May 1, 1984
Fort Myers, Florida
The last two weeks had been spent marshalling equipment and training the Guardsmen in executing a combined arms assault. They'd spent much of the past year practicing how to hold positions against Soviet armor, using hit-and-run tactics to fire antitank weapons, mount and dismount from M113s on the run. This was going to be something wholly different. Not only would they be in a firefight with irregulars, but it was going to be in the midst of a city filled with wealth in a world where the concept had disappeared from many parts of it. One of the Guardsmen remarked that living in South America was probably a billion times better than whatever was left of Florida they were “defending.” That remark was overheard by his sergeant, resulting in a substantial tongue-lashing but nothing more. Even the sergeant knew this mission carried little upside for them.
Don Ewing had learned a lot in the last two months, though. A by-the-book major when he was assigned to his position in Fort Myers, he’d recognized there was no book anymore, just survival. They had lots of rifles and ammunition, but almost nothing for armor. That would be serious trouble if they were facing LAWs. Ewing decided it was worth rolling the dice to try and counteract that threat. He convinced Seal to fly to Arcadia, the location of the Guard depot where his detachment had all loaded up before deploying. It was high-stakes, the major knew. He was risking a valuable asset (two, really, the helicopter and its skilled pilot) for this, but if he was lucky, it would yield the results he was looking for. Seal flew there, avoiding any population centers before Arcadia, and with Mallory riding shotgun to survey the depot with high-power binoculars, they were able to establish that the armory was intact. Seal carefully landed, and their backseat passenger, a captain, stepped out. There was a ragtag guard force, which actually saluted him. Arcadia was only about 5,000 people, making it a wonderful place to station an equipment depot, and they were remote enough to not be troubled by refugees. One of the guards took the captain inside the depot, where an aged officer wearing Korean War-era fatigues was sitting. The men traded salutes and sat down to talk. The Korean War vet had been drafted and won a battlefield commission late in the war to lieutenant. Soon after the armistice was signed, he was demobilized and came back home to his family’s citrus farm. When the nukes flew, he donned his old fatigues and went to the sheriff’s office. Like Fort Myers, Arcadia was a county seat. The sheriff asked him to round up some volunteers and secure the depot, which he’d done. The old lieutenant had been here every day since, only going home at night to have dinner with his wife and sleep a few hours.
The captain could not believe his good fortune. Arcadia was believed to have narrowly escaped fallout from all of the blasts across Central Florida. He’d fully expected to take fire at best and be shot out of the sky at worst from angry small-town southerners who had access to an arms depot, but this sixty-something-year-old man still remembered his oath and kept it all these years later. The Guard captain asked if he could be let into the vehicle shed (it was really much larger, but shed was the terminology the military used) and the lieutenant obliged. Once inside, he found what he was looking for. Together, the officers searched for the keys to unlock them, and found them inside of a desk drawer in the quartermaster’s office. The captain climbed inside the first vehicle and pushed the button while saying a prayer. The old diesel engine rumbled to life. The captain smiled broadly.
Those Cuban bastards won’t know what hit them. He turned the engine off and dismounted to find the old lieutenant with a tear in his eye. “These things saved my life a few times in ‘53 in Korea. Never thought I’d see them run again in my lifetime.” The captain nodded. “Lieutenant, we’re going to come back with a proper troop to take these with us. If you have anyone here who knows how to service them, we’d greatly appreciate it.” “Gladly, captain,” the lieutenant replied. “Why do you need them, though?”
The captain’s visage turned serious. “There’s a bunch of Cuban mercenaries that have control of Naples. Couple of former CIA guys helping them, too. We can’t have that. They’re heavily armed with stolen reserve equipment. Rockets, rifles, machine guns. If this works, it’ll be all the difference.” The lieutenant saluted. “Sir, we’ll give you anything we can. In fact, there’s a bunch of infantry mortars I found a few weeks ago while I was inventorying everything here. They’re about as old as me, but the beautiful thing about mortars is you don’t have to do much to use them effectively.” A closet door was opened and there were a half-dozen launchers and several shelves of mortar shells. The captain looked at the plate containing the manufacturer’s information. “Fucking hell!”
Stokes 3-Inch Mortar, NFF No 24, Balmoral Road, Watford. 1917. The lieutenant laughed. “I said it was about as old as me. It’s a little older than me, in fact, but the beautiful thing about these is that if they’re well-kept, they’ll last forever. These were created for trench warfare, in miserable conditions. I took one out across the road, there’s nothing for miles going north of here, and tested a couple out with the boys. It works, Captain. You could use all the help you can get. Go kill some Commie bastards for me, will ya?” The two men saluted each other, and the captain went back to the helicopter with one of the mortar launchers and a box with a dozen shells. He laughed to himself.
Proof of concept.
*****
Manny Rivera had spent much of the past two weeks overseeing his ex-Agency men as they themselves oversaw the creation of defensive positions around Naples. That, and sneaking off whenever he could with Brigitte to bang each other’s brains out. As it transpired, she had been introduced to the former Wall Street trader when he was in Miami on business before the war, and he was so taken by her that he offered her a substantial sum of money to be his “assistant” in Naples, which entailed various assignments charming those that needed to be charmed, and illicit
rendezvous when his wife was distracted or asleep. Brigitte enjoyed sex, and Preuss was not bad at it, but she’d become growingly appalled at sneaking around his clearly unaware wife. Manny was her assignment, and she’d decided that gave her an out if Preuss questioned her about how much time she spent with him. That wasn’t an issue yet, and was unlikely to become one anytime soon.
The CIA veterans recognized that there was no way to handle the sprawl east of the airport without making their task impossible, and they prevailed upon Manny to have a meeting with “King Solomon” about requiring people to move inwards west of Livingston Road. That would be the line to hold. There were four east-west thoroughfares, with very clean, open lines of sight. Three of them intersected with Livingston, with plenty of small canals and other terrain inhospitable for attacking in between, which made defending them easier. The fourth, Route 84, intersected with U.S. 41 near the airport, and that would be one of the heaviest armed defense points. Along the north end, running down Pine Ridge Rd, was a barrier line, constructed with palm trees that had been felled, fencing, and tour buses that were parked to obstruct U.S. 41 and Goodlette-Frank Rd. U.S. 41 at Pine Ridge Rd was the other heavily armed defense point—it was the obvious point of advance for any force coming south from Fort Myers. The north U.S. 41 guard post featured three machine guns, an RPG, and a rifle team. The south U.S. 41 post near the airport had an M60 machine gun, an RPG, and a rifle team as well. The airport would be the place for a last stand, should it occur. The remaining two RPGs and two machine guns were there, along with a quick response team that Matt Phillips and Mike Carr designed. Two vans, each with riflemen and SMGs, and each van would have one of the riflemen using the M203 attachment on the M16 rifle. The positive aspect is that while they had to guard the south/east approaches to the city, they could keep smaller teams there. It was highly unlikely that anyone with firepower would make it through the Everglades from the radioactive wasteland of Greater Miami, so much so that Carr said it was “near zero.” This was probably an understatement.
By the end of April, Naples had been well fortified. Anyone who had been living outside of the perimeter was sent a letter notifying them they could leave their property, come inside the protective ring, and be guaranteed food and safety. If they chose to stay in their home outside of the
cordon sanitaire, they were on their own. A few chose to stay, mainly those who had stockpiled food and ammunition and were known to be loner types. The rest left their homes and moved behind the lines. There were half-developed condominiums turned into makeshift apartments for families with plywood and tarp. Adult men were expected to work, either with building fortifications (if they had skills in engineering, carpentry, or construction), and bolstering security patrols (if they did not have any skill sets). Solomon Preuss, chosen by his peers (the wealthy citizens) and accepted by the elected officials, became a sort of
generalissimo, with authority to have the final say on any decision. The mayor was handling the day-to-day items, but anything big meant that the mayor came to Preuss. The man resented having been suborned, not as much as the police chief did, but both of them recognized that the man they’d welcomed a few short weeks ago as a savior of sorts was in the pockets of the gentleman scientist, and having Manny Rivera in your pocket meant his weapons and men were there too. The lack of help from the actual government and the sense of siege mentality that developed amongst the largely well-to-do population when it became clear Fort Myers had abandoned any pretense of working together translated into broad support for declaring a sort of independence.
Without military radios, there was no communication to Gainesville, so their only knowledge of this situation was through Ewing in Fort Myers. That would be very useful, from his end, but it also made it extremely unlikely that the situation could be resolved in a peaceful fashion. Rivera, Carr and Phillips specifically were wedded to a situation in which they maintained power and freedom. Rivera knew that surrender or losing would be death. Carr and Phillips were unsure—on one hand, what they were doing could be considered treason; on the other, they had a skill set invaluable to this world—and figuring out which was more likely was an exercise they were comfortable with. Regardless, even if there was an ability for Gainesville to communicate and make the Naples leadership feel as if the state cared about them, the reality was that they didn’t have it, and so two cities would go to war because of the manipulations of Manny Rivera and the multimillionaire banker
cum scientist Solomon Preuss.
*****
There was one more person with a part to play in this drama. Major Ewing called on Chief Stewart at the police station, and Stewart radioed for Detective Klima to return to the station. When Klima walked into the chief’s office, he saw the Major sitting there and knew something was up. “Sirs, why do I feel like I’m about to get some news I’ve no desire to receive?” Ewing smiled at that. “Well, Captain Klima, I am drafting you back to service,” Ewing replied. “Put bluntly, we’re going to be launching an operation against Manny Rivera and company within 48 hours. To ensure our success in this endeavor, I’ve managed to retrieve two M48A3 Pattons from the armory in Arcadia. I need you commanding one of them. I know you were in the M60 in Germany. This is older, but it’s diesel, has a 105mm cannon and a .25 caliber MG, and dimensions are roughly equivalent. From what Mr. Seal has told us, they’ve got RPGs and MGs, and the A3 was built to handle those in ‘Nam. I am only going to use them if we can’t break through whatever resistance they might have. It doesn’t sound like they’re hostages in Naples, so God knows what we’re going to be facing. I want to make sure we’re able to handle any of it. I have to have you in one of those tanks.” A mass of emotions ran through the tall body of the detective, but ultimately there was only one response. Jan Klima drew himself to attention and saluted the Major. “Sir, yes sir!”
