Glen Tate - 299 Days - The Visitors

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.