“Have you heard that Soetoro left the White House sometime yesterday?”
“I have.”
“The Pentagon said he refused an offer of a flight into exile.”
“Probably no one would accept him. He’d want to take Mickey with him, and that’s a deal killer.”
Sarah sighed and looked at the sky and army and mountains. “I’ll be glad when this is over,” she said. She flipped a hand at the ad hoc army, now getting ready to move. “The officers say that the former soldiers and guard troopers and veterans follow orders. The civilians are here on a toot. They don’t do what they’re told unless they feel like it. They were up drinking and partying all night. Some of them didn’t get an hour’s sleep.”
“My prediction is they’re going to get shot at today,” I said. “Some of them will run like rabbits. Don’t get caught behind them or you’ll get run over.”
I jumped in the driver’s seat of the truck, Sarah climbed in beside me, and we went looking for Grafton, who would be at headquarters if we could find it.
Turned out HQ was in the airport office building. Outside, I ran into Willis Coffee. “How goes the war?” I asked.
He looked disgusted. “Two accidental shootings last night. Civilians! One dead, one injured. Amateur hour.”
“We’ll see if Soetoro’s army can whittle them down today. They’re at Camp David, just over that little mountain to the east. The man himself may be there, so Grafton will probably have us humping hard to surround the place so he can’t sneak out.”
“Fine with me,” Willis said. “Let’s pop him and get on with the program.”
“You’d shoot him?”
“That son? In a New York minute. Vaya con Dios, asshole, and bang!”
“Where’s Travis?”
He gestured vaguely. “Scouting somewhere. Martinez sent him out before dawn.”
“Good luck today,” I said, and Sarah and I went inside the building.
Grafton was conferring with Generals Martinez and Considine. I listened in and gathered that they wanted to surround Camp David as quickly as possible. Trucks full of troops and the APCs would get on the highway and go around to the east as fast as they could. Another load of troops and APCs would go around to the north. The civilians would be pointed east and told to hike over the mountain, with some professionals along to ensure they didn’t get lost in the woods.
When the meeting broke up, Grafton said he was riding with me. “Which column are we going with?”
“The civilians, through the woods.”
My face must have fallen, because he said, “There’re a couple of dirt roads. We’ll take the pickup. If we do this right, the people at Camp David will think the mob coming through the woods is the main assault and leave the front door open for the pros.”
I wondered if he was having a senior moment. “If they aren’t stupid,” I suggested tactfully, “they might think the main assault is coming through the front gate.”
“Didn’t you see them when we flew over this morning, Tommy? The pros are dug in to defend the front gate and perimeter fence. They’re well dug in, with at least two machine-gun nests and a couple of artillery pieces that I saw. Our troops out front will set up ambushes a couple of miles from the front gate, and the defenders won’t even see them or know that they are there. With a little bit of luck, if the civilian volunteers coming through the woods can make enough noise, Soetoro will flush and boogey out the front and we’ll bag him.”
So he intended to capture the president of the United States. “What are you going to do with him when you have him?” I asked.
“Lock him up and let the new government worry about him. A significant percentage of Americans still think he’s God’s other son. We have got to bring people together, not drive them apart. The next government can have a trial, send him to Switzerland or Kenya, whatever floats their boat. And we can start putting America back together again.”
“What about all these civilian volunteers? They’re undisciplined, don’t know tactics, are poorly armed, won’t obey orders — they don’t know shit about combat. They’ll panic and get shot in droves.”
“We’re rebuilding a nation here, Tommy. It takes blood to create legends and myths. These people want to fight for their country. We’ll let ’em.”
That was the Jake Grafton I knew, one hard man. God help all these civilians.
There must have been three or four thousand of them, armed with everything from shotguns and deer rifles to black civilian versions of the M16. Lots of pistols. It seemed a quarter of them carried pistols and nothing else. I was appalled. If you were within pistol range of the enemy, you were too damned close.
Trucks passed out water bottles, and cases of water were tossed in the beds of our pickups. For all those people, it was not enough. A lot of them were going to get seriously thirsty, even though the temperature was only seventy degrees. I suspected many would pass out from heat exhaustion, especially those who were overweight. Today they had a mountain to climb and a fight on the other side ahead of them. It was at least fifteen miles, I suspected, to the Camp David perimeter fence, and most of it uphill. The crest of the mountain was about a thousand feet in elevation above us.
Looking them over, I thought the average age might be around forty. Everyone who claimed he was a U.S. Army or Marine veteran or retiree had already been winnowed out, given a uniform and a military rifle, and those folks were in trucks and APCs, going to fight the Secret Service and Federal Security police on the other side of the mountain. These were people who claimed no military experience, which meant they knew nothing of tactics or how to handle military weapons and hardware. They probably had minimum experience obeying orders, our modern world being what it is.
And yet… it was the men over forty who interested me. Many were apparently construction workers or farmers, wearing bib overalls or work trousers and leather boots. Lean and tanned, they carried their rifles like they knew how to use them and had a rucksack or backpack over their shoulders with water, rations, and ammo. Lots of ball caps; some of them were my very favorite, John Deere. I had no doubt most of these guys could walk me into the ground.
Then there were the outdoor types, men and women, also lean, wearing walking shoes with shorts and logoed T-shirts. They all had backpacks, some of them with the logos of purveyors of outdoor gear. Many wore floppy sun hats with strings that hung under their chins. A few even had bicyclists’ water bags over their shoulders. They carried their rifles or shotguns as if they were unsure how to do it.
And then there was everyone else. A few were teenagers, but many looked to me like they were professionals or middle managers, some pudgy, some downright overweight, wearing jeans and everything else you could imagine. Their T-shirts were from colleges, high schools, and state parks. At least a third of these folks looked as if a walk across a large parking lot would wear them out. I would have bet some of the women were soccer moms.
Black, white, brown, Asians, with ancestors from all over the globe, they looked like America to me.
At least three thousand of these volunteers gathered around the spot where the first dirt road left the pavement. They had walked over two miles through suburban Hagerstown to get there. It was getting on toward ten o’clock.
With General Considine beside him, Grafton stood in the bed of the truck and shouted for them to gather around. They did. He raised his voice, and I swear, I think everyone in that mob heard him. Grafton in full cry was a primal force.
“We’re going up this road to the top of that mountain and will hit the Camp David perimeter fence on the other side. It’s a good hike up there, and you need to keep up. Don’t fire your weapons until we make contact with the enemy. Obey your officers and stay together. No straggling. When you tell your grandkids about this someday, you’ll want to be able to say you were there at the finish, there when the dictator was captured and a new America was born. Keep your head down and shoot low. Let’s go.” And he waved his arm up the road.