General Martin L. Wynette read the news summaries of all this “grandstanding,” as he called it, at seven o’clock on Wednesday morning when he got to the Pentagon, and thought if this news didn’t wake up the fools in the White House, nothing short of nuclear war would. Those people in flyover land were pissed off and feisty.
One of his aides had brought him a copy of the Minerva Research Initiative, which the president had directed the armed forces to draft and study after he was elected in 2008. Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom and war. Idly, Wynette wondered about the subtle mind that had dreamed up that title. The Minerva Research Initiative was a military plan to put down a civil insurrection in the United States.
Wynette scanned it and tossed it aside. The plan assumed that the members of the armed forces would willingly participate in armed action against angry citizens. That was a forlorn and foolish assumption, Wynette now realized. He also had on his desk a flash message from the commanding general at Fort Sill in Lawton, Oklahoma, telling him that he had scoured his command for men and women willing to fight Oklahomans. They were willing to go to Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and if necessary Iran to fight for America, but only a few were willing to fight Oklahomans.
He was getting briefings on the result of other army commanders’ attempts to muster soldiers who would fight for the Soetoro administration against domestic enemies when he was summoned to the White House. Wynette stuffed the messages in his briefcase along with a copy of the Minerva Research Initiative and called for his aide and his driver.
In Colorado a group of FBI agents and a sheriff’s deputy searching houses to confiscate guns got into a shooting scrape with a homeowner and his son. The homeowner and son were killed, but not before they shot an FBI agent and the sheriff’s deputy to death. Another agent was in the hospital. Social media was aflame, with citizens promising the agents and local law officers who cooperated with them in confiscating guns more of the same.
An FBI office in Seattle was attacked, one agent wounded: perpetrators unknown. In Idaho a county sheriff who agreed to help search the homes of citizens of his county to find and confiscate guns was ambushed, stripped naked, dipped in tar and feathers, and carried to his office on a fence rail. He was now hospitalized with burns over sixty percent of his body. A county in Utah with a significant percentage of Mormon fundamentalists declared its independence from the United States and the State of Utah. Polygamy there was now legal. Finally, a dispatch from Mexico City: the Mexican government was considering diplomatic recognition of the Republic of Texas.
In Baltimore, a suburban sporting goods warehouse had been looted overnight. The gun counters were stripped clean and the looters helped themselves to every box of cartridges on the premises, then amused themselves by shooting at stuffed animal heads displayed high on the walls. The good news was that due to the federal government’s massive orders for ammunition over the last two years, and the president’s oft-repeated remarks about his desire for gun control that had induced civilians to buy and hoard ammo, the sporting goods store had only a small supply of cartridges, most in unpopular hunting calibers. The bad news went unspoken: the inner-city rioters were now armed.
In other riot-plagued big cities around the country, the police and National Guard contented themselves with trying to prevent the destruction from spreading. It was a losing fight. The centers of many of America’s largest cities now resembled the core of German cities after World War II.
People living in the suburbs nationwide were armed and organizing. They were also emptying the grocery and hardware stores, buying everything in sight, to the limits of their credit cards. Canned and dry food items were almost completely gone in some stores. Hardware stores sold out of emergency generators, charcoal, and gasoline cans. Gasoline stations found that many of their customers were filling up as many as ten five-gallon cans with fuel. Sporting goods stores were selling every gun on the shelf and all the ammunition in stock. In Howard County, Maryland, a bedroom suburb of Washington and Baltimore populated with a large percentage of federal civil service employees of all races, the county police and Homeland Security officers tried to search homes for guns, only to be met at four houses by armed householders who threatened to shoot to kill.
The chief of the Howard County police announced that henceforth his officers would concentrate on arresting criminals, answering domestic violence calls, and helping motorists involved in traffic accidents. The chief was quoted by a reporter as saying, “If Barry Soetoro wants to confiscate guns, he can figure out how to do it. The people here are frightened by what’s going on in Baltimore and elsewhere and want to be able to protect themselves. I can’t say I blame them.” After the story was published, two black Maryland legislators called the police chief, who was also black, a racist.
TWENTY
In Galveston that morning, after the sun came up, the sheriff drove his car down the pier and parked adjacent to the gangway of USS Texas. He walked across the gangway and shouted down into the open hatch, “Anybody home?”
In less than a minute, a man appeared below and looked up at him. “Yep, we’re home.”
“Mind if I come down and visit?”
“Please do.”
Speedy Gonzales escorted the sheriff to a small wardroom, where he found Loren Snyder studying several large bound volumes and sipping a cup of coffee.
“Coffee, Sheriff?”
“Don’t mind if I do.”
“Best coffee in the world,” Loren Snyder said.
The sheriff sipped at his, which he took black. Almost as good as Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, he thought, but he didn’t say it. Instead, he got straight to the point. “When are y’all going to nuke yourselves out of here?”
Loren laughed. “Well, we’re working on that right now. Before we go, I want my crew, all five of us, to run through every emergency procedure in the book and figure out how we’re going to handle it. We don’t have sixty people, just five. We don’t want to die in this boat.”
The sheriff looked around and nodded. “I sure understand that.” Just sitting here in this steel cigar gave the sheriff a mild case of claustrophobia. What it would be like being submerged he didn’t want to think about.
“How long can you guys stay submerged, anyway?” the sheriff asked.
“Until we run out of toilet paper.”
The sheriff chuckled at that, thinking Loren Snyder was being facetious. He wasn’t. With only five people aboard eating the stores, Texas could stay submerged for a long, long time.
“We’re going to spend today running emergency drills,” Snyder said, “making sure everyone knows what is expected of him and we are all on the same page. I hope by tonight we’ll be ready to leave this pier.”
“What about the U.S. Navy? I’ll bet they’re kinda unhappy that they lost this thing.”
“They’ll probably send SEALs to take it back,” Lorrie admitted.
“You mean like those guys who whacked bin Laden?”
“Yep. Naval Special Warfare commandos.”
“Maybe y’all oughta get outta here and do your drills someplace else.”
“Sheriff, I agree one hundred percent. As soon as we feel we can safely move this submarine, we will. In the interim, it would help if you would station some officers with radios out there around the harbor to keep a lookout. I suspect the SEALs will come at night. Probably tonight. We hope to be gone when they get here, but just in case, if your lookouts see anything suspicious — anything — I would appreciate a heads-up so we can cast off and get going. Once we close the hatches, the SEALs can’t get inside the boat.”