GWOT Paging Mr. Molotov

GWOT Paging Mr. Molotov

It is open house day at the bomb shed. The cool shit has been carefully tucked away. Mo and his four apprentices - two Employees, two guards - are like cats at a rocking chair convention, keeping an eye on all the guests.

The "no electronic devices" rule is being enforced by careful wanding under the hard eyes of Brooke. No exceptions.

Except for a skeleton crew in Security Control, on the roof at H5, and the gates, we have the entire guard force here. We also have the entire Fire Brigade, a smattering of stretcher bearers (mostly leaders), and key executives. The unholy Trinity: VP Site Ops, VP Facilities and VP Human Resources.

Courtesy of the cafeteria, we even have a barbeque going. The smell of cooking pork wafts over all. I want everyone to know that smell now instead of having to learn it the hard way later.

The SLE's protection team approaches in their cart, followed by a second ritzier golf cart carrying the SLE.

It's time to start the class.

"Thank you all for coming," says Sarah, one of my night supervisors, the most recently hired, and the most prone to stage fright. Functionally she is a junior officer - this is all hers to plan and to carry out.

Mo steps forward. He motions forward one of the employees, who is holding an oddly modified bottle of vodka in his barely not trembling left hand. Mo takes the mike.

"These practical demonstrations are to supplement training that many of you have already received. Online training, " (technically, computer assisted Intranet because hey, no Internet!), "... videos, our popular and harmless IED Petting Zoo, and occasionally classes. Today we are going to actually DO stuff. Dangerous stuff. Stuff that could kill if we were not very careful.

"My associate here is holding a Molotov cocktail. The drink of revolutionaries, terrorists and arsonists the world over. Start with a glass bottle, sometimes lightly scoring it to make sure it breaks when you want it to. Fill with a mixture of flammable liquids and a thickener. See your manuals for the details. Stick a rag in the throat. More details. Then light and throw, if you have a strong throwing arm. Heh."

Janine is standing nearby _wearing_ turnout gear and a large, heavy backpack consisting of two foam cylinders, a pressurized air cylinder, and a regulator. Two of her Fire Brigade firefighters are also wearing turnout gear and have several large dry chemical fire extinguishers to hand.

"On the command. Light!"

The hapless trainee bomb tech clicks an ordinary household grill lighter and lights the rag. It does not dribble. One useful detail - do not allow the rag to become contaminated with fuel, if you do not desire to become a flaming pinata. He drops the lighter and moves the molotov in his right hand, as far from his body as he can.

He then runs forward, shouts in terror, and flings the bottle. It flies forward towards the target, a piece of plywood on which a happy face has been painted.

It shatters, leaks out its contents, which then ignite in a WHOOSH of flame.

"Note! A molotov has no penetrating power! It will bounce off of fences, plywood, transparent plastics, even sometimes glass. If it hits a _person_, you will be badly burned - and without a burn unit available, your odds are not good. If it hits a structure, it can start a major fire. If it hits a vehicle, it depends a lot on where and how. Against an armored vehicle, good targets are vision blocks, tires and engine exhausts. Against a tank ... the [COMPANY] life insurance regretfully declines to pay out in such cases."

The shaking bomb tech runs back to the stage to a series of ironic claps from those of the guard force who are not busy.

The next apprentice steps forward. Mo takes an egg shaped object from him, looks at it very carefully, and hands it back. The apprentice looks at it again as if he has never seen it before.

The SLE's protection team becomes very alert.

"We are going to expend a grenade to demonstrate what to expect when a grenade goes off. This particular device is a concussion grenade, sometimes called an offensive grenade. It has no shrapnel. This is highly desirable in close combat where you may have people nearby who don't deserve to become leaky colanders."

Thus the careful double checking. Much more calmly, the second tech throws the grenade at a plywood display in which there is a large hole.

I personally checked that display three times. It is propped up so loosely that if the grenade hit the plywood instead of the hole, the plywood would fall down. No bouncing grenades back into our audience, if we please.

Further, the surface of the thin plywood is laminated. No wood fragments sprayed into our audience either.

BOOM.

A third tech steps forward. He has a tube over his shoulder.

Mo now, by slight of hand, has a single push button detonator in his left hand, half concealed from the crowd.

This is a bluff.

"This is an anti-tank rocket. We are going to expend one to demonstrate what they look like when they go off."

The SLE sits up sharply and stares at me.

The tech levels his tube, flips up the safety, takes a bead on the third plywood tank, this one a safely generic tank, and smoothly pulls the trigger back.

A harmless smoke rocket shoots out towards the target. The entire crowd is watching the rocket. Mo touches the detonator button just as it hits the plywood tank, which conveniently is smashed to splinters thanks to more lamination and some discreet precutting. Not to mention the tiny remote controlled charge Mo has just set off.

We don't have anti-tank. Would that we did. But we have just done a great job of pretending we do. And word will get around.

"Last but not least, our brave Fire Captain Janine will demonstrate that a Fire Department can always help you. If you have too much fire, call the Fire Department. If you don't have _enough_ fire, _also_ call the Fire Department!"

Janine grimly stalks ten paces forward and attacks each of the three targets with her flamethrower, jetting out a thirty foot lance of solid flame at each.

Underneath her turnout gear, she is wearing a hacker's black T-shirt that boasts, "WE VOID WARRANTIES!"

And also violate nearly every regulation promulgated by the California State Fire Marshal's Office.

Well, technically, she is a firefighter, and firefighters can use flamethrowers if authorized by their departments. But we haven't actually filed any of the paperwork to have our own fire department. We did the paper, we just didn't file it.

The firefighters on standby relax only once Janine has turned off both the valves on her repurposed foam projector. We're out of the specialized foam it uses. We hope to get more. But pressurized liquid is pressurized liquid, and a lighter on the barrel is nothing for the site machine shop to manufacture.

"And now, lunch!"

We are serving pulled pork sandwiches. The cafeteria isn't quite up to using every part of the pig but the squeal, but they're getting there.

Of the group, Janine, Brooke and I are not eating. Janine has stalked back to the middle of her crew.

Everyone having been screened but the SLE and his detachment, Brooke comes over to me and lays a hand on my arm.

"You OK boss?"

I am not smelling pork. But I am smelling burning meat.

"Yeah, I'm OK."

We do what we have to do. Even in apocalypse. Especially in apocalypse.

GWOT Visions of Peace

GWOT Vision of Peace


I tried to check every post as often as I could. For the perimeter posts, that meant once a shift or twice a day. Gates more often. Other posts I had to entrust to the supervisors - but any place we put a guard, I needed to check on occasionally.

The infirmary post was one I checked more often than most. The guard had to be polite, as trained in medical skills as we could manage, courteous, skilled at searching people, show some level of empathy to the hurt, sick, ill and dying as needed ... and utterly willing to kill instantly should that become necessary. They had developed their own procedures, under supervision, and some touched every part of the infirmary. The infirmary guard verified the pharmacy tech's log book twice a shift. The infirmary guard's metal detector wand had been unexpectedly vital during surgeries, minor and otherwise, for finding metal fragments. The infirmary guard double checked the receptionist's patient care log. And -- the infirmary guard was the link to Security Control, to advise the infirmary to get ready before the casualties started flooding through the doors.

The trash yard guard also had a wand and body searched people hands-on, but at that point similarities ended. Politeness took a back seat to watchfulness, and courtesy to assertion. Employees were guests in the trash yard; prisoners were exactly that, prisoners, and the protocols that forbade them to speak directly to employees were ruthlessly implemented by immediate corrective force. This was an unarmed post, no firearms in the yard, but might require instant and vigorous use of the baton.

The dormitory guard had the biggest challenge in terms of customer service. Dormitory staff were in charge of the dorms; but the dorm guard controlled access, patrolled, participated in searches (consent and otherwise), and enforced fire safety regulations with a fervor bordering on religious fanaticism. Too many lives in question to do anything else.

Today I was checking on the guard assigned to the Children's Area. This post was a partial - staffed between 0600 and 1000 - by which time any children who had not gone to school had returned from sick call and been put back to bed - and then again between 1700 and 2100, just an hour before Lights Out. On weekends there were enough employee parents around that guards were on call if needed, not assigned.

I inspected the log. The Count - the number of people for which this area was responsible - remained static at 174. Only authorized persons and parents of children were permitted access, and even then under specified rules with logs kept. Even my visit was logged, and properly so.

The guard was completely unarmed except for four zip ties in a sewn sheath, left in the desk drawer between shifts, and a powerful rechargeable flashlight on its wall charger mount - just in case an evacuation was ever necessary. I checked through the disaster bag at the post: hard hat, vest, leather gloves, clipboard, paper, pens, spare forms. This was not a search post so no wand was necessary. No radio either - one would be useful, but we didn't have nearly enough of them, and there was an internal VOIP phone right there on the desk with two more within easy sight.

I ran through scenarios with the guard on duty. Unauthorized attempt at access. Ill child. Elopement. Attempted abduction - which under the No Hostage Policy, would become a React incident where React would enter the room shooting. Fight between children. Staff allegation of misconduct. Domestic dispute between parents.

She knew her business. But she wanted to make her feelings plain on one point.

"I will not, ever, for you or anyone else, carry or use a weapon."

I was OK with that, because it had been disclosed up front. That severely limited the usefulness we could make of her, but that was OK as well. She would never attempt the Kill House, but her performance in both verbal judo and hand to hand was excellent.

I had a few words with the manager of the Children's Area, who had nothing but praise for all three of the guards who worked the Area.

On the way out, I stopped for a moment, just beyond the double doors with their signage "CHILDREN'S AREA."

I knew the price we paid to keep this bubble of normalcy going in the midst of madness. Some of these children had seen horrible things during the rescue convoys. Not a few had done them. Also not a few had had horrible things done _to_ them, and there was some overlap with the doers as well in that group.

No more of that. We would do the horrible things so that these children would live to grow up.

I reviewed again in my mind the site evacuation plan that had been proposed from Corporate. Eight hundred Employees board buses. Their spouses and children to ... follow? Squeeze in tightly at a ratio of 2.3 to 1? Hike?

Then all the Employees unworthy of priority evacuation, because replacements for them could be hired elsewhere. That was by definition true of nearly all the Contractors as well -- I mean, that's what we are. The hired help, interchangeable.

The one place we hadn't made distinction of class in our brave corporate fascism was here in the Children's Area. The children of valued Employees played and studied next to the children of landscapers and cooks.

And there was no evacuation plan for them. None whatsoever.

Not for the first time, I thought about the convoy I would need to get just the children out. It totaled up to three hundred seats or more, with only three vehicles in our motor pool capable of carrying more than seven passengers.

I'd had to give the County transit bus back, too. In addition to details like GPS tracking, they needed it - to help move evacuees and detainees out to camps in the Central Valley.

That was the worst part. There was no particular distinction being made between an evacuee, homeless merely because their homes had been nuked, and a detainee - often enough, for felony riot, looting and murder.

Put children into that mass of seething humanity?

Not on my fucking watch.

We needed more vehicles. The Bay Area was not a place we could get them.

Off to the salt mines. Time to send more E-mails.

Apocalypse. With E-mails.