Carlos relayed the question and the speakers crackled back to life with the hushed response.
"There's a couple of those square pop-up canopies close to the RV with camping chairs and plastic tables set up under them. There's a campfire nearby and it’s still burning. A couple of older guys that look like they're on a deer hunting trip are standing around there sipping cups of coffee. I think one of them must be the congressman based on the picture I saw.
“Another of the men is wearing what looks like a military uniform with insignia but he appears to be in his seventies. If I had to call it, I would say he was retired military. I got two other high-and-tights standing with these guys. Looks like they've got on a mix of hunting camo and tactical gear. I know you don’t want commentary but if I had to put money on it, I'd figure these guys for state troopers. They’ve got some kid working as their cook. I would put him at eighteen to twenty years old. Looks like he's heating dishwater now. Doesn't appear to enjoy his work. I’m getting a pissed-off, resentful vibe from him."
Kevin shot a quick glance at Arthur and the man nodded at him. Comments like that were good information. It was good to know there were chinks in the armor that could potentially be exploited.
"Give me a description of that dishwasher," Kevin requested. “Is he armed?”
Carlos relayed the question and waited for the answer.
Brandon’s whispered voice returned again. “Scrawny guy. Bad skin. Cheesy mustache. Dirty T-shirt with some logo I can't read. Oversized jeans. He's got a big-ass knife hanging off his hip but it's nothing I recognize. Reminds me of those cheesy zombie killer knives that kids are obsessed with. I don't see a holster which would make this the only guy I’ve seen with no sidearm."
"Brandon’s getting all this on video?" Arthur asked.
Carlos relayed the question and a second later nodded. “Affirmative.”
"Ask him if there's anything else we need to know," Kevin said. “Anything that sticks out to him.”
Carlos did as he was asked. The whisper came back across the speakers again.
"You'll see this on the video but they have a flagpole attached to the RV, flying the American flag. It kind of rubs me the wrong way considering what they’re trying to do."
Arthur gritted his teeth. It also rubbed him the wrong way that these men would hide behind the flag while trying to illegally seize his property.
Kevin leaned over the desk and picked up a microphone. "Jim Beam Delta, this is Jim Beam Actual. Your sentiments are acknowledged. Pack it up and retreat with the utmost caution. We’ll alert perimeter security to expect you at the reentry point. Safe travels. Jim Beam Actual out."
Robert observed the operation from a position close to the door in the hot, overcrowded communication shack. He was already overheated. He’d taken Arthur’s advice and done an intense workout on the shooting range. He’d dragged and flipped tractor tires, carried railroad ties, run sprints with cinderblocks. None of it helped. If anything, he felt his anxiety had risen to hair-trigger levels. He felt ready to blow but who was he going to blow up on? None of these people were deserving of it.
Maybe what he needed to do was slip through the wire and take it out on the people who were really at fault. Slip inside their campers at night and slit throats like some shadowy assassin. Such action wouldn’t be his call, though. Not to mention that he had no practice at being an assassin, though he’d written about one. Once. He’d probably end up getting killed.
With the group still processing the operation, Robert shoved his way out the door. His frustration was evident and did not go unnoticed by Arthur, Kevin, and some of the others. After a few moments, Sonyea followed him and found him stretched out on a wide wooden bench.
She nudged him with her foot, causing him to remove the hand shading his eyes. When he saw it was her, he moved his feet and sat up.
“What’s the deal?” she asked.
“You know the deal. The deal hasn’t changed since yesterday. Nothing has changed. That’s the problem.”
“People were watching you in there,” Sonyea said. “It was clear what they were thinking. They think you’ve checked out. You’ve moved on. You’re not one of them anymore.”
Robert opened his hands in a gesture that indicated he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do about that. He had a sour expression on his face. “I’m not one of them. This isn’t where I’m supposed to be.”
Sonyea’s mouth tightened. “You know, I’ve only met you in person a couple of times. Obviously we’ve spent more time together in the last few days, we’ve gotten to know each other better, but I have to tell you you’re not what I expected. You come off as being more together in your interviews and public appearances.”
“Those are under ideal conditions.”
“We don’t get to choose our conditions, Robert. Your books preach about flexibility and adaptability but I don’t see any of that here. What I see borders on a tantrum. You’re mad at the world because you’re not getting your way.”
Robert gave her a bitter look. “Sorry if I’m a disappointment. Excuse me if I don’t beg for forgiveness.”
Sonyea shook her head at him. “You just don’t get it, do you?”
“At this moment, I don’t really care about disappointing people. I’m more concerned about the people that aren’t here. Like my wife and kids.”
Sonyea sighed deeply, coming to the conclusion that arguing with Robert was a waste of breath. She rose and walked off, returning to the commo shack. Robert laid back down on the bench and slipped into the familiar murky waters of his thoughts.
3
"Jim Beam Delta is safely behind the wire," Carlos relayed when the forward observer reached his reentry point.
No words were exchanged but there was evident relief that the operation had gone off without a hitch. There was no such thing as a routine operation under the current circumstances. Arthur, Sonyea, and Kevin filed out of the radio hut and walked back across the gravel lot to Arthur's cabin. Arthur lived at his compound full-time since retiring and, as the only permanent resident, he’d built the most elaborate home on the property.
Arthur spotted Robert sitting on the bench. “You want to join us for some breakfast?”
Robert stood and gave a sullen nod, falling in behind the others.
While other investors had cabins, tiny houses, or stayed in the various bunkhouses that were scattered around the facility, Arthur had built his dream home here. It was fully off-grid with solar power. Secondary power was provided by diesel generators but it was unlikely Arthur would be using those very often since he didn’t know when fuel would become available again. There was even a micro hydroelectric generator installed on a spring-fed brook that ran off the mountain all year long.
With his construction background, Arthur did most of the work himself, building everything exactly how he wanted it. He performed the work with the attention to detail that made him successful when he built for a living. Doing the work himself also meant that he could reduce the number of outsiders he had visiting his property. No utility workers, no excavation contractors, no electricians, and no carpenters. The only thing he subbed out was concrete and metal roofing. Both were jobs that required a crew, and most of the time he was a crew of one.
There were times he preferred things that way. The end of the world, when numbers could make the difference between life and death, was not one of those times. That was a time to circle the wagons and join forces with people you trusted.
In the kitchen, Arthur cracked fresh eggs into a stainless mixing bowl and preheated the oven for biscuits. Sonyea was used to cooking for her son Tom, now safely living with Robert’s family outside of Damascus, Virginia. She didn’t take well to sitting on her hands and watching other people cook so she jumped in to help, mixing biscuit dough from scratch. The stove ran off a thousand gallon propane tank sitting a distance from the house. Now that they were under siege, Arthur was glad that the tank was not sitting immediately be
side his home.
Robert and Kevin sat at the table, watching Arthur and Sonyea work their culinary magic. It was one of those moments where, a few months back, both men would have been scrolling through their phones, checking calendars and reading emails. Without those devices, they had nothing to resort to but conversation.
"So, what’s your play now?" Robert asked.
He’d been silent in the communication shack but was curious what Arthur and Kevin were thinking now that they had more information. He was a guest here and felt he had no business asking questions during the stress of that operation. He was not one of Arthur's shareholders. He had his own relatively secure compound in the mountains of Virginia. He imagined that his family was experiencing some level of hardship but should be fairly comfortable when contrasted against the unprepared.
As long as there were no complications, anyway. And as long as they had no unexpected visitors.
Robert could not help but live a prepared lifestyle. It was a hazard of the job, so to speak. The collapse of society was his bread-and-butter. He lived and breathed fictional death and destruction every day, writing stories about apocalyptic events, constantly inventing new ways for the fabric of society to be torn asunder. As much as he understood the fragility of society, he never really expected anything to happen. He was fortunate, though, in that all of his research helped him to see the writing on the wall when the collapse began. He was able to understand where things were headed as soon as the first reports started coming in about the scope of the terror attacks. He knew it was time to batten down the hatches. Time to implement the bug-in plan he’d been perfecting for years.
The perfect bug-in plan didn’t help Robert now. Just outside Arthur’s compound was a United States congressman fully intent on taking Arthur’s compound for himself. Apparently the Honorable Congressman Honaker had picked up on the same early indicators of collapse that Robert had. He’d also known that it was time to batten down the hatches but he went an entirely different route in preparing for hard times. His plan went back to a period in time when Arthur Bridges first showed up on the congressman’s radar.
They’d met years ago when Arthur built a safe room in the congressman’s Washington residence. Congressman Honaker had not paid for the job himself. It was a gift from a “concerned citizen.” Through conversations between the two, the congressman figured out that his safe room contractor, Arthur Bridges, was a serious prepper. The common term at that time, the 1980s, was survivalist, and there were a lot of bad connotations associated with it.
At one time, Arthur considered Congressman Honaker to be his friend. Like many inside the beltway, the congressman had developed a different definition of friendship. Although he may once have been a country boy from the hills, he’d forgotten what real friends meant to country boys. Decades of deal-making and backstabbing changed him. He was more interested in what people could do for him than what he could do for them.
Years later, in the wake of the Y2K bug and 9/11, as prepping became more mainstream, Congressman Honaker recalled his encounter with the survivalist contractor Arthur Bridges. He began to wonder how far Arthur had progressed in his dream of having “a place to get away to if things get bad.” Using, or rather misusing, the powers of his office, the congressman kept tabs on the growth of Arthur’s compound. He developed a bug out plan of his own, based on booting Arthur off his property and taking it for his own friends and family.
It was not exactly working out like he’d planned, though. The residents of Arthur’s compound, needless to say, had no plans to go off quietly and surrender the facility they’d worked so hard to build. Hence the current stand-off.
At the island in his bright, open kitchen Arthur whisked his ingredients together in a stainless steel bowl, dumping in spices and a healthy squirt of Sriracha chili sauce. It was his favorite condiment.
"After I have another cup of coffee and I’ve enjoyed this nice breakfast, I’m going to try to get the good congressman on the radio to see if he's had time to recognize the error of his ways. Maybe he’ll realize that since we’re not rolling over on our bellies like scared pups he should just pack up and go home."
"I think he underestimated what he’d come up against," Kevin said. “I’d bet he wrangled together his hunting buddies, some of his law enforcement contacts, and asked them if they wanted to be part of his plan. I doubt they knew the details of what they were getting into. They probably thought they were just going to roll in here and you would give them what they wanted."
Arthur carefully poured the eggs into a cast-iron skillet heating on the gas range. “Well, you know what I bring to the table in terms of gear. I’ve been seriously preparing for this for probably thirty years. I know some of the equipment you and other folks staying here brought too. All of us came into this expecting the worst. We’ve spent years accumulating good weapons and high-tech gear. Beyond what we’ve talked about and shared openly, I bet we've all got a secret stash of even scarier stuff held back for a rainy day. Honaker and his guys are outclassed here. They have no idea how big a bear they’ve poked."
Robert smacked his hand on the table in frustration. “Then why not make that readily evident to them? A show of power and weapons capability might send them scurrying back down the mountain."
Arthur shook his head. “The problem with taking action like that is that you give way too much information. If we show our cards and allow the congressman to leave, we could be giving him the information he needs to go off and build a force that could eventually take this place down. It’s better to be vague and keep them guessing about what we have. I’d rather imply force than demonstrate it, when the situation allows."
"Then what does that leave you?" Robert continued. "I wouldn’t let those bastards linger out there any longer. If you're that much better trained, that much better equipped, then don't give them any more time to probe your defenses. They’ll eventually find a weakness and someone will get hurt. Put snipers on them. Plant a bomb and blow them all to Kingdom Come. Take out everybody in their head shed and then send in your foot soldiers to mop up the mess."
Arthur stirred his eggs. He looked grim. "That's not the only option. I want to try to talk to him one more time. He’s had time to think about this. He could still do the right thing."
"I just don’t get it," Robert mumbled, unable to let it go. It was his frustration speaking, the desire to clear out everything standing between him and getting home to his family. The comment was ill-timed, and exactly the wrong thing to say among this group of men.
"You sound like a politician," Kevin spat. "That ‘sending in the foot soldiers’ comment is the kind of shit you hear out of rear echelon desk jockeys who have never seen combat. You know what a fobbit is? Look it up some time."
This was not the first time Robert and Kevin had exchanged harsh words. There had been a little tension since their first meeting, when Robert angrily implied that Kevin’s chopper ride into the compound went against the idea of maintaining a low profile. He went on to speculate that it may have even led Congressman Honaker to Arthur’s place, thereby preventing Sonyea and him from getting home. They knew now that wasn't true. They had learned that Congressman Honaker had been tracking Arthur's progress for years as he built and stockpiled the compound.
Robert shrugged. "I know what a fobbit is, but I'm just trying to be realistic here. Times are different. You have to be prepared to make the hard calls."
That was the wrong thing to say to Kevin. He crossed his arms and shook his head with disgust. There was a look in his eyes that said, under different circumstances, he would probably be throwing a punch. “You’re in no position to talk to me about hard calls, buddy. I've made more of them than you'll ever have to make. How many times have you ever sent anyone off knowing they might not come back? And when the worst happened, when they didn’t come back, how many times have you ever had to visit a family and explain to them what happened?”
“Obviously, I’ve not done
any of those things,” Robert said. “Our experiences in life have been different.”
“Damn right you haven’t! When you have done those things, we can talk. Until then, everything that comes out of your mouth is just ignorance and noise.”
"Look, I appreciate your service to our country, Kevin. I would never try to minimize that. But being a contractor, an operator, a fixer, or whatever the hell you really are doesn't make you any better prepared for the collapse than I am. I have access to most of the same gear you can get. I’ve had plenty of shooting and tactical training. Having a military background doesn’t make you any more of a prepper than the next guy."
"And writing about being a badass sure as hell doesn’t make you a badass!" Kevin exploded. “You can take all the same trainings I’ve taken, you can own all the same weapons I have in my safe, and you can be prepared for every survival scenario out there, but that doesn’t prepare you for the consequences of taking a life. There are long-term emotional and psychological consequences. There is responsibility. Only experience prepares you for that, and you’ve got no experience. Right now you just sound like some keyboard warrior. Like some punk on an internet forum with all the answers."
Robert was silent, both surprised at Kevin's fury and embarrassed that he’d let his frustration push him to this point. He hadn’t wanted this to happen. He hadn’t intended to trigger Kevin in this way, but he clearly had. Sonyea slid the biscuits into the oven, wisely choosing to stay out of the argument.
Arthur scrambled his eggs with more vigor than was necessary. He was stewing too. Everyone saw it. Finally, he decided he could no longer stay silent. He pointed the oversized food service spoon at Robert.
“Those men out there, the ones we’re fighting, are still Americans. Honaker, I don’t give a shit about, but I don’t want to kill those other men if I don’t have to. They have families on the way here. What am I condemning those families to if I kill every man out there? To death, that’s what,” he said. “When the lights come back on, when the gas is flowing again, will I have to answer for that? Would killing the congressman be considered self-defense under these circumstances or would it be a war crime? I’m not saying it won’t come to the point where we have to take him out, but you have to think about these things. You have to consider the potential consequences even when there’s no law.”
Compound Fracture Page 2
