The crabber was for real; he’d worked Pamlico Sound in North Carolina for almost ten years since retiring, he told them, as a drug smuggler. His folksy reminiscences of raiding small pleasure craft, murdering all on board, then using the boats to make drug runs before scuttling them, were eaten up by an admiring Suzy. Sam was much less enraptured, thinking of all the lives lost for no cause but profit. But, he realized, a lot of his friends and associates used the substances men like this had brought in without thinking of how they got there or asking to see their pedigree. Smuggling remained a romantic pastime older than America, and its grisly side was never played up.
They turned in, past dangerous reefs, to the sound. A couple of times Coast Guard planes and helicopters looked at the old crabber, but it was a known ship with a long history and Suzy and Sam were well concealed. The familiar wasn’t checked very much by the authorities; they were looking for the unusual and out-of-place. Since the crabber had already radioed that he had engine trouble and was heading in, it wasn’t thought unusual for him to be on this course.
“I was supposed to go up to Virginia to help out some friends,” he told them, “but, of course, I was supposed to have a partial breakdown and turn back. Nothing odd. There really is a bad clutch in one of the engines, too.”
“Why not just take us to Virginia?” Suzy asked him. “After all, it’s closer.”
He frowned. “Hell, Norfolk’s a naval base and shipyard. Wall-to-wall checks of just about everything. And the Chesapeake and James are just crawlin’ with boatloads of bored, suspicious patrolmen. No, easier here.”
He pulled into the slip at his pier without incident. There was nobody around; the watermen were long gone, and the rest of the world still hadn’t awakened as yet.
An official-looking military car was parked out front of the crabber’s storage shed, and a man in his early fifties with more stripes than they could count on his Air Force uniform was sitting in front drinking a Coke and smoking a cigar. They stopped fearfully when they saw him, but the crabber called out, “Hi, Mike!”
The old sergeant smiled and got up. “Hello, Joe. These my two recruits, eh?”
The crabber nodded. “All yours now.” He turned to the confused pair. “Joe’s as genuine as you are,” he assured them. “See you all.”
They were dubious but had little choice. “Joe” put their luggage in the trunk of the staff car and told them to get in, which they did. In minutes they were away.
“I hope you two have eaten,” he called to them. “No way I can get us anything until we’re well into Virginia.”
“That’s all right,” Sam told him. He was nervous. Joe didn’t fit at all the image of the conspirators he had built up over all this time, and the car had an awfully authentic look to it.
“Is this car stolen?” he asked the driver.
Joe chuckled. “Hell, no. I signed it out at Shaw and I’ll turn it in at Andrews. You steal one of these and they have you in ten seconds. Nothing but military and truck traffic to hide in.”
Even Suzy was intrigued now. “Then you really are an Air Force SP?”
Again the older man chuckled. “No, ma’am, definitely not. But I was, once-before they caught me with my hands where they shouldn’ta been. Sweetest smuggling racket ever done, all on Air Force equipment. I had twenty-seven years in, so they didn’t throw me in jail, just reduced and booted me.”
That seemed to answer the motivational questions, and even tied him in with the likes of the crabber and the underground drug trade. But they would get no more information out of him about himself, just reassurance.
“The sergeant’s for real, he’s just somewheres else,” Joe said. “All of the procedures are perfect. You can do almost anything in the military if you got the right orders and the right forms.” He chuckled. He seemed to find everything slightly amusing. “That’s what got me in the end—one form. A real form, perfect signature and everything —and the damn ninnies lost it in the bureaucratic shuffle. Lost it! Military inefficiency defeated me. There was no way to duplicate the signatures on the spot, this drew attention, and that was that. You remember that. Depend on nothing but yourself, and keep it as simple as possible.”
They passed a large number of military check-points. It was easy. All they had to do was pass over their orders and ID cards. Joe had his and the proper authorization for the car which was real and therefore would withstand even a check with Shaw. Their own IDs had their photos, and their orders said they were proceeding to Thurmont with transfers to the 2794th SP Squadron, Headquarters Command. It was true that a check with the 2794th wouldn’t reveal that anybody knew they were coming, but that was so normal in military circles that it wouldn’t even be wondered at.
For the first time they saw how tightly the government was gripping the country. Military were everywhere; in a small town in southeastern Virginia they saw several ordinary-looking people pull over others, flash IDs, and randomly check papers. The roads themselves were ghostly not only for their lack of auto traffic but for the graveyards of motels, eateries, and tourist traps ruined by the restrictions.
Outside the towns, where public transportation was the only way to travel, school busses, trucks, and anything else that would do had been pressed into service as shuttles for the people. Those who lived too far out even for that could phone for service; farmers were allowed to use their tractors to get to shuttle-serviced routes.
Two things amazed Sam and Suzy: the apparent ease with which the majority of the population seemed to be coping with the tremendous inconvenience, and its almost casual acceptance by the people.
“Oh, there’s been a lot of trouble,” Joe told them, “but once you clamp down martial law and use it publicly, consistently, and effectively, you get obedience. Acceptance comes from the isolated cases of terrorism that manage to penetrate the security screen, and the occasional shootouts when they find one of our safe houses. The government controls the press, radio, TV, everything very tightly, and they use them to best effect.” Again the chuckle. “Hell, they’ve caught and killed more of our organization that we ever had! And crime’s down to just about zero.”
It was Sam’s turn to smile. “You mean they fake big victories?”
Joe nodded. “Sure. And, remember, for every really heavy-handed guy in uniform who gets power-drunk there are hundreds of ordinary folks in uniform. The power-drunks get short shrift; report a really bad actor to the local commander and you nail him. Congressmen are also keeping close watch for abuses in their districts.” His voice grew grim. “And the real bad abuses, they get covered up. Lots of people just disappear in the night, never to be seen again. They got big concentration camps all over the West, too, guarded with the best elite troops. Americans weren’t any different than any other population once they started living in constant fear.”
Suzy seemed to like the idea. “So our ‘different breed’ is just the same after all. It won’t be difficult to remold them, with the proper guidance.”
Sam was silent on that one, but he didn’t believe it. Revolution looked exceptionally unlikely under these conditions, and a lot of human misery was being perpetrated, and perpetrated not by some dictator in a poor and starving country or one with a long tradition of dictatorship, but by a government with its finger on the nuclear trigger and growing increasingly fascistic.
This quickly, too! he thought. He found it hard to accept. Maybe American society was truly as rotten as he’d pictured it—and maybe it was also the most totally politically naive society on earth.