Liberty's Last Stand (53 page)

“Well, well, well! By God, we heard it and here it is,” said one of them.

“Just shuck that pistol, asshole, and maybe we won't shoot you,” said the other.

I pulled out the Kimber and tossed it in the dirt.

“Look the plane over, Benny. You, get over here against the wall.” He waggled the barrel of his rifle and I went.

The one called Benny picked up my shooter, examined it, and tucked it into his pants. The other kept his rifle pointed at my belt buckle while Benny opened the door to the plane and looked around inside.

“Jearl, that kid is gettin' away!” A call from outside. So there were more of them out there.

Jearl must have been the stalwart guarding me, because he forgot me and ran back to the open panel in the door. “Hey!” Jearl went dashing out of sight, shouting, “Get off your asses and catch her!”

I grabbed a heavy wrench off the shelf and stuck it up my sleeve. Benny strolled over from the plane, pulling my Kimber from his waistband. He had a big wad of snuff under his lower lip. “You're a big one, ain't you?”

“Your mom know you boys are out causing trouble?” I asked.

“Man, the country has gone to hell. We can be just as bad as we wanna be and ain't nobody to say we can't.”

“And how bad is that?”

I heard the sound of another truck. So did Benny, and he turned his head to his right toward the door. I let the wrench slide down into my hand; as he turned back toward me I hit him in the jaw with it with everything I had, right on top of his snuff wad. The blow put him down hard and I was all over him. Got my pistol and his rifle. He was only partially conscious. His jaw was obviously broken. Blood, saliva, and brown tobacco juice dribbled from his open mouth.

The rifle was some cheap piece of Walmart crap with a plastic stock, but it had brass in the chamber when I pulled the bolt back for a peek.

I stepped to the left edge of the hangar door and looked around. Jearl was on the runway, about fifty yards from me, pulling a girl about nine or ten years old along by the arm. There were two men in the back of their pickup, and they had rifles pointed at Armanti, who was stepping from his truck with his hands up.

I braced the rifle against the door and shot the man on the right in the bed of the truck. Worked the bolt. The other one was quick as a cat. He spun toward me, leveled his rifle, and fired. Something burned my neck and my shot went wild. I worked the bolt again and got on him, but he was already going down. Armanti had shot him in the back.

Jearl, the guy in the meadow, held the girl against him with his left hand and pointed his rifle toward me with his right. I didn't figure he could even hit the hangar with that rifle shooting one-handed from the waist. I rested the rifle against the edge of the hangar door again and looked through the scope. Steadied the crosshairs on Jearl's head and squeezed one off. He went over backward.

I walked out for a look. The bullet had taken his head clean off. Above his neck only his lower jaw remained.

The girl was sobbing. I picked her up and walked back to the hangar. Armanti was standing, pistol in hand, over the guy I had tamed with a wrench. The guy was coming around.

“You want me to finish him?” Armanti asked me.

“Be as bad as you wanna be,” I told him flippantly.

“Who is this kid?” Armanti asked Benny, who was now moaning and writhing in the dirt.

Benny mumbled something, holding his mouth. Armanti kicked him, and he squirmed and moaned louder.

“I asked you a question, Jack,” Armanti said, “and if you don't tell it to me straight, things could get really iffy for you. Hold your jaw together and answer me! Who is she?”

With a supreme effort, holding his jaw with both hands, Benny said, “Some kid we picked up. Jearl was porkin' her.”

“Where's her folks?”

“Jearl killed 'em.”

I didn't even see it coming. Bang. The pistol in Armanti's hand went off, and the guy lying in the dirt was instantly dead with a 9-mm bullet through his head.

Armanti Hall holstered his pistol and came over to me, looked at the girl's face streaked with dirt and tears. “It's gonna be all right,” he said softly.

“Take her up to the house,” I said, “then come back and help me fuel this plane.”

He carried the child out to his truck, and I got busy tossing bodies into the back of the junky pickup they had arrived in. The corpses had almost stopped oozing blood, but I got some blood and brains on my shirt anyway. I figured the stuff would wash off. The key was still in the ignition of the truck, so I didn't have to go through their pockets.

My neck burned like fire and I could feel blood trickling down into my shirt. Another fucking scar! Welcome to the revolution.

TWENTY-EIGHT

T
he CH-47s dropped Colonel Kevin Crislip and his troops of the 10th Special Forces Group at six bridges across the Canadian River in the Texas panhandle, five highway bridges and one railroad bridge. The Canadian was not much of a river, merely a wet, sandy depression in that cap-rock country, but knocking the railroad bridge down would prevent any trains from using the railroad until it was replaced. The destruction of the five highway bridges across the Canadian would severely inconvenience truckers, who would have to go east to the main body of Oklahoma or west to New Mexico to find an alternate route south.

Colonel Crislip thought this whole mission a bad joke, political revenge on the Texas politicians who had embarrassed Barry Soetoro, but General Seuss and his staff had been trading messages with the Pentagon, so here the Green Berets were, blowing up bridges in the panhandle, each demolition team delivered by helicopter. Crislip consoled himself with the thought that these demolition jobs were good training, if nothing else.

Each bridge had one demolition team assigned and it was delivered by a Chinook, which moved safely away from the bridge after off-loading the team, their explosives, and a few guards. Colonel Crislip accompanied the team blowing the bridge north of Borger. He stood in the warm Texas night listening to crickets and inhaling the faint aroma of cow manure drifting on the breeze while the team worked. Crislip sent the guards up the highway on either side of the bridge to stop traffic.
There wasn't much. A semi came from the north fifteen minutes after they arrived and was waved on through. Five minutes later a pickup full of Mexicans who had been drinking came from the direction of Borger. They were going back to the ranch, they said, so the guard waved them across the bridge. They went by Crislip saluting and shouting and laughing. Although the Mexicans could see the helo parked in a nearby pasture, they couldn't see the soldiers working under the bridge, so they certainly couldn't warn anyone that the bridge was soon to be destroyed.

The colonel had never actually demolished a real bridge before; he went down the riverbank and stood underneath, looking up, ten feet, with a flashlight to see where his troops put the charges. They seemed to know what to do and how to do it.

They were planting C-4 charges, which the experts at Fort Carson had assured the colonel were quite enough to put the bridge in the sand of the Canadian River, if, the experts said, they were placed properly.

Always the big
if
, Crislip fumed. So if any bridge remained standing after its charge was detonated, his troops would take the blame. Wonderful!

He climbed back up the bank and was standing beside the highway listening to the crickets and savoring that stockyard smell when a battered old pickup coming from the north was stopped by the guard. Crislip walked over, just in time to hear his soldier tell the driver to turn around and go home. There were two other people in the truck's cab, Crislip saw, two women.

“Let him across the bridge if he wants to go,” the colonel told the guard as he walked up.

The driver, who looked to be in his fifties and was wearing a ratty ball cap, asked, “Who is the head man here?”

“I am,” Crislip said. “Colonel Kevin Crislip, United States Army.”

“I live just a little west of here, and we saw you people come in on that helicopter after dark and we been watching you. What the hell is going on?”

The dashboard lights let Crislip see the other passengers, one a woman about the driver's age and the other a teenage girl. “That's none of your business, sir. What's your name, anyway?”

“Zeke Lipscomb, buddy. And telling me to mind my own business ain't the way we do things here in Texas.”

“Mr. Lipscomb, this is army business. Cross the bridge or go home.”

“I'll cross.” He put the truck in motion, drove it a hundred yards and stopped right in the middle of the bridge. He killed the headlights, parked the truck, and he and the two women got out.

Crislip strode toward them. The guard was going to accompany him, but Crislip growled for him to stay put.

“I told you to drive across,” he said to Mr. Lipscomb, who had a female on each side of him.

“Well, I didn't. And I ain't a gonna. We kinda think you soldiers are up to no good, and we're not going to let you get away with it.”

Crislip sighed.

The older woman, presumably Mrs. Lipscomb, spoke up. “You federal troops got no damn business in Texas, Colonel, and you know it. We done declared ourselves a separate nation.”

Crislip looked back at the guard. There was just a sliver of moon and enough starlight to see him clearly, standing there in the road looking this way, no doubt wondering what the colonel was going to do about this stubborn rancher.

“Mr. Lipscomb and Mrs. Lipscomb—” he looked at the girl. “What's your name?”

“Ruby.”

“And Ms. Ruby Lipscomb. I am here obeying the orders of my superior officers, and the men with me are obeying my orders. We are doing our duty. Now I am asking you nicely to please get in your truck and drive on into Borger or return to your home.”

“You're gonna blow up this bridge, ain't ya?” Lipscomb said, scrutinizing Crislip's face.

“Yes, we are.”

“Well, we ain't goin' anywhere. We use this bridge to get back and forth to town, and so do our neighbors. Our tax dollars built this bridge, and we ain't gonna let a bunch of Soetoro's soldier boys blow it up. You people get in your helicopter and get the hell outta here.”

“There are ten of us, Mr. Lipscomb, and we're all armed.”

“I ain't packin'. My wife and daughter ain't packin'. But if we have to go home and get our rifles and start shootin', we will. You people ain't blowin' up this bridge without a fight . . . and that's my final word.”

Crislip walked over to the guardrail on the edge of the bridge and looked down. The soldiers in the riverbed had finished placing the charges under the bridge and were unrolling det cord.

He turned around and found Lipscomb beside him.

“You people must be idiots,” Lipscomb said. “Blowin' a bridge in the middle of the Texas panhandle ain't no way to win friends. You think that'll make us submit?” He spat onto the pavement. “When they hear about this glorious military raid in Austin, no doubt they'll decide to drag Texas back to Soetoro's slimy embrace, kiss his shitty ass, and beg for forgiveness.”

Crislip tried to decide what to do.

“Meanwhile the folks who live around here ain't got no bridge, thanks to the United States Army and Barry Soetoro.”

The colonel examined his options. He could have his soldiers drag these three people off this bridge and blow it. Or he could tell the Lipscombs to go get their rifles and blow it while they were gone. Or. . .

He took a deep breath of that foul stink of cow shit. “How the hell do you stand the smell?” he asked Lipscomb.

Lipscomb sniffed the air. “Oh, the cows. You get used to it.”

Kevin Crislip grew up in Des Moines, son of a lawyer. His mother's father had been a farmer, growing corn on three sections of land every summer. Kevin had loved his visits to his grandparents' farm. There he learned to drive a tractor, shoot a rifle—learned what hard work was.

After four years at West Point and twenty-three years in the army, four deployments in two wars, here he was standing in the darkness on a bridge in the middle of nowhere breathing that pure Texas smell, arguing with a rancher who really didn't deserve to lose his bridge to make Barry Soetoro happy.

The colonel made his decision. He leaned over the guardrail of the bridge. “Lieutenant,” he called.

“Yes, sir.”

“There's been a change of plans. Remove the charges from under the bridge, and let's go back to Colorado.”

“Ahh . . .”

“Do it,” the colonel said.

“Yes, sir.”

And that is what they did. The three Lipscombs were still standing in the middle of the bridge when the twin-rotor helicopter lifted off with all the soldiers aboard.

With the electricity off in much of east Texas, the prison, its power provided by emergency generators, seemed an oasis of light that Saturday evening. Although it was only six and darkness was several hours away, the institution's floodlights were all lit. That was an irony that didn't escape the seven armed men in National Guard camo uniforms who pulled up to the main gate in two Humvees with fresh Lone Star flag insignia painted on the doors. Behind them was a National Guard bus that contained another ten soldiers, also sporting newly painted Lone Star flags.

“It's after visiting hours,” the bored gate guard said. The officer in charge, a colonel, displayed a letter. He passed it through the window to the guard, who picked up a telephone on his desk and made a call.

From his right front seat in the Humvee, the colonel had a good view of the star-shaped building, the tiny barred windows, the guard towers, and the double-chain-link fence topped by concertina wire that encircled the entire facility. Popular legend had it that there had never been an escape from the prison, and the colonel could see why.

After a few minutes, the guard said, “I'm going to open the gate and you drive in and park by the stairs. Someone will be down shortly to escort you.”

That is how it went. Ten minutes later the colonel, whose name was embroidered on his left chest, and a captain were sitting in the warden's office. The warden was eating from a heaping plate on his desk, apparently his supper.

The colonel passed the warden the letter, which was on the stationery of the governor, now president, of Texas. The warden dropped his eyes to the signature. Jack Hays.

The warden, Arlen Kirkpatrick, was forty or so pounds overweight, was balding, and had prominent jowls. Kirkpatrick picked up a bite of fried chicken with his fingers as he started to read. He read in silence. In the document, President Hays summarily relieved him, thanked him for his past service, and appointed Colonel Ezekiel Holly in his place. Warden Kirkpatrick was told to report to the Bureau of Corrections as soon as possible to be reassigned or, if he wished, placed on the retired list.

He read the letter quickly, abandoned his dinner, then read it again much slower.

He dropped the two sheets of paper on the desk and looked at the colonel. “What did I do to earn this honor?”

“Obviously, the president is putting the military in charge of the prisons for the time being. He said he intends to see that you are reassigned to another prison when the crisis is past.”

Kirkpatrick shook his head in amazement. “Colonel Holly, someone has lost their senses. Soldiers aren't trained to run prisons. Our inmates are some of the worst in the system. Only a fool would send you here.”

“You are entitled to your opinion.”

Kirkpatrick picked up the letter and read aloud, “The Republic can no longer afford the past level of outlay on prisons. . . . Having full faith and confidence in Colonel Ezekiel Holly, I have ordered him to assess the prison population at your facility and recommend which prisoners should be released early.”

The warden stared at Holly. “Does this mean . . .”

“Indeed, there may be some early releases,” Colonel Holly said with a curt nod. “Texas is fighting for its life and must save dollars wherever it can. The president thought extraordinary measures were necessary.”

“I must verify this with the president,” the warden said.

“Certainly.”

“But I cannot. The electricity is out and the telephones are dead.”

Colonel Holly's face was impassive.

“I will not admit you to the prison proper until I can verify this with President Hays.”

“Just how do you propose to do that?” Holly asked softly.

“Well, wait until power is restored, I suppose.”

“Mr. Kirkpatrick. I have sixteen armed soldiers with me. Do I have to bring these troops in here and forcibly remove you from this office?”