299 Days IX: The Restoration (19 page)

The worst part was that everyone was telling her what a great hero Grant was. She just nodded, went along, and tried to smile. She was too humiliated to admit that he had left her, but the fact that everyone thought Grant was the greatest thing since sliced bread made the humiliation even worse.

On top of all this was Lisa’s constant worrying that Grant, as much as she hated him, would get killed or wounded or captured. She didn’t really care about him anymore, but she didn’t want her kids to lose their dad. She didn’t want them to lose him again, like when he’d left them in Olympia. Then she’d realize that he voluntarily left them and would get furious at him again.

Security at Pierce Point was going well. Rich and Dan had things under control. In the several months they’d been doing it, security had become a well-oiled machine. The gate guards were still doing a great job. They received several new volunteers to replace the guards who left with the 17th. The new volunteers, however, were either a little too young or too old to keep up with the others. That was okay; it was nice to have extra people on the gate and to rotate in and out to keep the better guards rested. The beach patrol was in full swing. They even shot some people trying to steal oysters, but only after the thieves started shooting first. It was sad: dying over oysters.

Crime was increasing in Pierce Point, but was still manageable. It was mostly shitbags stealing little things when they thought they could get away with it. There were no gangs of any kind in the community. Almost every home was well-armed.

The Crew, the backup people to the Team who did perimeter security for Team raids and handled the dogs, were now doing the SWAT work in Pierce Point. They had trained with the Team, and Rich and Dan were giving them lots of great training. They were pretty good. Pierce Point was lucky to have them.

Food and illness were starting to become a problem, though. The New Year’s Eve battle in Frederickson stopped the FCard food coming in, although it was dwindling down to a low level before the battle. There were no gardens this time of year. Hunting was very poor because most animals were hibernating or tucked away in their sleeping areas. Besides, the area had been heavily hunted for the past few months. Even rabbits, which were considered pests a few months before, were nowhere to be found. Fishing and gathering shellfish was not yielding anywhere near the amount of food it had even a few weeks ago.

One important source of food was the cattle raised by the private farmers. They were called “private farmers” because they grew livestock and crops for sale, instead of donating them to the Grange. At the beginning of the Collapse, most people didn’t resent them for selling for profit because there was an adequate amount of food. But now, in the winter, things were getting tighter and more people started questioning the farmers’ “gouging” on food prices. The private farmers hired some of the community as security but realized they couldn’t hold back a mass invasion of hungry neighbors. Besides, most of the people in Pierce Point were out of anything they could barter for food, so there was no point to trying to sell the food. The private farmers held a meeting with Rich and Dan and decided to donate half of their cattle and even a few old horses to the Grange kitchen.

Luckily, many people in Pierce Point had been storing food in the summer and especially the fall. Smoked salmon became a staple. Canned clams and oysters became the base ingredient of soups and chowders with a rotating supporting cast of canned vegetables. Those who had been “preppers” before the Collapse were using more and more of their beans and rice, and other foundational foods like oatmeal, dried mashed potatoes, and pancake mix. But these supplies were getting low.

A few more people volunteered to work for the community in order to get a meal card. Some of the new volunteers felt a little guilty that they hadn’t thought volunteering for the community was important until after they needed the food. Some of the long-time volunteers resented them, which caused some tension.

Cries to open up Gideon’s semi-trailer of food were getting louder. Grant, the main political force behind the effort to stave off opening the trailer, was gone and no one knew when, or if, he would return. The people who wanted free food were getting bolder and louder. Things weren’t desperate yet, especially with the private farmers donating half their livestock, but everyone could see that it was a matter of time before the semi-trailer needed to be opened up.

Chapter 315

Sheriff Bennington

(January 3)

It was sunrise on the third day of the new year in Frederickson and Sheriff Bennington—he named himself Sheriff and no one seemed to mind—was working hard to bring the county under control. His posse of former law enforcement, the ones who left the force when it was getting corrupt, and their volunteers were doing a nice job of cleaning things up.

The population was incredibly receptive to the new Sheriff. They had suffered enough from Winters and the gangs. They were turning in people left and right. Bennington’s posse was overwhelmed with leads and citizen arrests of cops, FCorps, and the remaining gang members hiding out. Bennington had more volunteers than he could handle. This was, he reminded himself, a good problem to have.

Some citizens in Frederickson weren’t content with just turning in the bad guys. Instead, they became paras and were going after them on their own. The paras didn’t trust the police to prosecute bad guys, which was understandable given the Winters’ administration. The paras were even going after the bad guys’ families. Some of the paras’ brutality was shocking and if it didn’t stop soon, would hurt Bennington’s efforts to win the hearts and minds of the population. He was trying to keep the worst of the para activity under control, but his primary concern was rooting out the Winters people and gangs. In a breakdown of society, there are always regrettable things that happen, but Bennington would have to focus on the paras after Winters’ people were gone. He had to prioritize. Then again, the more of Winters’ people Bennington’s men killed or captured, the less there was for the paras to do, so focusing on Winters’ people indirectly eased the para problem.

In addition to dealing with the remnants of the Winters administration and the paras, Bennington also tried to do whatever he could to support the Patriots. Even though Olympia had been taken, it was only a few miles away. The Patriot ham radio network warned the areas surrounding Olympia to expect fleeing Limas to try to hide out there. Bennington responded by alerting his volunteer gate guards at the city limits, who replaced the corrupt Blue Ribbon Boys, to be on the lookout for people in cars with government license plates or strange stories about why they were suddenly coming to Frederickson. Sure enough, a carload of SWAT officers from the Olympia area rolled up to the Frederickson gate. They were arrested without incident. Bennington, wanting to show the population that his way was better than the para way, made sure to use valuable jail space for the SWAT officers instead of shooting them in the street. Their trials would be the first ones when the courthouse opened back up.

Bennington wanted to do more for the Patriots than just hold Frederickson. He wanted to help the statewide Patriot effort. It was the 17th Irregulars, after all, whose massive presence on New Year’s Eve made it possible for Bennington to clean out Winters and his minions. Bennington had limited resources because he had to focus on the holdouts and paras, but he decided he would do two things to help the Patriots. The first was to care for their wounded scout, and to make sure the two Pierce Point scouts who were killed in action got a proper burial. It was the least he could do.

The second thing he did was announce to his posse that after Frederickson was stabilized, any of them wanting to join the Patriots in Olympia were free to do so and dozens volunteered.

Chapter 316

One Armored Car

(January 3)

Joe Tantori couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer. As the sun was coming up on … he had no idea what day it was … he fell soundly asleep in the passenger seat of one of his company’s armored cars. The past few days had been a blur, but they were the most exciting days of his life.

It started on New Year’s Eve morning when he and about fifty of his men, most of whom were FUSA Marines, boarded a barge at his facility. They had precious cargo on board: one of his armored cars from his pre-Collapse security business. With a Patriot tugboat to pull them and another as an escort, Joe and his men on the barge spent New Year’s Eve puttering down the Puget Sound toward their objective: Olympia.

In the pre-mission briefing by Lt. Cmdr. Dibble, Joe questioned the wisdom of landing a very small force right in the middle of the enemy’s location, the port of Olympia. He didn’t want to sound like a coward, but he had the lives of his men to think about. “Is this a good idea, landing my men right under their noses?” he asked.

“Normally, no,” Dibble said. “But in these circumstances, yes.”

“Okay,” Joe said, “tell me these circumstances so I can tell my men.”

“Sure,” Dibble said. “First of all, Olympia is hollowed out. Our intel shows they have been evacuating their key people for a few weeks. All that are left are some poor National Guard kids. You should hear the radio traffic from them. Those kids are terrified and they know they’re on their own. We expect mass surrenders.”

Joe nodded. He knew how unreliable intel could be, but he had seen with his own eyes the uptick in evacuations by sea on the Puget Sound from areas outside of Seattle into Seattle. The Limas were obviously abandoning their outlying areas and concentrating on Seattle. But the evacuations stopped about a week ago, apparently because they got all their key people into Seattle.

“Second,” Dibble said, “we have assets at the port facility itself. We know for a fact that the port employees are taking New Year’s Eve off. There will literally be no one there when you land.” He smiled. He was very proud that they had this level of information.

“Okay,” Joe said. He could sell this mission to his men. They were, after all, privateers operating under a letter of marque, which meant they could technically decline the mission. But there was no way Joe or his men would miss out on an amphibious landing in the Lima’s capitol city.

Joe was worried about being intercepted on the Puget Sound as they sailed south toward Olympia. They had to get past the Bremerton shipyards, Seattle, and Tacoma, all of which, theoretically, had significant maritime defenses. It was true that these facilities had potent defenses like mines and harbor boats to counter a close-range force directly attacking them, but several months into the Collapse they didn’t have many ships that controlled the open waters. FUSA naval assets needed an enormous amount of spare parts and fuel – and sailors, who were quickly going AWOL or joining the Patriots. So, while the Lima naval presence in the Puget Sound was significant a few months ago when Joe’s men were out patrolling on the outskirts of the sound, it had dropped off significantly by now.

Besides, there wasn’t much for Lima naval assets to do now, anyway. Except for the recent evacuations to Seattle, there was much less ship traffic in general than there had been before the Collapse. Before everything started, ships with goods from all over the world, especially China, clogged the waterways around Seattle. There was no more international trade now that the dollar had officially tanked and was virtually worthless. No country in its right mind would sell things to Americans for dollars and America had almost no reserves of foreign currency to pay for goods with money that other countries would accept. Fuel was very hard to come by, and this put even more of a dent in ship traffic. Finally, the FUSA Navy and Coast Guard were a small fraction of what they used to be. They no longer had the support of the rest of the American military because many states had “opted out” and weren’t supporting FUSA military operations.

The Limas still had a few maritime patrol aircraft. To lower any suspicion if they were spotted from the air, Joe’s men filled the barge with garbage, which worked out well because garbage had been piling up at Joe’s facility and he needed to get rid of it anyway. They put the men in two small shipping containers. The armored car was covered by a large tarp. The barge looked like a load of garbage with some ancillary cargo; perfectly normal to be on the water. They had some fake papers for the load, but the quality of the forgery wasn’t that good. If they were stopped, they’d have to shoot their way out of it. They could easily repel an attack from a patrol boat because the Marines brought some of their anti-tank rockets and they had quite a few .50 machine guns on board. But if a patrol boat or plane radioed in their location, a larger vessel could easily intercept them. They couldn’t outrun a real naval vessel. “Die with your boots on,” Joe said to himself, which was one of his favorite Iron Maiden songs.

As they were about to land in Olympia, Dibble pulled Joe aside on the bridge of the tug and said with a smile, “Hey, you wonder why no one stopped us on the water?”

“Yes, I sure did.”

“We have someone on the inside at the FUSA Coast Guard in Seattle,” Dibble said with a huge grin. “She’s at the Coast Guard Maritime Control Center. She’s one of the radar people that tells ship and planes where to go.”

“Or not go,” Joe said with a huge sigh of relief. The Patriots never could have won without inside help like this, Joe realized.

The Patriot tug radioed the barge to let them know that they were entering Budd Inlet, the final leg of the journey. It was just before midnight on New Year’s and the gunfire and explosions had just started near the capitol. The sounds of war got Joe’s men pumped up and ready to land.