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Command & Conquer: Blood of patriots, blood of tyrants
🕑 Added 2024-02-13 18:00:01 +0000 UTCSecret Service agents swirled around the President like ants on a fallen piece of candy, sweeping him out of the Oval Office and towards a bookshelf built into the wall. They virtually formed a phalanx around their charge as a particular book was pulled on the shelf and the bookcase retracted, revealing one of the elevators that President Dugan knew led down to the fortified bunker a half-mile below the White House. Inside the elevator was Team 3 of his protective detail, as well as General Carville—the only man in America with military authority comparable to his own.
The Service agents moved with crisp choreography. Team 1 had been in the room with the President when the alert sounded, while Team 2 had left their patrol of the White House to reinforce Team 1’s egress. Now, with Team 3 taking possession of the POTUS, Guardian-1 of Team 1—the President’s personal bodyguard—and two random members of Team 2, picked on the spur of the moment by the head of Team 3, entered the elevator.
With a Code Black alert in progress, the Secret Service took it as a given that their own agency had been compromised. They couldn’t afford not to. Every team—insulated like cells in a terror network—would check and counter-check each other. No one wanted to be responsible for handing the POTUS over to a rogue element.
But even as the representatives of all three teams plotted how to kill or disable their opposite numbers if it came to that, the President was utterly ignorant of their shared inner turmoil. Even it paled in comparison to a crisis that would have him abandoning the Oval Office.
“Ben, what the hell is going on?”
“First strike, Mr. President,” General Carville answered crisply. He was a heavily built man, balding, with a bristling moustache seeming like an added block of granite on his craggy face.
The President, Mike Dugan, was in many ways the opposite. A man storklike in his tallness, with a head of stark white hair that bristled like a toothbrush even when combed flat and a thin, drawn face that managed handsomeness from his pointed nose and shallow cheeks. With his frame dwarfing the head-shorter Carville, and Carville’s florid outline looking like it could bowl Dugan over, the two looked almost like a comedy duo in their contrast.
But one look at them made it clear their interplay was deathly serious.
“The Russians have launched an all-out attack. ICBMs and long-range bombers to soften us up, followed by troop transports and carriers to penetrate and secure. Saboteurs have compromised Warnet, the nationwide command and control system. We are unable to scramble an effective air defense. And our nuclear silos show no readiness; somehow, the Soviets have neutralized our launch codes.”
“My God,” Dugan breathed, feeling a sudden urge, a need, to sit down. Only the thought of history’s eyes upon him kept him up. He had to stay standing, even when he wanted to faint. “You’re telling me we’re about to lose a nuclear war?”
“That’s the good news,” Carville snarled in his Texas twang. “Such as it is. The Soviets are using conventional weaponry only. It is our current assessment that they want to invade and occupy. They’ll leave our infrastructure and citizenry largely intact—they want spoils of war,” he concluded bitterly.
Dugan swallowed dryly. “My wife, the kids, where are they?”
Guardian-1, a former Navy SEAL named Paul Cleve who was both pointman and operational head of the President’s defense, nodded without taking his eyes away from his Service counterparts. “Secret Service has them, they’re on their way to the bunker by other routes.”
Dugan nodded and looked at Carville with eyes that swam in and out of focus. He resisted the urge to rub them. “What are our military options at this time?”
“You ask twelve Joint Chiefs and you’ll get twelve answers. Everyone has a Hail Mary pass that they’ve wargamed for just such an occasion. But frankly, there’s only one real option on the table. Thank God for small favors—because you wanted me to sit in on this afternoon’s budget meeting, I may have just enough time to brief you and get your authorization while there’s still time for it to make a difference. And you may hate me for it, but it’s the only chance we have. Mr. President, we need to activate Cerberus Corps.”
Dugan blinked, searching his memory, but even through the pounding stress headache he could feel mounting inside him, he knew he would remember such an exotic name. “I’m not familiar with any such strategy.”
“You wouldn’t be, sir, you weren’t cleared for operational knowledge… until now, of course. And it’s not a strategy. It’s a person.”
“A person?”
The elevator stopped its fall. Dugan couldn’t believe how quickly they’d conversed. It seemed like hours had passed since Carville’s heart attack proclamation of the day’s events.
The doors whispered open. Once again, Dugan was ushered free of the elevator, Carville trotting alongside but well abreast of the protective cocoon the Service agents formed around their primary. Within moments, they were inside the blast doors of the darkened amphitheaters designed to run the country in miniature.
The doors closed: literal tons of lead clamping into place to bury them all alive, inside a cocoon of screens, computers, and communication devices meant to allow the President’s staff to protect others while they were protected.
To Dugan, though, it suddenly seemed very much like a luxurious tomb.
Carville clasped his hands behind his back and settled into a lecturing tone. “Mr. President, the Cerberus Corps is the sum of its parts: a combination of several next-generation warfighting apparatus meant to make the American soldier unbeatable.” He looked over to one of the Army Engineer Corps men manning this elaborate control room. “Phil, call up the footage to the main screen.”
Dugan looked to a projector screen as big as a movie theater’s. It showed the span of the world from North America to Eurasia, with a number of glowing dots leaving equally colorful snail-trails behind… swarming the Atlantic between Soviet-occupied Europe and the USA. Dugan could only gulp at the scale of the invasion before the vista was replaced with footage from the Vietnam War.
“My predecessor,” Carville began, “had a knack for out-of-the-box thinking. He saw several projects that struck him as falling largely under the same umbrella and combined them for maximum efficiency. First, tactics. During ‘Nam, we got our butts kicked because we were fighting a nonconventional enemy with conventional warfare. Project Alexander was a new frontier in small-unit tactics, psychological warfare, and even command and control thinking. Put simply, they wanted to fight fire with fire. Use guerrilla tactics against guerrilla enemies. When that proved effective, they took it a step further. Full-blown counterinsurgency strategic measures. Tacticians leading on the front lines, able to make snap command decisions, to quite simply destroy the enemy’s ability to wage war. The idea was, if we had a situation where a firebase was overrun by hordes of well-organized opposition, these boys would steamroll right through the enemy’s lines and attack right in their guts. The offense collapses because we’ve cut them off at the knees.”
Listening to Carville’s rollicking explanation—the man had a politician’s gift for gab, a charisma that let him sell a narrative which had almost come in more handy to his career than his military successes—Dugan was just about able to take his mind off the crisis they were in. But it was just too pressing. When he blinked, he saw again the vast array of forces plunging towards American soil.
“That’s all well and good, General, but I don’t think it’s guerrilla tactics we need to worry about.”
“Move on, Phil,” Carville said, and the screen now showed what looked like fitness tests. Men running, hurdling obstacles, doing push-ups and other strength tests. “The second component was Project Achilles, named after the Greek warrior who was dipped in the River Styx by his ankle to make him invincible. Simple premise here. The Army is always looking for ways to enhance its weaponry, body armor, vehicles, and other tools of the trade. But the human animal himself is still much the same as he was back in the days of the Trojan War. So what if we could enhance him to match his armament?”
“Enhance?” Dugan asked, drawn into Carville’s secret sharing despite the cold sweat he felt at his armpits and the small of his back. “What are you talking about, eugenics?”
“No. Surgery. Steroids. A limited amount of cybernetic augmentation. Breeding would be too scattershot. You make a German Shepherd of a baby, so to speak, and there’s no guarantee he’ll enlist. Which dovetailed neatly with Project Bearshirt.”
“Bearshirt?” Dugan repeated, remembering his classical education. “Berserker?”
“Again, simple premise. After Pearl Harbor, we had highly motivated, highly moralized soldiers to throw at the Nazis and Japanese. In Nam, with a draftee army, our boys were all but pacifists. What we wanted was a way to weaponize the mind just as Achilles weaponized the body. Make our recruits natural-born killing machines, no remorse, no stress, no moral compunctions. Then, after they leave the service, restore them to proper citizenry.”
“What is this you’re even talking about here? Brainwashing?”
“Conditioning,” Carville said offhandedly. “Certain drugs and hypnotic programs that could prepare the average joe for the rigors of combat. Have a new recruit that would no more freeze up in battle than a hardened veteran. With these three programs brought together, we began referring to them as the three heads of the beast. Cerberus.”
“The dog that guards the gates of Hell,” Dugan realized.
“And that’s just what they did, Mr. President. Unleashed Hell like they were manning the gates. I can tell you candidly, sir, that we owe several of our more impressive victories in the Vietnam theater to the Cerberus Corps.”
“You’re talking about them like your favorite baseball team… who were these people?”
“Volunteers, of a sort,” Carville said. “Obviously, we didn’t want to take good soldiers off the frontlines and for the program to do any good, it had to work on… the average soldier… even the below average soldier.”
“McNamara’s Morons,” Dugan said, breathless at the thought. “Good God… those men never should’ve been inducted into the Army in the first place.”
“We, ah, have my predecessor to thank for that, sir.”
“And you were under orders to discharge those men!”
“That would as much as be an admission of wrongdoing, taking all those men off the line. We cycled them out, all of them, eventually. The Cerberus program was a convenient cover for some.”
“You made a bunch of retards into supersoldiers? Carville, are you out of your mind?”
“One of the benefits of the program was enhanced intelligence. We were doing them a kindness.”
“What else? Did you grow back amputees’ legs as long as they’d let you tinker with their brains?”
“That was beyond our capabilities at the time,” Carville said without irony. “But there were deserters… men who were strongly suspected of crimes against their commanding officers…”
“You recruited soldiers who’d fragged their superiors?”
“Another intended effect of the program was loyalty. A rogue Cerberus was in no one’s interest—we thought it best to control for that particular malfunction in the testing phase. And then there was Kent.”
“Kent?” Dugan repeated.
“Major Kent Rockwell.”
“And what was he, a dogfucker?” the President demanded. With the country all but guaranteed to fall to the Russians, learning of this darkness in his old friend’s spotless career was like insult on top of injury.
“No, sir, he was what you might call a control group. A gifted soldier, preternaturally talented at the art of war. Two tours of duty. A kill count that shamed napalm. He was an integral component of Project Alexander. When the projects were consolidated, it only seemed reasonable to bring him onboard. The reasoning was that if we could make real motherfucking warriors out of reprobates and troglodytes… imagine what we could do to a modern-day Alexander the Great.”
“So what went wrong?” Dugan insisted. “I would’ve been briefed on this thing if I didn’t need plausible deniability.”
“Nothing went wrong. It went right. Too right. We made those men into top-tier soldiers. Smart, driven, ruthless! If I had a platoon of those boys when the Gulf of Tonkin kicked off, why hell…” Carville sighed guilelessly. “Problem is, we couldn’t switch ‘em off. They were always ready for battle, whether they were front-recon in the jungle or on leave in Saigon. There were… incidents.”
“Involving civilians?”
Carville nodded. “Then came the UN injunctions against genetic engineering and mental conditioning. ‘Supersoldier’ became a dirty word. We cashiered them all out and relocated them to low-impact locations.”
“Low-impact?”
“Isolated. Few people. Not much to stress them or make them… react. It was safest for everyone. But they are still operational, Mr. President. We continued to monitor their fitness over the years. There’ve been no health issues. If anything, now that they’re more used to their enhancements, they’re better able to tailor their reactions to the given situation.”
Dugan put a hand to his chin, brushing his thumb over the sweat that covered his upper lip. “What is it you’re asking my authorization for, General? You want to reactivate these… these berserkers and send them against the Russians? I don’t even see what difference that would make now. We’d be overrun before you even managed to corral them!”
“That’s the thing, sir. Major Rockwell… he’s reported in.”
“Reported in?”
“Showed up at our base in Alaska. Forty-five minutes ago. He saw the Soviets’ long-rangers flying past and… thought we might need him. I managed to lay hands on a Black Eagle. Traveling at supersonic speeds, that bird can pick him up and get him into the fight soon enough to make a difference.”
“Make a difference?” Dugan repeated, absolutely flabbergasted. “What is it you expect him to do, General?”
“What he was made for, sir.”
