Purge on the Potomac Read online

  Purge on the Potomac

  By David Thomas Roberts

  Copyright © 2018 by David Thomas Roberts

  (Defiance Press & Publishing, LLC)

  First Edition: August 2018

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  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author and publisher. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review. The author and publisher retain the sole rights to all trademarks and copyrights. Copyright infringements will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-998770-49-9 (Hard Cover)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-998770-46-8 (Paper Back)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-998770-48-2 (eBook)

  Printed in USA by Defiance Press & Publishing, LLC

  Proudly Published in The Republic of Texas

  Edited by Janet Musick

  Interior designed by Deborah Stocco

  Distributed by Midpoint Trade Books

  Bulk orders of this book may be obtained by contacting Defiance Press & Publishing at www.defiancepress.com or Midpoint Trade Books at www.midpointtrade.com.

  Also available in audiobook format on Amazon.

  Publicity Contact: [email protected]

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to my four grandchildren―Vivi Rose, Braeden, Aliza and Izzy, and to any of my future grandchildren in the hope that I have contributed in some small way to securing their God-given Liberty for them and future generations.

  Foreword

  The Texas Crisis–From “A State of Treason”

  The United States of America had just endured its most serious constitutional crisis since 1860, precipitated by the unconstitutional actions of a newly elected president against Texas and the newly formed Tea Party.

  President Tyrell Johnson was the first minority president elected in U.S. history, and the country believed he would be a healing and transformational president. Instead, his administration would go down as one of the most corrupt, divisive and inept ever to set foot in the White House.

  Wielding the full power of the Executive Branch, President Johnson’s Department of Justice and his attorney general, Jamail Tibbs, conducted unconstitutional operations against all his political opponents. Those actions would have made even Richard Nixon blush.

  At the epicenter of the conflict were the grass-roots constitutional literalists, mostly located in the South, but especially in Texas. Identified as the Tea Party, they were designated political enemies by the administration.

  An Islamic jihadist, whose sister was killed in a bombing raid by U.S. forces on a hardened nuclear facility in Iran, attempted to assassinate the president. Secret Service agents killed the would-be assassin, a master’s student at Southern Methodist University, during the attempt. When they raided his apartment, agents found his laptop and discovered his master’s thesis, which focused on the Tea Party.

  The administration purposely kept the assassin’s ties to Islam and Iran from the public but trumpeted his supposed ties and activism in the Tea Party. The administration fostered the notion that the assassin’s attempt on the president was racially motivated and played into the talking points used to try to discredit Johnson’s political opponents in the Tea Party.

  President Johnson, keenly astute to political opportunities, swiftly seized on public sentiment and launched raids on Tea Party offices, individuals and donors, mostly without warrants, using the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to classify these groups as terrorists with no habeas corpus protections. Under the careful orchestration of the attorney general, the FBI, Homeland Security and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) jointly carried out operations that resulted in several unnecessary citizen deaths in Texas.

  TV cameras captured a Waco-style raid by the ATF, showing a large Homeland Security tank slamming through the wall of a house owned by Houston resident Chuck Dixon, who was the president and founder of a large and successful Tea Party group. His wife and child were terrorized, and Dixon was arrested and transported to Ellington Field Air Force Base, where he was held incommunicado and interrogated for several days.

  The level of outrage by the average Texan was vocal and intense. Texas Governor Brent Cooper, a staunch political opponent of the president, ordered the Texas Rangers to find Dixon and rescue him. Under the command of legendary Texas Ranger Pops Younger, the Rangers and the Texas State Guard found Dixon and rescued him. During the operation, Younger arrested the participating federal agents and a federal agent was wounded, infuriating the president and attorney general. Not to be outdone, the attorney general issued federal arrest warrants for Younger, the participating Texas Guard and, unbelievably, Governor Cooper!

  The Texas Crisis, which had been simmering, was about to escalate and boil over.

  A Justice Department prosecutor, who had become aware of the real identity and motives of President Johnson’s would-be assassin, was able to secretly remove documents proving the man’s real motives and get them to Governor Cooper. Several days later, the whistleblower and his wife died in a suspicious car accident in the Georgetown district of Washington, D.C.

  Governor Cooper called for Congress to impeach President Johnson and remove Attorney General Tibbs but Congress, controlled by establishment Republicans, could not muster the courage or the votes necessary to support impeachment. An enraged Tibbs schemed with the president and cabinet members to put an end to the Texas Crisis by ordering a commando-style operation to arrest the governor and embarrass the state leadership of Texas. The attorney general became obsessed with the idea of the world seeing the brazen Texas governor doing a perp walk in handcuffs.

  Special Forces sent into Austin, Texas by the administration to make the arrests and seize the capitol building and the Department of Public Safety created a global incident as federal agents failed; a Blackhawk helicopter was destroyed and Pops Younger and his Texas Rangers outmaneuvered the feds. In the operation, federal agents and U.S. Army Rangers were killed.

  The sentiment of average Texans took on a more virulent hatred toward the administration, while the mass media painted the narrative of a state government out of control. The loss of federal agents and Army Rangers during the operation inflamed public sentiment in the media and on the U.S. Northeast and West coasts against Texas and its stubborn stance against the administration. How dared a sitting state governor demand the impeachment of a president, especially the first minority to hold the highest office in the country!

  The media and politicians downplayed the demand as coming from a few irrational extremists, but soon the entire world was glued to the high-stakes chess match taking place between Austin and Washington.

  Pops Younger advised the governor and top state officials to move to a remote west Texas location, the Swingin’ T Ranch, in anticipation of the administration’s next move. Secretary of State Annabelle Bartlett, her eye on the next Democratic presidential primary nomination, seized the opportunity to insert herself into the fray, attempting to be the hero who brokered a settlement in the crisis. She traveled to Austin to meet with the governor, unbeknown to the president.

  But the attorney general learned of the secret location housing the governor and his officials. Consumed by the immense satisfaction he would receive by arresting the governor, he sent a full military and Homeland Security unit into Texas to capture them. Wi
th permission from Mexico, the raid was launched south of the Rio Grande. Adding insult to injury, the Tibbs dubbed the mission “Operation Santa Anna” after the Mexican dictator who sacked the Alamo and marched into Texas, only to be defeated later by General Sam Houston’s army at San Jacinto.

  Five Homeland Security choppers left Mexican airspace for the Swingin’ T Ranch, but the raid went horribly awry. Governor Cooper and his wife Lyndsey were killed in the raid, along with several state officials, Texas state troopers and federal agents. The Texas Air National Guard downed two choppers as they attempted to escape back to Mexico and engaged the Mexican air force over both Texas and Mexican airspace, escalating an internal American constitutional crisis into an international incident.

  More skirmishes at Texas borders between the Texas Guard and militia troops heightened the stakes even more. Upon orders from the administration to launch a full military operation into Texas, several generals on the Joint Chiefs of Staff refused and were arrested as they left a meeting at the White House.

  When the bodies of the governor and his wife were flown to Austin for a state funeral, Pops Younger ripped off the American flags draping their caskets and replaced them with Lone Star flags. The scene was played repeatedly on world TV networks. As the new governor, Alvin “Smitty” Brahman, was sworn in, Texas became more defiant than ever as Brahman promised to call an emergency session of the state legislature for a special election to put an immediate referendum to the voters for independence. He repeated Governor Cooper’s demand for the impeachment of the president and his attorney general, but Congress remained impotent.

  The president declared martial law in Texas, going so far as to shut down the federal background check system so Texans could not purchase guns. Governor Brahman responded with an executive order lifting federal background checks in the state.

  Even the United Nations recognized the growing conflict and scheduled an emergency Security Council meeting.

  The president announced that any referendum on independence would be both seditious and illegal, announcing that the entire state of Texas was in “A State of Treason!”

  “The Deep State”—(noun) A body or group of people involved in the secret manipulation and control of government policy.

  - Anonymous

  Chapter 1

  “There are decades where nothing happens; and then there are weeks where decades happen.”

  - Vladimir Lenin

  Communist Revolutionary,

  Father of Leninism (version of Marxism)

  Americans were about to be jolted out of their winter Sunday early morning slumber as if a massive earthquake had hit the entire country at once…

  On a dark gray, bone-chilling Sunday morning in late November in the nation’s capital, only two people braved the cold, nasty twenty-three-degree weather to visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall. The Mall was eerily quiet except for a few Canadian geese honking as they kept together in small clusters to keep the water moving and thus from freezing in the center of the Constitution Gardens pond. Several hardy joggers were scattered on the concrete paths that meandered through the park, and large wet snowflakes lightly descended to the ground.

  Chris Vasquez and his sister Connie were bundled up in large wool coats and scarves as they made their way several blocks from their hotel to find a long monolithic granite structure, a memorial to those who died in the Vietnam War. This was their first trip to Washington, D.C. from Texas, and there was some trepidation about their feelings when they finally saw his name―their family name―on the memorial. They would be the first in their large family to see the memorial that honored their grandfather and other veterans of that war.

  It felt as if they were carrying the weight of the grief and ultimately the pride of their entire family as they carefully walked down the salted, wet concrete path. When they arrived the night before, the bad weather had not dampened their mixed feelings of anticipation, pride and sadness.

  The wind howled through the Mall, whipping the flags wildly and causing the brass swivel snaps to clank against the stainless steel poles. After about twenty minutes of looking for the name of their grandfather, they finally found it on the tenth granite panel. They both pulled off their warm gloves and touched the etched name, carefully outlining each character with their fingers, neither one saying a word. It was a seminal moment for both, seeming to last minutes although, in reality, it was much shorter.

  Their quiet reflection and solitude in the moment was about to be shattered…

  Less than a couple of thousand feet away, on the south lawn of the White House, Marine One was taking off without much fanfare. It had been a busy week for the first female president of the United States. Annabelle Bartlett had just finished a highly contentious meeting, to be continued at Camp David, with her chief of staff, Milton Weingold, and several others close to her.

  Despite what the public usually saw on television, the Secret Service and the Defense Department typically “scrambled” the presidential helicopters so as to create some ambiguity regarding which chopper the president was on. For that reason, there was always more than one chopper, just like there was more than one limousine in a presidential motorcade. In a presidential motorcade, there were typically five or six blacked-out SUVs, only one of which contained the president. The Secret Service played a shell game of sorts, so that any would-be assassins or terrorists would not know for sure which vehicle actually contained the president. This tactic was also known in defense circles as the “hide the president” shell game.

  Marine One operated on the same premise, usually deploying five of the same exact choppers taking off simultaneously from the south lawn. But, on this crisp morning, there were only three choppers slowly lifting off the lawn, swirling the snowflakes. Camp David was only sixty miles from the White House as the crow flies, and the president would be there in less than twenty minutes,

  The three choppers took off into a south wind heading, banking slightly as they changed direction to head up the Potomac in a northwesterly direction toward Camp David. It was a flight path that took them directly over the Mall and the Lincoln Memorial.

  The thundering thump-thump noise of the three choppers in the quiet morning got louder and caught the attention of the siblings at the memorial.

  “Wow, that must be the president. Look!” Chris pointed to the south lawn.

  “Oh, very cool!” Connie fumbled for her smart phone to get a picture or video. “What’s that?” she shrieked as she looked up.

  Across the reflecting pond at the Mall, she pointed to what looked like a very large bottle rocket streaming smoke as it climbed slowly and erratically into the sky. The smoke trail emanated from two men at the edge of the trees.

  “What the hell! Look over there, too!” yelled her astonished brother.

  There were so many of the streaming rockets that they couldn’t count them, and the missiles came from all directions.

  Before the siblings could say anything else, it appeared all three choppers moved in an asynchronous fashion, banking wildly in the sky at different and contorted angles. Suddenly, the chopper farthest to the south exploded into a huge fireball, dropping from the sky, falling like a meteor onto Seventeenth Street just yards from the World War II Veterans Memorial.

  “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god!” screamed Connie.

  Two shoulder-to-air rockets hit the second chopper. Smoke billowing, it was coming down hard right in their direction. Connie and Chris began running north to escape the falling chopper as it crashed into the southwest corner of the reflecting pond and hurled wreckage half-way up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

  The third chopper was still airborne, but it twisted like a drunken whirlybird. Unable to stay airborne, the pilots lost control, and the chopper slammed into the world headquarters of the American Red Cross a block away. Strips of aluminum foil fell gently to the ground with the snowflakes as barely deployed anti-missile chaff used for anti-aircraft
missile defense landed in the reflecting pond and on the partially snow-covered ground.

  Hiding behind a park bench, the siblings slowly stood up, both in shock.

  “Holy crap, did we really just see that?” Chris said, partly to himself and partly to his sister.

  “Chris, was the president in one of those?” Connie cried.

  “I don’t know, but we better get the hell out of here.” Chris looked around, wondering what the foil strips were that were falling all around them. For a few moments, there was an eerie silence, as if nothing had happened and they were the only two who witnessed this unthinkable calamity. The crackling noise of the burning wreckage was the only sound besides the honking of startled geese that had lifted off from the pond and were trying to circle back to their original places in the water.

  The wreckage burned brightly, reflecting off the low cloud cover and bathing the Lincoln Memorial in an ominous orange glow.

  Connie and Chris continued to stare at the wreckage, then instinctively they began to walk briskly north, turning every few feet to look back in the direction of the wreckage. Two different pairs of men in ski masks ran past them, then several more a block ahead of them. In the chaos, it seemed natural that people were running away; it did not strike Chris and Connie until later that the masks the men wore might be for a different purpose than just shielding their faces from the brutally cold air.

  When they reached Virginia Avenue two blocks away, Connie stopped. She turned to look back.

  “Chris, I don’t see any movement around the wreckage,” she cried. “What if she was in there? Did someone just kill the president?”

  “We’ve gotta go, sis. We’ve got to go!” he stated firmly, putting his arm around her to encourage her to keep walking north away from the carnage. They could not know that President Annabelle Bartlett, the first woman president of the United States, lay dead in the burning wreckage of the Marine One chopper at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial.