Chapter 708: Riots in Norfolk
The crack of batons echoed through the dry coastal wind as smoke drifted between shipyard cranes like ghosts of war yet to come.
Norfolk was aflame, not from foreign bombs, but from American voices.
Angry, desperate, betrayed.
They’d been striking for three weeks.
Welders, riveters, pipe-fitters, men who knew how to hold a torch and hammer, who’d built the very bones of the American fleet now limping home from the Pacific.
They hadn’t started with violence. Just silence. Pickets. Signs.
Lines of union men standing shoulder to shoulder along the shipyard gates, chanting for fair pay, for safe conditions, for a promise not broken.
Now they were met by police in riot gear.
"In the name of national security..."
That phrase had been uttered again and again in the halls of Washington.
Executive Order 9843 had given the President sweeping authority to "guarantee uninterrupted war production" and to "disperse domestic threats to operational military capacity."
In simpler words: shut it down.
Roosevelt wasn’t in Norfolk.
He was in D.C., pacing before a map of the Eastern Seaboard, his brows a pair of thunderclouds.
The Admiralty had begged him for action, destroyers were overdue for refit, troop transports half-assembled, dry docks silent.
Not to mention vessels damaged from Sabotage needed repairs so that they may be seaworthy again.
"This isn’t a matter of labor," he muttered to his aide-de-camp. "It’s a matter of survival. If we lack an operational fleet there will be nothing to deter an invasion."
"But sir," came the hesitant reply, "the press is turning on us. The Post, The Tribune, even The Sentinel. They’re calling it..."
Roosevelt’s hand came down hard on the desk. "Damn the press!"
The desk shook under the weight of Roosevelt’s fist, a paperweight rattling off its corner and clattering to the floor.
His aide flinched, but didn’t move to pick it up.
The President was no longer muttering. He was roaring now, cornered lion, cage cracking.
"Those cowards ran headlines about ’freedom of assembly under fire’ while our shipyards burn! Our coasts are undefended! And the only thing they can talk about is whether I’ve broken a campaign promise?!"
He turned, eyes bloodshot, neck blotched with rage.
"Do they not realize the enemy is already here? That saboteurs have crippled our naval production lines? That these strikes, these spontaneous, righteous, worker-led protests, are anything but? They’re coordinated. Funded. Inspired. This isn’t a goddamned labor dispute. It’s war."
He stabbed a finger at the wall map, Norfolk, Boston, Charleston, San Pedro, Bremerton. Pins marked them all. Half were circled in red.
"We lose Norfolk, we lose the Atlantic. We lose San Pedro, and there’s nothing between the Russians and San Francisco but wishful thinking. And meanwhile the dollar loses value by the hour. The hour, dammit! Markets sliding like they’re greased. Foreign creditors pulling out. The Reserve says we’re fine, but I know better. Someone’s dumping gold, or hoarding it. Someone who knows how this game is played."
He paused.
The aide didn’t speak. Because he knew who the "someone" was.
Roosevelt paced like a man trying to outwalk his own thoughts.
"Bruno von Zehntner," he hissed finally, the name tasting like venom. "That son of a bitch knew this would happen. He wanted it to happen. Sabotage. Psychological operations. Financial warfare. Philosophical subversion. I read his damn speeches, he telegraphed it all like a playwright begging for applause."
He grabbed the intelligence file from his desk and flung it open, pages spilling, half-scorched photos, intercepted communiques, blurred images of freighters offloading crates in Uruguay, Panama, Portugal.
"He knows the Constitution limits me. He knows I can’t just round up the agitators. I can’t declare martial law in six states without Congressional approval. He’s daring me to cross the line. To prove his thesis."
A bitter laugh caught in Roosevelt’s throat.
"You know what he said? In that speech before the Berlin Academy last fall? ’In times of prolonged crisis, democracy becomes a candle in a hurricane, its only choices are to be snuffed out, or shielded by tyranny.’"
He turned, face flushed with rage and helplessness.
"Well I won’t give him the satisfaction. I won’t burn the Bill of Rights just to put a bullet in that bastard’s theory."
Silence.
Just the tick of the naval clock on the mantle.
"But if I don’t... if I do nothing..." he whispered. "Then the Republic fractures. Not from bombs. Not from guns. But from rot. From debt. From despair. He’ll win anyway."
He leaned heavily on the desk, suddenly aged by years.
"We can’t beat him with ships. Not yet. And we can’t out-argue him with rhetoric. Not when every promise I made is being broken by necessity."
He stared out the window.
The Washington skyline was gray and grim, smoke on the horizon, Norfolk, maybe. Or maybe just another warehouse burning in Baltimore.
"Bruno didn’t just want war," Roosevelt said at last. "He wanted us to break ourselves trying to stop it."
And so far, it was working.
---
The morning air reeked of salt, steel, and something bitter, like burnt oil and old anger.
The shipyard gates of Norfolk stood sealed, flanked on either side by rusting cranes and scaffolding blackened by soot.
Over three thousand men stood outside, shoulder to shoulder. No tools in hand. No helmets on their heads.
Just signs, hoarse voices, and clenched fists inside calloused palms.
"We bled for this fleet!"
"No pay, no peace!"
"Roosevelt Lied, We Died!"
Some of the signs were crude, plywood slapped with spray paint.
Others looked carefully stenciled, union emblems stamped with pride.
Behind them, trucks loaded with steel plates and repair supplies sat idle.
Naval dry docks lay silent, their skeletons of half-repaired destroyers looming overhead like ghosts of wars half-fought.
At the front, a grizzled foreman with forty years on the docks, stepped forward.
His voice boomed like an old ship horn:
"We got every goddamn right to be here! First Amendment! We ain’t breaking no law!"
He held up a dog-eared copy of the Constitution, laminated, creased, and faded by sun and sweat.
A few younger men whistled and clapped.
An older worker behind him nodded solemnly, muttering, "Damn right."
But the line of police didn’t move.
Norfolk P.D., flanked by newly deputized federal "security enforcers", stood in tight formation.
In their arms were Remington Model 24 semi-automatic rifles.
Internal magazines full of .22lr ammunition, which in this day and age was considered "less than lethal" and was the go to round for riot control.
Others held batons firm in hands, preferring the visceral feel of metal cracking with bone over impersonal brutality of automatic gunfire.
A voice crackled over a loudspeaker, flat, official, robotic:
"By authority of Executive Order Nine-Eight-Four-Three, you are ordered to disperse. Failure to comply will be treated as an act of sedition under wartime law."
The crowd roared, not in fear, but in disbelief.
"Wartime? We ain’t at war!"
"Not one German bullet’s landed here, why we being shot at?!"
"We built this Navy, goddammit!"
Some in the crowd began singing. A defiant, off-key rendition of "Which side are you on."
A song initially used during the Coal Wars of the late 1910s during Bruno’s past life, now repurposed as an anti-government song regarding Corporations and their increasingly intimate relationship with Roosevelt’s regime.
Others locked arms, staring down the advancing line.
Tension hung in the air like a live wire.
That’s when it happened.
A metal lunchbox clattered to the pavement.
Someone had tried to toss it behind the line, back to a buddy who’d dropped it.
But it bounced off of a sign and hit an officer in the head.
He jolted back like he’d been struck by a rock. Instinct took over. His baton swung. Hard.
It caught a young man, barely twenty, across the temple. He dropped instantly. The crowd gasped.
A woman screamed. Then another. Someone threw a brick.
The line broke.
Tear gas canisters flew overhead, hissing like vipers before exploding in white-hot clouds. Men choked and staggered.
Others surged forward, not backing down now, not after blood had been spilled.
The foreman raised his arms.
"Hold the line! Don’t give them the excuse!"
But it was too late.
As the lines of the police began to crack, those armed with Remington Model 24s, began to open fire.
A swarm of bullets struck the laborers, in a spray of lead that was anything but less than lethal.
Women watching the scene unfold began to scream bloody murder at the sight of the carnage.
While men began to plead with the police to cease their escalation.
"Stop! These are Americans!"
Crack.
He went down, too.
Gas drifted like smoke from a burning church.
Flames licked up from a flipped food cart.
Someone had thrown a Molotov. Now a police cruiser was ablaze near the harbor fence.
"Section 3 is secured. Section 4 still resisting," barked the radio in one officer’s hand. "Light the flares and clear the yards. Authorization confirmed."
High above the chaos, a teenage welder had climbed a crane.
His face was red and streaked with tears. In his hand, a flare gun meant to signal news crews hovering miles away.
He aimed it skyward.
A crack rang out.
And he never fired.
The sniper didn’t miss.
The flare dropped from his limp hand and clattered down the scaffolding.
For one beat, everything went still.
Then all hell broke loose.