Liberty's Last Stand

by Stephen Coonts

“For God’s sake, Lorrie. We can’t do Texas any good if they disable us right here at the pier.”

  Loren Snyder ran his hand through his short hair. He had been so worried about his ability to handle this ship, perhaps losing her at sea and killing these volunteers, that he had not sufficiently considered the risks of sitting here at the pier. At the pier, Texas was only a harmless steel sculpture. At sea submerged, she was a powerful warship.

  “You’re right, Jugs,” he acknowledged. “Let’s get two guys topside to dump the gangway and cast off lines, you take the conn from the bridge. I’ll do the control room, and we’ll get the hell out of Dodge.”

  That was the way it worked. Julie Aranado gave the orders from the tiny bridge, and using her rudder and screw in reverse, Texas backed out of the slip in which she was moored and began forward motion toward the mouth of Galveston Harbor. Julie had her at five knots when she saw the speedboats with machine guns on the forward deck come through the harbor entrance at high speed and turn toward the submarine.

  “The SEALs are here,” she shouted into her voice-activated microphone on her headset. “Give me more turns.”

  She felt the screw of the sub biting. Behind her a rooster tail was forming. The screw was partially out of the water and was much less efficient than it would be when fully submerged.

  As the three speedboats rounded the far pier, a ragged fusillade rang out. Julie didn’t hear it, but she saw the faint traces of smoke and flashes from the rifles on the shore. The sheriff must have stationed sharpshooters on the piers, she thought.

  One of the boats lost way. The other two turned hard to fall in formation with the sub. Julie asked for more turns on the screw.

  “We’re going to have to submerge the hull,” she told Loren in the control room.

  “For God’s sake, stay in the channel,” he replied.

  She looked for the buoys. Fortunately this harbor was dredged regularly for cruise ships and freighters. The wind was playing with her hair as she scanned with the binoculars.

  Jugs heard the snapping of bullets passing close by. A glance aft. The machine guns on the speedboats were flashing. And the hull was settling under the surface and the submarine was accelerating. Still, the bullets from the machine guns could damage the small conning tower and the photonics masts, all that remained of the submarine above water. Without those masts, Texas was blind at periscope depth. The photonics masts had replaced periscopes. They contained low-light, natural-light, and infrared cameras, and their video was displayed on monitors in the control room.

  She timed the turn to the outbound channel and got it right. The boat answered the rudder nicely and the bow swung, and now they were going southeast into the rollers toward the ocean.

  Another glance aft. One of the speedboats was dropping back, but one was staying with Texas, now doing at least twenty knots.

  The speedboat might have managed to come alongside in calm waters, but now that they were out of the harbor the vessels hit the swells of the sea. Except for a slight pitching motion, Texas was unaffected, but the speedboat began to buck, rising and falling with every down thrust raising a cloud of spray.

  “Give me all you’ve got,” Julie said to Loren on the sound-powered phone.

  Incredibly, the bow wave that the tower was making became larger. She could hear and see the curl of water against the tower and feel the drops of spray. She held out her tongue and collected a few drops. They tasted salty. Riding the bridge as the sub ran on the surface was a sublime sensatory experience, just as she remembered it from her submarining days, a sensual experience that would stay with her all the days of her life.

  “Twenty-two knots,” Loren reported.

  Julie was watching the buoys. She wanted the safety of the deepest part of the channel. She was in it now, and she needed every foot. The coastal Gulf of Mexico was a shallow sea, unsuitable for submarine operations, the seabed dropping slowly away from the land.

  Finally the swells were too much for the last speedboat. A few more bursts, the spang of bullets smacking the steel conning tower, then the boat slowed. The submarine ran on into the empty ocean, past a coaster that may have been the SEALs’ mother ship, into the afternoon.

  Finally, an hour later, with two hundred feet of water beneath the keel, Julie Aranado said into her sound-powered mike, “Dive, dive, dive.” She unplugged the headset and dropped through the hatch, then pulled the hatch down behind her. Perched on the ladder, she spun the crank to dog it down. Then she went down the ladder and lowered herself through the opening in the pressure hull. She dogged that hatch behind her too, sealing the hull.

  At the helm, Ada Fuentes didn’t use the planes to help drive Texas under because the water was so shallow. The attack submarine sank slowly as her ballast tanks filled. When the conning tower disappeared under the surface in a boil of white water, the surface of the sea became a slick as the water continued to roil. While gulls soared above the place where Texas submerged looking for small marine life lifted by the swirling water, Texas ran southeastward, toward deeper water. She was in her element now, a powerful warship hidden under the surface, in the great wide sea.

  On Thursday morning, the first day of September, the power came back on in the Baltimore area. One power company, Potomac Electric Power, had figured out that the master computer that controlled the northeast grid had been sabotaged with bad code, so it began manually restoring power in portions of their service area. Still, restoring power to their entire service area would take a while, and restoring service to the entire northeastern United States would take days.

  One of the suburban residents, Lincoln B. Greenwood, a senior executive service employee of the Department of Health and Human Services, had not gone to work that day because without power nothing could be done at the office. He was delighted when his television came back on and lights illuminated in his house. He could hear the toilet tanks filling as water once again surged through the pipes. He grabbed his car keys and opened his garage door, which rose majestically.

  Greenwood was worried about the uncertainties the future held and had concluded that he and his wife didn’t have sufficient food in the house that would not spoil without refrigeration. And his daughter, with the four-month-old, undoubtedly needed baby food, formula, and diapers. He called her on his cell phone, and she affirmed his shopping list. She and her husband also needed more staples, she said.

  The lot at the mall in Clarksville was packed with cars when Greenwood arrived, which surprised him. All of these stores closed when the power went out because their registers and computer systems were nonfunctional. Greenwood glanced at his watch; the power had only come back on twenty minutes ago. All of these people must have been here waiting, probably for hours, hoping and praying the power would be restored.

  The queue to get into the supermarket, which also had a large pharmacy department, was four deep and extended around the corner of the store into the two-acre mall lot. Lincoln Greenwood got in line, resigned himself to a long wait, and began fretting that the store shelves would be empty when he got inside. The checkout lines would fill every aisle, blocking shoppers’ access to the shelves. What a nightmare!

  The man in front of Greenwood said he had parked on the grass across from the main entrance, and the store was not yet open. The clerks were just coming to work, he thought.

  Around the corner, out of Greenwood’s sight, the manager of the store stood in front of the locked doors and spoke to the crowd. “Folks, we are going to open the doors in a few minutes and admit ten shoppers a minute from the front of the line. When two hundred are inside, we will admit one additional shopper when one customer comes out. We have to comply with the fire codes, and besides, our checkout clerks can only work so fast. Due to the number of people waiting, we are limiting each shopper to the contents of one grocery cart, so there will be items on the shelves for everyone. Thank you for your cooperation and your patience.”

  Then, five minutes later, as he unlocked
the doors, the crowd, many of them white-collar workers from the vast bureaucracies of the federal government, scientists from the nearby Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, or mathematicians from the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, ten miles away, rushed the door. The surge was unplanned and unstoppable. The manager was swept out of the way. The exit door, on the other end of the store, shattered, apparently broken by someone in the crowd. People surged in through that door too.

  Behind the people in front shoving to get through the doors, the queue disintegrated and became a mob as people ran, shoved, pushed, and forced their way forward. Lincoln Greenwood gave way to panic. His daughter needed the baby supplies. He and his wife needed food and bottled water, and so did his daughter and her husband. Without it, they might starve if the power went off and water once again stopped coming from the tap.

  So Lincoln B. Greenwood fought his way forward. He threw several women to the ground and stepped on another who had already fallen. As he came around the corner of the building he could see the huge supermarket doorway, now standing wide open. A man took a swing at him but Greenwood parried the blow and continued his odyssey through the human sea.

  His shirt was torn and his face was bleeding from a woman’s fingernails when he made it through the door. People were already pushing shopping carts containing whatever they could grab, pushing them not toward the checkout counters, but toward the doors where people were trying to get in. People coming in began looting the carts. This milling, pushing, shouting, screaming swarm of humanity was no longer a group of civilized beings who attended church, obeyed the traffic laws, and were courteous to strangers; they were a primal force, much like a herd of charging elephants, driven only by their survival instincts.

  The store manager who had unlocked the doors and been swept aside ran into the parking lot and used his cell phone to call 911. Within two minutes a Howard County police car rolled to a stop with lights flashing and siren wailing. The officer killed the siren and met the manager, who ran toward him. Seemingly oblivious to the presence of the officer, the crowd surrounding the doors continued to push, shove, and fight.

  The police officer stood silently, watching the melee in disbelief as the manager shouted to be heard, “You have got to stop this madness. They’ll kill each other in there.”

  Indeed, the officer could see several people sprawled on the sidewalks and in the loading lane, apparently trampled or injured. They were being ignored by the surging mob. The officer tried to estimate how many people he could see, and concluded there were more than a thousand people outside the building.

  “What the hell do you think I can do?” the officer asked the manager without taking his eyes from the panicked mob.

  “Tear-gas them. My God, people are going to be killed in there! Can’t you see that?”

  “Tear gas isn’t going to stop them,” the cop said, and began talking to his dispatcher through the radio transmitter pinned to his lapel. He got into the patrol car and locked the door so he could hear better. The manager tried to jerk the door open, then pounded on the window with his fist.

  What the dispatcher knew and the officer didn’t was that this scene was being played out in supermarkets all over the county. Smaller mobs, but equally frightened, were looting hardware stores and stealing gasoline at service stations as quickly as it could be pumped.

  At the police station, the chief listened to the calls describing the looting and shook his head. Nothing could be done.

  Throughout the Pepco service area, similar scenes were being enacted. What the violent looting would have looked like if the crowds had known that just hours before Barry Soetoro had ordered electrical power shut off nationwide is something that defies speculation.

  Inside the Clarksville supermarket, Lincoln B. Greenwood managed to fill his pockets with little jars of baby food. He grabbed one box of six-quart cartons of Similac Infant Formula from a shopping cart and made for the door. He had to fight his way out, just as he had fought his way in. Now he had to keep both hands on the box of infant formula to keep it from being torn from his grasp, hug it into his belly, and use his elbows to create a pathway. When he finally reached his car, he still had the Similac, but two of the glass jars in his pockets were broken. He was bleeding from the nose where he had been punched and his shirt was in tatters.

  He got into the car, started the engine, and tried to get out of the parking lot, only to find that people trying to get in had abandoned their cars in the entranceways and ran for the store. He began bumping cars, trying to shove them out of the way. And succeeded. He got to a median, jumped it with his car, and drove away quickly. He was an animal fighting to survive, and he suspected he wasn’t going to make it.

  When Greenwood did get home that evening, the power was off again. Officers from the Department of Homeland Security had visited Pepco headquarters and demanded at the point of a gun that power be shut off throughout Pepco’s multi-county service area. When the lights again went out across the Pepco area, they handcuffed every executive they could find and led them away. Everyone else was told to leave the building immediately. The last officer out of the building seized the keys from a terrified janitor and locked the doors behind her.

  Oblivious to the panic that had seized suburban Maryland and was spreading like an internet virus across America, on Friday morning, the second day of September, Barry Soetoro went before the cameras in his best gray suit and blue tie, a combination that his makeup artist had once assured him was flattering.

  It would take hours, probably at least twenty-four, before the power went off all across the lower forty-eight states, or forty-six since Oklahoma and Texas had tried to go their own ways, so the president and his advisors thought he should use the time to build political support for the battles yet to come. “Comfort your friends and afflict your enemies,” Al Grantham advised; Soetoro thought that nugget summed up his mission. He had his best speechwriter prepare the remarks, and they were on the teleprompter, so he could look the unseen audience straight in the eyes as he delivered his truth.

  “My fellow Americans. As I address you today, many of our fellow Americans sit in the dark, sweltering in the heat, with food rotting, without any access to electricity because of the violent acts of desperate and dangerous men. Our nation is at war—at war with ideological fanatics who take the slave-owning Confederate States of America as their model. They want to destroy not only our nation’s electrical power grid, they want to destroy this country in pursuit of an extreme ideological vision that would deny women, minorities, and everyday Americans their basic rights. Already they have attacked United States military installations and killed brave servicemen and women who were defending freedom.

  “As you know, I have said repeatedly through the years that the two greatest threats to our nation are right-wing constitutionalists and climate change. I have been ridiculed in the conservative press for those statements, but as I foretold, the threat from the Right has become a deadly peril to our national life.

  “Tonight I ask all loyal Americans for their support, patience, and understanding as we fight to preserve the Union. One hundred fifty years ago, one of my predecessors had to fight the same battle against an enemy that would have kept half our nation as a haven for slavery. Today we battle a similar enemy, an embittered minority who cannot break with the past, whose political beliefs are grounded in ignorance, hate, and bigotry, and who are now in open rebellion against the United States. We face trying days ahead. But I pledge, as President Abraham Lincoln did before me, to preserve our Union and ensure that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth. Have faith, and I will lead us through the fire to the promised land. Thank you.”

  Where electricity still flowed through the wires, people nationwide sat staring at their television screens as picked liberal commentators talked about the president’s resolve, his vision. His forceful de
livery struck just the right note, one woman said. Another commentator, a tenured university professor infamous for urging all white people to commit suicide so the nonwhites of the earth could flourish, pounded the racial drum. Only through Barry Soetoro could the promise of racial justice and equal rights be realized, and white privilege once and for all be defeated and banished from the land.

  Where it was seen, the presidential speech had the opposite effect from the one he presumably intended. Panicked people quite beyond rational thought got in their cars and joined mobs looting stores.

  General Martin L. Wynette watched the speech on television in his Pentagon E-Ring office and shrugged sadly. Climate change!

  He asked himself, Were chaos and anarchy the president’s real goals, so he could build his socialist dictatorship upon the rubble? Or had the damned fool miscalculated once again? Was he a sublime evil genius, or simply a bumbling, incompetent believer in his own bullshit that fate and poisonous racial politics had raised to a very high place? Not that it mattered—the result was the same in either case. The apocalypse had finally arrived.

  A few offices down the E-Ring of the Pentagon from the office of the chairman of the JCS, the chief of naval operations, Admiral Cart McKiernan, was staring at a hard copy of the president’s order for the destruction of the power plants in Texas. The best way to do that was with Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles, the admiral thought, but he had no idea how many power plants there were in Texas.

  He had a much better grasp on how many Tomahawks the navy had, which was a little less than 3,400. The Soetoro administration had ended production in Fiscal Year 2015. The missiles cost $1.4 million each and the manufacturer, Raytheon, had stated that restarting the factory and suppliers’ production would take two years and increase costs. The next-generation missile was not scheduled into the fleet for ten more years.

  A Tomahawk was a subsonic cruise missile that carried a one-thousand-pound conventional warhead. To put a power plant out of action, the missile would need to score a direct hit. To do that, one needed to program the precise GPS coordinates, the latitude and longitude, of each target into the missiles. On a big power plant with large generators—as many as twenty, mounted on thick, reinforced concrete—direct hits by multiple missiles would be required to do significant damage. Perhaps five missiles for each target, because inevitably, as with all complex state-of-the art weapons, Tomahawk reliability was not one hundred percent. More like ninety percent, assuming they were properly and meticulously programmed before firing.