Chapter 31 -- VMFYANDGXMOKKKNT
Donald joined the group to watch the first use of the new runway.
An aircraft approaching and they
watched as the pilot set it down just short of their position and rolled past
before accelerating again and taking off. After several more touch-and-gos he
slowed to give a thumbs-up to the watchers before taking off for the
final time.
"That should make council meetings easier," Donald said. "And visiting other
freeholds. We've a pretty good network now, and we should be able
to put people where we need them quickly. And none too soon. Things seem to
heating up."
It had been only eight months since the elections had continued the existing
state of affairs, and the ruling party had become even more confident. As
expected, pressure was being applied to every remaining point of resistance to
the new order.
New restrictive gun laws were being passed in several states, with threats of
door-to-door confiscations, along with suggestions of checkpoints on borders with
neighboring states which did not adopt similar laws.
Some states had already prohibited home schooling, along with threats to
monitor private schools with auditors in the classrooms, particularly
religious schools.
A new federal police force was being formed to deal with 'trouble spots', and
was expected to have immunity from prosecution or lawsuits.
"I'm not sure we'll make it through this year without something blowing up,"
Donald said. "At the last Council meeting we had at least a half dozen
credible leads on organizations that are planning reprisals if they become victims,
and our information suggests that some of them are capable of doing some
serious damage. The thing we don't know how good they will be at not getting
caught. If they are, they'll be used for propaganda by the government."
"And justification for repression," said Jessica. "They couldn't wait to make
some new laws after the Oklahoma City affair, and when they passed the Patriot
Act they went wild. It wouldn't be surprising if they have some tricks planned
to justify tightening the screws."
"It's almost certain they will," Donald said.
"Could be difficult to tell who's who," said Carter. "The independent rebels,
the government false flags, and us."
"And that will work to our advantage," Donald said. "And at whatever point
we pitch in, they won't know where to look. In the case of an unknown attacker,
they'll choose a scapegoat, we've seen that before."
"Where do we fit in?" asked James.
"For now mostly in a support role," Donald replied. "My father, like several other
Council members, is quite wealthy. Wealth accumulated over many years, so it's
already accounted for as far as taxes go. To all appearances he's just a wealthy
retired farmer. So we mostly provide financial support. And now that we're a
stop on the air network, we can help out with transporting people and materiel
around.
"Of course, we train and practice with the other freeholds so we're able to
provide security for ourselves here - but as you saw with your extraction, we
can participate in operations like that. And those will probably be important
as time goes by. And of course you know we store a lot of weapons and other
supplies here. But with our small numbers, we're mostly in a support role."
"One of the things about our position," Jessica said, "is that we're practically
invisible. We're just a family farm with a handful of employees, all the
papers in order. No reason to pay attention to us."
"Until the government starts seizing the farms," Carter said. "But that's a
ways off. After they get things really screwed up. Hopefully we succeed in
stopping them before that."
"As long as they don't trace any of our more visible colleagues here," James said.
"Right," Donald replied. "That's why security is so tight. Our official
existence is easy to see - our bank accounts, phones, vehicle registrations -
the unseen part is very tight. Burner phones and prepaid debit cards replaced
regularly, any interaction with other freeholds is clean. You and Tommy took
a charter flight out to Utah instead of a regular commercial flight. We drove
you to the airport and back. The weakest link is the charter, and it would
take a long time to check the records of every small operator."
"I guess for now we're playing a waiting game," said Tommy. "Are we doing any kind
of prep work while we wait, or is it still too early to know, the what and where?"
"Pretty much," Donald replied. "I expect the first sparks to be either the government
doing something over the line, probably provoking a response from some of the more
militant dissidents.
It could take a long time, months even, for the government to respond in such
a case, but it's likely if they don't have a good suspect right away they'll
to the scapegoat route - just whack some outfit to send a message."
"Or," said Jessica, "if they have infiltrated any of these groups, and they
almost certainly have agents inside some of them, they'll do it from the inside.
That's a popular tactic, going way back."
"If they don't give up and quit right away, it could be a protracted conflict,"
Donald said, "that goes on for quite a while before they even know we're here. How much we do
during that time depends on the need."
"While we're waiting," Tommy said, "James and I are going for a ride. There's
a lot of back roads out here to learn. We've been working on that."
"Staying for lunch?" asked Jessica. "It's not long."
"All right," Tommy replied. "You convinced me."
"Couldn't have been hard," Jessica said.
The banter between Jessica most of the times was like that between siblings,
which they were close to being, at least in their feelings. Tommy's guilt
over her brother's death in Afghanistan, even though it was in no way his
fault, had drawn him back to Jessica and her father, and they in turn had
found in him some consolation for their loss, while Tommy found in Donald the
father missing from his life.
After lunch Tommy and James left while Jessica and Carter went with Donald to
his office to watch the news for a while. It had become a regular thing as
they tried to keep their perception of the situation current. At this point
it was relatively stable, if that was the right term. At least there had not
been any major events.
Thus, the usual news dominated. With the exception of the two or three
channels that actually reported news - where they were available, the major
satellite carriers were under pressure to drop one or the other or all of them -
there was not much coverage of crime. Apparently though, it was effectively
beyond any chance of being controlled. The police that were left on the
decimated forces were either unable or unwilling to do anything beyond show up
for work most of the time and try not to be involved in anything controversial.
Jessica thought of the young cop in Cincinnati who said outright that he wasn't
about to risk being killed or prosecuted for doing his job, and wondered how
many more had already done that. Selecting one of the mainstream channels,
they watched a segment about the first lady's appearance at a convention for
an organization for deviants, the name of which they had trouble keeping track of.
Apparently she had made a speech, but it wasn't included in the three minute
segment. A dumpy woman - at least it appeared to be a woman - with hair of
several colors not occurring in nature uttered a number of stock phrases and
then it was on to the next item, wherein Samantha the anchor and Laura the
reporter discussed an appearance by a group of parents opposed to something in
their school's curriculum. A brief shot of a crowd with signs and banners
overlaid that Laura's voice telling the audience that the crowd of religious
protesters had demonstrated for a couple of hours, mostly peacefully, before
leaving. No violence or arrests were reported. Then it was on to sports.
"They won't be mostly peaceful much longer," said Donald. "They won't give
them much more slack, especially opposing the schools. I was a little
surprised they went after the home schoolers so fast, but I guess they can't
tolerate even a few million unindoctrinated subjects. If this goes on long
enough, it will probably be made illegal at the national level. The supreme
court is either going to rubberstamp it or refuse to rule, the latter being more likely."
"I guess a lot of people will flee to free states while they can," said Jessica.
"Texas, New Mexico, Arkansas, but I can't see them holding out much longer.
If they don't get the fix in on elections in those states, the feds will just
come in and use force, won't they?"
"Most likely," Donald replied. "Not military, though. The states have nothing to
fight with - they'll just have federal grand juries indict them and send the
Marshals or whatever forces, maybe something new, to arrest them. Or perhaps
even kill them. I would imagine they have sleepers ready to be activated."
"Sleepers?" Carter asked.
"They've had those for years," Donald said, "or at least foreign actors have.
And the government had them, without the knowledge of Congress or the President,
run by the intelligence agencies. Now they most likely won't bother to hide it."
"How do they work?" asked Carter. "I know the general idea, but do they have a
strategy or technique we can identify?"
"What we suspect," Donald said, "is something like the Reagan affair. We haven't
been able to show that Hinckley was one, but we know he fit a certain profile.
You get a guy who's unstable but can be controlled, keep him out of trouble
but always ready to be set off. Then when he does the deed and gets caught,
which he most likely will, he's written off as being crazy. And you'd have
him doing modestly strange things occasionally to build the image. That's why
some of us thought Hinckley might have been one. We'll probably never know.
"The ones used in the 'mass shootings' aren't really sleepers, they're just
unstable people who are targeted for programming. The proliferation of social
media has made it even easier - both to find them and program them. You get
one in a chat room somewhere usually, find out who he is and where he lives.
If he looks like a good candidate, work on him. Reinforce the paranoia, hate, fear,
whatever drives them. With the fuse lit, wait. In a certain number of cases,
the bomb will go off."
"That's been done?" asked Carter.
"We've got a few cases at ninety-nine plus certainty," Donald replied.
Carter was silent, as was Jessica, for a while.
"It's worse than you think, by the way," Donald said with a humorless smile.
"Arthur - you've met him Jessica - one of the founding members of the Council,
says that the reason there are so many conspiracy theorists is that there are
so many conspiracies. He's right.
"Of course, a sleeper in this case wouldn't have to worry about much - they'd
be used against the opposition, so the government they work for could just
cover for them - fake their death or escape or whatever, change their identity
if necessary, make them disappear."
"So a sleeper might, what?" asked Carter "Target opposition leaders?"
"Probably," Donald replied. "Visible leaders, those with a lot of supporters
or even getting a lot of favorable press, might be publicly killed to discourage others.
And if the killer was believed to be just a crazy person, the person would be
just as dead and his supporters get the message that what they're doing isn't
very healthy, and less likely someone takes his place.
"And since the government has been killing people for years, either quietly or
in staged events like Waco, there's likely to be even less restraint now."
"So these independent groups, it doesn't look like and of them are very
organized of disciplined," said Carter. "And apparently fairly easy for the
government to infiltrate. But I wonder if we can use any of them to our
advantage."
"We'll try as we get opportunities," Donald replied. "It's a matter of watching
them, assessing the opportunities. If we see one about to do something we're
interested in having happen, we can provide help - information, materials,
weapons - but we have to deal with the infiltrators. Fortunately, we have
more ability to detect them or rather, we are disciplined enough to try.
These amateurs are too easily taken by infiltrators because they're operating
on emotion. There's no place for emotion with us."
"Do we have anything in the works?" asked Carter.
"Just what we were discussing. Maybe taking over one or more of these groups
and having them do some of our work. That requires undercover operations,
getting our people in there and in a position to influence them, while leaving
no tracks. So we're working that angle. Beyond that we're mostly waiting and
watching."
"That's the hard part," said Carter, looking over at Jessica. "Waiting for
what you know is coming, not knowing whether you want it to come and get it
over with or try to postpone if as long as possible."
"We're not likely to have a choice," she said.
"The last before the storm," Carter said.
"What's that?" Jessica asked.
"Something... something in a song I heard once. Something about facing the
storm, wishing you had been born in another time, or at least not in the one you're in."
"Don't we though? But we are the ones, and we have to stand up to it."