Liberty's Last Stand

by Stephen Coonts

  “If he’s there,” I said. “For all we know he may be in Hawaii playing golf.”

  “If he is, he swam over,” Grafton shot back. “Tommy, you drive. Follow that howitzer. The guardsmen with their mortars will follow you.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  The trek up the mountain was the most frustrating experience I have ever had. We averaged two miles every hour. I would move the truck ahead a couple of hundred yards and shut off the engine to save fuel.

  The western side of that mountain, the crest of which ran generally north and south, was a mix of pastures and woodlots with farm houses and ramshackle barns thrown in, and here and there a mobile home surrounded by the owner’s junk collection. Rotting tractors, curious cows staring at us over fences, abandoned pickups manufactured during the Truman administration, stray dogs, yards full of weeds, fences covered with poison ivy, it was rural America in late summer in all its glory.

  The fat people had it worst. They began dropping out, just sitting down. Some of the skinny people put their weapons in the truck and on the army trucks behind us carrying mortars, MREs, and water, just to lighten the load. People trudged and trudged up the edge of our road, raising clouds of dust.

  Grafton sat in the rear seat and was on the handheld radio constantly. He gave Sarah and me updates on the southern army. They were through Leesburg and had collected another two or more thousand civilians, who were walking and driving cars and pickups and vans. Everyone seemed to want to go to Washington. Our ambushers, Martinez’ bunch, were in position blocking the roads into and out of Camp David.

  The power was back on in eastern Virginia and Maryland, and television and radio reporters were giving their audiences the blow by blow. Dixie Cotton was with the army marching through Leesburg, heading for the eastern Virginia suburbs, and she was on the air and on fire, urging all loyal Americans to join with the army of volunteers on its way to liberate Washington.

  It was nearly one o’clock when I saw Travis Clay standing beside the road. I stopped beside him.

  “This is like herding cats,” he said. “Got any water?”

  “In the bed. Help yourself.”

  When he had guzzled a bottle and had another bottle in his hand, he came back to the driver’s door. “You going to sit there riding along in your limo, or are you going to help?”

  “I’m an officer. Rank has its privileges.”

  “I’m going to write a letter to your mother. ‘Tommy doesn’t play well with other children.’”

  I told Sarah to drive the truck and got out with my M4.

  I helped Travis and Willis herd the troops up the road. Every little bit a shot would echo around. The wannabe warriors got bored and shot into a tree or a deer or whatever. I saw a guy with a shotgun drop a crow that was flying over.

  “Save your ammunition,” I admonished the trekkers. “You’re going to need every damn bullet before the day is over. And for God’s sake, don’t shoot the cows: they don’t vote, don’t have guns, and can’t shoot back, so it isn’t sporting.” Some listened, some didn’t.

  We came upon a farm where the lady of the house had gone all out. Apparently she knew the column was hiking up the road, so she had a folding table set up by the gate and she and her daughters, both early teens, were pouring good well water for anyone who wanted a drink. And serving homemade cookies.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” I said as I helped myself to an oatmeal raisin cookie and filled up my water bottle. “How’d you know this mob was coming?”

  “Your scouts came up the hill at dawn this morning, and I met them coming back. They said a lot of people would be along.”

  So I sipped water and munched my cookie as the troops did the same, then we moved along while other people crowded the table. Everyone had a good word to say to the lady and her daughters, and she had a good word for everyone. America walking by your door, on a dirt road that leads nowhere in particular. It was a strange experience.

  Two miles farther up the road, I found a woman sitting with her shoes and socks off, looking at broken blisters, now leaking blood. A double-barrel shotgun lay beside her. “Are you going to be able to keep going?” I asked.

  She looked to me to be in her fifties. She cocked her head to eye me, squinting against the sun. “I’ll make it, Jack,” she said.

  “My name’s Tommy Carmellini.”

  “Betty Connelly.”

  She took a pair of dry socks from her backpack. “My daughter died in that parochial school in Arlington Heights a couple of weeks ago. She was a teacher. One of those jihadists Soetoro let into the country shot her in the face. I’ll get up this mountain if I have to crawl it.”

  While she put her shoes and socks back on, I inspected her shotgun, an elegant old side-by-side. I opened the breech and extracted one of the shells. Number six birdshot, perfect for pheasants. I put the shell back in, snapped the breech closed, checked the safety, and put her on the tailgate of our truck. Gave her a bottle of water and her shotgun. “You ride there until we get on top,” I told her.

  She nodded and brushed the hair back out of her eyes. “Thanks,” she said. I just hoped she didn’t get shot.

  After two hours, I got back in the truck. Although the temp was only seventy-five degrees, according to the truck’s thermometer, I was hot and sweaty, and so was everyone hiking up that low mountain to get to whatever fate awaited us. I guess I was a little nervous, right along with everyone else.

  Somehow, someway, we made it up the grade. The dirt road got worse and worse the higher we went, until it was just a rutted road full of dried-up mudholes. No farms up here, just woods. I glanced at the truck’s odometer. It had driven fourteen miles to cover the twelve miles direct distance to the edge of the bald.

  Grafton had received radio messages from the Predator crew long before. Soetoro’s army was on the crest of the mountain, and at least three hundred yards of cow pasture lay between the forest on the top of the western slope and the naked crest.

  It was four o’clock by my watch when I first sighted the bald. Sarah was at the wheel of the truck, so I got out and started directing our tired volunteers into the woods. I estimated we had lost at least half through straggling and heat exhaustion, but that was just a guess.

  “Get the troops spread out,” Grafton told me. “Link up with the people on the other road and stay in the woods. Have the mortarmen take their weapons out there a ways for max coverage.”

  Already the people on the crest were popping away at us. The bullets pattered on the trees and leaves like rain, but if they hit anyone, I didn’t see him or her go down. With all the dust and engine noise and gunfire all afternoon from our crowd as they climbed the mountain, there was no possibility of surprise. Not that Grafton wanted surprise.

  Our troops retrieved their weapons from the vehicles and went scurrying out through the woods as the distant firing and pattering of bullets encouraged them on. The howitzer was turned and set up in the road. The truck pulling it had already run over the cattle gate, flattening it. A three-strand barbed-wire fence on ancient, half-rotted posts ran away on both sides of the gate. The artillery officer, a captain, came over to confer with Grafton. “Not yet,” the admiral said.

  I went into the woods, trying to show the civilians how to take advantage of cover, advising them not to fire their weapons, but to wait. Some of the fools huddled down behind a bush or sapling that wouldn’t stop a BB, so I moved them to rocks and behind big trees. Inevitably a few of them began banging away at the distant crest, wasting ammo; they probably had no idea how far their bullets would drop at that distance. Some were shooting into the air at a thirty-degree angle; maybe they were trying to hit Camp David.

  One guy was walking around like it was Sunday afternoon in the park, shouting to his fellow warriors, “Hang tough. We’ll kick the shit out of those stupid sons of bitches.”

  “Get down, you idiot,” I told him.

  He looked at me with distain and struck a pose. “At this distance, the
y can’t hit—”

  Whap! There is no sound on earth like that of a bullet striking a living body.

  I heard the sound and saw the hole appear in the side of his head. Blood began leaking out. He swayed like an old oak in a storm, his eyes fixed on infinity, dead on his feet. He fell beside me.

  He had a nice rifle, an old 1903 Springfield with a four-power scope. I laid it across his chest and moved on, shouting, “You morons get behind something solid and stay down! Save your ammo!”

  After twenty minutes of that, when I had positioned the men and women who had made the climb on the left side of the road, I went back to the pickup.

  “Get out your sniper rifle, Tommy, and look at the people on the crest,” Grafton said. “When the action starts, shoot anyone who looks as if he is directing troops.” That was always the advice to snipers: kill the officers.

  “Yo,” I said and got out the best rifle, deployed the bipod, filled my pockets with cartridges, and set up using a pile of dirt that some snow scraper had deposited there in past years.

  I lased the crest. Three hundred fifteen yards, give or take.

  “Start shooting, Tommy,” Jake Grafton said.

  I picked out some fool who was standing up looking this way with binoculars and let him have it. After the recoil, I didn’t see him. I scared or hit him.

  I had fired ten shots when Grafton said, “Do you have a machine gun in the truck?”

  “Yes.”

  “Put it up there and get ready.”

  I had no more than gotten the bipod deployed and the belt in it when the howitzer began firing at a high angle. I saw the shells popping on the crest. Then the mortars opened up, dropping their shells along the crest too.

  This is it, I thought. They’ll break for the woods behind them and we’ll charge up there to take the crest.

  Grafton was running to the left, telling everyone who would listen that we were going to charge the crest, but to stop there. In all likelihood, the people on the crest would retreat to the woods on the other side and be waiting for our bunch to charge them.

  But…

  I was astounded when the enemy on the crest stood up and began running downhill toward us. They charged, at least two thousand of them, screaming at the top of their lungs and firing wildly. They were dedicated Soetoro fanatics, not professionals.

  I hunkered down over the M249 and began firing bursts. They went down in handfuls. To my right and left the woods came alive as the civilian volunteers let loose with everything they had, shotguns, rifles, and pistols.

  The charge broke halfway to the trees. The ground was carpeted with people when, suddenly, the survivors began running back up the hill en masse, some of them carrying and dragging wounded people.

  I shot the whole belt at them as the howitzer banged away to my left and the mortarmen dropped their shells among the survivors. Then the artillery shells that had been popping viciously moved their aim point and I no longer saw the shells land. They were obviously shooting to land their shells on the back side of the ridge.

  All along our line a shout went up and people who thought they didn’t have another erg of energy left in them left the trees in a trot, charging up that hill. That’s when my admiration of the American volunteer went through the roof. By God, they had guts.

  They swarmed up that hill.

  Sarah motioned to me, so I grabbed the machine gun and belt and got in the back. She put the truck in motion and I hung on. I wanted to change the belt in the machine gun but with the uneven ground tossing the truck around, there was no way. I grabbed my M4 and squirted a burst at any of the enemy who paused in flight to shoot at people charging up the hill.

  When we made the crest, it was empty. The enemy was running down the other side. Sarah stopped the truck. I dumped the carbine and grabbed a belt of ammo and slapped it in the M249 as bullets snapped around the truck. People running, guns blazing: it was the damnedest battle I have been in yet, like something from an American Civil War movie, blues versus grays. I dismounted, set up the gun, and shot at the retreating people dashing into the trees on the east side of the bald.

  “Hose the tree line,” Grafton shouted. He was outside the truck, crouching, watching everything. “They may have an ambush there.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him run over to the howitzer crew and point. In seconds the artillery shells began falling just back of the treeline: explosions, clouds of dirt, trees falling. The mortarmen came up to the crest in the pickups that they had used to transport their tubes, recoil plates, and ammo. After taking a moment to get set up again, they began lofting shells into the woods below.

  To my amazement, our guys who had scaled the crest stopped for only a moment to get their breath, then set off running downhill for the trees.

  I finished the belt and got another into the gun, which was getting damned hot.

  Grafton jumped into the truck and Sarah raced it downhill. I sprayed lead, then grabbed the gun and followed them.

  She stopped forty feet from the edge of the trees. I threw my machine gun in the bed and picked up my M4.

  Willis Coffee came running up. Grafton shouted at him, “Get some AT4s and shoot them into the trees.”

  “We’ve got about a dozen.”

  “Get them running for Camp David.”

  Willis did as he was told. Stood in the bed and launched the rockets as fast as he could.

  When our troops were no longer in sight, Willis got down. Our guys and gals had gone into the trees. They had literally jerked the old fence posts out of the ground rather than climb over or through the barbed wire.

  Grafton, Sarah, and Willis each got an M4, and we trotted toward the trees. We hadn’t taken five steps when Willis grunted and fell. I stopped and went back to check on him. He had taken a bullet in the chest. He looked at me and said, “Tell my wife…”

  “What?” I demanded. “Tell her what?”

  But he was dead. I realized then that I really didn’t know Willis Coffee very well. And I would never know him better. “God bless you,” I whispered, and ran on toward the trees.

  Dead and wounded lay everywhere. We disarmed the wounded and kept going. Our troops were in front of us, driving the enemy toward the perimeter fence somewhere in the woods ahead.

  When we hit the fence, it was down. Who tore it down I never learned. It was down when we got there and that was the reality of it. We kept going.

  Somehow in the woods amid the smoke and bodies, we lost Grafton. He must have run on ahead. I was too old a dog for loping through the woods when people could be hiding behind any tree praying for a good shot at their pursuers. Ahead I could hear the cacophony of gunfire. Bodies lay every which way, a lot of them shot in the back. The wounded were groaning. The rocky forest floor looked like hell’s half acre.

  A moment later I saw the first body that had been scalped. The head was a bloody mess and the hair was gone. At the time I thought, maybe shrapnel did that.

  I kept going, and soon found another. Scalped.

  A hundred yards later, I met an unarmed man wandering amid the shattered trees and rocks. He had long hair, at least on the fringes; his scalp had been cut and torn off. The top of his head and his face were masses of blood.

  I stopped him, forced him to lie down. “Whoa. What the hell happened?”

  “A shell hit near me. I was out for a bit, and when I woke up some guy was ripping the top of my head off. He had a big knife. He left me there.”

  “Lie still. The medics will be along after a bit.”

  “Help me, mister! For God’s sake!” He clutched at me but I drew back and scanned the woods.

  “Lie still,” I repeated. “Your war is over.”

  I picked up the pace. I had covered maybe two hundred yards when I came upon a big tattooed guy with a long knife and a black rifle. He had a bag on a strap over his shoulder. I could see hair protruding from it. He was bending over a figure on the ground, a woman in shorts with long blond hair, and he had his knife ou
t. She had an arm up, trying to fend him off. “For God’s sake,” she screamed. He grabbed a handful of hair, lifted her head a little, and jabbed the knife into her scalp.

  “Stop,” I roared. He turned toward me and I shot him.

  I ran toward him as he went down. The woman on the ground looked at me stunned, then she was dead, as if someone had turned a switch. He had her scalp half off.

  He was still alive. He looked at me with the strangest expression. I kicked his rifle away.

  Then a shot rang out. He took the bullet in the head. I turned and saw Sarah Houston standing there with her carbine at her shoulder.

  She shot into him three or four more times, turned, and began walking downhill, east toward Camp David and the rolling racket of gunfire.

  The woman on the ground was wearing a Penn T-shirt—University of Pennsylvania—now soaked with blood from a mortal wound caused by a large shard of a tree that was still sticking two feet out of her chest. She had bled a lot before the scalper got to her. Blood, almost black, was everywhere. She and the scalper lay in it.

  The sun was already behind the bald crest above me, leaving the woods in dark shadow. Below on the slope, Sarah threaded her way through trees still standing and those blasted by shellfire, around downed trees, limbs, and rocky outcrops, and disappeared from view. I got myself in motion, following along.

  Grafton must have passed these wounded people on his trot down the hill, sore ribs and all, trying to get to Camp David before the mob killed Soetoro. He was a man on a mission.

  I wasn’t. I didn’t give a damn what happened to Barry Soetoro.

  It got dark as I went through the woods. There was just enough moon and starlight to allow me to see trees and rocks except under dense foliage, when I had to literally feel my way along. I wished I had some night-vision goggles, but I didn’t. And of course, neither did anyone else. I only tripped and fell four times.