299 Days: The Visitors

Chapter 162 Choice? What Choice? (July 3)

“Chief, these are friendlies,” Chip said. “Very friendlies.” The Chief nodded and lowered his shotgun, which was pointed at the two men, both of whom looked like military contractors. They both had shemaghs, those Middle Eastern scarves, around their necks and over their mouths. There was an older one, a military looking man in his forties with black hair. There was a younger one, in his late twenties and blonde. One had an AR and the other had an AK.

Chip ran up and hugged the older one with black hair. The man took off his shemagh so his face was fully visible now.

Grant received confirmation. It was Special Forces Ted. Special Forces Ted!

In an instant, lots of things started to make sense to Grant. Why Ted was here, why the guns were in the basement, and what Grant would be doing for the next few months or years. Not that, Grant thought. He didn’t want to do what he knew Ted was there to do. But at the same time, Grant was elated that Ted was there.

Ted had a beard, but it was him. That was his familiar voice. A younger man, who also had a beard, was with him.

Grant knew what this meant. Pierce Point was going to transform from a peaceful Patriot mini-republic to a self-reliant base for guerilla fighters. Ted and his colleague were there to train fighters and launch them into a war. It was the only thing that made sense. Grant and the Team, and who knows who else, were going to be fighters, real fighters. Not a rigged-together group of guards and some amateur police. They would be real fighters with Ted reporting to a higher command and getting orders. A coordinated military force, albeit a guerilla one.

Grant didn’t mind the fighting part, in fact he kind of looked forward to it because he knew it needed to be done. However, he knew Lisa would go ballistic. Grant’s grandpa’s words flashed through his mind: “Never go off to a war that you don’t have to.” Grant remembered how mad his Grandma was at his Grandpa for going off to World War II and being a hero. She was mad for years; Grandpa said they never really were the same close couple they had been. Grant didn’t want that—the love of his life furious at him for years. Probably leaving him.

This is war, the outside thought said. I hate war, but sometimes it is necessary to stop the evil people do.

This is war, Grant repeated to himself. A real war, not some war 10,000 miles away that the professionals fight and everyone else gets to watch on TV. No, this war is a real one that affects everyone in America. Like World War II, the Civil War, and the Revolutionary War.

A total war, Grant thought to himself. A “total war” is when the civilian population is engaged in a war, like the Revolutionary War. A total war was not pushing buttons and having drones blow things up in a Mideast country. Total war meant famine, disease, combat deaths, reprisal killings against civilians right here at home. Just like in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars.

War. That awful, awful thing you pray never happens during your lifetime. If one comes, you don’t get to choose what’s best for your family life. That’s something you get to do in normal times. In peacetime, you can avoid going to war and choose a job that’s best for your family because it’s possible to make choices. But now the choices had been taken away.

This didn’t feel like a war where the headlines screamed “Pearl Harbor Attacked!” No one on TV announced that this war had started. In fact, Grant didn’t know for sure that a war technically was even underway. But he knew the war was on. There was only one reason why two Special Forces soldiers were on his beach wanting to talk to him.

Before the Collapse, Ted had talked to the Team about what he saw was coming. He could see things from the inside, from the military preparations the government was making. Ted predicted, in great detail, a breakdown almost exactly like the one that had occurred. In particular, Ted predicted the military would mostly desert, but that some units would split into Patriot and Loyalist groups. Ted said he would bug out and try to meet up with the Team and do what Green Berets do: recruit, train, supply, coordinate and lead guerilla fighters. Ted made it clear that he hoped this wasn’t necessary.

Grant figured the war would be coming; he just hoped it could go on without him. That was stupid, when he thought about it. But wishful thinking can often take over a person’s thinking, especially in times like these.

Once Grant realized that his wishful, war-avoiding, thinking wouldn’t be happening, he started thinking clearly. He had some very powerful assets that could greatly help in a war, at least out here in this area. He was in a 500 person rural place out at Pierce Point. Thanks in some part to Grant’s organizational and political skills, Pierce Point was functioning smoothly, unlike almost everywhere else. They were feeding themselves and had security. Pierce Point was on a waterway with quick access to everywhere in the Puget Sound south of Seattle, which included Olympia. Access by sea meant going around checkpoints on land. It was a perfect staging area. Grant had figured out the strategic importance of Pierce Point the first time he saw it when he was looking for cabins before the Collapse. The strategic location of Pierce Point was one of the things that drew him to the place.

Now he was wishing he hadn’t been drawn to a strategic location, as it just put him in the thick of it.

You have a choice to make, Grant thought. Fight the war or sit it out?

Choice? What choice? Grant remembered he was a wanted man, a POI. He was relatively safe in Pierce Point because there was no functioning Loyalist government.

In stark contrast, he was dead if he went into Olympia or Frederickson. He was dead if the Loyalists won. They’d kill him in a second if they could. Maybe his family, too.

Grant actually didn’t have a choice. The Patriots had to win or Grant and his family were dead. That was not a “choice.”

But, would his wife see it that way? Probably not. She had been so happy recently when Grant phased off of the Team. Lisa thought there was no need for Grant, a guy in his mid-forties, to go out and play Army with a bunch of shooting buddies.

Lisa, who had grown up in a peaceful upper income suburb, had never seen violence. She knew that bad people existed; she watched the news and saw that. What she didn’t appreciate was that bad people were much closer to her than she realized. They didn’t just live in “those areas.” They lived everywhere. Grant understood this, growing up poor and around lots of violence in his little logging town.

Bad people were even more of a problem when 911 no longer answered the phone and there were no police. Lisa couldn’t imagine that the police wouldn’t instantly be there, like they were in Lisa’s expensive neighborhood. That had never happened in her world; therefore, it couldn’t happen, period. So it seemed to Lisa like an absurd overreaction for Grant to run around with the Team breaking down doors at that meth house. It would be an even more absurd overreaction for him to go off and fight some stupid war.

War? Maybe all of this was an overreaction, Grant thought. A war? In the United States? Really? That doesn’t happen. Maybe Ted doesn’t need him, Grant thought, in another burst of wishful thinking.

Yeah, right. Grant knew exactly why Ted was there. And it involved Grant. Every eighty years or so, a generation in America had to fight a total war. Grant had been born into one of those generations. It was his turn.

Ted looked to Chip and motioned to the Chief and Paul as if to say, “These guys OK?”

Chip said, “They’re cool. You can talk around them.”

Ted looked relived. He turned to Grant, who had about two weeks of beard, and said, “Whoa, the scruff looks good on you. I never shave out in the field.” It sounded weird to hear Ted say “in the field” when he was in America.

Grant was trying to maintain a little distance with Ted because he was still very aware of how pissed Lisa would be about this, but he couldn’t stand it any longer. Finally, he snapped out of it and said, “Hey, man, nice to see you’re alive. Who’s your sidekick?”

“Sap.” Ted didn’t want to use last names around strangers like the Chief and Paul.

“Your guys here,” Ted said pointing toward the two of them, “are pretty good. We cruise in and out of beaches all the time and no one had ever caught us.”

The Chief, who had figured out who the mystery “Green Team” was, said, “United States Coast Guard, retired. Chief Boswain’s Mate. You ‘operators’ got caught by the lil’ ole’ Coast Guard.” The Chief laughed. He was always up for some inter-service jabs.

Paul chimed in, “And a civilian. That’s got to hurt.” Grant had never heard Paul trash talk like that and be so confident. He smiled to himself.

Ted and Sap laughed. “If we’re going to get caught, it’s best to get caught by guys like you,” Ted said. “You know, friendlies who aren’t going to kill us. Even if they are Coast Guard and, God forbid, a civilian.” They all laughed.

It was time to get down to business. Chip said to the Chief and Paul, “Uh, guys, you didn’t see this. Seriously. You didn’t. You can’t tell a single person about this. Don’t think that you can tell ‘just one person’ and it’ll stay a secret. This is highly important shit. People will easily die if this gets out. Do you want these two guys,” Chip said pointing at Ted and Sap, “to get killed?”

“See what?” the Chief said with a smile.

“Just another boring night of beach patrol,” Paul said. He had figured out that these two visitors were resistance leaders of some kind and was extremely excited to be part of this. He wanted to tell people, but realized that if he did, he’d be kicked off the beach patrol and maybe even beat up by these guys. Or worse. They had recently hung two people up at the Grange. Things were very serious right now.

Keeping a secret like this, even when he wanted to tell everyone, was part of the “new Paul.” Ever since the Collapse, he had been changing. There was some sort of change nearly every day, it seemed. He was losing weight, doing important things, like fabricating the metal gate, and with his knowledge of the currents on the inlet, he was a key part of the beach patrol. He was confident and proud. He wasn’t sitting around the house hating his ex-wife and complaining about how unfair the world was. He was intercepting resistance leaders, and the price to keep doing this was that he couldn’t say a word. It was a small price to pay, really. When this is over, Paul thought, I’ll have some great stories to tell. Save them up for then.

The Chief was curious. “How did you guys find this spot and then Chip knew right where you’d be?”

Ted started to give the full answer, but realized that, even though Chip said these two beach guys were cool, there was no need to give away operational details. “Just got lucky, I guess.”

The Chief smiled. He respected that Ted wasn’t going into details. These guys were professionals.

The real answer was that about two months ago, when Chip bugged out to Grant’s cabin after the evacuation of the gun store, he texted Ted the GPS coordinates of the cabin in a simple code they worked out in advance. No explanation, just the coordinates in a numeric code. Ted didn’t need an explanation; he and Chip had talked about it in advance.

Amazingly, civilian GPS was still operating most of the time. GPS was another one of the things the government kept operating out of fear of the repercussions. The government wanted to shut GPS down to prevent guys like Ted and Chip from linking up, but so many civilians had become dependent on it. No one knew how to use maps in America anymore. So many truckers used it that disabling GPS would screw up deliveries of vital supplies. This was the one thing the government was getting done right, and they didn’t want to screw that up just to catch a few tea baggers.

The government tried to monitor the use of GPS, but they couldn’t keep up with the billions of pieces of GPS data generated every day. They were so busy trying to get food to people that they didn’t have any time to spy on citizens. Ted knew this and took the slight risk of using the cabin’s GPS coordinates once. Now that he’d been there in person, he would no longer need the GPS coordinates so he wouldn’t use it again. He had passed the GPS coordinates on to his commander, Lieutenant Colonel Jim Hammond, for safekeeping. Headquarters, or “HQ” as they called it, needed to know where he was operating and where to find a friendly host, like Chip.

Ted, like so many in the military, especially the elite units, was an Oath Keeper, who pledged to keep the oath he took as part of the military to support and defend the Constitution. Oath Keepers and other Patriots formed “State Guards” modeled on the National Guard. A State Guard served the state, not the federal government. State Guards were the Patriot armies.

Ted and his young colleague on the beach, Sergeant Brandon “Sap” Sappington, who was also a former Special Forces soldier, joined the Washington State Guard. They were now serving as Special Forces soldiers for the Patriots in the Washington State Guard.

Special Forces is often misunderstood. The main mission of the Special Forces is not to be commandos, although they could do that. Special Forces’ typical mission was to go in behind enemy lines, make contact with friendly indigenous fighters, and then train and supply them to become guerilla units harassing and sabotaging the enemy. That’s what Ted and Sap were in Pierce Point to do.

Special operations also included Psychological Operations and Civil Affairs units. These were white-collar “nerd units” tucked into the commando-dominated special operations command. PsyOps was propaganda, weakening the enemy’s will to fight, which was a powerful tool, especially in situations like a Collapse where most of the population just wanted to survive and get on with life. The side that could show the population they were better off teaming with that side would have a huge advantage. In a civil war, it would be an astronomical advantage.

Civil affairs were the military governing authorities—the people who went into a devastated area and got the water running again and revived other governmental services. Civil affairs nerds were the ones who started to get the people back on their feet so they could provide their own basic government services again. This, too, was important because it did very little good for the badass soldiers to take an enemy city and then have the population rise up because they had no water, electricity, or food. The badasses’ work was in vain if the nerds didn’t finish the job of keeping the population happy.

Ted had very little regard for the civil affairs nerds back in his old unit. They were largely Loyalists. Almost all of them were in the Reserves or Guard, which wasn’t why Ted didn’t like them. He didn’t like them because, for most of them, their full-time jobs outside of the military were civilian government administrators, like city managers and county public works departments. They worked for the Loyalist authorities and were part of that system.

One of Ted’s missions was to link up with a Patriot civil affairs asset they’d heard about. The asset was at Pierce Point. And Ted knew the guy and trusted him.

Chip wanted to get the Special Forces guys off the beach and out of sight. “Would our guests like a little dinner?” Chip asked. He waved good-bye to the Chief and Paul and motioned for Ted, Sap, and Grant to follow him. Chip started walking back toward Grant’s cabin.

As they walked up the stairs, Ted and Sap were scanning for threats even with their rifles lowered; it was a habit for them. They’d spent thousands of hours walking through woods, beaches, jungles, mountains, deserts, and cities scanning for threats. Chip and Grant were pretty casual about the whole thing. Probably too casual, Ted noticed. Chip and Grant had walked these stairs so many times they didn’t treat them as some place to be cautious. It was home.

Chip took the lead and made sure none of the neighbors saw them. He couldn’t go into Grant’s cabin because the kids or Drew or Eileen were probably there. No one should see the mystery guests who looked so obviously like resistance leaders. Chip ran ahead and checked out the yellow cabin. It looked like the Team was still out. He didn’t have a key for it.

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?”