The Hunger Rebellion

by G F Cusack

  “What do you see, Flo? What do you hear?” Frank asked hurriedly.

  “Zap is working at his terminal. He is saying that the planes are transmitting a signal and he has managed to hack into it. They are very close!”

  Frank trusted Flo’s intelligence but he still took the extra precaution of deploying some of his people to watch out for the scouts.

  “Okay, Flo, it’s time to head to the tunnels.”

  As Frank would be one of the last to enter the tunnels, he had kept her by her side to receive intelligence for as long as possible. Although he was unsure how this mind talking or whatever it was called worked, he assumed that being in a deep tunnel might block the signal.

  Now the benefit of up-to-date intelligence seemed to be outweighed by the imminent risk.

  Flo ignored Frank for a minute to say a silent goodbye to Zap. “Please don’t worry if you can’t communicate with me. I am heading to safety but we may not be able to talk for a while. As soon as I can feel you in my head, we’ll talk again.”

  Zap was preoccupied watching the monitors, while trying to simultaneously communicate with Flo. For a split second, he took his eyes away from the monitor, concentrated and tried to send Flo warm, safe thoughts. He was trying to stop her feeling scared, being in no hurry to repeat the paralysing experience he’d had the last time she was afraid. He was taking a big risk here and his chances of discovery would be even higher if he was suddenly immobilised.

  Flo felt the warmth coming from Zap and said “Thank you” in her head. Taking the hand Frank was offering her, she allowed him to guide her down to the tunnels. He was almost dragging her and she struggled to keep up.

  The tunnels were a hive of activity. Multiple trolleys were being pushed towards the tunnels entrance and everyone was moving with purpose. Few were talking as no one was sure how much noise would travel to the outside. They needn’t have worried, though, as the walls and the outside doors were thick and solid.

  Once he reached the entrance to the tunnels, Frank bellowed upwards, “Okay, this happening.”

  He had left only fifteen fighters upstairs. Soon only two would remain, looking for the planes through binoculars.

  The thirteen stragglers followed Frank down to the tunnels. As the last of them arrived, Frank addressed his three lieutenants. He had already briefed each one but at this final check-in he could communicate the latest intelligence.

  Each had their tasks, with a third of the survivors in their charge. They also had a hierarchy in case Frank hadn’t made it to the tunnels in time. The plan was for them to stagger their convoys to avoid presenting one huge target on the road. This last brief was all the more important as they had no idea what was waiting for them outside of the tunnels.

  “Okay, get among your people and reassure them. Let them know that we expect the bombs imminently and it’s going to get noisy in here. I don’t want anyone panicking once the bombs arrive. A stampede will result in casualties and the plan is to avoid that. Let them know that we have a plan and it will work.”

  With that, the lieutenants went to their task quickly. Although Frank was unsure if the tunnels would withstand a bombardment, he couldn't let his people know that. He had to exude confidence so that they could in turn brief the others with confidence. A panic in this confined space could be fatal.

  Frank walked towards the tunnel exit, firmly grasping Flo’s hand.

  Being close to the exit would increase his own chances of survival but he was more interested in being there so that he was ready for any contingencies. For all he knew, the Company could already be aware of the exit and have troops outside waiting to ambush them.

  Once the bombs fell, there would be nowhere else to go so Frank needed to be at the front to assess the threat in real time.

  Suddenly the earth shook around them. Even though the ceiling above them stayed in place, the air was filled with dust. Some of the fighters had fallen over as the ground was moving, pretty much like earthquakes Frank had experienced in the past. He guessed this was the first bomb: the noise was muffled below ground, but the loud bang had been unmistakeable.

  Five or six further bangs followed. They were so close together, it was hard to tell if they were landing consecutively or if more than one bomb had hit at the same time. It was all over within about five minutes. They had not had time to receive a signal from the two spotters above, who were unlikely to have reached the tunnels in time.

  Unfortunately, conflicts always brought casualties. If these two were the only people to die today, Frank would see that as a huge bonus. Still the safety of all of his fighters was always on his mind, which is why he was respected.

  After the last loud bang, he waited a minute or so and then flew into action.

  “Okay,” he said to the fighters next to the doors. “You all know your positions.”

  Twenty fighters were standing with their weapons aimed at the door. The exit was a choke point and Frank realised that, if the enemy were waiting on the outside of these doors, their chances of survival were severely limited. Whatever came next, he wasn’t prepared to walk out with his hands up and be slaughtered.

  As he nodded, two large men rolled back the huge exit doors. The sunlight that burst through the doorways was broken up by shadows. The exit had been positioned so that anyone escaping would emerge under a canopy of trees. Although the trees’ natural camouflage disguised their position, it could also be an advantage to potential ambushers.

  Frank lowered his arm and the first group of fifteen fighters rushed out and took up positions in a protective arc, surveying their surroundings for potential threats. Nothing happened for a full ten minutes, as Frank had planned. He doubted that any potential Company ambush would have such patience.

  Next he sent out a group of fifty fighters. This group leapfrogged the fighters already there and took up a deeper defensive position.

  The fighters guarding the vehicles had been waiting for Frank’s arrival. The leader of this group had been briefed on where the rebels would exit and the six scouts that he had sent to welcome them were waiting in the trees as lookouts. They had been there for a couple of hours and knew to wait ten minutes after the first group exited before signalling their own people.

  The front man in the reception group gave the agreed raised-fist signal and the lead man of Frank’s group gave the same response back. Once the all clear was confirmed, Frank took charge of the initial fifty fighters outside of the tunnel and led them to the vehicles.

  As soon as he reached the vehicles, Frank began to instil a sense of urgency. He placed Flo in a vehicle with two guards so that she could concentrate and gather new intelligence.

  The rest of the group left the tunnels in staggered groups of thirty. Within an hour, the tunnels were deserted and the first convoy was ready to leave.

  To balance the needs of exiting the compound as quickly as possible and maintaining a strategic spacing between the convoys, Frank had scheduled a tight timetable. Although the situation could all change in an instant, at the moment things were going to plan.

  Frank hoped that the planes would stop circling after an hour or so. They may have initially stayed behind to check that their bombs had hit the buildings but Frank figured that, unlike the biofuel he used in his trucks, aviation fuel for planes would be in short supply. If they were concerned to avoid wasting fuel, they would not want to stay in the area for too long. Although he wasn’t sure how many planes had been deployed, Flo’s intelligence had been that there were only two.

  He assumed that these two planes had other targets to hit and that would also affect their time in the area. Conscious that the Farm wasn’t far away, Frank hoped that his fighters had been able to get there first so that they could provide the planes with a welcoming committee.

  Frank waved to Ramirez in the front vehicle of convoy one. When Ramirez waved back, Frank took this as confirmation that no changes in the plan were needed and the first vehicles left.

  Frank
had been making final checks before he was due to leave and next headed to the jeep where Flo sat.

  “Have you received any further messages?” he asked as soon as he opened the vehicle door. “What is happening?”

  She paused before saying almost under her breath, “They’ve hit the Farm.”

  “What do you mean, they’ve hit the Farm?”

  “I mean that the bombers have hit the Farm. They dropped some kind of bomb that burnt the whole place.”

  “Were my fighters there? Did they kill them? What happened? Tell me.” He realised that he was shaking her and forced himself to stop. It was unlike him to lose his cool. She was not in control of the information, but the possibility that he might have sent half of his fighters into an ambush made him feel sick to his stomach.

  “Zap could only relay what the planes saw. Lots of people were burnt alive but he didn’t know how many survived.” Flo replied before going silent.

  His mind went into overdrive. Maybe that was the Company’s plan all along? Maybe they expected him to send troops to the Farm and were waiting for the troops to arrive before they killed them all. Frank needed to take a minute. He didn’t want to stop, he had to decide fast. The plan had been for them all to head to the Farm but he now needed to change that. He had to contact the first convoy.

  As his vehicle had been set up as a command vehicle, it contained one of the few long-range radios that the rebels possessed. Quickly picking up the handset and pressing the send button, he shouted down the line, “Ramirez, Ramirez, this is Frank, are you listening? Are you listening?” He released the button and waited for a response.

  Almost immediately, a crackly voice came back, ”Yes, Frank, this is Ramirez. What’s wrong?”

  “Stop heading for your current destination. As soon as you can get to cover, stop and wait for my next message,” Frank said. “Do you understand?”

  With the overgrown roads and unkempt wilderness, they were never far away from cover.

  “Yes,” Ramirez replied. “We’ll take cover very soon. What is going on?”

  “The Farm is compromised!” Frank didn’t have time to use a code. “Do you understand? The Farm is compromised.”

  Ramirez replied solemnly, “I understand.”

  Frank wished he had an alternative but they couldn’t stay here and they were running out of options. There and then he decided to trust Flo’s intelligence.

  Ramirez had brought his convoy to a halt and had deployed sentries to the front and back of the convoy. Shortly afterwards, he heard Frank on the radio again. “Ramirez, can you still hear me?”

  “Yes, Frank. What’s the plan?”

  “We are heading north. Do you understand this instruction?”

  After a moment’s reflection, Ramirez replied, “Confirm that we are heading north and not to the Farm?”

  “Yes,” said Frank. “That is correct, do not head to the Farm, I repeat, do not head to the Farm.”

  “What’s up north?”

  “We are in a fluid situation. Wait an hour before you hit the main road north and we will meet you on that road. I will explain the plan in person but keep listening to your radio.”

  “Understood,” Ramirez said. “Safe travels.”

  Grabbing his driver, who was loading stores into the back of the vehicle, and another man nearby, Frank addressed them both together. “I need to go instruct the convoy leaders of the new destination and I need you to man this radio right now. If either of you hears a message on the radio or if this girl tells you she has a message for me, one of you is to come and get me right away. The other must stay with the radio and the girl. Do you understand me?”

  Both men nodded. Recognising the situation was dangerous, they believed that their best chance of survival was to follow Frank’s orders to the letter.

  Frank was thinking on his feet, relieved to have a contingency plan. He knew that this contingency plan wasn’t known to Debs. From Flo’s intelligence the Farm was already lost.

  He felt as though he was abandoning Debs but had to trust that she would do what she could for any survivors under her control. This plan was risky: they had no idea what resources were in the north and, with over three hundred fighters, their current supplies would not last long.

  Frank took it as some consolation that Debs might be able to forage something from the farm and that his convoys wouldn’t be putting further strain on those supplies.

  They only knew of this back-up location because of the intelligence Flo had passed on. She had been told about the crossing point near the border. Supposedly endless resources were on the other side of the border. Any resources of this nature would surely be controlled by the Company but the rebels had always fought the Company for their survival.

  They were not supposed to need a contingency plan. At the compound, their main contingency had always been to regroup and fortify the Farm if the compound fell. They had assumed that a ground attack would struggle to overwhelm such a large area and they had always expected a ground attack. Even an aerial attack of shrapnel bombs was thought to be of little threat to the wide-open space at the Farm.

  Apparently he, like the others in the compound, had been wrong. They hadn’t even known of a type of bomb that could burn large areas of ground. He knew that he could only work with the information he had but he felt that this was no excuse and his mistake could have cost his fighters dearly.

  When he got back to the vehicle, Flo was still sitting motionless. Although they had no choice but to implement this plan, he decided on one last check. “Okay, before we head off, I need to ask you, are you sure that we will be safe if we head north?”

  “He told me, he told me,” Flo repeated. “The Company has a staging post near the border where they store their vehicles and resources to deploy south. Any major attacks down here are staged through there. For some reason, it is not well manned. They feel safe.”

  Frank’s ears pricked up at this information. “Why would they feel safe enough to have only a small number of troops guarding valuable resources?”

  Was another surprise waiting for them in the north? At the moment, his priority was to get his people out of this area and assess things when they were away from the immediate risk.

  He had no doubt that the Company would follow up on its assault by sending someone here to check on their success. If they found that the rebels had escaped, they would deploy ground forces or planes to pursue them and hit them on the road.

  For the time being, Frank could only use his fall-back plan and hope that this was enough.

  30

  The second resistance council meeting

  17 September 2202

  It had been ten days since the first resistance leaders’ meeting. As chair of this next one, Hubert began. “Thank you for coming. I know we’re all busy people. I also know the risk involved in us all being together in one place. If we agree today to proceed with our plan, we are not going to be safe for some time. Before we continue without any predetermined rules, by a show of hands, how many of you are willing to proceed with this plan? I’m not asking you for unconditional support, I just need to know if you are committed.”

  Hubert looked round the table. Karla was the first to raise her hand, followed by Spider, Hook and finally CT. He felt relieved.

  “Okay, so in principle we agree to proceed but practically, what can we do?” CT asked.

  “First,” Karla said, “I have secured a source of intelligence that I think will be very useful. Without revealing my source, I can say that we will have access to information relating to the schedules of the Company troops, their numbers, deployments and the distribution of resources around the Sanctuary.”

  This announcement raised a few eyebrows around the group, but she continued. “Although we all have our own methods of gathering intelligence, I think we can all agree that Spider is the master intelligence coordinator. I therefore propose that Spider and I work closely together to determine what information we need.
I will then source this intelligence. Does that make sense to you, Spider?”

  “I am willing to at least entertain the idea,” Spider replied. Although at this stage the source wasn’t important, he would want to verify any information from it through his own network of spies. Still, if she did have such a source, it would be very valuable to their cause.

  “Now that we have decided to proceed, I need to share one more piece of information,” said Karla. “My source has informed me that five or six hundred rebels are heading north. They may not reach us of course but they are on the other side of the wastelands and getting closer.”

  “Why didn’t you open with this information?” Hubert asked.

  “All I know for sure is that the Company forces destroyed their compound and that they are desperate. I don’t know if they will even reach us but my source is in communication with them and they may be of some use. I am telling you this because we may have some back-up but we can’t count on them.”

  “Okay, for the time being let’s plan as if this band of stray rebels doesn’t exist. If they at some stage are here and we can use them, that will be amazing. For now, we’re on our own. I assume that you will keep us updated with any progress of these rebels?” Hubert asked.

  “I will of course let everyone know if there is any chance that we can get some support from them. To the matter at hand, I believe that if we are going to do this without being discovered, we need to act now. I propose that we set our sights on the upcoming festival. As someone that has prepared for many of them, I have an eye for detail and working out timetables and schedules. So I could put together our timetable, counting down to the festival. Does that sound like an idea?” As Karla looked around, the others nodded.