“The pursuit of Liberty is never convenient and often demands blood as the price to achieve it—and to keep it. Liberty is never permanent, for to believe in its permanence is most assuredly its ultimate destruction.”
The sound of blaring sirens started to envelope the entire city as every imaginable police car and firetruck within miles responded to what seemed to be a disaster of some type at the National Mall.
The Lincoln Memorial was bathed in a deep orange glow as the reflection of the burning wreckage of Marine One was strewn across the steps from the Mall and into the Memorial. The low cloud cover producing the light snow reflected the fires and lit the entire area.
Texans Chris and Connie Flores, who just moments before were tracing the name of their grandfather’s granite-etched name on the Vietnam Memorial, and who witnessed the downing of Marine One and two accompanying choppers, were running for their lives. For all they knew, a nuclear bomb could be the next thing that hit Washington, D.C.
Chris had an ominous sense of the happenings around them, even more ominous with what they had just witnessed with their own eyes. After seeing two men in wool ski masks that just ran by them, he realized they were carrying some sort of tube.
“Connie, let’s duck down back here. I’m not sure who those guys were, but I don’t know what we’ve just seen. I’m not even sure if we should be seen. Quick, get back here!” Chris pointed to a big green trash dumpster behind a small office building.
The trash dumpster at the end of a parking lot was positioned almost all the way to a concrete barrier from another parking lot, to another building that was about four feet higher than the parking lot the dumpster was in. This allowed them to crouch between the dumpster and the barrier, below the adjacent parking lot.
“What do you think is happening? Are we at war or something?” asked Connie, who was visibly shaking.
“Are you cold? Do you need my coat and scarf?” asked Chris.
“I don’t think so; I’m just scared to death. What the hell is going on?”
“Whatever it is, it’s bad. Really bad, but I know this. We don’t need to be here but, until we know what’s going on or see the police, let’s stay put,” he advised her.
“Uh-oh,” she whispered to Chris.
Three men wearing similar ski masks were running into their parking lot and directly toward them.
“Don’t move. Don’t move a muscle or make a sound,” Chris whispered.
The men went straight to the concrete barrier and handed some type of tube that looked like it had a trigger mechanism to someone with outstretched arms above the guard rail on the concrete barrier. Those arms took the tubes while the three men latched onto the guardrail and pulled themselves over the barrier. They got into the back of a van that backed into a spot right above them.
The brother and sister were hidden by the dumpster lid, which had been left open and was laying across the barrier. Chris motioned her to stay quiet, putting his forefinger over his lips.
Less than thirty seconds later, two more men dressed the same did the same thing when they reached the barrier.
The siblings could hear the men talking in quiet, excited tones, even going so far as slapping hands, like a high-five gesture.
Chris got a better look at the tube devices. He wasn’t a military expert, but he first thought the deep, green tubes looked like some kind of bazooka and had the stenciled letters “Слова.”
The men in the van closed the rear doors and drove away. Chris took a close look at the van but could only see that it was an electrical contractor’s van.
As soon as the van pulled out of the parking lot, Connie turned to Chris and asked, “Who the hell were they? What were they saying, and were those some kind of guns they were carrying?”
“I couldn’t really tell. Looked like bazookas, but had strange writing on them,” he answered.
“Also, what language was that?”
“I’m not sure about that, either. Let’s get out of here and see if we can find the police.” They got up and lifted the dumpster trash lid so they could get out of their hiding place.
At almost the same exact moment in time, Marine One went down with President Annabelle Bartlett aboard, and other calamities in D.C. and across the country started to be called into various law enforcement agencies, adding to the sudden chaos.
In D.C., Sally Ferguson-Haverton, who was just named chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, was killed outside her Georgetown flat by a single bullet to the back of the head as she was taking her springer spaniel for an early morning walk.
Chief of Staff Weingold was decapitated and his head was stuffed into his master bedroom toilet. His headless body, clad in a velvet robe, was found on his kitchen floor in a large pool of deep red blood.
The two generals from the Joint Chiefs who were in the Situation Room with President Bartlett the night before met similar fates, along with their wives, while sleeping in their beds.
GOP Majority Leader McCray and his wife of forty-six years were taken out as they got in their car to go to Sunday morning Mass.
The heads of the NSA, Homeland Security, FBI, ATF and the U.S. attorney general were assassinated with incredible precision.
Texas Governor Strasburg’s SUV was riddled by bullets at a stop sign in Austin as he was on his way to a Methodist church service, killing him, his wife and two staff aides.
Texas Senator Simpson was found slumped over on his toilet with his hands still clutching the Washington Post at his apartment in Alexandria, two bullet holes in his chest and one in his forehead.
By the time it reached noon on the East Coast, one hundred forty-two members of Congress and twenty-nine U.S. senators, along with eighteen state governors and various other political and public figures, were found dead. The assassinations included both Democrats and Republicans.
Throughout the date, the breaking news’ momentum built steadily.
A Special Report news bulletin came out on CNN as the host exclaimed, “I am sad to inform our viewers that President Bartlett has died in a crash of Marine One. Officials believe from eyewitness reports that it was not an accident. I repeat, it was not an accident. It appears as though The Great Purge is upon us. We are getting reports from all over Washington, D.C. and other locations throughout the country that a dastardly and systematic plan has been implemented to murder elected officials. No group has accepted responsibility; however, this would seem to be the work of a domestic anti-government terrorist group such as the Free Texas militia. We will stay right here as we bring you up-to-the minute news.”
As the electrical contractor’s van crossed over the state lines in West Virginia, it pulled into a rest area where the occupants abandoned the van and split up into two other vehicles whose drivers were waiting on them. The large tubes were now in duffel bags and loaded into the trunks of the cars.
As the first car sped up and entered the interstate, one of the men reached over to the passenger in the front seat to shake his hand.
“Congratulations, Comrade Volkov! The Americans must learn to pay their debts!”