Purge on the Potomac

by Roberts, David Thomas;

  “Yes, sir, here’s the keys. It actually belongs to the prison. Here you go, sir. Be safe.”

  Pops climbed into the pickup truck, then checked both his pistols to make sure they were fully loaded―a common habit he had when he figured a confrontation was coming.

  The prison truck had a police radio in it and Pops immediately got on the radio, “This is Texas Ranger Commandant Pops Younger. I need the FBI agent in charge at the Huntsville Airport immediately.”

  Pops waited a few seconds, then heard the crackled reply on the outdated radio speaker.

  “This is Agent Herforth.” He sounded stunned to hear Pops on the radio. He’d thought Pops was in the burning sheriff’s vehicle out on the two-lane highway heading west.

  “I need you to stand down. I’m coming back to the airport now. Again, I repeat. Stand down,” commanded Pops.

  “Sir, are the other occupants that arrived with you on this private jet with you right now?”

  “No, they are not. I am headed your direction and you need to stand down immediately!” Pops repeated.

  “Mr. Younger, I need to know where your other occupants are,” demanded Herforth.

  “They left the airport with Sheriff Robbins,” said Pops, purposely trying to throw them off.

  The FBI agent turned to the deputies standing near them, “Did you see anyone else get in that vehicle that left with your sheriff?”

  “Sheriff Robbins left from the other side of the hangar. We did not get to see who went with him. He left in a hurry,” said the deputy.

  “Yeah, right. So who is not in that terminal that came off that plane?”

  “Couldn’t tell you, sir. None of us were in the hanger. That’s where it taxied to originally and where the occupants exited.”

  “We’re coming in to interview the pilots.”

  Pops could hear the entire conversation on his truck-mounted radio.

  “Herforth, you will stand down until I get there. You are not to enter the terminal,” commanded Pops.

  “My orders come from Washington, Younger. They don’t come from some hayseed has-been,” said the frustrated lead FBI agent, who was also getting pressure directly from the national FBI director from the Situation Room to get into the terminal and find out who was still there and to arrest the pilots.

  “Deputy, do not allow anyone access to the terminal,” ordered Pops over the radio.

  “Roger that,” confirmed the deputy, glaring at the FBI agent, who was outnumbered by sheriff’s deputies and Huntsville city police on the scene. All those officers were visibly shaken and angry by what seemed to be the fate of their popular sheriff.

  A few minutes later, while a stand-off appeared to be happening at the terminal, Pops drove in and locked his brakes right in front of the terminal entrance. He got out and walked directly to the FBI agent in charge.

  “Who’s running this shit show? I want to speak to him right now!”

  “Sir, Texas Ranger Pops Younger is standing right here and would like to speak with you.” The agent handed his cell phone to Younger.

  “Younger here.”

  “Mr. Younger, this is General Thomas Southerland. I have you on speaker with FBI Director Nelson in the room. We need you to defuse the situation there, allow our people into the terminal, and to surrender your weapon to Agent Herforth.”

  “Did you instruct the Falcons to fire upon Sheriff Robbins?”

  “Our instructions were that no one was to leave the terminal. We had no idea who was in that vehicle, which left at a high rate of speed. We had no choice. Do you know who else was in that vehicle?”

  Suddenly, another explosion rocked the sky, and a small fireball lit up the night sky.

  “What the hell was that? What the hell are y’all shooting at now?” demanded Pops.

  “Sir, the Apaches are calling in saying the F-16s hit the Apache that landed to check on the sheriff! No word on the pilots! Jesus Christ!” said the deputy sheriff.

  “What the hell is wrong with you people, General! Did you give this order?” demanded Pops.

  “Mr. Younger, our instructions are not fuzzy. They aren’t in a foreign language. We’ve told your people down there to stay the hell in place. If they don’t do as instructed, people are going to die. The chopper was warned and he didn’t obey. The same thing will happen to any of you who do not follow our direct orders,” snapped the general.

  Weingold and President Bartlett received word that events were unfolding in Huntsville and were rushing back down to the Situation Room.

  The chatter over the frequencies used by both the F-16 pilots and the Apaches was intense. What the Apaches didn’t know was that both the pilot and weapons officer aboard the Apache that landed had gotten out of it and were near the sheriff’s vehicle to see if there was any chance the sheriff had survived.

  As the F-16s banked back toward the Huntsville airport, the fighter pilots were heard warning the three remaining Apaches to land immediately. “It’s your final warning,” they said ominously.

  “Stand your boys down, General. There’s no need for this to escalate. Do you hear me?” yelled Pops into the phone as the F-16s approached low and tight over the tall pine trees.

  The Texas Air National guard commander in Austin had given the Apaches permission to defend and to fire if fired upon. The F-16s were way too close to launch any missiles on the Apaches and seemed to be making another low fly-over for intimidation purposes as they had already done a few dozen times.

  The Apaches were not readily visible in the night sky. They could be heard but not seen. There were no running lights. The jets screamed over the terminal, quaking everything in sight, with the FBI agents and sheriff’s deputies covering their ears. The planes started to bank west at the end of the main runway.

  Since nobody could see them anymore, those standing outside the terminal didn’t realize the Apaches had all dropped down below a tall stand of pine trees less than fifty feet off the ground at the end of the main runway. As the F-16s banked, the Apaches rose up above the trees. The F-16s were now exposing their bellies to the powerful choppers.

  All three Apaches let loose with their 30 mm. chain guns, which are effectively automatic cannons. The entire crowd of people winced, shrieked and turned to see the tracers leaving the Apaches and striking both F-16s.

  The first F-16 immediately exploded into hundreds of pieces as the cannons hit the fuel tanks in the wings, the ordnance it was carrying, or both.

  The second F-16 was on fire and rapidly heading to the ground as the pilot tried to eject. The plane hit the runway and tumbled in a fiery heap for hundreds of yards. The body of the pilot could be seen easily from the glow of the burning wreckage as he glided a short distance to the earth.

  “What the hell is happening there?” the general shouted. “Younger, what the hell is going on?”

  “Son of a bitch, damn it, General! This is what happens when you let a situation spiral out of control. Your birds are down!”

  “What do you mean, down?”

  “I mean the Apaches just blew them out of the sky is what I mean,” said Pops, a trace of sadness in his voice.

  President Bartlett had just walked in and sat down, only to hear the last two sentences by both men.

  Lead FBI Agent Herforth was screaming at Pops, at his agents and the deputies, as total chaos unfolded quickly.

  “You think this is over, Younger? I can have twenty more fighter jets there in ten minutes or less, and you and your people will be grease spots on the prairie when I’m done with you,” yelled Weingold at the speaker phone.

  “Everyone here is under immediate arrest. Take their weapons and place them into custody now!” shouted Herforth.

  In one fell swoop, Pops dropped the phone, reached over to Herforth, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, pulled him toward him and yanked one of his pearl-handled Colt .45s from its holster. He pressed it hard into Herforth’s temple.

  “Back off! Back off now! All of you pu
t your damned weapons in the dirt!” he yelled to the dozen or so FBI agents. “Tell them, damn it!” he screamed to Herforth.

  At the same time, the sheriff’s deputies pulled their service weapons and trained them on the agents. The agents put their arms and hands out.

  “Git ’em out, boys. Drop ’em!” screamed the deputies.

  “Deputy, get your EMS crew dispatched over to tend to that pilot and see if he made it,” Pops directed, referring to the ejected pilot.

  There was no doubt about the outcome for the second pilot.

  “Now give me that damned phone again,” Pops said. A deputy picked it up and handed it to him. The FBI agents dropped their weapons as the sheriff’s deputies began placing handcuffs on them.

  “General, I want to speak to President Bartlett, right now, or I’ll blow the noggin off this sorry piece of shit I’d hate to waste good lead on!”

  The general, FBI director and Weingold paused and looked at the president.

  Bartlett hesitated, then announced herself.

  “This is President Bartlett. I suggest you surrender yourself and end this crisis you have going on there, Mr. Younger.”

  “You and your administration have caused unnecessary bloodshed and death here, Bartlett. You killed my friend Sheriff Robbins, a great man with a great family, for no damned reason.”

  “Mr. Younger, I can assure you…”

  “Shut the hell up, Bartlett. I’ve got Ottosson. Do you hear me? He’s confessed to the plot to murder Chief Justice Noyner. He’s confessed to his involvement in the death of another friend of mine, Texas Governor Brahman. We know about how elections were rigged through CIS. And, worst of all, he’s informed us of ALL the co-conspirators in the murder of the kids at the Dallas Fairgrounds!”

  “Younger, you’re a lunatic!” interrupted Weingold.

  “Listen, you little metrosexual piece of jackrabbit shit, all of you are going down. Do you hear me?”

  “Shit, Younger, that hurts!” stated Herforth. Pops pressed his .45 pistol deeper into the skin of Herforth’s temple the madder he got.

  “Mr. Younger, please relax. Mr. Ottosson is obviously not of sound mind,” begged the president.

  Everyone in the Situation Room was now standing. The cat was out of the bag. Surely dozens heard what Pops just claimed.

  “Take this piece of shit and bag him!” Pops shouted as he pushed Herforth to the nearest deputy. “Cuff his ass!”

  “Before you think about doing anything further, General, just know this,” Pops said back into the phone. “Ottosson is not here and he’s safe. No matter what you might do here, all of you are getting exposed. Do you hear me?”

  “Mr. Younger, let’s be reasonable here,” said President Bartlett.

  “I was in Dallas shortly after the shootings conducted by the Russian with your full knowledge and blessing. You know it and I know it. There were dead kids still lying on the grass, horribly mangled by the bullets. You have no heart. You have no soul.”

  “You’re out of your mind, Younger!” screamed Weingold.

  “Listen closely, you bastards. Texas is done with all of you. You hear me. The Great Purge is coming. The Deep State is over.”

  “You are certifiably a nut job, Younger!” yelled Weingold again.

  “Listen, you slime ball, I used to tell folks like you that Texans can forgive, but they never forget, but I can’t say that anymore.”

  Pops lifted his straw Stetson, took a handkerchief from his pocket, wiped his forehead and then his handlebar mustache.

  “But, in this particular case, Texans ain’t about to forgive.”

  Chapter 65

  “The pursuit of Liberty is never convenient and often demands blood as the price to achieve it—and to keep it. Liberty is never permanent, for to believe in its permanence is most assuredly its ultimate destruction.”

  - David Thomas Roberts

  Author

  The sound of blaring sirens started to envelope the entire city as every imaginable police car and firetruck within miles responded to what seemed to be a disaster of some type at the National Mall.

  The Lincoln Memorial was bathed in a deep orange glow as the reflection of the burning wreckage of Marine One was strewn across the steps from the Mall and into the Memorial. The low cloud cover producing the light snow reflected the fires and lit the entire area.

  Texans Chris and Connie Flores, who just moments before were tracing the name of their grandfather’s granite-etched name on the Vietnam Memorial, and who witnessed the downing of Marine One and two accompanying choppers, were running for their lives. For all they knew, a nuclear bomb could be the next thing that hit Washington, D.C.

  Chris had an ominous sense of the happenings around them, even more ominous with what they had just witnessed with their own eyes. After seeing two men in wool ski masks that just ran by them, he realized they were carrying some sort of tube.

  “Connie, let’s duck down back here. I’m not sure who those guys were, but I don’t know what we’ve just seen. I’m not even sure if we should be seen. Quick, get back here!” Chris pointed to a big green trash dumpster behind a small office building.

  The trash dumpster at the end of a parking lot was positioned almost all the way to a concrete barrier from another parking lot, to another building that was about four feet higher than the parking lot the dumpster was in. This allowed them to crouch between the dumpster and the barrier, below the adjacent parking lot.

  “What do you think is happening? Are we at war or something?” asked Connie, who was visibly shaking.

  “Are you cold? Do you need my coat and scarf?” asked Chris.

  “I don’t think so; I’m just scared to death. What the hell is going on?”

  “Whatever it is, it’s bad. Really bad, but I know this. We don’t need to be here but, until we know what’s going on or see the police, let’s stay put,” he advised her.

  “Uh-oh,” she whispered to Chris.

  Three men wearing similar ski masks were running into their parking lot and directly toward them.

  “Don’t move. Don’t move a muscle or make a sound,” Chris whispered.

  The men went straight to the concrete barrier and handed some type of tube that looked like it had a trigger mechanism to someone with outstretched arms above the guard rail on the concrete barrier. Those arms took the tubes while the three men latched onto the guardrail and pulled themselves over the barrier. They got into the back of a van that backed into a spot right above them.

  The brother and sister were hidden by the dumpster lid, which had been left open and was laying across the barrier. Chris motioned her to stay quiet, putting his forefinger over his lips.

  Less than thirty seconds later, two more men dressed the same did the same thing when they reached the barrier.

  The siblings could hear the men talking in quiet, excited tones, even going so far as slapping hands, like a high-five gesture.

  Chris got a better look at the tube devices. He wasn’t a military expert, but he first thought the deep, green tubes looked like some kind of bazooka and had the stenciled letters “Слова.”

  The men in the van closed the rear doors and drove away. Chris took a close look at the van but could only see that it was an electrical contractor’s van.

  As soon as the van pulled out of the parking lot, Connie turned to Chris and asked, “Who the hell were they? What were they saying, and were those some kind of guns they were carrying?”

  “I couldn’t really tell. Looked like bazookas, but had strange writing on them,” he answered.

  “Also, what language was that?”

  “I’m not sure about that, either. Let’s get out of here and see if we can find the police.” They got up and lifted the dumpster trash lid so they could get out of their hiding place.

  At almost the same exact moment in time, Marine One went down with President Annabelle Bartlett aboard, and other calamities in D.C. and across the country started to be calle
d into various law enforcement agencies, adding to the sudden chaos.

  In D.C., Sally Ferguson-Haverton, who was just named chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, was killed outside her Georgetown flat by a single bullet to the back of the head as she was taking her springer spaniel for an early morning walk.

  Chief of Staff Weingold was decapitated and his head was stuffed into his master bedroom toilet. His headless body, clad in a velvet robe, was found on his kitchen floor in a large pool of deep red blood.

  The two generals from the Joint Chiefs who were in the Situation Room with President Bartlett the night before met similar fates, along with their wives, while sleeping in their beds.

  GOP Majority Leader McCray and his wife of forty-six years were taken out as they got in their car to go to Sunday morning Mass.

  The heads of the NSA, Homeland Security, FBI, ATF and the U.S. attorney general were assassinated with incredible precision.

  Texas Governor Strasburg’s SUV was riddled by bullets at a stop sign in Austin as he was on his way to a Methodist church service, killing him, his wife and two staff aides.

  Texas Senator Simpson was found slumped over on his toilet with his hands still clutching the Washington Post at his apartment in Alexandria, two bullet holes in his chest and one in his forehead.

  By the time it reached noon on the East Coast, one hundred forty-two members of Congress and twenty-nine U.S. senators, along with eighteen state governors and various other political and public figures, were found dead. The assassinations included both Democrats and Republicans.

  Throughout the date, the breaking news’ momentum built steadily.

  A Special Report news bulletin came out on CNN as the host exclaimed, “I am sad to inform our viewers that President Bartlett has died in a crash of Marine One. Officials believe from eyewitness reports that it was not an accident. I repeat, it was not an accident. It appears as though The Great Purge is upon us. We are getting reports from all over Washington, D.C. and other locations throughout the country that a dastardly and systematic plan has been implemented to murder elected officials. No group has accepted responsibility; however, this would seem to be the work of a domestic anti-government terrorist group such as the Free Texas militia. We will stay right here as we bring you up-to-the minute news.”