299 Days: The Visitors (27 page)

“Where’s Ryan?” Chip asked.

“He’s driving the girls back,” Pow said.

“Girls?” Ted asked. He had not seen the girls so he didn’t know if they were girlfriends. He was hoping that “girls” meant the men’s daughters. He hoped it didn’t mean girlfriends, but he suspected it did. That was always trouble. Fighters with wives or girlfriends. They complicated everything. But it was common for SF to train fighters with families and, in some parts of the world, multiple wives, and even harems. Wives or girlfriends or whatever were nearly always part of the equation.

“Yep,” Bobby said. “We’re pretty hot shit out here,” he said jokingly. “It was finally time to get a little, but…you guys showed up.” He didn’t want to sound like he was whining, especially at Ted, so he added, “Business comes first. But, I gotta say, when business is done, I want to get back to that.”

“You bet,” Grant said. He wanted to keep his guys happy and dangling some girl time in front of them was a good way to do that.

“We’ll get Ted and Sap squared away,” Grant said, “and then you can text your friends later tonight,” Grant said in his dad voice, like he was telling them to do their homework before they could play video games with their friends.

Everyone took a seat. Ted remained standing, watching out the front window to see if anyone else came by. When everyone was seated, he turned around to face the group and give the briefing.

“We can make this initial meeting short,” Ted said. “I’ll go over why we’re here, what we hope to do, and our next steps.”

Ted paused to collect his thoughts. “Why we’re here. That’s easy. To train you guys and your neighbors to be a guerilla unit. You guys know the drill. This is what Sap and I did in the unit.” The Team started realizing that this was real. It was not a day shooting targets at the range. This wasn’t some L.A. Riot kind of thing that would blow over in a few days. They were part of something huge. Once in a lifetime huge. Tell the story to the grandkids huge. Be a hero for generations to come huge.

“Why we are here, specifically?” Ted asked rhetorically. “Chip has been in touch with me. He said you guys had a good set up here. Plus Chip has about half the guns from the store.”

Chip winced. “Uh, I kinda hadn’t mentioned that yet.”

“Oh, sorry,” Ted said.

“No problem,” Chip said. “I just didn’t want people to unnecessarily know.”

“I wondered where all the guns from the store went,” Scotty said.

“Grant’s basement,” Chip said. He told them how many guns, cases of ammo, magazines, optics, and accessories were there. He smiled while telling them.

So did Ted. “How many again?” Ted asked. Sap was taking notes. What a bonanza. Thirty plus ARs, all the fixin’s, and some miscellaneous AKs and shotguns. Plenty of ammo. All pre-positioned in the place they needed to be. This was an SF dream.

“I have a similar number of the same kinds of things,” Ted said. “I took them from the store to my place near Olympia. Between what you guys have and what I have, we can arm sixty or seventy fighters. Throw in the guns and ammo that the residents already have and we’re talking 100 fighters.” Ted smiled. So did Sap.

“We have at least thirty good residents here,” Grant said. “We have a very good guard system.” Grant described the guards and their equipment. He told the story of how they mobilized for the expected attack to get back Gideon’s semi-truck of food. Ted and Sap looked at each other and tried to contain themselves. Sap was writing all of this down.

“Shit,” Sap said. “We came to the right place.”

Ted continued, “Besides me being able to trust you guys and the fact that you have some hardware out here, Chip reported that you guys were squared away. The other reason we picked this place is your strategic location. You’re right on the water so infil and exfil is easy,” he said, meaning infiltrating supplies and other fighters in, and exfiltrating them out to wherever they needed to go. “Plus there are tons of wooded areas to house the training facilities. We can probably do that without anyone seeing a thing. They’ll wonder where all the guards and the Team went, but we’ll deal with that.”

Training indigenous fighters in a civil war was harder than when the whole population was on your side. In a civil war, the good guys and bad guys were mixed together in one place so the enemy could see you. In a traditional war, like WWII, the whole population was united, so it was OK for them to see your activities; not so in a civil war. This was a problem they could overcome, Ted thought. SF trained to work in civil war settings where some portion of the local population was hostile and was actively trying to find the SF-trained fighters and turn them in. Which brought Ted to the topic of popular support out there.

“What’s the political makeup out here?” He asked. Everyone turned to Grant.

“Mostly Undecideds,” Grant said, “but I think we’ll end up having a solid majority of Patriots. There are some Loyalists, but they have a pretty small following. I am working on a map showing the politics of each household.”

Ted and Sap smiled at that.

“We need to kill the Loyalists,” Ted said, in a flat, dead serious tone. That shocked everyone.

“What?” Grant asked.

“Kill them,” Ted said. Sap nodded.

“What, just round up people I think disagree with me and kill them?” Grant asked semi-sarcastically.

“Yes. How else do you do it?” Ted replied.

“Are you kidding?” Grant asked. “Just start killing people we think disagree with us?” He was rethinking the wisdom of working with Ted. This was starting to get weird.

“No,” Ted said, “I’m not kidding.” He looked at Grant to size him up. Was Grant up to this? All the killing that needed to be done? This Grant guy had no idea what war was about.

“Are you the one who’s kidding, Grant?” Ted asked. “Letting Loyalists walk around, see what we’re doing, and call in the Loyalist regular units? Why would I expose my fighters and myself to that risk?” Ted said. He was dead serious and was getting annoyed with Grant. He thought Grant was a fighter, not some pansy ass. Maybe Grant was like a lot of “Patriots”: all talk and no willingness to do what was necessary. Maybe Grant, who was a lawyer after all, thought this Patriot thing was just some debating club.

“Just kill them?” Grant asked. “Without any proof they’re going to turn us in? No evidence?”

“No, not all of them,” Ted said, realizing that he and Grant were miscommunicating. “Only people we know or have a very good idea are trying to kill us.” Ted didn’t want to alienate Grant, who was the apparent leader of the indigenous fighters he was tasked with training. And Grant was a friend. Ted needed to think like the person he was trying to persuade. Grant was a lawyer, so maybe he should approach this from that perspective.

“This isn’t a court case, counselor,” Ted said with a smile to soften the blow of that statement. “The Loyalists aren’t on trial in a court room. This is a war. You knew that there was a war, right?” Ted was serious about that: He wondered if Grant knew there was a war. Maybe he didn’t.

Grant didn’t appreciate that last comment. “No, I didn’t know there was a war, at least a formal one. Is there one?”

“What does it matter if there’s a ‘formal’ war?” Ted asked.

“Because if there’s a formal war then I’m not as concerned about things like killing people without knowing for sure that they’re a threat,” Grant said. “You see, Ted, we’re following the Constitution out here. It’s kind of a big deal.” That was Grant’s sarcastic zinger. “That means treason takes the testimony of two eyewitnesses and it’s done in a real trial, with a jury and everything. It’s in the Constitution,” Grant said.

“Yeah, I know,” Ted said. Ted had studied the Constitution extensively. He thought Grant was just being a lawyer.

“Well, OK,” Grant said, “the Constitution also has provisions about wars. It’s not precisely the same, but the power of habeas corpus can be suspended in times of war or insurrection. In a war, we operate under the laws of war, which authorizes actions without trials. Obviously. You couldn’t fight a war if you had to have trials. So I’m more OK—actually, I’m fine—with killing Loyalists if there’s a formal war. So is there?” Grant asked.

“Yes,” Ted said. OK, maybe Grant was coming around.

“Not sure whether this counts as ‘formal,’” Ted continued, “but the Patriots in most states have gotten together and declared their states to be ‘Free.’ So, for example, there is a ‘Free Washington State,’ a ‘Free Oregon,’ and so on. That means there’s an organized group in most states that are claiming the state for the Patriots. Some of the Free movements are larger than others, depending on the state. Texas is almost entirely a Free state; the Feds have pretty much taken off from there.”

“Anyway,” Ted continued, “when the Free State movements started a few days after May Day, the Feds declared that this was a formal ‘insurrection,’ which triggered a bunch more emergency powers. A declared insurrection is an act of war in many people’s books.” Ted knew the intellectual debate about whether a declared insurrection was technically a “war.” He had a Masters’ degree in the history of warfare from the correspondence courses he took in the Army. It was a real degree. Ted, like almost all SF, was extremely intelligent.

“But,” Ted shrugged, “it’s still a little fuzzy. No real declaration of war. You can imagine that the Feds don’t want to advertise that their country is breaking up so there hasn’t been any announcement to the civilian population, but it’s as close to a declared war as you usually get in civil wars,” Ted said, referencing his long study of the subject.

Grant realized that Ted knew what he was talking about. He had a good point about this being a war. Grant needed to show the Team that he wasn’t a stubborn dick.

He looked at Ted and said, “OK, man, I didn’t know. That changes my mind. There’s a war. A war for legal purposes. So we can go get them,” he said, referring to the Loyalists. “But I want to be careful about it. I’m trying to hold this place together under the Constitution so it doesn’t become a lawless group full of revenge killings.”

Ted nodded. “A laudable goal,” he said, “and one we share. “But, if we get smoked out by Loyalists and some regular Loyalist Army unit comes here, onto the nearly unguarded beaches you have, by the way, then we’re all dead. Your family is dead. And the Constitution is dead out here, too.”

It was silent. Ted had a point; an extremely good point, but one that was really hard to accept. We have no choice but to kill people we disagree with—and this is all to save the Constitution? That was true only in the rarest of circumstances, but this was the very rarest of circumstances.

Ted had been through this mental exercise before. It was part of his Special Forces training on getting indigenous forces to side with the Americans. A big part of that was specific tactics to convince leaders of indigenous forces to join the American side. Special Forces was sometimes more political and diplomatic than military. Ted used the technique from his training for the reluctant fighter: switch to practical details to get them thinking.

“So, who are the Limas out here who will try to kill us?” Ted asked Grant. “You know, Loyalists,” Ted said. “Ls. You know, ‘Limas’.”

“Lima” was the phonetic alphabet term for “L.” Like Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie were the phonetic alphabet terms for “A,” “B,” and “C.” Ted and the other Patriot military people called Loyalists “Limas,” like Ted did in Afghanistan, where the troops called terrorists “Tangos,” which was the phonetic alphabet for “T.” He and his colleagues would say “Tango down” when they killed a terrorist. Using a phonetic alphabet term dehumanized the person. He wasn’t a person; he was a Lima or a Tango.

“Snelling,” Grant said instantly. Grant described Snelling and all the Grange debates they’d had.

“And his douchebag sidekick, Dick Abbott,” Grant added. He told them about Abbott.

“That’s it?” Ted said. “Two enemy leaders out here? That’s great. Not too many. This should be easy.”

“What should be easy?” Grant asked. He was still in denial.

Chapter 164

“So, Who’s In?”

(July 3)

“Killing them, Grant. Killing them is what should be easy,” Ted said. He was being gentle with Grant because he could tell that he was a decent guy who needed to come to the conclusion about killing these people on his own. Chip had told Ted about the looters, so he knew that Grant had it in him.

Chip had also told Ted that Grant had a calm head after the shooting in preparing for a counter attack and then bugging out before the cops got there. So, Grant could do these things; he just needed a little coaxing to do them in a…premeditated way. “Premeditated” was the wrong word. That sounded like murder. This wasn’t murder. It was war. Grant needed to get used it and make the mental shift.

The political animal in Grant was feeling that he was about to be marginalized and lose his ability to persuade the Team. He had been doing so well ever since they got out there. Extremely well, actually. Now he was stumbling. He was being shown to be weak and clinging to the old ways. Shit, he realized he had normalcy bias, which was the worst thing someone could have out there. Grant had to do something to show he wasn’t living in the past. He had to authorize the killing of the Loyalists.

“OK,” Grant said. “Snelling and Abbott can go. But I have one condition.” Grant quickly realized that he had no ability to require any conditions, but he had already said it, so he might as well roll with it.