A State of Disobedience Read online

  A State of Disobedience

  by

  Tom Kratman

  Table of Contents

  A State of Disobedience

  Tom Kratman

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2003 by Tom Kratman

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 0-7434-7170-9

  Cover art by Stephen Hickman

  First printing, December 2003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

  Printed in the United States of America

  To Hillary, Janet, and Lon

  Prologue:

  From: Staring Into the Abyss: A History of the North American Republic in the First Quarter of the 21st Century, Copyright 2097, Professor Allan Richardson, Yale University Press

  * * *

  As we have seen in the preceding chapter, at no time since 1860 had the United States of America stood as close to civil war as it did a mere eight years after the turn of the century. With unprecedented sharp divisions in political, economic and social philosophy; with a near perfect balance in the electorate, the Congress, and the utterly political Supreme Court; with the growing specter of political failure equating to the levying of criminal charges, conviction and prison, politics—American politics—had become a very dangerous game indeed.

  This was brought home to all with the arrest, conviction and imprisonment of former President Thomas Jefferson Gates on charges of corruption, bribe taking, rape, aggravated sexual assault, unnatural acts, abuse of office, misappropriation of funds, and treason, the imprisonment itself leading to the former chief of state's beating, homosexual rape and murder by strangulation after his Secret Service detail was withdrawn by presidential order. It could well be said that no national-level politician could any longer afford to lose an election; the consequences had simply become too dire.1

  No more could one political party or the other afford losing its control of at least one body of the government: Executive, Legislative or Judicial, for without some political or quasi-political safe harbor, some means of countering and stymieing the opposing party, every member of each party faced a similar fate. None were whole; none pure, and all knew it.

  Yet, despite this mutual interest in maintaining the balance of power, the rewards of attaining control were simply too great to be forgone. For the Democrats, control—could it but be achieved—would make the revolution begun in the 1930s complete. Control of the economy, control of education, control of the environment (difficult to understand now, with the then-common predictions of ecological disaster proven wrong, but a powerful concern at the time); could all three branches be made to fall to the Democracy, however briefly in theory, the Democrats could so arrange matters that no one and nothing could ever remove them from power, or alter their vision of America's proper and just future.

  For the Republicans, however, the Democratic dream was a nightmare: thought control through linguistic control, micromanagement of the economy by those least suited to economic power, social engineering under the aegis of the most doctrinaire of the social engineers, disarmament of the population and the creation of a police state to rival that of Stalin or Hitler, at least in its scope if not by design in its evil.

  Indeed, it could be said that it was precisely the seventy years of open and quasi war with first Hitler, then Stalin, then with the heirs of Stalin that had put the United States in the position in which it found itself at the beginning of the 21st Century.

  For, as a wise man of the times had once put it, "You should choose your enemies carefully, because you are going to become just like them."

  And so, subtly, too slowly to be perceived, the United States had become—if not "just," then certainly much—like its erstwhile enemies.

  Not that there had been great choice in the matter. Faced with totalitarian propaganda, the United States had learned to twist truth in self-defense. Faced with planned economies, economies able to challenge the west only through inflicting deprivations on the workers, the United States had been forced to greater and greater economic control emanating from Washington. Faced with the possibility of armed invasion (though we know now that was never a realistic concern) the central federal government was forced into taking on more and more responsibility under the aegis of national self-defense.

  From the national highway system (to move the military to the ports and defense materials to and from the factories) to the school lunch program (to provide educable cannon fodder for the wars and campaigns) to rates and levels of taxation we can today only marvel at (to pay for waging an often hidden conflict by land, sea, air, in space and—through propaganda and strings-attached foreign aid—in the hearts of the uncommitted); each and every spurt of growth in federal power, each Republican-detested centralization of authority, the Republicans had themselves fought for, at a minimum acquiesced in, in the interests of winning the seventy year war.

  Yet, less than a generation after the successful closure of that interminable conflict the United States found itself as thoroughly divided into two hostile camps as had been the world previously.

  Briefly, things seemed to be on the road to improvement. National political and philosophical differences seemed cast aside one terrible morning in 2001 amidst the shrieks of thousands of bombed, battered, burning victims of a vicious terrorist attack that threw all awry.

  With the screams of the dying in their ears, the vision of the flames seared onto their eyes, no one, not Republican, not Democrat, not the man or woman on the streets resisted for a moment the most severe curtailing of civil liberties in the history of the Republic. Thus when, seven years later, the United States emerged victorious from what was known in some circles as "The Arab War," in some as "The Moslem War," in most as "The War against Terror," not only were all the previous differences found to be still largely intact, the mechanisms of control had been much improved and enhanced.

  Worse, as it had been in 1860, the balance was near perfect . . . and perfectly precarious. The slightest shift left or right could tumble the entire shaky edifice into ruin, even into civil war.

  Fortunately, at that time the right person, the right woman, appeared at hand.

  Chapter One

  From the transcript at trial: Commonwealth of

  Virginia v. Alvin Scheer

  * * *

  DIRECT EXAMINATION

  BY MR. STENNINGS:

  Q. Sir, Please state your name for the Judge.

  A. Scheer, Your Honor, sir. Alvin G. Scheer.

  Q. And where do you live, Mr. Scheer?

  A. Well, the past several months, at least, I've been living if you could call it that, at the Fairfax County Jail. Before that? I lived in Texas, little town called White Deer, not too far from Amarillo.

  Q. Mr. Scheer, please tell the judge your story.

  A. Yes, sir. Your honor, I understand from Mr. Stennings I need to tell y'all everything. I don't mind. But where to begin?

  If it 'tweren't the worst of times; surely 'twern't the best, neither.

  Heard something like that once on an old movie on TV. "Best and worst." Might maybe have come out of a book. Don't rightly know. I ain't no educated man. Always bee
n just a simple working man . . . "simple"—that's me. Not sophisticated, you know. Not like them folks over in Washington, the ones that got all the answers to everything.

  I watch 'em. I watch 'em on TV. Got an answer for everything. It used not be so bad; I remember. Used to be a man could rightly expect a job, a wage to support his family and himself, taxes that didn't eat him alive. Nope, surely 'twern't the best.

  Lotsa folks turned to religion . . .

  Washington, DC

  "Willi! Willi! Willi! WILLI!"

  The sound grew. Louder and louder the crowd chanted as their goddess ascended the stage to the podium. The chant's force caused dust to spring up from little unseen corners of the auditorium. It assaulted the ears. It overwhelmed the senses. It made the internal organs ripple in a way that was unpleasant to anyone not a devotee of politics.

  To Ms. Wilhelmina Rottemeyer, President-Elect of the United States of America, the sound was orgasm. Never in her life had a thrusting man entering her body given her such a glorious feeling. To be honest, never in her life had a man made her feel anything but weight, that and—not infrequently—disgust. Her ex-husband had mostly made her feel disgust.

  Reaching the podium, Rottemeyer surveyed the rainbow sea of devoted, ecstatic faces before her. She locked eyes with her lover, her true lover, retired—and soon to be recalled and promoted—Army Lieutenant General Caroline McCreavy. McReavy smiled warmly. Another small shudder of orgasm swept Rottemeyer's body, though it failed to reach her face.

  Lifting both arms up and outward, palms down, Rottemeyer made gentle patting motions. Gradually the sound ebbed. WILLI! Willi! Willi! Willi.

  She began to speak. "My people. My people. I have just received a telephone call from the President. He concedes the electio—"

  Louder even than before, the crowd broke out in a mindless animal shriek of fury and victory. Windows vibrated, threatening to shatter. Rottemeyer vibrated too as she closed her eyes and smiled a sort of Mona Lisa smile, another little orgasm well hidden.

  Eyes opened again. The smile grew wider. It grew divine. All gazed—glassy-eyed, slack-jawed—worshipping with hearts full to bursting.

  "The way was hard. They" (everyone knew that by "they" Rottemeyer meant the Republicans, the religious right, the antichoice fanatics, the prosperous . . . the people who disagreed with her, in other words) "fought us long and hard trying to steal this election. They tried every low, dirty, sneaky, legalistic trick in the book," said W. Rottemeyer . . . Esquire.

  "They even murdered the man who should have been standing here today." Or at least we made it look that way, thought W. Rottemeyer, murderess.

  "Anything but accept the will of the People!"

  The People howled their outrage and their triumph until quelled again by their leader's gentle pats.

  "But now the will of the People is made clear to all. Not only do we control the presidency, but with the switchovers and gains in both the House and Senate we control the legislature. With that, we will control the Supreme Court."

  "From this day forward the past is swept away. No longer will we tolerate oppression. No more will we accept second place. Never again will the rich oppress the poor. In the new, glorious future we will bring dead white men will finally lose their throttle on progress! My people, the great day is here!"

  * * *

  Austin, Texas

  "Oh, isn't this a great day for the Republic?"

  Governor Juanita Montoya-Serasin de Seguin (D, Tx)—she went by her husband's name, Seguin—smiled benignly upon her tall, slender, graying adjutant general. In her size seven dress—not bad for a mother of four strong boys—and with her pretty Mexican peasant-woman face, she radiated maternal warmth and caring. Some said that was what had gotten her elected—"How can you vote against your mother?"

  But Juanita was much more than a face. A shrewd politician? Both her rivals and her supporters said so. A woman of principle? There too they agreed, though some of them had, sometimes, disagreed with those principles. Especially did those of her party but not of her state disagree. Juanita was far too conservative to suit the social-democrat core of her party. In point of fact, she was far more conservative than many a northern Republican. Texas had always been a funny place; Texas politics rarely quite matched those of the rest of the country.

  "You didn't like Willi's speech, Jack? I thought she did a fine job . . . speaking, that is."

  Glaring balefully at his chief (the adjutant general for the State of Texas, like all National Guard officers, took his oath of office to his governor), Major General John Lewis Schmidt answered, "I could care less about the speech, Juani. What scares me . . . terrifies would be more like it . . . is that that . . . that . . . that woman has complete control of the federal government for at least the next two years. Worse, she's got dreams and some of them are doozies."

  "Dreams? You think?" Juanita laughed. She knew that Rottemeyer had big plans for her presidency; big plans for society. Some of those dreams Juanita even agreed with, relatively conservative democrat or not.

  Schmidt huffed. "You're just trying to get my goat," he snorted. His sun-worn, leathery face creased in a broad smile. "Still pissed about the pranks your brother and I used to play on you?"

  "Oh, that was long ago. Before the war, even."

  "Yes," answered Schmidt, dreamily, "it was before the war."

  * * *

  "Incoming!"

  Lieutenant Schmidt pressed himself deeper into the muddy earth of the paddy as the air was split by the shattering crump-crump-crump of enemy mortar rounds. The stench of human feces filled his nostrils, causing his stomach to lurch in protest. Scant inches above him jagged, razor sharp pieces of 82-millimeter mortar shell casing whined past like so many giant, malevolent mosquitoes on a homicidal binge.

  Around Schmidt a platoon of Vietnamese Rangers—those left alive—cowered under the withering hail. He risked a look around and saw the unit's Vietnamese officer running away, his cast off equipment flying behind him. "Useless dink," he muttered.

  A body flopped to the mud next to him. Schmidt tightened his grip on his rifle and began to turn before he heard a calm voice—under the circumstances a remarkably calm voice, "If we can hang on until night we ought to make it, Jack."

  The lieutenant smiled. "You mean, sir, of course."

  "Sure, Jack . . . I mean, 'sir.' " The speaker scratched his nose with a finger, the middle finger of his left hand.

  "Any chance for artillery, Sergeant Montoya?" Schmidt asked, pretending not to have noticed that his subordinate was giving him the universal salute.

  "Not a chance. The VC got the radio when they got the radio man."

  "Shit!"

  " 'Shit,' " echoed the stocky little Tex-Mex sergeant. Still with a voice of calm he said, "Not a total loss, though, since that was Lieutenant Dong's excuse for taking off. And we're better off without him. I'm going to get to work on setting up whatever we can of a perimeter." Without another word he crawled off toward a knot of soldiers hiding, poorly, in a little shell crater.

  Where does he get it; the courage, the calm? wondered an admiring Jack Schmidt.

  * * *

  "Jack? JACK?"

  Focus returned to the old general's eyes. "Sorry, Juani. I was . . . wandering. Thinking about Jorge. It occurs to me that at the precise moment we were caught in that ambush your new president and her ex were calling us murderers and baby killers. Jorge Montoya: a baby killer!"

  * * *

  Dei Gloria Mission, Waco, Texas

  " . . . in nomine Patrii, Filioque et Spiritu Sancti."

  A very young baby squalled under the Baptismal waters pouring from the vessel in the hands of Father Montoya.

  Holding the baby, Elpidia—the diminutive fifteen-year-old mother—looked up at the priest nervously. The Latin words were close enough to the girl's native—albeit poor—Spanish that she sensed the meaning of the words, if not their theological implications. There had been little of God in the girl'
s short, unholy life. In truth, there had been little of anything good. Drugs, sex, sex for drugs, sex for money to buy drugs; these had been her universe and her faith.

  But that had changed. . . .

  * * *

  The slender, tiny, and provocatively clad Mexican prostitute shivered in the cold, windy night of a San Antonio winter. Doing her best to shield her half exposed budding breasts from the wind, the hooker walked past the little gray pornographic bookstore opposite a well-lit used car lot already fronted by several working girls on their nightly patrol. Knowing this was not her area, and the girls already there might object strongly to competition, she continued on her way up Broadway to another area where the streetwalkers gathered.