by Michael Fine
In a panic, I ran around in the pea soup of dusk looking everywhere, calling out her name. I tried not to think about what it might mean that she wasn’t answering.
I bumped into a bunch of people and knocked over a few of them. I tried to stop and apologize each time, but eventually I just started yelling “sorry” each time as I frantically ran by, looking for my sister.
At last, I heard whimpering around the back of one of the tents along the edge of the fair. I slowed as I came around the corner and there she was, laying crumpled on the ground behind an air conditioning unit. Her hair was full of straw and her legs were covered in dirt. She was curled in the fetal position, crying softly. Her new kitten, Xander, mewed in his box next to her.
Suddenly, fireworks went off in the distance and the sky lit up with a burst of red, white, and blue. That’s when I looked down and saw a pair of Angel’s white cotton underwear lying nearby on the patchy grass and a small spot of blood seeping through the pleats of her lavender dress.
Chapter Two
Thursday, July 4 (the same evening)
Senator Royce Carrington’s Home
Village of Oyster Bay Cove, Nassau County, New York
By eight o’clock, the men had made their way to Senator Carrington’s home along the Long Island Sound on Long Island. Even in an affluent area, Carrington’s home was spectacular. The Egyptian Revival style mansion sat on a ten-acre property that faced the Sound and was surrounded on all other sides by thick foliage, making the home almost invisible to anyone who didn’t know it existed. Carrington’s grandfather had bought the property and built a modest home for his growing family. Carrington’s father, a successful real estate developer, razed that house and replaced it with the current 12,000-square-foot monster sixty years earlier. Carrington didn’t really like the fact that John Gotti, Jr. had a home in the area, but he liked the privacy of the village and of his grand home.
“All right gentlemen, take your seats,” Senator Carrington said. He didn’t have to say it twice; within moments, Porter Brooks and Julian Kingsley sat as directed.
Senator Royce Carrington, the senior Senator from Mississippi, was seventy-three but looked like he could be in his late fifties. He had short, impish silver hair and a bushy silver mustache. Despite his age, he was trim and fit. As a young man, he had been devastatingly handsome. Now, in his seventies, he still was. He spoke with a southern drawl that stayed on the charming side of the charming-bumpkin drawl line. He owned a modest ranch in Mississippi and made sure to be seen there a few times a year for the sake of his constituents. Not many would appreciate that their “down home” Senator actually owned a mansion in upstate New York.
Reverend Porter Brooks was a conservative activist and the pastor of Christ’s Fellowship Church, a mega church in Tennessee with an average weekly attendance of over fifty thousand. He was three years younger than Carrington but looked his age. Where people would call Carrington’s hair and mustache silver, they would call Brooks’ hair and beard gray. The man, while not obese, was a good forty pounds overweight and had taken to wearing overalls because none of his belts fit anymore. He was too lazy to shop for new ones.
Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court Julian Kingsley, at fifty-two, was two decades younger than the other men. Where Carrington’s unruly silver hair gave him an air of playfulness, Kingsley’s shaggy, unkempt brown hair just made him look messy. A lifetime of beer drinking had made his cheeks blotchy and had made him soft around the belly. His less than imposing physical stature belied a keen legal mind, however, and he had risen to his position on the highest court in the land, the reason Carrington had approached him a few months earlier.
The three men were in Carrington’s richly appointed study, which was in the far northeast corner of the house. As private as the house was, Carrington had made a few modifications to the home after his father died. Obsessed with privacy, he had contractors replace the large bay windows on the north and east walls with walls that had no windows, and which were specially constructed out of three-foot-thick stone slabs. He also sound-proofed the interior walls so that the room was a soundproof fortress. Thankfully, he had the forethought to ensure the room had air conditioning, although it was late enough in the evening that he’d actually started a small fire in the study’s fireplace.
Carrington sat, as always, in the Dragon Chair, the most expensive chair in the world, designed by Eileen Gray, first owned by Suzanne Talbot, and later sold to Yves Saint Laurent by Christie’s auction house. Carrington had paid over thirty million dollars for the upholstered brown leather chair framed in sculptured, lacquered wood with two models of intertwined serpentine dragons. Brooks and Kingsley sat in luxurious brown leather chairs that paled in comparison. All three had cigars in hand or nearby.
A skilled orator, Carrington had been a Senator for most of his adult life. His professional experience and his family wealth made him well suited to the pomp and seriousness of the duty he had accepted many years earlier.
“Almighty God,” he began, as all eleven men who had held his position had done before him, and precisely as he had been trained, “we bow before you, and recognize you as our great Savior. We lift our hearts in praise to you, and as your beloved children and your redeemed servants, we lay our lives before you in worship. We ask for your strength that we may be bold proclaimers of your Word. Amen.”
“Amen,” said the other two men in unison.
Reverend Brooks preferred the full verse of Luke 2:8-20, but he understood that here, in this group, they obeyed a different set of rituals. Judge Kingsley, despite attending church dutifully for decades, had no idea that the prayer was at all similar to a traditional Christian prayer; he rarely paid much attention during services.
Carrington stood solemnly, lit a match and used it to light one of the top corners of a thick one-inch square piece of cardstock with a single number on it. He held onto the opposite corner for as long as he could before gently tossing the card into the small fire frolicking in the fireplace. He walked over to his desk, opened his desk drawer, and removed another one-inch square piece of cardstock, this one blank. He lifted his Aurora Diamante fountain pen out of its holder and deftly wrote the number 2035 onto the card. After putting the pen back into its holder, he gently waved the card through the air, helping the ink dry. The card would be the only physical record of their meeting, as had been true for the previous 2034 consecutive monthly meetings of the ultra-secret Benevolent Overlords Society over the past 169 years.
Carrington set the small card down on his desk and walked to the small wet bar in the corner of the room. He lifted a bottle of champagne out of an ice bucket and turned to his colleagues.
“Nothing official today, friends,” the Senator said. “This,” he said, lifting the bottle solemnly, “is our first and only order of business.”
Reverend Brooks, while a man of the cloth, was not against a little bubbly. He rose and got three champagne flutes from the bar, handing one to Kingsley and one to Carrington, who had popped the cork on the bottle. Carrington filled the three glasses and set the bottle down.
“To the sanctity of life,” Carrington said, raising his glass.
“To the sanctity of life,” Reverend Porter repeated.
“To winning,” Julian Kingsley said.
The three men sipped their champagne, savoring their quiet victory: Earlier in the day, Julian Kingsley and four other Supreme Court justices had overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision in which the Court ruled 7–2 that the right to privacy under the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment included a woman’s decision to have an abortion. They had finally done it, in large part thanks to Kingsley’s swing vote.
Kingsley got up and walked over to the fully stocked wet bar in the corner of the study. He set his champagne glass, still full, on the cherry wood bar and reached into the refrigerator for a Stella Artois. He popped the top off and chugged it down. After setting the empty bottle
down, he reached in to grab a second beer and opened it, too.
Carrington shook his head in distaste but said nothing.
Reverend Brooks opened the wood-paneled armoire, grabbed the remote control, and turned on the TV. It was, as always, tuned to Fox News. Porter turned the sound up and the three men watched the celebratory mood on screen. The commentators could not hide their glee.
The men watched the celebration on Fox for a half an hour. Carrington and Reverend Brooks nursed their champagne. Kingsley repeatedly went to the bar to get more bottles of beer.
“Seriously, how many is that already?” Carrington finally asked.
“What’s your problem?” Kingsley responded. He poked his finger at the Senator. He was already drunk.
“My problem? I’m not the one with the problem. You’re the one with the problem, buddy boy. I heard that you had a drinking problem, but I had no idea it was this serious.”
“Oh, lighten up, Royce. I delivered. I delivered big time, didn’t I?” Kingsley slurred. Immediately realizing he’d overstepped, he added, “What I mean is, we did it. So cut me some slack. I think I deserve to celebrate. We all do.”
Carrington was about to explain how much work he, personally, had put into selecting and orchestrating just the right case with just the right plaintiff with just the right law firm and lawyers when Reverend Brooks stepped in to calm the waters.
Reverend Brooks said, “I know! Let’s watch the libs’ reaction to the decision.” He picked up the remote control and tuned to MSNBC, the liberal-leaning news station that none of the men could normally tolerate. He turned up the sound.
“Today’s decision is a travesty,” said one guest, a liberal pundit who was a frequent guest on many of the station’s shows.
“This will go down in history with Dred Scott, Plessy, Korematsu, Bush v. Gore, and Citizens United as one of the worst decisions in the Court’s history,” said a constitutional scholar from an elite law school.
The host interrupted and announced that protests were swelling all over the country. Footage was shown of a spontaneous gathering of a half a million people walking across the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, California.
As the three men watched, mocking the protestors marching in the streets across America, the Greenwich, Connecticut fireworks began exploding in the sky across the bay. The men couldn’t see or hear the fireworks because of Carrington’s remodeling, but they could feel reverberations from the explosions in the distance.
“Greenwich does a nice job with their fireworks,” Carrington said to his guests when he realized what was happening. “Let’s go outside and enjoy the show.”
Carrington and Reverend Brooks took their champagne flutes and headed out of the study, through the sliding French doors in the kitchen, and to the back yard. Kingsley quickly went to the refrigerator, grabbed two more beers, opened them both, and followed after the others.
The three men stood, heads raised, enjoying the fireworks in the sky to the north. As bursts of sparkles and light filled the sky and deep thuds boomed, celebrating America’s freedom, millions of women now no longer had the freedom to control their own bodies.
Chapter Three
4:30 a.m. Friday, July 5 AFT
(8:00 p.m., Thursday, July 4 EDT)
Undisclosed location near the village of Deshu
Less than 100 miles from Pakistan border
Helmand Province, Afghanistan
About the time fireworks shows were wowing crowds along the east coast of the United States, Second Lieutenant Diamond sat on his pack and gazed out into the Afghan desert. The sun would be up in less than an hour, and he’d come to enjoy a few minutes of cool, and calm, before the start of another hundred-plus degree summer day—and the chaos it could easily bring. Behind him were his platoon sergeant and three squads totalling twenty-four men. The youngest, an Indian kid named Patel, was just barely eighteen. The oldest was only twenty-five. Such babies. At forty-five, Diamond was the oldest second lieutenant in the Army’s history, having been commissioned just weeks before his thirty-sixth birthday, when he would have officially been too old for the position. He’d been on the front lines leading platoons of baby-faced soldiers in Afghanistan or Iraq for the past nine and a half years. He loved his country, the army, his men, and the good work they did every day.
“Hey L.T.,” Private First Class Lancaster said as he walked up behind Diamond. Lancaster was a pain in Diamond’s ass, always joking and laughing, but the man was also preternaturally gifted when it came to explosives work.
“Mornin’.”
“What’s the plan for today?” Lancaster asked. Not for the first time, Diamond found himself thinking that Lancaster would some day take his spot, or one even higher up the chain of command. The man was smart, dedicated, and oozed charisma.
“Air support is due at oh six hundred,” Diamond said. His internal clock was so tuned he didn’t have to look at his watch to know that this was less than ninety minutes away. “From there, it’s a shit show. First to Bagram to pick up some CIA tool, then back to FOB Lagman, which reopened recently, then to KAF.” KAF was the airport in Kandahar. The trip would take most of the day and take them across the country and nearly back. “HVT should be in Washington by early Saturday morning, local time. We done good here.” The HVT—or High Value Target—was the twenty-year-old son of Mullah Akhtar Mansour, former leader of the Taliban, who himself was now a rising star in the Sunni Islamic fundamentalist political movement.
“Holy backtrack, Batman,” Lancaster said, his disdain for the military’s planning capabilities obvious. “Why don’t they just fly the CIA guy to the airport?”
“Tell me about it. On second thought, don’t. Go ahead and get everyone up and ready. That bird is not going to wait for us.”
“You got it, L.T.,” Lancaster said before he turned to walk back to the sandy trench where most of the guys were sleeping.
An hour before their expected pickup time, his men were packed and relaxed. Most were downing an MRE or sitting around and chatting. Lieutenant Diamond unhooked his radio and was about to radio command when his field artillery firefinder radar operator, who manned the platoon’s AN/TPQ-36 counter artillery radar Firefinder Weapon Locating System, came rushing up.
“L.T.! We’ve got company. Approximately a hundred enemy combatants from the north and another forty from the west. All headed straight here. About five klicks out.”
Diamond didn’t have to say anything to the men, all of whom had seen the radar operator running to talk to their lieutenant. The squad leaders had their men ready and on alert within seconds.
Lieutenant Diamond held the radio’s button down with his meaty thumb. “Blue Moon, this is Blue Six. We have inbound hostiles from the north and west of our position. Approximately a hundred and forty persons. They are five klicks out, which puts them here right about the time our bird is set to arrive. How copy?”
After a several second delay, a reluctant voice came over the radio. “Blue Six, this is Blue Moon. Copy. But, uh, we have a problem… Apparently little Mansour Junior made a deal with the local ISIS leadership before you took him into custody. He told them that he’ll give up control of Helmand Province to them if they come to his rescue.”
“So? Send air support right now. Or get us the fuck outta here in the next thirty minutes.”
“Well, uh, see… that’s part of the problem. Brass says our peace deal with Russia is at risk if we unseat Mansour Junior. We already killed his father years ago. Bottom line is that your op is over, kaput.”
Diamond had been in the service long enough to control his anger at the situation. It wasn’t the first time the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing, or that they put good men at risk to achieve a mission only to abort the mission later.
The desert wind whipped what felt like a million miniature bullets of sand into Diamond’s face.
“Okay, fine. Whatever,” he said as he wiped his eyes. “We’ll cut jun
ior loose. But I’ve got twenty-five men here that need air support, or exfil, and they need it right now.” He glanced at the radar operator’s screen and saw that the men approaching were now no more than twenty minutes from their position.
“Blue Six, I wish I had better news for you, but I don’t. My recommendation is that you make your way southeast through Pakistan to India.”
“Listen up, fellas,” Diamond said to his men. “We are in deep shit. No air support is en route. I repeat, no air support is en route. Worse, our ride was cancelled. We’re on our own. Sixty seconds until we move out. South, then east.”
Lieutenant Diamond’s men might have lived through the day if it weren’t for a pair of Russian Sukhoi Su-34s, which each dropped a KAB-500S-E guided bomb on their position. The Taliban had air support that day, not the United States Army.
When the smoke cleared, all but Lieutenant Diamond, Private First Class Lancaster, and Private Patel were dead. Diamond had lacerations on his face and shrapnel embedded in his right pectoral muscle. Lancaster had a huge piece of metal in his left leg, lucky it had missed his femoral artery. Patel was unconscious. Mansour’s son lay dead, face down on the ground. Diamond walked over to where his body lay and shot him twice in the back of what remained of his head.
Acting on years of military training, Diamond grabbed a first aid kit and tended to Lancaster. After telling the man to bite down on the strap of his helmet, Diamond ripped the metal shard from Lancaster’s leg and immediately applied pressure, doused the wound in hydrogen peroxide, and wrapped the man’s leg in a tight bandage. He knew the hydrogen peroxide would actually delay healing, but he didn’t have a ready source of clean running water. Diamond tried to rouse Patel, but the man did not stir.
