299 Days: The 43 Colonels

by Glen Tate

  “Nick started working on his ‘Ponytailnet’ to be a stealth Darknet within their own Purplenet. He also obtained all the information necessary to thwart Purplenet and to disable many of the controls they were putting on the regular internet. Nick, being a Patriot, was just about the worst thing that could have happened to the Limas' plans for the internet.”

  “Nick knew how valuable he was and realized that he would be watched. Not just online, but physically, too. He saw people he thought were spying on him. He knew he was being watched when one of the NSA people introduced him to a beautiful woman for an impromptu ‘blind date.’ He declined, but it verified that he was being watched. He was really smart but couldn’t figure out a way to make contact with the Patriots without getting caught.”

  “So he waited. He got word in advance that ‘The Event’ would happen soon, which turned out to be May Day. He knew that the government people would be extremely busy when the Collapse hit. It wouldn’t be odd for him to be gone for a few hours when America was spinning apart. ‘Stuck in traffic’ he’d say when the highways were choked with cars.”

  “He used Ponytailnet to make contact with the local Oath Keepers leader. He put key passwords and other information on an old fashioned CD-ROM and delivered it to the Oath Keepers one day. The Oath Keepers' leader didn’t believe a word this weird guy with a ponytail had to say, but he passed the CD on to a Patriot in military intelligence. The response he got was ‘Find this guy and extract him to a safe place.’ Of course, Nick knew all of this because he was getting the Oath Keeper’s and military intelligence officer’s communications in real time. In the chaos of the third day of the Collapse, Nick came back to the Oath Keeper’s house and said, with a smile, ‘Extract me to a safe place.’”

  “Which the Patriots did. He was our highest priority asset, along with…” Ben smiled and said, “You’ll have to find out later.”

  “Nick and a three-person team of Patriot computer people got to work on rolling out Ponytailnet for use by our intelligence and military people. We also used Nick’s knowledge of Purplenet to tap into the Limas' most sensitive communications and data. We used access to Purplenet to cause enormous mischief for them.” Ben wished he could tell the audience all the devious things they did in Purplenet. They erased data about POIs and even put some particularly hated Limas on the POI list so the government would spend its resources chasing its own people. Ben was only told the simple and predictable things the Patriots did with Purplenet; not even the governor of a Patriot state was told some of the really ingenious things they did.

  “Once the Limas realized we were into Purplenet,” Ben said with another smile, “they shut it down.” Ben threw his hands up and said, “Good! That was the easiest way to shut down their only secure internet communications. It was far easier than a massive airstrike on some servers deep in a concrete bunker somewhere. So we can credit Nick with taking down Purplenet.” The audience gave Nick a standing ovation.

  “But that’s Nick’s contributions to the military aspect of this,” Ben said. “His contribution to the civilian Restoration is just as important. We’re using a variation, an encrypted, unbreakable variation, of Ponytailnet as the backbone of our internet here and in neighboring free states in the Mountain West. Restoration without an internet would be very difficult. It would be possible; humanity lived without an internet for most of its existence, but it sure makes things easier.”

  “Ponytailnet is now used for our cell phone system, including texting. It’s used by the Freedom Banks for sending money—real money, by the way, backed by real things, like gold—between Patriot banks. This allows people to buy and sell things like real estate and large machinery without having to bring a bag of gold bars. Ponytailnet is used by businesses to order and deliver supplies. It’s hard to rebuild a bridge shot up during the war without an efficient way to round up supplies for the repairs. One of the best things Ponytailnet is being used for is getting prescriptions filled. Now that some of the major pharmaceuticals are available from Texas, our pharmacists can order them and get them sent up here. It’s not perfect, but it’s a good start.”

  Ben smiled and said, “One of the best uses of Ponytailnet is the reunification of families. We took the old birth and death records and put them into a Ponytailnet database. I know ‘database’ isn’t a popular thing with us Patriots, but remember that a census is in the Constitution. It’s a legitimate government function—one of the few. So we now know who was born and when, as well as when they die.” There were still thousands of people missing from the war, but New Washington was starting to update its vital records, at least slowly. “When people voluntarily tell us where they are staying now, we can use all this information to reunite families torn apart by the Collapse and war. One of my very favorite things to do as Governor is to drop by the Olympia Reunification Office and see kids and parents hugging each other. That 'never gets old,’ to quote a friend of mine,” Ben said, nodding at Grant.

  Chapter 341

  Col. Leszek Stachyra

  (Rebuilder of Two Communist Economies)

  “We have plenty of war heroes to honor today,” Ben said after the applause died down for Nick Norton. “But we have one more nerd to honor before we get to an honoree who blew stuff up.”

  “Professor Leszek Stachyra didn’t blow things up,” Ben said. “He’s putting them back together.” Ben let that sink in with the crowd. He was shamelessly staying on message about the hard work of the Restoration. They didn’t pick 43 people with varying backgrounds on purpose; that was just who the big contributors were. “There were more civilians than military people who were critical in this war. George Washington and Mao would agree that civilian support is critical. It takes a lot more than tanks and jets to win an insurgency. In fact, insurgencies beat opposing forces which have tanks and jets. They do it with money launderers, tax protestors, computer nerds, and economists.” Ben motioned for Leszek to stand. He was a distinguished and fit man in his fifties with black hair.

  “Leszek Stachyra left Seattle early in the Collapse and resettled in Olympia at the Think Farm,” Ben started. “He is an economist,” Ben said. “Economist? That’s not very exciting, is it?” Ben explained, “Well, economics is how you eat, have shelter and utilities, can raise your kids, and can have health care. Everything you do and need is economics.” The audience was surprised by that statement.

  “How do you get food? Someone grew it and transported it, unless you have a garden, which is great, but most people don’t grow all their own food. Why did someone grow you food and transport it to you? Out of the kindness of their heart? The Communists tried that and quickly found out that no one toils in a field just to give away everything to people in a city.”

  “You’ve all heard the phrase, ‘the law of gravity.’ You’ve probably also heard the phrase, ‘the law of supply and demand.’ They’re both the same: a law of nature. Just as an apple drops to the ground under the law of gravity, the law of supply and demand ensures that when apples are scarce, people will pay more for them, and will pay less when they are plentiful. Economics is a background fact woven into the universe, just like the law of gravity. People, like the Communists and later the Limas, who tried to alter the law of supply and demand found that it was just as unsuccessful as attempting to alter the law of gravity. Yes, apples fall to the ground and so do their prices when they are plentiful.”

  “We in the New Washington government understand this,” Ben said, with yet another mini-plug for his administration. “Not only do we understand, but we embrace it. It’s like gravity: we embrace that, too. We let gravity do its thing by, for example, letting heavy bridges rest on their foundations. We’re applying the law of gravity to get our work done. We’re doing the same with the law of supply and demand. We’re letting the market work—for a change. Instead of fighting the law of supply and demand like our predecessors did, we’re letting this law of nature operate. It will anyway, we might as well let it work for us.
We’re letting it operate by not interfering with the fact that if apples are scarce, they’re more expensive or cheaper if they’re plentiful. And guess what? More apples get out to the people that way, and apple farmers are more fairly compensated for their work, and are motivated to grow more apples and make more money, and then buy more products from others. You can see how this works. And all that is necessary is for the government to get out of the way.”

  “That’s where economists like Professor, Colonel, Stachyra come in,” Ben continued. “I guess we don’t need experts like him to tell us to get the government out of the way, but he has some very important information for us.”

  “Professor Stachyra has something none of us do: experience at rebuilding an economy. He grew up in Poland during the Cold War. Let’s let him explain.”

  Lezsek stood up to a hearty round of applause, and came up to the rostrum. He shook Ben’s hand and then stood at the podium like he was giving a much-anticipated lecture. He was.

  “A Communist economy, which is an oxymoron, is all I ever knew,” Lezsek said in near perfect English. “I thought that nearly free bread and rent was normal, but so were shortages of bread and places to live. I thought it was normal for people to do the job the government told them to do instead of what they were good at or wanted to do. I thought everything, from bread to an apartment to a job, came from the government. The government was everything; there was no room in society for anything else. But my parents were secretly Christians who knew that their allegiance was to God, not the Communist Party. They started to whisper things to me at a young age about how corrupt and evil the system was. My grandparents quietly told me that bread lines and housing shortages were not normal, that before the Communists took over, life was good and people had plenty. My grandparents also told me that people used to work hard and took pride in their lives and accomplishments. Now they didn’t. I could see that my father, a brilliant writer, was suffocating in his job as an electrician at a shipyard. All the adults around me seem to be bitter, lifeless zombies who hated their lives and barely got by.”

  “Then I won a high school writing contest in my home town of Biala Podlaska. Apparently, I inherited that skill from my father. I wrote about how Polish youth had a much better future than their counterparts in the West. The essay was an extremely subtle but powerful satire, full of inside jokes that my fellow anti-Communists would pick up on. The authorities, who were mind-numbed robots just pushing paper, selected me as the winner. The prize? A student exchange to West Berlin during a thaw in the Cold War in the 1970s. Winners of the essay contest from Germany got to go Poland, where the Polish secret police worked hard to recruit these impressionable and idealistic kids to work for “peace” by spying on their home country when they returned home. The Polish government knew that it was taking a chance by allowing some of their students to see the West, but they valued an opportunity to recruit spies more than being concerned about letting some kids see McDonalds and listen to rock and roll.”

  “I was fifteen years old when, I believe you say, my world was rocked when I got off the train in West Berlin. People were happy. They had nice clothes. I still remember the smells, like good food, instead of the bland slop I had to eat in Poland. West Berlin was vibrant, alive, and buzzing. It was nothing like Poland.”

  He paused and raised his hands for emphasis. “And the sounds. Rock and roll. The Led Zepplin. Oh, the Led Zepplin. And the girls, the German girls. Oh, my, that was intoxicating for a fifteen year-old boy from a Communist country.”

  “So, yes, I fell for the McDonalds and rock and roll of the West,” he said with a shrug. “It was better than the government bread and Communist operas.”

  He got serious again. “I went to the student exchange and met a German student my age. His name was Matthiaus. My handlers, I had two Polish secret police accompanying me everywhere, even to the bathroom, were very suspicious of my new friend. I couldn’t do much with my handlers around, so I didn’t try. No use getting in trouble when, how you say, there was no upside. I had an idea, though.”

  “It was such a sad day when I had to leave West Berlin. I told my handlers that Matthiaus had whispered to me that he wanted to help the East in the name of ‘peace.’ I felt bad for making this up and for possibly endangering him, but I had a plan.”

  “My handlers gleefully reported this back to their superiors. I was given an extremely rare second trip to West Berlin. I got a second chance to meet with Matthiaus, along with my new handlers. I pulled a trick so simple I can’t believe it worked. I’m no spymaster, but I told the hotel to send a bottle of American whiskey to the handlers’ hotel room. I knew what they would do when they found it. I had a few hours while they were drunk to really talk to Matthiaus, which I did. I told him that I wanted to work for the West and wanted to emigrate there. He said he would try to make that happen.”

  “I was invited back to West Berlin several more times to give speeches on why Communist youth had a better future. My handlers got lazier each time I went to the West. They trusted me, which was a big mistake.”

  “Right before my last trip to West Berlin,” Lezsek said, “I told my parents I planned on defecting while I was there. My mother cried and my father swelled with pride. They wanted me to do it, even though they might go to prison for having a traitorous son.”

  “On my last trip to West Berlin, I slipped away from my handlers and met Matthiaus, who took me to a series of safe houses in West Berlin. Even though it was the West, the Communists still had many agents and assassins operating there; I was not safe in the open. I was given new identification papers, which looked very authentic. I went right through the checkpoint and got on a train to West Germany.”

  “My parents were briefly detained,” Lezsek said with emotion, “but this happened right at the same time as the Solidarity movement began in 1980. The secret police were busy fighting Lech Walesa and millions more Poles, so harassing the parents of a teenager who was seduced by rock and roll and German girls was not a high priority. My parents were released.”

  “I spent time in Germany giving speeches about how Communist youth most certainly did not have a better future than youth in the West. Then I went from Germany to America and spent the 1980s there,” Lezsek said. “I studied economics, fascinated by how American economics explained everything I saw in Poland: the shortages, the corruption, the poverty.”

  “When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, I rushed back home to Poland. My parents were glad to see me again. I started to work for the Solidarity movement’s political party and worked on the rebuilding plans we had.”

  “Many people think life is instantly better once a Communist government falls and the people are free. Yes, it is joyous and life is better.”

  Lezsek paused for dramatic effect. “But Communism creates a giant mess of an economy. A giant, stinking pile of dung. A destroyed heap of twisted metal and broken glass if an economy was formerly a skyscraper.”

  “It is hard to describe the complexity of the economic problems left by a collapsed Communist or socialist government. Nothing works. People haven’t worked, at least not hard or productively, in decades. No one knows what prices are supposed to be. The currency has no value.”

  “Worst of all, is what Communism does to the people. Not just the poverty and misery, although that’s bad enough. No, the worst thing Communism does to the people is destroy their drive, make them dependent, and make them afraid to risk anything. When I said that to people in West Germany in the early 1980s, my audience had no idea what I was talking about. But you people, here in what’s left of America decades later, actually understand what I’m talking about. You’ve seen with your own eyes how the Limas destroyed people’s drive to work or achieve, how utterly dependent they became, and how afraid they were to risk anything like starting a business or even thinking unapproved thoughts.” Many in the audience were nodding.

  “Think about that, ladies and gentlemen. A refugee from a Communist country is
accurately describing to you what America is like, and you all know from your own lives that I’m correct.” He paused to let that sink in.

  “Well,” Lezsek said, “luckily, I have also lived through a rebuilding.” He had done more than just live through the rebuilding of Poland in the 1990s and 2000s; he had actively participated in it as a Ministry of Finance official for the new non-Communist government. He became a professor of economics at the Instytut Ekonomii I Zarzadzania, the Institute of Economics and Management at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow.

  “Take the almost free bread as an example,” he said. “What do you do with this? People need to eat and they expect bread to cost a few cents. They also expect shortages of bread, but when they’re hungry and scared they seem to focus on the 'almost free' part instead of the 'frequent shortages' part.” The audience chuckled because they were seeing that in New Washington. For example, people in New Washington accustomed to “free,” but crappy, health care couldn’t believe they had to pay for it now.

  “Who owns the bakeries? Who owns the transportation to get bread to the stores, or get wheat to the bakeries? Who owns the grain and other ingredients? Who pays the bakery workers? If bread makes it to the store, who gets the profits? What currency is used to pay for the bread? How do families get the money to buy the bread? How does the bakery get capital to finance and expand the bakery to make more bread for all the hungry people?” Heads in the audience were slowly nodding.

  “Not so simple, huh?” He said with a smile. “That’s just bread. Try health care.”

  “Let’s go back to the bread example. The first problem I mentioned was ‘who owns the bakeries’? In a Communist system, the answer is no one, really. That’s a huge problem. The government owned them, but the government was no longer around. The solution we initially came up with was to give the bakery to the workers. They would be paid from the profits. An employee-owned enterprise. But we knew what happens when something is just given to people. They don’t appreciate it and they don’t maintain it. We could sell the bakery to the workers, but who would get the money from the sale? How would that be fair? And remember, all these things need to be fair or people will rebel against them. They had just spent the past decades being ripped off and anyone proposing to do that again would be hanged. I’m not exaggerating,” he said grimly.