America's Trust (45 page)

“It’s alright, guys,” said Jack to Frank and Butler. Jack stepped between them and lowered their guns. “They’re on our side.

“Tell my reprobate cousin Victor that the cousin he hates more than life itself is here to see him!”

“I don’t think so! His cousin is the President of the United States of America,” replied the man, one of Victor King’s Patriotic Guards of America.

“You bring that flashlight a little closer and shine it in my face and you’ll see I am President Jack King. Now stop wasting time and tell the sorry ass that I’m here to see him!” he commanded, in a voice that screamed presidential enough that the guard bypassed the flashlight shining and scurried off back to the main camp.

The sound of a plane landing had caused great concern around the camp. The runway was defunct and had been for a long time. The fact that anyone was using it was crazy. The fact they were landing just next to their base and in the dead of night was extremely worrying. Victor had shadowed his guards to the runway. He stood back with his towering right-hand man, Kyle, and a body of men, ready to repel an attack.

He had heard the shouts from below and the voice of his cousin. First and foremost he loved America. He maybe hated his cousin, but that did not mean he hated his office. He walked forward and down towards the aircraft.

“Mr. President,” he acknowledged.

“Victor.”

“How did you know we were here?”

“I knew as soon as the reports from Elk Point came in. It’s an ideal spot for a camp and far enough from Elk Point that the FBI would never find it.”

“You didn’t tell them?” He was surprised.

“I had a lot more on my plate and I figured it was their fault the refinery blew.”

“Damn right, idiots damn near killed us all! Shooting into a refinery.”

Jack nodded. He knew Victor would never have fired into the refinery. He may acquire weapons illegally and immorally but he was highly intelligent and certainly not suicidal.

“So what happened, Mr. President? You fucked up and need our help?” he joked, generating laughter from the rest of his guards.

“Yes,” replied Jack frankly and killing the laughter instantly.

Victor walked closer and looked into the eyes of a cousin he had grown up with, a cousin he had played with in that very location, and saw a deep sadness. He clasped his hand on his shoulder and led him back towards the camp.

“Fort Igloo,” said Jack. “Great place for a camp.”

A former munitions depot, the camp was filled with small igloo shaped solid concrete bunkers. Literally hundreds covered the landscape and offered perfect accommodation for Victor and his group. Access was restricted by one single road that led no further and they were miles from the nearest civilization.

“I knew it had been bought a few years back. I had a sneaking suspicion that it might have been you,” said Jack.

“I always loved when we came up here and spent the summer with Grandpa,” said Victor, reminiscing.

“You know, Victor, I never sold you out. Just the route,” said Jack, getting the large elephant in the room out of the way.

Victor turned to him, genuinely surprised. “Bullshit!” he said after a few seconds.

“Honestly, you even told me you didn’t run the guns yourself,” he reminded him.

Victor paused and considered the revelation that he hadn’t been totally sold down the river by Jack. “But you still sold out.”

“Only because we were losing men due to lack of equipment, Victor. I told you that when you told me what you were doing.”

“Shit. Well you could have helped with my court martial,” he said, beginning to realize some of his hatred may have been misplaced.

“Help you? I nearly lost the presidential race when they discovered what I had done to keep you out of prison, you stupid son of a bitch. You were caught red-handed with a crate of stolen M-16s. It cost us a fortune to keep it out of the papers!”

“Oh,” replied Victor, feeling somewhat embarrassed.

“Fucking ‘oh’,” said Jack. “Fucking
‘oh’
? You’ve not taken my calls for fifteen years, didn’t come to my inauguration or my wife’s funeral. And all you can say is
‘oh’
?!” screamed Jack. The tension of the last week was taking its toll and he swung a right hook that caught Victor perfectly on the chin, sending him crashing to the ground.

Kyle, all six foot nine of him, rushed towards Jack, only to find Frank’s Sig Sauer .357 pistol at the base of his skull. “Don’t even think about it, big boy,” said Frank. Kyle stopped, the nozzle pushing deep into his skin. There was little doubt that Frank was about an ounce of pressure away from shooting him dead.

Victor pulled himself up from the ground and walked towards Jack and gave him a hug.

“Gentlemen, this is my big cousin and a man I hated, maybe wrongly, for far too long,” he announced to his group. “He is also one hard, mean son of a bitch, so keep on his good side.”

On reaching Fort Igloo, Butler and Jack followed Victor into his own concrete igloo. Frank and Kyle stayed outside to protect their bosses.

As Jack and Butler explained what they knew, Victor sat speechless. “Even I didn’t see that coming,” he said as they finished. “The Chinese? The sneaky little…”

“So what do you know?” asked Jack. He knew that Victor would have means of communicating with other groups across the country. This was exactly the kind of scenario they planned for, whether by CB radio, hard line, telegraph wire, or whatever pre-electronic means were available to them, they connected with each other.

“A lot less than you. We’re aware that power and communications are down across the country. Beyond that, very little. Most of the groups we’re in touch with are in their camps like us. We’re hearing stories of stragglers coming through who’ve witnessed lootings and general disorder breaking out. And it’s been less than a day. Our predictions for this scenario, an EMP type strike, aren’t pretty. Days are okay. Most people can last a few days and neighbors will pull together, but when you start stretching that to a week and beyond, it gets nasty. Real nasty, real quick. It may even be irrecoverable. Society is a fine line and ultimately, we’re animals with a survival instinct.”

Jack nodded his head. His thoughts were of a similar timescale.

“So what can the Patriotic Guard of America do for our president?” asked Victor.

“How many men can you muster with decent weaponry?”

“For our president, I’d say about sixty, maybe sixty-five?”

“Christ, there are more than that in this camp,” said Butler, annoyed at the time they had wasted.

Both the president and Victor laughed.

“He means thousand, sixty or sixty-five thousand,” said Jack.

“But we’ll struggle against their tanks,” said Victor.

“Hmm, I think I may have a solution to that, Mr. President, but I’ll need to borrow your plane,” said Butler.

“Of course,” replied Jack.

“Victor, have you got a group in Arizona you can put me in contact with?” asked Butler.

“We’re everywhere.”

“
What about the Army? We need to get word to them and get them involved,” said Jack.

Victor shook his head. “What you’ve said explains a lot of the reports we’ve been getting through in the last couple of hours. American troops and equipment have been surrounding their own bases but their weapons have been pointing towards the bases not outwards.”

“Only they’re not American, they’ll be the Chinese in American uniforms with riot gear visors and Chinese tanks and choppers painted in the American colors and bearing US motifs,” said Butler angrily. “But why are they not just attacking them? They’re effectively defenseless!” he added, posing the question to himself as much as anyone.

“Our best chance is complete surprise,” said Jack. Butler and Victor agreed. Surprise was what would win the day.

“How long do you need to get your men to Washington?”

“If we want to do it without causing attention, five or six days?” said Victor after some thought.

“Okay, six days from now, we take our country back!” said Butler, getting up to leave.

“You might want to let the pilot sleep a little before you leave?” suggested Jack.

“That’s a good point, Mr. President. Have you got any ex-pilots here, Victor?”

“A few,” said Victor uneasily.

“Excellent! Can you send them all to the plane, the more the better!”

Wednesday July 8
^th
2015

He was back where it all had started for him - the microchips. The answer had to be the microchips. His only problem was that he didn’t know one end of a microchip from another. He had asked Victor for pilots but had added that any electronic whiz-kids would come in handy too. The stream of pilots arriving over the previous few days had been impressive, more than he had hoped for and probably far more than they’d have time to equip. What had been even more impressive were the technical geniuses that had been arriving with them.

Butler was embarrassed to admit that he had somewhat stereotyped the prepper/survivalist community. It seemed that even the most intelligent members of society were clever enough to prepare for the worst. When he was forced to think about it, it really wasn’t that surprising. He’d just been watching far too much sensationalist TV where the average prepper was most definitely not an MIT graduate who was working at NASA or some other genius type organization.

The C130 was stripped. Its electronic components were strewn across the cabin floor, in some apparent order but to Butler, it looked like chaos. How they were going to rebuild it, he had no idea, but they assured him it would only take a few hours to get it back together.

An M4S rifle secured from the C130’s hold also sat stripped, its microchips alongside those of the C130’s.

Butler waited. They had called him over to give him an update on their findings. Preliminary findings, they had hastened to add.

“So guys, what did you find?”

The MIT professor spent the next few minutes talking a language that, as far as Butler was concerned, was from another world. Few words made any sense and the sentences that they were used in, even less. The rest of the group hung on every word, nodding enthusiastically.

“Whoa! Please can I have the ‘for dummies’ version over here?”

“My apologies, Mr. Butler,” replied the professor. “That
was
the simple version.”

One of the younger members of the group of geniuses stepped forward. “Put simply, these chips are utterly brilliant in their design and effectiveness. They look like any normal chip and act in exactly the way they should, but are far, far more intelligent. At their core is a tiny receiver. The receiver has been designed to look different on each chip type but is in fact exactly the same component. You’d never know that these different chip types carry the identical component.”

“But why would they go to all that trouble?” asked Butler, confused.

“Redundancy,’ he replied, as though Butler should have known. “Imagine you had a problem with one chip across your equipment. All you need is a second chip that’s not the same as the first chip to back it up. That way, if one goes down you can still do what you have to do. Likewise, in some instances, there’ll be a third and fourth line of redundancy. Also, you never have the same component across your entire range of equipment.”

He noted Butler was struggling slightly.

“Okay, consider I make potato chips. For those, I need potatoes. So I buy potatoes. Imagine I only bought potatoes from one field with one farmer but that field was ravaged by disease. My potatoes would be useless and I couldn’t make any chips. So what would I do?”

“You’d not rely on one farmer and one field, or even one type of potato,” replied Butler, nodding and smiling. “You’d buy from lots of different farmers and fields.”

“Exactly. So if one was bad, the others would cover for them.”

“So we haven’t got that?”

“Well yes, we do,” he replied, “but they each share one particular component which
can
stop them all at once if required.”

Butler nodded. He had been right from the very start and that had been why they had been so desperate to kill him. He could have stopped them before they had even started.

“So how long to change the chips?” he asked.

“Years,” came the response from the whole group.

“And that’s just to create them. You’d then need to strip down every piece of equipment, replace the chips and rebuild them,” added one.

“So the entire equipment of the US forces has been killed by these little bastards?”