Liberty's Last Stand

by Stephen Coonts

  I went out to the pickup while Dr. Proudfoot worked. Clouds were building over the mountains to the west.

  I changed magazines in the M4 and examined the pistol I had taken off the bleeder. A 9-mm, and the magazine was full. God only knows where the bastard got it, but I would have bet a thousand to one he didn’t buy it. I decided to give it to the doctor. We were getting a nice collection of weapons, but no matter how hard you try, you can only shoot one at a time.

  Another guy pulled up in an old truck. His son was in the right seat, shot once above the heart. I helped him carry the boy inside. He was maybe fifteen. People were stealing the cows, the man said, and the boy put up a fight.

  “It’s like trying to stop an avalanche,” the old man said. Tears were running down his weathered cheeks.

  I emptied my wallet for the doctor, who tried to wave the money away. “Got nothing to spend it on,” he said.

  “It won’t always be like this,” I said, with more conviction than I felt. I told him I would be back tomorrow to check on Mrs. Greenwood, and carried Angelica Price out to the truck. I got the deer haunch from the pickup that I had intended to give Mrs. Price and gave it to the doctor instead.

  I took her to the CIA safe house and made the introductions.

  After Sarah had Mrs. Price in bed, I made sure Yocke and Molina were standing by the machine guns in the pits and drove down to the guard shack where Travis Clay and Willie the Wire were playing gin. “Big-city punks are out, hillbillies are hunting drugs, and scared people are looking for food. All of them are armed. You guys better cowboy up and be ready.”

  Willie was appalled. He wanted to argue, but I told him, “It’s us or them, Willie. If you want to keep on living, you’d better be willing to shoot.”

  Mrs. Price’s house was down to smoking boards when I got back. The bleeder was dead, and Armanti Hall had dragged him around the house and put him beside Lincoln Greenwood.

  There were four corpses in the remains of the house, burned beyond recognition. The boards were still hot and smoking, and we didn’t have body bags, so we left them there.

  We buried Greenwood and the bleeder up on the hill in the Price family plot. Before we tossed the bleeder in the hole, I checked his pockets. He had a nice roll of bills on him.

  “You can’t take it with you when you go,” Armanti Hall said with a sigh.

  Some of the bills were blood-soaked. I peeled them off and tossed them in the hole. “He can take these,” I said, and handed the rest to Armanti. “Grab his feet.”

  We tossed him in, then went down the hill to the garden gate for the man lying there. He stunk to high heaven. Each of us grabbed a foot; we dragged him up the hill and dumped him in on top of the bleeder.

  I heaved my cookies before we got the holes filled up.

  As we walked down the hill for the last time, Armanti said, “I don’t want to live in Barry Soetoro’s new empire. I’m thinking of going to Texas.”

  The taste of vomit was strong in my mouth and the smell of death in my nose. “Maybe I’ll go with you,” I said.

  He had picked some potatoes and green beans from Mrs. Price’s garden while he waited for me, and had them in five-gallon buckets. We loaded the buckets into the truck and headed up the road to find a place to turn around.

  On the way back by Mrs. Price’s, before we got there, a pickup pulled up below the three cars in the parking area and three white males got out. The oldest one had a rifle. He aimed it at one of the cows in the pasture and pulled the trigger. The cow staggered a few feet, then went down. As the younger males, apparently teenage boys, climbed the fence, the guy with the rifle turned to face our stopped pickup. He held the rifle in both hands and looked at us defiantly.

  “Protecting his kill,” Armanti muttered. “I could drop the bastard before he gets a shot off.”

  “To what purpose?” I asked, and put the truck in motion.

  We drove on by. The shooter never took his eyes off us.

  “This place is like fucking Syria,” Armanti remarked.

  I didn’t argue.

  The evening after the Tomahawk strikes, Jack Hays held a press conference at an “undisclosed location,” which was the bottom floor of an underground parking garage in Austin, which fortunately was still on the electrical grid. Three print reporters were there, and two local television reporters, whose cameramen were set up with lights and sound and all the bits and pieces, including a set with a podium for the president of Texas and folding chairs the reporters.

  Jack Hays started by reading a statement about the progress of the government in converting a state in the United States to a standalone nation. Much had been accomplished by the legislature, which was in session twelve hours a day, seven days a week. A new currency had been approved and a Texas Border Patrol and Customs Service established. The tax department was expanded and statutes passed adopting federal tax rates for the new nation.

  “Everything has to be done at once,” Jack Hays said, “and we are up to our elbows in it. Inevitably there will be glitches, but we will try in good faith to correct any mistakes and injustices, if everyone will help us find them.”

  The first question was, “Mr. President, what can you tell us about last night’s missile strikes in the Houston area?”

  “The missiles were launched from at least two United States Navy surface ships, both of which were subsequently damaged by an attack from a Texas naval vessel. We know that much because crews on nearby oil-production platforms radioed what they had seen to their companies, who passed it to news media. We are doing our best to get power restored in the Houston area. We understand that at this time of year, loss of electrical power in that area is a humanitarian crisis.”

  After a half hour of answering questions about the measures the legislature had passed and was considering, Hays said, “One more question and we’ll call it an evening.” Three hands went up and he pointed to a reporter from the Wall Street Journal.

  She asked, “Under what circumstances would Texas consider rejoining the United States?”

  “Under the old Constitution?” Jack Hays asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t think of any,” Hays said curtly. He had learned long ago that the best tactic for a politician was to just answer the question asked or evade it. In the silence that followed that short sentence, he reconsidered his answer. Texans deserved to know his thinking, and if they didn’t like it, they could say so.

  As he tried to decide what to say, the reporter followed up with the question, “What if it was no questions asked, all forgiven?”

  “I’m certainly not going to engage in international diplomacy via your newspaper,” he said tartly.

  “Even if President Soetoro were removed from office?”

  “My answer stands.”

  “You mean, sir, there is no peaceful way to restore the Union?”

  Jack Hays weighed his answer as the cameras scrutinized his face and the reporters watched.

  “The old nation was seriously divided,” he said, “with political power split between large urban populations and the people in the heartland. Even Texas has some of that. Some of the policies that the elected politicians in Houston wish to follow have been resoundingly rejected by the rest of the state’s residents. In a free nation there will always be the push and pull of conflicting views, conflicting desires, conflicting interests. Yet in my judgment, in the old nation the system had broken down, irreparably, and that is why Barry Soetoro chose to become a dictator, to force his political vision on people who rejected it repeatedly at the polls and in the Congress.

  “Be that as it may, the reality is that if the people of Texas wish to continue to enjoy the rights granted by the old Constitution, such as free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, the right to own a gun, the sovereign right to control our borders, the right to be ruled by elected representatives and not be dictated to by the executive or the courts or bureaucracies…if Texans want those things
, they need to be an independent nation.”

  Jack Hays paused, gathering his thoughts. “Our parting from the United States has not been amicable. Barry Soetoro is raining Tomahawk cruise missiles on the people of Texas. If he wants Texas back in the Union, I would tell him what the citizens of Gonzales, Texas, told Mexican army Colonel Ugartechea in 1835 when he demanded return of a cannon. If you want it, ‘come and take it.’”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The interview with the Texas president Jack Hays was broadcast via satellite to those stations and networks still broadcasting in an America with limited electrical assets. It also was soon on the internet. Yet it was on clandestine radio stations that it was picked up by the refugees hidden in the CIA safe farm in the Allegheny Mountains.

  I was there when it was played on the recorder that Friday night to the assembled audience in the cabin on the mountainside. I had spent the evening worrying about what would happen when we were discovered, which was bound to happen in the near future. I inspected the machine-gun pits, strategically located around a kill zone in front of the house where any vehicles would have to come to a stop, and inspected each and every rifle and pistol and AT4. I was a worried man, and tired of waiting.

  Sarah Houston watched me fret and said nothing. Perhaps she was becoming fatalistic. It would be a miracle if any of us got out of this mess alive. I wondered if she was resigned to the inevitable.

  Yet she was at my side when the tape played, and Jack Hays’ clear, confident baritone voice spoke of the problems of the United States and the future of Texas. I watched Jake Grafton’s face—the man should have been a poker master in Vegas—and the much more expressive faces of Sal Molina and Jack Yocke. And, I confess, cynic that I was, I wondered how all this squared with the White House plotting that Grafton had overheard. I had quizzed Sarah about that—she said she had listened to little of it. Grafton kept her too busy with other things. But, she said, Jake Grafton had listened. By the hour. Night after night. He knew!

  He knew what?

  When the tape was over, Sal Molina spoke first. “When Puerto Rico and Illinois melt down, America has two choices. We can let those two go bankrupt and default on their bonds, or the federal government can take over their debts. If the latter, the states as we know them are doomed: They will cease to exist as sovereign entities. The federal government—actually the executive—will be the ruler of America, able to dictate the smallest decisions, the minutiae of American life, dictate how it will be for his allies and his enemies, of whom he has a great many.”

  Yocke snorted. “It will never happen,” he declared.

  Molina merely gave him a derisive glance, stood, and went up the stairs to bed. Yocke piddled and diddled, looked out the window a bit, then followed Molina upstairs.

  Grafton and I were the only two left in the room. I decided to brace him. “How long are we going to hide here?”

  He looked at me with two raised eyebrows. “Are you getting impatient?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He nodded, readjusted his fanny without wincing, and sipped at a cup of cold coffee that rested on the stand beside him. After all his years in the navy, it seemed that he was impervious to caffeine.

  “The whole country is going to hell,” I said, “and I feel like a tit on a boar sitting around here. I’m ready to shoot somebody.”

  “I thought you did that earlier today.”

  “It wasn’t enough. I want to shoot some of those Soetoro sons of bitches, the assholes who decided to rule America and everyone in it. I want to kill those bastards for what they did to my country.”

  He grunted.

  “We can’t just sit here! What about your wife? Your daughter and her husband? What about America?”

  He smiled at me, which drove my blood pressure up another ten points. “Tommy, there is a time for everything. This pot has to simmer before the country is ready to throw Soetoro out. We’re almost there, I suspect, but not quite. Another day or two, then we’ll hit the road. We’ll have lots of help.”

  “Oh,” I said, less than enthusiastically. “And where the hell are we going?” I wanted to be sure the old fart had a plan.

  “Why, to Washington of course.”

  “And this help? Like who?”

  “We’ll pick them up on the way.”

  “You hope!”

  Grafton looked at me askance. “You don’t really believe in the American people, do you?”

  “I’ve killed too many of ’em.” He didn’t say anything, so I added, “They voted for Soetoro twice. They’ve sat on their collective thumbs watching the bastard pervert the Constitution, lie like a dog, and poison race relations, and they haven’t done anything about it other than elect some gutless Republicans who refuse to stand up to Soetoro. The American people don’t seem to give a damn about their country or the future that their kids are going to have to live in. Americans just don’t care anymore. Naw, I don’t think much of the American people. I wish I’d gotten out years ago.”

  When I wound down he cocked his head and looked me in the eyes as he said, “These are the descendants of the people who hacked out homes in the wilderness. They fought Indians, the British, the Mexicans, and each other. Over a half million Americans died in the Civil War. They peopled a continent and built a nation. They helped win two wars in Europe and defeated Japan. They fought in Vietnam to help a poor people resist communism. They’ve done their best to fight terrorism and help people in the third world get a leg up. You grossly underestimate them.

  “True, they voted for Soetoro, and a lot of them did it because they naively thought Soetoro would be good for race relations in America, and they thought that was a larger good. This race thing…,” he shook his head, “…people want America to include everybody. Martin Luther King left a huge legacy, and America wants his vision, wants an American to be judged by his character rather than the color of his skin. That is the society we want to live in, but we’re not there yet. Our first black president got into office not because of his character or his politics, but because he’s half-black—or in the parlance of today, black. He gets away with pissing on the Constitution because he’s black. He gets away with lying because he’s black. He gets away with poisoning race relations because he’s black. Even the liberals on the Supreme Court have given him pass after pass.”

  Grafton sighed. “His time has run out. The American people have gotten a good look at Soetoro this past week, and I don’t think they like what they saw. I thank my stars that I’m not Barry Soetoro. He won’t like his future.”

  I wanted to believe him, but I didn’t. For once I did the smart thing: I kept my mouth shut.

  “Help me to bed,” Jake Grafton said.

  As I hoisted him, my resolve melted. I asked, “Do you really think Joe Six-Pack and the missus will shoot at Soetoro’s thugs?”

  “This republic is their heritage,” he said. “If they don’t value it enough to fight for it, a great many men have wasted their lives fighting for them.”

  The next morning, Saturday, the first day of the three-day Labor Day weekend, the radio gave us the news that seven more states—Kansas, Nebraska, South and North Dakota, Wyoming, Idaho, and New Mexico—had declared their independence. Georgia had tried to, but federal paramilitary police broke up the legislature and arrested half the politicians. In South Carolina, a gun battle had broken out in the statehouse and at least ten people had died.

  The governor of New Mexico read a statement to the press after the Declaration of Independence was read. “The proud citizens of New Mexico will never escape poverty unless the flood of illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America is drastically curtailed. New Mexicans are being robbed of the American dream, the dream that by hard work and thrift they can improve their lot in life and provide a better life for their children. We have taken a stand here tonight. Let history be our judge.”

  “The liberals are going down hard,” Jake Grafton remarked.

  “You knew t
hey wouldn’t go easy,” Sal Molina shot back.

  “Yes. I did know that,” Grafton replied, glancing at Molina’s face. I was watching him. No doubt that is why he kept his mouth so firmly shut about Soetoro’s plans, which he had overheard on Sarah Houston’s White House bugging operation. I wondered what Molina’s reaction would be when he learned—if he ever did—that Grafton had been listening to all the White House bullshit and plotting for the last six months, including Molina’s.

  That Saturday was the day the Mexican army invaded Southern California. Maybe the Mexicans thought they could carve off a chunk for themselves, or maybe the troops were funded by the drug cartels that wanted their own country.

  As the day wore on, we heard that the Marines at Camp Pendleton were fighting back. All up and down the west coast, U.S. military units raced south to engage. Two carriers left San Diego and began launching strikes against the invading troops and fighting to maintain air superiority.

  When I had had all of the news I could stand, I went out onto the porch, carrying my M4. Sarah joined me and we climbed the hill and sat under a tree. A breeze whispered in the pines, and we sat for so long and so quietly that a doe and her two fawns eventually wandered by.

  When they were out of sight, she whispered, “Life goes on.”

  “With or without us,” I said.

  Ten or so minutes later an airplane broke the silence, flying low, just above the trees. A piston-engine plane. Then I got a glimpse of it through the forest canopy. A tail-dragger. A little Cessna by the look of it. It circled the safe house twice, and the pilot probably got a look at the trucks, even though they were parked under the trees.

  I was up and running, searching for a hole in the canopy so I could track the plane, which was still humming pleasantly. The sound was fading though. Then and I saw it in the distance, to the south, apparently circling to land on the grass runway in the valley.

  “Come on,” I shouted at Sarah. We trotted down the hill, jumped into a pickup, and raced down the road toward the valley.