“Who?” asked Jacob.
“Russian special forces,” explained Cody. “Provocateurs, agitators, spies, direct action teams… The Warsaw Pact made sure they’d be prepared for all kinds of warfare.”
“You gotta listen to your dad,” said Cobb, tapping the table in approval. “Sounds as though he knows his stuff.”
“That’s because my dad subscribed to journals on security and the military,” Cody explained. “There wasn’t much else to read in our house, so I read those.”
“And the Russian satellites… all those Sputniks they were firing off… you remember?” asked Cobb.
Cody realized that, despite his concerns about US military readiness during this crisis, he’d given no thought at all to the potential destruction in space. If protected power grids had gone down, what could have happened to the two thousand delicate satellites upon which modern life depended? “They used to have plenty of them. I know that. Probably still do.”
“Hundreds of ‘em,” said Cobb. “They used to fall out of the sky all the time. Some of them were only designed to last a few days, so the Russkies learned to do a launch every week! Big goddamned waste, if you ask me.”
“But you’re really thinking it was the Russians who put something up there?” said Jacob. “That they caused all of this?”
“Think about it, kid,” Cobb said. “We don’t really know what they put on top of their rockets. Could be secret experiments with their soldiers, sending up Spetsnaz with jet-packs and lasers to attack our satellites. Could be that they’re building huge mirrors,” he said, his arms expansive, “to light up the Arctic in winter. Or they could have pre-positioned a nuclear device, so it was just sitting there, ready for when they need it.”
Cody knew enough to object to all of these ideas; Cobb’s prejudices carried their own dangers, but Cody was careful not to appear rude. “Well, you know, there’s a whole community of people who track those objects and report their orbits to each other. Amateurs and professionals, both.”
“No lie! Back when I worked for the city,” Cobb began again, “they said we had to get binoculars and go up on the roof at special times to see if they were visible.”
Cody had to ask, “Which city? And, if I can ask, what did you do for them?”
“City of Houston. I did a few things, but I spent longest with their emergency preparedness shop,” Cobb explained. “‘Civil Defense,’ you might call it. Figuring out what to do if the Russians, or the Chinese, ever got a crazy idea in their heads and went and did… well,” he said, slapping the table and guffawing, “something exactly like this!”
“The Chinese, now, too?” asked Maddy. “You got a theory about them?”
“Even if they didn’t do it,” said Cobb, “can’t you imagine them, sitting in their politburo meetings and laughing themselves sick? ‘Those poor Americans, look how confused they are! Someone is brazen enough to take away their internet for a few days, and what happens? In no time, flat, their society begins to turn on itself!”
“They’d be just as affected by this as anyone,” Mary tried, though she was aware, no one could say for sure.
Cobb was in full flood and pressed on. “‘Do you see, fellow Chinamen and Chinawomen? Do you see how weak and unprepared they were? Is theirs really a nation to be feared and respected? Or is American a has-been, a broken old thing that should just shuffle off the stage?”
Cabot stood, ostensibly to return his mug to the kitchen sink, but first, he paused at the center of the room. “I like theories,” he said. “Theories let us play an idea out, see if it works. And right now, we don’t know a damn thing, so theories take on a strange tendency. I’ve seen it before. They begin to look like facts, as clear as day, and all of a sudden, we’re in a different information environment.”
Cody watched this enigmatic leader calming his troops, finding that Cabot could oscillate between sounding twenty years younger, and at other times, somehow even older.
“And that’s the kind of people we get calling us up, ten times a week,” said Cabot. “Folks from all over the place, unified by a love of country, sure, and a passion for the outdoors, I sincerely hope,” he smiled, “but also a conviction that something is going on. That the issues in their lives and in their communities aren’t just local, solvable problems. That there’s a nefarious power at work that wants America to fail, to be humiliated in front of the world. They saw it after Vietnam when we left with our tails between our legs and they decided to blame the Russians and the Chinese, or some kind of ‘international communist conspiracy.’”
“John, we’ve done this a hundred times,” Cobb reminded him, “and I’ll always say the same thing: you ain’t read what I have.”
Cabot wasn’t at all convinced. “That’s not the biggest difference between you and me,” he said. “It ain’t the size of our libraries. It’s whether we choose to believe dubious sources.”
“I don’t get to have any choice about the facts,” Cobb insisted,” and neither do you!”
“These people,” continued Cabot, “chose to see conspiracies swirling around the Vietnam debacle. Then they decided to see the opposite after 9/11 and figured something so complex couldn’t have been planned by a bunch of simpletons in an Afghan cave. So they blamed our government, decided it was an ‘inside job,’ started telling people the towers were brought down by explosives, not impacts…”
“The official report,” Cobb said, growing angry, “was a travesty.”
“And all of that,” Cabot said, “is a more likely scenario, to you, than the following: dedicated people planned the execution of something they wanted very much, and took their time getting trained and ready, and then did it. Is that so hard to accept?”
“Just as hard as the idea the EMP was an ‘accident.’ I mean,” Cobb posited, “who benefits? Think about that.”
“Depends how localized the damage has been,” said Mary. “We don’t know if China was directly affected.” Sitting next to her, Emma had so far said nothing, but her plate was empty, and she was listening intently to the debate.
“They’d be drinking from the poisoned chalice,” said Jacob cryptically.
“The huh?” asked Cobb. A new distraction for the old conspiracy theorist was a relief to everyone.
“I read a sci-fi novel where the Chinese go up into space and re-direct an asteroid so it hits Earth. They figure the damage will cost everyone else more than it costs them, and they’ll take over the cleanup and then run the world like the US has been trying to do.”
“Please don’t encourage this crazy old coot,” said Cabot fondly. “He’s bad enough already.”
“I’m just sayin’,” Cobb said, rising from his seat at the table, “we’re facing enemies who will think outside of the box. We would never have hit someone with EMP in peacetime, out of the blue, but that doesn’t mean they would turn down the chance. Look at all the confusion it’s caused! That gives them some deniability, so they can say, ‘Huh? Us, firing off a nuke in space? No way, it can’t have been. You can check our figures yourself: all of our weapons are accounted for. It must have been these guys, or those dudes over there, or whoever.’”
“And they try to encourage four or five different fake stories at once, just to muddy the waters,” said Mary, one of whose college friends had become a noted Russia-watcher with a D.C. ‘think tank’. “Pretty soon, no one knows what’s true.”
“Yeah,” Cody nodded, “we gotta be careful about sources of information. Are you in touch with any other ham radio people?”
Cabot’s hands dithered in mid-air. “On and off. Some respond once, and then not again. Others aren’t there when we call at the arranged time. Less than half our sessions produce anything at all, but we’ll keep at it.”
Jacob began to see an opportunity. “Um, I’ve been trying to work on a radio setup.” He explained the components to Cabot, who, as a military man, might recognize the potential.
The old homesteader nodded appreciati
vely. “Not bad, kid! Let’s see if we can’t get you some help with that, maybe make some longer-distance calls. And how about the rest of you?” he said next. “What you got to offer?”
“What do you need?” asked Mary.
“Well, I know the Margoles family would appreciate a couple of hours o’ childcare this afternoon.”
“Sign me up,” said Mary. “That’s, um, Hope and her sister, Fern, right?”
“At least someone was paying attention,” Cabot laughed. “I’ll introduce you after breakfast. Plus, we always need more hands in the garden.”
“Sure,” said Emma.
“All right! Cody, you and I will take Max and Bryce on patrol so that I can show you the land. It ain’t a bad idea to check on our perimeter, either.”
“For bears and such?” Cody asked.
“I ain’t worried about them. But we got ourselves some visitors a while back. Started maybe two years ago. They kept coming every week or two. Told us they needed food, medicine, ammunition. Not the politest folks, either. Eventually, we had to run them out of here and make some threats, but they’ve been back a couple of times, snooping around.”
“Who were they?” Jacob wanted to know.
Cabot shrugged. “Plenty of folks want to come out to the woods and make their lives here, but some of them want to do it very different from us.”
“How do you mean, ‘different’?”
“Well, old Cobb likes to sound off about 9/11 and JFK, and if he gets a coupla beers in him, we’ll hear about aliens building the pyramids and Chichen Itza. But he’s a skeptic, not a convert. These others, they’re… well, if I call them militant, do you know what that means?”
“I think so. You mean, the kind of people who’d join a far-right group?”
“No, I mean the kind of people who got thrown out of the far-right groups ‘cause their beliefs were too crazy!”
“Wow,” said Jacob. “The endless varieties of human dumbness.”
This set Cabot laughing, and he was still chuckling when he rounded up Max and Bryce; it was their turn for patrol, and he made them go through an equipment check while he watched. Then he walked over to find Cody at the Russell cabin. “You being Sharpshooter Russell’s son,” Cabot said to Cody, “I’m guessing you know one end of a rifle from the other?”
“Like to think so,” said Cody. “Do I need to audition?”
Cabot laughed again. “Ain’t no way of knowing whether you’re ready for battle until you’re knee-deep in one.”
“Battle?” muttered Cody. “I know times are strange, but…”
“It pays,” Cabot said gravely, “to be prepared. You already know that’s a big deal, up here at the camp. We think about it every day. Ways not to be caught out by events. Ways to survive and thrive, even when others aren’t.”
“Sure.”
“And ways,” Cabot emphasized, “of getting out ahead of threats. We got our nutrition threat dealt with, and the politics of our little community is pretty stable. Now, we reduce the other risks: weather-proofing the cabins, digging irrigation for the gardens, getting everyone trained up in CPR. Short of a biblical flood, there ain’t no natural event we’re afraid of. That just leaves one kind of disaster to think about.”
“Which kind?” asked Cody.
“A manmade one.”
25
1.8 miles north-east of the Russell Homestead, Maine
14:45h, Day Three
They could have taken the truck, of course, but Cabot wanted to show Cody his dad’s place the old-fashioned way. It gave them time to talk, he explained, without worrying about hitting a tree. “Besides, neither you, nor I, nor Mr. Dodge himself knows how many times that old engine will start.”
Max and Bryce accompanied them, quiet and discrete in their camo fatigues, sometimes in front and occasionally dropping behind in seamless shifts of formation which had clearly been practiced. After walking in near silence for half an hour, they encountered a clearing about two miles from camp and stopped to take five.
“Your dad ever happen to tell you,” Cabot was asking, “how big this place actually is?” He gingerly lowered himself down onto a thick log and checked his weapon, a modified M-16. “Officially, I mean. ‘Cause there ain’t no signs or fences, and nobody ever thought to find out for sure.”
“Dad used to say,” answered Cody as he found his canteen and took a long drink, “that you could walk across it in an hour. But that was walking as his speed.”
“Yeah, he was right at home here in the woods,” said Cabot fondly. “It was like he was born to it. I tried to listen, you know, to pick things up from him, but sometimes I felt like a novice walking along with an expert.” He laughed at himself. “Not often you get an airborne-qualified combat vet feeling like that! Honestly, I’d say the stupidest things, ask the dumbest questions. But he was very patient.”
It was Cody’s turn to laugh. “Then you must have encountered him on a good day! ‘Patient’ isn’t how I’d usually describe Grover Russell.”
The two youngsters took a quick tour of the clearing, checking for anything that looked strange, had changed, or felt out-of-place, before settling down to rest with Cody and Papa Cabot. “Reckon you two could find your way back from here, without help?” asked Cabot.
“Sure,” said Max confidently. “You could drop us anywhere on this patch, and we’d know.”
“What about at night?” Cabot pressed.
“Maybe,” said Bryce, “with flashlights.”
“And without?”
Bryce shrugged. “You can see lights from the cabins, or the fire, from a few hundred yards away. We’d get lost a few times, but we’d make it.”
Cody was curious about the training Cabot was giving these young men. “Sounds like you’re getting Max and Bryce good and ready for trouble.”
“Ready for anything,” Cabot said. “It’s not as though we’re alone up here.”
“How do you mean?”
“I was telling your boy, Jacob. We got little knots of folks that show up from time to time, trying to see what’s what. Like I said, we ain’t got no signs, so anyone could wander on in, provided they’re comfortable hiking uphill about four miles from the road.”
The property was in the shape of a rough parallelogram, Cabot told Cody. “It’s about three miles east to west, and maybe two, two-and-a-half north to south, best we can tell.” Surrounding the wonky square that formed the Russell Homestead was land owned—ostensibly, at least - by the US Forest Service, the power company, and just one local rancher, an octogenarian. “The old fella gave up and returned his patch to the wild. He had the hilly part, but it was easily overgrown, and it got away from him. With no one coming up here to draw lines of demarcation, we figure we’re responsible for everything as far as the road.” Six miles from camp, the ‘road’ which carved the only meaningful territorial boundary, was off-limits except to 4WD vehicles. “The trout brings people up here on weekends. But nobody is fishing right now.”
“Not the right season?” Cody guessed. “Nothing biting?”
“No, I mean,” Cabot laughed, “there ain’t nobody except you that’s got a working vehicle!” He found his canteen and took a judicious sip; it was the act of someone who had been trained, through painful military experience, to conserve water. “We used to think that we could fence the place off, you know, separate ourselves from the rest of the woods. But it don’t make sense.”
“Bad guys would just jump the fence, anyway,” said Max. “Plus, it’s a hell of a lot of work, and there are other things we’d rather be doing.”
“Like chasing girls and trying to steal cans of PBR from my stash?” Cabot said, wagging a finger. “It’s okay. I was the same at your age. Hell, I was worse. But, you know, Cody?” he said, turning to the other father in the group. “I never felt the need to bring the hammer down. Not on my son, and not on the grandkids, neither. Didn’t ever feel like turning into the ‘stern old asshole’ grandpa, the one you kinda
love, but also kinda fear.”
“I’ll confess I’m surprised to hear that,” said Cody, “given your background. My old man used to channel his military service into his home life. Sometimes it was like having a mean staff sergeant for a dad.”
Cabot sipped again, but in his face, he was objecting to the characterization. “The meanness is just an act, or it should be, in my view. Fear can be a useful motivator, and maybe your dad saw it as effective. I’d have spared the rod. But parenting ain’t a science, and what do I know, anyway? You’re his family. You knew him way better than any of us.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Cody admitted. “I don’t know if dad and I spoke more than once a year after I left home.”
“What happened there, anyway?” asked Bryce, an artless question from a child to an adult.
Cody let it go. “People change,” he explained. “Dad wanted me to join the military, or maybe train to be a cop, but I was headed in a different direction. I wanted to make things with my hands, not blow them up.”
Max thought Cody was missing out. “Blowing things up sounds like fun to me!”
“It’s all great fun, until,” Cabot cautioned, “someone gets hurt. Your dad wasn’t happy with your choices?” he assumed.
“He kept telling me,” Cody said, mustering his best impression of his dad’s grizzled wisdom, “‘You only got one life, my boy…’”
“‘… so fill it to the brim with things you won’t regret’,” Cabot said, completing Grover Russell’s favorite aphorism.
“I said you might know him better than me!” Cody laughed. “Wow.”
“He had a way with words so they stuck in your mind,” Cabot recalled. “A real sensitivity for what was most sensible, most rational in that moment. I guess that made him the opposite of the conspiracy theorists and the far-right assholes. He just wanted to do what was right.”
They set off again, heading farther east into the woods along a slender path flanked by stinging nettles and late springtime blooms. It was warm, but the shade suited them; even with the weight of his borrowed carbine, his 9mm sidearm, two quarts of water, and other gear, Cody found the walk pleasant enough. He’d have brought Jacob along, but his son had made ambitious promises to Cabot about the radio and was hard at work trying to repair what they had. Next time, for sure; he needed to get some exercise beyond operating a screwdriver and soldering iron, plus, feeling like one of the guys would do Jacob’s confidence a world of good. After all, Jacob only had ‘one life,’ too, and Cody wanted to help his son—and Emma, too—find the variety of experiences the woods could provide.
Protecting Our Home Page 14