Liberty's Last Stand (37 page)

“He got busted ribs in a car wreck?”

“I confess, I lied to your wife. Some men beat him badly with fists and shoes. Kicked him in the balls too.”

“FEMA sounds like tough duty to me,” he said acidly. I didn't argue.

If he didn't know about the safe house in the woods, he didn't show surprise. I guess in his practice he gave up surprise some years back.

Dr. Proudfoot glanced at Grafton, looked around at the equipment in the room, then went to work. He cut off the tape I put on his ribs, X-rayed the admiral, asked him about his general health and how he was feeling, checked his heart and vitals. After a careful exam and a study of the X-rays on a computer screen, he taped him again, a much better job than I did. He also gave Grafton a shot to make him sleep. “Six ribs are cracked on the right side, five on the left,” he told Sarah and me, “but none are severed, as far as I can determine. I think he'll heal okay, but he should be in a hospital where he can be observed.”

“We'll try to get him there as soon as possible,” Sarah assured him.

“Used to be I'd give him some pain pills, but the government is so tight on pain pills now I don't carry any. The good news is that the damned pill-billies aren't tempted to rob me. It's a hell of a world.”

“Isn't it though,” I remarked.

“If he's hurting when he wakes up, he can have a shot of whiskey. No aspirin. Keep him as inactive as possible. Now, I need all his information so I can get paid for this house call.”

“I'll give you cash. Is two hundred dollars enough?”

“That's more than the government would pay me.”

I paid him on the spot.

When I was taking him home, the doctor asked, “Is that a government facility?”

“Doctor Proudfoot, you appear to be a good man, and I'd like to answer your question, or questions, because I know you have more than one. But I cannot.” I smiled at him benignly. “I don't know where you stand on our current national difficulties, nor do I care. What I can say is this: I want you not to tell anyone about the facility you just visited or the patient you saw there. Or me. Or the other men there.”

“It's a government secret, huh?”

“Indeed it is.” We were on the secondary road by then, about a mile from his house. I stopped the truck in the middle of the road and turned in the driver's seat to face him. The panel lights made his face quite plain. “If we get visitors of any kind, sheriff, locals, FEMA people, FBI, state police, Homeland Security, anyone at all, I'll know you told someone the secret. You won't be prosecuted because you'll be dead. I'll find you like I did tonight and kill you. Do you understand?”

He stared at me with fear in his eyes.

“I don't want to kill you, but I will if you tell anyone at all. Even your wife. Tell me that you understand.”

He nodded.

I took my foot off the brake and drove him the rest of the way home. As he got out of the truck, I said, “I told your wife it was a car wreck. Make her believe it. Good night.”

I felt dirty and ashamed of myself, but I had to put the fear in him. I hoped for our sakes I scared him enough.

Back at the ranch, I sent Willis and Travis to spend the night in the guard cottage by the gate. Told them to drag the gate back across the road.

I put loaded weapons around the house, with a couple of grenades at each window, just in case, checked on Grafton, who was asleep, and Sarah, who was asleep in a bedroom upstairs. Armanti and the Wire, Jack Yocke and Sal Molina were sharing bedrooms. I took off my boots and flaked out on the couch downstairs.

Early that Wednesday morning, while most Americans were in bed, the Oklahoma legislature passed a declaration of independence and the governor signed it. The news had been out all day Tuesday that the legislature had been called into special session to consider the measure. Washington had instructed the FBI and FEMA to arrest the governor and the entire legislature to ensure the declaration wasn't even debated. The commander at Fort Sill was instructed to send a thousand troops to assist the federal agents in maintaining order in Oklahoma City.

The general at Fort Sill was willing, but as the evening progressed he found he didn't have a thousand troops willing to go. He had, at the most, about a hundred, so finally he sent them, armed and wearing battle dress. They went in trucks that convoyed up I-44 from Lawton. They were rolling through the open prairie south of Chickasha when the front tires of the lead truck were shot out. As the truck rolled to the side of the road, more heavy reports were heard and the tires of several following trucks went flat. The final truck had its dual rear wheels shot out while it was almost stopped.

The soldiers piled out and took up formation around the trucks, but there were no more shots. An hour later soldiers searching the prairie found where someone had apparently fired from a low hill three hundred yards from the highway toward the convoy. Not only was dirt scraped away and grass pulled to provide a decent field of fire, a single spent .50 Browning machine-gun cartridge was found in the grass. A little more searching located another firing position about equidistant from the highway on the other side of the interstate, but there were no more cartridges. Nor, apparently, were there any shooters remaining around. Whoever the marksmen were, they had retreated into the darkness with their weapons, undoubtedly bolt-action .50-caliber rifles set up for long-distance target competition.

The officer in charge of the column had already informed his commander of his predicament by radio, so the troops sat alongside the interstate smoking and munching whatever snacks they had in their packs as civilian cars and trucks rolled by. It looked like it was going to be a long evening.

Two hours later four replacement trucks from Fort Sill were fired upon from an overpass. Each truck was hit once in the radiator. The drivers didn't even walk up onto the overpass to look around. They reported the incident on their radios and settled in to spend the night sleeping in their cabs.

The FBI agents and FEMA troops found an estimated eight hundred armed National Guardsmen in battle dress surrounding the state capitol. The federal officers were disarmed and told to go home or they would be arrested. They went home.

During the course of the night, as debate raged on in the legislative chambers, civilians crowded onto the capitol grounds. They passed through the guardsmen's lines carrying lawn chairs and picnic baskets, and many had small children asleep in strollers. The floodlights around the capitol gave the warm evening a festive air. A local band set up amplifiers and microphones and got busy jamming to entertain the crowd.

Inside the building, every member of the statehouse and senate got his or her turn at the microphone. The current national situation, and Barry Soetoro's proclamations, were discussed and dissected. Oklahoma was one of only two states in the Union where Soetoro had failed to carry a single county in the 2012 election. His popularity had continued to sink since then, and it was soon clear that he had few friends in the legislature.

One woman delegate from Norman, a university town and the state's liberal bastion, argued that Soetoro would be out of office on January 20, 2017, a mere five months away, so there was no need for drastic action. “He's not only a lame duck, he's a dead duck. Why shoot ourselves in the head when he's going to be gone in five months, regardless of what we or Texas or any other state does?”

The following speaker took issue with her. “You are the wildest optimist in the history of representative government in Oklahoma. What makes you think there will be an election? Soetoro's party will lose if there is one, so he has manufactured this crisis to give himself a plausible excuse for calling off the election. He wants to be president for life. Or maybe king. Or emperor. Emperor Barry. We need to stand up for representative government here and now, regardless of the cost. We owe it to ourselves, for our own self-respect, and we owe it to our children and grandchildren. Five years from now, how will you explain to your grandchildren what happened to Oklahoma after you refused to do what you knew to be right? And we all know the
right
thing to do. But the right thing is
hard
. Let us do it now, and someday we can all stand proudly, shoulder to shoulder, in heaven before the ruler of the universe.”

There was more, lots more. One of the low points was a plea by a delegate from one of the districts encompassing the poorer section of Oklahoma City. “Nothing we can do here tonight will alter the course of our nation's history. We here in Oklahoma are a sideshow. We are a thinly populated state, with only three million nine hundred thousand people. Do you really think we can realistically defy the federal government? The decisions that matter will all be made in Washington. I urge you to not compound the president's problems by being defiant. Let us not beard the lion to see if, indeed, he will bite.”

Several of the following speakers heaped scorn on her position. One speaker summed it up: “Submit, submit, submit. Don't anger the tyrant. I never thought I would hear such words from a free American.”

The criticism of the Soetoro administration kept rolling, mixing with a broad criticism of liberalism and federal judges. “I am sick of federal judges deciding that the United States Constitution requires abortion and same-sex marriage,” a state senator from Enid said. “I challenge you to read that document from end to end, and if you can find the word ‘abortion' in it I will kiss your ass tomorrow at high noon on the capitol steps. Ditto gay marriage. What's next? Plural marriages? Legalizing infanticide? We're practically there now. I say it's time we seized control of our own lives here in Oklahoma. Anyone wanting an abortion or to marry a homosexual partner can move to California or New York. We shouldn't be forced to put up with it, and my constituents don't want to. The real problem here is federal judges who enshrine their liberal philosophies in federal decisions instead of letting individual states vote their consciences in open, fair elections. Abortions, gay marriage, legalized pot, all of that should be decided by the states. Whatever happened to the governmental powers reserved to the states? Let's declare ourselves independent, give the people of Oklahoma the right to decide which laws they want to live under, and tell Barry Soetoro where to go and what to do to himself when he gets there.”

Another delegate in the House had this to say: “Oklahomans are tired of being ruled by federal bureaucrats and judges, none of them elected. They decide everything from what can be taught in the public schools to what can be served to kids for lunch and whether the kids can have a prayer. They decree that welfare recipients are entitled to a color television and cell phone, all paid for by the working families of Oklahoma, some of whom can afford neither. They claim they have the right to regulate every creek, farm pond, mudhole, and wet spot in America, including here in Oklahoma. We have to pay for their crackpot regulations based on crackpot science, or no science at all. We have to pay the salaries of the bureaucrats and put up with the endless delays and mountainous paperwork. It's high time to put a stop to bureaucrats and judges running our lives. Let's take back control.
Independence today
,
tomorrow
,
and forever
.”

The Oklahoma Senate and House passed the declaration by overwhelming majorities and made the vote unanimous by voice vote, and the governor signed it. As in Texas, the declaration, which was almost word for word identical to Texas', was read before television cameras on the statehouse steps to a wildly cheering crowd that commentators estimated at more than ten thousand people.

In New Mexico the legislature also met that evening, but decided to defer any action until Soetoro had made a definitive announcement about whether the presidential election would proceed in November. If it was canceled altogether, the New Mexico legislature agreed to revisit the issue. The governor of Arizona called the legislature to meet the following evening. The governors of Kansas, Nebraska, Arkansas, South Dakota, North Dakota, Wyoming, and Utah scheduled special sessions two days hence. The governors of Montana and Iowa called for a special session of the legislature in three days time, to give lawmakers a chance to canvass their communities. Other states, too, were mulling their options.

Although the legislatures had yet to be called, in Alaska and Hawaii the question of independence was also being weighed and debated, for different reasons. The previous year Soetoro had announced his intention to ignore the U.S. statutes and declare a huge chunk of northern Alaska off-limits to oil exploration. Many of the people of that sparsely settled state were outraged; oil development created good-paying jobs, of which Alaska had far too few, and severance taxes funded state and local governments and generated a check every year for every Alaskan. Oil development had never been the ecological disaster the save-the-earth crowd swore it would be. Soetoro's announcement would slowly upend the Alaskan economy and affect every man, woman, and child who lived there. The devil of it was that the only people who visited the undeveloped Arctic were Alaskans who went to hunt and fish; the limousine liberals in Soetoro's audience rarely if ever trekked the frozen north dribbling dollars as they went. Still, Soetoro would be gone in five months, they hoped, and his extralegal imperial declarations would then be history.