Dominatus, page 1
DOMINATUS
By D.W. Ulsterman
Editing by Louise Broda
2013
LINKS TO OTHER NOVELS BY D.W. ULSTERMAN:
TUMULTUS
(sequel to Dominatus)
MAC WALKER'S BENGHAZI
MAC WALKER'S BETRAYAL
THE SECOND OLDEST PROFESSION
BENNINGTON P.I. "Bonita"
BENNINGTON P.I. "Take two and call me in the morgue"
DWULSTERMAN.COM
To my wife.
For everything…
“Government is not reason, it is not eloquence – it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”
-George Washington
I.
April, 2037
Going through the door of the aptly named Freedom Tavern was actually a movement of stepping back in time. I had seen photos of places like this in America, locations where people gathered, paid for alcoholic beverages, sought out conversation, companionship, or simply a moment away from the countless other distractions and responsibilities of life. Environments of rough hewn communion where both the best and worst aspects of humanity were openly on display.
While the practice of owning a business that served alcohol had not been formally prohibited by the New United Nations’ mandates, the taxes and unavoidable fines levied against those businesses made their existence increasingly prohibitive until, inevitably, they simply died out. The last privately owned drinking establishment I had witnessed was nearly fifteen years ago when I was not yet fifteen years old. And that one was for the very wealthy only, as the cost of alcohol had increased multiple times in just a few short years following the N.U.N. mandates and resulting taxes so that only the rich could afford to purchase alcoholic beverages. Everyone else was left like me – looking at pictures of an America that once was, but would never be again.
Here in this remote and secretive Alaskan community of some 100 people, a tavern still stood, though – privately owned and its doors open to the public. Music came from an antique contraption I knew to be called a “jukebox”, where a song from generations before titled Sweet Home Alabama played in the background.
Above the jukebox hung an original fifty-state American flag – another example now forbidden by the New United Nations mandates. A few years ago a man in Portland, Oregon had been arrested for refusing to take down an original American flag that he displayed outside his apartment balcony. Soon after he was found dead from what authorities described as a robbery. The only thing taken had been the flag.
I am certain my face registered clear shock as I took in the unmistakable smell of burning tobacco, and saw no less than three men seated at the bar smoking IN PUBLIC, with open bottles of beer sitting in front of each of them. These men were smoking cigarettes! Unlike alcohol, cigarettes had been banned outright by the mandates – cited as dangerous public hazards and “prohibitive to the well being of society”. That was just over 20 years ago. I remembered lessons on the ban during my final years of high school, the teacher reviewing all of the reasons supporting the ban, and how it was our responsibility not to question, but to simply accept these newly developing rules of the world society. We were also instructed to turn our parents into the authorities if they continued to smoke inside their homes because by doing so, we were told, they were putting our lives at risk and were in fact guilty of serious child abuse. One of my boyhood friends in fact did just that – his father was charged with the crime of smoking/child abuse and spent six months at an adult education facility. By then the government no longer used the term prison, or jail – almost all forms of discipline were simply called “education”.
Apparently the men with cigarettes dangling from their mouths didn’t get the lesson. The tobacco smoke hung over them in the low-ceilinged structure like their own personal clouds of defiance. Each of their faces, weathered, worn, and hard, also appeared quite content. One of them laughed at the ending joke of a story told by another, clapping his hand on his shoulder and shaking his head while the third of them gestured to the person behind the counter…the “bartender” if my memory was correct, for another beer.
It was all so remarkable. As I said, I was convinced I had somehow literally stepped back into time – an America before the New United Nations. An America where personal freedoms still existed in some form and all those rules to protect the “well being of society” were not yet fully implemented. An America that still governed itself.
An America before the New United Nations.
The man behind the bar looked directly at me as I noted both the intensity of his stare and the familiarity of the face from the few photos of him my dad had shown me. Through the dim lighting of the tavern I could make out his face was now far older than those photos, more gaunt, but I was certain it was him. He was nearly my own height of six foot, the years having bent his back just a bit, with a narrow, deeply lined face framed by square-rimmed glasses and shortly cropped salt and pepper hair. I raised my eyebrows in an attempted greeting, hoping he was in fact the one I had come to see.
His right hand motioned for me to come down to the far end of the bar where only an empty stool resided. Before sitting down I extended my own hand across the bar to further communicate I came in peace, this time including what felt to be both an awkward and nervous smile on my part.
“Sit.”
It wasn’t an offer – it was a directive. I found myself following the order without even thinking about it. Though the volume of the word was barely audible, the tone of authority was unmistakable.
Again I gave up the same weak smile as I further looked over the man I had traveled some four thousand miles to interview – the individual my recently deceased father had worked tirelessly to free from prison for the manufactured crime of defending the defenseless. A soldier wrongly accused, sent away to serve as an example to others – keep your mouths shut. That event was long before my own time, but my father had shared it with me often. It had become for him, and then for me, one of the critical examples of how America had gone so wrong, so quickly, and so completely. The events of the trial took place almost twenty five years ago. My father had now been dead for just over a year.
“Go talk to him. In Alaska. He owns a bar up there. Actually owns his own bar! Imagine that. Might be the last privately owned bar in the country. Let him tell you his story. Some of it is my story too, but it’s mostly his. I just played a part in it. If people are going to wake up, we all need to hear those stories. How things were. How they changed. You say you want to fight. I’ve protected you from that, but I won’t be around long enough to stop you now. So, you go talk to him. I have the location in the file, his file. It’s all there. Kept it hidden away from the U.N. audits. After the trial, he disappeared for quite a few years. Then I received a brief message, and we have been communicating on and off ever since. He’s a hero, you know. And that’s why they did to him what they did. Obama. Jarrett. They killed others. Afghanistan. The purge. They set him up, sent him to prison. But I got him out. The last real thing…the last real work I did as an attorney. The rest was bullshit. But I did something good there. And so, if you really want to do this, I can’t stop you from it. From the truth. So you go see him. I told him you were coming, so go ahead. You have my blessing. Take the information…I’m not sure what you think you can do with it, and you’ll be watched, you know. They’re all being watched. The entire community up there. Sooner or later there will be a conflict. He knows it. They all know it, and, you might find yourself in the middle of all that. You WILL find yourself part of that just by having been there. But, I should have taken you with me back then. When I visited him up there. I should have taken you, your brother, your mother…all of us. We should have gone away from here – from all these rules, the spying, the damn government…and never looked back. Don’t end up like me in some bed with your body wasting away into nothing. I’m already gone. Your mother, brother…you’re all that’s left of us. If you want to go talk to him, you have my blessing. And once you get there, maybe…maybe you don’t come back. Make your stand with them. Make your life count for something.”
My father would be dead within a month of speaking those words to me. An extremely rare form of cancer resistant to any of the latest treatments. One in a million, the doctor told me. Never seen anything like it, said another specialist. It took him from relative health to his deathbed in just over six months, and though he never came right out and said it, his eyes told the truth of it at the end – that cancer was no accident. It was no one in a million happenstance. Or just bad luck. Funny how nobody within the government dies from cancer anymore.
He, like so many already gone before him, knew just enough to make him a liability. And if what he knew was enough for them to kill him, what then of me? How long before I too was eliminated as a gesture of “just in case” by the N.U.N. operatives?
And so, just as Mac had done eighteen years earlier after my father secured his release from a federal prison, I too travelled to Alaska to interview one of the now last few survivors who had dared challenge the original Obama regime.
“You got your dad’s way kid. Saw him as soon as you walked in here. I promised him we would talk. Not sure what good it’s gonna do you, but I owe him a hell of a lot more than that, so we’ll talk.”
His hand shot across the bar and took my own in a firm handshake, and I noted the small Seal Team Six tattoo on his forearm.
“…And I’m sorry to hear about his passing. The bastards finally took him out, huh? Tha
“…Welcome to Dominatus, Alaska son. Let’s talk.”
The sound of Bob Marley’s Redemption Song now enveloped the interior of Freedom Tavern as I prepared to ask the first of my many-many questions.
“Let’s go to my office in the back.”
I followed the tavern owner down a narrow hallway leading to the opposite end of the small building where a door stood partly open, noting the holstered handgun that hung from his waist. The temperature dropped considerably as the heat from the coal burning stove in the tavern’s main room seemed hesitant to make the trip down the hallway I was now taking. The door was opened and I followed the man inside where I was greeted by a small but tastefully furnished office space where a large oak desk and leather chair sat swathed in the warm glow of a single incandescent light bulb. Very old school. I hadn’t seen one of those light-bulbs lit up for nearly twenty years. They, like so many other things in America, had been banned from use by the general public, though it was well known a thriving black market was available to those still wealthy or influential enough to purchase such items.
The room’s walls were lined with photos from what appeared to be locations spanning the globe. Behind the desk was a framed copy of the American Declaration of Independence, and above that hung what appeared to be a genuine musket rifle. One photo was placed prominently in the middle of the wall showing four men with their arms draped over each others’ shoulders with Egyptian pyramids as backdrops – the man on the far left a much younger version of the one who now sat across the desk from me.
“Many lifetimes ago. A whole different world then. I’m the last one left alive in that picture. Even though I was the oldest of the four of us. We saw a hell of a lot of shit together. They had us dropping in everywhere. Congo. Malaysia. Greece. Then came Benghazi and it all went to shit. And after that, one by one, we were gettin’ picked off. Suicide. Traffic accident. Heart attack. So I came up here, before they got to me too. And I ain’t been back since. Fuck it. Fuck them. Fuck all of it. And if they want one last fight with this old boy…bring it.”
For the first time I took in just how tired this man I had been told stories of for so long, now appeared and sounded. My notes indicated he had just recently turned seventy-three, but there was a fatigue in him that suggested a man who felt the burden of years even beyond those of seventy-three, especially in the eyes. Deep crevices shot out from the cornered rims of his glasses, and equally deep lines encircled both sides of a mouth that inclined downward into a permanent frown. The closely cropped salt and pepper hair was much thinner than the photos my father had shown me, and certainly more sparse and grey than the man he once was in that photo on the wall. The shoulders remained broad though, and the firmness in his grip during our recent handshake hinted at a significant strength that still remained in a body trained decades ago by a government to seek and destroy those who would do that government harm, until eventually, that same government deemed him and those like him to be a threat as well.
I took out my recording device. It had been my dad’s and was nearly forty years old. I felt its use to be more appropriate to this particular task and subject than something more modern.
“Can we begin?”
He turned his head back to me and gave a brief glimpse of a smile and an even briefer nod of the head.
“Sure, however you want to do this. I promised your father to give you have as much time as you need. Ask all the questions you want. Whatever…whatever questions you want.”
I noted the faint hum of what was likely the tavern’s generator coming from somewhere outside the office – possibly behind one of the doors in the hallway.
“Please state your name.”
“Mackenzie Walker - people been callin’ me Mac since I can remember. You can do the same.”
“When and where were you born, Mac?”
“Born and raised in Carville, Louisiana – 1964.”
“So you are now, at the time of this interview, seventy-three years old, correct?”
“Yes.”
“And when did you enter the United States military?”
“That was October, 1984. Did a couple years of junior college, then signed up. Wanted to see the world. Young and dumb – all that kind of thing.”
“What branch of the military?”
“Navy. When America still had a military – still had its own Navy before it was co-opted by the U.N. Was in for just over a year, then applied and was accepted into SWCC.”
“What is that?”
“Special Warfare Combatant Crewman. Work alongside the SEALs – get in get out operations, and from there…did that for about nine months… I decided to try out for the SEALs. Knew enough of them by then, and figured I was tougher than most, so why not? Did my time at BUD/S, passed my PST easily, so easily that some people from JSOC noticed me and I got handed over to them.”
“And that led to your involvement with SEAL Team 6?”
“Yes – DEVGRU. Naval Special Warfare Development Group. At that time working out of Fort Bragg. This was around 1987...1988. Reagan was still in the White House.”
Mac had become much more animated than when I first saw him. Clearly the subject of his past military experience, at least its beginnings, was a favored one.
“How long did you remain with SEAL Team Six?”
“Nine years, up to about 1997. Did several months in Eastern Europe, Kosovo. Black Squadron. That’s where I started to hook up a lot with the Intel gang. A bit of NSA. CIA. All the voodoo-acronyms. The real nasty fucks. Started the transition with them.”
“Transition?”
“NSA was scouring installments like DEVGRU for recruits. Wanted guys like me who could handle themselves in a shit-storm but had some Intel training too. Went over my file, report records, all of it. Liked what they saw and asked me to join up. They fed my ego. I was the biggest bad ass on the planet back then – so I thought. Still young and stupid. Told me how much good I could do for the country, so I said yes. Took the offer. And for government work – the money was damn good. Well, months went by, then years…thought I had made a mistake. Had me pouring over data inside of a cubicle at Fort Meade. I was losing my mind there. Kept making requests to put me in the field and they kept coming back with soon. Real soon. Then 9-11 happened. The World Trade Center attacks in New York. The ones the U.N’s curriculum programs, their cultural sensitivity mandates scrubbed from the history books, from all the media logs. Kids today don’t even know those attacks happened. After 9-11 I was offered to become part of something called Project Icon. A little in-house zero oversight thing of the DoD’s that also ran through NSA. In fact, PI was hardly known about, but what we did…we were even deeper behind the curtain than Icon was. That’s where the picture there on the wall you were looking at comes from. The four of us there – we were Project Icon. That’s where I really learned how to kill. And the more I did it, the more atta boys they gave me. Just like the movies back then, some shit went down, we got the call…we cleaned it up. Or…we went in and stirred the shit up and then got out and waited. And we were good at it. That picture was Egypt…2003. Five weeks before American military forces hit the sand in Iraq. We helped pave the road for them. A few Egyptian weapons smugglers helping out Saddam’s military. First we asked nice. They ignored us. Then we executed them. Then we posed for that picture and slept without a care in the world that night.”
