299 Days: The Stronghold

Chapter 124 Paras (May 13)

Jeanie woke up feeling lucky. She felt lucky to be in a protected place like Camp Murray with the walls, barbed wire, and troops. The power was always on and the internet always worked. They had medics and a full hospital there. She felt especially lucky to be able to eat all the fabulous food she wanted in the cafeteria, and she had a great meal every time, complete with linen napkins and real silverware. Her boyfriend, Jim, was pretty safe, too, in his National Guard unit. They had security and plenty to eat. Given what she knew from the briefings they were getting, they were very fortunate to be so well taken care of.

Jeanie had been struggling with guilt for the past few days. She was bothered by the guilt of knowing that she had scrumptious meals and was totally safe while the rest of the people were…she couldn’t really finish that sentence in her mind. The regular people were suffering in varying degrees. Some were doing OK, especially in Seattle, at least the nice neighborhoods that didn’t have looting. Others were struggling with periodic empty shelves in the stores and worrying about feeding their kids. Others, especially out in the sticks, were on their own. God only knew how they were doing. The economy was destroyed. No one was working, at least in the private sector, but with the government nationalizing everything there really wasn’t a “private sector” anymore. Crime was out of control.

The second reason why Jeanie had been feeling guilty was that some of her friends were now wanted by the government. Especially Grant Matson. He was on the POI list, as were all the Washington Association of Business guys she knew. She’d been to their houses, drank beer with them, knew their kids. Now those guys were wanted. She used to think like they did, believing in limited government, and now she was a government employee actively working to keep the government in operation. She had become one of “them”: a government insider who had it way better than regular people.

Last night she had thought about the guilt, slept on it, and woke up realizing she was lucky. She was taken care of and she wasn’t about to be arrested. Survival is all about taking care of yourself, she thought. She also thought that she was doing a damned good job of it. It wasn’t her fault that she was in such good shape compared to the rest of the people. Lucky. She was lucky, she kept telling herself.

She checked the headlines on her laptop before the 7:00 a.m. briefing. Two of the stories she worked on were on the news. The first had her quoted as a “high level state official” and was about how the rumors of the federal government sending even more help to Washington State were true. Well, that’s what Jeanie had been told, so she told the reporter it was true. The second story featured video of her explaining how the strict federal anti-fraud measures in place for the FCards worked and how people were cooperating to make sure their neighbors got enough. She doubted that was true, but, hey, this was her job.

She loved being on camera. She was beautiful, energetic, and enthusiastic. And, since she worked for the “Republican” State Auditor Rick Menlow, the Governor’s Office loved to put her on camera. It reinforced their message that the Crisis was “no time for politics” and “we’re all in this together.”

The Democrats running Washington State were already getting ready to let Menlow win the next gubernatorial election. (If they could even administer an election given the Crisis; whether to have the election was still being debated.) The Democrats knew that Menlow would govern exactly as they had and they could still blame everything that went wrong on the Republicans. Perfect. Jeanie knew she, and especially Menlow, were being used, but given the alternative of trying to live outside Camp Murray with the shortages, crime, and fear, it was a good trade.

The briefing started on time, as usual. Camp Murray was full of military people and after about a day, there was a military atmosphere. Things were on time. Everyone said “sir” or “ma’am” to each other. People stood at attention when the Governor walked in the room. That kind of thing.

Menlow came to this briefing. He usually didn’t attend these morning meetings. In fact, Jeanie had no idea what her boss did all day long. She just did her job and assumed he was doing his. Although, there really wasn’t much auditing happening these days. Almost all the staff of the State Auditor’s Office were either laid off or had just stopped showing up to work. Jeanie figured that Menlow was basically being the Governor’s understudy. He would attend the meetings with the Governor, see what she did, and meet people he would be working with when he was the Governor. He probably was meeting with senior National Guard brass to learn the most important part of the job of being Governor during the Crisis: Commander in Chief of the Guard. Of course, almost all the Guard units had been federalized, and therefore were under federal command. But, the public expected the Governor to appear to be tirelessly working to coordinate the relief efforts. So the “Commander in Chief” thing was constantly pitched to the media. They ate it up and faithfully regurgitated it back to the public.

Her boss looked tired, but otherwise OK. He was carrying himself like the next Governor, not the fifth-in-line-of-succession State Auditor. He had his own security detail. He loved it.

“Good morning, Jeanie,” Menlow said to her when he came into the conference room. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”

“How are you, sir?” she asked, finding it odd that she just called her boss “sir” but it seemed to fit in perfectly under the circumstances.

“Fine, but we have lots of work to do,” he said and sat down for his briefing. He seemed to be distant from her. Like he was above her. Not arrogant, but above her. She chalked it up to him being wrapped up in everything; preoccupied, perhaps. Jeanie didn’t care much. She was safe at Camp Murray so her boss could be a little distant to her. Whatever.

Jason started the briefing with a wrap-up of the overnight news. The President would be making a speech tonight about “unity.” This was because several of the southern and mountain western states had announced that they would “opt out” of the federal government. The opt-out didn’t surprise anyone because the southern states had been talking about it for a while. Overnight, the Feds said that even more power outages had hit the Northeast. They had gone down in frequency the past two weeks, but were back. The Feds were getting a handle on it, but the problem wasn’t over. The attacks were still coming from China, but now also out of Russia and Brazil, of all places.

A few high-ranking generals had publicly announced that they fully supported the President and would start to court martial Oath Keepers who did not take a new oath. The new oath military people were being required to swear to was to the President and not to the Constitution like with the old oath. The old oath was the one spelled out in the Constitution and had been used since then.

None of the civilians in the room understood the significance of the new oath. Most people already assumed that the military took some oath to follow the Commander in Chief. The military people in the room understood the significance of the change of the oath. But they didn’t say anything. If they were Oath Keepers they wouldn’t be in this room at Camp Murray, where personnel had been screened for loyalty to the current government—to the President, that is.

“FCards are working pretty well,” Jason said. He reported that almost 50% of the country had one and that riots and looting for food were down dramatically. The corporate mega farms were starting to get food directly to the Feds for distribution. There were plenty of problems still, but given that no one expected it to work at all, the moderate level of success exceeded their expectations. Mediocrity was good enough right now.

Someone asked about food getting out to people, “How is this possible?” A fair question.

“For a few years now, America has been a net importer of food,” Jason said. That stunned Jeanie. America—“amber waves of grain”—that fed the world was now importing more food that it was exporting? How was that possible? “Well, needless to say we’re not exporting anymore food right now. Most of the food imports were luxury foods like fresh fruits and vegetables and there’s not a huge market for those.” Gardening in the U.S. would supply those foods now. “So we’re doing a decent job of channeling all that grain and livestock to ourselves. Luckily for us, almost all of the agricultural production is done by the large companies friendly to us that we have nationalized.” The government could never commandeer millions of small farmers, but getting a couple of giant corporations to play ball was easy.

“One other reason,” Jason said, “we’re feeding people pretty well is that before the Crisis, we wasted an astounding amount of food. Food that wasn’t 100% perfect got tossed. Not anymore. People will eat anything now. Today, our FCard retailers will sell food that used to be routinely tossed.”

Jason didn’t tell the entire truth. Sure, there was a surprising amount of food getting to the stores, especially now that the semis were nationalized and the roads were cleared and patrolled. But still, there was less food, by a long shot, out there. And the food that was getting through were staples, like grains and minimally processed foods. People were getting a sustainable amount of calories, but much less than they were used to. America was on a forced diet.

Jason got serious about the next subject. “This is top secret. One of the problems we’re seeing emerge is the ‘paras.’ That’s short for ‘paramilitaries.’ They’re vigilantes. They kill and kidnap people who they view as corrupt.” He was uncomfortable and said, “This is usually government officials.” He was saying what everyone knew.

“The paras,” Jason said, “are almost always fellow government employees, often police and even some military. Some of the para foot soldiers are civilians, but the paras get their leadership and intelligence from insiders, like police. Many para units started when cops would go ‘off the clock’ to deal with a particular criminal or gang that they weren’t getting approval to arrest.” They weren’t getting approval, Jeanie knew, because the criminals were probably protected by the authorities.

Jason continued. “The number of paras has started to grow and they have started to get bolder and bolder. Now they are also targeting public officials perceived to be corrupt. We’ve been blaming a lot of the killings and disappearances of officials on the right-wing militias, Red Brigades, and even the Oath Keepers. But it’s really the paras. They are everywhere.”

This was scary to Jeanie because she had always felt safe with the walls and troops at Camp Murray keeping people out. But what if they had security threats inside Camp Murray? All those security people with guns. What if one of them decided to start shooting? Suddenly Jeanie felt like a fish in a barrel.

“We obviously are not talking about this,” Jason said as he looked down. He was really concerned about this. “It’s pretty much the worst message we could send. ‘There are well armed and organized assassins in the government who are killing all the corrupt people.’ We’re not exactly highlighting the unfortunate corruption problems we’re seeing out there. The people need to believe the police and military are under control and are there to help them. We don’t want scared people to start thinking these paras are the ‘good guys.’”

Jason smiled and said, “But there’s good news. The loyal police and military are rooting out the paras. They’ve made several arrests. Yesterday, most of the remaining Spokane police department and several deputy sheriffs were arrested by the FBI. It was pretty awful. Cops turning on cops. Some departments are in full civil wars between paras and the cops trying to prosecute them. It’s a mess. Oh, and to further complicate matters, some paras have turned into full-on gangs themselves.”

Jason continued, “In this state, the paras seem most active in eastern Washington and the rural areas. Well, in the rural areas, we don’t exactly have a presence except for intermittent Freedom Corps reports, so we’re assuming the paras are running things there. We see anecdotal evidence of it, like local police running towns and known criminals ending up dead. We don’t know if they’re paras or not. Maybe they’re just exercising emergency powers. We don’t know.”

Jason took a breath and said, “The larger urban areas, Seattle in particular, seem to have good control over their police. These paras obviously create a political problem for us. They would be seen by the public as solving a problem the authorities can’t or, in the case of corruption, won’t. This is why we need to make sure our friends in the media do not report about paras. We don’t even want the term ‘paras’ out there. Remember, assassinations are Red Brigade or Oath Keepers, or, better yet, ‘right-wing militia terrorists.’ You can admit that there are a handful of cops acting like gangs because there are. But do not, do not, let the paras be seen as heroes.”

There was one last thing for the meeting, but at the last minute Jason decided not to tell the media relations people in the conference room. It was that no one was watching the news anymore. He didn’t want the media relations people to think their work was in vain.

When the Crisis first started, news ratings were through the roof. Everyone was glued to the internet, TV, and radio. Now, the numbers of hits on media websites were plummeting. Ratings for TV news and even local radio were way down. They were below, far below, the levels before the Crisis.

Jason was worried that people were figuring out that the government had been lying about everything. People weren’t looking to the broken and corrupt government for solutions. They were looking to themselves. That was what worried him the most.