by Ryan Hyatt
RISE OF THE LIBERATORS
A Novel
RYAN HYATT
© Copyright 2017 Ryan Hyatt
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1543093051
ISBN 13: 9781543093056
Cover design by Ronald Villegas – www.ronaldvillegasdesign.com
Book photo by Paul Jacob Bashour - www.custombuiltfilms.com
“Gain by the loss of another is not profitable in the end.”
— Hazrat Inayat Khan, Sufi Sage
CONTENTS
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
PART TWO
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
PART THREE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
PART ONE
Hired
CHAPTER 1
Ray racked the weights and sat upright on the bench press. Gazing out from his open garage, he watched brilliant pink light recede over the black silhouetted mountains beyond his subdivision. He sighed, saddened that his three-year-old daughter Sara would never glimpse such a splendid Arizona sunset.
Earlier that day doctors confirmed Sara was colorblind. Ray was a laid-off United States Marines helicopter pilot whose benefits were set to expire at the end of the month. That meant no more financial assistance for his family, no more health insurance for his daughter. No implants. Nothing. Sara was doomed to see the world in shades of gray, not as the radiant spectacle it was.
A fly passed Ray’s eyes, and he caught it with his hand. The door creaked open behind him, and he heard his wife’s quiet voice.
“Dinner,” she said.
“I’ll be right there,” Ray said, and he let the fly go.
As Dee closed the door, a police car pulled up across the street. Ray turned off the fan buzzing in the garage, stood and walked to the edge of his driveway.
“Is everything all right?” he said to one of the officers, knowing already everything wasn’t.
The O’Learys were at it again. Ray heard glass shattering and screams piercing their stucco home. The bank was going to foreclose on them, too, but unlike other families kicked out of the neighborhood, the O’Learys weren’t leaving without a fight, if only with each other.
“Just a little domestic spat, that’s all,” the officer said. “Happens all the time these days, not your concern.”
It was the hottest July on record, and with thirty percent of the Phoenix population unemployed, tempers were flaring. Sanity, it seemed, was becoming as rare a resource as water – or gasoline.
As the officers pounded on the front door of the O’Leary residence, Ray glanced up and down the street. About half the houses had for-sale signs, their windows boarded up by the banks that owned them, the inhabitants gone. Of those who remained, only old man Thomas bothered stepping out to catch the show.
Thomas must have reported the disturbance, Ray thought, surprised that he himself failed to hear the racket until that moment. Then again, Ray’s own problems kept his mind plenty occupied.
When Mrs. O’Leary finally opened the door, her face was flush with tears, but at least she was alive and unharmed. It was becoming too common an occurrence for families to be killed in murder-suicides.
Ray sighed and pushed a button.
The garage door closed, darkness enveloping him as he retreated into his own hellish sanctuary.
They couldn’t afford to use the air conditioner, so Ray and his wife relied on fans to keep the house cool. On such sweltering summer afternoons, however, the fans hardly made a difference. Once the thermometer passed one hundred degrees, the house became an oven, trapping heat, with no relief from the misery. It often felt hotter inside their home than outside.
So, Ray dragged in the plastic kiddy pool. He set it up in the middle of the living room and filled it with two inches of water, with towels lying around it, so Sara didn’t slip on the tile when she stepped out. Ray, Dee and Sara spent most of their days there, splashing feet, playing games, watching the Telenet. Ray’s break from the routine mostly came from the workouts he did in the garage or the occasional jog, in the dead of night, when he couldn’t sleep. As for his wife, she almost never escaped their domestic prison.
“Daddy!” Sara said, stepping out of the pool in pink underwear.
Sara grabbed a folded piece of paper from the coffee table and handed it to Ray as he entered the living room. It was a picture of a flower, with pretty heart-shaped petals, and it was black.
“Beautiful,” Ray said, lifting Sara and carrying her and her gothic masterpiece to the kitchen counter. He attached the picture to the fridge with a magnet. “Thanks, sweetie pie. You’re my favorite artist in the world.”
“Food’s on the table,” Dee said.
“Thank you, too,” Ray said, reaching over and kissing his wife.
Gazing at Dee’s face, Ray realized she wore more makeup than she did in the good old days, before their problems started. Maybe Dee did so to cover the bags under her eyes, caused by the tears she cried to herself at night, when husband and wife should have been sleeping but couldn’t. No matter how much makeup Dee wore, however, she was unable to hide the overall dismay that seemed to have become permanently etched on her face. Their family’s poverty was a slow, sordid, inevitable pit that dragged down everyone and everything with it. There was no hiding from the wear and tear caused as it consumed their lives.
Ray hoped that with a little luck finding a job, his wife’s countenance would revert to a less doomed state, with the easy looks and warmth with which he fell in love. On the other hand, Ray couldn’t imagine how he appeared to his wife. At thirty-four, bald and broke, Ray was ten years older and wearier than the scholar athlete Dee met in college.
They sat to eat. It was the usual: rice and beans.
Sara didn’t try to disguise her displeasure. After a few bites, she started to flick her beans into the kiddy pool. It was a protest of one, but all three family members laughed.
Ray reached over and flipped open the blinds. The sun started its descent behind the mountains. Soon the temperature would be bearable enough to be outside, at least for a while.
“Okay, that’s enough dinner,” Ray said to Sara. “Drink the rest of your milk, please, and put on some clothes. We’re heading to the park.”
“Yay!” Sara said.
She put down the fork, gulped her glass of milk and ran to her bedroom.
“Would you like to join us?” Ray said to Dee, grabbing a can of beer from the fridge.
“No,” Dee said, finishing her food, eyes fixed on the Telenet. “I’ll clean up here and enjoy a moment to myself.”
The next day Ray applied to become a car salesman, file clerk, telemarketer and pizza delivery driver, and like the jobs he applied to in the days, weeks, months and years before, there was no response. Apparently no one gave much of a damn about his military service, nor did the ex-Marine
helicopter pilot seem to have what it takes to safely deliver pizzas.
The hard times, of course, were not limited to Ray or the city, state and nation in which he lived. It was a global phenomenon.
Born and raised in Tucson, Ray earned a full ride academic and athletic scholarship to the University of Arizona, where he played football and graduated in 2010 with a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering. The recession underway at that time was the most devastating the United States faced in eighty years since the Great Depression, although it proved to be a primer for greater economic calamity to follow.
With zero job prospects out of college, Ray joined the military, which at least was hiring. He graduated from Officer Candidate School at the top of his class, specializing as a Geronimo helicopter pilot. Ray married Dee, his college sweetheart, and he served briefly in Afghanistan and Ukraine. He was transferred to Venezuela in 2018, where he led major combat operations as squad leader against guerillas until his discharge in 2020, victim of federal budget cuts.
China, which supported Venezuela in that conflict, insisted on cashing half of its investment of United States treasury bonds that year, knowing the beleaguered American government would struggle to make the $600-billion payment. Washington considered ignoring Beijing’s request but decided to meet the demands of its rival superpower once it determined that failure to do so might prompt a worldwide economic collapse. The global economic situation already was bleak, and the United States did not want to be blamed for making matters worse.
Thus, the federal government liquefied huge public assets, including large portions of its vast military arsenal, to create the cash flow necessary to pay off the Chinese. As a result of this boondoggle, the federal bond rating was downgraded to a sub-prime investment status, a designation from which Washington never fully recovered. The weakened American dollar gave rise to the id, or international dollar, backed by Chinese and Russian reserves. The id has competed since to become the world’s dominant currency.
Historians dubbed China’s 2020 financial sabotage against the United States as the ‘T-Party,’ marking that nation’s official entry into the Oil Wars, the period in which the world’s great superpowers and their allies fought, often indirectly, to secure the planet’s depleting fossil fuel supplies.
The American military, which consumed more than half of the federal budget, was forced to downsize during wartime. The Geronimo helicopter proved too easy a target for well-equipped Venezuelan insurgents backed by Russian surface-to-air missiles. Manufacture of the helicopter was discontinued.
By 2020, Marine Captain Ray Salvatore found himself in the awkward position of being a decorated war hero, unemployed homeowner, and new father. He spent the next three years using the little benefits he was entitled to pay a mortgage on a home for his family that he could not really afford.
Dee, who once worked at an advertisement agency, was never re-hired after taking maternity leave, which only exacerbated the family’s financial squeeze.
Such household strain had little impact on Sara. She spent the first years of her life having both of her parents dutifully by her side. It was of little consequence to her that her family lived at the national poverty line. As far as she was concerned, she had everything a toddler needed – the two people she loved the most accommodating her every whim. Only lacking, perhaps, was variety in her meals.
Ray made the most of his time with his daughter. In fact, if he had been granted only one wish, it would have been to expose his little one to those joys and experiences he felt she deserved but was not yet aware of – namely, those joys and experiences that cost money. Ray would have liked to enroll Sara in beginning gymnastics classes, for example, or buy her a more comfortable pair of shoes, or most importantly, purchase the implants she needed that would allow her to see in color.
However, the money for such purchases was not available, and although the Salvatore family’s struggle was common, the widespread neglect Americans faced during the first years of the Greatest Depression tended to only alienate them further from each other. While social media outlets provided a platform for criticism over the nation’s dire economic circumstances, few citizens converted their virtual vitriol into purposeful action. Those who dared to take their grievances to the streets in protest were met by an unapologetic government and unyielding police. There seemed to be no limit to the hardships Americans were forced to endure and neither safe nor viable opportunities to address them. The market correction desperately needed to make positive change was far from reality. Perhaps arising out of a sense of guilt or shame, many families opted out of society as much as possible during this period, embracing poverty by themselves, behind closed doors.
That July, Ray felt the brutal, hot, stagnant Phoenix air finally getting the best of him. To top it off, he received a foreclosure notice in the mail. With nowhere else to turn, Ray was preparing to move his family into their automobile. There was no extended family he trusted that was still alive, and because of it, Ray and his wife and daughter had nowhere to go, but perhaps Ray would have better luck finding work on the road than he did applying for jobs from home. Ray had been unemployed for nearly three years, and he was losing hope he would ever be able to improve his daughter’s lot in life. Poverty clung to Ray and his young family like a chronic illness once reserved for the old and feeble, but they would persevere. They had to.
Then one afternoon, a monsoon rolled into the neighborhood booming thunder, pouring rain. Ray took a break from submitting his futile job applications. He joined his wife and daughter in the living room, and they opened the windows and gazed out at the approaching storm, pleased by the gusts of cool air and natural relief.
That’s when the phone rang; Ray took the call.
“Captain Ray Salvatore?” a voice said.
“This is he,” said Ray, surprised to hear his old namesake.
“This is Colonel John Perkins with the United States Marine Corps,” the voice said. “I’d like to talk to you about a job.”
“What kind of job?”
“Kicking ass, of course,” the voice said. “The kind of job you know best.”
Ray’s head rang with a sickening sort of laughter. He hadn’t felt up to ‘kicking ass’ in years, and the wave of nauseous amusement that came over him must have been apparent.
“Is something funny?” the voice said.
“Not really,” Ray said, returning to his senses. “Listen, my family is destitute. Soon, we’ll probably be homeless. Our situation is bleak, so whoever you are, you’ll have to excuse me if I’m in no mood for games …”
“Neither am I,” the voice said. “Are you still at the Chandler address?”
“Maybe,” Ray said. “What’s it to you?”
“How’s ten tomorrow?”
“For what?”
“Your job interview.”
“Okay, I guess.”
“You guess?” the Colonel said. “Believe me, Captain, this isn’t a job you can afford to miss. I’ll send a car for you. Dress to impress.”
CHAPTER 2
That night Ray dreamed that he was on a long and exhausting run. He passed through city streets in foreign countries, crowded and dirty and exotic places, dodging anxious and frenetic faces. At last, Ray turned onto his residential street. It was a sunny day, typical of Phoenix, but the weather was unusually cool and inviting. Ray’s home was in sight. He noticed Dee watching over Sara with amusement as their little one colored a vivid picture with chalk on the driveway. She was making red butterflies and orange bees, hovering over pink flowers, protected by a rainbow. Ray marveled at his daughter’s creation, but the closer he approached, the farther she, his wife and their home receded into the distance. Anxiety started to overwhelm him.
Ray startled from his slumber, gasping for breath.
“What is it?” Dee said. “A nightmare?”
“Of course,” Ray said. “Isn’t that all there are these days, nightmares?”
“W
hat was this one about?” Dee said.
“Being far from home,” Ray said. “The good news is Sara could see in color. She made a beautiful picture.”
“Relax, baby,” Dee said, rubbing her husband’s neck. “The dream probably means your fortune is about to change, for the better.”
“Maybe,” Ray said, but he wasn’t sure he or his wife really believed it.
Even if Ray managed to get a job with the military, he knew new struggles – and nightmares – were sure to follow. Instead of struggling with poverty, Ray and his family would likely struggle with more isolation, loneliness – maybe even death. If there was anything being a father taught Ray, it was the value of life. Since the military hadn’t shown much discretion for Ray’s, discharging him just as he became a provider to his daughter, Ray was hesitant about returning to his former employer, despite his desperation.
By all accounts, Ray loved serving his country, but he didn’t love the way his country treated him when he needed it most, and there was more at stake in Ray’s life than ever. There was Sara, growing into a wonderful little girl, and she needed her father alive more than America’s enemies needed him dead. It would have to be one hell of an offer for Ray to commit to another tour of duty again, he decided, tossing and turning in bed. Money was only worth so much, even when you didn’t have enough. At the very least, any agreement Ray signed to re-enlist would have to cover the cost of Sara’s implants.
Unable to return to sleep, Ray decided to get an early start to his day. He went for a run. It refreshed him and made him feel optimistic, unlike his dream. By the time he returned home, the sun began to rise like a ball of flame over the eastern desert horizon, and Ray found Dee and Sara asleep, peaceful and unconscious.
Fortunately, Ray didn’t have to go to his interview stinking. At almost ten dollars per gallon, the price of water was creeping up to the price of gasoline, and it was Ray’s turn to shower that Monday morning. He set the alarm on the bathroom counter for two minutes, pulled the curtain and turned on the spigot. As cool water splashed his face, he recalled some of the cold hard facts he once learned about his hometown in school.