This was Christie’s first visit to Texas City; this evening he imagined he detected the taste of burning in his mouth. A hurricane last year had scattered the ashes of the city across Texas all the way to Chihuahua in Mexico but he could not think of this alien, desolate landscape with tasting those ashes in his mouth. Sometimes even the most terrible physical scars were as nothing to the abominations seared into a man’s mind.
Christie jammed his forty-five — a rebuilt untraceable Navy Colt he had picked up in San Antonio a week ago — into the waistband of his trousers.
Getting out of the Dodge he waved to the tall young man who had emerged from the compound. He made no effort to conceal the forty-five as he reached back into the cab and recovered a scruffy sports jacket of a type that would have terminated his career in the FBI in an instant.
“Hi, Mickey!” He called to the elder of Galen Cheney’s surviving sons as he pulled on his jacket.
“We weren’t expecting you until tomorrow, Mister Anders,” the twenty-two year old with a mop of rebellious dark hair said, visibly relaxing the moment he recognized the newcomer. He looked over his shoulder and shouted: “It’s okay. It’s Mister Anders!”
Dwight Christie had become Edward Thomas ‘Tom’ Anders, a former Air Force man searching for missing members of his extended family a week after the failed rebellion.
It was only now that the true scale of the disaster in the District of Columbia was becoming evident. The resistance had recklessly burned seventy to eighty percent of its effective, organised — well, barely semi-organised as things had turned out — militia in the doomed attempt to topple the Kennedy Administration. The rebellion had been ruthlessly crushed and any time soon the now re-invigorated Federal Government, supported by a perverse post-insurrection fragile national unity, was Hell bent on hunting down every last ‘traitor’. Old Joe McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities witch hunt of the 1950s had nothing on what was going on now. Anybody who had ever had a question mark against his or her name in any FBI, Secret Service, National Security Agency, US Marshall’s, or local police department file was being called in, interrogated and basically, if they did not come up with a good answer, carted off to hurriedly organized ‘holding camps’ for further questioning. In the armed forces it was worse, much worse, anybody who had been anywhere near any of the suspected ‘issues’ which had ‘compromised’ the chain of command in the days and weeks before the battle of Washington was presently the subject of a full-blown military Special Investigation Branch inquiry, and or, in the custody or the sights of the FBI. The atmosphere was so poisoned that everybody in law enforcement, the military and state and national politics suspected practically everybody else and members of the House of Representatives were literally drowning under the weight of ‘leaks’ and allegedly ‘inside’ intelligence information deluging down around them from countless aggrieved, and probably very frightened whistleblowers. That was the dreadful, unfunny irony of the situation; had the resistance not broken itself — entirely of its own volition — on the barricades of Washington DC now would be the perfect time to strike at the heart of the Union.
However, it was too late; the enemy was in disarray but so was what remained of the resistance. The shock troops of the revolution were mostly dead or competing with each other to give up their secrets in Federal interrogation pens like Camp Benedict Arnold just outside Washington near the site of the Civil War battlefield of First Manassas.
The leaders of the resistance were mostly locked up in Federal jails; show trials were already scheduled for the early summer and in the meantime networks which had taken decades to build were being methodically unravelled by a resurgent and focused FBI. The Battle of Washington had temporarily stilled the clamour for state’s rights in the South and the East because right now nobody wanted to be seen to be disloyal to the Union. Besides, if Washington could come under attack from within was any State Capitol safe without the mailed fist of the US military at its back? America had been sleep walking to whatever fate awaited it before the rebellion; the country had been drifting, the seeds of revolution had been sown. If the leaders of the resistance — the majority of whom were presently in JFK’s prison camps — had held their nerve another year, or perhaps two, the country might have been ripe for the taking…
Christie had followed Michael Cheney between the circled cars into the heart of Galen Cheney’s little kingdom. A teenage girl with a dirty face and a shock of blond hair peered at him from the door of one of the huts.
The average age of the member’s of Galen Cheney’s personal harem got younger every week…
The resistance was a busted flush and he was attempting to keep the cause alive fighting alongside maniacs like Galen fucking Cheney!
The last time Christie had met Cheney he had been clean shaven, now he had three weeks growth of beard, his dark hair was unkempt and his clothes worn, patched and dusty, and his old workman’s boots scuffed beyond repair. In recent weeks he had shed some of his former fleshiness, begun to acquire a hard-bitten, prematurely grizzled look which perfectly matched his current mood.
Galen Cheney was sitting at a rough hewn bench cleaning his long-barrel Smith and Wesson .44 calibre revolver — as he did around sunset most days — when the visitor was ushered respectfully into Hut № 1.
Hut № 2 was where the women lived and worked.
Hut № 3 was where Galen Cheney’s sons lived and slept.
Hut № 4 was where the Cheney clan ate and worshipped.
But Hut № 1 was Galen Cheney’s; nobody stepped over its Spartan threshold without his say so. Today Michael Cheney hesitated at the threshold, waiting to be instructed to enter or depart.
“Shut the door, Michael,” the father murmured, waving for him to go.
Dwight Christie heard the door clump shut at his back as he stepped towards the older man. The interior of the cabin was mostly empty. There was the work bench, the cedar box in which Cheney kept his guns and his ammunition, another for his gunsmith tools. There was no bed; the man spread a blanket on the bare boards to sleep.
“What happened in Dallas?” Christie demanded lowly.
“Oswald disobeyed my orders,” Galen Cheney replied evenly, indifferently. He carried on threading the cleaning brush down the barrel of his Smith and Wesson. “It was a test. He failed. I left him to his fate.”
Christie was sorely tempted to pull out his forty-five and blow the mad sonofabitch’s head off!
Which part of ‘the enemy can lose a thousand men to every one man we lose and he will still win’ did the fucking maniac not understand?
“That’s not what I’m talking about,” he said calmly, his temper seething behind his poker face.
Galen Cheney shrugged.
“Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord,” he declared coldly. “Oswald betrayed us. His family was forfeit. Those are the rules.”
“They’re not my fucking rules!”
When Christie had discovered what Cheney had done on the first night of the Battle of Washington to Carl and Martha Drinkwater and their two young children in Colorado Springs he had said nothing, done nothing and been ashamed, and horrified that he could walk away from such an atrocity.
Never again, he had vowed.
And yet here he was about to walk away again.
“I follow a higher calling,” Cheney countered, his tone that of a man a little disappointed in his comrade in arms.
“Was it you who raped the wife?”
“What’s it to you?” Galen Cheney sniffed, raising the silvery barrel of the gun in his hands to his eye and sighting along it. “Not me. Two good old boys I know. I needed Isaac to see how we treat people who betray his God.”