by Tom Kratman
"Dammit!" he muttered, shoulders slumping again. "How does he keep doing that to me after all these years?"
He turned around and glared into the smiling face of his oldest and best friend. "Why do you do that?" An extended finger began to move up to scratch his nose.
"Because I can and because it's funny." Schmidt kept his eyes away from his friend's battle scars.
The priest's middle finger stopped moving. He gave a rueful smile, rubbed it and the index finger of his free hand under his nose and admitted, "I suppose it is at that."
Sack still on his shoulder, Montoya looked around for one in particular of the boys helping him unload the monthly supply run from the 49th Armored Division, Texas National Guard truck—food and truck both courtesy of his friend, Jack Schmidt.
Spotting the boy, the priest shouted, "Miguel, take over here. I am going to have a few words with the general. Elpi, would you bring us a couple of beers from the cellar?"
"Si, Padre," answered the dark skinned, brown-eyed teenager, running to take the sack from Montoya's shoulder. "Come on, Julio. You too, Raul . . . put your backs into it. These men"—he meant the National Guard truck drivers—"don't have all day."
* * *
In the cool, dimly lit rectory Montoya and Schmidt sat down on opposite sides of the roughly crafted but sturdy wooden table. The priest took two beers from Elpidia, thanking her. Then he opened both and passed one over to Schmidt. . . .
* * *
"Here, drink this, Jack," ordered the sergeant, handing over his own canteen. "Only the best for you."
The lieutenant refused at first, but at his sergeant's insistence took a sip of the tepid, muddy, iodine-tinged water. As he did Montoya glanced down at the red seepage at Schmidt's waist, gift of a mortar fragment ripping across the officer's stomach. Only the bandages Montoya had applied kept the lieutenant's innards from spilling to the ground. It did not look good.
"Not looking too good is it, Jorge?"
"That's 'Sergeant Montoya' to you." The sergeant smiled, hesitated, then continued, "We're down to fourteen men, plus you and me. Ammo's holding out . . . but only because so many of the ones who ran didn't want to carry theirs. What is it, four assaults we've beaten off? No . . . five, I think. They've got to be getting tired of it."
Still on his back, Schmidt nodded weakly before allowing his head to flop to a muddy rest. His practiced eye gauged the setting sun. "It's time, Jorge."
"Time? What time?"
"Time for you to leave me, take what you can save and try to get the hell out of here."
Montoya just snorted for an answer. Then, to change the subject—admittedly somewhat ineptly, he turned his rifle over and read aloud the serial number, "120857. Good. Still have my own."
"That's an order, Jorge. Get out and save what you can."
"No."
"Damn you, you wetback! I said get out of here."
"No, Jack," answered the sergeant, calmly, as ever. With determination, as ever.
* * *
"Jack? Are you all right?"
Schmidt collected his wits as quickly as he was able, covering his lapse with a sip and the observation, "Good beer."
"Only the best for you."
"Who was that girl?"
"Just a poor girl who has found her way to Christ."
* * *
Under winking stars, Montoya whispered, "It's just you and me and about six of the ARVNs left. They're the best six though: Nguyen, Tri, and their crew."
More unconscious than awake, Schmidt muttered, "Christ," then nodded as if he understood. What was left of a platoon had assembled a rude stretcher out of a poncho and a couple of saplings. On this they proposed to carry off their wounded officer under cover of night.
Montoya spoke a few sentences in reasonably fluent Vietnamese, courtesy of a short course and a long tour, themselves courtesy of the Army. Taking courage from the round eyed Mexican, Corporal Tri grunted his own determined assent in broken English, "We no leave notin' for stinkin' baby killin' Cong."
* * *
"So . . ." Schmidt hesitated. "I've got some bad news for you, Jorge. Juanita asked me to tell you. She would have told you herself if you would have a damned phone put in here. I can't use my trucks and busses to transport you and your kids to any more political rallies."
"Political? What political?" the priest demanded. "Murder is murder and there's nothing political about it."
"Come on, Jorge, be serious. There is nothing so political in this entire country as abortion. And with the new rules from Washington, any state that permits any interference is going to get hurt, let alone one that uses an arm of its government . . . which I am."
"Bah. Tell Juanita I am disappointed in her."
"She's doing the best she can, Jorge. Times are tough and getting tougher."
"Not as tough as being twisted around inside your mother and having your brains sucked out through a tube."
* * *
Dallas, Texas
Nearly four hundred and fifty people burned candles through the night as Father Montoya led them through prayer and song. Mothers held their babies. Husbands held their wives. All joined in asking for divine intervention to stop what they considered a horrible series of crimes.
Montoya looked with mild disapproval upon a large banner fronting one group of protesters: "We, personally, would object to shooting abortion doctors . . . but we would never want to interfere with somebody else's choice of values. Catholics for Children."
And so Father Flores is heard from again. Montoya walked over to see his fellow priest.
"Don't you think that sign is, maybe, a little—oh—inflammatory, Father?"
Flores' fanatic eyes flashed fire. "Not so inflammatory as what awaits the people who work in that clinic."
"That is God's choice for them, Father, not ours."
A murmur arose among the protesters. Montoya turned about to see a line of armored, shielded and baton wielding riot police forming up the street from the clinic. These were not Dallas police, but the United States Surgeon General's new special troops, specially flown in for their first real test. They were four hundred of Rottemeyer's planned one million new police, raised at the same time and under the same bill that gave her a major expansion of manpower, arms and equipment for the Secret Service's new Presidential Guard, in all but name a personal mechanized brigade.
A loudspeaker blared, "Attention. Attention. In accordance with the Act of Congress for the Prevention and Suppression of 'Emotional Terrorism' you have five minutes to clear away from this clinic. This will be your only warning."
Montoya glanced at his watch, then looked around for Miguel. "Get our people out of here now, Miguel. Hurry."
Miguel just nodded and ran, first to Elpidia where she sat playing with her baby, then to the others. "Father says we have to go now. Hurry."
Before the protesters had a chance to so much as move, long before the mandated five minutes were up, the riot police began their charge. Peaceful dispersal was replaced by panicked, screaming flight.
Undaunted, his flock in danger, Montoya steeled his heart and moved to interpose his own body between them and "police" running amok.
* * *
Dei Gloria Mission, Waco, Texas
If anyone among the boys of the Mission held a position of leadership, under the father, it was Miguel Sanchez. Need to rebuild a shed? "Miguel, see to it." "Si, padre." Need to put up a fence? "Miguel, see to it." "Si, Padre. Julio, come on and help me."
Did a field need plowing, a tree need pruning, a boy need "counseling"? "I'll take care of it, Padre."
With the father now lying broken and battered, head bandaged where a policeman's baton had cracked it, much of the day-to-day running of the mission fell to young Miguel, under the guidance of Sister Sofia, the mission's sole nun.
But if anyone, besides the father, held leadership over Miguel, it was not Sister Sofia, but little, thin Elpidia. She had so held since about three days after s
he and the baby arrived at the Mission.
For her part, Elpidia liked Miguel well enough, as well as she could be expected to like any normal male after the life she had led. But her heart belonged to the priest.
* * *
"How old are you girl?"
"Old enough to work," she answered.
Shaking his head slightly, the priest provided his own answer. "Fifteen? Fourteen? Fourteen, I think. This is no life for you, child."
"It is the only one I have, Padre."
"Parents? Family?" he asked.
"None, Padre. Just me and my baby, Pedro, and the man I live with, Marco."
"He sends you out to do this and you still call him a man? We shall see. Get in the car. Where do you live?" asked the priest.
Will overborne, Elpidia entered and gave directions. Following these, the priest drove through narrow back streets and side alleys, past garbage and trash long uncollected. At length the car arrived at the girl's—Shabby? "Shabby" would have to do, though it was much worse than that—apartment.
"Padre, what are you doing?"
"Taking you and your baby to a better life," he answered, without further elaboration. He exited the car, walked around and opened the door for the girl—no one had ever been so polite to her before—and asked, "Which one?" At the girl's hesitantly pointed finger, he ordered, "Lead on. I will follow."
The sound of a squalling baby and the smell of soiled diapers hit them even as the girl opened the apartment's cheap door. There was another smell too, one the priest recognized from days long past.
Sprawled on the couch, a man—Marco—scruffy, unkempt, filthy, slack faced, smoked a pipe. He looked up as the door opened. "Hope you made some goddamned money tonight, bitch." The man saw the priest as he stepped around to stand beside the girl. "Get the fuck out of my house, old man."
The father ignored the dope smoker. "Get the baby, Elpidia. You might want to gather up its things, too. Neither you nor he will be coming back here."
Doped Marco certainly was. He was not, however, so drugged that he didn't recognize the imminent threat to his livelihood. "You ain't goin' nowhere, you little slut." He stood to bar the way to the baby's unutterably filthy closet. When Elpidia tried to go around him he slapped her to the floor.
Marco was never quite sure, thereafter, how it was that he found himself suspended above the floor, back to the wall and a grip of iron about his throat. He kicked for a little while, his bare, filthy feet impacting on some stone-seeming wall that he knew had not been in the apartment before. With his vision fading, blood pounding in his ears, he dimly heard the priest repeat, "Get the baby, girl."
"Where's Pedro, Elpi?"
"He's sleeping, Miguel."
"Oh. Too bad. I wanted to play with him. Cute little critter."
He looked at Elpidia and said, "You're a good mom." Then he asked, shyly, "Do you think I might make a good father someday? Before he was hurt Padre Jorge told me he had been talking to his friend, Jack, about maybe finding me a decent job with the Guard once I turn eighteen."
"That would be so good for you, Miguel. How is Father?" A tear escaped the girl's eye.
Miguel shook his head angrily. "The same. He can barely walk. But did you see him fight them? It took fifteen of them to beat him to the ground. Fifteen! What a man!" exclaimed Miguel, who had himself once made the mistake of fighting the father. That was the last mistake he had ever made—or wanted to make—where the priest was concerned.
* * *
Austin, Texas
What kind of man is this? My very first instance of "hate at first sight," thought the governor of her state's new "Federal Commissioner."
"So you see," droned that worthy, Harold Forsythe, Yale Law '66 and a long-time crony of both Wilhelmina and her ex-husband, "you have got to stop seeing yourselves as separate states. We are all one country and we are all in this together. We can't have Texas going its own way anymore. Take abortion. You have placed some restrictions here that are just intolerable. And so, until those are lifted, Texas can forget about seeing one red cent in federal aid for Medicare or Medicaid. Nor will we permit you to stop funding them at your level. Same for your schools. Nearly half of them have failed Federal certification and no more educational aid is going to them until their entire staff has been reviewed and approved for retention or fired."
"You mean reviewed for political leaning, of course, don't you?" demanded Juanita. "Your entire test was a thinly disguised check of political correctness."
"Well, we can't have unenlightened teachers polluting the minds of America's youth now, can we?" Forsythe smiled smugly.
"And you had better do something about getting a handle on the guns in private hands in this state too. And soon. You are not going to be permitted to give people the right to the implements of death or to deny women the right to do what they choose with their own bodies."
How did we ever let it get this far? wondered Juanita. Then she supplied her own answer. We let it get this far by letting the federal government take the burden of taxing for us. And now they have more—a lot more—power than the states do because they have so much more money than the states do.
* * *
Dallas, Texas
Guns holstered and concealed, the federal agents poured over the smoking ruins of an abortion clinic torched by fanatics in the night. No note or sign claimed credit for the arson. Nor had anyone been hurt in the blaze.
Special Agent Ron Musashi pondered the lack of evidence. To one of his men he said, "Get me the files on the six leading antiabortion groups in this part of the state."
"Already did it, Chief."
"Good," Musashi complimented. "Who's the most likely candidate?"
"Catholics for Children," came the instant reply. "We suspect them of having torched two other clinics. Never a shred of proof, though. Professional, you know? Their headquarters is over in Fort Worth."
* * *
Fort Worth, Texas
In another life, Ron Musashi would have been happy enough pouring Zyclon B crystals into gas chambers full of Jews. The Rape of Nanking would have been a wonderful vacation. Bayoneting stragglers on the Bataan Death March? Just a pleasant walk in the woods. But for being short of stature—and having the wrong shape of eye—Musashi would have fit right into Himmler's Waffen SS.
Not that he would have enjoyed the killing. All Musashi ever felt from killing was recoil. Though he did derive considerable personal satisfaction from a job well done.
This job was made for him. The orders were simple, amazingly so considering they came to him from Washington, DC: "Assume that the occupants found at the headquarters of that terrorist organization known as 'Catholics for Children' are armed and dangerous. Kill or capture them all."
* * *
Returning from lunch, Father Flores turned the corner to see an even dozen plain-clothed men—police of some kind, so he assumed, based on the drawn pistols and locked and loaded machine guns—crouching by the main door to his organization.
Unseen by the agents, themselves intent on their mission, Flores ducked back behind the building corner, one eye only watching the event. His heart began pounding wildly as he saw four of the agents draw back a large battering ram then smash it once, twice, three times against the front door.
He heard muffled screams.
* * *
The door collapsed inwards, torn off its hinges. Musashi ordered, "Go! Go! Go!" and the first team of four burst over the shattered door and through the empty frame. Inside a woman screamed with fear and shock. Automatically, she reached for her purse.
A gun? The agent who saw her could not take the chance. A burst of submachine-gun fire punched through the woman's body, spinning her in her desk chair while inertia made her head do an imitation of Linda Blair in The Exorcist. The woman fell, bloody and torn, to the floor.
As if the initial shots were a signal, the other three agents in the first rush likewise opened fire on the office workers, cutting them do
wn in a welter of gore. Fired. Fired. Fired again. There were no survivors.
When Musashi looked into the woman's purse, he found a cell phone. He left the phone, but added to the purse's contents one small-caliber pistol.
* * *
Unseen, Father Flores, olive complexion turning pale, turned and ran; ran for his car, for his life.
