As he tried to decide what to say, the reporter followed up with the question, “What if it was no questions asked, all forgiven?”
“I’m certainly not going to engage in international diplomacy via your newspaper,” he said tartly.
“Even if President Soetoro were removed from office?”
“My answer stands.”
“You mean, sir, there is no peaceful way to restore the Union?”
Jack Hays weighed his answer as the cameras scrutinized his face and the reporters watched.
“The old nation was seriously divided,” he said, “with political power split between large urban populations and the people in the heartland. Even Texas has some of that. Some of the policies that the elected politicians in Houston wish to follow have been resoundingly rejected by the rest of the state’s residents. In a free nation there will always be the push and pull of conflicting views, conflicting desires, conflicting interests. Yet in my judgment, in the old nation the system had broken down, irreparably, and that is why Barry Soetoro chose to become a dictator, to force his political vision on people who rejected it repeatedly at the polls and in the Congress.
“Be that as it may, the reality is that if the people of Texas wish to continue to enjoy the rights granted by the old Constitution, such as free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, the right to own a gun, the sovereign right to control our borders, the right to be ruled by elected representatives and not be dictated to by the executive or the courts or bureaucracies… if Texans want those things, they need to be an independent nation.”
Jack Hays paused, gathering his thoughts. “Our parting from the United States has not been amicable. Barry Soetoro is raining Tomahawk cruise missiles on the people of Texas. If he wants Texas back in the Union, I would tell him what the citizens of Gonzales, Texas, told Mexican army Colonel Ugartechea in 1835 when he demanded return of a cannon. If you want it, ‘come and take it.’”
TWENTY-SEVEN
The interview with the Texas president Jack Hays was broadcast via satellite to those stations and networks still broadcasting in an America with limited electrical assets. It also was soon on the internet. Yet it was on clandestine radio stations that it was picked up by the refugees hidden in the CIA safe farm in the Allegheny Mountains.
I was there when it was played on the recorder that Friday night to the assembled audience in the cabin on the mountainside. I had spent the evening worrying about what would happen when we were discovered, which was bound to happen in the near future. I inspected the machine-gun pits, strategically located around a kill zone in front of the house where any vehicles would have to come to a stop, and inspected each and every rifle and pistol and AT4. I was a worried man, and tired of waiting.
Sarah Houston watched me fret and said nothing. Perhaps she was becoming fatalistic. It would be a miracle if any of us got out of this mess alive. I wondered if she was resigned to the inevitable.
Yet she was at my side when the tape played, and Jack Hays’ clear, confident baritone voice spoke of the problems of the United States and the future of Texas. I watched Jake Grafton’s face — the man should have been a poker master in Vegas — and the much more expressive faces of Sal Molina and Jack Yocke. And, I confess, cynic that I was, I wondered how all this squared with the White House plotting that Grafton had overheard. I had quizzed Sarah about that — she said she had listened to little of it. Grafton kept her too busy with other things. But, she said, Jake Grafton had listened. By the hour. Night after night. He knew!
He knew what?
When the tape was over, Sal Molina spoke first. “When Puerto Rico and Illinois melt down, America has two choices. We can let those two go bankrupt and default on their bonds, or the federal government can take over their debts. If the latter, the states as we know them are doomed: They will cease to exist as sovereign entities. The federal government — actually the executive — will be the ruler of America, able to dictate the smallest decisions, the minutiae of American life, dictate how it will be for his allies and his enemies, of whom he has a great many.”
Yocke snorted. “It will never happen,” he declared.
Molina merely gave him a derisive glance, stood, and went up the stairs to bed. Yocke piddled and diddled, looked out the window a bit, then followed Molina upstairs.
Grafton and I were the only two left in the room. I decided to brace him. “How long are we going to hide here?”
He looked at me with two raised eyebrows. “Are you getting impatient?”
“Yes, sir.”
He nodded, readjusted his fanny without wincing, and sipped at a cup of cold coffee that rested on the stand beside him. After all his years in the navy, it seemed that he was impervious to caffeine.
“The whole country is going to hell,” I said, “and I feel like a tit on a boar sitting around here. I’m ready to shoot somebody.”
“I thought you did that earlier today.”
“It wasn’t enough. I want to shoot some of those Soetoro sons of bitches, the assholes who decided to rule America and everyone in it. I want to kill those bastards for what they did to my country.”
He grunted.
“We can’t just sit here! What about your wife? Your daughter and her husband? What about America?”
He smiled at me, which drove my blood pressure up another ten points. “Tommy, there is a time for everything. This pot has to simmer before the country is ready to throw Soetoro out. We’re almost there, I suspect, but not quite. Another day or two, then we’ll hit the road. We’ll have lots of help.”
“Oh,” I said, less than enthusiastically. “And where the hell are we going?” I wanted to be sure the old fart had a plan.
“Why, to Washington of course.”
“And this help? Like who?”
“We’ll pick them up on the way.”
“You hope!”
Grafton looked at me askance. “You don’t really believe in the American people, do you?”
“I’ve killed too many of ’em.” He didn’t say anything, so I added, “They voted for Soetoro twice. They’ve sat on their collective thumbs watching the bastard pervert the Constitution, lie like a dog, and poison race relations, and they haven’t done anything about it other than elect some gutless Republicans who refuse to stand up to Soetoro. The American people don’t seem to give a damn about their country or the future that their kids are going to have to live in. Americans just don’t care anymore. Naw, I don’t think much of the American people. I wish I’d gotten out years ago.”
When I wound down he cocked his head and looked me in the eyes as he said, “These are the descendants of the people who hacked out homes in the wilderness. They fought Indians, the British, the Mexicans, and each other. Over a half million Americans died in the Civil War. They peopled a continent and built a nation. They helped win two wars in Europe and defeated Japan. They fought in Vietnam to help a poor people resist communism. They’ve done their best to fight terrorism and help people in the third world get a leg up. You grossly underestimate them.
“True, they voted for Soetoro, and a lot of them did it because they naively thought Soetoro would be good for race relations in America, and they thought that was a larger good. This race thing…,” he shook his head, “… people want America to include everybody. Martin Luther King left a huge legacy, and America wants his vision, wants an American to be judged by his character rather than the color of his skin. That is the society we want to live in, but we’re not there yet. Our first black president got into office not because of his character or his politics, but because he’s half-black — or in the parlance of today, black. He gets away with pissing on the Constitution because he’s black. He gets away with lying because he’s black. He gets away with poisoning race relations because he’s black. Even the liberals on the Supreme Court have given him pass after pass.”