Liberty's Last Stand

by Stephen Coonts

  “Fred coming down?” Fred was the younger brother, teaching school somewhere in the Dallas area.

  “For the funeral. He and his wife can’t get off just now.”

  “Call me when you get the funeral scheduled,” the governor said. “Nadine and I will want to be there.”

  “I will, Jack.”

  Jack Hays hugged JR again, then went to the helicopter and climbed in. “Let’s go,” he told the pilot.

  TWO

  Martial law! Rule by decree from the White House! Barry Soetoro, emperor of the United States. People had been whispering for years about the possibility, but like most folks, I dismissed the whisperers as alarmist crackpots. Now, according to Sal Molina, the president’s longtime guru, the crackpots were oracles.

  I sat at my desk in my cubbyhole and thought about things. I wondered if there was any truth to Grafton’s crack that Soetoro and company had been waiting for a terrorist incident so they could declare martial law. Well, why not? The nation was fed up with the Democrats. Seniors and the white middle class had deserted the party by the millions. Cynthia Hinton didn’t have a chance. The Republicans were going to take over the government in November if there was an election.

  I felt hot all over. Suddenly the room was stifling. It looked as if the nation I had grown up in, the crazy, diverse republic of three hundred million people all trying to make a living and raise the next generation, was going on the rocks. And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men weren’t going to be able to put it back together again. That must have been the thrust of Grafton’s remark before Molina arrived.

  I felt as if I were on the edge of the abyss, like Dante’s hero, staring down into the fiery pit. What next?

  Grafton would be gone. Like tomorrow. The agency would become another arm of Soetoro’s Gestapo. Molina had implied that much.

  I opened the locked drawer where I kept my stuff. I had a shoulder holster and a little Walther in .380 ACP in there. Since I did bodyguard duty for Grafton, I had a permit for it signed by the director, who was Grafton. I took off my jacket, put on the shoulder holster, checked the pistol, and made sure I had a round in the chamber and the safety engaged. Put the pistol in the holster and put my coat back on.

  I stood there looking around. There was nothing else in my office I wanted. Not the CIA coffee cup, the free pens, the photo of me and the guys on a big campout in Africa that hung on the wall…none of it. I locked the drawer and cabinets, left the room and made sure the door locked behind me, then headed for the parking lot.

  Driving out of the lot was surreal. There were still some cars there, and people trickling out, just as there were every evening. The streetlights were on; traffic went up and down the streets obeying the traffic laws; news, music, sports, and talk emanated from my car radio…and it was all coming to an end.

  As I drove I took mental inventory of my arsenal. If you live in America, you gotta have some guns, so when the political contract falls apart…yeah!

  I drove over to a gun store I had had prior dealings with. A few people in the store, about as usual. I bought two more boxes of Number Four buckshot for the shotgun, another box of .380 ACP for my Walther, and four boxes of .45 ACP for my Kimber 1911, which was in my apartment. Three boxes of .30-30s for my old Model 94 Winchester.

  “Expecting a war?” the clerk asked.

  “Comes the revolution, I want to be ready,” I replied.

  I used a credit card to pay for the stuff. If the future went down the way I suspected, in a few days no one would be able to buy guns or ammo for love or money. Soetoro would shut down the gun stores. Screw the Second Amendment.

  Then I drove over to Maryland to visit the lock shop I owned with my partner, Willie “the Wire” Varner. He was a black man about twenty years older than me, and had been up the river twice. Now reformed, he was my very best friend. Don’t ask me why a two-time loser should be the only guy in the world I really trust—besides Jake Grafton—but he is. Maybe because he’s so much like me. As I unlocked the front door and went into the shop, I realized that I couldn’t tell him about the bomb Molina dropped, but I did have news.

  Willie was in the back room of the shop wiring up the motherboard of an alarm system for installation in an old house. The final innings of an Orioles game were on the radio. “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey. Stopped by to tell you, I quit the agency this evening.”

  He stared. “No shit?”

  “Honest injun. I am not going back.”

  “They give you any severance?”

  “Uh, no.”

  He turned back to the alarm system. “They goin’ to be lookin’ for you, Carmellini?”

  “Naw. It’ll be days before they figure out that I’m gone. Maybe weeks.”

  “Want to tell me about it?”

  “Just did. All I can.”

  He straightened up and gave me another look. “And I thought I had a monopoly on fuckin’ up my life. If you ain’t gonna tell me nothin’, just why the hell did you drive over here tonight?”

  I was at a loss for words. Why did I? I knew the answer, of course—because I needed some company—but I wasn’t going to tell him that.

  “Don’t think you’re gonna start workin’ here on salary,” Willie declared. “We ain’t got barely enough work for me. We divide it up and neither one of us will be eatin’.”

  I nodded. Stood looking around. Maybe I should just give Willie a bill of sale for my half of the place and be done with it. He would never leave the metro area, and I wasn’t staying. I didn’t know where I was going, but I did know I wasn’t staying in Washington.

  I decided that was a problem for another day. Said good night and left.

  I wasn’t ready for my apartment. Hell, I had nothing better to do, so I headed for Jake Grafton’s condo in Rosslyn. I had certainly been there often enough these last few years, so I knew the way. I was going to try to find a parking place on the street, but instead decided to cruise by the building and see who was sitting outside in cars. Sure enough, a half block from the entrance there was a parked car with two men in it. They were of a type. FBI. After a while you get a feel for them. Trim, reasonably fit, wearing sports coats to hide a concealed carry, maybe a tie. Who, besides middle-level government employees, dresses like that at ten o’clock at night?

  I decided I didn’t give a damn if they saw and photographed me. There were no parking places on the street, so I steered the Benz into the parking garage and found a spot on the third deck. Took the stairs down, crossed the street, and went into Grafton’s building.

  Grafton buzzed the door open and I went up. Knocked and he opened the door. Callie was sitting in the kitchen. The admiral led me there and asked, “Want a drink?”

  “Sure. Anything with alcohol.”

  Callie Grafton was a tough lady, but she looked about the way I felt. Bad. “Tommy,” she said, trying to smile.

  I realized then that coming over to Grafton’s was a really bad idea. But I couldn’t just walk out. The admiral opened the fridge and handed me a bottle of beer. I unscrewed the top and sipped it. “Car out front with two men in it. Maybe FBI.”

  “A dirty gray sedan? They followed me home,” he said.

  “So are you going in tomorrow?” I asked.

  “Of course,” he said, scrutinizing my face.

  “Not me. I’m done. Gonna hit the road tomorrow. I think the time has come for Mrs. Carmellini’s boy Tommy to go on to greener pastures.”

  The admiral didn’t say anything to that. Mrs. Grafton hid her face behind her tea cup.

  On the way over here I wondered if Grafton had told his wife about the conversation with Sal Molina. From the silence and the way she sat looking at the dark window, I knew that he had.

  “I shouldn’t have come,” I said. “I’ll take this road pop with me to remember you by, Admiral. Goodbye.” I stuck out my hand. He shook it.

  “Mrs. Grafton.” She rose from the table and hugged me. Fiercely.
<
br />   Then I left. Pulled the door shut until the lock clicked. I took the elevator down, put the half-empty beer bottle in my side pocket, crossed the street, and climbed the stairs.

  The next morning, Tuesday, August 23, I was wide awake at five in the morning. The sky was starting to get pink in the east. I hopped out of bed, showered, shaved, put on jeans and a golf shirt, and got busy packing. Everything had to go in my car, which was a 1975 Mercedes. Guns and ammo, of course, plus some of my clothes. No kitchen utensils, pots, pans, dishes, or coffee pot. No television or radio. I did decide to take my laptop and charger, but I left the printer.

  When I had made my selections and the stuff was stacked in the middle of the little living area, I began shuttling stuff down to the car in the elevator.

  When I got the car loaded, I stood in the middle of my apartment and took stock. Nothing else here I wanted.

  I wrote a short letter to the landlord and enclosed my key and building pass. He could have everything left in the apartment. The stuff in the refrigerator I emptied into a garbage bag and carried down with me.

  In light of what happened subsequently, perhaps I should have been worried about the country and martial law and what was to come, and perhaps I was on a subconscious level. I must have suspected the future might be grim or I wouldn’t have worried about the guns and ammo. Still, after I packed the car, I was thinking about what I was going to do with the rest of my life.

  It was a nice problem. I had daydreamed about afterward for years, after the CIA, but that eventuality was always somewhere ahead in a distant, hazy future. Now, boom, the future was unexpectedly here, and it wasn’t hazy.

  Of course I didn’t have to plot my next fifty or sixty years today. I decided that this day would be a good one to head west, following the sun. A few weeks of backpacking in Idaho or Montana would suit me right down to the ground.

  Already I was late for work—at Langley—as if I were ditching school. Feeling rather bucked with life, I drove to a breakfast place in a shopping mall and ordered an omelet and coffee. I scanned a newspaper while I waited for my omelet. The journalists had dug up a lot more on the dead terrorists. They were from Syria, Yemen, and Iraq. The experts were speculating on where and how they acquired their weapons, all of which were legally for sale in many states in America. Two more of the Saturday gunshot victims had died, bringing the grand total of deaths to 173.

  At 9:45 I was standing in line in the lobby of the suburban Virginia bank where I had my accounts. When I reached the window, I wrote a check for the amount in my checking account, leaving only a thousand bucks in the account to cover outstanding checks.

  “And how would you like this, Mr. Carmellini?” The teller was a cute lady wearing an engagement and wedding ring. The best ones are always snagged early.

  “Cash, please. Half fifties and half hundreds.”

  She tittered. “Oh, good heavens. Since it’s over ten thousand, we must fill out a form. Are you sure you don’t want a cashier’s check?”

  Titterers set my teeth on edge. On the other hand, she wasn’t still swimming around in the gene pool looking for a man. I silently wished her husband luck. “Pretty sure,” I replied. “Cash, please. And while you are at it, I want to close out my savings account. I’ll take that in cash too.”

  She had to go get more cash from the vault, then the paperwork took another few minutes. When I had my money, a little over twenty-two thousand monetary units—they gave me a little cloth envelope with the bank’s name printed on it to carry it in—I opened my safe deposit box with the help of one of the ladies who didn’t titter.

  Back in my younger days, when I thought the day might come when I wanted to leave town in a hurry—like today, for instance—I had stashed thirty grand in cash in the box, along with a couple of false driver’s licenses in various names, credit cards, and a genuine false passport. Getting that paper had taken time and money years ago, but I did it and kept the stuff. Of course, the credit cards had long expired, but they added heft to my wallet and looked good to anyone who happened to glance into my wallet while I had it open. Some people think that people with credit cards are more trustworthy than those without.

  Under the money at the bottom of the drawer was another 1911 .45, an old Ithaca made during World War II with brown plastic handles and most of the bluing gone from the slide, plus two extra magazines and a box of cartridges. The pistol was marked “United States Property M 1911 A1 US Army.” It had either been liberated from the army’s clutches many years ago or sold as surplus. It was serviceable, although it didn’t have the good sights and fancy grips of my Kimber.

  If there is a possibility that you might get shot at, you should at least be prepared to shoot back. In this brave new world that Emperor Soetoro envisioned, I thought the odds of getting shot at would be increased for a great many people, me included. I emptied the metal box into my briefcase, then with the help of the vault lady, who had discreetly faded while I plundered my treasure box, put the box back into its slot where it would rest undisturbed, safer than a pharaoh’s sarcophagus, for all eternity, or until my annual box rent was due and I wasn’t around to pay it, whichever came first.

  As I was leaving the lobby with my now-bulging briefcase, Barry Soetoro was on the television high in the corner, reading from a teleprompter. That was, I had long ago concluded, his one skill set. The audio on the TV was off, so I was spared his mellifluous tones. There were people standing behind him, but since I knew Jake Grafton wasn’t among them, I didn’t bother to check out the crowd of toadies. I walked out of the bank with my money—earned, not stolen, with taxes paid on every dime. I kinda wished I had stolen it, then I would have felt better about this whole deal. I was just too goddamn conventional.

  To hell with all of it! I walked out of the bank into the rest of my life.

  Barry Soetoro’s declaration of martial law stunned the nation. His reason—the need to protect the nation from terrorism—met with widespread skepticism. After all, at least three of the Saturday jihadists had entered with Soetoro’s blessing, over the objections of many politicians and the outraged cries of all those little people out there in the heartland, all those potential victims no one really gave a damn about.

  His suspension of the writ of habeas corpus went over the heads of most of the millions of people in his audience, since they didn’t know what the writ was or signified. He didn’t stop there. He adjourned Congress until he called it back into session, and announced an indefinite stay on all cases before the courts in which the government was a defendant. His announcement of press and media censorship “until the crisis is past” met with outrage, especially among the talking heads on television, who went ballistic. Within thirty minutes, the listening audience found out what the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus meant: FBI agents arrested select television personalities, including some who were literally on camera, and took them away. Fox News went off the air. Most of the other networks contented themselves with running the tape of Soetoro behind the podium making his announcement, over and over, without comment.

  During the day FBI agents arrested dozens of prominent conservative commentators and administration critics across the nation, including Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Michelle Malkin, George Will, Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Ralph Peters, Judge Jeanine Pirro, Matt Drudge, Thomas Sowell, Howard Stern, and Charles Krauthammer, among others. They weren’t given a chance to remain silent in the future, but were arrested and taken away to be held in an unknown location until Soetoro decided to release them.

  Senators and congressmen, from both sides of the aisle, were told in no uncertain terms that they too would be arrested if they publicly questioned the administration’s methods and motives.

  Plainly, life in America had just been stood on its ear. All the usual suspects who had supported Barry Soetoro for seven and a half years, no matter what, through thick, thin, and transparent, rushed to find a reporter with a camera so that they could say wo
nderful things on television about their hero, the self-proclaimed messiah who had said when he was first elected that he would lower the level of the sea and allow the earth to heal.

  While all this was going on, Jake Grafton was fired as director of the CIA. Two White House aides arrived in Langley with FBI agents in tow and delivered a letter from the president. Grafton was summarily relieved and the assistant director, Harley Merritt, was named acting director.

  As Grafton departed with the FBI agents, the two White House aides remained for a talk with Merritt about what was expected of him.

  The FBI took Grafton to a federal detention center that had been set up at Camp Dawson, a National Guard facility near Kingwood, West Virginia. Grafton should have been surprised to find that the holding facility had concertina wire, kitchens, latrines, and a field full of erect army tents containing a dozen cots each, but he wasn’t. Obviously someone had done the staff work to have facilities ready and waiting, with only the date that they were to be used remaining to be selected.

  Grafton arrived in time to shuffle through the lunch line, which contained about forty people. Most were men in their twenties and thirties, with here and there a few women salted in. The women huddled together. Everyone was in civilian clothes. He recognized several of the other detainees, or prisoners: two army four-star generals and a couple of former cabinet members. He picked up an aluminum tray from the stack, and a soldier in uniform spooned out mashed potatoes, mystery meat, and corn. At the end of the food line, he could select paper napkins and plastic tableware. No one trusted the detainees with real knives or forks.

  Afterward Jake was given a plastic Walmart bag for his stay, one containing a disposable razor, soap, a towel, a toothbrush, and toothpaste. The tube of toothpaste was small, TSA size, and he hoped that was an indicator of how long he would be here. He suspected it wasn’t.