Liberty's Last Stand

by Stephen Coonts

  During the course of the night, as debate raged on in the legislative chambers, civilians crowded onto the capitol grounds. They passed through the guardsmen’s lines carrying lawn chairs and picnic baskets, and many had small children asleep in strollers. The floodlights around the capitol gave the warm evening a festive air. A local band set up amplifiers and microphones and got busy jamming to entertain the crowd.

  Inside the building, every member of the statehouse and senate got his or her turn at the microphone. The current national situation, and Barry Soetoro’s proclamations, were discussed and dissected. Oklahoma was one of only two states in the Union where Soetoro had failed to carry a single county in the 2012 election. His popularity had continued to sink since then, and it was soon clear that he had few friends in the legislature.

  One woman delegate from Norman, a university town and the state’s liberal bastion, argued that Soetoro would be out of office on January 20, 2017, a mere five months away, so there was no need for drastic action. “He’s not only a lame duck, he’s a dead duck. Why shoot ourselves in the head when he’s going to be gone in five months, regardless of what we or Texas or any other state does?”

  The following speaker took issue with her. “You are the wildest optimist in the history of representative government in Oklahoma. What makes you think there will be an election? Soetoro’s party will lose if there is one, so he has manufactured this crisis to give himself a plausible excuse for calling off the election. He wants to be president for life. Or maybe king. Or emperor. Emperor Barry. We need to stand up for representative government here and now, regardless of the cost. We owe it to ourselves, for our own self-respect, and we owe it to our children and grandchildren. Five years from now, how will you explain to your grandchildren what happened to Oklahoma after you refused to do what you knew to be right? And we all know the right thing to do. But the right thing is hard. Let us do it now, and someday we can all stand proudly, shoulder to shoulder, in heaven before the ruler of the universe.”

  There was more, lots more. One of the low points was a plea by a delegate from one of the districts encompassing the poorer section of Oklahoma City. “Nothing we can do here tonight will alter the course of our nation’s history. We here in Oklahoma are a sideshow. We are a thinly populated state, with only three million nine hundred thousand people. Do you really think we can realistically defy the federal government? The decisions that matter will all be made in Washington. I urge you to not compound the president’s problems by being defiant. Let us not beard the lion to see if, indeed, he will bite.”

  Several of the following speakers heaped scorn on her position. One speaker summed it up: “Submit, submit, submit. Don’t anger the tyrant. I never thought I would hear such words from a free American.”

  The criticism of the Soetoro administration kept rolling, mixing with a broad criticism of liberalism and federal judges. “I am sick of federal judges deciding that the United States Constitution requires abortion and same-sex marriage,” a state senator from Enid said. “I challenge you to read that document from end to end, and if you can find the word ‘abortion’ in it I will kiss your ass tomorrow at high noon on the capitol steps. Ditto gay marriage. What’s next? Plural marriages? Legalizing infanticide? We’re practically there now. I say it’s time we seized control of our own lives here in Oklahoma. Anyone wanting an abortion or to marry a homosexual partner can move to California or New York. We shouldn’t be forced to put up with it, and my constituents don’t want to. The real problem here is federal judges who enshrine their liberal philosophies in federal decisions instead of letting individual states vote their consciences in open, fair elections. Abortions, gay marriage, legalized pot, all of that should be decided by the states. Whatever happened to the governmental powers reserved to the states? Let’s declare ourselves independent, give the people of Oklahoma the right to decide which laws they want to live under, and tell Barry Soetoro where to go and what to do to himself when he gets there.”

  Another delegate in the House had this to say: “Oklahomans are tired of being ruled by federal bureaucrats and judges, none of them elected. They decide everything from what can be taught in the public schools to what can be served to kids for lunch and whether the kids can have a prayer. They decree that welfare recipients are entitled to a color television and cell phone, all paid for by the working families of Oklahoma, some of whom can afford neither. They claim they have the right to regulate every creek, farm pond, mudhole, and wet spot in America, including here in Oklahoma. We have to pay for their crackpot regulations based on crackpot science, or no science at all. We have to pay the salaries of the bureaucrats and put up with the endless delays and mountainous paperwork. It’s high time to put a stop to bureaucrats and judges running our lives. Let’s take back control. Independence today, tomorrow, and forever.”

  The Oklahoma Senate and House passed the declaration by overwhelming majorities and made the vote unanimous by voice vote, and the governor signed it. As in Texas, the declaration, which was almost word for word identical to Texas’, was read before television cameras on the statehouse steps to a wildly cheering crowd that commentators estimated at more than ten thousand people.

  In New Mexico the legislature also met that evening, but decided to defer any action until Soetoro had made a definitive announcement about whether the presidential election would proceed in November. If it was canceled altogether, the New Mexico legislature agreed to revisit the issue. The governor of Arizona called the legislature to meet the following evening. The governors of Kansas, Nebraska, Arkansas, South Dakota, North Dakota, Wyoming, and Utah scheduled special sessions two days hence. The governors of Montana and Iowa called for a special session of the legislature in three days time, to give lawmakers a chance to canvass their communities. Other states, too, were mulling their options.

  Although the legislatures had yet to be called, in Alaska and Hawaii the question of independence was also being weighed and debated, for different reasons. The previous year Soetoro had announced his intention to ignore the U.S. statutes and declare a huge chunk of northern Alaska off-limits to oil exploration. Many of the people of that sparsely settled state were outraged; oil development created good-paying jobs, of which Alaska had far too few, and severance taxes funded state and local governments and generated a check every year for every Alaskan. Oil development had never been the ecological disaster the save-the-earth crowd swore it would be. Soetoro’s announcement would slowly upend the Alaskan economy and affect every man, woman, and child who lived there. The devil of it was that the only people who visited the undeveloped Arctic were Alaskans who went to hunt and fish; the limousine liberals in Soetoro’s audience rarely if ever trekked the frozen north dribbling dollars as they went. Still, Soetoro would be gone in five months, they hoped, and his extralegal imperial declarations would then be history.

  In Hawaii, independence talk had been around for years, especially among native Hawaiians, many of whom were still on the bottom rung of the economic ladder. There was also a large number of people of all races that felt the Hawaiians had gotten a raw deal in 1893 when white American businessmen played a large role in toppling Hawaii’s last monarch, Queen Lili’uokalani, an overthrow that even then-president Grover Cleveland thought an illegal act of war. The current political crisis on the mainland looked to many native Hawaiians like a rare, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: perhaps the U.S. government would be too busy chasing Texas traitors to worry about the islands in the sea’s middle. On the other hand, the economic ties to the mainland were the bedrock of the economy. Could trade and tourism from Japan and China replace lost American dollars? Would the people of the islands be better or worse off as an independent nation?

  General Martin L. Wynette read the news summaries of all this “grandstanding,” as he called it, at seven o’clock on Wednesday morning when he got to the Pentagon, and thought if this news didn’t wake up the fools in the White House, nothing short of nuclear war woul
d. Those people in flyover land were pissed off and feisty.

  One of his aides had brought him a copy of the Minerva Research Initiative, which the president had directed the armed forces to draft and study after he was elected in 2008. Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom and war. Idly, Wynette wondered about the subtle mind that had dreamed up that title. The Minerva Research Initiative was a military plan to put down a civil insurrection in the United States.

  Wynette scanned it and tossed it aside. The plan assumed that the members of the armed forces would willingly participate in armed action against angry citizens. That was a forlorn and foolish assumption, Wynette now realized. He also had on his desk a flash message from the commanding general at Fort Sill in Lawton, Oklahoma, telling him that he had scoured his command for men and women willing to fight Oklahomans. They were willing to go to Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and if necessary Iran to fight for America, but only a few were willing to fight Oklahomans.

  He was getting briefings on the result of other army commanders’ attempts to muster soldiers who would fight for the Soetoro administration against domestic enemies when he was summoned to the White House. Wynette stuffed the messages in his briefcase along with a copy of the Minerva Research Initiative and called for his aide and his driver.

  In Colorado a group of FBI agents and a sheriff’s deputy searching houses to confiscate guns got into a shooting scrape with a homeowner and his son. The homeowner and son were killed, but not before they shot an FBI agent and the sheriff’s deputy to death. Another agent was in the hospital. Social media was aflame, with citizens promising the agents and local law officers who cooperated with them in confiscating guns more of the same.

  An FBI office in Seattle was attacked, one agent wounded: perpetrators unknown. In Idaho a county sheriff who agreed to help search the homes of citizens of his county to find and confiscate guns was ambushed, stripped naked, dipped in tar and feathers, and carried to his office on a fence rail. He was now hospitalized with burns over sixty percent of his body. A county in Utah with a significant percentage of Mormon fundamentalists declared its independence from the United States and the State of Utah. Polygamy there was now legal. Finally, a dispatch from Mexico City: the Mexican government was considering diplomatic recognition of the Republic of Texas.

  In Baltimore, a suburban sporting goods warehouse had been looted overnight. The gun counters were stripped clean and the looters helped themselves to every box of cartridges on the premises, then amused themselves by shooting at stuffed animal heads displayed high on the walls. The good news was that due to the federal government’s massive orders for ammunition over the last two years, and the president’s oft-repeated remarks about his desire for gun control that had induced civilians to buy and hoard ammo, the sporting goods store had only a small supply of cartridges, most in unpopular hunting calibers. The bad news went unspoken: the inner-city rioters were now armed.

  In other riot-plagued big cities around the country, the police and National Guard contented themselves with trying to prevent the destruction from spreading. It was a losing fight. The centers of many of America’s largest cities now resembled the core of German cities after World War II.

  People living in the suburbs nationwide were armed and organizing. They were also emptying the grocery and hardware stores, buying everything in sight, to the limits of their credit cards. Canned and dry food items were almost completely gone in some stores. Hardware stores sold out of emergency generators, charcoal, and gasoline cans. Gasoline stations found that many of their customers were filling up as many as ten five-gallon cans with fuel. Sporting goods stores were selling every gun on the shelf and all the ammunition in stock. In Howard County, Maryland, a bedroom suburb of Washington and Baltimore populated with a large percentage of federal civil service employees of all races, the county police and Homeland Security officers tried to search homes for guns, only to be met at four houses by armed householders who threatened to shoot to kill.

  The chief of the Howard County police announced that henceforth his officers would concentrate on arresting criminals, answering domestic violence calls, and helping motorists involved in traffic accidents. The chief was quoted by a reporter as saying, “If Barry Soetoro wants to confiscate guns, he can figure out how to do it. The people here are frightened by what’s going on in Baltimore and elsewhere and want to be able to protect themselves. I can’t say I blame them.” After the story was published, two black Maryland legislators called the police chief, who was also black, a racist.

  TWENTY

  In Galveston that morning, after the sun came up, the sheriff drove his car down the pier and parked adjacent to the gangway of USS Texas. He walked across the gangway and shouted down into the open hatch, “Anybody home?”

  In less than a minute, a man appeared below and looked up at him. “Yep, we’re home.”

  “Mind if I come down and visit?”

  “Please do.”

  Speedy Gonzales escorted the sheriff to a small wardroom, where he found Loren Snyder studying several large bound volumes and sipping a cup of coffee.

  “Coffee, Sheriff?”

  “Don’t mind if I do.”

  “Best coffee in the world,” Loren Snyder said.

  The sheriff sipped at his, which he took black. Almost as good as Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, he thought, but he didn’t say it. Instead, he got straight to the point. “When are y’all going to nuke yourselves out of here?”

  Loren laughed. “Well, we’re working on that right now. Before we go, I want my crew, all five of us, to run through every emergency procedure in the book and figure out how we’re going to handle it. We don’t have sixty people, just five. We don’t want to die in this boat.”

  The sheriff looked around and nodded. “I sure understand that.” Just sitting here in this steel cigar gave the sheriff a mild case of claustrophobia. What it would be like being submerged he didn’t want to think about.

  “How long can you guys stay submerged, anyway?” the sheriff asked.

  “Until we run out of toilet paper.”

  The sheriff chuckled at that, thinking Loren Snyder was being facetious. He wasn’t. With only five people aboard eating the stores, Texas could stay submerged for a long, long time.

  “We’re going to spend today running emergency drills,” Snyder said, “making sure everyone knows what is expected of him and we are all on the same page. I hope by tonight we’ll be ready to leave this pier.”

  “What about the U.S. Navy? I’ll bet they’re kinda unhappy that they lost this thing.”

  “They’ll probably send SEALs to take it back,” Lorrie admitted.

  “You mean like those guys who whacked bin Laden?”

  “Yep. Naval Special Warfare commandos.”

  “Maybe y’all oughta get outta here and do your drills someplace else.”

  “Sheriff, I agree one hundred percent. As soon as we feel we can safely move this submarine, we will. In the interim, it would help if you would station some officers with radios out there around the harbor to keep a lookout. I suspect the SEALs will come at night. Probably tonight. We hope to be gone when they get here, but just in case, if your lookouts see anything suspicious—anything—I would appreciate a heads-up so we can cast off and get going. Once we close the hatches, the SEALs can’t get inside the boat.”

  The sheriff nodded reluctantly. “Today and this evening?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’ll try like the devil to get this stuff done and get out of Galveston?”

  “Cross my heart.”

  “Okay, Captain. But I ain’t asking my deputies to get in a shootout with SEALs. No way. They’re law enforcement officers, not soldiers.”

  They discussed radio frequencies for a moment, then Loren Snyder said, “Thanks for stopping by, Sheriff.”

  The sheriff had one last gulp of coffee, then said, “Good luck to y’all out there, Captain.” After he and Loren shook hands, he followed Speedy to the fo
rward torpedo room and the ladder topside.

  Captain. Loren Snyder liked the sound of that.

  Secret Service sniper Tobe Baha drove slowly around Austin looking things over. He had had a private interview with President Soetoro’s chief of staff, Al Grantham, then went home and packed for a trip. He put his rifle in its aluminum airline case in the toolbox behind the cab of his pickup. He carefully locked the toolbox with the best padlocks money could buy.

  The rifle wasn’t his service rifle. This was his personal rifle, a Remington Model 700 in .308, or as it was known in the service, 7.62×51 NATO. It certainly wasn’t the best cartridge for extreme long-range shooting, but Tobe had used it extensively while in the military and knew the ballistics cold, so he was very comfortable with it. And ammo for it was available everywhere, if need be. Tobe had loaded his own with match bullets and had two boxes in the airline case.

  Under his rifle was another airline case stuffed with a quarter of a million U.S. dollars and fifty thousand dollars’ worth of gold. That was his down payment on the assassination of Jack Hays.

  The problem was that Tobe Baha wasn’t an assassin. He was a sniper, pure and simple, so he didn’t even bother trying to come up with a second method of taking out the president of Texas if setting up a snipe proved difficult. Actually, he couldn’t conceive of a set of circumstances that would cause him to miss a rifle shot, if and when he got one. And he would get one, sooner or later. Everyone was vulnerable to a sniper, unless they lived in a prison, and politicians especially. They had to make public appearances, they got into and out of limos and helicopters on a routine basis, and most of them, including Jack Hays, had families.

  Patience was the sniper’s golden asset, and Tobe Baha had more than his share. He could and would wait until he was presented with a shot he knew he could make during one of Jack Hays’ inevitable public appearances. After that, with a cool million in his jeans, he would disappear.