299 Days: The 43 Colonels

by Glen Tate

  “A week before the Collapse, when I had final word that it was coming, I told John and gave him the proof. We had pre-arranged that, when the Collapse seemed imminent, John would hand me over to some Patriot intelligence officers who would be my handlers. We did the hand-off to the new handlers. I remember looking at John and realizing I’d never see him again. Either he would die or I would. He just tipped his cowboy hat and got in his truck.”

  “During the Collapse and war, I was in Seattle hiding. I couldn’t do much for the Patriots from inside Seattle. First of all, the Legislature was not in session so I didn’t have many people to meet with and get information from. Second, Patriot agents couldn’t move around in Seattle as freely as in Olympia before the Collapse. I had done plenty, at least I thought, before the Collapse by getting the Limas’ plans out to the good guys.” The audience applauded.

  “Right before New Year’s Day, a kind, elderly lady came to my house with a pre-arranged code phrase. I got in the car with her and, through a series of safe houses, I got into New Washington. I’m glad to be here today.”

  He paused. “Oh, and my wife?” He shrugged. “I hope she’s enjoying whatever it is she enjoys out of life.”

  Chapter 356

  Col. Adrienne Baucus

  (Party Girl)

  “Well,” Ben said, “we’re going to continue in the vein of non-traditional heroes—no offense, Col. Rogers.”

  “Col. Adrienne Baucus is really non-traditional,” Ben said. “She was a party girl; that’s how she described herself. She was no church girl. I think we’re all grownups in this room. We can handle this. She was no angel.”

  “I must admit there was considerable debate in the Legislature about honoring Adrienne with a colonelship. She did things for our cause that we don’t like to talk about. She didn’t charge a machine gun nest, but she consciously gave her life for a huge, huge Patriot strike. And, the Legislature finally decided, there were lots of people like her who did things that we don’t like to talk about in polite company, but who made a huge difference for us. In a sense, we’re honoring all the people who did things that will make us blush in the church pews.”

  “As you can tell from me referring to Adrienne in the past tense, she is no longer with us. She was 32 years old when she died. Far too young.” Ben paused.

  “I met Adrienne a few years before the Collapse. She was the younger sister of my Chief of Staff, Tom Foster’s, wife. I met Adrienne at a Washington Association of Business staff party one summer.”

  “The first thing you noticed about Adrienne was that she was extremely beautiful. Black hair and nearly hypnotic green eyes.” Ben realized that with all these dignified people in the audience, not the least of which was the First Lady, he better cut the description of how beautiful Adrienne was short before he said something he regretted.

  “The other you noticed about Adrienne was that she was wild. She was loud, animated, and loved to party. Her motor ran in a higher gear than most of ours. She was absolutely comfortable and confident at a party with a drink in her hand. She loved to be unfettered, to be free. She rode a motorcycle, loved guns, and ran several miles a day. She needed to be unwound and flying down the road, whether literally or figuratively.”

  “Like some of our other colonels, Adrienne was essentially non-political. She didn’t care about politics. She looked around Olympia, where she lived, and saw that politics was a scam. She was right. The Limas ran government like a scam. You can’t blame her for thinking so.”

  “She never read the Constitution or the Federalist Papers. She never studied the political philosophy of Thomas Jefferson. She didn’t need to. All she knew was that the Limas were hurting people. When you think about it, that’s all someone needed to know to help us. We take all comers, and that’s apparent when you hear about how Adrienne helped us.”

  “When the Collapse began, Tom Foster’s wife, Joyce, had a courier get recordings of our Rebel Radio show out from the Prosser Farm where we were hiding to Adrienne in Olympia. She was happy to make copies of them and distribute them. For her, being a spy girl was an adventure.”

  “She needed blank CD-ROMs to make copies of the show, so she found a man who worked for the state who had plenty of them. She got friendly with him and the Patriots had all the CD-ROMs they needed. She realized she could use her beauty to get things the Patriots needed. She was okay with that, from what we can gather from conversations she had with her other Patriot operatives.”

  “After she got the CD-ROMs, she started hitting the Lima party circuit. The Limas liked to party, and they didn’t take a break from it during the Collapse. If anything, they hit it harder. They had the liquor, drugs, and everything else they needed to party, and many people in the general population wanted an escape from the grim daily grind during the Collapse. Limas with liquor and drugs would throw huge parties and lots of party-goers, primarily attractive women, would attend. The parties grew and grew.”

  “At the center of these parties was Adrienne. She threw herself into the party circuit pretty hard and, she readily admitted, enjoyed herself.”

  “She started to notice that she was meeting more and more important people. Agency directors, high-ranking elected officials, and military and law enforcement officers. She realized what a treasure trove of VIPs she had access to. She talked to some of the Patriot intelligence operatives she worked with on distributing the Rebel Radio recordings and they came up with a plan for her to start spying for the Patriots.”

  “And spy she did. She was having affairs with some of the most important Limas in Olympia. She would get to know them and then start to ask them about their jobs. Pillow talk. She caught them when their guard was the lowest. Many of these men were dying to tell her things. They were doing things in their jobs that they were ashamed of. Now they had a beautiful young woman listening to their every word. She seemed to genuinely care what they had to say, because she actually did. And she was taking it all in to her amazing memory. Dates, times, places, troop strengths. She kept track of political squabbles between Lima leadership. She listened to which military and law enforcement units were considering ‘sitting out’ and which ones were loyal and which ones might go over to the Patriots. She listened as military and intelligence chiefs told her what fence-sitting units wanted to stay loyal. She told Patriot intelligence agents this, who then arranged for the Patriots to offer those units just a little more than they were asking from the Loyalists to sit out the fighting.”

  “She was smart. She would spend her off-time getting background briefings from Patriot intelligence on military terms so when a general she was,” Ben paused to use the right word, “spending time with said a ‘battalion’ was considering sitting out the war, she knew what that meant. She learned military jargon so she knew what people were talking about when they assumed she was just a party girl. She had a photographic memory and memorized maps of the state. When a ‘friend’ of hers said they were moving troops or police to a particular town, she knew to nonchalantly ask where the troops were coming from and could then tell her Patriot handlers which routes the troops would take, and when.”

  “We know from other intelligence sources that the Limas thought we had broken the encryption on their most sensitive communications. Nope. We just had a party girl in their leaderships’ beds.”

  “Adrienne is being honored tonight for much more than just getting us some valuable information, even if she did it in ways some of us disapprove of,” Ben said.

  “You have all heard of the raid on the Olympia Grand Hotel on December first that netted us the Lieutenant Governor, the Director of the Department of Emergency Management, several state senators from the old state and members of the House of Representatives, as well as the state director of Homeland Security.”

  “That was Adrienne’s work, and she paid for it with her short, beautiful life,” Ben said. “She told us when and where the party would be, and who would be there. She also told us approximately how many
guards there would be. We know she died in that raid. From what we can piece together, it looks like she was confronting a guard on the outer perimeter and the guard killed her right before the raid started. Our forces reported hearing a shot from inside the hotel compound before the raid. The guards we captured reporting hearing a panicked radio dispatch from one of their own about a ‘girl’ pulling a gun on one of them.”

  “So, while she served the cause in an unusual way, Adrienne Baucus did, indeed, serve our cause. She provided us extremely valuable information. It meant the end of the party for her.”

  Chapter 357

  Col. Joe Tantori

  (The Privateer)

  The crowd was silent after Adrienne’s colonelship was presented. Ben knew the next one would be well-received.

  “Before this war, not many of us had heard of a Letter of Marquee,” Ben started. “Now most of us have. It’s a grant of authority by a government, like ours, to ‘privateers’ to intercept enemy ships and seize them for us. The privateer gets to keep some of the seized property for his expenses. It is half patriotism and half capitalism.”

  “But privateers put their lives at risk just like a regular soldier.” Ben didn’t say it, but about a dozen Patriot privateers had been executed by the Limas. It was a dangerous occupation.

  “Privateers are a poor man’s navy,” Ben continued. “And we didn’t have a big regular navy. We had some magnificent sailors and some very capable watercraft, but not a large, regular navy.”

  “Privateers put the enemy on the defensive over a wide area. To combat the privateers, the Limas had to take elaborate naval security measures, which slowed their transit times down significantly.”

  “We got the idea from the Constitution, where Congress has the power to issue Letters of Marque. We also got the idea from George Washington. People wonder how a scrappy little collection of small boats could pin down the mightiest navy in the world at that time, the Royal Navy. We learned a thing or two from the first Revolutionary War.” Ben changed subjects.

  “We’re here tonight to honor a privateer, Col. Joe Tantori. But Joe did two additional things. First, he recruited and supplied a large contingent of Marines who came over to our side, as well as his own military contractors. Second, he loaned us that magnificent armored car that came in so handy when we took Olympia.”

  “Col. Tantori is being honored because he did everything he could to help us: privateering, the Marines, and the armored car. He’s an example of a citizen who went ‘all-in’ and threw everything he had at helping us. I am proud to introduce Col. Joe Tantori.” The crowd applauded loudly.

  Joe went up to the rostrum. He was comfortable speaking to his Marines and contractors, but this was a different setting: a joint session of the Legislature. He had told Ben in advance his remarks would be short.

  “Thank you,” Joe began. “The Governor described the things I did to help make New Washington a free state, and I’m very glad I was in a position to do those things. But, if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to talk about the reason why I did all these things, and why I’m just like you.”

  “The Limas tried to take everything from me.” He told the audience about how he owned his shooting range and training facility for military and law enforcement. A powerful county commissioner was annoyed because he could faintly, very faintly, hear gunfire. And this county commissioner hated guns. The county cooked up some zoning violations, based on a repealed version of the zoning code. They tried to search Joe’s facility and ordered him to shut down. Joe spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on attorneys until, finally, Eric Benson at WAB took the case and won.

  “There are thousands of Joe Tantoris out there,” Joe stated. “We were just average people who worked hard and tried to follow the law. But the people in charge changed the law whenever it suited them. They used their power for their personal vendettas.”

  “Here’s my point for all of you: they turned a harmless small business owner into a privateer, leader of Marines, and the Patriots one and only armored unit in the war. I want you to think about that, ladies and gentlemen. Think of how much pain I was able to inflict on them, all because they decided to play their usual games and pick on a little guy like me.”

  “This is how we won. It wasn’t privateers, Marines, and armored cars, although those helped in the final stage when it was all over for the Limas anyway. But how did it get to that stage? How did they get so weak? Why couldn’t they count on the support of the population, even the people who were absolutely dependent on them for food and security? They couldn’t even get those people on board. They were massively failing at governing. Why?”

  “Because they had created so many Joe Tantoris. And why did they do that? Why did they bully people like me? So what was it that drove them to do something so damaging to themselves?”

  “Ego. They loved the power. They loved pushing me around. They were so used to treating us like slaves that they couldn’t help themselves. They were abusing people just for kicks.”

  “I have been appointed an interim county commissioner and will be running for election for a full term later this year. I think that’s some sweet justice: they used the power of the county for their personal vendettas and now they’re out of office and I’m in. I will make sure there are no more Joe Tantoris, at least in my county.”

  “I look at the people who ran my county and did these things to me and wonder what they’re doing now. Most are in hiding in Seattle. They don’t dare come back to my county. They have to be living in hiding in a horrible, falling apart place like Seattle just because they let their egos get out of control.”

  Joe paused. “I have just one question for them: was it worth it?”

  Chapter 358

  Col. Shahram Hadian

  (The Black Robe Regiment)

  “In the first Revolutionary War,” Ben started, “guess what the British feared the most?” He paused to let the audience think about their answer.

  “It wasn’t the Patriots’ cavalry, or artillery, or even their privateer navy.” He paused again. “It was one particular unit that wasn’t really a unit at all.”

  “The Black Robe Regiment,” Ben said. “Black Robe referred to the robe the clergy wore. The Black Robe Regiment was what the British called the organized clergy fighting—yes fighting—for the Patriots.”

  “Our next Colonel, Shahram Hadian, originally came from Iran. Many of our colonels grew up in oppression and fought against it here, often harder than many native-born Americans. Col. Hadian converted to Christianity after he arrived here. For that, he earned a death sentence because, as a convert from Islam, he is an apostate, which means, under Sharia law, Muslims have a duty to kill him. He also alienated his family, who disowned him. He has already made sacrifices, regardless of what the Limas did to him and would still like to do.”

  “Col. Hadian became a prominent outspoken pastor against the former regime in Washington State. Many of you in this audience heard his internet sermons. That landed him in a Lima prison cell. He inspired, encouraged, taught, led, and comforted us. Currently, Col. Hadian advises my office on religious liberty issues. We are just as committed to allowing the free exercise of religion, any religion, as we are committed to not having an official state-sanctioned single religion.”

  “It is with great pleasure that introduce my friend, my pastor, and a Patriot hero, Col. Shahram Hadian.” The crowd gave him a standing ovation.

  A Middle Eastern man, Persian to be specific, walked up to the rostrum. He was confident and at ease. He was used to speaking, even to large audiences. He had a huge smile on his face. He was beaming with joy that he had a chance to address this crowd and was personally honored to receive a colonelship. This was a very happy day for him.

  “Hello!” He bellowed to fire up the crowd. “What a great and beautiful day God has created. I am so happy to be with you. I never appreciated things like this until I was in prison. Now addressing a large and distinguished body doesn
’t make me nervous; I get joyous that I can come here freely and speak. It’s a joy that develops only when you have been prohibited from doing it.”

  “Here’s the short version of my life story. As Ben,” Shahram said and then caught himself being too informal with his friend, “as Governor Trenton said, I grew up in Iran, escaped, and converted to Christianity in America, land of the free. Right? Land of the free.”

  “I found that wasn’t so true. I could tell from my experience in Iran where America was heading before the Collapse. I have no earthly fears, so I decided to fight the enemy head on. By ‘enemy’ I don’t mean the Limas, at least at this point in the story. The enemy I’m referring to is the being that doesn’t want us to be right with God. I fought this enemy by talking about the similarities between the pre-Collapse period and the period before the Revolutionary War. The similarities were astounding. I talked about how the Founding Fathers relied on God and how God created miracle after miracle to allow a ragtag group of farmers and small merchants to defeat the mightiest military in the world at the time.”

  “People ask why a foreign man, with a name that’s hard to pronounce and who is a former Muslim, came to have such a large following among American Christians and even non-religious people. I have two answers. The first is that God wanted to get my message out.” He smiled, threw up his arms, and said, “C’mon, guys, you knew I was going to say that! But it’s true.”

  He continued, “The second reason is that I was saying things that people knew were true, but traditional churches had stopped saying. I want to talk about that last point because it is so crucial, in my opinion, to explain why we won and how.”