NEXT BEST HOPE (The Revelation Trilogy) (23 page)

“Do what you think best, General Aloysius,” Whitfield told him.

Sherman radioed his orders to the commander on the ground. The commander stepped outside his bunker with a foghorn in his hands. He put it to his lips and announced that if the CM forces did not retreat to the Mississippi line within ten minutes, federal troops would open fire on them.

The CM boys who had been horsing around in front of the federal troops snapped to attention, returned to their vehicles and put on their battle gear. After seven minutes, the lead vehicle commander for the CM troops announced to his forces that he had received orders to withdraw to the Mississippi line. Despite this announcement, the vehicles behind him held their positions, refusing to give up the little bit of Louisiana they had taken.

Precisely ten minutes after the federal commander gave his warning, federal guns opened up on the New Israel convoy. The CM vehicles were like ducks on a pond for them. One after another of the vehicles took hits and exploded as their young occupants struggled to free themselves from the burning detritus of war. As federal fire worked its way east up the bridge, the CM troops abandoned their vehicles and ran wildly across the wide expanse of the Mississippi Bridge, back to their native soil. Some of them pointed their pistols towards the federal troops and ripped off a few rounds that fell spent into the father of waters, the river that President Lincoln said had run unvexed to the sea since the fall of Vicksburg and Port Hudson in the summer of 1863.

When the CM retreat was finished, the federal commander had his troops triage the CM casualties. He signaled the CM commander to come and retrieve his wounded and watched as attendants loaded bodies and wounded young men in field ambulances before weaving their way back across the river, dodging incinerated Humvees and troop carriers.

The federal commander then ordered caterpillars up the highway where they piled destroyed CM vehicles on top of each other and blocked the Interstate.

“No one is coming through here unless he comes through me,” the federal commander said.

•  •  •

J. Franklin Westmoreland sat at his desk in Waco and monitored each transmission from the front. When he heard the news from Waskom, he said, “I knew they didn’t have the gumption to fight us.”

But the news from Vicksburg caught him off guard.

“Who told them they could retreat?” he asked Stanley.

“You gave the generals on the ground authority to make those kinds of decisions,” Stanley said.

“I am rescinding those orders,” Westmoreland said. “From now on, I’ll call the shots.”

“Frank, you don’t know anything about fighting a war,” Stanley said trying to calm him.

“The Lord will give me the knowledge I need when the time comes,” Westmoreland responded.

“We knew this moment was coming,” Nussbaum said. “It is better that it came early, and we suffered only a handful of casualties. Now our boys will be ready for the real thing.”

“I guess you’re right, Stanley,” Westmoreland said. “We’re in this for the long haul. I may have underestimated the opposition. I won’t make that mistake again.”

•  •  •

In Washington, General Aloysius met with Bass Whitfield, Ert, and Leadoff and gave them the report.

“How many soldiers died today?” Bass asked.

“None on our side, sir. As far as we can tell, Mr. President, on the CM side there were about seven killed and forty wounded,” Sherman said.

“God help us,” Whitfield said.

“I’m not sure whose side he’s on, Mr. President,” Leadoff said as his thoughts drifted to the sight of Curry McNabb shot through the head lying on the Gregg County Courthouse lawn.

LEON MARTINEZ SAT
in the back seat as Ralph eased the limo through the front entrance to Shiloh National Military Park where the driver showed his Tennessee driver’s license to the security guard. The guard gave him a sticker that Ralph hung on his rearview mirror as he turned east and began to tour the park.

During the week on a school day in mid-Spring, the park was almost deserted as the limo made its way from one narrow lane punctuated by historical markers to the next.

Near the Shiloh Methodist church, he parked on a gravel drive in front of a fence that marked off a private cemetery. He stayed in the vehicle while Leon got out and walked through the gate to the graves. In a few minutes, he came out the gate and ambled alongside the fence until it led him to a wooded area between the graveyard and the state highway that fronted the park. On the top of a wooded ridge, he sat down on an old stump, took his New Testament from his pocket and flipped through the pages, looking for nothing in particular.

“Who would have thought that we would return to the scene of the crime?” he heard someone say to him.

“That’s the last place most people think to look, Agent Finis,” Leon said.

“I suppose so, but it’s too exposed for my comfort,” Ithurial said. “Tell me what you have on your mind because I don’t plan to stay here long. I figure Agent Brown is not far behind me.”

All Leon had thought about the last few days was what he would say to Finis if he ever saw him alive again. Now he had trouble spitting it out.

“I’m not sure how some of these things are going to play out, Agent Finis. But one way or another, you will probably have to kill at least one more national leader before we are through with our mission,” he said.

Finis thought back on his history with Martinez, how Westmoreland introduced them and commended Leon, how Finis agreed to train paramilitary troops for a suicide mission, how Ithurial never liked him but ignored Leon’s arrogance while he focused on God’s plan, how Martinez dismissed his advice like a tenured college professor lecturing to incoming freshmen.

Finis fought back his impulse to add Martinez’s name to the list of national leaders already sacrificed on the CM altar. He clinched his fists and walked several paces away from Leon, looked at the ground and kicked a rock loose from the red clay with the tip of his army boot.

Leon watched Finis but paid no attention to his mood. His mind was on the scheme he had planned, a plot that only Finis could make happen.

“I need to know you’re with me on this all the way to the end,” Leon said, pressing him. He had never gotten up from the stump.

Finis turned toward him and drew his revolver.

To Leon, the barrel on the pistol pointed at him looked a foot long with a diameter the size of a silver dollar. He froze, afraid to make a run for it, afraid to cry out to Ralph for help, afraid to pray.

“Let me tell you something, you self-righteous little prick, I no longer answer to you. I don’t expect to live through this mission. But I have no intention of dying for your political ambition. If you are on the Lord’s side, I am your best ally; if you’re not, then you had better keep a watchful eye out for me.

“Now tell me your plan in twenty-five words or less and haul your scrawny ass back to Houston,” Finis said as his body trembled with rage.

“Yes, sir, Agent Finis,” Martinez said. Then Finis listened without speaking while Leon told him what he was thinking.

When Leon finished, Finis lowered his pistol and said, “You can go now.”

Leon flew off the dead tree trunk, stumbled his way down the slope of the ridge and never looked back, not even after he got in the limo where Ralph was asleep in the driver’s seat with the window rolled down.

“Get us outa here now,” Leon barked at Ralph, who came to life.

“What’s wrong with you, boss?” Ralph said as he looked around and didn’t see obvious threats.

“None of your goddamned business,” Leon said. “I said get us out of here.”

Ralph straightened his chauffeur’s cap and looked straight ahead. He rolled up his window, cranked up the volume on Hank Williams and drove toward the park exit. When they passed the visitor center, now off-limits to the public because of the investigation surrounding the siege, Ralph tipped his hat as a sign of respect, not knowing that those courageous men, who thought they were the vanguard of God’s kingdom, had died not for God, but for purposes known only to his back seat passenger.

Leon Martinez never glanced at the place where Asa Cockburn carried out his orders. When he felt the car slow down as Ralph showed his respect to the fallen CM militia, he poked him in the shoulder.

“Get a move on, Ralph. I’m not paying you to sight see,” he said as he took a call on his iPhone from a big time donor.

AS THE MAJOR
networks announced the news of the first overt hostilities between U.S. forces and the CM troops of New Israel, President Bascom Whitfield despaired. He pounded his hand on his leg and wondered what he had gotten himself and his country into. He yearned for a simpler time, one that knew no division of American society into those factions on God’s side and those against Him, a time before the politicizing of every issue, a make believe world in which people judged the actions of their leaders by what was best for the country, not what matched up with their personal agendas.

As Bass struggled with his inner demons, Ert Roberts let himself in the Oval Office and took a seat in an antique armed chair near the far wall. Roberts knew not what to say, how to counsel the president.

The two men sat in the seats of power—powerless before the onslaught of history.

“I should have stopped Sherman before he gave the order to fire on them,” Bass said, breaking the silence.

“And then what?” Ert said. “You couldn’t let the CM forces march in and take whatever they wanted. You had to send a message to them somehow.”

“But what message did I send? That force is the answer?” Whitfield said. “If that is the answer, then peace is nothing but the tyrannical rule of the person with the biggest stick. Human history is littered with the failed artifacts of that approach. I become just another bully with more guns than the other guy.”

Leadoff entered in time to hear the president’s last remark.

“Mr. President, we all know the saying that evil triumphs when good men do nothing,” Leadoff said.

“That’s just a way of justifying whatever we want to do,” Whitfield said. “We believe we are the good guys; they think we are the devil’s henchmen. How do we know we are in the right?”

“The best we can do is to consider all the options and act as best we know how,” Ert responded. “No one has ever been able to do anything better than that. Our consciences are our guides.”

“The CM forces aren’t worried about their consciences,” Whitfield said. “They rely on the certainly of their religious beliefs. They are beyond doubt, beyond soul-searching, and self-introspection.”

“They rely on their religious beliefs as interpreted by Frank Westmoreland. He doesn’t have an inside track on God,” Leadoff said. “His God is worse than my devil. His God said it was all right to execute a good man like Curry McNabb to prove a point. I reject that creed. If that is what faith is about, then to hell with it.”

Whitfield stepped next to the window where in the darkness he saw people outside the walls of the White House compound as they marched back and forth with signs that condemned the actions of the federal troops.

“No one is willing to demonstrate against God,” he said as he turned away from the window.

On the TV screen, the men saw footage of U.S. forces as they carried dead CM soldiers in body bags and loaded them into ambulances with the flag of New Israel painted on them. Cameras filmed the ambulances as they grew smaller and faded into the distance on the east side of the Mississippi. One clip fastened on the face of a U.S. soldier as he looked across the river with tears in his eyes.

As more scenes cascaded across the monitor, the President’s phone rang. He picked it up and listened as someone gave him a report.

“You’re kidding me,” Whitfield said and then continued listening.

Ert and Leadoff looked at each other and waited for Whitfield to let them in on the news.

“Tell him he can come over. I’ll notify the guards at the gate,” Whitfield said.

Bass got a pen and wrote a few words on a note pad. He placed the phone on the hook, and sat down at his desk, oblivious to Ert and Leadoff.

He buzzed his intercom and BB entered in a matter of seconds.

“Tell security we have a guest on the way,” he said to BB as he handed him the note.

BB didn’t say a word. He took the note, saluted the president, turned on his heel and marched out of the room.

Whitfield looked at Ert and Leadoff. “You’re not going to believe this one,” he said. “I don’t want to spoil it for you.”

Before the door closed completely behind BB, Sherman Aloysius stuck his hand in and caught it. The three men in the room glanced at him and then looked away. They sat down and left him standing.

“I did what I thought was right,” Aloysius said. “I still think it was the right thing.”

No one spoke.

Finally the President said, “Sit down Sherman. You’re still chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Just don’t expect us to pat you on the back. Now we have to decide how to proceed. But first, we have a visitor to interview.”

The general looked around the room. Ert and Leadoff shrugged their shoulders. Before Sherman could ask for any more information, BB signaled the president on the intercom.

“Come on in,” the president told him.

BB opened the door and stepped in the Oval Office. With his left hand he held the door for the guest, a bald, overweight man in his late fifties. The man shook hands with everyone in the room until he came to the President’s desk, then he stood at attention awaiting the President’s direction.

Bass Whitfield walked around his desk and extended his hand.

“It is a great pleasure to meet you, Mr. President,” the man said.

“The pleasure is mine, Mr. Greenwald,” President Whitfield said.

“Please call me Flash, Mr. President,” Flash Greenwald said.

A COUPLE WALKED
up the steps to church on the Sunday after the skirmish on the Mississippi Bridge. The stained-glass windows in the massive building glistened in the morning sun and protected the worshippers from an unfettered view of the outside world. Near the dozen stairs that led to the massive front doors, two fields of white crosses bore silent testimony; one to the fetuses aborted each day in Texas, the other to the seven CM soldiers lost at the Battle of the Mississippi Bridge. Similar displays cropped up at churches throughout New Israel and within the United States.