INDIAN
COUNTRY
A Kelly Turnbull Novel
By
Kurt Schlichter
Kindle Edition ISBN: 978-0-9884029-5-9
Paperback Edition ISBN: 978-0-9884029-6-6
Version: Final - Full 052817 v30
Text Copyright © 2017 Kurt Schlichter
Cover Images © 2017 Kurt Schlichter
Cover Design by J.R. Hawthorne
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many people helped make this novel possible, but most of all my hot wife Irina Moises, who was there from the beginning. This time I actually let her read it while it was in progress, and she was again my primary advisor on whether it made sense. She was also the main editor. She spent a lot of time fine tuning it. Without her help and support, this book would have never materialized. I would have spent all my time tweeting at idiots on Twitter instead of getting this prequel written.
There is a prequel because of the wonderful readers who took a chance on People’s Republic and made it a success. A lot of people bought it, and that still sort of makes me scratch my head. The notion that some story I cooked up in my head as a warning about the perilous path our country is on could entertain so many people is still a bit baffling to me.
I want to thank everyone who read it, and especially those who gave me their feedback. Except the ones who pointed out typos in early versions. Yeah, I know it’s necessary but I still hate it. Anyway, to my readers – thank you!
I got a lot of support from my friends in the conservative media who have tirelessly helped me get the word out about People’s Republic and, hopefully, about this one. These include Cam Edwards, Larry O’Connor, Tony Katz, Dana Loesch, Hugh Hewitt, Derek Hunter, Ben Shapiro, Ezra Levant, John Cardillo, Howie Carr, and Cameron Gray. There are more who I will kick myself for forgetting to include.
Jim Geraghty took People’s Republic seriously enough to interrogate me on it and demand more – he was there at its inception as well in that bar that night we started discussing where this nightmare that our country is in might conceivably lead!
Let’s not forget my former battalion commander, Colonel (Retired) Bill Wenger. His example taught me what it is to be a real commander.
Once again, I pillaged the minds of people like Michael Walsh, Robert O’Brien, Owen Brennan, Stephen Kruiser, Drew Matich, Adam Baldwin, Daniel Knauf, and John Gabriel for material without them ever knowing it. There are others as well.
And, of course my pal known to most as @WarrenPeas64 did some early reading and told me to keep writing. I also got great support from Christian Collins. There were many others whom I have overlooked. Thank you too!
I also want to remember Bob Owens, who gave me some invaluable firearms 411. He is gone too soon.
I also want to thank all of my Twitter followers (currently 100,000+) for being so very, very #caring.
Let’s not forget the amazing J.R. Hawthorne. He turns my silly ideas into awesome covers. I don’t understand how. Thanks!
As always, I want to thank the late, great Andrew Breitbart, for sucking me back into this whole conservative thing against my will and better judgment. Our country owes him a huge debt of gratitude, and I owe him a personal one.
And to those who might not dig this book, I want to quote Andrew:
Apologize for what?
Kurt Schlichter
PREFACE
This novel, like People’s Republic before it, is no volume of giddy wishcasting for violent civil unrest. Anyone who says so is an idiot or a liar, and probably some combination of the two. This book is, like its predecessor, a warning.
When Donald Trump was elected on November 8, 2016, I had two thoughts. The main one was that I was relieved for my country. Hillary Clinton, with her unique blend of malice, stupidity, and middle class college girl radicalism, had a very real chance of ripping this country apart and making my last book come true. Her hate for lesser Americans – and pretty much everyone living more than 50 miles from a coast is “lesser” in her clique’s book – plus her utter conviction in her own divine right to wield power was such that she could never, ever stop poking, prodding, and aggressing against red America.
And I feared she would provoke red America to aggress right back.
So I was delighted that evening when I realized that we had dodged the Hillary bullet, and I hoped that we could get back to the urgent mission of making America, if not great again, at least normal again.
But I was wrong. The Left did not engage in the soul-searching or self-examination necessary to understand why half of America – incidentally, the half with most of the senators, congressmen, and Electoral College votes – rejected it. Or, if it did, the result of that soul-searching and self-examination was a renewed sense of its own absolute moral purity and its manifest destiny to rule over us.
Instead, the Left launched an unprincipled and unlimited attack not just upon the legitimacy of this president but upon the legitimacy of the people who put him into office. Yes, the Left hates Trump, but its hatred is really for us. In its hive mind, we have no right to rule ourselves, no moral standing to defy the pagan god of Progressivism. And, as with other religious fanatics, anything leftists choose to do is therefore justified if it serves their perverted vision of the greater good by bringing us heathens to heel.
That’s why we have seen blue state governments allow conservatives to be silenced, to be intimidated, and to be beaten, in the full view of blue state law enforcement. My worst fears are slowly coming true, much to my regret. The Left is using all its governmental, political, and cultural power to marginalize and repress its opponents. If you want to see the true frothing hatred of the Left, jump on social media. Don’t worry – the leftists will tell you exactly what they think.
Nothing I write in People’s Republic or in this book is beyond their aspirations; in fact, my dystopian vision may well be too optimistic. The bottom line is that the 2016 election did not render People’s Republic moot. There is still more story to tell and still a warning to be issued. That’s what I hope to do here.
Now, the second (and substantially smaller) of my election night thoughts turned to the Kelly Turnbull canon. In People’s Republic, Hillary wins the presidency in 2016, leading to the Split between the red and the blue states in the early 2020s. Well, that’s a storytelling problem for me in writing the prequel – and I have decided to solve it by simply changing the future history in Indian Country.
Let the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises tie themselves in narrative knots to ensure they aren’t bombarded with furious tweets by angry nerds infuriated because in Episode 4 Luke’s favorite color was green while in Episode 8 it was blue. I’m just going to tell my stories and you’re going to like ‘em, damn it.
Being a prequel, Indian Country takes place a number of years before the events in People’s Republic. As you will see, Indian Country begins in 2022, after Hillary Clinton’s disastrous 2020 election and as the country is moving inexorably toward disintegration. It then skips ahead and picks up later a few years, after the country splits in two. I hope this resolves any confusion and provides a powerful lesson to you – always read the Preface.
But the fact that I can still write about our country tearing itself apart without seeming utterly nuts is itself nothing to be happy about. I would gladly write a more traditional action thriller set in a world where people didn’t wonder if the sun was setting on America as we know it. Maybe someday I will. But for now, it’s me and Kelly Turnbull. And if you and others enjoy Indian Country, he’ll be back soon.
Maybe someday we will realize that the path we are currently on ends in a place that looks a lot like Kosovo, where I served from 2004-2006 with the United States Army’s 40th Infantry
Division. The people there chose expedience and violence over the hard work of sustaining the rule of law. To paraphrase that knight in that Indiana Jones movie, they chose poorly.
But we don’t have to. We can still choose wisely. As I wrote in my Preface to People’s Republic, we still can choose not to throw away the greatest, freest nation in the history of mankind.
And I still pray we do.
We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.
2 Corinthians 4:8-9
Baghdad
August 2022
1.
Whenever Kelly Turnbull met someone, he always made a tentative plan to kill him.
Or her. Or xe, if that was xis pronoun of choice. It was August 2022. With Hillary Clinton finally president – the third time was the charm – the US Army, in the years leading up to the Split, might not have been too concerned with winning wars, but it was definitely big on diversity, including diversity of gender identity. And Captain Turnbull didn’t discriminate.
Everyone was a potential target, so everyone got a termination plan. Man. Woman. Unspecified.
This was a real timesaver in his line of work.
Some people earned more detailed plans than others; for most, the plan was his default move – shoot them in the face with the tricked-out Kimber Model 1911A1 .45 automatic he kept locked and loaded 24/7 with eight hollow point Federal Premium HST rounds in his extended mag. Plus, of course, one in the pipe. Totally illegal ammo – some of the REMFs called it a “war crime,” but never to his face.
Others’ killing plans got more in-depth attention. But after years of fighting, his planning process was now just a reflex.
Hi.
How are you?
I think I will use this pen to take you out by going for your left eyeball.
But in preparation for tonight, Kelly Turnbull had made a very detailed plan.
It was still hot in Baghdad at oh-dark thirty – no one ever called it “zero dark thirty.” His body armor and battle gear, worn over tan civilian tactical clothing designed to obscure the fact he was a soldier, only made it worse. The young captain paused to wipe the accumulated layer of sweat off of his forehead. Had Turnbull opted to wear the helmet he was supposed to have on, he’d have been even hotter. He wore a ball cap instead.
The whir of a gas-powered generator had covered their movement over the low wall and into the compound. Turnbull and his team paused behind a storage shed, checking out the two-story house, weapons up, covering the windows. Behind them lay a zip-tied and duct-taped sentry who one of his Iraqi commandos had silently taken down in textbook fashion. He probably didn’t know it, face down in the dust with a broken nose, but he was lucky.
Turnbull’s boys didn’t play, and the American advisor trusted his five man team of local fighters with his life. He’d worked with them, trained them, and the hell if he was going to let them go on a mission without him regardless of the standing orders sent down from the desk drivers back in Washington.
The last thing the politicians presiding over the accelerating collapse of the Union wanted the public to hear about was more dead Americans fighting in some distant, endless counterinsurgency. No, the politicians had much bigger problems at home. And so Kelly Turnbull’s faraway war was just an unwelcome footnote to a much bigger story.
But that didn’t mean he was going to fight his own personal war on the jihadists any less aggressively.
There were lights on upstairs. Khalid al-Afridi, known as the Accountant, would be up there. Khalid was all his now. Homeboy had a lot of dead commandos to account for. And dead commando families. Because in the bitter calculus of insurgency, an effective way to hurt a guy inside a well-defended forward operating base was to go butcher his family at their home and have one of your minions drop off a bag of heads and hands at the front gate.
That was the kind of thing Khalid the Accountant was responsible for funding. And tonight Kelly Turnbull was intent on him paying for his actions in a different kind of currency. One that was denominated in calibers.
There was a lot of noise and movement on the first floor. It was 3:00 a.m., Baghdad time, but these assholes were all wide awake, probably sampling some of the meth they were supposed to be arranging to truck out to the desert and into the wild lands of Syria for their Islamic State pals’ kid soldiers. After all, if the promise of an afterlife of eternal booty calling wasn’t enough motivation, some crank would seal the deal. They sure loved their drugs – being whacked out probably made it easier for them to do what they did.
But Turnbull didn’t need drugs to do hard things to bad people. That’s what made him so very good at his job.
Too good, according to some.
The bad guys were all exactly where they were supposed to be. It looked like the informer had actually been straight with Turnbull. The Shia militia Turnbull’s team uneasily worked with had fingered the informer, meaning the Iranians who pulled the strings were in on it too, so Turnbull’s trust meter was pegging zero when they talked. The informer was initially reluctant to assist. It helped when Turnbull had explained that if he wasn’t straight, Turnbull would shoot him in the face. One look in Turnbull’s eyes and he knew this American was not like other ones he had dealt with.
So he chatted freely and without restraint.
The Iraqi police commando lieutenant to Turnbull’s right fingered his M4, breathing shallowly. He spoke English, the only one of the Iraqis who did. But after working together so long, the team’s tactical conversations were conducted with hand and arm signals. They were a machine. Still, it didn’t hurt to make sure the plan was clear one more time.
“Remember, I’m going in first and clearing the upstairs,” Turnbull whispered. “You guys just deal with the shitheads on the bottom floor and everything will be fine.” Turnbull made the appropriate gestures to illustrate the plan as he talked.
“Okay,” the lieutenant replied, and then he repeated the instructions to his men in Arabic. Turnbull could understand bits and pieces of the speech, but had no trouble feeling his counterpart’s underlying fear – the lieutenant cared for the family he was always talking about, and that emotion made him vulnerable. But he was still braver than most. He would not let his American advisor down.
“Are you going to take this guy alive, Kelly?” the lieutenant asked. “I mean, for once.” The other guys who made up the team just watched, looking as if they understood the question even though none spoke a word of English beyond “dollar,” “whiskey” and “fuck.” They’d seen this happen before dozens of raids all through Baghdad over the last year.
Turnbull smiled, then peeked around the corner of the shed at the main house. It was a pretty nice-sized two-story job that some local Baathist flunky had owned and that had been turned over to the gentlemen they would be visiting this evening. The owner had kindly chosen to donate it when the Islamic State goons showed up at the front door and gave the owner four hours to clear out or be disemboweled in the street along with his whole family. Even though the government of Iraq, such as it was, was at war with the Sunni insurgents, through bribes and fear, these guys operated out of this house with impunity.
Until tonight.
Seeing an unobstructed path up to the main door and no goons stumbling around out front, Turnbull motioned for his guys to move forward. As they ran, the rest of the team was breathing heavily, but not Turnbull.
They backed-up against the front stucco wall of the house, in line next to the door, and paused. A woman cried out from somewhere inside, probably upstairs. The police commandos always got meaner when they felt they were protecting women, and there were always fewer explanations required afterwards. Turnbull understood that, as a practical matter, he was going to have a free hand.
The dudes downstairs were in for a shitty evening, though no doubt orders of magnitude less shitty than the ones who were about to encounter Turnbull.
He did not anticipate that being a problem.
The American didn’t need to rack in a shell – there was always one in his chamber. He nodded, and the team set for entry. Turnbull swung out about four feet back from the door, took aim at the top hinge and blasted it out. The guys inside went nuts as Turnbull pumped in a second shell and blew out the lower hinge. It should have been another team member who took down the door, but contrary to protocol, Turnbull hit the loose door running with his shoulder, knocking it into the foyer.
The stairway was right in front of him, just like the source had drawn it. The source had hesitated for a moment when asked to draw it. Turnbull stuck the Kimber to his temple and told him in broken Arabic that in 60 seconds the piece of paper that was just slid in front of him was either going to have a diagram of the house on it or his frontal lobe all over it. Turnbull made it clear that it didn’t matter to him which one it was.
Indian Country Page 1
