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GWOT I - Rescue and Recovery
In between the blood and mud and screaming and death, I had to set up a Security Operations Center.
Had to. Can't drive without a steering wheel. Can't steer a ship without a navigation bridge. Can't fly without a cockpit.
This task was dramatically simpilfied by the fact that our old SOC had been blown up by a truck borne VBIED backed thoughtfully into our loading dock.
The client, being paranoid enough for any ten corporations, had already set up the cabling and wiring for a backup SOC to one of the conference rooms. So I ruthlessly appropriated that conference room, and the one next to it, and we salvaged some equipment and stole more to get some semblance of functionality back up.
Space Planning was voluntold to bring some cubicle pieces and some additional chairs. Their supervisor came to me.
"Hey, man, you're kind of in charge in this madhouse."
"No, that would be the guy in H5."
"Yeah, but the Facilities VP is kind of not handling any of this well. I can't get him to authorize us for the cafeteria, and well, my people are getting kind of hungry."
Well shit, that was not on. I grabbed Sharon, explained the problem, and sent him and her off to go figure out an answer. She knew the people and the Site, she could figure it out. Or I could fire her and get another supervisor from somewhere. Possibly out of my ass and around the corner. Sorry, recent quote.
Sharon came back with the VP of Facilities, who was in a screaming match with my boss of the moment, the client's Security Director.
I listened without listening. A useful skill for any contractor. What I was actually doing was configuring consoles and camera views. From behind I looked like another techie, plus weapons.
"You can't just reallocate space to your department, there's a process! And Space Planning should be cross billed to your department!"
OK, that safely didn't make any sense. Nor did much of the conversation that followed. Corporate doubletalk.
My client put a hand on my shoulder.
"Echo 18, I'd like to introduce the VP of Facilities."
"We've met," the latter snarled.
Indeed we had. Knowing that in most organizations that Facilities oversaw Security, I'd checked in with him shortly after arriving at site and he'd told me to fuck off. Then I'd tied in with my client and things had gotten busy and crazy from there, as the casualties in Infirmary could attest and the dug-and-filled holes on Boot Hill couldn't.
"I'll send him and a detail to check. I can't go myself, too much going on here."
The VP of Facilities stalked off. I pasted a slight smile on my face as I reached for my pocket notepad.
"What are we checking?"
"His house." He rattled off an address from memory. "Wife, two kids, suburbs. He can't call them and he's worried. Bring them here."
"Copy that."
We had a map of Silicon Valley spread out on the table in the other conference room. I noted the route. We couldn't spare Arturo, he was overseeing the site security. Sharon was doing Site stuff that seemed to involve getting the Space Planning folks printed plastic badges in place of the daily stick-on badges that I'd deauthorized in no uncertain fucking terms.
Brooke. Johnson. One truck, one SUV. A quick dash over, dash back.
I issued the orders, checked my gear, got two boxes of 5.56 from the storeroom we were using as a temporary armory, went over to the motor pool.
The SUV had a hitch on it. So did the truck. The problem was that neither had been equipped for towing.
I braced the motor pool manager.
"It's a stupid idea so we're not doing it," that august personage told me.
I shrugged.
"OK, no more convoys."
"Wait," he cried as I walked away. "We don't have the parts!"
I turned. "Yes you do, look in the back of that U-Haul over there. That's where I stole all the parts from. Should take your mechanic about an hour. It doesn't have to be legal, doesn't have to involve lights or brakes, just enough that if we have a tire shot out, we don't combat-loss the vehicle or die."
He blinked, but complied. There'd been a lot of that lately.
I had the chance to reload my magazines, clean my rifle and pistol, see that Brooke and Johnson did the same, and decide to try out the contract tow-truck driver who'd gotten stuck on site.
Big burly guy. "Buddy Nolastname," read his badge. I could see where that came from.
"Why the fuck should I help?" he asked.
"Do you like to eat?" I retorted.
He wordlessly went over to where the mechanic was botching the installation of the forward hitch on the SUV, and took over.
Twenty minutes later we were rolling. Brooke was driving for Johnson in the truck. Buddy was driving for me in the SUV.
It wasn't just about flat tires. I wanted the option of shooting him if he went off script.
The front gate was continuing to improve. We now had sandbagged bunkers and Arturo explaining to a guard how timing and head space works on a machine gun as we left.
We were headed out into the fringes of surburbia. It was amazing to me how quicky things had gone from seemingly normal to utterly fucked. We needed the smaller vehicles so we could get around the obstacles. By staying in motion, we avoided getting mobbed. By having someone hanging a rifle out the top, we kept the people standing on street corners giving us a wide berth. Street lights? Traffic signals? You are of course pleased to jest.
The first obstacle was a San Jose Police security control point at a major intersection. Four cop cars in a circle with seven wary cops staring out. #8 was resting, peacefully, wrapped in blue tarp tied off at top and bottom. Forever.
They waved us through. We were armed, in some semblance of a uniform, and appeared to know where we were going. Also our vehicles were empty so nothing to loot.
The wealthy suburb we were heading to showed signs of disrepair. Trash hadn't been picked up, that was most obvious. The stoplights had long since run out their batteries. Abandoned vehicles here and there. A general smell of rot and smoke.
The target house was a six bedroom, four bath three-story structure set some distance back from the road. There were ornate wrought iron gates. They had been locked with padlock and chain, from inside, but breached with bolt cutters.
I could see from the driveway that the front door was open and the front yard was what I could call in a report "in a state of disarray."
"Go in, park, dismount," I said to Buddy. I waved the truck in after us. A quick huddle.
"We need to sweep and clear. I think we're too late, but don't take chances," I ordered.
The front door was a fatal funnel I had no intention of being slurped by. We circled the house once. The back door, also open. And a faint odor of blood and shit I'd come to associate with violent death.
I motioned Brooke forward. I would stack second, Buddy behind me, Johnson on the rear.
"I want a gun," Buddy interrupted.
"You can have mine if I'm killed," I muttered. "We'll discuss it after we sweep the house."
Brooke went in the back door. By habit, she called out, "United States Marines!" She'd been one. The reason I had her on point.
Johnson had been Army. The reason he was covering our backs.
Buddy was unarmed because I didn't know if I could trust him, and this would be how I would find out.
I had my pistol in my hand. Too much chance I'd need to do something - open a door, check a switch.
As it happened, a pulse. A dead pre-teen girl sprawled obscenely across a couch whose stains, and position of her legs, left no doubt of how hard she'd died.
I lifted my hand from her cold neck. Rigor but not putrification. We were between a day and three days late.
The ground floor was clear but obviously looted of valuables. The TV set, stuff knocked over and pulled out, looking for cash and jewelry and drugs.
Brooke needed help getting up the stairs alive. Johnson covered her.
This left Buddy shaking his head looking at the recent corpse.
"That's fucked up," he started to say and I quieted him by putting my bloody left finger near my lips and not quite pointing my pistol at him. He shut up at once.
"Clear," Brooke called from the top of the staircase. Buddy and I joined her.
She looked kind of green.
"Guard the cars," I ordered. She made it down the stairs and out the door before I heard the sound of retching.
Johnson stood with his rifle at low ready facing what had been the master bedroom of the house.
A boy, perhaps ten, was dead in the doorway. He'd been hit in the head with either the stock of a rifle or a baseball bat. His yolk was splashed from there to there and his sightless eyes stared into the carpet.
I won't describe what condition the wife was in. I didn't need to check her pulse, the flies had gotten there first.
Buddy suddenly vomited profusely. I'd been expecting it.
"All the rooms?" I asked quietly.
"Yeah, we finished the sweep," Johnson muttered.
I took out my otherwise useless phone and took several careful photos. Not crime scene photos. Proof of death photos. And another two which I tapped twice and selected the "Hidden" option from my camera software. No one needed to see that shit. Hopefully I wouldn't even have to see it again.
One of the spare rooms had been ransacked lightly, but was intact enough for me to find a sheet.
"Buddy, start bagging items of true value. Bathroom, medications and sundries. Kitchen, food. Meet me in the garage in ten."
He wiped his mouth and nodded, taking the sheet from me to use as a sack.
Johnson and I went downstairs. I checked the garage. It looked horrifyingly, reassuringly normal. If you didn't know what was in the living room or the bedroom.
POP. POP. Two shots from near the cars.
I ran outside. Brooke had just dropped two ... scavengers. The others loitered nearby, cat-calling and screeching.
I unslung my rifle and they scattered. I got another two before they were out of line of sight.
Scavengers. Coyotes. Wild dogs. And I wasn't counting the number of feet, nor did I consider them human.
Not then, not ever.
"I'll take security," I told Brooke. "Help them loot."
I didn't take a photo of the dead girl downstairs. I'm not a bloody sadist.
I stood there, looking around, for ten minutes or so.
What little soul I had left, departed my body for a clear blue sky in which men did not do these things.
###
I demanded that my client take the VP of Facilities down to the infirmary conference room. I wouldn't say a damn thing until then.
"Sir, is this the driveway to your house?" I began.
Showed him a photo. Gate breached.
"I told her not to unlock.... yes."
I showed him a photo of the open front door.
He blanched.
"Yeah."
"I'm very sorry for your loss, sir."
I showed him one more photo. Even though I was half expecting it, he picked me up by the lapels and shoved me against the wall.
Instantly the Security Director and our priceless vet tech had him by each arm, trying to get him off me.
"You could have saved them! You could have saved them!" he was roaring in my face, spraying spittle.
I shook my head sadly, as much as his grip allowed.
"Rigor had set in when we arrived."
He set me down. Mostly.
"What the fuck does that mean?"
"The three of them were dead for at least several hours by the time we arrived. I am thinking at least a day, maybe more."
I already knew, but specifics were important. The three of them. Sorry, no hope.
What I had not seen at the site was any evidence of either firearms or their use. No guns, no shell casings, no bullet holes, no slight smell of smokeless powder.
But there had been a reloading setup in the garage, which we of course had taken, and I knew from that and other clues that the VP of Facilities had owned firearms and was a hunter.
"She hated guns," he said. The vet tech was puzzled.
The Security Director and I were not.
Because I'd only found three corpses. Scavengers don't take their dead with them when they leave. Only those things of value.
"Why didn't you bring back their bodies?" he asked.
Now it was the vet tech's turn to shake her head.
She knew, both from training and from her vet practice and most pointedly from the many deaths in our ertsatz hospital, what dealing with bodies was like.
Also, he'd have seen how very hard they died. And I wouldn't inflict that suffering on him for any casual or trivial reason.
There was only one chance at figuring out who had done this.
"Sir, I need you to write down a list of all unique valuables in the house. Especially firearms. Serial numbers if you recall them."
A notepad and two pens were already on the small table.
In ordinary police practice, they would be reported stolen in a triple homicide.
In our practice, if they turned up, we'd know where they came from - and more homicide would assuredly follow.
It wasn't likely. But it was the only chance at revenge that he would ever have.
He started writing. Given something useful to do, he also started weeping.
His dead family was dead and there was nothing we could do about that.
But the Site needed him. Living. Able to do his job. Which is why the VP of HR and the Site Location Executive slipped in as the Security Director and I slipped out.
"Sir, I gave strict orders. No rumors."
My eyes and his met. I opened my phone. Opened one of the two 'hidden' photos. Showed him briefly.
He nodded curtly. Message heard and understood clearly.
There was always something else to do. So I went back to Security Operations and found it.
Before I took far too many of our people and a lot of guns and used us up hunting bandits, to the general detriment of banditry and the specific loss of the Site and all persons sheltered within.
The end of that would be a blue tarp tied at head and foot for most of us, but not the rest.
Those are the choices we make in Apocalypse.
Had to. Can't drive without a steering wheel. Can't steer a ship without a navigation bridge. Can't fly without a cockpit.
This task was dramatically simpilfied by the fact that our old SOC had been blown up by a truck borne VBIED backed thoughtfully into our loading dock.
The client, being paranoid enough for any ten corporations, had already set up the cabling and wiring for a backup SOC to one of the conference rooms. So I ruthlessly appropriated that conference room, and the one next to it, and we salvaged some equipment and stole more to get some semblance of functionality back up.
Space Planning was voluntold to bring some cubicle pieces and some additional chairs. Their supervisor came to me.
"Hey, man, you're kind of in charge in this madhouse."
"No, that would be the guy in H5."
"Yeah, but the Facilities VP is kind of not handling any of this well. I can't get him to authorize us for the cafeteria, and well, my people are getting kind of hungry."
Well shit, that was not on. I grabbed Sharon, explained the problem, and sent him and her off to go figure out an answer. She knew the people and the Site, she could figure it out. Or I could fire her and get another supervisor from somewhere. Possibly out of my ass and around the corner. Sorry, recent quote.
Sharon came back with the VP of Facilities, who was in a screaming match with my boss of the moment, the client's Security Director.
I listened without listening. A useful skill for any contractor. What I was actually doing was configuring consoles and camera views. From behind I looked like another techie, plus weapons.
"You can't just reallocate space to your department, there's a process! And Space Planning should be cross billed to your department!"
OK, that safely didn't make any sense. Nor did much of the conversation that followed. Corporate doubletalk.
My client put a hand on my shoulder.
"Echo 18, I'd like to introduce the VP of Facilities."
"We've met," the latter snarled.
Indeed we had. Knowing that in most organizations that Facilities oversaw Security, I'd checked in with him shortly after arriving at site and he'd told me to fuck off. Then I'd tied in with my client and things had gotten busy and crazy from there, as the casualties in Infirmary could attest and the dug-and-filled holes on Boot Hill couldn't.
"I'll send him and a detail to check. I can't go myself, too much going on here."
The VP of Facilities stalked off. I pasted a slight smile on my face as I reached for my pocket notepad.
"What are we checking?"
"His house." He rattled off an address from memory. "Wife, two kids, suburbs. He can't call them and he's worried. Bring them here."
"Copy that."
We had a map of Silicon Valley spread out on the table in the other conference room. I noted the route. We couldn't spare Arturo, he was overseeing the site security. Sharon was doing Site stuff that seemed to involve getting the Space Planning folks printed plastic badges in place of the daily stick-on badges that I'd deauthorized in no uncertain fucking terms.
Brooke. Johnson. One truck, one SUV. A quick dash over, dash back.
I issued the orders, checked my gear, got two boxes of 5.56 from the storeroom we were using as a temporary armory, went over to the motor pool.
The SUV had a hitch on it. So did the truck. The problem was that neither had been equipped for towing.
I braced the motor pool manager.
"It's a stupid idea so we're not doing it," that august personage told me.
I shrugged.
"OK, no more convoys."
"Wait," he cried as I walked away. "We don't have the parts!"
I turned. "Yes you do, look in the back of that U-Haul over there. That's where I stole all the parts from. Should take your mechanic about an hour. It doesn't have to be legal, doesn't have to involve lights or brakes, just enough that if we have a tire shot out, we don't combat-loss the vehicle or die."
He blinked, but complied. There'd been a lot of that lately.
I had the chance to reload my magazines, clean my rifle and pistol, see that Brooke and Johnson did the same, and decide to try out the contract tow-truck driver who'd gotten stuck on site.
Big burly guy. "Buddy Nolastname," read his badge. I could see where that came from.
"Why the fuck should I help?" he asked.
"Do you like to eat?" I retorted.
He wordlessly went over to where the mechanic was botching the installation of the forward hitch on the SUV, and took over.
Twenty minutes later we were rolling. Brooke was driving for Johnson in the truck. Buddy was driving for me in the SUV.
It wasn't just about flat tires. I wanted the option of shooting him if he went off script.
The front gate was continuing to improve. We now had sandbagged bunkers and Arturo explaining to a guard how timing and head space works on a machine gun as we left.
We were headed out into the fringes of surburbia. It was amazing to me how quicky things had gone from seemingly normal to utterly fucked. We needed the smaller vehicles so we could get around the obstacles. By staying in motion, we avoided getting mobbed. By having someone hanging a rifle out the top, we kept the people standing on street corners giving us a wide berth. Street lights? Traffic signals? You are of course pleased to jest.
The first obstacle was a San Jose Police security control point at a major intersection. Four cop cars in a circle with seven wary cops staring out. #8 was resting, peacefully, wrapped in blue tarp tied off at top and bottom. Forever.
They waved us through. We were armed, in some semblance of a uniform, and appeared to know where we were going. Also our vehicles were empty so nothing to loot.
The wealthy suburb we were heading to showed signs of disrepair. Trash hadn't been picked up, that was most obvious. The stoplights had long since run out their batteries. Abandoned vehicles here and there. A general smell of rot and smoke.
The target house was a six bedroom, four bath three-story structure set some distance back from the road. There were ornate wrought iron gates. They had been locked with padlock and chain, from inside, but breached with bolt cutters.
I could see from the driveway that the front door was open and the front yard was what I could call in a report "in a state of disarray."
"Go in, park, dismount," I said to Buddy. I waved the truck in after us. A quick huddle.
"We need to sweep and clear. I think we're too late, but don't take chances," I ordered.
The front door was a fatal funnel I had no intention of being slurped by. We circled the house once. The back door, also open. And a faint odor of blood and shit I'd come to associate with violent death.
I motioned Brooke forward. I would stack second, Buddy behind me, Johnson on the rear.
"I want a gun," Buddy interrupted.
"You can have mine if I'm killed," I muttered. "We'll discuss it after we sweep the house."
Brooke went in the back door. By habit, she called out, "United States Marines!" She'd been one. The reason I had her on point.
Johnson had been Army. The reason he was covering our backs.
Buddy was unarmed because I didn't know if I could trust him, and this would be how I would find out.
I had my pistol in my hand. Too much chance I'd need to do something - open a door, check a switch.
As it happened, a pulse. A dead pre-teen girl sprawled obscenely across a couch whose stains, and position of her legs, left no doubt of how hard she'd died.
I lifted my hand from her cold neck. Rigor but not putrification. We were between a day and three days late.
The ground floor was clear but obviously looted of valuables. The TV set, stuff knocked over and pulled out, looking for cash and jewelry and drugs.
Brooke needed help getting up the stairs alive. Johnson covered her.
This left Buddy shaking his head looking at the recent corpse.
"That's fucked up," he started to say and I quieted him by putting my bloody left finger near my lips and not quite pointing my pistol at him. He shut up at once.
"Clear," Brooke called from the top of the staircase. Buddy and I joined her.
She looked kind of green.
"Guard the cars," I ordered. She made it down the stairs and out the door before I heard the sound of retching.
Johnson stood with his rifle at low ready facing what had been the master bedroom of the house.
A boy, perhaps ten, was dead in the doorway. He'd been hit in the head with either the stock of a rifle or a baseball bat. His yolk was splashed from there to there and his sightless eyes stared into the carpet.
I won't describe what condition the wife was in. I didn't need to check her pulse, the flies had gotten there first.
Buddy suddenly vomited profusely. I'd been expecting it.
"All the rooms?" I asked quietly.
"Yeah, we finished the sweep," Johnson muttered.
I took out my otherwise useless phone and took several careful photos. Not crime scene photos. Proof of death photos. And another two which I tapped twice and selected the "Hidden" option from my camera software. No one needed to see that shit. Hopefully I wouldn't even have to see it again.
One of the spare rooms had been ransacked lightly, but was intact enough for me to find a sheet.
"Buddy, start bagging items of true value. Bathroom, medications and sundries. Kitchen, food. Meet me in the garage in ten."
He wiped his mouth and nodded, taking the sheet from me to use as a sack.
Johnson and I went downstairs. I checked the garage. It looked horrifyingly, reassuringly normal. If you didn't know what was in the living room or the bedroom.
POP. POP. Two shots from near the cars.
I ran outside. Brooke had just dropped two ... scavengers. The others loitered nearby, cat-calling and screeching.
I unslung my rifle and they scattered. I got another two before they were out of line of sight.
Scavengers. Coyotes. Wild dogs. And I wasn't counting the number of feet, nor did I consider them human.
Not then, not ever.
"I'll take security," I told Brooke. "Help them loot."
I didn't take a photo of the dead girl downstairs. I'm not a bloody sadist.
I stood there, looking around, for ten minutes or so.
What little soul I had left, departed my body for a clear blue sky in which men did not do these things.
###
I demanded that my client take the VP of Facilities down to the infirmary conference room. I wouldn't say a damn thing until then.
"Sir, is this the driveway to your house?" I began.
Showed him a photo. Gate breached.
"I told her not to unlock.... yes."
I showed him a photo of the open front door.
He blanched.
"Yeah."
"I'm very sorry for your loss, sir."
I showed him one more photo. Even though I was half expecting it, he picked me up by the lapels and shoved me against the wall.
Instantly the Security Director and our priceless vet tech had him by each arm, trying to get him off me.
"You could have saved them! You could have saved them!" he was roaring in my face, spraying spittle.
I shook my head sadly, as much as his grip allowed.
"Rigor had set in when we arrived."
He set me down. Mostly.
"What the fuck does that mean?"
"The three of them were dead for at least several hours by the time we arrived. I am thinking at least a day, maybe more."
I already knew, but specifics were important. The three of them. Sorry, no hope.
What I had not seen at the site was any evidence of either firearms or their use. No guns, no shell casings, no bullet holes, no slight smell of smokeless powder.
But there had been a reloading setup in the garage, which we of course had taken, and I knew from that and other clues that the VP of Facilities had owned firearms and was a hunter.
"She hated guns," he said. The vet tech was puzzled.
The Security Director and I were not.
Because I'd only found three corpses. Scavengers don't take their dead with them when they leave. Only those things of value.
"Why didn't you bring back their bodies?" he asked.
Now it was the vet tech's turn to shake her head.
She knew, both from training and from her vet practice and most pointedly from the many deaths in our ertsatz hospital, what dealing with bodies was like.
Also, he'd have seen how very hard they died. And I wouldn't inflict that suffering on him for any casual or trivial reason.
There was only one chance at figuring out who had done this.
"Sir, I need you to write down a list of all unique valuables in the house. Especially firearms. Serial numbers if you recall them."
A notepad and two pens were already on the small table.
In ordinary police practice, they would be reported stolen in a triple homicide.
In our practice, if they turned up, we'd know where they came from - and more homicide would assuredly follow.
It wasn't likely. But it was the only chance at revenge that he would ever have.
He started writing. Given something useful to do, he also started weeping.
His dead family was dead and there was nothing we could do about that.
But the Site needed him. Living. Able to do his job. Which is why the VP of HR and the Site Location Executive slipped in as the Security Director and I slipped out.
"Sir, I gave strict orders. No rumors."
My eyes and his met. I opened my phone. Opened one of the two 'hidden' photos. Showed him briefly.
He nodded curtly. Message heard and understood clearly.
There was always something else to do. So I went back to Security Operations and found it.
Before I took far too many of our people and a lot of guns and used us up hunting bandits, to the general detriment of banditry and the specific loss of the Site and all persons sheltered within.
The end of that would be a blue tarp tied at head and foot for most of us, but not the rest.
Those are the choices we make in Apocalypse.