Liberty's Last Stand

by Stephen Coonts

  Nasruli continued to shout, to rant. Sergeant Hill asked, “Do you want him blindfolded?”

  “He can take this with his eyes open,” she said.

  Nasruli refused to stop shouting. He was still shouting when Major Saar told the marksmen to aim at the center of the chest and gave the commands: Ready, aim, fire. The shots came as one report and Nasruli went down, held semi-erect by the pole. She heard the spent shells tinkling on the concrete. She walked over to the body. Blood stained his shirt. His eyes were open, staring at nothing.

  Like an automaton, she drew her pistol, looked to ensure the safety was off, and, using both hands to steady and aim the pistol, shot Nasruli in the head from a distance of three feet. Brains and bloody tissue flew out the back of his head.

  She engaged the safety of her Beretta, holstered it, and turned to the officer commanding the detention facility, who was staring slack-jawed at the remains of Major Nasruli. “Pour gasoline on the body and set it afire, Captain.”

  The sergeant called the firing squad to attention, turned them, and marched them back into the detention facility.

  It took twenty minutes for the detention facility staff to come up with a five-gallon can of gasoline. They are probably robbing a civilian on a lawnmower, Judy Saar thought. She stood and looked at the sky, at the windows of the detention facility, at the body against the pole. She thought she was going to be sick, but she choked it down. Later, she whispered. A bird skittered along the top of the wall. A mockingbird, she noted.

  After they put the body against an exterior stone wall, drenched it with gasoline, and set it ablaze, she marched back through the detention facility and vomited by her car. Then she drove back to headquarters.

  The staff sergeant and the five other men from the firing squad were waiting for her in front of the building. They had apparently turned in the carbines to the base armory. All of them saluted and she returned their salute. “Major, we’d like to enlist in the Texas Guard,” Sergeant Hill said.

  She nodded and motioned for them to follow her inside.

  There was a handwritten letter waiting for Major Judy Saar in the commanding general’s office.

  “You are now the CO of the base and the 1st Cavalry Division. Get as many soldiers enlisted as possible, and get the 1st Cavalry ready to fight. I am on my way to Fort Bliss to grab the 1st Armored, Old Ironsides. We’ll need them too. You are a good soldier. I’ll back you in every decision you make. Texas needs you.” It was signed by JR Hays, Major General.

  TWELVE

  On the flight line at the base airfield, JR Hays went into a ready room full of helicopter pilots. They were gathered around a television, watching the feed from Washington. Someone saw JR enter the room and called everyone to attention. JR walked to a spot in front of the television, turned it off, and told everyone, “Please be seated.”

  He surveyed the faces. Most army pilots are warrant officers. He was looking at a bunch of them, with a few commissioned officers scattered among them.

  “I’m JR Hays of the Texas Guard. As you know, Major General Ellensberger surrendered to the Texas Guard just an hour or so ago. You’ve been watching television, so you know the current political situation. Barry Soetoro declared martial law and ripped up the Constitution, and consequently Texas declared its independence. General Ellensberger surrendered Fort Hood because it is indefensible. Circling the wagons in a lost cause struck him as ridiculous unless he was prepared to cut his way out of Texas, and he wasn’t.

  “Which gets me down to you. Every one of you has a decision to make: you can go home, pack your family, and leave Texas, or you can join Texas in our attempt to build a free nation dedicated to the principles that the Founding Fathers laid down when they wrote the U.S. Constitution. I suspect Barry Soetoro’s army will not be pleased if you choose to join Texas in its fight, and it will be a fight, a second American Civil War. Barry Soetoro is going to use the armed forces of the United States to try to conquer Texas, so if you sign on, you will be fighting U.S. forces. Americans against Americans, as if it were 1861 all over again.

  “Finally, if you choose to join the Texas Guard and fight with us, you can’t change your mind later. It’s sort of like getting baptized down at the creek: as the preacher would say, once you’re in, you’re all in, and you can’t wash it off.

  “Any questions or comments?”

  One of the warrant officers stood up and said, “Sir, Chief Warrant Officer Three Buck Johannson.”

  JR nodded and Johannson said, “My dad is a state representative in Wisconsin. His politics are right of center and he’s loud. The feds arrested him yesterday and put him in a camp because they don’t want other people to hear the opinions of a free man. Far as I’m concerned, Texas is on the side of freedom. I’d like to join the Texas Guard.”

  “Fine,” JR said. “Anyone else?”

  Another warrant said, “I think Soetoro wants to be a dictator. I don’t want my kids to grow up in that kind of country. I’m from Georgia, but from now on I’m a Texan.”

  “Welcome to the Alamo,” JR said, which drew a chuckle from his listeners.

  About half the pilots volunteered to serve with Texas. JR dismissed the others, told them to go home and pack. “If, while you’re doing that you decide to join us, you know where the headquarters building is.”

  When only his volunteers remained, JR said, “Our first priority is the First Armored in Fort Bliss. I want to go over there and capture the whole outfit. We need the tanks, helicopters, ammo, and all the rest of it. I’ll need three Apaches and a Blackhawk armed to the teeth. We are going to do some violence, enough to make the CG there, Major General Lee Parker, surrender. Who wants to go?”

  Specialist Fourth Class James B. Cassel, a name that he and his kin had always pronounced Castle, spoke for thousands of his fellow soldiers when he got home to the tiny apartment he shared with his wife, Linda Sue, and their infant daughter. Jimmy Cassel was from a tiny town in the coalfields of southern West Virginia. He told Linda Sue, who was from Killeen and had married James just a year ago, about the surrender of Fort Hood to Texas forces.

  “They say I can enlist in the Texas Guard, or we can pack up and get outta Texas,” he said as he took off his uniform and put on his jeans and tennis shoes. “Get packed up. We’re leavin’.”

  “I was born and raised here,” Linda Sue protested. “I’m Texan clear through to my backbone. I’m not turning my back on my family.”

  “I joined the army to get the hell out of the coalfields,” Jimmy explained as he pulled on a T-shirt that advertised the local Harley dealership, although he didn’t own a motorcycle because he couldn’t afford one, not even a used one. “I didn’t join the army to shoot Americans. If I was willin’ to do that when push come to shove, I’d have joined the police. I got no love for that son of a bitch Soetoro, but America’s my country from coast to coast. I ain’t goin’ to shoot Texans or Hoosiers or Californians or anybody else from America. We’re leavin’.”

  “I’m not,” Linda Sue declared. “And the baby is stayin’ with me. You just load your stuff in the car, Jimmy, and get the hell out. Go ahead, run off! If you won’t fight to defend us, I don’t want you.”

  “Now, hold on! You married me and I’m the man of the family. My dad was in the army and fought in Kuwait. My granddad fought in Vietnam and got shot for his troubles. Us Cassels been fightin’ for this country since before it was a country. I ain’t turnin’ traitor.”

  “Jimmy Cassel, I am not turnin’ traitor neither. I want to hear exactly nothin’ about your daddy and granddaddy. The baby and I are your family now. And if you won’t fight for your family, then you just hit the road. I’m takin’ the baby and walkin’ down to Mom’s place.”

  An hour later, sitting alone in his apartment, Jimmy Cassel started to cry.

  Sergeant Claude Zeist handed beers to three of his sergeant friends at his house on base. The television was on: scenes of federal agents making arrests alternated with
scenes of riots in Baltimore, St. Louis, LA, and Chicago.

  “The Texans have bit off a big chunk, and I doubt if they can chew it,” Zeist said. “But that’s neither here nor there. Fact is, I took an oath to defend the United States of America, and when this is all over I want my kids and grandkids to know that I did my duty. Did what I swore I would. And there is no way in hell I am going into combat against my fellow American soldiers.”

  “It’ll be over soon,” his friend Benny Straight said. “Thing I can’t figure is why everybody is so damned upset. Barry Soetoro will be gone in January. He can’t run again. The next president can set things right.”

  “What if he doesn’t?”

  “That’s tomorrow’s problem. You don’t burn the house down just because the sewer is backed up.”

  “So what are you going to do, Claude?”

  “I’m going to pack up the wife and kids and get outta Texas and find an army base somewhere so I can be an American soldier again. That’s what I always wanted to be, and if we have to kick ass again like we did during the Civil War in the 1860s, so be it. That damn General Ellensberger hasn’t got enough guts to make a sausage.”

  “Generals get paid to decide when to fight and when not to,” Benny remarked.

  “One good fight and Texas will crack like a rotten egg,” Claude Zeist insisted, and drained his beer. Then he reached for another. “We should have had it today. Never put off until tomorrow kicking ass today.”

  No one smiled; they were worried.

  Benny Straight put into words a thought that all of them had and none of them had yet voiced. “After Texas folds, the U.S. Army is going to court-martial any United States soldier who did the turncoat trick. They’ll be called traitors, and you know it.”

  “If Texas folds,” Jeff Hanifan said.

  “Oh, it will,” Benny Straight scoffed. “For God’s sake, one state against forty-nine? Texas against the United States Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps?”

  “Well, something good came out of this shit storm, anyway,” Claude Zeist said. “The Texans put Nasruli up against a wall and shot him. I would have bet my left nut that Soetoro was going to wait until his last day in office and commute the sentence to life in prison.”

  “This is Texas,” Jeff Hanifan said, as if that explained everything. His comrades, all career soldiers, nodded knowingly and drank more beer.

  Loren Snyder went down the open hatch in front of the small sail of USS Texas and found himself in the torpedo room. He looked around with his flashlight. The reactor was scrammed of course, and the boat was dead iron. The torpedoes in their cradles looked sleek and fat and ominous.

  He wandered along, inspecting everything. The sailors hadn’t even been able to take their personal gear. It seemed they would return any moment, but he knew they wouldn’t.

  The flashlight’s beam in that dark ship was sorta spooky. The gentle, barely perceptible motion of the ship riding the little waves of the harbor made it even more so.

  In the control room, the realization hit him that he was standing right dead center in a cruise missile target. Tomahawks could be climbing for their final dive right this instant. Each breath he took could be his last. He felt perspiration break out on his forehead and forced himself to concentrate on what he could see with the flashlight’s beam.

  In the reactor spaces, he examined everything and could find nothing amiss. The crew had simply secured the reactor and the batteries, then trooped up the forward ladder out of the ship.

  Assuming he could get the reactor started again, how many men would he need to move this boat? Lorrie Snyder thought hard. No more than five, he thought.

  Move her where? Satellites could see her submerged in shallow water, even if the water were muddy, using infrared. Where could he put a submarine so that the U.S. Navy couldn’t find her?

  Even if he could find such a place, did he really want to do it? JR Hays had asked the question point-blank: Was he willing to fight for Texas? Well, was he?

  If he planned on living and practicing law in Texas, Loren Snyder thought he had better get that figured out. Along with everything else.

  The easy way out of this personal nightmare would be to just scuttle the submarine right here at the pier. Then the U.S. Navy wouldn’t need to sink her or send SEALs to steal her. JR Hays would tell him he had done his best, and thank him. Loren Snyder thought about that too.

  That Sunday afternoon chairman of the JCS General Martin L. Wynette was back at the White House. He hadn’t had a day this bad since he was a plebe at West Point, way back when. President Soetoro, Vice President John Rhodes, and their aides surrounded him at a conference table and wanted to know how and when the armed forces of the United States were going to crush the Texas rebellion. The general had two aides with him, a Major General Stone and a brigadier, but the questions were directed at him, and the politicians weren’t happy. They wanted action now.

  “Willy-nilly bombing and invasion without a plan will get us nowhere,” the general explained. “We are working around the clock to formulate a coherent plan that will accomplish a military objective, which is the occupation of an enemy state.”

  “That’s not it,” Soetoro said, thumping the table. “The military objective is to destroy the political opposition in Texas.”

  “Your political opposition.”

  “You’re damned right. Those who oppose the progressive policies of this administration, earth-friendly policies that will benefit all future generations, policies designed to take care of those today who are unable to participate in our high-tech economy, whether from institutional racism or white privilege or the circumstances of birth, are indeed my political opposition. They oppose America! Your job is to kill or capture them. Now—how are you going to get it done?”

  “The navy will launch two Tomahawk cruise missiles at power-generating facilities in Houston later tonight, after dark in Texas. Your staff told me they want bombs falling immediately, so I gave the order. We are planning more strikes on the power plants—”

  “Planning?”

  “Scattering cruise missiles around like grass seed isn’t going to kill or capture your political opposition, Mr. President. These strikes must be in coordination with armed invasion, or we are simply wasting missiles.” Wynette felt his irritation leaking through. He was the military expert. None of these political types had ever spent a single day in uniform, unless they did a stint at scout camp once upon a time. Hell, they didn’t even like soldiers, whom they often referred to as neolithics.

  “So when is the invasion?”

  “Sir, as I said, we are working around the clock to produce a plan. Going in half-cocked and getting our asses shot off isn’t going to get us any closer to your objective. When we go in, we want to win.”

  “So when? Tomorrow? This week? Next week? Next month? Next year? When?”

  “I would say next week. We must move soldiers and equipment from all over the country, figure out the logistics—”

  “Bullshit,” Soetoro’s senior political advisor, Sulana Schanck, said acidly. “This isn’t the invasion of Germany or Iraq! Your opposition is a mob of crackers with deer rifles who will shit their pants when the shooting starts and run like rabbits.” She obviously was a believer in direct speech.

  The thought shot through Wynette’s head that British General Thomas Gage had that same opinion when he marched his troops from Boston to seize the arms and powder at Lexington and Concord, but he had the sense not to air it. He did, however, screw up the courage to say, “The Texans did a number on General Santa Ana, as I recall.”

  “Damn it, General,” Soetoro roared. “I don’t want a history lesson! I want you to take the United States armed forces down there and kick butt. If you can’t do it, we’ll find someone who can.”

  Wynette automatically dropped into his ass-kissing mode. “We’ll get it done, sir.”

  “And how come the brass in charge of these military facilities in Texas are bu
sy seeing how fast they can surrender? Are they a bunch of traitors?”

  “Sir, I have ordered investigations. The commanders will be held responsible for their actions.”

  “Firing squads will stiffen some backbones. The sooner the better.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “When the invasion starts, I want you down there in the lead tank, General. Do you understand? If you fuck this up, don’t come back alive.”

  “Yes, sir,” General Wynette said.

  Late Sunday afternoon as JR Hays settled into one of the passenger seats of a U.S. Army executive jet, normally used to ferry flag officers around, he took stock of all the things he needed to get done and hadn’t been able to attend to today. Everything needed to be done immediately. He hoped that Air National Guard Major General Elvin Gentry had hit the ground running. Air traffic facilities and their radars, in addition to fighter planes, bombers, helicopters, had to be seized by the Guard. Without ground control sites pinpointing incoming enemy planes, fighters were handicapped severely. Gentry also needed to ground civilian air traffic and confiscate every jetliner he could lay hands on so they could be used to ferry troops.

  Just thinking of all the critical tasks and decisions that had to be attended to made JR’s head throb and gave him a sense of anxiety that he was having trouble shaking off. The fact that the feds were equally inundated didn’t help much to ease his frame of mind. If the feds got licked, they had forty-nine other states to play in. If Texas got licked, a whole lot of Texans were going to die in the aftermath.

  The three Apaches and one Blackhawk that he had launched from Fort Hood were going to make a pit stop for fuel in Pecos. Unfortunately the weather was rotten around El Paso. Thunderstorms full of rain and lightning were drifting in from the west and southwest, bringing low ceilings and visibility in addition to their usual goodies.

  He had no plan for forcing the 1st Armored to surrender. He had learned long ago the truth to the old maxim that no plan survives contact with the enemy, so he made none. First he had to learn what the situation was in El Paso and at Fort Bliss, then he could plan. The Apaches and the Blackhawk were arrows in his quiver. The National Guard commander, Wiley Fehrenbach, scion of the Hill Country Fehrenbachs, and his old civilian contractor boss, Pete Taylor, would know, so he would land at the civilian airport and seek them out.