Liberty's Last Stand (67 page)

About two hours later the bodies of the president, vice president, chief of staff, and chief political advisor were carried out of the house and placed on a stack of firewood in the middle of a grassy area. The crowd had raided the presidential woodpile. They piled the bodies on that rick of wood, poured a couple of gallons of gasoline on them, and set them afire.

The National Guard had arrived by then and the volunteers had stopped shooting their guns into the air. The prisoners were loaded on trucks and driven away. I didn't ask where they were being taken.

A huge silent crowd encircled the fire. As I watched, the woman from the hike up the mountain, Betty Connelly, stepped from the crowd, leveled her shotgun into the fire, and fired twice.

Then she turned and walked away.

Grafton and Considine came over to where I was standing.

“Tell me what happened in there, Tommy.”

So I told it, from climbing the balcony, to finding Grantham's corpse, to watching the Soetoro party trying to decide what to do. . .to Schanck's unexpected knife work.

“So you didn't hear what she and the president said?”

“No, sir. It looked like she was urging him to do something that he didn't want to do. Maybe she wouldn't take no for an answer.”

“Workplace violence,” General Considine remarked flippantly.

They had a few more questions, but I had no more answers.

“ISIS or Al Qaeda will claim they got him,” Grafton said gloomily.

“Soetoro is the one who chose Sulana Schanck to sit beside him and whisper in his ear,” Considine remarked. “The true believers are going to have to swallow that, Jake, whether they want to or not.”

“
Et tu, Brute
,” Grafton muttered.

I scored a flashlight off a soldier on the water truck and went looking for Sarah. Meanwhile she found Grafton. The funeral pyre was burning steadily now. The admiral had a handheld radio up to his ear, so I gave him the Hi sign and he acknowledged. With the fire illuminating a thousand faces, Sarah and I turned our backs to it and plunged into the darkness.

It was a five-mile hike through the woods, all uphill, and we came out on the bald about a half-mile north of the pickup. A sliver moon was hanging in the sky and the stars were out. This old earth just keeps on turning. Walking toward the truck, I asked her, “How are you feeling?”

She didn't reply.

“If that truck isn't hors de combat, I thought we might head west.”

She didn't say anything.

“You got the keys to the truck?” I asked.

“I left them in the ignition.”

Oh boy.

That half-mile hike through the grass in the moonlight, with corpses lying on the ground in a random pattern, was one of the memories I will carry with me all my days. There were at least two army trucks out there, lights ablaze, looking for wounded. The whole scene was surreal. The dead didn't even whisper.

We passed a young woman wandering along, trying in the moon and starlight to see the faces of the dead. She didn't have a weapon. Maybe she never did, or threw hers away or lost it. She didn't speak to us, so we passed her and kept hiking. I wondered which side of the fight she had been on, then decided that really didn't matter.

It was a little after midnight when we got to the truck. The keys were dangling from their slot. Is this a great country or what? All four tires had air. The windshield had taken at least three bullets and was in bad shape. One of the bullets had gone through the windshield and out the rear window. Fortunately Sarah had been lying on the seat at the time, protected by the motor and lots of metal, so she wasn't tagged. One of the truck's headlights was shot out. Some of the sheet metal had holes or gouge marks from bullets, and the radio aerial was missing, shot off. I opened the hood and examined the radiator and hoses with the flashlight. No visible leaks. Maybe the antifreeze all ran out. I looked at the ground under the engine, which was dry. We were good to go.

About a hundred yards to the south was an army truck with every light on. I walked over and saw a white cross painted on the side. Dr. Proudfoot was there, and he said the medics were out looking for wounded.

“We found some guy who had been scalped,” he said. “Hell of a wound. He's a professor from some little college in New England. I sedated him.”

“Is he going to make it?”

“Probably, if infections don't kill him.”

I shook Proudfoot's hand and walked back to my stolen FEMA truck. Sarah was already in the passenger seat, buckled up.

“Idaho,” Sarah said.

“Idaho,” I agreed.

I fired up the motor. The lone headlight bravely stabbed the darkness.

THIRTY-SIX

W
e spent what was left of the night at Camp Dawson, which was manned by a skeleton crew of guardsmen. I gave them the machine gun and extra ammo and three AT4s that Willis hadn't managed to shoot. After lunch, we hit the road.

In a little town in Ohio I found a glass repair shop that was open. They replaced the windshield, rear window, and headlight. The head man wanted to talk, so I told him about the battle for Camp David.

When I finished he said, “I have been really worried about America for years, and martial law was my worst nightmare come true. I think the socialists and left-wing radicals want to change America into a nation my kids won't want to live in. It seems like they don't know the basics of economics, don't believe in work, don't believe that a person should earn and keep the fruits of their labor. They'll run America into the ground, then what?”

“Maybe now the future will be better,” Sarah said.

“Then there is terrorism, all those Muslims admitted willy nilly,” he said. “I can only hope and pray.”

The power was back on in Ohio and Indiana, so we spent a night in a chain motel that was open. We ate a free breakfast at the bar off the lobby, which consisted of cornflakes and milk. I asked about the milk, and was told cows keep giving it regardless.

Filling stations were open again, and before the tank in the truck was empty, we found one with fuel to pump. Life was looking up.

In Illinois a state trooper took offense because I was driving at eighty miles an hour when the speed limit was sixty-five. He pulled us over.

“I told you to slow down,” Sarah said primly as the trooper walked up.

“You with the government?” he asked, looking us over. The pickup had federal government plates, although it lacked logos on the doors. Sarah and I were still wearing our web belts and pistols. The trooper was a big black man with hair going gray at the tips. For a man who spent most of his working life sitting behind a wheel, he was reasonably trim and fit.

“Ah, no,” I admitted. “We quit. We were with the CIA.”

“Spies, huh?”

“I stole the truck,” I said brightly, “from FEMA.”

“Those assholes? No shit! You got ID?”

I dug out my wallet and passed him my CIA Langley pass.

He looked it over and passed it back. “What you got in the cooler in the bed?”

“A six-pack. Filling station back in Indiana had some. Want one?”

“Man, I haven't had a beer since Soetoro declared martial law. Yeah, I'd like one.”

We got out and opened the cooler, and all three of us took a beer.

“If you have a camera in your cruiser, they might get unhappy seeing you with a beer,” I said.

“Camera's broken. Piss on 'em.” He popped the top on his can and took a swig. “Ahh! Tell me about the bullet holes in your ride.”

So we sat on the tailgate of the truck and sipped beer while I told him about the attack on Camp David. As I talked and he asked questions of Sarah and me, he visibly relaxed. He believed us. If he only knew how good a liar I was, he would have been more suspicious, but ignorance is bliss, so they say. And for a change I stuck strictly to the truth.

When he finished asking questions about the death of Barry Soetoro, the trooper, whose name was Davis, waxed philosophical. “Soetoro made life a living hell for us cops, made us targets, turned people against us, and stirred up racial hatred we sure as hell didn't need. Sure, there are a few bad cops, the same as there are bad dentists, doctors, CEOs, and plumbers, but all these body cameras and shit, and the constant second-guessing of cops who put their lives on the line—that's bullshit. That bastard Soetoro killed a lot of people by making criminals feel free, taking their side, and giving carte blanche to illegal aliens with criminal records. He destroyed a lot of trust, especially with law enforcement. And you know, without the rule of law, we don't have a civilization. It's that simple.”

I'd seen enough to know that.

He stood and dusted off his trouser seat. “You two slow it down, huh?”

“Yes, sir.”

Davis got into his cruiser and drove away. We put all three empties in the cooler and got our chariot under way, heading west.

I didn't want to read newspapers or watch television or listen to radio. I had had enough of the world's troubles. Sarah and I chatted and watched the countryside pass by and the road unwind endlessly before us. Although traffic was light, things were getting back to normal. We saw tanker trucks sitting in filling stations, food trucks rolling the highways, trucks hauling cattle and hay, and farmers in the fields running combines. Trains went by on tracks that paralleled the highway. Here and there construction crews were back at work on road and bridge projects. Jets were flying again, so contrails streaked the blue sky.

Yet even political hermits like Sarah and me found the political crisis impossible to avoid. Every diner or bar we went into had televisions going full blast. The generals in the Pentagon had asked Jake Grafton to get an interim civilian government up and running and to hold elections in every state that wanted to remain in the old Union. Texas was independent and intended to stay that way, President Jack Hays said. The commentators were still aghast, and delighted, at the effrontery of the Texas military in stealing—or “replevying,” Jack Hays' word—fifty tons of gold. At the quoted market price that morning—$2,132 an ounce—the metal was worth $3.4 billion. Jack Hays assured an interviewer that Texas would return any excess after Texas' claims against the federal government were settled by negotiation.

In California, the Mexican Army had been driven out, but Mexican gangs and their radical supporters were now engaged in a civil war against everyone else. They had supported the Mexican Army, and now were fighting for an independent Mexican Southern California they planned to call Aztlan. They were being crushed, but Southern California, and Los Angeles in particular, would never be the same again. Television cameras lingered lovingly on columns of smoke rising over the LA basin.

In Mexico, another civil war had broken out. The reasons seemed to be manifold: the flood of illegals back to Mexico, Texas closing the border, the failed invasion of California (some said at the behest of the drug lords), and massive unemployment. The good news was that without the United States as a safety valve, Mexico was finally going to have to come to grips with poverty, monopoly, corruption, and lack of opportunity for most of the people who lived within its borders.

The violent death of Barry Soetoro had, as Jake Grafton feared, transformed him into a cultural icon among certain groups. His sins were forgotten in the pathos of his demise. Bogus eyewitness accounts aired between newscasts. Mickey Soetoro publicly and loudly blamed “white people.” A waitress at a truck stop told us that Oprah was in tears for her entire show. All this despite the fact that the conversations Sarah captured in the White House in which Soetoro plotted to become a dictator were still airing on some radio stations.

We had been on the road for four days when we rolled into Idaho. We examined the brochures at a visitor's center and signed up for a float trip down the Salmon, the River of No Return. That took six wonderful days under a September sky. The nights were spent camping on a beach, and the days riding the river with a guide who paddled occasionally while Sarah and I fished the riffles and rapids for steelhead going upriver to spawn. We actually caught several good ones, which we immediately released back into the river.

The whole experience was magical. The canyon was wild and glorious, the eternal river flowing through rapids and down long, languid stretches, then through more rapids. We saw mule deer and coveys of chukar. Eventually we ended up on the Snake and spent a day drifting with the current to the pullout. People along the banks of the Snake on farms and in yards waved to us.

Sarah and I were laughing and smiling when the experience was over. America was still here, still glorious.

After another week of driving through the mountains, we ended up in Idaho Falls. That evening we finally turned on the television to a news channel and began catching up.

A constitutional convention had been announced. Jake Grafton was on television with the leaders of the House and Senate asking the governors of states both in and out of the Union to send delegates. He finished with this statement: “I think a great many people feel that the constitutional mandate for separation of powers between the three branches of government, and between the states and the federal government, got badly warped through the years. We hope a convention can fix that, especially by putting more teeth into the Tenth Amendment.”

Grafton continued, “The judges decided the interstate commerce, due process, and some other clauses were loopholes big enough to swallow the states and give the federal government control of every aspect of American life. That control was not exercised by Congress, an institution totally inadequate for the task, but by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats, sometimes controlled by the executive but often controlled by no one at all. That has to change. I don't know what devices the convention delegates will come up with to harness the Cheshire Cat, but they can try or fail or surrender, as they choose.

“The delegates may also choose to revise our democratic institutions to make them more efficient and responsive to the electorate.

“What is not on the table are the basic civil rights we Americans as a free people enjoy. We are seeking new ways to preserve those rights, not diminish them.

“If the delegations do their jobs well, we will have added safeguards to preserve liberty, the rights of the states, and the freedom of the people. It is my hope that the states that have declared their independence will return to the family of states that we call the United States, a family that has provided shelter and livelihoods for a free people for over two centuries, and I believe, with tweaking, can shelter us and our descendants for many more.

“May God bless a restored and reunited America.”

After the speech a commentator appeared on camera. I stared. Yes, it was Jack Yocke, clean-shaven, with a haircut, wearing a suit and tie. He was now the network's expert on all things Grafton.

Jack Hays was next.

“Texas is getting its act together,” he said. “We are in talks with Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona to form some kind of federation. How that will work out, I don't know, but I am encouraged. The illegals who don't speak English and have no job skills are going back to Mexico; we have about two thousand families a day moving to Texas to find jobs, families that do speak English and have trades and job skills to support themselves and make positive contributions to the economy and tax base. We are reforming the education system, training Americans, and putting them to work. Texas has a bright future.”

When we turned off the television in the wee hours of the morning, Sarah asked, “So what are we going to do with our lives?”

“I don't know,” I replied, truthfully.

“We can't keep doing nothing.”

“I know.”

“I want to go home,” she said.

The following day we pointed the truck east. The highways were more crowded, almost back to normal, I thought, and every filling station and truck stop had gas and lots of customers.

Four days later we rolled into West Virginia and stopped by the safe house near Greenbank. Dr. Proudfoot was there making a house call. Mrs. Price sat on the porch with a jacket around her shoulders and a blanket over her legs enjoying the fall colors, which I thought were near their peak. Little Sarah threw herself at Big Sarah, and Armanti Hall shook my hand until I had to jerk my appendage out to save it.

“I thought you were boogying off to Texas,” I said, flexing my fingers.

“Gonna stay here and rebuild Mrs. Price's house. Then the three of us are going to live in it.”

“Got enough money for lumber, toilets, and pipes?”