Liberty's Last Stand (41 page)

Soetoro made the decision, as his inner circle of committed progressives knew he would. “Do it,” he said, and gestured toward the door.

Some moron asked, “How?”

Grantham fielded that one. “Call the heads of the various power companies and tell them to shut off the juice, and if they don't, send the FBI around to arrest them and every officer in the company. Crack the damned whip.” When you have dictatorial powers, you can iron out all the little difficulties.

“Yes, sir,” they said, and scattered.

“You stay,” the president said to the general and his aides.

When the room was empty, the president said, “Tell me about that attack in Louisiana.”

So he had heard after all. “I got a telephone call in the car on the way over here,” Wynette said, “so all I know are the basics. Apparently B-1 Lancers. They probably came from Dyess Air Force Base in Abilene.”

“What can we do about those Texas traitors?”

“Sir, we are putting together an invasion, as you directed. JR Hays just made the invasion a little more difficult, but he can't stop it.”

“What will he do next?”

“We need to destroy those B-1s on the ground at Dyess. I was thinking of using the B-2s at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri to do that as soon as possible.”

“Fine,” Barry Soetoro said. “We should have retired those old B-1s years ago. Instead we wasted mountains of money on them that could have been better spent elsewhere.”

Wynette didn't argue that point.

“I also want you to turn off the lights in Texas, General. I don't think calling the president of the power company will do it. Do it any way you can. As soon as you can. Texas started all this trouble.”

“Yes, sir.”

Barry Soetoro would have been furious if he had known that JR Hays was already one jump ahead of him. Another half-dozen B-1 Lancers were already in the air on their way to Missouri to bomb Whiteman Air Force Base. An hour later, as the carcasses of the B-2s at Whiteman were still burning, he found out.

In the limo with his general officer aides, Martin Wynette said, “He knew about that Louisiana attack when he ordered the power turned off nationwide.”

His generals both nodded.

“And he knew about the state legislatures giving him the finger.”

Yes.

“Did he do it to punish the American people?” Wynette asked aloud.

“Ten to one that he blames the Texans for the loss of power,” the female two-star said.

“No bet,” her male colleague said.

“A hundred to one,” she offered.

“No bet.”

But with the power off, only a few will hear him, Wynette thought. And who will care? The one fact every American will understand is that the federal government can't keep electricity flowing through the wires.

At Barksdale Air Force Base four F-22s broke over the runway and swung into trail on the downwind. They slowed, dropped their landing gear and flaps, and the controller in the tower cleared them to land. Once down, Ground Control directed them to park on one end of the B-52 ramp.

Everything appeared normal to the pilots as they followed the directions of linesmen, parked in a row, and one by one shut down. Number Four was the last to shut down, of course, and the pilot was the last to exit his cockpit onto a boarding ladder that had been pushed to the side of his plane.

He was standing with one foot in the cockpit and one foot on the ladder when he looked around and realized that the other pilots had their hands in the air and soldiers in battle dress were pointing weapons at them.

He drew his pistol from a holster under his left armpit and began shooting into the instrument panel, which was composed of complex multifunction displays.

The air force officer had fired three shots when Specialist Jimmy Schaffran triggered a three-shot burst from his M4 carbine from a distance of eighteen feet. The pilot tumbled backward without even trying to grab the ladder and fell to the concrete.

Jimmy Schaffran, late of Minnesota and now of Texas, walked over to the body. The man's head was at an odd angle. Obviously a broken neck. If the carbine bullets didn't kill him, the fall to the concrete did.

Schaffran was still staring at the corpse when his buddy from South Carolina came running over.

One look at the dead man was enough. Carolina threw an arm over Schaffran's shoulders. He turned him away from the body and said, “You had to do it, Jimmy. We may need these planes.”

“Fuckin' shit,” said Jimmy Schaffran.

“Hey, man. We chose our side of the fence and he chose his. Not much any of us can do about it now. God will have to figure it out.”

TWENTY-ONE

I
n Galveston, Loren Snyder had a visitor. The man shouted down the open hatch, got no answer, then climbed down and wandered aft. He found Loren in the control room.

“Hi. I'm George Ranta. The sheriff sent me to see you.”

“Oh.” Loren was more than a little surprised. The sheriff was supposed to be guarding the pier and preventing the locals from meandering over for a look at a real submarine.

“I used to serve in attack boats. In fact, I used to be the head sonarman on this one.”

“On this boat?”

“Yes, sir. Could you guys use some help? I'd kinda like to volunteer, if you could use me.”

“Volunteer for what?”

“For whatever you have in mind, Captain.”

That captain thing did it for Loren. This guy could be a SEAL in civvies, he reflected, here to kung fu the whole crew, all five. On the other hand, that captain thing sounded automatic, and he didn't look like a muscle man who spent four hours a day in the gym. Maybe he was on the level. “Prove it,” Loren said.

Ranta sat down at the main sonar console and began flipping switches. In less than a minute the sonar was running through built-in tests. Yep, he knew what he was doing.

“We're going to sea in a few hours. If you've served in these boats, you know what we're up against. The navy won't like us out cruising around in an armed attack submarine.”

“You have torpedoes in the tubes and Tomahawks in the wells?”

“Yep.”

“Going to use them?”

“We might.”

“To free Texas?”

“Yep.”

“I'll go if you'll have me.”

“Got any stuff?”

“It's on the other side of the gangway.”

“Go get it, and find yourself a bunk.”

Two hours later, another person showed up, a woman. Loren heard her call and went to meet her as she came out of the torpedo room.

“I heard you guys were getting ready to go to sea, so I talked to the sheriff and he let me come down here to talk to you.”

“So talk.”

“Got out last year after three years aboard
Colorado
.”

“Why'd you get out?”

“Oh, the usual. I had a boyfriend and he wanted me home to fuck him every night. So—”

“The navy will try to sink this boat. You understand?”

“Sure.”

“And you still want to go?”

“I was born and raised in Texas.” She stopped, thought about that answer, and decided it was adequate. She was of medium height, trim, with a firm mouth and thin lips. Her hair was in a ponytail. The T-shirt she was wearing had a Texas flag on the front and back.

“What was your rate?”

“Quartermaster.”

“Can you handle the helm?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Get your stuff and find a bunk.”

“I already dropped my bag through the hatch.”

“Welcome aboard.”

She stuck out her hand. “My name is Ada Fuentes.”

“Loren Snyder.” He grabbed her hand and pumped it.

Fifteen minutes later Jugs met Ada and shook her hand. She sent Ada aft to meet the rest of the crew, who were running engine room drills.

When they were alone, Jugs said, “Lorrie, we gotta get outta here.”

“As soon as the engine room drills are complete.”

“No, Loren. Now.”

“Are you getting worried?”

“You are goddamn right I am. What if those SEALs come before we submerge and shoot holes in the outer casing? Or shoot out the photonics masts? Or throw a chain around the screw?”

“Well. . . .”

“For God's sake, Lorrie. We can't do Texas any good if they disable us right here at the pier.”

Loren Snyder ran his hand through his short hair. He had been so worried about his ability to handle this ship, perhaps losing her at sea and killing these volunteers, that he had not sufficiently considered the risks of sitting here at the pier. At the pier,
Texas
was only a harmless steel sculpture. At sea submerged, she was a powerful warship.

“You're right, Jugs,” he acknowledged. “Let's get two guys topside to dump the gangway and cast off lines, you take the conn from the bridge. I'll do the control room, and we'll get the hell out of Dodge.”

That was the way it worked. Julie Aranado gave the orders from the tiny bridge, and using her rudder and screw in reverse,
Texas
backed out of the slip in which she was moored and began forward motion toward the mouth of Galveston Harbor. Julie had her at five knots when she saw the speedboats with machine guns on the forward deck come through the harbor entrance at high speed and turn toward the submarine.

“The SEALs are here,” she shouted into her voice-activated microphone on her headset. “Give me more turns.”

She felt the screw of the sub biting. Behind her a rooster tail was forming. The screw was partially out of the water and was much less efficient than it would be when fully submerged.

As the three speedboats rounded the far pier, a ragged fusillade rang out. Julie didn't hear it, but she saw the faint traces of smoke and flashes from the rifles on the shore. The sheriff must have stationed sharpshooters on the piers, she thought.

One of the boats lost way. The other two turned hard to fall in formation with the sub. Julie asked for more turns on the screw.

“We're going to have to submerge the hull,” she told Loren in the control room.

“For God's sake, stay in the channel,” he replied.

She looked for the buoys. Fortunately this harbor was dredged regularly for cruise ships and freighters. The wind was playing with her hair as she scanned with the binoculars.

Jugs heard the snapping of bullets passing close by. A glance aft. The machine guns on the speedboats were flashing. And the hull was settling under the surface and the submarine was accelerating. Still, the bullets from the machine guns could damage the small conning tower and the photonics masts, all that remained of the submarine above water. Without those masts,
Texas
was blind at periscope depth. The photonics masts had replaced periscopes. They contained low-light, natural-light, and infrared cameras, and their video was displayed on monitors in the control room.

She timed the turn to the outbound channel and got it right. The boat answered the rudder nicely and the bow swung, and now they were going southeast into the rollers toward the ocean.

Another glance aft. One of the speedboats was dropping back, but one was staying with
Texas
, now doing at least twenty knots.

The speedboat might have managed to come alongside in calm waters, but now that they were out of the harbor the vessels hit the swells of the sea. Except for a slight pitching motion,
Texas
was unaffected, but the speedboat began to buck, rising and falling with every down thrust raising a cloud of spray.

“Give me all you've got,” Julie said to Loren on the sound-powered phone.

Incredibly, the bow wave that the tower was making became larger. She could hear and see the curl of water against the tower and feel the drops of spray. She held out her tongue and collected a few drops. They tasted salty. Riding the bridge as the sub ran on the surface was a sublime sensatory experience, just as she remembered it from her submarining days, a sensual experience that would stay with her all the days of her life.

“Twenty-two knots,” Loren reported.

Julie was watching the buoys. She wanted the safety of the deepest part of the channel. She was in it now, and she needed every foot. The coastal Gulf of Mexico was a shallow sea, unsuitable for submarine operations, the seabed dropping slowly away from the land.

Finally the swells were too much for the last speedboat. A few more bursts, the spang of bullets smacking the steel conning tower, then the boat slowed. The submarine ran on into the empty ocean, past a coaster that may have been the SEALs' mother ship, into the afternoon.

Finally, an hour later, with two hundred feet of water beneath the keel, Julie Aranado said into her sound-powered mike, “Dive, dive, dive.” She unplugged the headset and dropped through the hatch, then pulled the hatch down behind her. Perched on the ladder, she spun the crank to dog it down. Then she went down the ladder and lowered herself through the opening in the pressure hull. She dogged that hatch behind her too, sealing the hull.

At the helm, Ada Fuentes didn't use the planes to help drive
Texas
under because the water was so shallow. The attack submarine sank slowly as her ballast tanks filled. When the conning tower disappeared under the surface in a boil of white water, the surface of the sea became a slick as the water continued to roil. While gulls soared above the place where
Texas
submerged looking for small marine life lifted by the swirling water,
Texas
ran southeastward, toward deeper water. She was in her element now, a powerful warship hidden under the surface, in the great wide sea.

On Thursday morning, the first day of September, the power came back on in the Baltimore area. One power company, Potomac Electric Power, had figured out that the master computer that controlled the northeast grid had been sabotaged with bad code, so it began manually restoring power in portions of their service area. Still, restoring power to their entire service area would take a while, and restoring service to the entire northeastern United States would take days.

One of the suburban residents, Lincoln B. Greenwood, a senior executive service employee of the Department of Health and Human Services, had not gone to work that day because without power nothing could be done at the office. He was delighted when his television came back on and lights illuminated in his house. He could hear the toilet tanks filling as water once again surged through the pipes. He grabbed his car keys and opened his garage door, which rose majestically.

Greenwood was worried about the uncertainties the future held and had concluded that he and his wife didn't have sufficient food in the house that would not spoil without refrigeration. And his daughter, with the four-month-old, undoubtedly needed baby food, formula, and diapers. He called her on his cell phone, and she affirmed his shopping list. She and her husband also needed more staples, she said.

The lot at the mall in Clarksville was packed with cars when Greenwood arrived, which surprised him. All of these stores closed when the power went out because their registers and computer systems were nonfunctional. Greenwood glanced at his watch; the power had only come back on twenty minutes ago. All of these people must have been here waiting, probably for hours, hoping and praying the power would be restored.

The queue to get into the supermarket, which also had a large pharmacy department, was four deep and extended around the corner of the store into the two-acre mall lot. Lincoln Greenwood got in line, resigned himself to a long wait, and began fretting that the store shelves would be empty when he got inside. The checkout lines would fill every aisle, blocking shoppers' access to the shelves. What a nightmare!