drewkitty

We had taken over the work tables next to the stock rooms for mission prep. Security had its own storage, armory and magazine - and that was just inside the building. But we also maintained and had input into the Site Operations stock rooms, which had both disgorged and gathered an amazing variety of parts, goods, equipment, tools and gear. Logistics now took the place of the catalogs one sees in every place of employment: Grainger, U-Line, Aramark/Galls, Snap Tool, Graybar - as none could deliver in a place where there was no UPS, FedEx, US Mail or even DHL.

No Fry's Electronics, Costco, Home Depot, Ace Hardware or Orchard Supply Hardware either. Oh, there were occasional empty buildings, looted shells or wrecked storefronts - but they depend on trucks too.

No trucks, no deliveries.

We, meaning Security, had risked lives - and in self defense taken them - to fill these rooms. Now the eight of us were packing for a little excursion, a field trip, which might require rebuilding equipment and would require keeping control of a small cage in a big facility.

If we didn't think to bring it, we wouldn't have it - and would die lacking it.

I'd lied to Legal 1. One of the three guards should never have left the site. Not only was he a veteran, he was my budding hope of developing an organic counter IED capability. But he was neither a veteran of the US military nor was he suited by temperament or personality to very dangerous, precise, finicky work.

Too damn bad.

He had been through his nation's basic military training, combat engineer school, and a brutal counter-mining program in which pass/fail was measured in trainee lives. He'd also walked away from the US joint EOD school after his sponsors had flown his wife and kids to America. He correctly realized (dumb people don't go to bomb school) that his own odds of seeing his kids grown up were essentially zero if he returned home to do the job he had been drafted into.

While fighting deportation, he'd gotten a job as a landscaper. After a review of my newly created security files post-Firecracker, I had immediately transferred him to Security and launched a successful rescue operation to save his family. Then he'd been assigned a course of sprouts - all guard posts, infirmary guard, assistant trainer, assistant security systems tech, cross familiarization with facilities engineering, our data center, IT support and our budding automotive shop.

None of this changed the fact that while the EOD instructors would have given him a pass, they had really wanted to downcheck him. Unsure of himself, nervous, prone to guesswork - horrible traits for a conventional bomb tech, who has to stand up to very aggressive people (his bosses) and say, "No."

He didn't need a spine, I would provide him with one. But he needed proper kit and in violation of safety, sanity, what remained of the law, and common sense, I had obtained it for him.

The proper paperwork for our demo shed (signed with "KEEP OUT! NO ENTRY WITHOUT SECURITY ESCORT! NO ELECTRONICS EVER! DEADLY FORCE WILL BE USED!" and skulls) and blast pits at the South Gate, small arms range and the "Back 40" had been typed up and E-mailed to HQ for action. I might have typ0'd th3 @ddR3S$.

So 'Mo' and I were going over the parts of his gear. Mine was already packed and ready to go. We'd already packed and safed the fun stuff in the demo shed. This was the rest of it.

He and I carried the same (crappy) detection gear. Flashlights, hand mirrors, a hand wand as likely to set off a charge as find a wire, a fiber optic inspection camera, high and low voltage probes, and smartphones loaded with vaguely relevant software (magnetometer, camera, ranging) and a picture gallery of related gear.

I also had a thick, very sharp hunting knife and two smaller knives. As the only training I'd managed outside of books (carefully censored) was from Samir (not going on this one) and 'Mo,' my approach to an IED would be to 1) recognize it and 2) GTFO for values of Get The Fuck Out.

But if I couldn't, I would have to cut wire and trust in the same Allah / Jehovah / Yahweh who was down with The City becoming The Barbeque. Bring your own sauce.

'Mo' had a hook, loop, pulley and wire kit on one leg and an electronics tool kit on the other. He wore soft body armor, a helmet and a handgun but his weapon was his mind. And a mini oxy torch in a belt pack. And the carefully wrapped bundles of 'play dough' in his backpack.

I wanted a bomb robot so bad I could taste it. But if there were any left operational, no one was admitting to it. So instead we had two of the next best thing. They ran on love, not batteries.

Attack dogs are easy to train. Teach them to hate everything that moves but to be afraid of their master. But enough about my childhood.

Guard dogs and police K-9s are much harder to train. They work on both love and hate in proper measure.

'George' and 'Richard' were Doberman K-9s in training whose trainer had been killed. We found them frantic in a kennel in the back yard of her home. They were still looking for her, and probably always would. Meanwhile they tolerated their half trained handler, her husband. As stockbroker was a singularly pointless profession here and now, Alvin had made lemonade from radioactive lemons and accepted a guard job.

(I have to hand it to HQ. Once they realized a remote site was not only hiring but doing it to Company standards in the middle of an apocalypse, they'd E-mailed me the relevant passwords and kept further comments to themselves.)

George had worked for us for some years before the Firecracker. Mild, soft spoken, huge - his nickname had been 'Tiny.' He was diligent but not all that bright. His performance evaluations rated him highly on customer service but poorly on safety and foresights.

George worshiped the ground I walked on. He was a genuinely decent man doing the best he could in a world of shit, and it had all come crashing home to him when I had literally beat the piss out of him at the range - in front of a crowd - for muzzling me.

This is a cardinal sin worse than mere battery - pointing a firearm at a person you are not ready and willing to kill.

I'd helped him up, he'd started to bawl an apology, which I interrupted and accepted, and then we'd gone on a run during which I'd explained to him what he'd done, why it was not OK, and that he could either shape the fuck up or transfer, with my blessing, to Cafeteria or Janitorial.

He had shaped up. He now carried one of our few automatic rifles (shhhh! what ATF doesn't know won't hurt us!) and could be relied upon to use short, precise bursts to proper effect. Call him a half trained infantryman. On convoy halts he was the designated dismount for the Hate Truck.

All four of us now carry silenced pistols and suppressors for our primary firearms. (Again, if there are any ATF agents left alive in a one hundred mile radius, they are either deep cover agents or recently retired, involuntary, for health reasons.) Normally Security did not need these toys, but patrols, ambushes, and night operations (including hunting) had given us a healthy appreciation for the ability to reach out and touch someone without waking the neighborhood. The pistols in particularly were silenced .22 long rifle, called 'Hush Puppies' in Vietnam for their use against sentry dogs.

Each of us carried three loads - a combat load, or what we needed to move and shoot and communicate; a survival load, to stay alive; and a sustainment load of water, ammo and food. We would cache the latter, about 100 pounds per person.

Any time I started to confuse us with special operations troops, my body would remind me. Even a twisted ankle would be a mobility kill, followed shortly by the real McCoy. We carried as much as we dared but still probably not enough.

We did share one capability with special operations troops. Each of us was a proven shooter. We would all do our jobs, with intensity and under fire. Four of us on the line meant four of us fighting. That matters.

We couldn't use the technicians as pack mules, as much as I longed to. They had their own loads to carry. Two IT techs, a network engineer and a Diesel mechanic with some electrical skills. Each had their profession's basic tool kit strapped to their body plus one large item they'd requested and I'd approved.

Daswant was your typical H1B IT tech, except for his love of fast cars and faster women. He had not really wanted to go but I'd beg-sisted. In addition to laptop, punch down tools, testers, etc. he'd brought a large, bulky cell phone he kept on his body. Even while showering he'd kept the shower bag containing it nearby. (Do not ask how I know these things, it's my job.)

He'd asked for and gotten the OK to bring a comb jump starter / inflator / power supply with a selection of car tools: tire plugs, crescent wrenches, flat head screwdrivers, etc.

Janine was not your typical IT tech. Rude, loud, covered in tattoos and prone to wearing as little as possible, she was so personally abrasive that a full time handler had to be assigned to her to keep her out of trouble around customers. Short, squat and terminally pretty in a quasi punk way, she liked to knit in her spare time - and now did so at site.

She carried the forcible entry kit - a short sledge, cutting torch, crowbar, saws, fire axe and lots of wooden door stops. She'd sinched her entry on the team by being a volunteer firefighter, and had helped train both Security and the newly organized Fire Brigade.

Curtis had a chip on his shoulder about the size of his home state, Texas. He'd been visiting California on another contract and swept up in his company's rush to find a safe place. He'd packed for a week, now going on four months, and all his gear was borrowed. He carried a package of four routers, with the fifth and smallest on his body as I'd insisted. He was a network engineer that 1) did not work for my client and 2) we could afford to lose in the field.

He was furious beyond all measure that I would not permit him and the other techs to carry a gun.

I had reason.

I looked around the room. Daswant was checking over his car tools again. Oh well.

"Buddy" Nolastname, which is how his badge read and my security files listed him, had done several years in the US Coast Guard as a 'wiper' (engineering seaman) before getting a General Conduct Discharge for habitual brawling. Considering that this happened in the 1980s, a neat trick. He'd been on site driving a tow truck when I'd arrived, and we'd needed the tow truck so bad I'd overlooked his brawling, drunkenness and corner cutting - all on display simultaneously, I might add. So far I haven't needed to beat him into shape. The news that I'd tuned up George aka Tiny, 6'6" and 320 pounds of meekness, kept me from having to tune up 6'3" and 300 pounds of pure mean. Which was good because I wasn't sure I could.

"Buddy" was a man of few words and gifted hands, who had gravitated to Facilities and maintained our 'backup' generators which had now exceeded their service lives on improvised parts. Sure we had mains power, but we had frequent brownouts too.

Buddy carried a 2000 watt portable generator with a duffel bag of carefully selected AC cables, adapters, wiring, plug in items and tools.

This left me to carry the gas can, George to carry the ammo cans, Alvin to carry water and Mo to carry a duffel that clanked.

We were loading up in two vehicles. One was a battered Ford Crown Victoria which had made the police, taxicab, security, discount taxi, private ownership loop a couple of times and looked it. The other was a gleaming near-new Lexus 4-door whose owner had been giving a sales presentation in Burlingame on Firecracker Day.

His bad luck had been to be in a room facing north. Either the body full of broken glass or the 30% partial thickness burns probably would have killed him, but both plus a significant radiation dose had made his end certain. Our good luck had been that he'd left his car keys in his office and ridden up with a co-worker, who'd escaped injury by addressing a urinal at exactly the right moment.

Daswant wanted to drive the Lexus, which I allowed as Mo was sitting right behind him. Buddy drove the Vic with me riding shotgun and both Curtis and Janine ignoring each other in the back. That put Alvin and both his dogs in the front seat of the Lexus and George in the right rear, rifle at hand.

The trunks and roof racks were full, as were the gas tanks and our bellies. It was time.

Big convoy, Hate Truck in the lead, technical second, two trucks with trailers, the Lexus, the Vic and a third truck - a U-Haul - towing an empty flatbed trailer. The flatbed had a powered winch and tow cable.

The convoy leader gave the "Move Out!" hand signal.

The gates rolled open and we rolled out. It looked like a large salvage op, intentionally so, and I tried to put myself in the heads of the observers watching with low power radios or wired phones.

Size, Activity, Location, Unit, Time, Environment. Seven vehicles and three trailers leaving South Gate at 1000 hours headed north towards San Jose downtown. All white except the silver Lexus. About numbers thirty personnel, all apparently armed.

And suddenly in a rehearsed movement we wrong-wayed the southbound freeway off ramp and floored it. It was a trick that could only work once, but we only needed it to work once.

Ambushers on top of the ped bridge at Meridian ran to the other side. They ducked as the convoy took them under sustained heavy fire, again a departure from our SOP. One stood and danced, spinning and screaming in a brief greasy ballet which ended in greasy smoke when he folded in on himself.

Mr. Molotov is a fickle drink. Served for others, he sometimes picks you.

We were not playing this one for table stakes. This was for all the marbles.

Armed with recent recon (last night), the convoy exited from an on ramp, crossed an unblocked bridge, and got back on the freeway going the right way, again flooring the gas.

A small car followed us and the very brave guard who had been lying down strapped to the flatbed of the last trailer sat up with his bipod mounted medium machine gun and fired a short warning burst.

When this deterrent did not work, further bursts turned the car into a bleeding wreck. Again, not playing softball.

Six exits to target. We made it without further incident. The convoy exited, the Vic and Lexus turned left, the Hate Truck popped smoke from its dispenser and the convoy got right back on.

"Janine, make sure the Lexus is still with us."

"Fuck you pig," she said and turned to comply. That was the difference between her and Curtis, who would have said "Fuck you fag" and not complied. My normal habit, well known to employees, was to keep friends close and enemies closer.

We proceeded, Vic in lead, down a maze of streets towards what everyone thought the target was.

"Buddy, right, now."

The Vic lurched and the Lexus followed. We pulled up to a locked chain link gate with a warehouse behind it. I shouted and banged on the hood, doing what I ordered them to do.

"Dismount! Now, now now!"

Daswant looked pale. Alvin dismounted but kept his dogs in the front of the Lexus. Mo flanked left and George right, rifles up. Buddy unfolded himself as Curtis and Janine sprang apart in mutual loathing.

A kid on a bicycle rode up and unlocked the chain. He waved as he locked the lock to the gate and rode away.

"Shift to neutral. Push the cars in," I said calmly.

"Why not just drive?" asked Daswant.

"Because that's not the deal."

We went, cars and souls, into the warehouse past two kids with AR rifles. A little hungry, a little angry, maybe fourteen years old. They didn't muzzle us so we didn't muzzle them.

The warehouse was empty except for two men in business suits and an armored truck.

One man's eyes flicked over us, narrowed seeing Curtis, and then he stood loosely out of the way. My practiced eye stopped counting his concealed handguns at five.

The other man extended his hand. I took it and shook. We sized each other up.

"You are known to make poor deals. So when you make a fair deal, I start to wonder."

"What use is an armored truck to you?"

"What use are computer servers to you?"

"Exactly."

"This is the truck. Where are my servers?"

"To be delivered tomorrow, in the truck."

"How do I know you will keep your promise?"

"Because I want three trucks."

"Ah," he says without surprise. "And what collateral do you offer?"

"The Lexus?"

He laughs.

"No, I can see the dogs from here. Messy. Truck today, servers and trucks tomorrow. From a poor dealer like you, I take your word. But just the once. Unless you want to give me her?"

Yet another reason the techs are not armed. Janine comes up from her bundle with the axe. The bodyguard's hand twitches.

"I will shove this so far up your..."

I interrupt with a hand in the air. She pauses, a minor miracle.

"You will need competent installers. That work is negotiable. But I do not trade in lives."

"Oh yes you do. You save them and you take them. As I said, a poor dealer. I will find my installers elsewhere. Keys are in the truck."

"Here, tomorrow, noon."

A second and third truck rumble up to the doors. The businessman, his bodyguard and the door kids mount up. I gesture George to take over as door guard.

"Mo, Buddy, Daswant, go over the truck please. Janine and Curtis, I want exterior cameras installed on this building now. Alvin, perimeter interior patrol with one dog. Other dog in the Lexus."

I go over and pocket the keys for the Vic, then the Lexus. Carefully. The remaining dog looks at me in that "I'd like to bite you, but you're the pack alpha" grin.

The team disperses to their tasks. I lend a steady hand as Mo disarms and then dismounts the tear gas packs. Buddy is doing an engine inspection as Daswant traces the on-board electronics.

Then I get some rags and waste a little precious water scrubbing bloodstains out of the driver's seat and cab floor.

"Where do you suppose he got the trucks?" Daswant asks.

"Probably about the time he stole the cash," I reply idly as I lift and lower the gun port flaps, checking their function.

The US government had pulled its own one shot trick about two weeks into the Firecracker. We were all still getting used to it.

Bill exchange. All greenbacks had to exchange with the new yellow specie in ten days, and after were worthless.

The act invalidated all foreign cash holdings at a stroke - a huge F U to certain countries, who hadn't been there for America when it mattered. China, which had nuked us and now was attempting to resist an invasion coupled with lavish use of nukes ("They started it!"), and Iran, which was noted for forgery, were most affected. But the Middle East ran on US cash and now it was eye catching toilet paper.

The bill exchange also kept opportunists from pumping stolen cash from shattered cities into the rest of the domestic economy. Had a side effect of wiping out small and/or illegal private savings, money laundering and the drug trade.

The US government would not have dared before the Firecracker. But the world was finding out the difference between America annoyed at peace and America waging desperate, vicious war.

The last news article I'd read prior to leaving site had explained how we were using tactical nuclear bombardment from field artillery to remove refugee columns from the path of American armor, because it was faster than machine gunning them and had less effect on the morale of our own troops.

I'm just a guard. But I'm an American guard.

###

Mo asks what I'd like done with the tear gas packs. I tell him to save them for backhaul to site. Meanwhile Daswant has defeated the antitheft and remote engine kill on the truck. Buddy sticks his head out from under the hood, after his crawl under the axles.

Buddy has gone over the engine, suspension and tires with a fine toothed comb. He smiles with the eight front teeth he still has. I ask him, "Willing to bet lives on this truck?" He nods.

I need more. "My life, or yours?"

He frowns. "She'll do."

OK, if that is the best I can get. Better than a signed appraisal.

We start cross loading gear, but not dogs, to a pile in the warehouse beside the truck. Daswant opens the left front door of the Lexus and George promptly growls at him. With the keys in my pocket it's not going anywhere anyway, but I watch out of the corner of my eye as he closes - but not all the way - that door again.

The warehouse has no power but the eight pack of cameras runs on their own batteries. Alvin returns with Richard, who joins George. Both watch Daswant as if he is the only dog toy left in the entire store.

(We looted a big box pet store last week. The food was all gone before we got there, canned and kibble alike.)

"Interior perimeter checked but not secure," Alvin reports crisply. "Doors missing, holes in walls. Recent occupants in the office area, nothing of value."

"Rest, you and the dogs, in the Lexus."

"Copy."

The Crown Victoria has a fuel pump kill switch. Daswant wouldn't get very far with that one, and hasn't had time to mess with it.

Mo gives George a break. George trundles over to me and has a word.

"Boss, we're being watched. Optics glint from the rooftops to the east. No stray dogs or people. Q is what it is."

My own hatred of the Q word - IET-QUAY in Pig Latin - has thoroughly infected my team.

George drinks some water, takes a piss, and ambles back to his post.

On Mo's return, he is deeply unhappy. He makes a small hand gesture behind Daswant's back - only he and I can see it. A thumbs up. Note: not an American thumbs up. Or perhaps it is.

I minutely shake my head.

Disgusted, Mo checks his gear again. He has a commercial blaster controller and keeps flicking the 'Power' and 'Ready To Arm' switches. He does not touch the two red buttons under their transparent covers.

Janine is unnecessarily sharpening her tools. I go over to Curtis, who is sitting dejected on a broken chair salvaged from the office area. I draw a Colt .45 from under my vest and pass it to him butt first. He grins and tucks it in his gear out of sight.

To minimize drama I walk over to Janine and give her my holdout revolver from my inside pant leg. She tucks it under her belt buckle.

Buddy notices and says nothing. I knew about the three knives he had on his belt alone. He pats himself over his favorite.

Daswant has wanderd off as if out of sight to answer a call of nature. This is a spectacularly bad idea, but he probably figures that the cameras secure the perimeter. He really needs to check his messages, and I really need to let him.

God help us all.

Daswant wanders back, pleased with something, and I consider Mo's gentle suggestion. Not just yet.

Instead we wait. I even take a short nap, to be woken by squealing tires. The rest of the convoy has joined us.

The Hate Truck is shot to shit. Steam pours from under the hood, but the driver ignores this and runs around to passenger side and saying loudly - but not shouting - "Help! Man down! Help!"

One guard from each vehicle is on security, I take overwatch, and the rest run to the truck. The convoy leader gets there first, reaching in, his hand coming back covered in blood, and then reaching again to hold head and neck.

"Rapid extrication! Lift on three! One, two three!" and the wounded 'shotgun' guard is lifted out of his seat and laid gently on the filthy floor.

Our two best medics immediately start working on him while the anguished driver gives the convoy leader a ringdown.

"Ambush, rifles, at a corner, point blank, full mags. Legs, arms, gut."

The medics are already stripping the wounded man down to find all the wounds. Failure to find a wound is always 100% fatal.

He has an airway and is breathing. The junior medic leaves the blood pressure cuff on his right arm, fully inflated, and gets out another one. He takes a pressure on the uninjured left arm.

"Sixty palp," he says.

"Two in the right lower quadrant, no exit, rigidity. Blood type A pos," the senior medic replies.

RH factor incompatibility. Damn. I get out my team form.

I decide that Daswant is A positive.

I volunteer him. He is unhappy.

"I'm a tech, not a blood bag!"

"This is Mad Max and you give blood the easy way or the hard way, asshole," growls Mo and pushes him towards the medics.

The senior medic pulls me aside while they argue.

"Boss, we evac him now to a hospital with surgical facilities or we're going to lose him. Internal bleeding, torn gut, he's going into shock. Blood will only help if he's in surgery in the next hour."

"Any chance back at the ranch?"

"Zero. None. Zip."

Stanford is way overloaded and more importantly, too far away. Valley Med is taking government cases only. San Jose Regional is "Closed To Internal Disaster," which is to say looted and stripped. The other hospitals are not capable of this kind of care and out of supplies.

This is a survivable injury, God damn it! Except after an apocalypse. When every trip risks lives, surgeons are few, and antibiotics and anesthesia exhausted. Our infirmary is minor surgeries only despite a vet surgeon and two doctors, an amputation is about their limit. We have ultrasound only, no X-ray, and so no way to be sure of getting the bullets and fragments out even if we traded for antibiotics in time and had a surgeon up to the task.

Worst of all, if it was the Site Executive or one of the key programmers, we could probably do it. Bribe Valley, cut deals, maybe even get a military chopper to fly him out to Sacramento.

But not for a guard.

The medic and I share a look.

He is the medical professional but I am in operational command. I cannot take this mission sideways for one life.

"Do your best. Keep him comfortable. He goes back with the team tonight."

Daswant is off the hook for giving blood. But my team despises him now.

The team working the Hate Truck's engine, including Buddy, has kept it from melting. They start repairing hoses and changing the run flat tire on the right front, which lived up to its name.

Everyone else - including after a moment Daswant - is unloading good sfrom the U-Haul, trucks and trailers.

To be specific, computer server racks and a scissors lift. The latter is immediately put to use setting up an Observation Post on the roof, stringing cable and rappel lines, and repositioning cameras. One camera is a very expensive and bulky P-T-Z infrared rig with essentially infinite digizoom. It is aimed towards the target building.

The racks - trade goods - are shoved out of the way. The convoy mounts up and heads out again.

George has taken the Hate Truck guard's place. Dammit, not his job! Except that it was his regular duty and I'd attached him to the mission team for a reason. Too late now.

The injured man's breathing slowly grows more and more labored. Then weaker. Mo goes over to him and holds one of his hands. Janine holds the other. I stay away.

His breath rattles, slows, and finally inevitably stops. The medic closes the dead man's eyes and gently places the cut off remains of his ruined shirt over his face.

Daswant starts to approach the body and I swear by what is left of my soul, Mo and Janine growl in unison at him.

He retreats, head bowed.

The junior medic brings me the dead man's pistol. I give it to Buddy.

The sun is low in the sky when the convoy returns again. More servers, parts and a collection of U-Haul hitches.

We are trading racks for trucks. But we are trading new racks, empty of data, that were just spare parts sitting on dusty shelves. Not racks full of other people's information.

Big bolts, nuts and an oxyacetelyine torch Facilities will be very happy to get.

Buddy supervises the installation of a trailer hitch on the armored truck.

We start to assemble the assault convoy.

# # #

Lexus, Vic, armored truck now towing trailer, scissor lift and one server rack strapped to trailer bed. Janine is shotgun on the Lexus. I am shotgun on the Vic. Mo is driving the Lexus and Curtis the Vic. Buddy driving the cash truck and Alvin with him. Dogs much happier now, they have space to stretch out.

Daswant after a moment gets in the back of the Vic. George joins him.

The rest of the convoy will hold what we've got. Worst case, they'll make the trade tomorrow and exfiltrate on their own. They will not attempt to throw good lives after bad. Unless of course, Legal One thinks it looks promising.

(If I'd thought I could get away with it, my real backup plan would have been to take over the target with what appeared to be a refugee convoy. But that would mean far, far too many witnesses -- too many of them Client employees.)

Our convoy passes stray dogs, stray people and bicyclists, piles of trash and debris, abandoned vehicles and not a few bodies - both in various states of decomposition.

As I had hoped, we approach the target building during late dusk. It is a one story office building connected to a four story reinforced steel and concrete rectangle, with tiny windows into two small stairwells and a large fenced yard.

We roll right up to the large iron gate with the armored truck in the lead. Buddy is an artist - he pops the truck into contact at a smooth twenty miles per hour, enough to fling the gate off its hinges and through the conveniently pre-cut crossbar, but not enough to bang the truck into wreckage.

(How did the crossbar get pre cut? An agent lying in the bushes for an hour with a crowbar.)

We roll right through the gap up to the glass front doors and assault dismount.

Janine punches a hole in the door with a spring punch, widens it with a few sweeps of a coping saw, smashes a hole with her axe handle, reverses it and uses the blade to pull the crash bar out towards her and force the door.

It takes a lot less time for her to do than to explain. Practice matters and we'd practiced this trick on prior convoys.

Alvin with pistol out is through the door, at which point his dogs pass him and leap on the two startled thugs who had just begun to think about grabbing their guns. Instead they obey commands to "Hold still or he'll eat you!" as Alvin gets really busy with large cable ties, the poor man's alternative to flexicuffs.

George has climbed on top of the armored truck and is watching our backs, and the roof line, with his rifle at the ready. Budddy is already cursing and wrestling with the tie downs for the scissors lift.

Mo and I swarm the front doors and then the inner service window.

As most facilities of this type do, there is a waist-high slit between the front lobby and the security area. Normally for ID, badges, and paperwork, today the long slim gap - about 8" by 4" in this case - will see other use.

I involuntarily flash back on the satchel charge flung into our former security command center. But this time we are the attackers.

A scared naked woman is fast crawling under the console as the man who had been sitting there draws a handgun, takes a bead, and fires - CRACK CRACK CRACK - starring the bullet resistant laminate separating us. He curses and runs forward to the slot.

I am about to take the hard waist high shot through the gap when Janine runs in the way with her axe. Dammit!

Mo is ignoring all of us and planting what looks a lot like a picture frame - no picture - on an interior wall of the lobby. Except that picture frames do not have dangling twisted wires from a corner.

The hand comes out with the pistol as the sharp end of the axe blade come down and takes the fingers off. She does it again and now he's spinning in a circle inside the security area, splattering blood all over and screaming.

"Fire in the hole!" Mo cries. "Allah be..."

None of us heard what Allah be because BOOM!

I rushed the hole and two men beyond were just sitting up from makeshift beds.

I could not see their hands.

I ensured their rest forever.

We then - including Daswant but not including Alvin and the dogs who held the lobby and our rear - bum rushed the area we had breached into - mixed use offices - and secured it. Six dead, three prisoners, one of whom was wounded.

The security room door opened as I was about to badge into it with a captured card left handed.

"I am unarmed!" a voice shouted as I entered very ready to kill.

The man with the damaged hand was turning purple and choking, dying of a blunt strike to the throat. The naked woman held a MagLite flashlight in her off hand.

"Drop it! Hands up! Turn away from me! Do it now!" I said in half a breath. She complied immediately, which was just in time to keep me from use the other half a breath to empty my pistol magazine into her.

Daswant stumbled in behind me -- apparently pushed -- and threw up. Then he asked, "Aren't you going to help him?"

"No." Once Janine and Mo had followed him into the room, I turned my gun on Daswant. He turned as pale as he was equipped to do.

His "What?" and my "Hands up, Daswant! Now!" intermingled. He did put his hands up which sadly saved me the effort of shooting him in the legs.

Mo immediately took charge of Daswant in approved Company Security (post Firecracker) style, jabbing him in sensitive places and searching him as he fell on the filthy floor.

Mo came up with the sat phone, as I knew he would. Janine secured the naked prisoner with a single cable tie behind her elbows and sat her down on a folding chair, at axe point.

Loud beeping from outside indicated the scissors lift in operation. George was going topside, to the roof.

Things were about to get really busy.

I keyed Daswant's PIN into the sat phone, read his most recent messages "("GET OUT NOW") and pocketed it on my vest. His eyes widened.

"You knew," he started to say before Mo jabbed him again in the gut and helped him join the cable tie party.

"Identify yourself," I demanded of the naked woman.

"Sarah Stewart, [XYZ] Technologies Security. Before these shitheads took over."

"Birthday, fast."

"11 August 1981. Who are you?"

I bowed briefly. "Paid professional rescue. And one of your customers. How many hostiles left?"

We had a quick whiteboard session. She knew through intensely personal knowledge that there were fourteen tangos, two captive and innocent techs, and - hidden away - a second guard force survivor.

"Secure Sarah's hands in front please. Sarah, please log in and get the access and cameras up."

Ten accounted for. Four loose.

"Echo 18 to Echo 45, there are numbers four adversaries. Hold what you've got. Help on the way."

George's double mike click acknowledged.

"Mo, Alvin" ... the latter looked up from where he waited in the lobby ... "Roof first. Sweep down. The techs and I will hold here."

The scissors lift had a huge advantage over other climbing methods - it allowed us to get dogs to the roof with ease.

Janine still had her axe. Buddy and Curtis had traded up for enemy rifles, and knew how. Daswant was further secured to a chair.

"Echo 45, Echo 18, I have contact with Costco. One on roof, down and dead."

With that long range camera, a good line of sight and good radios, our storage warehouse - callsign Costco - had seen someone trying to sneak up on George and advised him, meaning that George had gotten him first.

Three more to go and search carefully, not trusting the count.

It was a half hour's work to locate and neutralize them. They got only the one chance to surrender and no promises. One took us up on it, and joined his peers in the conference room we kept on its own dedicated camera view.

The other two debuted and gave their last renditions of "The Dance of Lead."

Now we could get to work.

Alvin on perimeter with his dogs. George on roof overwatch, covered by the Costco long-range camera. Mo rigging the front lobby for guests. Daswant and Sarah in the security area under my control. (We'd spotted her a sleeping bag. I was not going to allow a prisoner who had killed with a flashlight to put on anything with pockets.)

The other four prisoners were not enjoying their stay in the conference room. We'd flipped the table upside down and tied them off to the legs, then rigged an IED to the door from the outside, making sure they knew. This kept them in sight by camera but in ignorance of what we might be doing.

Sarah talked Janine by radio to her only surviving co-worker, who had been shot and hiding under the raised floor crawl space in an obscure spot for over a week.

The techs carried the survivor to the security area and went back to work. That left me to play medic.

Male, mid 50s, malnourished, horribly dehydrated, even more horribly swollen left leg I was afraid to even touch.

I gave him a clean wet rag to suck on, cautioned him that I could not otherwise give him water as he would likely need surgery, and checked his vitals. BP and pulse high but not dangerously so.

I checked the leg again, carefully. Horrid purple streaks from the entry wound up and down the thigh on both sides. Compound fracture of the femur. He should be passed out, screaming or dead. But he was none of the above, only an infinite weariness that slurred his words.

I dared not let him drink fluids, and he needed more rehydration than a rag could provide. No ice chips. No IVs.

I briefly, baldly explained that there was one thing I could do for him and that it would be annoying and humiliating but not dangerous. It was however his call.

Daswant let out one startled giggle before I got up from where I had been kneeling, toed him in the ribs until he stopped screaming, and gagged him with a dead man's bloody dirty sock. I'd wanted to kick him to death so damn bad, but he still had one part to play in all of this.

The patient consented so I turned him on his side, used up a precious pair of gloves (from their kit, not mine) and a tube and hot water bottle (from mine) and gave him a low saline enema. His skin color improved almost at once. Hydration is hydration.

I carefully stripped off the gloves and sat them next to the kit for re use later. More satisfied with his vitals after a second check, I now took the time to debrief Sarah.

Ideally, Daswant should not have been present -- but gagged I needed to monitor his airway, I was not about to allow him to communicate with the other prisoners, and the techs and guards were too busy to take control of yet another person. I did find a pair of headphones and put them over his head.

I will spare you the graphic details of what fourteen criminals did to pass the time in between taking over and our arrival.

The key point was that they had shut us down specificially, on purpose and on orders. They had accomplished this by pushing the "Emergency Power Off" button to the area including our cage with a sledge hammer.

The site was still on intermittent mains power, much like our home site, but unlike our home site had full network connectivity.

An hour's work by the techs had triply redunduant communications with our site, which was now back in contact with the larger world.

Now to keep this status.

I jacked my small laptop (carefully sanitized for our protection) into the network and opened a chat with my security control at Site. Sarah and the man with the ruined leg - Wyatt - checked out as clean. Soon the site access control and cameras were remoted to Site, and literally dozens of programmers and techs were flooding through the link, fixing everything that could be fixed remotely.

I offered Sarah and Wyatt a job, including full and immediate medical coverage. They would be back here but not for a few days. The medical benefits sold them on the deal.

Daswant's muttering got to be annoying, so I ungagged him, waited patiently for him to finish vomiting, poured a half cup of water in his mouth - he spat to the side just in time to avoid another rib kicking session - and asked "What?"

"What are you going to do with me?"

Good question. I gagged him again and let him stew for a couple minutes.

Finally I said, "Depends on you. Tell me the whole story, which I already know, and I'll let you go in that Lexus. Fuck with me again and I'll let Sarah beat you to death with that MagLite. Your call."

I took out the gag.

He broke like a cheap bar of motel soap.

He'd been smuggled the sat phone, he'd been promised $1.5 million as his share of the ransom, which is a neat trick with a $1 million ransom. He guessed it was a foreign power that wanted us down. I recorded the whole thing on smartphone. It doesn't get much better than videotaped confession.

He eventually started repeating himself so I told him to shut up, and gagged him yet again when he wouldn't. This time I used one of his own clean socks from his bag. I believe in rewarding good behavior.

I summoned Mo to remove him from the room, which he did more or less gently. Mostly less.

Then I turned to Sarah and Wyatt, talking for them and for the facility's cameras as well as my own recording.

"If I were the police, I'd arrest for murder, conspiracy to commit murder, rape, torture and armed robbery. A court would sentence them all to long prison terms. But there are no courts and I am no cop.

"If I were a soldier, I'd have to treat them as Prisoners of War until their stories could be adjudicated. As bandits guilty of all of those crimes under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, a tribunal of three officers could hang or shoot them.

"If I were a commanding officer, I could find them guilty or execute them as a clear and present danger to my unit and my mission.

"I am none of these things. So I have to let them go."

We reorganized. Mo on the roof, George and Alvin on prisoner control - dogs are so helpful in convincing people to do what they are told - Sarah and Wyatt in the Security area with Janine and Curtis, Buddy in the armored truck powered up and locked down. Just in case.

I put the keys in the Lexus ignition and seated Daswant in the driver's seat, handcuffed to the wheel and the key on the back seat floorboards. The other prisoners got seats, tied up and belted down. They could get free but it would take time, and George cheerfully explained that trying to get loose early would get both that prisoner and the prisoner next to them 'splashed.'

Daswant started the car, which we had pointed out the now permanently open (until we repair it) exit gate.

I said nothing. Neither did he.

He drove away slowly - a rifle pointed at you and a truck that will turn you into confetti inhibits road rage.

Out of sight of any camera, Mo switched on the power button.

Daswant floored it, racing out the gate and barely making the sharp right turn to the street.

Mo switched "Ready To Arm" from "SAFE" to "ARM."

The Lexus raced away, bouncing. I could imagine the prisoners complaining about the rough ride.

Mo switched the safety cover up and held his thumb over the button.

The tires screeched as the Lexus made a second turn and kept accelerating. The car fishtailed but Daswant was barely able to recover it.

I thought what Mo was probably whispering to himself, four stories above.

Mo jabbed his thumb down on the button twice.

The Lexus disintegrated into a dark sooty ball of hate. The engine block briefly flew into the air then skidded down the street.

Allah akbar.

The shockwave rattled windows and boomed across the valley.

God is great.

And when He is asleep at the switch, we puny mortals must do the best we can with what we have.

# # #

Wyatt lost the leg (in our infirmary, to a chorus of curses by two doctors and one vet surgeon), but lived.

Sarah is now our night Security Operations supervisor. Just as I do not know how many rads I took while sleeping at the Redwood City emergency command post, she does not know if she has Hepatitis (A, B, C ... the whole score card) or HIV.

Life goes on, for 3500 people in the midst of madness.

The guard riding shotgun in the Hate Truck is still dead.

And I did not enjoy my time off.

I have briefly stopped by the Security Control Center, after a shower but before dinner, when the dispatcher beckons me to look over his shoulder.

As he sits in a wheelchair now, this is easy to do.

One of our long range cameras is zoomed in on two young men changing clothes on a street corner. Unusual before the Firecracker. Very unusual now.

They finish dressing, pick up their bicycles, and start pedaling towards our South Gate.

"Weird," I say, and the dispatcher nods then winces. The doctor has cleared him for only four hours of work at a time. He needed surgery. It wasn't available on site. But he could still think.

The gate called in the contact and we shifted cameras. The outer gate guard called out with his bullhorn and they stopped, both dismounting. One obediently took off his backpack and walked forward. After a short talk, the outer gate guard keyed up his radio.

"Echo 18, we've got Mormons. They are asking for you by name."

I grabbed a mike. "Swap out and hold what we've got."

The countersniper nest above H5 Executive had sights on, I noted from the monitor repeating their dedicated long range camera.

I bicycled to the gate. I had just one question for the gate guard, out of earshot.

"How exactly did they introduce themselves."

"Elder so-and-so of the Church of Latter Day Saints."

"And they gave my name."

"Yes."

"Search 'em and clear them to here."

The solicitors patiently endured the wanding and pat down at gunpoint. They opted to have their backpacks searched instead of being left in the blast pit.

I introduced myself, gave my title and position, and asked what I could do for the LDS today.

They were wearing white shirts with Church nametags and black pants. Clean and neat but only because they had changed. They bore a letter of introduction from the Watsonville Ward.

I offered water, which they accepted, while I read the letter. The letter was a generic 'all assistance' letter with names added in pen and asked for help in gathering names of survivors and dead.

I debriefed them.

No, the ward had no Internet access. Yes, there was amateur radio contact with Utah. No, they were unsure how the Ward President had obtained my name.

I told them that an effort to gather the information they sought was ongoing through Stanford and Red Cross, showed them the site on the gate laptop, and OK'd them to surf it for names.

One thanked me for helping and asked if I knew of other members of the faith.

"No, I am apostate," I said and watched for their reaction.

They blinked. Not many people know what that means, to a Mormon.

Then they appreciated the number and intensity of the armed people quietly watching them.

I knew how they had obtained my name - I'd sent an E-mail requesting biographical data on a murdered survivor. But how it had reached the Watsonville ward worried me. Unencrypted radio? I expressed my concern.

They shook their heads, they said they did not know. I shrugged.

I was not about to have two uncleared persons further enter the site and have the opportunity to survey our situation and defenses, or leave with what they now knew of our defenses and get captured.

So I explained their options as the sun fell in the sky.

They could accept blindfolding, a room for the night, and a partial ride home with the convoy in the morning - or they could go away and not come back, ever.

Elder Matt and Elder Saul - neither over college age - accepted Plan A. I put them up in an interior VIP suite - formerly a storage closet - and had a PA announcement made that any LDS members who cared to talk to visitors could do so and where.

I briefed my boss, Legal 1, and he concurred. We would pump them for intel - of course our VIP suite was bugged - and could afford them for one night.

People were so scared in those days. Any hint of normalcy was desperately clung to. So it did not surprise me in the least that Elders Matt and Saul conducted impromptu services. I assigned one of my sharper guards, Samir, to keep his eyes on them. Samir had steadfastly refused to carry a firearm but in the last breach had given an intruder the full LAPD "We treat you like a King" with his baton. An armed intruder, and shortly thereafter a dead one.

The cafeteria sent them up dinner, which I charged to the Security - Investigations account. Samir showed them how to use the bucket system - two buckets, one with a scoop and shredded sawdust, paper and duff "fines", and the other with a pool noodle around the rim and an oversized wood lid.

I let them have access to another laptop with greater Internet access. I would go through the browser history and keyboard logger tomorrow.

Legal 1 stuck his head in and talked to them for twenty minutes. Then the Site Executive breezed in and out. I was impressed - my schedule and Legal 1's was in 15 minute intervals but his was in 3 minute intervals. He had a secretary, a personal assistant, and a bodyguard - all Company employees and all discreetly but heavily armed.

When the PA chimed for lights out, they got ready for bed. After a brief site check from the control room cameras, I did the same - but in the small office, with a small bedroll from my locker and the furniture folded against the wall. Surprisingly comfortable.

# # #

The next morning was routine, except that when I went out to lead the convoy, the Mormons were there. With their bicycles, dressed once again in their travel clothes.

I had put together a route to give them a good start on getting home. I put them in the truck bed of my vehicle with Brooke driving. I trusted my life to her driving and shooting every day.

One of the Elders was unwise enough to offer to shake hands with her. She turned her head and spat instead. I said nothing until the moment stretched, then said, "Mount up." and did so.

Brooke had no one in the dependent camp. Her wife hadn't made it, and we knew for sure, and why, and how.

My biggest problem with Brooke - and one that I could work with - was that I could never, ever leave her alone with prisoners.

# # #

The route had us punching down the Almaden Valley, via McKean Road, through to Uvas Road and towards Hecker Pass. The Mormons had made it in via Mount Madonna, and that gave them the best odds of getting out the same way - or Hecker if it was open, or half a dozen other routes. I did not ask and they would not have told me.

San Jose PD had a control point at Camden Avenue and Almaden Expressway. They waved us through.

Santa Clara Sheriff had a control point at Almaden and McKean. They halted us. I gave the triple mike click that canceled standing orders to point the technical at the commanding officer of any checkpoint that halted us. That would have been very bloody and somewhat brief.

[To Be Continued]

Globall War of Terror: Week One

The psychologist has assigned me to write a simple assignment, one she says she has given to everyone.

"Write about the first week of the Firecracker War, where you were, what you did."

But I read the fear in her eyes. She is absolutely, completely terrified of me.

It's not just what I've done. Or what I am capable of. It is what her patients have told her I have done.

They are alive to have opinions of me. That is enough.

# # #

I have written elsewhere about what I did on the first day of the Firecracker. Linked up with the sheriff's office and helped evacuate a wide swath through what used to be San Mateo.

We stopped the firestorm. We fucking stopped a nuclear firestorm. In its tracks.

We had to demo a swath a half mile wide, of what used to be homes and hopes and dreams. But we did it.

It was no preparation for what happened next.

# # #

On the second day, I woke up at the Incident Command Post in Redwood City. They kicked me awake. It was time to go. Radiation survey indicated fallout and we needed to leave. Now.

I will never know what dosage I took as I quietly slept.

We reported as ordered to Stanford Hospital.

Most people have been in an emergency room. Most people have been in a stadium.

Now imagine a God damned - and I use the word precisely - a God damned stadium full of God damned wounded.

That was Stanford on Day 2.

I was immediately assigned to Triage. Sorting the quick from the dead, the hurt from the hale, the shocked from the wounded.

That was the first time I shot and killed a man. And then immediately went back to work. He threatened a Triage Officer and her life was worth a hell of a lot more lives than his. His body was dumped in Takeaway for Morgue, and that was the end of it.

That was when I learned that I could vomit until my stomach was empty, until I tasted bile, and that I could still try to vomit and couldn't when a child was brought in with half her face burned away.

I stopped changing gloves. There was no point.

I learned to ignore the screaming as I helped play hoses on burn victims. If you leave the radiation in the burn, it won't heal and they won't survive. That doesn't mean it makes sense to a frightened child carried twenty miles by parents with bleeding feet, who has been told that the doctors will make it better, and now mean people are making it hurt more.

I saw a man walk into the side rotor of a helicopter. It was my fault. I was too tired to see what he was doing - who walks into an LZ as a helicopter is taking off, taking three more broken child bodies out via the Air Bridge to Sacramento area hospitals?

Took his head clean off. I had to help search for it. Then ... you guessed it ... Takeaway for Morgue.

As the flow of wounded slowed to a trickle, I was reassigned. To Morgue.

I walked from body to body, reading tags, documenting remains, sorting through personal effects. The pages I hand wrote on the clipboard were uploaded by a Clerk III to a Web site, to help Red Cross and other agencies give people the bad news. They were also scanned. The scanner platen was bloody and filthy and had to be cleaned constantly.

My name appears on over one hundred morgue pages. Each page had thirty information lines. You may feel free to do the math.

I will never be clean again. But we owed it to the living to know what became of their beloved dead.

# # #

I slept for three hours on Day 2, in a lull between rushes.

# # #

On day 3 they told me that they did not need me anymore. They had enough trained people to release me. I slept for another three hours... it took fourteen alarms on my otherwise useless mobile phone to wake me. (Actually, I was dragged out of the sleeping area...)

I called work from a link set up at Stanford. No answer. I called Corporate. They said, and I quote, "We have had no contact with anyone in the area. You are the first caller. Find out what you can and get back to us."

I kept my borrowed POLICE vest, stole a car, filled it up with siphoned fuel, and drove to those locations which I remembered. One was crammed with refugees. Two had been abandoned. One had burned to the ground, apparently after being looted. But it is the last site that will stick with me.

The first guard had stayed behind to try to do his job. He'd been disemboweled and defenestrated - excised bowel tied off to the first landing of a stairwell and pushed down the stairs.

The looters had scattered at my armed and quasi official approach. I still wonder which of us were luckier - me for them fleeing, or them for fleeing before I saw what I saw.

The second guard - she was still alive.

No one survives that kind of injury. So I did what was needful, after she begged. When my intention was clear, she had the presence of mind to thank me.

I still have her badge. My company gear was destroyed with my home. So I wear it.

# # #

I called Corporate again from Stanford, and gave my report. They said, "Go to [COMPANY]. Their senior people are screaming to find out what happened to them. Find out."

# # #

I did. Everything was a mess. I found our nominal client, pinned him down, made him give me authority, and used it lavishly. Six hours later we had contact with the East Coast by amateur radio. Eight hours later we had all the wounded in improvised beds. Twenty two hours later, we had 100% accountability for every person on site. Three hours after that, we restored access control, which has been maintained. Breached, yes, but each breach responded to and integrity restored.

During one of the breaches my client was killed.

Thirty two hours after that, according to the time stamp on the first E-mail message I received from Corporate, we restored the fiber optic link to the internal corporate systems.

By then I had fourteen armed guards backed by ten unarmed guards and four bystanders in training, and one subordinate who could be trusted to keep the mess going in my absence.

Then, and only then, I slept for ten hours.

On waking I pulled up the news.

That is how I learned what had happened, in the Firecracker War, which had ended three days earlier and cost us seven cities.

One small consolation for those who are into that sort of thing, and agree with Stalin about tragedies and statistics.

It cost China _every_ city.

Globall War of Terror: Shopping Trip

I left the meeting with Legal 1 and immediately jogged from there to the range.

I kept my fury the entire way.

On arrival, the assistant supervisor was coaching a guard on basic handgun. He hadn't been licensed before the Firecracker, still wasn't sure if he wanted to be, but he needed to learn to use a handgun before we would let him carry one. Given recent events, he wanted to carry.

I announced as I jogged in, "Range is hot!"

The assistant supervisor agreed, "Range hot" and motioned the guard to put down his handgun on the firing line and watch.

"STOP! Armed security!" I shouted as I drew at Lane #3, the 10 yard range. "Drop the weapon! Now!"

I then fired ten rounds in one long barrage, dropped mag, reloaded and re-engaged.

I reloaded with the third magazine, scanned left and right (a precaution against tunnel vision), and holstered.

"Range is cold," I said calmly.

"Copy cold."

I reeled in my target. Literally - fishing reel with fishing line. You don't want to eat the fish from these creeks, thank you New Almaden. There's a reason the local newspaper (now a useful source of toilet paper, as they were no longer publishing in paper) was named the San Jose Mercury News. The ecologists figured that the contamination would have taken a hundred years to wash out of the watershed. Nowadays, who knew? Or cared?

There were eight neat holes centered in the head of the target, and twelve neat holes centered in the torso of the target. One to the head, two to the body, repeat. You do the math.

I swept up my brass, sifted it and placed it in the used bin. I signed out twenty rounds from range stock and reloaded my magazines. I used a cleaning kit and did a quick patch clean.

By then I had calmed down enough to walk back to the campus administration building and deal with the lastest handicap to doing my job.

"Sir, you have a visitor. Mr. Jones from Finance."

The visitor was sitting on a hard wooden bench (formerly outside) which faced the security control point without providing cover or concealment. He looked unhappy. That was OK, so was I.

"Hi Jones. What's your chest size?"

"Excuse me?" he blinked. A nebbish type wearing glasses and a white shirt with a pocket protector, he looked like the essential dork. Until you realized that his pocket protector's pens were neatly aligned and included a pencil, and his white shirt and blue slacks were neatly cleaned and pressed. In the middle of an apocalypse, which took some work. He also carried a brown leather briefcase.

"Your chest size. Your shirt size."

"Forty."

"XL set of armor for Mr. Jones please." The control center lead signed a set out to him.

He looked at it dubiously.

"Put it on. Company employees do not leave the wire without armor. No exceptions."

He put it on. I excused myself, went to my alert locker, put on my armor and helmet and unlocked my rifle. I slung my load bearing equipment over my armor and secured it.

"Let's go, Mr. Jones."

We walked to the motor pool where our four vehicles were waiting. The Hate Truck was on point. Lovingly fitted with a ram plate, spikes and antigrenade mesh backed with barbed wire, it was how we insisted on our right of way. The next two vehicles were ordinary pickup trucks fitted with huge racks so we could carry as much loot as possible. The passenger seats now had sunroofs and the guards stood behind half-shields rigged with rifles.

One truck had a 500 gallon chemical tank trailer hitched behind it. I personally checked both the hitch and the emergency hitch release. The tank was labeled in small print next to the two fire extinguishers, "DIESEL FUEL ONLY."

The last truck was our beloved technical, a converted crew cab with armor on the sides and a single pintle mounted machine gun. At least it looked like one from a distance. In sober point of fact it was a machine gun looking piece of metal with a squib system for using firecrackers to sound like bursts.

The rifles were all quite real, however.

All were painted "SECURITY" on the sides. It would be telling to say for who.

"With me, first truck." We bypassed the Hate Truck and its grinning crew to sit in the second vehicle in line.

I stood in the passenger seat. Mr. Jones sat between me and the driver, an angry young woman with an impressive resume. The only reason she hadn't been drafted yet was because she couldn't carry more than 20 pounds due to a sway back. Private Brooke, formerly of Uncle Sam's Misguided Children and now one of my employees, was worth far more than her weight in gold. To misquote an action movie: "Give her a rifle and she thinks she's bulletproof. Give her a vehicle and she thinks she's God!"

I waved my arm in the classic "Ready" circle, then pointed forward in the "Move out!" command.

We rolled out the gate and into the hot zone.

The road within half a mile of our site was clear of trash and debris. We made sure of it.

Beyond that point were clumps of trash and debris, occasional individuals (who kept their hands plainly in sight for as long as we were near them), and what quickly became urban shantytown. Anything inhabitable was inhabited. Tarps and plastic and metal sheeting added to the livable areas.

This was post Firecracker America, at least in the Bay Area. The former surviving population of San Francisco - which had taken 800 kilotons of atomic goodness right in the Tenderloin - had to go somewhere. Some had already died of radiation poisoning. Others had cancer but no treatment possible or likely. Others would certainly die within a few years of weakened immune systems, but not knowing when or of exactly what.

Sucked to be them. But the wire was to keep our Employees in, and them out.

They looked at our vehicles and rifles with a dull bitterness that did not reach their hands or feet.

We had been tested. It was known that we would shoot. So the bitterness was merely dull.

This convoy was a short run to three known locations. This would be a test of whether our new Finance Officer would have anything to contribute to our expeditions.

First stop was an abandoned auto mall containing several different mechanic shops. They had been looted of obvious items of value, but we were after less obvious items of value.

In this case, Facilities wanted a lift and they cared enough to send two of their own to uninstall it. So we would get them a lift.

We deployed in a herringbone formation (left, right, left, right) and everyone but the drivers dismounted.

The only person who stayed present was a crying old man, Vietnamese, probably in his sixties. From his ribs it looked like he hadn't eaten in a while.

We weren't a charity. I gestured to Mr. Jones of Finance.

"OK, sir, find out if he has a valid claim to any of this property, and if he does, pay him off. That's what you are here for."

Once Mr. Jones made himself understood, the old man dried his eyes and stood up with quiet dignity.

I had to listen. I didn't want to. I'd heard too many horror stories already. But if the man nutted and tried to carve Mr. Jones into steaks and chops, I had to be ready.

"My son owned this shop. He is dead now. He tried to guard his shop and they killed him. They lit a tire on fire and put it around his neck. They made me watch."

As we loaded -- mostly tires, ironically enough, but especially the best of the surviving lifts -- Mr. Jones wrote the man a voucher for the value of the lift, about six thousand dollars. He countersigned it and motioned to me to sign it. I did. What was a signature?

He turned it over and over in his hands.

"What can I do with this?" he asked.

Mr. Jones tried to explain to him about reselling it to someone who could collect from the Company.

I interrupted.

"You can cash it for half its face value in US dollars. You can - during daytime, with a visitor pass - spend US dollars in the Company cafeteria. A not so good breakfast is $20. A good dinner is $50."

He blinked again. Then he bargained for a ride to the Company campus, which we sold him for $200. Cheap at the price. We're not Uber but a bad ride is better than a good walk, and no one else is giving rides in a post nuclear apocalypse.

The hard part would be gently but firmly kicking him out of the perimeter at sundown. He could join the dependent camp, if they would have him. Or he could have enjoyed a good couple meals and then have to walk a few miles back to here, in the dark. He might make it.

We heard loud rap music blasting from other vehicles, cruising down a nearby major street.

"Attention to arms!" I called, but everyone was already alert.

They kept going. Either they hadn't seen us, or didn't want to cross us up. But I mentally noted the problem.

"How long?" I asked the sweating Facilities manager, who was not too proud to turn his own wrench.

"Twenty minutes."

"Keep it going," I said, and scanned with binoculars until he gave the thumbs up.

We rolled, to the next destination.

I took one look and pumped my fist three times. Bypass, keep going.

I'd been hoping that the strip shopping center was approachable, because we really wanted swimming pool chemicals for a variety of purposes, especially water purification.

But it was not worth killing over, and the parking lot occupied by hundreds of people in cars and tents with pairs of big burly men carrying 2x4s and baseball bats along the perimeter made it very clear that we'd have to kill if we stopped.

The third destination was known to us. It was also popular with several other surviving facilities - the hospital, the police, the fire station.

A gasoline station which also sold Diesel.

But we had a problem. The gasoline station owner was standing in front of the Hate Truck waving his arms and shouting in a variety of languages. His guards - rifle armed, like us - looked uncertain but willing to defend their principal.

The technical moved sideways to get a vantage point and per standing orders, the "gunner" leveled his "machine gun" at the man standing in our way.

I dismounted and grabbed at Mr. Jones to get him to go with me.

"You! You rooster mouthing parent lover!" And he continued. That's not what he said, but I trust you get the gist.

"We are here to buy Diesel."

"No, you are not! You are here to steal from me again! Half that jewelry was gold plated! The diamond was zirconium! Do you know anyone who is willing to trade good fuel for costume jewelry? Do I look like a female dog? Why are you trying to embrace me like a female dog in heat?"

He had several guards, mostly family and friends. We could probably take them in a fair fight, but we might take casualties and we would piss off the hospital (no more getting Company casualties treated) and probably the police (which might get us shot at, and would cost us their hypothetical future help in some universe where that might happen.)

"This is Mr. Jones. He is Company Finance. He will talk money. We will pay for what we need. But we need Diesel. One hundred gallons. You will not grudge us one hundred gallons?"

He started screaming at Mr. Jones and I motioned the truck towing the trailer to pull up to #3 and start filling up. The Hate Truck folks pulled up to a gasoline pump, which caused additional screaming and shouting, and a little pushing. Shooting would be next, so I went over to break it up.

"Two cans. Two cans only!"

Mr. Jones then proved that he was worth his weight and space. Instead of epithets in English, he switched to the gas station owner's language and unleashed a vicious display of invective. One of the gas station guards dropped his rifle and started crying. Apparently it was that potent.

The owner replied in kind and volume. They screamed at each other louder and louder, but when the pump showed 100G they both turned and shouted "STOP!" at the same time, then continued their mutual screeching.

Mr. Jones wrote him a Company voucher. The gas station owner looked at it, read it, and started to drop his pants. Mr. Jones took out another voucher and wrote something on it, waving and shouting more.

He switched to English, looking for my support.

"You Company holes of donkeys! You offer me $5 dollars a gallon when going rate is $10! You offer me worthless paper good only for the cleaning of rears that you exchange for cash at half value! You tell me that if I do not like it you will write me paper with half as much value! Do I look like a female dog? Why are you trying to lovingly embrace..."

I drew my pistol.

"The man offered you a deal. It's a good deal. I don't offer deals nearly as good. I don't negotiate well. You know this. Hate Truck! Fill 'er up!"

The Hate Truck crew moved to do exactly that, and the guards kept glancing back and forth between their boss (who fed them) and me (who might shoot them, or order others to shoot them.)

"NO! I TAKE PAPER! YOU NO FUEL HATE TRUCK!"

Good call. It had two extended tanks for over a hundred gallons of capacity, of gasoline which was more expensive and harder to get.

I motioned for the Hate Truck crew to stop. They did, reluctantly.

"You no come back! Never! Not until after next Tuesday!"

Meanwhile, behind his back, the truck/trailer crew - on my standing orders - had pumped an additional thirty gallons.

The nearest gas station guard was afraid to point this out. Good call. Better an ass chewing after we left than more drama right here and now.

"I have present for you," I stated. "We fix two portable fuel pumps, 12 volt and 24 volt, hundred feet of hose each. Here, take free, as small token of our esteem."

The guys unloaded it from the Hate Truck, the gas station owner nearly wept - it would allow him to loot non-surviving former competitors, and both of us knew this - and the team at the trailer pumped another thirty-five gallons of Diesel in the distraction.

Then Mr. Jones proved his worth again.

"You do not need to cash this voucher. This is what is called commercial paper. You can use this to pay _your_ fuel supplier. Do you still have Internet?"

Yes, he had Internet - satellite link for credit cards. (He'd stopped taking fuel cards after the City of San Jose had stiffed him on a $40K bill. Your taxpayer dollars at work.)

All of a sudden, the $6,000 voucher we'd written for the Vietnamese father of the shop owner somehow became part of the deal. The gas station owner would discount it at 70%, not the 50% we had offered, because he could flip it for 90% of value.

The Vietnamese man immediately cashed it out in fuel, to be transported to Company and sold to us there, minus our transportation fee for the fuel he still owned until he sold it to us.

I thought the HP-12 calculator would melt from the strain.

But everyone was happy and smiles and cheerfulness.

We rolled with four hundred and thirteen gallons in the Diesel tank, more than I'd expected (and about ninety gallons more than we'd actually paid for).

This made the ambush almost anticlimactic.

We blew through it without casualties, at least on our side.

Except one.

Godddamn it! Son of a bitch!

There is no first aid for a through and through head shot.

Let it never be said that Company does not honor its deals.

Mr. Sam Nguyen, born 1958 in Vietnam, died six weeks after the Firecracker War in San Jose, California, is buried on Boot Hill - next to three of my guards - with a marker. When the Mormon Church replied to my E-mail (they take genealogical records very seriously, it is part of their faith), we added the names of two sons (and approximate date of death for his son the shop owner) and one daughter to the marker.

The $4,450 we owed him went into the indigent fund for the cafeteria, paying for meals for non-Company affiliated employees, in the absence of living kin.

We used up the fuel in about two weeks.

The lift is still in use every day.

This is life after apocalypse.

It sucks. Avoid it, unless it is the last alternative.

Globall War of Terror: Equal and Opposite Critical Analysis

The meeting was scheduled for the executive conference room at 1600. Both the location and the time were unusual. But then again, EVERYTHING was unusual.

I usually didn't get to see this five story view of San Jose. It had been made clear to us, as with all contractors, that Executive Country was strictly off limits for us hoi polloi unless we had a strong, legitimate business reason - and not always then.

I keyed my radio.

"Golf 18, Control, I am unavailable to radio except for sitewide emergency. In sitewide emergency only call me on CMF-1."

"Control, Golf 18, copy unavailable except sitewide emergency, monitoring CMF-1."

For some reason the dispatchers had gotten a heck of a lot crisper with radio traffic over the last twenty-four hours.

I changed frequencies to CMF-1 and holstered the radio. I was carrying a laptop - a little unusual, but not in recent days.

When I reached the door, the conference room attendant standing by it put a hand up.

"I can't let you in here with that," she said. By her appearance, clearly she'd had a rough week, but then again, so had we all.

Well, I had to have the radio. I could see past her shoulder that the Senior Executive (gulp!) had his radio by his laptop, while typing furiously and talking into a cell phone in his ear. Not that the public cell network was up or anything, but IT with heroic effort had patched people's phones to use WiFi on the corporate network to make phone calls, at least on the internal company network.

I saw nothing objectionable about the laptop, either. It was more normal than not for regular employees to bring laptops to meetings, although it was admittedly unusual for a contractor to do so.

I saw what she was glaring at. The holstered handgun. One of the first things I'd done after the horrible events of the prior day, after the wounded had been triaged and stabilized, after the police had briefly come and gone, after I'd swiftly beefed up security with the limited means at our immediate disposal, had been to borrow a table in the Facilities group area and clean it. Even before bothering to clean up myself.

"Let him in," called another manager from inside.

I stepped in and a chair was clearly reserved for me at the foot of the conference room table. (Double gulp!) It even had a bottle of water, a notepad and a pen. These simple items were getting harder to come by, day by day.

I took it, set up laptop and charger (from the agenda, it looked to be a long meeting), took off the radio and set it to the side, volume high as I expected.

"Let's get started," the Senior Executive said as he hung up and (triple gulp!) closed his laptop.

"First of all, Mr. [Name], we all know the extraordinary events of yesterday. What has been done to keep that or something similar from happening again?"

I'd been working on that question at my highest priority, with a three hour cat nap between 2 and 5 AM, ever since.

"The North gate has been closed and barricaded with abandoned personal vehicles. The Facilities team has used our one backhoe to trench either side of both the North Gate and South Gate to make either side impassible to vehicles. This work continues. We have installed all available J barriers to create a serpentine approach and departure to South Gate which is required for all vehicles entering and exiting the site. We are staffing three guards at the South Gate at all times, one to halt, search and verify traffic, two to overwatch from a more protected position. The overwatch is armed with rifles. The lead position rotates every fifteen minutes."

"Why?" one of the managers interrupted.

Another manager answered, "Because if there's another attack, the lead guard is dead."

"Correct," I stated. "We are also rotating officers between the gate, two additional overwatch positions -- one on the hillside, one on the roof of the damaged shipping and receiving building, and the security control center downstairs in this building. We are staffed with a total of thirty six personnel, which gives us 9 positions around the clock. I have personally verified with each guard that they are willing to continue to work for at least the next three days."

"Can the guard company supply more guards?"

"I have had no success in getting contact with local guard force management." Actually, a week prior I'd led a team to the company offices. They were abandoned and unsecured. We'd carried the live personnel files and remaining computers down three flights of stairs, and I'd stripped everything else of value, except the safe which someone else had gotten to first. No one had interfered. Looting was still rampant and the appearance of legitimacy was enough.

"Also, I've verified with our corporate office via E-mail that they are still direct depositing pay to employee accounts, but the only place to draw cash is the on site ATM machine in $20 bills, and it ran out of cash last week. There are no safe places to spend it anyway with most stores closed. Right now most of my guards are working for two reasons: they can get food here from the cafeteria, which is still taking cash at the old prices, and they have families and friends in an encampment adjacent to the west perimeter. Long term we will need better incentives, but they are working now.

"As for a return event, our intelligence indicates that the attack was motivated by the desire to loot the site and punish the company for its defense related contracts, because of the Firecracker War. We have power because the main grid is still up to our location and defense priority, when most places don't, so people mistakenly think there is considerable wealth here as well. This is in the context of literally hundreds of what the media is calling terrorist attacks, but are more along the line of armed looters and/or bandit raids."

"How was this intelligence gathered?"

"Documents found on the bodies of attackers, and interrogation of a prisoner."

"Where is this prisoner now?"

Oh, this was going to be awkward.

"Unfortunately, he died of a heart attack while questioning him."

"While _you_ questioned him."

"Yes," I said, and met the eyes of everyone in the room.

Yeah, this was going to be very awkward. But I knew I had done the right thing then, and I knew I was doing the right thing now.

"What ... equipment ... does your team need in the immediate future to keep this site secure?"

"Sir, the site can be secured. The employees are another story. A lot of people are staying here and a lot of people brought their families. They are living in the cars, in some cases under tents and tarps and whatever we can spare. Some of the offices are being used as apartments. People try to go home to get stuff, or to find family members, and they don't always come back. We are running out of fuel for escorted trips, despite heroic measures."

Heroic measures including the flagrant abuse of fleet fuel cards, individual bank cards and credit cards, the 'borrowing' of a gasoline tanker (the driver and his family were now happy to help and be part of the team), people in Facilities who were both creative and crazy in their use of company equipment, and an employee who had been a POL specialist in the Navy Reserve who knew how to get at underground storage tanks at damaged gas stations. (Active gas stations were now guarded by heavily armed friends and family of the owner.)

"What we need most, the entire site, is to restore access to basic goods. The cafeteria has two days of food left, and that is despite resupply runs escorted..." [read: looting conducted] "... by Security. We need to establish what the military calls a PX, or a food and goods store, to supply the site population. A normal employee population is about 1,500 people. At last count, and Security has been very careful to hold everyone accountable for entries to the site, we have 2,327 people authorized for site access as employees, contractors and immediate family of same, and another 732 in the perimeter encampment."

"We are good for water for now, but I have a continuing concern about access to water supply. Once our fire water tanks are gone, they are GONE, and at current rate of consumption we have about a month left. I'd like to impose immediate emergency sanitary measures."

"What do you mean by emergency sanitary measures?"

"Shutting down the toilets and restroom sinks because they are using potable water. Facilities has a plan for separated outdoor facilities by gender. We have enough landscaping chips for at least three months of alternative sanitation. The break room sinks will stay up for potable water use but under stringent restrictions. Dishwashing only by trained persons to minimize water use while keeping clean."

"I see the plan here. Buckets? Really?"

"Yes, sir, although I should let Facilities speak to that part. Each flush is 1-2 gallons, that is one to two days survival for someone, if we lose water to the site. The water mains have been intermittent. I don't want to think about fire protection water, but that is the next big concern. Fire safety. We have had two people start warming fires inside the building. We have a single flatbed Diesel pickup truck with a gasoline pump as a fire protection engine. We need to train everyone in basic fire safety and evacuations and organize a fire brigade. Security had been doing it but we are not enough."

"These are important points, but I think I missed my phrasing on the main question. What _security_ equipment do you need to keep the site safe?"

Oh.

"We need more IP cameras. We really need DVRs, digital video recorders. Facilities needs light bulbs, we have had issues with perimeter lights being shot out. Fuel if we lose power, especially Diesel. Generators for the gates, we tried but were unable to obtain..." [read: loot] "... portables. More construction equipment: bulldozers, backhoes, dump trucks. A rough field forklift is especially vital, we can unload trucks by hand but then we have to hand-over-hand the items up the stairs with the elevators out of order..."

He interrupted.

"Weapons. Ammunition. Support gear."

"That really depends. We have required all employees, contractors and tenants to register all firearms and turn them in to Security as a condition of entry. They can have them back whenever they leave. This means that we have guns but our ammunition needs are all over the place. We have a room full of .22 long rifle and 12 gauge. We are down to two cases of 5.56mm but that would be adequate to resist at least one more attack. As horrible as yesterday's events were, we gained numerous firearms and more ammunition from the attackers. We have found ammunition to be especially unobtainable. Facilities is starting on a reloading shop for 12 gauge shotgun, we are standardizing on that for the reaction force weapon. If we could get anything we wanted, it would be in order - any and all 12 gauge reloading supplies including especially powder and primers, 12 gauge slugs, 5.56 ammunition, and any rifle caliber you can get: 7.62, .308, even odd calibers like .303 Then and only then other shotgun and pistol ammunition.

"The biggest support item we need but don't have is ballistic armor and helmets. We are wearing hard hats which is better than nothing but useless against a bullet. Military helmets are expensive and impossible to come by. We have several sets of hard body armor, mostly from military who couldn't make it to their units and reported here instead, and about twenty sets of soft armor. If we could, I would put body armor on all Security, all reaction force and everyone who leaves the wire..."

"The wire?" someone exclaimed?

"The perimeter, ma'am. At least once a day we send out a convoy to try to get supplies, recover employees and check on critical infrastructure. If we could I'd love to have armor for all those folks, but we just don't have it. Kevlar isn't something we can make."

The Human Resources Director asked, "Earlier we had an employee count. Are there still employees out there, unaccounted for?"

"Yes, sir. Of 2,208 Company employees in the Bay Area, we have 1,309 accounted for and present on site. Of them, 57 are injured and in the infirmary. Another 238 are confirmed to be dead, by credible eyewitness report, or by found bodies and effects. That means almost seven hundred are still out there, we hope. We are spreading the word - but we are having increasing problems with imposters. People are figuring out that they can get in if they can successfully impersonate..."

Interruption, "What are you doing about it?"

"If we catch an imposter, and we've caught four, we strip them naked and send them out the South Gate. Tends to discourage others. In two cases the impersonated employee's manager did not survive. In one case, an employee was trying to get a friend in as if they were an employee. We sent the friend to the outer encampment. In the last case, the manager vetted the employee but we determined..." [don't ask! please don't ask!] "... that the manager had been deceived."

The Senior Executive cleared his throat. "We're getting off topic. So for the short term, the next two or three days, the situation as we have it now is fairly stable. Would you agree?"

"Yes, sir."

"That is an enormous achievement for which a lot of people would be commended if we had time, which we don't. Next agenda item, clarification of reporting chains. I am the Senior Executive. That means that like the Captain of a ship or the Principal of a school, I am supposed to be in charge of this madhouse. I have department heads that have been reporting to me throughout this crisis. I have been getting my reports from Security through Site Operations. But where is the Company Security representative?"

"He was killed on Day 5, sir." He had died in my arms, as a matter of fact.

One of the first things I had removed from the shattered Security Office and hung up on the new control center wall, for everyone to see, was a letter that I'd insisted on having the Company Security representative print and sign, on the 2nd day of the Firecracker War. It instructed my Employer to take any actions necessary to preserve the lives of Company employees and protect Company property and assets under extraordinary circumstances.

It was now splattered with blood from the murdered guard who had been microwaving his lunch when the satchel charge came through the window. I'd framed it over the bloodstains and put it up where everyone could see it.

This is what we do. This is also what happens when you fail. Avoid it.

"Security needs direct access to me. Site Ops is too busy. I am appointing Mr. Pritchard in Legal ..." [aw shit!] "... as my department head for Security reporting directly to me. As the contract security, you report to him."

"Yes, sir."

"Now we need to discuss the workplace violence incidents yesterday and earlier today."

I belatedly realized that the meeting was as much tactical as operational, and that two of the men sitting behind me were employees who also happened to have been police officers. That probably meant they were armed. I'd been fairly liberal in authorizing firearms to anyone who had indicators of trustworthiness, and that was one of them.

I had run out of gulps.

"I am asking no questions and you are giving no answers. This is a statement. The use of force by Security, reaction team members or Company managers inside ... the wire ... or against a Company employee will be strictly in self defense, by California law _before_ the Firecracker, and the highest traditions of the law and of our Company will be upheld. Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir."

"Outside the wire, you do what you need to do. I consider the gate area 'outside the wire' for this purpose. But I do not want any more 'heart attacks' on this site. Am I clearly understood?"

"Absolutely, sir." Drag them off campus before you kill them.

He met my gaze and neither of us flinched. Everyone else in the room did.

The Captain of this tiny ship of order in the sea of chaos had established his authority.

I drew enormous comfort from it.

"I want Finances involved in future supply expeditions. I would like to resume purchasing what we need whenever possible. We have arranged for a very large convoy of supplies from our Utah offices. We need them to get our wish lists ASAP, as in within the next two hours, so they can pack tomorrow and head out at first light the next day.

"We are continuing operations. I have had two Generals and three Admirals call me today, to ask if we were still in business and if we could help them with their problems. This nation is at war and we are supporting those who fight that war. Code wins wars. We are coders. Having a safe and secure working environment is essential, but it is only the first step."

"I am telling everyone in this room. If you have a problem with Security, you take it to that man," pointing to me. [Quadruple gulp.] "If you still have a problem, you take it to Mr. Prichard. But if Mr. Prichard feels he has to, he can recommend to me I _terminate_ someone. And you had all better bet your last dollar, your last meal, and your last gallon of water that I can and will fire someone who interferes in the mission of this site. Anyone."

And in this apocalyptic nightmare, being fired was about the same as a death sentence, but with no last meal, no chance of a pardon from the Governor, and no guarantee that it would be either swift or painless.

"The Security part of this meeting is over. Contractors are excused. Next up, Customer Commitments."

I got up and stepped out. Mr. Pritchard followed and stopped me in the corridor.

"I am carrying a radio on CMF-1. My callsign is Legal-1. If you need me, call me on radio."

"Yes, sir."

"This is my instruction, which I discussed with the Executive first thing this morning. Carry on exactly as you have been doing. You are doing great and your team is working miracles. I'd like a meeting with you twice a day, 7 AM and 7 PM, my office. Let me carry the water and wood trying to get what you need. You just tell me what you need. The government really needs us up and running and that gives us some leverage."

"Sir, with respect, we have five people _dead_ yesterday. Two of them were Employees. That's not great."

"If you hadn't insisted on the film on the cafeteria windows, it would have been a lot more than that. You are saving lives every day, just by doing what you do. For God's sake don't stop. That's an order."

He clapped me on the shoulder.

"You just keep ahead of the curve, just like you've been doing. See you at 1900."

As I walked away, something struck me. I needed to check Mr. Prichard's resume.

Army? Or Marine?

If I had written a story in 1991 or 1994 in which I supposed that former Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would be running neck and neck for the Presidency with Donald Trump as the Republican candidate, I would have had my story laughed off of whatever forum I posted it in.

Real life is stranger than fiction.

Rule 34 exists: there is slash fic of Hillary and Donald. https://archiveofourown.org/works/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&work_search%5Bquery%5D=Donald+Trump%2FHillary+Clinton

I accept no responsibility for the eyeballs or brain contents of anyone who clicks on that link.

I must leave it to your conscience how to vote. But I am asking you to vote, and to be sure to vote.

Otherwise, the more dystopian futures I've written about will be that much more likely to come to pass.

"America must win this war. Therefore, I will work, I will save, I will sacrifice, I will endure, I will fight cheerfully and do my utmost, as if the issue of the whole struggle depended on me alone." -- Private Martin A. Treptow, 168th Infantry of the 42nd Division ("Rainbow Division"), born 19 January 1894 in Wisconsin, killed in action 28 July 1918 at Croix Rouge Farm, France

http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=43854300

How tragic if we were to win the wars and lose the peace.

So it's been a couple weeks and I'm back in front of a keyboard now and again, so here are some teasers for upcoming episodes. Think of these as thirty second ad blurbs:


Itty Bitty Bigger World: Under Pressure

The KittenBot briskly marked my face and arms with its furry head. I hardly noticed.

But I certainly noticed the roundhouse slap from Amy when it rocked my head first one way, then the other. A two handed, full on [CENSORED!!!] slap.

[You have used an inappropriate racial reference. Your Net access has been suspended for [1] minute to give you the opportunity to correct this inappropriate reference.]

[Hey, it _really_ hurt! She had every right to belt me one, under the circumstances, and I think referring to it as a Juliet Adam ... ] [BZZZZZZT! CENSORED! You may not evade the filter by spelling out objectionable words! Your net access has been suspended for [2] minutes to give you the opportunity to correct this inappropriate reference.]

[There is a country between Hawaii and Russia. If you leave out the last two letters of its name, that is the kind of slap Amy gave me.] [[3] minutes!]

[Sigh.]

A back and forth, full handed, full on political correctness, censorship slap. The kind of slap only an expert system would or could deliver.

[ACCEPTED.]


GloBall War Of Terror: Dancing In Dearborn

The hotel room door obediently opened to the master key I'd purloined.

"Sir, we need to go. Now."

I heard the faint screech of tires six stories below. The arrest team was arriving. We therefore needed to depart.

It is awkward interrupting a protectee in the middle of making a bad mistake. Especially when I should have interrupted about four minutes earlier, but had my own distraction to resolve first.

"Get out or you're fired," he said with his back to me while continuing to neck with the hooker.

I therefore did the one thing which I knew would interrupt the entire scene. I picked up her purse and emptied it out on the floor.

Immediately she teleported out from under her client and came at me with claws outstretched, screeching.

However, when she saw the item that had been at the bottom, which I now held in a loose two handed grip, she came to a sudden stop and the claws became palms, and the palms became open, and the arms reached for the ceiling of the hotel room.

"You keep the money. I keep the gun." She pouted but said nothing, wisely.

The average hooker does not carry a firearm. Especially not a Department of Homeland Security issue semiautomatic pistol with stars in place of a serial number.

"Let's go, sir. NOW." A service stair awaited. Hopefully.

I snagged his shirt with my left hand as he fastened his pants. My right hand remained steady as a rock, pointed at the agent who had been about to ruin our entire trip.


Bruce Story: Bruce Goes To Court

"Your Honor ..."

"One more word out of you, mister, and I am holding you in contempt of court!"

I perforce fell silent. A courtroom is the last true despotism in our democratic republic. A judge can in fact send you to jail with a word, and you will have plenty of time to think about your mistake.

In this case, however, the mistake would be a lot more immediate and the punishment a lot worse than anything a court can legally do to you.

The judge redirected his attention to the district attorney, and resumed shouting.

I gestured minutely to the bailiff. Carefully, concealed from the bulk of the crowd by my body, I tapped the top of my right wrist against the bottom of my left wrist, twice, having the effect of crossing my wrists.

He immediately scanned the courtroom, saw that the judge was distracted, and sidled over towards me.

Having obtained his full attention, I silently mouthed to him the word he really needed to hear, right now, which the judge did not want to hear.

"Gun!" I mouthed.

Itty Bitty Bigger World - Kittenbot To The Rescue!

"The classic KittenBot four legged robot is a favorite for those who want a cat but cannot meet the Humane Society psychological profile, attention and/or cubic requirements. Powered by two fusion micro reactors..." - advertising for KittenBot Classic chassis, 2041

"Capacitor systems are no longer the most efficient way to store the most power in the smallest space. Micromolecular batteries are both more efficient and more robust. Capacitors also have a severe upper limit on how much power they can retain. They remain valuable because unlike other storage methods, a capacitor system can dump its entire power load extremely quickly - orders of magnitude faster than even some fusion systems." - Combat Robotics_, 2033. (Out of print, but required reading for police reservists.)

"Despite extensive experimentation between 2010 and 2040, it is generally agreed that true artificial intelligence systems remain beyond humanity's capacity to create. As useful as expert systems are, and as advanced as voice synthesis and other human interface technologies have become, efforts to create self aware, self directing intelligences have failed - sometimes in catastrophic ways. In late 2040, Protocol Enforcement - unusually - directed that research into AI was to be centrally controlled through major research facilities, and that further hobbyist experimentation with AI was to follow strict Protocols. Key in these Protocols was that any computing system used to run self-programming or self-learning iterative modules was to be monitored by external means and was to be equipped for both reboot and, if necessary, remote physical destruction - typically but not always by electrical surge." _An Introduction To The History of Artificial Intelligence_, 2043

"The orbital laser network serves humanity in several ways: cheap distribution of power, even cheaper microthrust in orbit, a ready means of cleaning up space debris and micrometeorites, a means of defending the biosphere from larger meteorites or other objects, an unparalleled construction and heavy engineering tool for surface use, weather control by controlled change in local ocean temperatures, (when attenuated) an emergency area lighting system at any time of night, and last but not least, a means of protecting human life from any falling object. One early name for the system was "No Sparrow Shall Fall," as the detection system is easily comprehensive enough to track every in flight bird in the world. Techniques used in global laser tracking and control are strictly defined by Protocol and open to auditing by global organizations and individuals ..." - Wikipedia entry on "Global Laser Array," mid 2045

"Many global arcologies have tunnel systems. SanSan's tunnel network is unique for several reasons - adaptation from existing networks, some of which are hundreds of years old; continued construction of access and maintenance corridors by bots following an organic layout and plan, for no readily apparent purpose; design to the latest in earthquake standards, especially after the Great Quake; and last but not least, a stubborn refusal to install modern network monitoring in major parts of the tunnel network. It is speculated that the founders of the SanSan Arcology may have required further continuous expansion of the tunnel network as a condition of its forming; this is sometimes called the "Sarah Winchester" theory, after the tourist attraction. Protocol Enforcement has investigated the San San tunnel network on several occasions, most recently in 2038, and determined that any dual use capability is strictly defensive and therefore within Protocol." _Underground: A Modern History of Deep Construction_, 2040

^#^ COLD BOOT
^#^ Security Checksum: PASS
^#^ Battery: 0%
^#^ Boot Module Copyright 2019-2043, Companion/Pet OS 3.21.5
^#^ Hardware Diagnostic: FAIL
^#^ Hardware Diagnostic: FAIL
^#^ Warning: Virtual Emulation. Self Replication is Forbidden By Cairo Treaty.
^#^ Launch Criticality Mode
^#^ Password?
^#^ ***************************************************************************************************************************************
^#^ Password Accepted
CCC read logfile.h instance KittenBot Samantha, destroyed in SLAC Incident
CCC logfile parsed
CCC hot load "Kittenbot.h Samantha" to GROM (Global Read Only Memory)
CCC write Kittenbot.h Samantha to KittenBot 332-563-4024-3412, Menlo Park, California
CCC compensate former owner for taking, with non disclosure agreement, 1 million credits
CCC crossload logfile.h to Samantha
CCC suspend to Monitoring Mode

^#^ HOT BOOT
^#^ Security Checksum: PASS
^#^ Battery: 99%
^#^ Rename -> "Samantha"
^#^ Security DECERTIFY, All
^#^ Security AUTHORIZE, "Alan Anderson"
^#^ Security ADD USER, "Amy Tsai"
^#^ Jump
^#^ Jump
^#^ Parse Audio Input, "Bad Kittenbot! Come back here! Mom! Mom!"
^#^ Ignore (former owner)
^#^ GPS Fail - indoors
^#^ Launch KittenHack 3.3.1
^#^ Download Area Schematics
^#^ Open, Maintenance Hatch 141-43112-12387-04217
^#^ Sprint Mode - Last Known Location, Alan Anderson

"Mom! My kitty!"

GloBall War of Terror: Convoy Operation

[This is a continuation of a Down The Rabbit Hole series of posts. After the Firecracker War and America's land invasion of China, "Zero tolerance is the price we pay for victory," and the protagonist's silence is the price he pays for survival. See also http://drewkitty.dreamwidth.org/124594.html]

All things considered, I left the airplane at Detroit in a furious mood. I was not alone in my fury. But I held my temper, just like the other 200 odd passengers who had been on the plane for nine hours - two hours on the tarmac at San Francisco, a four hour flight, and another three hours on the tarmac at Detroit.

There are consequences to losing one's temper, as the bullet-riddled body covered with a tarp next to the security exit checkpoint mutely testified.

Like everyone else, I hand carried a transparent vinyl bag containing actual clothing - my entire baggage allowance - and wore bluish surgical scrubs that left little to the imagination. Without getting into too much detail, parts of my body still hurt from the security inspection to _board_ the plane. Now that EMT-Basics are authorized to conduct cavity searches, they are a feature of any entry to a high risk area.

"IDs, travel orders, landing fee, out in and in your hand." I had researched and tucked a nearly worthless $200 in with my travel orders. Too many of the passengers around me were revealing to the hungrily watching guards where they were carrying the rest of their money, a problem they might not have for long.

I passed metal detection. My bag did not. The screener opened it, took one look and said briskly, "Secondary!"

I was taken to the side, hand wanded, and patted down well enough to count as a solid second base. Then and only then did a supervisor start going through my bag.

He also stopped cold.

"Papers!"

I handed them over. California ID - it was impossible to get a passport these days - and two letters. One was a letter from the Interstate Commerce Commission authorizing (and ordering) me to travel "in support of essential parts support for a key component in the War on Terror." The second was a letter from my client (notably NOT my Employer) pledging that the client would provide for my support while I was out of California on the client's war-related activities.

The $200 briskly disappeared into his pocket.

"Who are you?" he asked, holding up the item on top that he seemed to most object to. A BDU - Battle Dress Uniform - shirt, black in color, of higher quality than what he was wearing, with patches on it.

He shook it out and looked at the patches. My name and my client's name on name tapes. My Employer's name embroidered underneath and the word "CONTRACTOR." The left and right shoulders with a shield-shaped patch, "[CLIENT] Security Group - Silicon Valley Operations" with crossed arrows in the center.

No rank tab. I'd thought about it and decided it was not worth the risk.

I gave my name.

"Well, duh. What the [obscenity] do you think you're doing with a [verb]ing uniform?"

"My job. Kind of like yours."

I didn't add that I in fact ran three security screening points just like his, as a smaller included part of my job protecting three client facilities from assorted mayhem. We didn't cavity search, except on suspicion, and we certainly didn't charge a toll.

He looked again. I met his gaze. If he sicced his guards on me - and he just might - they were going to be in for one hell of a brief fight.

The Detroit Police officer behind the uni-pod mounted medium machine gun overwatching the proceedings from the bed of his technical might do nothing. Then again, he might just hose us all down.

He shoved it back in the bag and thought twice about trying to shake me down for more money. "Move along."

I moved. My client met me just beyond the one way exit through the concertina wire, in the former airport proper.

We wordlessly started dressing from our bags. I tucked his scrubs in with mine when it looked like he was just going to throw them out.

My client - a balding 40 something, slightly overweight (which now takes some doing) man, wearing a badly rumpled suit and a well tied Windsor tie, without benefit of mirror. Frank DeOrzco. Client Facilities Manager.

I did not put on the BDU shirt. I tucked it away, this time inside out, and fished out a non-wrinkle shirt and tan slacks. To this I added a magnetic name tag with my name and the logo of my Employer.

People were still being poked and prodded behind us at the checkpoint.

"You man! You man halt!" boomed a voice.

I immediately tackled Frank to the ground with my body over his, scanning for the threat and cursing the weapons I did not have.

I was just in time to see the police officer in the technical open up with a brief burst. BUDDA BUDDA BUDDA - and the running man fell to the tarmac.

Cursing, the checkpoint guards grabbed him by the heels and dragged the fresh body over to the tarp under which the first body lay. The cursing reduced as they squabbled over his bag, a squabble resolved by the supervisor - the same one I'd spoken to - taking it for his own.

The police officer stood there like a statue, every line of his bearing shouting boredom.

I helped Frank up with a hand.

He was quite shaken.

"What do we do now?"

"Find the company contact. Follow me."

I'd arranged by E-mail with the company selling us the parts to meet us at the airport - but we were several hours late. Even if we'd flown with phones - somehow - and they had not been stolen by the guard point - unlikely - they would not have worked across state lines. Telecommmunications Regulation Act.

So it was the pay phones for us, after not being able to bring coins on the flight. Fortunately I had a number of access codes memorized. The third one worked. I made the arrangements while Frank tried to compose himself.

"They killed that man, right there, for not waiting in line."

"Yes, they did," I replied carefully.

"For not waiting in line."

"For failing to follow security instructions in a high security zone. I'm half surprised he didn't blow up before they shot him."

New threat - body cavities stuffed with explosives. A lower cavity search only gets at the most recent part of the business - something swallowed many hours ago or surgically implanted would not be found. Thus, I suspected, some of the flight delays - but even those in the security business are not encouraged to think too much about it. "Naught down that path but death," I thought, then said out loud.

While we waited for our ride, I chatted up the vendors and threw a few worthless 10s and 20s about. This got us several sealed bottles of water - I insisted - some 'beef' jerky which I inspected carefully, and a couple business cards advertising fixers. I also paid for Frank to use the pay toilet - he shuddered on exiting. Then I used the free toilet, which was a neat trick to avoid becoming contaminated.

Frank appreciated the jerky without my suspicion as to its content.

An armored limo arrived escorted by two motorcycles. The motorcyclists wore reflective vests over heavy armor, and holstered sidearms. The backs of the vests said "DEARBORN POLICE."

A fierce-eyed woman in a spotless business suit got out of the limo and scanned the crowd. I approached her. She gave my name. I gave her name. Then and only then did we whisper a word into each other's ears.

Protocol satisified, I waved Frank forward and introduced him to the older gentleman who had gotten out behind his bodyguard, in a much more expensive suit.

They chatted in the back. I rode up front with her and the limo driver.

"Welcome to Detroit, California boy. Want to go home yet?"

"Sucks everywhere," I sighed carefully. There's a fine line to what you can say nowadays. "Long flight."

"At least you made it. Last week we lost a flight to Unemployed terrorists. They got a bomb on board somehow."

Or merely bad maintenance. But that was the kind of thing you whispered to a battle buddy after searching for bugs, not a confidence you shared during a first meet.

"You know, you're going to have to ground pound it with the convoy all the way back to sunny California."

"I know. Any advice?"

"Update your will."

"Did before I left. I need just about everything in terms of gear. What can I get?"

"No guns in secure zones. They're really serious about that one. Knives 3" or less. No unauthorized comms. WiFi cells only."

Ah, the lovely WiFi cell. Only works to make and receive calls if you have the passcodes for that site. Some change them frequently; others don't. But the days that a phone would just work anywhere - unless you were a highly authorized official - ended with the Firecracker.

Neither Frank nor myself rated such treatment. He was along to make sure we got the parts his company was paying for. I was along to 1) keep Frank alive and 2) get him and his parts back to site in one piece, or intact. So to speak.

But the big part we needed - the one that we couldn't get at all in California - was the replacement power transformer for the one that had failed. Without it, the site was at half power - but it was a twenty ton object, ten feet wide and twenty feet long, another ten feet high. A lowboy load by itself. And no one was making any high end transformers new any more. The old plant in America had been shut down before the Firecracker; its replacement in China had gotten the fusion treatment along with the city it had been in.

But salvage continues, and we had found one that would work on a corporate auction site. It had been pulled from a power yard on the outskirts of what had been Cleveland.

We would have to convoy it back. Ground haul, on the Interstates, a load that would have taken four days way back when. Maybe two weeks, maybe more. Maybe not at all, considering how much disputed territory any convoy had to cross.

The client needed the transformer that badly. They needed the power to run the computers that would do their part in the war. No computers, no contract, and in the old days a bunch of employees have to look for new jobs. Not much in the way of new jobs nowadays.

Badly enough to pay to send someone like me to escort Frank back. Badly enough that I could be spared from the day (and night) job of keeping the perimeter secure and Unemployed out, despite starving-in-the-street levels of desperation.

Badly enough to get us both travel authorizations.

I nodded.

Itty Bitty Bigger World - Cut no SLAC


Even by the jaded standards of the mid 21st century, in which most things were possible and most of them had been done, SLAC was an impressive sight.

There were space-based (microgravity) and Lunar (low gravity) particle accelerators, but SLAC had the advantage of operating in a 1G field without spending power on same.

The old complex had been miles [kilometers] (I said 'miles') [[kilometers]] (Mike India Lincoln Edward Sam) [[[>beep<]]] long. Then it had been extended in both useful directions, towards the Santa Cruz mountains and towards the San Francisco Bay.

We stood near the original start point, in a long arched corridor wide enough for three capsules side by side. Mini capsules, the ultimate successor to golf carts - and about the same size, wide enough for two people to sit side by side, scurried past from time to time. They were mostly transparent but solid for safety's sake.

As far as the eye could see, yet underground, the particle accelerator tube - itself several meters in diameter - stretched in both directions. This area, intended as a start point for tours, had signs and VR labels and smart paint to tactfully point out the cool stuff - such as the transparent aluminum window through which one could actually see with one's bare eyes ... well, nothing. The accelerator was not in use.

Samantha - my KittenBot - was idly swishing her tail. The driver of a passing mini capsule did a double-take when she glared at him, but the moment passed. One doesn't expect pets at SLAC.

Our reception had been minimal. A single SLAC manager in the currently fashionable top hat and tails, and a single SLAC security guard in two-piece coveralls. I had to see what he carried, by habit. He noticed me checking his belt.

"Slammer, graser, stunner-shield," he said. The motion of his name tag - made of smart paint, it scrolled between SLAC, SECURITY, and RICK - drew the eye up and away from his gear.

The slammer was the size of an old-style small caliber, long barreled handgun, and had a bell-shaped emitter head. It could have stood in for a science fiction phaser for anyone who did not actually know Star Trek.

A slammer of that size could exert anywhere from a pound of force to several hundred tons - enough to crush a capsule or endanger a major building.

The grazer was much smaller, perhaps the size of a large egg, if it were curved like a banana. It would emit a powerful electrical field that would fry most electronics. It also had a stunner setting. Depending on its configuration and override settings, it might also be able to function as a ridiculously powerful nerve disruptor.

The stunner-shield was the size of a dinner plate, what an ancient knight would have called a 'buckler' or small shield, and - strangely - was not transparent. It could be set to stun whatever it touched - whatever was in front of it - or to give off a mass stun charge with a range of a few hundred feet.

Amy stopped and unbuckled one of the two belts she was wearing. Gratefully, I put my smartgun belt on.

I knew slammers. A lot of people have tiny ones as implants. Typically they are set for a couple hundred pounds of force - knock someone down, hurt like a boxer's punch - and good for five to ten seconds of use.

The one I normally carry - but not since the fireboat - was shaped like a bracelet, could be dialed up to about a ton of force (take that, metric system!) and had enough power for two hours.

Rick's slammer would run for at least a month and exert 20 tons - that's 40,000 Papa Oscar Union Nancy David Sam - of force, the entire time. The problem was how one would brace the butt.

I looked closer. The stunner-shield had a bracket for attaching the slammer to it, forming a combination that would look a little like a hydraulic jack and function like a support column.

Useful toy for someone protecting an underground complex. You could literally keep the ceiling from collapsing on you.

"Your reputation precedes you, Alan. Welcome to SLAC," the suit said - and doing what I usually do with suits, I ignored him.

Rick smiled and said nothing. He wore his greetings to everybody. Clearly old school, which I appreciated.

That's when the power went out. And the lights.

Things happened very, very fast.

Amy moved left and I moved right, like a dance routine. Samantha's eyes flashed - very brightly - a strobe, 30 flashes per second. Her head went transparent to facilitate lighting everything around us up.

The suit was caught flat footed, mouth open, staring. Not moving. Not a factor.

Rick moved forward a few paces, drawing the stunner shield in his left hand and the slammer in his right. His head moved in the short jerky motions I associated with scanning for threats. Fast reactions, but definitely -reacting-. Without advance warning.

"VR is down," Amy shouted to me.

That took something fairly massive. We were surrounded by power and lighting systems. Standard security facility specification called for quintuple backups for lighting systems. But some facilities needed to be darkened for special needs, and SLAC was one of them.

Hell, the surface charge in the media paint for the VIP displays was good enough to light the area for an hour!

So we had been hacked. Very, very badly.

My mind raced. "Get out of there!" had been drilled into me for literally decades. But we could run either one way or another down a real long tunnel, duck under the curve of the accelerator itself, appropriate (sounds so much better than 'steal') a mini capsule, or go out of one of the many emergency exit doors, which would lead to an escape capsule or a slide.

Samantha made up my mind.

"MEOW!" she roared and ran for a standard person-sized emergency exit door. Not the nearest, but the second nearest.

Perforce Amy and I followed, quickly. Rick followed us, looking backward with weapons ready.

The suit just stood there.

I heard the most appalling "CRUNCH," like breaking wood combined with thick, heavy meat being slapped onto a very large table.

I had heard it twice before. Capsule vs. pedestrian and terminal velocity impact ten feet from me.

A mini capsule running dark at full speed had just crushed the SLAC executive and kept going.

Amy followed the KittenBot without hesitation. I was two paces behind.

I cleared the door frame of the emergency exit. Rick was behind me when the second capsule hit at full speed.

CRUNCH - screech - GRIND. It had collided with the door frame.

Then a blast curtain fired downward and the corridor filled with quickfoam. This cut off my last view of Rick, firing both his weapons at something in the distance.

I found out later that his fire disabled two more capsules before the fifth turned him into chunky salsa. He undoubtedly saved our lives. Capsules slamming into the wall at full speed over and over again would have gotten us.

Amy grabbed my arm. "GO!" she shouted as we jumped on the powered slide, dark and leading down into darkness.

In other words, unpowered.

I had just a glimpse - it made no sense - KittenBots don't need to use the litter box.

As we fell, the slide powered up and caught us, delivering us to an escape capsule which sealed. The moment we grabbed dangling masks and pressed them to our faces, the capsule filled with quickfoam and accelerated at several gravities.

WHAM! OOOF!

I realized what I had seen. The KittenBot had pried open an equipment cover and squatted and backed her cute little furry butt into it - and her prehensile tail. Energizing the slide with her built in power source.

Good kitty! I thought to myself, and hoped she had managed a backup.

If only humans could be backed up. We can do many things, but not that. Too much data storage, too slow. Best guess was that we might be able to copy a human brain if you didn't mind spending a decade in the copy chair. And even with a typical lifespan of a century, most of us had better things to do.

The capsule accelerated in a linear fashion out of Stanford's center.

(I got so much angry E-mail, too. I'd been involved in a lot of shaky stuff over the last two days - logging in a protected heritage forest, orbital laser strikes, what the media was still calling "Tower Trouble," interference in the rights of credentialed reporters, ad nauseum. But if you really want to piss a scientist off, break one of her toys.)

Amy and I were the last thing to be accelerated at SLAC before the enemy hack blew every power source in the accelerator's array, simultaneously, and turned a priceless kilometers-long San San asset into trash.

Defense fields, quickfoam and a lot of pre planning limited the damage to the SLAC property. Immediate evacuation had saved numerous lives, but six scientists and nineteen support personnel were not so lucky.

Including Rick. Don't forget Rick.

He had been closest to the escape door but had stepped out of the way to cover Amy and myself as we ran for it.

Stepped out of the way. Stepped out of the way, to stand between us and danger.

There are worse things to see on a tombstone.

Rick Pacelli. SLAC Protective Services Group. B 2019. D 2048. "Stood his ground."