Chapter 8

General Williams wanted us to press our luck and start a swing of conquest up the east coast of Florida while the opposition was still off balance from our success so far. We certainly had the resources for it, now that all of the Army units in the Miami area had defected to us. Our revolution was not bloodless, but it was awful damned close, and Hank wanted to maintain the momentum.

Actually, Jimmy and I didn't take much convincing. We told Hank to do whatever he thought was the right thing to do. He knew our goal: freedom for Florida from the tyranny of the bosses, and he appeared to know how to achieve it, so we told him to go ahead.

He did send a company of the former Marines down to Key West, just to formalize our rule. We wanted a presence in case somebody wanted to contest our right to the Keys. Hank set up a rotation system so that every man would get a chance to do "occupation duty" in Key West. It was kind of a working R&R.

Meanwhile, the march to the north was organized. The vast majority of the population of South Florida was concentrated along the Atlantic Coast, most of whom were servicing the gambling and prostitution establishments congregated close to the beaches. The prostitution union was the one I was especially anxious to break, since they were really mistreating the union members.

This was probably the only union that had such a high turnover rate. The women, no, make that girls, who were employed as prostitutes were never over 17 years old, and many were as young as 12. On her 18^th birthday, a girl was expelled from the union and had to freelance after that. She had no other prospects for employment, so most of them had committed suicide by their 25^th birthday.

In a fit of desperation, I asked Mary to set up a string of brothels for the otherwise unemployed prostitutes to service the NOA. At least, the women had a form of gainful employment, and we made sure that they were not mistreated. We paid the women a flat salary and did not charge military patrons for their visits. This way, both the employees and their customers were happy.

OK, I admit it, I did hunt for an excuse, but we were able to find a technicality we could use to bring the head madam in for a flogging. We set the event up in the largest highschool stadium we could find in the Ft. Lauderdale area. The judge pointed out to me that we did have her in on a technicality, so he could only bring himself to sentence her to 100 blows, instead of the 200 maximum.

The setup was the same as we had used for the union boss in Miami: the St. Andrews cross on a small stage. The woman was frog-marched in, fighting her guards all the way and screaming that she had the protection of the New York bosses. She was fastened to the cross and her red jumpsuit was cut away. This seemed to be the first time that the woman fully realized that we were not intimidated and were about to beat the shit out of her.

She screamed when the first blow was struck, of course, and continued to scream through the first 27 blows; however, she couldn't last beyond that, as her voice gave out on her. The applause was thunderous at each stroke, probably because the live audience was made up almost exclusively of current and former prostitutes.

When she was turned around for her second 50 strokes, everybody was sitting on the edge of their seats, waiting to see what would happen when the whip landed on her nipples. The man wielding the whip was unusually skilled in its use and managed to miss her nipples and pussy for the first 10 strokes. The audience was beginning to get restive at this apparent coddling of the madam, and some unpleasant noises were coming from the crowd.

The 11^th stroke on her front changed all of that! This blow was almost confined to her breasts and several strands of the whip landed dead on her nipples. This was the loudest scream of all, and the audience went wild with joy. The 12^th stroke was aimed at her pussy, and her clit was subjected to the same kind of torment as her nipples.

Strokes were aimed at other places on her body from her knees to her neck, but many were struck on her nipples and her clit. By the time she had accumulated the 100 strokes of the whip, the woman was simply hanging by her wrists. No one came forward to claim her after the whipping, so we were at a loss as to what to do. For lack of anything else to do with her, she was thrown into the back of a pickup truck and taken to a vacant lot where she was dumped. It was later reported that innumerable people, mostly women, stopped by her body and pissed on her. She died sometime during the night, and her body was picked up the next day and dumped into the municipal fertilizer composting station, along with the other garbage.

When the story of the fate of the madam got circulated, a lot of union bosses headed for New York where they thought that they would be safe.

When the Army got to Melbourne, Hank halted the march north and swung due west to cut across to the west coast. The idea was to isolate the lower half of Florida and consolidate our rule there before trying to gobble up more of the state. Jimmy and I were amazed that we heard no more from the US military, but Hank said that he was not surprised. The top officers were afraid of losing more of their troops the same way that his men had been lost to the NOA. If the troops had no chance to defect, the Army could be held together for a little longer. Eventually, though, the inevitable was going to happen, and the vast majority of the US Army was going to join the NOA. The question was not whether, but when!

Our troops marched, if you can call riding in triumph in APCs and trucks as marching, across Florida, liberating citizens as they went. When they got to Tampa, they cut south. This was one long, extended party as the NOA traveled on its way. By this time, the bosses and their soldiers had plenty of warning that the NOA juggernaut was coming, so they, too, cut and ran to the coast to grab a boat for anywhere they could go to escape New Ochnee.

Finally, the NOA wound up back in Miami. There was no need to clear bad guys from the interior, since they had all run while they had the chance. We now had so many recruits for the NOA from the locals that we were forced to set up a formal training program to convert them into respectable and responsible soldiers.

Our training spent virtually zero time on marching in ranks and that sort of thing, but we concentrated on the fighting skills that they needed, to be soldiers in the NOA. We had an ulterior motive in this training—we wanted them to be able to take care of themselves after they were mustered out of the NOA back to civilian life. Our current plan was to let them keep their personal weapons after they were discharged. Our intention was that an armed and trained citizenry was not going to pushed around by bullies or would-be bosses.

The result of all of this was that we had an army of over 10,000 troops as well equipped and as well trained as the US Army, which we expected to have to face, one of these days. We had just come through hurricane season, but the Cuban forecasting of hurricanes had been superlative, and we had all of the warning that we needed to prepare for the minor blows that we had. However, rainy season had set in, and we really were not in a hurry to run around in the rain. We decided to wait for spring before continuing our war of liberation. Besides, we had to get our logistics better organized.

Florida is sort of at the tail end of everything when it comes to transportation. We had a few railroad lines and a few first class highways, but we really were not set up for supplying an army in the field. Of necessity, we struck a deal with the Teamsters Union. The agreement was that if they stopped acting like assholes and treated their members right, we would hire them to handle our logistics. We could see the greedy glint in the eyes of the union bosses when we first contacted them, but that glint quickly disappeared when we pointed out the whipping crosses. We wound up with an agreement that was advantageous to both sides, and they stuck to the agreement with only a minimum of urging.

Supply depots were set up just behind our border, and arrangements were made to move the supplies northward as our troops moved that way. Our reputation had proceeded us and we were able to advance clear across the state with no opposition when the time came in the spring. Sometimes we moved faster on the east coast and sometimes we moved faster on the west coast, but that was because of the delays caused by welcoming committees and liberation parties. The rate of advance in the central part of the state was more consistent, and I have no idea why.