True Allegiance

by Ben Shapiro

  Bubba said, “Ellen, it could get this bad for everyone down here, too. You’ve seen Prescott. You know him. That’s why we have to protect ourselves.”

  “And what will Prescott do to us if we turn him down?”

  “I know what he won’t do,” Bubba answered. Ellen lifted an eyebrow. “He won’t send the National Guard.”

  Ellen shook her head. “I need to think about this, Bubba.”

  “Don’t take too much time. I’m going to make this move, Ellen. You’ve stood with me the whole way, down the line. But if you can’t be with me this time, I’ll need your resignation on my desk this afternoon. There’s just no time left.”

  Minot, North Dakota

  They’d made their way to the farm gradually. At first, there were only a few—friends and family of the militia members, an agglomeration of survivalists and nuts. I don’t belong here, Soledad thought. Then she realized that they were here because of her.

  Minot, North Dakota, lay near the banks of the Souris River, a midsized town of forty thousand just south of the Canadian border. It was truly the middle of nowhere, Soledad thought. They’d moved north, then north, then north some more, out of the populated areas, out where it would take a lot of manpower to track them down. They’d nearly been tracked down in California; the authorities still thought they were there, having originally believed, mistakenly, that they’d been burned during the fire at the ranch. By the time investigators caught onto the fact that they were still alive, they were in Idaho. Every few days, they moved.

  Until they reached Minot. In Minot, Aiden had allies and friends. His parents had come from there before moving south, and he still had a pack of relatives unafraid to lend him a covert helping hand. It wasn’t like the FBI had a heavy presence in the area, and Aiden figured that everybody up here pretty much kept their mouth shut as much as possible. “Neighborly,” Aiden had called it.

  The only major employer in the area was the US Air Force base they’d all need to avoid, although since the attack, the base had been pretty much abandoned, with all the National Guard being called to New York for cleanup. The nearby turnoffs were all smaller towns, many of less than a thousand people. The land was relatively treeless, but Aiden had managed to find a more heavily wooded area for the group to hunker down; there had been an abandoned barn and a decent-sized cabin he’d rented in cash from a distant cousin under the table.

  And there, the acolytes had begun to arrive. The first were men who had approached Aiden’s family about finding help during the big call-up. They were mostly local boys, men who didn’t want to be sent to New York for an indeterminate length of time, who had joined the National Guard mainly out of state pride and a feeling of local duty. Some were cowards; those, Aiden spotted and turned away. But some, he thought, could be useful.

  Aiden had a few rules about the new recruits. No married men—they had too many ties that could be exploited by the government if their identities were uncovered. No cell phones—the government’s surveillance programs were far too sophisticated to allow uncontrolled transmission. No Internet, for the same reason. And no leaving the base: a random spot check by a local cop could bring the entire weight of the federal government down on them, even if the feds were currently busy cleaning up the atrocity in New York. That meant that the group was immobile, in constant need of supplies.

  Nonetheless, in days, the group had grown from the handful of original militiamen into a small force of nearly forty. Soledad had gotten to know each of them. She had a gift for connecting with people, the same gift that had made her a staple of the evening news coverage, and she was truly interested in all of them. It flattered most of them. And all of them were grateful for a place to go.

  Aiden clapped his hands together, trying to warm them. Another freezing day in paradise.

  They’d settled into a kind of routine. Every morning, Aiden would check the barn door, make sure that nobody had been snooping around, make sure that none of the vehicles had been moved. The early snow had been their ally: he could see by footprints who had been where. Next, he’d take the truck down to the road, see if he could spot any traffic coming or going, anybody snooping. He’d put together a little task force to walk the perimeter of the property and stand shifts during the day. Aiden wasn’t taking chances.

  After ensuring that the posse was alone, Aiden would take the truck into town. He’d pick up supplies with the cash the posse had brought with them. They were beginning to run short on money; Aiden figured that sooner or later, they’d have to begin sending in members to make withdrawals, a risky business at best. A disproportionate number of cash withdrawals would certainly raise red flags in the middle of nowhere. He’d been trying to come up with alternatives, but other than robbing banks, he couldn’t think of a quick or easy solution.

  After buying groceries for the forty or so men, he’d head over to the bar. Aiden wasn’t a drinker, but he’d buy himself a beer and nurse it, sitting in back, watching the television screen hanging next to the deer’s head over the liquor bottles. A week before, he’d arrived to find the bar closed up—an oddity on a weekday. At first he’d been suspicious that the authorities had found them, that someone would follow him from the bar back to the farm. But after driving a mile in the wrong direction, nobody in sight, he’d realized something else was going on. He’d flipped on the car radio and heard about New York. Aiden wasn’t much of a praying man—he couldn’t stand his Catholic school growing up, the nuns with their dull black shoes and brittle faces and yardsticks—but when he got back to the farm, he’d lit a candle. So had Soledad. Together with the men, they’d prayed.

  Today, the bar was open. Aiden made his way inside, nodded to the bartender, and took his usual seat in the shadows, watching the television. More coverage of New York, of course, where authorities were still dredging the river for bodies. National Guard troops were pouring into New York and New Jersey, filling up all the available communities, straining capacity. The city had virtually shut down. The stock market had been closed ever since the attack. Curfew was still in place. The roads were heavily policed, travel heavily restricted.

  The foreign policy experts were blaming Ibrahim Ashammi for the attack, but he’d stayed strangely silent. Normally, Ashammi couldn’t wait to rush to a camera, and with an attack of this magnitude, most of the commentators had expected a big victory speech from the terrorist mastermind. Around the Muslim world, however, rallies sprang up celebrating the attacks: Palestinians in Gaza dancing and cheering, handing out candies; Muslim Brotherhood operatives in Egypt using the operation as a trigger for their own attacks on the US embassy; the Iranian mullahs leading vast crowds in chants of “Death to America,” even as the president of Iran shed crocodile tears over American losses while simultaneously suggesting that America could not avoid terror if it continued to support the Zionist regime.

  Aiden found himself enraged. These were the enemies. Not ranchers trying to make a living in California or pinstriped Wall Street muckety-mucks with private jets or Christian bakers who didn’t want to bake a cake for a gay wedding. These monsters. These people who wanted to kill the decent and indecent alike, who didn’t care what happened to the babies they were still finding washing up on the banks of the Hudson.

  The bottle in Aiden’s hand shattered. He’d been gripping it tightly in his fist without noticing it; a deep gash ran down the meat of his palm. He walked to the bar and asked the bartender for a towel, stanched the flow of blood with it. Then he motioned up at the screen. “Hey, buddy, is there anything else on? How about something a little less depressing.” The bartender shrugged, tossed him the remote. Aiden began flipping channels.

  When he hit MSNBC, he stopped. They weren’t covering the cleanup at the Hudson or the investigation into the terror attack. Their cameras were focused on the streets of Detroit. Specifically, one of their reporters stood outside the Detroit detention center.

 
“This could get out of control,” the reporter said, a hopeful gleam unmistakably shining in his eye. “This morning, a leader of the uprising, one Levon Williams, posted a list of demands on the website of the Fight Against Injustice and Racism movement, what they’re calling the FAIR movement. Here’s what we know about Levon Williams. He’s a graduate of the University of Michigan with a degree in African-American Studies. No police record. Model citizen, by all accounts, owns a barbershop on Eight Mile Road. According to the public interviews he’s done, he came back to the community in an effort to bring prosperity home.

  “The shooting of Kendrick Malone prompted him to action, he says.”

  The footage cut to a shot of Levon on set with an MSNBC anchor, some carefully manicured white guy with 1950s-style black-rimmed glasses. “We have seen injustice stacked upon injustice,” Levon said slowly. “Too many injustices to count. Kendrick Malone is just another victim in a long line of victims stretching back to the first black men and women stuffed into cargo holds to be sent to die on plantations in this country. We’re not going to back down this time. We’re not going to let this wave of brutality go unchallenged. We demand justice for Kendrick Malone and all the other Kendrick Malones who have died and all the other Kendrick Malones we want to keep from dying. Justice for Kendrick.”

  The anchor pondered this statement. “And what if Officer Ricky O’Sullivan is not prosecuted?”

  Levon said, “The people demand justice. And the people will receive justice.”

  MSNBC cut back to its reporter on the ground. “Levon Williams, leader of the FAIR movement. Well, today, the FAIR movement listed its demands: immediate trial of Ricky O’Sullivan. A jury of his peers from the Detroit area—no transfer of trial to a more sympathetic venue. More equity in the economic system of Detroit and surrounding areas. A complete makeover of the police force, including the firing of the police chief, with officers drawn from the local community, and an end to what they call the ‘occupation’ directed against people of color.”

  Now another anchor, female, appeared from the MSNBC studios on split-screen with the reporter. “Gil, have they said what they will do if their demands are not met?”

  The reporter gestured to a sign in the crowd: “RICKY O’SULLIVAN, DEAD OR ALIVE.” Then he said, “If the feeling I’m getting from the crowd is any indicator, it could get very ugly very quickly.”

  Soledad sat on the porch of the cabin, watching the snow fall. She had a blanket wrapped around her; she thought she probably looked like her ancestors had, without any modern conveniences, garbed in an old quilt, breathing steam into the air. In her hands, she held a cup of tea, sipping it every so often, reading yesterday’s newspaper. She was mildly relieved to see that she’d been knocked completely out of the newspaper for the first time since the conflagration in California.

  The door to the cabin opened behind her. She turned to see Ezekiel Pope—grizzled, older than the other recruits. He was black, came from Los Angeles. Their California background had been their point of connection. He’d joined up with the air force decades ago, and he’d been just about ready to quit thanks to the military cutbacks: he’d never rise higher than lieutenant colonel. He’d been called into his superior’s office just after the New York attack, told to round up his men and get ready to ship out to New York.

  For some reason, he’d come to Soledad instead.

  Aiden said he hadn’t given a reason for deserting. But he said that Ezekiel was trustworthy. Soledad had no option but to trust Aiden’s judgment.

  Ezekiel looked over the snow falling silently into itself. He wore heavy work gloves on his hands, and an M4 slung over his shoulder, a maroon scarf around his neck. Soledad gestured at the gun. “What’s that for?”

  “We’re gearing up.”

  “Gearing up for what?”

  Ezekiel laughed. “Well, you tell us. After all, you’re the Terrorist Mama. That’s what they’re calling you now, you know. Ever since the escape.”

  She felt sick to her stomach. She’d wanted to feed her workers, water her animals. That was it. Opening up the waterway had just been necessity. She hadn’t wanted anyone hurt or killed. “I’m no terrorist,” she said.

  Ezekiel spat into the snow. It steamed, hissed out. “Last time I checked, didn’t matter much what you had to say about it. They’ll drone you just the same. I know. I worked for them.” He stood, turned to walk into the house. Then he turned back to her. “Listen, Soledad. You can either hide out and hole up and wait for them to turn you into a pile of guts, or you can figure out what comes next.”

  “Sounds like you have some ideas about what should come next.”

  He laughed. “I always do. That’s why they never made me bird colonel.”

  “What’s your plan?”

  “I always say the best defense is a good offense. So does Clausewitz. When your force is small, concentrate it and hit them where they’re weak.”

  “Who are ‘they’?”

  “The same people who shut down your farm. The same people who attacked you.”

  “Those people are Americans.”

  “It isn’t American to do those things. America means more than being born here. It means believing certain things.”

  “So we should shoot those who disagree?”

  “Only if they shoot first.”

  “I don’t want more blood,” she said.

  “Then you went into the wrong business, woman. Blood’s about all that’s guaranteed from here on in. And you can’t stay here forever. You’ve got to keep moving. Move or die.” The screen door whispered closed behind him.

  Detroit, Michigan

  Levon couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  Reverend Jim Crawford sat there, in the conference room of the MGM Grand—the room had already been scanned for bugs and been found clean—in his expensive suit, explaining why he thought Levon should get his people off the street. Now.

  Levon had seen Big Jim’s press conference with the mayor the previous week. The mayor, still sporting a bandage over his gashed forehead, had thanked Big Jim profusely for stopping the violence, for cutting short the possibility of a riot. Big Jim grinned the high-wattage grin, and told the mayor that he did so knowing that the two of them could work together to fix the deeper problems plaguing the city. Problems of inequity, he said. Problems of racial justice. Mayor Burns nodded along, knowing that he had no choice—he could use the photo op with the civil rights icon in his reelection campaign.

  Newsweek put Big Jim on its cover. The headline: “THE PEACEMAKER.” The photo framed his head with a halo. In the piece, Big Jim said that Detroit would have to pursue a complete makeover of its obviously racist police department. That meant community policing in the truest sense: drawing police officers from the community itself. That didn’t mean hiring officers from outside, the way they’d hired Ricky O’Sullivan. It didn’t even mean hiring black cops from outside the city and forcing them to live in the city to get to know the people they protected. It meant hiring longtime residents of the city, even people with backgrounds. “America,” said Big Jim, “is the land of second chances. You want to know why our community doesn’t trust the police? They don’t trust the police because to them, the police are strangers, and the other way around. And it takes more than living in the community a few months to earn trust.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he told the Newsweek reporter. “It takes more than even being a good policeman. It means having been through what these folks have been through. It means knowing that just because somebody got sent up to prison for some stupid drug crime that wouldn’t have gotten a white boy six months in the can, that doesn’t mean their life should be over. It means understanding that there is a legacy of racism in this country, and that the police have historically been the arm of the racist establishment. That’s stuff you can only know if you’ve lived it.”

&nb
sp; The reporter asked, “Are you saying that everybody on the force must be black?”

  “No,” replied Big Jim. “I’m saying that everybody has to have the right kind of experience. And if that means being black, that means being black.”

  The interview had caused an uproar. They’d even quoted Levon in it, asking him what he thought of Big Jim’s leadership. Levon told them that without Big Jim, the whole street would have gone up in flames. “Big Jim,” he told them, “is standing up for us. So long as he does, and so long as we get justice, we can make this city whole again.”

  Now, however, Levon regretted he’d ever laid eyes on Big Jim. He’d been foolish to have trusted the man; he’d figured he could always outplay him. Everybody thought Big Jim was past his prime, that he’d run his course. After a youth of rabble-rousing and race-baiting, he’d entered the mainstream. He’d been invited to the White House. He’d appear from time to time outside some big chain store, accusing them of institutional racism, then pick up a large donation for his action group and disappear again. Jim Crawford, Levon had thought, could be handled.

  Clearly not.

  “Listen, Levon,” Big Jim said, leaning back in his leather chair. “We’ve done a lot of good here. Justice Department will come in, force the PD to engage in some systemic change. The DA will probably indict O’Sullivan. You’ve got the mayor on the run—just keep on top of him, and he’ll do most of what you ask for. You’re gonna be big in this city. One day you’ll be able to get what you want out of these people, you play the cards right.”

  Levon just stared at him. “So that’s it?”