299 Days: The Stronghold (26 page)

Pow also had Grant’s Gerber LMF knife hanging upside down on the webbing of his left shoulder, his non-firing shoulder. Normally, Pow didn’t carry a knife on his kit because he wasn’t trained at knife fighting and didn’t want to pull a knife on someone, not know how to use it, and get it taken away only to be used on him. Grant was the same way, almost never carrying anything other than his Zero Tolerance folding knife. But, Grant had brought his thoroughly badass Gerber LMF along knowing that he needed to “dress up” Pow for an extra badass appearance. It was a little bit of theater. With his sunglasses, 5.11s, and combat boots, Pow looked like a military contractor. Perfect. Let the rumors fly about the professional gun fighters out at Pierce Point. It wasn’t true, of course, but that was a false impression that was good to have out there.

Ryan was using extra kit borrowed from various Team members. Ryan, who was still in Marine shape from his recent return from Afghanistan, looked plenty badass himself. He was wearing his Marine camouflage-pattern pants, a black tee shirt, and boots.

Rich handed a handheld CB to Pow and Ryan. “These are more for show. I don’t think we’ll need them, but I want the Frederickson boys to think we’re all equipped with these.”

“Why not the ham radios?” Ryan asked. “I mean, they’re way more high speed than CBs.”

“Because I don’t want people in town to know that we have hams,” Rich said. “Ham is the way we do our sensitive communications. If they know we have them, they might start trying to listen in on those frequencies. Let them listen in all they want on CB, which is where we say routine things. But also let them think we have tons of handheld CBs out here, which we don’t. This trip is as much about starting the legend of Pierce Point as it is getting medical supplies.”

Cindy came out to the Rich’s truck. She had a clipboard and several garbage bags in which to bring things back.

“Good morning,” Ryan said to her.

“Morning,” she said, nervously. She was scared. She knew town was dangerous. Really dangerous. She was glad she had an extremely well-armed escort, but she was still scared. She really didn’t want to be doing this, but she knew she had to.

Ryan made a facial gesture to Pow and Rich that Cindy needed to be made comfortable. They nodded. They would ease Cindy’s mind.

Cindy got in the cab with Rich. Pow and Ryan got in the back of the truck and opened the rear window to the cab so they could talk to Rich and Cindy. They started down the road toward the gate. The guys began to banter about the weather and all the things they were going to do in a few hours when they came back—safely, of course.

“What are the Grange ladies serving up for lunch?” Ryan asked.

“Dunno, man,” Pow said, “but I hope it’s those deer burgers. And, damn, that potato salad. Hey, Cindy, you had that potato salad?”

She nodded. “It’s good,” she added. She was relaxing a little. She hadn’t slept the night before worrying about going into town. Not just about danger to herself, but about seeing all the horrible things going on in town. She wasn’t sure she was prepared for it.

Just before they got to the gate, Cindy asked, “Did you guys bring money? How are we paying for these?”

Rich pointed toward the back of the truck and said, “We have something much better than money. You’ll see.” Rich realized that they hadn’t told Cindy the plan yet so it was no wonder she was nervous. Just going to town without money would be a scary thing.

“We have some valuables to trade for the medical supplies,” Rich said, pointing toward the back of the truck. “Then we’ll meet someone who will, shall we say, cut the red tape for us and take us to someone who has medical supplies for sale. Don’t worry. We have this thing well planned.”

Cindy relaxed some more. She thought Rich had done plenty of things right in the past and seemed to know what he was doing. She was reassured they had a plan and something to trade for the medical supplies.

Rich got on the CB. “Bennington, leaving now. See you at the rendezvous in about five minutes.” Pow’s and Ryan’s CB’s echoed with this. They were all on the same channel. Of course.

“OK. See you soon,” the other voice, which must be Bennington, said.

Rich’s truck came up to the gate. Ryan made sure the towels were over the packages. The guards seemed puzzled when the guys and Cindy didn’t get out of the truck to be at the guard station. Were they going into town?

“Gotta do some errands,” Rich said with a smile to Dan, who knew the plan. Dan shouted, “Let them through.” The steel-pole gate swung open and out they went. It was scary to be leaving the safety of Pierce Point. The guys were mildly scared, but wouldn’t admit it. Cindy was terrified, but was trying to calm herself down.

They went across the bridge and turned down the road to Frederickson. Rich, trying to ease the tension, looked at his gas gauge and said, “Full tank.” He had been getting fuel donated to him from various neighbors with gallon gas cans of gas siphoned from vehicles they no longer drove. Cindy nodded. One less thing to worry about, she thought.

She finally admitted it to herself. It wasn’t getting shot or even dying that she worried about. It was getting raped. That word was so ugly. She hated to even think it, so she didn’t. She thought about getting caught by a group of men, but then her thinking cut off and went back to the beginning when she got caught. She could never complete the thought about what would happen after getting caught. She couldn’t. She was starting to grip the clipboard hard. Rich could tell she was really scared.

Rich gently put his hand on the clipboard and said, “We’re all scared, but we’ll be fine. I do this kind of thing for a living. I’ve come home every time.” He looked away from the road and directly at her and said, “You have three extremely good gunfighters working for you. We’re way better than any of the punks in town. Seriously. We know what we’re doing. We have a plan and, as you’ll see, help from ‘friends.’ We’re good at this, just like you’re good at nursing.” He wanted to change her thinking from guns to nursing, which was, after all, why they were going into town. Well, the medical supplies were one of the two reasons they were going into town.

About a mile after the Pierce Point gate, Rich slowed down before a gas station. It had a sign up that said, “NO GAS” and looked like it had been looted. There was a police car there.

Cindy was alarmed. The men in the truck had guns that were illegal—especially those Army-looking guns—and now they were letting the police see them?

“Part of the plan,” Rich said with a smile. “You’ll see.” Even though Cindy was about to see what was going on, Rich had secrecy so drilled into him that he didn’t want to tell her even a minute in advance. That made no sense, but it was how he was.

Rich said to the guys in the back, “Rendezvous. Keep your eyes open for more than one guy, though.” Rich didn’t want his cargo to get stolen. He basically trusted Bennington, but he couldn’t be too sure in this climate. In many ways, this rendezvous was the most dangerous part of the trip into town.

Pow and Ryan scanned. There was no one around, unless the bad guys had snipers on the roof of the gas station, and the shot angle wouldn’t work too well if they did. Rich saw that there was apparently only one cop in the car. Good.

He pulled up alongside the police car. The cop waved. Rich said, “Mornin’ John.” Rich tapped on the back window.

Pow and Ryan jumped out and started sweeping the area with their ARs. They looked extremely professional and intimidating. Good.

This startled Bennington, but he realized that they had every right to be taking security precautions. He acted like it was no big deal even though it was jarring.

Rich said to Cindy, “Stay in here. We’ll be back in a minute.” She nodded. She had the feeling that this was actually all well planned. She didn’t know exactly what was going to happen, but she knew it was well planned. That alone was comforting.

Rich got out of his truck and came over to the cop car door and Bennington got out.

Rich shook his hand and smiled. “Nice to see you again, John.”

“Nice to see you, too,” Bennington said.

Rich walked to the back of the truck and lifted up the towels. “Well, John, just like we talked about on the radio last night,” Rich smiled, “it seems that I have two AR-15s, ten magazines, and a full case of 5.56 to ‘turn in’ to the authorities. All those items being illegal and all, I wanted to do my civic duty and get them to you for safekeeping.”

Bennington wasn’t thinking this was as funny as Rich was. Bennington was actually ashamed of what he was doing. It wasn’t funny to Bennington.

Bennington said curtly, “Yeah, thanks.” He opened the AR boxes and looked at the guns. He counted the magazines and tested one of them by pushing in on the follower. It seemed to work. Everything seemed to be in order.

“OK,” Bennington said to Rich, “help me put these in my trunk.” Bennington was looking around, not for attackers, but for anyone to see him doing something so dirty. Taking a bribe. Kind of. And doing his job. Kind of.

Rich started to help Bennington put the cargo into the trunk. Pow and Ryan were scanning the area from cover. Bennington looked over at them and said to Rich, “How many of these kind of guys you got in Pierce Point?”

Rich would be an idiot to give an accurate answer. So, instead, he said, “Oh, several squads.” He intentionally used a military term like “squad,” implying that the fighters at Pierce Point had some military structure.

“What?” Bennington asked, completely surprised.

“Oh, yeah,” Rich said very convincingly, “Ryan, there,” he said pointing at Ryan, “just came back from Afghanistan. A bunch of his Marine buddies were out of work. So a couple weeks ago they came to live with him. I don’t even know how many, but there’s dozens. They talk about a ‘Squad Five’ so I guess there’s five squads and that’s, what, fifty men?” Rich was loving this. He made a mental note to do some CB chatter back when he was at Pierce Point saying things like “Squad Three Leader, this is Squad Five Leader” to make the charade a little more real. They would assign a person to be a specific “squad leader” so there would be a consistent voice associated with that title. There was a good chance he didn’t need to do that because the cops probably weren’t listening to the CBs, but it was easy enough to throw a few of those “squad” references in every once in a while. They would also use fake squad references on the ham frequencies since the FC might be listening to that.

Rich continued, “And another guy living in Pierce Point was a military contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan with Blackwater or whatever they’re called now. He had about a dozen of his contractor buddies come live with him like this guy,” Rich said pointing to Pow, who was scanning the area with his AR from behind the cover of the pickup bed. Bennington remembered seeing a six-foot Korean guy with full kit and some other contractor-looking guys when he came to the gate. So that explained who they were, Bennington thought.

“I guess we’re lucky to have them,” Rich said with a shrug. “All nice young guys. ‘Sir’ and ‘ma’am’ to everyone. They follow orders and, when they’re not guarding or patrolling, they are working hard on gardens and things like that. Real nice to have them,” Rich said matter of factly as he was loading the last box into Bennington’s trunk.

Bennington asked, “So do all these guys have ARs?” It was pretty obvious that Bennington was gathering intelligence, so Rich thought he’d fully load him up with false information to take back to Commissioner Winters and the FC.

Rich hadn’t thought of the answer to the AR question because he was making up the fifty Marines and dozen contractors story.

“Oh, yeah,” Rich said, “they all have personal weapons. ARs, mostly, of varying kinds. Dunno where they got them. Never really asked.” Rich remembered seeing photos of contractors with AKs so he said, “Some of the contractors run AKs. I guess they learned to like them over there.”

Rich added, “You know, John, I never knew how many vets we had out at Pierce Point until they all started volunteering. You saw some of them at the gate. Every branch is represented. And those good ole’ boys and girls out at Pierce Point have guns galore. ARs, AKs, M1As, mini-14s, you name it. We have stacks, literally stacks,” Rich motioned with his hand to show a waist-high stack “of hunting rifles and shotguns. And pistols. It seems like everyone has a pistol. Those guns came out of the woodwork. You know how gun sales have been the past couple of years. Well, people in Pierce Point were the ones buying them off the shelves and now they’re being put to good use. Yep, lots of good ol’ boys and girls out at Pierce Point. We’re much better off than city people. Most everyone is self-reliant, to one degree or another, out here.”

This wasn’t entirely true, but Rich wanted to create the impression with the authorities that Pierce Point was on its own. Not a threat and not needing anything. Just there, but not to be messed with.

Bennington had already determined that if Rich was telling the truth then Pierce Point would take a much larger force than the police had. Taking down Pierce Point would be impossible. But, anticipating his boss Commissioner Witners’ next question, Bennington wanted to find out if there was enough loot in Pierce Point to justify asking for some military help to go get it. So Bennington pointed to an AR in a box and asked Rich, “How many more of these do you got?”

“This is it,” Rich said, knowing that he didn’t want to say there was a treasure chest out at Pierce Point to be taken. Besides, for all Rich knew, these were all the extra ARs Grant had out there. “These were a couple extras one of the hunter guys had. He bought them for an investment in the run up to the Crisis,” Rich was using the politically correct term with Bennington. “So this is it as far as extra ARs go out there.”

Rich realized that he could oversell the (false) capabilities of the Pierce Point “troops.” He didn’t want to create the impression with the authorities that Pierce Point was a powerful and rogue force that would threaten them. He wanted the rumor to be that Pierce Point would be a good trading partner, but not a threat.