Liberty's Last Stand

by Stephen Coonts

  “Think he’ll go?”

  “No, but it’s worth a try.”

  A minute later we were airborne and climbing over the Potomac for the White House. Maybe it was my imagination, but the crowd outside seemed larger. As we crossed the Mall, we could see people walking toward the mansion, like an incoming tide.

  I looked away from the scene below. There was a house fire somewhere up to the northeast, and the plume was rising and drifting on the wind. I wondered if the fire department was on the job. Grafton finally leveled his wings heading west and added power to climb.

  The flagship of the Texas Navy, the attack submarine Texas, was fifty miles east of Cape May, New Jersey, running at three knots when Loren Snyder poked the telescoping photonics masts—Texas had two of them—above the surface. In less than a minute, the video from the mast confirmed what the sonar was telling the crew, that there were no surface ships of any kind within their visible horizon.

  Five days had passed since the combat with the destroyers among the oil rigs offshore of Louisiana. Texas had transited the Florida Straits and headed north. Snyder had it in his mind that if he torpedoed a couple of container ships in the approaches to New York and Newark, he could probably shut down those ports for a while. Days of cruising deep and listening via sonar for ships and submarines had been unproductive. The ocean seemed extraordinarily empty.

  “Maybe the war is over,” Jugs Aranado suggested.

  “We should hope,” Snyder said, but just in case, he decided to listen to East Coast radio stations to see what he could learn.

  The AM band was remarkably quiet, but there were a few stations on the air. He channel surfed, looking for a news show. What he found was a station broadcasting the White House eavesdropping show. Barry Soetoro’s voice sounded in his ears. The fidelity was quite good, and he could readily understand the conversations. They were talking about declaring martial law and arresting subversives.

  As he listened on a headset, Snyder wondered what he was listening to. Gradually the idea dawned that someone had recorded a White House conversation weeks ago, perhaps months.

  Thirty minutes later he was sure. They were talking about the upcoming Republican nominating convention. This had to be recorded in late July or early August!

  He flipped a switch to put the audio on the loudspeaker in the control room.

  Jugs was there, and Ada Fuentes was on the helm.

  The two women sat, startled at first, then mesmerized.

  “How did this get on the radio?” Fuentes asked, dumbfounded. What she was hearing just didn’t compute.

  When the scene was over, an announcer came on. “You were listening to President Soetoro and his advisors, Al Grantham and Sulana Schanck. Now for the next scene.”

  Snyder reached for the dial and turned it. He found a news station. The announcer was interviewing a Long Island congressman. “We have fifteen hundred people assembling at the Meadowlands parking lot. Tomorrow we will begin our march on Washington. Food has been donated from the local food bank and some local farmers. Anyone who wishes to join us should do so today. Bring your own weapon and ammunition and whatever camping gear you think you will need. Bring whatever food you can.”

  “What will you and your ‘army’ do in Washington?”

  “We are going to drag Soetoro from the White House and hang him.”

  “And you are sure the military won’t interfere?”

  “They said they wouldn’t—you have been reading their press release every hour on the hour. They’re fighting Mexico, not Americans. We’re taking them at their word. If they want a fight, however, we’ll give it to them.”

  Snyder looked at Jugs. “What do you think?”

  “Holy Christ!”

  He lowered the photonics masts and told Ada to speed up to arrive off the Narrows at dusk. He suggested she descend to two hundred feet, and as Jugs flooded tanks, she did.

  Stabilized at that depth, they discussed what they had heard.

  “Let’s go home,” Ada suggested.

  Jugs didn’t say anything, merely scrutinized Loren Snyder’s face.

  He had to make a decision, so he did. “We’ll take a look at New York Harbor and listen again this evening, with everyone not on duty in the control room. We’ll let everyone have his say, and I’ll make a decision then.”

  Things began to go wrong pretty quickly when JR Hays saw the Bank of Manhattan’s vault. It had a massive circular door that weighed about twenty-five tons, Gottlieb said proudly. The ingots were stacked in the vault and almost filled it. Around the walls on shelves and in drawers were the packs of small wafers, small bars called kilobars, Krugerrands, and other gold holdings, all labeled with owner’s names. The sight of all that gold was awe-inspiring, the wealth of nations.

  The bank had precisely two electric forklifts and four dollies to move the gold ingots, but they weren’t set up for speed. Each bar had a serial number, and two men were busy writing down the number on each bar. JR put a stop to that. “The gold is going to the Fed,” he said. “You already have the numbers.”

  “Can you guarantee that all the bars will arrive in good condition?” Gottlieb demanded.

  “Sure as shootin’,” JR said, and told him to watch and simply count bars.

  Colonel Holt took him aside and said, “I figure it will take two days to empty this vault, if nothing breaks.”

  “How long to load up fifty tons? Can we get that accomplished today?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Make it happen. Get soldiers down here to help carry the ingots out by hand. Fifty tons is our goal. I’ll tell Gottlieb we’ll be back for the rest tomorrow.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  With the help of a dozen soldiers who were soon sweating profusely, the work speeded up. The soldiers grabbed an ingot in each hand and carried it to the elevator while Gottlieb and another bank officer counted them. For the receipt, of course.

  JR tried to stay calm. Fifty tons would be a good haul. Be satisfied with that, he told himself.

  He had been there an hour when one of the officers came to the vault holding a handheld radio. “Just talked to the airport,” he said. “Some FAA guy came around. He stayed ten minutes and left.”

  “Keep me advised,” JR said, and watched the gold being loaded onto dollies. He was learning a lot about gold ingots. The standard bars in the vault were Good Delivery bars, each with a serial number. They weighed 12.4 kilograms each, contained 400 troy ounces, or 438.9 ounces. That translated to about 27.5 pounds each.

  He did some figuring in his head. Fifty tons was one hundred thousand pounds, which equals about 3,600 bars, more or less.

  They weren’t going to get it done using dollies or a dozen soldiers. He had Colonel Holt assemble a conga line of thirty soldiers, and they passed gold bars from hand to hand into the elevator, and when it held a couple of hundred, sent it up to be offloaded into a truck while more were stacked at the entrance. The work went faster.

  The men ate MREs in shifts at midday and took a five-minute potty break in shifts. The pile of gold shrank slowly.

  We should have brought some dollies, JR thought. Well, one can’t think of everything. He found himself glancing at his watch every few minutes. The minute hand crawled.

  Our flight back to Dawson was uneventful. The weather was benign, a typical September day in the eastern United States. We watched for ambushes and found none. We did see our columns snaking along. They had made almost a hundred miles since we saw them in the early morning. We saw another convoy of trucks and cars heading west from Baltimore, approaching Frederick, about fifty miles behind our northern army column. This convoy wasn’t ours.

  Grafton circled the convoy, low enough that we could see flags with Soetoro’s image on them (a sort of Che Guevara T-shirt look) fluttering from car and truck aerials. Then we headed for Dawson.

  I decided to deliver myself of an opinion. “The problem with democracy,” I told Grafton on the ICS, “is that fools elec
t fools.”

  He snorted. “And the problem with hereditary kings is that too often you get the pampered, coddled village idiot running the country.”

  “Life is tough,” I told him.

  The National Guard camp near Kingwood was almost deserted. We taxied up and shut down in the precise spot where we had manned the plane hours before.

  I chocked the plane and tied it down after Grafton went off to find whoever was manning the radios. I got busy fueling the plane. An army portable generator supplied the power to pump the avgas.

  As I finished I noticed some metal blossomed out on the left wing. I climbed off the ladder and took a look. There was a bullet hole in the wing, about six feet in from the port wingtip. A bullet had gone in the bottom of the wing and out the top. A .30 caliber, from the look of it. And neither Grafton nor I had felt a thing. Someone we flew over today was unhappy with us, with life, maybe with the world.

  After I got the fueling hose put away and the generator secured, I looked the airplane over carefully for any more punctures, didn’t find any, and then strolled away carrying my M4. I found Sarah with Grafton in the headquarters building by the radios.

  He was on the horn to General Martinez. “I’ll meet you at first light at the Hagerstown airport. I suspect you are going to meet that bunch coming from Baltimore tomorrow mid-morning between Hagerstown and Frederick. I want to be with you.”

  “Roger. I’ll meet you there.”

  Sarah looked at me and I looked at her. She didn’t say anything, and I couldn’t think of anything except, “Want to go see if we can find something to eat?”

  She did, so with a nod to Grafton, we left. He got busy talking to the southern column.

  “Seen the Wire around?” I asked.

  “Not hide nor hair.”

  I wondered where in the world that fool was. Giving him a weapon the other night in Kingwood was a bad mistake. He wasn’t any part of a warrior, which was why I liked him. I was worried. It was a tough world out there these days, and he wasn’t a tough man.

  The Bank of Manhattan’s president, Abe Gottlieb, wanted to know if the Fed was waiting for the gold. “Of course,” JR said. “I have troops there. They’ll stay open until we arrive and if necessary will work all night getting it into their vault.”

  “Ah, the army!”

  “Indeed.”

  “How do you know that a few soldiers won’t steal some bars?”

  That sally drew a frosty stare from the general. Gottlieb said he needed something to eat, and wandered away.

  JR was upstairs in the bank when the power came back on in Manhattan. He knew it was on because the outside telephone lines began ringing. The receptionist smiled broadly, shouted to the other tellers, and answered the phone.

  Uh-oh.

  JR looked around for Gottlieb. Two FBI agents were with him, and he signaled to one of them, who jogged over.

  “Power’s on, phones are up,” said JR. “We’ve got to move. Close the doors, round up the staff—all of them including Gottlieb—and put them in a conference room upstairs. Confiscate all cell phones and remove the regular phones from the room. Get cracking.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  JR went back to the vault. Soldiers were passing bars along at a good clip. “How many ingots have you loaded?” he asked Holt.

  “By my count, about two thousand.” JR looked at his watch. It was almost one o’clock.

  “Sixteen hundred to go. Get the bank employees out of here and give them to the FBI agents. Get more troops down here.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  JR went along encouraging his soldiers. “Come on, men. You can do it. We’re over half way there.”

  He went up on the street and checked the trucks. As soon as a truck had four hundred bars in it, a new truck was pulled into position. Armed soldiers were stationed around the trucks, and they kept the curious moving on. Not all of them, of course, since the sight of all that gold stopped people in their tracks.

  Three policemen had been enlisted to help keep the crowd moving along the sidewalks. As JR watched, another police car pulled up and a captain in uniform came over. He had scrambled eggs on his hat. He saluted JR, who returned it.

  “We got no notice of this move.”

  “We can handle it. We figured you had enough troubles as it was.”

  The cop took off his hat and wiped the sweat from his hair, then put it back on. “We sure do, General. We sure do. But with the electricity back on, maybe things will start returning to normal.”

  “We can only hope.”

  He pointed to JR’s combat infantryman’s badge on his chest. “I got one of those,” the captain said. “The Gulf War, Desert Storm.”

  “Thank you for your service,” JR replied.

  “Yeah. Got out and joined the police. Probably should have stayed in the army. It was a great experience, but I wanted to come home to New York. You know, you’re the first general I ever talked to.”

  “Well, you’re my first police captain. I hope we never meet professionally.”

  The cop grinned. “You’re pretty young too.”

  “Good whiskey,” JR confided. “Never drink the cheap stuff.”

  The captain held up his hand and adjusted the earpiece in his ear. He rogered the transmission, then said to JR, “Gotta go. Got some dead people in an apartment house. Someone just found them. Been dead a few days.”

  They shook hands, and the captain trotted over to his cruiser and jumped in. The driver hit the lights and siren, and away the cruiser went up the street, howling madly.

  Everyone has problems, JR thought, and got back to attending to his.

  Texas poked her photonics masts up as she approached the narrows. Loren could see the Verrazano Bridge across the narrows, and he saw ships. Lots of ships, none of them going anywhere.

  “Water is pretty shallow, Captain,” Jugs said.

  “Surface,” Loren said. “I’ll go up to the bridge. I want to see what’s in the harbor. Listen to the radio and brief me over the sound-powered phone.”

  So Texas rose from the depths and her sail broke water. Loren opened hatches and was soon standing on the small bridge. He plugged in a sound-powered headset and talked to Jugs.

  Giving heading commands, he went around ships that were anchored and under the bridge. Not much traffic on it, he noted, and he used his binoculars to examine the freighters and tankers anchored in the lower harbor, waiting for pier space.

  He saw no navy ships. Not a one. Maybe there was a submarine outside the narrows, but maybe not. Maybe peace had broken out all over. The sky was empty of airplanes, even helicopters.

  Staying at ten knots, Loren took the boat around Liberty Island. “Jugs, come up here.”

  In about a minute she was standing beside him, gazing at Lady Liberty, the ships, and the Manhattan skyline.

  After a bit she said, “It’s time to go home, Lorrie.”

  “I think so too,” he said, and put his elbows on the rail in front of him and breathed deep of the tangy, salty air. “Why don’t you go below and send the others up here for a look, one by one.”

  “Aye-aye, sir,” she said, and went down the ladder.

  Loren used the sound-powered phone to order a turn back toward the narrows. George Ranta came topside, looked and laughed and pounded Loren on the back, then went below and sent up Mouse.

  Two hours later, safely back through the narrows and with good water under the keel, Texas slipped beneath the waves. In the control room, Jugs briefed him on what she had heard on the radio. The power was back on in New York. The Pentagon was adamant that the military was not taking sides in the Soetoro administration’s squabble with the states. People were being released from concentration camps in droves. Politicians were lining up at radio and television stations to be interviewed.

  Maybe America—and Texas—will make it after all, Loren thought, and gave orders for the voyage back to Galveston.

  It was four in the afternoon when t
he 3,600th gold ingot was laid in a truck and the tailgate closed. The bank’s personnel were locked upstairs in conference rooms, and the fake FBI agents had put the fear of God in them.

  Five minutes later the last of the soldiers and Texas Rangers were aboard the trucks and they were rolling. The traffic signals were working again, although the streets were still almost devoid of traffic. The trucks didn’t stop for lights—they simply drove on through.

  At LaGuardia the planes were sitting with their ramps down when the trucks rolled up, and the loadmasters used hand signals to guide the drivers into the cavernous bays of the C-17s. Every soldier helped with the tie-down chains, then the loadmasters checked everything as the ramps came up and the planes started taxiing.

  When they were airborne, a sergeant passed out bottles of water and MREs to the troops. JR went up to the front of the plane and came back with an open packing case. He walked down the line of soldiers sitting beside the trucks passing out bottles of champagne. “You guys have to share. We only brought a case for each plane.”

  Corks popped and happy smiles broke out.

  JR went up to the flight deck and sat down in the jump seat. By God, we did it, he thought. Fifty tons of gold!

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Ariot in the streets in front of the White House and in Lafayette Park broke out between supporters and opponents of Barry Soetoro that evening. The melee quickly got out of control, so the police called for fire trucks with water cannons, which were waiting a half-mile away. And they fired tear gas grenades.

  The mob wavered under the gas, but it was the fire trucks that finally dispersed the crowd. A dozen people were dead, either beaten to death or trampled, and several hundred injured.

  While the tear gas wafted into the White House, the survivors of the battle surged through the streets smashing out store windows, looting, and overturning cars and setting them on fire.

  In the White House, loyalists gathered around Barry Soetoro and urged him to accept the Pentagon’s offer of a plane to take him into exile.