He looked at Stan. “How are you going to spin your messages to them, Stan, when there’s no way to find your audience?”
Stan Burdett looked pensive. “There was a way once. People lived out there before there was electricity or radio, and they were still a part of the republic.”
“They had a ruling class. All those planters. The people did what the planters told them.” He smiled. “Like Judge Chivington’s family. They could deliver fifty thousand votes; they ran that part of Texas like they were little kings. But nobody can deliver those votes anymore, not consistently. It’s still corrupt there, but it’s nothing like it was.” He shrugged. “But now, who knows? Who knows what’s out there?” The President gave a big smile, then laughed. “If you spin a message but there’s no one to hear it, is there a message? That’s what we should be considering.”
Stan seemed glum. “If you say so, sir.”
“I had a dream about bread yesterday. Did I mention my dream about bread?”
“No.”
“UFOs are made of bread. It’s a true fact.”
Stan just looked at him. The President clapped Stan on the shoulder. “Oh, never mind,” he said. “Let’s just walk along and enjoy the country.”
Islands, the President thought, the Balkans. He was finding equivalencies everywhere. The previous day’s breeze had died away entirely, leaving a sultry, expectant stillness in its wake. Nick slept the latter part of the afternoon away beneath the pecan tree used by the Escape Committee. Aftershocks shivered the leaves over his head. The camp was quiet in the moist afternoon heat, everyone trying to stay cool, and the deputies didn’t come. Nick’s thoughts drifted like the distant clouds, remote from the world.
The longer before the deputies came, he thought as he lay beneath the tree, the more time the deputies had to make plans. Nick didn’t like to think about that.
His father, he thought, would have a quote from Sun Tzu that was appropriate to the occasion. If you have a clue, let the enemy think you are clueless. Let the enemy believe you are wise on the occasions when you don’t know shit from Shinola.
Or something like that.
The westward-drifting sun shone hot on his eyelids. He shifted beneath the tree, put the shadow of a branch over his face. The leaves rustled pleasantly overhead.
What is of the greatest importance in war is to strike at the enemy strategy. Sun Tzu’s words, in the accents of General Jon Ruford, floated into his mind. So, he thought, what was the enemy strategy?
Obviously, to keep the refugees in the camp, and to keep the world from finding out what they were doing.
Escaping from the camp would strike at the first object of the strategy. But what would strike at the second?
Making phone calls to the media and the authorities, he supposed. But both were far away, and the locals phones supposedly didn’t work, and even if the state police or the Army heard of the horrors in Spottswood Parish they might not be able to respond quickly.
There were a couple dozen deputies involved with what was happening in the camp, and some of them, like the sheriff, hadn’t been seen in days. This suggested that the other inhabitants of Spottswood Parish—and there had to be thousands—either knew nothing of what was happening here, or were taking good care not to know. The Klan sheriff, or someone, was managing events so that it was difficult to find out what was happening here.
Nick wished he could grind the whole sordid scene right into the faces of the world. Then he sat up suddenly. The sun shining through tree limbs blinded him for an instant, and in the flash of unexpected light he knew how to proceed.
“We go to Shelburne City,” he said aloud. Two members of the Escape Committee looked at him.
“I take the Warriors to Shelburne City,” Nick said. “Just like Sun Tzu.” Nick remembered the details only vaguely. Back in ancient China, Kingdom A had been on the verge of defeating Kingdom B. Sun Tzu, who commanded the army of Kingdom C, was ordered to go to the aid of the beleaguered Kingdom B. But instead of reinforcing Kingdom B, he took his whole army and marched straight for the capital of Kingdom A, which forced the enemy to retreat from Kingdom B to defend their own country. Sun Tzu caught the army on the march and destroyed it, winning the war. Nick had planned for the Warriors to stay in the area of the camp as a rear guard while the rest of the refugees evacuated to a more defensible area. But that was surrendering initiative to the enemy. It would allow them all the time they needed to gather their forces and respond.
What Nick needed to do was to force the issue by attacking Kingdom A. He needed to take the Warriors right into Shelburne City and seize a big, defensible building in as public a place as possible. The people in the parish couldn’t ignore that. They would have to start asking questions. The enemy would have to respond to that first, they couldn’t go haring off into the countryside looking for escaped refugees. They would have to meet Nick on their own ground.
Stumbling over words in his haste, Nick told his plan to the Escape Committee. Reaction seemed divided.
“Running into town like that, you could get surrounded by a thousand crackers,” said one. “It could be like John Wayne at the Alamo.”
“The Alamo was a success,” Nick said. “The Alamo delayed things long enough for the rest of the Texans to get their act together and win the war.”
In the end, Nick got his way. The others had no better plan to offer.
The shadows had grown long. People began to line up for dinner. “Best go get our sand buggers,” one of the men said, and the Escape Committee rose to their feet and began to trudge toward the cookhouse. The silence of the early evening was broken by the sound of truck engines, revving as they rolled along the broken roads from the direction of town.
There was sudden stillness in camp as everyone paused, frozen in the midst of their motion, to listen. Nick’s pulse was suddenly loud in his ears. “They’re coming!” someone said, and suddenly everyone was moving.
“Calm, people!” It seemed to Nick as if the reluctant words had stuck to the inside of his throat, and he had to peel them off with an act of will and throw them into the air. “No running! No shouting!” Guards surrounded the camp. What they saw had to be refugees milling around, not fighters taking their posts.
Nick made himself walk carefully to the cookhouse, where Armando Gurule had set up the master control for the claymores. He felt strangely lightheaded, as if he might topple over at any minute. At one point he realized he’d forgotten to breathe, and when he let the breath out and took in another the air was sweeter than anything he’d tasted in his life.
He found Armando standing by the control board in the shade of the cookhouse. People were running madly through the camp, parents scooping up their children and trying to find cover. Nick hoped that to the guards this looked like a normal reaction to an approach by the deputies. Nick stood in silence. Just let them get close, he thought.
Two five-ton trucks pulled off the road in front of the camp, and began backing toward the gate. Over intervening heads, tents, and awnings, Nick saw some other vehicles and some Caucasian heads bobbing around. Nick didn’t see the crop-haired runt who had Gros-Papa’s watch, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t there. He glanced left and right and behind and saw, glimpsed through trees and tents and awnings, deputies taking up station on the perimeter.