Liberty's Last Stand

by Stephen Coonts

  “I didn’t know that the president had the power to suspend the rules of criminal procedure or the presumption of innocence or the right to be represented by counsel.”

  “Are you a lawyer?”

  “No.”

  “He has been advised by good lawyers, including the attorney general. He is fulfilling his constitutional duty to protect the nation.”

  “If you say so.”

  “We want to ask you about your role in the conspiracy to remove the president from office.”

  Jake sat silently, watching the man drone on. He had suspected this might be coming since Callie told him of the FBI’s announcement to the press.

  When Sluggo Sweatt paused for air, Grafton said, “I deny any involvement whatsoever.”

  “Four people have confessed, so far. They swear you knew about the planning for a coup d’état.”

  “Who?”

  He named names. Two names Jake thought he recognized from the CIA, low-level staffers. The other two he didn’t.

  “I don’t care what they signed. I deny any involvement whatsoever, nor did I know of any plot.”

  “You had better rethink that, Admiral. You have a daughter, a sonin-law, and a grandson. Your wife lives on your pension. You have money in the bank and property. With a stroke of a pen, all that can be taken away from you.”

  Grafton said nothing.

  “I don’t think you realize how serious the crime is that you are accused of,” Sweatt explained, as if Grafton had a 75 IQ and his wife had to help him put on his pants in the morning. “The penalties are catastrophic, for you and your family. We have drafted a confession for your signature.” He opened a drawer and removed the confession, tossed it on the desk. “As you will see, you are charged with nothing but failing to report treasonous activity. There is no suggestion that you committed any overt act. I suggest you read it, please.”

  Grafton didn’t even pick it up. “Sluggo, I am not going to put my fingerprints on that. I have no doubt you can forge my signature, if you want it, and no doubt whatsoever that you have sold your soul to the devil. Currently there is nothing I can do about this situation, or you, but I’ll remember you. Not fondly.”

  “I won’t try to persuade you,” Sluggo Sweatt said coolly. “But I want you to consider the fact that the world has turned, and you are in serious danger of being roadkill. There won’t be another day in your life when you can do anything about it, about me, or about your situation. Not a day, not an hour, not a minute. You can only save yourself and your loved ones a great deal of grief by signing that document.”

  “Is that why you sold out? Saving yourself grief?” Grafton replied.

  The man shrugged. “Unlike you, I have some common sense,” he said, and gestured to the agents against the wall.

  “I am delighted to hear that, Sweatt,” Grafton shot back. “Common sense is almost as rare as hen’s teeth, and equally hard to find.”

  The agents led Grafton back to the compound.

  The members of the Texas legislature that packed into the governor’s office were a mixed lot. Some were demanding that the legislature pass a declaration of independence and declare Texas a free republic. Others looked damned worried.

  “Are you people out of your minds?” It was Smokey Bryan from Hall County. “I fought for the United States in the army. I am a citizen of the United States. My family have all been American citizens, and my great-great-grandparents who came to Texas when it was Comanche country and got scalped—they were Americans. I’ll be goddamned if I am gonna commit treason and try to take Texas out of the Union. Again. The last time we tried that they shot a lot of Texans but didn’t hang anybody. This time they might. Barry Soetoro is, no question, a would-be tin-pot dictator, but he is the president of the United States. And let’s call a spade a spade—no pun intended—he’s black. Most black people will stick to him even if he declares he is the risen Christ.”

  Luwanda Harris, a black woman representing a district in Houston, said, “Gangs of terrorists are running around killing people. People are plotting a coup. I don’t know who, but it’s probably Republicans. They hate him. You are damn fools to sit here discussing treason when the FBI hasn’t finished its investigation.”

  Someone shouted from the back. “You don’t seem very worried about your constituents who are caught in the middle of a riot.”

  “Fuck you,” she shot over her shoulder. She was looking straight at Bryan when she said, “And you too, Smokey, you Nazi bigot. Black people have been shit on for centuries, ever since they were dragged to Texas as slaves. You people have segregated them, won’t educate them, won’t give them a leg up. You won’t even increase the minimum wage. Let the niggers rot. That’s—”

  “You racist bitch!” Senator Bryan roared. “I have had—”

  “Quiet,” the governor shouted. “If you people are going to cuss at each other, go outside on the lawn to do it. You can use your fists, shout, pull hair, act like children, get your names and photos in the papers. Go on. Get the hell outta my office.” Silence descended.

  Jack Hays lowered his voice. “Ms. Harris, Mr. Bryan, you two seem to have lost sight of the fact you are on the same side. You are both against Texas independence. Yet we all share a common concern, I hope. We all care deeply about the people of Texas, all of them, and what is best for them.”

  “I’m concerned about what is best for black Americans,” Ms. Harris shot back. “All you white people can worry about your own damned selves. We black people are going to stick together.”

  “You speak for yourself, woman,” interjected Charlie Swim. “You don’t represent me, and when the fires finally go out, don’t come begging the legislature for money to rebuild the projects. You won’t get it. You helped them burn.”

  That caused another frenzy of shouting.

  “Shut up,” Jack Hays roared. “The question is, How are we going to stop the riot? If the feds interfere, what are we going to do?”

  “You’re goin’ to Houston and shoot a bunch of black people,” Luwanda Harris said. “I know it, they know it, and the White House knows it.”

  “We’re going to arrest rioters and hold them responsible for their crimes,” the governor said in a normal voice. “Murder, rape, looting—nobody gets a free pass. Nobody. I have sworn to uphold the law and I will, whether you are white, black, brown, yellow, or green. If you want to do your community a service, Ms. Harris, you will get yourself to Houston and help stop the riot.”

  “Who do you think I am?” Luwanda Harris demanded. “You think I own them?”

  “Anybody else?” the governor said.

  A delegate from the Dallas suburbs wanted to discuss threats. Her name was Melissa McKinley. She didn’t know whether Soetoro was right about a right-wing conspiracy, but her constituents were worried about security. Terrorist threats, insane people, drug violence, the list went on. “My constituents want to be free from fear, free to raise their children in a safe environment. Guns scare them, enraged homicidal maniacs that shoot kids in schools and theaters scare them, terrorists and assassins scare them. The specter of a civil war would horrify them. They don’t want to live in Baghdad or Beirut or Syria. They want their children to have a chance to reach adulthood free from fear.”

  “How much freedom are they willing to trade for their security?” Ben Steiner asked.

  “They don’t want to bury their kids, Ben.”

  “So they would be happy in Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia in a comfortable little cell, just as long as their blood didn’t flow?”

  “I doubt it, but freedom doesn’t do you a lot of good if you’re dead.”

  “Amen to that,” several of the legislators muttered.

  They wanted to mention the grievances of their constituents, introduce them into the discussion, things such as EPA regulations designed to save the climate at the expense of the working men and women of Texas, even though there was no scientific evidence that the changes demanded would
have any impact on the problem as defined by the EPA. And the EPA’s demands to shut down coal-fired power plants, which would raise electric bills dramatically. Several wanted to talk about the financial and social burden of illegal aliens on the school districts and the education of American children, whose parents were paying the taxes to fund the schools. Others wanted to talk about federally mandated school curriculums and school lunches. Many were sick and tired of being dictated to by Washington bureaucrats who thought they knew more than the people ruled by their edicts.

  Another just wanted to talk about a federal government many of her constituents perceived as an out-of-control, fire-belching, meat-eating monster that could not be tamed, controlled, or killed, a monster that increasingly stuck its nose into every facet of American life and propagandized their children every minute of the school day. A minister denounced a government that he believed was not just neutral on religion, but actively antireligious.

  Charlie Swim broke in. “The bottom line is we need to stop these riots. You want to help black people?” He scowled at Luwanda Harris. “The people getting crippled and maimed and killed are black. The people doing it are black. A lot of the businessmen getting looted and burned out are black. If the federal government won’t stop it, the state government must: it’s that simple. A government that fails to protect its citizens from violence has forfeited its claim to legitimacy. And if bucking Soetoro and the feds leads to a confrontation, it’s time for Texas to face the issue head-on and declare its independence.”

  Charlie Swim stood on a chair and looked around the room. “I tell you now,” he continued, “I’m for independence. The people of Texas would be better off without the other forty-nine states, all the Texans, white, black, and brown, for all the reasons that have been mentioned here this morning. We would be better off without those fools in Washington.

  “Luwanda, you, the Republicans, and everyone in the country with a brain know that Cynthia Hinton doesn’t have a chance to win the November election. She knows it too. She has plenty of her own ghosts, but carrying the Soetoro record on your back would have defeated anybody. All Hinton is doing is jacking off the faithful.

  “And as for Soetoro and his gang. You know what their motto is: Never let a crisis go to waste. I don’t trust them or believe anything they say.

  “I think the time has come for us to start our own country. When you don’t trust your spouse, or your boss, or your government, it is time to say goodbye and go on down the road.”

  When JR Hays considered the tactical possibilities, he decided the only answer was booby traps, or mines. One man shooting wasn’t going to get it done. Oh, he might get a few of the drug smugglers, but he wouldn’t get them all, and if he didn’t get them all, every last one, he would be signing his own death warrant.

  Not that JR thought he was going to live forever, because he doubted that he would.

  The problem with booby traps was that they kill anyone who trips them—illegal pregnant women trying to get across the river to have their babies in Texas, men looking for work, as well as any drug smugglers and professional killers who happened by. Anyone and anything, including kudus, elands, oryx, springbok, nyalas, impalas, whitetail deer, and coyotes.

  Unless he wanted to bury a lot of relatively innocent people and very innocent animals, he needed mines he could detonate at the proper moment.

  He unlocked the toolbox in the bed of his pickup. Using the truck’s tailgate as a table, he laid out all the devices he had borrowed from his former employer, the defense contractor, and looked them over carefully. Nothing there was explosive. What he had was sensors, miniature control boxes, radio controllers, batteries, and the other bits and pieces of high-tech booby traps. With the black powder and fuses, he should be able to construct some seriously lethal homemade Claymore mines.

  FIVE

  After the crowd filed out of Jack Hays’ office, Ben Steiner stayed behind and closed the door. He dropped into a chair and lit a foul little cigar. Jack Hays sat in his executive chair, which his wife had bought from Office Depot and he had assembled in his garage.

  “Looks like you’ve crossed the Rubicon, Jack. Ain’t no going back from here.” Steiner blew smoke around, then looked for an ashtray. There wasn’t one. “You’re sort of in the position of the fellow that found himself astride a fence when the ladder gave way and he came down with one leg on either side.”

  “If you introduce a declaration of independence in the legislature,” Hays asked, “will it pass?”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it?” Ben Steiner said, puffing lazily. “And damn, I don’t know. It might. Just might.”

  “Or it might not,” Jack Hays said disgustedly. “Don’t you think you ought to start counting noses? If it’s DOA, I’d like to know it before I manage to piss off every federal employee from the postman to Soetoro.”

  “I’m all for it,” Steiner declared, “but it’s a big step. Soetoro is arresting everybody in Texas he can get his hands on—whoever intimated, hinted, or told his wife that he didn’t like Soetoro. FEMA has a camp for them up in Hall County. They got a list and are rounding ’em up.”

  “How come you aren’t on it?”

  “Oh, I am, but my wife told them I was in Argentina fishing for a couple of weeks.”

  “Ben, it would be silly to introduce such a resolution, or bill, unless we knew it was going to pass.”

  “By how much?”

  “Simple majority.”

  “That isn’t much.”

  “We’ll be lucky to get that,” Jack Hays said. “We must have something to paper our ass with. Unlike Soetoro, I want to hear the people’s representatives speak. One way or the other. Yea or nay.”

  “It’s that ‘lives, fortunes, and sacred honor’ thing that has them worried.”

  The governor took his time answering. “I think everyone would like to wake up and find this is just a nightmare. But it’s real. None of us are going to be able to bury our head in the sand and hope the wolves don’t bite our asses. The revolution has started. Soetoro has suspended the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Lincoln did it under his war powers. Unfortunately for Soetoro, we aren’t in a war. A rebellion, or revolution, will change the life of everyone in America. Indeed, perhaps everyone on the planet. We can’t start it—and the Texas legislature can’t—because Barry Soetoro already did.”

  “That wasn’t what you told me yesterday.”

  “I’ve changed my mind.”

  Ben Steiner took a deep drag on his cigar and let the smoke out slowly. “Our people need a little time,” he said. “They gotta work up to being brave. They gotta examine all the options before they can screw up their courage for this one.”

  “How much time? The Soetoro administration has been planning martial law for years.”

  “Tomorrow or the next day.”

  “We better not have the vote if we aren’t going to win. Barry Soetoro is too much of an egotist to ignore an independence vote, win or lose.”

  “We’ll win,” Steiner said grandly. In his fifties, with a booming voice, he knew how to sway people, persuade them. Jack Hays was a more difficult sell than the average juror, however.

  “When you’re sure you know how the vote will go, after you’ve talked to every member, come back and see me.”

  Ben Steiner leaned forward. “Jack, as we sit here Luwanda Harris and some of her friends are burning up the wires to Washington. If you don’t want the capitol surrounded by tanks and army troopers from all over, you had better start talking to people, tell them what’s at stake. We must get this done, and soon. If you don’t, my best guess is the government of Texas is going to get arrested en masse and accused of treason. In the interim, let’s cut off access to Washington.”

  “Can we take down the telephone system and the internet?”

  “Of course. The only question is how fast.”

  “Let’s do it,” Jack Hays said. “Who do we call?”

 
; “The state director of disaster response, Billy Rob Smith.”

  The governor picked up the phone and made the call.

  Billy Rob Smith heard the governor out, then asked, “Are you nuts? Every business in America bigger than a lemonade stand relies on telephones, landline and cell, and the internet. Millions of people use the system to send or get business information and to buy and sell securities. Medical records are transmitted via fax or over the internet. The feds have been working like beavers to digitize every medical record in the nation—shutting off the internet may mean people can’t get proper medical care. And the telephone system—you can’t shut one system down without turning off the other. In a lot of places, voice and digital use the same wires. In some places the telephone system is completely digital. Turning off cellular and landline telephones will drop us right smack dab back into the nineteenth century. Shutting those systems down is insanity.”

  “I didn’t ask for your opinion—I am giving you an order.”

  “And I’m telling you that you’re crazy. Hell, I don’t even know that you are the governor. You sound like an idiot jabbering on the telephone.”

  What ended the argument and decided the matter was an announcement at precisely that moment that was carried on television networks nationwide: The president had directed the military to work with civilian law enforcement agencies to confiscate all the guns in America in private hands. In the future, only the military and law enforcement officers would have guns.

  Billy Rob Smith had a television in his office airing a twenty-four-hour news channel, which was limiting itself to government press releases these days, and he paused his conversation with the governor while an aide told him the news as rapidly as possible and pointed at the television set.

  Smith was not stupid. “Did you hear that?” he demanded of Jack Hays.

  “Yes.”

  “Holy damn. It’s like the British marching to Lexington and Concord. This tears it. Americans won’t stand for it. Hell, the people of Texas won’t stand for it.”