by Bobby Akart
“There he is!”
*****
Steven walked in a low crouch toward the railing to get a better look at the procession entering the building. He prepared his weapon and looked through the Elcan reflex sight, scanning the crowd for O’Brien. How can I miss this guy?
He raised up for a better perspective and then he felt the arm of Elkins around his throat. Before he could react, Elkins plunged a six-inch serrated knife into Steven’s back, instantly severing several vertebrae in his spinal column.
“Governor O’Brien sends his regards,” hissed Elkins into Steven’s ear.
Steven landed face-first onto the marble floor, still conscious. In his peripheral vision, he saw Grant’s chest burst into a mix of crimson and goo. Another round obliterated Grant’s head.
*****
Sarge saw Elkins drive the knife into his brother’s back at the same time Grant pointed his rifle at Sarge. Without hesitation, Sarge put two rounds in his chest and a third in his head before his body hit the floor dead. Elkins looked toward Sarge and then ran, firing his weapon wildly into the air to create confusion. Sarge would never forget his face—the beady-eyes flanking an oversized nose. Coward.
“Get him!” he shouted as he ran to his brother’s side. Gibson’s men gave chase for a moment, but Elkins rolled down the marble stairs toward the crowd on the first floor. Gunfire erupted in the hall as Steven’s men and Sarge’s detail exchanged volleys with the UN troops on the first floor.
Sarge was oblivious to it all. He slid through the blood to Steven’s side and pulled him into his lap. “Steven, buddy. Hang on. We’ll get some help.” Sarge looked around him, frantically seeking answers, but there was a firefight going on and they were in danger.
“Listen, I’ve got to get us out of here. I’ve gotta move you, Steven.”
Steven just grinned in response as he coughed up a little blood. “It’s over for me, Sarge. I’m sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry. You were right. O’Brien double-crossed us. I should’ve listened to you.”
“It’s okay, Sarge. We’ve all got our jobs to do.”
“Steven, I can’t do this without you. Can you hold on?”
“Fuck me. I can’t feel anything.” He coughed up more blood and grimaced. “It’s karma, you know.”
“What is?” asked Sarge.
“My whole life has been in the shadows. I killed, and they never saw it coming.”
He coughed again and his eyes began to roll back in his head.
“I love you, brother,” said Sarge, ducking as a rapid burst of bullets sailed over his head. “Hold on for me.”
Steven was whispering now. “You know what they say?”
“What’s that?”
“Karma is just a polite way of saying ha-ha, fuck you.”
And Steven slipped into the darkness.
The saga will conclude in…
CHOOSE FREEDOM
Book six of The Boston Brahmin series
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APPENDIX A
History of The Mechanics and The Loyal Nine
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
~ George Santayana, philosopher and novelist
America has a penchant for rebellion. While the dates associated with the War for Independence are well known, the battle for freedom began many years before with the early colonists and continued into the nineteenth century.
Author Bobby Akart explores the trials and tribulations of a fledgling nation with a careful examination of the attitudes of the early colonists and their taste for freedom as they built America.
Seeds of Liberty, an Amazon #1 bestseller in the modern history, sociology, politics and social sciences genres, takes the reader on a historical journey beginning with the settlement of Roanoke Island in 1585 through the British attempts to clamp down on the colonists via the Stamp Act in 1764—the impetus for the creation of The Loyal Nine.
Revolutions tend to be brutal affairs, and America’s fight for independence was no different.
How did the American Revolution yield a constitutional republic, with greater freedom on a large scale than the world had ever seen? Successful revolutions never begin overnight. The American Revolution was two centuries in the making. Starting with the early attempts at English colonization on Roanoke Island in 1585, and throughout the first settling of the New World, important stones were laid for the foundation of American freedom and independence.
The American colonies had known violent rebellion long before the Revolutionary War. Each of the original thirteen colonies had experienced violent uprisings. Americans had shown themselves more than willing to take up arms to defend a cause held dear. This tradition of rebellion characterized the American spirit throughout its early history.
Seeds of Liberty chronicles certain critical events such as Bacon’s Rebellion, Culpepper’s Rebellion and King Philip’s War. Over these formative years, the seeds of revolutionary thinking took root, and the stage was set for Americans to assert their independence from their British brothers and sisters. Many events transpired between the one-hundred-year period of 1676 and 1776 that served as precursors to the American Revolution. In many ways, the American Revolution had been completed before any of the actual fighting began. The roots had already grown.
The Loyal Nine
Boston, Massachusetts, became the epicenter of the colonist opposition to British rule. In 1765, a group of Bostonians formed a “social club”—attempting to avoid the scrutiny a political organization might provoke. Their purpose, however, was more than social. This group of nine Bostonians, formed and operating in secrecy, plotted a response to the Stamp Act.
They called themselves the Loyal Nine. Although they were respectable merchants and tradesmen, they were not necessarily the most prominent Bostonians. They were private and unassuming, avoided undue publicity, and were diligent in their secretiveness. The names of the Loyal Nine aren’t prominent in American history books. But these nine men sowed the seeds of the American Revolution. They were average, hardworking Americans—fighting against tyrannical rule.
For ten years following the formation of the Loyal Nine, tensions between the British government and the colonists grew. As pressures built in America, chapters of the Sons of Liberty were formed all over the Thirteen Colonies, especially throughout New England, Virginia, and the Carolinas.
As the independence movement grew, so did the colonists desire to adopt some form of heraldry. Heraldry was used throughout history as a means to express a group’s pride and loyalty. In 1767, the Loyal Nine adopted a five red and four white vertical-striped flag as the group’s formal standard. It became known as the Rebellious Flag, and the nine stripes paid tribute to the Loyal Nine. With the Rebellious Flag, and the groundswell of support for independence, came the Sons of Liberty.
The Mechanics
In America, the first intelligence network on record was a covert group in Boston known as The Mechanics. Beginning with the rise of The Loyal Nine, The Mechanics’ acti
vities in the 10 years before the outbreak of the Revolution in April 1775 included some of the earliest uses in America of warning, surveillance, and intelligence collection. Probably the most famous of The Mechanics was Boston silversmith Paul Revere.
The Mechanics grew out of the Sons of Liberty as their insurgent arm. The colonists successfully opposed the burdensome Stamp Act, passed by Britain's Parliament as a revenue generating measure on March 22, 1765. Although the Stamp Act was repealed following Colonial protests in 1766, some of The Mechanics, mainly skilled laborers and artisans, continued to organize resistance to governmental authority and gather intelligence on British activities and movements.
In the words of Paul Revere,
“In the fall of 1774 and winter of 1775, I was one of upwards of thirty, chiefly mechanics, who formed ourselves into a committee for the purpose of watching British soldiers and gaining every intelligence on the movements of the Tories. We frequently took turns, two and two, to watch the (British) soldiers by patrolling the streets all night."
In addition to their surveillance activities, The Mechanics, who were frequently referred to as the Liberty Boys, sabotaged and stole British military equipment in the Boston area.
They would never have succeeded as seasoned members of modern intelligence networks. They met regularly in the same place—the Green Dragon Tavern on Marshall Street in downtown Boston, and one of their leaders—Dr. Benjamin Church, was an undercover British agent.
Nonetheless, they had resources of their own, and intuitively saw through the cover story the British had devised to mask the march of seven hundred Redcoats on Concord to seize Patriot stores of munitions and arms.
The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere
On April 19, 1775, Dr. Joseph Warren, chairman of the Boston Committee of Safety, charged Revere with the task of warning Patriot leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock (who was staying at Lexington) that they were also the targets of the British operation.
Revere arranged for warning lanterns to be hung in the Old North Church, to alert Patriot forces across the river at Charleston, as to the means and route of the British advance. One lantern to indicate that British troops were advancing by land, two to indicate that the choice of route was across the Charles River.
After two lanterns were hung in the church steeple, Paul Revere set off on his famous ride. He notified Adams and Hancock, joined Dr. Samuel Prescott and William Dawes, and rode on toward Concord, only to be apprehended by a British patrol en route. Dawes got away, and Dr. Prescott managed to escape soon afterward to alert the Patriots at Concord, 21 miles west of Boston. Revere was questioned and soon released, after which he returned to Lexington to keep Hancock and Adams apprised of the proximity of British forces.
The Shot Heard 'Round the World
Following a skirmish with seventy American minutemen at Lexington, the British column proceeded to Concord, where they burned some gun carriages, entrenching tools, flour, and a liberty pole. The caches of munitions and arms the British expected to find had long since been removed by the alerted Patriots. With the countryside aroused, the British force soon came under sustained attack on its way back to Boston, suffering over seventy dead and nearly two hundred wounded. Four thousand colonists engaged the British at one point on that fateful day at Lexington and Concord, or along the route back to Boston.
One of the minutemen had fired the infamous shot heard 'round the world, as celebrated decades later in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem. That shot might never have been heard if not for good intelligence work of the Mechanics and the timely warning of Paul Revere and his companions.
The leaders of the revolt, the Sons of Liberty, were faced with a chance to fundamentally change the course of America. They faced a choice—continue to live under tyranny or choose freedom. They chose freedom. By 1775, their opportunity became reality, and the war for independence began. But the seeds of freedom were planted by nine brave Bostonians who had a vision and the courage to stand by their convictions—the Loyal Nine.
APPENDIX B
INSURGENT ACTIVITIES THROUGHOUT HISTORY
In the Art of War, Sun Tzu wrote, “Be so subtle that you are invisible. Be so mysterious that you are intangible. Then you will control your rival’s fate.”
Loosely organized guerrilla warfare and insurgent activities have been the dominant form of military conflict throughout history. Unconventional warfare dates back to the times of antiquity. From the nomadic rebels who fought to bring down the Roman Empire (detailed below) to the internet-savvy, to the plane-exploding jihadists who triggered America’s global war on terror, irregular forces are a constant factor in the history of warfare. And fighting them has become tougher than ever.
Take, for example, Vo Nguyen Giap, the brilliant Communist general who succeeded in expelling first the French and then the Americans from Vietnam. Giap closely followed the teachings of Mao in planning a three-stage struggle—first, he utilized localized guerrilla warfare, then a strategy he called the war of movement and finally general uprising—which he waged with a three-tier force of village militias, full-time guerrillas and a regular army.
But where Mao was always cautious to avoid confrontations with more powerful forces, Giap’s tendency to gamble on premature offensives in 1968, and again in 1972, could have proved fatal each time had it not been for the psychological and political frailties of the South Vietnamese. In guerrilla warfare, what matters most is the ability to shape the political narrative, not the facts on the ground. This is how guerrillas are able to win wars even as they lose battles.
How do the weak vanquish the powerful?
Because insurgencies pit the weak against the strong, most still end up failing. Between 1775 and 1945, an analysis of guerrilla warfare reveals that a quarter of insurgencies achieved most or all of their aims. But since 1945, that number has risen to nearly half. Part of the reason for the improving success rate is the rising importance of public opinion. Since 1945 the spread of democracy, education, mass media and the concept of international law have all conspired to sap the will of states engaged in protracted counter-insurgencies. Thanks to the internet and our complex, inter-connected world, in the battle over the narrative, insurgents have many more weapons at their disposal than before.
That's not to say that counter-insurgency in the twenty-first century is a losing game. But to prevail requires an understanding of the game’s rules. Military strategists have returned to the so-called population-centric approach pioneered by the British during the twelve year, post-war Malayan Emergency, which lasted until 1960. The strategy was rediscovered by American generals such as David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal in Iraq and Afghanistan after several setbacks in fighting the Taliban. There are several principals which make up the population-centric approach.
The first principle is to abandon conventional military tactics. Clear and hold replaces the normal approach of search and destroy. Most importantly, to defeat an insurgency you must provide enough security for ordinary people to live their lives. Winning the ideological battle is more important than military victories.
The second is that legitimacy is vital for both sides. Corrupt or excessively violent governments will always struggle, but so too will guerrillas who terrorize their own people. ISIS, for example, has failed in gaining legitimacy for this reason.
The third principle is staying power. Firepower is no substitute for patience and boots on the ground. The people you need on your side must believe that you are in it for the long haul.
The fourth is that most counter-insurgency campaigns abroad are lost at home. Liberal democracies have short attention spans, low tolerance for casualties and other calls on their sources of domestic spending. Unless voters believe that an intervention is necessary for their own security they will quickly withdraw support for it.
All of which explains why the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq never fully gained the support of the American people. The population-centric approach—and the tro
op surge needed to effectuate it—came too late in the conflict and with a foolishly rigid deadline imposed by Washington.
Insurgencies are the way of the future. Here are two examples of historic, successful guerrilla/insurgency campaigns:
The American Revolution: The Mechanics of 1767 - 1783
Although many of the engagements of the American Revolution were conventional, guerrilla warfare was used to a large extent during the War for Independence from 1775 through 1783, which made a huge difference.
However, guerrilla tactics were first used by the colonists, and then the Sons of Liberty via their insurgent arm - The Mechanics. As we wrote in Seeds of Liberty, America has a penchant for rebellion. Large scale insurrections began in the seventeenth century and continued until the Revolutionary War. Bacon’s Rebellion, Culpeper’s Rebellion, and King Philip’s War are just a few examples explored in detail in Seeds of Liberty.
The Boston Massacre (1770) and The Boston Tea Party (1773) are other key events which led to the American Revolution. Later, at the Battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, insurgent activities and unconventional methods were used by the patriots to fight the British.
During the War, George Washington sent militia units with limited Continental Army support to launch raids and ambushes on British detachments and forage parties, the militia and Continental Army support would skirmish with British detachments in small scale battles and engagements. Insurgent victories raised morale for the Patriots as their guerrilla operations against the British were very effective.
There are other Americans who used hit and run raids, ambushes, and surprise attacks against the British such as William R. Davie, David Wooster, Francis Marion, Shadrach Inman, Daniel Morgan, Morgan's riflemen, and over mountain men. All these American guerrilla fighters did their part by using unconventional tactics to fight the British and loyalists.
