Chapter 14
First WindsThe mood around the conference table was dark. Everyone had just spent an hour more or less blaming each other while reports were brought in. The Secretary of the US Army, Bill Dukeson and the Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Louis Thatcher were sitting in one corner, blaming him the CIA. The CIA again, represented by the chairman of central intelligence, Porter Ross, blamed the army for ignoring reports of Soviet Troop movements. The White-House Chief of Staff, Elaine Waterfield, had resigned after unsuccessful attempts at organizing the discussion, and just sat silently on her chair. The Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, sat mostly on his chair reading incoming documents, to rise occasionally to blame the Army, Navy, Air force, Marine-Corps, the CIA and the boy scouts about as much, or so it felt for Dave Callaghan who as leader of the casters guild was ordered to take part of the discussion.
The Secretaries of State and Commerce, Newton Walker and Hasad Kubilay were arguing amongst themselves mostly, but Dave was too depressed to listen. He had been woken up at one o'clock in the night, told the Soviets were attacking Norway, of all places. Not that his guild had any men there, but it was counted as a major government organization, and World War 3 was a big deal. But he had been awake and working now for 12 hours and was just about to brief the president, only he didn't have the slightest clue about what to say, and apparently the other ones didn't either. He heard a door opened and noticed the president walking in, and so did everyone else as the sound in the room dropped immediately.
The president walked fast and with an angry look on his face. "Ok, I held a speech this morning where I told the public everything I know, which is nothing. Now I have, reluctantly, given you half a damn day to get me answers, and I want to hear them now. So?" he said, leaning over the chair at the end of the slightly oval-shaped table. As he begun sitting down after his speech everyone in the room started talking at once, Dave among them. The president quickly threw up his hands motioning everyone to stop, and stated to everyone in the room "I don't care who you want to blame, and your excuses will be for later. Right now you tell me what the hell you know, and all of it. You start." After at everyone's eyes as he spoke, he pointed at General Louis at the end.
The general fumbled a bit with some false starts until he finally started talking normally. "Yes, to be blunt, the Russians are attacking us in Norway with a shitload of everything. We had the 6th and 10th Infantry along with the 82nd Airborne division there. Missile-strikes, commando operations and electronic interference has destroyed the command structure, so we are at worst forced to use local telephone-lines to keep in contact with our troops. But over there we have no one in command. The biggest unit still fighting is the 2nd brigade in the 6th Infantry, and we have maybe a dozen battalions still active. But they are apparently using casters to break up our lines, and it's working. There is no way we can get the army organized and able to fight in time, so the current general plan is to withdraw south into Finland and Sweden, if possible further into Norway. That way we can save our men, and hopefully later in the war supply and organize them. If you desperately want to give the people good news, you can tell them that the Russians are still lying still in central Europe. We have of course begun to prepare for war there too,"
"Are you telling me that our army has begun speaking French! 'We surrender', is that the new motto of America? You keep up the fight; the Russians think America is weak, and that we will run if they hit us easily. Well, they are wrong. Anyway, I forgot. You next Porter," the president said, banking hard on the table several times as he spoke.
"Yes, as the general here said, the Russians are doing nothing in the rest of Europe, well, except taking up defensive positions. They are calling up reserves from Russia and placing them far away from the border. The pacific regions are peaceful too. To let everyone know, we did notice their troop-concentration in the north near Norway, but we didn't think they'd be stupid enough to attack, especially as the rest was quite calm. Why they attacked, I don't know. Their claims of us attacking are pure lies, and there's nothing really important north of the Arctic Circle, or at least nothing important enough to start the next world-war over."
"Nothing important up there! Are you fucking crazy, or are you saying they are? Are you telling me a million damn Russians just really, really want to swim at the beaches of northern Norway? We have goddamn anti-peace protestors outside and you are telling me you don't even know why we are being attacked?"
"Uh, yes sir, that is the case. But if I can..."
"No, you can't. So, shut up. I am having a very bad day and I want good answers and solutions. Is there anyone in this room that can give them to me?"
"Mr. President, if you could just relax now. The press conference is not for another hour," Elaine said, trying to relax the tension in the room before it exploded, or at least so it seemed to Dave. She and the president spoke something to each other, but he wasn't able to hear exactly what. Whatever it was it seemed to soothe the president somewhat. He decided to make his move.
"Sir, if I may. Apparently the Russians have been using battalion or brigade-sized caster units, and it is working. As you know my organization is mostly a civilian one, we have, perhaps unwisely, earlier decided to not use the source in combat until our people are trained enough and know if it's safe to use or not. Although it isn't official, I think I should tell you now that we have trained some troops to act as special forces. If you want, I think we can form at least 5 battalions. If you whip up the war card and the people are ready for war, forming a division should be possible even. But I need time. Half a year, maybe even a full year. And that's a crash program; most of our grunts train longer than that."
After sitting silent for a few seconds the president rose up in his chair, slapped his hands together and shouted "Aaaand, we have a winner!" Everyone just sat silently around the table until the president continued. "I don't suppose you can narrow that 6 months to 6 days? No, wait, never mind, I am the president after all. We are knee-deep in shit here. I want you to get me one battle-ready battalion of casters ready to fly to Europe within a week. Anyway, thank you General Callaghan. Now, the rest of you offer me solutions."
The meeting went on for half an hour. For the rest of the meeting Dave just sat silently, praying for the meeting to end so that he could run and start organizing a battalion. He noticed that after the others had offered something, they too started to look at their watches and squirm around uncomfortably. Finally the president rose up, and as the door out of the room closed behind him, Dave and everyone else in the room rose up and started running. He managed to get first out of the room so he wasn't fully sure where everyone else was going, but he even called his chauffer to start the engine.
Once the car was going, and he sitting in the back seat he took a few minutes to relax before starting to call. After thinking about it for a minute, he decided to contact Sen. Sumpner first. The man was the co-leader of the casters guild after all, and now the man could show off his worth.
He had to talk to some secretary first before he could get a hold on the man, but it went better than usually. "Hi there. I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that we don't have any ban on using our casters for military uses anymore... uhuh, well, I though it was good news. The bad news is that we need to have a battalion of casters ready to fight a war in 7 days... A battalion? It's around 800 men. Anyway, could you take care of the running of the guild for now? I need to find 800 men who are willing to die. Anyway, let me know if you have any questions."
Later on as they drove to the airport he called most of the senior staff and asked that they report than plan to form an instant battalion immediately after the presidents speech. The guild had quite a few casters who had been in the army; the biggest problem was that almost no one of them had trained in using the source for fighting. It was going to be bloody.
The following days went quickly. At first getting volunteers was easy, but once a written order came from the Pentagon to begin readying at least 4 extra battalions to be ready in 6 days, the willingness to enter the war in a week dropped like a rock. At least choosing the officers was easy as there weren't enough volunteers to choose from, Dave though as he later on read trough the possible candidates. He worked as hard as he could, talking to the people directly to get them to join, but by day three only a little under 500 of real worth had volunteered and he had only gotten 7 hours of sleep.
Finally at three in the morning as he looked at the blackboard where he was writing up the battalion organization he had an epiphany. He started erasing and writing on the blackboard as if there was no tomorrow, and suddenly where there had been three companies there were six. He celebrated by drinking some of his finest cognac. After a few glasses had gone down his throat a few extra support platoons magically and the title 'Final Plan' appeared on the blackboard. He was sitting on his chair and admiring his work when he finally fell asleep.
He was still asleep when the next morning Sen. Sumpner came over to check up on the progress. The senator tried to kick Dave's chair a bit, but once he noticed that Dave was not going to wake up, he went back out and started talking to the aide. After some discussion he ordered the aide to copy down what was on the board, then send it to the commanding officer of the new battalion so that he could begin getting the men into their groups.
Later in the day, almost past noon, Dave finally woke up. He used the small toilet joined to his room to shave and brush his teeth. After he checked himself out in the mirror and found his appearance satisfactory he walked out into the corridor, determined to appear as if he was in full strength and had nothing to be ashamed of. The post should have come by now too, and the organization was still to be fixed, last night was just crazy.
"Captain, any important news? If not, I still need time to work on the battalion plan so don't have anyone bother me," he said while checking trough his in-box on the captain's table. It appeared to be mostly unimportant stuff, newspapers, supply reports.
"Sir. Senator Sumpner was here earlier, around eight. He went in and saw you sleeping, and considering your hard work these past days, he decided to let you rest and OK'd the plan. We sent it forward to colonel Writer and his staff. You had written out some majors and captains as company-commanders, so we had it sent forward to them too. Oh, and they brought this disc an hour ago. It should have the latest front-report on it. A damn hassle word is that some hacker got into our systems today so the order is to avoid using them to deliver critical information. You might want to disconnect your computer when you read th... Sir, are you ok?"
"... Whadda. No. Yes! Of course! Wha... Did you say 4 hours ago? Sumpner? ... Yes, right, good work. Sorry Beatrice, I was just surprised. Anyway, I'll go to my room and read these news now. Have colonel Writer call me in an hour or so, I just want to check out that everything is going well," he said, then grabbed the whole lot of papers in the in box, took the disc with his left hand, and walked back into his room. He dropped some papers as he tried to open the door with his left hand. He placed the rest of the papers on one of the chairs in the room, and then picked up the rest from the floor outside his room and threw them on the chair as well. Once he had the disk placed safely on his desk he looked at the blackboard, and said to himself 'Whoops'.
He looked around the room for a few minutes and then tried to remove the stress with a good solid game of computer solitaire. He failed. Damn that Sumpner, now he will either make me look like a fool or we will have a very shittily organized military. But it's probably better for me to remain in power rather than to lose prestige by admitting this fuckup. God only knows what good old Timothy would do to this guild. Fucking shit, he though as he threw a fistful of pens at the blackboard.
He finally decided to check out what was on the disk, More bad news no doubt, he though. After decoding the files he came to the conclusion that he was right. The army-structure had completely collapsed now; the biggest units left were company-sized. The Russians had been said to be around 50 km from the Swedish border, although in the time it took for him to get this report the Russians had probably already reached it. In the sea the situation was more equal. The USS Seawolf, Bill Clinton and Hawaii reported sinking enemy submarines. As a matter of fact the Hawaii had sunk two. On the other hand the contact had been lost with the USS Hyman G. Rickover.
It took less than thirty minutes to read trough all the relevant information on the disc. While waiting for the colonel to call he checked trough the rest of the mail. The newspapers appeared to only hold information about the war, and it seemed as if they knew even less about the horror of the situation than the president. 'Fight them until you die, hurrah' he thought to himself as he saw the picture of a few hundred American prisoners. Apparently the picture had been copied from Soviet newspapers.
The colonel called at about one-thirty. The colonel described the process and commented something about a brilliant and original plan. Dave just said "Right", "Ok" and "Mmm" back. Finally he asked if they had any problems getting supplies such as winter-clothing, weapons, ammunition and food. Feeling satisfied with the yes answer from the colonel, he said goodbye and hung up. There was still the matter of getting flights organized, first to Norway, then up north to the battle-zone from there.
Precisely one week after he got into his car outside the White House there was a press conference at the Wheeler-Sack airfield, with a select few reporters having the ability to interview the soldiers, take photos and write good news about the war. The select few were five to be precise, Dave noticed, although when the constantly attacked him with questions it felt as if they were five hundred. He tried to be as vague as possible, although he did have a few agents standing near him to make sure he didn't say anything secret. There were as many agents as there were soldiers to be precise, so all the reporters seemed to want to attack him or the colonel to get information straight from the top. The president had promised to come a few days before, but as information leaked out that he was to blame for the US-soldiers becoming prisoners, he had more or less locked himself into the White-House now.
The day went well in the end though, and before dusk the battalion was already on their way to Germany, from where they would be then flown up to Oslo. Helicopters would then bring them most of the way to the front, and then it would begin.