Her boss looked tired, but otherwise OK. He was carrying himself like the next Governor, not the fifth-in-line-of-succession State Auditor. He had his own security detail. He loved it.
“Good morning, Jeanie,” Menlow said to her when he came into the conference room. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”
“How are you, sir?” she asked, finding it odd that she just called her boss “sir” but it seemed to fit in perfectly under the circumstances.
“Fine, but we have lots of work to do,” he said and sat down for his briefing. He seemed to be distant from her. Like he was above her. Not arrogant, but above her. She chalked it up to him being wrapped up in everything; preoccupied, perhaps. Jeanie didn’t care much. She was safe at Camp Murray so her boss could be a little distant to her. Whatever.
Jason started the briefing with a wrap-up of the overnight news. The President would be making a speech tonight about “unity.” This was because several of the southern and mountain western states had announced that they would “opt out” of the federal government. The opt-out didn’t surprise anyone because the southern states had been talking about it for a while. Overnight, the Feds said that even more power outages had hit the Northeast. They had gone down in frequency the past two weeks, but were back. The Feds were getting a handle on it, but the problem wasn’t over. The attacks were still coming from China, but now also out of Russia and Brazil, of all places.
A few high-ranking generals had publicly announced that they fully supported the President and would start to court martial Oath Keepers who did not take a new oath. The new oath military people were being required to swear to was to the President and not to the Constitution like with the old oath. The old oath was the one spelled out in the Constitution and had been used since then.
None of the civilians in the room understood the significance of the new oath. Most people already assumed that the military took some oath to follow the Commander in Chief. The military people in the room understood the significance of the change of the oath. But they didn’t say anything. If they were Oath Keepers they wouldn’t be in this room at Camp Murray, where personnel had been screened for loyalty to the current government—to the President, that is.
“FCards are working pretty well,” Jason said. He reported that almost 50% of the country had one and that riots and looting for food were down dramatically. The corporate mega farms were starting to get food directly to the Feds for distribution. There were plenty of problems still, but given that no one expected it to work at all, the moderate level of success exceeded their expectations. Mediocrity was good enough right now.
Someone asked about food getting out to people, “How is this possible?” A fair question.
“For a few years now, America has been a net importer of food,” Jason said. That stunned Jeanie. America—“amber waves of grain”—that fed the world was now importing more food that it was exporting? How was that possible? “Well, needless to say we’re not exporting anymore food right now. Most of the food imports were luxury foods like fresh fruits and vegetables and there’s not a huge market for those.” Gardening in the U.S. would supply those foods now. “So we’re doing a decent job of channeling all that grain and livestock to ourselves. Luckily for us, almost all of the agricultural production is done by the large companies friendly to us that we have nationalized.” The government could never commandeer millions of small farmers, but getting a couple of giant corporations to play ball was easy.
“One other reason,” Jason said, “we’re feeding people pretty well is that before the Crisis, we wasted an astounding amount of food. Food that wasn’t 100% perfect got tossed. Not anymore. People will eat anything now. Today, our FCard retailers will sell food that used to be routinely tossed.”
Jason didn’t tell the entire truth. Sure, there was a surprising amount of food getting to the stores, especially now that the semis were nationalized and the roads were cleared and patrolled. But still, there was less food, by a long shot, out there. And the food that was getting through were staples, like grains and minimally processed foods. People were getting a sustainable amount of calories, but much less than they were used to. America was on a forced diet.
Jason got serious about the next subject. “This is top secret. One of the problems we’re seeing emerge is the ‘paras.’ That’s short for ‘paramilitaries.’ They’re vigilantes. They kill and kidnap people who they view as corrupt.” He was uncomfortable and said, “This is usually government officials.” He was saying what everyone knew.
“The paras,” Jason said, “are almost always fellow government employees, often police and even some military. Some of the para foot soldiers are civilians, but the paras get their leadership and intelligence from insiders, like police. Many para units started when cops would go ‘off the clock’ to deal with a particular criminal or gang that they weren’t getting approval to arrest.” They weren’t getting approval, Jeanie knew, because the criminals were probably protected by the authorities.
Jason continued. “The number of paras has started to grow and they have started to get bolder and bolder. Now they are also targeting public officials perceived to be corrupt. We’ve been blaming a lot of the killings and disappearances of officials on the right-wing militias, Red Brigades, and even the Oath Keepers. But it’s really the paras. They are everywhere.”
This was scary to Jeanie because she had always felt safe with the walls and troops at Camp Murray keeping people out. But what if they had security threats inside Camp Murray? All those security people with guns. What if one of them decided to start shooting? Suddenly Jeanie felt like a fish in a barrel.
“We obviously are not talking about this,” Jason said as he looked down. He was really concerned about this. “It’s pretty much the worst message we could send. ‘There are well armed and organized assassins in the government who are killing all the corrupt people.’ We’re not exactly highlighting the unfortunate corruption problems we’re seeing out there. The people need to believe the police and military are under control and are there to help them. We don’t want scared people to start thinking these paras are the ‘good guys.’”
Jason smiled and said, “But there’s good news. The loyal police and military are rooting out the paras. They’ve made several arrests. Yesterday, most of the remaining Spokane police department and several deputy sheriffs were arrested by the FBI. It was pretty awful. Cops turning on cops. Some departments are in full civil wars between paras and the cops trying to prosecute them. It’s a mess. Oh, and to further complicate matters, some paras have turned into full-on gangs themselves.”
Jason continued, “In this state, the paras seem most active in eastern Washington and the rural areas. Well, in the rural areas, we don’t exactly have a presence except for intermittent Freedom Corps reports, so we’re assuming the paras are running things there. We see anecdotal evidence of it, like local police running towns and known criminals ending up dead. We don’t know if they’re paras or not. Maybe they’re just exercising emergency powers. We don’t know.”