by Ben Shapiro
“Meet our new Ayn Rand.”
–Salon.com
“True Allegiance is a terrifying read that brilliantly lays bare the chilling future we all fear is headed right for us.”
–Brad Thor, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Code of Conduct
“Provocative, intense, and about five minutes from becoming reality, Ben Shapiro’s True Allegiance is a riveting thriller about what happens when America falls apart. It’s not just a phenomenal thriller, it’s prophetic.”
–Ann Coulter, author of ten New York Times bestsellers
“We all know Ben Shapiro for his keen intellect and his impeccable ability to articulate the principles that made America great. Now Ben has delved into the world of fiction in his book, True Allegiance—but is it really fictional? This is a must read novel in which we must ask ourselves, will we make a stand?”
–Lt. Col. Allen B. West (US Army, Ret.),
Member, 112th US Congress
“A gutsy and gut-wrenching vision of an America coming apart at the seams—an America not so different from the one we’re living in right now. Ben Shapiro has used his deep understanding of current events to create a fictional world that could well be our world the day after tomorrow. It’s a scary story and just a little too real for comfort.”
–Andrew Klavan, screenwriter, Edgar Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of True Crime and Don’t Say A Word
“Ben Shapiro’s strong, elegant writing moves from journalism to fiction with grace and impact. His famous insights into the characters and institutions of our times now present in razor sharp delineation of characters and their gripping progress, each with their own arc that draws you tightly into his remarkably well-told story. True Allegiance cuts no corners and makes no easy choices in unfolding its tale of the great challenges of our times and the perilous way they’re being managed. Shapiro’s view, through the eyes of those who become captives of history, finds them all, those who seek greatness only to becoming unwitting pawns, and others upon whom destiny is thrust. This is a wonderful novel, a brisk and enjoyable read.”
–Lionel Chetwynd, Emmy Award-winning screenwriter
“Hard to put down. Ben gleefully serves up a combustible mix of real-life anecdotes, dramatic license, comically precise details and conservative worldview—and a jaw-dropping, I-can’t-believe-he-wrote-that climax!”
–Jim Geraghty, senior political correspondent, National Review
and author of The Weed Agency
A POST HILL PRESS BOOK
Published at Smashwords
True Allegiance
© 2016 by Ben Shapiro
All Rights Reserved
ISBN: 978-1-68261-077-0
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-68261-078-7
Cover Design by Christian Bentulan
Interior Design and Composition by Greg Johnson/Textbook Perfect
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.
Post Hill Press
275 Madison Avenue, 14th Floor
New York, NY 10016
posthillpress.com
Published in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
CONTENTS
Prologue
Part 1: Before
Brett
President Prescott
Soledad
Levon
Ellen
Brett
President Prescott
Ellen
Soledad
Levon
Mohammed
Part 2: Collapse
Brett
President Prescott
Ellen
Soledad
Levon
Brett
President Prescott
Ellen
Soledad
Levon
Part 3: The End of the Beginning
Brett
President Prescott
Ellen
Soledad
Levon
Brett
Ellen
The End of the Beginning
Epilogue
About the Author
New York City
By the time Jennifer Collier hit the George Washington Bridge, it was already almost 9:00 a.m. Rush hour. The bridge had turned into an enormous parking lot.
Jennifer looked out at the sea of red lights before her, stretching all the way into New York, and sighed. There had to be thirty thousand cars on this bridge, all of them moving two miles an hour.
Jennifer glanced at her watch and sighed.
She was on the west side of the bridge, and she could see its two enormous steel-encased towers looming before her. In the passenger seat, her daughter, Julie, breathed softly, sleeping.
Jennifer glanced at her watch again. 9:03. “Come on,” she muttered.
Which is when she heard it.
The bridge groaned.
It was a loud, low groan that made the car vibrate.
Julie woke up. “What was that?” she asked drowsily.
The groan died away.
“Nothing,” said Jennifer. “Probably just a plane overhead. Go back to sleep.”
“Mommy…”
The bridge groaned again. This time, it was longer, more drawn out. Jennifer felt the brake pedal vibrate beneath her foot.
“Mommy, that’s not a plane,” said Julie, wide awake now.
The groaning continued, booming from beneath them.
The bridge was undulating slightly up and down now. Jennifer could see the cables of the suspension bridge oscillating like the strings of a guitar.
“Mommy, what’s going on?” Julie cried.
Cars ahead were honking now, urgently pleading for those at the front of the bridge to hurry up. A few cars were trying to ram their way through the traffic, pushing other cars toward the edge of the bridge. The honking and crashing, combined with the burgeoning low roar, made Jennifer’s head ache, pound, the driving rhythm of her blood surging through her temples.
Then the bridge’s roar stopped again. The people ahead of Jennifer kept honking, panicking, trying to get off the bridge. After about thirty seconds, the honking seemed to die down a little bit. Julie’s wide eyes grew wider. She was staring at a crash on the other side of the divider, the flames leaping from the engine of a smashed Toyota. Jennifer could see a man’s arm hanging, lifeless, out the window.
Jennifer reached out and gripped Julie’s arm. “It’s okay, baby,” she whispered, wetting her lips.
Then time seemed to stop.
The noise of the traffic went silent.
Jennifer’s eyes opened in horror.
The bridge before Jennifer tilted sideways. The 604-foot tower before her began to lean, almost gracefully, to her right.
Jennifer screamed, but it was drowned out in the ear-splitting cracking noise, hundreds of thousands of tons of steel twisting and bending and grating on each other, the sound of a million airplanes all crashing at once. Jennifer looked to her left as she heard the steel cables shriek, stretch on the other side of the bridge. She locked eyes with an elderly man driving a silver Lincoln Continental. Behind him, she saw one of the enormous metal cables snap clean and slither wildly back and forth like a beginning fly fisherman’s messy cast.
“Look out!” she shouted at the man. He couldn’t hear her, but he turned to follow her eyes.
The cable ripped through the Linc
oln, slicing its occupant in half vertically, a jet stream of red following in its wake, splattering Jennifer’s windshield.
She opened her mouth to scream and realized that she was already screaming so hard, no sound was emerging.
In front of her, the road itself began to tilt. Cars slid horizontally toward the railings, bath-time playthings of an angry god.
The first tower buckled.
Jennifer felt herself fall as the top level of the bridge dropped. For a moment, she was weightless—the peculiar memory of jumping inside an elevator when she was a little girl flitted through her brain—and then the second level of the bridge slammed down on top of the first level at a twenty-five-degree angle. The tower stopped, bending but holding grotesquely, the metal shrieking and moaning, smoke emerging from below.
Jennifer could hear the screams and cries of the wounded below her, the carnage of metal and bone. An awful crematory smell burned her nose as cars exploded beneath her, one by one, muffled by the tons of cement and steel, sounding for all the world like popcorn. Julie was screaming uncontrollably. In the distance, sirens sounded eerily, and over the river, she could see emergency helicopters approaching.
Jennifer fumbled for her purse and dug through it for her cell phone. She threw aside her wallet, her makeup, poured out the contents on the floor of the passenger seat. Grabbed her cell phone. Speed-dialed Bill.
It rang once. Then twice. Finally, it went to message.
“I love you,” she whispered into the phone.
As she did, Julie pointed through the front windshield, her lips quivering in silent horror.
The second tower was tilting, too.
Like some sort of horrible snake, the bridge responded to the tower. It tilted and keeled over, the road peeling away before Jennifer as it leapt up and to the side. Jennifer saw thousands of cars turn on their sides, rotate like clothes in a washing machine.
Jennifer heard the awful roar, the unnatural screaming of thousands of voices, as the stream of red lights before her began to disappear.
There was nowhere for her to go. She turned to Julie, her eyes round with terror. She grabbed her hand.
“It’s going to be all right,” she whispered. Julie nodded slowly. Jennifer clasped her by the face and looked into her eyes. “I promise you,” she said. “It’s going to be all right. Now, just close your eyes, darling.”
Julie closed her eyes. Jennifer didn’t. She looked into the river below her, saw the disappearing taillights of the thousands of cars descending into the depths of the Hudson.
“God,” she whispered. “Oh, God.”
Part 1
Kabul, Afghanistan
Brigadier General Brett Hawthorne looked at his M9 magazine and cursed to himself. Empty.
He was sat up against a mud-brick hovel in the city’s poor part of town—even in Kabul, there was a large income gap—and felt the sweat trickle down cold between his shoulder blades. He hadn’t been alone for years—generals always had a personal security detail—but things had gone hellishly wrong.
Hawthorne was a bear of a man, six three in his bare feet and two hundred fifteen pounds in his underwear, with a graying blond crew cut and a face carved of granite. But he had plenty of smile lines. He just didn’t like showing those to people unless he knew them.
He looked up at the Hindu Kush. The city was romantically placed in full view of the mountain chain, a bizarre, large cyst at the bottom of the grandiose peaks. The Kabul River, which once passed lazily through the city, slicing it in half and providing it with an anchor, had dried up to a series of puddles, leaving the city afloat on the steppes.
It was freezing, just like every other December day. What wasn’t like every other day was the silence.
It was quiet, except for a few scattered screams and the occasional rapid-fire rounds. Hawthorne sucked in the smell of smoke with every breath; he could see the Kabul Serena Hotel burning. The new coalition government had bragged about the hotel as the standard-bearer for the modernization of the city, with its historically imitative Islamic architecture, satellite TV, and wireless Internet. Now the flames licked at the windows as ashes floated down on the city.
It wasn’t the only building burning. It seemed as though half the city was on fire.
Well, Brett thought to himself, at least I can tell those stupid bastards, “I told you so.”
A few short years ago, Afghanistan had seemed to be on the upswing. The Taliban had been on the run, hiding in the mountains of the Tora Bora region, sallying forth every so often to hit a supply chain, but mainly holing up waiting for the invaders to leave. The coalition forces had been systematically rooting them out from local areas, empowering Afghan forces to hold the areas, and funding local governance in those areas.
Hawthorne knew all of this because he had designed the strategy.
And now that strategy had gone to shit.
Brett Hawthorne was the youngest general in the American military. He’d grown up lower middle class in Chicago, his mother a teacher, his father a salesman for the local phone company. When his dad lost his job, the family moved from the more expensive North Side to the South Side of Chicago—poorer, industrial, and heavily black.
He’d been a shy kid, gentle, quiet, built like a reed. But he learned one skill pretty quickly at Thomas Edison High: how to talk his way out of a bad situation.
That, he learned from Derek.
On the second day of school, Brett was sitting by himself at lunch. He wasn’t one of the Irish kids, and he wasn’t one of the Italian kids, so he couldn’t sit with those cliques. And he’d made the mistake the day before of trying to befriend a couple of the black kids. That hadn’t gone well. He’d ended up with a black eye and a few new vocabulary words to add to his dictionary.
So today, he sat alone. Until he made the mistake of looking up. Standing above him, glaring at him, was a behemoth, a black kid named Yard. Nobody knew his real name—everybody just called him Yard because he played on the school football team, stood six foot five, clocked in at a solid two hundred eighty pounds, and looked like he was headed straight for a lifetime of prison workouts. The coach loved him. Everybody else feared him.
If Brett hadn’t looked up, everything would have worked out just fine. But then again, he didn’t have much choice, given that Yard grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him out of his seat like a rag doll.
Then Yard mumbled something in his face.
“What?” said Brett.
“I said,” Yard growled, “did you just call me nigger? Because I just heard you call me nigger.”
The entire room turned to watch the impending carnage.
Yard’s hand came down on Brett’s shoulder, heavy as doom. Brett could feel his bowels begin to give way when a smallish hand emerged on Yard’s shoulder. A black hand. Yard swiveled ponderously to face down the person connected with the hand.
A small person, slim, wearing glasses and a wide smile across his face.
“Yard, man,” he said, “he didn’t call you nigger.”
“What you talking about, Derek?” rumbled Yard.
“It was me, man! I called you nigger.”
Yard looked puzzled. “No,” he said slowly, “it was the white boy.”
“Oh, yeah, man,” said Derek. “It was. I’m white. You just mixed us up.” He moved around to stand next to Brett. “See? We’re twins. Identical. Anybody could mix us up. Even though I’m more handsome.”
Yard’s eyes glazed over with confusion. The giggling started at the back of the room. Yard’s hands clenched and unclenched as the wave rose over the room, until the kids were slapping each other on the back. Yard’s fists closed tight.
But as they did, Derek leaned forward, reached out, and lightly tapped Yard’s hands—and then started singing at the top of his lungs that Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder song, “Ebo
ny and Ivory.” “Come on, sing with me, Yard! You be ebony, I’ll be ivory!”
But Yard was backing away now, a look on his face asking, who is this nut job?
Derek turned to Brett and continued singing.
And Brett smiled and crooned back, in warbled harmony.
That’s how Brett met his best friend, and learned how to talk his way out of violent confrontation. He’d become a master at it over the years, learned to stick and move with his words, disarm the enemy, keep him laughing rather than fighting. It was a tool that he’d deploy with soldiers and presidents.
It also brought him Ellen.
Between junior and senior years of high school, Brett finally hit his growth spurt. Like his dad, he bloomed late—but when he did, he put on muscle and height like a racehorse. He sprouted five inches, to six foot two; he broadened through the chest, filling out to a healthy two fifteen. The coaches had ignored him in high school, but at The Citadel, he quickly became their favorite. He didn’t pick the college because of its military background. He picked it because he read a Pat Conroy book, and because South Carolina seemed gothic and romantic compared to the South Side of Chicago.
It was. But the college was brutal, especially for a kid lacking discipline. He bridled at the orders, bridled at the system. He bucked it whenever he could, and found himself on the wrong end of a lot of forced runs and extra burpees and early morning wake-ups. Fortunately, the extra meat on his bones helped.
On one of his rare off days, Brett found himself at Charleston’s bustling City Market. The shops were heavy with traffic; rain outside had forced everyone into the covered complex of artists hawking their pictures and crafts. He was wearing his Citadel uniform, standing out conspicuously among the women in their summer dresses and the men in their jeans and seersucker sport coats. Reluctant to run back out into the rain, he leaned back against a bookcase.
“No loitering, cadet.”
The voice was musical—for some reason, the image of a woodwind came to mind. A southern woodwind, since her accent sang of long summers and lemonade.