GWOT 2 - Explanations
Mar. 3rd, 2019 03:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drewkittyIt took the rest of the afternoon and all of the evening to patch the security issues created in my absence.
It turned out that Mo's family was living in the bomb shed, and Mo had taken the opportunity to go plainclothes and make friends off campus. We'd sent out a convoy to pick him up, with two freshly disarmed devices.
It shows quite a bit of dedication to keep working after you are fired and you and your family are sent out to what the sender believes is certain death.
That's Mo for you.
We restored the guard tower at the South Gate to its properly unmanned status. I will cheerfully risk the lives of our personnel as needed, but that wasn't a risk ... it was a death trap.
We fixed the ration cards. We restored Arturo to duty. Cartwright's Cronies were removed from duty pending further evaluation. My meeting with them had been brief.
"You keep your rank. You keep your weapons. But if any of you want to follow your late boss to hell, bring it the fuck on."
No one had taken me up on it.
I had considered arresting them all on general principles. But I decided to follow the example set by the SLE. Keeping them out of restricted areas would have to do for now.
Then I discovered that my "lair" in the Data Center had not only been cleared, but filled with installed server racks, cheerfully whirring away.
You get home and find out you're homeless.
That's when I found out that the guards, who had been assigned barracks in unwanted first floor offices in D building, had been evicted to sleep in tents on the perimeter.
On. The. Perimeter.
Oh, bull SHIT.
I had gone to enormous effort to clear and empty the perimeter camp. As I'd instructed, the shacks and sheds had been struck or moved to other locations. But the guards protecting the site had been moved to the camp, under canvas.
That this put them several hundred yards from our defenses, their duties and their weapons had not been addressed.
Then I started thinking.
One thought ... another ... a logic chain. Then it came to me in a blinding flash.
Hopefully not too late.
I started to key my radio, then stopped. Instead I picked up a phone.
"Control, [Echo 18]. I need a wifi text page. All off duty officers to Security Control. Now. Nothing on radio or PA. At once and quickly."
Then I did key up my radio.
"Security Actual to Reaction Actual. Recommend Alert One. Say again, Recommend Alert One."
He was back on the radio in seconds.
"Why?" he said, devoid of protocol.
"Dusk," I replied, because it was. The time between late afternoon and early evening, when the sun is low in the sky and shadows hang over.
A good time for an attack. Which we had been thoughtfully stripped of our preparations for and defenses against.
"Approved. Alert One, all posts. Alert One."
I called the South Gate. Sharon answered.
"Lock it down. We're about to get smacked."
The back of my brain caught up to the front and informed me of the subtle changes I had seen but not noticed passing through the gate on the way in. The kick-out rollers under the barriers had been "made safe" and were no longer kick-out. There was now only one layer of sandbags around the main gate bunker, not three. The tower spoke for itself. None of the three armored trucks had been parked in the accustomed spot. The Hate Truck was getting an oil change and was not fitted with a machine gun on her hard point.
For that matter, I didn't know for sure that we had _any_ automatic weapons available. I knew we didn't have explosives - apparently the lockers at the South Gate and the Motor Pool had been emptied and disposed of by detonation.
I started walking briskly towards the Armory.
"Surprise inspection, now," I announced to the armorer in the cage - one of our firearms instructors, a Company rather than a Client employee.
In other words, I was his boss and I had every right to pull a surprise inspection.
He did not open the door. He put his hand to his holstered pistol.
"[Echo 18] to Security Control, emergency traffic, I need Corporate Reaction Team response to the Armory. React react react."
The armorer's hand turned white on his sidearm. Then he slowly removed it and held his hands stock-still at waist height.
"I am not attempting to enter the armory. But when React arrives you are going to open the door to our bosses. Do you understand?"
Running booted feet arrived, in bulk.
The armorer opened the door, and the inventory began.
Five of our six automatic weapons were missing. The sixth -- Brooke's rifle - missing its firing pin.
She matter of factly recovered it and took it apart on one of the armory tables, intended for that purpose. She installed a firing pin, either the original or a spare, and no time to ask.
There was also no time for camera review. A quick check of records showed that the last person to sign in the weapons was ... the on-duty armorer. He was promptly disarmed at gunpoint and arrested.
We were in grave danger of needing to find the other five weapons the hard way.
At this point the Reaction Team was standing to. Sixty corporate militia, a third of them in a compact reaction force centered on our vehicles, a third spread out among 2 and 3 person bunkers on the inner perimeter, and a third walking briskly to reinforce the south perimeter.
It was almost anticlimactic when the H5 Observation Post reported a vehicle movement towards the South Gate, mixed cars and trucks.
The gate would hold, or it wouldn't. Either way we had to deal with the internal threat, and quick. We now needed to arrest all of Cartwright's Cronies, we could sort them out later, but they needed to be disarmed and in restraints right the fuck now.
There were half a dozen vulnerable points on the campus they could pick. Security Control was the site's brain - but amply defended. The Armory we now held. The Motor Pool was on high alert, recently seeing your co-workers shot will do that.
Only one location gave me no time to be wrong. And it had been where Cartwright had headed for.
"H5, emergency procedure Castle," I ordered on radio.
That was safely ambiguous. That was a procedure I had trained all the H5 personnel on, but only by voice. It appeared nowhere in our procedures books or our general or post orders.
This situation was exactly why.
"Copy Castle," came the reply.
I started running. Brooke was with me. But Sarah had remained where I had posted her, with the Site Location Executive.
H4 offices.
The most valuable target not presently secured.
Splitting off three to cover the armory, the remainder of the mobile third of the Reaction Force followed. Their commander, with the third tasked as perimeter reinforcements, would have to run the gate and entrance fight.
The H perimeter doors were hard locked against keys and badges. We tried both. Cartwright had gotten to the locks and to the badge servers.
He'd set up his own office in H4 and been in the building a lot.
They were not locked against the precise application of a sledge and wedge by one of Janine's firefighters.
Another triumph of crude over technical.
We made entry. There was no initial resistance. But the elevators were on H4 level and disabled.
That meant the stairwells were death traps.
I motioned to the reaction team to break to cover each. Their shouts of "Reaction Team" were countered by shouts from above, "Keep clear! Executive orders! Stay out!"
As they shouted at each other, I assembled my team by eyeball.
One firefighter, four guards including Matt, one guard rifleman (Brooke) and one very angry guard manager.
We ran into one of the first floor classrooms, empty and unoccupied. I popped open the unlocked closet. Behold, a lowly server rack, bracketed to the wall and leading to the ceiling.
It made a handy ladder. The firefighter popped the dropped ceiling panels and slid the bolts of the newly installed hatch out of the way, and clambered up and through.
This put us in a 2nd floor HVAC space, normally empty in between the large ducts and fans and electrical transformers.
I took a small stepladder from its rack on the wall, set it up next to a head-height transformer, jumped up on the live transformer (completely ignoring the red line on the floor around it), and reached up for the coiled rope that had been prepositioned there.
Our Facilities electrician and I had gone over the grounding for this transformer three times. It was as safe as anything else we were doing lately.
With a good solid yank, the rope coiled down, dragging a chain ladder down after it. I climbed same, held on with one hand, and undogged the bolts of the next hatch. Then I dropped back down on the transformer and gave Brooke a leg up on the ladder. This allowed her to pop the hatch and point the rifle in one motion.
She did not fire, but disappeared into the third floor. I followed, as did the team.
We were standing in a printer-copy room with an unusually heavy table braced against (and bolted to) the far wall. This time Matt popped the dropped ceiling, made a reach, and leaned the aluminum single ladder down to contact with the table top.
This was from three to four.
It had been an enormous amount of work to prepare this escape route for the SLE. Damned if I would let him go down a stairwell or an elevator in an emergency.
Matt climbed the ladder and slowly lifted the hatch. It was under the desk of one of the executives who had his office near the SLE suite.
He leaned down briefly, held his index finger over his lips ("Shhhh!" without speaking), and slowly climbed up with his pistol in his right hand.
I followed, drawing my pistol as I cleared the hatch edge.
Then Brooke with her rifle, happy switch set to pure 600 rounds per minute happiness.
The firefighter passed up his axe to Matt while I covered the door.
This was just in time for a patrolling adversary - one of Cartwright's Cronies I had chastised - to stick his head in the door.
He should not have had the clearance to be in this _building_ let alone on this floor.
I brought my pistol up. I did not shoot. Gunfire would start a civil war. It would also sacrifice the element of surprise.
The axe left Matt's shoulders at blurring speed, in a two hand swing that crunched into the adversary's unprotected neck and sprayed blood into the office and the hallway.
We stepped over the body headed in a tactical clump for the SLE's office.
There had been no time to challenge or ask his intentions. We might have murdered an innocent man.
We would find out later. Meanwhile we had to get to the SLE.
I smelled recent cordite - burnt gunpowder, from gunfire - as we entered the SLE's suite.
There were two bodies on the floor. One was bleeding. One had stopped bleeding.
Sarah. The Dragon Lady.
I stepped over both with my pistol up.
Two of Cartwright's Cronies were on either side of the SLE; one held a pistol to his head.
I opened fire as one opened his mouth to speak.
Individual aimed shots. Head head, slight turn, head head, step, hasty execution shot, step, kick away handgun, careful execution shot.
On the trip home from Utah, I had been given a gift. In the desert of southern Oregon, a pillar of smoke by day and by night.
All flesh is grass. And I had seen the lawnmower.
Trimming these two blades had become utterly casual, a humdrum everyday task that required neither introspection nor hesitation.
I had gone far beyond "No Hostage Facility."
Perhaps we needed new signage at the gate.
"No Fucks Given."
Behind me Brooke fired a fully automatic burst to cover our rear.
The firefighter was already giving Sarah first aid, tying a tourniquet around her arm and tightening. She weakly moaned in agony.
The entire right side of her face was one huge reddish purple bruise, with a bloodshot eye staring out of it.
Matt shook his head briefly after lifting his hand from the Dragon Lady's neck. The pearls she liked to wear shone brightly against the dull dark gray of her lifeless skin. Dead.
I helped the SLE to his feet from where he had fallen. Unhurt, at least physically.
He reached into his desk and removed a pearl handled .45 pistol.
He was the boss. In fact, the Boss. He could do that.
He racked the slide, chambering a round.
"Where to?" he asked me.
Just then the ceiling panel in the main suite fell down and three figures in guard uniforms dropped into the midst of us.
"Blue on blue!" I shouted as I holstered. "Blue on blue! Blue on blue!"
Brooke heard my frantic call and did not turn. It takes enormous bravery to trust your ears over your eyes and brain and accept the risk of being shot in the back.
The SLE laid his pistol on the desk.
Matt held his pistol down low by his leg, pointed at the floor. If he holstered he would point it at one of the sudden entrants, and that would be . . . bad.
The firefighter continued with first aid, securing the tourniquet windlass to Sarah's upper right arm. Bravery equal to Brooke's, in my opinion.
"Castle!" one of the entry team shouted. "Sir!" he said with relief as he saw me.
Near tragedy averted, the entry team moved to reinforce Brooke at the door. This allowed Matt to follow.
I picked up the phone and keyed in a code. When I spoke, the building PA amplified my words, on every floor.
"This is Echo 18. The SLE is safe and unharmed and under my protection. Aggressors will lay down their weapons on my guarantee for their lives. Do this now."
I paused.
"Utah boys, you lost. It happens. But give up now. Anyone who keeps fighting will be hung for murder. Wire noose, slow drop. Save your lives, surrender now."
A hideous, agonizing death. But there was nothing left to fight over in this building.
Boots coming up the stairwells told me the offer had been accepted.
The SLE dug around in his desk, found his holster, clipped it in and holstered his pistol.
I keyed up on H5's frequency.
"Perimeter status?" I asked.
"Attackers beaten off. No friendly casualties."
I changed frequencies.
"I need a medic and two stretcher bearer teams to H4 Executive, immediately."
We would keep the SLE where he was; reinforce the site; and sweep to make sure we'd gotten all the Cronies.
"Sir, problem!" called one of my guards loudly from down the hall. "Homicide bomber!"
Brooke immediately rushed forward with her rifle, then stopped at the corner, stock still.
She didn't have the shot.
She saw something that caused her to do the unthinkable - to slowly lay down the rifle. Stalling.
Matt pushed the SLE towards the office with the floor hatch under the desk. The firefighter followed, closing the office door behind and kicking wedges under the frame edges. Half-conscious and groaning, Sarah dragged herself to lean against the door, drew her firearm with her off hand and weakly brought it up.
I advanced to talk to the threat. Between me and the SLE, I knew perfectly well who was more expendable.
It turned out that Mo's family was living in the bomb shed, and Mo had taken the opportunity to go plainclothes and make friends off campus. We'd sent out a convoy to pick him up, with two freshly disarmed devices.
It shows quite a bit of dedication to keep working after you are fired and you and your family are sent out to what the sender believes is certain death.
That's Mo for you.
We restored the guard tower at the South Gate to its properly unmanned status. I will cheerfully risk the lives of our personnel as needed, but that wasn't a risk ... it was a death trap.
We fixed the ration cards. We restored Arturo to duty. Cartwright's Cronies were removed from duty pending further evaluation. My meeting with them had been brief.
"You keep your rank. You keep your weapons. But if any of you want to follow your late boss to hell, bring it the fuck on."
No one had taken me up on it.
I had considered arresting them all on general principles. But I decided to follow the example set by the SLE. Keeping them out of restricted areas would have to do for now.
Then I discovered that my "lair" in the Data Center had not only been cleared, but filled with installed server racks, cheerfully whirring away.
You get home and find out you're homeless.
That's when I found out that the guards, who had been assigned barracks in unwanted first floor offices in D building, had been evicted to sleep in tents on the perimeter.
On. The. Perimeter.
Oh, bull SHIT.
I had gone to enormous effort to clear and empty the perimeter camp. As I'd instructed, the shacks and sheds had been struck or moved to other locations. But the guards protecting the site had been moved to the camp, under canvas.
That this put them several hundred yards from our defenses, their duties and their weapons had not been addressed.
Then I started thinking.
One thought ... another ... a logic chain. Then it came to me in a blinding flash.
Hopefully not too late.
I started to key my radio, then stopped. Instead I picked up a phone.
"Control, [Echo 18]. I need a wifi text page. All off duty officers to Security Control. Now. Nothing on radio or PA. At once and quickly."
Then I did key up my radio.
"Security Actual to Reaction Actual. Recommend Alert One. Say again, Recommend Alert One."
He was back on the radio in seconds.
"Why?" he said, devoid of protocol.
"Dusk," I replied, because it was. The time between late afternoon and early evening, when the sun is low in the sky and shadows hang over.
A good time for an attack. Which we had been thoughtfully stripped of our preparations for and defenses against.
"Approved. Alert One, all posts. Alert One."
I called the South Gate. Sharon answered.
"Lock it down. We're about to get smacked."
The back of my brain caught up to the front and informed me of the subtle changes I had seen but not noticed passing through the gate on the way in. The kick-out rollers under the barriers had been "made safe" and were no longer kick-out. There was now only one layer of sandbags around the main gate bunker, not three. The tower spoke for itself. None of the three armored trucks had been parked in the accustomed spot. The Hate Truck was getting an oil change and was not fitted with a machine gun on her hard point.
For that matter, I didn't know for sure that we had _any_ automatic weapons available. I knew we didn't have explosives - apparently the lockers at the South Gate and the Motor Pool had been emptied and disposed of by detonation.
I started walking briskly towards the Armory.
"Surprise inspection, now," I announced to the armorer in the cage - one of our firearms instructors, a Company rather than a Client employee.
In other words, I was his boss and I had every right to pull a surprise inspection.
He did not open the door. He put his hand to his holstered pistol.
"[Echo 18] to Security Control, emergency traffic, I need Corporate Reaction Team response to the Armory. React react react."
The armorer's hand turned white on his sidearm. Then he slowly removed it and held his hands stock-still at waist height.
"I am not attempting to enter the armory. But when React arrives you are going to open the door to our bosses. Do you understand?"
Running booted feet arrived, in bulk.
The armorer opened the door, and the inventory began.
Five of our six automatic weapons were missing. The sixth -- Brooke's rifle - missing its firing pin.
She matter of factly recovered it and took it apart on one of the armory tables, intended for that purpose. She installed a firing pin, either the original or a spare, and no time to ask.
There was also no time for camera review. A quick check of records showed that the last person to sign in the weapons was ... the on-duty armorer. He was promptly disarmed at gunpoint and arrested.
We were in grave danger of needing to find the other five weapons the hard way.
At this point the Reaction Team was standing to. Sixty corporate militia, a third of them in a compact reaction force centered on our vehicles, a third spread out among 2 and 3 person bunkers on the inner perimeter, and a third walking briskly to reinforce the south perimeter.
It was almost anticlimactic when the H5 Observation Post reported a vehicle movement towards the South Gate, mixed cars and trucks.
The gate would hold, or it wouldn't. Either way we had to deal with the internal threat, and quick. We now needed to arrest all of Cartwright's Cronies, we could sort them out later, but they needed to be disarmed and in restraints right the fuck now.
There were half a dozen vulnerable points on the campus they could pick. Security Control was the site's brain - but amply defended. The Armory we now held. The Motor Pool was on high alert, recently seeing your co-workers shot will do that.
Only one location gave me no time to be wrong. And it had been where Cartwright had headed for.
"H5, emergency procedure Castle," I ordered on radio.
That was safely ambiguous. That was a procedure I had trained all the H5 personnel on, but only by voice. It appeared nowhere in our procedures books or our general or post orders.
This situation was exactly why.
"Copy Castle," came the reply.
I started running. Brooke was with me. But Sarah had remained where I had posted her, with the Site Location Executive.
H4 offices.
The most valuable target not presently secured.
Splitting off three to cover the armory, the remainder of the mobile third of the Reaction Force followed. Their commander, with the third tasked as perimeter reinforcements, would have to run the gate and entrance fight.
The H perimeter doors were hard locked against keys and badges. We tried both. Cartwright had gotten to the locks and to the badge servers.
He'd set up his own office in H4 and been in the building a lot.
They were not locked against the precise application of a sledge and wedge by one of Janine's firefighters.
Another triumph of crude over technical.
We made entry. There was no initial resistance. But the elevators were on H4 level and disabled.
That meant the stairwells were death traps.
I motioned to the reaction team to break to cover each. Their shouts of "Reaction Team" were countered by shouts from above, "Keep clear! Executive orders! Stay out!"
As they shouted at each other, I assembled my team by eyeball.
One firefighter, four guards including Matt, one guard rifleman (Brooke) and one very angry guard manager.
We ran into one of the first floor classrooms, empty and unoccupied. I popped open the unlocked closet. Behold, a lowly server rack, bracketed to the wall and leading to the ceiling.
It made a handy ladder. The firefighter popped the dropped ceiling panels and slid the bolts of the newly installed hatch out of the way, and clambered up and through.
This put us in a 2nd floor HVAC space, normally empty in between the large ducts and fans and electrical transformers.
I took a small stepladder from its rack on the wall, set it up next to a head-height transformer, jumped up on the live transformer (completely ignoring the red line on the floor around it), and reached up for the coiled rope that had been prepositioned there.
Our Facilities electrician and I had gone over the grounding for this transformer three times. It was as safe as anything else we were doing lately.
With a good solid yank, the rope coiled down, dragging a chain ladder down after it. I climbed same, held on with one hand, and undogged the bolts of the next hatch. Then I dropped back down on the transformer and gave Brooke a leg up on the ladder. This allowed her to pop the hatch and point the rifle in one motion.
She did not fire, but disappeared into the third floor. I followed, as did the team.
We were standing in a printer-copy room with an unusually heavy table braced against (and bolted to) the far wall. This time Matt popped the dropped ceiling, made a reach, and leaned the aluminum single ladder down to contact with the table top.
This was from three to four.
It had been an enormous amount of work to prepare this escape route for the SLE. Damned if I would let him go down a stairwell or an elevator in an emergency.
Matt climbed the ladder and slowly lifted the hatch. It was under the desk of one of the executives who had his office near the SLE suite.
He leaned down briefly, held his index finger over his lips ("Shhhh!" without speaking), and slowly climbed up with his pistol in his right hand.
I followed, drawing my pistol as I cleared the hatch edge.
Then Brooke with her rifle, happy switch set to pure 600 rounds per minute happiness.
The firefighter passed up his axe to Matt while I covered the door.
This was just in time for a patrolling adversary - one of Cartwright's Cronies I had chastised - to stick his head in the door.
He should not have had the clearance to be in this _building_ let alone on this floor.
I brought my pistol up. I did not shoot. Gunfire would start a civil war. It would also sacrifice the element of surprise.
The axe left Matt's shoulders at blurring speed, in a two hand swing that crunched into the adversary's unprotected neck and sprayed blood into the office and the hallway.
We stepped over the body headed in a tactical clump for the SLE's office.
There had been no time to challenge or ask his intentions. We might have murdered an innocent man.
We would find out later. Meanwhile we had to get to the SLE.
I smelled recent cordite - burnt gunpowder, from gunfire - as we entered the SLE's suite.
There were two bodies on the floor. One was bleeding. One had stopped bleeding.
Sarah. The Dragon Lady.
I stepped over both with my pistol up.
Two of Cartwright's Cronies were on either side of the SLE; one held a pistol to his head.
I opened fire as one opened his mouth to speak.
Individual aimed shots. Head head, slight turn, head head, step, hasty execution shot, step, kick away handgun, careful execution shot.
On the trip home from Utah, I had been given a gift. In the desert of southern Oregon, a pillar of smoke by day and by night.
All flesh is grass. And I had seen the lawnmower.
Trimming these two blades had become utterly casual, a humdrum everyday task that required neither introspection nor hesitation.
I had gone far beyond "No Hostage Facility."
Perhaps we needed new signage at the gate.
"No Fucks Given."
Behind me Brooke fired a fully automatic burst to cover our rear.
The firefighter was already giving Sarah first aid, tying a tourniquet around her arm and tightening. She weakly moaned in agony.
The entire right side of her face was one huge reddish purple bruise, with a bloodshot eye staring out of it.
Matt shook his head briefly after lifting his hand from the Dragon Lady's neck. The pearls she liked to wear shone brightly against the dull dark gray of her lifeless skin. Dead.
I helped the SLE to his feet from where he had fallen. Unhurt, at least physically.
He reached into his desk and removed a pearl handled .45 pistol.
He was the boss. In fact, the Boss. He could do that.
He racked the slide, chambering a round.
"Where to?" he asked me.
Just then the ceiling panel in the main suite fell down and three figures in guard uniforms dropped into the midst of us.
"Blue on blue!" I shouted as I holstered. "Blue on blue! Blue on blue!"
Brooke heard my frantic call and did not turn. It takes enormous bravery to trust your ears over your eyes and brain and accept the risk of being shot in the back.
The SLE laid his pistol on the desk.
Matt held his pistol down low by his leg, pointed at the floor. If he holstered he would point it at one of the sudden entrants, and that would be . . . bad.
The firefighter continued with first aid, securing the tourniquet windlass to Sarah's upper right arm. Bravery equal to Brooke's, in my opinion.
"Castle!" one of the entry team shouted. "Sir!" he said with relief as he saw me.
Near tragedy averted, the entry team moved to reinforce Brooke at the door. This allowed Matt to follow.
I picked up the phone and keyed in a code. When I spoke, the building PA amplified my words, on every floor.
"This is Echo 18. The SLE is safe and unharmed and under my protection. Aggressors will lay down their weapons on my guarantee for their lives. Do this now."
I paused.
"Utah boys, you lost. It happens. But give up now. Anyone who keeps fighting will be hung for murder. Wire noose, slow drop. Save your lives, surrender now."
A hideous, agonizing death. But there was nothing left to fight over in this building.
Boots coming up the stairwells told me the offer had been accepted.
The SLE dug around in his desk, found his holster, clipped it in and holstered his pistol.
I keyed up on H5's frequency.
"Perimeter status?" I asked.
"Attackers beaten off. No friendly casualties."
I changed frequencies.
"I need a medic and two stretcher bearer teams to H4 Executive, immediately."
We would keep the SLE where he was; reinforce the site; and sweep to make sure we'd gotten all the Cronies.
"Sir, problem!" called one of my guards loudly from down the hall. "Homicide bomber!"
Brooke immediately rushed forward with her rifle, then stopped at the corner, stock still.
She didn't have the shot.
She saw something that caused her to do the unthinkable - to slowly lay down the rifle. Stalling.
Matt pushed the SLE towards the office with the floor hatch under the desk. The firefighter followed, closing the office door behind and kicking wedges under the frame edges. Half-conscious and groaning, Sarah dragged herself to lean against the door, drew her firearm with her off hand and weakly brought it up.
I advanced to talk to the threat. Between me and the SLE, I knew perfectly well who was more expendable.
