Liberty's Last Stand (48 page)

Ohnigian was numb. He let his wingman do the debrief while he stretched out on a couch in the ops building.

So Johnny O'Day was dead and he had killed him. Holy mother. . .

What was he going to say to Johnny's wife, Ruby? Two little kids. . .

How was he going to tell Susie, his wife, about this? She and Ruby had double-dated the roommates. The marriages were just a year apart.

Staring at the ceiling, he decided that Ruby and Susie might forgive him, someday. The real problem was how he was going to forgive himself.

At Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, Major General Douglas Seuss was trying to figure out how to comply with Pentagon demands that he send an armored column from the 4th Infantry Division to fight the rebels in Texas. Most of his soldiers were refusing to fight fellow Americans, and Washington was demanding court-martials. That didn't strike Doug Seuss as a productive idea. He needed soldiers who would fight, not people looking for an opportunity to desert to avoid a combat they thought morally wrong.

Seuss had been trading messages with the Pentagon. West Texas was the finest terrain on this side of the Atlantic for tank operations, but he was unwilling to commit his tanks without air protection. There was no place on the naked plains for tanks to hide if they were attacked from the air. Seuss told the generals in the Pentagon that he was unwilling to sacrifice his troops needlessly to make political points. “You must guarantee me air cover for my tanks or they will not be committed,” he said flatly. His worry was that he would get the promise of air cover, commit the tanks, and friendly fighters would never appear while Texas fighters would. That, he thought, was the way the wind was blowing.

Sifting through the readiness reports and the results of interviews with his soldiers, he found a company of the 10th Special Forces Group had sixty percent of their troops willing to fight. He called the colonel in command of the group, Colonel Kevin Crislip, into his office. After a heart-to-heart talk, he decided to send the colonel and his volunteers to Texas to blow up some highway and railroad bridges.

“We've got to do something,” Seuss said. They looked at maps and decided to blow some bridges on U.S. Route 287 north of Amarillo and several bridges on the nearby railroad. Route 287 was a major truck route between the Pacific Northwest via Denver and Dallas and east Texas. The railroad carried a lot of freight. Bridges were good targets for tactical air, yet the Pentagon was demanding action from the Carson troops, so the ball was in Seuss' court.

Crislip wanted to use CH-47 Chinooks to insert and extract his men, and Seuss agreed. In at dusk, out at dawn was a tactic that would minimize the chance of air attack while the commandos were on the ground. Both officers thought the chances of the Special Forces troopers running into Texas ground forces were slim or none at all, but just to be sure Predators would be launched tomorrow at dawn and reconnoiter. Tomorrow the Green Berets would ride Chinooks to the Army's Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site on the Purgatoire River, and launch from there for Texas at dusk.

As Colonel Crislip was leaving, Seuss said, “And colonel—I never dreamed I'd have to say this—make sure the men you take are politically reliable.” That was the jargon of the latest Pentagon directive. General Seuss found that phrase offensive in the extreme, smacking as it did of the old soviet military and their political commissars, but what could one do?

General Martin L. Wynette was a worried man when he rode to the White House that Friday morning, the second day of September, in his limousine. Arizona had declared its independence, the fourth state to do so, along with Texas, Oklahoma, and Alabama. Other states were meeting this afternoon and tonight and no doubt some of them would pass declarations of independence.

The people of the big cities from coast to coast were about out of endurance. Without electricity, there was no way to escape the summer heat, no running water, no way to flush toilets, no way to preserve food. Soon there would be no food to preserve, since trucks couldn't deliver without fuel, and even if they could, they wouldn't deliver to looted stores. Calls to police, fire departments, and paramedics went unanswered. Houses burned down with no one there to rescue the kids or fight the blaze. People died from heart attacks because they couldn't get to the hospital. People ran out of medications and couldn't get more. Given time, people would learn to cope, those who survived, but in the interim a lot of people were going to die.

In Chicago, the Black Panthers had attacked a police station. It looked as if a race war was about to explode in the city. The mayor was begging the governor for National Guard troops.

Wynette's aide, Major General Stout, wisely kept his mouth firmly shut that morning as the limo carried them through the streets of the nation's capital.

Inside the executive mansion, the soldiers found the president flanked by his chief of staff, Al Grantham, and his senior political advisor, Sulana Schanck.

“The Texans bombed the bridges across the lower Mississippi last night, Mr. President,” Wynette said. “The reports we received at the Pentagon said all the highway and rail bridges were down from Baton Rouge to above Memphis. It's going to take at least a month, perhaps six weeks, before we are ready to mount an invasion.”

“Why not drop paratroopers?”

Wynette explained that lightly armed paratroopers didn't have the combat power to hold out long without relief. They were shock troops and not equipped to invade and conquer enemy territory.

“And then there is the problem of numbers. We are having extreme difficulty keeping people who will fight. About half the army and air force is AWOL. The navy's numbers are better only because they have ships at sea. There are dozens of ships on the east coast that are unable to get under way because the crews have abandoned the ships.”

Sulana Schanck's eyes narrowed and her voice was hard. “It is time you shot some people, General. I think perhaps ten people from every unit, while the rest of them watch.”

Al Grantham seemed inspired. “You've got to teach those damned kids that they have no choice. They are in the United States armed forces, and by God, they'll fight or die.”

“As I've said before, I don't have the authority to issue such an order,” Wynette objected. Indeed he didn't. The Uniform Code of Military Justice didn't provide for summary executions. Islamic militaries might do them, Wynette knew, but those of civilized nations didn't.

“You do now,” Grantham said. “The president has declared martial law and he is the commander in chief.”

Wynette recognized that he was being made the fall guy. “I'll need a direct order signed by the president,” he insisted.

“No, by God, you won't,” Grantham roared. “You are going to take the responsibility, General.
You
!
You
will write the order and sign it.
You
will have it transmitted to every major command and ship.
You
will demand that the commanding generals or officers or whoever is in charge find ten people who refuse to fight and have them executed. The names will be reported to
you
. Have I made myself clear?”

“Write it out, Grantham.”

“No,” Barry Soetoro said in his coldest voice. “You'll do it, General. That's a direct order from me. And summary justice for those who disobey orders applies to the Pentagon too, to the E-Ring.”

So there it was. Shoot people or we shoot you.

While Martin Wynette was swallowing that, Sulana Schanck started in. “We hear that there is some talk in the E-Ring about a coup. What have you heard about that, General?”

Wynette's first impulse was to deny he had heard anything, but under the stares of Soetoro, Grantham, and the bitch Schanck, he decided that answer might get him shot. There was no telling what they had heard, who had whispered, if anyone had. Schanck was probably just shooting in the dark. Perhaps. Or perhaps not.

Soetoro smacked the table with his open palm. “Answer, damn it. Don't sit there thinking up a lie.”

“The assistant chairman, Admiral Sugar Ray, told me that he, the army chief of staff, and the air force chief of staff did discuss a coup. That is all I know.”

“Did you put him under arrest?”

“No.”

“Ray discusses treason with you and you do not arrest him? Whose side are you on, General?”

For the first time in many years, Martin Wynette felt the cold hand of fear grip him with paralyzing fierceness. He had a powerful urge to urinate and somehow managed to hold it in. But he lost control of his face, and knew it.

Soetoro took obvious pleasure at Wynette's discomfort. He glanced at Schanck and made a little motion with his head. She got up and left the room.

“Did you order the Tomahawks launched?” Al Grantham demanded.

“Yes. We should have waited for night, but the missiles will be on their way momentarily, as soon as they can be programmed. Two destroyers will shoot fifty each. They will take out the twenty largest power plants in Texas.”

Grantham nodded. Once.

Wynette said, “All of the missiles won't get through. In the daytime fighters can find cruise missiles and shoot them down.”

“They might get a few,” Barry Soetoro said, “and the people of Texas will hear and see them flying over, on their way to cause havoc.” He smiled. “The missiles will deliver an unmistakable message that we are in charge and that disobedience has its price.”

Martin Wynette was enough of a soldier to know that using military weapons to deliver political messages was a good way to lose a war, but he held his tongue. Hitler had tried delivering messages with V-1 and V-2 rockets and that hadn't worked so well. Lyndon Johnson tried to send explosive messages to the North Vietnamese and failed rather dismally. Truly, Wynette thought, Soetoro was a fool.

Armanti Hall and I were exploring the roads in his pickup truck when we saw a little house fifty yards or so from the road, a strip of twelve-foot-wide asphalt that wound around over the hills following the contours. It was a nice enough little clapboard house, but the reason it attracted my attention was the large garden beside it. The flora it contained was big and tall.

We parked and strolled over. We didn't get very far before we realized that lying near the garden gate was a body.

As we walked up I could see it was a man. He had that totally collapsed look of the dead that are in the process of returning to the earth. From ten feet away, I could see the dark mottled color of his skin and the bloating of his abdominal cavity, so I guessed he had been dead at least a day, and perhaps two.

“Don't go any closer to that gate,” a woman's voice said.

We turned to face the house. A small old woman with iron-gray hair was sitting in a rocking chair under a roof on a flagstone patio that was just inches above ground level. Across her knees was a lever-action rifle. Her right hand rested on the stock above the trigger.

“Looks like this gent expired suddenly,” I said conversationally.