Chapter 6

Our visitor introduced himself, "Good day, Gentlemen. I am Jason Rivers, manager of the plant you have just closed down. I am here to see if we can come to some accommodation so that the plant can be reopened."

We introduced ourselves, and then I said, "What did you have in mind, Mr. Rivers?"

"Well, we assume that you would allow us to reopen the plant if you had a larger financial interest in it. We had been paying your predecessor 1.5% of the net which amounted to approximately $180,000 per year. We are prepared to offer you 2.0% of the net which should be approximately $240,000 per year. We feel that this is a fair portion of the profit of the plant."

"Mr. Rivers, I appreciate the way you are being up front with us, but I must say that we have nothing to negotiate. As far as I am concerned, your union has mismanaged itself out of business at this plant. We are sincere when we say that we want better human relations for the workers. This means a 40-hour week. Furthermore, we want everybody to be paid an adequate wage and to have a medical and dental care plan. We also want everybody to have two weeks of paid vacation. Those are our minimum requirements and non-negotiable."

"My, God, Mr. Johnson. Do you realize what that would do to our profits?"

"Of course, I don't know the exact amount my demands would cost, but I do know that you people would still make an obscene profit after these additional expenses are factored in."

"We simply cannot accede to your demands, Mr. Johnson. It would set a precedent that we could not live with. Please reconsider."

"Mr. Rivers, as I said before, my demands are non-negotiable. If you are not prepared to meet those demands, I'm afraid that your plant will remain closed."

"Mr. Johnson, you do understand that I do not have the authority to agree to such outrageous demands. I will have to buck your demands upstairs and wait for a decision from the Atlanta office. Until I hear from them, there is nothing else that I can offer. I will bid you good day and get back to you when I hear something. Thank you for you courtesy, and I hope to talk to you, again, very soon."

"Good bye, Mr. Rivers. I hope that we have a more congenial conversation the next time we meet."

Three days later, we got a response from the Atlanta office. This response took the form of a visit from six of the union enforcers. The arrived after midnight in two cars. Mary and I had just finished an edition of any young man's sexual fantasy and I was flaked out, hard asleep, but no longer hard anywhere else.

Mary was in the bathroom taking a shower when the goons arrived in front of the house in Ochnee. They managed to jimmy the front door open without making enough noise to disturb anyone. This was when Mary shut off the water in the shower, so they didn't hear her in there when they came into our bedroom. They had just slapped a piece of duck tape across my mouth when she opened the door from the bathroom. The goons were in the process of taping my wrists together with more duck tape when Mary realized what was going on. She stepped back into the bathroom and picked up the AK-74 from its rack and thumbed off the safety.

The goons were taping my ankles when Mary stepped back into the bedroom and let loose with a blast from the assault rifle on full automatic. She did a wonderful job of hosing down the creeps—no bullet ever came close to me! Each of the six men was hit by at least three bullets, all between the belt and their armpits. You couldn't ask for better gun control. I was really proud of her! And it all happened so fast that none of them made a sound.

Jimmy came dashing into the room a few seconds later with his gun ready, but he saw that Mary had the situation under control. Actually, he was lucky that she didn't shoot him, too, but she had emptied the magazine and was in the process of exchanging it for a fresh one when Jimmy showed up.

Still naked from the shower, Mary got some alcohol to ease the pain and carefully peeled the tape from my lips. As soon as I could speak, I said, "Mary, I love you. Please marry me?" She was so shocked that she had to sit down. Jimmy took the bottle of alcohol from her and started to work the remaining tape off me.

Once the tape was removed and I could move, Mary swept me up in her arms and said, "Yes! ... Yes! ... Yes! I'll marry you. When can we do it?" Well, we spent the next hour getting that straightened out. Once we had things settled, Mary ran to the telephone to call her mother with the news. It had to be 2:00 AM by then, but Mary never noticed, and I think her mother reacted the same way when she found out the reason for the call.

Jimmy and I dragged the bodies outside, but that was the extent of the clean up until later. Mary and I slept in a guest room for the rest of the night. Actually, neither one of us got any sleep, we were both too excited.

About noon, I had the bodies loaded onto a truck and delivered to the processing plant. The two cars were left with the bodies outside the front gate. Once my people left, some more thugs came out and moved the cars and the bodies. As expected, we never heard a word from the union people about this little adventure.

Jimmy decided that we had been downright careless with security in general, and our personal safety in particular. He arranged for several of the militia members who were otherwise unemployed to become our bodyguards on a 24/7 basis. I stayed out of the way while he arranged it, but I never went anywhere after that without at least four bodyguards. It was a little bit annoying at times, but not nearly as annoying as being dead would be!

OK, the next thing we had to worry about was a bunch of thugs moving in to beat up on the strikers. Jimmy and I talked about that and decided to preempt that phase of the cycle. We had no intention of sitting around on our asses waiting for somebody to get badly hurt—that just wasn't our style.

We organized a raid on the processing plant, since Atlanta was too far away for us to attack directly. We loaded up four trucks with unemployed militia members (this was getting to be such a regular thing that maybe we just needed to admit that we needed a standing army) and drove to the processing plant. We took along one of the strikers to act as a guide once we got inside the plant.

The front gate was locked, but we didn't let that stop us. I sent a man, with armed protection, to use a bolt cutter to open the gate. That didn't take long and we were at the manager's parking spot in only a minute or so. I had just stepped from the car I was riding in when we were met by 11 of the plant's enforcers. They were carrying clubs, but no guns, so I ordered no shooting unless in self defense. The combination of the knife (not much of a bayonet, but adequate at this time) and the solid metal and plastic gun stock on our version of the AK-74 was enough to punch our way through the thugs. Only one of them, probably the most stupid, had any broken bones, and there were very few knife wounds, all minor.

Our striker guide led us directly to the manager's office where we found him hiding under his desk. I promised not to hurt him this time, so he could come out. When we had him standing in a corner (I wanted to put on psychological pressure by not letting him sit at his desk), I explained that we would be back if any of the strikers had so much as a broken fingernail as a result of union action, and when we came back, we would be prepared to dish out some major hurt. We could smell that this threat caused him to shit in his pants, so we left to let him clean himself up.

Back home, Jimmy and I congratulated ourselves on a successful operation. Now we had to wait for the next move by the union. Jimmy expected that to be a military action. We brought in John Mason and a couple of other leaders he recommended, and spent three days planning how we were going to counter an invasion by the Army and, possibly, the Navy. We knew that the Army could crush us with a minimum of effort if they really wanted to, so it was up to us to keep them from wanting to.