Danaher was still lean and fit. He looked, JR thought, exactly as he had when he was in Afghanistan, only a little older and grayer. JR remarked on it.
“Still get up at five o’clock every morning and run five miles,” Danaher said. “Might as well; can’t sleep past five anyway. Heard your cousin put you in charge. He couldn’t have found a better man.”
“That remains to be seen. Where do you stand on independence?”
“Well, when I first heard about it, I thought, there goes my fucking pension and health benefits unless I get the hell out of Texas. That was pretty small of me, I suppose, but then I heard on TV that Texas is taking over all the federal government’s obligations to military and Social Security retirees, so that was a relief. I’ve got some money saved up but nowhere near enough without a pension. I despise that son of a bitch Soetoro and everything he stands for. It’s a big club so I have lots of friends. Independence is great if you folks can make it stick, because the country that elected that bastard twice is going somewhere most people in Texas don’t want to go.”
“I need some help,” JR said. “I need some civilian duds, and then if you are willing, let’s the two of us drive over to Louisiana and take a look around.”
“You mean it?”
“I do.”
“My wife is playing bridge this afternoon. Went over after lunch. I’ll leave her a note. We’ll be back tonight?”
“I hope.”
“I think I may have some clothes that will fit you. If you haven’t had lunch, mine the refrigerator while I root around. Make yourself a sandwich or something. Last night’s meat loaf was pretty good.”
JR was halfway through a cold meat loaf sandwich when Nate returned with a pair of baggy shorts, an ancient VMI T-shirt, and a set of worn tennis shoes. He also handed JR a pistol, an old double-action revolver, small and trim. “If you’re going to Louisiana you better take this, stick it in your pocket, just in case. It’s loaded.”
JR checked the cylinder, snapped it back in place. The gun was an old Smith & Wesson in .38 Special with about half its bluing remaining. “That thing’s about ninety or so years old,” Danaher said. “Used to carry it in my pocket when a service pistol wouldn’t do. Louisiana is enemy territory for you.”
Nate Danaher’s car was a late model sedan. “Where are we going?”
“Barksdale Air Force Base, east of Shreveport and Bossier City.”
“I know where it is. Take Gina to the doctor there on a regular basis. She’s got lymphoma. It’s under control now, we think, but…” he shrugged, “it’s in God’s hands. I shop at the PX while she’s getting examined.”
“Stay off the interstate tonight. Take the back roads. We don’t need to run into a roadblock.”
“Sure.”
“Got that postcard from you a while back,” JR explained. “So I knew you were in Texas. Why here?”
“Our daughter is here. Her husband is an engineer in the oil business. Gina wanted to be near the grandson, Little Nate, who just turned seven. He’s a pistol.”
“I seem to recall you had a son, too.”
“Yep. Got on drugs in high school and dropped out. Pot at first, then crack, then heroin and meth. We put him in rehab twice, but it didn’t take. Haven’t seen him in… well, it’s been twelve years now. A few years ago someone said they saw him in New Orleans, living on the street. For all I know he may be dead now. All those drugs — it figures he won’t last too long.”
JR changed the subject. “So how is Longview taking to independence?”
“Was out at Walmart today. The place was packed. People on welfare were cashing their last checks, loading up their cars, and getting out of Texas. They heard Texas isn’t paying welfare anymore, so a lot of them are heading for greener pastures. Everyone else is stocking up. Everything they can get, food, toilet paper, everything. People in line said the liquor stores were mobbed. I wanted to buy a little generator — figured I could wire it into the house circuits some way — but Walmart was out of them. None in the hardware stores. People sense that times are going to get hard.”
“Yeah,” JR said dryly.
Sarah and I drove the van along the road by Camp Dawson and sure enough, there was the compound that held the detainees, though we didn’t see any. The compound, surrounded by a chain-link fence topped by barbed wire, with guard towers about ten feet above the ground on all four corners, was about a hundred yards on each side. It was lit up in the late afternoon like Macy’s on Christmas Eve, so obviously they had generators going. All the comforts…
The gate was manned by four guys in FEMA dark-green coveralls carrying carbines and wearing green caps. They weren’t soldiers, lounging around like that, smoking, laughing, and grab-assing. And, I suspected, they were not well disciplined. No army sergeant I ever met would allow his troops to goof off on guard duty. They were armed thugs.
I got all this on one slow drive-by. The gate guards paid no attention to us. The guy on the last guard tower was leaning on the rails of his perch, smoking a cigarette, looking into the compound.
Which made me suspect that they weren’t worried about people breaking in, but their prisoners breaking out. The thought that someone might assault them with intent to kill apparently had not entered their hard little heads. When the shooting started in earnest, many would probably boogie. No one wants to be dead any time soon, which can happen when people shoot at you.
Across the road from the compound was an up-sloping pasture, maybe fifty yards wide, with what looked to me like yearling steers in there munching grass. Maybe dreaming of the girlfriends they would never have. Perhaps those were the virgins the jihadists would find in Paradise. Beyond the pasture and higher was a strip of forest on a low ridge. Over the top of the ridge I got a glimpse of a green mountain.
I kept on driving, thinking about how we could pop Jake Grafton out of that compound. Since we had no idea where in there he was, we were going to have to ask someone. That would be my job. I am pretty good at getting answers in a hurry from people who initially thought they didn’t want to be bothered.
The designated rendezvous was a crossroads about eight more miles along. I pulled over to the side of the road and turned off the engine. The sun was just setting, so we had at least another half hour of evening, then maybe another fifteen minutes of twilight.
All I needed were my troops.
“You know how to use that pistol?” I asked Sarah.
“Never fired one in my life.”
I showed her how the Beretta worked, popped out the magazine, jacked out the shell from the chamber, made her dry fire it, and put everything in and reloaded. “Just disengage the safety, point, and pull the trigger. It will fire thirteen shots, one with every squeeze of the trigger. The gun will kick in your hand, so use both hands. Don’t use it unless the bad guy is very close, and keep shooting until he’s dead on the ground. Not wounded on the ground, but obviously dead, so he can’t hurt you.”
“Okay,” she said, hefting the weapon.
“Never point a gun at a man unless you are willing to shoot, and never shoot unless you are willing to kill. This isn’t Hollywood.”
“Okay,” she repeated, and holstered the weapon.
I felt better. She seemed to be getting into this warrior gig. If I could just keep finding her bathrooms or port-a-potties.
I rooted in my duffel and came up with my Kimber 1911 in a holster. I added it to my web belt and put it on the right side. On the left I put my Marine Corps fighting knife with the eight-inch blade.
The Beretta was a 9-mm: it shot a .357-caliber, 125-grain full-metal-jacket bullet since it was a weapon of war — Geneva Convention and all that — and would make nice holes in people. Magazine capacity was thirteen rounds. The .45 shot a 230-grain bullet, and I used hollow points. Under fifty feet, one of those to the body would kill King Kong. It held eight cartridges, but if eight wasn’t enough, I was probably gonna soon be dead anyway.