299 Days: The 17th Irregulars

by Glen Tate

  Yes, he did. And it showed.

  Tammy and Bill and two of the younger electrical repairmen were in a conference room getting a “briefing” from the FC man. Bill motioned and the two repairmen left. Then, a few minutes later, Bill said to the FC man, “Tammy can take you out to the switching shed to show you where the master switch is.”

  Bill pointed at Tammy. That was her cue. Her hands started to shake and she felt dizzy. It took a few seconds for her to regain her composure. She took several deep breaths. She had a job to do. Her family, and the whole county, was counting on them to prevent the shut-off.

  Finally, she was calm. In fact, after the initial shakes, she amazed herself at how calm she was. It was only because so many people were counting on her.

  “Sure, come on,” Tammy said. “The shed is just down the road. Can we take your truck?” she asked the FC man.

  “Whatever,” he said like Tammy was wasting his time.

  Tammy chuckled to herself; who would really think the master switch for turning off the power to a whole county would be in a shed a mile from the main building? This FC guy was either really stupid or just a robot doing what he was told.

  Tammy left the room and Bill didn’t even look at her. He wasn’t going to give her a look that might tip off the FC man.

  Tammy took the FC man out of the building and they got into his truck

  “Which way?” he asked, a little curtly, like she should have been giving him better directions.

  She pointed out of the parking lot and down the road, and he began following her direction.

  “How far?” he asked impatiently.

  “Oh, about half a mile,” Tammy said. “Then we turn off on Dearborn Road. Take a left on it.” Her heart was pounding. She was trying her best to be calm, but she was afraid she wasn’t pulling it off. It only took a minute to get to Dearborn Road. He turned left.

  “How far now?” he asked.

  “Just around this corner,” she said.

  They turned the corner and there was a pickup truck in the road. It looked like they had broken down.

  “Oh, great. Some hillbillies,” the FC man said. Tammy looked at his pistol. This wouldn’t be easy, but it had to be done.

  He honked the horn and stopped the truck. He yelled at the men in the pickup, “Hey, move!”

  The men got out of their truck. They looked familiar. They were the repairmen, but were wearing different shirts and now had sunglasses. The FC man obviously didn’t recognize them from the conference room.

  Tammy opened the door and sprinted out of the way. She ran as fast as she could. Away, away, away from there she kept thinking as she ran. She wanted to be as far away as possible because of the…

  Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!

  Because of the loud gun shots. Tammy hoped those were the repairmen’s guns going off and not an FC pistol.

  Tammy got ahold of herself. She realized that she was a coward running away like that.

  Missy. Tammy thought about her sweet, innocent little granddaughter Missy, who would grow up in a destroyed country if the power were shut off. She might not even live, because of what these bastards had done. Tammy stopped and turned around. She ran back toward the gun fire, suddenly wanting to be a part of this. She wanted to do something to change the horrible situation. She wanted to do her part. She ran up and saw the two repairmen with shotguns leveled at the FC truck. She saw a person in the truck slumped over. As she got closer, she saw some big holes punched in the driver’s side door of the truck. They had used rifled slugs, which had punched through the truck door, like a nail through a soda can. There was blood all over the inside of the windows of the truck. It looked like the FC man exploded.

  Tammy saw the blood. She wished she hadn’t looked at it. She started to feel sick. They had killed a human being. Her mind started racing: she didn’t know for sure that the FC man was a bad person. Maybe he wasn’t there to shut off the power. Maybe he didn’t have to die. Maybe he had kids like she did. Maybe they didn’t have to kill him. It was so final. If this were a mistake, she could never undo it.

  “Let’s go,” one of the repairmen yelled.

  The other repairman came over and they both ran to the FC truck. One of the repairmen ran back to their truck and got a can of spray paint. He sprayed a big red star on the FC truck and wrote “Red Brigade” on it.

  The first repairman came over to Tammy and said to her, “OK, remember. The truck was stopped by two men. They had ski masks on. They made you get out and then they shot him. OK? We’re going to take off now. You just wander back to the office.” He didn’t even say good bye or look at her. They just got in their truck and they took off.

  Tammy wanted to get out of there. She didn’t want to look at the FC truck again, or especially the bloody dead man in there. It was too disturbing. She realized she’d have this scene in her mind for years to come; likely the rest of her life. This “do-your-part-for-the-movement” thing was all fine and good, until you were looking at a dead man blown to pieces and you helped to do it. Tammy knew she’d have nightmares, but it had to be done. She would have worse nightmares if the power had been turned off.

  Missy. This is for Missy; for her future. That’s what this is for, Tammy kept saying to herself as she ran back toward the office.

  She got winded after running a while, so she started walking down the road. Walking? No, that wouldn’t be believable. She had to run. If she had really just been ambushed, but managed to escape and really wanted to summon help, she would run back to the office. She would sprint. She started to run. It was hard to keep running, but she had to make this convincing.

  She only got a few hundred yards until she had to stop. She started walking again. Then she’d jog a little and walk some more. Pretty soon she was at the office. She started yelling when she got in the parking lot.

  “They attacked us!” she screamed. “They shot him! They shot him!” Bill came running out, acting very surprised. He was surrounded by other employees who looked confused and scared.

  She told the story to the crowd of her co-workers huddling around her at the entrance to the power company. The same simple story she’d been rehearsing on the way back to the office. She didn’t tell the part about the red star. She wouldn’t have known that because she just got out of the truck and ran. She heard the shots and kept running toward the office. That was the story. Everything was a blur.

  “Someone call the police!” Bill yelled. That scared Tammy. She didn’t want anyone actually investigating this. Too bad; she was in it too far now.

  “Send someone out to go see if he’s still alive!” Bill yelled. “And be careful. They still might be in the area.” Two trucks left the parking lot and headed out toward Dearborn Road.

  About twenty minutes later, which seemed like twenty days, the two trucks came back to the office. “Terrorists!” one of drivers said. He described the red star and “Red Brigade” on the truck. He wasn’t in on the plan, so he really believed it.

  “Tell the police we have terrorists here!” Bill yelled. “Everyone, back in the office! They might be coming back for us!” He was so convincing.

  Employees started running back into the office. People were running out to their trucks and grabbing rifles and shotguns to take with them into the office.

  Everyone was hovering around Tammy. They were offering water, asking her what the terrorists looked like, and what kind of truck they had. What was the license plate? She couldn’t remember. “It all happened so fast,” she kept saying. Which was true.

  Before the Collapse, the police would have been on the scene in a matter of minutes. Now, however, they probably wouldn’t even make it out there. A killing on the side of the road? Take a number. But, the call came in that “terrorists” had attacked. That got the attention of the police.

  Lt. Bennington was the first to arrive. Terrorists? Oh wow. This was getting serious. He wanted to find them. He interviewed Tammy. She kept telling the same story.
She said she needed to go home. Bennington said she wouldn’t be safe there. The terrorists might try to get her at her home. She needed to stay at the offices for a while. She’d be safe there. She knew that, if her story had been true, they would be right about that, so she had to play along.

  Someone sent for Mark and he came, appearing very worried for her. She couldn’t tell him what had really happened. That was going to be extremely difficult for her. She knew she’d eventually cave; she couldn’t keep something like that from him. The day seemed to go on forever, until that evening when an agent of some kind came from Olympia. He wanted to know all about the terrorists. Tammy kept telling the same story. She was hoping she was telling it consistently. She didn’t want to slip up. She would get out of telling details by saying she needed a break and that it was too traumatic. She had already told the other police. Could she just have a break?

  That night around dark, Bill came into the conference room where Tammy was and closed the door.

  “You won’t believe this,” he said with a smile. A smile? What was there to smile about?

  Tammy just stared at him. She was drained. Emotionally and mentally drained. She’d never had a day like this before.

  “The Feds say that the FC man, who was named Arthur Durman, was acting on his own!” Bill said. “Can you believe it?”

  “Huh?” Tammy asked. She did not see that coming.

  “Yeah!” Bill said as he clapped his hands. “They say Durman was not authorized to come out here. They say the idea that they would turn off the power was crazy. They told me that the President would be going on TV tomorrow for his daily update to tell the country that rumors of the Feds cutting off power to rural and Southern areas was ‘terrorist’ propaganda.”

  That didn’t make any sense to Tammy or Bill. A few days later, Patriot ham radio operators were getting the word out about the Utility Treaty. Then it made sense why the Feds claimed the FC man was acting on his own.

  Tammy kept thinking about the Durman, the FC man. If only he would have just waited one day.

  Oh well, Tammy later told herself. Durman had no business trying to cut off electricity to tens of thousands of people. He volunteered for that FC job. He got to wear a little helmet and drive a government truck. He had a job, and his FCards had lots of credits. Durman knew exactly what he was doing and he started to do it, anyway.

  That night, around midnight, they let Tammy go. Mark took her home, and they didn’t talk at all. Tammy was all talked out. Mark’s presence and the silence comforted her.

  Everyone had heard about this at the Pierce Point gate. They were quick to ask her how she was doing and told her that no strangers would get into Pierce Point. They were on the lookout for the Red Brigade. Tammy felt bad fooling them, too, but it had to be done. It was for their own good. If the government showed up with a tank and said they wanted to arrest Tammy, the guards would have to fight, and die, or turn her over. By lying, she was allowing them to avoid that.

  Mark and Tammy came down Over Road. They were almost home. Gideon came out of the guard shack with his AK pointed in the general direction of the truck. He was making sure no one came through who might be after Tammy.

  “Glad to see that you’re home safe and sound,” Gideon said. “Have a good night. You’re safe here, ma’am.”

  Tammy started to cry. She was safe there. Thank God. But the real crying came when she walked into the house.

  “Grandma!” Missy yelled. “You’re home!”

  Tammy grabbed her granddaughter and hugged her so hard she thought she would snap the little girl in half.

  Tammy cried and cried.

  “Are you OK, Grandma?” Missy asked.

  Tammy looked at Missy and said, “Oh, yeah, Grandma is OK.”

  Tammy paused and thought, Grandma did a bad thing.

  Chapter 171

  Utility Treaty

  (July 5-13)

  Indeed, Forks, Washington had been one of about one hundred remote little towns to be the first test of Operation Cracker Corral. “Cracker” was a pejorative term for white trash. “Corral” was, of course, a cowboy term meaning to force animals from one area to another.

  The idea was to force people in rural Patriot areas to move to suburban and urban Loyalist areas, which would concentrate resources in Loyalist areas and break the Patriots still left in Patriot-held areas. To accomplish this, the goal of Operation Cracker Corral was to deprive Patriot areas—primarily rural areas, the South, and mountain West states—of much-needed electricity. The people staying in the Patriot areas would be broken and powerless. Good. That was the plan.

  The government was smart enough not to do this all at once. Suddenly shutting off power to half the country would cause an uprising and flood the Loyalist areas with too many hungry mouths at once, so the government decided to slowly shut off the power, beginning with the most isolated areas first. It would not seem odd to people in the shut-off areas because there had been so many periodic outages since May Day. Those people would not suddenly jump on their ham radios and tell the rest of the country what was happening. People in the shut-off areas would take a while to realize it. Slowly, they would either move to Loyalist areas, where they were easier to control, or they would…die.

  Of course, the government planners who came up with this didn’t dwell on the part about dying. They actually thought they were doing people a favor. All the government services were in the cities. People should want to be there. Government was fabulous and helped people. The people just needed a nudge to get them to the places where they could take advantage of all the wonderful things government was doing for them.

  Cracker Corral was not a new idea. For centuries, governments had been using shut-offs of vital supplies to control populations and win civil wars. Back in ancient times, it had been shutting off irrigation water. Then, in the modern era, it had been shutting off electricity. Dictators knew how powerful this tool was.

  Electricity was an even more potent weapon in the United States. People were so dependent on artificial things, like electricity, that a shut off was essentially a death sentence. Soon after a shut off, food would go bad and gas pumps wouldn’t work. Then people would figure out they needed to move to the cities.

  For decades, the government had studied the effects of an electromagnetic pulse, or “EMP,” where a small nuclear device is detonated high in the atmosphere sending a pulse of electromagnetic energy—basically static electricity—downward on a large area, like North America. The pulse fries all electrical wiring and circuitry, instantly destroying all the electrical devices on the ground. Car and truck starters, gas station pumps, computers, refrigerators, hospital equipment, communications equipment. Everything would be permanently destroyed because the wiring is basically soldered together by the EMP pulse. They can’t be repaired. It takes a brand new electrical device, but they can’t be manufactured because everything necessary to make them—manufacturing plants, trucks to transport them—have also been destroyed. It would take a century to recover. That is not an exaggeration: one hundred years. Following an EMP, a majority of the population would die from starvation, lack of medications, communicable diseases, gang violence, and eventually, war.

  The government knew how absolutely dependent American society was on electricity. They ran the scenarios. They knew American society could only last about two weeks without electricity before the areas without it would be totally broken and submissive.

  Their plan was to totally break the Patriot areas, which was easier than a military invasion and occupation. Besides, the FUSA did not have the military resources for a fair fight.

  Operation Cracker Corral was brilliant, but too brilliant. Because it was basically a genocide plan, it was inevitable that one of the thousand or so people planning it would be reluctant to kill several million of their fellow citizens. However, the government was so desperate when they hatched their plan that they got sloppy as they hurried to come up with a solution. They got sl
oppy by getting too many people involved.

  It was a quiet nerd, Andrew Berkowitz, who saved millions of lives. He was a stereotypical short, thin PhD mathematician who wore big glasses.

  Andrew was an analyst for one of the many government think tanks. He had been brought in on a contract with the Department of Homeland Security to work on the plan to shut off electricity. How ironic it was that the people planning how to murder millions of people in the American homeland worked for the Department of Homeland Security.

  Andrew’s background was thoroughly checked out. They determined that he was safe. He had no outside interests; all he did was work, so he wasn’t political. He didn’t drink, do drugs, or chase women (or men), so he wouldn’t be compromised that way. He was Jewish so the assumption was made that he wouldn’t be one of the Bible-thumping right-wing Patriots. He would probably be afraid of what the redneck Patriots would do if they got power: set up an evangelical Christian theocracy. That’s what the Loyalists kept telling themselves. By breaking the Patriots in Operation Cracker Corral, the Loyalists thought they were preventing a bigoted Christian theocracy. Surely, a Jew would want to help with that effort. Therefore, Andrew could be trusted with some of the most sensitive secrets the FUSA had.

  At first, Andrew was just doing his job. With all the other government workers out of a job, he was glad to have the work. He really didn’t care what he was working on; he was working. He began his work by reading the top secret project overview memorandum for something called Operation Cracker Corral.

  The moment Andrew saw the project overview he knew exactly what it was: genocide. His grandfather had lived through one of those and it wouldn’t happen again, no matter what religion the victims were. Not if Andrew could do anything about it.

  And he could. Rod Evans, a neighbor in his DC suburb, seemed like one of those Patriot people. Before the Collapse, Andrew noticed that Rod occasionally wore one of those “Don’t Tread on Me” t-shirts. Rod had a younger brother who was a math geek, so he felt for Andrew and knew how hard it to be social when you’re so brilliant in one concentrated part of your brain. He went out of his way to be friendly to him.