Firebase Freedom (17 page)

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Authors: William W. Johnstone

BOOK: Firebase Freedom
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“Imam,” another of the girls asked. “What is the punishment for a man who has intercourse with a girl younger than nine?”
“There is no punishment, for a man having intercourse with a girl younger than nine years of age has not committed a crime, but only an infraction. For that, he shall be verbally admonished.
“While you are here, you may be approached by one of the men who are on the staff. If he wishes to take you as a wife, whether by continuing or temporary marriage, you must obey.”
“But, Imam, what if we don't wish to marry the man?” one of the older girls asked.
The instructor shook his head. “It does not matter what you wish. You will have no say. You are to be totally subservient to the man.”
“But you said that to do so, would mean that we are committing adultery,” the girl who had been questioning him earlier said.
“That is true.”
“But, if we commit adultery, won't we be punished?”
“Severely.”
“So, we are damned if we do, and damned if we don't,” one of the oldest girls said.
The Imam looked at her with cold, hard, flinty eyes, then without saying a word he walked over to her and slapped her so hard that she was knocked out of the chair. The veil came off her face.
“Cover your face, harlot!” the imam said, angrily.
The girl was too shaken and frightened to cover her own face, so one of the other girls, who had been sitting close to her, put the veil back in place.
“I will not tolerate swearing,” the imam said. “This harlot should praise Allah that I am in a benevolent mood. Had I not been, she would have been tied to the stake and beaten.”
C
HAPTER
E
IGHTEEN
Pleasure Island
 
By the time Mike Moran reached South Alabama, a pontoon bridge had been constructed across the canal, and over to the island. There was a huge sign just north of the canal, and Mike read it.
STOP!!!
If you have come to join us
you will be required to pull
your own weight. We can use
carpenters, electricians, plumbers
engine and vehicle mechanics,
as well as farmers, doctors, nurses,
and those with military experience.
If you meet that criteria and seek
freedom among us, you are welcome.
If you have come to live off the toil of
others, you are not welcome.
—Robert Varney, President
Mike had come to Gulf Shores because he knew about the movement here, having picked it up over shortwave radio broadcasts and Gregoire's Internet television shows. He had ditched the stretch limousine soon after he stole the three million Moqaddas, but the car he was in now, a 2011 Volvo, ran on gasoline, not wood gasification, so that alone would be enough to garner the attention of others as soon as he came on the island.
Mike had spent some time on Pleasure Island back before the collapse of the United States, so he knew the place fairly well. Assuming that governing offices of the island would be in the old police station building, he went there.
“No, if you are looking for Bob Varney, you are going to have to go all the way out to Fort Morgan. What used to be the fort museum is now the president's office,” he was told.
“How far is that?”
“Twenty-three miles.”
“I have enough fuel to drive out there, but won't have enough to drive back. I don't suppose there is any gasoline available on the island, is there?”
“No, but if you have enough to get out there, either James or Marcus can convert your car to take natural gas. We've got a lot of that.”
“Really?” Mike replied with a smile. “Damn, that's great! I thought I was going to have to give up my car.”
Mike knew exactly where the fort museum was, because the last time he had come down to the island, he and his wife had gone out to visit the fort. He recalled that visit now, remembering with sweet sadness the happier time, before Ohmshidi had brought about the collapse of the republic, and before his wife had been murdered.
Mike blamed Ohmshidi for her death, even though neither he, nor any of his State Police goons, were directly involved. She had been killed because she was carrying a loaf of bread. The fact that the world had so collapsed around them that a woman could be killed for a loaf of bread was, Mike believed, the cause and effect of Ohmshidi's disastrous policies. What Mike didn't know was whether the destruction of the greatest nation in the history of humankind was the result of Ohmshidi's incompetence, or if he had brought this about by some grand scheme.
When Mike pulled his Volvo to a stop in front of what had been the office and museum of Fort Morgan, there was someone standing out front, watching him. The man out front was wearing a shoulder holster, and Mike recognized the pistol as a P-38, nine millimeter.
“Can I help you, Mister?” the man asked.
“I'm here to see President Varney.”
“He's inside.”
Mike reached back into his car and pulled out a briefcase.
“Hold it. What have you got in there?” the armed man called.
Mike opened the briefcase, then turned it upside down over the hood of his car. What tumbled out from the case were several bound packets of Ohmshidi notes.
“Holy crap! What is that?”
“That, my friend, is three million Moqaddas in negotiable currency.”
“What do you plan to do with it?”
“I plan to give it to the treasury of the new nation of United Free America.”
The armed man came over to Mike then and extended his hand. “The name is Marcus Warner. Welcome to United Free America.”
“You want to help me put this back in the case?” Mike asked as he started scooping up the money.
It took but a moment until all the money was back in the briefcase, then Marcus opened the door and led Mike inside.
Bob was sitting at a desk, tapping on a computer keyboard.
“Writin' another story?” Marcus asked.
“Yes.”
“Well, if you can pull yourself away from it for a minute or two, I think this fella—”
Marcus realized then that he hadn't gotten the name and he turned toward him.
“Mike Moran.”
“Mr. Moran, this is Bob Varney. He's our president. Bob, I think Mr. Moran has something you will be interested in.”
“All right,” Bob said, looking expectantly toward Mike.
Again, Mike opened his valise and turned it upside down. This time the money tumbled down onto Bob's desk.
“There's three million Moqaddas here,” Mike said. “Use it however you need it. I've come to join up.”
Bob chuckled. “Well, I'd say you just bought your way into our little group.”
 
 
“You know what we should do,” Bob said later, as he, Jake, Tom, and some of the others were talking. “We should gather up every Moqaddas on the island, then use it to buy gold. If we have gold to back it, we can issue our own currency.”
“Damn,” Jake said. “That is a good idea.”
“I've got a better idea,” Tom said.
“What's that?”
“Instead of buying gold from Ohmshidi's government, why don't we just take it?”
“Take it from whom?”
“Take it from Ohmshidi.”
“Hah. Yeah, right,” Jake said. “We just go to Fort Knox and take it. Do you have any idea how that gold is stored?”
“Yes,” Tom replied. “It's in a two-story building constructed of granite, steel, and concrete. Its exterior dimensions measure 105 feet by 121 feet. Its height is forty-two feet above ground level. Within the building is a two-level steel and concrete vault that is divided into compartments. The vault door weighs more than twenty tons. The vault casing is constructed of steel plates, steel I-beams, and steel cylinders laced with hoop bands and encased in concrete.”
“What the hell?” Jake said. “How do you know all that?”
“When everything started going south, I was detailed by the U.S. Navy to take a shipment of gold there.”
“How much gold did you take?” Bob asked.
“I took seventy-two bars.”
“Whoa! Seventy-two bars? How much is that?”
“Two thousand pounds”
“Two thousand pounds, times sixteen ounces, that's what? Thirty-two thousand ounces?”
“No, it's times twelve,” Tom said.
“What do you mean, times twelve? There's sixteen ounces in a pound.”
“No, Tom's right,” Bob said. “You measure precious metals in troy ounces, and that's twelve ounces to the pound.”
“All right, so it's twenty-four thousand ounces. That's still a hell of a lot of ounces. How much money is that?”
“At the time I took the shipment, it was worth in the neighborhood of forty million.”
Jake chuckled. “Yes, I'd say that forty million was a pretty damn good neighborhood. But the gold is up at Fort Knox in that building you just described, so I don't see . . .”
Tom smiled, and held up a finger. “Ah, but you see, the gold I'm talking about isn't at Fort Knox.”
“What? What do you mean, it isn't? You just said that you took it there.”
“No, I said I was
detailed
to take it there. But before I even left San Diego, I saw the writing on the wall. I knew the country was going to hell in a basket, and I thought it might be nice to know how to get my hands on forty million dollars at some future time. So I didn't take it to Knox. I took it to Fort Campbell.”
“Fort Campbell? What's at Fort Campbell?” Jake asked.
“Damn!” Bob said. “I know what's there. At least, I know what was there in 1963, when I was stationed there. There was a secret Navy weapons storage facility there . . . just south of the officers' club.”
“You mean when there were still officers' clubs,” Jake said. “They closed all the O clubs, even before Ohmshidi was elected.”
Tom smiled. “I know the building he's talking about though. It's still there, even though it was no longer an officers' club. And you've got it. The gold is at that Navy facility in an empty weapons bunker.”
“What makes you think it's still there?” Bob asked.
“Well, of course I don't know for sure, but I would be willing to bet it is. I pulled out a board at the top of the wall and dropped the bullion bars down in between the wall and the lead sheet that lines the bunker, and I replaced the board. It's not likely anyone would just stumble across it, unless they pulled the bunker apart. And there's no reason for anyone to do that. Except for the gold, there's absolutely nothing of value in any of the bunkers.”
“I'm sure you didn't do that alone,” Jake said. “What about the men who were with you? What makes you think they didn't go back for it?”
“There were only two with me that day, and they're both dead,” Tom said. “One of them was killed in a car wreck. The other committed suicide.”
“Why haven't you gone back for it?” Bob asked.
“It's not that easy for one person to get rid of a bullion bar. That's 27.5 pounds, which was worth about half a million dollars when we moved it. Then, right after the country collapsed, gold wasn't worth much. If you recall, for a while there, we were strictly on the barter system. To be honest with you, I don't know how much it would be worth for us to have it now.”
“If we had gold here, we could issue our own currency, backed by the gold,” Bob said. “And that gold would secure our currency in foreign exchange, and that would make our money viable. We wouldn't have to depend on Moqaddas anymore.”
“Well then,” Tom said, smiling, and rubbing his hands together. “What do you say we go get it?”
C
HAPTER
N
INETEEN
Baltimore
 
Baltimore had been leveled by the nuclear bomb and was pretty much a wasteland, totally flattened for a distance of a mile in every direction from where the blast was detonated. The damage was severe for up to two miles away, and there was considerable damage for as far as five miles away.
Many of those who survived the initial blast subsequently died of radiation sickness, and those who were not, evacuated. As a result, there were many homes, otherwise totally intact, that were empty in the city.
There was no governmental control of Baltimore, because the SPS and other government officials feared the radiation, even though the amount of radiation had now dropped to below the danger level. That meant that the empty homes were quickly filling with those who were avoiding the government, from those who were here as an act of conscience, to the petty thief, to the murderer.
Technically, Chris assumed that he was in the latter category. He had just killed six people, including Justice Ayambuie and the two clerics who were with him in the car. But he didn't consider that murder, any more than he considered the “with extreme prejudice” jobs he had taken for the FBI or the CIA in the “before time” to have been murder.
Chris and Kathy had come to Baltimore shortly after he killed Ayambuie. As far as he knew, he wasn't a suspect for those murders, but caution seemed the best option. He brought Kathy with him because he didn't want what happened to Margaret to happen to her.
There had been enough canned and packaged food abandoned when Baltimore was evacuated to feed the few thousand who eventually found their way back into the city, so for a while, people subsisted on a “take what you need when you need it” basis. But as the supplies began to dwindle, a commerce system developed where some would leave Baltimore to make purchases out of the city, then bring their purchases back for barter, or sale.
The others in the city sort of naturally fell into occupations they had held before. Carpenters made a good living in refurbishing the houses, mechanics did just as well by putting cars and trucks back into service. Since pork was outlawed throughout the rest of the AIRE, some enterprising men and women were raising pigs . . . and finding a surprisingly large market for pork, which was always marketed as “goat” to customers outside of Baltimore.
There were also the black marketers who bought gasoline within the official economy, then brought it into Baltimore to be used by those who were outside the mainstream of things.
For the first few days after he arrived in Baltimore, Chris was unsure as to just what he would do. He wasn't a carpenter, or a mechanic. He didn't have a feel for merchandising, and he certainly wasn't a farmer. He was a man of action. But whereas the FBI and the CIA had paid him for his contract work, that kind of work was no longer available to him now.
Or was it?
There was no longer an agency around that would pay him for his rather unique work, but there was certainly no reason why he couldn't go into business for himself.
Not as a contract killer, but as a thief. Because of the new currency, shipments of the Moqaddas bills were being sent everywhere, and those money transfers, as well as the
Moqaddas Sirata
–compliant banks which controlled all the transactions, were ripe for the picking.
Willie Sutton once answered the question, “Why do you rob banks,” by saying, “Because that's where the money is.”
Chris chuckled as he thought about that. He had just hit upon how he was going to make a living.
He was going to rob banks.
 
With Jake Lantz
 
They left Gulf Shores in two vehicles, a Toyota minivan and a Ford two-ton pickup truck. James had put a false bottom in the bed of the truck, leaving just enough space between the false bottom and the real bottom to have a place to conceal the gold bars. For now, M-4 rifles were concealed in the false bottom. The truck was loaded with cut logs.
Mike Moran was driving the pickup, and Tom was with him. Deon was driving the minivan, and Jake was with him. There were saws and axes in the back of the minivan. Because I-65 was being patrolled, they went up the back roads: 59, then 21, finally joining I-65 at Montgomery. That was where they were stopped for the first time; but at least now, there was nothing to indicate they had come from the “land of the rebellion.”
They were stopped by highway patrolmen, which was good because the highway patrolmen weren't as dogmatic as the SPS.
“Papers,” one of the patrolmen asked.
Jake took some encouragement from the fact that the patrolman had not greeted him with the “Obey Ohmshidi” salute.
“I've got the papers for the two of us in this car, and the two men in the pickup behind me. They're workin' for me.”
The patrolman took the papers from Jake's hand.
“Kind of hot to be standin' out here all day lookin' at people's papers, isn't it?” Jake asked.
“Yeah,” the patrolman said.
Using Tom's papers and ID, Bob had duplicated them on the computer so that all four had the “proper credentials.”
“St. Louis? All four of you are from St. Louis?”
“Yeah.”
“What are you doing down here?”
“We came down here to cut wood for the paper mill up in Wickliffe, KY.”
“This seems like a long way to come to get wood.”
“The wood is cheaper down here.”
The patrolman walked back to the truck and looked inside. It was filled with cut wood.
“All right, you can go,” he said.
They were stopped six more times before they reached Fort Campbell, and their story and papers held up every time.
Because they weren't driving very fast, and because they were stopped so many times, they spent one night on the road, camping alongside their vehicles. They actually did go to Wickliffe, where they sold their logs.
“I'd like a paper that says you bought the wood from us,” Jake said. “I'll need to show it to the police when we go back down to Alabama.”
“Alabama? Why did you bring the wood all the way up here to us? You've got dozens of paper mills in Alabama. Birmingham, Tuscaloosa, Huntsville—they would have all been closer.”
“I've got family in Paducah, thought this would pay for the trip up.”
“All right,” the manager of the paper mill said.
“Say, didn't this used to be the New Page Corporation?”
“Yeah. But the government owns it now. You have a problem with that?”
“No, why should I? It's no sweat off my balls,” Jake said. “Whether the government pays me, or New Page, it's all the same.”
“I thought you might see it that way,” the manager said. He counted out one thousand Moqaddas, then gave Jake a paper validating the sale.
“Thanks,” Jake said. “This will pay for our trip.”
They reached Fort Campbell, or what had been Fort Campbell, later that day, driving down Highway 41 from Hopkinsville, past all the businesses that had, at one time, catered to the soldiers of the 101st Airmobile Division. The businesses, like the fort, were now closed. All the gates into the fort were blocked off, but they were able to get around the barriers at gate 5, then drove onto the main section of the base.
Coming onto an army base again was a nostalgic thing for Jake, who had spent his entire adult life in the army. But there was a sadness in seeing abandoned buildings, weeds growing in areas that were once kept neatly trimmed, and the rusting hulks of military trucks and hummers.
A long, brick wall which once proudly proclaimed Fort Campbell as the home of the 101st Screaming Eagles now had only a few letters remaining.
 
F t C MP L H E F EO1S E ING GLES
 
The empty flagpole was rusting and the lanyard was slapping against it.
“Stop the car,” Jake said, and Deon complied. Jake got out of the car and faced the flagpole. Deon, Tom, and Mike got out with him.
“Present arms!” Jake said, and all three men, former U.S. Military, snapped a salute. They held it for a long moment, then Jake said, “Order, arms!” And, with military precision, all four men brought the salute down.
“At ease,” Jake said.
“Were you ever stationed here, Major?” Deon asked. It had been a while since he had called Jake “major,” but it seemed appropriate for the moment.
“I was never stationed here, but I flew in and out of here a few times. What about you?”
“No, sir, I never was,” Deon replied.
“Me neither,” Mike said. “I was at Fort Bragg, but never here.”
“Bob was here,” Jake said.
Deon chuckled. “Yeah, in 1963. You know how long ago that was? That's over half a century ago.”
“Don't sell that old man short,” Jake said. “You haven't forgotten that nifty bit of flying he did back when we first got to Fort Morgan, when there was a group of outlaws who blocked the road, have you? They were going to kill us and take what we had, remember?”
“Yeah, I remember. I was riding door gun for that old man.”
“What are you talking about?” Tom asked.
Jake told the story, telling it so vividly that Tom and Mike, who had not been there, could almost witness it.
“
Is that a helicopter I hear?” John asked.
“It is, yes,” Jake said. “I hear it, but I don't see it.”
“It's close,” John said. “Look, they hear it too.” John pointed to the men who were standing by the barricade. They could be seen searching the sky and talking to each other, obviously looking for the helicopter.
Suddenly a Huey popped up just over the roof of the houses along the beach. “Damn! That's our Huey!” John said. “Who the hell is flying it?”

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