“It’s a tunnel,” Ducky said. He held a lantern out in front of him and strained his eyes to see past the very edges of the orange-yellow light thrown by the lamp. Ducky, Pook, Eagles, and Billy were down in the basement of the Yoder house, and after moving old boxes and some broken furniture away from the walls, Ducky had spied a door that was almost hidden. It was a panel that was just not quite flush against the rest of the wall.
“Yep,” Ducky said. “It’s a tunnel, and it’s pretty long.”
“Well, we might as well find out where it leads,” Pook said. He turned to Eagles and smirked.
“Yippee,” Eagles said flatly.
The tunnel led downward and then broke hard to the left after about fifteen meters. The downward angle of the slope increased after that, and for a while they had to hold on to the sides of the walls so that they didn’t slide down the slick, damp floor. Another twenty meters and they came upon a part of the tunnel that had been heavily reinforced. Water dripped down from the ceiling and gathered in a low area off to the side of the walking path.
“We must be under the creek,” Pook said.
“Creeking must being up there,” Eagles repeated from behind Pook.
As they stepped carefully past the wet portion, the tunnel leveled out and started to angle upward again, only at a shallower slope than the section they’d just walked down. The tunnel continued straight and slightly upward for another fifty meters, then took a right turn and began to decline again.
The four men were wondering aloud how far the tunnel ran, when up ahead of them on the right, a door opened and a young Amish man stepped out. He was a tall man, about twenty years of age, and he wasn’t wearing his Amish hat. He didn’t run or try to scramble back through the doorway from whence he’d come. When he saw the TRACE men coming toward him, he just thrust his hands deeply into the pockets of his broadfall pants and cast his gaze downward at his boots.
Ducky had drawn his weapon and was hustling forward, but the rest of the men kept their pistols hidden, not wanting to have an accident or to fire the weapons indiscriminately in such a cramped tunnel. Ducky trained his pistol on the Amish man, and when he reached him, he asked the young man to put his hands up in the air. The man obeyed, and then Ducky gently pushed the man into the room he’d come from.
Inside the room were four other Amish men, all seated at desks. The room was filled with computer equipment, and it was obvious to Pook that they’d found the other Yoders—the rest of the extended family that had been wreaking havoc against both sides in the Transport war.
The men surrendered immediately and were submissive, and answered all of Pook’s questions without equivocation.
“So you’re the Techno-Amish Terrorists?” Pook asked.
The leader of the Amish group smiled. “We prefer to call ourselves the Farm Bureau.”
The Amish men admitted that they were operating on their own, and that they had learned to use the computer equipment from Amos Troyer’s spies and agents in the City back before it was blown to pieces. They’d procured pirated BICE chips, laptop computers, and other equipment, and they’d made contact with Transport too, promising to spy for the government in the Amish Zone. In this way, they’d triangulated themselves, putting themselves in a position to throw both military groups into disarray, and spreading both information and disinformation as needed to keep either side from winning the war. The men insisted that they’d never been involved in any violence, although when Ducky challenged them on that and said that their actions had almost certainly led to violence and death, the men just nodded, without saying anything more on the topic.
“What did you hope to accomplish?” Pook asked the leader of the group.
“Confusion,” the Amish man said. “And we hoped to exhaust both sides, hoping they would both give up and go home… or just quit.”
“What did you have to fear from the rebels?” Pook asked. “All we want is for everyone to be free.”
“Inherent in the power to make men free by force is the power to enslave them again,” the Amish leader said.
“You do realize that Transport is planning to attack and destroy this place—this Amish Zone—don’t you?” Billy asked.
The Amish leader’s head dropped again, and he looked at his boots for a moment before looking up again at Billy. “We have only just realized this.”
“And what do you plan to do about it?” Pook asked.
The Amish man stared into Pook’s eyes. “We will not fight them. But if it comes down to it, we will thwart their plans.”
“How?”
“Come,” the man said. “I’ll show you.”
(37
BARN RAISING
SATURDAY
The day dawned fresh and cool, and it wasn’t long after the sun was up that buggies began appearing at Matthias’s farm from every direction.
A long table was set up with hot coffee, tea, and every form and fashion of muffin, donut, and pastry, along with biscuits and pots of gravy and plates of thick-cut bacon.
From the buggies, ladies in pristine white kapps and long, somewhat formal Amish dresses of almost every color (although all of their capes and aprons were black) began to unload pans of roasted chickens and bowls of salads and fruit.
Most of the men, all wearing black broadfalls and roughspun shirts with suspenders crossing in the back, neatly folded their jackets and handed them to their wives, mothers, or sisters. They then grabbed hot coffee and a light breakfast, and ate it as they headed to their work stations.
Before long, the sounds of construction filled the air in the Amish Zone of New Pennsylvania. Boards were being sawn and then handed up to men who were standing on the already-completed concrete and cinderblock foundation. Within a half hour, the rough-sawn timbers were being fitted together, and the sounds of heavy mallets could be heard as the timbers were assembled and then raised into position using pikes and ropes.
The whole event was a symphony of cooperation and friendship. Young girls and boys carried pitchers of lemonade and filled glasses to the rim anywhere they could find someone willing to have another glass. To the Amish, a work time is simply a fellowship time where work happens to take place too. Although the job continued at a comparatively rapid pace, at any one time—if one were to take a snapshot (which would be frowned upon)—one might have seen groups of two or four or six Amish men leaning on their tools as they talked in an animated way. Breaks were common, but unspoken. Everyone just seemed to be where they were supposed to be when the time came for them to be useful. If a board was needed, the dimensions were shouted down from up top, and someone grabbed a hand saw and cut the board perfectly to fit. The board would then be handed up, and on its journey it might pass through the hands of a dozen men, crawling upon the structure like ants, before it reached its predestined location.
Jedediah Troyer had participated in many barn raisings, and he always loved the experience. Like the coffee-can window pane—still perfect in his mind—the barn raising kept him in touch with his roots. It reminded him of who he was, and what he stood for. It was an anchor… but only a temporary one.
Dawn Beachy couldn’t remember ever seeing a barn raising. She surely must have watched several as a young girl, but if she had, she couldn’t now remember them. For her, this was a very special day. A perfect day. And for a time, she was able to put the other world, and the war that had killed her husband Ben, out of her mind.
She looked up at Jed, up at the very top of the barn, sitting astride the center beam like he was riding a horse. Men were handing up roof rafters and Jed was hammering them into place, one after another.