Liberty's Last Stand

by Stephen Coonts

  After a while I got glimpses of fires burning around the presidential enclave. I moved carefully, the M4 at the ready. I came out of the trees and walked along a graveled path toward the biggest of the fires. People were everywhere, and all of them were armed. I figured they were our guys, and was sure when I saw fifty or sixty people sitting on the ground wearing white plastic ties around their wrists. There must have been a thousand people in the lawn and flower beds, most of them shouting like fiends.

  Near the front door of what I took to be the main building or lodge, I saw Grafton and some of the people from the camp this morning confronting a knot of men and women in business attire. They had to be Secret Service. Barry and Mickey Soetoro were not in sight. I went around the corner of the house away from the group. The house, or lodge, was a two story. Looking around and concluding I was unobserved, I leaped for the bottom of a balcony. Got my hands on the concrete floor of the thing and pulled myself up with every muscle screaming about all the exercise I hadn’t been getting.

  Checking over my shoulder, I decided I still didn’t have an audience, so went up like I was climbing a rope. Hooked an ankle over the top of the rail and voila, I was in. The door, unlocked, led to a bedroom. The lights were on inside and it was empty.

  I closed the balcony door and stood listening with my pistol in my hand as I scanned the room. Actually, it was the sitting room of a suite. The crowd noise outside was now only a murmur. First I checked the bedroom, which was dark and empty. So was the bathroom.

  The interior door of the sitting room opened into a hallway. I could hear voices from my left. That was the way I wanted to go, but only after I checked these other suites, for there appeared to be four of them off this hallway. When I went toward the voices, I wanted to know that there was no one behind me. The second suite I checked was empty of people, but the bed and bathroom had obviously been used.

  In the third suite I found the body. It was lying beside the wet bar, as if it had fallen off a bar stool. The remnants of several drinks were on the bar. His throat was cut and he had done a lot of bleeding. I tried not to step in the blood, but to get a look at the face to see if I could recognize it. Yep. Al Grantham, the chief of staff.

  Whoever cut his throat knew exactly how to do it. It looked like just one vicious swipe had severed the carotid arteries and his windpipe. Apparently done from behind. Unconsciousness had followed within a second or two as blood pressure in the victim’s brain dropped toward zero.

  I reached and touched his hand. It was still supple, although just beginning to cool off. He hadn’t been dead long, not more than a few minutes. The blood was red and sticky.

  I found that the palm of my hand on my pistol was sweaty. I dried it on my jeans and checked to make sure the suite was indeed empty of living people. A surprise by a knife fighter of that caliber was something to be avoided.

  The hallway still empty, I tried the door of the fourth suite. Sucked it up and went in fast with the pistol ready. No one there.

  Back down the hallway, gliding along beside the wall, listening intently. The voices got louder as I moved.

  I could see that the wall I was against turned into a railing, and the hallway became a balcony leading to a stairway down into a great room. I got down on the floor, and after crawling, inched the top of my head around the edge of the wall and peeked between it and the first balcony upright.

  There in the main room below, no more than fifteen feet from me, were Barry and Mickey Soetoro…and Sulana Schanck and a male aide I didn’t recognize, talking to a couple of Secret Service types carrying M4s. Vice President Rhodes was there, the veep from central casting, with the superbly barbered white hair and square chin, in a gray suit that fit perfectly. Two other people were facing the agents: I couldn’t see their faces and didn’t know who they were. Rhodes’ aides or politicians, no doubt, and true believers to the core.

  “…There are at least a thousand of them, Mr. President. Perhaps twice that. They have the buildings surrounded and have complete control. We have six people left. The rebels can come into this building anytime they decide to walk over us and do it.”

  “Have you called for reinforcements? Assistance? Whatever you call it?”

  “Yes. No one answers our radio transmissions, and no one is picking up the scrambled landlines.”

  “You’re going to have to talk to Grafton,” the veep said to the prez.

  “I am not going to surrender,” Soetoro declared. I thought I could detect a slight tremor in his voice, but it may have been only the acoustics. “Where are our supporters? Where are the liberal armies that were going to preserve order and support the federal government against the reactionaries? Where are they?”

  I thought that his loyal supporters lying dead or maimed on the mountainside or sitting outside with their hands shackled by plastic ties were beyond caring how much they had disappointed ol’ Barry.

  Which of these people killed Al Grantham with a knife, and why? If you were going to do it, why not years ago? Truthfully, his mother should have done it way back when she realized what a twisted, diseased monster she had foisted upon the world, but that was water under the bridge, until today.

  Of course, the knife artist could be somewhere else in the building, not down below. I glanced back down the hallway, a bit nervously, I suppose, to ensure that it was still empty. I certainly didn’t want that dude within twenty yards of me.

  Meanwhile they were jabbering away just below me. Everyone talking at once. Just beyond the door was a seriously unhappy crowd, or if you were inside looking out, an angry armed mob. These people in the lodge had no idea what fate awaited them. Jake Grafton didn’t know either. Not only did I not know, I didn’t give a damn.

  I became aware that Sulana Schanck was having a serious private conversation with Barry Soetoro, just a few steps away from the others. No one else was apparently paying attention to what was being said, and they were talking too low for me to eavesdrop, even though my hearing is excellent. I tried to read lips and body language. She was adamant and he was resisting.

  Whatever fate awaited these two, it would probably be worse for Soetoro. Schanck was merely a bit player. Or so I thought.

  Then, in a twinkling of an eye, I found out how wrong I was. Sulana Schanck pulled a large knife from her sleeve and with one vicious backhand sliced Soetoro’s throat from ear to ear. Blood geysered forth, showering Schanck, as the president sank toward the floor.

  I scrambled to my knees and pointed my pistol, but I was too late. She spun like a ballet dancer, took one bound, and used the knife on the veep’s neck, with similar results. John Rhodes went down in a welter of blood.

  One of the Secret Service agents beat me to the trigger. He put a burst in Sulana Schanck’s chest, hammering her to the floor.

  “Drop it,” I shouted. I had the Kimber .45 at arm’s length pointed right at his head. If he tried to swing that carbine in my direction he was going to die.

  “Drop the weapons,” I roared again. Both carbines hit the floor.

  The outside door swung open and a man appeared there with a pistol in his hand. I shouted, “You in the door. Get Admiral Grafton and send him in here now!”

  Down below, Mickey had freaked. The aides and pols were fluttering around uselessly, staring horrified at the corpses of Barry Soetoro and his vice president. There was nothing anyone on earth could do for them. Sulana Schanck hadn’t twitched since she hit the floor. Maybe she was in Paradise now or shaking hands with Muhammad in Hell.

  To my eternal relief, Jake Grafton and General Considine walked into the room accompanied by four guys carrying weapons.

  I sat down on the floor and holstered my shooter.

  About two hours later the bodies of the president, vice president, chief of staff, and chief political advisor were carried out of the house and placed on a stack of firewood in the middle of a grassy area. The crowd had raided the presidential woodpile. They piled the bodies on that rick of wood, poured
a couple of gallons of gasoline on them, and set them afire.

  The National Guard had arrived by then and the volunteers had stopped shooting their guns into the air. The prisoners were loaded on trucks and driven away. I didn’t ask where they were being taken.

  A huge silent crowd encircled the fire. As I watched, the woman from the hike up the mountain, Betty Connelly, stepped from the crowd, leveled her shotgun into the fire, and fired twice.

  Then she turned and walked away.

  Grafton and Considine came over to where I was standing.

  “Tell me what happened in there, Tommy.”

  So I told it, from climbing the balcony, to finding Grantham’s corpse, to watching the Soetoro party trying to decide what to do…to Schanck’s unexpected knife work.

  “So you didn’t hear what she and the president said?”

  “No, sir. It looked like she was urging him to do something that he didn’t want to do. Maybe she wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

  “Workplace violence,” General Considine remarked flippantly.

  They had a few more questions, but I had no more answers.

  “ISIS or Al Qaeda will claim they got him,” Grafton said gloomily.

  “Soetoro is the one who chose Sulana Schanck to sit beside him and whisper in his ear,” Considine remarked. “The true believers are going to have to swallow that, Jake, whether they want to or not.”

  “Et tu, Brute,” Grafton muttered.

  I scored a flashlight off a soldier on the water truck and went looking for Sarah. Meanwhile she found Grafton. The funeral pyre was burning steadily now. The admiral had a handheld radio up to his ear, so I gave him the Hi sign and he acknowledged. With the fire illuminating a thousand faces, Sarah and I turned our backs to it and plunged into the darkness.

  It was a five-mile hike through the woods, all uphill, and we came out on the bald about a half-mile north of the pickup. A sliver moon was hanging in the sky and the stars were out. This old earth just keeps on turning. Walking toward the truck, I asked her, “How are you feeling?”

  She didn’t reply.

  “If that truck isn’t hors de combat, I thought we might head west.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “You got the keys to the truck?” I asked.

  “I left them in the ignition.”

  Oh boy.

  That half-mile hike through the grass in the moonlight, with corpses lying on the ground in a random pattern, was one of the memories I will carry with me all my days. There were at least two army trucks out there, lights ablaze, looking for wounded. The whole scene was surreal. The dead didn’t even whisper.

  We passed a young woman wandering along, trying in the moon and starlight to see the faces of the dead. She didn’t have a weapon. Maybe she never did, or threw hers away or lost it. She didn’t speak to us, so we passed her and kept hiking. I wondered which side of the fight she had been on, then decided that really didn’t matter.

  It was a little after midnight when we got to the truck. The keys were dangling from their slot. Is this a great country or what? All four tires had air. The windshield had taken at least three bullets and was in bad shape. One of the bullets had gone through the windshield and out the rear window. Fortunately Sarah had been lying on the seat at the time, protected by the motor and lots of metal, so she wasn’t tagged. One of the truck’s headlights was shot out. Some of the sheet metal had holes or gouge marks from bullets, and the radio aerial was missing, shot off. I opened the hood and examined the radiator and hoses with the flashlight. No visible leaks. Maybe the antifreeze all ran out. I looked at the ground under the engine, which was dry. We were good to go.

  About a hundred yards to the south was an army truck with every light on. I walked over and saw a white cross painted on the side. Dr. Proudfoot was there, and he said the medics were out looking for wounded.

  “We found some guy who had been scalped,” he said. “Hell of a wound. He’s a professor from some little college in New England. I sedated him.”

  “Is he going to make it?”

  “Probably, if infections don’t kill him.”

  I shook Proudfoot’s hand and walked back to my stolen FEMA truck. Sarah was already in the passenger seat, buckled up.

  “Idaho,” Sarah said.

  “Idaho,” I agreed.

  I fired up the motor. The lone headlight bravely stabbed the darkness.

  THIRTY-SIX

  We spent what was left of the night at Camp Dawson, which was manned by a skeleton crew of guardsmen. I gave them the machine gun and extra ammo and three AT4s that Willis hadn’t managed to shoot. After lunch, we hit the road.

  In a little town in Ohio I found a glass repair shop that was open. They replaced the windshield, rear window, and headlight. The head man wanted to talk, so I told him about the battle for Camp David.

  When I finished he said, “I have been really worried about America for years, and martial law was my worst nightmare come true. I think the socialists and left-wing radicals want to change America into a nation my kids won’t want to live in. It seems like they don’t know the basics of economics, don’t believe in work, don’t believe that a person should earn and keep the fruits of their labor. They’ll run America into the ground, then what?”

  “Maybe now the future will be better,” Sarah said.

  “Then there is terrorism, all those Muslims admitted willy nilly,” he said. “I can only hope and pray.”

  The power was back on in Ohio and Indiana, so we spent a night in a chain motel that was open. We ate a free breakfast at the bar off the lobby, which consisted of cornflakes and milk. I asked about the milk, and was told cows keep giving it regardless.

  Filling stations were open again, and before the tank in the truck was empty, we found one with fuel to pump. Life was looking up.

  In Illinois a state trooper took offense because I was driving at eighty miles an hour when the speed limit was sixty-five. He pulled us over.

  “I told you to slow down,” Sarah said primly as the trooper walked up.

  “You with the government?” he asked, looking us over. The pickup had federal government plates, although it lacked logos on the doors. Sarah and I were still wearing our web belts and pistols. The trooper was a big black man with hair going gray at the tips. For a man who spent most of his working life sitting behind a wheel, he was reasonably trim and fit.

  “Ah, no,” I admitted. “We quit. We were with the CIA.”

  “Spies, huh?”

  “I stole the truck,” I said brightly, “from FEMA.”

  “Those assholes? No shit! You got ID?”

  I dug out my wallet and passed him my CIA Langley pass.

  He looked it over and passed it back. “What you got in the cooler in the bed?”

  “A six-pack. Filling station back in Indiana had some. Want one?”

  “Man, I haven’t had a beer since Soetoro declared martial law. Yeah, I’d like one.”

  We got out and opened the cooler, and all three of us took a beer.

  “If you have a camera in your cruiser, they might get unhappy seeing you with a beer,” I said.

  “Camera’s broken. Piss on ’em.” He popped the top on his can and took a swig. “Ahh! Tell me about the bullet holes in your ride.”

  So we sat on the tailgate of the truck and sipped beer while I told him about the attack on Camp David. As I talked and he asked questions of Sarah and me, he visibly relaxed. He believed us. If he only knew how good a liar I was, he would have been more suspicious, but ignorance is bliss, so they say. And for a change I stuck strictly to the truth.

  When he finished asking questions about the death of Barry Soetoro, the trooper, whose name was Davis, waxed philosophical. “Soetoro made life a living hell for us cops, made us targets, turned people against us, and stirred up racial hatred we sure as hell didn’t need. Sure, there are a few bad cops, the same as there are bad dentists, doctors, CEOs, and plumbers, but all these body camera
s and shit, and the constant second-guessing of cops who put their lives on the line—that’s bullshit. That bastard Soetoro killed a lot of people by making criminals feel free, taking their side, and giving carte blanche to illegal aliens with criminal records. He destroyed a lot of trust, especially with law enforcement. And you know, without the rule of law, we don’t have a civilization. It’s that simple.”

  I’d seen enough to know that.

  He stood and dusted off his trouser seat. “You two slow it down, huh?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Davis got into his cruiser and drove away. We put all three empties in the cooler and got our chariot under way, heading west.

  I didn’t want to read newspapers or watch television or listen to radio. I had had enough of the world’s troubles. Sarah and I chatted and watched the countryside pass by and the road unwind endlessly before us. Although traffic was light, things were getting back to normal. We saw tanker trucks sitting in filling stations, food trucks rolling the highways, trucks hauling cattle and hay, and farmers in the fields running combines. Trains went by on tracks that paralleled the highway. Here and there construction crews were back at work on road and bridge projects. Jets were flying again, so contrails streaked the blue sky.

  Yet even political hermits like Sarah and me found the political crisis impossible to avoid. Every diner or bar we went into had televisions going full blast. The generals in the Pentagon had asked Jake Grafton to get an interim civilian government up and running and to hold elections in every state that wanted to remain in the old Union. Texas was independent and intended to stay that way, President Jack Hays said. The commentators were still aghast, and delighted, at the effrontery of the Texas military in stealing—or “replevying,” Jack Hays’ word—fifty tons of gold. At the quoted market price that morning—$2,132 an ounce—the metal was worth $3.4 billion. Jack Hays assured an interviewer that Texas would return any excess after Texas’ claims against the federal government were settled by negotiation.