Liberty or Tyranny (25 page)

Shekel tried to smile but just couldn’t. “Do you realize the shitstorm you’ve started? Arresting those generals makes it look like some kind a purge. You and I have already talked about how the military is on the verge of revolt. And now you pull this? Also, I thought we had agreed to give the military six months before pulling the rug out from under them. The idea was to give them enough rope to hang themselves. Well, they haven’t hanged themselves. In fact they’ve been helping the people organize and start farms over much of the country. And they’ve been protecting the people for the first time since it all went to hell.” He pointed out the window. “Have you been out in the city lately? The DC no longer looks like some kind of a zombie movie. The streets are safe, and commerce is even starting up again. Hell, there are a few grammar schools open in DC now. And it’s not just DC. About 20% of the country has been stabilized. Give them another six months and at least half of the country will be relatively safe and free from hunger. Do you understand what that means? If you don’t, the people damn sure do. Pulling this shit now is absolutely the worst mistake I’ve seen you make so far.”

Capinos jumped up from his chair behind the desk, red-faced. “How dare you come in here and bark at me like that! I have a habit of kicking in the front teeth of anyone who snaps at my ankles like a little Chihuahua.” He huffed for several seconds and rubbed his hands together. “If we weren’t lifelong friends, Bill…”

“Sorry, neither of us have time to hug and kiss. You have put your presidency at stake, and that means my ass is at stake. This was the very worst time for you to pull this. The idea was for us to wait until the military fell on its face. You have chosen exactly the wrong time, while the military is still being very successful and gaining the support of the American people. If you had just waited a few months longer, they were bound to have screwed up bad. That’s when you should’ve stepped in. That was the whole idea.”

“Uh, yeah, well,” Capinos’ strange expression alone could have inspired a psychiatrist to write volumes about a new type of megalomania, “Quit the act, Bill. I see right through it. You’re not on my side at all.”

“And whose side am I on?” Shekel asked.

“Why, yours of course,” Capinos answered.

“What, you think I want your job?”

“Maybe.” Capinos smiled. “But I suppose you’re going to tell me it’s the country you care about.”

Shekel seemed to be losing patience. “I’ve been trying to help both you and the American people.”

The laughter that emanated from Capinos was sickening. “It was your men who killed those civilians in Florida.”

“Under direct orders from you, it seems,” Shekel added. “I would have had anyone involved in a massacre put up on charges.”

Capinos laughed again. “It was your idea to blame the massacre on those two missing operators, though I doubt they did it. It was this Kramer guy who seemed to be having qualms about doing his duty.”

Shekel examined the Oval Office carpet. “That’s true. I was willing to sacrifice two good men for the sake of the country. Now I’m glad they’ve escaped. Two deaths not on my conscience.”

Relaxing, Capinos sat on the edge of his desk and crossed his arms. “Then what’s your problem with sacrificing a few generals? I need to make examples of them. Too many high-ranking officers signed that damn petition. I can’t arrest them all, not and have enough to run the military. I haven’t touched those on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for the very reason I need them. But a few examples can speak as loud as a thousand.”

Shekel turned white. “You’re
not
going to have them executed? Don’t you know what that will mean?”

“Already have.” Capinos’ face turned to cold stone. “Just the ones I had arrested. Most of them were brigadier generals.”

His jaw hanging slack, Shekel turned white. “Oh my God!”

Confused, Capinos asked, “What, did you know one of them?”

Shekel didn’t answer. “My God. It’s inevitable now.”

“What the hell are you muttering about, Bill?”

“Civil war. That’s what I’m muttering about.”

~~~

The next morning at Mrs. MacKay’s farm.

“The last truck will be leaving soon.” Caroline’s dilemma brought tears to her eyes. “You three could use an
extra rifle, and I would like to go with you. But I have Samantha to think about.”

Nate stood by the truck, still loaded with corn, and the trailer also packed with produce. “Samantha is welcome too.”

Deni and Brian spoke simultaneously, “You’re both welcome.”

Nate looked at the little girl, who had little resemblance to his own daughter, but still reminded him of her. “I suppose she would be safer with a larger group. It’s your decision. But you’re both welcome.”

Caroline asked, “You’re not still going into town, are you?”

Deni glanced at Nate before answering. “No. It’s too dangerous now.”

“We’re heading home,” Nate added. “I’m not sure what we’ll do with all this produce once we get there. We won’t have much time to prepare it for storage before going into hiding. I don’t think we have long before it hits the fan. Not that anyone will come after us specifically, not yet anyway, but we don’t want to get in their way while the different factions are going at each other.”

Brian watched half a dozen men feverishly load a two-ton truck with sacks of dried beans and canned produce. “We sure can’t can it. We’re out of Mason jars.”

Nate walked over to a group of men loading another truck. He pointed at the trailer loaded with produce. “You think you could hook that up and take it with you? We were going to take it into town, but it’s too dangerous for that now.”

The man nodded. “Yes, we could do that. Thank you.”

“How about the corn?” Nate asked. “We need the truck though. We’re in too much of a hurry to get home to walk.”

“Uh, we need to get out of here too.” The man looked at the pile of corn. “If you give us 20 minutes, we might have time to take some of it off your hands. God knows we have a lot of people to feed, despite all our work harvesting the fields.” He shook Nate’s hand. “You’ve been a good friend to us. We all hope you fare well.”

Nate nodded. “We’ll hang around another 30 minutes then.” He returned to the others. “Guess we just solved that problem.”

“If they’d give us some baskets or buckets, we could start loading the corn on their truck for them while we wait,” Brian offered.

A pale-faced woman ran out of the main house and onto the front steps. She screamed at the top of her voice, “Why oh bright beam of an August moon have you not written me? They just broadcast the code! Why oh bright beam of an August moon have you not written me?”

MacKay joined her on the porch. “Orderly, people! Orderly! There’s no need for panic. We have plenty of time.”

Everyone froze for a second. Then the yard was a flurry of action.

“Get in the truck!” Nate yelled. “Caroline, if you’re coming with us, take Samantha and get in.” He ran back to the trailer and unhooked it.

Brian jumped up on the pile of corn in the back of the truck. He waved at Mrs. MacKay. “Good luck!”

She waved back, struggling to smile.

When Nate jumped behind the wheel, he saw that Caroline was sitting next to Deni, Samantha on her knee. He cranked the engine and took off, speeding down the drive and through the open gate. Two guards waved as they passed.

“Is there need for this kind of a rush?” Deni asked. “It’s not like there’s a drone circling above.”

The poor condition of the road forced Nate to slow down. “Maybe not. How can we tell?” He glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Brian struggling to not be bounced off the pile of corn. “What little I know about our new president and Congress tells me not to put anything past them. There are still things we have to do at home before we disappear. It’ll be dark by the time we’re through.”

Col. Greene read the message handed to him by a lieutenant. His rage obvious, he handed the paper back. “You might want to keep that. Some day it’ll be an historical artifact.” He looked at the gathering of stunned officers and noncoms in the room. “Capinos just sent us a message. He had most of the generals he relieved of duty executed by firing squad.” A few men lost control and yelled expletives. Greene raised his voice. “Don’t jump to any conclusions. No one knows how this’ll play out or how bloody it’ll get. We’ll continue to serve the American people.” He grit his teeth. “But I for one will no longer take orders from a tinhorn dictator.”

The soldiers erupted in a roar of support.

~~~

Capinos expected a little trouble, but he was stunned by the military’s reaction and shocked by the people’s outrage.
I’ll have to stop playing with them.
Decision made, he called for a meeting with the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was late, so he scheduled the meeting for 11 AM the next morning.
My teams will have all night to do their thing before I lower the hammer on the top generals.

~~~

Nate stopped the truck and pulled over to the side one quarter mile from the farm and got out to check the dirt road for tire tracks.

Brian searched from his perch on the pile of green corn. “I don’t see any sign anyone came through here since we did.”

Nate scanned down the road to the driveway with binoculars. Satisfied, he said, “We’ll walk through the woods the rest of the way, swinging around to the north side.”

“Yeah.” Brian checked for trouble coming up behind them. “We better hurry if we’re going to get the place closed up and be out of there by dark.”

Nate looked into the cab through the open door at Deni and Caroline. “Keep your voice down. Don’t slam the door.” He grabbed his pack off of the pile of corn and slipped the straps over his shoulders. Grabbing his rifle, he said, “I’m going to leave the key in the truck in case someone from the horse farm comes by and wants to take the corn with them. Maybe we can get the truck back later.”

Deni nodded. “Okay. We won’t be needing the truck for a while.”

They slipped into the woods and never looked back.

As they walked through the darkening woods in the dying sunless afternoon, Nate began to grow ever more wary. When he could see the roof of the barn and they were not far from the clearing, he stopped and signaled for the others to get down. Whispering in Deni’s ear, he said, “I have a bad feeling about this.”

Deni looked back at him with worried eyes. “Knowing you and your ability to smell trouble, I think maybe we should bypass the farm and go on into hiding.”

Brian’s shoulders slumped, but he said nothing.

Caroline held Samantha with one hand and her rifle with the other, while she constantly scanned the woods for danger. Suddenly she froze and hissed, “Listen!”

Dull percussions shook the ground beneath them. An overpressure wave and then two more followed. The pressure waves were weakened by distance but noticeable.

Brian tried to peer through the treetops at the sky. “What the hell was that?”

“People dying,” Nate answered, his voice sounding almost like a moan.

Deni exhaled deeply. “Bombs, missiles, artillery. Hard to say which.”

“It damn sure wasn’t any deer rifle.” Brian continued to look at the sky, searching for danger. He froze. “It couldn’t be the horse farm, could it? We couldn’t hear it that far away, could we?”

“Sounded like 500-pounders to me,” Nate answered. “Could’ve been 1,000-pounders from farther away.” He was the only one there who had seen and heard heavy bombs used in warfare. “I have no idea what they would be using that kind of ordnance on out here. Any asshole who ordered that should be shot.”

“What about the farm?” Brian asked again.

Nate looked at his son. “They couldn’t have been that far away. We wouldn’t have felt any overpressure at all and no ground vibrations if they were. They must’ve been a long ways off but nowhere near as far as the horse farm.” He didn’t mention they could have been used against vehicles on the road.

Deni shook her head. “I can’t believe it’s already started in this backwoods area. So soon?”

“I guess someone’s pissed off at the people in this county,” Caroline said.

Nate’s jaw set. “Maybe Capinos doesn’t like us.”

It had grown cooler with the sunset, but everyone there was sweating and breathing hard.

Brian pointed. “I saw movement near the barn!”

Nate scanned with binoculars. They were just close enough to the edge of the clearing he could see through the brush. “Armed men. All young and in good shape. No uniforms. But the way they’re maneuvering says military.”

He watched as a man shouldered an anti-armor weapon and fired it at the front door of the house. A fiery explosion left most of the house burning under a billowing cloud of black smoke.

Everyone but Nate hit the ground and laid flat. Barely controlling his temper, he thought,
these assholes believe in overkill.

Nate slipped his binoculars under his shirt. “Follow me and stay low!”

They hadn’t gone three yards when automatic gunfire forced them to hit the ground again. Bullets chewed at trees just over their backs. Yelling from the direction of the house and barn, intermixed with more gunfire, motivated them to crawl fast until they were far enough back in the trees they thought it safe to run, keeping bent over and low, heading for the river.

Nate ran 50 yards and stopped just long enough to look back and make sure no one had been left behind. He saw all four of them looking at him with wide, scared eyes and sweaty pale faces, gasping for air. Caroline had Samantha in her arms. She had been carrying her. Nate stepped closer. “Give her to me. We have to move fast, and you have only one leg.”

Samantha began to cry but didn’t make much noise. Nate held her with one hand and his rifle with the other. “We don’t want to even try to outfight them, so we better outrun them. Stay low and on my heels.” He took off at top speed and prayed they didn’t run into an ambush.

Running downhill through the swamp, Nate came to the river, knowing they would have to swim it. He could hear the killers shouting, coming at them. They needed to put more distance between them and their pursuers before crossing the river or chance being caught midstream and helpless. Loaded down with their packs and weapons, it wouldn’t be easy. He pushed himself mercilessly and hoped the others could keep up. It was Caroline, slowed by her artificial leg, he worried about being left behind most. But in the past, she had proven herself capable, artificial leg or no. He noticed Samantha kept looking over his shoulder, keeping her eyes on Caroline, and he hoped she would warn him if Caroline stumbled and was being left behind.

After 40 minutes of pushing through brush, Nate stopped to catch his breath and check on the others. They struggled to catch up and were soaked in sweat, gagging for air.
They look like I feel.
He let Samantha down to rest his arm and looked past them in the direction of their farm – out of sight because of the trees blocking his view – where he saw a column of smoke – his burning house. As he looked and panted for air, another black column rose straight up, insulting the clear sky with its violent message of destruction. They had set the barn on fire, too. Most of the house was concrete and stone, the roof tin, but the inside was mostly wood and the barn nearly all wood. Both seemed to be burning fast.

Deni reached out and hooked a palm tree with her left arm and held on as if she would collapse without its support. Gasping, she looked back. “The bastards are burning the barn too.”

Brian turned to look. His chest heaving, he snapped his head around and looked up at his father with eyes full of rage.

Before he had time to speak, Nate cut him off. “Be more afraid than mad. There must be three dozen of them, and they’re outfitted like an army. Now let’s get across. We don’t want them to catch us in the water.”

“We’ll be sitting ducks,” Deni added.

They scrambled down to the water’s edge and waded in. Nate scanned the bank quickly with his eyes, finding no logs suitable for helping them across. “You two have your waterproof pack liners sealed well?” He asked Deni and Brian.

They both answered yes.

“Good. You’ll need the floatation. The river’s not more than five feet deep until just before you reach the far bank. I’ll take Samantha across.” He hung his rifle on his neck, so he would they have both hands. “Wait there until I’m on dry land. I’ll throw you a rope – Caroline first – and pull you across fast. You can hold your breath that long, if you go under.”

Deni checked behind them. “Let Brian go first.”

Nate heard no sounds of pursuit, but he knew the men who hunted them were all young and in good shape and couldn’t be far behind. “Don’t argue. I’ll need your rifle to shoot them off him if they catch us before we’re all across.” Not wasting time, he waded in, creating a wave in front, as he pushed forward against the water’s resistance. He noticed the river was low and the current weak. It hadn’t rained much lately. The tea-colored water felt cold at first, then warm. Heavy with ammunition, his pack had many pounds of negative flotation and tried to drag him under when it got too deep to wade. He sidestroked the rest of the way, his mouth below water some of the time, but Samantha’s head always above water. After lifting Samantha onto the bank, he crawled onto dry land and yanked his pack off. A coil of 3/8-inch nylon rope was tucked under the pack’s top flap, where he could get to it fast. After Caroline threw him her M4 rifle, he cast the rope to her. She looped it around her, and he began to pull. For two yards, she was under, but he soon had her on the bank, gasping for air.

Caroline scrambled to grab her rifle and get into shooting position. She would be ready to kill anyone she saw on the far bank and keep them off Deni and Brian. When Samantha ran to her, she pushed the little girl down behind a log.

The process worked just as well for Deni. She rushed to get into position to fire across the river.

Nate had Brian across even faster, since he was smaller. They left the river’s edge and ran into a 20,000-acre swamp they knew well, the sound of pursuit on the far bank urging them on.

“Why didn’t we fight at the river?” Brian asked between gasps for air. “We could’ve gotten some of them.”

Nate didn’t answer for several minutes, concentrating instead on running. Finally, he slowed down but didn’t stop. “We could kill a few of them, but there are too many. They would just pin us down and cross the river out of our sight, then outflank us and finish us off. There’s no point in killing a few of them when it gets us killed in the end. There’s nothing left back there to fight over.”

“They burned our home,” Brian protested. “We took on that gang a year and a half ago.”

Nate shook his head, saving his breath. When he came to a large log and had to slow down, he said, “We’ll talk later. Run.”

~~~

Just after midnight, the exhausted fugitives dragged themselves into thick brush. Nate prayed the canopy of pine trees above would make it difficult for FLIR, or forward looking infrared, to detect them from the air.

Samantha was fast asleep, her head lying on Nate’s shoulder. He waited until Caroline had laid out her sleeping bag before handing Samantha to her. “I’ll take first watch,” he whispered.

Brian grabbed his shoulder. “Do you think there’re still hunting us?”

“Someone wants us dead,” Nate answered. “Yes, I think they’re still hunting us.”

Deni already had her pack off and her sleeping bag laid out. “We have to get some rest, Brian. We’ll eat something before daylight and push on.” She took a much-needed drink from her canteen.

“Then what?” Brian asked.

Nate slipped his pack off, making an effort not to make any noise. He whispered, “After making certain we’ve shaken them off our trail, we’ll go to one of our hiding places and stay there. We lost some of our supplies that we hadn’t cached in the woods yet when they burned the house and barn, but we still have more than enough to last a year, on top of what’s left at Mel’s place.”

Brian wasn’t finished. “I don’t mean to be a complainer, but it seems like every time things are looking up it gets worse than ever. I’m tired of living like this.”

“Damn it.” Nate put his hand on Brian’s shoulder. “I know. We’re all tired. Right now we have to get these killers off our trail. How long we end up hiding out here depends on what the military and others in Washington do. There’s simply no way to know what’s going to happen now. It could all be over in a few weeks. Or… well, it could get a lot worse and last years.”

Deni quickly added, “I think generals are formulating a coup right now. Whatever happened must be a big deal, and the military was already losing patience with Washington.”

“Maybe,” was all Nate said on the matter. “Everyone get some rest. I’m tired myself, and will be waking one of you to pull security in about two hours.”

~~~

Samantha cried when Caroline woke her 45 minutes before sunrise. “Shhh,” Caroline said. “If you have to cry, be quiet about it.”

Each of them ate the first thing they could grab out of their packs, and Caroline finally got Samantha to eat some crackers with blackberry jam smeared on them.