Forty Days at Kamas Read Free

attack.
    "Everybody on the ground! Sit! Link arms!"
    The command to sit rang out again and again as prisoners dropped to the ground and stuffed precious bread into their clothing.
    "You! Woman! Freeze!" screamed the enraged dog handler closest to the old woman. But the woman had already taken the girl's hand and was leading her back into the trees with remarkable speed and agility.
    Without a moment's hesitation the handler reached down to unleash his dog. In a flash a black German shepherd was racing alongside the column in headlong pursuit. Having seen dogs like these maul prisoners many times, I shuddered at the thought of what would now happen to the unfortunate woman or her child. For an instant I considered stepping between the dog and its quarry but I lacked the nerve. The beast galloped past me at top speed.
    Then I heard a high–pitched canine yelp followed by shouts and cries of animal pain. I turned my head in time to see a broad–shouldered prisoner sitting astride the black shepherd dog, one forearm locked firmly in the dog's jaws and the other pinning the dog's windpipe against the icy road. Guards converged upon the man and beat him senseless but the dog remained limp when they pulled it away from the prisoner's inert body. Angry murmurs spread among us but were soon suppressed by another burst of gunfire over our heads.
    "Major Whiting! Sir! Request permission to track the women!"
    A young dog handler stood at attention before the convoy leader, a lean, sinewy man of about forty who spoke quickly but with an Oklahoma twang.
    "Stand down, Rogers. We have prisoners to deliver. Leave the women and help move these vermin onto the trucks."
    Whiting watched with a vigilant eye as the column waited opposite the trucks. Then he strode back to where one of the guards was directing two prisoners to drag the dog slayer's body to the nearest tractor–trailer.
    "Is he still alive?" Whiting asked the guard.
    "He was a minute ago."
    "Then tie his hands and feet. If he lives, send him to the isolator with Reineke."
    "Yes, Sir!" the guard answered.
    "And next time, son, when you open fire, don't waste your bullets firing into thin air. Hit somebody."
    Roesemann and I looked at each other in mute fury. On command we hoisted Reineke between us and lifted him onto the truck.

 
     
     
    C HAPTER 2
     
    "Whoever can conquer the street will one day conquer the state, for every form of power politics and any dictatorship–run state has its roots in the street."
—Joseph Goebbels
     
    NOVEMBER 2016
     
    We lived in a stone farmhouse atop a forested knoll that commanded a sweeping view of the hills along the Ohio River to the southwest. The south end of the house projected just beyond a line of towering maples, the French doors of our old glassed–in porch opening onto a flagstone veranda. Beyond the boxwood hedge that enclosed the veranda on three sides, the hill sloped gradually at first, then more steeply, past our neighbor’s horse paddock to the two–lane state road that connected downtown Sewickley with Interstate 79.
    I finished my mug of tea and joined my wife on the veranda. Juliet had begun covering the boxwood with burlap slipcovers and called me over to shovel mulch around the roots. I pulled a long–handled shovel from the wheelbarrow to join. Meanwhile, our two daughters, Claire and Louisa, aged five and three, busied themselves collecting fallen twigs for the woodpile. The sun was already high in a cloudless sky and the morning frost had melted nearly everywhere.
    It was the second Saturday in November, only four days since the national elections in which the president was re–elected under the banner of his newly formed Unionist Party. The Unionists also took both houses of Congress, which had struck me as a complete surprise. I had been spending sixty–hour weeks at the office and had not paid much attention to the persistent reports of large–scale voter registration fraud, voting machine hacking,