Grant felt those “coincidence” goose bumps again. He was getting used them, although they still amazed him.
“Let’s go out and fix New Washington,” Gen. Roswell said, as he walked out of the room.
Grant stood and thought about that. Let’s fix New Washington.
And on to fix it they went.
Chapter 322
Reconciliation Commission
(January 17)
“This never gets old,” Pow said, as the Team piled into Mark’s truck nearly two weeks after they took Olympia. Hearing this reminded Grant about Pierce Point, which reminded him of Lisa. For about two seconds. Then he put her out of his mind, which he was getting better and better at. He’d had lots of practice. He knew Manda and Cole were fine. Cole probably missed his tucking, but he was almost fourteen now. He needed to be more independent. Instead of being a kid with autism, Cole needed to be a teenager with autism. Grant had work to do so he needed to focus. He always amazed himself at how he could compartmentalize his family situation and get on to the work he needed to do. Being surrounded by his guys 24/7 made that much easier for him. Grant wasn’t lonely out there on the still-dangerous battlefield. There were still Lima hold-outs around.
The Team was still using that beat up truck. Might as well. It worked fine, despite the shot-out windshield from the Watershed Park engagement. By now, New Washington was trading with Texas so there was plenty of diesel in Olympia so that was another reason to keep using it. There wasn’t any diesel for civilians, but lots for the military.
Well, technically, for State Police units like the Team. They had been deactivated from being part of the 17th Irregulars to a special detachment of the State Police. Except Grant. He was not technically in the State Police. He had to be neutral, given that he was heading the Reconciliation Commission. He couldn’t be “enforcing” the laws when it was his job to decide who should or shouldn’t have the laws enforced against them.
Despite technically being cops, the Team didn’t do anything differently now. They didn’t have badges yet. At least, not official ones. They still had their pre-Collapse “Concealed Weapons Permit” badges so they wouldn’t get shot by actual cops when detaining a bad guy. Now everyone on the Team was a real cop.
New State Police badges were on the way, at least, temporary ones. The temporary badges would be a patch with intricate stitching that would be very hard to counterfeit. A small shop in nearby Centralia run by Patriots was able to make them. They would work fine to serve as an identifier that only the State Police had.
Everyone in the truck had their familiar roles. Bobby drove. He had to dress warmer now that the windshield was gone and had to wear goggles for when they got up to speed so the wind wouldn’t get in his eyes. They were military-issue goggles from the Iraq war. At first, Bobby looked a little odd with goggles up around his black fleece cap, but it pretty quickly looked normal.
Scotty was still up front working coms. He also was the makeshift medic, although he hadn’t had to patch anyone up yet. Thank goodness.
Scotty’s kit was still blood-stained from hoisting up that kid who killed Wes. His kit had the most blood on it. They tried to clean it off with some pretty harsh detergents which got most of the blood out, but the stains were still there. The Team wore the blood stains as a badge of honor. It showed everyone that these guys had killed and would do it again. Every drop of blood on their kit was justice for Wes.
Kellie was devastated when she got the news at Pierce Point. At first she didn’t believe it. Then she cried for two days. Lisa was concerned she might lose the baby with all the stress. When Lisa told her this, Kellie almost instantly calmed down. She told Lisa, “I won’t do anything to harm this baby. He or she is my only link to Wes. If calming down is what I need to do, I’ll do it.” After that, she was much better, but she missed Wes almost every waking minute of the day. She had the Team Chicks and lots of others to support her. They reduced a horrible situation to simply bad, mostly sad.
The Team had come up with a plan to not only have at least one of them spend every New Year’s Day in the future with Kellie, but also to take care of her and their little soon-to-be child. The Team would make sure she always had a good job and everything else she needed, including lots of company and friends around. The Team had made a vow way back before the Collapse to take care of each other’s families. It meant that a man could go into danger and fight because he knew his teammates would take one of his biggest fears off his mind: taking care of his family.
Kellie got to Olympia for the funeral. They had to bury Wes in Olympia because they had no good way to preserve him for burial in Pierce Point. Wes was buried, along with way too many others, in a new cemetery in Olympia called Patriot’s Cemetery. Wes was laid to rest with full military honors. By some miracle, Wes' dad was there. He was a retired Ranger from Ft. Lewis and had joined a Patriot irregular unit in Enumclaw. He cried at the funeral and screamed out that he was proud of his son. Grant knew that Wes had known this. Wes knew the importance of the work he was doing. Grant went up to Wes' dad at the funeral and told him all the brave and heroic things Wes had done. Grant even fibbed a little and told his dad that Wes had said that he knew his dad would be proud. That would comfort Wes' dad for the rest of his life.
Grant refocused on the task at hand: going to a town to informally hear evidence about some prisoners. Pow was in the back of the extended cab with Grant, windows down to shoot out of if necessary. “That’s what a heater is for,” they always said. Pow was really developing into a tactical commander, even more than before. He was now leading more than just the Team. He was looked to for his advice on tactical matters by other police and military leaders.
Ryan still rode in the back, which he insisted upon. He didn’t want to change his routine. He was always in the back with Wes and that was where he wanted to stay. It was his version of mourning mixed with normalcy bias. It was fine.
They used the back of the truck to haul a few high-priority parcels from point to point. Grant’s job had him going all over New Washington. If a load of medicine needed to get to Aberdeen and Grant was going there anyway to a Reconciliation Commission event, then they’d take the load with them.
Grant’s main job was to set the tone of the ReconComm, as it became known, and to recruit good people to work on it. He had a flood of volunteers for the ReconComm, many of them Patriot lawyers. Most of them had done tax protestor and other liberty work before the Collapse. It wasn’t hard to determine who was a real pre-Collapse Patriot and who was just saying they were for the sake of career advancement. Since there were so few Patriot lawyers before the Collapse, Grant knew most of them. He had about two dozen of them and about two hundred investigators. They were all volunteers who didn’t get paid. They did receive meals and a place to stay.
Grant didn’t actually decide cases—there were too many for one person to do—but he read all the reports his staff produced. Instead of deciding cases, he was the driving force behind the ReconComm. He was basically going out and giving speeches about the reason why reconciliation was important. He was there to show people that a real person—a fair and decent person—was the “face” of the ReconComm. It helped that Grant was a “war hero” (although he didn’t think so). The 17th Irregulars quickly became famous, not for pure military feats—the regular military units did all the hard work—but because they were a largely a bunch of regular civilians who did some important things, especially in the first few hours of the attack on Olympia. The stories about Olympia were exaggerated, as were the stories that Grant had single-handedly turned Pierce Point into a paradise, but the Patriots needed heroes so the population would believe in them. Grant was happy to oblige and it made it easier for him to accomplish what he wanted to accomplish, which was reconciliation.
Grant viewed every speech he gave, every group he talked to, and every small article he wrote for the new independent newspapers as an opportunity to go out and persuade people about reconciliation.
Most people were initially skeptical about why they should forgive and forget when Limas had done terrible things. Grant was good at explaining this. He got lots of practice.
There were still small pockets of Lima insurgents. Grant was a big, fat juicy target, so the Team was there to protect him. He had to stop carrying his AR and kit everywhere because it wouldn’t send the right message if he had those. If the war was over and this guy is telling everyone to forgive and forget, why does he have a rifle and full kit? Grant still wore his pistol and extra magazines, though. He had to protect himself at all times. He continued to wear “contractor” clothes as they became known. His 5.11 pants, “hillbilly slippers,” earth-tone shirts and jackets.
The Team also wore contractor clothes and, like just about all soldiers and police, had beards. Like the beards, the knit caps became part of the Team’s “look” during that winter.
Grant didn’t want to wear a business suit which would send a message to people that Grant was a technocrat or a politician. And Grant needed people to believe the “war hero” stories in order for him to have credibility with them so they would be open to reconciliation. Grant wearing contractor clothes reinforced the impression that he was an irregular unit citizen-soldier. Besides, Grant didn’t have any suits, and if he did, they wouldn’t fit anyway, given all the weight he’d lost.
On this particular day, Grant and the Team were going on a long trip. Across the mountain pass—Highway 12, the only one open because the main pass, I-90, went through Seattle and was Lima-held—to Yakima in eastern Washington. A trip that took four hours before the Collapse now took a whole day. There was a lot of traffic clogged up the one open mountain pass, and lots of precautions for staying out of an ambush. There weren’t too many because the Limas were very weak in New Washington, but there was always that threat. Grant and the Team had a military Humvee in front of them and behind them during this trip.
On the rides, Grant would read hundreds of pages of reports and recommendations on pardons or prosecutions for various people. He signed off on them. He couldn’t possibly know the details of all the cases. He had to rely on his commission staff. These reports were chock full of interesting stories.
Chapter 323
Reports and Letters
(January 17)
From all the reports he was reading, a pattern was emerging. There were two kinds of Limas: involuntary and voluntary. The involuntary ones, which were the vast majority of them, were people “just doing their job.” They were government employees or government contractors and their business was doing what government wanted. And before the Collapse, government was the majority of the business in the state, so the majority of people did business in some way with the government.
The involuntary Limas weren’t angels. They profited—handsomely, in most cases—from the government. Leading up to the Collapse, they got things that were taken from other people. Whether it was tax money or property seized, or whether it was a competing business that was regulated out of existence, these people got things that were taken from other people. It was that simple.
The theft accelerated during the Collapse. The involuntary Limas were the ones with big fat FCards and gas. They had the power to potentially put their neighbors in jail with one “report” to the authorities. Some of them abused this power, but many did not. Most abused this power a little but usually, they would say, only to take care of their families.
“I didn’t have a choice” they would say. That might be true, or at least partially true, in most cases.
The involuntary Limas would be pardoned. There were several reasons for this. First, and most disturbing, was because it would be impossible to execute them all. Not that killing them all was what anyone wanted—except some hardcore “retributionist” Patriots as they became known. But, with the limited resources the New Washington government had, there weren’t enough firing squads or jails for all the involuntary Limas. Most of the pre-Collapse economy was tied to government. Most people had done business in some way with government. Grant remembered that for a while, he too, was a government employee at the State Auditor’s Office. He technically “profited” from government, too. Should people like him be killed? There were just too many involuntary Limas to do anything about.
Second, mass killings and revenge was exactly what Grant was there to prevent. In fact, Grant spent most of his time fighting the retributionists. Not physically, although he and the Team were expecting a retributionist para group to try to take him out, but politically. There were retributionist legislators and even a few judges. Politics was helping Grant, though. While most average citizens hated the Limas and wouldn’t mind if they all died, they were so tired of war and hunger and dying that they wanted it to stop. They wanted the economy to get back on its feet and for life to quit being so damned hard. Therefore, there was little political support for the retributionists. Especially if the ReconComm was being fair and punishing the truly bad people, which was Grant’s job.
The third reason for not killing all the Limas was that the economy needed these people. The majority of educated people were Limas, if not active ones, then Lima sympathizers in the past. This was because, once again, most of the economy was government. The well-educated Limas were the white-collar people who ran things. The managers. They were managing and running things that didn’t need to be run like a giant government. However, they were the ones who would be necessary to make things run smoothly in the new economy where a former government manager wouldn’t have a new government job, but he or she might be a great manager for a manufacturing plant that wanted to open.