The House of War: Book One Of : THE OMEGA CRUSADE (43 page)

Things will be different now. She was right about the Christians. Joe was wrong and she was right. Corelli’s sneer is gone, she notes. He is sitting silently on the bench a few seats from her, sullen and sulking. He is staring out across the cavernous control room, the fingertips of his right hand resting lightly and seemingly absent-mindedly, a few inches below his sternum. Maybe not so absent-mindedly, Annie thinks suddenly. Joe does wear a small, gold crucifix around his neck. The cross hangs at about the sternum. It is a keepsake from him grandmother, Joe explained when she asked about it months ago. Regardless of its source, it now fed Annie’s suspicions. President O’Neill seemed to believe Corelli’s account of his relationship with Captain Castillo. Congress
man Reed did too. Annie is reserving judgment. There is no telling how deep these lunatic Christians have infiltrated government. Annie decides that she would be foolish to trust Joe.

Corelli could easily be one of them.

Annie Cooper has fought them, Christians, all her life. They were hostile to everything she is and believes in. Starting with her own parents, Christians have antagonized Annie from the beginning. She never forgave her mother and father for what they put her through those last few years she lived with them in Joplin Texas. They made a living hell of her high school years, but that was the least of their crimes against their only daughter. Annie would always hold her parents responsible for the untimely death of her first love, Alicia. She would never forgive them for it.

Annie and Alicia became friends in Tae Kwon Do class halfway through junior high. By the first year in high school they were inseparable, and that is how her parents found them in bed. It was their first time. They hadn’t even gotten all their clothes off when Annie’s mother opened the door unexpectedly and screamed as if she had walked in on a murder scene. Her father raced up the stairs and stood for what seemed an eternity in the doorway, his face frozen in a mask of disgust and contempt. Together, Annie’s parents separated the two of them violently and Annie’s father beat her in Alicia’s presence, humiliating the two of them. They told Alicia’s parents, who in turn, not only beat her severely, but also sent her to a special church summer camp in the hope of ridding her of the ‘demons’ of depraved sexuality.

Poor Alicia, sensitive as she was lovely, was never the same. Cowed and her spirit broken, she was too ashamed to seek Annie’s company again. Alicia dropped out of Tae Kwon Do and avoided Annie at school. She rarely left the house at all, not wanting to face the cruel taunting of fellow students and did her level best to keep her nose buried in the Bible as her parents insisted. Alicia threw herself into the Bible studies and other church activities, trying to win back her parents’ affections or maybe even purge herself of desires that were not going to go away. Annie Cooper didn’t know. The two were reduced to communicating only in the most perfunctory of manners at the Pentecostal church where their parents attended. As much as she hated the weekly services, Annie went faithfully and even happily as it was another chance to feast her eyes on Alicia. Every week Annie arrived at the church hoping to see in her
eyes some sign that she still wanted her, still loved her; but every week she left disheartened and angry.

It was the toughest year of Annie Cooper’s youth. She fought constantly, in and out of school, exacting broken teeth and bloody noses from every leer the boys shot her way. She wanted nothing from them. All Annie wanted was Alicia and she never abandoned the hope that one day, when they were older and free of their parents, they would continue where they left off. Alicia, Annie was sure, was living a lie and she would eventually tire of it and come back to her. Annie was certain of it until the end, when she learned that her darling Alicia hung herself from her bedroom’s ceiling fan. It happened the week after school let out for the summer, a week before Alicia was scheduled to return to Bible Camp for more reparative therapy.

The news devastated Annie. For the first time in her life, Annie Cooper became intimately familiar with hate. It was not the hatred of others projected out at the world at large, nothing like the hatred of her parents for what she was and had done; no, it was a hatred of her own creation, born of her own pain and fed by her own sense and grasp of the injustice she felt she would always have to face. That injustice, the young Cooper believed, sprung from the certainty with which religious fundamentalists challenged the world. Their positions were invulnerable to dissuasion. So be it, she decided at that young age. So be it. Annie swore she would forever meet their callous certainty with an absolutism of her own.

At the funeral she interrupted the preacher to accuse the congregation of murdering Alicia. She denounced her own parents and Alicia’s parents as smallminded, sexually repressed fascists. She derided the congregation as superstitious Neanderthals. Annie spat curses on their religion and let loose a tirade of expletives even as her father dragged her out of church. Out in the parking lot she concentrated her fire on him. He tried to silence his daughter with the back of his hand when she refused his order to “Shut up, already!”

Annie surprised herself when she not only ducked under his blow but, lunged at him and buried her knee into his groin. The back of her fist crashed into his ear on his way down to the pavement. Annie Cooper always thought back to that moment, standing over her father balled up at her feet, as the beginning of her life, a life she would live openly and defiantly in the face of all prejudice.

“You touch me again and I will kill you in your sleep,” she yelled at him in full view of her mother and the parishioners gawking from the church doors. “You so much as raise a hand to me and I swear to you, I will cut your throat the next time you pass out drunk in the house.”

The threat seemed to hit her father harder than the knee to the groin. He looked at her through eyes squinting and watering with pain, no longer able to recognize the gangly young woman glaring down at him. Annie barely recognized herself at that moment. She walked away from her father hardly believing what she had done and said, but all the same glad that she gave her rage expression.

Her father never raised a hand against her again. He barely looked at her and certainly never said a word to her. Her mother tried to make peace but Annie ignored her every entreaty, leaving the woman to stew alone in her misery. Six months later, Annie had her GED diploma in hand and the dust of Joplin Texas off her heels. She left her parents without ceremony or good bye and settled in San Francisco.

More than a thousand miles from home, Annie Cooper began life anew. She threw herself whole-heartedly into politics, both in her studies and in extra-curricular activities. To her pleasant surprise, after a youth spent feeling ostracized, dismissed and ignored, Annie was being listened to, taken seriously; and by her final year in school, she was a leader in the alternative lifestyle campaign that legalized gay marriage in California despite the popular referendums against it. She then went on to work in the national campaign that pushed The Marriage Equality Act through Congress in the spring of 2015. She took great pride in her work and joy as it pitted Annie against the very sort of Christian fundamentalists that tortured her childhood. Through her work, Annie got to make connections with future power players on the national scene. Danny Manny, former Mayor of San Francisco and presently California’s first gay governor was one of them. Through him, Cooper met Holly Villa while the then Senator was campaigning with William O’Neill for the White House.

It was Holly Villa who convinced Annie to put her organizational and administrative skills to use for the FBI.

“It won’t be easy,” the Senator warned her over breakfast after their first tryst. “These law enforcement agencies are the last bastions of the patriarchal
mindset that have made life all but impossible for women like us, women who insist on owning their own bodies.”

Annie Cooper didn’t need much convincing. Her work for gay and lesbian issues, while personally rewarding, was mostly done as a volunteer. The little money she could squeeze out of government grants was not paying the bills she was accruing. The story of two gay playwrights beheaded in their Chicago apartment by homegrown Islamists offended by the portrayal of Muhammad in the lover’s musical was still in the news. The job offered her would pit her against such fundamentalists and pay her well for the privilege.

It was a no-brainer. Annie Cooper took the job.

And now, four years later, she is once again powerless in the clutches of religious fundamentalists. She hates the feeling. It’s why she accepted Sergeant Burnett’s challenge. The fight will allow some release of the anxiety building in her. Annie knows it in her bones; if these psycho Christians talking about crusades and inquisitions get their way, if this coup of theirs succeeds, all the gains of the last fifty years will be lost. The prospect angers Annie Cooper. She rubs the tender bruise the stun baton left on her side. The prospect also frightens her a little. She shakes it off and rises from her seat on the bench.

Corelli rises suddenly from his seat as well, his attention focused sharply on the monitors ahead of him. Annie turns to follow his gaze. She notes that the endless looping of
‘It’s a Wonderful Life’
has stopped, replaced by a shot of the White House.

“Mr. President,” Annie says. “I think we’re finally going to hear from the Colonel.”

00:00:05

“Alright Colonel, you’re on in four, three, two, one…”

Colonel Miguel Cesar Pereira looks into the camera. The image of the Colonel, seated behind the Resolution Desk in the Oval Office, wearing his medal-studded uniform, is beamed the world over. The signal which carries it interrupts the playing of
“It’s a Wonderful Life.”
To the surprise of millions around the world, the signal also turns on televisions, computers and cell phones that were shut off.

“My fellow Americans, my name is Colonel Miguel Cesar Pereira,” he says, his voice a rumbling baritone. “And in the interest of preserving our Republic, I have seized control of government.

“First let me say that I regret the necessity that compelled me to do this. The tens of thousands who are putting their lives and honor on the line with me tonight likewise wish they didn’t have to become revolutionaries. However, we see no other way to save our country from the downward spiral of decay and decline than to wrest control of the nation away from those who have set it and keep it on so grave and doom-bound a course.

“The pit of oblivion, my fellow Americans, yawns wide beneath us. That is not mere hyperbole. We all know it; our country is not what she used to be. We are in free fall. Many are rightly afraid that America is dying. We have been written off by a great many people, both abroad and at home. For the first time in our history, it is all too possible to imagine the world without an America.

“Our great nation is also reviled and condemned the world over as the source of all modern ills. Enemies without and within are hard at work at destroying us. Our way of life, what’s left of it, is everywhere denounced. Our flag is every day defiled. Our accomplishments are dismissed as the spoils of exploitation. In response, many of our leaders have taken it upon themselves to shamelessly circle the world, hat in hand, bowing and begging forgiveness on our behalf.

“My comrades and I believe the calumny heaped on America is grossly undeserved. We believe the pandering of our politicians to world opinion to be disgraceful. Contrary to what is daily peddled by the world press and treasonous politicians at home, my compatriots and I unapologetically and unabashedly assert that America has been a greater force for good than any other nation in human history.

“America did not invent war. We did not invent slavery. We know America did not create colonialism, imperialism or fascism. Bigotry and hatred were not made in the USA. We know for a fact that the multitude of sins America is accused of, have likewise been committed by all nations; more often than not, to far more egregious extremes. No people on the face of the earth have the right to lecture us on any subject. There is no nation, anywhere on the globe, which has either the just cause or the moral authority to demand anything, least of all an apology of America. Let the world believe and say what it will. We
know better. We know America is an exceptional nation, without equal on the planet and without peer in history.

“We know however, that our unrivaled greatness was made possible not because we are inherently better than any of our fellow human beings. No, our meteoric rise to glory was the result of the nation’s founding upon the fount of blessings which is Christianity.

“And like our nation, our religion has had much calumny thrown, undeservedly, in its face.

“We’re not so blind as to claim to be without sin, but if we catalogued all the crimes of Christians that can be justifiably dropped at Christendom’s door, it would be no longer, no more lamentable a list than the litany of abuses the Church could raise against the world’s treatment of Her. We would remind the Jew that it was he who first persecuted the Christian, that our first martyrs were condemned to tortured deaths by inquisitions of the Sanhedrin. To the Muslim who reaches back to the crusades for the justification of his animosity against us, let him note that the Christian can reach back even farther into history, to the blood-soaked centuries of Islamic imperialism that precipitated those wars. We would remind Islam, that long before a crusader’s sword left scabbard, jihadist armies had already sacked Rome and reached the gates of Vienna, Paris and Madrid. We would remind the secularist that the unparalleled butchery of atheist regimes has always singled out Christians as the first victims of their brutality. This has been the case since the very beginning of the church-burning, genocidal barbarism of the so-called Enlightenment.

“Christians have always been ready and willing to forgive the world its trespasses and move on. The world has not been so forgiving, except here in America.