Shanghaied - 2ACW

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.



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.

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

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

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

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.