The Last Centurion

by John Ringo

  The manager of the fuel point sees the hit and nearly jumps for joy. If it's legit. They'd had lots of people who could talk a good line about being experienced. One who was very good at talking had nearly blown the place up.

  They get in contact. He quizzes her. She sounds good. But so did the nightmare. But how to get her to him?

  Hey, fuel moves.

  Mostly it moves by rail to distribution points like that. But they also handle more minor materials such as volume grease and oil. The military term is "POL": Petrol, (gasoline for Americans) Oil, Lubricants. Oil and lubricants, to a great degree, still moved by trucks.

  There was a fuel point, from another company, near Beltsville. It had all the people it needed, but it also had trucks going north. The truckers, in this case, were known quantities.

  Calls were made. E-mails were exchanged. (The oil companies had ensured their own connections to backbones long before the Plague. They were going to be hooked tight into the Internet if anything happened. They also had satellite connectivity if even that went down. Oil companies tend to be planners, too.)

  She met a trucker at the "other company" fuel point who carried her to the outskirts of Philly where there was a distro point still open. From there, with the knowledge of the distro point manager, she caught another ride to another point. And so on. She had someone who knew who she was, where she was going and when she was supposed to arrive at each point.

  She wasn't, really, a hitchhiker. She was a commodity being moved for the good of the companies. And while the companies were cutthroat, normally the exact opposite of "random voluntary associations" they also understood scratching back. When a favor was needed, it would be called. They trusted the other company, especially in these conditions, to be good for it.

  She reached Cincinnatti and went to work.

  By the way, there was a certain ignoring of paperwork in those days. Green cards were not necessary. Social security numbers were not necessary. Pay, by the same token, was spotty. Really long-thinking companies like oil companies tried to keep their people fed and mostly succeeded.

  But it was still maximally fucked up.

  The point to all this is that you can have massive unemployment and still have a labor shortage. Even if things are sort of bumping along, sort of, maybe, the "disruption" means that bodies, parts and everything else that is needed to keep any business going is scattered in the wrong places.

  What saved the U.S. was a lot of people at fairly low levels working very hard to keep things going using any means necessary to do so. Like moving a skilled worker around via trucks that had strict regulations against picking up hitchhikers.

  What nearly killed us were people in positions of power who wanted things to work the same way as pre-Plague.

  There were articles and news reports on various "irregularities." Okay, that was a minor one and mostly overlooked even though she didn't file taxes for the whole of 2019. (Thank God for the Amnesty Bill is all I'll say.) Hell, she didn't officially work for Exxon for most of 2019 . . . Oops, did I say that out loud?

  J

  (Wife edit. Thanks a lot. If you think you're getting any for the rest of the year, think again!)

  (Hell, most of 2020 you worked for the feds! Back off.)

  (And it was a nightmare.)

  But the worst "irregularities" were "price fixing."

  Sigh. The government could do price fixing but not companies. Especially not oil companies.

  Sigh.

  Look, things were total suckage. People were still dying. There were very few truly functional banks. Nobody could figure out if we were dealing with run-away inflation or runaway deflation.

  So a bunch of managers getting together and saying "We need to call a truce" just made sense. Don't compete. Associate for the common good. Wait until things cool down to go back to stabbing each other in the back as hard as we can.

  They had a far better idea of what valid prices were than Warrick. They knew their costs, they knew their inventories (and when the on-hand inventory was out, it was going to be a while getting more oil on a national level. There was no chance of getting out of the Middle East, I can tell you that. Not sure of deploying troops to cover the pumping and transfer. Which we got around to eventually.) They consulted, they planned, they projected, they shook hands and they set their prices.

  And they got hammered.

  Oh. My. God. The news media led the charge. The evil oil companies were screwing the American People. Profits were soaring as prices were fixed by an unnamed cabal.

  So Warrick nationalized the oil companies and arrested the "conspirators."

  And that worked real well.

  At that point she was nationalizing so many industries, many of which were effectively defunct, that she didn't have government employees to run them. Sure, she could just say "all of you are government employees" but who bells the cat?

  Okay, take the oil companies.

  Running an oil company is, at almost every single level, a very complex business. Receptionists are about the only people who don't require hours and weeks of training before you can let them do anything on their own. One wrong turn of the wrench in a refinery can mean a big boom. Figuring out how to get just the right inventory to Peoria, Kansas, means having figured out which ten thousand gallons of fuel from which tanker at what point in its voyage is going to go there months in advance. Not exactly, but functionally.

  What does "you are nationalized" mean?

  Well, in the case of Exxon (oops, sorry) it meant choosing a crony to become the CEO with all the perks, pay and privileges. Said crony being, effectively, a tofu-eater. Notably, the person put in charge of Exxon had, upon a time, been a senior member of Greenpeace. And an "environmental lawyer."

  Metaphors on that one are tough. I guess putting Osama Bin Laden in charge of the Defense Department works.

  The crony brought in more cronies who brought in more cronies. Their job was to make the oil company less evil not make sure it ran efficiently. Profits were no longer their objective; "serving the world" was their objective.

  Some of the "service" that was required of the company during the brief reign of what were and are called "the fucktards" were odd to say the least. Okay, so they had to be even more environmentally conscious than they already were. I'm not an oil guy, that would be someone I know and she's not a guy, (Thanks) but there's this thing called "the law of diminishing returns."

  Look, refineries were already about as clean as they were going to get. Spills were a major response issue. Emissions were pretty low, all things considered.

  Getting the emissions lower required engineering that was horrendously expensive and, at the time, unavailable. The refineries were having a hard enough time just continuing to function. Installing more and better emission systems simply was not an option. Who was going to make them? They don't grow on trees! They grow in China on trees!

  But they had to get lower. And gas has to get cheaper. Oh, and you need to start contributing to various funds. Greenpeace, Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund. And pay these huge numbers of grasshoppers exorbitant salaries so that they can get back to their grasshopper lifestyle even though they're not actually contributing anything but bitching to the company.

  And contribute to the presidential election campaign, by the way. I mean, I'm the CEO. I can cut a check if I want to.

  First of all, there weren't profits for the first two years of the Time. There was also no infrastructure renewal, damned little maintenance and there was barely money to pay the workers. The oil companies had been providing fuel to major farm corporations in return for food that was then distributed down to, well, the level of a lady working in a refueling plant.

  That was illicit collusion and had to stop.

  Because most of the tofu-eaters didn't understand the oil business, or any of the many other businesses they were put in charge of, they were often flat ignored. They did so love meetings, especially meetings with obsequio
us and chastened oil company executives bowing and scraping and giving long PowerPoint presentations. They were taken to refineries and shown all the new "environmental improvement systems," many of which were cobbled together from spare pipe and flashy lights, and generally led around by the nose in the hope that grown-ups might get back in charge.

  And in cases where they weren't ignored, or things fell apart anyway, the government then had to pick up the slack and actually try to run things. That worked about as well as any communist-run organization. And there were cases where workers rioted or quit despite the employment conditions or went on strike and had to be told "get back to work, slaves!"

  Another lovely job of the Army. In that case, the rules of engagement were somewhat reduced.

  The Army had long experience of mob control, though, if not in the U.S. And commanders tended to negotiate rather than open fire. The workers, many of which had a certain respect for the military, tended to talk things out as well.

  (This, by the way, was slightly different than the case of the Long Beach Oil Terminal. In that case, the strikers were led by a very hard-core union group that stated that it had "seized the means of production for the people" and was less than willing to negotiate. Actually, they didn't want to negotiate, they simply had demands that had to be met or "the oil terminal would be destroyed." When President Warrick dithered the commander of SOCOM ordered Delta to deal with the situation. Delta dealt. The remaining strikers, with ten dead ringleaders being carried out by their heels, went back to work. The SOCOM commander was court-martialed as was the group commander who carried out the mission. Delta got gutted. But oil flowed. Ex-General Pennington is being bruited for the next secretary of Defense. Got my vote.)

  Look, civilian control of the military is a very important thing. If the military doesn't obey their civilian commanders, sooner or later you get Generalissimo Jones trying to run things and making things worse. We knew that. That bedrock belief went all the way back to George Washington who, when some of his officers wanted to mutiny, ordered them to swear an oath to always obey the orders of the government, no matter how bad they seemed. It was the foundation of The Society of Cincinnatus. I'm not a member since I'm not descended from any of them. The S-4 in Iran was, but that doesn't reduce the importance of the concept.

  But we were being told to do things that were clearly unconstitutional, and the Constitution is what we swear an oath to not the President, while simultaneously being told to do things that were suicidal.

  Did we ever slip control, totally? No. But at first at lower levels then at higher and higher we started to ignore The Bitch. When told to do something clearly illogical, we tended to tune it out and do something more logical. Or at least survivable. We got people fed when we had the food. We distributed to groups we trusted. We were color blind on that but not culture blind and sure as hell not tactically blind.

  On an actual functional level, we implemented the original Plan, even if we didn't realize it at the time.

  We reacted, adapted and overcame.

  Which, finally, leads to "let's talk about me."

  BOOK TWO

  The Last Centurions

  Chapter One

  Stick, Shit End, One Each

  So there I was, no shit . . .

  January we got our warning on H5N1. February, late, we got our innoculations. By then there were more reports around and Patient Zero in Chicago. March was when the Plague hit in earnest in the States.

  We were sitting in Fars Province as things went from bad to worse in Iran. It didn't take the Plague hitting (it hadn't, really, yet) to screw things up in Iran. All it took was Iranians.

  Look, Iranians are, by and large, good people. I'm not talking about the jihadi assholes, obviously. I'm talking about your regular low to middle class Iranian. They like to talk, they like to share green tea. They're even reasonably hard workers (unlike the fucking Arabs).

  But they're also massively screwed up. There's a bunch of reasons, but I can easily detail two.

  One: They're arrogant as fuck. Look, ever seen a movie from pre-Plague called The 300? Bunch of stupid Greeks hold a pass against the whole Persian army. (That would be Iranian, by the way.) Three hundred (actually, more like a thousand with battle squires and allies) against two hundred thousand. Go with the thousand number; they're still outnumbered two hundred to one.

  Worse, back then Persia (Iran) was The big superpower. Persian emperors spotted a place they liked, invaded and took it over. They were too large and powerful not to be able to take anything they wanted.

  Back then, Persia was The Thing.

  (Of course, not too long later historically they were subjects of the Greeks, but I'm not writing a book about the ascent of democracy and why shock infantry always wins over alternatives.)

  Iran, even in pre-Plague days, was a third class power.

  First Class powers were ones that if they got really busy were going to trash the shit out of any non-First Class opponents. Basically, just pre-Plague, that came down to the U.S. and China. The U.S. because we had, hands down, the best military in the world and we were "the world's economic turbine." China because it was just so fucking big and so was its army. They might not have been able to trash us, (see Greeks vs. Persians; size does not always matter) but if they got it into their heads to invade, say, Cambodia, Cambodia might as well roll. And they were pretty powerful economically as well.

  Second class were places like Japan and Western Europe. They had large economies, they were world players and they had small but functional militaries. (Some very good. Australia comes to mind. Then there's the French. It varied.) Throw "academia" and "artists" into this if you wish. Military and economic were usually followed by more or less equal values of the other.

  Third class were countries that had some economic power (mostly oil), some semblance of a real economy and were regional powerhouses. They were often big frogs in very little ponds. Brazil, South Africa and Iran all come to mind. Russia might have been second class, might have been third. Not worth debate.

  The problem is, Iranians just could not get over the fact that they used to be the big frog in any pond. They still thought they were. And because of that, they thought they knew everything. How could some upstart from a country only two hundred years old know how to do something better than they did?

  Well, maybe because the world's changed and we're not still doing it the way that Xerxes wanted it done.

  The second problem with Iranians might be an effect of Islam (it's certainly consistent in most Islamic countries) or it might have been something that was a long-term meme. Don't know. Read well researched arguments for both. Anyway, the second problem was they were fatalists.

  Look, anybody who has ever been in heavy fire and survived mentally is somewhat fatalistic. "I'm alive so far but if there's a bullet with my name on it, oh, well . . ."

  But Persians raise this to high art. The term is "In'sh'allah." "It is as Allah wills."

  Bus about to fall off a road in the mountains? "It is as Allah Wills." Circuit board not precisely put in place. "It will work if Allah wills." Foundation for a building made out of quicksand? "It will stay up if Allah wills." In'sh'Allah.

  Need a group of workers at a certain place at a certain time? "They will be here if Allah Wills."

  For a Midwestern farm boy and military officer, dealing with In'sh'Allah was less than pleasant.

  Kipling wrote about it once, talking about people who are not like that:

  They do not preach that their God will rouse them a little before the nuts work loose.

  They do not preach that His Pity allows them to drop their job when they damn-well choose.

  Ayrabs and Iranians are not the sons of Martha.

  But the point is, when the first news of the Plague hit, the entire country went into a spasm. Trust? Familial trust society. If you're not family, you're nobody. You'd better have a hard power control to get anything done.

  Familial groups
started shifting and contacts started dropping off the screen. Getting anything done quickly became flat impossible. Except getting shot at and bombed which continued right up to the point of Plague hitting Iran in earnest and then just got more random.

  Meantime, things were going to hell in a handbasket back home and we were stuck in the ass end of nowhere attempting "reconstruction duties" while the world was deconstructing around us.

  March 5th I got the e-mail I'd been dreading. It was from Bob Bates, Dad's senior manager and vice president of the corporation. Dad had contracted H5N1.

  Mom died of ovarian cancer when I was ten. I didn't have any brothers or sisters. (Turns out Mom's uterus was pretty screwed up to start with.) Dad was all I had left.

  Growing up with Dad had never been real easy. Don't get me wrong, if he backhanded me or gave me a spanking I deserved it. But while "negative conditioning" was high on his list, "positive conditioning" was less so. The flip side is, when he gave praise it was because you deserved it. That made the slightest hint that you'd sort of maybe not screwed up entirely worth gold. I learned a lot about leadership from my dad.

  But Midwestern farmers, despite this little missive which is much bigger than I'd intended, don't talk a lot. They spend so much time in their own company, they just learn to absorb the silence. Slowly over the years they tend to become more and more like a Minnesota winter, cold, silent and powerful.

  That left me wondering what to say to a man with whom I'd exchanged barely ten words in the same number of years and yet whom I loved beyond measure.

  "Get well soon. I love you."?

  Oh, GOD no.

  "I need you in my life so you'd better pull through."?

  If he did live he'd kick my ass! (And despite being in his fifties he could probably do it.)

  "Dear Bob:

  "Tell Dad that if he doesn't pull through he's a wuss."

  Yep, those were the last words from me my dad ever got.

  I'm morally certain he understood the love buried deep within them.

  The rest of the e-mail from Bob, and it was long, was about the farming situation. Distribution was getting bad. They had laid in rye for the planting season but he wasn't sure when they could get it in the ground. Even rye needs a certain amount of soil temp to sprout and soil temperatures weren't even beginning to flicker upwards. By early March you usually saw some thawing and it just wasn't happening. He also wasn't sure about getting a herbicide and fertilizer delivery. They might have to do some "organic" stuff but that required hands. Which were not available.