Chapter 14 -- ICFRLJNFYIWFDW
The fourth day of the event featured a meeting with several senior members of
the Freeholders, followed by discussion groups by the participants. Tracy and
Chris introduced Carter to their father, one of five members of the Nine in
attendance. He was, like most everyone Carter met, an affable person, not
given to excessive speech - another characteristic of freeholders. Tracy took
Carter around and introduced him to everyone he hadn't met, and then the group
seated themselves at the various tables in the room, about five or six to a
table. Carter went with Jessica, and found himself with one of the ex-
military men, a young woman named Jerri from Texas and a man named Dan who
had come with her. Almost all the attendees had come in pairs, a few in threes.
Jerri was quite young, Carter guessed just in her mid-twenties. Except for
the ex-military men most were older, at least into their thirties. Jerri's
entrance into the organization it seemed, had been influence of her older half-
brother who, due to her father remarrying after is wife died, was much older.
Eleven years, in fact, she said. When she was in college and found herself
the object of attempted brainwashing by most of her professors, she discussed
it with brother, as she thought of him, and their discussions, against the
backdrop or a disintegrating society, had led to her joining him and their
father in the Freehold. Mark, the half-brother, was a computer science major
and between that and being older, he had missed some of the indoctrination was
was aware of it.
Their freehold was, like almost all, in a rural area. Their family and a dozen or
so others had purchased a large tract of land some distance from Waco. They
were aware of the events at Waco, even though Mark was a child then and Jerri
was not yet born. Their father had told them about it from memory, pointing
out the inaccuracies in the supposedly official accounts. While he considered
the people foolish for drawing attention to themselves, the murderous attack
by the government forces, and the reasons for it, were beyond reprehensible -
they were downright evil.
Thus his own motivations in helping organize the freehold were those that all
of them embraced - remaining unseen until the time to act was at hand. He and
the small group he organized had built a small settlement on the 140 acres of
land they had purchased, first dividing the land into smaller tracts of five
to ten acres, then building houses for themselves. As new members arrived they
were awarded properties under a contract that enabled them to dispense with
any that did not work out. Due to the their careful recruitment it had never
been necessary. There were now about forty houses for the seventy or so
members. Many were older people, mostly men but a few married couples, who
did not have to work. A few others were self-employed at various occupations.
A certain amount of money was provided by the Council, collected from the very
wealthy freeholds, for services provided.
Those services included secure storage of assets, mostly weapons and other
equipment, but also caches of gold and silver. Mark worked with members of
other freeholds in cyberoperations, primarily working at finding ways to
penetrate and if necessary, sabotage government computer operations. They
were at any time aware of such avenues, undiscovered by others and thus not
revealed to potential targets. Operatives like Mark also, working with their
counterparts around the country, provided secure and impenetrable
communications channels.
Jerri, he learned, worked for the government. As in the federal government,
in the federal building in Waco. Working in the IRS office she drew a good
paycheck while spying on them. Not that she would be useful in the short term
as there wasn't much interest in what an IRS office in Waco was doing, but she was
in regular contact with other federal employees from other agencies, and the
amount of useful gossip that she picked up in the normal course of work was
surprising. Or maybe it wasn't - government employees often weren't the
smartest people. In any case Carter found it amusing, although he already
knew that they had spies embedded in various areas of government.
He hoped Jerri was up to the task. She seemed a very unremarkable person,
aside from being very attractive but not much more than many other women. Probably
the main key to not getting caught was in not asking questions, or
unauthorized acts in her work. He suspected that their undercover
operatives were not going to take risks, rather they would be more like
sleeper agents, to act when the time arrived.
Their former military companion, Gordon, was a one-time enlistee in the army.
Just out of school and almost as naive as most young men, he signed up for six
years, figuring a shorter enlistment wasn't going to be long enough to learn
much, and he wanted to get as much paid-for education as possible. While he
became disillusioned very early, he decided to make the best of it. He had
grown up in rural Kentucky and was already an expert shot with a rifle and not
bad with a handgun. He easily got into sniper school and excelled.
Exiting the army, he spent several months trying to figure out what to do with
his life, deciding to acquire a trade that buy groceries reliably. He went to
welding school and soon had a lucrative job, working as much overtime as he
could stand and piling up money in the bank, but unable to kill the uneasy
feeling that he was living a purposeless life.
One of his colleagues was involved in a group that, while they did not know it,
was set up for the purpose of recruiting for the freeholder organization.
They kept the organization clean, never allowing any illegal activities or
doing anything to attract unwanted attention. The most suitable members were
approached with invitations. They remained in contact with the group without
revealing their new affiliation, thus providing access to other potential
resisters without revealing themselves.
Having been through sniper training, Gordon asked Carter about his experience.
"I noticed you did pretty well on the range," he said. "Most people don't
shoot that well at 400. Much long range experience?"
"Not much," Carter replied. "The guys on the SWAT teams of course had sniper
training, but I don't know how much. I had the minimum exposure, which was
silhouettes and a couple hundred yards."
He hadn't told them how he came to stop being a cop, and most people probably
thought he had just quit. Thus far no one had connected him with the affair,
even knowing his name.
"You'd probably be pretty good at it," Gordon said. "I've shot at the
thousand yard ranges, we have a couple of them out in Texas and Arizona where
there's a lot of room."
"I used to wonder if I could shoot someone from cover, if they weren't an
immediate threat. But you don't have to be pointing a gun at me to be a threat.
I can see that now."
"Yeah," Gordon said. "I presumed that in war, killing an enemy soldier would be
no problem no matter how far away he was. But in other cases... I suppose by
the time it came to that I would be ready."
"One thing," Jessica said, "is that the first shots will have been fired by the
enemy before we start. In fact they already have, and still are. By the
time we have to act, there will be no doubt in anyone's mind."
After lunch they formed new groups, and this time he and Jessica shared a
table with an older couple in their forties, a young man from Texas, and
another ex-military, this one an older man named Harry who turned out to be a
retired army master sergeant. He had been in the middle east three times
before he finally tired of the stupidity, he said.
"I lost my brother there," Jessica said. The old soldier looked down at the
table for a few seconds before responding.
"I'm sorry," he said. "That's the really evil part of it, all those young men
dying, and in the end we accomplished nothing. Like Vietnam. And don't think
it won't happen again. Especially now, the mess the government's in now, they
might start something for a distraction.
"I suppose in Vietnam they may have actually thought it was the right thing, but they
sure went about it the wrong way. And in the middle east, we had a president
who may have had good intentions, but his advisers certainly didn't. That's
the advantage the dictators have over us -- they're in charge permanently,
until they die or are deposed. Changing government every few years, sometimes
the balance of power changes in as little as two years, there's no consistency
even if the war was justified."
"Have you had any military experience?" Jessica asked the young Texan, whose
name was Michael.
"No," he said. "I only saw it on television, but it looked the way Harry
described it, like the joke about insanity continuing to do the same thing and
expecting a different result. The scary thing was, this is our government
doing it, stupidity or incompetence or whatever you think it is, on a huge
scale. And these people control our destiny."
The couple were Christi and Sam, from Idaho. Carter knew that part of the
country was a popular destination for 'preppers' and other people who shared
their outlook. Their organization, like many, was small and composed of a
number of families with some relatives and friends. They operated a small
used car lot and garage, and most of the other members either had jobs in
nearby Twin Falls while others were retired.
Jessica asked about their knowledge of the people moving to Idaho in
anticipation of coming troubles. They both laughed.
"That's what most of us are," said Christi. "What was it when we started, Sam?
About twenty or so. We were just some prepper types that got together a group
that had virtually no disagreements on anything except favorite beverages.
Over the past five or six years, we've about doubled in size, almost all from
recent arrivals."
As Carter was beginning to learn, there were a lot of small freeholds like
theirs, and they would be an important part of the resistance if it came to
that. Or almost certainly, when it came. He asked about the situation in
Little Rock.
"It looks to be going the same as usual," said Sam. "They've found what
works, and they'll keep doing it. I suspect that last night they were just
waiting for the professional agitators to show up, with their hired mob."
"No doubt they'll keep it up as long as it works," said Harry, "and these
cities are not going to change on their own. And the worse it gets, they're
guaranteed to continue having these kind of incidents, at an increasing rate."
"It wouldn't take much to shut these down," Michael said, "if you could get some
operatives in there, break it up, and get out without getting caught."
"As in, the police will instantly arrest anyone who interferes with the rioters."
said Sam. "You'd be fighting the 'law' and the rioters."
"Yeah," said Michael. "But you get say, two dozen good men in there, bust it up,
and disappear. Since they'd be coming in from out of town and leaving afterwards, if
they couldn't be identified they won't be caught. The trick is the in and out,
along with not getting killed in the process, or taking down a cop. That
would really ruin it."
"So," Harry said, "you take in a strike force, well trained and well equipped,
go in fast and hard, inflict some casualties, and get out."
"What sort of casualties?" asked Carter. "We're talking non-lethal, right?"
"Of course," Harry replied. "Flash-bangs, pepper spray dispensers, rubber ball
grenades -- stuff to inflict pain. Not only are these people cowards, most
especially the organizers, but once they are hurt their enthusiasm diminishes
quickly. And of course, if a cop accidentally gets hit..."
"So if you did something like that, probably a couple of times would stop it,"
said Carter, "They'd have to try something else. But how much good would it
do in the end?"
"Not much. It might slow the rate at which the feds move in on taking over
local law enforcement," Michael said. "It might be better to let the
deterioration continue. Trouble in the cities means they've got less time to
come after us."
"It might be worthwhile to do it, just to confuse them," Michael said. "We
could blame it on right-wing extremist white supremacists, the usual. Only if
they can't catch any of them..."
"They'll make something up, as usual," said Harry.
"Darrell and I were discussing another angle." said Jessica. "It's likely they'll
sacrifice another cop or two, and that's something that should stop."
"What did you have in mind?" asked Harry.
"What if," Carter asked, "whoever the unlucky cop is, he's charged with some
kind of murder, looking at going to prison for a while in view of past events.
Of course it will take a while to get to the trial, so we'd have plenty of
time to plan. We go get him, if he's willing, and hide him. Kind of like the
witness protection program the government uses."
"There would be the mother of all manhunts," said Harry.
"No doubt," Carter agreed. "But with our network and hiding places, we could
make sure he would never be found."
"We'd have to get clearance from the Council for any operations like these,"
Harry said.
"I believe if they're willing to take any early action, before the big day,"
said Carter, "it might be something like this."
"My father is a member of the Council," said Jessica. "They have a meeting in
a couple of weeks. I'll talk to him and see what he thinks."