Shanghaied - 2ACW

[James G]

Jun 8, 2021 0:32:41 GMT Brky2020 said:

If Mexico decides to side with the DAR...how much of a game changer might that be?

If they do, there will be consequences. Washington will not stand for that.
Mexico, like others, have been warned about dealing with the DAR and the US is serious!

Jun 8, 2021 10:15:28 GMT gillan1220 said:

There will be blood or worse. Also Mexican Armed Forces are not that strong to fight the U.S. military on top of being dependent economically with the U.S. Mexico would not dare to join the war,

Also James G , looks like we have something that diverges from OTL since Vandenburg AFB and Buckley AFB have been renamed into Space Force bases just this year.

Any Mexican military intervention would be crushed: it'd be a Curbstomp War! Trade and diplomacy might be the way to go but DC will not stand for that.
Ah... yes. I saw that about Vandenburg post starting the story. Worse, the Space Force HQ I have in Colorado in 2029 IITL, is moving to Alabama in OTL... long before 2029. Damn gits, don't they know about my fictional world!?

[James G]

137 – Head on a pike

In the immediate aftermath of destroying the 1st Cavalry Division, DAR forces spread across Arizona made a general attack up and down the front there. They were in no fit state to do anything big, to make a massive strike to land a decisive blow. However, forward advances were made and ground retaken. What the United States had said that they had liberated, the Democratic American Republic ‘re-liberated’. In a good number of places, those moving forward were stopped cold, turned around and lost ground. Elsewhere though, a lot of good, steady progress was made going forward. There were very little air cover for those on the defensive. They weren’t subject to silly orders to hold onto patches of ground against all odds either. There was flexibility with the US III & VII Corps where they were spread across the length of Arizona, holding onto eastern and central bits of that state, and they were able to make localised withdrawals. The Arizona Corps freed up some ground near to Flagstaff allowing for a loosening of the partial encirclement of that small city. Over near to Casa Grande, where Interstate-10 met the beginning of I-8, a tactical retreat by US national guardsmen was also forced to free up that connection for the attackers: neither freeway was in good condition due to war damage but the area was cleared of the opposition.

Up above, the situation was far better for DAR Air Force units engaged in combat. There remained control for them where they had air dominance and extended the scope of their forward offensive air missions to strike deep into the eastern half of Arizona. Davis-Monthan AFB and Tucson Airport had been lost to United States control when Arizona was entered. Once important DAR Air Force facilities, they were heavily attacked by that service. Where I-10 ran away from Tucson back towards New Mexico, most of that freeway had been cleared of obstructions by US Army engineering units. Trucks of all descriptions were in view of pilots flying attack missions against military traffic down I-10. The Tenth Air Force did try to use their F-35s to try to avert the worst of what happened but those US Air Force strike-fighters suffered grave losses in the sky when trying to duke it out with F-22s which they didn’t get a visual on. Missile firings from far away from the latter – and the DAR Air Force didn’t have many – took out the former and cleared the skies of the failed attempt to try and maintain fighter cover even in the rear for those who had entered Arizona to try and liberate it. US fighters were pulled back into New Mexico skies. The commanders of ARNORTH and AFNORTH – United States Army North and Air Force North respectively – fiercely argued over that with their superior at US Northern Command drawn into the dispute. AFNORTH was husbanding its smashed up air assets and waiting for the return of F-22s to flight operations yet, in the meantime, ARNORTH took an absolute battering below. NORTHCOM’s commander tried, and failed, to sort it all out in one of his last major interventions during the war

The destruction of the 1st Cavalry Division, combined with the massive diplomatic mess that that created due to part of it trying to escape via Mexico, as well as the general attack made across the front in Arizona, were played up for all that they were worth by the secessionist government in Las Vegas. The track record of honestly in boasts made of military accomplishments for the DAR had been woeful previous to March 4th, yet that day wasn’t one for fake news nor misinformation. Minister of Defence & Security Rawlings there in the capital told the truth about the defeats inflicted upon US forces and she didn’t need to exaggerate – or lie – for once. A firm kicking had been given to those seeking to bring down the DAR on the battlefield. Rawlings promised that more of that was due to come afterwards too.


Eleanor Rawlings had been the US Senator from Hawaii when she turned her back on the United States and joined the breakaway government in Las Vegas to assume one of its most important positions. Hawaii had returned to the union which was the United States but she remained committed to the cause for which she had taken up… while also aware that the end for her if the United States caught up with her would almost certainly be fatal. Her time as the DAR’s own version of the US Secretary of Defence (with many other functions that the Department of Defence in the East didn’t have too) outlasted her direct opposite number. E. John Ferdinand was the SecDef at the beginning of March 2029. He’d been in that post for two years, first under President Walsh then under Presidents Roberts & Mitchell too. Walsh had fired him, putting him out of office for a fortnight, but he had returned when the 48th President had left office in disgrace and the 49th President used up much political capital with Congress to get him back. Moreover, it was Congress which had put Ferdinand where he was in the first place, back in ‘27 in the aftermath of the disastrous Taiwan Conflict where (for a period of less than two days) US and Chinese forces had clashed. Ferdinand’s predecessor had resigned rather than have Congress impeach him and Republican lawmakers, aided by many hawkish Democrats too, Rawlings one of them, had demanded that they put a new SecDef in place. When it came to the Ferdinand-Mitchell relationship, the 50th President had never had as much faith in him as Roberts did. The deceased Roberts had got Ferdinand re-confirmed though and Mitchell had inherited someone whom he didn’t want. Congress might have allowed the SecDef to return yet a lot of his former support had been lost. Democrats – War Democrats they were – in Congress didn’t back him and it was only Republican votes that put him back at the head of the DOD. What happened out in Arizona, where the 1st Cavalry Division was first encircled and then destroyed trying to unsuccessfully escape was the final straw for those whose patience with Ferdinand had run out. The Senate Majority Leader and the Speaker of the House, two Republicans with massive majorities when all those absent Jacobean Democrats from the West hadn’t been replaced, turned against him openly. Mitchell’s chief-of-staff caught the way the wind was blowing early on. She met with Senator Green and Representative Fraser who made it clear that Ferdinand would be faced with impeachment proceedings if he didn’t leave his position. Green wanted the SecDef’s ‘head on a pike’, so Keating told Mitchell. Moreover, should the president chose to stand by Ferdinand, there would be consequences.

It had been strongly hinted to Keating that final confirmation of Mitchell’s choice for vice president, Cristina Cruz Flores, could be delayed. Procedural games would be played. Green and Fraser were happy to see her take the VP slot, and would allow that in the end, but they intended to drag things out and make it all messy to cause Mitchell trouble. If he binned Ferdinand though, there would be none of those dramas. Cruz would fast become the next vice president, putting a young(-ish) Latina from the Republicans right there at the top of the country’s leadership. In addition, walking away fast from Ferdinand would also see the Congressional leadership willing to compromise and not cause unnecessary issues over whom Mitchell might nominate to be the next SecDef… as long as that nominee wasn’t completely objectionable. It was a no-brainer. Mitchell asked for Ferdinand’s resignation. He didn’t want the fight with Congress and had never fully been onboard with having such a hold-over from the past as his SecDef. Ferdinand granted the request made of him and duly submitted his resignation: to try and fight would do no one any good, least of all him himself. Mitchell sought and gained another resignation too though. That was NORTHCOM’s commander. Personally, while not the biggest supporter of Ferdinand anyway, in the mind of the president, the theatre commander himself answerable directly to the SecDef – the Joint Chiefs were important but not in the chain-of-command itself – had done more harm to the war effort against the DAR than Ferdinand ever could have. Mitchell spoke with the Joint Chiefs and asked for their view on a replacement at NORTHCOM. Unilaterally, they agreed with the president’s suggestion that the best selection for the job would be the CENTCOM (responsibility: the Middle East) commander. Lt.–General Colin Reilly was named as NORTHCOM’s commander the moment that the then current holder did as Ferdinand had done and submitted the requested resignation: Reilly was on his way home before that went into effect, flying direct from Bahrain.

As to whom would be the new SecDef, there at once came an unsolicited petition from someone who desired the post where she put herself forward to replace Ferdinand. Governor Erika Cook from Florida, who’d tried to manoeuvre herself into the VP slot despite Mitchell wanting Cruz, and Cook being so responsible for making sure that Roberts and not Maria Arreola Rodriguez had become the 49th President, tried to get that job. It was shameless, her all over. She bent the ear of Green, Fraser and other congressional senior people where she made her case for why they should force Mitchell to nominate her. What were her qualifications? Erm… well… self-promotion, a particular distasteful brand of patriotism and not much else. No, not even Senator Donner, whom she had plucked from nowhere to be first of all a new secretary of state for Florida and then made a senator too to replace a murdered office-holder, backed her for that play. There was nowhere near any appreciable congressional support and Mitchell wouldn’t even give the idea any consideration when she managed to browbeat her way into trying to get to Keating to raise it with him. It was Terence Darby who he wanted to become the new SecDef.

The congressman from Washington state, out there in the West in the hands of the secessionists yet still retaining his US House seat, had been someone whom Mitchell had put forth as a possible VP candidate before – under pressure – having settled upon Cruz instead. Darby was rated highly by Mitchell and considered perfect for the SecDef position. Green and Fraser had said no to him for the vice presidency but when Mitchell put forward Darby’s name to replace Ferdinand, and was damn serious about not being willing to budge, showing the same backbone as they had done previously over Cruz, they were willing to bend. He’d scratched their back and they returned the favour. They were willing to allow for his name to go forward for confirmation hearings, promising to make it a speedy process too. He’d been vetted before when Mitchell had tried to make him VP and had a lot of notable qualifications yet they did want to to through the process rather than seeing his appointment rubber-stamped. The timescale agreed upon was days, not weeks, because a SecDef was needed. As long as Darby didn’t trip up and nothing came out about him unknown previously, he would get that post.

Darby’s confirmation would come the same day that Cruz was also confirmed into office as well where she would become the nation’s 53rd Vice President.

[panzer192]

Hopefully, the US can get itself sorted out. The defeats in Arizona and continuing effects of Glowworm do not bode well for a eventual US Victory over the western traitors.

[gillan1220]

Jun 9, 2021 12:01:16 GMT panzer192 said:

Hopefully, the US can get itself sorted out. The defeats in Arizona and continuing effects of Glowworm do not bode well for a eventual US Victory over the western traitors.

I don't see the DAR lasting long either once all the ammo runs out. The U.S. will win but at a costly victory. All while China and Russia enjoy a divided a U.S. as they plan for eventual global superpower status.

[James G]

Jun 9, 2021 12:01:16 GMT panzer192 said:

Hopefully, the US can get itself sorted out. The defeats in Arizona and continuing effects of Glowworm do not bode well for a eventual US Victory over the western traitors.

(Welcome to the thread!)
The US has been put on the back foot yet still remains very strong. Glow-worm will keep going though. Only the DAR has a 'master key' which could stop it.

Jun 9, 2021 12:18:07 GMT gillan1220 said:

I don't see the DAR lasting long either once all the ammo runs out. The U.S. will win but at a costly victory. All while China and Russia enjoy a divided a U.S. as they plan for eventual global superpower status.

The Dar's leaders face certain death if defeated. That's quite the motivator to fight dirty and do everything to survive. The leadership is beset by shifting loyalties and those who want full power too!
Russia is making noise while China is waiting it all out yet still making quiet, small moves too. Both would love a continuing fully-fractured America.

[James G]

138 – Conspiracy theory nonsense

Try as they might, the various agencies within the US Intelligence Community hadn’t been able to uncover any established link between the organs of the Democratic American Republic and the Toomeys. Nicholas and Jessica Toomey – siblings – acted independently of the regime out in Las Vegas, at times even criticising specific actions undertaken. Their general support for the DAR remained though with each of them arguing very well their case for why they believed in that illegal country. Nicholas had once been a deputy chief-of-staff at the White House (under the 46th President) while Jessica, a polyglot, had been an ambassador to the EU for the 47th President. The former never said anything that could get him into legal trouble where he stayed just inside the line and didn’t actually commit treason. As to the latter, while her brother remained in DC, she had travelled across Europe and met just as much opposition as he did but in a different form. Angry crowds and open threats of violence were made against Nicholas. A grieving father whose son had been killed fighting against the DAR came within a whisker of murdering him too. Doors were closed in the face of Jessica by former government contacts and she was also denied entry into first Britain and then Norway where those two nations wouldn’t let her in. She spoke with the media as much as possible and had them trail her when she sought out deserters from the US Army who hadn’t gone home like everyone else to fight against their brothers & sisters in uniform. Talking to the media when he left DC and went up to New York, seeking to address an anti-war rally in Manhattan, Nicholas claimed that his sister had been the subject of a kidnap attempt by ‘US agents’ when in Eastern Europe by that the security services of a ‘third country’ had saved her: he gave no more details than that. For the two of them, protesting against the war while on different continents was done almost as much as vocal defence of the DAR was. When it came to Nicholas’ trip, he never made it to that anti-war rally in the Big Apple though.

Nicholas Toomey did a vanishing act.

Authorities in Pennsylvania (he was travelling through that state) undertook enquiries as to his whereabouts due to the mysterious circumstances of his disappearance though the FBI refused to get involved with the unofficial claim made by a spokesperson that he had ‘likely gone West’. President Mitchell’s press secretary was asked about Nicholas and whether the US Government had anything to do with his disappearance. That was categorically denied. Jessica got wind of that. She was in Stockholm when news reached her that he had vanished. Suspecting foul play on the behalf of either the CIA, the NSA or the Department of Homeland Security, she made a claim from the Swedish capital to allege that he had been kidnapped by the US Government to be held in a Black Site somewhere. Afterwards, Jessica left Stockholm and took a train – her US passport had been cancelled so she couldn’t fly: she could make use of the Schengen area as long as governments, like those in Oslo, respected her freedom of movement – to the Finnish capital Helsinki. She made further claims about the disappearance of her brother when talking to the media there before getting on another train and crossing another border. That was an external one, outside of the Schengen area. She went to Russia with a special visa waiver provided by their embassy in Helsinki. That train took her all the way to Moscow and she met with government officials there. Despite claims made afterwards from opponents of both her and her brother, there was no meeting between Jessica Toomey and President Makarov. She did meet people in his inner circle, just not him.

From the Russian capital, Jessica made a further series of audacious claims against the government of a country who she had previously declared she was no longer a citizen of. The United States had not only ‘forcibly disappeared’ Nicholas but there were others missing too. She read out the names of nine other people who had quietly vanished when they had been providing vocal opposition to the war against the DAR while within United States territory. They had been kidnapped and illegally detained, she said, with those responsible being the US Government who held each of them illegally. All that was just the opening act though. Those claims were followed by what she really wanted to get people to listen to.

Jessica Toomey asserted that President Roberts had been murdered after ten days in office. Such a thing had been said by others before her and dismissed as conspiracy theory nonsense, yet she provided what she claimed was proof of his murder. There was video surveillance footage of an alleged White House intruder the night when Roberts supposedly choked to death while having a midnight snack. A medical report concerning a post-mortem carried out upon the 49th President was something that Jessica presented where there were highlighted portions that she said proved there had been foul play. Moreover, Jessica likewise released to the media with that footage and the medical report un-redacted transcripts of an apparent telephone call between then Vice President Mitchell and a former business acquaintance: the transcript depicted Mitchell talking about ‘when he would take over’. Mitchell had killed Roberts, that was the overall message of Jessica’s claim, and in doing so had committed the ultimate act of treason against his country while claiming that he was in fact fighting traitors.

The ‘evidence’ which Jessica handed over copies of went to Russian, European and American media members who’d been invited to the press conference she held in the Russian capital. She answered questions put to her afterwards where she followed up what she said that evidence proved with more remarks alleging that Roberts’ death had been no accident and instead he had been murdered by his replacement. It was said by her too that she was certainly not the only one who knew all of that, who had access to such proof. There were plentiful powerful people in DC as well as among foreign governments allied to the United States who knew that same thing about what had happened to Roberts. Journalists were invited by her to ask questions of them and pick holes in what she said would be their lies. As to her, she declared she was staying in Moscow because to go outside of Russia meant risking her freedom, her life even. Why, an American journalist asked her, not go to the DAR and instead stay in Russia where there was no freedom? Jessica did herself no favours by denying that Russia wasn’t a bastion of freedom but put more effort into assuring that questioner that she would never make it back to the DAR if she tried due to the dangers to her in any attempt.


Makarov wasn’t in Moscow when Jessica Toomey was there. He had gone to where she had travelled from and when in Helsinki met with Acting President Doroszewski. The latter had flown up from Warsaw for a meeting which was at first a secret known only to a few outsiders, the Finnish Government included. Poland had only recently lost its president in even more suspicious circumstances than the United States had. His replacement was cautious in her journey to Helsinki but was never in any danger: Russia had bumped off the man she replaced so that she could, unwittingly, do their bidding so they weren’t about to harm Doroszewski.

Following talks with Makarov with Finnish assistance to that, Doroszewski and Russia’s president came to an agreement. They pledged to each stop launching military attacks against each other either within each other’s country, and also up in the Baltics as well. With that secondary part of the deal, Makarov promised that he could stop what Russia had always denied having any influence over: terror attacks inside the Baltic States. The two of them shook hands on their deal before going to then present it to the world leaving out that last detail to save blushes all round.

Poland’s stand-in leader did all that she did without consulting any of her allies beforehand. She screwed them over completely. Makarov couldn’t have been more pleased! He’d put a ‘reasonable woman’ in power and got all that he wanted in Helsinki while back in his capital, all of that trouble was being caused by someone else very willing too to play Russia’s game all for no reward as well.

[gillan1220]

So Mitchell was behind the murder of Roberts? This is like the plot of Angel Has Fallen.

[James G]

Jun 10, 2021 1:16:50 GMT gillan1220 said:

So Mitchell was behind the murder of Roberts? This is like the plot of Angel Has Fallen.

Such is the allegation made, one many will believe.

[James G]

139 – No Lightnings

The US Air Force weren’t the only ones who flew the F-35 Lightning. They had many of the -35A versions in service, which were stealth multi-role strike-fighters, and were joined too by several Air National Guard units (from Alabama, South Carolina, Vermont & Wisconsin) flying the same aircraft. Who else flew the Lightning were both the US Navy and the US Marine Corps. Those two services, the latter much more than the former, had the same aircraft flying from land bases in support of the war against the secessionist Democratic American Republic. Marine-piloted -35Bs were vertical take-off & landing capable yet flew in a conventional fashion and were able to carry more ordnance and fuel when doing so. A couple of US Navy air units had been assigned to Air Forces North with AFNORTH using the -35C versions against the DAR as well. When the F-22A Raptors were grounded, as the B-2A Spirits before them had been as well, the Lightnings were called upon to take up the slack. Overseas customers – there were plenty of them as well – used the same aircraft for fighter missions because the Lightning was a very capable platform. However, when going up against F-22s flown by former brothers & sisters in arms, the Lightnings used by AFNORTH against the DAR in the West were second-rate. They just couldn’t do what those dedicated air dominance fighters did. Still, they were sent into action during early March 2029 and their aircrews did their best when faced with an enemy who had began to assert control of the skies. Losses increased as the days and nights went on.

Come March 5th, there were a couple of crashes not caused by enemy action or any preventable maintenance/engineering problem.

One of the F-35As flown by the South Carolina Air National Guard and under Fifteenth Air Force command suffered a complete shutdown of flight systems while high above the west of Colorado. The pilot was unable to restart the computer when it died unexpectedly and his aircraft, in the middle of some pretty bad weather, was something he quickly had no control over. It started to enter a spin and lost altitude while doing so. He pulled his ejection handle as he abandoned his aircraft and would end up some distance away from the air wreck while also in enemy territory. Both a -35B flown by a Marine Corps air unit and then a pair of US Air Force -35As on fighter missions for the Tenth Air Force over the eastern edges of New Mexico had similar loss of all computing power within hours of that first instance to their north. The Marine aviator went down with her aircraft though the pair of pilots from the 52nd Fighter Wing (home from Europe) ejected and ended up in friendly territory. Four Lightnings went down in almost identical circumstances in quick succession. Next up, two -35Cs with VX-23, a US Navy test & evaluation squadron, were in the last stages of pre-flight checks when on the flight-ramp at the retaken Peterson AFB in Colorado. Those two strike-fighters had been captured when Peterson had been with the jets having served in the US Navy’s Pacific Fleet before the upstart DAR Navy sent them to Denver International Airport. The flight computers crashed minutes before the aircraft were about to get airborne. Nothing the pilots nor the ground crews could do to restart those computers would work. They were dead. The two pilots feared that they would have been too if that had happened in mid-air.

Throughout that day, there were more and more outages with the Lightnings assigned to AFNORTH units. Those occurred when the aircraft weren’t in the air but during what (it had been hoped) would be a temporary grounding of the entire class of aircraft. Elsewhere, from land bases and then from aircraft deployed aboard carriers, the same problems were reported. The flight computers all went down without any way to restart them. The aircraft which they were in couldn’t fly. All over the place, new computers were put into aircraft and tests run. They started but then soon died as well. Fortunately, none of those failed test runs took place while the fighters were up but there were a few close calls with eager commanders trying to force extremely wary aircrews from going up into the sky to be live test dummies.

The gift which kept on giving, the computer virus known as Glow-worm, struck again. Hundreds of aircraft were left unable to fly for the foreseeable future.


With no Lightnings available, AFNORTH was pretty much impotent. There were F-15s (the -15C pure fighter version and the -15E strike model), F-16s and A-10s but the use of them in combat meant that they were prey to a stronger enemy fighter force. The DAR had taken many losses during the conflict that had been raging for more than six weeks yet they still had a decent number of F-22s flying and especially many more F-35s of their own available for combat operations. Lightnings in DAR service against what was left of the AFNORTH combat force was a sure-fire way to keep the skies fully in their control even without the ‘magic bullet’ F-22s. They would take down as many US aircraft as they could with the likelihood of very few, maybe just a handful, of losses themselves.

The new commander of the US Northern Command, General Reilly, arrived at his wartime headquarters established at Vance AFB in Oklahoma to be faced with that first major problem for him. After coming straight from his CENTCOM leadership role – with the Middle East having been almost stripped of American military power when civil war broke out at home –, the news on forced grounding of the Lightnings was an issue that all eyes went to him to solve. Reilly couldn’t change the fact that the air situation had completely swung over to the control of the secessionists though. Nothing he could do could reverse the situation where first the F-22s and then the F-35s couldn’t fly. Without them, any other air missions flown was exposed to an attack where air losses would mount faster than they had been ahead of his arrival. All he could do was inform his superiors that there was no way that he could order the sending of aircrew to their deaths when going skywards. No air cover could be provided for those fighting on the ground also to try and liberate the West from that unelected, illegal regime who had seized power and territory there.

AFNORTH, Reilly’s NORTHCOM and the United States too had been checkmated by the DAR and their own version of asymmetrical warfare on the grandest scale where they used (stolen) lines of code in such a manner.


End of Part Six

[panzer192]

@james, could we possibly see a update from the CINC of NORAD or Strategic Command, maybe even President Mitchell, on the possible impact of Glow-Worm and its negating of the US Nuclear Triad?

[gillan1220]

With your permission, I might write a short vignette about myself and my Republican friend in California reacting to the events on the 2ACW.

[James G]

Jun 12, 2021 0:52:45 GMT panzer192 said:

@james, could we possibly see a update from the CINC of NORAD or Strategic Command, maybe even President Mitchell, on the possible impact of Glow-Worm and its negating of the US Nuclear Triad?

Well... its already stopped the B-2s from flying so that is one leg of the triad badly disrupted!
I'll see what I can do. That will be an important factor in the story's eventual conclusion too, I think, so yep.

Jun 12, 2021 16:03:38 GMT gillan1220 said:

With your permission, I might write a short vignette about myself and my Republican friend in California reacting to the events on the 2ACW.

Go for it. No problem at all and I'll have a read once you have done it for sure.

[James G]

Interlude


140 – The devil

Stephen Berman and Mike Erikson drove to El Paso all the way from Bemidji up in Minnesota. It took them several days to cross the middle of the country like that and was expensive due to exceptionally high fuel prices. Flying would have been so much easier but with the restrictions, and the danger too, they took a road-trip with each one spelling the other driving. A direct route to El Paso on the final stage of the journey was impossible due to the situation in New Mexico with the main routes closed to military traffic only. They went into Texas from Oklahoma and then followed the freeways running out to Far West Texas. Both Interstate-20 first and then I-10 too were crossed by the two of them – with Erikson driving up I-10 into El Paso – and they observed from out of their vehicle’s windows ‘war damage’. Wrecks of both military and civilian vehicles alike had been pulled off the freeway and patch-ups done elsewhere to keep traffic flowing around bomb damage. Air strikes as well as commando activity had many times closed the route to and from El Paso but it was open come early March 2029. They were allowed down the freeway too, something that Erikson had assured Berman wouldn’t have been the case had they tried to follow I-25 southwards through New Mexico. When they entered El Paso, Berman, in the passenger seat beside his old friend, at once took note of all of the military activity in the city. Texas State Guard troopers were everywhere on the ground while it seemed like dozens of small drones were up above them too. There were checkpoints which they had to go through as they approached the border crossings yet nowhere were they stopped from going further. A check on their ID and a search for weapons was conducted each time before they were allowed to go. Berman was unhappy at the implications of those checks for personal freedom, he was a staunch liberal, but didn’t raise any complaint. Getting to the border and across it was his urgent need and so he shut up.

The border had only been open a week. There were big queues of traffic going across, mostly trucks laden with goods. Berman and Erikson had heard about all that was going on across in Mexico with the security situation over there reported to be horrendous yet there were still trucks going back-&-forth through that. Few cars with civilian passengers were in the queue which they joined though. Border Protection officers were joined by those State Guard troopers in providing security: Texan national guardsmen who Erikson had expected to see there were in Arizona Berman told him. The two of them weren’t waved through the controls on the US side. Politely, yet firmly, they were asked to leave their vehicle and come for a ‘chat’ after being directed to a vehicle waiting area. How Berman wanted to complain but, as before, he shut up and did what he was told. To not do so would mean he wouldn’t make it into Mexico. US Customs & Border Protection (different from the Border Patrol) was part of the Department of Homeland Security. Erikson had had many dealings with them in the past and had explained to Berman on the way to El Paso that their organisation was in a bad state due to all of the pre-war disruption and then armed attacks made against them from criminal groups even away from where the fighting was out further West. He dealt with their questions on behalf of himself and his friend. The first question which came for Erikson to answer was just what was a licensed private investigator and his travelling companion, a retired US senator, seeking to gain by entering Mexico at such a time? Erikson told those asking the truth: they were searching for Berman’s missing daughter and following what was thought to be a firm lead. Berman confirmed that. The two of them were told that it was a very bad idea to go into Mexico. There was a drug war raging with things just over the border in Juárez, where they would be entering, worse than they had ever been… even worse than 2010. Erikson asked whether the two of them would be stopped from crossing. As anticipated, he was told that they wouldn’t be. The advice was not to go though. In reply, Erikson assured those USCBP people that there were people waiting for them over on the other side: private security contractors. He too had been to Mexico before in recent years and understood the dangers. Good luck was wished to them both and to Berman the senior USCBP agent said he hoped that he would find his daughter. The way in which that final comment was made betrayed a belief that nothing good would come of the search.


There was gunfire inside Juárez. Berman and Erikson heard it during the crossing over the frontier trace itself and then again when they were inside Mexican territory. Straight away, they were met as arranged by four private security contractors. They had been hired by Erikson – with Berman’s cash – and hadn’t gone into Mexico through official channels. Their company, Avenues Enterprises, was acting illegally in sending them into Mexico via a hidden route yet it allowed them to bring in a lot of weaponry with no questioned asked about that nor what they did. The three men and one woman with the mercenary team were all Latino-Americans and knew what they were doing. Erikson had demanded only the best and got that. There was a change into a new vehicle as well as a report that the location arranged for a meet with the Mexican contact who had a line on Berman’s daughter had been moved. Erikson expressed concern about that but the Avenues Enterprises people weren’t. That was how things were. Locations, times and everything else were ‘flexible’ for those with influence in Mexico when it came to such matters. The senior-most one of them told Erikson that he would have been very worried if everything agreed to was struck to… that would have meant trouble. They soon left Juárez and went out into the depths of the lawless state of Chihuahua. Berman sat squeezed between the hulking figures of two of the mercenaries in the rear of the vehicle. He was frightened indeed but wouldn’t turn back and run for the safety of home. His daughter was in Mexico like him yet he knew that she would have no such protection as he did. Getting her own drove him to face down the danger.

Bethany, aged twenty-one, and he were estranged. She was his eldest child, a product of his first marriage. Hating him, his new wife, and pretty much so much of the world was what Bethany was all about. She’d been a rebellious teenager and then a very angry young woman. Studying in her third year at NYU, Bethany hadn’t come home for Christmas 2028 when the semester ended and instead gone out to Las Vegas to join the protest movement there against the outcome of the presidential election and subsequent government actions against protesters. Berman was a former Democratic senator, retiring in ‘26, but to Bethany, and so many like her, he was as much the enemy as the Republicans were due to his centralist, middle-of-the-road politics. She joined the protests against President Walsh and in many ways marched with those maddened crowds against her father too. He’d tried to get her to come home. He had also made an effort to use his standing as a senior Democrat to stop the breakaway, secessionist movement in the West as well. Bethany did what she wanted to though and those out West ignored his high-profile efforts at peacemaking. When independence was declared and the country split in two, Berman lost track of his daughter. He’d heard that she went to Oakland in California and tried once more to get her home because it was clear at that stage, in mid-January ‘29, that war was imminent. Erikson, a friend, had tried to bring her home himself. He’d found Bethany in Oakland and brought with him a message from her mother, not her father, in the hope that would change things. The young woman had been open to leaving, to going with Erikson, yet Berman’s friend had then faced arrest and deportation from the crazy place which California, part of the Democratic American Republic, had become. He was forced out yet had been able to see that Bethany would leave too, just via a different route. With some other youngsters like herself, Bethany had left the DAR and gone to Mexico. There were people like Bethany who had had a change of heart about the DAR when being inside that country and there had been a departure of many who no longer agreed that the new country was the progressive paradise it had been promised to be for those who had ‘fought’ – i.e. marched on the streets – for that to happen. However, in Mexico, those with her had lost track of her. Erikson had spoken to the two boys (one who’d been intimate with her) who had travelled with her and they said that she hadn’t been kidnapped nor come to harm but had simply refused to come home. They left her in Tijuana. Berman had wanted to see the two of them come to some serious harm at the ends of his fists. How could they abandon his daughter in a place like Tijuana!? Erikson, calmer, had plugged them for all available information, got them away from Berman and then used his contacts. Berman had thrown all of his savings at the investigation which Erikson oversaw. The FBI nor anyone else was interested in helping. He was a former senator, and his daughter had first willingly supported the DAR and then left that nation by her own accord with no evidence that she was in any danger in Mexico. Like thousands of other parents with missing teenage / twenty-something children – so many of those on the streets in Las Vegas, Denver, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, Seattle and so on had been youngsters from the East – he had had no government support. He had Erikson though, someone who knew Mexico. Contact had been made though someone who knew someone who knew someone who had contact with Bethany in Tijuana. She’d moved on though, all the way over to Juárez. To Juárez and then into Chihuahua, Berman and Erikson had gone.

The meet turned out to be an ambush. Before Berman, Erikson nor even the mercenaries knew what was happening, more than a dozen guys with heavy automatic weapons had them surrounded. It all happened so fast. Berman almost collapsed with fright. No gunfire took place. Everyone held their nerve instead of squeezing triggers. The contact didn’t show up and instead, from behind several of those armed men who had his party surrounded, Berman came face-to-face with someone who he didn’t know personally but certainly knew of. In the middle of the Chihuahuan desert, at a rundown former farmhouse, Felix Jesus Carrillo Morales introduced himself. Carrillo welcomed Berman to Mexico and told everyone to calm down because it was a ‘business meeting’ and ‘not a gun fight’. Weapons weren’t dropped, just lowered. Berman was invited to take a seat by the man whose face had been all over the media. The Californian businessman was alleged to be the terrorist mastermind who had helped instigate the Second American Civil War to financially gain from the outcome of an independent DAR. Berman had believed all that he had heard. Nonetheless, to see him inside Mexico at the head of a well-armed and organised party of gunmen was surprising. What he had to do with Berman getting his daughter back was something he didn’t understand. Erikson quickly grasped the situation though. He introduced himself unbidden – taking a risk by being so forward – and treated Carrillo with a lot of respect… the man clearly was in charge with so many gunmen so he thought it was best to do that! Bethany was safe. Carrillo got that out of the way straight away. He informed Berman that he had heard that the young woman was in danger and so he sent some members of the Vaqueros private security group to protect her form harm. That danger came from the man whom Berman and Erikson had come to Mexico to meet: the intention was to hurt Bethany, in the worst possible ways, and then to hold Berman as a hostage for ransom. There was no longer any fear about that outcome. Instead, the Vaqueros would escort Berman and his party back to the border and they would all re-enter the United States there without anyone coming to any harm. A woman brought Bethany into the room. Her eyes were gazed over yet she told her father she was fine. She just wanted to go home. Carrillo, grandstanding, welcomed the happy news and said that he had done Berman such a good service out of the kindness of his heart. The former senator, like his friend who’d come to Mexico with him, even the outgunned mercenaries from Avenues Enterprises, knew that there would be a ‘but’ coming though. Of course there was.


Telling him no harm would come to him, that he just wanted to talk in private, Carrillo took Berman into a smaller room. Alone, Berman was told that Carrillo required a small favour from him. Naturally, there would still be freedom given to him and his daughter if he said no to that, but Carrillo explained that he didn’t think that Berman would refuse to help him with something after the kindness that he has shown the Berman family. The favour was to deliver a message once Berman got home. Carrillo told him the message and to whom he wanted Berman to talk to. He then provided a folder with some documents inside. Keep them to yourself, Berman was told, and only let the person I have told you to go see look at them. He queried as to why he was being chosen to do that. Carrillo said that Berman, like he, was a private citizen, though one of a different country (the DAR and the United States respectively), and the contact he was asking him to make needed to be done in that manner rather than officially. Berman had a status too, even after leaving the US Senate, and couldn’t be ignored. As promised, Carrillo let those he had effectively taken hostage go. An armed escort was provided for Berman and his party all the way back to the border crossing. At the last moment, the mercenaries employed by Erikson broke away and it was only three Americans who went through the Mexican border control point. Berman had brought his daughter’s passport with him. She hadn’t used it to get into Mexico but she used it to leave: no problems, which there should have been, cropped up with that. The hand of Carrillo reached from afar to ensure that Bethany’s passage out was uninterrupted by bureaucracy on the Mexican end. Berman and Erikson then got her into the United States. The same senior USCBP agent was there when Berman came back, shocked to see him not just alive but with his daughter as well. There had been others before Berman – as there would be afterwards – who were told not to go into Mexico to search for someone, who did regardless and subsequently hadn’t been seen since. Berman asked that senior agent if he could speak to a certain named person within Joint Task Force North.

Prearranged at Erikson’s insistence, a doctor at a private clinic in El Paso working for Avenues Enterprises, plus security there, was waiting for Bethany. Erikson had feared that Bethany wouldn’t come back from Mexico – if they had found her – in a good state. When she had been handed over by Carrillo’s people, she had looked to Erikson to have been drugged and having been hurt in unseen ways. He didn’t say what he worried had had happened to her in front of her father and got her to that doctor as fast as possible. As to Berman, knowing that Erikson had his daughter’s care in hand, he did as Carrillo had asked and went to see the CIA station chief in El Paso. JTF-North was a Pentagon operation on the northern side of the US-Mexico border established during the Nineties. It was supposed to co-ordinate security for the border in cooperation with civilian agencies such as the FBI, the DEA, USCBP and the DHS among others. The CIA was officially not part of it though had ‘advisers’ attached since the beginning. Through the Twenties, the CIA presence increased leading to a senior posting for an official from that agency who, if he or she served elsewhere at such a post, would be a station chief. Having to use Carrillo’s name to get anywhere, but also with the confirmation that he had himself had once held such a high political post, after a little bit of fuss too, Berman was able to see that station chief representing the CIA at JTF-North. A dance had to be done where the spook claimed to be just an adviser on contract and Berman played along with what. He then did what Carrillo had wanted him to do and deliver a message as well as pass on those documents to such an important representative of his own government.

Berman was asked if he understood just how powerful the man he had met was? He told the CIA that he had heard all about Carrillo but only through open sources: back when he had been a senator, he had never heard of the man. Well… Carrillo was more than just the ‘average’ drug smuggler. Berman was informed that in the past few months, Carrillo had taken over all territory south of the border from the various previous competing cartels. From Tijuana to Sinaloa and from Juárez to Laredo (no further south though), Carrillo was in charge. The murder and mayhem ongoing in the north of Mexico was all down to his actions. He was smuggling drugs, people and legal goods that were in short supply across the border north while moving arms and valuable commodities (instead of useless cash) south. Cartel leaders were dead and their militias bent to his will. No one had dared try to achieve what Carrillo had before he started doing that. The fighting was still ongoing and he hadn’t won but he looked likely to. The man was a monster with the blood of thousands on his hands.

Berman had met with the devil in Mexico. He had brought back a message from the devil though, one to the US Government.

[gillan1220]

I see Carrillo playing both the DAR and the USA. Whoever is the highest bidden would serve his interests.

[James G]

Jun 13, 2021 16:49:03 GMT gillan1220 said:

I see Carrillo playing both the DAR and the USA. Whoever is the highest bidden would serve his interests.

He is a bad, bad man. What his vocal message and handed-over documents about will play out through Part Seven.

We're about to meet a badder man than Carrillo though. This is a storyline which has been playing out for a while.
To picture Green, think the character played by Ned Beatty (RIP) in the film Shooter... just more of a sh*t-bag.