll see if we can reschedule your Spring Break trip, Mr. President," said Secretary Preston to laughter.

  "Ok," said the Acting President, "that's all a lot of good news. Now break the bad to me."

  "The air bridge across the Atlantic bringing forces and supplies to the so-called Democratic Union is holding, Mr. President," said Admiral Wahl, the Chief of Naval Operations, "and we don't have much that can interdict it at the moment."