Liberty's Last Stand (33 page)

Jack Hays nodded. He was delighted JR was thinking about all this, because he hadn't had time. Politics was his business, not the military.

“We need to seize the initiative and force Soetoro's military forces to react to us. We need to put them on the defensive, derail
their
plans. And, if possible, we need to move the fight out of Texas; we want the front line to be somewhere else, not here.”

“So how do you propose to do that?”

JR Hays began explaining his plans.

When he had finished, Jack nodded.

“We're going to have a lot of civilian problems to deal with,” JR added. “Soon the enemy will target our power plants. Houston and Dallas and the high-rises all over Texas will instantly become uninhabitable. We need to get organized now to take care of what will become a huge humanitarian crisis.”

“Houston and Dallas are using school buses to evacuate all the people stranded at the airports,” the governor mused, “so we have a start, anyway. I'll get our emergency people involved.”

“In my view, Jack, your number one job is to buck up the people of Texas with your courage and determination to see this through to the end.”

“My courage? How much do you think I have?”

“Enough, or we're doomed. Leaders must lead. But the more effective you are, the more likely Soetoro will send assassins or commandos to take you out. If they kill you, the backbones of a lot of people will soften. Get some bodyguards, and good ones. Use them.”

“The Texas Rangers,” Jack Hays decided.

“Your call. But they must keep you alive. That said, you and the Congress need to get out of this building and set up at an undisclosed location. I suggest somewhere underground, like a parking garage under a hotel. Right now a handful of cruise missiles into the capitol would decapitate the new republic. No doubt Soetoro is thinking about that right now, trying to figure out what the repercussions of a mass assassination would be on his political base up north.”

“We'll be out by five o'clock.”

Jack Hays nodded, stood, and shook hands. JR left. He had a ton of things to do, all of which needed to be done at once. Or yesterday.

His jailers came in midafternoon and tossed a plastic water bottle on the cot. Jake Grafton was still on the floor. One of the jailers came in and kicked Grafton in the ribs, repeatedly.

The man who delivered the water stopped the kicker. “Don't kill him. Sluggo wants him alive.”

Grafton was still conscious. His ribs were on fire. If one of the broken edges penetrated a lung, he would die quickly. If he started coughing blood, he would know.

Steeling himself, he moved. The pain was searing. He managed to reach the water bottle.

The plastic cap almost defeated him. He had to open it with his teeth. After he drained it, he lay back on the floor. And passed out.

As it happened, the White House political staff was indeed trying to estimate the damage decapitating the Republic of Texas would cause in the president's political base. Would it fuel insurrection elsewhere? There were no easy answers, so the staff was having a wonderful time wrestling with these imponderables, preparing a list of options for the chosen one.

While staff was staffing, Barry Soetoro signed an order temporarily closing all stock and commodity exchanges. Since the power was off in New York and Chicago, this order wouldn't create much of a sensation today, but it would when the power came back on. Tomorrow, perhaps. Or the next day. No one knew when the juice would again flow. The power company execs were doing all they could, they told his staff. One of them darkly hinted at sabotage, but Soetoro wasn't buying that excuse. One natural-gas trunk line in Virginia had been severed, stopping the gas flow through that line, yet that amount was only a drop in the bucket. Sheer damned incompetence, he thought angrily. One of these days he was going to have to nationalize all the public utilities, replace the executives with reliable people.

His thoughts turned back to Texas. Using cruise missiles or JDAMs on all the power plants in Texas was certainly an option. In August and September it was a lot hotter in Texas than it was in most of the Northeast. Texas was closer to Hell.

Had Soetoro been a fly on the wall in Jack Hays' office that afternoon, he would have been delighted at what he heard. A delegation of oil and gas and refinery executives had called in a body upon the new president. Many rich men and women value predictability and stability above all else, so this crowd had been cold to the idea of independence from the start, hinting strongly, as it did, of civil war. There is a lot of money to be made in war, but people with multibillion dollar capital investments in the line of fire wouldn't be making much of it. If anything, they stood to have their investments wiped out.

Jack Hays listened patiently to the executives.

“Mr. President, the fact is that any damned fool with a machine gun or a few sticks of dynamite could take down the refineries on the southeast coast of Texas.” Even if that didn't happen, the feds could destroy the refineries and oil storage tanks by air attack. And the U.S. Navy could prevent tankers carrying foreign oil from discharging their cargoes, restricting supply to what Texas could produce, which in fact was a hell of a lot, since Texas was the biggest producer of hydrocarbons among the fifty states. Still, guerillas or federal forces could stop the flow of natural gas and gasoline out of Texas, destroying their markets. All together, the group spokesman said, the picture was “bleak.”

“What assurances, Mr. President, can you give us that the armed forces of the Republic can protect our facilities?”

“Very few, gentlemen,” Jack Hays said. “In fact, I was thinking of asking you to stop pumping oil and gas to the northeastern United States and California. That would bring a significant amount of political pressure to bear on the Soetoro administration.”

The executives were horrified. Such an action would cut off their cash flow, and it would mean that many of their facilities would have to shut down, oil and gas wells would be shut in, people would be laid off, and money would cease to percolate through the economy.

“Do you realize, sir, how many people make their livings directly from the petroleum industry in Texas? And twice that many indirectly. You are talking about a depression,
millions
jobless.”

Another said, “The people of Texas didn't sign up for
that
!”

Jack Hays refused to be riled. “I think the people of Texas knew that they would have to fight for their independence when the idea was first discussed. In a war one stands to lose not only his livelihood, his home, and everything he owns, but also his life and the lives of his family. Texans aren't stupid; they knew that. They were for independence anyway, if that meant they could preserve the benefits of a free society with a representative democratic government that they had enjoyed all their lives, benefits they hoped to again enjoy, benefits that would be their legacy to their children and the generations of Texans still to come. They were willing to pay the price. Or most of them were, anyway.”

Everyone tried to talk at once, but Jack Hays silenced them with a gesture.

“We have taken a political step that cannot be reversed,” he said.

“Of course it can be reversed,” a big oil executive said loudly, to drown out other voices. “It's time to make peace with Soetoro. You've made your political points, Hays. Now let's settle this mess and get on with business.”

“Talk loud, then surrender. Is that your advice?”

“Now see here. That isn't what I said. Oil and gas are the heart of Texas industry. Hell, of American industry.”

“Gentlemen, thank you for your time today,” Jack Hays said. “I will carefully consider all your points. For my part, I'm glad that Colonel Travis had men with him at the Alamo who had more backbone than you have.”

One of the executives—dressed in an Armani suit, hand-tooled alligator boots, and a two-hundred-dollar silk tie—snarled: “Travis didn't own a goddamn thing but his horse and some worthless scrub land. If he had owned something he'd have been a bit more careful.”

And you'd be speaking Spanish and working for Petromex, Jack Hays thought savagely. He didn't say that, of course. What he did say was, “I will meditate upon that insight. Now if you ladies and gentlemen will excuse me. . .”

“How much time do you think we have before the electrical wizards figure out what you did to their computer, and fix it?” I asked Sarah as we rolled into the West Virginia panhandle.

“I have no idea,” she said distractedly. She was looking at the huge towers carrying their high-voltage transmission wires across the countryside.

When I realized what she was looking at, I said, “Are you thinking what I'm thinking?”

“There's no power on those wires right now. If we could lay down some towers, they wouldn't know we did it until the grid came back up. People who see it fall can't even call in.”

“You are a natural-born terrorist,” I acknowledged.

I pulled over to the side of the road and the pickups pulled up behind me. I got out, and we all huddled over a roadmap. “Here is where we're going, Camp Dawson, near Kingwood, West Virginia, in Preston County. I thought we would stay off the interstates and do the back roads. But along the way, I'd like to take down some of these transmission towers. Two or three on each right of way, to put the wires on the ground. Use C-4, set the timers to the max on the dial.”

“That's an hour,” Armanti Hall said.

“You guys can drop off, do a couple of towers, then catch back up. Try to make them fall in the woods or streams, not on the road. We'll meet here.” I jabbed my finger at a crossroads, near Kingwood.

“Okay by me,” Travis said. The others nodded their heads.

I went back to the van and climbed in.

“I could use a bathroom,” Sarah said.

“The side of the road is brushy,” I pointed out. “No one will see you. Climb on down there.”

“I don't have any toilet paper.”