Liberty's Last Stand (66 page)

“We've got about a dozen.”

“Get them running for Camp David.”

Willis did as he was told. Stood in the bed and launched the rockets as fast as he could.

When our troops were no longer in sight, Willis got down. Our guys and gals had gone into the trees. They had literally jerked the old fence posts out of the ground rather than climb over or through the barbed wire.

Grafton, Sarah, and Willis each got an M4, and we trotted toward the trees. We hadn't taken five steps when Willis grunted and fell. I stopped and went back to check on him. He had taken a bullet in the chest. He looked at me and said, “Tell my wife. . .”

“What?” I demanded. “Tell her what?”

But he was dead. I realized then that I really didn't know Willis Coffee very well. And I would never know him better. “God bless you,” I whispered, and ran on toward the trees.

Dead and wounded lay everywhere. We disarmed the wounded and kept going. Our troops were in front of us, driving the enemy toward the perimeter fence somewhere in the woods ahead.

When we hit the fence, it was down. Who tore it down I never learned. It was down when we got there and that was the reality of it. We kept going.

Somehow in the woods amid the smoke and bodies, we lost Grafton. He must have run on ahead. I was too old a dog for loping through the woods when people could be hiding behind any tree praying for a good shot at their pursuers. Ahead I could hear the cacophony of gunfire. Bodies lay every which way, a lot of them shot in the back. The wounded were groaning. The rocky forest floor looked like hell's half acre.

A moment later I saw the first body that had been scalped. The head was a bloody mess and the hair was gone. At the time I thought, maybe shrapnel did that.

I kept going, and soon found another. Scalped.

A hundred yards later, I met an unarmed man wandering amid the shattered trees and rocks. He had long hair, at least on the fringes; his scalp had been cut and torn off. The top of his head and his face were masses of blood.

I stopped him, forced him to lie down. “Whoa. What the hell happened?”

“A shell hit near me. I was out for a bit, and when I woke up some guy was ripping the top of my head off. He had a big knife. He left me there.”

“Lie still. The medics will be along after a bit.”

“Help me, mister! For God's sake!” He clutched at me but I drew back and scanned the woods.

“Lie still,” I repeated. “Your war is over.”

I picked up the pace. I had covered maybe two hundred yards when I came upon a big tattooed guy with a long knife and a black rifle. He had a bag on a strap over his shoulder. I could see hair protruding from it. He was bending over a figure on the ground, a woman in shorts with long blond hair, and he had his knife out. She had an arm up, trying to fend him off. “For God's sake,” she screamed. He grabbed a handful of hair, lifted her head a little, and jabbed the knife into her scalp.

“Stop,” I roared. He turned toward me and I shot him.

I ran toward him as he went down. The woman on the ground looked at me stunned, then she was dead, as if someone had turned a switch. He had her scalp half off.

He was still alive. He looked at me with the strangest expression. I kicked his rifle away.

Then a shot rang out. He took the bullet in the head. I turned and saw Sarah Houston standing there with her carbine at her shoulder.

She shot into him three or four more times, turned, and began walking downhill, east toward Camp David and the rolling racket of gunfire.

The woman on the ground was wearing a Penn T-shirt—University of Pennsylvania—now soaked with blood from a mortal wound caused by a large shard of a tree that was still sticking two feet out of her chest. She had bled a lot before the scalper got to her. Blood, almost black, was everywhere. She and the scalper lay in it.

The sun was already behind the bald crest above me, leaving the woods in dark shadow. Below on the slope, Sarah threaded her way through trees still standing and those blasted by shellfire, around downed trees, limbs, and rocky outcrops, and disappeared from view. I got myself in motion, following along.

Grafton must have passed these wounded people on his trot down the hill, sore ribs and all, trying to get to Camp David before the mob killed Soetoro. He was a man on a mission.

I wasn't. I didn't give a damn what happened to Barry Soetoro.

It got dark as I went through the woods. There was just enough moon and starlight to allow me to see trees and rocks except under dense foliage, when I had to literally feel my way along. I wished I had some night-vision goggles, but I didn't. And of course, neither did anyone else. I only tripped and fell four times.

After a while I got glimpses of fires burning around the presidential enclave. I moved carefully, the M4 at the ready. I came out of the trees and walked along a graveled path toward the biggest of the fires. People were everywhere, and all of them were armed. I figured they were our guys, and was sure when I saw fifty or sixty people sitting on the ground wearing white plastic ties around their wrists. There must have been a thousand people in the lawn and flower beds, most of them shouting like fiends.

Near the front door of what I took to be the main building or lodge, I saw Grafton and some of the people from the camp this morning confronting a knot of men and women in business attire. They had to be Secret Service. Barry and Mickey Soetoro were not in sight. I went around the corner of the house away from the group. The house, or lodge, was a two story. Looking around and concluding I was unobserved, I leaped for the bottom of a balcony. Got my hands on the concrete floor of the thing and pulled myself up with every muscle screaming about all the exercise I hadn't been getting.

Checking over my shoulder, I decided I still didn't have an audience, so went up like I was climbing a rope. Hooked an ankle over the top of the rail and voila, I was in. The door, unlocked, led to a bedroom. The lights were on inside and it was empty.

I closed the balcony door and stood listening with my pistol in my hand as I scanned the room. Actually, it was the sitting room of a suite. The crowd noise outside was now only a murmur. First I checked the bedroom, which was dark and empty. So was the bathroom.

The interior door of the sitting room opened into a hallway. I could hear voices from my left. That was the way I wanted to go, but only after I checked these other suites, for there appeared to be four of them off this hallway. When I went toward the voices, I wanted to know that there was no one behind me. The second suite I checked was empty of people, but the bed and bathroom had obviously been used.

In the third suite I found the body. It was lying beside the wet bar, as if it had fallen off a bar stool. The remnants of several drinks were on the bar. His throat was cut and he had done a lot of bleeding. I tried not to step in the blood, but to get a look at the face to see if I could recognize it. Yep. Al Grantham, the chief of staff.

Whoever cut his throat knew exactly how to do it. It looked like just one vicious swipe had severed the carotid arteries and his windpipe. Apparently done from behind. Unconsciousness had followed within a second or two as blood pressure in the victim's brain dropped toward zero.

I reached and touched his hand. It was still supple, although just beginning to cool off. He hadn't been dead long, not more than a few minutes. The blood was red and sticky.

I found that the palm of my hand on my pistol was sweaty. I dried it on my jeans and checked to make sure the suite was indeed empty of living people. A surprise by a knife fighter of that caliber was something to be avoided.

The hallway still empty, I tried the door of the fourth suite. Sucked it up and went in fast with the pistol ready. No one there.

Back down the hallway, gliding along beside the wall, listening intently. The voices got louder as I moved.

I could see that the wall I was against turned into a railing, and the hallway became a balcony leading to a stairway down into a great room. I got down on the floor, and after crawling, inched the top of my head around the edge of the wall and peeked between it and the first balcony upright.

There in the main room below, no more than fifteen feet from me, were Barry and Mickey Soetoro. . .and Sulana Schanck and a male aide I didn't recognize, talking to a couple of Secret Service types carrying M4s. Vice President Rhodes was there, the veep from central casting, with the superbly barbered white hair and square chin, in a gray suit that fit perfectly. Two other people were facing the agents: I couldn't see their faces and didn't know who they were. Rhodes' aides or politicians, no doubt, and true believers to the core.

“. . .There are at least a thousand of them, Mr. President. Perhaps twice that. They have the buildings surrounded and have complete control. We have six people left. The rebels can come into this building anytime they decide to walk over us and do it.”

“Have you called for reinforcements? Assistance? Whatever you call it?”

“Yes. No one answers our radio transmissions, and no one is picking up the scrambled landlines.”

“You're going to have to talk to Grafton,” the veep said to the prez.

“I am not going to surrender,” Soetoro declared. I thought I could detect a slight tremor in his voice, but it may have been only the acoustics. “Where are our supporters? Where are the liberal armies that were going to preserve order and support the federal government against the reactionaries?
Where are they
?”

I thought that his loyal supporters lying dead or maimed on the mountainside or sitting outside with their hands shackled by plastic ties were beyond caring how much they had disappointed ol' Barry.

Which of these people killed Al Grantham with a knife, and why? If you were going to do it, why not years ago? Truthfully, his mother should have done it way back when she realized what a twisted, diseased monster she had foisted upon the world, but that was water under the bridge, until today.

Of course, the knife artist could be somewhere else in the building, not down below. I glanced back down the hallway, a bit nervously, I suppose, to ensure that it was still empty. I certainly didn't want that dude within twenty yards of me.

Meanwhile they were jabbering away just below me. Everyone talking at once. Just beyond the door was a seriously unhappy crowd, or if you were inside looking out, an angry armed mob. These people in the lodge had no idea what fate awaited them. Jake Grafton didn't know either. Not only did I not know, I didn't give a damn.

I became aware that Sulana Schanck was having a serious private conversation with Barry Soetoro, just a few steps away from the others. No one else was apparently paying attention to what was being said, and they were talking too low for me to eavesdrop, even though my hearing is excellent. I tried to read lips and body language. She was adamant and he was resisting.

Whatever fate awaited these two, it would probably be worse for Soetoro. Schanck was merely a bit player. Or so I thought.

Then, in a twinkling of an eye, I found out how wrong I was. Sulana Schanck pulled a large knife from her sleeve and with one vicious backhand sliced Soetoro's throat from ear to ear. Blood geysered forth, showering Schanck, as the president sank toward the floor.

I scrambled to my knees and pointed my pistol, but I was too late. She spun like a ballet dancer, took one bound, and used the knife on the veep's neck, with similar results. John Rhodes went down in a welter of blood.

One of the Secret Service agents beat me to the trigger. He put a burst in Sulana Schanck's chest, hammering her to the floor.

“Drop it,” I shouted. I had the Kimber .45 at arm's length pointed right at his head. If he tried to swing that carbine in my direction he was going to die.

“Drop the weapons,” I roared again. Both carbines hit the floor.

The outside door swung open and a man appeared there with a pistol in his hand. I shouted, “You in the door. Get Admiral Grafton and send him in here
now
!”

Down below, Mickey had freaked. The aides and pols were fluttering around uselessly, staring horrified at the corpses of Barry Soetoro and his vice president. There was nothing anyone on earth could do for them. Sulana Schanck hadn't twitched since she hit the floor. Maybe she was in Paradise now or shaking hands with Muhammad in Hell.

To my eternal relief, Jake Grafton and General Considine walked into the room accompanied by four guys carrying weapons.

I sat down on the floor and holstered my shooter.