Read Online Liberty's Last Stand by Stephen Coonts - Free Book Online Page B

soon as I can,” he told the aide. “Get out the riot plan and act on it.”
    â€œYes, sir.”
    He got in the back of the helicopter with Nadine; the two troopers climbed aboard after them.
    Jack saw JR watching as the machine lifted off.

    After the interment, Fred Hays and his wife and son shook hands with JR, got into their car, and started driving back to Dallas. Fred and JR had just inherited a twenty-two-thousand-acre ranch in a very dry corner of Texas, and now didn’t seem to be the time to discuss what they were going to do with it. Fred and his wife were schoolteachers, had two kids, and needed every dollar they could get. Neither wanted to live along the Rio Grande miles from civilization—if Pumpville, Texas, was civilization. Fred had grown up on that ranch and that was precisely the place he wanted away from when he went to college. He had never come back except for brief visits. And his parents’ funerals.
    JR, on the other hand, had spent too many years in Iraq and Afghanistan to look at desert chaparral with affection. The ranch was a big, windy, dry place, and in August hot as the doorstep of Hell with the fire doors open. His grandfather had settled here way back when because the land was cheap. It wasn’t worth much now, either. His father had stayed because he loved it, and he had gone broke there. Oilmen had drilled some exploratory wells yet never found anything. Probably never would. The place was mortgaged for the fence and exotic animals. If JRand Fred didn’t sell it, they’d need to find a way to make money to pay the bank. Hosting hunters was probably the only way.
    Maybe, JR thought sardonically, he should sell it to the dope smugglers.

    JR gave his father’s sole employee a check worth two weeks’ pay. “Take some time off. Visit your family. I’ll call you when we need you. We’ll probably sell the place, and while it’s for sale we’ll need someone to look after it and keep the fences repaired, so we don’t lose the animals.”
    â€œI don’t want to get shot by them dopers,” the hired man said.
    â€œI don’t blame you. Just stay the hell out of their way and fix the fences in the daytime. You could do that, couldn’t you?”
    â€œI reckon.”
    â€œTwo weeks. See you then.”
    JR went in the house and called his boss in El Paso. Quit his job on the phone. “I won’t be coming back. Dad’s dead and there’s the ranch.”
    â€œI understand.”
    â€œI brought some of the company’s stuff with me, and I’ll bring it all back in a couple of weeks.”
    â€œSure. Sorry about your dad.”
    JR inventoried the grub in the house and his father’s meager collection of weapons. The sheriff had returned the Marlin, with its nightscope. JR looked it over. It seemed intact and should be workable if he charged the battery, but he had a much better one under the rear seat of the pickup. There was a twelve-gauge pump shotgun and an old thirty-eight revolver, a double-action Colt that his father had used to execute pigs years ago, when he kept pigs and cured his own hams and ate his own bacon.
    Then JR got in his pickup and headed for Del Rio, eighty miles away. He drove fast, so he got there before the stores closed. Went into the first gun store he saw. The man behind the counter was sitting on a stool watching television. He wore a holstered pistol on his belt.
    â€œI need to buy a couple of guns,” JR said. “And some ammo.”
    The proprietor gestured toward the television. “Barry Soetoro says he is shutting down all the gun stores nationwide. We ain’t supposed to sell guns and ammo anymore to anybody but law enforcement. Fuck that raghead commie son of a bitch. I ain’t seen nothin’ in writing from the ATF, and until I do I’m still open. Sell you ever’thing in the whole goddamn store if you got room on your credit