all, the trouble spot of old Israel. Canada well knew that worldwide objections would be raised against an orbital New Israel. She also knew that no corporate state on Earth had been in the past, or ever would be in the future, likely to bring such single-minded dedication and ability to the establishment of space colonies.
Canada found that Egypt, Arabia, Iraq, and other AIR countries would willingly help finance the extraterrestrialization of Israel. In 1995, major powers would have intervened. By 2010, some major power might again intervene. But this odd consortium of Canadians, Islamics, and Israelis saw the next few years as a launch window in time.
Turkey, nominally a democratic Islamic moderate, had already permitted many Israelis to relocate from Cyprus to the Tuz Golu region, but knew that in transforming her central plateau to an Israeli staging area she would risk opposition from inside and out. Internally, the nomadic Kurds were raiding advance Israeli camps. Externally, Turkey feared that the RUS might retain enough clout to mount an expeditionary force to prevent Israel from developing her orbital habitats.
Turkey's problem, then, was simply that she needed an army of janissaries for a few years. Canada was the broker for these services. She knew that the US was in no position to withhold our Third Army, now that we depended on Canada for aid.
Ultimately, White House Deseret viewed the 'Ellfive Solution' with cautious optimism. The Apostles — the ruling committee of the LDS — felt that the official Mormon accounts of world history would, in time, greatly benefit by a general Jewish exodus from the planet. They reasoned (simplistically) that Jews everywhere would clamor for berths on Ellfive shuttle ships, so that Mormon America would be rid of one highly visible religious minority. The truth was that most American Jews had lived urban lives, and died urban deaths, a year before. More Jews survived in Europe than in America. Like Japan, Europe was rich in industry, poor in natural resources. There was good reason to expect that New Israel could have her pick of emigrants to a new industrial frontier.
The long purposeful retreat of the US Third Army was applauded by Allies and SinoInds alike for varied reasons. Iran and Kurdistan mounted token opposition, but feared contamination by plague more than they feared the passage of the infidel. Thanks to Canadian chocolate, very few cases of plague assailed our troops in Asia and by early September, our Third Army reached Eastern Turkey. The First and Fifth US Armies were streaming toward the Bering Strait while the weather held.
We had historical precedents in Dunkirk and Cyprus for the massive crossing from the Chukchi Peninsula to Alaska. We believed that the SinoInds, like the Russians, were too weak to mount serious opposition to our crossing. But just in case, the US and Canadian fleets assembled in the Chukchi and Bering Seas.
Chapter Seventy-Eight
The Bering Shoot was a misnomer coined by media; it should have been called the Chukchi Nukes. Before dawn on Thursday, September 11, a covey of ballistic birds sailed over from the Sea of Okhotsk to pound the Chukchi Peninsula where over one million US troops were staging to cross the strait.
Most of our naval forces stayed submerged and could not affect the outcome of the SinoInd attack. It was the big delta dirigibles, refitted by the US Navy after their success in the Maldives, that intercepted most of the nukes with particle-beam weapons. Inevitably, shock waves from airbursts blew seven of our fifteen deltas out of the skies over Chukchi. Our few orbital weapons salvoed every warhead they could muster against the SinoInd craft in the Sea of Okhotsk, and no second strike came from that quarter or any other.
In all, the Bering Shoot accounted for two hundred thousand US casualties. Without the antimissile delta squadron it would have been over a million. In the two weeks after the Bering Shoot, naval and commercial craft shepherded all but the rearguard of our Fifth Army across the strait. The rearguard was, man for man, probably the most heavily armed and mechanized military group ever assembled. Sampling each fuel dump before razing it, chiefly with crews of no more than two to each armored ACV, the rearguard met no strong opposition. In this respect, they fared better than their comrades who had reached Alaskan soil.
Opposition to the returning US armies came from the last quarter they had expected: White House Deseret.
One of the most signal failures of American media was its failure to reassure our civilian population on the subject of plague. Everyone knew that any influx from Asia would bring keratophagic staph and blindness — and no facts to the contrary had much effect. When Yale Collier announced an 'overnight, God-sent miracle cure' from Canada, only Mormons and the RUS believed him. The public outcry in the US amounted to an instant plebiscite which Collier dared not ignore. In the face of several resignations by general officers, the President insisted that our First and Fifth Armies hold fast in Alaska — at least until the message optimizers in our media could turn the public from its panic.
To pragmatic veterans this implied a winter in Alaska and many of them said The Hell With It. While fuel dumps still burned in Chukchi, entire divisions were moving toward the states of Washington and Oregon in open defiance of their Commander-in-Chief. America had never faced such widespread military defection, perhaps because America had never been in such disorder.
Once again Canada found a compromise, and urged it on our deserters without much concern for Collier's approval. Obviously, she pointed out to the deserters, they did not carry plague — for which they could thank Canadians. Just as obviously, Canada was emerging from the war as one of the few winners. American deserters could apply for Canadian citizenship immediately, so long as they did
Canadian money was now preferred in most of the US northwest. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and their frequently summary courts were already maintaining order from Portland to Duluth, sanctioned by the US Government which worried more about its southern borders than its north. There was, bluntly, not enough US Government to go around anymore.
It became clear to the Collier administration that we could keep Alaska and Hawaii but we would — temporarily of course — lose Washington, Oregon, Montana, most of Idaho, North Dakota, and so on to the shrewdly sympathetic Canadians. But there was hope for future reparations because, for one thing, Mormonism had a solid toehold in western Canada.
It was equally clear to the RUS that the Union of Soviets was dying of Chinese Plague and Canadian neglect. On September 23 the RUS made their demand on Canada: vaccine or war.
No one — not Canada, not the US, not even Chairman Konieff — knew whether remaining RUS weapons could deal serious blows past Canadian defenses. Canada's Parliament quickly replied that shipments of oral vaccine were being readied for the Russians and, meanwhile, the US Third Army in Turkey could help by sending its stocks of Canadian chocolate to the Ukraine and Azerbaijan, across the Turkish borders.
The RUS, naturally, wanted distribution to begin in the Urals and the heartlands around Novgorod, Gorkiy, Volgograd. It was transparently clear to the Supreme Council that Canada was more interested in saving rebellious Ukrainians than in protecting the central RUS nervous system.
Less than fifty hours after acceding to the RUS demand, Canada began her airlift of vaccine-laden chocolate. Ironically, the distribution could have been faster if the vaccine had been by gel capsule, but Russians knew by now that immunity came in
A few cases of plague had turned up in Leningrad, Grodno, and Baku, cities on the edge of RUS dominion. Tens of thousands of cases were being treated in the heartlands. Naturally, predictably, the Canadian airdrops began in Estonia, Byelorussia, Azerbaijan. Canada wisely asked UN observers to help, and to vouch for the fact that enough vaccine had been dropped onto Russian soil to immunize a hundred million people. All the RUS needed to do was complete the distribution. Any country powerful enough to threaten war on Canada was surely capable of passing out chocolate — and, Canada added, she would not send aircrews of slow transport craft two thousand klicks into the heartlands of a country which
Boren Mills could not have optimized messages better than the Canadians. Millions of RUS citizens — Russians, Tatars, Bashkirs, all those who heard the news through RUS jamming and feared the plague more than they feared the Supreme Council — made pathetic attempts to reach the vaccine dropsites. Few RUS citizens owned private vehicles, so most of the travelers went by government-owned mass transit, which required faked permits, outright bribes, or stowaway status. The result of the peripheral airdrop by Canada was almost complete
