Chapter 4

Major Appleby and his staff thought that they now had enough of a force in the ESP Brigade to win any battle they might encounter in the immediate future, so they were ready to take on a campaign of expanding ESP Land. The question was one of which way to strike. They decided to go west with an initial goal of taking over the port city of Mobile, Alabama. Mobile had been the second largest port on the Gulf coast. However, since the mid-30s, it had dwindled down to a simple fishing community. POV showed that the infrastructure was still there; it only needed a thorough cleaning and maintenance regimen.

Brock was given the responsibility of finding the best route for them to follow in their conquest of south Alabama and west Florida. Very little actual physical movement of people was expected during this campaign. Most of the work would be done by POV, with the people comfortably ensconced in Camp Rucker.

Brock planned to zig-zag across Florida and Alabama, hitting the major towns along the way until he came to Pensacola, Florida. There had been a major naval base and training station there before the collapse, so he expected that he would find significant opposition centered there.

The POV scouting done by him and his assistants showed that there were very few people located south and west of Dothan. The land there had been of little use before the collapse; this had been low grade farm land that required a heavy investment in fertilizer to produce much. As a result, the war lords had tended to ignore this area as not being worth their attention. The few people who still lived in the area were on a hand-to-mouth existence level and were not considered to be of any help or hindrance to anybody who wanted to rule.

This meant that Pensacola was mostly involved in fishing, with few acres under cultivation. The fish offal would produce enough fertilizer for farming a limited area if workers could be found who could tolerate the smell. This meant serfs who had no choice in the matter. Enough forced labor, mostly colored, was found to feed some agricultural produce into Pensacola, but they certainly had nothing to finance a territorial expansion. Most of their slaves were employed in the fishing industry, which was a going concern all along the Gulf coast.

Since it was apparent that Pensacola had to be neutralized before an advance could be made on Mobile, Brock set out to make a detailed survey of its threat level and capabilities. He found that the warlord there was, as expected, an ex-Navy officer who had moved in when the regular government had collapsed. He was running a very rigid society with three levels: the aristocracy who rule with an iron fist, the soldiers who enforced the rule of the upper class, and the serfs/slaves who did all of the grunt work.

To the casual observer, life in the Pensacola vicinity looked to idyllic for the two upper classes, but this was not true. The men were constantly waging political fights among themselves to try to become the most important vassal in the hierarchy. The women were constantly conspiring to assist their men in moving up, so there was little love lost among the inhabitants. This continual struggle kept their society at a very unstable boil. The result was that less than 20 families ruled about 200 soldiers and around 10,000 serfs/slaves. This was only a small fraction of the original population, but starvation during the economic collapse had removed most of the people, especially the old and the young.

The ruler was a former Chief Petty Officer who had grabbed power years before by ruthlessly killing off his superiors. He now styled himself as "Admiral" Haggarty. He was getting old, but still tried to live like he imagined Genghis Kahn or Tamerlane had done. He had a large "harem" of slave women who were supposed to serve his sexual needs, but this duty had been reduced to the occasional ceremonial blow-job as their ruler had aged. Mostly, the women just lazed around the "palace" in the nude where Admiral Haggarty could see them. They sported a lot of body piercings, particularly in the nipple and pussy area, since the Admiral tended to find these attractive.

The real rule was done by a council of three subordinates who administered the "Empire of Pensacola" to their greater profit and pleasure. One handled civil administration, one handled military matters, and the third handled the fishing and farming responsibilities. None of the three was able to dominate the other two, but it was not for lack of trying. They were always polite to each other, to the point of silliness, but the animosity was still there.

Brock thought the fishing fleet was the most interesting feature of the Empire of Pensacola. The fleet was an eclectic mixture of boats ranging from the very small to the moderate in size. The smallest boats were two-man operations with a military guard to make sure the sailors didn't take off in search of freedom elsewhere. The largest boats had 6-man crews with a captain and a couple of guards. The 30 boats in the fleet could catch a respectable quantity of fish under the right conditions.

The fleet had a flotilla of "protectors", aka guards, who manned what might be called PT-boats, except that there were no torpedoes. The boats were armed with two .50 caliber machine guns and 4 additional men with Thompson submachine guns. This was in addition to the captain and crew of 3 sailors. This was too many men for these PT-boats to carry normally, but they returned to port every night, so the men managed fairly well.

The protectors were needed because other groups also fished these waters and were not above poaching when they thought they could get away with it. The Gulf of Mexico was a large body of water, but the prime fishing spots tended to be grouped in a few locations. This caused rival fleets to be in view most of the time and it kept each side's guards on the alert. The protectors from Pensacola were generally better armed than their rivals, so they were usually able to intimidate the opposition and rarely had to do more than fire warning shots.