True Allegiance

Weeks passed. At least a hundred times, she considered backing out, moving on. She knew she was doing something borderline insane—even though she’d taken all the precautions, no precautions could prevent the federal government from bringing all of its resources to bear. And if they were concerned enough about a fish to stifle the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people, what would they do if someone destroyed one of their offices?

She kept coming back to one image: Juan’s coffin. That image would quickly merge with the image of the dead cattle and the dried-up land and the empty house.

They didn’t understand, she knew. And they’d never understand, unless she made them understand.

The handoff went down in the middle of a Saturday night in an open field. Nobody noticed it, of course—this was the Central Valley, and nobody cared what went down in the Central Valley.

She didn’t sleep much. When she finally fell asleep, an empty wine glass dangling from her hand, it was 3:00 a.m.

She woke up with the television blaring. Pictures of the blown-out side of the Water Resources Control Board offices on I Street in Sacramento led every news network. All of them. Even Soledad was somewhat shocked by the security video—it looked like something out of a Schwarzenegger movie, with cement and steel blasting into the night sky. Plumes of smoke and ash rose from the bombing site. Soledad was grateful that the truck had been completely eviscerated by the explosion, but she knew that federal investigators would check the camera footage—it was only a matter of time before they did proper forensic analysis and traced the truck.

There were no casualties—Soledad had insisted on a weekend attack to avoid any human toll—but the building itself smoldered, a gaping crater where the front door used to be. The news crawl scrolled: “MASSIVE BOMBING AT FEDERAL BUILDING…TERROR SUSPECTED.”

The governor pledged to get to the bottom of what he termed a “brutal terror attack.” He called on the federal government for emergency relief—after all, the Environmental Protection Agency shared offices with the Water Resources Control Board. The president pledged to do what he could. He agreed with the California governor, saying, “Such acts have no place in a democratic America.”

Prescott pledged to enforce federal law, to investigate fully, to prosecute those who would assault the government. Anarchy, he said, could not be allowed to reign.

Two days later, the SWAT team showed up. They were fully militarized, driving MRAVs. They looked like they’d been redeployed directly from Afghanistan. Which, in fact, some of them had. Virtually every agency of the federal government had been given heavy weaponry—even the environmental agencies. You never knew, the lawmakers said, what kind of weapons American citizens had socked away in their basements.

When the SWAT team arrived, they set up a perimeter around the ranch. They didn’t approach, presumably fearful of sparking a firefight. Soledad spotted at least two surveillance drones flying above the barren ranch, with its remaining cattle lowing hungrily at the empty creek.

She turned on the news to see an aerial shot of the ranch—her ranch. The scrolling caption on CNN read: “TERROR SUSPECT RANCHER SURROUNDED.”

So she called in. After first convincing several producers that she was, in fact, Soledad Ramirez, and had no intention of screaming “bababooey” live on air, they let her through to talk to Wolf Blitzer.

The scroller on the TV changed to “BREAKING: TERROR SUSPECT CALLS CNN.” They flashed a picture of her, looking surprisingly sinister, and plastered it across the screen. The producers must have pulled it from her Facebook page and then darkened it for effect, she thought.

“Ms. Ramirez,” Wolf said in his faux shout—it’s like the man never knew how a microphone worked—“do you have any intention of surrendering to the authorities?”

“Hello, Wolf,” she answered. “No, I don’t have any intention of surrendering to the Environmental Protection Agency over some damn fish. They’ve been starving out me and every other rancher for years. So they can come in and arrest me. They can jail me. I have no interest in spilling blood. But they already have blood on their hands as far as I’m concerned.”

She told Blitzer about Emilio and Juan, about the dead cattle and the bankruptcy. She told him about the surrounding farms, all dried out, about how the breadbasket of the country had turned into a dust bowl. “You tell the governor and the president,” she concluded, “that I’m happy to surrender and do my jail time if they just keep this water flowing. Because I’m not going to stand for my government—yes, it’s my government, too—violating my God-given rights to water my land. I’ve never taken anything from anybody. And I don’t plan to start now by giving up not just my rights, but the rights of my friends.”