Liberty's Last Stand (10 page)

Charlie Swim stood on a chair and looked around the room. “I tell you now,” he continued, “I'm for independence. The people of Texas would be better off without the other forty-nine states, all the Texans, white, black, and brown, for all the reasons that have been mentioned here this morning. We would be better off without those fools in Washington.

“Luwanda, you, the Republicans, and everyone in the country with a brain know that Cynthia Hinton doesn't have a chance to win the November election. She knows it too. She has plenty of her own ghosts, but carrying the Soetoro record on your back would have defeated anybody. All Hinton is doing is jacking off the faithful.

“And as for Soetoro and his gang. You know what their motto is: Never let a crisis go to waste. I don't trust them or believe anything they say.

“I think the time has come for us to start our own country. When you don't trust your spouse, or your boss, or your government, it is time to say good-bye and go on down the road.”

When JR Hays considered the tactical possibilities, he decided the only answer was booby traps, or mines. One man shooting wasn't going
to get it done. Oh, he might get a few of the drug smugglers, but he wouldn't get them all, and if he didn't get them all, every last one, he would be signing his own death warrant.

Not that JR thought he was going to live forever, because he doubted that he would.

The problem with booby traps was that they kill anyone who trips them—illegal pregnant women trying to get across the river to have their babies in Texas, men looking for work, as well as any drug smugglers and professional killers who happened by. Anyone and anything, including kudus, elands, oryx, springbok, nyalas, impalas, whitetail deer, and coyotes.

Unless he wanted to bury a lot of relatively innocent people and very innocent animals, he needed mines he could detonate at the proper moment.

He unlocked the toolbox in the bed of his pickup. Using the truck's tailgate as a table, he laid out all the devices he had borrowed from his former employer, the defense contractor, and looked them over carefully. Nothing there was explosive. What he had was sensors, miniature control boxes, radio controllers, batteries, and the other bits and pieces of high-tech booby traps. With the black powder and fuses, he should be able to construct some seriously lethal homemade Claymore mines.

FIVE

A
fter the crowd filed out of Jack Hays' office, Ben Steiner stayed behind and closed the door. He dropped into a chair and lit a foul little cigar. Jack Hays sat in his executive chair, which his wife had bought from Office Depot and he had assembled in his garage.

“Looks like you've crossed the Rubicon, Jack. Ain't no going back from here.” Steiner blew smoke around, then looked for an ashtray. There wasn't one. “You're sort of in the position of the fellow that found himself astride a fence when the ladder gave way and he came down with one leg on either side.”

“If you introduce a declaration of independence in the legislature,” Hays asked, “will it pass?”

“That's the question, isn't it?” Ben Steiner said, puffing lazily. “And damn, I don't know. It might. Just might.”

“Or it might not,” Jack Hays said disgustedly. “Don't you think you ought to start counting noses? If it's DOA, I'd like to know it before I manage to piss off every federal employee from the postman to Soetoro.”

“I'm all for it,” Steiner declared, “but it's a big step. Soetoro is arresting everybody in Texas he can get his hands on—whoever intimated, hinted, or told his wife that he didn't like Soetoro. FEMA has a camp for them up in Hall County. They got a list and are rounding 'em up.”

“How come you aren't on it?”

“Oh, I am, but my wife told them I was in Argentina fishing for a couple of weeks.”

“Ben, it would be silly to introduce such a resolution, or bill, unless we knew it was going to pass.”

“By how much?”

“Simple majority.”

“That isn't much.”

“We'll be lucky to get that,” Jack Hays said. “We must have something to paper our ass with. Unlike Soetoro, I want to hear the people's representatives speak. One way or the other. Yea or nay.”

“It's that ‘lives, fortunes, and sacred honor' thing that has them worried.”

The governor took his time answering. “I think everyone would like to wake up and find this is just a nightmare. But it's real. None of us are going to be able to bury our head in the sand and hope the wolves don't bite our asses. The revolution has started. Soetoro has suspended the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Lincoln did it under his war powers. Unfortunately for Soetoro, we aren't in a war. A rebellion, or revolution, will change the life of
everyone
in America. Indeed, perhaps everyone on the planet. We can't start it—and the Texas legislature can't—because Barry Soetoro already did.”

“That wasn't what you told me yesterday.”

“I've changed my mind.”

Ben Steiner took a deep drag on his cigar and let the smoke out slowly. “Our people need a little time,” he said. “They gotta work up to being brave. They gotta examine all the options before they can screw up their courage for this one.”

“How much time? The Soetoro administration has been planning martial law for years.”

“Tomorrow or the next day.”

“We better not have the vote if we aren't going to win. Barry Soetoro is too much of an egotist to ignore an independence vote, win or lose.”

“We'll win,” Steiner said grandly. In his fifties, with a booming voice, he knew how to sway people, persuade them. Jack Hays was a more difficult sell than the average juror, however.

“When you're sure you know how the vote will go, after you've talked to every member, come back and see me.”

Ben Steiner leaned forward. “Jack, as we sit here Luwanda Harris and some of her friends are burning up the wires to Washington. If you don't want the capitol surrounded by tanks and army troopers from all over, you had better start talking to people, tell them what's at stake. We must get this done, and soon. If you don't, my best guess is the government of Texas is going to get arrested en masse and accused of treason. In the interim, let's cut off access to Washington.”

“Can we take down the telephone system and the internet?”

“Of course. The only question is how fast.”

“Let's do it,” Jack Hays said. “Who do we call?”

“The state director of disaster response, Billy Rob Smith.”

The governor picked up the phone and made the call.

Billy Rob Smith heard the governor out, then asked, “Are you nuts? Every business in America bigger than a lemonade stand relies on telephones, landline and cell, and the internet. Millions of people use the system to send or get business information and to buy and sell securities. Medical records are transmitted via fax or over the internet. The feds have been working like beavers to digitize every medical record in the nation—shutting off the internet may mean people can't get proper medical care. And the telephone system—you can't shut one system down without turning off the other. In a lot of places, voice and digital use the same wires. In some places the telephone system is completely digital. Turning off cellular and landline telephones will drop us right smack dab back into the nineteenth century. Shutting those systems down is insanity.”

“I didn't ask for your opinion—I am giving you an order.”

“And I'm telling you that you're crazy. Hell, I don't even know that you are the governor. You sound like an idiot jabbering on the telephone.”

What ended the argument and decided the matter was an announcement at precisely that moment that was carried on television networks nationwide: The president had directed the military to work with civilian law enforcement agencies to confiscate all the guns in America in private
hands. In the future, only the military and law enforcement officers would have guns.

Billy Rob Smith had a television in his office airing a twenty-four-hour news channel, which was limiting itself to government press releases these days, and he paused his conversation with the governor while an aide told him the news as rapidly as possible and pointed at the television set.

Smith was not stupid. “Did you hear that?” he demanded of Jack Hays.

“Yes.”

“Holy damn. It's like the British marching to Lexington and Concord. This tears it. Americans won't stand for it. Hell, the people of Texas won't stand for it.”

Jack Hays took a deep breath. He had other things to attend to. “Smith, I want you to shut off the telephone and internet systems in east Texas. Start right here in Austin, right now. Then Houston. Get busy.”

A very subdued Billy Rob Smith said, “Yes, sir,” and hung up.

Jack Hays repeated the news to Ben Steiner, who was taking a last puff of his little cigar. Steiner stared, slack-jawed. Finally he said, “Soetoro isn't just temporarily suspending the Constitution, he's tearing it up.”

Jack Hays rubbed his forehead.

Steiner said, “Luwanda Harris will never change her mind, but this will get us Smokey Bryan and a whole lot of others who were on the fence. Of course, a lot of liberals will have a spontaneous orgasm when they hear Soetoro has repealed the Second Amendment, people like Melissa McKinley, but they weren't going to vote for independence no how, no way. They don't mind a dictator repealing the Second Amendment as long as they think he's on the side of social justice and the planet, like they are.”

“Ben, if you are going to introduce a declaration of independence, and I don't mean an ordnance of secession, hadn't you better write one? After you count noses.”

Ben Steiner rushed from the room, taking his cigar butt with him.

Trust Jack Yocke to know when something was going on, Jake Grafton thought. He was standing under a tree watching it rain from a low overcast sky when the
Washington Post
columnist found him.

“I saw them take you into the admin building, Admiral,” Yocke said. “Rumor has it you are now part of the conspiracy that planned a coup d'état.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“It's being whispered around.”

“They wanted me to sign a confession.”

“Did you?”

“I am not going to confess to anything I didn't do. Ever. Once you start that, there's no end to it.”

“No matter how bad you think the Soetoro White House gang is,” Yocke said, “you're wrong. They're worse.”

“They certainly think they are on the side of righteousness and history.”

“Hitler and Stalin were sure of it too—didn't work out so well for them.”

“Now I feel better.”

Jake Grafton had his hands in his pockets. He looked around. No place to sit that wasn't wet. He leaned against the tree trunk, which wasn't wet yet. The rain was falling in greater volume.

“So what are your politics, Admiral? In all the years I've known you, I never got an inkling.”

Grafton snorted. “Long ago, when I was very young, I learned that all political points of view were valid for the people who held them, except for the fanatics on the fringes who are usually incapable of rational thought. Think about the blind men and the elephant. Honorable people can hold very different opinions because they have very different life experiences. Liberals, conservatives, middle-of-the-roaders, big-government types, libertarians, old, young, middle-aged, highly educated or average or uneducated, skilled or unskilled, stupid, average smarts, or genius, they all see a little bit of how the world works and process it into a worldview, and they are all correct. The genius of representative democracy is that it takes all these viewpoints and grinds them up and arrives at some kind of resolution, most of the time. Look at the federal tax code: government policy has tried to accommodate all major and many minor concerns and still raise revenue. Any dictator with half a brain could put a tax code together that is simpler and
more efficient and raises more revenue. But the United States still has one of the highest, if not the highest, rate of voluntary tax compliance of any country in the world. So something must be working right.”

“Democracy can't handle every problem; you have to admit that.”

“Slavery was too big for representative government,” Grafton acknowledged. “The story of this century is the haves versus the have nots, and illegal immigration is one aspect of that. Drugs are another piece of that problem. The disintegration of the black family is a piece. The desire of Barry Soetoro to drastically increase the number of non-white voters in America as quickly as possible to enhance the political power of blacks and Hispanics and Muslims and dilute the power of the whites is another. Representative democracy hasn't figured these problems out and may not be able to do so. Still, no other form of government has a better chance.”

Lightning flashed, then two seconds later came the clap of thunder. The wind picked up.

“So how will the story turn out?” Yocke asked.

“I don't know, Jack. I really don't.”

“I'm getting wet,” the
Post
's man complained, and brushed wind-driven raindrops from his hair.

“See you later,” Grafton said.

“Good luck, Admiral.”