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Wish Shift: Chapter Thirty-Eight The Ashes of Empire Year 1 A.S. Day 193 0920 Hours Amy opened the door. There were two men standing there, both of them were dressed in dark suits. She thought for a moment that they might have been someone sent from the church and asked the two men what they wanted. The shorter one, a stocky black man told her that they needed to speak with her and her husband immediately. When she nodded agreeably and opened the door for them the taller of the agents marveled at the stupidity of the church programmers who thought that it was a good idea to inculcate complete obedience to men in their female victims. Every single one of the houses that they had visited today had just let them in just like this. Amy led them past the kitchen and slid open the study door. She stepped in and stood in front of Joshua's desk with her head bowed until he looked up and acknowledged her. When he had given her permission to speak she stepped back and told Joshua that these two men needed to see them. Joshua looked them over. He didn't recognize them and they had not given any sign that they were from the church. He looked warily at the two men and then looked over to her where she was still waiting silently for his permission to leave them. His brow furrowed in anger and he demanded to know why she had just let strange men into his house without his permission. She merely mumbled something about it being sinful for a woman to disobey to a man in such a way and then fell silent. The taller agent looked at them and asked if they were who they were. Joshua sullenly confirmed that they were Joshua and Amy Minton and demanded that they explain themselves this minute. They both pulled their credentials out and displayed them. "Mr. and Mrs. Minton you are both being taken into custody as material witnesses in the investigation into the organization known as the church of the blessed. Under section 12 of the emergency powers decree you will both be taken to a secure facility until further notice. This is for your protection." Joshua didn't answer them with words, he came over the desk and attempted to fight with the two men, but his resistance didn't last long. He was immediately tasered by one of the agents until he couldn't move and then while he was twitching on the floor another agent reached for him and injected his neck with a powerful sedative before he could recover. Amy made very little effort to object to what the two men ordered her to do. The taller agent reached for his phone and called in that the targets were secure. They waited a few minutes while the transport crew that was waiting for the all clear to be given wheeled a stretcher into the room and loaded a now sedated and restrained Joshua onto it. The two men with Amy walking slowly between them followed them out and loaded her into their car. After they had taken them to the collection point and dropped off their devices with the information needed for the deception team to use them they would be off to the next pair of names on their assignment list. There were still another dozen names on their own list that had to be visited. When they turned over the prisoners and their phones to be processed back to headquarters, none of them had rang yet but it was only a matter of time before they would. The two agents signaled the van that was following them to move and they headed out to their next pick up. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Year 1 A.S. Day 193 2115 Hours Lt. Col. Archibald Schmidt leaned back in the thinly padded seat of the Humvee. Her column of troops had gotten the order to move out per the sealed operations orders that had been delivered with her copy of the warning order delivered earlier today. The afternoon in their camp outside the football stadium of this local high school had been nothing but a bustle of movement as she laid out what was required of them and her orders were implemented. The National Guard detachment that shared their bivouac were also moving in overdrive as they prepared to move out on their own mission as well. The heavy diesel engines of the Humvee were nothing like sound of the old jeeps she thought. She looked back over the column stretching out behind her. All five companies of the 6842nd Composite Infantry Group were moving in their collection of Humvees, five ton trucks and deuce and a half's that formed the bulk of their transportation assets. Col. Schmidt's vehicle was in the forward section of the column, but it damned sure wasn't the first vehicle. The Wehrmacht had taught her whole generation when she was a young soldier, how incredibly stupid doing something like that was. A commander leading the column in the first vehicle was Hollywood bullshit and she had both cringed and laughed over the years when she saw films where they did something like that. She flicked on her red lens light flashlight and looked over her movement orders again and reached for the radio handset to direct the lead element of her convoy to the map coordinates of their staging area now that they were under way. She knew what they were told to expect, but even though there should have been no way for the target to have any idea of what was moving toward them she approved of how they were playing this. The 6842nd was an emergency group formed from volunteers immediately after the Shift. It was equipped with whatever could be scraped up, organized hastily and had scraps thrown into it from any source that could be scared up just to create this military sausage. It was very much an outfit in the mould of those emergency units that were thrown together and hurried into the line during the early days of Korea. Col. Schmidt knew about that all too well. She'd used her 4-F brother's birth certificate to volunteer when she was sixteen. By the time she turned eighteen she had already been fighting the Germans from North Africa to the Rhine. She ended that war as a first lieutenant by virtue of a battlefield promotion along the way. After she was recalled with the first batch of retreads to plug the hemorrhaging wound in Korea she had stayed in this time and retired as a major just after Tet. When she had looked in the mirror and saw the face of the thirty-six year old Pakistani woman that she would see now for the rest of her life, she didn't let it break her. The call that went out for everyone who could do what was in their abilities to get things working again had already been made. And Major Archibald Schmidt (Ret.) had more important things to do than let having an instant sex change stop her. She met Herman Mullins, the man that was now her headquarters First Sergeant in the recruiting station while waiting in line with others who had made the same decision that she had. First Sergeant Mullins had served in Korea as well and had risen to platoon sergeant when a burst from a Viet Cong Kalashnikov had shredded both his Achilles tendons during one of the first nights of the Tet onslaught. Top was in better shape now. The twenty-four year old black NCO was a couple of vehicles behind her now and between them they had come a long way toward forging this scratch unit into an effective fighting force. Almost all of the 6842nd was like them. There wasn't enough time to retrain soldiers like these ones in all of the ways that the army had changed in the years since they were last in active service. Command had made the decision to do the next best thing. They grouped them together with others who had similar experiences and set up units that would let them be as effective as possible over the short term. When Col. Schmidt sat down opposite the seven year old boy wearing staff sergeants chevrons pinned to civilian clothes, she didn't see it as a joke on old timers like herself. She saw glaring evidence that her decision was exactly the right one she needed to make. She brought all that she could lay her hands on at the moment to prove as much as possible that she was who she really was. Unlike others, Archibald didn't see the need for her to change her name just because she had tits and a twat now. That was her name and she had neither time nor inclination to change it after a lifetime of use. After they had gotten that straightened out as best they could, she found herself bumped up to Lt. Colonel and assigned to make something militarily useful out of the men, women and equipment that they had scraped up and thrown together in this effort to create a reasonable facsimile of a military unit. Most of what they were using was late Cold war equipment that hadn't been sold as surplus and had been sitting in storage when National Guard and Reserve units were upgraded. She still got the willies though looking at the silhouette of the Fritz-style Kevlar helmets that her troopers now wore. She had lost count of how many times she had felt the urge to reach for her sidearm when she was making her rounds of the perimeter during the night and saw that familiar shape looming ahead in the dark. She told Top privately, that no matter how much she told herself that it was nothing like that, deep in her gut she saw Wehrmacht and every nerve screamed at her to respond accordingly. While the column bumped over the back roads they were taking to the objective, she reviewed what she knew about the target so far and what she should probably do with her deployment when they got there. She knew that there were supposed to be a large number of civilians at this place. Intel suggested that it was being used for brainwashing the poor bastards who made the mistake of coming to these pricks for help. How they would react when the assault began would be anybody's guess. They may stay out of the way or they may join the defense just as easily and that would really screw this pooch. As for the size of the place, what they had to go on was pre-Shift building permits that suggested that it was mostly going to be a small area with a lot of little frame buildings, very few of them would be brick construction. How many people were there was an unknown. Col. Schmidt needed to send out scouts as soon as they stopped so she would know just what kind of a shit sandwich they had given her before she took a bite. She twisted in her seat and turned to her RTO in the seat behind her. The fiftyish PFC got on the company commo net and told the commanding officers to report immediately to the command vehicle the moment the wheels stopped. She turned back to the map. She had five companies to work with. She looked over the topography of the objective and decided to place Able, Dog and Fox companies in blocking positions on the east, south and north boundary of the target. Fox would have to watch the road that would split their area of operations so she would put the reserve near them if they were needed. Baker would breach the perimeter with Charlie company in reserve. The west had the most heavily forested area so that was her instinct to assault from unless there was some good reason not to. She looked at her watch. 2140 hours. So much still to do. At least the watch was familiar. She had worn it since she bought it in a Ft. Benning PX before she shipped out for North Africa and it had somehow survived along with her all of these years. It was only fitting somehow that her old companion was on her wrist again now. She looked back at her radio telephone operator. He was one of the few that didn't serve decades ago. He had been a twenty-one year old veteran of the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. There were a few like him in the group. Men and women whose knowledge of how the army operated now in critical areas like supply and communications made it easier to just shoehorn them into makeshift units like these rather than retraining old soldiers like herself in the new procedures using alien and unfamiliar equipment. She opened the stiff material of her ballistic vest to let some of the built up heat out from under the heavy fabric, the rip of the Velcro pulling apart was loud enough to be noticeable even against the throaty growl of the Humvee's engine. She didn't use these things when she had started and she had been stationed at the Pentagon when earlier versions had come into use before she retired. They trapped body heat and were uncomfortable in her opinion, but if they kept rounds away from her flesh then she wouldn't bitch about it. She looked over at the flash suppresser of her M-16 held upright in a latch by her knee. She missed her Garand and had considered bringing the old one she had purchased for her own use after the war with her before deciding not to. Keeping it in ammo would have been too much trouble anyway. When they had told her what she was going to be doing she agreed that, how they chose to organize and set up the 6842nd made a lot of sense. They needed an operational force yesterday with so much of the armed forces in disarray now. Placing men and women who spoke the same military language together was what they called a no brainer today. Her first suggestion was for them to just be equipped with similar gear to what they had used their first time around, but she was told that was impossible due to most of that being sold off as surplus years ago. They did the next best thing though. Most of what they had now was fairly standard and not too far removed from what many of them remembered using. Many of her two time vets had served in both Korea and Vietnam and quite a few of them remembered when the M-16 was a cranky unreliable beast that was almost too high maintenance to be depended on. She had to say that, when she fired it for familiarization this time around that, she approved of the changes that had been made over the years between that early model and the one that she and her troops were using now. M-60's from reserve stocks and older M-249's with a few vehicle mounted .50 cal's rounded out the machine gun support they had available. The mortar squad vets were clustered in two teams in the headquarters platoon and were just as effective now with their 60mm and 81mm tubes as they were their first time in the saddle. Her first task once they had gotten their feet under them had been to make them into something that most of them hadn't been in years; a trained and disciplined fighting force. They had stepped up to the challenge and had been driven pretty hard by Col. Schmidt to bring them up to their fighting potential as well. Keeping her troopers focused on training, manning check points and the constant patrolling in the streets had kept them focused and knocked the rust off of the old soldier's skills. It had been good for them. It gave all of them an anchor and kept them centered. Even with all of the people who had ended up under her command, the 6842nd wasn't a large unit. There were only three platoons in each company and even with three oversized squads each, that didn't add up to that many effectives. They were better manned then the last time she commanded a scratch force of this type during the early days of Korea and she was confident that her troops were up to the job, but not knowing what they were up against gave the old soldier too much to think about on the way there. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Year 1 A.S. Day 193 Outside of Easton 2250 Hours Their staging area was a small airfield she had selected about two kilometers from the objective. It had been a Civil Air Patrol emergency field that had been abandoned for the most part, even before the Shift. There was an old hangar on one end of the field. A rusting open ended Quonset hut that was more for overnight storage of aircraft than for keeping anything there over the long term. The rest of the small buildings squatting next to it were equally as dated and Col. Schmidt paused for a moment to wonder when they had last seen activity on the scale of tonight. They broke the lock on the larger building and set up a temporary headquarters there. After blacking out the windows with spray paint, the portable lamps hung from the ceiling and placed on some of the tables gave Col. Schmidt more than enough light to go over their orders and lay out the situation with her officers. While they departed to get the scouts on their way she watched from her command vehicle as the group slowly shook itself into battle order and start preparing to move out. Col. Schmidt sent a runner for Top, she wanted him with her when they moved out as well. First Sgt. Mullins came right away. She told him of her intention to go with one of the scouting teams at least close enough to get a visual for herself of the objective. She asked him if the assault and reserve company's were preparing for their part of the operations while the others moved out to their blocking positions. When he said that they were already going over what they needed to do she relaxed a little. She told him then that they should get started on their end with what they needed to do and be in position by 0300 hours. He asked her if she really should be doing that and she reminded him that they both knew that there were times when you had to see the lay of the land for yourself. When the scouts moved out at 2335 hours the two of them were with them as they moved silently through the pines toward the camp ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Year 1 A.S. Day 194 Easton Salvation Camp 0122 Hours Lt. Col Schmidt watched the fence line of the camp through her night vision glasses. Her eyes followed the outline of the perimeter and what she could see of the layout from her position. When she could, she had moved her command group to a gully about a thousand meters from the edge of the fence. Scouts had been drifting in to give their reports and add to the details that they hadn't known of when they built the small sand table mock up just outside the command position. She looked at that mock up under the moonlight and watched the details of the camp begin to unfold with each report. She turned her eyes back to the glasses and scanned the place again. The towers by the gate were freshly built, as were what appeared to be log and earth bunkers on the corners. Hasty construction and not meant to be in any way permanent. Col. Schmidt lowered her NVG's. Somehow, someone in the camp knew something was coming its way. She could see pairs of guards moving in and out of the cones of light that feebly lit the interior of the area. She told Top to check with commo and make sure that any traffic in or out of the camp was still being jammed. Top said he'd take care of that and she raised her glasses to look at the camp again. There was only the single line of fencing that stretched between them and even though the whole of the place was not visible from the main road she was certain that whoever entered this place didn't see it like she was seeing it now. When she first laid eyes on the camp just outside the small town of Easton, she had felt a cold hand rise up from its grave and grip her heart. Buchenwald. The name burst like a mortar shell in her memory. Buchenwald; The place that she had finally been well and truly introduced to what was meant when someone said hell on earth. She had been eighteen when she first thought she had made that acquaintance. She had thought the blood saturated sand of Omaha beach that had been ground into her uniform as she scuttled across that killing field was what they meant when they said that. She thought that the savage bloodletting to break out of the hedgerows afterward and the bitter house to house fighting all across France that whittled the men around her down to the dead, the wounded and the survivors had merely upped the ante for her understanding that. When she moved into Belgium and felt the fury of the resurgent Wehrmacht surging around and battering them she thought she had gotten a whole new level of understanding of that phrase. The cold anger and the iron taste of fear when she and her buddies experienced what it meant to be overwhelmed as they were driven back and the thought that they might still lose what they had gained had peeled away another layer of that bitter onion. When she crossed over the border during the final drive into Germany itself, she learned that no matter what she had experienced before, that phrase still had even more layers of agony that she needed to encounter. Each one of them showing her, that she had only started to glimpse just what the faint outlines of what that phrase meant as they were slowly peeled away. As the war was winding down she thought she knew everything about it. But it wasn't until the moment that she stepped past the gates of Buchenwald that she had truly understood exactly what those three words meant. Her seeing of what men became on the battlefield and what it was that they could do to one another there had hardened the young soldier that she was down to a razor's edge. What she had within herself was whittled down to the hard core of being, reducing her to her most basic essence in the harshest school imaginable; where learning the day's lesson only meant that you had gained a reprieve for the moment. She thought she had already walked through the landscape of hell and had been initiated into and inured to most of what it was capable of. And then she walked through those gates in April and learned that she had known nothing at all about those three words. Those were the memories that tore at her through the years afterward. When she had been in Korea and heard young men back from the line talking about how what they had seen was hell on earth, she had not corrected them. What they had seen was that for them, but in her silence she was grateful for their sake that no matter what they had seen so far, no matter how terrible it was, they were not even on the same sphere of understanding anything like the lesson that she had learned in April of 1945. When she was an old man, just before the Shift, the one saving grace of knowing that her days were drawing to an end was that the days that she had left to carry those images of hell unleashed were drawing to a close. When she had looked in the mirror and seen the woman looking back at her, she had to make peace with the idea that, somehow that burden was not yet hers to lay aside and she did what she had done in the years before. She kept the memory at arm's length and pushed it down so it wouldn't swallow her whole. But looking at Easton tonight, through the sickly green of the night vision glasses, she thought that there was another reason now. Those memories and the woman who bore them now were here so that this place would be recognized for what it was by one who had been taught to see what hell looked like and recognize it in the instant she did. It didn't have the smell of Buchenwald and it was nothing anywhere near it in scale. Not even close to the size of one of the smallest sub camps that radiated out around that little slice of hell. She didn't see the bodies of those who were kept here piled in the open parade ground or hear the voices of those still barely clinging to life within this place like there had been there. There was none of that to link that place and this one and someone who hadn't seen both places would be forgiven if they dismissed Col. Schmidt's gut connection between the two places and they would be wrong. It was the seed of this place that told her that they were the same. Buchenwald had been small once too. It had once had clean areas between the buildings as well, just as this place did and it had seen that seed sprout and grow and metastasize and corrupt until it flowered into its purpose as a gateway into hell. She looked over darkened buildings with the occasional lights mounted outside buried beneath swarms of whirling insects and felt that same seed growing here and as she waited for 0330 hours to arrive, she resolved that no matter the cost, she was going to rip it out of the ground before it even came close to becoming the malevolent growth that she had seen so long ago. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Year 1 A.S. Day 194 Easton Salvation Camp 0450 Hours Col. Schmidt looked down the long row of prisoners. They were on their knees mostly with a line of troops behind them weapons ready to drop the first one who even twitched the wrong way. The ones that weren't able to move, were helpless on their backs while medics were working on them. Top was walking with her as she made her way into each of the buildings and looked through them. With every step into this place she could feel the same psychic stench that had permeated both camps. This camp had not taken lives so much as it had taken souls and ground them up like fine sand and scattered them to the wind, but the same evil was squatting here. The inmates didn't pose any difficulties. All of them were so completely doped that they did just what they were told to do. She looked at those shuffling automatons as they were loaded into the buses that the Area Commander had dispatched when she had notified them that the area was secure. They would be going to wherever the higher ups had in mind to send these poor bastards. The guards were another story and most of all, the one that Col. Schmidt wanted was the commander of this shithole. She wanted to hang that SS prick up by his thumbs and slow roast the fucker. She knew he really wasn't SS, but from what they had seen already they might have well as been as far as she was concerned. She had seen some of the sullen glances some of the men now under guard had sent as they were watching her and the other women in the unit as they moved around after the place was secured and she had the strongest urge to just line the bastards up and finish it and damn the consequences. Top was good for her. He kept her grounded. He hadn't seen Buchenwald the way she had, but when he had been stationed in Germany between Korea and Vietnam he had seen it then. And he remembered how it felt there as well. Like birds didn't even want to sing there sometimes, but they did anyway, like it was an effort they had taken on themselves to erase what had been done there one note at a time. He told her that he felt that sensation here as well, so she was reassured that it wasn't just herself overreacting from old memories. The man they thought was the commander was nothing of the sort. But they did think that he was someone high up in the ranks of these fucks. When she had first seen the dead eyed bodies spill out of the barracks she had been so very close to ordering her troopers to just execute the bastards and she was going to write it up as a failed escape attempt that, unfortunately, there were no survivors of. Now after looking over some of the files that were waiting to be transported away from here she had even more difficultly in not thinking of the scum here as SS. The one they thought was a high level turd was still being kept separately from the others. His phone had been used in a futile effort to warn several numbers over and over. This one somehow had gotten wind of what was in the works. It was a good thing that the communications blackout was already in effect hours before the strike launched or there might have been enough time for the rest of the snakes to slither away. Another thing he had been doing was he was in the middle of changing his clothes when her troopers caught him. It appeared that what he had in mind was to try to blend in with the others. He refused to speak in anything other than that religious twaddle he kept spouting and so far they hadn't really gotten anything out of him. Col. Schmidt knew his type. Bastards like this one were always trying to farm her income when she had been an old man and after seeing what this one had done with that kind of money here she had a hard time not sticking muzzle of her sidearm into his ear and just squeezing the trigger. But Top talked her down. They were mostly finished transferring the prisoners and the guards into another units hands when Able company CO sent for her to come at once. Col. Schmidt took a long look at what she had to show her and then told her to set guards on this place and get that FBI team over here. They needed to see this and she needed a drink to unsee it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Year 1 A.S. Day 198 Agent Kellerman felt sick. Not about the operation. That had gone very well overall. What was making him sick was the initial review of the intelligence that had been seized from the various operations that the church was directing. It was going to take weeks to really dig through it, but going over it even in a cursory manner was just as nauseating. The primary two items that were of concern at the moment and both of them had to do with people. First, there were the masses of those recovered from those camps. He was already having to call in resources and personnel from as far away as California to even have a decent chance of starting to reverse the damage done to them. The cult's reach was both smaller and farther afield than they had suspected before they went in. So far they had already identified at least six thousand people who were either at the camps when they were shut down or had passed through them and were now living outside. Kellerman was not really surprised that so many had come from places out of state. Their use of the internet to spread their message was an initial method of recruiting desperate people and it had cast a wide net. It had been a minor discovery that over ninety percent of them were resettled in the local area. It made sense for them to do that as a means of maintaining control and it also fit in with what they had uncovered about their further plans. Among the papers that they had already gone through were references to individuals who had been contacted who were candidates for different offices in the upcoming elections. There was nothing more damning in there than they had just been spoken to. But with this group that would be enough. Kellerman suspected that when the documents had been fully examined there would be a lot of more serious implications than just speaking with some potential officeholders. Already they had already identified almost twenty percent of the candidates as having some form of contact with cult agents in one form or another. Kellerman already suspected that the nature of that contact was probably setting them up to take that damned drug on command. There were two things that he did know for certain so far. This group had been very diversified in their projects and they had obviously been planning for long term ambitions as well. Already he had found it necessary to create over a dozen analytical groups just to sift through everything and make sense of it. Some of the agents assigned to working through the documents were already speculating that it was probably the blueprint for a slow motion coup, but they wouldn't say anything for certain about it yet. The other area of concern was the field that the mass graves had been identified in. Teams using ground penetrating radar were already swarming over the site identifying their locations for certain before shovel one touched earth. They had already found some information in captured documents referring to a percentage of those who they had laid hands on that were proving resistant even when their minds were wiped. Kellerman was positive that those mass graves were the cult's solution. But it hadn't been the only one. In one camp younger, attractive females who fell into that group had been found basically programmed to be little more than mindless sex slaves and set aside for the use of cult members. In another there was an entire building full of men who had just been castrated and had been used afterward as laborers. Disturbingly, but not surprisingly, the majority of these had all been members of different minority groups. Earlier today one of the teams he had set up to go through this mass of paperwork were talking to him about plans for some sort of breeding program that they had found references to as well, but so far they had not reported back to him on just what they had found. The main bit of good news was that almost complete surprise was achieved. Except for a couple of outlying areas almost none of them even suspected that this move was coming. That didn't mean that it was easy though. Many of the camps had significant stockpiles of weaponry, with a lot more of it than Kellerman would have liked had been military grade. Kellerman suspected that most of those would be traced back as coming from Aryan Nation and other similar groups. Brother Paul was in custody as were a great many of the upper leadership and a significant portion of the rank and file as well. The most damning evidence was already on its way to a military tribunal. Agent Kellerman expected that once that mass of plans and machinations that the cult was guilty of setting in motion was gone through, it would be responsible for sending all of them to face that outcome as well. Kellerman put some of the preliminary reports into his briefcase. He had a flight to catch in a very short time. The president was expecting him to brief her on as much as was known as soon as he touched down in D.C. He had the idle thought that maybe they should have just gone with that one colonel's instinct and lined up all of the bastards and shot them while trying to escape. But no, he thought, that was not really possible. As satisfying as doing that would be, knowing what he did at the moment, that was not what they had done this for. But it may yet come to something like that if the full scope was anything like what he thought it was. He checked his watch and walked out of the office -----------------------------------------------------------------------