“Daddy always read me a book before bed.”
“I don’t have any books. Maybe I can tell you a story, after you get in bed.”
Five minutes later Sarah began, “Once upon a time…”
A half hour later, Sarah came out. I was sitting on the top of the stairs. She sat down beside me.
“That kid has been through a hell of a lot.”
“I guess.”
“She’s in denial right now. Sooner or later the implications of the murder of her parents, rape, all that is going to hit her hard. She is only eight years old and she saw all that mayhem.”
“God help her,” I murmured.
“You can sleep on the couch downstairs.”
“Okay.”
“Oh, Tommy. What a disaster… for all of us.”
“Yes.”
I put my arm around her. After a while she said, “I’m staying here when you leave tomorrow. Someone has to take care of this child.”
“Okay.”
“Will you come back? Afterward?”
“You can bet your life on it.”
Sunday evening two Muslim male refugees from Syria, ages nineteen and twenty, raped a thirteen-year-old black girl in St. Louis. She screamed and they beat her. Despite the perilous state of law enforcement in St. Louis after a week of rioting in the black neighborhoods, the police apprehended the pair. They were taken to a police lockup.
That night a crowd of almost eight hundred people, mostly black, surrounded the police station. These were not ghetto dwellers, but middle-class suburbanites, and many were armed. They held the police at gunpoint and removed the two rapists from the cells. The two were taken outside and hanged by their necks from a nearby tree with ropes some members of the crowd had thoughtfully brought along.
Then the crowd, now containing about 1,500 people, walked in a body to the downtown mosque that the imam had made infamous by preaching jihad from the pulpit; the mosque, incidentally, where the two rapists had worshiped. The crowd found the cleric cowering in a closet in a nearby house, dragged him outside, and hanged him too. The mosque was set on fire.
While the imam dangled and strangled, a few people in the crowd fired some shots in the air and shouted catcalls, but mainly the crowd was quiet. Some police officers sat on the hoods of their cruisers, watching and smoking. An intrepid television cameraman filmed the holy man swinging in the wind for broadcast whenever. An hour or so later, the crowd began to dissipate and trudge away into the night.
Amazingly, the energy seemed to go out of the rioters in other sections of town, many of whom actually went home. For the first time since Barry Soetoro declared martial law, the hours from midnight to dawn on Labor Day were quiet in St. Louis.
At nine o’clock that Labor Day morning, a convoy of two companies of Marines from Quantico arrived at the Pentagon. A colonel was there to meet the company commanders, both captains. After a short conversation, the troops set up machine guns inside sandbagged positions at the entrances to the Pentagon, other Marines were sent to guard the Metro station downstairs (even though it wasn’t running) and to guard the entrances to the parking lots. They set up a bivouac on an empty section of the vast parking lot on the western side of the massive building, a lot that looked relatively empty because, despite the crisis engulfing the nation, many of the civilians had Labor Day off.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Martin Wynette, knew nothing about the Marines’ arrival. He was upstairs in his office on the E-Ring going over readiness reports from the U.S. armed forces around the world, with special attention to those units in the United States. The United States armed forces were in full mutiny, he said to his staff after a quick perusal of the reports. People in uniform willing to fight for Barry Soetoro against Americans were a rare commodity. The only bright spot was the Marines in Southern California, who had strapped on the Mexican military as though they were God’s gift to starving men. At last, an enemy to shoot at. The crews of the navy’s two carriers now cruising off the coast of San Diego were apparently happy as pigs in slop launching strikes at the Mexican invaders. They had achieved complete control of the air, left Mexican armor burned-out wrecks, destroyed Mexican staging areas on the American side of the border, and flown support missions for the Marines. It was a proverbial turkey shoot.
The rioting Mexicans in the slums of LA weren’t the military’s problem. What the civil authorities were going to do about them was up to Barry Soetoro and the politicians in LA and Sacramento who wanted those Hispanic votes more than they wanted salvation. If they wanted salvation, which was doubtful.
Martin Wynette was trying to figure out what he was going to tell the president and his disciples when he went over to the White House to brief them at eleven o’clock when a group of flag officers led by CNO Admiral Cart McKiernan came into his office unannounced and closed the door. The commandant of the Marine Corps was there, as well as the deputy chiefs of staff of the army and air force. The four officers stood in front of the desk looking down on Wynette.
“Marty,” said the commandant, Morton Runyon, “tell us why you threw Sugar Ray, Jack Williams (the army chief of staff), and Harry Miller (the air force chief) to the wolves.”
Wynette stood up. “You don’t know what you are talking about.”
“We’ve talked to Major General Stout, who was there at the White House with you. Remember?”
“Now, listen, people. Someone told Soetoro that a coup was being planned over here in the Pentagon. He already knew. What could I say?”
“He didn’t know shit, Marty. Schanck tried a shot in the dark and you spilled your guts. You pulled the trigger on Sugar, Jack, and Harry.”
“Well, Jesus, they were planning a coup! Talking about it, anyway. For Christ’s sake, he’s the commander-in-chief. He’s the president!”
“And you took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. Soetoro has become a dictator. He’s ripped up the Constitution.”
“These are perilous times,” Wynette explained. “The president has a right to do whatever is required to maintain the government. You know that.”
“He doesn’t have the right to convert the country into a dictatorship,” Cart McKiernan said, and made an angry gesture. “But we aren’t here to debate politics. This has gone too damned far. Three senior officers were executed without a trial in the courtyard downstairs. This isn’t Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. Get your head out of your ass, Marty.”
Wynette sank into his chair and his gaze went from face to face.
“What do you want of me?” he said softly.
The CNO, who was in short-sleeve summer whites, nodded to the commandant, who was in greens. He lifted his blouse and pulled out a pistol. “This is yours, Marty. I stopped by your quarters and your wife let me in. I got this from the desk in your study.”
Martin Wynette stared at the faces. “I’m not going to shoot myself, if that is what you are implying.”
“We’ll call Mrs. Ray. What is her name? Naomi, I think. Maybe she’ll do it for you. Or Barry Soetoro can send his goons over to do you in the courtyard.”
Wynette said nothing. He was sweating and licking his lips.
Morton Runyon walked around the desk and fooled around with the pistol. Then, quick as a flash, as Wynette looked at the other officers, he put it to the right side of Wynette’s head and pulled the trigger. Blood, tissue, and little pieces of skull spurted out the other side. Wynette slumped in the chair.