Juani looked out, smiling, at a known opponent, Imogene Cochran, seated about center in the room. Imogene—pinch faced and severe—was of the rather rare far left variety of Texas Democrat. She returned Juani's smile with a sneer.
"We are prepared to fight them," Juanita announced baldly, voice ringing loud and clear through the hall. "On the Gulf Coast beaches, in the cities, in the towns, in the field . . . we are prepared to . . . but surely we do not want to," this last was spoken in a stage whisper.
"We will hold off from fighting until the very last extremity.
"Something else we know: officials named by the White House have been integrated into the regular armed forces down to battalion level. These men . . . and a few women . . . are backed by federal police forces and appear to have the duty of insuring that the orders of the White House are enforced."
Juani gave a smile that was perhaps slightly out of place. "It seems that Washington does not trust its own army. Kind of makes you wonder whether, if Washington doesn't trust the armed forces, perhaps—just maybe—we can."
Most of the legislators joined Juani's smile at the jest. Imogene merely looked furious.
Juani took a deep breath, steeling herself. The next part was going to be difficult. She pushed a button on the podium. The symboled map disappeared leaving a blank screen in its wake.
"Did you ever notice how, when Somali kids are starving, the papers and television screens are full of pitiful pictures? Did you ever notice how, when Kurdish kids are driven from their homes you can hardly pick up a magazine without being bombarded with big, innocent eyes? A California girl gets kidnapped and murdered and the media pastes her picture across the nation.
"Why do you suppose we've never seen a single picture of any of the kids burned alive in Waco?" She tapped the button on the podium once again and the screen behind her lit with a portrait of a smiling little Mexican girl.
"That's Josefina Sanchez." Juani tapped the button again and the screen split. On the right side appeared the obscenely charred corpse of a very small person, curled into a fetal position and holding a smaller bit of once-human charcoal between arms and chest. The legislators groaned.
"That is also Josefina Sanchez. In her arms is a little baby . . . what is left of one . . . named Pedro."
A tap of the button and the picture zoomed in to focus on the little shriveled bundle that had been found wrapped in Josefina's arms. Another tap and it focused further onto Pedro's face, little carbonized teeth faintly visible inside a burned and distorted mouth, empty eye sockets staring from blackened face.
Again she tapped the button and a full color picture of Pedro at his first birthday party appeared on the right side of the screen. Thank God I didn't let Elpi come to this and told Mario not to let her near a television or computer, thought Juani, fighting down her own gorge.
Juani continued to tap, interspersing normal pictures with pictures of the recovered, charred bodies. At each she announced a name, "Maria Ramirez, aged nine . . . Pablo Trujillo, aged eleven . . . Peter Smith, aged eleven . . . Colleen Drysdale, aged ten . . . Katherine Collins, aged eleven . . . David Robles . . ." About halfway through there was the sound of someone wretching.
"You have no right," shouted Imogene. "You have no right to show us these things. It isn't decent."
Juanita scowled. "No right, Imogene? No one had a right to do to these kids what was done to them. And you don't have a right to bury your head in the sand and ignore what was done to them. Admit it, that's the real crime in your mind. Not the killings, but upsetting you." Bitch.
"Enough, anyway," Juani continued. "The rest of the pictures wouldn't show you all anything you don't know now.
"But you all needed to see why I decided to resist. It wasn't my brother and it wasn't even that . . . that . . . that bastard of a 'United States Commissioner for the State of Texas,' Forsythe, that Washington stuck me with. It wasn't the taxes and it wasn't the jobs and it wasn't even over the control they were taking in the schools.
"I just don't want to live, don't want any of our people to have to live, under a government that will do this; murder a bunch of kids then wrap itself in a shroud of sanctimonious hypocrisy and pretend nothing ever happened.
"One last thing before I go: we are about to be invaded. Washington will no doubt decide to call it something else . . . but an invasion is what it is. I am not going to ask every Texan to fight the invasion. In fact, except for those many thousands who have joined our National Guard and State Defense Force, I am going to ask the rest of the state not to fight.
"But I am going to ask, in fact I am going to beg of the people—here in Texas and elsewhere in the United States—do not fight . . . but do not cooperate. Block roads, interfere with supply columns, stop trains, swarm over airfields. In short, make this invasion impossible to supply and federal control impossible to maintain.
"If you will do this, I think we can win."
* * *
Matamoros, Mexico
Hanstadt never did quite buy in to the whole nonviolent civil disobedience idea. It just wasn't in his nature. He measured things materially; so many guns, so many tons of rations, so many artillery shells . . . so much X . . . so many Y. That was what made him a prize as Schmidt's G-4 and something of a cipher for the governor's other plans.
"How many shells did you say came with those things?" he asked, pointing a finger at a passing CONEX on its way to Camp Bullis. He had to shout to be heard over the roar of massed diesels.
"Carl" answered, "Seven hundred fifty rounds, mixed high explosive, illumination and smoke, with each 85mm gun. two-fifty to three-fifty with the others. Plus you're getting a fair number of pure ammunition loads."
"And you say these things are self-propelled?"
"The SD-44s, the 85mm jobs, are auxiliary-propelled. That is, they have an engine, a steering wheel, a driver's seat and a small gas tank. For the 122s and 152 you're going to have to rig up something on your own and use civilian trucks."
"And the manuals are inside?"
"Every CONEX comes with a manual and firing table printed in Spanish. I figure you have enough Spanish speakers in Texas. Though, I've got to tell you, those manuals were translated from Chinese by people maybe none too good. You'll have some problems."
Hanstadt normally wouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth, but these guns were no gift. Texas had paid for them with the ships about to be seized while going through the Panama Canal. They had also forked over no small amount of cash for all the stock to Materiales de Seguridad, SA, the Mexican-incorporated, Panamanian-run arms company that had held these particular weapons.
He figured this entitled him to check the teeth. "Where and why did you get all of this? Why did you hide it?"
Carl hesitated before answering. Some of what Hanstadt was asking was very close-held. In the U.S. military and intelligence communities it would have been called "Special Compartmentalized Information." "We bought it from China, Russia and North Korea when this sort of thing was a glut on the market. We have kept almost two-thirds of it out of Panama expressly to avoid antagonizing the United States. And that is all I can say . . . except that some Panamanians have been in the surreptitious arms business for quite some time . . . TOW missiles to Iran in the 1980s . . . rifles and mortars for Croats in the 1990s . . . that sort of thing."
"Fair enough. Though I insist that it is not fair for you people to grab over five hundred newer and heavier guns we paid good money for and replace them with three hundred fifty lighter and older ones for even more money."