by Glen Tate
Gideon saw Chip and wondered what he was doing. Might as well let Gideon in on it, or at least part of it, Chip thought. If you can’t trust the guy guarding your families at night, who can you trust?
Chip came up to Gideon and said, “Hey, you got a key to the yellow cabin?”
“Yeah,” Gideon said. He knew that Chip lived in the Morrell’s cabin so he wondered why Chip needed to get into the yellow cabin, which was loaded with the Team’s extremely valuable guns. Gideon basically trusted Chip, but his job was to protect the cabins on Over Road, so he wasn’t going to let Chip just walk in and potentially take stuff. In times like these, Gideon knew from growing up in a rough part of Philly, people you think are your friends will steal from you.
“Why do you need to get in there?” He asked Chip.
Chip could tell Gideon was no dummy, which was good. Gideon was guarding Chip’s huge stash of guns and ammo hidden in Grant’s basement, so he wanted a smart and inquisitive guard there.
“Well, might was well let you in on a little secret. You were in the Army, right?” Chip asked Gideon.
“Yeah. MP,” Gideon said, referring to the military police.
“Oh, an MP,” Chip said. “Better yet. Well, you know when someone says ‘You never saw something’?”
“Yeah,” Gideon said. He was really curious now. He straightened his posture and gripped the AK-74. Something was up.
“OK, you didn’t see this,” Chip whispered. “I have some guests. People from the outside who are going to help us. But they fly under the radar, know what I mean?”
“No, I don’t know what you mean,” Gideon said. He kind of did, but he was curious.
“Can I trust you, Gideon?” Chip asked.
“I hope so,” Gideon said. “I’m guarding your shit.”
“Fair enough,” Chip said. “These gentlemen are Special Forces. For the Patriots, of course. They’re here to do their training thing.” Chip knew that Gideon would know what that was since he had been in the Army.
Gideon’s eyes got big. “Damn,” he said. “Damn.” Gideon thought for a while. This was great news.
He decided when he was taken in by Pierce Point that, with his family trapped in Philly, he would probably never see them again. He decided to make the best of it, and fight hard to make sure his new home of Pierce Point was as safe as possible. Besides, Gideon got to know some of the Special Forces guys back when he was in the Army. They were cool guys. Gideon wanted to be part of it. A small part, but a part.
“See what?” Gideon said with a smile. “Just crazy Chip doing his usual crazy-ass…whatever it is he does. That’s all I saw.”
“Thank you, sir,” Chip said with a big smile. “If anyone is poking around here, they might be poking around about the green lid boys,” Chip said, referring to the nick name for Green Berets. “We can’t have that.”
“Gotcha,” Gideon said. “We have double valuable cargo in the yellow cabin. Equipment and people.” Gideon got the key to the yellow cabin out of his pocket and gave it to Chip.
“Yep,” Chip said and he took the key. Chip turned and motioned for Grant, Ted, and Sap to follow him to the yellow cabin. They did.
As Ted and Sap walked by the guard shack, Gideon said, “Good evening gentlemen. Who I didn’t see.”
Chip pointed to Ted and Sap and said to Gideon, “They’re me and Grant’s gay lovers.”
“Oh, you guys must be from Seattle,” Gideon said. That got a good laugh. Gideon couldn’t resist one more joke.
“Good luck with your lovin’,” Gideon said to Ted and Sap. “It might be hard. Well, soft. Grant’s wife tells me he has problems down in his drawers. That’s why she comes to me.” More laughs. Gideon was fitting in just fine out there.
Chip unlocked the door to the yellow cabin, Ted and Sap let themselves in and looked around. ARs, AKs, tactical shotguns, cases of ammo, optics, and kit were everywhere. They knew they were in the right place.
“Nice,” Sap said as he looked around at the gear. “You guy aren’t duck hunters, that’s for sure.”
“No, but we’re not SF, either.” Grant said.
That was music to Ted and Sap’s ears. Ted had trained some with Grant and knew he was a level-headed guy, not a “mall ninja.” Mall ninjas were simultaneously overconfident and undertrained, which was the worst combination possible.
“Militias” were even worse. Some of the Patriot SF units would be sent out to make contact with militias. The number of groups calling themselves a “militia” went way up as the Collapse unfolded. Many were good people organized to help the community, but quite a few groups calling themselves a “militia” were total goofballs. Mall ninjas. They knew more about how to fight in video games than in real life. They were worthless.
Ted and other SF units could work with even the greenest civilians and train them, which is what they did all over the world and were now doing in America. But, if the trainees thought they knew it all, there was no use even trying to train them. The mall ninjas would get themselves, and everyone else, killed. Or they’d run at the first sound of gun fire.
Ted realized that he hadn’t fully introduced Sap to Chip and Grant. “Gentlemen, this is Sgt. Brandon Sappenfield. We call him ‘Sap.’” Sap looked a little like Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars movies.
Sap shook Grant’s hand. “Pleased to meet you,” Sap said in a slight upper Midwest accent. Grant thought maybe Minnesota. Sap shook Chip’s hand, too.
“You guys hungry?” Chip asked.
“Yep,” Sap said.
Chip got them some MREs. “Sorry, guys, that’s all we have here. We usually eat at the Grange. Hot meals. Very nice. But you guys can’t just stroll in there.”
“The Grange?” Ted asked.
This was Grant’s moment to shine. He had done a lot to organize functioning governmental services out at Pierce Point. He hadn’t done it all alone, of course. Rich, Dan, and a host of others had made it possible. But Grant was the driving force behind all the services they were developing out there. The fact that they had so many volunteers at the Grange, and could feed them, was a big bragging point for him.
“The Grange is where…” Grant started.
There was a knock at the door.
Gideon’s voice said, “Hey, the Team’s coming and they have some girls. What should I do?”
Chapter 163
Limas
(July 3)
Ted and Sap looked concerned. Who were these people coming to the cabin?
“The Team can come in. The girls can’t,” Grant yelled through the door. “I’ll come out and explain it to them,” he said. Chip motioned to Ted and Sap that things were cool, even though he was wondering if they really were.
Grant ran out the door. He and Gideon went to meet the truck rumbling down the gravel road. Sure enough, there was the Team getting out of Mark’s truck, with some lovely female friends.
Grant had wondered how long it would take for this to happen. The Team was made up of single guys in their mid-twenties. They were the heroes of Pierce Point. Do the math.
Gideon yelled to them, “Hey, sorry, guys, this is a restricted area.” He was harkening back to his MP days using that phrase.
Grant yelled, “Yep. We need your guests to wait in the truck for a minute.”
Scotty yelled back, “What the fuck?” There are few things that get guys more angry at each other, even good friends, than one of them getting in the way of the other’s lovin’.
The young ladies looked confused. They were on their way to the Team’s place for a party and…well, everyone knew how things would end up.
“Pow, I need to see you, man,” Grant said. Pow was not happy about this, either. He got out of the truck and came up to Grant.
“This better be good,” he said softly.
“It is,” Grant whispered back.
When Pow was close and no one else could hear, Grant said, “Ted is here with another SF liaison. They’re in the yellow cabin. We c
an’t have random people, even hot ones, know they’re here. Sorry, but I’m calling operational security over some hoochie time.”
Grant was softening what he was saying with a word like “hoochie,” but he was in command right now. What he said went. People’s lives literally depended on it. There was a time for palling around and this wasn’t it.
Pow’s eyes got big. “Roger that,” he said.
Pow went back to the truck and said, “Sorry, ladies, but we’ll have to get back with you. Something has come up. It’s probably nothing, but it’s a little dangerous.” He might as well reinforce the hero thing with the girls. “We’ll text you in a little while when it probably calms down. But we’ll text for sure, either way.”
The guys were looking at him like he was insane, but they knew that whatever Grant said to Pow was truly something that needed their attention right then. They were disappointed that business had gotten in the way of their only pleasure in quite some time.
The girls were disappointed, too. They started hugging the guys. One of the girls came up to Wes and they hugged like they knew each other. The other girls were staking out which man was theirs with their departing hugs.
The Team, minus Ryan, who was driving the girls back to the Grange, assembled around Grant and Pow.
“Well?” asked Scotty. “What is it?” He was pissed. His girl was smoking hot.
Grant motioned for them to follow him into the yellow cabin. Gideon was watching the truck the whole time to make sure it was gone and not coming back. He wasn’t going to let anyone discover the SF guys.
The Team walked inside, expecting to meet with Grant. They did not expect to see other people in their cabin, especially not Ted.
Bobby was the first to recognize Ted. “Ted? That you? No way!”
Wes just said in his southern drawl, “Well, I’ll be…”
Scotty and Pow said “Oh shit” at the same time. They knew what this meant.
Everyone on the Team was excited. They lived for this. They idolized Ted. They wanted to be like him. They loved learning from a real Green Beret. They wanted to be a part of whatever Ted was a part of. They wanted to go into battle with Ted. It was how they were wired. They were sheepdogs.
They wondered who the guy with Ted was and he introduced them to Sap.
“Where’s Ryan?” Chip asked.
“He’s driving the girls back,” Pow said.
“Girls?” Ted asked. He had not seen the girls so he didn’t know if they were girlfriends. He was hoping that “girls” meant the men’s daughters. He hoped it didn’t mean girlfriends, but he suspected it did. That was always trouble. Fighters with wives or girlfriends. They complicated everything. But it was common for SF to train fighters with families and, in some parts of the world, multiple wives, and even harems. Wives or girlfriends or whatever were nearly always part of the equation.
“Yep,” Bobby said. “We’re pretty hot shit out here,” he said jokingly. “It was finally time to get a little, but…you guys showed up.” He didn’t want to sound like he was whining, especially at Ted, so he added, “Business comes first. But, I gotta say, when business is done, I want to get back to that.”
“You bet,” Grant said. He wanted to keep his guys happy and dangling some girl time in front of them was a good way to do that.
“We’ll get Ted and Sap squared away,” Grant said, “and then you can text your friends later tonight,” Grant said in his dad voice, like he was telling them to do their homework before they could play video games with their friends.
Everyone took a seat. Ted remained standing, watching out the front window to see if anyone else came by. When everyone was seated, he turned around to face the group and give the briefing.
“We can make this initial meeting short,” Ted said. “I’ll go over why we’re here, what we hope to do, and our next steps.”
Ted paused to collect his thoughts. “Why we’re here. That’s easy. To train you guys and your neighbors to be a guerilla unit. You guys know the drill. This is what Sap and I did in the unit.” The Team started realizing that this was real. It was not a day shooting targets at the range. This wasn’t some L.A. Riot kind of thing that would blow over in a few days. They were part of something huge. Once in a lifetime huge. Tell the story to the grandkids huge. Be a hero for generations to come huge.
“Why we are here, specifically?” Ted asked rhetorically. “Chip has been in touch with me. He said you guys had a good set up here. Plus Chip has about half the guns from the store.”
Chip winced. “Uh, I kinda hadn’t mentioned that yet.”
“Oh, sorry,” Ted said.
“No problem,” Chip said. “I just didn’t want people to unnecessarily know.”
“I wondered where all the guns from the store went,” Scotty said.
“Grant’s basement,” Chip said. He told them how many guns, cases of ammo, magazines, optics, and accessories were there. He smiled while telling them.
So did Ted. “How many again?” Ted asked. Sap was taking notes. What a bonanza. Thirty plus ARs, all the fixin’s, and some miscellaneous AKs and shotguns. Plenty of ammo. All pre-positioned in the place they needed to be. This was an SF dream.
“I have a similar number of the same kinds of things,” Ted said. “I took them from the store to my place near Olympia. Between what you guys have and what I have, we can arm sixty or seventy fighters. Throw in the guns and ammo that the residents already have and we’re talking 100 fighters.” Ted smiled. So did Sap.
“We have at least thirty good residents here,” Grant said. “We have a very good guard system.” Grant described the guards and their equipment. He told the story of how they mobilized for the expected attack to get back Gideon’s semi-truck of food. Ted and Sap looked at each other and tried to contain themselves. Sap was writing all of this down.
“Shit,” Sap said. “We came to the right place.”
Ted continued, “Besides me being able to trust you guys and the fact that you have some hardware out here, Chip reported that you guys were squared away. The other reason we picked this place is your strategic location. You’re right on the water so infil and exfil is easy,” he said, meaning infiltrating supplies and other fighters in, and exfiltrating them out to wherever they needed to go. “Plus there are tons of wooded areas to house the training facilities. We can probably do that without anyone seeing a thing. They’ll wonder where all the guards and the Team went, but we’ll deal with that.”
Training indigenous fighters in a civil war was harder than when the whole population was on your side. In a civil war, the good guys and bad guys were mixed together in one place so the enemy could see you. In a traditional war, like WWII, the whole population was united, so it was OK for them to see your activities; not so in a civil war. This was a problem they could overcome, Ted thought. SF trained to work in civil war settings where some portion of the local population was hostile and was actively trying to find the SF-trained fighters and turn them in. Which brought Ted to the topic of popular support out there.
“What’s the political makeup out here?” He asked. Everyone turned to Grant.
“Mostly Undecideds,” Grant said, “but I think we’ll end up having a solid majority of Patriots. There are some Loyalists, but they have a pretty small following. I am working on a map showing the politics of each household.”
Ted and Sap smiled at that.
“We need to kill the Loyalists,” Ted said, in a flat, dead serious tone. That shocked everyone.
“What?” Grant asked.
“Kill them,” Ted said. Sap nodded.
“What, just round up people I think disagree with me and kill them?” Grant asked semi-sarcastically.
“Yes. How else do you do it?” Ted replied.
“Are you kidding?” Grant asked. “Just start killing people we think disagree with us?” He was rethinking the wisdom of working with Ted. This was starting to get weird.
“No,” Ted said, “I’m not kiddin
g.” He looked at Grant to size him up. Was Grant up to this? All the killing that needed to be done? This Grant guy had no idea what war was about.
“Are you the one who’s kidding, Grant?” Ted asked. “Letting Loyalists walk around, see what we’re doing, and call in the Loyalist regular units? Why would I expose my fighters and myself to that risk?” Ted said. He was dead serious and was getting annoyed with Grant. He thought Grant was a fighter, not some pansy ass. Maybe Grant was like a lot of “Patriots”: all talk and no willingness to do what was necessary. Maybe Grant, who was a lawyer after all, thought this Patriot thing was just some debating club.
“Just kill them?” Grant asked. “Without any proof they’re going to turn us in? No evidence?”
“No, not all of them,” Ted said, realizing that he and Grant were miscommunicating. “Only people we know or have a very good idea are trying to kill us.” Ted didn’t want to alienate Grant, who was the apparent leader of the indigenous fighters he was tasked with training. And Grant was a friend. Ted needed to think like the person he was trying to persuade. Grant was a lawyer, so maybe he should approach this from that perspective.
“This isn’t a court case, counselor,” Ted said with a smile to soften the blow of that statement. “The Loyalists aren’t on trial in a court room. This is a war. You knew that there was a war, right?” Ted was serious about that: He wondered if Grant knew there was a war. Maybe he didn’t.
Grant didn’t appreciate that last comment. “No, I didn’t know there was a war, at least a formal one. Is there one?”
“What does it matter if there’s a ‘formal’ war?” Ted asked.
“Because if there’s a formal war then I’m not as concerned about things like killing people without knowing for sure that they’re a threat,” Grant said. “You see, Ted, we’re following the Constitution out here. It’s kind of a big deal.” That was Grant’s sarcastic zinger. “That means treason takes the testimony of two eyewitnesses and it’s done in a real trial, with a jury and everything. It’s in the Constitution,” Grant said.
