Liberty's Last Stand (29 page)

“I'll stay,” Lee Parker said. “My officers can make their own decisions.”

“I understand you have some civilians locked up.”

“Orders from Washington,” Parker replied curtly. “FEMA has lists.”

“Let them out, Wiley, and get them rides home. And haul down the American flags on base. Find some Texas flags and run them up.”

“Yes, sir.”

Wiley Fehrenbach unbuttoned his shirt and produced a Lone Star flag. He grinned at JR and handed it to the nearest soldier. “You heard him. Run it up the pole outside and get one for the pole at the main gate.”

JR glanced at the leather couch, and asked the two generals to conduct their business in the outer office. When the door was closed behind them, he sacked out on the couch. He glanced at his watch. The Republic of Texas was just a bit less than forty-eight hours old. The window was open and the breeze felt good. He was asleep ten seconds later.

SIXTEEN

T
he riots continued in inner cities around the country. Baltimore was probably the worst: it had been racked by riots the previous year, and this time the mob at the core expanded across downtown and into the suburbs.

Police and National Guardsmen had disappeared. Much of their leadership had already been imprisoned by the feds. Many of those left on duty went home to protect or move their families. Others just threw up their hands. Why try to bring a mob under control when the physical risks were high and the politicians were frightened that they might lose some votes, so none of the political elite or police brass would back the men and women in uniform on the streets? Police and guardsmen went into bars, had a few, then found their cars and went home.

In the suburbs, people were getting into a state of near panic. Rumors were rampant. In subdivisions and neighborhoods, mothers and fathers surrounded by children met in front yards and culs-de-sac, exchanging rumors and fears. People talked about blocking off streets as they faced the prospect of having to defend their homes against marauders. It seemed as if much of America now had two ravenous domestic enemies—rioting, looting mobs, and the federal government. Many of the suburbanites had an old lever-action Winchester or Marlin, or a bolt-action Winchester, Remington, or Ruger in the closet, and a couple boxes of ammunition for it. They decided what they were going to do if the mobs invaded their neighborhoods to rob, loot, rape, and burn.

In Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Los Angeles, the mobs were still in the ghetto, but as in Baltimore, those who lived in the riot-torn area and were not a part of it were trying to flee. People left on foot and in cars, streams of refugees, some with the contents of looted stores on their backs, but all convinced they had had enough.

Local and network television were showing some of this, where censors would allow it, and radio stations were on the spot with breathless reporting. Social media filled in with some truth, rumor, and wild speculation. As usual on social media, budding writers of sardonic fiction posted absurd tales they thought only fools would believe; of course the fools did believe, but so did many frightened people who were definitely not foolish.

Everyone had someone they needed to talk to desperately: Telephone networks were at maximum capacity. Calls, e-mails, and text messages inundated city and state officials high and low, all those remaining after the FBI, FEMA, Homeland Security, and cooperating county sheriffs had carried off the disloyal for incarceration. Some of the less cooperative sheriffs and police chiefs had also been arrested, decapitating their law enforcement departments. The only thing observers could agree on was that the situation was getting worse. In the White House and congressional offices, staffers stopped answering telephones and e-mail servers crashed. Monday night, August 29, was another wild one in America.

They came for Jake Grafton at Camp Dawson at three in the morning, Tuesday, August 30. Four of them, in green coveralls with FEMA badges on the right shoulder. They woke him up by dragging him from his cot, slamming him to the floor, and kicking him.

Then they cuffed his hands behind his back and dragged him from the tent, across the common area, by the mess tents, to the building Sluggo Sweatt used as headquarters. Up the stairs into Sluggo's lair. He was up, with a light on, waiting. The four thugs lifted Grafton bodily from the floor and threw him into a chair. Another man came in and dropped Grafton's watch and cell phone on Sluggo's desk.

“Good morning, Grafton,” Sluggo said pleasantly. “I decided it was time to take the gloves off and confront you with the reality of your situation.”

Grafton tried to ease himself in the chair. It felt as if one of his ribs on the left side was broken. Sharp pain with every breath.

“My conscience requires me to tell you in advance that the road ahead for you is filled with pain. I need you to sign a confession of complicity in the attempted assassination of President Soetoro. Of course, there will be television cameras. You will need to speak slowly and coherently about your crimes.”

Jake Grafton looked around the room, the same one he had visited twice before.

One of the men on his right used a fist into his side. He gasped at the blow and almost fell from the chair.

“Be polite and pay attention,” Sluggo said. “I told my colleagues that you would undoubtedly need a lot of persuading, and they thought it would be fun to do it. There isn't much to do to pass the time here in the boonies.” With that, Sluggo nodded.

The thugs dragged him from the chair and took him along a hallway to a jail cell, complete with bars and a cot and a honey bucket. There they started pounding on his ribs. One of them stomped on his scrotum. At some point he passed out.

When he came to, the lights were on, but he had no idea whether it was day or night or how long he had been unconscious.

Television. That was why they hadn't touched his face.

The good news was that he was still alive. The bad news was that Sluggo's men were going to beat him to death by inches.

Loren Snyder had been busy. He used the Houston telephone book to find the address of a former naval officer, Julie Aranado, also known as Jugs. Apparently the Aranado men of prior generations had favored big-bosomed women, so Julie was awesomely endowed. Lots of exercise kept the rest of her figure slim and trim, showing off the trophies. She had acquired her nickname at the Naval Academy and, although it reeked of political incorrectness and sexism, she liked it, so it stuck. “If you got 'em, be proud,” she had been heard to remark when questioned about the appellation.

After eleven years of active duty, she decided the GI Bill's offer of a free advanced education beat the navy's retention bonuses. So she quit the navy and was earning a PhD in physics at the University of Houston. She returned to her apartment on Sunday evening, after watching Jack Hays' speech at a girlfriend's house, and found Loren Snyder sitting on the front stoop waiting for her.

“Hey, Jugs. You're looking good.”

“Mr. Snyder! I haven't seen you in what, two or three years?”

“About that. And it's Loren. Hey, I need some help and you were the first person I thought of.”

“I heard you were in law school at UT.”

“Yep.”

“What kind of help?” she asked as she unlocked the door. Snyder was at least ten years her senior, and she had served with him aboard an attack sub. Romance hadn't been on the agenda then, and she knew it wasn't now. The Loren Snyder she had known was all business.

“The Republic of Texas is now the proud owner of a
Virginia
-class sub, USS
Texas
. She's lying in Galveston. I'm the new skipper and you are now my XO.”

She snorted. “Don't bullshit me, Snyder. School starts again next week and I need to study. What do you want?”

He told it as he had gotten it, then added, “I went aboard her yesterday evening. The crew scrammed the reactor, secured the batteries, and left, arrested by the county sheriff, who doesn't know jack about ships, boats, or submarines. I inspected everything I could see and couldn't find any sign of sabotage. All
Texas
needs is a crew.”

Jugs snorted. “Where, pray tell, are you going to find sixty people to man her?”

“I'm not. I figure with five people who know what they are doing, I can get her under way. We can't leave her lying at the pier. I figure there is probably one chance in five the navy will destroy her with Tomahawks, and four chances in five the navy will send a SEAL team to take her.”

“SEALs couldn't get her under way,” Jugs objected with a frown. “They don't have that kind of training.”

“They could if they brought five or six certified people with them. And you know they can do that.” Both these former naval officers had a very healthy respect for the navy's special operations warriors, arguably the best in the world. If anyone could steal a submarine, they could.

“They're probably planning a mission right now,” she said thoughtfully.

“If we are going to save that boat for Texas, we have to get in gear. Are you for independence?”

“Hell, yes. I'm from San Antone. I've had more than enough of Soetoro pissing on the Constitution. It's high time we went our own way.” Although Aranado didn't say it, like many Mexican American Catholics, she was socially conservative. Same-sex marriages, she believed, were an insult to the sanctity of that institution. Abortion horrified her—especially late-term abortions, doctors sucking the brains from viable infants—and Soetoro's and his party's fervid support of the practice had cost them her vote years ago. In fact, she had sworn in church at the altar of God she would never vote for one of those baby-butchering sons of bitches as long as she lived.

Jugs always was blunt, Snyder reflected. “I need three more qualified people,” he said. “Who do you know that we can get?” Then he added, “In Texas?”

Another group, five young men in their late twenties or early thirties, was also busy that Monday night. They were unemployed coal miners in southern West Virginia. They had been following Soetoro's declaration of martial law and Texas' reaction to it on television, in bits and pieces. They were nonpolitical high school grads who had become certified underground miners and worked in the mines since their early twenties. Their mines had laid them off some months back when demand for coal forced mines to lay off shifts. Their fathers had been miners, and their fathers before them. Underground mines were the last remaining sources of good jobs in southern West Virginia since NAFTA had sent factory jobs to Mexico twenty years before. They believed Barry Soetoro's EPA was killing coal, and with it, their way of life, and they were bitter. They still had fishing, hunting, riding their ATVs, and chasing girls, but without a decent paycheck, their futures looked bleak. None wanted to leave the hills to look for work elsewhere. Here was where they had spent their lives, here was where their friends were, here was where their relatives had been buried for over two centuries in the little graveyards surrounding the one-room white churches that dotted the hills.
This
was their place.