Liberty's Last Stand

by Stephen Coonts

The copilot, who was from Albany, New York, keyed his mike and replied, “We are fucking crazy. Once more into the suck. Will Texas pay our widows death benefits?”

  One of the Apaches behind him keyed the radio. “Sabby, I got him on infrared. Clear to the left.”

  The copilot initiated a turn. They were almost on the housetops. Flying a helicopter was an unforgiving art, and in filthy weather this close to the ground, it attained the level of black magic.

  The Apache behind them came abreast, accelerating. The Apache was an attack helicopter, manned by a crew of two seated in tandem. The pilot sits in the rear seat, the copilot/weapons operator, or gunner, sits in the front. Both were usually rated pilots and both had controls to fly the machine, but in combat the front-seater operated the sensors and aimed and fired the weapons, which included a chain gun under the fuselage and whatever rockets or missiles were loaded for the mission. It was designed to provide close air support to infantry, armor, and artillery, and it did it well.

  The Apache gunner had his target in sight; the chain gun sent a finger of fire shooting across the gloom.

  The target absorbed two seconds’ worth of 30-mm, then, with its tail rotor gone, lost control and tilted sideways, rotating viciously, then went into the ground and exploded.

  Erik Sabiston saw the flash of the explosion in his night-vision goggles.

  “The base,” he told the copilot. “Turn toward it.”

  They turned right. The base was lit up with streetlights, house lights, lights in parking lots. Tanks and artillery were bunched up, parked in a large grass area behind the exchange, facing the main gate.

  “Go down the flight line,” Sabby said.

  They got lost once, flying just over the tops of the buildings, then miraculously they saw the field dead ahead: Blackhawks, Apaches, and a few old Chinooks were lined up in rows illuminated by floodlights on poles. They should have at least turned the lights off.

  “I have the controls,” Sabby said. He turned the Blackhawk and pulled the nose up, bleeding off airspeed dramatically. When he was down to fifty knots, he straightened out, about fifty feet from the ground, and flew between the two rows closest to the hangar. He spoke on the intercom to the door gunners. “Shoot ’em up, guys.”

  The gunners fired one-second bursts at each target. One helicopter caught fire. Brap, brap, brap, the gunners worked methodically; the noise bursts were out of sync. Another Apache in the line caught fire.

  “Some ground fire from the hangars,” the copilot said, and within seconds a hole appeared in the right front quarter of their windshield. It was a strange feeling, being fired on intentionally by Americans.

  When they finished the line, Sabiston accelerated and turned to fly back to El Paso International. No warning lights on the panel. All systems looked normal. “Any damage in back?” he asked his crew chief.

  “Don’t think so. I’ll inspect.” He turned the controls over to the copilot, then flipped freqs and got on the radio to JR Hays, who needed to know about the disposition of the base armor and artillery.

  The Apache flown by Harvey Williston was following the Blackhawk down the line. “I have the target,” his gunner said. Dustin Bonner, from Tupelo, Mississippi, was the gunner. Earlier, Dustin was wondering if he had made the right decision signing on with the Texas Guard. There was going to be a lot of flying, a lot of shooting, and a lot of dying done before this thing was over. Maybe, he thought, he should have sneaked back to Mississippi and got back to playing blues guitar and working on his uncle’s catfish farm. One thing was sure, there was a future in catfish. Being a gunner on an Apache in the middle of a shooting war, not so much.

  Certainly not when you were flying in a helicopter in shitty weather like this. Even if the bad guys didn’t whack you, Mother Nature might. He fired rockets at the first few helicopters in the third row, which look undamaged. Three of them were obscured by the warhead’s blast. Locked up a TOW wire-guided missile and launched it. Another. Then he was aiming the 30-mm M230 chain gun mounted on the fuselage between the landing gear. He pulled the trigger, moving from parked chopper to chopper.

  The Apache flown by Mike Berk from Bemidji, Minnesota, followed along behind, with Mike’s gunner doing the dirty work. Despite soldiers sheltered behind hangar doors taking pot shots, there was no opposition. First Armored had not yet got it into their collective heads that they were in a war. They’d figure it out pretty soon, though, so the next trip down the flight line wasn’t going to be as pretty. Ahead of him he saw Williston turn left. “Follow me, Mike. Hellfires into the hangars. You have the one on the right, I’ll take the left.”

  The two attack helicopters made a sweeping 270-degree turn as lightning flashed and rain came in waves, under that low ceiling, until they were lined up. The ramp lights were off by then—someone had gotten to the switches. It didn’t matter to the Apaches, which had night-vision and infrared sensors that allowed the crew to fly and employ their weapons as if it were high noon on a cloudless day. The gunners fired the Hellfire missiles through the open hangar doors, and the explosions caused at least one fire that they could see.

  Then the two Apaches swept away southward toward El Paso International.

  Wiley Fehrenbach worked feverishly with his officers and NCOs to get their stuff loaded and out of the Guard’s compound. When the trucks were rolling, men jumped in their cars and left as fast as they could get out of the garage. The last of the cars were still pouring from the parking lot when the tanks rolled into view.

  The tanks stopped, then the Bradleys behind them. Only when the parking lot was empty did the tanks move forward again, carefully.

  From his vantage down the street three blocks, JR Hays and two volunteer troopers watched the tanks and Bradleys go by. JR had an AT4 under his right arm and an M4 carbine on a sling across his back. One of the troopers was also carrying an AT4, an extra, just in case.

  Before they left the armory, JR asked the young guardsmen, “Have either of you ever actually fired an AT4?”

  “No, sir,” each of them said.

  “Then you get to watch me miss tonight. Your job is to act as lookouts, to ensure we don’t get jumped by scouts.”

  But to JR’s amazement, there were no scouts. This was America, for Christ’s sake, not Baghdad or Mosul or some other squalid Arab town. Well, the soldiers would learn. And fast. The next time the Guard tried this, it wouldn’t be so easy.

  JR decided he would try for a Bradley when the troopers had re-embarked and were headed back to base. Patrols looking for guerillas or hidden troops took manpower. A constant low-level threat also took a toll on morale. JR knew because he had done his tours in the Middle East.

  JR found a basement stairwell to hide in, and took the extra antitank rocket.

  “If you see a scout, open up, force him to take cover, then scatter to the rendezvous point. Tonight’s goal is to ratchet up their fear a notch. You got that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Both these young troopers looked to be about twenty years old, but they were game. Given time, they would be good soldiers. Time. That’s what JR had to buy them by arranging some serious air attacks on the 1st Armored. Fuel storage tanks were probably the top priority if he could get some planes in the air carrying bombs. Without fuel, 1st Armored was going nowhere.

  With just the top of his camo cap showing, JR watched the troops set up a perimeter around the armory, with tanks on the four corners. Bradleys each carried six troopers, so that meant there were twenty-four troopers out there afoot, searching and guarding and looking to shoot the first man they saw with a gun.

  Time passed. Perhaps a half hour. The idling tanks were surprisingly quiet. The thunderstorm drifted off to the east and the wind was just a zephyr.

  Finally JR realized they had fired the armory. Probably by pouring gasoline around. Some of the windows must have been broken or shattered on their own, because soon smoke was oozing around the lights on poles around the place and the lights illuminati
ng the parking lot. He hoped the fire department had the sense to stay in the station tonight.

  He checked his sentries, who were out of sight. Waited.

  Waiting was the hardest part, he thought. You never get used to it. You wait for everything in the army, literally everything. Take a number, soldier. Or get in line. Then in combat, you wait some more. Wait to shoot and wait to die.

  Finally, with visible fire coming from three of the armory windows, the Abrams tanks started snorting and moving. Two of them led off up the street.

  JR Hays ignored them and watched the troopers return to the Bradleys. The Bradleys lined up; two tanks guarded the rear of the column.

  Darn.

  Picking up his AT4 and the spare, JR scuttled out of his hidey hole—he didn’t want to be there if the tank or Bradleys cut loose. The Abrams main battle tank was a formidable foe. Equipped with a 120-mm gun, a .50-caliber machine gun, and two .30-caliber machine guns, it was a rolling sixty-ton fortress protected by massive armor. Quite simply, the M1A1 Abrams was the finest tank on planet earth.

  The Bradley was also armored, more lightly than a tank, but for protection it did have a nice 25-mm gun that fired up to two hundred rounds a minute. Twenty-five millimeters meant the shells were about an inch in diameter. Throwing three of those monsters every second, the gun could shred buildings, vehicles, and people very nicely, thank you, at terrific ranges.

  JR took up a new position, partially hidden by a corner of a building. He laid his spare AT4 on the ground against the building. The lead pair of tanks clattered past JR at perhaps eight to ten miles per hour. He turned on the battery in the AT4. Now the Bradleys came, in formation, at the same speed. Kneeling, JR glanced at the trailing tank, then sprinted forward to get a square shot at the rear of the last Bradley. He kneeled, pushed the safety button forward, quickly made sure he had the crosshairs where he wanted them, and pushed the fire button. The job took no more than four seconds. Just a tiny delay and the rocket shot out of the tube, leaving an enormous blast of glowing hot exhaust gases pouring from the rear of the launch tube…and almost instantly the rocket hit the end of the Bradley, punched through, and exploded. A jet of fire shot back out the entry hole.

  JR had already dropped the empty tube and was running for the corner of the sheltering building when he heard the chatter of a machine gun. That was from the tank behind him, he thought. He tore around the side of the building, out of sight of the tanks, ran right by the extra loaded tube lying by the building, and ran hard. Troopers from the other Bradleys would be after him in seconds.

  He quickly found himself in an old neighborhood of mature trees and lawns and iron fences. Vaulted a fence and ran as if the hounds of hell were behind him, which they were, then got into an alley and ran on the gravel.

  From somewhere behind him he heard a shot. Not too loud. One of his kids, he hoped, slowing down the pursuit. He checked street signs and kept moving, now jogging.

  The carbine on his back was slapping him at every step, slowing him, so he pulled it off and carried it in his hands. His pistol belt was also rubbing him with every step. Damn, he was going to be sore. He must have run three miles or more before he came to the parking lot of a Walmart. He found Wiley Fehrenbach sitting behind the wheel of his SUV; his two guardsmen were already seated in the back.

  “I’m getting too old for this shit,” he told Wiley as he motioned him to drive and put on his seatbelt. Then he tried to ease the pistol on his raw, aching hip.

  Fehrenbach headed downtown.

  JR thought about the troopers in the Bradley he’d shot. No doubt they were all dead, or wished they were. They had been American soldiers, and perhaps he had even served with them somewhere in the last twenty years. When he recovered his breath, he turned to the two soldiers in the backseat.

  “I’m a soldier,” he offered in way of explanation, “which is an ancient, honorable profession. I had absolutely nothing to do with independence. I wasn’t even asked my opinion before the legislature did it. They did it because they thought their constituents wanted it desperately and without independence, Texas didn’t have a chance. I don’t know if they were right or wrong, yet I’m a Texan, and I’m all in. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” the two young men murmured. They were Texans too. JR wasn’t sure they did fully understand, so he continued: “Soldiers fight for their country. Ours is Texas. Freedom isn’t free, and if we’re going to get it, we’re going to have to fight for it. We’re going to have to hurt them worse than they hurt us, and we can’t ever give up. You see that?”

  One of the soldiers, his name tag said he was Murray, replied, “My dad is locked in a railroad car at the base. He’s the president of the El Paso Rotary. Wrote some stuff for one of those independence movements. Fight for Texas? Hell yes.”

  The other soldier, his name tag said Tyler, nodded his head. At the wheel Wiley Fehrenbach was nodding too.

  “Some of our enemies have to die and some of us will too,” JR Hays said. “Blood is the fertilizer of freedom. Maybe yours and mine.”

  He fell silent and watched the street with old, careful eyes. Fehrenbach pulled into a McDonald’s parking lot. Cars full of National Guard soldiers were waiting. “Murray, Tyler, run on over there and tell them to follow us to the airport. We have some work to do tonight.” The young guardsmen trotted off, carrying their weapons.

  On the way to the airport, JR said to Wiley, “Our objective is to isolate First Armored, make sure it can’t be reinforced or resupplied and can’t run. I want you to pull all those executive jets onto the runways and taxiways and then shoot out their tires so they can’t be moved easily. We may not be able to hold the airport, but at least no airplane will land on it until the army takes it back.”

  “And the airport on base?”

  “We’ll take care of that in a day or two,” JR said. “After you do the international airport, I want you to get busy blowing up railroad trestles, as far out of town as you can. No trains in or out. Then bridges on the highways.”

  “We can do that. We’re engineers.”

  “Do some ambushes, one or two, after you blow a trestle or bridge and they come to look. Try to hit a patrol in town occasionally. Shoot, then skedaddle. Don’t get in any stand-up fights when you’re outnumbered and outgunned. Just worry them.”

  “Hit and run.”

  “Precisely. The playbook is so old the pages are crumbling, but the tactics still work.”

  After a moment he added, “The army will soon be trying to ambush your men and doing searches house to house looking for weapons and uniforms. You’ll be amazed at how fast the army’s combat veterans will catch on, even anticipate your tactics. They’re pros, not twenty-year-old amateurs like the two with me tonight.”

  “I understand.”

  “You have to watch out for your boys, Wiley, or soon we won’t have any soldiers to fight with, just a bunch of bodies.”

  JR thought about his comment to the soldiers that he had had nothing to do with independence. Perhaps Joe Bob’s death at the hands of smugglers had pushed Jack toward independence. Certainly, he thought, his father’s death had convinced him, when he heard about independence, that he was going to fight.

  Not being an introspective man, he left it there and began thinking about how to win the war of independence. When Wiley Fehrenbach climbed out of the car and went inside the terminal to wait for his soldiers to assemble, JR found a notebook in the car and wrote an order to Major General Elvin Gentry.

  “It is essential that we take the offensive and give Washington something to think about besides pounding Texas into submission. Have your B-1 people study up on railroad trestles and bridges out of the Powder River Basin in northeastern Wyoming and southeastern Montana. Send as many planes as possible as soon as possible to hit those trestles and bridges. I want to stop all the trains into and out of the Powder River Basin. The coal-fired power plants they service will soon run out of coal and shut down. The second-priority t
argets are pumping stations on natural gas delivery lines to the Upper Midwest and Northeast. If we can shut some of those gas lines down, many of the power plants there will have to shut down too.”

  He signed it JR Hays, Major General Commanding, Texas Guard. Then he went into the executive terminal, found the pilots of the executive jet that he had flown in on, gave them the note, and told them to fly to Dyess right away, before the runway was blocked. They were to deliver the message to Elvin Gentry.

  Fehrenbach posted guards armed with rifles and AT4s on the access roads to the airport. He set the rest of his men to towing planes onto the runways with the little tractors and tow bars the FBO had parked on the ramp. “Park the crash truck out there too,” he said.

  Wiley Fehrenbach and JR Hays were called to the lobby television by the desk lady, who apparently had no idea that the jets on her ramp were being moved. She pointed to the television. Jack Hays was giving a speech.

  President Jack Hays—the legislature had awarded him that new title along with declaring itself the Congress of Texas—was escorted by the leaders of the Texas House and Senate. They walked past television cameras from local stations whose feed was beamed to satellites that were broadcasting across the world. Soetoro’s censors might prevent it from being aired outside of Texas, but it would circle the earth and eventually reach every person upon it.

  After shaking dozens of hands on his way to the podium, Jack Hays at last took his place behind it. His writers and Ben Steiner had given him a speech, but to Steiner’s dismay, he left the speech in his pocket. He was going to wing it.

  In the packed gallery he saw his wife, Nadine.

  “My fellow Texans,” he began. Then he changed that, “My fellow Texans and American patriots everywhere. I speak to you tonight after a tumultuous few days, a historic period that marks the beginning of our fight for freedom, a fight that we hope patriots everywhere in America will join and stand shoulder to shoulder with us against tyranny.”

  He detailed President Soetoro’s transgressions, laying special emphasis on his imposition of martial law and the jailing of political opponents. “Who would have thought that what is being done now was possible in the United States: that we live in fear of the midnight knock on the door; that many of our leading citizens are in concentration camps, where at any moment we might join them as prisoners. Let us be frank. America is now being ruled by a tyrant who has shredded the Constitution of the United States. In the last week, one man has seized all power unto himself, and the rights of no man or woman in America are safe.