299 Days VIII: The War (41 page)

“They’re fine,” he said, “and you actually did me a favor. Now I’m not in Olympia,
which will soon be under the control of people who wouldn’t like the old me.” He smiled.
Getting kidnapped by the Patriots wasn’t his idea, but now he was working for the
side that appeared to be winning.

“Finally,” Dutch said as he pointed to a civilian, “this is Roy Chopping, who used
to work for you at the Attorney General’s Office. He was code-named ‘Trigger’ and
is the guy who arranged for your – shall we say – ‘evacuation’ from Olympia and your
new life here.”

“General, it’s a pleasure,” Roy said, in his thick New York accent and shook Jerry’s
hand. “Glad things turned out well.” Roy truly was glad Jerry decided to work with
the Patriots because he had been ready to kill him. And Roy didn’t like killing people.

“Hey, Jerry,” Dutch said, “they’re just here to tell the story about your evacuation
from Olympia.” He motioned toward the video camera. “We’re going to make a video about
what happened, you know, for historical purposes. We’re documenting lots of stuff
like this for the historians, for after we win.”

Jerry stared at them, trying to process what was going on. Historical purposes?

“Jerry, kids in high school history class will watch this for a couple decades to
come,” Dutch said. “You’ll be famous – in a good way.”

That stirred another slight smile from Jerry. He was a politician, after all.

“Okay,” Jerry said. “Let’s do this.” He paused, “Actually, I’ve never heard the whole
story of what happened, so I’m as curious as anyone else.”

Dutch smiled and directed each of the men to sit around the conference room table.
When they were seated, the cameraman looked through the view finder and gave a thumbs
up. They were ready to film.

“So,” Dutch said, “introduce yourselves and describe how you all came together back
in August.”

After introductions, Paco started to tell the story. “I got the mission from Tom Kirkland,
who was a Patriot Special Forces solider volunteering to run missions from a Lima
base. He pulled me aside and told me that we needed to pick up an HVT,” a high value
target. “He said the HVT was in St. Peter’s Hospital in Olympia, courtesy of a Patriot
operative working within the Attorney General’s Office.” Everyone looked at Roy.

Paco continued, “We had to pick up a team of SOF guys,” meaning Special Operations
Forces, “to do the extraction from the hospital. We had to pick up Terry and his team
at a landing site on the way to the hospital, but the pilot was a Lima so we had to
make him think Terry’s people were Lima contractors. Tom made sure Terry’s people
were at the landing zone.”

Paco paused, “I had to take the helicopter over; I was the co-pilot, so I did.” He
kept it vague because he had to shoot the pilot. “Then we picked up Terry and his
team at a landing site and I took them to the hospital.”

“That’s where my guys took over,” Terry said. “We had the perfect cover: bringing
a wounded helicopter pilot to the hospital. They let us walk right in. We knew right
where to go because of Trigger.”

Roy grinned, “Okay,” he said, “this is the best part of the story.” He paused. “Well,
Jessica gets a lot of the credit. Wanna tell the story?”

She shook her head and motioned for Roy to tell the story.

“You’re too modest,” he said to her. “Jessica worked for Jerry in the AG’s Office
and so did I. She approached me when things were getting bad with her concerns about
what was happening in the office. We became friends. We are similarly minded and we
decided to work together. I had contacts in the Patriot community. She faked an appendicitis
attack and I told General Harvey that she was in the hospital. I took him there to
see her, except he ended up seeing Terry instead.” They all laughed, even Jerry.

(January 1)

It had been light now for several hours. Jeanie Thompson could hear an increasing
amount of gunfire and explosions. The sounds seemed to surge in intensity around 2:00
a.m. and then they tapered off. Now, there were just occasional “pop, pop, pops” and
an occasional “boom.” They seemed far away, but then again, she was in a big, armored
building at Camp Murray so the sounds could be close and were just being muffled by
the building’s thick walls.

Camp Murray—the Emergency Operations Center for the legitimate Washington state government—was
evacuating. Key personnel, most notably the new Governor and his people, had already
left, before all this started. The rumor was that they’d gone to Seattle.

Convoys of progressively less important people were leaving in armored caravans up
I-5 to Seattle. The longer a person had to stay showed how unimportant they were.
Jeanie knew she’d be in the last convoy or get left behind entirely. She knew she
was dead when the teabaggers came through the gates of Camp Murray, but she didn’t
even try to get a spot on a convoy leaving. She couldn’t be trusted because of her
past friendship with some WAB people. That put her on the bottom rung of everything
at Camp Murray. Maybe her past friendships would persuade the Patriots not to kill
her. That was her plan: get captured and drop some names. She knew it wasn’t much
of a plan.

Word came back that the second and third convoys got hit a mile outside of Camp Murray,
right on the grounds of JBLM! The Patriots knew they were coming and had regular military
units ambush them! Oh my God, Jeanie thought. No one was safe.

Wait, Jeanie thought. Maybe her plan of being captured and dropping names was better
than the others’ plan of leaving in a convoy. For the first time since she saw the
ball drop in Times Square on TV a few hours ago, Jeanie smiled. She might be the survivor
here.

That thought ended her gloom. It opened up her mind. All the old gloomy thoughts she’d
been thinking had become a loop of repetition. Now she was thinking fresh. She had
ties to the Patriots and that meant she might actually live through this. What had
been a liability for months was suddenly an asset.

“Hey, Jeanie,” Roger said as he ran up to her “duty station” at the visitors’ barracks.
“Can we talk?” It was Roger, the Emergency Management Department computer guy.

“Sure,” Jeanie said. She was political enough to know exactly what he was going to
say.

“Um, you know some teabaggers,” Roger said. “I mean Patriots, right?”

“I used to,” Jeanie said. She would have been suspicious in the past that they were
trying to find out if she was a spy. But with the complete breakdown of everything,
she knew that this was no loyalty test. This was a plea for help.

“Well, if they come in here,” Roger said, but hesitated. “Will you tell them that
I never believed any of this stuff. Will you?” He was terrified. Both about the Patriots
coming in and about trusting Jeanie with that statement that could get him killed
by the internal security people.

“Sure,” Jeanie said. She had no idea if Roger really was a Patriot or just a guy trying
to save his skin. Either way, he would be useful to Jeanie because he would go back
and tell people that she could get you in good with the Patriots. That would bring
more people to her and, who knows, maybe she could organize them here for a mass surrender.
The more defectors she could deliver to the Patriots, the better the odds of her being
treated better. She hated to think selfishly like that, but this was a matter of life
and death. Hers.

Roger looked around to see if anyone heard what he said. He mouthed “thank you” and
took off. In a few minutes more people were coming to Jeanie and asking her the same
thing. The word was officially out: Jeanie can get you in good with the Patriots.

It never occurred to Jeanie to organize defectors at Camp Murray and then have them
physically attack the Loyalists. That wasn’t her personality. She knew how to help
the Patriots. Just sit there. Don’t try to help the Loyalists. Just sit there and
wait for the Patriots to come. All the people coming to ask her to put in a good word
with the Patriots were doing the same thing. They were just sitting in a chair not
even trying to do their jobs.

“Loyalists”? Jeanie thought. Did I just call my co-workers that? Yes, she realized.
Things had changed in her mind. She was now fighting the Loyalists. In her own way,
not with a gun.

Just sitting there and not doing her job was very easy because there was very little
work to do at Camp Murray. Most of the important people were gone. There were no computers
to run, for example. Those operations had been taken over by computer centers in Seattle.
Jeanie went into the computer room just to get an update on what was going on.

It was silent in there. Silent. All the computers were turned off. The silence was
so strange in that room, which normally had humming noises from all the servers.

People were just sitting in their chairs staring at turned-off screens, silently contemplating
their fate. Rehearsing what they’d say to the Patriots when they came through the
door. The silence and the stares off into space were too much for Jeanie. It meant
that this was really over. She thought hard about that: Camp Murray was over. All
the people, her co-workers, and all the things they did here were over.

Jeanie was glad it was over, but it was hard to accept that it really was. Like an
elderly relative in terrible pain who finally dies. You’re glad the pain is gone,
but it’s hard to believe it’s finally over. It seems so final. Because it is.

(January 1)

The sense of it really being over was also palpable at the Clover Park TDF. Nancy
Ringman couldn’t believe what was happening.

“Pick up!” she screamed into her cell phone. Because she was an important official,
she had the one cell phone provider that was still operating. Kind of. It was supposed
to be secure and up all the time, but, like with lots of other things the government
promised, it didn’t exactly operate as advertised.

Nancy was trying to call Linda, her boss. Linda had been ignoring her for days. Linda
had told Nancy to get rid of all of those prisoners at the Clover Park TDF. Two thousand
of them or whatever. Nancy had done exactly as she was told and all she wanted was
to get the hell out of there. Clover Park was in the JBLM ring, but not even that
was safe anymore. Some important convoys from Camp Murray had been ambushed right
near Clover Park—inside the JBLM ring! Nancy wanted to get to Seattle where everyone
else seemed to be going, but it took connections to get on one of those buses. Nancy
had always had great connections. Always. But now it took even better connections
to get anything done. She needed Linda to make arrangements for her to get to Seattle.
If Linda didn’t pick up … maybe Nancy would have to stay at Clover Park.

That thought started to take over in Nancy’s mind. She might have to stay put.

It was late morning on New Year’s Day. Nancy had been hearing the gunfire and explosions
all night, but had just assumed that she’d be evacuated. She was, after all, the director
of a TDF. She was important.

“Not anymore,” she said out loud.

Okay, so that was it, she decided. She was being abandoned. She realized that spending
hours trying to call a cell phone when there was gunfire and explosions was denial.
She was in a dangerous situation, a very dangerous one, and her usual way of getting
out of them, connections and networking, wasn’t going to work.

She opened a bottle of wine. It was some of the really good stuff she still had there.
She just sat there, paralyzed. It was all so obvious now. She had been used. Linda
had just told her to kill over two thousand helpless people and now Linda wouldn’t
help her get out of this war zone.

Used. She had been used. Nancy started to realize how stupid she had been. She had
enjoyed all the power. She’d loved it, actually. Worshiped it was a more accurate
word. She’d also loved all the goodies, like the kickbacks from the prison food contractors,
including the wine.

She looked at the bottle of wine she was drinking. It was so valuable it was a shame
to even be drinking it. It was probably worth an ounce of silver.

“Thirty pieces of silver,” she said out loud, referring to some guy in the Bible that
she had learned about as a kid. Judas, that was the guy, she remembered. Thirty pieces
of silver. Thirty bottles of wine. Same thing.

Everything was so clear now. She’d done all of this. It was her fault.

She got up and walked slowly down the hall of the empty facility to the window facing
the football field. There was fresh dirt on the football field. And under it were
two thousand people. She had put them there.

She kept thinking about that Judas guy and silver. She tried to remember how that
story ended. Then she realized that Judas killed himself. She started to think about
that. It made sense. She had been used. No one was going to save her. The teabaggers
would be at Clover Park soon and she could only imagine what they’d do to her.
This was a big decision, so she needed another bottle wine. She gulped it down. She
was good and drunk by now.