Liberty's Last Stand

by Stephen Coonts

  I played my ace. “If you were in some ISIS dungeon waiting for your appointment with the knife, you know that Jake Grafton would move heaven and earth to get you out. Whatever it took. Whether State gave its okay or not.”

  He jerked as if I had stuck the knife in him right there. He refused to meet my eyes.

  After a bit he said, “Tell me about it.”

  The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Martin L. Wynette, was summoned to the White House that morning. Wynette was a sycophant, a paper-pushing soldier who had never seen combat but had kissed a thousand asses on his way up the ladder. He was known throughout the military for his role in destroying the career of a lieutenant colonel teaching a course at the Joint Forces Staff College about Islamic extremism and jihad, a course suggested and approved by the college. Some Muslims got wind of it and wrote a hot letter to Barry Soetoro, who ordered the offending officer disciplined and the course dropped. Wynette did the dirty work without protest. Of course Wynette knew that Soetoro’s father was a Muslim, his chief political advisor was a Muslim, and a sizable chunk of the American population thought he was too, but after all, the American people had voted Soetoro into the White House, twice, so Wynette was certainly willing to let the prevailing wind flap his flag.

  This morning the general was escorted into the presence of the anointed one, who was beyond fury. He was outraged and shaking, at times almost incoherent. Texas had to be punished, he told General Wynette. “Texas must be taught a lesson that the people there will never forget. What are you people in the Pentagon going to do to smash them?”

  The truth was that the military had no contingency plans to attack Texas, or New York City or Honolulu or Des Moines or anywhere else in the United States. But General Wynette told the president, “Staff is working on it, sir. I assume you want boots on the ground.”

  “Boots on the ground, bombs on target, and the heads of every one of those sons of bitches in the legislature. And that governor—I want him alive. You go get them, General. Go to Texas and kick ass. Go as soon as you can get there.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Dismissed, he marched out to the limo waiting to take him back to the Pentagon wondering if the president really meant for Martin L. Wynette to personally go to Texas to direct the invasion. Certainly not. He must have meant that figuratively, General Wynette decided. He settled back into the comfy leather seat of the limo.

  Other than that, Wynette thought, the president had been specific enough. Bomb the hell out of those rebels, then invade. Air force fighter-bombers blasting refineries, factories, power plants, and oil fields would get those fools’ attention. A naval blockade would stopper their ports and screw them down hard. Then the U.S. Army would go charging through Texas like Wynette’s hero, George Patton, went through Germany. As Georgie used to say, “Like crap through a goose.”

  When he drove through the little town of Langtry, JR Hays saw Texas flags flying in front of every house and building, every business. Must have been a hundred of them. Was this Texas Independence Day? No, that was in March. He shrugged and kept driving.

  Del Rio also looked as if it were having a flag festival. Texas flags were everywhere, flying, hanging, tacked to buildings, strung across the street. He pulled into a filling station and went in for a piss and a Coke.

  The people inside greeted him like a long-lost cousin. “Happy Independence Day.”

  “I thought that was in March.”

  “That was then, this is now. Today. Early this morning Texas declared its independence. Haven’t you heard?”

  “No.”

  The young man behind the counter with rings in his ears and one in his nose pointed to a newspaper. “Special edition,” he said. The headline took up all the space above the fold: “Texas Free, Again.” The kid was wearing a pistol in a belt holster.

  “How about that,” JR said.

  “Already we got some troubles,” the kid said. “Mexicans tried to force the bridge from Ciudad Acuna this mornin’, tryin’ to get across. Must have figured that without the feds we’d be runnin’ around with our thumbs up our asses. Some of the guys went down there with their rifles and put a stop to that shit. Shot some of ’em. They’re layin’ out there on the bridge bleedin’ all over. The Mexicans won’t expose themselves to drag them away and our guys ain’t goin’ to go to their rescue. They can crawl back to Mexico or lay there and die.”

  “Hmm.”

  “State trooper was in here a little bit ago and tol’ me all about it. Eight or ten got across before the shootin’ started. Folks are roundin’ ’em up and gonna make ’em walk back over the bridge. Some other guys are goin’ through the city right now roundin’ up illegals to take the walk. Feds ain’t protectin’ them anymore.”

  “Where are the feds?”

  “Home, I reckon. They’re all Texans. They don’t like that asshole Soetoro either, but it was do it his way or get fired.”

  After he went to the men’s room, JR picked a Coke from the cooler and took it to the counter.

  “American money still good?”

  “The boss ain’t tol’ me not to take it. Reckon the politicians will have to figure all that stuff out.”

  “I guess so,” JR said. “Happy Independence Day.” He paid and walked out.

  Outside, he looked around. There wasn’t an American flag in sight. Just lots of Lone Star flags.

  Being human, he wondered about his pension. Twenty years in the army and now no pension. He felt like one of those Mexicans bleeding to death down on the bridge over the river.

  He started the truck and screwed the plastic lid off the plastic bottle and took a sip. Then the implications of independence hit him. Texas was going to need an army. Maybe he could join. Hell, soldiering was what he knew how to do; it was the only thing he knew how to do. He would ask Jack about that.

  At a stoplight he lit another Camel.

  Damn! The Republic of Texas. How about that!

  Travis Clay had been home from the Middle East for only two days and had next week off. He was just getting out of bed when I knocked on the door of his apartment. He was in his underwear when he opened the door and motioned me in. I could hear television audio from the bedroom.

  He went to the kitchen and put coffee in the basket and added water. As he did the work, I leaned on the door jam and asked, “How was Syria?”

  “The fires of hell have leaked through the crust there. Never trust a man who wipes his ass with his bare hand. We thought we knew where that British dude was who likes to lop off heads with a knife, but he was gone when we hit the place. The Brits were royally pissed. Words cannot express how badly they want that murderous prick. They would sell a prince and maybe a princess or two to lay hands on him for just an hour.”

  “That’s what they get for letting every raghead who can get there into the country.”

  “Don’t say that aloud to them. They don’t have warm fuzzies about the politicians. And Soetoro is doing it too. Welcome to diversity.”

  “So where’s your significant other?”

  “Rachel? She hit the road. I don’t know the straight of it, but I think she got tired of waiting for me to come home and started picking up men in bars. Anyway, she left a note. Want to read it?”

  “No.”

  “That’s good, because I tore it up.”

  The coffee was dripping through, and he poured me a cup. He had to wait a minute for the pot to deliver enough for another cup.

  When we were sitting in his little living room, I said, “I suppose you heard about Jake Grafton getting arrested.”

  “Yeah. And parochial school murders and martial law and Texas declaring independence and all of that. The whole damned country is going to hell in a wheelbarrow. I’m thinking about pulling the plug and going to Montana. You know I grew up there?”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Yeah. My folks are outfitters, fishing trips during the spring and summer and hunters in the fall. My dad told me
last night I’ve got a job there if I want it. I’m sorta thinking I do. I don’t want to go back to Syria. They’re all pedophiles and wife-beaters. Sunnis and Shiites will be fighting each other for a century or two, and the truth is, I don’t think it matters a single teeny tiny little goddamn who wins.”

  “Probably not,” I murmured.

  “The only thing I am absolutely convinced of, I don’t want to die in that shithole.”

  “Montana would be good.”

  “I’m thinking about it.”

  “Before you run off, I need some help.” I told him about Jake Grafton and my project to rescue him.

  Travis Clay took it like a man and didn’t cry. What he said was, “Fuck you, Carmellini.”

  “You aren’t cute enough.”

  We batted it back and forth awhile, and I told him Willis Coffee was on board.

  “Oh, hell,” he finally said. “Why not?”

  Half an hour later, after we had gone through my plan from end to end, he said, “If you have to shoot an FBI agent, can you do it?”

  I answered honestly. “I don’t know.”

  “Better get that figured out before we saddle up. I guarantee you they will shoot you and me and Willis Coffee in a heartbeat if we stop that car. That’s what they train them to do at Quantico. They won’t even think about it—they’ll just throw lead.”

  “I suppose.”

  “What you need, Tommy, is a serious diversion. Think about that for a while. The feds will pull out all the stops if we snatch Jake Grafton, whether we shoot an agent or two or not. Barry Soetoro will turn purple. We must give Soetoro and the rest of them something else to think about, something with a higher priority.”

  I was in a McDonald’s munching a Big Mac when the phone rang. It was Callie Grafton.

  “I saw him,” she said. “He looks good.”

  “Great. Maybe I’ll stop by this evening for a beer.”

  “Sure,” she said.

  We hung up.

  So it was a go.

  JR Hays rolled into Austin late that Sunday afternoon. He was fighting to stay awake, but he parked by the state capitol and walked across the lawn. Upstairs, he told the governor’s receptionist who he was and took a seat in the waiting room. Legislators came and went, striding purposefully, almost trotting. He gathered that the legislature was in session on the other side of the building, arguing about and passing the legislation needed to convert Texas from a state in the United States to an independent republic.

  An hour passed. JR dozed in the chair. The governor shook him awake. “Come into my office, JR. I apologize for the wait. We’re making history and trying to give every Texan a decent place to live.”

  He went into the office, and Jack Hays closed the door behind them. “Talk to me,” the governor said, and sat down behind the desk.

  JR dropped into a chair and told it. “There are ten dead men at the ranch. I ambushed them last night. They were carrying about two hundred pounds of some kind of drug, and I have about a hundred fifty pounds of it in the truck. Two of the backpacks the mules carried were too full of holes to hold the stuff. One of the guards was that deputy sheriff we met before the funeral, Morales I think his name was. There couldn’t be two men in west Texas tattooed like that. After the ambush, I hot-footed it out to the highway, and who should be driving up and down but Sheriff Manuel Tejada.”

  “Was he in on it, you think?”

  “I called him this morning, told him there had been a shootout between two drug gangs, and the stuff was lying all over. Told him I wanted to call the state police and DEA. He begged me to wait until he had come out to look the scene over. He would have probably tried to shoot me, so I boogied.”

  Jack Hays was a quick study. “How do you want to handle this?” he asked his cousin.

  “We have to fix it so the drug syndicate guys don’t come to the ranch with enough firepower to conquer Israel and whack little old me. Plugging Tejada would have felt mighty good, but it wouldn’t have solved that problem. I want to take these backpacks over to DPS headquarters, and the colonel needs to have a press conference. Show the drugs to the press. He needs to thank Sheriff Manuel Tejada for his cooperation, which was an essential element in the investigation that allowed the Texas DPS to break up this gang of smugglers.”

  Jack Hays smiled. “The phones here are down. I’ll take you over there. Let’s go.”

  The cousins drove to the state police headquarters in JR’s truck. They went in to see Colonel Frank Tenney. Fifteen minutes later two state troopers armed with the key to JR’s toolbox in the bed of his truck carried the backpacks full of dope up to Tenney’s office.

  Tenney looked the governor in the eye. “There was a warrant issued for JR over in Upshur County today. He’s wanted for murder and drug trafficking. It’s signed by a justice of the peace. They radioed the news in.”

  “Squash it,” Jack Hays said, waving the warrant away as if shooing a fly. “He was working as an undercover agent for the Department of Public Safety. I want you to hold a press conference, for the evening news if possible, and have the department take full credit for recovering a hundred and fifty pounds—or whatever it is—of narcotics and smashing a smuggling gang. And I want you to tell the world that it wouldn’t have happened without the active help of the sheriff of Upshur County, Manuel Tejada, who gave you the intelligence necessary to break up this gang. It is unfortunate that the smugglers chose to fight rather than submit to arrest and trial by jury, but that was their choice. I want you to make the point that the Republic of Texas will seek out and actively hunt down narco-criminals. Tell the world that Governor Jack Hays has personally assured you the Department of Public Safety will get the funding and manpower needed to finally do the job right.”

  The lab did a quick check and established the drug was pure, uncut cocaine, and the cops weighed the stuff. The street value they came up with was $1,360,000 at twenty grand a kilo.

  Driving back to the capitol, Jack Hays told JR, “Come on over to my place for dinner tonight. We need to talk. Washington is gearing up for a war against Texas.”

  “Breakfast tomorrow,” JR said. “I’ve been up over thirty-six hours and am going to a hotel to crash.”

  “Breakfast at my house,” Jack Hays said, shook his cousin’s hand, and walked into the capitol.

  JR did indeed crash, but not until after he had a shower and watched Colonel Tenney on the evening news. The camera lingered on the pile of cocaine on Tenney’s desk. “Breaking this gang would not have happened without the intelligence provided by and the active cooperation of Sheriff Manuel Tejada of Upshur County,” Colonel Tenney intoned, staring into the camera. “He was instrumental in helping us smash a major narcotics smuggling operation. All of Texas thanks you, Sheriff Tejada.”

  JR hit the bed and slept for ten hours.

  The aftermath was not slow in coming. Two mornings later Mrs. Tejada found her husband wired to a tree in their backyard. He was dead, strangled with bailing wire. She was pretty broken up about it, until she found over a quarter of a million dollars in an old chest in the guest bedroom, wrapped in a quilt her mother made over a half century ago. Since no one knew where the money had come from, she kept it and lit a candle for her husband in the local church.

  When the state police finally got around to visiting the Hays ranch, they found the bodies, which had been worked on by buzzards, coyotes, and feral pigs, one of which was lying dead with the mules. It had apparently ingested enough of the cocaine scattered around to kill it, so presumably it went to pig heaven happy. The only positive identification the cops made was the body of Deputy Sheriff Jesus Morales, identified by his fingerprints and distinctive tattoos, but his boss had been dead almost a week by then, so it was decided to not make a fuss and embarrass the Morales family, who were third-generation Americans, and by all accounts good people. The other dead men were apparently Mexican nationals, so their fingerprints were passed to the Mexican DEA, which didn’t bother to ac
knowledge the receipt of them.

  When the Hays’ hired man returned from his two-week vacation, he repaired the ranch fence.

  But all that was aftermath, and the lives of Jack and JR Hays had moved on by then.

  TEN

  On Monday morning, August 29, JR got his pickup from the hotel valet and drove to the governor’s mansion. There he discovered that the governor had a maid, who admitted him and led him to the dining room, where Jack and Nadine were buried in the Austin Statesman. The events of the previous day and the full text of the Declaration of Independence filled the front page. Inside were interviews with legislators and quick man-in-the street quotations from celebrating citizens of the new republic. The Statesman, a liberal newspaper, editorialized that the governor and legislators who voted for independence were irresponsible radicals whose actions bordered on insanity.

  After the trio had discussed the events of the previous day, JR remarked about the maid. Jack said he did a lot of official entertaining so the legislature paid the salaries of a maid and a cook.

  “He’s in the kitchen now whipping something up. You ready?”

  “Sure,” JR said.

  “Jack, read that editorial aloud,” Nadine urged. So he did.

  Jack said dryly, “If the Statesman had editorialized that we had done the right thing, I would have been really worried.”

  Soon the maid served eggs Sardou with crumbled bacon, unbuttered toast, and white wine.

  Jack said to his cousin, “If it’s too early for you for wine, we have coffee and the juices.”

  JR glanced at his watch. “I have an ironclad rule that I never drink before seven in the morning,” he said, “and it’s ten after. I’ll do the wine.”

  Nadine took coffee with cream.

  Jack and Nadine expressed the hope that the Houston rioting was at last at an end. As they ate they discussed the new status of Texas.