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A Midnight Drive
By Andy Zask
Based on “Paul Revere’s Ride” by Henry Longfellow
No truly democratic and free people would allow themselves to go from freedom and democracy to tyranny and subjugation without a fight. The first time the United States had an election of theirs rigged, miscounted, poorly judged and robbed, they should have fought. They should have risen. Instead, they were complacent. They accepted their fates as being out of their control. Maybe a tenth of the population knew and recognized what had happened.
The second election was more of the same. This time, however, they had seen the trickery before. More people came to see the rigging, the bad counting machines, and the corrupt judges. By the end of the second election, over a third of the people knew and recognized that their government had been stolen. They knew that their officials had not been elected and that their democracy had become a fascist state. Still, they didn’t fight. They waited. They can’t do it again, they thought.
When the third election was robbed, the dissenters had had enough. Their numbers had grown, and they began to unite. They began to communicate and organize. The backlash against the government’s corruption became so wide spread that the people no longer mumbled and groaned. Now they yelled and spoke loudly. More and more people came to realize that their fear of losing their way of life to a corrupt government was greater than the fear of what that government could do to them. The early revolution began to go public. The government sought to stem their efforts with the 2009 Sedition and Betrayal Act, which essentially suspended the Fourth Amendment. The growing rebel coalition laughed at the name. Sedition was what they were fighting.
The government had their laws and their wire taps and satellite communication interceptors. The NSA nearly doubled in size as they were forced to bring on new recruits to process the massive amounts of intelligence gathered on American citizens. Rebels added to their woes, distributing flyers advising citizens to interject suspicious phrases such as, “overthrow the government” or “bomb the white house” into their everyday phone conversations.
That was really a ploy within a ploy. The rebels weren’t worried about cell phone taps. That was just another way to get the corrupt government to waste and misplace resources. The real important communications took place over the Internet. They set up secret chat rooms that the government couldn’t access, tens of thousands of them, most filled with computer bots that carried on mindless conversations about war and terrorism and political corruption for the benefit of any intelligence officers who could access them. They set up elaborate e-mail programs, where every e-mail sent would go out with tens, hundreds, or even thousands of other messages to dummy accounts carrying misinformation. The correspondence put out by these tactics filled a massive volume. Every dummy message, every fake chat room carried suspicious and dangerous potential leads. Every day, the thousands of intelligence officers attempting to analyze the data fell behind by several years.
In July of 2009, the final protest was staged. In every major city, thousands of men and women dressed in blue jeans, blue jackets, and ski masks despite the heat. They marched, in orderly fashion, to the city hall, state capital, or in DC, the national capital. The protest signs all had one word: Surrender. In each city, the thousands of protesters stood still and quiet, rank and file, in front of the buildings. One member of each protest group stood ahead with a bullhorn and read a list of charges, indicting the federal government. At the end of the charges, the man or woman said, “You have 24 hours to respond. If the government does not abdicate its power, we will remove it by force.”
Just north of Palm Springs, at a rest stop on the westbound side of I-10, Simon Williamson waited anxiously in a blue Corvette with a walkie talkie in his hand. The response to the day’s protest had begun. FM and AM radio were out, as were all cell phone communications. They had even shut down the Internet Service Providers. The government had recognized that they were at war. Their first response had been to shut off all communication for the enemy. That means us, Simon thought. We’re the enemy. Although the Corvette’s engine was off, Simon gripped the steering wheel tightly. He found he couldn’t keep his feet still, and they played drum beats on the pedals. Every time a car drove by the freeway behind him, he held the walkie talkie up to his ear, afraid that he might miss his signal. Simon, a welder by trade, wasn’t perturbed by the lack of phone and Internet service. He’d been active in the New Revolution since the third election results had been forged. He had known his role for months, since all these plans had been laid down.
While this emergency communication system had been set up, the government had been busy investigating false reports that insurgents were building forces in Canada, Mexico and Cuba, or that there was a conspiracy to take control of the nation’s nuclear arsenal, or any of a few hundred other horrible stories that had been disseminated en masse over the Internet. Millions of form messages had paralyzed the government. They would have overlooked simple messages about walkie talkies and Morse code, and someone’s brand new Corvette. Stuff like that doesn’t seem so dangerous compared to the threat of a neutron bomb going off at the Lincoln Memorial or a plan to poison the water supplies of every major military base.
Thirty miles east of Simon, a friend of his sat in the dirt overlooking the road leading out of 29 Palms Marine Base. It was a clear night, and the man had a good vantage point. He watched the road and the sky above it. His job, so simple and yet so important, was to watch for movement and, if he saw it, to press the buttons on the side of his walkie talkie in a certain combination based on what he saw. At 11:58 pm, he saw headlights on the road. He lifted his binoculars and saw that the lights belonged to a camouflaged green jeep. Behind it, another jeep, and then a large tented truck. He saw more lights behind the truck, and when he strained his eyes, he made out the dark hulking outlines that he knew to be tanks. The time had come for his task. He sent out a simple message.
If he had seen planes and helicopters instead of tanks and trucks, he would have hit the “dash” button, then the “dot” button three times to make the letter “B.” “A” if by land, “B” if by air. His radio guaranteed a signal range of 15 miles. The rebel coalition had agreed that radio relayers would stay 10 miles apart from each other. If the military had sent out an air strike first, the message would have been relayed quickly west to the San Bernardino Mountains, north and east to the Sierra Nevadas, and along the Central Valley, warning the people to uncover and arm their hidden antiaircraft guns. Spreading the word in the middle and eastern part of California was fairly easy. Going west was more difficult. As the radios entered heavily populated areas, their signals tended to falter as they were overridden by ambulance and police services and thousands of truckers. For reliable radio communication in the western cities, someone would have to bring radios close to the people. That was Simon’s job.
As Simon’s friend outside 29 Palms saw the trucks and tanks, he hit the two buttons on the side of his radio – “dot” followed by “dash” – the letter “A.” These were simple walkie talkies with no sort of encryption or way of hiding the signal. Certainly the men in the tanks below picked it up, as did the communications specialists back on the base. The beauty of the code was in its simplicity. The letter “A” in Morse code came through the air, perhaps signaling that a child with a new toy was learning about radio communications. Certainly the letter “B” would follow soon. And when it didn’t, that was okay too. Within seconds Simon’s friend heard a response from the next man in the relay chain: “dot – dash.” At 11:59 Simon’s radio received the message. As he heard the letter “A,” Simon fired up the engine. He peeled onto the I-10 and made his way for Los Angeles at the turn of midnight.
It was midnight on a weekday, and I-10 was mostly deserted. Simon pushed the Corvette, reaching 140 mph. By 1:00 am he had passed Riverside and was crossing I-15. As he passed overhead he hit his radio’s side buttons, passing the word to another young man in a car at a rest stop, so that that driver could drive the word south to San Diego. At 2:00 am, Simon left I-10 in favor of the 101 heading north. Since entering Riverside, his fingers had been working non stop, “dot-dash, dot-dash, dot-dash.” As his message spread, the local factions left their houses and took to the streets. They began to construct previously conceived fortifications, to place arms and supplies and to evacuate civilians from the areas they had designated as combat zones. In a few short minutes most of Los Angeles had transformed into a military base. Simon drove on.
By 3:00 am, Simon had reached Oxnard, and the smell of cattle in the summer heat. A few minutes later, he passed through Ventura. Constantly his fingers moved, transmitting that single letter that would mobilize his people. At 4:00 am he passed through Santa Barbara. This was the last of his responsibilities. All other routes and lines of communications had been taken care of. At 4:15 am, Simon pulled into a gas station near Lompoc. The Corvette was dangerously low on fuel. Simon filled it up, shrugged at the $65 price tag, and went into the store to pick up some Red Bull and pay the cashier. “What’s up, man?” the cashier asked.
“War,” Simon replied.
“War?”
“We’re at war. It started today.”
The cashier looked at Simon quizzically, looking for a sign of humor. He found none. Guess we’re at war, he thought, and gave Simon his change. Simon walked out and got into the Corvette. Its owner was in Oakland. Simon had agreed to run the message from 29 Palms to Santa Barbara, but now his mission was to get to Oakland and rejoin the militia.
He headed north as he had been. At 4:20 am, the road was deserted. Simon checked his rear view, and all he saw reflected was the darkened road, glowing red beyond his taillights. The enemy is back there, he thought, but wasn’t afraid. With grim satisfaction he thought of the hornets’ nests he’d passed and that they were now awake and angry. All over the country this had happened. Tens of thousands of troops erupted from their posts and bases, ready to crush and destroy the rebels. In response, a few hundred young men and women drove their sports cars down the freeways and highways, hitting buttons on their radios and mobilizing the resistance. His gaze steely and determined, Simon drove through the night and the morning to reach San Francisco and Oakland to end his drive and make his stand.
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