by Tom Kratman
"Ummm . . . no. Hanstadt said that Fulton had the less important half all shot and is holding the rest as hostages of his own."
Wide eyed, Juanita's hand flew to her mouth. "Oh, my."
"I confess, I like the man's sincerely . . . oh . . . forthright attitude. Can't get much more sincere than shooting seventy-one federal agents and mid-ranking members of the incumbent party out of hand. I am pulling back the people we have facing him by about twenty miles and moving their supply dumps back thirty. We just can't know what is going to happen with 1st Marine Division and, if it turns to shit, I'd rather have them walking forward at maybe three miles an hour than rolling forward—using our gas—at forty."
"If things work out the way they are supposed to in California, Fulton is going to need gas though. He says that the second his people's dependents are safe then the 1st Marine Division and 3rd Armored Cavalry regiment will declare for Texas."
"And the other side of that," observed Juani, "is that if they can't rescue their families, and if those families continue to be held hostage, and if it looks like the Presidential Guard is bloody minded then the Marines might have to attack us."
* * *
Interstate 10, Arizona
Miles and miles of fuck all, thought Diaz as the bus carrying him and the bulk of his company continued on a seemingly endless track through desert and scrub.
Seated at the front, he was in position to see, or rather not to see, the other busses returning 1st Recon Battalion to its home. He could not see any of the others because they were strung out over more than one hundred miles and many were not even using the Interstate.
Not for the first time Diaz felt an almost overpowering urge to call home. He could not, he knew. The operation was a potential intelligence sieve already and, should the people "guarding" the Marine's families find out they were coming, there was no telling what might happen.
Not that it was home, precisely, that Diaz wanted to call. His wife would not be there, he knew. She was comatose in the hospital. But a friend? A comrade's wife? Anybody who could assure him that she would be fine.
Even if the assurance were a lie, still he wanted it.
Before leaving Texas, Diaz's initial anger had been directed toward the unknown, unnamed, likely never-to-be-caught assailants. Then his division commander had sat him down and asked him to consider a few questions; questions like, "Whose good did this all accrue to; what happened to your wife and the others?" Questions like, "And isn't it funny that the PGSS was ready to move at a moment's notice after coming out of one of the bloodiest battles ever to take place in this hemisphere?" And, "Do you suppose it's a coincidence that we voted to bow out of the current troubles and then our families were attacked?" And, "Isn't it funny how the demonstration that got out of hand started with a speaker from the party in power? The same party that controls the PGSS? The same PGSS that was ever so ready to take our families hostage?"
And so, after reflection, Diaz had added up one plus one plus one plus one plus one and come up with the mathematically suspect but morally perfectly precise answer, "Rottemeyer."
"Bright boy," Fulton had beamed. "And I assure you we are going to get even . . . if not a bit ahead."
Diaz wanted assurance of, oh, many things. And, knowing he could not have it, he turned his thoughts, along with his eyes, to a map of Camp Pendleton and thought about the one form of assurance he thought he could have.
* * *
Austin, Texas
"Time to leave, Juani," announced Schmidt. "They'll be here in a few hours. And you can't let them catch you."
"I'm not leaving the Capital, Jack. Just forget it. It's not going to happen."
Schmidt answered, "Governor, the federals will be here in a couple of hours. They may stop and wait a bit if they think we are going to fight. And," Schmidt held up a quieting palm, "we are going to fight. But the end result is all the same. Now you have to leave. Before the bullets start to fly.
"Juani, if you don't go quietly I'll have you carried out."
Juani set her face grimly, plainly determined to argue. Jack was having none of it, equally plainly.
She relented. "I have a few hours, don't I?"
Seeing his nod she continued, "Then I want to make a televised address before I go."
"Okay, Governor. We have time for that."
"You've never approved entirely of nonviolent civil disobedience I know, Jack. But I am going to give it one more try. Can your quartermaster come up with a great deal of transportation in a hurry?"
* * *
Camp Pendleton, California
Marines can be very practical folk. Faced with a lockdown of a fenced camp, said lockdown conflicting with either the desire not to be on the camp or the fact that one is on the other side of a fence—perhaps without permission—and wanting to be on the camp, a Marine will usually find a practical solution.
Nine times out of ten, he'll cut the fence.
The fence around Camp Pendleton had been cut so many times, by so many Marines, for so many excellent reasons, that more than one 1st Division commander had contemplated simply leaving the holes there.
Others had spent precious installation maintenance funds keeping the fence in constant repair.
Fulton had adopted a different approach. He had, true, repaired the fence upon his arrival. But then, somewhat unusually, he had had the likely cutting points guarded and ambushed.
For some weeks after his arrival, as a Marine cut the fence and was duly caught, Fulton had called out the battalion of the offender for a no-notice and rather strenuous roadmarch with full—rather overfull, actually—packs. The march was invariably followed by one or more weeks of pulling guard in full battle uniform, by companies, at the breach.
This worked at least to the extent that a) the Marines' breaching grew craftier and b) they tended to repair the cuts they made behind them.
The cuts were still there, of course, but harder to see, find, and use.
The PGSS knew nothing about the breaches, though Crenshaw might have told them had he not been in a hospital somewhere in Kansas.
The First Marine Division Reconnaissance Battalion knew everything there was to know about the breaches.
* * *
Captain Emanuel Diaz, 1st Recon Battalion, lying in a shallow drainage ditch that led through the fence and into the camp understood all about the breaches. He understood full well, also, why he could not go to see his wife's shattered body where she lay in the hospital. Her mind wasn't there anyway, not for the nonce . . . not, perhaps, in the future.
She'd been beaten—badly—by thugs, before being raped.
* * *
Diaz twisted his neck, pulled down a shoulder and risked a single brown eyeball to look over the lip of the ditch. Standing to either side of a side entrance door, facing the ditch, stood—rather, slouched, and slouched in a manner that seemed tired unto exhaustion—two apparent members of the Presidential Guard.
The moon fell behind a cloud, darkening the landscape and, especially, the gymnasium that was the target for Diaz's crew. He tapped two men with a very softly whispered, "Go."
Sudden grins were as suddenly suppressed. Faces blackened, browned and greened; knives in hand, the men slithered from the drainage ditch that had run under the chain-link fence surrounding the camp.
"Swift, silent, deadly," whispered—prayed—Diaz. Celer, Silens, Mortalis—the motto of Marine Recon.
Diaz could neither see nor hear the snakelike approach or the action, in itself a good sign. But less than a dozen minutes later the glowing red of an issue filtered flashlight shone three times.
"Pass it on; follow me," he whispered before slithering out himself to join his point men.
From other places, along other avenues, the Marines of 1st Recon slipped onto Camp Pendleton . . . swiftly, silently and—based on the number of black battle-dressed, bleeding, bashed, strangled, dismembered and throat-slashed corpses they left behind them—in a fashion most deadly.<
br />
* * *
El Paso, Texas
"1st Battalion reports Pendleton is secure, General," announced Fulton's flush-faced Public Affairs Officer, or PAO, bursting into the general's office. The PAO's voice grew somber. "Six of ours killed, seventeen wounded."
"The dependents?"
"Some are missing. The recon battalion is looking."
"The PGSS?"
The PAO gave an evil smile; he had not always been a paper pusher, had started in the Corps as a rifleman, in fact. "Surprisingly few prisoners."
Fulton grunted. "You may be surprised. I'm not."
The PAO lifted an eyebrow as much as to say, that's an official notation of surprise, General, not a personal one.
Fulton noted the raised eyebrow and correctly interpreted it—no damned surprise at all.
"Assemble the officers in one hour."
* * *
10,000 feet over Austin, Texas
The Air Force wouldn't play; that had been made clear enough. Whether pilots insisted they were too sick to fly or ground crews insisted that the planes were too sick to be flown, virtually nothing in the Air Force inventory had taken any part in the troubles. Nothing had taken any truly aggressive part.
But there were planes . . . and then there were planes. There were air forces hidden within a number of nonmilitary entities.
The CIA was one such.
Unburdened with a fighter pilot mafia, equally unburdened with a close-air-support mafia, the Central Intelligence Agency had taken to Remote Piloted Vehicles, RPVs for short, with a vengeance.
The Predator III RPV was one such. Descended from earlier models which had, over and over, proven their value both for reconnaissance and attack in foreign and hostile places, the III model was larger, faster, carried more of a bomb load, and carried a greater variety of ordnance as well.
Two of these models, remotely controlled via secure satellite link from the CIA's main headquarters in Langley, Virginia, circled high above Austin, Texas. The pilots, sitting in a dimly lit control room many leagues away from Austin, watched their screens and waited for the word to engage.
* * *
Austin, Texas
It wasn't that she had lived there all that long. Still, leaving the Governor's Mansion for what was quite possibly the very last time hurt in a way Juani had never expected.
The mansion was brightly lit. In anticipation of the federal onslaught some of her assistants were boxing up state memorabilia to move south to San Antonio. Her husband was doing the same for family mementos. And Mario, who had still not forgiven his mother for sending Elpidia into danger in Houston, was busy, Juani knew, packing up Elpidia's meager possessions.
Juani turned to look briefly at her former home, then, at Jack Schmidt's insistence, boarded his Hummer for the long drive to the south.
* * *
Langley, Virginia
"We've got a vehicle pulling away from the target area," announced one of the Predator III pilots, hunching over a view screen. "Given that the house is lit up like Christmas, I don't like it."
"Can you identify the vehicle?" asked the mission chief.
The pilot snorted. Ten thousand feet was no obstacle with the television system he was using. "It's a Hummer. I can't make out the identity from this angle, but it's a Hummer."
The mission chief just wasn't sure. The Predators were carrying rather large bombs, suitable for demolishing a rather large house. But there were only the two of them. If they wasted one on the vehicle the other might not be enough to ensure the complete destruction of the target.
"Hold fire while I make a call," he announced.
* * *
"Hold up the car, Jack," Juani demanded.
The driver looked at Schmidt for confirmation. Seeing the general's reluctant and heavy nod he applied the brake gently and pulled to a stop near the mansion ground's main gate. Juani fiddled with the plastic handle, pushed the light door open, and stepped out.
Jack and the driver, likewise, emerged from the vehicle. The driver left the Hummer running. Feet again on the asphalt, he walked a short distance away and caused a sound indistinguishable from water hitting a rock. Muttering something about discipline, Jack went to stand by Juanita.
Seeing Juani leaning against a stone pillar, her head hanging and tears streaming down her face, Jack threw an arm around her shoulder to lead her back to the Hummer.
"No," she insisted, voice breaking. "Not yet." Then, completely breaking down, she cried, "It's all over. . . ."
* * *
The mission chief said, "Yes, ma'am," into the telephone receiver. Then, hanging up the phone and turning to the pilots, he said, "Ignore the Hummer. More important to make sure nothing survives inside the mansion. But we have authority to attack now. Do it."
Without a word from either of them the two pilots began manipulating the controls that would bring their Predators into optimal attack position to ensure the Global Positioning System–guided bombs hit precisely where they were intended.
* * *
Schmidt had begun turning Juanita back to the Hummer by main force when something caught his eye. Reacting entirely by instinct, once finely honed and still at least good enough, he screamed "Down!" and forced her to the asphalt, covering her body with his own.
The driver, somewhat distracted by other concerns, never saw the smashed roofing material that flew up where two two-thousand pound bombs penetrated. He didn't see the walls and windows suddenly billow out, even as the roof, or rather pieces of it, began to ascend. He felt a remarkably sudden build-up of pressure.
And then he felt a very large piece of masonry smash his torso.
* * *
"Jesus," murmured one of the two pilots, watching the mansion disintegrate in his screen. "Jesus." The other pilot merely gave off a soft whistle. Neither had ever seen such complete demolition, done so suddenly, from their aircrafts' perspective.
The mission chief gave a grunt of approval, then picked up the telephone again to make his report.
* * *
"Nooo!" shrieked Juani once Jack had gotten off of her and helped her to her feet. "Nooo! Mario!" she wept for her son. "Emilio . . ." she murmured through tears for a lost husband.
She began to try to tear herself away from Schmidt's grip.
"No," he shouted, enfolding her in a bear's embrace. "They may not be done and you are too valuable to lose."
Juanita fought to escape but Jack was having none of it. Transferring his hold to grasp her in one arm he reopened the Hummer door with one hand, then used two to forcefully throw her into the front seat, slamming shut the door behind her.
Juani's head struck the steering wheel hard enough to stun her into submission while Schmidt ran frantically to the driver's side. He spared one glance at the unconscious driver, even now breathing his last through bloody-frothed lungs.
"Sorry, son . . . I can't help you," Schmidt muttered.
Throwing himself into the driver's seat, Schmidt took a fierce grasp of Juani's hair and pushed her from the steering wheel, keeping the grip to avoid the risk of her escaping.
With his left hand Schmidt fumbled with the parking brake, then awkwardly put the Hummer into gear and drove off as fast as the vehicle would move.
In the distance he could hear sirens, police and emergency vehicles, converging on the flaming wreck of the mansion.
Chapter Nineteen
From the transcript at trial: Commonwealth of
Virginia v. Alvin Scheer
DIRECT EXAMINATION, CONTINUED
BY MR. STENNINGS:
Q. Of course the Feds, they were pretty serious too, right Alvin?
A. Oh my yes. Blow up the governor's house? Kill her husband and her kid? Kill a whole bunch of folks that just worked there? That was about as serious as you could get, wasn't it?
Q. What did you think had happened?
A. I wasn't rightly sure. The papers and TV said, at the time, that it was some locals what done it, protest
ing the rebellion. I remember seeing the head of the Air Force saying on the TV that there was no way any of his people or planes had bombed Austin. Seemed real serious. I kind of believed him, too.
* * *
Austin, Texas
The Corps entered the state capital without incident. Expecting a bloodbath, the commander had waited until he had enough artillery, most importantly enough weight of shell, to be certain of crushing all opposition, along with enough fuel and small arms ammunition to be certain of being able to clear the town and exploit the breakthrough.