Chapter 62 -- OKPFCRLFNYCXYBCXZAVGJZSR
The final touches in place, the first use of the new command post, as Carter
called it began. Grant Meredith, who lived downstate near the I-70 corridor
connecting Kansas City and St. Louis, had come up to help. He, along with
some family and friends, made up one of the smallest freeholds, with a handful
of families living on contiguous properties of several acres each.
"OK, folks," Grant said. "Let's see what we have."
He flipped switches of a
control panel on a small table which was flanked by two larger ones, each
holding a number of computers. In front of the tables, several large
television screens were mounted on the wall. Their signal inputs could be
switched between the satellite receivers and the computers.
With all the equipment powered on, they began checking the functionality.
They had been working since early in the morning, and it was well past noon.
Soon all the screens were lit up and network traffic was flowing.
"Anyone not ready to eat?" Jessica asked.
"I thought you'd never ask." Grant grinned. "What's on the menu?"
"Since we're running late, it looks like pizza, whatever else we can find to go
with it. Let's take a look."
Grant followed her and Carter into the kitchen and helped unbox some pizzas and
get them in the oven, opening chips and dip.
"You weren't planning on driving back tonight, were you?" Jessica asked.
"I can stay over if you have a place," Grant replied. "Probably shouldn't be on
the road after it gets dark. Let me give Lisa a call."
Lisa was his Grant's wife,
and he gave the impression that they were a close-knit family, as most
freeholder families were.
"In that case, you want a beer?" she asked.
Grant laughed. "Stop twisting my arm."
She was in a pretty good mood, Carter thought. The events of last few days
had put a cloud over things, one that wasn't likely to go away any time soon,
but she was holding up well.
The food ready, the began setting the table in the dining room and spent a
relaxing hour before returning to the command post.
They set the televisions to the major news channels, and Tommy and James used
their computers to monitor a couple of the most useful of the web sites that
they now called 'resistance channels', watching the chatter as the television
provided the official version of the news.
They watched the coverage of the collapsed transmission tower in Arizona,
briefly turning up the volume to see if there were any developments. It
seemed a reason for the separation of the tower from its foundation had not
yet been found.
"Was that one of ours?" Carter asked.
"Yes, it was," Donald replied. "Our operatives used thermite to melt the bolts
holding the tower legs to the base. It was a big job, a tower like that,
but it worked perfectly. Over the past couple of years we've built a substantial
stockpile of thermite, along with various explosives, incendiaries, and other
things. The thermite we have here will probably be used at some point. As
well as the dynamite. With the runway we can allow pickups from here to be
delivered to anywhere we need them."
"It looks the word is out anyway," said Tommy. "Whether or not the news people
know it. There's chatter about it being either explosives or thermite. The
consensus seems to be sabotage, though."
"That suggests a leak, someone among the investigators, once they figured out
what it was," Donald said. "If it takes the news a while to pick it up, they're
probably withholding for some reason. Anything about railroads in there?"
"I don't see anything yet," Tommy said. "What are we looking for?"
"Depending on how ready they were, we should be seeing news about a blown
railroad bridge, or two or three." Donald said.
"That may be it," Carter said, pointing to the screen on the right. The
picture showed a railroad crossing with a train rolling slowly through it. It
soon changed to another scene, this one apparently away from the urban areas,
with nothing but farmland around.
Donald turned up the volume and they listened. Apparently three railroad
bridges on a railroad running through rural Kansas had collapsed, all within a
distance of over less than a hundred miles, within minutes of each other.
Repairs were expected to take weeks, at a minimum. Nearby residents in the
sparsely populated area reported hearing explosions. Apparently, the
railroad had received a warning beforehand, but while they were able to stop
traffic on that line, there was no time to search for the bombs planted by the
saboteurs.
"They would have had the bombs planted before they warned the railroad," Donald
said. "Once they had time to stop trains on that line they detonated them.
Those small bridges are everywhere along highways and railroads, crossing
small streams and creeks. Most of the smaller ones are made of wood, easy to
destroy. And a gap of fifty or a hundred feet or so, shuts down the railroad
as effectively as blowing a bridge across a big river. It doesn't take as
long to repair, but weeks of having a railroad out of commission causes a lot
of disruption."
"Railroads, electricity, highways - it adds up if you hit enough of them,"
said Jessica. "Do we have the ability to really cripple large cities, even
one like Phoenix?"
"We can cause considerable pain," Donald replied. "The large cities, especially,
are quite fragile. Constant replenishment of food, in particular, is necessary.
Even in suburban and rural areas most people don't have food for more than a
few days, and in the urban areas with concentrated poverty, it's much worse.
And so many of those people are completely reliant on what they need or want
always being there. Once the supply chain is disrupted in a major way, you'll
have riots in the affected cities."
"Giving the government less time to look for us," said Carter. "I take it
this is just a warning."
"We'll look at the responses and try to get an idea of how desperate they are.
These few incidents won't put enough pressure on them to contact us, I suspect.
These people are not the smartest, far from it. Their arrogance will drive
them to continue to work on suppression, long after they should have realized
it isn't working. It's going to be a while."
"Any more surprises in the works?" Carter asked.
"I expect we'll see a few more collapsing power lines, bridges on both rail
and highways, maybe some fires. It's especially dry in California this year,
and they can have forest fires year round. We'll let this simmer for a while
and see. We're especially interested in what the free-lancers do. In the end,
they may do a lot of good work for us."
"Looks like something new here," said Tommy. "Rural Tennessee, looks like some
kind of commune, maybe preppers, religious commune. A little sketchy so far.
James, anything on at Redline?"
"Let me check."
James had quickly adapted to working with Tommy in sifting the
various websites where news travelled under the radar of the corporate media.
Often it was much more current, with the bureaucracy of the commercial channels,
and the necessity of aligning their output with the higher powers.
Grant was looking over their shoulders, occasionally pointing out something.
He had shared some of his resources with them as they worked on the setup, and
had made a few improvements.
"Allentown, Tennessee, see what is." Grant said. James clicked a link, scrolled.
"These guys seem to know their stuff. What have they got?"
"New thread, little over an hour old," James replied. "It's busy. Let's see the newest
entries."
"It looks like Allentown, Tennessee, or nearby. It's not a big place, probably
out in the country." he said after a couple of minutes.
"Hilly," said Tommy, looking at a map of the area.
"Allentown," Donald said. "That's one of the places the guys from Zebra Pass
visited recently. Said it seemed like a pretty solid crew, might be worth
working with. What happened?"
"Some sort of raid," James said. "From the looks of it. Whole bunch of guys
in black, a couple of SWAT vans. Shooting, lots of shooting. That's about it
so far. Someone who goes by El Gato Negro says he has a good source and will
get back soon."
"That's a lot of action for one day," said Carter. "If this is just a teaser,
even we are going to have trouble keeping up."
"Fortunately," Donald said, "we at least will know exactly what's going on from
our end. And we don't have to worry about the independents - we always
counted on them being potential loose cannons. But they can't do us any harm
really, only the enemy."
"Anything else on the official news?" Jessica asked.
"Nothing new," Donald replied. He had been monitoring the news channels. "There's
still nothing on the tower. They may be able to conceal that for a while, but
three rail bridges out simultaneously, on the same line, isn't going to be so
easy. I would guess before the day is out they'll have to admit to what it was."
By the time they decided to retire for the night, no new information on the
tower was available, but the railroad bridges were assumed to be sabotage. As
for the affair in Tennessee, the dominant rumor was that a religious commune
had been assaulted by law enforcement, and not much more. That one would most
likely make the news, Carter thought, wondering what had happened there.