Local and network television were showing some of this, where censors would allow it, and radio stations were on the spot with breathless reporting. Social media filled in with some truth, rumor, and wild speculation. As usual on social media, budding writers of sardonic fiction posted absurd tales they thought only fools would believe; of course the fools did believe, but so did many frightened people who were definitely not foolish.
Everyone had someone they needed to talk to desperately: Telephone networks were at maximum capacity. Calls, e-mails, and text messages inundated city and state officials high and low, all those remaining after the FBI, FEMA, Homeland Security, and cooperating county sheriffs had carried off the disloyal for incarceration. Some of the less cooperative sheriffs and police chiefs had also been arrested, decapitating their law enforcement departments. The only thing observers could agree on was that the situation was getting worse. In the White House and congressional offices, staffers stopped answering telephones and e-mail servers crashed. Monday night, August 29, was another wild one in America.
They came for Jake Grafton at Camp Dawson at three in the morning, Tuesday, August 30. Four of them, in green coveralls with FEMA badges on the right shoulder. They woke him up by dragging him from his cot, slamming him to the floor, and kicking him.
Then they cuffed his hands behind his back and dragged him from the tent, across the common area, by the mess tents, to the building Sluggo Sweatt used as headquarters. Up the stairs into Sluggo’s lair. He was up, with a light on, waiting. The four thugs lifted Grafton bodily from the floor and threw him into a chair. Another man came in and dropped Grafton’s watch and cell phone on Sluggo’s desk.
“Good morning, Grafton,” Sluggo said pleasantly. “I decided it was time to take the gloves off and confront you with the reality of your situation.”
Grafton tried to ease himself in the chair. It felt as if one of his ribs on the left side was broken. Sharp pain with every breath.
“My conscience requires me to tell you in advance that the road ahead for you is filled with pain. I need you to sign a confession of complicity in the attempted assassination of President Soetoro. Of course, there will be television cameras. You will need to speak slowly and coherently about your crimes.”
Jake Grafton looked around the room, the same one he had visited twice before.
One of the men on his right used a fist into his side. He gasped at the blow and almost fell from the chair.
“Be polite and pay attention,” Sluggo said. “I told my colleagues that you would undoubtedly need a lot of persuading, and they thought it would be fun to do it. There isn’t much to do to pass the time here in the boonies.” With that, Sluggo nodded.
The thugs dragged him from the chair and took him along a hallway to a jail cell, complete with bars and a cot and a honey bucket. There they started pounding on his ribs. One of them stomped on his scrotum. At some point he passed out.
When he came to, the lights were on, but he had no idea whether it was day or night or how long he had been unconscious.
Television. That was why they hadn’t touched his face.
The good news was that he was still alive. The bad news was that Sluggo’s men were going to beat him to death by inches.
Loren Snyder had been busy. He used the Houston telephone book to find the address of a former naval officer, Julie Aranado, also known as Jugs. Apparently the Aranado men of prior generations had favored big-bosomed women, so Julie was awesomely endowed. Lots of exercise kept the rest of her figure slim and trim, showing off the trophies. She had acquired her nickname at the Naval Academy and, although it reeked of political incorrectness and sexism, she liked it, so it stuck. “If you got ’em, be proud,” she had been heard to remark when questioned about the appellation.
After eleven years of active duty, she decided the GI Bill’s offer of a free advanced education beat the navy’s retention bonuses. So she quit the navy and was earning a PhD in physics at the University of Houston. She returned to her apartment on Sunday evening, after watching Jack Hays’ speech at a girlfriend’s house, and found Loren Snyder sitting on the front stoop waiting for her.
“Hey, Jugs. You’re looking good.”
“Mr. Snyder! I haven’t seen you in what, two or three years?”
“About that. And it’s Loren. Hey, I need some help and you were the first person I thought of.”
“I heard you were in law school at UT.”
“Yep.”
“What kind of help?” she asked as she unlocked the door. Snyder was at least ten years her senior, and she had served with him aboard an attack sub. Romance hadn’t been on the agenda then, and she knew it wasn’t now. The Loren Snyder she had known was all business.
“The Republic of Texas is now the proud owner of a Virginia-class sub, USS Texas. She’s lying in Galveston. I’m the new skipper and you are now my XO.”
She snorted. “Don’t bullshit me, Snyder. School starts again next week and I need to study. What do you want?”
He told it as he had gotten it, then added, “I went aboard her yesterday evening. The crew scrammed the reactor, secured the batteries, and left, arrested by the county sheriff, who doesn’t know jack about ships, boats, or submarines. I inspected everything I could see and couldn’t find any sign of sabotage. All Texas needs is a crew.”
Jugs snorted. “Where, pray tell, are you going to find sixty people to man her?”
“I’m not. I figure with five people who know what they are doing, I can get her under way. We can’t leave her lying at the pier. I figure there is probably one chance in five the navy will destroy her with Tomahawks, and four chances in five the navy will send a SEAL team to take her.”
“SEALs couldn’t get her under way,” Jugs objected with a frown. “They don’t have that kind of training.”
“They could if they brought five or six certified people with them. And you know they can do that.” Both these former naval officers had a very healthy respect for the navy’s special operations warriors, arguably the best in the world. If anyone could steal a submarine, they could.
“They’re probably planning a mission right now,” she said thoughtfully.
“If we are going to save that boat for Texas, we have to get in gear. Are you for independence?”
“Hell, yes. I’m from San Antone. I’ve had more than enough of Soetoro pissing on the Constitution. It’s high time we went our own way.” Although Aranado didn’t say it, like many Mexican American Catholics, she was socially conservative. Same-sex marriages, she believed, were an insult to the sanctity of that institution. Abortion horrified her—especially late-term abortions, doctors sucking the brains from viable infants—and Soetoro’s and his party’s fervid support of the practice had cost them her vote years ago. In fact, she had sworn in church at the altar of God she would never vote for one of those baby-butchering sons of bitches as long as she lived.
Jugs always was blunt, Snyder reflected. “I need three more qualified people,” he said. “Who do you know that we can get?” Then he added, “In Texas?”
Another group, five young men in their late twenties or early thirties, was also busy that Monday night. They were unemployed coal miners in southern West Virginia. They had been following Soetoro’s declaration of martial law and Texas’ reaction to it on television, in bits and pieces. They were nonpolitical high school grads who had become certified underground miners and worked in the mines since their early twenties. Their mines had laid them off some months back when demand for coal forced mines to lay off shifts. Their fathers had been miners, and their fathers before them. Underground mines were the last remaining sources of good jobs in southern West Virginia since NAFTA had sent factory jobs to Mexico twenty years before. They believed Barry Soetoro’s EPA was killing coal, and with it, their way of life, and they were bitter. They still had fishing, hunting, riding their ATVs, and chasing girls, but without a decent paycheck, their futures looked bleak. None wanted to leave the
hills to look for work elsewhere. Here was where they had spent their lives, here was where their friends were, here was where their relatives had been buried for over two centuries in the little graveyards surrounding the one-room white churches that dotted the hills. This was their place.
Now evil politicians, rich environmentalists, and Washington bureaucrats had robbed them of it, they believed. They had never thought of themselves as terrorists, but for months now they had been talking about getting even with those distant bastards who had taken everything they had. These young men despised Barry Soetoro and everything he stood for and admired the Texans. Unlike the miners in West Virginia, those Texans hadn’t just hunkered down and let the big shits fuck them. They were fighting back.
Harlan Greathouse was the natural leader of this little group, and the biggest talker. Sunday, while they were fishing the eddies in a quiet little river shaded with verdant sycamores and drinking beer, Greathouse prodded them into action.
One of them still had a key to the explosives locker at the mine where he used to work. The padlocks on the locker were supposed to be changed periodically, but who knew when the mine foreman would get around to it. The key still worked, and for that they were grateful. The locker was a grounded steel building as far away from structures and dwellings as was practical. Sunday night they used that key, opened the locker, and helped themselves to three cases of dynamite, blasting caps, a roll of wire, and three detonators that passed their battery checks. The roll contained about a thousand feet of wire. They really needed three rolls, so they could plant three charges, but they decided to make do with one.
Harlan Greathouse led in his pickup, and his friends in two more pickups followed him to the interstate. They stopped at a convenience store on a freeway exit, gassed up, and bought more 3.2 percent beer, the so-called non-alcoholic beer, then got back onto the highway. As they finished each can of beer, they crushed it and with a practiced flip of the wrist, tossed it into the beds of their pickups. They drove into the great valley of Virginia and across the Blue Ridge to the rolling countryside cut by old rivers that ran into the Chesapeake.
On a two-lane asphalt road that ran through bucolic countryside they found a pumping station on one of the natural-gas trunk lines that ran from Louisiana northeastward all the way to Boston. Anyone could see it was a pipeline right-of-way because the tree-less terrain covered in low weeds ran from one horizon to another and was about a hundred feet wide. This line serviced a myriad of smaller feeder lines that supplied natural gas to factories, cities, towns, and gas-fed power plants.
None of the miners had the slightest idea how big the explosion would be when they blew the pumping station. Big, they figured, big enough to perhaps ignite this stand of dry pines that stood on either side of the right-of-way. They saw in the moonlight—it was four in the morning—that each stand consisted of about five acres of trees. A quick reconnaissance revealed that these two stands were surrounded by pastures and meadows as far as the eye could see, with here and there a modest house and its associated barn. Cattle grazed in the pastures. The nearest house was perhaps five hundred yards beyond the edge of the trees, so they figured no one there would be injured by the blast.
Harlan thought this a good place. They could set one case of dynamite, unroll perhaps four hundred feet of wire off the roll, cut it, and rig it to a detonator. The loss of line pressure after the explosion would cause emergency shutoff valves farther up and down the line to secure the flow of gas. Those power plants to the northeast that depended on this line would be down until gas from other, interconnecting lines, could be routed to them. The explosion would no doubt obliterate this pumping station, and it would eventually need to be rebuilt.
“They should have stayed with coal,” one of the miners said, chuckling, just loud enough to be heard.
The pumping station, about a half-acre in size, was surrounded by a ten-foot-high chain-link fence topped with three strands of barbed wire and was lit by floodlights on poles. There was a gate, of course, and it was padlocked.
The gate wasn’t a problem. The miners hooked a tow chain around one of the fence posts, hooked the other end to a tow-hitch, and pulled it down.
They all knew how to handle dynamite. In less than five minutes they had divided a case of dynamite into three charges, one of which was set on the main inlet line—about three feet in diameter—another on the line out, and one on the main pump itself. Between the pump and the charges on the lines were the safety cutoff valves, which were going to be destroyed too. One car went by without slowing while they worked. They inserted the blasting caps, wired up a harness that they mated to the caps, then unrolled an estimated four hundred feet of wire, cut it, and turned the pickups around.
Harlan Greathouse thought he should be the one to trigger the blast. The other two pickups went on west a half mile or so to the crest of a low hill as he wired up the detonator. He took cover behind his pickup and lifted the safety lever. Took a deep breath and pushed the button.
The resulting explosion wasn’t really that bad. But it was followed by a hurricane of noise as natural gas under pressure hissed from the ruptured line. That lasted just long enough to register on Harlan’s ears, then the gas was ignited by molten hotspots in the steel. A giant explosion resulted. Trees were flattened to the east and west. The stupendous fireball from the blast rose in a monstrous flaming mushroom cloud.
The pickup truck absorbed the peak pressure of the shockwave from the concussion of the gas explosion, thereby saving Harlan from being crushed. However, even with the dubious shelter of his shattered truck, he perished within a second or so as the pulse of superheated air scorched and fried him to blackened gristle. The heat pulse also set the ten acres of now-flattened pines instantly aflame.
Within a minute the gas flowing from the ruptured lines slowed as pressure bled off. Air rushing back into the blast area and escaping gas fed a blowtorch flame that rose at least three hundred feet in the air. The initial fireball, now expanding into a mushroom cloud and turning from yellow to red and orange, rose and rose into the sky, lighting the countryside as bright as day.
Harlan Greathouse’s friends came driving madly back, but one look in the light of the burning gas told the story. They turned their pickups around in the road and roared away to the west toward the distant mountains.
As dawn was breaking Tuesday in Galveston, Snyder, Aranado, and three men, all of whom Jugs knew from her naval reserve weekends, were aboard Texas checking her out. Speedy Gonzales was a nuclear engineer, Mouse Moore was a first-class petty officer with twelve years in attack subs, and Junior Smith was a third-class who had served aboard Polaris boats. All Texans, all foursquare for independence, they had volunteered immediately.
Using flashlights, they inspected everything they could see, opened panels and examined wiring and fittings, checked the galley for provisions, and all came to the same conclusion. Texas was ready for sea. The former crew’s personal effects were still aboard, uniforms, underwear, hygiene items, letters from wives and girlfriends. The batteries had a good charge on them. It was as if the crew had mustered on the pier and marched off, leaving everything. Although Snyder and his crew didn’t know it, that was pretty much what had happened.
All five gathered in the control room and discussed their inspections. “She’s ready to go, I believe,” Speedy said. “A full load of Tomahawks and torpedoes, plenty of food and water, more than ample for five people. The batteries seem okay, the checklists are in place and apparently complete.” He spoke like a judge, weighing every word before he uttered it because it would appear on the court reporter’s transcript.
“Mouse?” Loren asked.
“She’s ready to go, Mr. Snyder.” Snyder was an officer, and under no conceivable circumstances would Mouse Moore address him familiarly. He had spent too many years in uniform. In his bunkroom he might tell his shipmates his opinion of Loren or Jugs, but he would never address either of them that way to their faces. It was
a mark in his favor: Mouse was a good sailor who would always obey orders.
Junior Smith was cut from a slightly different pattern. He had been doused in naval tradition and most of it had washed off. He was a civilian at heart, and so he said, “Loren, I’m willing to go to sea in her.”
“Just precisely what do you plan, Mr. Snyder?” Jugs asked, preferring to address Loren formally.
“I want to get the reactor cooking again, check that every system is working properly, run some drills to ensure we don’t entomb ourselves, and if we’re all cool, cast off and get the hell out of Dodge before the SEALs show up. They can’t get at us if we’re submerged.”
“We have no secure way to communicate with JR Hays,” Jugs objected.
“After a while we can poke up the mast, listen to the radio, and learn what’s happening. Right now, I think it imperative we get gone before the SEALs come, and you all know they will.”
“Sure as God made little green apples,” Junior agreed.
“So let’s check all the circuit breakers and emergency alarms, then fire off the tea kettle. Stations everyone.”
“Your first command,” Speedy said with a grin.
“And probably my last,” Loren Snyder admitted. “Miz Aranado, you and Speedy bring the batteries online and let’s do it.”
Four minutes later the batteries brought the boat to life. Lights came on, air began circulating, computer displays came to standby. Back aft Speedy Gonzales checked the emergency alarms one by one. Loren Snyder snapped off his flashlight and smiled. It was as if he had returned to something he had loved and missed. He thought for three seconds about law school, and snorted. Someday, maybe.
General Martin L. Wynette, the Joint Chiefs, and their staff were having a terrible morning. The news of the surrender of Fort Bliss, after a mutiny, cast a pall on their planning to invade Texas. Large numbers of troops that refused to obey orders, or refused to fight, or went AWOL was a nightmare that the U.S. armed forces had never before dealt with. It raised the question of whether any troops ordered to attack Texas could actually be relied upon to do so. It seemed to the planners that the answer to that question would determine what could be done, and when. Of course, the White House staff was outraged and said the military was dragging its feet in the face of treason. That comment was grossly unfair, and even Martin Wynette was severely irritated by it. Everyone in the E-Ring offices of the Pentagon knew that imprudent action would lead to even more severe condemnation of the military.
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