That night around dark, Bill came into the conference room where Tammy was and closed the door.
“You won’t believe this,” he said with a smile. A smile? What was there to smile about?
Tammy just stared at him. She was drained. Emotionally and mentally drained. She’d never had a day like this before.
“The Feds say that the FC man, who was named Arthur Durman, was acting on his own!” Bill said. “Can you believe it?”
“Huh?” Tammy asked. She did not see that coming.
“Yeah!” Bill said as he clapped his hands. “They say Durman was not authorized to come out here. They say the idea that they would turn off the power was crazy. They told me that the President would be going on TV tomorrow for his daily update to tell the country that rumors of the Feds cutting off power to rural and Southern areas was ‘terrorist’ propaganda.”
That didn’t make any sense to Tammy or Bill. A few days later, Patriot ham radio operators were getting the word out about the Utility Treaty. Then it made sense why the Feds claimed the FC man was acting on his own.
Tammy kept thinking about the Durman, the FC man. If only he would have just waited one day.
Oh well, Tammy later told herself. Durman had no business trying to cut off electricity to tens of thousands of people. He volunteered for that FC job. He got to wear a little helmet and drive a government truck. He had a job, and his FCards had lots of credits. Durman knew exactly what he was doing and he started to do it, anyway.
That night, around midnight, they let Tammy go. Mark took her home, and they didn’t talk at all. Tammy was all talked out. Mark’s presence and the silence comforted her.
Everyone had heard about this at the Pierce Point gate. They were quick to ask her how she was doing and told her that no strangers would get into Pierce Point. They were on the lookout for the Red Brigade. Tammy felt bad fooling them, too, but it had to be done. It was for their own good. If the government showed up with a tank and said they wanted to arrest Tammy, the guards would have to fight, and die, or turn her over. By lying, she was allowing them to avoid that.
Mark and Tammy came down Over Road. They were almost home. Gideon came out of the guard shack with his AK pointed in the general direction of the truck. He was making sure no one came through who might be after Tammy.
“Glad to see that you’re home safe and sound,” Gideon said. “Have a good night. You’re safe here, ma’am.”
Tammy started to cry. She was safe there. Thank God. But the real crying came when she walked into the house.
“Grandma!” Missy yelled. “You’re home!”
Tammy grabbed her granddaughter and hugged her so hard she thought she would snap the little girl in half.
Tammy cried and cried.
“Are you OK, Grandma?” Missy asked.
Tammy looked at Missy and said, “Oh, yeah, Grandma is OK.”
Tammy paused and thought, Grandma did a bad thing.
Chapter 171
Utility Treaty
Indeed, Forks, Washington had been one of about one hundred remote little towns to be the first test of Operation Cracker Corral. “Cracker” was a pejorative term for white trash. “Corral” was, of course, a cowboy term meaning to force animals from one area to another.
The idea was to force people in rural Patriot areas to move to suburban and urban Loyalist areas, which would concentrate resources in Loyalist areas and break the Patriots still left in Patriot-held areas. To accomplish this, the goal of Operation Cracker Corral was to deprive Patriot areas—primarily rural areas, the South, and mountain West states—of much-needed electricity. The people staying in the Patriot areas would be broken and powerless. Good. That was the plan.
The government was smart enough not to do this all at once. Suddenly shutting off power to half the country would cause an uprising and flood the Loyalist areas with too many hungry mouths at once, so the government decided to slowly shut off the power, beginning with the most isolated areas first. It would not seem odd to people in the shut-off areas because there had been so many periodic outages since May Day. Those people would not suddenly jump on their ham radios and tell the rest of the country what was happening. People in the shut-off areas would take a while to realize it. Slowly, they would either move to Loyalist areas, where they were easier to control, or they would…die.
Of course, the government planners who came up with this didn’t dwell on the part about dying. They actually thought they were doing people a favor. All the government services were in the cities. People should want to be there. Government was fabulous and helped people. The people just needed a nudge to get them to the places where they could take advantage of all the wonderful things government was doing for them.
Cracker Corral was not a new idea. For centuries, governments had been using shut-offs of vital supplies to control populations and win civil wars. Back in ancient times, it had been shutting off irrigation water. Then, in the modern era, it had been shutting off electricity. Dictators knew how powerful this tool was.
Electricity was an even more potent weapon in the United States. People were so dependent on artificial things, like electricity, that a shut off was essentially a death sentence. Soon after a shut off, food would go bad and gas pumps wouldn’t work. Then people would figure out they needed to move to the cities.
For decades, the government had studied the effects of an electromagnetic pulse, or “EMP,” where a small nuclear device is detonated high in the atmosphere sending a pulse of electromagnetic energy—basically static electricity—downward on a large area, like North America. The pulse fries all electrical wiring and circuitry, instantly destroying all the electrical devices on the ground. Car and truck starters, gas station pumps, computers, refrigerators, hospital equipment, communications equipment. Everything would be permanently destroyed because the wiring is basically soldered together by the EMP pulse. They can’t be repaired. It takes a brand new electrical device, but they can’t be manufactured because everything necessary to make them—manufacturing plants, trucks to transport them—have also been destroyed. It would take a century to recover. That is not an exaggeration: one hundred years. Following an EMP, a majority of the population would die from starvation, lack of medications, communicable diseases, gang violence, and eventually, war.
The government knew how absolutely dependent American society was on electricity. They ran the scenarios. They knew American society could only last about two weeks without electricity before the areas without it would be totally broken and submissive.
Their plan was to totally break the Patriot areas, which was easier than a military invasion and occupation. Besides, the FUSA did not have the military resources for a fair fight.
Operation Cracker Corral was brilliant, but too brilliant. Because it was basically a genocide plan, it was inevitable that one of the thousand or so people planning it would be reluctant to kill several million of their fellow citizens. However, the government was so desperate when they hatched their plan that they got sloppy as they hurried to come up with a solution. They got sloppy by getting too many people involved.
It was a quiet nerd, Andrew Berkowitz, who saved millions of lives. He was a stereotypical short, thin PhD mathematician who wore big glasses.
Andrew was an analyst for one of the many government think tanks. He had been brought in on a contract with the Department of Homeland Security to work on the plan to shut off electricity. How ironic it was that the people planning how to murder millions of people in the American homeland worked for the Department of Homeland Security.