Land of Promise (32 page)

Uthman recounted the recent failure and said, “I want you to personally oversee the destruction of that embassy. Use Martyr Operations if you must, but I want to see that embassy reduced to a heap of
rubble
, within one year. And I want you to step up the campaign against the Ilemi Republic itself. Slaughter their cattle. Burn their villages. Decimate them. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, oh Prince of The Faithful. I will do as you have ordered, without fail.”

Chapter 30: Common Ground

“Libertarianism holds that the only proper role of violence is to defend person and property against violence, that any use of violence that goes beyond such just defense is itself aggressive, unjust, and criminal.”
-- Murray N. Rothbard

Solus Christus, Ilemi Republic -- June, Five Years After Declaration of the Caliphate

Following up on a text message exchange with Gary Keene, Rick and Meital took a drive to Gary’s Gulch in their seven-year-old tan Toyota Hydro Hilux pickup. Baby David sat contentedly in a carbon fiber baby car seat, laughing and giggling with each bump on the road. This was one of his first rough road adventures. The pickup had numerous dents and scratches, and its passenger-side rearview mirror had been broken off years earlier, but it had a strong running engine and a clutch that still engaged crisply. The saying in Africa was that the Hilux model was “The truck that refused to die.”

They had been asked to arrive for some conversation “…and lunch if you can stay” at 11 a.m. As they bounced their way up the washboard surface of the canyon dirt road in the shadow of Naoyeta Mountain, an odd assortment of tepees, tents, yurts, and shacks came into view. Noticing the expression on Rick’s face, she reminded him, “Not necessarily wrong, just different,” echoing a phrase their pastor used in a sermon a few weeks prior.

Rick nodded in agreement and said, “You’re right. We can’t judge anyone based on their assets, their income, or what sort of house they live in. You know me. I’m only sharply discerning when it comes to doctrine and things like swearing. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt.”

Gary Keene’s house was one of just a few underground houses in Gary’s Gulch. Parked in front of it was an old brown Jeep Patriot SUV that had its roof removed with a Sawzall. Unlike most cars and trucks in the Ilemi that bore
no
license plates, Keene’s had
partial license
plates -- just the top 30 millimeters cut from its original New Hampshire plates, the part that read “LIVE FREE OR DIE.”

They walked down six steps to the front door. The door had an attached wooden cutout of a stylized porcupine. “Piney” was the town’s symbolic mascot and adorned many flags, T-shirts, and coffee mugs. To the right of the front door, a dummy antique hand grenade was mounted on a wooden plaque with the inscription beneath: “Complaint Department: Take a Number.” A tag with “ #1” was attached to the grenade’s pin ring. Seeing this, Meital swiveled her head and gave Rick a wry look. He grinned broadly in response.

Rick knocked on the door, and they soon heard boots coming up the stairs. Gary Keene swung open the door and declared, “Right on time. Welcome! I see you brought the baby. Welcome to you too, little man.” He had his usual bushy beard with wisps of gray and was dressed in short pants and a Bennington “76” flag logo T-shirt that was tight over his round belly. He was also wearing a battered pair of boots, from which the cuffs of white athletic socks sprouted at the top. Oddly, the pistol holster on his right hip was empty.

Stepping into the geothermally-cooled house felt refreshing. It was an underground dome home, much like their own, but less elaborately painted and decorated. Keene’s Great Room had a circular skylight with a steel cover that could be rolled back. Today the cover was open, so there was a two-meter-wide disc of light tracing its way across the floor. The Great Room was painted white but embellished with some hand-painted murals that had vibrant colors. One of these murals was of an African sunset.

There were two workbenches at opposite ends of the great room. One bench, with a rack above it, held an odd assortment of amateur radio equipment and computers. Two of the computers on the bench were open architecture PC towers -- something that hadn’t been made since the 2020s, once integrated PCs became the norm. The other workbench had a red steel tool chest cart alongside it, and an assortment of gunsmithing and general mechanical tools were evident on the cart.

There were four flags hanging from the cardinal point-facing riser walls: An Ilemi flag, a yellow Gadsen “Don’t Tread On Me” flag, an alternative version of the same flag featuring Piney instead of the rattlesnake, and an Israeli flag. Across the archway that led to his kitchen was painted Gary’s personal motto, in large bold letters: “Peace, Pop-Tarts, and 7.62.” The same phrase was included in Keene’s e-mail signature block. The sight of this painted motto gave Rick a chuckle.

Gary gestured for them to sit down. Meital placed the baby seat on the couch beside her; David was drifting off to sleep. The furniture was overstuffed and nondescript. The room had a faint but distinctive aroma of bong water. On the top of a low table between the couches they saw a couple of dated issues of
Israel, My Glory
magazine, a disassembled Browning Hi-Power pistol, some pistol cleaning gear, a bottle opener, and an open bottle of Fepic Ale, one of the local microbrews.

Keene asked, “Do you want a beer, mineral water, anything?”

Meital answered, “No, thanks, we were sipping still mineral water most of the way here.”

“So, why the face-to-face? I thought we had a good string of conversation going by SMS text.”

Rick shook his head from side to side, and said, “I’ve always hated texting and e-mails. They always lose the finer points, like inflection and facial expressions. With just text, sometimes it is hard to tell if people are being straightforward, versus facetious or ironic.”

“Yeah, I hear that.” He glanced down at the table and idly picked up the orange-handled pistol cleaning rod before continuing, “Your buddy Alan and his wife had quite the little shootout in Jeru-Sa-lay-em. How are they holding up?”

“They’re doing fine. Just some sketchy nights of sleep for a few nights afterward. They were worried that the stress of it might put Grace into premature labor, but she’s fine. It was a scary experience. Alan tells me that there is nothing that focuses a man’s attention quite like having bullets whizzing by and having a Krinkov pointed at him.”

“I hear that.” After a pause to twirl the cleaning rod between his fingers Gary asked, “And what’s the talk around the water cooler about the security situation here inside the Ilemi, within the P5 offices and IRDF?”

Rick nodded and said, “They’re thinking that we can stay inside the threat spiral. Presently, unless they come at us unexpectedly with some sort of tank
blitzkrieg
, then we’re ready to meet them toe-to-toe and trounce them quite soundly. But just
finding them
and reacting quickly, if they continue to come at us piecemeal, will be the problem.”

“More sensors,
better
sensors?”

“We’re working on that. There is now even a technology that discriminates between the smell of human waste versus animal scat.”

Gary laughed and said, “That’s amazing.”

Rick looked Gary squarely in the eye and said, “But there are some questions that have been raised within the IRDF cadres, and they’ve been bouncing it back and forth with both their Intel Cell and the Passport office. They wonder about the resolve within the tribes, whether they’ve developed a strong enough sense of nationalism in such a short period of time, since Independence.”

“I see. Well, I don’t know how things are with the eastern tribes, but out here, the western cattlemen that I’ve talked to are
committed
. You can probably see a big tribal registration in the next Basic Intake. And some of the tribal herdsmen and the Afrikaners as old as 40 are making arrangements to sort of ‘board’ their cows with each other, so that the men and even some wives will be free to take the IRDF short course.”

“Well, that’s commendable. What about your neighbors, here in the Gulch?”

Gary stopped twirling the cleaning rod and pointed the handle forward to punctuate his words. “Look: We may be a bit of a circus troupe here, but we
are
Ilemis, through and through, and we’ve got plenty of backbone. We will defend the country and back the IRDF
one hundred percent
in protecting our borders.”

Meital and Rick both smiled. Meital said, “It is a relief to hear that. It is good to know that we can count on you.”

Rick pointed to the workbench with the computers and ham radio gear and asked, “I see that you have a couple of old PC towers. Are those for nostalgia, or do you want to be able to change MAC addresses?”

“For the latter. I have friends on three continents who are keeping their eye out at swap meets and thrift stores for old octicore motherboards for me. So far I’ve accumulated 24 boards. And of those, only two of them have MAC IDs that are in any way associated with my name or the Ilemi Republic. With just a shut-down, card swap, and a reboot, I can reappear under entirely new personas. When you combine that capability with VPN tunneling and encryption, those can be
very
powerful privacy tools.”

Rick gave a nod and a smile, but Meital’s face took on a slightly puzzled look.

Rick said, “You may not have heard, but back before I was in Merger and Acquisitions, I did a stint as a cyber-combat guy with the Air Force. We had access to some pretty sophisticated tools -- mostly software, but a few of them were custom hardware. One of those was a CPU that outwardly appeared to have a burned-in MAC ID, but in fact it was reprogrammable in PROM.”

“Sweet.”

Rick resumed, “And in addition to recruiting pilots, I’ve been tasked with recruiting some cyber warriors for IRISS -- the IRDF’s intelligence arm.”

“Where will you find them?”

“That’s my question for
you
, Gary.”

Keene chuckled, realizing that Rick had pegged him as a hacker. Then he responded, “My knowledge of those arcane subjects is a bit dated. That was mostly back when I was in college. But I do try to at least follow current events in the deep web.”

After a pause, Keene continued, “Rick, I’m sure you’ve heard of DEF CON.”

“Of course. I’ve never been there, but from all accounts, that convention in Vegas each summer is definitely the mecca for the hacking world.”

“You should definitely
go there
. DEF CON is the biggest one, but there is also Toor Con in San Diego, and C3, the Chaos Communication Congress, in Hamburg, Germany. But regardless of which conventions you choose, my advice is to
not
rent booths or even wear an Ilemi flag lapel pin that identifies you -- that might result in recruiting some people who are already on the payroll of
other
agencies. Just walk around at the convention, and watch the T-shirts. The Christian libertarians will make themselves apparent. If
you
stop them in the hall and strike up conversations, then the chance of infiltration will be much lower.”

Meital giggled and then said in a deep voice, “By their T-shirts ye shall know them.”

This comment got them all laughing.

Keene put on a grin, and asked, “So, can you two stay for lunch?”

Rick replied, “Sure. What’s cooking?”

“Kudu steaks with honey sauce.”

Meital made a loud, contented humming noise and said, “Then we’re
definitely
staying.”

Chapter 31: C-Beams

“Sovereignty must not be used for inflicting harm on anyone, whether citizen or foreigner.”
-- Ludwig von Mises

Solus Christus, Ilemi Republic -- November 1st, Five Years After Declaration of the Caliphate

Most of Independence Day was taken up with the annual
Schützenfest
rifle shooting match, which was open to all classes of Citizens and to resident aliens. There was a trophy-awarding ceremony at dusk. With the high score of the day, the big trophy went to François Deschamps, a French-born but Moroccan-raised mining engineer. In recent years, he had been a competitive high power rifle shooter in the United States and had won the Raton Cup in New Mexico.

The awards ceremony was followed by a picnic dinner. Baby David Akins drifted off to sleep during dinner, nestled in his babypack. After it was full dark, the Independence Day fireworks began. All of the firing was done out over the Tannhäuser Gate, into the expanse of the canyon.

The citizenry started with lots of tracers from 5.56 and 7.62 mm rifles and light machineguns. Next, a few .50 caliber machineguns were driven up to the firing line. The 5.56mm tracers only burned for about 400 yards, but the .50 BMG tracers seemed to trace three times that distance. Then, from up on Artillery Hill, a couple of short bursts of tracers were fired from a towed Vulcan 20mm AA cannon and a truck-mounted Quad .50 caliber. The noise woke up the baby, and he seemed mesmerized by the sight of the tracers arcing up into the night sky: Seeing the tracers made him giggle.

Before the tracer fire ended, the flare launching began. There were hundreds of flares fired -- everything from 27.5mm flare pistols to those from 4.2” mortars. Most of the flares were single glowing meteor flares and triple or quadruple star cluster flares. Some of the flares were of the parachute variety, lingering to come down very slowly. There was a slight breeze from the east, so the parachutes drifted west out into the canyon as they descended. Those fired from the big mortars burned for nearly 90 seconds each.

The Hindenburg Finale came when dozens of white two-meter diameter weather balloons were filled with hydrogen, chemical light sticks were tied to their bottoms, and they were released in quick succession. The IRDF machinegunners then did their best to down them, but judging the distance was difficult, so it often took several bursts before a tracer bullet would hit each balloon and cause it to explode in flames. A few of the balloons escaped the gunners and reached elevations that were out of range for the FN-MAG machineguns.

Then Dr. Sami Demirci put on his display, first using his lidar for target acquisition and then firing silent one-tenth-second bursts from his green C-Beam LINAC. He exploded the nine remaining balloons in rapid succession. None of them could escape his beams.

The crowd reacted with a wave of applause, and one man shouted, “To God be the glory!”

As they walked back up the hill to their house, with Rick wearing the babypack, Meital nudged up to Rick’s side and held his hand.

There was a cluster of people ahead of them. As they got closer, they saw that it was a group of people huddled around Harry Heston, who had flown in for the week of Independence Day. They didn’t seem to be reporters. Heston was smiling and seemed relaxed, but Rick felt sympathy for Harry having to face encounters like these.

One of the men in the small crowd asked, “I heard that you are turning over day-to-day management of GlobalMAP to one of your VPs. Is that really your plan?”

“Yes, that’s true. The transition may take as long as two years. I want to be able to spend more of my time here in Ersatz Israel. My business keeps me in Scotland too much of each year, but my heart is here in the Ilemi.”

Seeing the Akinses approach, Heston turned and said, “Rick and Meital! I was just heading up to your house. I was hoping that we could chat.”

Meital answered, “Certainly! Come along with us.”

Propitiously, the arrival of the Akinses provided a polite way for Heston to break away from the small throng of well-wishers. After pausing to shake a few hands, Harry joined the Akinses on their stroll. After talking briefly about the fireworks, and once they’d walked well out of earshot, Harry said, “You know there will be a lot more Janjaweed coming.”

Rick sighed. “I know, I know. We’ll have some very dangerous and difficult times ahead of us, but we’ll
be ready
for them. At least if they fight us face to face, then we’ll prevail.”

Heston glanced at David sleeping in his babypack and said, “Well, then we’ll just have to do our very best to make sure that your son grows up happy, and free -- no matter what the cost. We owe him that much.”