“Thank you for your service,” JR replied.
“Yeah. Got out and joined the police. Probably should have stayed in the army. It was a great experience, but I wanted to come home to New York. You know, you’re the first general I ever talked to.”
“Well, you’re my first police captain. I hope we never meet professionally.”
The cop grinned. “You’re pretty young too.”
“Good whiskey,” JR confided. “Never drink the cheap stuff.”
The captain held up his hand and adjusted the earpiece in his ear. He rogered the transmission, then said to JR, “Gotta go. Got some dead people in an apartment house. Someone just found them. Been dead a few days.”
They shook hands, and the captain trotted over to his cruiser and jumped in. The driver hit the lights and siren, and away the cruiser went up the street, howling madly.
Everyone has problems, JR thought, and got back to attending to his.
Texas poked her photonics masts up as she approached the narrows. Loren could see the Verrazano Bridge across the narrows, and he saw ships. Lots of ships, none of them going anywhere.
“Water is pretty shallow, Captain,” Jugs said.
“Surface,” Loren said. “I’ll go up to the bridge. I want to see what’s in the harbor. Listen to the radio and brief me over the sound-powered phone.”
So Texas rose from the depths and her sail broke water. Loren opened hatches and was soon standing on the small bridge. He plugged in a sound-powered headset and talked to Jugs.
Giving heading commands, he went around ships that were anchored and under the bridge. Not much traffic on it, he noted, and he used his binoculars to examine the freighters and tankers anchored in the lower harbor, waiting for pier space.
He saw no navy ships. Not a one. Maybe there was a submarine outside the narrows, but maybe not. Maybe peace had broken out all over. The sky was empty of airplanes, even helicopters.
Staying at ten knots, Loren took the boat around Liberty Island. “Jugs, come up here.”
In about a minute she was standing beside him, gazing at Lady Liberty, the ships, and the Manhattan skyline.
After a bit she said, “It’s time to go home, Lorrie.”
“I think so too,” he said, and put his elbows on the rail in front of him and breathed deep of the tangy, salty air. “Why don’t you go below and send the others up here for a look, one by one.”
“Aye-aye, sir,” she said, and went down the ladder.
Loren used the sound-powered phone to order a turn back toward the narrows. George Ranta came topside, looked and laughed and pounded Loren on the back, then went below and sent up Mouse.
Two hours later, safely back through the narrows and with good water under the keel, Texas slipped beneath the waves. In the control room, Jugs briefed him on what she had heard on the radio. The power was back on in New York. The Pentagon was adamant that the military was not taking sides in the Soetoro administration’s squabble with the states. People were being released from concentration camps in droves. Politicians were lining up at radio and television stations to be interviewed.
Maybe America — and Texas — will make it after all, Loren thought, and gave orders for the voyage back to Galveston.
It was four in the afternoon when the 3,600th gold ingot was laid in a truck and the tailgate closed. The bank’s personnel were locked upstairs in conference rooms, and the fake FBI agents had put the fear of God in them.
Five minutes later the last of the soldiers and Texas Rangers were aboard the trucks and they were rolling. The traffic signals were working again, although the streets were still almost devoid of traffic. The trucks didn’t stop for lights — they simply drove on through.
At LaGuardia the planes were sitting with their ramps down when the trucks rolled up, and the loadmasters used hand signals to guide the drivers into the cavernous bays of the C-17s. Every soldier helped with the tie-down chains, then the loadmasters checked everything as the ramps came up and the planes started taxiing.
When they were airborne, a sergeant passed out bottles of water and MREs to the troops. JR went up to the front of the plane and came back with an open packing case. He walked down the line of soldiers sitting beside the trucks passing out bottles of champagne. “You guys have to share. We only brought a case for each plane.”
Corks popped and happy smiles broke out.
JR went up to the flight deck and sat down in the jump seat. By God, we did it, he thought. Fifty tons of gold!
THIRTY-FOUR
Ariot in the streets in front of the White House and in Lafayette Park broke out between supporters and opponents of Barry Soetoro that evening. The melee quickly got out of control, so the police called for fire trucks with water cannons, which were waiting a half-mile away. And they fired tear gas grenades.
The mob wavered under the gas, but it was the fire trucks that finally dispersed the crowd. A dozen people were dead, either beaten to death or trampled, and several hundred injured.
While the tear gas wafted into the White House, the survivors of the battle surged through the streets smashing out store windows, looting, and overturning cars and setting them on fire.
In the White House, loyalists gathered around Barry Soetoro and urged him to accept the Pentagon’s offer of a plane to take him into exile.
“Their price is a letter of resignation,” Soetoro said, “and I am not going to resign this office. It would be a betrayal of all those people who believe in me.” His chin quivered. “I am America’s hope, the hope of all people everywhere to build a just society and save the planet. That is my destiny.”
Sulana Schanck believed. “You are the hope of the world! And the world will come to your rescue. These racist pigs will not prevail!”
Amid the coughing and fervid pledges of loyalty, the realization sank in that they couldn’t stay in the White House. The mob would return. And when it did…
They took the tunnel to the Executive Office Building across the street, and from there went to the basement, where their staff had a fleet of cars waiting. Not everyone got into the cars, of course. Most of the senators and representatives decided not to go. One said later that he knew when Soetoro’s car pulled away that he would never see Barry Soetoro again.
The standoff between the crowds and the police and Secret Service guarding the executive mansion ended at about midnight. A crowd of almost two hundred people, mostly men, came walking out of a side street on the west side of the grounds. With them was a large tow truck, one used to rescue tractor-trailer rigs. Leading them was a black man in the uniform of a captain of the D.C. police. They came straight to the west gate, where four D.C. police in riot gear stood guard. Behind the gate, which was closed, were a half-dozen federal police, also in riot gear. Accompanying the crowd was a television reporter and her cameraman.
The police captain, who was unarmed, walked up to the cops, who knew him. “Guys, we are going to open that gate and go through it. You have two choices: you can shoot me or get out of the way while we pull the gate down.”
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Captain?”
“I’ve joined the rebels. It is time to stop the bloodshed over Barry Soetoro. We’re going in.”
One of the cops fingered his radio. While he was doing that, the captain gestured to the tow truck, which moved up to within six feet of the gate. Men carrying chains went around the cops and ran the chains around the gate and hooked them to the massive bumper hooks of the truck. Then the helpers got out of the way and the truck backed up with its audible warning beeping madly.