GWOT III - Operational Assessment

GWOT III - Operational Assessment

I had some intel that was utterly useless to Homeland, as they knew it all already.

I had been in this building before.

From another angle, not in custody. As a visitor.

I had been all around the outside of the building. Once during that visit, once during a memorable hike that ended in bodies on the ground and would-be protesters hustled aboard buses.

So I knew from that, and the angle of the sun as it came through the narrow sliver of window in my cell, and the progress of light under the crack in the interrogation cell door when I was chained in there, that I was on the south side of the former Federal Building in downtown San Jose.

Why former?

Most of the agencies had shut down their Northern California operations. The courts had closed completely and I had not heard of a working Federal court in operation, anywhere in the country.

The FBI simply no longer existed. There had been a bureaucratic bun fight within days of the Firecracker and Hoover's boys had lost. The survivors had joined Homeland, and likely edited their resumes accordingly. And thrown out all those cheap suits.

Homeland didn't need courts. Turns out in the hoary saying "Lawyers, guns and money!" all you really need are guns.

So this left most of the building for use by Homeland.

Obviously the hundreds of thousands of people they had detained or in transit were nowhere near here. There were sprawling detention camps in the Central Valley for them.

They needed some admin. But not as much as you would think. Once your paycheck is direct deposit and your expense reimbursements are auto approved in software, your purchase orders are shipped next day and your residence is in confiscated housing ... just put on your gear, get your orders and do the thing.

A little known detail of the German Holocaust. It was made possible by computing machines made by good old IBM. The reduction of undesirables was computer assisted. Every person had their little punch card, and it was destroyed when they were.

Modern technology was far advanced of that. Pre-War, I'd even seen a horrific little bit of software called Concentration Camp Manager. Like flight simulators and train simulators and amusement park simulators, it simulated running an extermination camp.

In Site's corporate ecosystem, there was a constant fight between database software and spreadsheet software. Little stuff, easy stuff, could be spreadsheets. But data silos and heavy lifting needed to be in the databases. So there were software engineers whose job it was to hunt through the corporate file system, look for rogue spreadsheets and database them long before anything became dependent on such lists.

All we'd known for sure is that Homeland ran an internal computer system named (or nicknamed) "Eagle." It spat out lists of people, addresses, dispositions. To misquote a rap song, "Some of them I murder, others I let go."

Somewhere else in this building were secure data links. Computers hooked up to them. An entry in "Eagle" named Echo 18.

Site did some of the maintenance for the underlying software that ran Eagle. But we hadn't pulled on that particular thread.

I seriously doubted that my path would lead from here out to either a detention camp or an extermination camp. I simply knew too much for anyone to take that risk.

The only way they could let me go from here would be to make me a Homeland asset. Recruit me as one of theirs, or hire me as a contractor.

You don't torture future employees. When they'd manhandled me into that lovely electrical room and seated me on my destiny, I'd known at some level that I was not merely fucked but FUCKED.

As in, this is the building in which I am going to die.

So they would have to get rid of my ugly corpus.

Homeland had thought of that. Not for me, but for many thousands.

Field incinerators were designed for efficiently turning rotting meat into cremains. They had been designed pre-War and stockpiled for use after general nuclear war. The salvage teams would find bodies. The bodies would get in the way of the recovery. Thus, disposal method.

Also, a point not to be missed, schoolchildren had been taught to "Duck and Cover" - to hide under their desks - in the event of nuclear war. The survivors would need those buildings, not as schools but as hospitals and shelters. If the kids scattered and ran all over the place, more of them would survive but the little dead bodies would be scattered to hell and gone.

"Duck and Cover" meant orderly little piles of corpses, one under each desk. Easy cleanup, less PTSD for the cleanup crews.

So this building had been rigged with at least one field incinerator, perhaps more. Likely in the basement because that's where they would be room. Also explained a couple of smokestacks I'd noted from the overhead view, that hadn't been consistent with either HVAC or plumbing stack.

(Overhead view? Post-War? Yup. We'd gotten two. One, the infamous download from the Beeb. The other - well, a drone made of waxed cardboard with a couple video cameras.)

Another issue. When you torture people, you leave marks. When you torture them to death, their dead bodies are silent witness to how they died.

Cremation fixes that problem as well.

So I was on what one Russian author called "the conveyor."

A piece of lost human luggage.

Rolling on my gurney down the track.

That last was really telling.

Why strap someone to a piece of rolling equipment to take them to Medical? Or Dental?

Because once they realize what's in store, they might fight the cell extraction team. That gets people hurt and your people getting hurt is bad for your chances of advancement.

The quick trips from my cell to interrogation and back were short enough that it wasn't worth the effort to strap me to a gurney. They saved that for elevator rides.

So the conveyor ran downward. These cells, with a sliver of view. Then down to torture rooms, which don't need windows because you don't want anyone overhearing the screaming. Then the dirty work in the basement.

How could I get off this ride?

I wasn't getting off this ride.

Luggage doesn't have agency. It goes where it shoved to.

People have agency.

I could play head games with my interrogator(s). I could play games with my own health and welfare.

I couldn't escape. Too many layers, too many barriers. Even if I were James Bond (I'm not) and had all his gadgets (I don't), there are just too many layers of physical security between here and the nominal freedom of the street.

Let's say I got out in the street. Armed with a stolen weapon or two.

The Homeland troopers and their military backup would annihilate me as casually as we had run over that asshole Cartwrong.

We believed that the Chinese had actually organized and carried out an open attack on Site, in the early days of the War. Certainly there had been an open attack. My first client contact had died in my arms as a result.

That attack - as organized and planned as it was - would bounce off this building's defenses. Boing!

So who could be induced to attack this faciilty?

Anti-American partisans, which was what Homeland blamed for all protest and terrorism and crime in general? (Did you know that starving people will steal instead of starving? Damned anti-American partisans is what it is.)

The Resistance?

The Ammunition Technical Working Group's best guess was that the Resistance was more a meme than an organization and that while it had many sympathizers and fellow travelers, its actual fighting power numbered in the low hundreds. As in three hundred to five hundred.

That's more dangerous than you might think.

The Troubles in Northern Ireland were the result of a mere 800 odd Irish Republican Army guerillas. They died or were imprisoned, and as rapidly replaced, keeping their numbers roughly constant. They were the subject of story and song, and winning the Troubles had taken literal regiments of British soldiers decades. Ultimately they were defeated by transitioning them to an organized crime syndicate and letting them destroy themselves.

Drugs are bad, m'kay? Even if you're selling them.

But the Resistance could no more take and hold this facility than Site could.

Wait. A. Minute.

My knowledge of the facility was useless as a lone escapee. Even the inmates who had swum from Alcatraz had had help. Each other.

I didn't even have a spoon to tunnel through concrete with.

Our entire armed assemblage - Reaction Team and contract security force, designed to complement each other's weaknesses and maximize each other's strengths - would break on this rock.

But if I could marry the two - my knowledge of the site plus a plan that pitted our strengths (explosives, entry methods) against Homeland's weaknesses (sloth, incompetence, poor design)...

It was a pipe dream. It couldn't happen.

The cell door clanged. Time to go to work.

I longed for coffee. Oh, how I longed for coffee.

Soon enough, I would be getting a coffin.

Close enough.