Liberty's Last Stand

by Stephen Coonts

  Of course, he worried a little about the possibility that the Soetoro administration might eventually want him permanently removed from the land of the living. If they just had him arrested, he might talk. So arrest wasn’t the risk.

  Tobe Baha had thought it over when approached for this shoot, and decided he could handle the risk of treachery by his employers. After all, three or four of the Secret Service people knew of the plot.

  He had said as much on his last interview with Al Grantham. “If you don’t pay me the money you owe or if you send people after me, I’ll come after you,” he told Grantham, “and I won’t miss.”

  Austin certainly had possibilities, Tobe concluded as he drove around. The capitol was surrounded by buildings, although they were several hundred yards from the capitol itself, which sat on a small knoll surrounded by scattered large trees and lots of grass. The governor’s mansion also had buildings within range of a .308. The real question was whether Jack Hays’ bodyguards included snipers. Protecting a public figure from bombs and maniacs with pistols and knives was what the Secret Service did best. Snipers, however, were the worst threat, which was why Tobe Baha had been recruited by the service. It takes a sniper to kill a sniper.

  If the Texas crowd didn’t have snipers protecting Jack Hays, Tobe Baha’s mission would be a whole lot easier. So his first task was to determine if they did.

  Tobe Baha smiled. This was going to be a good hunt.

  Major General JR Hays launched his first offensive that morning, the thirty-first of August. He watched Texas guardsmen file aboard six C-130 Hercules transports, four-engine turboprops, at Fort Hood, sixty-four combat-equipped soldiers to each plane. Two other C-130s were being loaded with howitzers, ammunition, rations, water, and a portable field hospital.

  “I’m banking on surprise,” JR told Colonel Nathaniel Danaher, who was leading the attacking force. “I think you can get on the ground and establish a perimeter before the people on the ground figure out that something is going down. I want you to clear the planes and let them take off immediately for another load. Ideally, I’d like to get a brigade on the ground over there with some artillery to give it teeth. F-16s will provide close air support and top cover. But it’s up to you to stop our assault if you find you are in way over your head. You must remain in radio contact with the planes in the air at all times, keep them advised of how things are going.”

  Nate Danaher looked ten years younger than he did last night. The challenge of leading men in combat had always energized him.

  The six transports bearing soldiers took off first, escorted by a high top cover of F-16s from Lackland. The attacking force would fly east of Barksdale, turn and approach the base from that direction, calling the control tower for landing clearance. While the panicked air controllers sorted through messages trying to find one about incoming Hercs, the Hercs would land, discharge their troops, and take off again. The C-130s bearing howitzers and ammo would land an hour later, after the soldiers of the first wave had secured the flight line.

  Would they achieve surprise? JR Hays asked himself that question, but he didn’t know the answer. If the bad guys had gotten wind of the invasion of Louisiana, he would be among the first to hear about it.

  Maybe yes, maybe no, he decided.

  Perhaps he should have given his major general stars to Nate Danaher and commissioned himself a colonel, then led the troops invading Barksdale. Jack Hays would have said okay, if that was the way he wanted it. But would Nate Danaher have laid on this attack if he had been the general in charge? That hypothetical had no possible answer, because JR had made the decision. Nate had saluted and marched off to give every ounce he had in him. That quality, JR thought, was the salvation of the professional soldier. Regardless of whether the professional thought the order wise or foolish, he said, “I will do my best, sir,” and the rest of the sentence was unspoken: “Even if it kills me.” So generals ordered men into combat, knowing that some of them, an unknown number, would die. Generals hoped and prayed that the objective would be worth the sacrifice, and, in the end, only they and God would know how the scales balanced.

  JR thought ruefully about the old observation that doctors buried their mistakes. Truly, so did generals.

  And yet, even if he lost every soldier and airplane he sent this morning, JR Hays would win a strategic victory simply by attacking. He knew that in the depths of his military soul. Soetoro would stop worrying about invading Texas and wreaking havoc and start worrying about protecting what he had. People the world over expect their government to protect them, and when it doesn’t, or can’t, they begin to worry.

  And if Danaher was victorious and captured a fleet of intact B-52s, Barry Soetoro would start fretting about where they might be used against him. Would they bomb Washington? New York? Los Angeles? A squadron of B-52s carpet-bombing with unguided weapons could destroy a city, just as they did Hanoi. Fighters would be detailed to guard the skies over cities and military bases. Soetoro must commit his air force to protecting those places, and if he did, those air assets would be unavailable to attack Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Austin, or the military bases Hays had captured.

  JR walked across the tarmac when the troop-laden transports were out of sight and went into the base’s air traffic control facilities. “Are the Lancers from Dyess airborne?”

  “Yes, sir. Target time is less than an hour away.”

  The B-1s were targeted against the military equipment at Fort Polk. Many of the soldiers at Hood had trained at Polk, and they helped annotate maps. The Lancer crews knew precisely where they were going, and they had air cover, F-16s from Lackland. In and out fast like a rabbit was their credo. Leaving smoldering wreckage.

  JR got a cup of coffee from the pot and sat down in front of a temporary theater map taped to the wall. He had launched his strikes; now there was nothing to do but wait.

  Wait, wait, wait.

  I found Jake Grafton alert that morning when I took a cup of coffee into the dispensary. He was still on the gurney.

  “Tommy, you’ve got to get me off this thing and help me to the restroom.”

  I did that, and then I put him in a large easy chair in the main room of the facility, or lodge, or whatever they called it, with a blanket wrapped around him.

  “Thanks for rescuing me, Tommy,” Grafton said with coffee in hand. He sniffed it, savoring the smell before he took the first sip.

  “Any old time, Admiral. The guys and I had nothing to do since you got kicked out of the agency. So we thought, let’s go spring the admiral and take a nice vacation.”

  “And Sarah Houston?”

  “She’s got the hots for me something terrible. I think that’s affected her brain. Whatever, she came along.”

  About that time all the folks upstairs came down, so I got busy fixing breakfast. Needless to say, we didn’t have eggs or milk or any of that, but we had beans and MREs and a lot of canned meats and veggies. I made a stew. Tasted it and added some salt and a generous dollop of Cholula sauce.

  When I brought it into the main room and put it on a table, Sal Molina and Jack Yocke were in earnest conversation with Grafton. I ladled some of the stew out for the admiral, gave it to him with a spoon, and told everyone else to help themselves.

  Sarah was eating tiny little bites. “The first person who complains gets to do the cooking,” I said with no-nonsense authority.

  Willie Varner made a face. “Tastes like shit, Tommy, but good.”

  When the chuckles died, he started telling about the fare in the prisons he had resided in. According to the Wire, prisons were good feeders. He was lying, again. After he got out the second time, he told me he never wanted to see a macaroni or spaghetti noodle again as long as he lived.

  I sent Willie and Armanti down to the guard shack to relieve Travis and Willis. “We’re going to have visitors, probably sooner rather than later.” I told them about the doctor and my threat. “I doubt if he believed me. I don’t have a face that will sc
are anybody.”

  “He’ll blab for sure,” Willie said, nodding.

  When Willis Coffee got there, he went upstairs and got an extra shirt and jeans for the admiral. He was about the same size. Travis Clay loaned Grafton his tennis shoes; he said the boots were fine for him. I left the guys to clean up, took a carbine, checked to see that the magazine was full and there was a round in the chamber. Strapped my pistol belt around my middle. It had been a few years since I was here, and I wanted to refresh my memory about how the land laid. Grafton, Molina, and Yocke were busy solving the world’s problems as I left.

  I walked up behind the lodge, stood for a moment listening to the muffled generator, then hiked straight up the hill to the ridge. At first the hill behind the lodge was steep, then the grade lessened and it was just a walk in the forest, which was beautiful. The chain-link fence on the ridge ran north-south, surveyor straight. The trees and brush had been cleared for ten feet on either side, and this late in the summer, the open space was full of knee-high weeds. I walked the fence for about a half mile north, going downhill when the ridge turned west. I crossed a little creek that didn’t have any water in it and then followed the fence back steeply uphill.

  I kept track of the security cameras mounted unobtrusively in trees on our side of the fence. The cameras were battery-operated and broadcast to a receiver in the security shack. I could just discern a trail agency people had walked through the years changing the camera batteries, and no doubt replacing cameras that broke or got water in them or someone in the National Forest on the other side of the fence shot for the hell of it.

  When I had had enough I turned eastward, downhill in the general direction of the guard cabin. Ended up climbing another ridge. This ground was cut up by meandering little creeks and steep slopes, all heavily wooded.

  Mainly by accident I finally found the access road and followed it to the guard cabin. I could hear the generator running a hundred feet away.

  I walked in without knocking and startled Willie Varner and Armanti Hall, who were listening to a radio—police calls, or maybe FEMA calls. The digital feed from the security cameras was on a monitor beside the radio, but they weren’t watching it.

  “With that generator going, you dudes won’t even hear them coming,” I remarked.

  “Sit down, Tommy,” Armanti said. “You should hear some of this. People are shooting at federal officers. I don’t know if they are FEMA or Homeland, and I don’t guess it matters.”

  “Where?”

  “Well, I don’t recognize any of the place names, but I kinda think up in Maryland or Pennsylvania someplace. One guy was talking about getting more vehicles and agents out of Harrisburg.”

  Willie chimed in, “Two federal guys shot and need evacuation. They claim they killed three of the locals. Civilians. Ambushers, they called them.”

  “We thought we should keep an ear open for transmissions around here,” Armanti explained, reading the expression on my face.

  “You guys start watching the barn and hangar security cameras on the monitor. The feds won’t sneak down through the woods. Someone will drive up that road sooner or later and they won’t give you a heads-up call on the radio. You’ll see them on the barn and hangar cameras.”

  “We can’t stay here,” Willie declared. He wasn’t Einstein but he got there eventually.

  I tromped out and headed up the hill to the lodge. If we didn’t leave we were running the risk of being trapped. I should have stuck my pistol in that doctor’s mouth and scowled until he crapped his pants. Grafton was asleep again. He was certainly in no condition to be moved, so we had to stay.

  I got Willis Coffee and Travis Clay to dig a nest for two heavy machine guns across the road from the parking area where they could engage any vehicles that drove up. They were pros: they knew how to set up a machine-gun nest. They took some AT4s along, just in case, and got busy moving the guns and ammo.

  Jack Yocke and Sal Molina were not thrilled when I told them they were now soldiers in the Army of the Rebellion. “I’m a reporter,” Yocke said stiffly.

  “I just drafted you,” I replied. “When this is over, you’ll probably have enough material to write a couple of books and eat on the rubber chicken circuit until you die of constipation. Right now, however, your problem is staying alive. I’m about to do you a big favor and show you how you can do that, and help the rest of us stay alive too.”

  “And if I say no?”

  “You walk down to the hard road and hitch a ride anywhere you want to go.”

  “I’ll stay.”

  “I’m so thrilled.”

  Molina said, “I’m fat, out of shape, and never touched a weapon in my life.”

  “When this is over, you’ll want to join the NRA.”

  “What about me?” Sarah asked.

  “You are my inside surprise. You can toss grenades and shoot if they come through the door in front or back. I suggest that you pick a few spots to watch the back of the building. If we get visitors with something nasty on their minds, they will drop someone off to come through the woods behind us. Your job is to guard the rear.”

  I showed the three of them how to operate the carbines, grenades, and AT4s. “Don’t fire one of these AT4s in the house. The back blast will burn the building down.”

  When I thought they had the basics, I gave them a little heart-to-heart about combat. “You are going to be very scared when the shooting starts. Concentrate on making your weapon function and keep firing it at the bad guys. It’s really easy to shoot the wrong people, which will not help you nor the rest of us. The main thing is to stay in the fight.”

  “What about prisoners?”

  “What about ’em?”

  “Well, what if they throw down their weapons and surrender?”

  “Anybody who gets into a shooting scrape with us wants our weapons, vehicles, and food. If you surrender, they’ll kill you. I suggest you do the same to them.”

  “I can’t do that,” Molina said frankly. Yocke nodded his agreement.

  “Don’t worry. Someone will do it for you,” I said. “Just don’t let ’em run off.”

  “Could you shoot a man with his hands up?” Yocke asked Sarah.

  She looked at him as if he had asked if she were still a virgin. Women are usually tougher and more realistic than men.

  One of the troopers in the back of the first C-130 in the string flying just above Louisiana was Specialist Jimmy Schaffran from Minnesota. His story was unique, as was the story of every man in the plane, but perhaps similar to many. He had been a chubby nerd in high school, addicted to video games, partly because he wished to find some way to escape a bad home situation and partly because he was unattractive to girls. He had no idea what to say to them. Certainly he wasn’t a jock or rocket scientist. There was no money in the family to send him to college when he graduated from high school, a fact he didn’t fret because he didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life and doubted that he was smart enough for college, anyway. He got a job delivering sandwiches in his father’s old work car, then pizza because the tips were better, and finally decided to join the army.

  Recruit training nearly killed him. Pushed mercilessly by the sergeants, the pounds began melting off and his stamina increased dramatically. After thirty pounds of fat were gone, he began gaining muscle.

  Jimmy Schaffran found a home in the army. He had some buddies and they went into town together. He met a girl, a cute waitress in Killeen with a little tattoo over her heart, which happened to put it on the top of the swell of her left breast; she loved to neck in his car, the first one he had ever owned, cherry red, only three years old, with a loud aftermarket muffler.

  When this Texas thing went down, a Guard officer asked him if he wanted to go back to the U.S. Army or fight for Texas. Jimmy hadn’t hesitated. “I’m from Minnesota,” he said, “but now I’m a Texan.” His buddies, from California, Michigan, and South Carolina, also decided they were Texans. “Be a shame to break up
a good team,” one of them said. So all four were in this assault on Barksdale, two on this plane and two on another.

  “Hell, it’s all an adventure,” Jimmy Schaffran told himself, wished his stomach would stop doing flips, and squeezed his weapon a little tighter.

  Nathaniel Danaher sat behind the pilots in the cockpit of the first C-130 to approach Barksdale. The planes, strung out in trail about a mile apart, had flown the entire distance from Fort Hood at a hundred feet above the ground. They had managed to avoid several radio towers, which would have made flying at this altitude suicidal at night.

  As briefed, the pilot called Barksdale Approach, gave his position from the field, and asked for clearance to land. “I’m leading a flight of six. My playmates are in trail and would like to land behind me.”

  There was a long silence, then, “We don’t have a flight plan on you. Where did you take off?”

  “Fort Rucker.”

  Another pause, then, “Make a modified straight-in to Runway Three-Three, Altimeter two niner niner six, wind three one zero at seven. Switch to Tower and report five miles.”

  “Wilco.”

  The copilot flipped the radio freq and made the call, trying to keep his voice airline-pilot, ah-shucks cool.

  “Flight of six, cleared to land.”

  The copilot turned to Danaher. “They’ll get on the phone to Rucker, sir.”

  “Regardless of what they say, land. Taxi right over in front of base ops and drop the ramp.”

  Danaher went into the back and got his troops ready. They had been carefully briefed, and knew they were to go off running as soon as the loadmaster lowered the ramp.

  In Barksdale Approach Control, confusion reigned. The only planes scheduled to arrive at noon were a flight of four F-22s. If Ops had received messages about arriving Hercs, no one had seen them, but that didn’t mean they didn’t exist somewhere. And there was something else. Approach Control radar showed blips without transponder codes, up high and approaching from the south. What were these airplanes? The duty ops officer called his boss, a colonel, who confessed his ignorance. Flipping madly through the messages on the message board, and calls to the message center, didn’t help. Nor would calling Center do any good: Center was off the air and no one was answering the telephones.