Liberty's Last Stand

TWENTY-THREE

After dinner Travis Clay and Willis Coffee went down to the guard cabin and in a little bit Willie Varner and Armanti Hall walked into the house. They were full of radio news, which they passed to Grafton, Yocke, and Molina.

We settled in for another night. Before we did, I took off Grafton’s tape and bandages and rewrapped them. His bruises were turning yellow and green. That was good, I thought. There were no hematomas that I could see, and no bulges from busted ribs pushing against his skin. He really needed to be in a hospital, but he would never agree to that, even if there were a hospital we could get him into, which there wasn’t.

“Thanks for getting me out of that camp,” he said. “If it weren’t for you, I’d be dead by now.”

“Forget it,” I replied. “But I must say, you have a real talent for getting yourself in messes.”

He just grunted. I figured he must be doing some serious thinking about where we were going to go and how we were going to survive the next few days, or weeks, or years, when Yocke and Molina weren’t bending his ear.

“We only have so much gasoline for the generators,” I told him, “and we need to save what we have for the one in the guard shack so we can monitor the security cameras. I’m going to turn off the one here in the house. There are candles and some kerosene, and we’ll cook on the outdoor fireplace. Pour water from the creek into the commodes.”

“Oh boy,” Jake Grafton said.

“If it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down.” Tomorrow, I decided, I’d dream up something to keep Yocke and Molina busy. I told him that.

“Good,” he said. “Neither of them can handle being alone with their thoughts for very long. They’ve had no practice.”

“I’ll probably shoot a deer and let them butcher it. Fresh meat would be a treat.”

Then, out of nowhere, Grafton said, “Molina is a cynical bastard. He’s an economist, so maybe it’s his training. He thinks all political behavior, or most of it, can be predicted based upon where the money is going. He’s right to some extent, but life is a lot more complicated than that. He’s sat over at the White House for years preaching that welfare, Social Security, disability, food stamps, and cell phones would win the hearts and minds of the low-skilled and unemployed. He knows that poor people are easily bought. It’s everyone else he doesn’t understand.”

“How so?” I ventured.

“People are motivated by a myriad of things. Religion, tradition, a sense of service, loyalty, curiosity, challenge, accomplishment, praise, patriotism, sometimes a kick in the ass, a sense of rightness… and greed, the most basic of human emotions. Greed has built civilization; greed is the reason entrepreneurs start businesses, inventors invent, businessmen try to earn profits. Greed is the reason we aren’t still living in caves. Most people want to earn more money so they can have a better life. Yet we could make a long list of human motivations and still not get every one on it.

“The people at the White House, including Barry Soetoro, don’t understand America. None of them has ever been in the military, so they don’t understand the men and women in uniform. They aren’t religious, so they don’t understand the deep antipathy so many feel toward abortion or gay marriage. They never worked manual labor jobs, so they don’t understand those who do. They think marriage and traditional morality are old fashioned, so yesterday, so they don’t understand those who believe in them. Most of them have never worked in private industry, so they think business is crooked and contemptible. Their political base is in the inner cities, yet they advocate policies that will keep people poor and fight policies that would give the poor a leg up. They are perfect hypocrites, con artists, traitors to the people who believe in them. They willingly tell lies to advance their political agenda, and are amazed when that outrages people.

“They think they can ram things down people’s throats, and maybe they can, to some extent. Remember Willie Varner’s comment the other night: ‘Tastes like shit, but good’? No matter why you put up with something that tastes like shit, you can’t get the taste out of your mouth. Shit is shit.”

He paused, so I said, “Soetoro picked staffers who thought like he did.”

“Indeed. Yes-men. And of course women. That may be good for one’s ego, but it’s a lousy way to ensure you get good advice. Only a man who never ran anything would surround himself with staff that has only one point of view. Barry Soetoro is a lousy manager and a lousy politician; we’re all paying for that. And he has another fatal flaw: he doesn’t want to hear anything that conflicts with his opinions, or prejudices. He refuses to listen to intelligence that might make him revise an opinion or consider other options.”

“There’s a lot of that going around these days, especially in the universities.”

Jake Grafton nodded. “People with closed minds are always the ones who get the worst surprises,” he said.

“One thing is for sure,” I said. “Soetoro’s managed to change the political landscape in the United States, and I doubt if he likes the changes.”

I wanted to ask the admiral what he had learned from eavesdropping on the White House for the last six months, but decided not to. Sarah shouldn’t have told me about it, and if I mentioned it to Grafton he would know I got it from Sarah. So I kept my mouth shut. The thought occurred to me that he had just told me his conclusions.

But I wondered. If I had listened to the conniving and plotting at the White House for six whole months, what would I have done? Whom would I have told? Who would believe me when I accused the president of the United States of plotting to subvert the Constitution, the Constitution that he was sworn to uphold, and declare himself a dictator? Who would have believed me if I accused him of waiting for a terrorist incident so he could declare martial law?

The answer of course was no one. Not a solitary soul on planet Earth. That was undoubtedly the conclusion that Jake Grafton reached.

I finished my doctoring and told the admiral he was good to go.

The attack submarine Texas, now the flagship of the Republic of Texas’ Navy, ran just below periscope depth in the Gulf of Mexico. Loren Snyder called an all-hands conference in the control room. He would rather have convened his little congregation of seven in the wardroom, but he wanted to keep a person on the helm at all times. The water was only three hundred feet deep here, so if the sub rammed into the bottom, she might never come up again. Fortunately the floor of the gulf fell away as one proceeded away from the coast, becoming well over a mile deep in places.

Snyder checked the depth, 240 feet; the heading, 130 degrees; the boat’s speed on the inertial readout, eight knots.

He surveyed the faces of his crew. Submarine duty attracted smart, technically savvy people who were interesting to be around, which was why smart, technically savvy people enjoyed it. The challenge was constant and boredom rare.

Ada Fuentes was on the helm, Jugs Aranado was sipping coffee, George Ranta, Speedy Gonzales, Mouse Moore, and Junior Smith were drinking water or eating toast from a loaf Mouse made in the galley last night.

“Okay, folks,” Loren said. “We made it to sea. That was the first hurdle, and we got over it, and I thank you. I thought our chances of getting out of Galveston about fifty-fifty. In any event, we are out.

“A few words on how this Texas Navy sub is going to be run. I am the captain, and I will make all decisions and expect my orders to be obeyed. That said, I want and need advice from each and every one of you on how to run the boat and use it as a military weapon. I hope you will give me honest opinions, and I will use them to make the best decision I can. But once I have decided, that is the way it is going to be. No more debate.”

He got nods from everyone standing around the plotting table in the center of the room.

“Our first problem for discussion is this: What are we going to do with this boat? Are we going to find someplace to hide and wait out the war, making the U.S. Navy worry about where we are and what we might be doing every minute of every day? Or are we going to use her as an attack boat? If we are, what are our targets? Where and how can we do the new Republic of Texas the most good? Your thoughts, please.”

“If we don’t do anything, the navy will stop worrying before long,” Speedy Gonzales said. “They’ll assume we managed to submerge forever.”

“Someone put two or three Tomahawks into power plants around Houston the other night,” Jugs said. “I assume they were launched from a surface ship. At least, I hope they were. If there is another attack boat out here we have major problems. They are fully manned and we aren’t.” She shrugged. “Anyway, I suggest we put a fish into that surface combatant, then get out of this pond and into the Atlantic, preferably the Gulf Stream, where we can go deep.”

“Ranta, you’ve been on the sonar. Any idea where that destroyer or frigate might be?”

“No, sir.”

“I’ve been looking at the chart,” Jugs said. “If I were the skipper of that ship, I’d be in the middle of the deep water rigs off Louisiana and Texas. If I were him or her, I’d be worrying about this submarine.”

“Tough operating around those rigs,” Ranta said. “Sonar will be crap.”

“Our main problem is another attack boat out here. It’ll be just as tough for them as it will be for us.” Snyder’s audience liked the idea that someone might be worried about what they would do.

Snyder studied the chart. Deep down, he thought the best and safest course of action was to get out of the Gulf of Mexico and look for a warship in the Atlantic. The drawback was that choice would cede the gulf to the United States Navy.

“Can we operate among those platforms without ramming a platform leg?” he mused aloud.

Junior Smith said, “We have to threaten Soetoro’s navy some way, and keeping them away from the shipping channels to Houston seems worthwhile to me. Let’s make ’em sweat.”

“What about torpedoing a Louisiana production platform?” Mouse Moore asked. “Or a tanker loaded with Arabian oil? Soetoro’s navy has to protect those tankers and platforms or the people of Louisiana are going to get huffy. Not to mention what will happen to insurance rates if one of those crude haulers gets torpedoed.”

“Let me think about this,” Loren Snyder said. “We certainly can’t go under a rig, but we can thread our way around them using the photonics mast. We’ll have to get GPS fixes as often as possible, but let’s not update the inertial until we are absolutely sure the feds haven’t tinkered with the GPS satellites.” He used a parallel ruler to plot a new course and gave the course to Ada Fuentes at the helm. She brought the boat around to the heading.

“And slow the boat. Five knots, I think. Ranta, we need you on the sonar for as long as you can stand it. Then I’ll relieve you. I was the sonar officer on my first boat, and I think I remember most of it.”

“Aye-aye, sir,” they said.

“Thank you for your input,” Snyder told his crew, who went off to the reactor and engineering spaces and, if they were off duty, to try to nap in a bunk. Sleep was precious.

Now on a more easterly course, Texas ghosted along through the heart of the sea.

Loren Snyder busied himself in the control room, checking the computers and torpedo data computer, the TDC. He and Jugs were going to have to run all this stuff. As he worked he thought about his first submarine skipper, who drilled his crew mercilessly and ended up convincing himself and everyone aboard that the crew was the best in the fleet. Incidentally, they passed their Operational Readiness Inspection (ORI) with flying colors and won the Battle Efficiency E.

Snyder picked up the intercom mike and keyed it: “This is a drill, this is a drill. Runaway torpedo in Tube Two. This is a drill.”

He hung the mike in its bracket and heard a loud “Oh, shit!” and then the sound of running feet.

That first night in September, F-16 Falcons from Lackland landed at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. An hour after midnight, the F-16s were gone again, fanning out to defend the B-52 Stratofortresses, which were beginning their start rituals. They were loaded with JDAMs, two-thousand-pound dumb bombs with a GPS seeker and steering that would guide them to their targets.

JR Hays knew the GPS system was controlled by the United States government, which had the capacity to induce errors into the system, or shut it down altogether, but such an action would affect air navigation all over the earth, no doubt causing a few airliners to crash, and he doubted that the Soetoro administration was ready for the inevitable international political backlash that would cause. Not yet, anyway.

The B-52s came to life — three of them, because another crew volunteered — and slowly taxied to the takeoff end of the duty runway. The wind was still out of the northwest, so the runway was 33.

Elvin Gentry was in the lead bomber. He had flown in at dusk and had a hurried conference with JR and Nate Danaher, then went to the crew briefing.

No doubt Soetoro loyalists all over the area would have liked to alert Washington when the fighters arrived and took off, and burn up the lines when the B-52s serenaded the city on their climb-outs, but the local power company had obeyed Soetoro’s orders and the electricity was off in the greater Shreveport area.

B-52s were old airplanes. The first one flew in 1952. Between 1952 and 1962, when the production line was closed, the air force bought 744 of them at a cost of a couple of million dollars each. Informally and affectionately known by their crews as BUFFs, which stood for Big Ugly Fat Fuckers, they carried up to seventy thousand pounds of bombs at high subsonic speeds and were relatively cheap to operate. The design intended to replace them, the B-70 Valkyrie, was too expensive. The variable-geometry B-1 Lancer and the stealth B-2 Spirit, both of which actually made it into service, were also too expensive to acquire in large numbers, and had high operating costs. Despite the air force’s institutional predilection for faster, sexier, and newer, economics reared its ugly head; the air force continually upgraded the B-52s and planned to keep them in service until 2045, over ninety years after the first one had flown. The only version still flying was the B-52H. The air force had invested an estimated $100 million into each one, so far, mere peanuts compared with the cost of newer warplanes. Twenty B-2 stealth bombers had cost Uncle Sam $2 billion each.

The B-52 crews planned on delivering two JDAMs on a support for each targeted bridge. The hope was the two bombs would drop one span in the water, or at least do enough damage that the bridges would no longer support sixty-three-ton M1A2 Abrams tanks.

And if tomorrow some bridges were still standing, Gentry planned on launching F-16s carrying two one-thousand-pound JDAMs each. He was willing to trade planes for the bridges.

Gentry would have loved to have an airborne early-warning airplane in the sky tonight, but he didn’t have one. His F-16s would have to make do by listening to the freqs GCI sites used to control the U.S. fighters. Gentry worried about F-22s, stealth fighters, which could detect and shoot down fighters and bombers of ranges as far as a hundred nautical miles. What he didn’t know was that the F-22 wing had sent all the pilots who were willing to fight for Barry Soetoro, all four, to Barksdale. So there were not going to be F-22s in the air tonight. Had he known, he would have been much less apprehensive than he was, and he might even have stayed on the ground tonight. As it was, he thought the risks were so high that he was unwilling to send his aircrews into combat unless he shared the risks with them.

JR Hays, no man to evade risks himself, reluctantly agreed. He didn’t want to lose Elvin Gentry, but he had to trust Gentry’s judgment and leadership abilities or get someone else. Barry Soetoro would have never understood.

Gentry had never before ridden in a Stratofortress, so the pilot’s exercise of the Crosswind Crab Control while they taxied felt spooky. The wheels continued to track the centerline of the taxiway, but the airplane turned to point up twenty degrees to the left, then swung back to point twenty degrees to right.

On the runway, the wind from the right demanded a crab in that direction, so the centerline of the runway was visible out the left side of the pilot’s windshield. The BUFF accelerated with all eight engines pulling, they reached decision speed right on time for the load they were carrying, and began rotating five to ten knots before liftoff speed. It wasn’t much of a rotation, a bit over five degrees. Then the giant green bomber parted company with the earth.

On climb out the pilot turned to the general, just to see how he was doing. His face was lit by the glow of the red instrument lights. Gentry was struck by his youth. Captain Rogers, flying a bomber from the 1950s, was all of twenty-seven years old. Gentry felt like a fossil.

JDAMs were units that screwed into freefall bombs. They were comprised of a GPS receiver, a small computer, and canards that steered the bomb to its target, which was a preprogrammed bulls-eye defined by GPS coordinates. Accuracy was only as good as the GPS coordinates programmed in, so satellite maps of the earth had to be consulted.

The delivery crew, in this case in a B-52, had to use the onboard weapons system to drop the bomb into an invisible cone with its tip resting on the target and the large open end up in the sky. If the bomb were placed within the cone, it could steer itself to a bulls-eye. If it were released outside the cone, the canards would not be able to get the bomb back into the cone, so it would miss. This nebulous cone was defined by the capability of the canards that steered the bomb, by the prevailing wind, and by the angular velocity imparted to the weapon by the airplane that released it.

Guided weapons were the future of aerial warfare, Elvin Gentry believed. The days of dropping huge numbers of dumb bombs in the hope that one or two would hit the target you wanted destroyed were history.

GPS-guided bombs were a technological leap into the future from laser-guided bombs, which steered themselves to a dot of laser light projecting upon the target, projected by the bombing aircraft or a spotter aircraft, occasionally a person on the ground. Unlike laser-guided systems that were useless in bad weather, GPS-guided bombs hit their bulls-eyes all the time, whether they were falling through clear air, clouds, rain, snow, blowing dust, or smoke — as long as you had the correct coordinates for your target: type in a wrong digit somewhere and you missed.

The cockpit of the B-52 was cramped, almost like a two-seat tactical jet. Gentry sat in the jump seat aft of the pilots, and he didn’t have an ejection seat. After everyone else ejected, he was supposed to go to the lower level, or deck, and jump through the hole in the fuselage left by the recently departed navigator or bombardier. It sounded iffy, but if worse came to worst…

The F-16s were out there somewhere ahead on a fighter sweep, looking for bad guys, protecting the bombers from beyond the range of fighter missiles. That was the theory, which was only as good as the fighter pilots. Elvin Gentry consoled himself with the thought that we all have to die sometime. At least, he reflected, he wasn’t in a B-17 on the way to Berlin, harassed every mile by flak and German fighter pilots who knew their business. Those B-17 guys had balls, he thought. This little jaunt tonight was a piece of cake.

He keyed the intercom and told the crew, “A piece of cake.”

“Yeah,” the copilot said. “Sir.”

In minutes, as they were still climbing for altitude, the B-52s split up, each headed for its initial fix, to begin a series of bomb runs on bridges. The bombardiers had been plotting their courses and run-ins to their targets, and were now checking their ordnance panels.

Gentry heard the cryptic transmissions on the intercom of his BUFF, heard the pilot and copilot running through checklists, and heard the countdown begin to the first bomb release, on the highway bridge on I-20 at Vicksburg. And on the adjacent railroad bridge. The tops of the cones overlapped, so the BUFF would drop four one-ton weapons on this run. He saw the light on the instrument panel as the bomb bay doors came open, he heard the countdown, then the bombs released and he felt the airplane give a jump upward as it became four tons lighter in a fraction of a second. Felt the plane bank into a turn. The next targets were the bridges at Natchez.

So far, so good, Gentry thought. Then he realized he had been holding his breath. He exhaled and forced himself to breathe deeply.

Walter Ohnigian was a career F-16 pilot. Flying fighters was all he had ever wanted to do since he watched the Thunderbirds perform at an air show when he was twelve. He had attended the Air Force Academy, worked like a slave to get into flight school, and once in gave it everything he had to get fighters. He had fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, had graduated from two courses at USAF Weapons School, and had served a tour as an instructor on F-16s. Along the way he found time to serve a tour in a Navy F/A-18 squadron, which meant a nine-month cruise aboard an aircraft carrier. He had planned to stay in the air force until they forced him to retire.

The Texas Declaration of Independence changed his mind. Now he was a Texas fighter pilot. His decision had been easy; born and raised in Brady, Texas, he loathed Barry Soetoro and all he stood for.

Susie Ohnigian, from Colorado Springs, was a tougher sell. She had met Walt when he was a cadet and knew the blood, sweat, and tears he had put in to succeed at his chosen profession. Basically nonpolitical, Susie loved her husband. She knew military aviation has its risks, even in peacetime, and she consoled herself with the indisputable truth that God was in charge of our lives, and He would take Walt when it suited His purpose. He hadn’t yet, and she prayed that He wouldn’t until they were both old and full of years. She took her marriage vows before the altar of God, and thought it her duty to stand by her husband for as long as they both lived, so with some misgivings, she concurred with his choice.

Tonight he was over southeastern Mississippi, listening to the published approach and departure frequencies for Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida panhandle. Ohnigian thought that by the time the air force figured out that bombers were attacking the Mississippi bridges, it would be too late to launch and catch the bombers, which would be several hundred miles west. On the other hand, if Eglin had fighters on a combat air patrol, they could intercept the BUFFs. Or intercept the Texas F-16s.

So he listened on all the frequencies they might use, and he used the radar in his fighter to sweep the skies for airplanes. Targets. Bad guys. Fighters that might attack the friends in the BUFFs. Fortunately civilian traffic was prohibited by the Soetoro regime. Any targets Ohnigian and Free saw tonight on their radars were enemy airplanes. Or outlaw airplanes whose pilots had decided to roll the dice and take their chances.

The F-16s flown by Walter Ohnigian and his wingman Drew Free had two AMRAAMS (advanced medium-range air-to-air missiles) and two Sidewinders each, an internal M-61A Vulcan 20-mm cannon, and a two-thousand-pound external fuel tank. No doubt if there were Eglin F-16 fighters aloft, they were similarly armed.

The AIM-120C AMRAAM was seven inches in diameter and twelve feet long, flew at Mach four, had an active radar homing seeker, carried a forty-pound high-explosive warhead, and had a maximum range of fifty-seven miles. The AIM-9 Sidewinder was a short-range (up to twenty-two miles) missile with infrared homing; in other words, a heat seeker. It was five inches in diameter and nine feet long and carried a twenty-pound warhead. The latest versions could turn over ninety degrees to chase their targets at speeds up to 2.7 Mach, and could even lock on a target up to ninety degrees off the airplane’s boresight. Sidewinder was the perfect dogfight weapon: when it locked on your quarry’s tailpipe signature, the hunter squeezed it off and the Sidewinder did the rest. Sidewinder even had a limited head-on capability.

Tonight Walter Ohnigian hoped and prayed that there were no F-22 Raptors aloft. If there were, he would never see them on radar. His first indications of an F-22 would be a Raptor radar locked on him, so he kept his radar warning indicator in his instrument scan. Nothing so far.

He checked that he was on Eglin Air Force Base tower frequency. Yes, two fighters were taxiing. A flight of two. The lead had a laconic, gravelly voice.

He headed that way and eased his fighter into a climb. He wanted to be as high as possible so he would have an energy advantage. His wingman to his right and aft stepped up several hundred feet.

Now the Eglin fighters were airborne and switching to Departure Control. He pushed the button on the radio for the new frequency.

And he heard that voice again. Jesus, it sounded like Johnny O’Day! Of all people, Johnny O’Day, his roommate at the Air Force Academy, way back when.

Another transmission to Departure. Hell yes, it was Johnny O’Day, and he flew F-16s. Headed for the B-52s over the Mississippi.

The bombs from Gentry’s BUFF smashed into the bridges at Vicksburg. They were falling supersonic, so no one on the ground had a clue except for the faint, distant rumble of jet engines way up there in the night. The explosions on each bridge were so close together they sounded like one big bang, which rolled through Vicksburg and woke up several thousand folks.

Slowly, ponderously, the weight of the now unsupported bridge spans carried them down into the dark water of the big river. There were only two trucks on the highway bridge, since traffic on the interstates these days was down to a trickle. One driver on the highway bridge managed to stop his truck; the other rode the span into the river and drowned in his cab.

The railroad bridge actually had a train on it, rumbling along at eight miles per hour. The bombs went through a railcar, penetrated the track and ballast, and detonated against the targeted abutment. The spans on either side of the abutment began sagging, dragging the train along, down, down into the river.

The scene would be repeated tonight up and down the river. America was being cut in half with surgical precision.

Victory in a modern dogfight usually goes to the pilot in the most technologically advanced fighter, who will usually detect his enemy first and shoot first. Once missiles are launched, the rest is up to the missiles, those marvels of modern weaponry, which, if fired within their operating envelope, are quite deadly.

Tonight Walter Ohnigian fired two AMRAAMs at the Eglin fighters at a distance of fifty miles, head on. They raced off downhill at their targets and had soon accelerated to four times the speed of sound, the active radar in the nose of the missiles probing the night for their targets.

“Fox Three,” Walter Ohnigian said over the radio, a transmission he knew Johnny O’Day would hear. He held the transmit button on the stick down and continued, “Johnny, this is Oboe. You better eject.” Johnny was married to an operating room nurse and they had two kids. Ohnigian owed him the warning.

In his fighter, climbing through ten thousand feet, Johnny O’Day’s eyes automatically scanned the sky for the pinpoint exhausts of the rocket engines in missiles. Oboe — Ohnigian! After wasting several seconds, he looked at his radar screen.

And saw the tiny dots streaking toward his aircraft and that of his wingman.

He pumped off chaff and tried to turn a square corner. He was pulling eight Gs when the first missile went off just below the belly of his fighter and showered it with shrapnel that penetrated into the delicate internal organs of his steed. One second later the fighter exploded.

The second AMRAAM exploded as it went through the expanding cloud of pieces.

O’Day’s wingman had also turned violently to avoid the oncoming missiles, so after he was sure they had missed him, he had to turn back into the threat to acquire a firing solution on the bogeys on his radar screen. He was turning hard when the first AMRAAM from Ohnigian’s wingman actually struck his machine and exploded. Like Johnny O’Day, he died in the fireball.