GWOT 2 - Feeding Mushrooms

The problem with returning from a business trip is the need to pick up the normal routine.

Of course, the normal routine had been so badly disrupted that we'd had to run over my alleged boss, go pick up his head, and then liquidate his minions when they decided to play at homicide bomber.

So my first stop, instead of re-reading my E-mail or coming up with an agenda, was to grab the duty reaction force and go visit the trash yard.

I wanted to make very sure the prisoners were where we had put them.

Shane Shreve was of course in the reaction force. But George had also attached himself to the reaction force, and kept standing in such a way that he was behind Shreve and his right hand was always free.

Good.

I read the trash yard duty log. The seven new prisoners - the last survivors of Cartwright's Cronies - had been separated, searched, given pencils and paper and the opportunity to make preliminary statements, and locked in their cells for the night. As they had not yet completed in processing, training or orientation, they were still in their cells. Breakfast had been delivered.

I read the two memos that had been filled out. One was a demand that we contact Corporate Security immediately on his behalf. I opened my phone (which worked only on campus but gave me E-mail) and sent a quick E-mail to that effect to the SLE, and wrote the words "Done - E18" and the date and time on the memo. The other was a statement that he had only gone along with the others because he didn't know who to trust or what to believe. No action required. He can stay a prisoner for a while, problem is self correcting. Liar or coward.

I deeply regretted not taking all the Cronies into custody immediately after Cartwright's death. But it would have been a confused, nasty situation and they would have been within their rights to resist and to appeal to Corporate Security for a resolution. Taking their loyalty and integrity at face value had been the high road. It had also cost us three extremely valuable lives - one of my last remaining unarmed guards, the SLE's designated bodyguard and last but not least, the SLE's executive secretary. Maybe we would win the political fight, but it was a damned expensive way to do it.

My E-mail chimed. A reply from the SLE. "Talked to Corp. He's fired. Do whatever you want with him."

I had the trash yard guards drag him from his cell over to the guns side. A red line painted on the ground and a rack of lockers indicated the boundary between where guns were allowed (in fact, required) and where they were not.

We had an interrogation room on the custody side. I wasn't using it. Going unarmed, even for a moment, this soon after an attempted coup struck me as begging to be the sudden victim of the worst case of suicide anyone ever saw.

Instead I had him stood against the wall, handed him his request, and given a chance to read it with my additional notation.

Then I passed him my phone with the SLE's E-mail open.

I looked him in the eyes while he read it. I was ready to go hands on with him if he tried to break the phone - but by doing so, he'd seal his own fate, and he'd have to be quite the fanatic to die over something so easily replaceable.

He handed the phone back, and it was like someone let the air out of him. He took a deep sigh.

"Looks like I picked the wrong side," he said.

"Shouldn't have been that way. Should only have been one side to begin with. I need some answers."

"Go."

"Who authorized the kidnap attempt on the SLE?"

"Cartwright."

Nice safe harmless answer. Can't interrogate the dead.

"Did he also authorize the murder of Alice Snyder? Did he also authorize the murder of Kurt Sebas?"

"Huh?"

"Alice Snyder was the SLE's executive secretary. She was murdered during the kidnap attempt. Kurt Sebas was the SLE's bodyguard, and as such a Corporate Security manager as is your company policy. He was shot in the head with his pants down while he was taking a shit. No chance at all. So that's two straight up murders of Employees. Key employees, I might add, worth a lot more than me. So who authorized those murders?"

He looked stricken.

"I'll add that Cartwright obviously got his orders from someone else. Someone in Utah or someone in Colorado. Quite literally an inside job. But they're in Utah or Colorado. I just got back from Utah - so unless I'm wrong, I'm pretty sure it wasn't Utah. That means Colorado. And you ... former Employee that you are ... accompanied Cartwright all the way from Utah out here. Convoy of fire and brimstone, hauling worthless crap over a thousand miles to be stuck in a radioactive hell with ... me.

"So what you are going to do, right the fuck now, is take a bunch of this paper and write the best fucking memo of your life. You are going to say Who, What, When, Where and How and especially WHY. You are going to write out everything and leave out nothing. You have eight hours.

"Because eight hours from now, I'm going to read that memo. And if I don't find in it anything to serve as a reason to keep your worthless ass alive, I am going to execute you for conspiracy to commit capital murder, three counts."

"What about my right against self incrimination?"

"Abrogated during a time of national emergency. You fuckers have already had two chances: to cooperate with Cartwright alive, to cooperate with Cartwright dead. You don't get a third. I am prepared to execute all of you. Try hard to give me a reason not to.

"Lock him in his cell with a bunch of paper and one sharpened pencil at a time."

I paused.

"Of course, if you think you have the balls, you can probably put the pencil through your eye and into your brain. If you really think this is worth dying over. And you are absolutely sure you won't flinch."

I gestured and he was dragged back.

I worked my way through the rest of the prisoners. Same offer. Write the best memo of your life, or die in eight hours.

I gave some orders.

"If anything happens to any of these prisoners between now and then, or any of the paper they dirty goes missing, I'll be taking absolutely lethal exception. Lives ride on this information and anyone who fucks it up is trying to get all of us killed. Not just me, not just the SLE, everyone on the site. So a three person rule is in effect from now until I come back in seven hours. Follow standard operating procedure. Reaction personnel will assist. But no convenient accidents, no staged suicides, and anyone who takes a piece of paper away from one of these prisoners before I do is probably going to be buried with it. Clear?"

I still took George and Shreve with me when I left. Next stop, Cafeteria.

Not for my breakfast. To find out where we were with the food situation.

"Oh thank God!" the cafeteria manager exclaimed as she got up from her desk and stopped just before committing to give me an enormous hug.

"How many days?"

"Two."

"Two?" I exclaimed.

"Two. I was told the buses would be here to take everyone away a week ago."

Well, shit.

How many ways is this asshole going to try to kill us all from his grave?

No wonder she was happy to see me.

This is the problem with having a reputation. You get to live up to it, over and over again.

Two days of food was a nightmare scenario beyond measure. Now we were going to have to get apocalyptic levels of funky.

We didn't really have two days. We had between three and five, depending on when and how panic set in, and which of my contingency plans worked.

"Serve as light a lunch as you dare. Slightly better dinner, you know the psychology. Solid breakfast tomorrow, no lunch. Dinner tomorrow night for children, invalids and pregnant women only."

She nodded. It went without saying that she would maximize food efficiency ... that was literally her job.

As we walked to Security Control, I cautioned George and Shane.

"Keep this a secret. Period."

At Control I reviewed the gate logs. Foraging had stopped as soon as the H1B convoy had left. Two food convoys had arrived via Bakersfield. Nothing since.

I called Finance from the safety of our duty office with the door closed.

"Cartwright said not to pay them, the quality was poor and the quantity shorted."

He'd know, wouldn't he?

"Regardless, and I'm swearing you to secrecy on pain of taking flying lessons from H5, we need the food. Now. Or better yet, yesterday. Can you pay them?"

"Of course."

"Pay them double. Tell them there was a screwup on our end."

"Do you have any idea what it takes to prepay a corporate purchase order? This goes above the SLE, I'll need a C level executive to OK it."

Sadly, I did.

"We buy food or we evacuate at once. We're not evacuating. So we buy food."

"I get it. I hope they'll still take my calls."

"If they don't, I need to know at once. Because as you and I both know, there are no other vendors in Bakersfield who will put up with our nonsense."

Nonsense in terms of waiting for a check instead of bluebacks on the barrelhead. But the only people with bluebacks were government agencies and the vendors they paid in same.

So much for the legal ways of getting food.

Now for the illegal ways.

I excused myself to go up to the Room. In the Room, I pulled down the binder labeled "Distribution Centers" and started going over addresses and diagrams.

Security spends its time preventing and responding to theft, burglary, robbery and fraud.

Now it was time for us to plan and commit.

GWOT 2 - Test of Character

GWOT 2 - Test Of Character


As I worked through my target selection process, I had to confront something that up until now I hadn't been forced to confront before.

We were going to go steal stuff. Stuff that somebody else needed, to save lives with, but we felt our need was greater so we were going to lie to, beat up (or worse) anyone who got in our way, and then take it.

No dancing around the issue, no self defense, no pussy footing, no waving around purchase orders or receipts, no 'ends justify the means' or even 'necessity defense.'

Never mind the law. I'd broken enough laws to make my hypothetical future indictment a thing of beauty. This would just be _wrong_.

I knew the rationalizations as well as anyone else. Didn't make it right.

But we were going to do it anyway.

The problem was the gap. Cartwright had allowed the site's supplies to run so low that even if we pushed the orders through today - which I had no guarantee of - and a convoy could be found and assembled, it would take too long for the purchased supplies to arrive.

So we had to steal the stuff. Paying for it would admit who we were.

That meant we had to go in full undercover. I had considerably fewer people able and willing to do that. Shreve, for instance, might require more than one milk carton, but would be instantly recognizable in any clothes or none at all. (Yuck.)

We couldn't bring our own vehicles. That means a hijacking.

We couldn't risk being tracked back to site. That meant bringing equipment that could find and defeat tracking devices.

We needed an escape plan. Preferably one that didn't require us to kill cops. (Homeland, OK, you do have the draw the line somewhere. But not cops.)

As I finished my musings I realized that I had both a target and a plan. Damn I'm good.

Now I had to pull my handful of people together and wait for dark.

I went downstairs and logged into my scheduler.

"Ammunition Technical Working Group. Due to missed meetings, a makeup meeting is scheduled for 1600, usual location."

###

"Fuck me what?" offered Janine.

"You're the only one with the skills to defeat a tracker," Mo pointed out. "There are several reasons I can't go. But that's the big thing you can do that I can't do."

"We don't even know that there _is_ a tracker," Sharon offered.

"If pizzas were still getting delivered, the fucking pizza boy would have a tracker rammed up his ass," Betty pointed out. "What I object to is going. This is crazy wave guns at people shit."

I smiled broadly.

"Crazy is what you do, Betty." And who you do. "We have to do this as a snap kick, and that means a small crew of crazy, highly skilled people. We are the bare minimum crew. Janine to drive and defeat the tracker, Sharon and I to disable guards and truckers, and you to get us in and get us close."

"And how am I going to get... oh, you bastard."

Mo excused himself to start preparing the handful of care packages we would be bringing.

Brooke was on overwatch and carefully wouldn't know a damn thing.

###

"Where's my car?" I asked dangerously.

The mechanic looked up.

"Cartwright had us part it out."

When I die and go to Hell, I am looking him up. He can't die _enough_ to suit me.

I looked through the list of vehicles. There was only one that would work for what we needed.

Which is how the four of us got crammed into a Subaru station wagon, oddly equipped and carefully sanitized. With a bicycle rack and a bicycle on the back, too.

Driving to the vicinity of the target would be fairly simple. So we didn't. The Subaru dropped me off, with the bicycle and a very heavy backpack full of stuff, next to a screwed up gate to a dirt road. I did some things, left the backpack behind and rode after on the bicycle.

Cue front gate of secure facility, from which the battered Subaru had been parked a considerable distance. Cue us, carefully staying well away from front gate, equipped with armed guards with rifles who were actually conscious. Cue us going over the back fence instead, one by one. "Us" did not include me; I had another task.

Prior recon had determined that the fence was not alarmed and the cameras were not watched. We were dressed for the occasion, all over black sweats with towels over our faces. All the coverage of a ninja with less than a tenth the cinematic star power. That was OK, this was not Hollywood (or Bollywood), this was real life, where "Cut!" means nothing.

Betty stripped down as soon as the sight line blocked the corner of the building. She was now dressed in a short skirt, a blouse that left nothing to the imagination and a totally inappropriate use of makeup. She was now what truckers call a Lot Lizard, a prostitute looking for sex with truck drivers.

We identified a target truck. Truck waiting for clearance to leave, that had already been loaded. Awkward to hijack an empty truck. Fatal to hijack a guarded one.

Betty lurked in wait for the driver. I waited in the bushes some distance from the front gate, bicycle at hand and earpiece in my ear.

Betty pounced. The driver started to take her to the side. I found out later that he hissed something about "Not here!" but it was too late when she turned a kiss into a stranglehold and put him out with her thumbs on his carotids, then tied him up with her discarded sweatshirt.

This allowed Betty, Sharon and Janine to all crowd into the front of the truck and Sharon in particular to start the truck. One of the many odd jobs she'd had in between a bad childhood and a worse marriage was local short-haul truck driver.

The truck pulled forward just as the gate opened to allow another truck, one that had been cleared, to leave.

I heard a double click in my ears. Showtime.

I got on the bicycle and rode boldly at the guard shack, dinging the little bell on the bicycle and shouting.

"Here, piggies piggies piggies! Here oinkers! Food for the rich, fuck the poor, huh PIGS! FUCK THE PIGS! FUCK THE PIGS!"

A guard came out of the shack with his hand on his holstered handgun, clearly wondering how much trouble he'd be in if he dropped me. Probably none.

So I threw the first of several small packages at him with one second fuses.

BANG! BANG! Clouds of smoke and a sharp flash. Smoke was good because the guard naturally drew down and started shooting with an intention to hit me but a total inability. The entire front gate area covered in huge waves of smoke.

I rode like hell using the sound of the two trucks to guide me. Upon seeing the clouds of smoke, the first trucker sensibly came to a halt. The second trucker - Sharon - floored it and pushed past, blindly making the turn and aiming to put her left front tire on the center line of the public street.

I rode the curb line. This allowed the bumper of the truck to miss me in the smoke by about ten feet.

The right cab door opened as the truck started to pass.

This is the part we hadn't practiced. I realized at the last moment that I couldn't climb up from a moving bicycle to the side of a moving truck.

So I climbed up on the seat and pushed off the bicycle seat as I leapt for the side of the truck and desperately latched onto the side handle, at the same time a (belted in, she's not stupid) Janine grabbed at my torso and hauled me sideways.

The bicycle fell under the wheels and was crushed. Fortunately, I was not.

The driver would wake up and identify his truck. This would allow his dispatch to track, or worse, remotely disable the stolen truck.

So we sped down local roads and parked parallel to an empty office building, up on the sidewalk along the north side. This put the GPS antenna of the truck in partial shadow from some of the satellites. If we were lucky, it might interfere with the antennas of the tracker(s) as well.

Janine immediately dismounted with her tool kit while Sharon popped the hood and started checking the engine. That left Betty and I to check the back of the truck. Locked and sealed, but a moment with a shim and less than that with a blade took care of that.

The truck was full of boxes. If it hadn't been, we would have aborted - dumped the trailer, dumped the cab some distance away, spent an unpleasant night escaping and evading, and tried again if we survived.

The boxes were not loaded on GPS pallets. If they had been, it would have been a desperate effort to break bulk before they could be tracked, and dump the pallets and run.

I climbed, painfully, the top of the trailer from the cab, and cut two things that looked like they could be antennas. Finished with the tractor, Janine got inside the trailer and did the same. Then she checked the front of the trailer a second time.

While I was up there, I clipped the satellite antenna for the truck.

Sharon started the truck. Or tried to. It wouldn't.

Janine started tracing the ignition interlock, which led to the satellite uplink ... and the truck was smart enough to know that if it didn't talk to the satellite, the engine didn't really need to start after all.

But this also needed to have an override, accessible to stupid drivers with stupid guards - or worse, Homeland - pointing guns at their heads, to clear the checkpoint Or Else.

Janine traced and found the correct fuse, and pulled it.

The truck started.

Janine waved her frequency counter over the engine one last time, and slammed the hood.

This revealed to our horrified gaze ... two guys with a pickup truck, parked so as to keep the truck from moving.

One of them got out with a chrome plated handgun.

"Hey, ladies, need some help with something?" he mocked.

Betty double-tapped him twice in the head, stepped quickly sideways, and as the driver put his hands up in turn, head jobbed him neatly as well.

I cursed as I dragged the body clear, fastest as I was already wearing gloves.

"Betty, damn it, make him get out of the car BEFORE you execute him."

"Uh, sorry."

I then sat in the driver's blood to move the truck out of the way.

We all got in the cab of the truck and rolled out.

Pre-Firecracker, this wouldn't have worked. Drivers call 911, people follow you, CHP air units hover from their untouchable sweeping perspective, and you're so very very fucked. That's before you leave out the trackers.

Post Firecracker, you merely roll the dice with being found by someone. In this case, we had. But fortunately for us (not them) it had been someone we could head-job.

If it had been cops, we'd have had to try the _other_ head job gambit, Betty if they were straight and me if they were gay.

Call it half lucky. We were well clear of the second crime scene when a single local police unit came up behind us and burped its siren at us.

We pulled over.

As the cops got out, I got out and threw something under their front wheels.

As I got back in, their cruiser caught fire from the thermite grenade. If they had the sense God gave little goslings, they bailed out and started shooting at us with handguns. But we were already in motion and neither noticed nor cared.

But they did have radios.

So we reached the gate I'd stopped at earlier, and left behind a backpack. I dismounted, hopefully for the next to last time. Not for the last time, because that would mean I'd be dead on the ground nearby.

I reached into the backpack as the truck slowly rumbled past me. I ran between the gate posts, stretching something behind me, and securing it.

Three police cruisers came roaring up to the gate as I ran for the truck. Fortunately, Sharon hadn't sped up. Because if she had, I'd be dead.

I could hear the swearing over the truck's engine, then the high pitched cracks of rifle fire after I'd gotten into the cab.

I wondered if they were shooting at the truck, or the doubled length of heavy chain that kept them from further pursuit.

A few miles away, we met another truck - one of ours, suitably disguised, and a crew of loaders with a pallet jack. Parked butt to butt with a metal bridge ramp, it took only minutes to yank the pallets across. (The pallet jack was lifted and passed hand over hand as needed; amazing what six strong scared men with long arms can do.)

We started an evasion route. Ultimately, we made it back.

###

Bandits Strike At Systema Foods!

Two guards were killed and seven wounded when bandits attacked Systema Foods distribution center in a daring daytime raid this afternoon. One bandit threw hand grenades while two others fired at guards with automatic weapons. Homeland agents vowed to get to the bottom of this. The items taken were believed to exceed $100,000 in value, destined for use at soup kitchens and orphanages in the East Bay.

###

Pickles. Two pallets of pickles. And we didn't dare allow them to be used in any way that would reveal that we had so many, because Homeland was perfectly capable of putting two and two together from a cafeteria that always had lots of pickles and a cargo theft containing two pallets of same. And we couldn't even trade them away, same reason, except very very quietly to the Mormons.

Some crimes carry their own punishment.

Pickles. But in Apocalypse, if what you have is pickles, you drink pickle juice and you are thankful for it.