NEXT BEST HOPE (The Revelation Trilogy) (22 page)

He took his field knife and cut some small saplings. He cut sections of green vines and wove them through the saplings creating a makeshift stretcher. He laid the stretcher next to Flash and rolled him over a full revolution ’til he came to rest in the middle of it. When he had him in place, he leaned down and said, “I have one more thing to do. I’ll be right back for you.”

When he returned to the ridge, he went to a spot twenty yards from his last vantage point and sneaked another peek.

No Finis.

Rather, along the side of the embankment, he saw evidence that the assassin had somehow freed himself and tumbled down the side of the ravine to a narrow flat strip of dirt along the rapids. He could see boot prints in the mud along the stream that stopped when the feet plunged into the water. Brown ran along the ridge for a hundred yards, looking for any sign of Finis. He gave up the search and went back to Flash.

“Hold on tight, Flash. I’ll have you out of here before you know it.”

“God bless you, sir,” Flash said.

“Please leave God out of this. He’s done quite enough already,” Brown said.

Brown dragged Flash up the trail until he reached a landing within sight of the guest house.

•  •  •

He checked Flash’s wound, applied deep pressure to it for several minutes and hauled him the rest of the way to the edge of the sidewalk that led up to the front porch. He handed Flash his canteen and watched him drink most of the water out of it.

Brown got out his cell phone and called for an ambulance. He knew it would take it twenty minutes to arrive.

“I’m Federal Agent Quanah Parker Brown,” he said to Flash. “I saved your ass because I love the United States of America and admire President Bass Whitfield. There are two ways we can play this deal,” Brown said. “I’ll leave it up to you which way it goes.”

Brown stayed with Flash until he heard the siren of the ambulance. He got up to leave and patted Greenwald on the shoulder.

Flash grabbed Brown’s hand.

“I won’t forget what you did for me today,” he said. “I think for the first time in my life I am seeing things clearly. Be careful, Agent Brown.”

Brown moved into the brush just as the ambulance started down the driveway towards Flash. When he was deep in the woods, he stopped long enough to pull his digital recorder from his pocket and listen to Ithurial Finis’ voice as he confessed to the assassination of the president.

“I’ve got you now, you god-fearing sonofabitch,” Brown said. He hiked three miles through the Smokies to his Camaro. When he got to his car, he loaded his gear into the trunk and paused for a minute before he got in.

“This time, I know where you’re going, Ithurial,” he said as he watched the sun fall behind the mountains.

ON THE IDES
of March, the day Flash Greenwald escaped death, Stanley Nussbaum drove Prophet Westmoreland from Waco to Arlington for a CM rally at Cowboy Stadium. Where I-35 split into its east and west branches north of Waco, he stayed to his left, preferring to come into the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex from the west.

As he drove, Nussbaum glanced at Westmoreland from time to time. He sat with his eyes closed in the front passenger seat but didn’t appear to be asleep. Every now and then, he would open his eyes and say something to Stanley about the beauty of the spare countryside where they drove for miles seeing only an occasional ranch-style house set off a long way from the highway. Then he would close his eyes again and retreat into his own thoughts.

During one of J. Franklin’s silent episodes, Nussbaum reached into the center console and pulled out his iPod. He attached it to the car stereo system with an auxiliary cord, and soon Willie Nelson’s music filled the car.

“
On the road again, like a band of gypsies we go down the highway,
” Willie sang.

“That’s us all right,” Westmoreland said as he snapped out of his reverie. “Let’s take Highway 80,” he said as the two friends approached the south side of Fort Worth.

A few miles up the road Stanley exited to his right and drifted east through a tired section of Cowtown where Hispanic garages and Laundromats adorned the old U.S. Highway that ran from the Atlantic to the Pacific. On the western edge of Arlington, on the north side of the highway known there as Lancaster Avenue, they came upon an overgrown cemetery where tumbleweeds outnumbered headstones.

“It looks like no one is here today,” Stanley said. “Want to pay our respects while we’re in the neighborhood?”

“I think that would be more than fitting in light of our mission,” Westmoreland said.

Stanley turned left onto the one lane drive that squeezed through an opening in a chain link fence. He dodged potholes as he made a full circle around the graveyard. He stopped their Mercedes next to an uneven concrete curb. Frank rolled his window down and looked for a point of reference.

“I think I see it,” he said. “Get the shovel out of the trunk.”

Both men got out of the car and joined up at the edge of the curb. They trudged up a sidewalk long ago abandoned to weeds. Next to a footstone almost completely hidden by grass, they stopped. Westmoreland knelt down, took his pocketknife out and stuck it deep enough into the dirt to carve out the boundaries of the marker. He looked up at Stanley, who began to scrape dirt off the stone until he had reclaimed it from the wild. Frank took a monogrammed handkerchief from his coat pocket and wiped the marker clean. When he finished he stood up next to Stanley, and both men bowed their heads in prayer.

Westmoreland broke the silence. “He was a great man, misunderstood by his countrymen,” he said.

After a few minutes the men turned from the footstone, which now displayed the one word “Oswald,” got back in their car, and drove the six miles to the stadium.

•  •  •

When they approached the arena, Stanley followed the VIP signs to a driveway that brought the men to a section of parking spots marked off with orange cones. A valet approached them, and Stanley flashed an ID badge.

“Welcome to Cowboy Stadium,” the young man said. “It is a great honor to welcome our Prophet.” He directed them to an usher who accompanied them through a tunnel that opened out onto the football field. Stanley and Prophet Westmoreland walked along a red carpet to the steps to the main stage where they took their seats. They were an hour early, and the event workers ignored them while they finished their preparations for the evening.

The night was mild, and through the open roof of the complex, Westmoreland and Stanley could see Orion as if it were displayed on a planetarium ceiling. The sounds of the city seemed subdued in the great theater where throngs of citizens filed in quietly and took their seats in folding wooden chairs brought in especially to give the meeting a homespun feel. A song leader led the crowd in singing hymns and patriotic songs with certain verses modified to fit New Israel.

By the time J. Franklin Westmoreland rose to speak 125,000 people were assembled before him. Westmoreland with a wireless microphone clipped on his tie walked to the front of the stage ignoring the lectern. He faced the crowd in front of him—turned to his right and left—and then looked behind him at the throng of people on that side of the stadium. Even before he said a word, people in the crowd began to wave miniature CM flags on small wooden sticks in the air. Bright colored banners billowed above their heads, furled around wire that the event organizers rigged so that they could manipulate them on cue. The state of the art sound system blared “Onward Christian Soldiers” as the crowd in unison leaped to its feet yelling “Prophet Westmoreland. Prophet Westmoreland.”

It was a rally the likes of which no one had seen since Leni Riefenstahl’s
Triumph of the Will.

After five minutes of deafening noise, Frank put the crowd in their seats with a broad sweep of his arms. He reached, grabbed his pulpit Bible from the lectern, and raised it high above his head.

“My brothers and sisters, today the Word of God is fulfilled,” he began. “The kingdom of God is among you.”

The people stood as if on command and stomped their feet to the cadence of their war hymn.

Westmoreland plunged into his stump speech. He recounted the history of the CM movement. When he spoke of his personal ordeal, he laid his Bible down and replaced it in his hand with his autobiography,
God’s Struggle
, which Stanley had made sure to provide to hundreds of vendors at every entrance and exit to the hall. He praised the crowd for its courage in the secession conventions. When he outlined the initial difficulties of the new regime, he blamed those “unfaithful” ones who had attempted to subvert God’s work in God’s new land.

He returned to the lectern and took the Bible again in one hand while holding his own book in his other. He lifted them both above his head and looked back and forth from one to the other.

“To defeat those infidels, we imposed upon ourselves the law of God, a law fashioned not by godless politicians but drawn from the Holy Bible itself,” he said. “Our godly judges have carried it out to the letter, never shirking their responsibilities. Their dedication to God’s justice has brought order out of the chaos that threatened to defeat God’s people. We have set our feet on the solid rock of Jesus Christ.”

Time after time, the crowd reacted with shouts and cheers.

Westmoreland fell silent, his head bowed, his eyes closed as if he were in prayer. Soon the crowd took its seat. The music stopped as everyone watched the leader and waited for him to resume his speech.

Stanley began to fidget in his seat on the platform. He waited along with the crowd. Just as he was about to approach Frank to see if he was all right, Westmoreland lifted his head and looked toward the opening in the roof at the night sky. He lowered his gaze, walked to a lone chair at the edge of the stage and sat down.

“But it has not been enough, my brothers and sisters,” he said, his voice barely more than a whisper. “We have come far. The Lord has led us through the wilderness, but ahead of us is the river Jordan.”

Stanley had heard every speech J. Franklin Westmoreland had made since the movement began, but he knew he was about to hear something new, something totally different.

“The Lord has told me that it is now time for us to cross that river, to mobilize the army of God, to seize the Promised Land.”

Frank jumped to his feet and kicked the chair off the front of the platform.

“People of God, are you ready to fight the Lord’s fight? If so, let me hear you say so,” he yelled.

“We are ready. We are ready,” the crowd chanted until the stadium shook like the walls of Jericho just before they came tumbling down.

Frank turned and walked to Stanley while the crowd continued its incantation. He motioned for Nussbaum to get up and follow him. The two men walked down the steps and strode down the red carpet out of the coliseum. They reached their car. In the parking lot, they could still hear the crowd pounding its feet, the noise growing louder and louder.

“Let’s go home, Stanley. We have the Lord’s work to complete,” Westmoreland said. He opened the passenger side door, plopped down in the front seat and looked over his shoulder at the stadium.

Stanley started the car, waved at the attendant and drove across the parking lot. He intersected the highway and moved deliberately along the road to Waco. As he watched the lights of Dallas-Fort Worth dim behind him in his rear view mirror, he knew that somewhere on that stretch of Interstate he had passed the point of no return.

THREE DAYS AFTER
the rally at Cowboy Stadium, a convoy of vehicles approached the Texas state line with Louisiana from the Texas side of Interstate 20 at Waskom, Texas. A federal security unit at the border waved for the convoy to stop but had no blockade in place. The New Israel forces disregarded the orders of the federal troops and plowed ahead as if they had a right to be on Louisiana soil. They planned to unite with other CM forces at Monroe, two hours east of Shreveport, and then move south for a triumphal entry to Baton Rouge and ultimately New Orleans.

When Congressman Farragut received word that New Israel forces had met no resistance when they took western Louisiana, he told his aides that the CM conquest of his state would be the easiest military operation since Hitler marched into Poland while the world stood by and let it happen.

Thibodeaux Arceneau had other plans for eastern Louisiana.

On the Louisiana side of the Mississippi at Vicksburg, federal troops were ready for the Mississippi National Guard when it rolled across the river bridge. They called for the advancing units to halt. When the motorized forces kept coming, the advance federal guard dug in at its position and fired a volley over the heads of the Mississippi National Guard contingent. The convoy stopped in its tracks while the soldiers in the front Humvees radioed their superiors to confirm their orders.

Near Champion Hill, twelve miles east of the great river, the New Israel commander assembled his war council.

“Westmoreland said we could waltz in without a shot fired,” he said. “What are we supposed to do now? Our boys weren’t planning to die today.”

The war council soon decided to have their forces hold their positions until further orders.

On the Louisiana side, Arceneau watched the developments from a makeshift bunker on the north side of the Interstate.

“They are not ready to fight,” he told the federal commander. “They’ve hunted and fished with these Louisiana boys all their lives. They don’t want to start killing each other.”

The CM convoy sat still on the highway for an hour that turned into two, then three. Around noon, the soldiers climbed out of their Humvees and stretched their legs. Some of them waved at the federal troops; others shot them the finger, acting like they were outside the kill zone.

In the Situation Room at the White House, Aloysius Sherman had received the play-by-play since daybreak. When noon came without any resolution, he told President Whitfield the time had come for action.