Foreign Enemies and Traitors

by Matthew Bracken

  ****

  Phil Carson slid the booklet across the table to Boone. “Jenny’s traitor wasn’t much for operational security. This thing is full of his cheat sheets. Check it out.” The pages of the pocket notebook were arranged by topics. The writing was neatly printed in black ballpoint ink. On one of the first pages, twenty names were listed, across from their aliases and radio call signs. Each of the following pages covered a different subject.

  “Bad opsec is right,” Boone replied, flipping through the pages. “I guess he never thought his notebook might get lost. Damn, he writes as neat as a girl. I’ll bet his checkbook was perfect.”

  “He wrote down his frequencies, his call signs…even their passwords,” said Carson.

  “Passwords?”

  “Looks like it. ‘Challenge and reply,’ it says there.”

  “Let’s check the words for tonight—that might be helpful.” Boone flipped through the pages until he found the passwords.

  Both men laughed. Carrying all of this information in hard copy on one’s person was a cardinal sin for a special ops soldier.

  “Let’s see,” said Boone. “It’s animals, and they change it every week. This week it’s camel and horse. ‘Boora and Toolpar.’ That must be in Kazak, so there’s no chance of an American guessing the right password.” He turned the page. “And they use a number code for crossing out of the Kazak areas. That’s all done in English. I guess English is the only common language between all of the foreign mercenaries. This week for the password, you add up to number seven.”

  “You hear five and you say two, you mean like that?” asked Carson.

  “Right.”

  Carson said, “We were doing it like that way back when I was in the Army.”

  “Well, they probably had American advisers set up the multinational stuff for them.”

  “You mean American traitors.”

  “Yeah, American traitors,” agreed Boone. “Look, it says they use the infrared lights anytime they’re approaching another ‘national area of operations.’ It’s Morse Kilo for the Kazaks. Morse N for the Nigerians, they’re the next bunch north of us. It’s all in here.”

  Boone turned another page. “This is a gold mine. Look at this: phone numbers. Fort Campbell Building 1405—that must be the traitors’ HQ. That part of the base was closed when they axed most of the 101st. What a dipshit this guy was to write all this down!”

  “Even so, you’ve got to admit that it’s pretty impressive when a seventeen-year-old girl takes out a full-grown man. That’s not something that happens every day.”

  “You think everything she said is true?” asked Boone.

  “Well, she’s wearing his uniform, and she’s got his gun and his notebook. If it’s not true, it’s the most elaborate plant in history. Sure, it must be true, how can it not be? You saw the massacre; she sure didn’t make that up. It’s just too bad that she wasted him before we could do a little field interrogation.” Carson smiled. “Good thing the stupid bastard wrote it all down for us anyway.”

  Both men snickered, and Boone handed the notebook back across the table. Carson opened it up to the page giving the aliases of twenty or so officials. One name in particular stood out from the rest. The name right at the top of the list. An unusual name, one that he remembered from seven years ago in Virginia.

  Director Bullard = General Blair.

  ****

  Zack Tutweiler was glad to ride the stationary bike. He didn’t consider it a chore at all. The older men were busy with their own tasks. The bike’s chain drove an iron flywheel connected by a rubber fan belt to an automotive alternator. This whirring mechanical generator was wired to an interconnected rat’s nest of car batteries, AC/DC inverters, transformers and small battery chargers, all pulsing and blinking with red and green LED lights. The heavy flywheel and the resistance provided by the alternator made Zack feel like he was pedaling up a slight grade. Staring into the darkness of the cave, he was able to travel familiar Mississippi roads in his mind.

  Doug Dolan was packing and preparing equipment while occasionally stirring the big cast-iron stewpot. The pot hung from a tripod constructed from iron rebar. The bottom of the pot was poised a few inches above a burning chunk of what Boone said was C-4 explosive. They had run out of the hexamine and trioxane fuel tablets that they had been using, and now they had to use C-4 to heat water and cook. It looked like a burning marshmallow, only smaller. Phil Carson had explained that this was safe. You could burn small pieces of C-4, as long as you didn’t drop anything on it while it was lit. That iron pot hanging over the C-4 would probably do the trick if it fell! Zack wondered what a thumb-sized piece of C-4 would do inside the cave if it exploded. It couldn’t be good. Boone had also said that there was enough natural ventilation in the cave to keep the fumes from building up. Well, the three adult men seemed confident, and Zack had no choice but to trust their judgment. They were all professional soldiers, now or in the past. The rice was bubbling and filling the cave with steam. Doug added cans of vegetables and even meat to the pot. Its aroma made Zack’s mouth water, and he pedaled harder. Soon they would be sharing a hot “all you can eat” feast.

  Phil Carson and Boone Vikersun were whispering over the card table. Between the two of them, they had many years of experience as guerrilla fighters, and Zack was completely willing to accept their leadership. Even though Carson was the older of the two, Boone was unquestionably the leader of this little squad. Boone had announced that Zack would take Jenny south to Mississippi, and that was that. It only made sense. He was heartened that they considered saving the infant’s life to be worth some effort and risk. He was glad that even under these difficult circumstances, they still found the life of a single orphan baby to be worth preserving.

  It was quite a responsibility, to be entrusted with getting Jenny and the infant she called Hope to safety down in Mississippi. She was back inside the tent with the baby, where she had spent most of her time since they had crawled into the cave. He wondered if Jenny was sleeping, or doing some motherly task with the baby, or just daydreaming like him. In some ways Jenny was familiar to Zack, and in other ways she was a mystery. She had also lost her family, so they had that in common. She had survived the brutal year since the earthquakes, and so had he, when so many others had not. They had both adapted to life without central heat or air conditioning, running water, flush toilets, full refrigerators and microwave ovens. Not to mention no cell phones, television, video games or trips to shopping malls and restaurants. They had all of that in common.

  There was a hardness and aloofness to Jenny that did not match her devotion to the orphan baby. Maybe it was a case of compensation. Maybe caring for the baby filled a vacant spot in Jenny’s personality. That would be understandable. Maybe the infant was a substitute for her missing family. It was too bad that Jenny was so cold toward him. They were the same age, almost eighteen, but Jenny barely acknowledged his existence. Still, she had not protested Boone’s decision for the two of them to hike south on their own with the baby. At least not that he had heard. Privacy was hard to come by in the cave. Maybe she was keeping her feelings about the planned trek to herself, until he was out of earshot.

  During the last few months, Zack had not thought much about the opposite sex. Staying alive was higher on his list of priorities. Now, in the relative safety of the cave, surrounded by warriors, he felt the familiar urges return. Jenny was tall and strong, even if she was on the skinny side. Who wasn’t, these days? Her face was kind of bony and angular, but her blond hair was still pretty, and matched her wide-set honey-colored eyes. He wondered what a few months of good eating would do for her looks. Her chin and her cheekbones would not be so prominent, but she would be nice-looking either way. Zack could not help the lustful thoughts he felt toward her. He wondered if she was undressed inside the blue tent. Did she have underwear on, or maybe long johns? He tried to imagine her naked, inside the tent. Long legs she had for sure, he could see that even through her
oversized Russian camouflage pants. The rest of her body’s shape was almost a complete mystery to him, and that was unlikely to change, so he was left to his teenage virgin’s imagination.

  Zack had little hope of arousing romantic interest in her. Girls like Jenny McClure always went for an older guy, somebody like Doug Dolan. Somebody from a big city, who had gone to college. Like Doug, Jenny was also a city girl. She’ll never be interested in me, Zack thought. Especially not with my bad complexion and my messed-up front teeth that keep me from smiling much. She would travel with him until they reached safety somewhere in Mississippi, and then she would go her own way. That was the unfortunate truth. At least he would be close to her for the days that this quest might take. And he was honored that the older men had thought him capable of performing this mission. They consider me a man, Zack thought, or they would not let me guide Jenny and the baby to safety in Mississippi. Perhaps more importantly, they trust me to get the second camera with the massacre pictures to the right people. Zack had seen the photos, on the little LCD screens on the backs of the cameras. He understood how important they were.

  The chunk of C-4 beneath the stew pot gradually diminished in size, until the flame guttered blue. Doug Dolan gently placed another thumb-sized piece of the white plastic explosive beneath the pot, and it quickly ignited from the last of the old fire.

  ****

  “I can’t believe all the foreign militaries that are in Tennessee,” said Carson, examining the dead traitor’s notebook. “There’s Albanians, Bolivians, Kazaks, Koreans, Egyptians, Indonesians, Nigerians, Pakistanis…”

  “Yeah, those countries have all sent over at least a battalion of ‘volunteers.’ There’s about a battalion of mercenaries in each ‘unpacified’ county. And the Russians are behind the Kazaks, you can be sure of that. The Kazaks are just Russian puppets. You can bet their officers report straight to Russian intelligence—if they’re not Russians posing as Kazaks in the first place.”

  Carson asked, “And the president doesn’t care?”

  “Jamal Tambor? Tambo? Hell, my guess is that J.T. reports to the Russians too. He’s been a closet Marxist since he was wearing red diapers. He’s a good talker, he’s smooth, but just look at the friends he picked all his life. Communists and one-worlders. America haters, every one of them. That’s no coincidence.”

  “I don’t even recognize this country anymore,” Carson replied with a sigh. “What in the hell are all these foreign troops doing here? How could our own president have sold us out like this?”

  “Tambo’s an internationalist down to his bone marrow. The depression and the earthquakes are his big chance to finally destroy American sovereignty once and for all. That’s what the push for the North American Union is really all about; it’s not just about the new currency. Hell, there’s more NAL troops in Tennessee than all the other foreign contract battalions put together. Anybody that can speak Spanish can join the North American Legion, with no questions asked. That basically covers everybody from the Rio Grande to Cape Horn who wants to move here and become an American citizen. But the Legion troops are mostly Mexican illegal aliens who were already here. Mexicans and Central Americans. There are thousands of them just in Tennessee. Tens of thousands.”

  Carson asked, “How’s that going over with the locals?”

  “It’s not going over well with the whites and the blacks, but hey, Tennessee has changed a lot in the last few years. Did you know there’s more Hispanics than blacks in Middle Tennessee now?”

  “No kidding?”

  “Yeah, it’s true,” said Boone. “And not just in Tennessee. That’s the trend in almost the whole United States…or what’s left of it. Hispanics are starting to outnumber blacks almost everywhere. So now that we’ve been invaded—that is, now that our traitors allowed us to be invaded—we’re supposed to just suck it up and become part of the North American Union. Canada, America, and Mexico. One big happy family. Just like the NAL motto: ‘Three Nations—One America.’ Canamexico, they might as well call it. It’s in Congress, and it’ll pass. The president already said he’ll sign it. Tambo’s been pushing the North American Union for years.”

  “When did we ever get to vote on this bullshit?” asked Carson.

  “We didn’t. But it’s happening anyway. The whole North American Union, it’s part of some kind of master plan, it has to be. That’s why they’ve kept the border with Mexico wide open, and that’s why we’ve had all the amnesties. That’s why we’re going from dollars to that new North American money, the Amero. It’s been planned for years. This was no accident.”

  “Boone, what the hell happened to America? I don’t care if they’re from Mexico or Timbuktu, foreign troops don’t belong here! What was the president thinking, to bring in foreign mercenaries?”

  “You have to understand Jamal Tambor; he’s a globalist at heart,” said Boone. “Has been all his life. There was never a U.N. treaty that he didn’t support when he was a senator, and it’s worse now that he’s president. The same goes for his cabinet and most of Congress. The depresssion just gave them the opportunity to finally push it through, once and for all. Hell, they probably wanted this damned depression—they’d never have been able to do all of this otherwise. I don’t think they even consider themselves Americans anymore: they’re ‘citizens of the world.’ Give them a choice between an American solution and an international one, and they’ll choose international every time. Just on general principle. That’s who they are.”

  Carson said, “You’re telling me that Americans couldn’t handle the earthquakes without foreign help?”

  “Probably, at least before the depression. But even considering how weak America is now, the earthquake response was totally bungled. Not that the problems weren’t enormous—they were. With all of the bridges down, it was damned near impossible to bring in relief supplies, especially to Memphis. Helicopters just couldn’t bring in enough tonnage to make a difference, not when law and order totally collapsed. Not to millions of people.”

  “Doug and Jenny told me all about it.”

  “Yeah. So you can understand how hard it was. No bridges meant no fuel trucks could get in. And no fuel trucks meant you couldn’t run the equipment to fix the bridges. With the bridges all down, the rivers were blocked. Catch-22. It was just terrible from Nashville to Little Rock, but inside Memphis, it was unbelievable. Memphis went totally Mad Max in about the first three days. To the outside world, Memphis looked like a living nightmare. Media from all over were covering it from helicopters. They were calling Memphis ‘America’s black eye.’ All those dead bodies lying all over the place, and where was Uncle Sam? Why didn’t the Feds rush in with FEMA and fix everything?”

  “Yeah, well, that’s what I’d be asking too,” said Carson.

  “The honest answer is that nobody could wave a magic wand and fix it. Maybe not even before the Greater Depression, when the dollar was still worth something, and we could import enough fuel to run the helicopters and the transport planes. But no matter how you looked at it, the Feds were just pathetic in how they responded. There was no hiding it from the cameras up in the helicopters. It was complete anarchy down on the streets. Memphis was just dog-eat-dog. The mainstream networks filmed it all, and every day people were screaming, ‘Where’s the government? What’s taking so long? People are dying and the government is doing nothing!’ And that’s not all they were asking. People were asking why so many bridges collapsed, why the dams failed, and why all those government housing projects in Memphis and St. Louis collapsed. If you looked at it honestly, it seemed like a lot of the blame really would have to be pinned on the government. Bridges and dams: that’s the government’s job.

  “So, what Washington needed was an excuse for why they couldn’t get FEMA into Tennessee and save the people in time. Something more than just natural causes, more than the earthquakes, more than the dams and bridges collapsing. They needed a scapegoat. They needed a bad guy to take the blame, to take the heat off
of FEMA and the Feds. Tambo didn’t want to wind up like George Bush, getting blamed for what happened after Katrina. Especially not with him being a minority president, and all those black victims in Memphis. That’s when they came up with the white racist genocide angle. That was their excuse for everything: they couldn’t get the relief in because the white rednecks started shooting at everybody in sight, including the rescuers. And of course with no police around, those rednecks reverted back to their own true white racist selves and just started blowing away every black person they could find. And that’s the story that was put out in the media wall to wall.”

  “And this worked?” asked Carson.

  “Hell yeah, it worked! The genocide story got plenty of traction, since the TV networks were beating the drum 24/7. I mean, there were plenty of black bodies to film, that’s for sure. Bodies were everywhere, and nobody was organized to collect them. Not to bury them or to burn them. They just lay where they died, in droves. Phil, I don’t have to tell you that after a few days almost every corpse turns black. So with every passing day, it looked more and more like whites were gunning down blacks wholesale. That was the big lie, and the big excuse for the government not getting FEMA in. And you know what? It worked. The big lie worked.

  “Hey, it wasn’t the government’s fault that the rescuers couldn’t get into Western Tennessee—it was because of those gun-toting white rednecks! It was perfect. And once that excuse became the official line, well, it’s pretty easy to see why the government wouldn’t be in a big hurry to go in and rescue those white racist killers, right? Southern whites became the perfect group to blame. Anything that happened to us, we had it coming, because of what we supposedly did to the blacks.

  “After the second quake, most of the relief supplies for Western Tennessee were flown into Memphis International. They fixed Doug’s bridges again and Memphis got the big rescue operation, at least what was left of it. But in the end more than a hundred thousand people died in Memphis, and who got blamed? Whites! It took the federal government two months to get Memphis halfway under control, and then the relief and reconstruction supplies started pouring in. But those white rednecks out in the sticks? Forget it. They were the racist killers who caused most of the mayhem, right? So forget them! And the rural white folks were mostly from the ‘religious right,’ so screw them twice, they never voted Democrat anyway. It was perfect. Doug calls it ‘the convenient lie.’ You know, like the opposite of ‘an inconvenient truth’.”