Wynette was trying to put this mess into perspective when the assistant chairman, a four-star admiral, knocked on the sill of the open door and, when Wynette glanced up, strolled into his office and closed the door behind him. He was the only officer in the navy that outranked the chief of naval operations, Admiral Cart McKiernan.
His name was Hiram Gregory Ray. He was a feisty little cuss, a fighter pilot, and somewhere along the line he had acquired the nickname of Sugar. He was anything but sweet, but the people who worked for him regarded him in awe. Brilliant, technically savvy, aggressive, and competent, he could fire up a room full of sailors and he could kiss a congressman’s ass so subtly and perfectly that the bastard would fart red, white, and blue for months.
Sugar Ray knew Wynette’s peccadillos and usually tried not to fret the boss unnecessarily. After a day spent watching the United States and the armed forces come apart at the seams, he was in no mood tonight to stroke the chairman.
“I think we can wave good-bye to America,” he said, “unless that damned fool in the White House turns the juice back on. New York, Chicago, and LA are in meltdown. Soldiers, sailors, and Marines deserting in droves, refusing to enforce Jade Helm mandates, refusing to fight, refusing to back up the police… Why in the name of God did that idiot turn off the power?”
“He blamed it on the Texans,” Wynette said sourly. “He’s a disciple of Joseph Goebbels. The truth will never catch up to a lie. ‘If you like your doctor, you can keep him. If you like your health insurance, you can keep it.’ He’s that kind of guy.”
Sugar Ray tossed a message on the desk. “Here’s a tidbit that will make your evening. Soldiers at Fort Benning are deserting and taking their weapons with them. They are driving out of the base in trucks. The CG there says all order and discipline are lost. If he tries to arrest people, he is afraid that the MPs will refuse to obey, and if they do obey, he’s afraid the people he wants to arrest will shoot back. He asked the chief of staff for guidance.”
Wynette picked up the message and read it. “A complete breakdown of order and discipline,” he muttered.
“I think it’s high time we arrest Soetoro and take over the government.”
Martin L. Wynette stared at Sugar Ray for several seconds, took a deep breath, and said, “I’ll pretend you didn’t say that.”
“Oh, shove it, Marty! Soetoro is attempting to become a dictator, and he has got to be stopped. We should arrest him or shoot him. Personally, I’d like to shoot him, and I volunteer to pull the trigger, but I’ll settle for arrest and solitary confinement.”
Wynette shook the message at Ray. “And just who the hell do you think we’re going to lead over to Pennsylvania Avenue to do all this arresting? Or will it be just you and me with a couple of pistols and any beggars with signs that we can pick up on street corners along the way?”
Sugar Ray cocked his head as he looked at his boss. “Have you sent any of these numbers—” he gestured at the messages on Wynette’s desk “—over to the White House?”
“Not yet. Tomorrow morning is soon enough.”
“What do you think the reaction will be?”
“By God, I don’t—”
Sugar Ray interrupted and finished the sentence for him. “You don’t know. Civil society in this country is coming apart in the large cities. Old people and babies are dying like flies in un-air-conditioned apartments and tenements; people are fighting for food, looting grocery stores, banks, liquor, and jewelry stores; breaking into ATMs; shooting at police at every opportunity… and the military is collapsing. Man, we went back to the stone age in less than ten days! I hope you appreciate the delicious irony of the fact that Soetoro fucked the very people who voted for him.”
Wynette grunted. He thought political loyalty was an oxymoron.
Sugar Ray wasn’t done. He said to the general, “Tomorrow morning Soetoro will probably want some heads, and yours is first on the block.”
Wynette didn’t reply to that comment.
“But that’s in the short term,” the admiral said, dismissed that little problem with a flip of his hand. “Eventually Soetoro is going down hard, and anyone who saluted and said, ‘Yes, sir,’ may go on the gallows with him. Hitler’s and Mussolini’s generals didn’t fare so well.”
Admiral Ray stood and leaned toward Wynette, braced himself with his fingertips on the general’s desk, and said, “My assessment is that this situation is completely out of Soetoro’s control. If we lock up Soetoro and everyone else in the White House we can lay hands on, maybe we can stop a humanitarian disaster and save millions of lives. Maybe we can even save our miserable country and some of those morons who voted for Soetoro… twice.”
Wynette looked at Sugar Ray for a long moment, then asked softly, “Who have you talked to about this?”
Ray straightened up and took a deep breath. “All the other chiefs. I was hoping it would be unanimous, but it isn’t. The commandant and army chief are with me, but CNO and the air force want to think about things.”
“Well,” Wynette said dryly, “treason is a big step.”
“Yeah — and Barry Soetoro is striding out. How long are we going to wait, Marty, before we call him on it? In a better day to come, Americans are going to ask that question of us.”
Wynette sat stolidly, eyes focused on infinity.
Sugar Ray shrugged, then headed for the door. “I’m going home and getting some sleep,” he tossed over his shoulder, and pulled the door shut behind him.
Walter Ohnigian actually flew two flights that night, and landed as dawn streaked the eastern sky. The B-52s were safely back on the ground at Barksdale and the Mississippi bridges all had at least one span in the river, from Baton Rouge to Memphis.
Ohnigian was numb. He let his wingman do the debrief while he stretched out on a couch in the ops building.
So Johnny O’Day was dead and he had killed him. Holy mother…
What was he going to say to Johnny’s wife, Ruby? Two little kids…
How was he going to tell Susie, his wife, about this? She and Ruby had double-dated the roommates. The marriages were just a year apart.
Staring at the ceiling, he decided that Ruby and Susie might forgive him, someday. The real problem was how he was going to forgive himself.
At Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, Major General Douglas Seuss was trying to figure out how to comply with Pentagon demands that he send an armored column from the 4th Infantry Division to fight the rebels in Texas. Most of his soldiers were refusing to fight fellow Americans, and Washington was demanding court-martials. That didn’t strike Doug Seuss as a productive idea. He needed soldiers who would fight, not people looking for an opportunity to desert to avoid a combat they thought morally wrong.
Seuss had been trading messages with the Pentagon. West Texas was the finest terrain on this side of the Atlantic for tank operations, but he was unwilling to commit his tanks without air protection. There was no place on the naked plains for tanks to hide if they were attacked from the air. Seuss told the generals in the Pentagon that he was unwilling to sacrifice his troops needlessly to make political points. “You must guarantee me air cover for my tanks or they will not be committed,” he said flatly. His worry was that he would get the promise of air cover, commit the tanks, and friendly fighters would never appear while Texas fighters would. That, he thought, was the way the wind was blowing.
Sifting through the readiness reports and the results of interviews with his soldiers, he found a company of the 10th Special Forces Group had sixty percent of their troops willing to fight. He called the colonel in command of the group, Colonel Kevin Crislip, into his office. After a heart-to-heart talk, he decided to send the colonel and his volunteers to Texas to blow up some highway and railroad bridges.