“Yes. No one answers our radio transmissions, and no one is picking up the scrambled landlines.”
“You’re going to have to talk to Grafton,” the veep said to the prez.
“I am not going to surrender,” Soetoro declared. I thought I could detect a slight tremor in his voice, but it may have been only the acoustics. “Where are our supporters? Where are the liberal armies that were going to preserve order and support the federal government against the reactionaries? Where are they?”
I thought that his loyal supporters lying dead or maimed on the mountainside or sitting outside with their hands shackled by plastic ties were beyond caring how much they had disappointed ol’ Barry.
Which of these people killed Al Grantham with a knife, and why? If you were going to do it, why not years ago? Truthfully, his mother should have done it way back when she realized what a twisted, diseased monster she had foisted upon the world, but that was water under the bridge, until today.
Of course, the knife artist could be somewhere else in the building, not down below. I glanced back down the hallway, a bit nervously, I suppose, to ensure that it was still empty. I certainly didn’t want that dude within twenty yards of me.
Meanwhile they were jabbering away just below me. Everyone talking at once. Just beyond the door was a seriously unhappy crowd, or if you were inside looking out, an angry armed mob. These people in the lodge had no idea what fate awaited them. Jake Grafton didn’t know either. Not only did I not know, I didn’t give a damn.
I became aware that Sulana Schanck was having a serious private conversation with Barry Soetoro, just a few steps away from the others. No one else was apparently paying attention to what was being said, and they were talking too low for me to eavesdrop, even though my hearing is excellent. I tried to read lips and body language. She was adamant and he was resisting.
Whatever fate awaited these two, it would probably be worse for Soetoro. Schanck was merely a bit player. Or so I thought.
Then, in a twinkling of an eye, I found out how wrong I was. Sulana Schanck pulled a large knife from her sleeve and with one vicious backhand sliced Soetoro’s throat from ear to ear. Blood geysered forth, showering Schanck, as the president sank toward the floor.
I scrambled to my knees and pointed my pistol, but I was too late. She spun like a ballet dancer, took one bound, and used the knife on the veep’s neck, with similar results. John Rhodes went down in a welter of blood.
One of the Secret Service agents beat me to the trigger. He put a burst in Sulana Schanck’s chest, hammering her to the floor.
“Drop it,” I shouted. I had the Kimber .45 at arm’s length pointed right at his head. If he tried to swing that carbine in my direction he was going to die.
“Drop the weapons,” I roared again. Both carbines hit the floor.
The outside door swung open and a man appeared there with a pistol in his hand. I shouted, “You in the door. Get Admiral Grafton and send him in here now!”
Down below, Mickey had freaked. The aides and pols were fluttering around uselessly, staring horrified at the corpses of Barry Soetoro and his vice president. There was nothing anyone on earth could do for them. Sulana Schanck hadn’t twitched since she hit the floor. Maybe she was in Paradise now or shaking hands with Muhammad in Hell.
To my eternal relief, Jake Grafton and General Considine walked into the room accompanied by four guys carrying weapons.
I sat down on the floor and holstered my shooter.
About two hours later the bodies of the president, vice president, chief of staff, and chief political advisor were carried out of the house and placed on a stack of firewood in the middle of a grassy area. The crowd had raided the presidential woodpile. They piled the bodies on that rick of wood, poured a couple of gallons of gasoline on them, and set them afire.
The National Guard had arrived by then and the volunteers had stopped shooting their guns into the air. The prisoners were loaded on trucks and driven away. I didn’t ask where they were being taken.
A huge silent crowd encircled the fire. As I watched, the woman from the hike up the mountain, Betty Connelly, stepped from the crowd, leveled her shotgun into the fire, and fired twice.
Then she turned and walked away.
Grafton and Considine came over to where I was standing.
“Tell me what happened in there, Tommy.”
So I told it, from climbing the balcony, to finding Grantham’s corpse, to watching the Soetoro party trying to decide what to do… to Schanck’s unexpected knife work.
“So you didn’t hear what she and the president said?”
“No, sir. It looked like she was urging him to do something that he didn’t want to do. Maybe she wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
“Workplace violence,” General Considine remarked flippantly.
They had a few more questions, but I had no more answers.
“ISIS or Al Qaeda will claim they got him,” Grafton said gloomily.
“Soetoro is the one who chose Sulana Schanck to sit beside him and whisper in his ear,” Considine remarked. “The true believers are going to have to swallow that, Jake, whether they want to or not.”
“Et tu, Brute,” Grafton muttered.
I scored a flashlight off a soldier on the water truck and went looking for Sarah. Meanwhile she found Grafton. The funeral pyre was burning steadily now. The admiral had a handheld radio up to his ear, so I gave him the Hi sign and he acknowledged. With the fire illuminating a thousand faces, Sarah and I turned our backs to it and plunged into the darkness.
It was a five-mile hike through the woods, all uphill, and we came out on the bald about a half-mile north of the pickup. A sliver moon was hanging in the sky and the stars were out. This old earth just keeps on turning. Walking toward the truck, I asked her, “How are you feeling?”
She didn’t reply.
“If that truck isn’t hors de combat, I thought we might head west.”
She didn’t say anything.
“You got the keys to the truck?” I asked.
“I left them in the ignition.”
Oh boy.
That half-mile hike through the grass in the moonlight, with corpses lying on the ground in a random pattern, was one of the memories I will carry with me all my days. There were at least two army trucks out there, lights ablaze, looking for wounded. The whole scene was surreal. The dead didn’t even whisper.
We passed a young woman wandering along, trying in the moon and starlight to see the faces of the dead. She didn’t have a weapon. Maybe she never did, or threw hers away or lost it. She didn’t speak to us, so we passed her and kept hiking. I wondered which side of the fight she had been on, then decided that really didn’t matter.
It was a little after midnight when we got to the truck. The keys were dangling from their slot. Is this a great country or what? All four tires had air. The windshield had taken at least three bullets and was in bad shape. One of the bullets had gone through the windshield and out the rear window. Fortunately Sarah had been lying on the seat at the time, protected by the motor and lots of metal, so she wasn’t tagged. One of the truck’s headlights was shot out. Some of the sheet metal had holes or gouge marks from bullets, and the radio aerial was missing, shot off. I opened the hood and examined the radiator and hoses with the flashlight. No visible leaks. Maybe the antifreeze all ran out. I looked at the ground under the engine, which was dry. We were good to go.
About a hundred yards to the south was an army truck with every light on. I walked over and saw a white cross painted on the side. Dr. Proudfoot was there, and he said the medics were out looking for wounded.
“We found some guy who had been scalped,” he said. “Hell of a wound. He’s a professor from some little college in New England. I sedated him.”