When Good Plans Go Bad, page 6
part #2 of DimWorld Series
Chapter 6
“So, how many people do we have to work with here?” Quentin asked. “People that can fight, let’s start with that.” They were back in Viho’s house for a brainstorming session after taking a break to explore the village and cool off.
Viho nodded. “We have almost five hundred people. Out of that, about one hundred fifty are children, too small. Our women are tough, but they are not warriors, and that’s about two hundred. So, one hundred fifty men. Some of them are too old to fight. About one hundred who can run, and use a bow or a spear.”
“Okay, that’s not so bad,” Quentin said. “If Macalister has a total of forty men, then we outnumber him significantly.”
Quentin was back in charge of planning, after a heated discussion with Bob and Tocho. Quentin wanted to take a giant step back after the debacle at the first meeting and learn from the sidelines, but they weren’t having it. They’d promised to support him, but he was running the show.
“Don’t forget that they have guns,” Bob said. “Bullets against arrows are a great equalizer.”
“Maybe,” Quentin said. “Maybe not. In our dimension, General Custer and his army with guns got the shit kicked out of them by the Indians. No survivors.”
“Native Americans,” Eissa corrected. “And I think they had guns, too.”
Quentin sighed, trying not to get annoyed. “Some of them might have, but not all of them. Anyway, that’s not the point. We’re not trying to kill anyone, remember?”
Eissa stuck her tongue out at him. Her refusal to take things seriously was a survival mechanism, part of her PTSD, but knowing that didn’t make it any less irritating for him. He was trying desperately to look professional in front of the Bribri, and her immature behavior made him feel like a little kid playing dress-up in front of the grown-ups. He shifted away from her slightly, as if the increased gap between them would separate her behavior from his in the eyes of the others.
“What’s your idea?” Bob asked. “I can see the gears turning in your head.”
“Well, it’s just a rough idea,” Quentin said slowly. “If we ambush one of his chocolate trade groups, or convoy, whatever you call it, like you had mentioned, and we manage to keep the element of surprise, we should be able to capture the lot without a single shot fired. It’s not like they’ll be marching down the road with their guns drawn, right? They do this all the time; they’re not expecting trouble.”
“Right,” Bob agreed.
“So, if a hundred guys jump out of the woods with arrows drawn, surrounding them, they can’t do anything. We’ll totally have the drop on them. Then we just disarm them, tie up the guards, release the slaves, and job done.”
Quentin looked around the group, hoping for some glimmer of support. Mazik spoke up.
“If we have them like that, why don’t we just shoot them all? Three seconds, a hundred arrows, and it’s all over. Then they don’t have a chance to shoot anyone.”
“Well, that hurts our chances of making a deal with Macalister,” Quentin pointed out. “We can’t kill all of his men, and then ask him to meet us in the middle.” He didn’t add that killing people wasn’t on his skills list.
“If we kill all his men, and kill him too, then we can just take over the chocolate trade,” Mazik said with a dark smile. “We’ll make our own deal with the Inka and the Aztecs.”
Quentin took a deep breath. He wasn’t a natural diplomat, and he certainly wasn’t prepared to spend the day talking someone out of going on a killing rampage. The whole discussion with Viho and Tahki Ana had been geared towards not getting anyone hurt or killed. Mazik was clearly on a different sheet of music than his grandparents.
Tocho cleared his throat. “If we kill everyone, then we become bad people, just like DimCorp. We are the good guys. We don’t want to kill anyone, if we can help it.”
“They are soldiers,” Mazik said. “Killing them is not the same as killing other people.”
The concept of nonviolence seemed to be lost on Mazik. If they couldn’t trust him to not start shooting arrows into the DimCorp guards, then they were going to have a serious problem. He needed to find a way to help Mazik broaden his perspective and see the bigger picture. Quentin tried to come up with a commonality between Mazik and the guards. If he could plant that seed, perhaps he could coax some empathy out of it.
“They’re people,” Quentin said. “They have hopes and dreams and families, just like you and me. They have values, just like we do. Theirs might be different than ours, but we have to be true to our values, and killing them, especially from ambush when they’re defenseless, is wrong.”
Mazik glared at Quentin, anger clouding his eyes like a storm, and pointed to the scar on his cheek. “Do you think the man who did this was worried about my hopes and dreams and family? He killed my father with the same knife that gave me this scar. He deserves to die.”
Viho raised his hand, silencing the room. He bowed his head for a moment.
“Mazik is young, and he has suffered much,” he said. “He does not yet understand that you cannot bring peace to the world by killing all of your enemies.”
The first thing Quentin’s therapist would ask is if he had tried to see things from Mazik’s perspective. If his own father had been killed by Carl Holt, the DimCorp security guard that had started Quentin down this path, would he be able to set that aside and be pragmatic? It was easy to say that he would, in a theoretical sense, but he couldn’t deny that he would want justice, and if he couldn’t get that, then he would settle for vengeance. Hell, if he was being honest with himself, he had to admit that he’d acted just like Mazik only a month ago, when he was more concerned about going home and confronting Carl Holt and Gerrard Zimmerman than he was about confronting DimCorp as a whole.
There was a lot more pain and suffering in Mazik’s past than Quentin gave him credit for, and he felt guilty for not acknowledging that beforehand. If he was going to guide Mazik effectively, he had better understand what motivated Mazik. Logic wasn’t going to be enough, by itself. He needed to speak to Mazik’s pain points.
“If we kill forty men from DimCorp, four hundred will come through the Gate,” Quentin said. “If we kill them, four thousand will come. It is without end.”
Mazik was silent, brooding.
“The way forward is not through killing,” Viho said. “If killing were the answer, then there would only be one man left in the world, and he would die alone, with no one to care that he ever lived.”
Mazik hung his head. “Yes, grandfather.”
Quentin was taken aback by Viho’s nugget of wisdom. He hadn’t really thought about it like that before, but it was hard to argue with. If he killed everyone he disagreed with, he would have already killed everyone in this room at least once. The concept chilled him.
Viho turned to Quentin. “This ambush, what happens if a guard shoots his gun?”
“Well, we have to defend ourselves. If someone starts shooting, then kill him, but only him. There must be discipline to not start killing the others, too.”
Viho nodded in silence.
“I think we need to see what we’ve got for resources,” Bob said. “If we go with this plan, we’re going to need a lot of rope to tie up the guards.”
“We have rope as well as rawhide,” Viho said. “We’ll soak it and cut it into strips. We use that to tie many things. It is very strong.”
Bob nodded and ran his fingers through his beard.
“Okay, let’s plot this out,” Quentin said. He leaned forward and drew a line across the llama skin with his finger. “That’s the trail. How many people are going to be in the trade group? Has anyone ever seen how they do it?”
“Two guards lead the way,” Mazik said. “Then come five Bribri, with packs. Three guards behind them, and five more Bribri. Five guards at the end.”
If the trade convoy was really that small, walking down a trail in dense jungle foliage, an ambush with a hundred people wasn’t going to be practical at all. He was going to have to scale it back, but that might be a good thing. If he could split his forces in half, they could do a lot more.
“Okay, so we’re looking at ten guards, spaced out along here.” Quentin pointed to the line. “If we have twenty men with bows, we can put ten on each side. Every man is assigned to a guard. Bob and I step out on the trail and stop them and tell them they’re surrounded. If a guard starts to raise his gun, the two men assigned to him shoot him. No one else shoots. Then ten other men come up and disarm the guards and tie them up. What do you think?”
“Why not have fifty on each side?” Eissa asked. “Overwhelm them with numbers.”
“It’s going to be hard enough to hide twenty people where they can’t be seen easily, but still have a clear shot,” Quentin said. “I don’t think you could hide a hundred people in the woods and keep them close enough to the trail to be effective.”
“Fair point,” she said. “So, where am I in all of this?”
“You’re the medic, so we need to find a spot that’s close to set you up with the medical gear. If someone does get hurt, we need to be able to get them to you pretty quick.”
Eissa smiled, as he knew she would. Once she had a purpose, a direction, she would fully engage with it, and he wouldn’t have to worry about it. That was doubly true with a first aid station. Give Eissa a medical mission, and she was in her element.
“Do you want me to be mobile and come to you, or do you want me to have a spot where I set up a triage center, and you bring them to me?”
“What is happening?” Viho asked. “What is a triage center?”
“It’s basically a field hospital,” Eissa said. “I brought a lot of medical supplies so we could practice realistically, which was a good decision, as it turns out. Hopefully we won’t need them, of course.”
“Are you a doctor?” Mazik asked, perking up. “When I was a boy, a DimCorp doctor came through the Gate and healed a guard who broke his leg.”
Eissa shook her head. “No, I was a combat medic. My job in the Army was to keep people alive long enough to get them to a doctor.”
“A triage center is probably the best way to do it,” Quentin said, trying to get them back on topic. “If you’re mobile, we’ll have to have people carrying gear for you, and digging around trying to find what you need, and all that.”
He turned to Viho.
“We don’t want anyone to get hurt, but if they do, we want to be ready to help them as best we can. Do you have someone that can help her, someone with experience like this?”
“Yes, of course,” Viho said. “We have three women who will help her. They are very good healers.”
Quentin consulted his list. They were doing a fairly good job of covering the bases. They didn’t have a second plan to compare it to, or at least not yet, and that was something he wanted to move on to soon. He was already learning that there was a lot he didn’t know about doing something like this, and the last thing he wanted was for his lack of experience to get someone hurt or killed.
“Bob, what do you think about this plan?” Quentin asked. “You’re the one with all the experience. How can we do it better?”
Bob looked at Tocho before answering. Tocho shrugged.
“Well, it’s basically the same concept I had,” Bob said. “We’ve used something similar before. The biggest flaw I see is that you’re pretty sure they’re just going to drop their guns and surrender. I guess that’s possible, but usually there’s at least a couple that want to shoot it out. You have to be prepared for that.”
Logically, no one should try to shoot it out when they’re surrounded, and it was a good reminder that people are seldom logical, especially in an emotionally-charged situation. It was difficult for Quentin to anticipate things like this, and he nodded to Bob in gratitude.
“I’m hoping to talk them out of that,” Quentin said. “Maybe you and I can step out and talk to them. We’ll tell them that we don’t want anyone to get hurt, but they’re surrounded by archers who will shoot them if they move their hands. That way, they’ll have a second to think it through. Obviously, we don’t want everyone jumping up and pointing bows and arrows at them. I don’t want to make it a race thing, but I think they’ll listen to us since we’re white.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Eissa asked. Her face darkened into a frown.
“It means that they aren’t expecting any white people to be there.” Quentin swallowed his frustration, determined not to get lured into an argument with her in the middle of a strategy meeting. “If the Bribri just pop up, they’ll assume they’re being robbed, and probably start shooting. If two white guys appear and want to talk, they’ll be confused enough to hear us out.”
Eissa held his stare for a moment, her jaw clenched. He could tell that she knew he was right from the twitch in her eye, but that she hated to admit it. It was an understandable sticking point for her, but he needed her to get past it.
“It is wise to play on the prejudices of your enemy,” Tocho said. “Bob and I used that strategy for many years.”
“Well, I guess that makes sense,” Eissa said, dropping her eyes at last. “But you sounded like an asshole when you said it.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll work on my presentation.” Quentin winked at her as a way of apologizing. She gave him a small smile.
“You know that by doing that, you’re making yourself an easy target,” Bob said. “There’s nowhere for us to hide if it goes bad.”
“Well, how else can we do it?” Quentin asked. “That’s the kind of feedback I need here. What can we do to make it safer, more foolproof?”
No one said anything. Quentin went over the diagram, trying to improve on it, but there were only three moving pieces, and he couldn’t come up with another way to reach the desired conclusion. When the trade convoy came down the trail, they needed to be stopped, notified of the situation, and disarmed and restrained. There just wasn’t another way to accomplish that.
“Well then, I guess that’s Plan A,” Quentin said. “If it works, then we send one of the pack carriers back to the camp to tell them they got attacked, and we do it again on the second set of guards that shows up.”
He looked around the room. Viho sat silently, his stone face unmoving. Mazik’s eyes glittered, and his agitated fingers drew patterns on the llama skin. The contrast between the two was striking; the stillness of experience and wisdom, and the energy of righteous rage.
“The second group of guards is going to show up ready for war,” Bob said. “If they think there’s a battle going on, they’re liable to shoot first and ask questions later, as the saying goes. We’ll have to figure out how to de-escalate things, so it doesn’t turn into a blood bath.”
There didn’t seem to be any way to handle them differently than the first group. There were the same three moving parts. The only way to approach it was for someone to approach them with a white flag and try to talk it out. He couldn’t argue with Bob about the danger in that. The very thought of standing alone with his hands raised over his head as a group of men with machine guns raced towards him made his bowels loose with fear, but what else could he do? There was no other way.
“I have a bad feeling,” Viho said. “I remember everything that has been said, but I do not like any of this. I wish now that you had not come.”
“That wouldn’t have stopped the future from happening,” Bob said. “Half your tribe would still be slaves. Eventually, DimCorp would want more. They will always want more slaves to take more resources, until they have taken everything in your land. And if it’s not them, then someone else from this world would show up one day and try to take it away from you.”
A breeze picked up the curtains and waved them about, their shadows dancing across the floor. Dust motes floated in the sunbeams, stirred by the moving air. The silence was heavy, but less pressing than before.
“Are all men so greedy in their heart?” Viho asked. “Is no people safe in their own land?”
“Not really,” Quentin said. “They call it colonizing, or empire-building. People have been doing it to each other forever. Some people want things, and the way they get it is by finding people like the Bribri and taking it from them. Sometimes it’s land, sometimes it’s labor, or gold, or oil. They move in, take over, and get what they want. Eventually, someone else will come along and do the same thing to them.”
Viho shook his head, and Quentin realized he was crying. He reached over and put his hand on Viho’s shoulder and squeezed.
“We think it’s horrible, too. That’s why we’re here. We’re trying to fight back.”
Viho put his hand on top of Quentin’s.
“I know this,” he said. His voice shook with emotion as he looked at each of them in turn. “The sadness is heavy on my heart when I think about all of my people who have died for this already. My son. The sons of my friends and family. What have they died for? For a cacao seed? Is that the value of life to these people? I would have given them a thousand bushels of seeds if they had asked. Instead, the Bribri people died, and became slaves... for nothing. This is my sadness.”
Quentin’s chest tightened. He was powerless to stop the grief that radiated from Viho, and it poured over him in relentless waves. He pushed the emotions down and tried to compartmentalize them, to seal them off, at least until the meeting was over. If he started crying too, he might not be able to stop.
They sat in silence for several minutes, contemplating Viho’s words. Quentin used the time to slow his pounding heart and get refocused on the logistics of the situation. Gotta stay logical, Q. Don’t be an emotional sponge. Sometimes it was helpful to be empathic and feel the emotions of those around you. In this situation, though, where there was such an overwhelming volume of powerful emotions, it would drown him if he let it. He knew what they were feeling, he didn’t need to feel it with them. Best to put the emotions in a box and lock the lid. When he felt that it was safe to resume the discussion, he cleared his throat lightly.
