DIRECT EXAMINATION, CONTINUED
BY MR. STENNINGS:
Q. I saw the same thing, Alvin. What did you think had happened?
A. No question about what happened, sir. Not even then. See, you can't even grow up in Texas without learning about the Alamo, even if you grow up kind of dumb like me. Those folks knew the story as well as I did. Maybe better. They blew themselves up, there at the end. I knew it as sure as I knew the beer I was drinking had gone warm and a little flat.
Q. And the other people . . . just your own impressions, Alvin?
A. They was shocked. Maybe stunned is a better word. I'd guess they just didn't realize, up to then, how damned serious Texas, and the Governor, were.
* * *
"It's over, Juani."
The governor's head rested on folded arms on her desk. Eyes puffed and reddened with lack of sleep, she looked up from the papers, reports and files littering the wood to gaze blearily upon Schmidt. "The Currency Facility?" she asked.
Schmidt nodded. "Yes. Gone. At the end they blew the whole thing up, just like they said they would. There won't be any survivors. Even televised, I've never seen anything like it. No survivors."
Juani spoke dully, "My fault, too, I suppose."
Schmidt shook his head, then walked around the large desk to take Juanita's face firmly in both hands. "No, Juani. Not your fault. You did what you had to."
He moved a hand from her left cheek to the top of her head, tussling her hair as he had not since the day he had left Texas for a war few wanted to remember. "I was so proud of you, my Juanita. Always, but never so much as the day you made the only decision you could have under the circumstances; the decision to lose the Currency Facility and save New Mexico."
Juani found speech difficult. Nonetheless, she choked back her feelings and nodded brisky. "Thank you, Jack. Now what?"
Schmidt drew a hesitant breath. "What happens? Well, Third Corps continues to come south to Austin, the Marines and 18th Airborne Corps to our east continue to get ready to hammer us . . . and eventually they do."
"Out west?"
Schmidt took a deep breath before answering. "Fact is, Juani, I don't know. Their commander wants them to openly side with us, I think. But politically, he just doesn't have the horses inside his own organization for that."
"Politically? In a military organization?" Juani looked extremely skeptical.
"Yes, 'politically.' Oh, I know people look at the military and see a dictatorship. But it just isn't so. Every military organization is a very delicate—and to a large degree democratic—political entity. A commander is more than a rabble-rouser and cheerleader, true. But if he didn't have some political skills, to persuade his own troops, he'd be hopeless."
"You've never explained this to me before."
"You never needed to know," Schmidt answered.
Schmidt paused momentarily, then said, "There is something you need to know though and it also has to do with our friends around El Paso."
Juani turned her hand palm up and made a "come on, give" gesture.
"The Marine part of it is based out of San Diego. There have been a couple of incidents involving, apparently, the families of some of the Marines."
"Incidents?"
Schmidt gave a disgusted sigh. "A speech that turned into a demonstration. A demonstration that turned nasty. Several break-ins. One rape. One murder. One other rape that ended in a murder. My people are trying to confirm some rumors that the PGSS," he showed a wicked smile, "or what's left of them anyway, are being sent there to take the Marines' families into protective custody."
"Hostages," announced the governor.
"Hostages," agreed Schmidt.
"What will that do to us? If they take the Marines' families hostage I mean?"
"Juani, I haven't a clue. It could mean that suddenly our western flank is open and vulnerable again. It could mean that the Marines march right back to San Diego picking up as much rope on the way as they can get their hands on. If the White House handles it just right it could mean nothing more than that the Marines stay out of play. If the White House can do it, or thinks it can do it, it could mean the Marines start to march on us again. But I can't tell you which."
"I can tell you that if the PGSS lost as many men as I think they did at Fort Worth there are going to be some pissed-off honchos . . . the kind that are not too likely to handle a delicate mission well."
"How many do you think were killed, Jack?"
"Over a thousand. Maybe over two thousand. They are going to be really, really pissed, Juani."
* * *
"Motherfuckers haven't seen what pissed means, yet," murmured the Marine, Fulton, as he read his intelligence officer's reports of the incidents happening to his people's families back in California. "Funny how the Presidential Guard was ready to move in to 'secure things' so quickly. Yes . . . funny."
Fulton lifted his eyes from the report to shout to his driver, sitting at a makeshift desk just outside the door. "Get me the quartermaster, the division recon battalion commander, and the trans officer. Now!"
Then, very softly so that none but he might hear yet, Fulton said, "And I'll need lines to Austin and Camp Pendleton."
* * *
Mrs. Fulton spoke calmly over the phone. She was certain that, whatever problems she and the other dependents at and around the camp had, her husband's problems were much, much worse. She spoke calmly, but also very carefully. The Presidential Guard officer seated opposite her seemed much too unstable—a boiling mix of anger, pain, fear, regret and something the general's wife could not quite put her finger on—to risk his displeasure.
"Yes, dear, it looked like a spontaneous thing. Someone started speaking downtown and the next thing we knew there was a crowd marching on the camp gates. Some of the crowd didn't come here, though. They fanned out over some of the nearby residential areas . . . looking for the wives, I guess. It was pretty bad . . . yes, dear, you do know some of the women that were caught up in it. You remember Captain Diaz' wife—cute little thing? She's in the hospital and it doesn't look good.
"Yes, dear, we're all safe enough now. The Presidential Guard has taken over our security and is evacuating all the dependents they can find from off the installation. Everyone is kicking in to put them up in our quarters, doubling up. The overflow is going to gyms, the theaters, anyplace we can get a roof over their heads.
"Yes, dear . . . I'm sure we'll all be fine," she lied. "You just take care of yourself and the division."
* * *
Hanstadt had been closest. Alone, clad in civilian clothes, he had driven a commandeered rental car from San Antonio west, down the Balcones Escarpment, past the thin, amorphous Texan "front" line and to the forward trace of the 1st Marine Division.
There, at a nondescript segment of Interstate 10, he had been met by Fulton's sergeant major. After saluting and looking over Hanstadt's bona fides, the sergeant major had escorted him through the lines and onward to Division Headquarters.
At the headquarters were a number of tour busses, each with a full or nearly full load of men clad in civilian clothes. The men were so obviously Marines that Hanstadt wondered why they even bothered. Entering the headquarters, Hanstadt was unsurprised to see both the accompanying sergeant major as well as the uniformed guards at the entrance "present arms" to another civilian clad man who looked about the right age to be a somewhat youngish battalion commander.
Seeing Hanstadt's raised eyebrow the sergeant major merely said, "General Fulton will brief you on that, I imagine, sir."
"I can hardly wait, Sergeant Major."
Hanstadt was startled as a long rattle of musketry, seemingly from some miles away, shook the windows of the headquarters.
* * *
Juani stared from her office window at the gathering clouds. So many problems pressed upon her that it could not be said she was concentrating, or was even able to think clearly, upon any one of them. In a few days, she knew, the main body of the force to the north would arrive in the vicinity of Austin; the point of that dagger had long since come. To the east, Houston, cut off from open communication, was rumored to be in a state of violent anarchy. South the Navy stood poised to descend upon the coast. Further south, from Panama, she had been informed that the ruse was wearing pretty thin and that soon the gates of the Canal must be opened to pass the Marines through.
Far to the west? New Mexico was beginning, late and slowly, to imitate Texas. Nearer though, in the vicinity of El Paso, the Marines were forming up for something. Possibly to march east again. Jack had told her, though, that their supply status was said still to be terrible so perhaps if they marched, they would do so slowly. Even so, combat could not be far away; not on any front.
Besides New Mexico, not a single governor or legislature had thrown in with Texas, despite her pleas. They were sympathetic, yes. They wished her and Texas well, yes. They were "concerned" about the direction the country would take after Texas went under, yes.
They were afraid of the same treatment . . . also, yes. "Governor, if you somehow manage to survive what's coming for you then maybe we can talk."
So deep in her thoughts was she, yes—and her bitterness, that Juani didn't notice as Schmidt entered and quietly closed her office door behind him.
He cleared his throat to announce his arrival.
"Yes, Jack?" she answered, without moving her eyes from the cold gray sky.
"Hanstadt's back."
"And?"
"He says the Marines are going to take care of their own problems with the PGSS. For now, they are under a threat and they know it. The White House has been too canny to try to force them to do anything . . . but the message was clear: if the Marines decide to side with us their families will suffer for it."
"That means that the Marine—Fulton was his name?—is going to have to turn back control to the political people that were watching him before they were arrested."
"Ummm . . . no. Hanstadt said that Fulton had the less important half all shot and is holding the rest as hostages of his own."
Wide eyed, Juanita's hand flew to her mouth. "Oh, my."
"I confess, I like the man's sincerely . . . oh . . . forthright attitude. Can't get much more sincere than shooting seventy-one federal agents and mid-ranking members of the incumbent party out of hand. I am pulling back the people we have facing him by about twenty miles and moving their supply dumps back thirty. We just can't know what is going to happen with 1st Marine Division and, if it turns to shit, I'd rather have them walking forward at maybe three miles an hour than rolling forward—using our gas—at forty."
"If things work out the way they are supposed to in California, Fulton is going to need gas though. He says that the second his people's dependents are safe then the 1st Marine Division and 3rd Armored Cavalry regiment will declare for Texas."
"And the other side of that," observed Juani, "is that if they can't rescue their families, and if those families continue to be held hostage, and if it looks like the Presidential Guard is bloody minded then the Marines might have to attack us."
* * *
Miles and miles of fuck all, thought Diaz as the bus carrying him and the bulk of his company continued on a seemingly endless track through desert and scrub.
Seated at the front, he was in position to see, or rather not to see, the other busses returning 1st Recon Battalion to its home. He could not see any of the others because they were strung out over more than one hundred miles and many were not even using the Interstate.
Not for the first time Diaz felt an almost overpowering urge to call home. He could not, he knew. The operation was a potential intelligence sieve already and, should the people "guarding" the Marine's families find out they were coming, there was no telling what might happen.
Not that it was home, precisely, that Diaz wanted to call. His wife would not be there, he knew. She was comatose in the hospital. But a friend? A comrade's wife? Anybody who could assure him that she would be fine.
Even if the assurance were a lie, still he wanted it.
Before leaving Texas, Diaz's initial anger had been directed toward the unknown, unnamed, likely never-to-be-caught assailants. Then his division commander had sat him down and asked him to consider a few questions; questions like, "Whose good did this all accrue to; what happened to your wife and the others?" Questions like, "And isn't it funny that the PGSS was ready to move at a moment's notice after coming out of one of the bloodiest battles ever to take place in this hemisphere?" And, "Do you suppose it's a coincidence that we voted to bow out of the current troubles and then our families were attacked?" And, "Isn't it funny how the demonstration that got out of hand started with a speaker from the party in power? The same party that controls the PGSS? The same PGSS that was ever so ready to take our families hostage?"
And so, after reflection, Diaz had added up one plus one plus one plus one plus one and come up with the mathematically suspect but morally perfectly precise answer, "Rottemeyer."
"Bright boy," Fulton had beamed. "And I assure you we are going to get even . . . if not a bit ahead."
Diaz wanted assurance of, oh, many things. And, knowing he could not have it, he turned his thoughts, along with his eyes, to a map of Camp Pendleton and thought about the one form of assurance he thought he could have.
* * *
"Time to leave, Juani," announced Schmidt. "They'll be here in a few hours. And you can't let them catch you."
"I'm not leaving the Capital, Jack. Just forget it. It's not going to happen."
Schmidt answered, "Governor, the federals will be here in a couple of hours. They may stop and wait a bit if they think we are going to fight. And," Schmidt held up a quieting palm, "we are going to fight. But the end result is all the same. Now you have to leave. Before the bullets start to fly.
"Juani, if you don't go quietly I'll have you carried out."
Juani set her face grimly, plainly determined to argue. Jack was having none of it, equally plainly.
She relented. "I have a few hours, don't I?"
Seeing his nod she continued, "Then I want to make a televised address before I go."
"Okay, Governor. We have time for that."
"You've never approved entirely of nonviolent civil disobedience I know, Jack. But I am going to give it one more try. Can your quartermaster come up with a great deal of transportation in a hurry?"
* * *
Marines can be very practical folk. Faced with a lockdown of a fenced camp, said lockdown conflicting with either the desire not to be on the camp or the fact that one is on the other side of a fence—perhaps without permission—and wanting to be on the camp, a Marine will usually find a practical solution.
Nine times out of ten, he'll cut the fence.
The fence around Camp Pendleton had been cut so many times, by so many Marines, for so many excellent reasons, that more than one 1st Division commander had contemplated simply leaving the holes there.
Others had spent precious installation maintenance funds keeping the fence in constant repair.
Fulton had adopted a different approach. He had, true, repaired the fence upon his arrival. But then, somewhat unusually, he had had the likely cutting points guarded and ambushed.
For some weeks after his arrival, as a Marine cut the fence and was duly caught, Fulton had called out the battalion of the offender for a no-notice and rather strenuous roadmarch with full—rather overfull, actually—packs. The march was invariably followed by one or more weeks of pulling guard in full battle uniform, by companies, at the breach.
This worked at least to the extent that a) the Marines' breaching grew craftier and b) they tended to repair the cuts they made behind them.
The cuts were still there, of course, but harder to see, find, and use.
The PGSS knew nothing about the breaches, though Crenshaw might have told them had he not been in a hospital somewhere in Kansas.
The First Marine Division Reconnaissance Battalion knew everything there was to know about the breaches.
* * *
Captain Emanuel Diaz, 1st Recon Battalion, lying in a shallow drainage ditch that led through the fence and into the camp understood all about the breaches. He understood full well, also, why he could not go to see his wife's shattered body where she lay in the hospital. Her mind wasn't there anyway, not for the nonce . . . not, perhaps, in the future.
She'd been beaten—badly—by thugs, before being raped.
* * *
Diaz twisted his neck, pulled down a shoulder and risked a single brown eyeball to look over the lip of the ditch. Standing to either side of a side entrance door, facing the ditch, stood—rather, slouched, and slouched in a manner that seemed tired unto exhaustion—two apparent members of the Presidential Guard.
The moon fell behind a cloud, darkening the landscape and, especially, the gymnasium that was the target for Diaz's crew. He tapped two men with a very softly whispered, "Go."
Sudden grins were as suddenly suppressed. Faces blackened, browned and greened; knives in hand, the men slithered from the drainage ditch that had run under the chain-link fence surrounding the camp.
"Swift, silent, deadly," whispered—prayed—Diaz. Celer, Silens, Mortalis—the motto of Marine Recon.
Diaz could neither see nor hear the snakelike approach or the action, in itself a good sign. But less than a dozen minutes later the glowing red of an issue filtered flashlight shone three times.
"Pass it on; follow me," he whispered before slithering out himself to join his point men.
From other places, along other avenues, the Marines of 1st Recon slipped onto Camp Pendleton . . . swiftly, silently and—based on the number of black battle-dressed, bleeding, bashed, strangled, dismembered and throat-slashed corpses they left behind them—in a fashion most deadly.
* * *
"1st Battalion reports Pendleton is secure, General," announced Fulton's flush-faced Public Affairs Officer, or PAO, bursting into the general's office. The PAO's voice grew somber. "Six of ours killed, seventeen wounded."
"The dependents?"
"Some are missing. The recon battalion is looking."
"The PGSS?"
The PAO gave an evil smile; he had not always been a paper pusher, had started in the Corps as a rifleman, in fact. "Surprisingly few prisoners."
Fulton grunted. "You may be surprised. I'm not."
The PAO lifted an eyebrow as much as to say, that's an official notation of surprise, General, not a personal one.
Fulton noted the raised eyebrow and correctly interpreted it—no damned surprise at all.
"Assemble the officers in one hour."
* * *
The Air Force wouldn't play; that had been made clear enough. Whether pilots insisted they were too sick to fly or ground crews insisted that the planes were too sick to be flown, virtually nothing in the Air Force inventory had taken any part in the troubles. Nothing had taken any truly aggressive part.
But there were planes . . . and then there were planes. There were air forces hidden within a number of nonmilitary entities.
The CIA was one such.
Unburdened with a fighter pilot mafia, equally unburdened with a close-air-support mafia, the Central Intelligence Agency had taken to Remote Piloted Vehicles, RPVs for short, with a vengeance.
The Predator III RPV was one such. Descended from earlier models which had, over and over, proven their value both for reconnaissance and attack in foreign and hostile places, the III model was larger, faster, carried more of a bomb load, and carried a greater variety of ordnance as well.
Two of these models, remotely controlled via secure satellite link from the CIA's main headquarters in Langley, Virginia, circled high above Austin, Texas. The pilots, sitting in a dimly lit control room many leagues away from Austin, watched their screens and waited for the word to engage.
* * *
It wasn't that she had lived there all that long. Still, leaving the Governor's Mansion for what was quite possibly the very last time hurt in a way Juani had never expected.
The mansion was brightly lit. In anticipation of the federal onslaught some of her assistants were boxing up state memorabilia to move south to San Antonio. Her husband was doing the same for family mementos. And Mario, who had still not forgiven his mother for sending Elpidia into danger in Houston, was busy, Juani knew, packing up Elpidia's meager possessions.
Juani turned to look briefly at her former home, then, at Jack Schmidt's insistence, boarded his Hummer for the long drive to the south.
* * *
"We've got a vehicle pulling away from the target area," announced one of the Predator III pilots, hunching over a view screen. "Given that the house is lit up like Christmas, I don't like it."
"Can you identify the vehicle?" asked the mission chief.
The pilot snorted. Ten thousand feet was no obstacle with the television system he was using. "It's a Hummer. I can't make out the identity from this angle, but it's a Hummer."
The mission chief just wasn't sure. The Predators were carrying rather large bombs, suitable for demolishing a rather large house. But there were only the two of them. If they wasted one on the vehicle the other might not be enough to ensure the complete destruction of the target.
"Hold fire while I make a call," he announced.
* * *
"Hold up the car, Jack," Juani demanded.
The driver looked at Schmidt for confirmation. Seeing the general's reluctant and heavy nod he applied the brake gently and pulled to a stop near the mansion ground's main gate. Juani fiddled with the plastic handle, pushed the light door open, and stepped out.
Jack and the driver, likewise, emerged from the vehicle. The driver left the Hummer running. Feet again on the asphalt, he walked a short distance away and caused a sound indistinguishable from water hitting a rock. Muttering something about discipline, Jack went to stand by Juanita.
Seeing Juani leaning against a stone pillar, her head hanging and tears streaming down her face, Jack threw an arm around her shoulder to lead her back to the Hummer.
"No," she insisted, voice breaking. "Not yet." Then, completely breaking down, she cried, "It's all over. . . ."
* * *
The mission chief said, "Yes, ma'am," into the telephone receiver. Then, hanging up the phone and turning to the pilots, he said, "Ignore the Hummer. More important to make sure nothing survives inside the mansion. But we have authority to attack now. Do it."
Without a word from either of them the two pilots began manipulating the controls that would bring their Predators into optimal attack position to ensure the Global Positioning System–guided bombs hit precisely where they were intended.
* * *
Schmidt had begun turning Juanita back to the Hummer by main force when something caught his eye. Reacting entirely by instinct, once finely honed and still at least good enough, he screamed "Down!" and forced her to the asphalt, covering her body with his own.
The driver, somewhat distracted by other concerns, never saw the smashed roofing material that flew up where two two-thousand pound bombs penetrated. He didn't see the walls and windows suddenly billow out, even as the roof, or rather pieces of it, began to ascend. He felt a remarkably sudden build-up of pressure.
And then he felt a very large piece of masonry smash his torso.
* * *
"Jesus," murmured one of the two pilots, watching the mansion disintegrate in his screen. "Jesus." The other pilot merely gave off a soft whistle. Neither had ever seen such complete demolition, done so suddenly, from their aircrafts' perspective.
The mission chief gave a grunt of approval, then picked up the telephone again to make his report.
* * *
"Nooo!" shrieked Juani once Jack had gotten off of her and helped her to her feet. "Nooo! Mario!" she wept for her son. "Emilio . . ." she murmured through tears for a lost husband.
She began to try to tear herself away from Schmidt's grip.
"No," he shouted, enfolding her in a bear's embrace. "They may not be done and you are too valuable to lose."
Juanita fought to escape but Jack was having none of it. Transferring his hold to grasp her in one arm he reopened the Hummer door with one hand, then used two to forcefully throw her into the front seat, slamming shut the door behind her.
Juani's head struck the steering wheel hard enough to stun her into submission while Schmidt ran frantically to the driver's side. He spared one glance at the unconscious driver, even now breathing his last through bloody-frothed lungs.
"Sorry, son . . . I can't help you," Schmidt muttered.
Throwing himself into the driver's seat, Schmidt took a fierce grasp of Juani's hair and pushed her from the steering wheel, keeping the grip to avoid the risk of her escaping.
With his left hand Schmidt fumbled with the parking brake, then awkwardly put the Hummer into gear and drove off as fast as the vehicle would move.
In the distance he could hear sirens, police and emergency vehicles, converging on the flaming wreck of the mansion.