There was a fork a mile or so up the road, and he had stationed guardsmen there to divide the civilians, sending half on one road, half on the other. Travis Clay had reconnoitered both, he told Sarah and me, and both roads led to a bald spot on the mountain crest; the Camp David perimeter fence was just beyond that. “Considine will take the north fork and I’ll take the south. We expect to meet most of Soetoro’s volunteers at the bald crest,” Grafton told us as we watched our crowd trudge up the road. “That’s the fight that will flush Soetoro, I hope, and Martinez will bag him on the other side of the mountain.”
“If he’s there,” I said. “For all we know he may be in Hawaii playing golf.”
“If he is, he swam over,” Grafton shot back. “Tommy, you drive. Follow that howitzer. The guardsmen with their mortars will follow you.”
THIRTY-FIVE
The trek up the mountain was the most frustrating experience I have ever had. We averaged two miles every hour. I would move the truck ahead a couple of hundred yards and shut off the engine to save fuel.
The western side of that mountain, the crest of which ran generally north and south, was a mix of pastures and woodlots with farm houses and ramshackle barns thrown in, and here and there a mobile home surrounded by the owner’s junk collection. Rotting tractors, curious cows staring at us over fences, abandoned pickups manufactured during the Truman administration, stray dogs, yards full of weeds, fences covered with poison ivy, it was rural America in late summer in all its glory.
The fat people had it worst. They began dropping out, just sitting down. Some of the skinny people put their weapons in the truck and on the army trucks behind us carrying mortars, MREs, and water, just to lighten the load. People trudged and trudged up the edge of our road, raising clouds of dust.
Grafton sat in the rear seat and was on the handheld radio constantly. He gave Sarah and me updates on the southern army. They were through Leesburg and had collected another two or more thousand civilians, who were walking and driving cars and pickups and vans. Everyone seemed to want to go to Washington. Our ambushers, Martinez’ bunch, were in position blocking the roads into and out of Camp David.
The power was back on in eastern Virginia and Maryland, and television and radio reporters were giving their audiences the blow by blow. Dixie Cotton was with the army marching through Leesburg, heading for the eastern Virginia suburbs, and she was on the air and on fire, urging all loyal Americans to join with the army of volunteers on its way to liberate Washington.
It was nearly one o’clock when I saw Travis Clay standing beside the road. I stopped beside him.
“This is like herding cats,” he said. “Got any water?”
“In the bed. Help yourself.”
When he had guzzled a bottle and had another bottle in his hand, he came back to the driver’s door. “You going to sit there riding along in your limo, or are you going to help?”
“I’m an officer. Rank has its privileges.”
“I’m going to write a letter to your mother. ‘Tommy doesn’t play well with other children.’”
I told Sarah to drive the truck and got out with my M4.
I helped Travis and Willis herd the troops up the road. Every little bit a shot would echo around. The wannabe warriors got bored and shot into a tree or a deer or whatever. I saw a guy with a shotgun drop a crow that was flying over.
“Save your ammunition,” I admonished the trekkers. “You’re going to need every damn bullet before the day is over. And for God’s sake, don’t shoot the cows: they don’t vote, don’t have guns, and can’t shoot back, so it isn’t sporting.” Some listened, some didn’t.
We came upon a farm where the lady of the house had gone all out. Apparently she knew the column was hiking up the road, so she had a folding table set up by the gate and she and her daughters, both early teens, were pouring good well water for anyone who wanted a drink. And serving homemade cookies.
“Thank you, ma’am,” I said as I helped myself to an oatmeal raisin cookie and filled up my water bottle. “How’d you know this mob was coming?”
“Your scouts came up the hill at dawn this morning, and I met them coming back. They said a lot of people would be along.”
So I sipped water and munched my cookie as the troops did the same, then we moved along while other people crowded the table. Everyone had a good word to say to the lady and her daughters, and she had a good word for everyone. America walking by your door, on a dirt road that leads nowhere in particular. It was a strange experience.
Two miles farther up the road, I found a woman sitting with her shoes and socks off, looking at broken blisters, now leaking blood. A double-barrel shotgun lay beside her. “Are you going to be able to keep going?” I asked.
She looked to me to be in her fifties. She cocked her head to eye me, squinting against the sun. “I’ll make it, Jack,” she said.
“My name’s Tommy Carmellini.”
“Betty Connelly.”
She took a pair of dry socks from her backpack. “My daughter died in that parochial school in Arlington Heights a couple of weeks ago. She was a teacher. One of those jihadists Soetoro let into the country shot her in the face. I’ll get up this mountain if I have to crawl it.”
While she put her shoes and socks back on, I inspected her shotgun, an elegant old side-by-side. I opened the breech and extracted one of the shells. Number six birdshot, perfect for pheasants. I put the shell back in, snapped the breech closed, checked the safety, and put her on the tailgate of our truck. Gave her a bottle of water and her shotgun. “You ride there until we get on top,” I told her.
She nodded and brushed the hair back out of her eyes. “Thanks,” she said. I just hoped she didn’t get shot.
After two hours, I got back in the truck. Although the temp was only seventy-five degrees, according to the truck’s thermometer, I was hot and sweaty, and so was everyone hiking up that low mountain to get to whatever fate awaited us. I guess I was a little nervous, right along with everyone else.
Somehow, someway, we made it up the grade. The dirt road got worse and worse the higher we went, until it was just a rutted road full of dried-up mud-holes. No farms up here, just woods. I glanced at the truck’s odometer. It had driven fourteen miles to cover the twelve miles direct distance to the edge of the bald.
Grafton had received radio messages from the Predator crew long before. Soetoro’s army was on the crest of the mountain, and at least three hundred yards of cow pasture lay between the forest on the top of the western slope and the naked crest.
It was four o’clock by my watch when I first sighted the bald. Sarah was at the wheel of the truck, so I got out and started directing our tired volunteers into the woods. I estimated we had lost at least half through straggling and heat exhaustion, but that was just a guess.
“Get the troops spread out,” Grafton told me. “Link up with the people on the other road and stay in the woods. Have the mortarmen take their weapons out there a ways for max coverage.”
Already the people on the crest were popping away at us. The bullets pattered on the trees and leaves like rain, but if they hit anyone, I didn’t see him or her go down. With all the dust and engine noise and gunfire all afternoon from our crowd as they climbed the mountain, there was no possibility of surprise. Not that Grafton wanted surprise.