Liberty's Last Stand

THIRTY-TWO

JR Hays had four C-17s lined up, fueled, and ready to go. Aboard them were twelve trucks, three apiece. For now, the trucks were loaded with ammo, welding torches, and C-4 explosive. On the trip back, they’d be loaded with gold. He had selected and briefed his men — all one hundred of them. They were dressed in U.S. Army combat gear that would have passed the inspection of any sergeant major. The men had been briefed to shoot only in self-defense. He meant this to be a bloodless adventure.

JR had confirmed, in three satellite calls with the Pentagon, that the United States armed forces were in a state of armed truce and officially neutral in the war between the United States and Texas, and he had letters in his pockets, all forgeries on good paper with appropriate letterheads affirming that he was Lieutenant General Robert Been, United States Army, with written orders from the president of the United States, Barry Soetoro, and the secretary of the Treasury to transport the gold in the Bank of Manhattan to the New York Federal Reserve Bank for safekeeping until the current political crisis had passed. To further his ruse, he had five Texas Rangers, three men and two women, in civvies carrying FBI pistols and credentials, which Colonel Tenney had confiscated from agents in Austin. Chuy Medina had told him the bank had at least a hundred tons of gold on deposit. JR hoped to take every ounce.

Sarah and I went to the big head honchos’ meeting in the conference room of the headquarters building on Tuesday night after dinner. The place was packed, standing room only.

There were four generals: Jose Martinez, an active-duty two-star who either took leave or deserted (he wasn’t telling); Mort Considine, a retired brigadier; Lee Netherton, a retired three-star; and Jerry Marquart, a congressman if Congress ever got back in session. Jake Grafton was the general commanding, by the unanimous vote of the four, and he presided.

The big news was that radio stations along the East Coast had received duplicate thumb drives of Sarah’s recordings from Dixie Cotton; and Dixie herself was making a splash as she flitted through Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, broadcasting on her mobile radio. FEMA and Homeland were after her, but I figured they would drop the chase soon enough — news of the recordings had already gone nationwide, and the rumor was that even FEMA and Homeland were now having doubts about Soetoro.

Within twenty-four hours of the first Kingwood broadcast, more than a thousand people joined our little army — veterans, truck drivers, steel workers, mechanics, carpenters, dentists, students, housewives, eccentrics, whackos, and no doubt some true psychopaths, all angry about Soetoro’s violation of their “rights” and the “Constitution.” Many brought their own firearms.

The generals fretted about the willingness and ability of civilian volunteers to follow orders. As usual, Grafton cut to the chase. “We’ve got to keep control of our troops or we are nothing but a mob. Let’s agree right here, right now, that anyone caught robbing, stealing, raping, or murdering noncombatants will be summarily executed on the spot. Anyone accused of these crimes but not caught in the act will be court-martialed as soon as possible with the accuser and any witnesses testifying. If found guilty, he or she will be executed immediately. That will be General Order Number One.”

Further orders followed swiftly. Jose Martinez, with Mort Considine as his deputy commander, would take the units designated as the First Army, or our northern army, to Washington via I-68. Lee Netherton, with Jerry Marquart as his deputy, would lead the units organized into the Second Army, or our southern army, to Washington via Leesburg. Grafton would fly the Cessna, our only observation plane, and keep in touch with the columns via radio. Predators would scan the ground for bad guys and ambushes.

Then they got into logistics. The generals told their staff officers to stay but ordered the rest of us to get busy.

Thinking that good advice, I wandered out with Sarah and asked, “Wanta get laid?”

She stopped and did a double take, then said, “Why, Mr. Romantic, I thought you would never ask. You must be overwhelmed by my feminine charms.” She held up a palm. “Don’t explain. I would rather keep my illusions.”

“Wise woman,” I acknowledged.

“Where do you plan to conduct our tryst? The barracks is full of people playing poker, shooting craps, and listening to Barry Soetoro on the radio, and I’m not doing it in a pickup truck, period.”

“I was thinking of walking a little way up into the woods and finding a leafy glade that we could remember fondly all our days.”

“You animal! Lead on.” She placed her hand in mine.

Apparently some other couples had similar ideas, so we had to go a bit further uphill into the woods than I wanted. It was so dark we tripped over tree roots twice.

When we thought we had a private spot free from brush and snakes, we sank to the ground. “Ooh,” she said as she ran her hand around, “moss covered with sticks and stones and spiders. I’ve always dreamed of getting laid on a bed of moss, our very own private bower of carnality.”

“I’ll bet,” I said, and got busy brushing the debris off the moss.

Hours later gently pattering raindrops woke us. The night was as black as the inside of a coal mine but a lot noisier, what with drops loudly whacking leaves, which were beginning to drip on us. Sarah and I hurriedly put on our clothes and threaded our way through the trees downhill toward the barely visible lights of the camp.

When we got back to our barracks we were a little damp, so we hung our trousers and shirts and web belts on the posts at the end of the bunk and both of us crawled under my blanket. When I woke up, it was dawn and Sarah was still sound asleep in my arms.

Other people were stirring, but they studiously ignored us.

Jake Grafton came thumping in. I pretended to be asleep. He shook my shoulder anyway and said, “Come on, Tommy. See you at the plane in fifteen minutes.”

“Yessir.”

Grafton was adding a quart of oil to the Cessna’s engine when I came walking up. I put my M4 carbine and a little bag of extra loaded magazines and a dozen grenades in the plane. The sun was trying to come up under a high overcast. The earth smelled of late summer, pungent, fertile, and hinting of fall. The temperature was in the fifties so my sweatshirt felt good. Truly, we had a marvelous piece of the planet.

I stood there inhaling it all and watching the sun fire the tops of the trees as Grafton finished his preflight. I could hear the PA system squawking, wakening the troops. I had been hesitant to wake Sarah so I didn’t kiss her good-bye; now I wished I had.

“You ready?” he asked.

“I suppose.”

We got aboard and put on seat belts and headsets, and he fired up the engine. It caught on the first crank, and the prop spun into a blur with a nice little roar, blasting the morning dew from the windscreen. I checked the fuel gauges on the butts of both wings: we were full.

There was no wind, so after waiting a moment for the engine to warm and doing a short run-up and mag check, we were rolling down the runway. The tail came up and in less time than it takes to tell, we were airborne. Out over the camp and the trees, climbing into that morning sky between the low green mountains, then turning eastward into the morning sun.

He gave me a brief on the ICS. “We’ll check the roads the two columns are going to take, then we’re going to Washington.”

“I thought we were the eyes of the army?”

“For a little while. Then we have places to go, things to do, people to see.”

“Right.”

“It’s a great morning to fly,” he said. That was Jake Grafton. He was wearing a little smile.

After an hour in the air, he reported on his handheld to the generals. No ambushes were evident. We did find a couple of campsites in the woods, but apparently the people there were refugees from the cities. Fires were giving off smoke, and we saw no evidence of heavy weapons. Our scouts would see the smoke and be forewarned.

Then Grafton set a course to the east. No low clouds, excellent visibility, so he climbed to four thousand feet. Soon Leesburg came into view, and a few moments later the long runways at Dulles airport.

The C-17 Globemasters landed one after the other at LaGuardia airport in Brooklyn. There were no flight plans, of course, since the FAA was out of action because the power was out, but these were air force planes on official business, so they landed and that was that.

The ground controller parked the four giant cargo planes on the cargo ramp, appropriately enough, and the loadmasters and their soldier passengers got busy off-loading the trucks. Also on the trucks were little cargo donkeys driven by gasoline engines, just in case.

The caravan got itself arranged, the soldiers got their weapons and got into cabs and on the backs of the trucks, two armed guards were posted at each plane, and the fliers stayed with their steeds. The rest of the hardy band of adventurers set off through the wilderness of Brooklyn toward Manhattan.

The place reminded JR Hays of Baghdad. Trash was everywhere, windows were broken out, and knots of idle young men congregated on corners, looking like packs of feral dogs. Few women could be seen, and those that were, were always walking with several men. Carcasses of burned-out cars sat pushed to the side of the street. Other cars had been stripped of wheels and even doors.

None of the stoplights worked, which didn’t matter because there was little traffic, probably because there was little or no fuel available, so the caravan rolled steadily at twenty-five miles an hour onto the main thoroughfares that led to the bridge into Manhattan.

He looked at his watch. At least this Wednesday, the seventh of September, there weren’t a couple million commuters and an endless stream of over-the-road tractor-trailers and local trucks fighting to get into Manhattan. The roads were essentially empty, with pieces of cars strewn randomly that the army trucks had to drive around. Wrecks were abandoned against the median barriers. It looked to JR as if Barry Soetoro had finally managed to choke America, and it was dying.

It was ten minutes before nine. His convoy would arrive at the bank a few minutes after the hour. He straightened his uniform, the dress uniform of a lieutenant general in the United States Army. He had given himself a promotion. He had used his own ribbons on his left breast, which was a dazzling collection for a twenty-year light colonel, but rather sparse for a three-star. JR doubted that the bankers had met many three-stars in full regalia.

As the truck rumbled along, he sat in the right seat on the lead truck praying that the Bank of Manhattan was going to be open today. If it weren’t, this trip would be nothing but two airplane rides and a short jaunt on abandoned highways and streets.

From the right seat of the Cessna buzzing over suburban Virginia, I didn’t see any airliners in the air, but I saw a bunch parked around the terminals at Dulles. Every gate was full and the ramps were crowded.

We flew on. The Washington Monument rose like a finger ahead of us. Grafton flew toward it. What a view that was, with the Potomac winding into town, the Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol Building, the White House, the Jefferson Memorial, and the long slash of the Mall.

I was nervous. I figured someone might decide to take a pot shot at us with anti-aircraft artillery or a surface-to-air missile, but apparently not. The streets looked almost deserted, yet the Mall and area around the White House certainly weren’t. People everywhere, a sea of people.

Grafton swung the airplane to fly around the White House counterclockwise, with the good view on his side. But I could see plenty. Uniformed police and cops in riot gear were arranged outside the fence that encircled the executive mansion. They faced a sea of people, ten, perhaps twenty thousand flooding toward the White House. It was the damnedest sight I ever saw.

Books have been written about what was going on in the White House that morning of the seventh day of September, about how the president and his advisors and staunchest legislative allies weighed options and tried to figure out what to do next. At the risk of stating what you already know, I will summarize by telling you that Barry Soetoro was in denial, according to later accounts, and so were Al Grantham and Sulana Schanck. They raved about the treason of the military, demanded summary executions.

The vice president thought the mob outside could be handled by the Secret Service and police riot squads, augmented if necessary by fire trucks with high-pressure nozzles. He urged calm and assured everyone who would listen that America’s progressives and people of color would ignore the crap spewing over the radio (and now some television stations), and support their president with their lives, if necessary. According to an account written by a senator, a delegation from Capitol Hill tried to warn the president that the fury of the American people was real and widespread, and had been dismissed as traitors for their pains.

Of all that drama Grafton and I were blissfully ignorant. After Grafton had made two complete circles, he leveled the wings and aimed the plane across the river toward the Pentagon, that massive stone structure between the Potomac and Reagan National Airport.

Grafton circled the Pentagon, eyeing the vast parking lot. On his second circuit, I had a good view of armed soldiers, machine-gun nests, military vehicles, and tents. We were only a few hundred feet above the parking lot by then, but no one started shooting.

Grafton swung out and began a straight-in to the parking lot. There were light poles here and there, but most of it was empty. He pulled up on the bar between the seats, which put in half flaps, then pulled again for full flaps and we were on final doing about seventy miles per hour. He plunked that thing in a three-point landing within twenty feet of the edge, just clearing some power wires, avoided all the light poles, and slowed to a taxi. Then he braked to a stop and pulled the mixture knob out. The prop swung to a stop as a Humvee came rushing up.

Grafton killed the mags and master switch and we got out. Two soldiers jumped from the vehicle with guns in hand. Optimist that I am, I left my M4 and bag of grenades in the plane.

“My name is Jake Grafton. I want to see the CNO or army chief of staff, if they are around.”

“Sir, you aren’t supposed to land here.”

“Right. Now get on the radio and find out if Admiral McKiernan has the time to see Jake Grafton.”

Fifteen minutes later we were in some kind of situation room still wearing our sidearms. At least they weren’t going to arrest us on the spot, I thought, which was a relief.

Grafton shook hands all around — the room was full of admirals and generals — enough brass to make a few dozen monkeys. He was even courteous enough to introduce me, although all I got from the heavies were nods, then they ignored me. They all knew him and were obviously happy to see him. The commandant whacked him on his back so hard I worried about his ribs, but Grafton didn’t wince.

“Was that you we saw flying around the White House a few minutes ago?” someone asked, and Grafton admitted it was.

“The FAA will mail you a flight violation.”

On a console were three large screens showing the mob surrounding the White House. It only took me a moment to figure out that these pictures were the datalink video from drones. A large map of downtown Washington covered one wall. It was held there with masking tape, so it hadn’t been there long.

I watched the video while Grafton chatted and the brass nodded at the screens and shook their heads. “He’s going down before long,” one general said.

Everyone seated themselves in chairs and Grafton got right to it. “Is it true that the military is no longer taking sides in this civil war?”

“That’s right,” Bud Weiss, the air force general, said. “We’re America’s armed forces, not Barry Soetoro’s.”

Jake Grafton nodded. “I had hoped that you would see it that way.”

Cart McKiernan explained, “Marty Wynette committed suicide in his office two days ago. This war against Texas and Soetoro’s enemies had gone far enough, so we decided the best course for the military was to remain neutral.”

Fifteen minutes later I thought I had the picture. The military was devoting its efforts to pushing Mexican forces out of California. A very unhappy Barry Soetoro was hunkered down at the White House fulminating and making big noises, but so far he had left the Pentagon, and the Marines surrounding it, alone — probably because he had nothing to bother them with.

“What does Jack Hays down in Austin say about all of this?”

“I talked to him earlier today on the radio,” the army general, Frank Rodriquez said. “He says if we leave Texas alone, Texas forces will leave our troops and military installations alone. I guess you could call it a truce.”

Grafton gratefully accepted a cup of coffee from an aide. He sipped it and told the brass, “There are a bunch of folks, about three thousand, but the number is growing by the hour, heading this way from Camp Dawson in West Virginia. They’ll probably be here tomorrow.”

“Who is in charge of this group?”

“I guess I am,” Grafton said with a smile. “We intend to enter the White House and arrest Soetoro, if we can get there before that mob beats us to it. His days are almost over.”

“Then what?” some general asked.

“We need to get the United States up and running again. Get the power turned on nationwide, get water flowing through the pipes, and restore public order.

They weren’t yet ready to talk about tomorrow. “What do you know about this White House recording that is all over the radio dial? We think three or four stations are broadcasting it.” General Weiss said that and he gestured at the video screens. “That is what has them stirred up. The big problem is that that mob is made up of people who hate Soetoro and people who think he is the risen Christ and is being viciously slandered. We have people down there reporting on what’s happening. That thing may turn into a battle royal between the two groups right there in Lafayette Park, a bloody riot.”

Grafton replied, “I authorized secret electronic monitoring of the White House about six months ago. We used an Israeli program to turn all their cell phones, computers, and surveillance equipment into listening devices. The signals were gathered by the White House Wi-Fi system, encrypted, and sent to us. My tech staff” (that was only Sarah Houston, by the way — she was going to smile when I related this remark to her) “waded through hundreds of hours of conversation, but edited our take down to the pithiest sixty hours. That is what the radio stations are broadcasting.”

Rodriquez whistled. “That stuff is dynamite.” He jumped right to the key point. “So you knew Soetoro was planning to declare martial law for weeks before he did it?”

Grafton merely nodded.

“How many weeks?”

“Two months,” Grafton said.

As they digested that revelation, General Runyon said, “You should have told us.”

Grafton made a face. “There is always the question of whether clandestine recordings are genuine, and that cannot be answered to a certainty by listening to them. Even if you concluded that I was as honest as Diogenes, what would you have done after you listened? The American people needed to see the reality of a dictator in the White House, not listen to him scheming. Now they have seen and believe and most are ready to listen. The die-hards, a minority, are convinced the recordings are a plot to slander the saint; nothing on God’s green earth will make them change their minds.”

The military brass sat and looked at each other. “He’s right, you know,” Cart McKiernan said. No one wanted to argue. All eyes went to Grafton.

Grafton took another sip of coffee. “You made the right decision when you pulled your troops to the sidelines. The American people need to solve this problem. And I think they’re about to.”

That was the moment when I knew my country had a future. Jake Grafton talked about the rebuilding mission ahead, and the Pentagon generals and admirals listened carefully to every word.

I slipped out of the office, closed the door behind me, and asked the aides in the reception area how to get to the men’s room. A major escorted me, and when I had lightened the load, I asked if there was food available. There was. The major and I had a delightful late breakfast of scrambled eggs, sausage, fried potatoes, and toast with real butter.

I was in an expansive mood. The major wanted to talk about the splash the Soetoro White House conversations were making. I wasn’t about to tell him that was a Sarah Houston/Jake Grafton production, so I just listened. When he had expressed his and his colleagues’ stupefied amazement, he segued to the subject of the rebels coming to town. I told him what I knew, which wasn’t much.

“Who is leading the rebels?”

“Admiral Grafton, the officer who flew me here. I think you lead a rebel army by moral suasion. That’s Jake Grafton. I used to work for him but I quit. Now I do what he asks or tells me to do because he’s Jake Grafton and I’m me.”

“What’s going to happen to Soetoro?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” I said. “If Grafton has an idea, he hasn’t shared it with me. I doubt if he does. He’s sorta playing the melody by ear. May I have another cup of coffee?”

We both went and filled our cups. Seated again, the major said confidentially, “The betting in my shop is that Soetoro will fly to Iran and ask for asylum.”

“Maybe the ayatollahs will put him to work in a bomb factory,” I suggested.

“I don’t think he’s going to get rich making speeches,” the major declared.

“Probably not,” I agreed and finished the coffee.