It was the toughest year of Annie Cooper’s youth. She fought constantly, in and out of school, exacting broken teeth and bloody noses from every leer the boys shot her way. She wanted nothing from them. All Annie wanted was Alicia and she never abandoned the hope that one day, when they were older and free of their parents, they would continue where they left off. Alicia, Annie was sure, was living a lie and she would eventually tire of it and come back to her. Annie was certain of it until the end, when she learned that her darling Alicia hung herself from her bedroom’s ceiling fan. It happened the week after school let out for the summer, a week before Alicia was scheduled to return to Bible Camp for more reparative therapy.
The news devastated Annie. For the first time in her life, Annie Cooper became intimately familiar with hate. It was not the hatred of others projected out at the world at large, nothing like the hatred of her parents for what she was and had done; no, it was a hatred of her own creation, born of her own pain and fed by her own sense and grasp of the injustice she felt she would always have to face. That injustice, the young Cooper believed, sprung from the certainty with which religious fundamentalists challenged the world. Their positions were invulnerable to dissuasion. So be it, she decided at that young age. So be it. Annie swore she would forever meet their callous certainty with an absolutism of her own.
At the funeral she interrupted the preacher to accuse the congregation of murdering Alicia. She denounced her own parents and Alicia’s parents as smallminded, sexually repressed fascists. She derided the congregation as superstitious Neanderthals. Annie spat curses on their religion and let loose a tirade of expletives even as her father dragged her out of church. Out in the parking lot she concentrated her fire on him. He tried to silence his daughter with the back of his hand when she refused his order to “Shut up, already!”
Annie surprised herself when she not only ducked under his blow but, lunged at him and buried her knee into his groin. The back of her fist crashed into his ear on his way down to the pavement. Annie Cooper always thought back to that moment, standing over her father balled up at her feet, as the beginning of her life, a life she would live openly and defiantly in the face of all prejudice.
“You touch me again and I will kill you in your sleep,” she yelled at him in full view of her mother and the parishioners gawking from the church doors. “You so much as raise a hand to me and I swear to you, I will cut your throat the next time you pass out drunk in the house.”
The threat seemed to hit her father harder than the knee to the groin. He looked at her through eyes squinting and watering with pain, no longer able to recognize the gangly young woman glaring down at him. Annie barely recognized herself at that moment. She walked away from her father hardly believing what she had done and said, but all the same glad that she gave her rage expression.
Her father never raised a hand against her again. He barely looked at her and certainly never said a word to her. Her mother tried to make peace but Annie ignored her every entreaty, leaving the woman to stew alone in her misery. Six months later, Annie had her GED diploma in hand and the dust of Joplin Texas off her heels. She left her parents without ceremony or good bye and settled in San Francisco.
More than a thousand miles from home, Annie Cooper began life anew. She threw herself whole-heartedly into politics, both in her studies and in extra-curricular activities. To her pleasant surprise, after a youth spent feeling ostracized, dismissed and ignored, Annie was being listened to, taken seriously; and by her final year in school, she was a leader in the alternative lifestyle campaign that legalized gay marriage in California despite the popular referendums against it. She then went on to work in the national campaign that pushed The Marriage Equality Act through Congress in the spring of 2015. She took great pride in her work and joy as it pitted Annie against the very sort of Christian fundamentalists that tortured her childhood. Through her work, Annie got to make connections with future power players on the national scene. Danny Manny, former Mayor of San Francisco and presently California’s first gay governor was one of them. Through him, Cooper met Holly Villa while the then Senator was campaigning with William O’Neill for the White House.
It was Holly Villa who convinced Annie to put her organizational and administrative skills to use for the FBI.
“It won’t be easy,” the Senator warned her over breakfast after their first tryst. “These law enforcement agencies are the last bastions of the patriarchal mindset that have made life all but impossible for women like us, women who insist on owning their own bodies.”
Annie Cooper didn’t need much convincing. Her work for gay and lesbian issues, while personally rewarding, was mostly done as a volunteer. The little money she could squeeze out of government grants was not paying the bills she was accruing. The story of two gay playwrights beheaded in their Chicago apartment by homegrown Islamists offended by the portrayal of Muhammad in the lover’s musical was still in the news. The job offered her would pit her against such fundamentalists and pay her well for the privilege.
It was a no-brainer. Annie Cooper took the job.
And now, four years later, she is once again powerless in the clutches of religious fundamentalists. She hates the feeling. It’s why she accepted Sergeant Burnett’s challenge. The fight will allow some release of the anxiety building in her. Annie knows it in her bones; if these psycho Christians talking about crusades and inquisitions get their way, if this coup of theirs succeeds, all the gains of the last fifty years will be lost. The prospect angers Annie Cooper. She rubs the tender bruise the stun baton left on her side. The prospect also frightens her a little. She shakes it off and rises from her seat on the bench.
Corelli rises suddenly from his seat as well, his attention focused sharply on the monitors ahead of him. Annie turns to follow his gaze. She notes that the endless looping of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ has stopped, replaced by a shot of the White House.
“Mr. President,” Annie says. “I think we’re finally going to hear from the Colonel.”
00:00:05
“Alright Colonel, you’re on in four, three, two, one…”
Colonel Miguel Cesar Pereira looks into the camera. The image of the Colonel, seated behind the Resolution Desk in the Oval Office, wearing his medal-studded uniform, is beamed the world over. The signal which carries it interrupts the playing of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” To the surprise of millions around the world, the signal also turns on televisions, computers and cell phones that were shut off.
“My fellow Americans, my name is Colonel Miguel Cesar Pereira,” he says, his voice a rumbling baritone. “And in the interest of preserving our Republic, I have seized control of government.
“First let me say that I regret the necessity that compelled me to do this. The tens of thousands who are putting their lives and honor on the line with me tonight likewise wish they didn’t have to become revolutionaries. However, we see no other way to save our country from the downward spiral of decay and decline than to wrest control of the nation away from those who have set it and keep it on so grave and doom-bound a course.
“The pit of oblivion, my fellow Americans, yawns wide beneath us. That is not mere hyperbole. We all know it; our country is not what she used to be. We are in free fall. Many are rightly afraid that America is dying. We have been written off by a great many people, both abroad and at home. For the first time in our history, it is all too possible to imagine the world without an America.
“Our great nation is also reviled and condemned the world over as the source of all modern ills. Enemies without and within are hard at work at destroying us. Our way of life, what’s left of it, is everywhere denounced. Our flag is every day defiled. Our accomplishments are dismissed as the spoils of exploitation. In response, many of our leaders have taken it upon themselves to shamelessly circle the world, hat in hand, bowing and begging forgiveness on our behalf.
“My comrades and I believe the calumny heaped on America is grossly undeserved. We
believe the pandering of our politicians to world opinion to be disgraceful. Contrary to what is daily peddled by the world press and treasonous politicians at home, my compatriots and I unapologetically and unabashedly assert that America has been a greater force for good than any other nation in human history.
“America did not invent war. We did not invent slavery. We know America did not create colonialism, imperialism or fascism. Bigotry and hatred were not made in the USA. We know for a fact that the multitude of sins America is accused of, have likewise been committed by all nations; more often than not, to far more egregious extremes. No people on the face of the earth have the right to lecture us on any subject. There is no nation, anywhere on the globe, which has either the just cause or the moral authority to demand anything, least of all an apology of America. Let the world believe and say what it will. We know better. We know America is an exceptional nation, without equal on the planet and without peer in history.
“We know however, that our unrivaled greatness was made possible not because we are inherently better than any of our fellow human beings. No, our meteoric rise to glory was the result of the nation’s founding upon the fount of blessings which is Christianity.
“And like our nation, our religion has had much calumny thrown, undeservedly, in its face.
“We’re not so blind as to claim to be without sin, but if we catalogued all the crimes of Christians that can be justifiably dropped at Christendom’s door, it would be no longer, no more lamentable a list than the litany of abuses the Church could raise against the world’s treatment of Her. We would remind the Jew that it was he who first persecuted the Christian, that our first martyrs were condemned to tortured deaths by inquisitions of the Sanhedrin. To the Muslim who reaches back to the crusades for the justification of his animosity against us, let him note that the Christian can reach back even farther into history, to the blood-soaked centuries of Islamic imperialism that precipitated those wars. We would remind Islam, that long before a crusader’s sword left scabbard, jihadist armies had already sacked Rome and reached the gates of Vienna, Paris and Madrid. We would remind the secularist that the unparalleled butchery of atheist regimes has always singled out Christians as the first victims of their brutality. This has been the case since the very beginning of the church-burning, genocidal barbarism of the so-called Enlightenment.
“Christians have always been ready and willing to forgive the world its trespasses and move on. The world has not been so forgiving, except here in America.
“Since our colonial beginnings, despite the many, well known failings of Christians, Americans have acknowledged in Christianity the principle and all-pervading element and foundation for their laws, policies, customs and civil institutions. As the country grew, Christianity spread with it. The bond between the two is writ large across our nation. We can read it in Maryland, the state named in honor of the Blessed Mother of God. It is there in Corpus Christi, Las Cruces, Santa Fe, Los Angeles, as it is in the myriad of other cities, counties and streets named after the saints of Christendom. From the start, America has found in Christianity her highest ideals. In our striving to live up to those values we made our nation the envy of the world. Conversely, our abandonment of Christianity is what set us on the road to ruin.
“Today, we step off that path. Today, we declare America to be a Christian Republic, a nation under God once more, which acknowledges the sovereignty of Jesus Christ, the Lord of lords and the King of kings! The crosses that have been torn down shall be raised again. Every law that impedes the practice of Christianity is now null and void.
“Today we dissolve our bonds with a world that is hostile to both America and Christianity. We declare our independence from its culture of death.
“Today we offer the world an alternative. We ask you, our fellow Americans and you, our fellow citizens of the world; we invite you all to join with us in creating a new, pro-life civilization.
“Turn a tender eye with us to human souls when they are at their most vulnerable, innocent and most dependent on our goodwill and, we promise you, gentler yet will be the hands with which we touch each other. Reject life, insist that some human beings are disposable just because they’re in fetal form and the war of all against all will continue to curse the world with the bloodbaths of genocide. It can be no other way. Either all human life is sacred or no human life is sacred. If any human life is dismissed as disposable, then all human life can be considered expendable.
“Let us resolve here and now to choose life. If we can revere every member of humanity from conception through natural death we will, in short order, reorder our minds, industries and institutions, putting them to work creating a world where every life is welcomed, wanted and provided for. Reject life and it will continue to grow ever cheaper. We will continue to abandon the weak and the wounded, step over the homeless and turn deaf ears to the cries of the hungry and the tortured.
“Choose life, we beg you. Let us love every soul that God delivers to our keeping and all life, every great and small creature of God, the planet itself even, will yet know us as better, more thoughtful, caring stewards. Reject life and we will never be able to see each other as more than human resources, faceless statistics or worse, cannon fodder and collateral damage. Choose life and we can all, at last, become good Samaritans to each other.
“This Christmas Day, here in America, we begin again. We pray you join with us and choose life, because its alternative has and always will be war, bloodshed and death.
“Consider our offer. Talk and pray it over with family and friends. At the end of this transmission, phone lines will be opened up again so you can contact loved ones. We will continue to suppress television, radio and the internet however, as these mediums will generate more heat than light on the subject. We will turn them back on again at the end of Christmastide. At that time we will also release all our prisoners.
“Until then, Merry Christmas to all, and to all, a good night.”
†
Joe Corelli watches Colonel Pereira pick a remote control up from the desk. The Colonel aims it at the camera and pushes one of its buttons. The image from the Oval Office vanishes in a flash of snowy static. A moment later the screen lights up with an aerial view of the United Nations Tower complex in Manhattan. Two helicopters lift off from its roof and head across the East River. A third helicopter rises from the plaza and circles the tower as it climbs into the air. On the ground, the NYPD can be seen urging and pushing the crowd, thinned across the far side of First Avenue, up the side streets. A muffled explosion is heard. And then another and another; a whole series of muted blasts rock the street and plaza. People stop in their tracks and look back at the tower. Another, longer and louder series of explosions shatters the still, winter air. Windows burst outward in glinting shards from the bottom floors to the top as puffs of smoke plume out the sides of the building. People scream. Most run but some stand, transfixed. The ground rumbles. One after the other, the bottom floors of the tower buckle. The top floors fall, pancaking one atop the other, as the building shrinks. The skyscraper collapses in seconds, disappearing behind a rolling and rising cloud of impenetrable smoke and concrete dust.
A final blast splits the gray dome of the General Assembly into pieces. A great tongue of flame spits them into the air as the supporting walls collapse and crumble. Smoke and dust billow over the camera and the view is lost in a dingy white-out.
The coverage from New York is cut suddenly and the televisions return to playing ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’ Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey is running through the black and white, small town snow-scape of Bedford Falls wishing everyone a Merry Christmas. Beneath the television, the President, the Congressman, Annie and the rest of the kidnapped party stand stunned and slack-jawed.
Corelli looks down the wall of glass. The soldiers in the control room are cheering, whooping, clapping, trading high-fives and throwing their Santa caps in the air. He catches sight of Carlton Quinn. He is bear hug
ging two women, one in each arm. Their legs kick excitedly as he lifts them off the ground and spins in place. When he puts them down, they plant a kiss on each of his cheeks and run off to celebrate with others. Quinn looks up and catches Joe’s attention. The sniper gives him a quick grin, wink and a thumbs-up before he crosses arms at the elbows with Salvador Alvarez and the two improvise a twirling jig. Laughing soldiers wheel carts in from the four tunnels. Bottles of champagne, iced in bus tubs, sit atop the carts. Out of the north tunnel a short, wiry man with a handlebar mustache runs into the control room. He is not in uniform but wearing a long-tailed, white tuxedo stamped with a red and green houndstooth pattern. A matching top hat is planted on his head. He slides across a good sized length of the polished stone floor with a bottle in each raised hand. He raises the bottles of champagne high in the air and simultaneously pops the corks off each with his thumbs.
“Merry Christmas!” he shouts out.
“Merry Christmas!” the soldiers roar in reply.
Corelli turns his back on the scene. He moves past his still-struck party and takes a seat at the bench. He buries his face in his hands and tries to quiet his mind. He tries to empty it of the thoughts battling in his brain. He tries to reconcile the two disparate images of Sandi behind each warring faction. There is the girl he met in Destin, dancing in high heels, black mini and a canary feather tube top; and Sandi as Captain Castillo in combat boots, armored and armed to the teeth. The images will not reconcile themselves. When Corelli raises his head again, he notices that Annie is headed, like a sleepwalker, to her room. The President and the Congressman continue to stare at the war room turned into a discotheque of flashing lights and brassy, dance music. Beside them, Morton Gallagher and his team look upon the same scene with the same incomprehension on their faces.
The House of War: Book One Of : THE OMEGA CRUSADE Page 34