The middle-aged, balding black man sitting on the floor was being worked on by a medic, who was strapping tape around a bandage arranged on his chest. Blood was smeared on his chest and trousers.
The man on the floor ignored the audience. He stared at Yocke. “Will you write it true? Write it the way I say it?”
“You know I will. You’ve read my stuff.”
“The Jefferson projects. You remember?”
Yocke nodded. Oh yes, he remembered. The murder of Jane Wilkens by a crack dealer running from the cops. Another life lost to the crack business. “Jane,” he said.
“Yeah. Jane.” Shannon took a deep breath and grimaced at the pain. “It was my idea. We’re all victims. We all lost somebody — a son, daughter, wife, maybe even our own souls. We lost because we expected someone to fight the evil for us and we waited and waited and they never did. Oh, they talked, but …”
He lifted his good hand and pleaded, “Don’t you see, if we don’t fight evil, we become evil. If you ain’t part of the solution you’re part of the problem — it’s that simple. So we decided to take a stand, all of us victims.
“Then this terrorist stuff started. And the dopers started looting and shooting and trying to wipe out their competition so they could have a competitive advantage when it was all over.
“Now I tell you this, Jack Yocke, and you gotta write it just like this: I hope the talkers try me. I hope I get prosecuted. The people who don’t want to be victims anymore will see how it has to be. We can’t wait for George Bush or Dan Quayle or the hot-air artists. We can’t wait for the police. We have to take our stand.
“I’ve taken mine. You kill my woman, you kill my kids, don’t hide behind the law ’cause it ain’t big enough. Justice will be done! Right will be done. There are just enough people like me. Just enough. You’ll see.”
The medic finished and spread a blanket on a stretcher. Four men lifted the wounded man onto it.
“I’m not good with words,” the man told Yocke. “I never had much education. But I know right from wrong and I know which side I’m on. I’ve planted my feet. Here I am.”
“What can one man do?” Jack Yocke asked.
“Lead an army, part the Red Sea, convert the world. Maybe not me. But here I stand until the world takes its place beside me.”
The medics carried him away.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs arrived by helicopter fifteen minutes later. Ten minutes after that the Vice-President arrived. Together they walked through the parking lot looking at the dangling corpses.
Jake Grafton went over to where Toad and Rita were sitting in chairs. “Come on. Let’s go home. You got the car keys, Toad?”
“In my pocket.”
“Rita, take the keys and bring the car up to the door.”
“What about Yocke?” Toad asked as Jake helped him into the front seat.
“He’s over with the heavies getting a story. Let’s go home.”
As the car exited the armory parking lot, Toad pointed toward the official party in the parking lot across the street. “Wonder what they’re thinking?” “They’re politicians. Tom Shannon and the other citizens here tonight just delivered a message. They’re reading it now.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
People heard the news of the hanging on portable, battery-operated radios, then ran next door to tell their neighbors. The news seemed to drain whatever energy remained from the wounded city. The next morning it lay stunned, exhausted, its citizens cold and without power.
There was no rioting, no looting, no fires. The soldiers walked the streets without incident as crews worked feverishly to restore power to the residential neighborhoods. The bombed substations would require weeks to repair or rebuild, but emergency repairs began to restore power to a few areas by nightfall. In the areas without power, people were evacuated to schools and auditoriums where the Army installed portable generators. The people of Washington began to reach out to help each other.
Jake Grafton spent the day in a round of meetings as the federal authorities devised ways to thwart the terrorist threat from the Extraditables in the short term. Over the long term, the problem was the cocaine industry in South America.
The next day the ban against motor vehicles was lifted and people swarmed the city in a monumental traffic jam. That evening, after conferring with the directors of the FBI, DEA, and CIA and being advised that those organizations knew of no additional terrorists in the country, General Land started pulling out the troops.
He had Jake Grafton, Toad, and Rita come to his office and make a complete report. An hour later when the chairman signaled the interview was over, Jake asked for leave for himself and Toad. Rita was already on leave. The request was granted.
Out in front of the Pentagon Jake asked the two lieutenants, “You want to come over to the beach house and spend Christmas with Callie and Amy and me?”
They glanced at each other, then accepted.
All the troops were out of the city on the twenty-ninth of December. The following day George Bush was discharged from Bethesda Naval Hospital and returned to the White House.
He held a news conference that afternoon that was carried live nationwide. Attorney General Gideon Cohen sat beside him.
Bush said he felt good and was getting better every day. He wanted to take this opportunity to publicly thank Vice-President Quayle for his excellent stewardship during his incapacity, and he did so with the leaders of the House and Senate and all of the surviving Supreme Court justices in attendance. And he announced the formation of a presidential commission to study the nation’s illegal drug problem and make recommendations on what needed to be done to solve it. Gideon Cohen was appointed chairman.
“I have asked the attorney general to chair this commission because he has been one of the harshest critics of our efforts to date. I know we can rely on him to give us a thorough, honest evaluation of our shortcomings. I promise you, we will ask the Congress to turn the commission’s recommendations into legislation.”
Then the President got down to brass tacks. “The drug problem is a complex social issue that is not going to go away by itself. Its causes include everything from poverty in Colombia and Peru to poverty and rotten schools in this country. The crux of the problem is that so many people have been left out of the world’s evolving economy, people in the Third World, people right here in America. I don’t know that there are solutions — certainly no easy ones — but I promise you this: we are going to face the problem.”
Intended by the President to help calm the political atmosphere, which was rife with accusations and recriminations, the news conference had no such effect. It was too little too late.
Critics like Congresswoman Samantha Strader attacked the Army’s handling of the crisis and damned Tom Shannon as a psychotic vigilante. He would have been stuffed into the same crack that held Bernard Goetz had he not been black. Unable to hurl the racist stink bomb, those who opposed tougher drug laws and tougher law enforcement and those with their own political agendas and ambitions united to demand that Shannon be tried, convicted, and hurried on his way to perdition.
Those who believed that the government hadn’t done enough to combat illegal drugs rushed to Shannon’s defense. It was wrong, they claimed, to martyr Shannon on the altar of the white man’s guilt.
Jack Yocke’s articles in the Post merely drew the lines for the combatants. Saint or sinner, Tom Shannon stood at the vortex of the developing firestorm. Curiously, he stood alone. After a quiet conference with his chief adviser, Will Dorfman, George Bush decided not to have the FBI or police attempt to discover the identities of the people who had accompanied Shannon to the armory. Those seeking to destroy Shannon were likewise not interested in having the stories of a thousand victims of the drug trade paraded before the public one at a time, night after night, ad infinitum. So Tom Shannon was the only man charged, for conspiracy with a person or persons unknown to lynch 382 people.