Liberty's Last Stand Read online

  Copyright © 2016 by Stephen Coonts

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, website, or broadcast.

  Regnery® is a registered trademark of Salem Communications Holding Corporation

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner.

  First e-book edition 2016: ISBN 978-1-62157-529-0

  Originally published in hardcover, 2016

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file with the Library of Congress

  Published in the United States by

  Regnery Publishing

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  ALSO BY STEPHEN COONTS

  The Art of War

  Saucer: Savage Planet

  Saucer: The Conquest

  Saucer

  Pirate Alley

  The Disciple

  The Assassin

  The Traitor

  Liars & Thieves

  Liberty

  America

  Hong Kong

  Cuba

  Fortunes of War

  The Intruders

  The Red Horseman

  Under Siege

  The Minotaur

  Final Flight

  Flight of the Intruder

  WITH WILLIAM H. KEITH

  Deep Black: Death Wave

  Deep Black: Sea of Terror

  Deep Black: Arctic Gold

  WITH JIM DEFELICE

  Deep Black: Conspiracy

  Deep Black: Jihad

  Deep Black: Payback

  Deep Black: Dark Zone

  Deep Black: Biowar

  Deep Black

  NONFICTION

  The Cannibal Queen

  ANTHOLOGIES

  The Sea Witch

  On Glorious Wings

  Victory

  Combat

  War in the Air

  WRITING AS EVE ADAMS

  The Garden of Eden

  To all those persons, wherever they are, who believe in Liberty.

  The oath to be taken by the president on first entering office is specified in Article II, Section 1, of the United States Constitution.

  “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  PROLOGUE

  On that third Saturday in August, four separate events came together and snowballed into an avalanche that forever changed life in the United States.

  The first occurred on a ranch in west Texas, a few minutes after one in the morning. There was no moon, so the night was dark, enlivened only by a million stars in the clear sky. The ranch belonged to Joseph Robert Hays, Joe Bob to his friends. For many years Joe Bob had made a modest living raising cattle on his twenty-two-thousand-acre spread, but drought and economics finally forced him out of that business. Like the very first Texans, he had no intention of giving up his land, so he decided to try something else.

  Today the ranch raised African game animals, a dozen varieties of antelope, which rich sportsmen paid Joe Bob serious money to hunt. Why go to Africa to hunt, Africa with its desperate poverty and brutal Islamic terrorists? Hunt right here in Texas, in the beating heart of the good ol’ US of A. That was what his brochures said that he mailed to anyone who inquired about his ranch. His youngest son was a schoolteacher and had cleaned up the message so it read smoother in the brochures, but that is the way Joe Bob wrote it.

  Joe Bob also picked up a little money by hosting scout camps on weekends over the winter and making sure every camper got to see and photograph some of the exotic species.

  His ranch adjoined the Rio Grande, the river that formed the boundary between the United States and Mexico, with its poverty, caste system, and systemic corruption. So the poor Mexicans migrated. Over thirteen million of them, over a fifth of the Mexican population, had crossed that border illegally in the last fifty years and were grubbing for work in the United States, usually for minimum wage, or living on welfare and food stamps. Illiterate, unskilled, and usually unable to speak English, they flooded the schools with their children, kept blue-collar wages low, and formed an underclass that resisted assimilation and required huge amounts of public assistance dollars.

  American politicians had done little through the years to stem the flood. Hispanic voters wanted their kinsmen to be able to enter the United States regardless of their ability to contribute to the economy or pay their own bills, yet this wasn’t the decisive factor. Farmers and small-business men wanted a source of cheap labor, and were content to pass the true costs, the social costs, on to the taxpayers. Generous public welfare programs also drew millions of Mexicans, more than small business or agriculture could possibly use. Even draining off an eighth of the population didn’t really help Mexico, which found itself racked by turf wars between vicious criminal gangs that smuggled drugs into the United States to supply the richest narcotics market in the world.

  Joe Bob’s ranch had six miles of riverfront, and unfortunately sat astride an ancient trail up from old Mexico, one that had been used for millennia. The tread of thousands of feet for thousands of years had left their mark on the land. The trail began somewhere in the Mexican state of Coahuila, hundreds of miles to the south, but it could be accessed from a dirt road that crossed it two miles south of the river. From there it descended into an arroyo, avoiding the sandstone escarpments that the river had left in the tens of millions of years it had been eroding the land. The escarpments, cliffs of hard, dense rock from eight to twelve feet high, were vertical and formed walls that spread out from the
arroyo in a fan pattern. On the north side of the river, the trail, about six feet wide and packed hard, climbed another arroyo into the scrub brush of the Hays ranch. The trail was the easiest and most direct way to get from the dirt road south of the river to the hard road on the north side of the ranch. Drug smugglers sent the mules—men carrying drugs in backpacks—from the road on short summer nights after dark. They would wade the river, cross the Hays ranch on the north side, throw the drugs over the fence there to men waiting with a van, then walk back and be south of the river, safe in old Mexico, by dawn.

  When he ran cattle, Joe Bob Hays had used a three-strand barbed wire fence across the trail about three hundred yards north of the river to keep his cattle in. Illegal immigrants and drug smugglers had to merely lift the top wire and press one down to crawl through. When he got into the hunting business, Joe Bob had to build a much better fence to hold the exotics, an eight-foot-high chain-link affair topped with a strand of barbed wire. The fence was more expensive than the animals. He borrowed money from the bank at the county seat to finance both. In addition to keeping the antelope in, the fence kept the Mexicans out, so they cut it, allowing the various species of expensive antelope to escape the ranch.

  Joe Bob was nothing if not determined. After he had repaired holes in the fence a half-dozen times, he decided he had had enough. He complained to the Border Patrol, the DEA, and the county sheriff, and he wrote letters to his congressman and senators and members of the Texas legislature. All to no avail. The DEA, mysterious as always, didn’t reply to his letters. Those who replied said they were sorry, but nothing could be done. Neither the Border Patrol nor the sheriff’s department had the manpower to guard his fence.

  The politicians pointed their fingers at the president, who, for political reasons, was in a squabble with Congress about immigration and refused to compromise. Of course, he was merely the latest president, and this was the latest Congress, to do little or nothing about the unarmed invasion from Mexico. Someday, someway, all those illegals would become American voters, and when it happened in that distant, hazy someday, both political parties would want their votes, but none more so than the Democrats, who had bet their political future on the bedrock of welfare and food stamps for the uneducated, the unskilled, the addicted, and the shiftless unable or unwilling to find work in an American economy increasingly fueled by science, technology, and government employment.

  It never occurred to Joe Bob to complain to the Mexican government, which actively encouraged its citizens to migrate illegally to the United States and was infamously corrupted by criminals in the drug business.

  So the last time he repaired his fence, Joe Bob put tin cans with small rocks in them on the top strand of barbed wire. The cans tinkled when the wind moved the wire, and they should tinkle when Mexicans operated on the chain links with wire cutters.

  Tonight Joe Bob sat under some scrub brush on the bank of the arroyo on his side of the fence. Across his knees was an old Marlin lever action in .30-30, with a nightscope mounted on it that he had ordered from a Cabela’s catalog.

  He had been here for two nights, had seen and heard no one, and was tired. Yet this evening before twilight he had seen dust to the south, so he thought some Mexicans might come tonight. If they were drug smugglers, they wouldn’t cut the fence by the hard road. Illegal immigrants would cut the northern fence, however, to squeeze through.

  Damn them all, anyhow.

  Joe Bob opened his snuff can and put a pinch in his mouth. He really wanted a cigarette, but they might see the glow or smell the smoke. He wanted to surprise them, throw some shots around, run them back across the river. The sons of bitches could find another place to cross, and no doubt would. But he was sick and tired of working on his goddamn fence.

  He was thinking about a drink of water when he heard the cans rattle down in the arroyo. Someone, man or animal, was fooling with the fence.

  Joe Bob lifted his rifle and began scanning with the scope, looking for people.

  What he didn’t know was that two Mexican gunmen on the other side of the fence were also looking for him with nightscopes, better ones than Joe Bob could afford. They had been hired to escort eight mules to the paved highway on the northern side of Joe Bob’s ranch, where a vehicle would meet them to take the packages of cocaine on to Los Angeles.

  The lead mule rattled the fence while the gunmen searched. One of the shooters, Jesus Morales, spotted Joe Bob Hays seated under a bush and settled the crosshairs of his scope on him. He squeezed the trigger.

  The bullet smacked Joe Bob in the chest, a mortal wound, and he went over backward.

  Nothing else moved on the ranch side of the fence, so after a twenty-minute wait to be sure, the fence was cut and the mules moved through the opening up the ancient trail. Morales climbed the bank of the arroyo to where Joe Bob Hays lay bleeding out. He found him with the nightscope.

  To Morales’ amazement, the rancher was still alive. Morales pointed his rifle at the dying man’s head and pulled the trigger. His head exploded.

  The Mexicans moved on, walking north with their loads. The wheels of commerce were turning, as they had to turn, for that was the way of the world.

  At eleven o’clock that Saturday morning four clean-shaven, skinny young men bought tickets for the Amtrak Express to New York at the BWI Airport station between Washington and Baltimore. They had arrived in a stolen car that they parked on the upper level of the garage adjacent to the station. Carrying backpacks, they took the stairs down and into the train station and stood in line to buy tickets. When their turns came, they each paid cash for a ticket to New York, then went out onto the platform to wait for the train. There were no metal detectors to pass through; no one inspected their backpacks.

  Ten minutes later the train arrived right on time. They climbed aboard, each entering a different car.

  They found seats. The train was crowded, as usual. The young men looked around and were pleased to see that there were no uniformed police, no armed guards of any type, not that they expected any. This was America, the most under-policed nation on earth.

  The train pulled out right on time, at twenty-two minutes after the hour. There was no clanking and jerking. Powered by electric locomotives, the train merely glided into motion.

  The traveler who had boarded the last car, Salah al Semn, found that the only empty seat was in the middle of the car, facing two fit young men, one white, one black, clean-shaven, with military haircuts, wearing jeans and pull-over short-sleeve shirts. He had seen that type before in Iraq, and suspected, rightly, that they were in the American military. He ignored them. Beside him was a young person with unkempt long hair wearing ear buds and apparently listening to an iPod.

  With their backpacks on their laps or in the overhead bins, all four of the men who boarded at BWI sat back in their seats, avoided eye contact with their fellow passengers, and checked their watches. They had some time to wait, so they watched the countryside pass outside the windows and thought private thoughts as the train ran along through suburbs and into downtown Baltimore.

  In the Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights, a van pulled up outside a parochial school. There were three men in it, brown, clean-shaven skinny men in jeans. They sat watching as families parked their cars and took children into the school. Today was registration day for a new school year that was to begin Monday. Nuns ran the school and taught some of the classes. In the office, nuns supervised the registration process and shook hands with the parents and greeted the students, most of whom were returning for another year. The school was for children in grades one through six. It had been in operation for over a hundred years, and many of the parents were graduates.

  The name of the school, Our Sisters of Mercy, was emblazoned above the main entrance, but the men in the van couldn’t read the words. Not only did they not know how to read and write English, they were illiterate in all the world’s languages, including their own, which was Farsi. The only education any of the thre
e had ever received was in an Islamic school, where the sole item in the curriculum was the memorization of the Koran. The Prophet’s message, their teachers knew, was all the boys really needed to know to wend their way through this vale of tears and earn their way into Paradise.

  The men in the van checked their watches. As the two in the front seat scrutinized every vehicle and watched traffic on the street, the man in back began opening bags and extracting semiautomatic AR-15 assault rifles, into which he inserted magazines.

  At Yankee Stadium in the Bronx the players were on the field warming up, tossing balls around, taking batting practice, and signing autographs for the kids and fans who hung over the rails. The Yanks were not having a good year; they were third in the American League East standings, ten games off the pace, so management expected that only half the seats in the stadium would have bodies in them when the game against the Detroit Tigers started at precisely one o’clock.

  The jihadist, Nuri Said, sat in the top tier of seats watching the activities on the field as fans wandered in. He had attended two games in the past few weeks and had a rudimentary understanding of the game, which he thought boring. Mainly he watched the uniformed police who stood here and there at the portals that people had to pass through to get to and from the stands to the vast galleries where there were restaurants, fast food stands, and restrooms.

  Nuri had chosen Yankee Stadium for his jihad strike because of the television cameras that would make him and his three mates famous and immortal. The police were a necessary evil, he thought, and would kill all four of them, but not until after the cameras had captured the naked power of Islam for all the world’s infidels to see and ponder. Nuri Said and his three fellow believers would please Allah, he knew, which was more than most men accomplished in this life. That would be enough.