The plainclothes PBI detectives had taken over a suite of offices and began their work. They ignored Cannon except to demand he retrieve or move various things for them; they saw the PSF officers as fodder and a PSF officer who had been a local deputy was even lower in their esteem.
The detectives were bringing in a lot of computers. Cannon heard some of their cell calls – he couldn’t quite make out what they were saying, but it looked like they were increasing monitoring of cell phone traffic within the county. And there was talk of software that would help define terrorist networks.
The people of Jasper who would not roll over were, apparently, terrorists now.
Kessler was afraid of the PBI contingent, though she tried not to show it. The lead detective was a man named Kunstler; he had her shaking in her boots every time he spoke to her. Or rather, spoke at her.
It took them some time to learn what Cannon already guessed, that the admin building shooter downtown was the same Larry Langer who had capped two PSF while escaping during the raid on his family farm. He obviously had not left town and the PBI “recommended” she increase patrols and random stops for ID on the street and at checkpoints.
“Have you set up surveillance on his known frequented establishments? Is there a bar or something he usually frequents?” asked Kunstler calmly.
“I, I don’t know,” Kessler stammered. “I just got here a few weeks ago.”
Kunstler looked her over, annoyed. “Starting now, I’m assuming command. Get your officers ready to go out on the street. We are going to tear this town apart.”
9.
“Look, we’re not calling ourselves ‘Wolverines,’” Turnbull said, annoyed. “Stop suggesting that.”
One or two of the assembled insurgents looked disappointed.
“What we are going to do is turn this map red,” Turnbull said, pointing to an AAA roadmap of Southern Indiana that they had tacked up to the wall of the barn.
There were about a dozen men and a couple women there, gathered around, watching the stranger. There were deer rifles, some AR15s and a few AKs leaning against the wall. One of the younger guys, a trucker from a nearby town, looked at the map, then at Turnbull, then back to the map. Turnbull had heard him called “Kyle.”
“You mean red, like in ‘red state’?”
“No,” Turnbull said, now even more annoyed.
“You mean like blood?”
Sometimes, I hate civilians, Turnbull thought. “No, not like blood. Look, when you’re doing an insurgency there are three colors on the map. White is where the counterinsurgents hold. That’s cleared of the guerrillas and the troublemakers. Right now, this whole map is white.”
The groups nodded, listening as Turnbull continued. “Next, pink. That’s the at-risk area. That’s where there’s some trouble, but the government has got it sort of under control. Then there is the red. The red is insurgent territory. Our territory. That’s what we are going to make out of all this white territory on this map. First, we make all this white space outside the towns pink, then red. Then we make the towns pink, then red. That’s when we take Jasper itself.
“I thought it meant blood,” said Kyle, disappointed.
“It doesn’t mean blood.”
It had been eight days since the attack on the administrative building and the checkpoint, eight days of organizing and training. True to his word, Dale Chalmers the insurance salesman had identified the likely rebellion’s early adopters and set up the cells. Reliable contacts turned them on to other reliable contacts. Each night, Dale and Turnbull met to assess the new prospects and to analyze the information that was coming in.
They were organizing by cells, and not just in Jasper. There are other towns around, a few miles down each road, small and tight-knit, none with their own PSF station. Turnbull wanted a cell in each dot on the map, and Dale set to it. The cells were made up of neighbors and relatives; Turnbull knew that was the best way to keep them secure. Kind of like the mafia, but with pick-ups and Protestants, as well as the Catholics who settled the region.
There was tension – everyone could feel it. Some wanted to hide their heads. Others wanted a more active role. Turnbull generally left it to the locals to decide who was allowed how deep in the organization. Dale, the Mayor, Lee Rogers and Davey Wohl would sit around at night tossing names back and forth.
“He’s dumb as a box of Illinois rocks,” Wohl declared about one candidate.
“No, she never shuts up,” the Mayor said about a woman he had greeted on the street as a long lost sister earlier that afternoon. “Worst gossip in town. We can’t ever tell her anything, but she’ll tell us everything.”
“Not Jake Cole,” Lee Rogers said. “He’s a meth addict and people saw him talking to some blues. People are saying the PSF is trying to use junkies as snitches.”
“Oh yeah?” said Larry Langer. That night he went out at about 11 p.m. with Lee, and didn’t say where. The next day word spread through town how a moaning Jake Cole had been found with a bullet through his right knee, wearing a tourniquet and tied to the courthouse park’s new statue of Ruth Bader Ginsberg. There was a sign around his neck that said “Rat.”
Langer also paid a visit to Andy Houk out at his remote farmhouse, approaching from the woods and catching Andy on the porch coming out with a satchel of the meth he sold in town.
“Hi Andy,” Langer said, shoving the barrel of his massive .357 into the big, bald man’s multiple chins.
“Hey Larry,” the dealer said, with more composure than was warranted.
“Things are getting a little confrontational with the government, and I wanted to make sure you and your customers weren’t going to get sideways on us. Seems Jake Cole was talking to the blues and, well, his dancing days are done.”
“I don’t have no use for cops either. You know that, Larry.”
“Well, it seems they’re letting you run pretty free in town. I was wondering if you were kind of doing them any favors in return for being let alone.”
“I don’t talk about terrorist stuff to them.”
“You calling me a terrorist, Andy?”
“I mean freedom fighters! The TV –”
“Okay, okay, calm down. I’m just saying, if you help them and not us, I’m going to have to find you and I’m gonna have to shoot ya.”
“I won’t help ‘em, I promise, Larry. Swear to God!”
“That’s good. Now, we’re the ones really in charge now, so here are the rules. You can sell your meth to your regular junkie customers, but you tell them if they ever whisper to a blue you’re cutting them off. You got that?”
“I got that, Larry.”
“Okay. Now, I get if you got that meth demon you gotta feed it, but if I catch ya selling to any kids, I’m shooting you. Starting at the toe and working north. You feel me, Andy?”
“I feel you, Larry.”
“Good. Then you have a nice day.”
Most locals weren’t chosen as fighters, but most tasks did not involve direct fighting. Much of it was observation and intelligence. The PSF noticed that there were always a few locals hanging around outside of the station, watching who went in and went out. They would deny it when confronted – “We’re just hanging out? Why are you hassling me? Is it because I’m part Hispanic?” – but drop-ins by locals with good info dwindled to nothing.
Others contributed in their own way. The first graffiti soon appeared. It was usually obscene suggestions about what the PSF or the PR itself should kiss or suck. When the lazy public workers finally got around to scraping one tag off a wall, the next night two more would appear.
There were other, smaller acts of rebellion. A PSF officer coming into a restaurant could always expect a little something extra in his sandwich. One or two officers a day were usually out with the stomach flu. At the Starbucks favored by PSF leadership, the word passed among the baristas that their lattes should always be prepared with “extra loogie.”
The maids at the former Best Weste
rn – that chain and all the others had recently been nationalized and were now simply called “Economy Hotel” – were enlisted to survey the rooms of the out-of-town PBI detectives when they cleaned them. USB sticks often went missing; if confronted and accused of with stealing, the maids were instructed to claim “sexist and classist oppression.”
This same strategy was why Davey Wohl was selected to drive weapons and ammo across town in the trunk of his car – no one expected him to be stopped by the no-notice check points popping up around town. But one evening he was, and when the PSF officer demanded that he open his trunk he flew out of his Buick in a fury, screaming, “I’m not going to stand for this racial profiling bullshit! I am a proud black man and I want my Anti-Racism Representative and I’m going to make a complaint about your cracker ass!” The PSF officer quickly apologized and pleaded with Wohl to just go, please go. He did, laughing hysterically as he drove away with a trunk full of sixteen rifles, six shotguns, twelve pistols and about 5000 rounds of various ammunition.
The reinforced PSF stepped up its patrolling, but for the approximately 60 new PSF officers now assigned to the Jasper sector, there were only about half that number of vehicles. And there were detectives, according to Ted Cannon. He was passing on some information, in bits and pieces, but he was adamant that he would not pass on anything that would get any of his fellow PSF officers hurt. They might be assholes, but they were still his assholes – sort of. Turnbull told Dale to take whatever was given; at some point, Turnbull knew Cannon would need to choose.
The detectives were gathering, collating and examining data. And they were going out and talking to people. In fact, the orders had come down that the People’s Security Force was to go out and mingle too, an idea which the rank and file did not like. They hated the locals, and they feared them. But they did do some walking patrols, trying to show they were not afraid. They were usually not afraid in groups of six or more, all carrying long weapons.
But out in the country, outside the city limits, they still made their presence known one vehicle at a time.
“We’re going to own the countryside first,” Turnbull said. “We’re doing it starting tonight. Understand that this is coordinated. It’s happening in other places too. So, nobody goes home until it gets done, and I don’t want to see anybody near cell phones. You shouldn’t have them on you at all.”
The rule, announced immediately to all their recruits, was no personal cells. Never. Cells would give the bad guys a road map of where you’d been and who you talked to if they ever decided to look at you hard. Plus, as he learned in Iraq, they were an easy way for informants to tip off the bad guys to an op. Turnbull didn’t expect they were infiltrated with any informants, but he was taking no chances.
The group nodded. They ranged from teens to an older man in his sixties who still operated a farm, though how long that would go on with the never-ending imposition of new regulations was uncertain. They all lived and worked around Bretzville, a small community a few miles southeast of Jasper where State Routes 162 and 64 crossed.
They knew their mission. It was pretty simple, but they did not plan and rehearse it as if it were simple. Turnbull had gone over it with them again and again, first drawing it out and diagraming where all the players would be. Then he took the shooters and made them walk their positions and their routes of ingress and egress, until they knew the choreography perfectly. The spotters trained too, practicing spotting PSF cruisers and calling them in on the Motorola hand-held radios that had previously been used to coordinate deer hunters. They practiced the timing, from where they spotted the cruiser until it crossed into the proposed kill zone. They ran through other scenarios and options for the plan – “branches and sequels,” Turnbull called them.
Turnbull would go with them this time, as an observer. Langer was off with another team that would pull off its own mission tonight. But the locals would do the work. They would pull the triggers.
“All this to take some pot shots at a police car?” asked Kyle.
“Yeah, all that to shoot a few bullets,” Turnbull said. “Let me ask you something. How many lives do you have? Are you a cat? Do you have nine lives?”
“No,” said the confused would-be guerrilla.
“Let me ask you something else? You know everybody in this room, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Lived by them, went to school with them, and related to more than a few of them? Maybe all of them?”
“So?”
“So how many of them is it okay for you to lose tonight?”
“None.”
“That’s right. None. This is real. People can die in this, your people. So we plan and rehearse. I’m not promising you won’t lose anybody, and if this goes the way I think it will, I can pretty much promise you that you’re going to lose people you know. Know that going in. But every time we rehearse, every time we plan, every time I get a map or get a sand table with a little army man and make you mark out exactly what you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it so everybody knows the plan and there are no screw ups, then that makes it a few percentage points more likely that you all walk away from this. Yeah, we’re just shooting at a freaking police car. But what if they shoot back?”
“We’ll be at 450 meters. They are going to have a hard time hitting us.”
“See, you know that because we planned. We planned it so the edge is ours, that we have the advantage. You know exactly where you are going to hit them and you know exactly when. You know the terrain. You know how to get in, how to get out, and what they have to cross to get to you. You know how long it’s gonna take for them to get back up, maybe even air support. Yeah, that’s why we plan and rehearse. Because let me tell you guys something. You are outgunned. You cannot win a standup fight. They will always be able to generate more combat power against you. Every single time. Maybe you kill the first ten to get there, but what about the next ten and the next ten and then the next hundred? This is a guerrilla war, guys. We don’t have the numbers. We don’t have the combat power. So we have to make up for it. We make up for it by stealth. We make up for it by planning. We make up for it by picking our battles so we fight on our ground on our terms where we choose against an outnumbered unit of the enemy. That’s how we win. That’s how you don’t have to go home and explain to your mother how your brother got his brains blown out because you started some bullshit, off-the-cuff firefight that went south. So, are you guys ready for this?
“We’re ready, Kelly,” the young man replied. “We’re pissed off and ready.”
“Well, that might be the problem. Because if you’re pissed off you’re not thinking. If you’re pissed off, you just want revenge. You need to be cold. You need to be calculating. You need to have arranged all the pieces of the puzzle so in the end it’s them dead and not you. I know you can shoot. You’re all deer hunters and you all grew up with rifles in your mitts. But let me tell you another thing. Pulling the trigger is your least important skill. I want to say it again, because it’s important. Your least important skill is the ability to pull the trigger. The PV assholes can pull triggers, and they are completely screwed up, tactically and strategically. We’re going to train. We’re going to plan. We’re going to rehearse the tactics that keep you alive. We’re not going to fight until we are good and ready, on our terms. Now everybody, get your shit. We’re rolling in an hour. I’ll do the inspections myself.”
“Inspections?” the young man asked.
“Yeah, Kyle, inspections,” said an older guy. He spent most of his time listening instead of talking, only taking a moment to correct one of the others when he observed something tactically wrong in the rehearsals. His name was Banks. He motioned Kyle to come over and then he started helping the young man arrange his battle gear.
“You were an NCO?” Turnbull asked.
“Marine staff sergeant,” Banks replied.
“Now you’re one of my NCOs,” Turnbull said. “When I’m not here, you’re
in charge.”
“Roger,” said Banks. Turnbull didn’t need to tell him anything else. Banks knew exactly what to do.
The radio in Banks’s hands went off. “Cheeseburger, cheeseburger. Out.”
Turnbull watched from his belly a few feet away as Banks stayed low and moved along the line of three shooters with scoped rifles, all looking down from the ridge across the wheat field to the south at State Route 64. It was a two-lane highway, and it often got confused with Interstate 64, which ran parallel a few miles to the south. They had selected a stretch of road west of a wide curve that ran through the little collection of buildings known as St. Anthony. That’s where the spotters had seen the PSF cruiser heading west. At the posted speed of 55, it would be in the kill zone in about 60 seconds.
The radio went off again as the other set of spotters, watching the road to the west, confirmed there were no PSF vehicles coming from that way.
“Pizza, pizza. Out.”
Now Banks was whispering to his people, reminding them of what he expected. He himself carried his prized M14, which he had secured out in the woods when the People’s Republic declared privately owned firearms illegal. He was not going to fire tonight unless he had to – if it went bad, he had a few 20-round magazines of powerful .308 NATO bullets he could use on semi-automatic to suppress anyone moving on their position from a distance while the rest of the unit escaped.
Banks took his place and pulled up his binos. Turnbull raised his own and looked toward St. Anthony where 64 left it behind. There was one set of headlights coming from the east – if there had been a civilian vehicle nearby, they would have scrubbed the mission. He swung the binos south to the kill zone once more to make sure no knucklehead had wandered into it. The illumination was poor – no moon yet and some cloud cover, but he didn’t see anything. Off on the periphery, lights from farms, houses and businesses twinkled. There were a lot more occupied shelters out here in the sticks than one might imagine, and with the powerful rounds they were using they had to be very, very careful of their background less someone drop a stray .270 slug through some farmer’s dining room wall.
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