To his credit, he didn’t hesitate. “I’ll get my bag.” He charged into the house. There was a lighted kerosene lamp on the porch and apparently at least one in the house.
“Sorry to ruin your evening, ma’am,” I told the lady.
“Goes with the territory,” she said. “What happened?”
“Car wreck. One hurt.”
Dr. Proudfoot came trotting out with his black medical bag. He got into the passenger seat of the truck, and we headed back for the safe house. I told him about the fictitious wreck.
“How did you find me?”
I gestured to the GPS. “FEMA can find anyone,” I said, which was true.
“How are you making out without electricity?” I asked.
“Fine,” he said confidently. “Rural nets occasionally go down when there are thunderstorms or someone knocks down a pole with a car, but only for a few hours or overnight. That’s just a nuisance. Still, a few years ago we had a blizzard that took a lot of lines down and left us without power for eight days. That was a real pain, so I’m set up now. Even have a little generator that keeps the refrigerator and water pump running. We’ll be fine.”
As we drove up the road I told him about the patient. “He’s a little over sixty-five, I think, six feet, not obese, in fairly good health as far as I know, but he has a bunch of cracked or broken ribs on each side. I taped him up as best I could; he’s in a lot of pain and needs a doctor.”
“He got busted ribs in a car wreck?”
“I confess, I lied to your wife. Some men beat him badly with fists and shoes. Kicked him in the balls too.”
“FEMA sounds like tough duty to me,” he said acidly. I didn’t argue.
If he didn’t know about the safe house in the woods, he didn’t show surprise. I guess in his practice he gave up surprise some years back.
Dr. Proudfoot glanced at Grafton, looked around at the equipment in the room, then went to work. He cut off the tape I put on his ribs, X-rayed the admiral, asked him about his general health and how he was feeling, checked his heart and vitals. After a careful exam and a study of the X-rays on a computer screen, he taped him again, a much better job than I did. He also gave Grafton a shot to make him sleep. “Six ribs are cracked on the right side, five on the left,” he told Sarah and me, “but none are severed, as far as I can determine. I think he’ll heal okay, but he should be in a hospital where he can be observed.”
“We’ll try to get him there as soon as possible,” Sarah assured him.
“Used to be I’d give him some pain pills, but the government is so tight on pain pills now I don’t carry any. The good news is that the damned pill-billies aren’t tempted to rob me. It’s a hell of a world.”
“Isn’t it though,” I remarked.
“If he’s hurting when he wakes up, he can have a shot of whiskey. No aspirin. Keep him as inactive as possible. Now, I need all his information so I can get paid for this house call.”
“I’ll give you cash. Is two hundred dollars enough?”
“That’s more than the government would pay me.”
I paid him on the spot.
When I was taking him home, the doctor asked, “Is that a government facility?”
“Doctor Proudfoot, you appear to be a good man, and I’d like to answer your question, or questions, because I know you have more than one. But I cannot.” I smiled at him benignly. “I don’t know where you stand on our current national difficulties, nor do I care. What I can say is this: I want you not to tell anyone about the facility you just visited or the patient you saw there. Or me. Or the other men there.”
“It’s a government secret, huh?”
“Indeed it is.” We were on the secondary road by then, about a mile from his house. I stopped the truck in the middle of the road and turned in the driver’s seat to face him. The panel lights made his face quite plain. “If we get visitors of any kind, sheriff, locals, FEMA people, FBI, state police, Homeland Security, anyone at all, I’ll know you told someone the secret. You won’t be prosecuted because you’ll be dead. I’ll find you like I did tonight and kill you. Do you understand?”
He stared at me with fear in his eyes.
“I don’t want to kill you, but I will if you tell anyone at all. Even your wife. Tell me that you understand.”
He nodded.
I took my foot off the brake and drove him the rest of the way home. As he got out of the truck, I said, “I told your wife it was a car wreck. Make her believe it. Good night.”
I felt dirty and ashamed of myself, but I had to put the fear in him. I hoped for our sakes I scared him enough.
Back at the ranch, I sent Willis and Travis to spend the night in the guard cottage by the gate. Told them to drag the gate back across the road.
I put loaded weapons around the house, with a couple of grenades at each window, just in case, checked on Grafton, who was asleep, and Sarah, who was asleep in a bedroom upstairs. Armanti and the Wire, Jack Yocke and Sal Molina were sharing bedrooms. I took off my boots and flaked out on the couch downstairs.
Early that Wednesday morning, while most Americans were in bed, the Oklahoma legislature passed a declaration of independence and the governor signed it. The news had been out all day Tuesday that the legislature had been called into special session to consider the measure. Washington had instructed the FBI and FEMA to arrest the governor and the entire legislature to ensure the declaration wasn’t even debated. The commander at Fort Sill was instructed to send a thousand troops to assist the federal agents in maintaining order in Oklahoma City.
The general at Fort Sill was willing, but as the evening progressed he found he didn’t have a thousand troops willing to go. He had, at the most, about a hundred, so finally he sent them, armed and wearing battle dress. They went in trucks that convoyed up I-44 from Lawton. They were rolling through the open prairie south of Chickasha when the front tires of the lead truck were shot out. As the truck rolled to the side of the road, more heavy reports were heard and the tires of several following trucks went flat. The final truck had its dual rear wheels shot out while it was almost stopped.
The soldiers piled out and took up formation around the trucks, but there were no more shots. An hour later soldiers searching the prairie found where someone had apparently fired from a low hill three hundred yards from the highway toward the convoy. Not only was dirt scraped away and grass pulled to provide a decent field of fire, a single spent .50 Browning machine-gun cartridge was found in the grass. A little more searching located another firing position about equidistant from the highway on the other side of the interstate, but there were no more cartridges. Nor, apparently, were there any shooters remaining around. Whoever the marksmen were, they had retreated into the darkness with their weapons, undoubtedly bolt-action .50-caliber rifles set up for long-distance target competition.
The officer in charge of the column had already informed his commander of his predicament by radio, so the troops sat alongside the interstate smoking and munching whatever snacks they had in their packs as civilian cars and trucks rolled by. It looked like it was going to be a long evening.
Two hours later four replacement trucks from Fort Sill were fired upon from an overpass. Each truck was hit once in the radiator. The drivers didn’t even walk up onto the overpass to look around. They reported the incident on their radios and settled in to spend the night sleeping in their cabs.
The FBI agents and FEMA troops found an estimated eight hundred armed National Guardsmen in battle dress surrounding the state capitol. The federal officers were disarmed and told to go home or they would be arrested. They went home.
During the course of the night, as debate raged on in the legislative chambers, civilians crowded onto the capitol grounds. They passed through the guardsmen’s lines carrying lawn chairs and picnic baskets, and many had small children asleep in strollers. The floodlights around the capitol gave the warm evening a festive air. A local band set up amplifiers and microphones and got busy jamming to entertain the crowd.