GWOT 1 - Devout
Sep. 6th, 2023 08:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drewkittyGWOT I - Devout
People looked at me very differently now.
At first it had been Mr. Murphy who had welded things together. He knew people. I did what he told me to do. He was the client, I was the contractor.
Then Mr. Murphy had been killed.
Then the site had been literally truck bombed.
Then I'd taken one of the men who had helped do it, metaphorically around the corner, and depending on who you believed:
-- stressed him out so bad he had a heart attack
-- beaten him so badly he had a heart attack
-- suffocated him
-- broken his hand with a sledge hammer, which caused him to have a heart attack
I knew the truth. All four.
The chain of command was very short. The SLE, Site Location Executive, that's the Big Boss to you. His head of the legal department was now in charge over me. He liked his callsign, Legal One, which massaged his ego.
So I was making it all up as I went along, with carte blanche to do whatever I wanted that 1) secured the site and 2) did not interfere with the coding that normally paid the bills, but now kept us all alive.
Spend the Site's emergency cash on guns? Sure.
Start a fire department and put a walking HR disaster in charge of it? No problem.
Train and equip a corporate militia that kept its guns locked up outside of training and calls? Of course.
But the hazards were orders of magnitude worse than anything I had ever done before.
Someone wanted us off line. That someone had managed to scrape up troops ... troops ... to attack us. I would have expected the new Homeland agency to swarm all over us with cameras and investigators and forensics. Instead, Legal One told me "Don't worry about it, it's taken care of."
Taken care of? Forty guys with guns openly attack a technology site, we sling their corpses into a charnel pit, and the national defense agencies aren't even bothering to take their fingerprints?!?
And we had no protection from it happening again, that we didn't come up with ourselves.
Thus the Reaction Teams, aka corporate militia.
I of course had bothered with fingerprints. Started developing a counter-intelligence capability. But we had so many holes in our security profile that I hardly knew where to begin.
Physical security starts with a perimeter and access control. Two gates was one too many, so we closed the north gate permanently. The perimeter was big and hard to hold, but we were working on it.
To get in the South Gate now required getting past bunkers with machine guns, dog leg paths, a "chicken pit" (only distinguishable from a charnel pit in that the body inside was 1) breathing and 2) alone) ... and then you submitted to verification of identity and physical search.
We were allowing outsider vehicles to enter. That is how the truck bomb had gotten in, and only two minor miracles (my throwing a temper tantrum, and window film) had saved hundreds of Employees from fragmentation.
So now we were making the few deliveries we could get break bulk at a temporary loading dock in the far corner of a parking lot. They could blow up Over There, not in the loading dock of an actual building. The hassle of loading and unloading twice was more than made up for by the added protection. It was a trick I borrowed from Groom Lake, the real Area 51 of urban folklore.
There's a joke about the Dalmatian chasing the fire truck. Another dog asks him, "What on Earth are you going to do if you someday actually catch it?!?"
I knew how to search for bombs. I'd taught our staff.
What I didn't know was what to do when we caught one. Normally you clear a huge radius (there are charts for how many hundreds of feet), and call the police and bomb squad and FBI and ATF and ...
Let's take that in steps.
Police. Weren't coming. WAY too busy. The San Jose Police Department at last report held downtown San Jose and was skirmishing to try to take back city facilities elsewhere in town.
Bomb squad. SJPD had a small one. Sheriff's Office had a big one. But for scary stuff they reached over their shoulder to ... let's be vague. Hayward, Dublin, Livermore. That's vague enough.
The problem is that nearly all bomb squad technicians - a narrow specialty - were former military. And everyone who'd ever taken a nickel from Uncle Sam was in China, beating the shit out of her for the cardinal sin of nuking San Francisco.
FBI? What FBI? As best I could determine without excessive risk, the Federal Bureau of Investigation - once a presence in Silicon Valley, disputing China's industrial espionage foothold - had simply disappeared. Burner phone calls to their numbers rang endlessly. Emails bounced with error messages. The fragments of the Internet that were still up didn't resolve their Web site.
ATF? ATF had merged with Homeland. They had the expertise in arson and bomb investigation particularly. But Homeland was busy rounding up anti-American influences ... and (whisper it) ... displaced persons.
I didn't want to invite Homeland on site. I just had a really bad feeling.
There are basically two things you can do with an explosive device that is not your friend.
- Blow it up, either in place or after moving it.
- Take it apart, presumably without letting it blow up.
By far, the easiest thing is to put a bigger explosive charge next to it and blow it up. That meant bomb-making. Call me old fashioned, but playing with explosives was just not my thing. In addition to the hideous risks, substantial effort had gone into doctoring and booby-trapping (puns intended) the handful of references on 'How To.' Trying to teach yourself bombs from a cookbook would blow you up by Chapter 3.
The counter-terrorist in me heartily approved of this.
But it meant we wouldn't be training our own bomb guys from books.
Professional bomb techs are trained in classes taught mostly on the East Coast by the Navy, the Army, the previously mentioned FBI, ATF, etc. No one was teaching classes even if we had any way to get our people authorized and there.
They are trained from people who have handled explosives before. That's former military. All in China.
So what I needed was someone who was 1) already on Site and 2) former military, but not in China.
That, to quote a Spartan, was going to be a problem.
I braced Arturo (former Phillipine military), Johnson (medically disabled, US Army) and Brooke (medically disabled, US Marine Corps). My three soldiers in the Security Department.
They knew how to play with Serious Putty, which is the polar opposite of Silly Putty. It came in cases. They had no idea how to get the stuff, and less idea how to make it.
They knew how to recognize Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs. They had even gotten a chance to play with them. Inert - i.e. harmless - IEDs in, and this is not a joke, actual IED Petting Zoos. Training facilities run by bomb techs, through which soldiers were cycled in order to get touching the stuff out of their system so they didn't touch as many in the field.
IEDs were by far the big killer of American troops in Iraq. They were a problem in China, according to our heavily censored news. And that meant they were a Big Problem if we were hearing about them at all.
So based on their memories and some pictures, including still frames from training videos, we were making our own Site IED Petting Zoo and setting up training on how to recognize the damn things.
That still didn't solve the problem of what to do when we found one. And we would.
###
"Echo 18, we need you at the IED Petting Zoo. Someone's causing a disturbance."
I hung up and motioned to Shane Shreve.
He did nothing. Oh yeah, he's an idiot.
"Shreve, I need a ride over to E building."
Only then did he start walking towards the electric golf carts.
Sigh.
When we got there, the landscaping supervisor was waiting for me.
That's right, the landscaping folks were being put through the IED Petting Zoo today.
Why?
Because they're outside, on the grounds, and most likely to see anything before it gets in the building. I'd had to fight to get them into the training, because old habits die hard and there was a class issue. Landscaping was below Security on the corporate totem pole, which meant very fucking low indeed.
"One of my guys says this is all wrong," the landscaping supervisor said the moment he saw me.
I blinked.
"Is he a good worker?" I asked immediately.
"Yeah but..." I stopped listening.
Brooke was arguing passionately with a middle-aged man wearing a landscaping hat indoors. He work the typical jeans and cotton shirt but somehow they fit wrong on him. Unlike nearly every other landscaper, he wore sneakers rather than boots.
Tell. The backs of the sneakers were pushed down slightly, as if he put them on and took them off several times a day. And he had a many times folded large cloth in his right rear pocket.
They were arguing over a bundle of road flares attached to a wind up clock. Inert as all the Petting Zoo items were.
"Peace," I said as I walked up to interrupt.
They both stopped. Brooke, in shock. The man, from simple courtesy.
"Echo 18, contract security manager. The Petting Zoo was set up on my orders. You feel there are problems here. Tell me about them, please."
"This mock up is a joke. There are too many wires and there is no battery. It is a stereotype not a IED."
I placed his facial features finally. Not Hispanic, a racist term that covered everything from Moor to Central American. But the hiring coordinator had seen his face and thrown him in with the other brown folks.
"Are you from Afghanistan, sir?"
I was looking at his hands. He had delicate hands that had been hardened by weeks of digging and scraping.
He had all his fingers. That meant either that he did not play with bombs, or if he did, that he was _good_ at it.
"How did you know?"
I motioned Brooke to chase everyone else away from the conversation.
Unlike Shane Shreve, she caught the cue and did so.
The way to recruit someone is to get them talking and look interested. The way to look interested is to be interested. So I took him on the tour and encouraged him to lecture me.
I found IEDs very interesting. They killed my clients. That made them a subject of passionate curiosity.
This man knew IEDs.
I found myself indifferent as to how he knew them. For all I cared, he was Taliban.
He told me anyway. And he was worried as he did, beads of sweat dripping down his face.
He was here on an asylum visa. And he was very afraid that he would be sent back, now that America had turned not merely fascist but totalitarian, and his visa was now wastepaper.
He'd been Afghan military. But he'd been sent to a demining course in the States and simply quit. The bureaucracy hadn't gotten around to kicking him out yet. While he fought deportation, pre-Firecracker, he'd looked for work. I believe I mentioned the brown = landscaper issue?
"Mohammed, I would like to offer you a job. Security Department, contractor, reporting to and supervised by me. Bomb tech."
He accepted instantly, despite his knowledge that he would most likely be killed by a device.
Sometimes crossing oceans is not enough to escape one's karma.
Very quietly, I whispered in his ear.
"I will look out for your family. In the camp?"
He nodded tersely, once. A man with a family cannot take risks the way a single man can. But he had a lot of experience surviving in war zones.
"Play along," I ordered.
"Brooke, detain this man for further investigation. Security offices, if you please."
She turned her gaze on him and it was like a tank turret whining as it traversed to bring barrel in line.
"Mr. Mohammed, will you come quietly with me?"
He shuddered and nodded. She perp-walked him with two fingers on his wrist, but arm not wrenched up behind his back.
I went to the landscaping supervisor and told him I was detaining Mohammed.
"He's a good man," he protested.
"I know," I said quietly. "That's why you are going to say nothing of this, to anyone."
As if accidentally I flexed and unflexed my left hand.
It was his turn to shudder and nod.
And that is how I hired our bomb tech.
People looked at me very differently now.
At first it had been Mr. Murphy who had welded things together. He knew people. I did what he told me to do. He was the client, I was the contractor.
Then Mr. Murphy had been killed.
Then the site had been literally truck bombed.
Then I'd taken one of the men who had helped do it, metaphorically around the corner, and depending on who you believed:
-- stressed him out so bad he had a heart attack
-- beaten him so badly he had a heart attack
-- suffocated him
-- broken his hand with a sledge hammer, which caused him to have a heart attack
I knew the truth. All four.
The chain of command was very short. The SLE, Site Location Executive, that's the Big Boss to you. His head of the legal department was now in charge over me. He liked his callsign, Legal One, which massaged his ego.
So I was making it all up as I went along, with carte blanche to do whatever I wanted that 1) secured the site and 2) did not interfere with the coding that normally paid the bills, but now kept us all alive.
Spend the Site's emergency cash on guns? Sure.
Start a fire department and put a walking HR disaster in charge of it? No problem.
Train and equip a corporate militia that kept its guns locked up outside of training and calls? Of course.
But the hazards were orders of magnitude worse than anything I had ever done before.
Someone wanted us off line. That someone had managed to scrape up troops ... troops ... to attack us. I would have expected the new Homeland agency to swarm all over us with cameras and investigators and forensics. Instead, Legal One told me "Don't worry about it, it's taken care of."
Taken care of? Forty guys with guns openly attack a technology site, we sling their corpses into a charnel pit, and the national defense agencies aren't even bothering to take their fingerprints?!?
And we had no protection from it happening again, that we didn't come up with ourselves.
Thus the Reaction Teams, aka corporate militia.
I of course had bothered with fingerprints. Started developing a counter-intelligence capability. But we had so many holes in our security profile that I hardly knew where to begin.
Physical security starts with a perimeter and access control. Two gates was one too many, so we closed the north gate permanently. The perimeter was big and hard to hold, but we were working on it.
To get in the South Gate now required getting past bunkers with machine guns, dog leg paths, a "chicken pit" (only distinguishable from a charnel pit in that the body inside was 1) breathing and 2) alone) ... and then you submitted to verification of identity and physical search.
We were allowing outsider vehicles to enter. That is how the truck bomb had gotten in, and only two minor miracles (my throwing a temper tantrum, and window film) had saved hundreds of Employees from fragmentation.
So now we were making the few deliveries we could get break bulk at a temporary loading dock in the far corner of a parking lot. They could blow up Over There, not in the loading dock of an actual building. The hassle of loading and unloading twice was more than made up for by the added protection. It was a trick I borrowed from Groom Lake, the real Area 51 of urban folklore.
There's a joke about the Dalmatian chasing the fire truck. Another dog asks him, "What on Earth are you going to do if you someday actually catch it?!?"
I knew how to search for bombs. I'd taught our staff.
What I didn't know was what to do when we caught one. Normally you clear a huge radius (there are charts for how many hundreds of feet), and call the police and bomb squad and FBI and ATF and ...
Let's take that in steps.
Police. Weren't coming. WAY too busy. The San Jose Police Department at last report held downtown San Jose and was skirmishing to try to take back city facilities elsewhere in town.
Bomb squad. SJPD had a small one. Sheriff's Office had a big one. But for scary stuff they reached over their shoulder to ... let's be vague. Hayward, Dublin, Livermore. That's vague enough.
The problem is that nearly all bomb squad technicians - a narrow specialty - were former military. And everyone who'd ever taken a nickel from Uncle Sam was in China, beating the shit out of her for the cardinal sin of nuking San Francisco.
FBI? What FBI? As best I could determine without excessive risk, the Federal Bureau of Investigation - once a presence in Silicon Valley, disputing China's industrial espionage foothold - had simply disappeared. Burner phone calls to their numbers rang endlessly. Emails bounced with error messages. The fragments of the Internet that were still up didn't resolve their Web site.
ATF? ATF had merged with Homeland. They had the expertise in arson and bomb investigation particularly. But Homeland was busy rounding up anti-American influences ... and (whisper it) ... displaced persons.
I didn't want to invite Homeland on site. I just had a really bad feeling.
There are basically two things you can do with an explosive device that is not your friend.
- Blow it up, either in place or after moving it.
- Take it apart, presumably without letting it blow up.
By far, the easiest thing is to put a bigger explosive charge next to it and blow it up. That meant bomb-making. Call me old fashioned, but playing with explosives was just not my thing. In addition to the hideous risks, substantial effort had gone into doctoring and booby-trapping (puns intended) the handful of references on 'How To.' Trying to teach yourself bombs from a cookbook would blow you up by Chapter 3.
The counter-terrorist in me heartily approved of this.
But it meant we wouldn't be training our own bomb guys from books.
Professional bomb techs are trained in classes taught mostly on the East Coast by the Navy, the Army, the previously mentioned FBI, ATF, etc. No one was teaching classes even if we had any way to get our people authorized and there.
They are trained from people who have handled explosives before. That's former military. All in China.
So what I needed was someone who was 1) already on Site and 2) former military, but not in China.
That, to quote a Spartan, was going to be a problem.
I braced Arturo (former Phillipine military), Johnson (medically disabled, US Army) and Brooke (medically disabled, US Marine Corps). My three soldiers in the Security Department.
They knew how to play with Serious Putty, which is the polar opposite of Silly Putty. It came in cases. They had no idea how to get the stuff, and less idea how to make it.
They knew how to recognize Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs. They had even gotten a chance to play with them. Inert - i.e. harmless - IEDs in, and this is not a joke, actual IED Petting Zoos. Training facilities run by bomb techs, through which soldiers were cycled in order to get touching the stuff out of their system so they didn't touch as many in the field.
IEDs were by far the big killer of American troops in Iraq. They were a problem in China, according to our heavily censored news. And that meant they were a Big Problem if we were hearing about them at all.
So based on their memories and some pictures, including still frames from training videos, we were making our own Site IED Petting Zoo and setting up training on how to recognize the damn things.
That still didn't solve the problem of what to do when we found one. And we would.
###
"Echo 18, we need you at the IED Petting Zoo. Someone's causing a disturbance."
I hung up and motioned to Shane Shreve.
He did nothing. Oh yeah, he's an idiot.
"Shreve, I need a ride over to E building."
Only then did he start walking towards the electric golf carts.
Sigh.
When we got there, the landscaping supervisor was waiting for me.
That's right, the landscaping folks were being put through the IED Petting Zoo today.
Why?
Because they're outside, on the grounds, and most likely to see anything before it gets in the building. I'd had to fight to get them into the training, because old habits die hard and there was a class issue. Landscaping was below Security on the corporate totem pole, which meant very fucking low indeed.
"One of my guys says this is all wrong," the landscaping supervisor said the moment he saw me.
I blinked.
"Is he a good worker?" I asked immediately.
"Yeah but..." I stopped listening.
Brooke was arguing passionately with a middle-aged man wearing a landscaping hat indoors. He work the typical jeans and cotton shirt but somehow they fit wrong on him. Unlike nearly every other landscaper, he wore sneakers rather than boots.
Tell. The backs of the sneakers were pushed down slightly, as if he put them on and took them off several times a day. And he had a many times folded large cloth in his right rear pocket.
They were arguing over a bundle of road flares attached to a wind up clock. Inert as all the Petting Zoo items were.
"Peace," I said as I walked up to interrupt.
They both stopped. Brooke, in shock. The man, from simple courtesy.
"Echo 18, contract security manager. The Petting Zoo was set up on my orders. You feel there are problems here. Tell me about them, please."
"This mock up is a joke. There are too many wires and there is no battery. It is a stereotype not a IED."
I placed his facial features finally. Not Hispanic, a racist term that covered everything from Moor to Central American. But the hiring coordinator had seen his face and thrown him in with the other brown folks.
"Are you from Afghanistan, sir?"
I was looking at his hands. He had delicate hands that had been hardened by weeks of digging and scraping.
He had all his fingers. That meant either that he did not play with bombs, or if he did, that he was _good_ at it.
"How did you know?"
I motioned Brooke to chase everyone else away from the conversation.
Unlike Shane Shreve, she caught the cue and did so.
The way to recruit someone is to get them talking and look interested. The way to look interested is to be interested. So I took him on the tour and encouraged him to lecture me.
I found IEDs very interesting. They killed my clients. That made them a subject of passionate curiosity.
This man knew IEDs.
I found myself indifferent as to how he knew them. For all I cared, he was Taliban.
He told me anyway. And he was worried as he did, beads of sweat dripping down his face.
He was here on an asylum visa. And he was very afraid that he would be sent back, now that America had turned not merely fascist but totalitarian, and his visa was now wastepaper.
He'd been Afghan military. But he'd been sent to a demining course in the States and simply quit. The bureaucracy hadn't gotten around to kicking him out yet. While he fought deportation, pre-Firecracker, he'd looked for work. I believe I mentioned the brown = landscaper issue?
"Mohammed, I would like to offer you a job. Security Department, contractor, reporting to and supervised by me. Bomb tech."
He accepted instantly, despite his knowledge that he would most likely be killed by a device.
Sometimes crossing oceans is not enough to escape one's karma.
Very quietly, I whispered in his ear.
"I will look out for your family. In the camp?"
He nodded tersely, once. A man with a family cannot take risks the way a single man can. But he had a lot of experience surviving in war zones.
"Play along," I ordered.
"Brooke, detain this man for further investigation. Security offices, if you please."
She turned her gaze on him and it was like a tank turret whining as it traversed to bring barrel in line.
"Mr. Mohammed, will you come quietly with me?"
He shuddered and nodded. She perp-walked him with two fingers on his wrist, but arm not wrenched up behind his back.
I went to the landscaping supervisor and told him I was detaining Mohammed.
"He's a good man," he protested.
"I know," I said quietly. "That's why you are going to say nothing of this, to anyone."
As if accidentally I flexed and unflexed my left hand.
It was his turn to shudder and nod.
And that is how I hired our bomb tech.
