by Billy Roper
“You are the most unappreciative, ungrateful man I’ve ever known! Any body else would be impressed and thanking me and wondering why anybody would do something like that for somebody else. Not you. You just wonder if it’ll get you in trouble with General Harrison, who doesn’t deserve his job as much as you do, any way….”
The Lt. Col. interrupted her: “Don’t go too far. I’ve given you unprecedented, virtually unfettered access, but I won’t tolerate anybody from the media discussion sedition or…”
“The media? Sedition?” Carolyn spat. “Oh, you idiot. You’re too blind to see the old buzzards hanging onto your coattails, letting you be the front man, while they hold on to the power? They’re jealous of you because you’re smarter and braver and tougher than them, and willing to get your hands dirty. They’re using you!”
He stopped in front of her, putting his hands on his hips. “This is not about anybody else but you, and anything else but what you did. Don’t try to change the subject. I should have you arrested, if I ever thought you would do something like this, I never would have let you get so close! If I had ever known you were capable of such a stunt…”
“Oh, you didn’t know I was capable of doing anything without asking for your permission, first? You didn’t know I could make moves and get people to do things for me? That’s so rich. How do you think I got here? How do you think I got so close to you? You didn’t know I would do something like this?” Carolyn was smiling icily, now.
The Chairman of the Convention had dismissed the delegates for the day this morning, when news of the devastating attacks on the American East coast had come across his radio. He had ordered all flags in the city, which were still the Old Glory fifty starred version, for now, to be lowered to half staff, and declared the convention closed for a day of mourning for their lost fellow Americans in those cities back east. He didn’t think things could get any worse, until the Nebraska pulled back up to its mooring. What he had thought yesterday must have been just a routine training run to keep their engines clean and their batteries charged turned out to be THIS, and the Captain’s bad luck to give his report on this of all days was unfortunate. John looked at Carolyn, looked out his window at the arch in the distance, and tried to rein in his temper. But she kept on…
“You had your goon squad, who everybody in the city knows you use as a hit team, by the way, come and drag me out of a meeting with my editor where I was promoting YOU, to get yelled at because I tried to do something nice, and then you insult me worse by saying that you didn’t think I was capable of doing it? What, do you think I wasn’t smart enough? Not ruthless enough? Not Machiavellian enough? Haven’t you heard the story, John, about the little old lady who lived by herself in the woods? You know, she was out gathering firewood one day, and found a snake half frozen to death, so she felt sorry for it and took it inside and put it by the hearth to thaw out? Remember that story?”
Lt. Col. McNabb looked at her like she had lost her mind, like he had lost all respect for her. She stood up, tears streaming down her face in rage and hurt. His secretary on the other side of the door had probably retreated to the end of the hall. Kip’s desk there probably wasn’t even far enough away for this to be a private conversation.
“Well, that snake, he thawed out, and he coiled and struck and bit her, and as the little old lady lay there dying, she asked the snake, Mr. Snake, you were frozen and about dead, and I saved you, I brought you in and warmed you up and saved you, and this is how you repay me?” some southern Tennessee had crept back into her voice.
John was still listening to her seemingly bizarre rambling, as Carolyn stomped to the door, then turned and pointed her finger at him like it could kill. “And that snake, John, do you know what he said? He said, “Idiot, you knew I was a snake when you brought me in.” She made sure to slam the door, as she left. Hard. The pictures rattled on his wall. One fell with a crash.
He didn’t make much progress in trying to formulate a response to the bombings of Boston, Baltimore, New York, Providence, and Philadelphia, that afternoon. Not that there was much they could do. He was glad at least that so many hundreds of thousands of people had moved west, out of the cities, over the last eight months. The black riots had ironically saved their lives by spurring White flight across states and regions. Now, how would the loss of Toronto effect his planned annexation of the three Canadian prairie provinces? McNabb’s secretary wouldn’t meet his eyes when he left for the day. His security team didn’t say a word on the way back to the Hyatt. McNabb dreaded seeing tomorrow’s paper. For more reasons than one. Never make an enemy who buys their ink by the barrel.
Chapter Twelve
"I advocated the preservation of the white race, whatever it takes to preserve it. The white race is the most endangered species on the face of the earth."
–Pastor Richard Butler
No One Here Gets Out Alive
Two brief tours of the facility while he had been Senator and Vice-President elect had not prepared Perry Bellefont for just how big Fort Hood was. The base had needed to spruce up their image after that crazy raghead doctor had shot it up, and he needed to toughen up his image, so he had taken a walk-through as a mutual back-rubbing photo-op right after the primary. He had taken another right after the November election, to personally thank the base commander who had broken military protocol by personally endorsing Bellefont’s patriotic credentials. Major General Hampton had probably earned their ticket a million votes throughout the south and west with that one endorsement. Running for public office in Texas without a military record required some finesse. He had been able to position himself as a conservative, even as a right-winger, without it, though. The party establishment had even said that they kept him on the ticket because it was better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in. He guessed that sometimes you had to be careful what you pretended to be, because that’s what you ended up becoming.
Bellefont’s decision to bail on New Y ork and trying to reassert his by-God Constitutionally legitimate authority over the nation had been his best move yet, as it turned out. At the time it had been a pragmatic move, based on the fact that Texas needed a hero, and had the resources and history to pull off nationhood. Oh, and this was his home, that too. The green graves of his sires, and all that. Now, the rest of the cabinet and executive branch who hadn’t taken an oath of loyalty to him and given up on the U.N. jockeying for position, well, they were finely ground ash being blown out over the north Atlantic.
When he had first cornered the party’s nomination for Vice President after that shrill feminist witch had won all of their female and minority votes, Perry had been struggling. He had never been a good loser. It was something he didn’t like to practice at. Making it worse, losing to a woman, especially an ugly and old woman, had hurt his pride. If she’d been some young hottie, heckl, he could understand that. Not that shriveled up, flappyjowled, used up old lesbian. But if you wanna play in Texas, to paraphrase Charlie Daniels, you gotta have a cowboy in the band. So, he had picked himself up from the campaign trail, brushed himself off, put his Stetson on, and climbed back on the horse for another ride. That round carried him to D.C., even if he was riding shotgun instead of leading the charge.
It had taken a careful balance of reigning himself in after his primary campaign rhetoric had gotten him labeled “the uncensored voice of violent militarism” by his opponent’s spin doctors. Perry had pushed for a strong defense budget and a tough foreign policy. That just cinched up the veterans, the military families, and what the President had condescendingly referred to as the “flaggots”, the patriotic types, for him. She needed that constituency, are at least a big slice of it. The Texas Senator, not the Lord, would provide. Amen.
Because of his perceived expertise in military affairs, the Vice President had presided over day after day of emergency base closure oversight meetings as racially mixed units had been locked down and dismantled, then reconstituted after segrega
tion. The mainstream media had been all over that, even with the country tearing itself apart. A White officer got shot by a black soldier, or a group of Mexican enlistees took over a recruiting center, and he got blamed. Firefights broke out between different racial groups in Fort Bragg, with the Whites coming out on top, and he got the blame. White soldiers got massacred by black enlisted in Fort Benning, and guess who got blamed? You guessed it. Perry. Not just by the sniveling, grasping, Jew-driven media, either. No, he had to hear about it two or three times a day from the Wicked Witch Of The East, too. He had known that there was no way in hell their ticket could get re-elected, after basically giving up on a racially diverse armed forces. It was like they had admitted that multiracialism didn’t work, that diversity, well, it wasn’t such a strength, really, after all. The military had been used as a tightly controlled lab for social experiments since the Korean War. From racial integration to homosexual rights, social change had been pushed in the armed forces, first. It was kind of fitting that the armed forces had been the first elements of society to push the failed experiment of multiracialism back out, in many places.
Frankly, Bellefont had only liked the first couple of weeks in Washington. His wife, a trophy he’d picked up from a Houston oil family he’d needed to finance his second Congressional run, hated the Naval Observatory grounds, and hated the security always present, and hated the D.C. parties and social dinners that came with the house and the job. His kids hated the Sidwell Friends school, and the ‘fake posers’, as they called them, there. If anything, they were all happier living on the base here at Hood. It was a damn site better than the two bedroom apartment they had been cramped into for a couple of months at One UN New York.
To man y, Perry was the President, even though he hadn’t been sworn in to take the oath of office. In all honesty, he hadn’t taken the oath yet because he wasn’t sure that he wanted the job. More and more, as the Mexican Army pushed north into his beloved Texas and the Governor dithered in Austin, he felt needed there. When the state government evacuated the capitol city and the Governor resigned in disgrace, he knew that the eyes of Texas were upon him.
Major General Scott Hampton’s calls to the U.N. headquarters hadn’t gone through official channels. The commanding officer of III Corps at Fort Hood had been trying to reach Bellefont, personally. On the third try, he got his secretary, and then Perry himself. Gen. Hampton was seeking permission to consolidate the command for the defense of Texas under his staff, basically co-opting the Air Force. Bellefont told him that the fate of the nation rested on what happened in Texas, not what was happening, or not happening, in New York. He would come home and assert civilian leadership over the situation and give Gen. Hampton the command of all of the armed forces in the great state of Texas, in exchange for his support. Ten minutes later, the call ended with a plan already in motion.
When the Secret Service had listened to his rationalization, they had obeyed orders, with very few exceptions, and simply had the Sikorsky VH-3D Sea King fueled up at the U.N. helipad hangar where Marine Two had been parked. Well, it was Marine One, now, Perry thought. Those exceptions he released from duty, against his vindictive instincts, to win over the loyalty of the rest. La Guardia was closer, but out of the question, since a company of Italian U.N. blue helmets had moved in to secure and hold it, and JFK was out of commission, but Westchester County airport had been secured by New York State Police up there. A couple of calls had begun the process of maintenance and preparation of a former JetBlue A320 airbus that would carry the hundred or so federal employees and staff from the Executive branch that he wanted on his list. Gathering them together without creating a panic with the U.N. had been accomplished through the planning of a fake birthday party for his son the next day, which he of course wanted his closest friends to be at. His reduced but still loyal staff briefly interviewed each of the party invitees in person, to see how many were willing to go to Texas.
In addition to Perry and his family and the five members of his staff, eight secret service members, eleven Marines, (four of them from Texas), and five Air Force flight crew were with the program. In addition, the junior Congressman from Laredo and his girlfriend (Bellefont would let the Congressman and his wife sort that out, once they got home) and the sycophantic Senator who had been elected to replace Perry in his Senate seat and his three staff members and wife and kid, and the other Senator who was flying stag because his family had stayed in Fort Worth, were signed up. Two other Congressmen were missing in action in D.C.. Another had been on a fact-finding mission in Israel, so she wouldn’t be taking up any legroom on this flight.
Outside of the military and Texan group, they would have along the Secretaries of the Department of Education and the Department of Veterans Affairs, a Deputy Secretary of Defense, an Under-Secretary from Homeland Security, the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, and members of their families, along with a mix of Executive branch staffers, policy wonks, and chain of succession loyalists. About eighty five people he could trust. Enough to plan a murder, or start a new religion. Or, just maybe, a new government, a new nation. Several of the people he invited had turned him down. Most disappointing of these were the Secretary of the Department of Defense and the Secretary of State, but they both promised not to say anything to the U.N. until he was gone, not even to the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., herself. They were all just secretly glad to be rid of him and the truncated power he represented, truth be told.
Bellefont set the loyal military folks to rounding up and fueling vehicles for the motorcade, so they could be lined up and loaded up at a moment’s notice. The party invitees were instructed to walk over to the ballroom with their one bag of luggage each was allowed wrapped up as a birthday gift. To the U.N. staff watching the procession, it looked like his son was going to be one lucky kid. By the time the vehicles filed out of the parking garage and began to be quickly loaded, it was too late to stop them. Not that anybody particularly felt like trying.
The Sikorsky with himself and his family and a couple of agents aboard had already lifted off from the helipad. They kept the post-apocalyptic wagon train below them in sight as it twisted and turned northwards through the city. First Avenue up to 58th, then the wrong way west to Park Avenue, and north again. Their bird’s eye view helped the caravan avoid a multi-car pileup at the intersection with 60th, which the agents were able to radio back and forth to steer clear of. Over to Fifth Avenue and the wrong way past the pond, where a clutch of penguins, obviously wandering free from the Central Park Zoo, huddled in fear. They had clear sailing until a pile of tires blocked the way to Marcus Garvey park, which seemed to be an armed encampment. Veering right to avoid Harlem, they took 116th over to Harlem River Dr., then the 278 to the Hutchinson River Parkway, where things cleared out, and the sporadic sound of warning shots from surrounding rooftops faded away. It took three hours, over twice the normal drive time, for their seventeen vehicle motorcade and armored personnel carrier escorts to drive the forty miles, due to having to drive around barricaded streets and openly hostile (as in, shooting at anything moving) neighborhoods. Perry was standing beside Marine One, patting the smooth metal skin affectionately for the last time, as they rolled in and started transferring onboard the plane.
When they had landed at Robert Gray Army Air Field Airport in Fort Hood, Gen. Hampton himself was there to meet him, with an honor guard and a brass band playing “Hail To The Chief”. It was good to be back home.
A Feast Of Friends
Randall had been fighting these dirty jihadist Arabs in Grand Rapids for over a month. Since the Michigan Militia had been integrated, consolidated, educated, and relegated to the Unified Command, he had been riding and walking from one strip mall to the next. From one shootout to the next. Most of the terrorists they couldn’t catch alive, but when they did, they spoke better English than the blacks they had mainly wiped out around here. Most of them claimed to be American citizens, even. But they sure hated America, whether they ha
d been born here, or brought here. Running a party store or a 7-11 one day, blowing up a car bomb the next, pretty much, as far as the Lieutenant was concerned. They also were well armed, probably by their Islamic State contacts, before international transport had shut down. At least, Randall hoped that they weren’t still shipping more AKs, M4geries, LAW rockets, RPG-7s, and heavy machine guns into Lake Michigan from the Atlantic. Rumor had it that not all of the fishing boats travelling back and forth again these days were hauling in whitefish. The twenty-five miles from Grand Rapids to the waterfront was heavily patrolled by militiamen like himself, but you couldn’t be everywhere at once. The Lucky Strikes he smoked came across that way, as did loot from Milwaukee.
His militia unit had watched Detroit burn last August as bombload after bombload of incendiaries from the 127th Air Wing at Selfridge roared in. Randall had fallen in love with those A-10s. Their ground support had saved his butt when they got cut off and surrounded in the Dearborn pocket. The Arabs had hit them from behind while the Michigan Militia was tasked with driving the black rioters back into Mexicantown where the MS-13 were tearing them up. Taking fire from all sides, Lieutenant Balderson and his platoon had made a stand at the 153 cloverleaf where they had clear fields of fire in all directions, and called in air strikes on all points of the compass.
He would never forget the roar from behind coming nearer and passing over him to make a Red Robin up the road disappear in a flash as another hostile position was attrited. A cargo van launched itself out of the Planet Fitness parking lot, over the curb, and up the grassy bank. The driver obviously didn’t know they were too close to the Militia position for the Thunderbolts to hit. Randall and Craig and Terry, who had been together from the start, kneeled behind their Yukon Denali and tried their best to take out the driver. One of them must have been lucky, because at close to one hundred yards the van veered into the guardrail and ground to a halt. The free side door opened at the same time as the back doors, and several active targets engaged them at long range…at least it was long range for his AR-15 and flipup sights. Craig’s 30.06 had a high dollar scope made for taking deer at twice that range. The heavy rounds punched through van doors and walls and Arab traitors as if they were Bambi. The last one left the dubious cover of the van and tried to run back across the road to the ditch. He didn’t make it.