Winter Kill - War With China Has Already Begun

by Gene Skellig

  Casey started to get intimate with every little detail of his new property, the adjoining properties, and the community at large. Now that he had chosen the site, it was time to begin to set his plan in motion. Now all that he needed was time. Time to get out of the military, time to build the house, and time to move the family before all hell broke loose with the world.

  What Casey Callaghan did not realize at the time was just how close he had cut it. Had he delayed even one more year, it would have proven fatal for a great many people.

  8

  GUN CLUB

  28 June: 23 Months Before NEW

  H. Lindsay Contracting had been hired for forty hours of excavator time. Harold had promised to send an experienced operator, with a fairly new excavator.

  Sure enough, as Casey turned the corner from Grafton Road onto John Wainscott Crescent, he saw the big orange rig that had already been walked-off of its trailer onto a bed of tires laid down to protect the asphalt. The excavator operator, Marc Legrand, was hammering away on a giant steel pin to attach the right size bucket. Casey saw that there were successively smaller buckets nested inside the mammoth 2.5 yard bucket.

  “Looks like you’re just about ready to go! Hi, I’m Casey Callaghan, but everybody calls me ‘Boss’.” Casey introduced himself as he took Marc’s hand in a firm handshake.

  “Hi, Boss! I’m Marc! Harold said you’ve got a long list of jobs for me, and that you wanted our biggest machine for at least a week. So here we are!” Marc said as he looked up at the beautiful new machine with pride. “While I let her warm up for another five minutes, why not tell me about the job?”

  “Sure! Let’s start with the big picture. I have the geotechnical and contour data in the Suburban,” Casey said, as he walked Marc over to the well-used 1995 GMC Suburban.

  “Well, what do I have here?” Casey asked, mockingly, as he opened the door and brought out a 4-pack of Tim Horton’s coffee. A paper bag filled with creams, sugars, and stir-sticks was jammed between the cups.

  Over years of dealing with subcontractors Casey had learned that taking time to talk with machine operators and lead-hands was always worthwhile. Marc appreciated this and quickly found that Harold had been right when he described the new customer as a former builder with a good understanding of heavy equipment. Marc liked this “Boss Callaghan” immediately.

  “The property itself is eighty-acres. It starts about three hundred meters down Wainscott, over there,” Casey pointed, “and goes back almost one km or so from there, past the right side of that hilltop you can just see there, through the trees. From back there, it cuts across to a gulley down the left side of that hill, and then forward here to the road by that survey stake next to that stump over there.”

  Marc could see a fresh survey stake and orange ribbons near a cedar stump about a hundred meters to the left.

  Casey then led Marc back to the Suburban and rolled out a large thick plastic case holding the geotechnical products. On one side was the topographic survey, at 1-meter intervals. Additional details had been hand-marked in different colors.

  “You see this brown line?” Casey asked. “It’s the rough shape I want for the road. I want to keep the first thirty meters of trees here, along Wainscott, as a green belt.”

  Marc Nodded, easily following Casey’s orientation.

  “You see that big cedar there? I want the road to curve around it to where that small alder is, then sweep along parallel to the frontage, and then hook back to the right, there, after that thick holly tree,” Casey explained.

  “How wide?” Marc asked, while visualizing how he would walk the excavator through the trees on his initial cut, then pull the logs back into that open area beyond the little holly. Marc was always thinking of the most efficient way to manage a job and not work himself into a corner.

  “Four meters, plus a ditch on both sides,” Casey replied.

  “What about Hydro? Do you want me to cut-in from that pole with the transformer on it?” Marc pointed down the road.

  “No, it’s going underground. I’ll mark out a chevron trench for you later. The idea is to have no ugly power lines anywhere on the property and to keep a solid green-space along the road. You see this circle? You can use that as a stump-dump for now. I’ll get the permit for the burn. Pile all the large logs and poles in this area.” Casey indicated the same spot by a holly tree that Marc had already considered. “I’ll buck’em up so you can pluck the stumps out.” Marc nodded in agreement.

  Casey turned the chart over. The reverse of the case showed the geotechnical data and soil survey. “You should be able to pull a lot of material out here, to build up the driveway as it ascends that left slope up toward that first knoll. Do you see there?” Casey pointed near the center of the chart. “This first knoll is the building site for the HOTH!”

  “HOTH?” Marc asked.

  “House - On - The - Hill!” Casey explained, with a smile. “But it’s not really a house. It’s more like a combination of house and a commercial facility that will be mostly vacant space at first. One day it will be a large bed and breakfast,” Casey lied. “Or a small hotel, as well as living quarters.”

  “How large will it be?”

  “The floor plan is basically an octagon with the middle portion elongated on one axis. The rough excavation will be thirty meters by forty meters, to give me room to work. There is also this barn with a similar footprint, going from the right side of the HOTH excavation and extending to the west.” Casey indicated the excavation areas marked off on the chart.

  “This four-acre area, here, between the HOTH and the green-space along the frontage will ultimately be a field and lawn. But it’ll also house a large septic distribution field. There will also be a closed loop-geothermal circuit about five meters under the distro field. You can see from the legend that this area has a lot of packing pit-run so you should find it easy material to work. You’ll hit glacial pan here and here, but we’ll just use that as the maximum depth for the geothermal lines once you’ve exposed the trench.”

  “But that’s only about four meters deep,” Marc observed, reading the depth indications from the chart.

  “Good pick-up, Marc!” Casey smiled, genuinely happy that Marc knew how to read a geotechnical chart. “So we’ll have to move a lot of overburden from the HOTH excavation and from this esker, here.” Casey pointed out a ridge-like feature descending from the barn site all the way down to Wainscott Crescent.

  “Even so, that’s a lot of material to move. We’ll need a couple of tandem-axels here when we get into that; and for all the road-building snaking through the trees,” said Marc.

  “Already on order with Harold! But that’s several days away. I’ve also ordered ten loads of Three-Quarter-Minus to top-dress the road. But for now, I want you to get started with brush-clearing, piling up the burn pile, and exposing the pit-run and clay seams. Don’t bother working the fill just yet; I have some other details I need to work out first.”

  With that briefing completed, Casey left Marc to start opening up the forested property, confident that Marc understood what to do and how to read the maps that Casey had given him.

  Over the next three days, Casey spent hour after hour at the property. Marc proved to be very skilful with the huge machine. He moved the excavator’s powerful bucket like an extension of his own arm and the jaws as deftly as his own fingers gripping logs, stumps and rocks and tossing them about.

  Marc quickly transformed the dense forest into a beautiful clearing and house site nestled neatly into the rising terrain. The details provided in the geotechnical charts were helpful to Marc, allowing him to see the property as a whole and to manage the on-site materials efficiently.

  The charts also helped Casey plan the special features he wanted to imbed in the site before any construction workers arrived on scene, as these features must remain secret.

  While Marc worked, Casey would wander around the periphery of the clearing and often just sit on a rock and watch
Marc work the material. At times, Casey would bring Marc some fresh coffee and have him take a break while Casey explained some particular detail about the site preparation. Boss Callaghan knew what he wanted to have done, and clearly trusted Marc’s ability to do his job without constant direction.

  During this time, there was just one task which Casey engaged in off-site. For approximately two hours each day, Casey would visit the Oceanside Gun Club in Parksville.

  Casey was not a gun enthusiast even though he had renewed his qualification on the C-7, the Canadian version of the M-16 assault rifle, and Browning 9mm pistol every year during his years of military service. Casey had maintained fairly good groupings and overall weapon handling skills, but he was not a gun lover. Casey thought of guns as excessively powerful.

  During his military service, Casey had been required to refresh his basic military skills with weapons training as well as annual Chemical-Biological-Radiological-Nuclear training. Because the Air Force had always provided Casey with the weapons, ammunition, chemical warfare suit and other essentials, Casey did not have any weapons or CBRN equipment of his own when he retired. In Winnipeg, Casey bought a very expensive hunting rifle and began accumulating ammunition and some very unusual accessories. That way, when he moved to British Columbia and continued buying arms, it would not be immediately obvious that he was building up a small arsenal.

  Unlike the US, where gun ownership is a constitutional right, it was more of an exception in Canada. The stringent weapons-safety and storage regulations in Canada suited Casey just fine, however, as he was not a big fan of private ownership of guns. Casey believed that guns were for killing and that having one in the home was more likely to result in the death of a loved one than the successful defense of one’s home. But given the way that Casey expected the future to unfold, and with the added danger of cougars and other wild animals in the forests behind his somewhat remote property, Casey felt it prudent to have some firearms available.

  When Casey began signing up for every Weapons Safety Course and Firearms Seminar on offer at the Oceanside Fish & Game Association, however, his goal was not to learn what he already knew very well. Rather, it was to build up his files on the “Gun Club”. Casey wanted to get to know the local gun lovers.

  Knowing the names, addresses, faces and personalities of the region’s more active gun lovers was an essential part of Casey’s Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield. Unlike the physical site preparation that Marc was taking care of with the big excavator, Casey had to use his eyes and ears as his tool for this task. To get to know these people, he had to engage with them, participate in their social activities and listen to what they talked about.

  Casey was a people-oriented person, so fitting into the network of a hundred or so gun lovers in the region was actually quite enjoyable. He felt that he could become friends with many of these people, but that a few of them were hot-heads and probably not all that trustworthy.

  Casey didn’t like hot-heads. It didn’t take him long to identify the dozen or so quick-tempered loudmouths who liked to take over any conversations they joined into, and shut down any views that contradicted their own. One of these bozos was an RCMP officer from one of the Oceanside detachments. Casey didn’t like Constable William Walker, in particular because Bill seemed to think being a RCMP officer gave him authority over virtually anything going on around him.

  It wasn’t hard to build up a good set of notes on the Gun Club members. The more aggressive types would talk at length about other people’s business as long as they had an audience.

  Other than a very few jerks, Casey found that there were a great many reasonable, intelligent and thoughtful people in the gun-loving community. Most of them were like him, to one degree or another, survivalists. Many would not use the term to describe themselves, however, as it had such a negative social connotation. The word “survivalist” brought to mind the image of a gun-crazed loner with a huge stockpile of food, weapons, and ammunition – enough to stand up to those evil and conspiring Federal Government types who wanted to interfere with their freedom and God-loving ways!

  Casey was not among those who loudly advocated “God, Gold and Guns”. Rather, Casey believed that membership in a small community and in a variety of different activities and social groups is the essential element in survival.

  Acceptance in the Oceanside Gun Club was easily granted. Casey contributed many hours of volunteer effort in support of the group’s little projects and activities. He rather enjoyed this, as he felt more human when he was engaged with people. He hung around watching others firing at the indoor handgun range on Ruffels Rd and helped to police up the shotgun cartridges and shell casings hiding in the grass of the 200 yard range out at the Dorman Road Range at least once a week.

  While he seldom spoke about his own interest in weapons, he usually participated in the bi-monthly “shoot-off” events that were the cornerstone of the Gun Club’s social life. What Casey enjoyed most of all was having a few beers and some barbequed steaks at the Eaglecrest Golf Clubhouse out on Bennett Road, where the gun club held most of its social events.

  In the course of his Gun Club activities, Casey had met Wayne Palomar. “Pal” was the owner of the “On-The-Fly Gun & Tackle Shop”, which sponsored the indoor range on Ruffels Road and provided a small office for the Gun Club. Pal was a very friendly and well loved member of the Oceanside community. His business was essentially just a side-show to his addiction to the social life of the Gun Club. It was a small shop, with just Pal and his eager young helper, Peter Wright, keeping the shop open from ten to five, Tuesday through Saturday. The limited hours of Pal’s business made it clear that it was more of a hobby than a money making enterprise.

  Sales appeared to be modest, sustained mostly by the forty or so core members of the Gun Club with little in the way of actual growth. One thing Casey learned about Pal, however, was that he was a bit of a renegade. Even though some of his best customers were police officers, and Pal was an honest and upright member of the community, he also had his secrets. One of them was a collection of non-registered weapons.

  One day, Pal invited Casey to his home, just around the corner from his gun shop. There, over a couple of beers and a few laughs on the heavily timbered cedar deck overlooking the Strait of Georgia, Pal surprised Casey.

  “I know what you’re doing, Callaghan!” Pal smiled.

  Casey remained silent, and became very tense.

  “You’re building up a small arsenal!” laughed Pal. “Peter noticed it first, and then I started watching for it. You spend most of your time talking with the others while they shoot off their rounds, but you don’t actually shoot that many of your own. Then you typically disappear for a few minutes. What are you doing, going out to your car and back?” Pal asked, rhetorically. “I think you dump off those extra rounds in your car, don’t you?” Pal concluded, very satisfied with himself.

  There was a long silence. Casey was not sure what to say, because Pal was right. Casey had been slipping rounds into his sports bag, as part of what he thought had been well disguised slight of hand. He had accumulated nearly a thousand 30-06 and 9mm rounds in the last two months to add to the eighteen hundred he had stockpiled in Winnipeg, for his stainless steel 9mm SIG Sauer P226 semi-automatic pistol and 30-06 Remington 700 hunting rifle, not to mention the shells he had accumulated for his Remington 870 pump-action shotgun.

  “Relax, Casey, I’m not going to turn you in! We all do it. None of us wants the Feds to take away our guns and ammo!” Pal said with enthusiasm. “We’re not like Americans, with their First Amendment rights, but WE love our freedom too!” he went on. “I bet every member of the Gun Club, or at least the active members you’ve met in the last two months, all have at least 5,000 rounds to go with their guns. And most of them have one or two non-registered guns,” he added.

  “Really?” Casey said, starting to relax a bit. “So I’m not the only one with off-the-books guns?”

  “Yup.
And I’ve got some beauties.” Pal volunteered this with a strange look in his eye. Pal was weighing something in his mind. “Wanna see ‘em?” he asked, to which Casey nodded.

  After leading Casey to his basement rec room, Pal left Casey sitting at a card table with a freshly opened can of imported beer.

  “Just wait here, Casey. I’ll be right back”.

  Casey listened to some strange sounds coming from another room, somewhere in the back of the basement where Pal had disappeared to. It sounded like things were being moved aside, then suddenly Pal re-appeared in the rec room.

  “You keep my secret, and I keep yours!” he said, as he placed three long, heavy boxes on the table. They were reinforced plastic cases. Once opened, Casey could see that they had padded sides and covers to protect the contents. “These are my beauties! I’ve only shown them to a few people from the Gun Club,” Pal said. “They're mostly jabber-mouths and gossip-hounds. But you, Mr. ‘Ex-Military-Captain-Boss-Callaghan’, you I can trust to keep a secret!” he said, as he handed Casey the first weapon.

  Casey felt its heavy, fifteen kilogram weight. As Pal explained, it was an Armalite AR-50, 0.50 caliber, bolt-action sniper rifle. Casey could see that it had seen some use, by the scratches and discolorations on the rifle stock, but it appeared well maintained and otherwise in perfect condition. When Pal handed him one of the six-inch long bullets, Casey felt that he was holding a small missile. He knew that the 0.50 caliber round could blow right through a brick wall or take out the engine block of a car, but wondered how it would do against the 8-inch concrete walls of the HOTH. As he was thinking about the firepower of this obviously prohibited weapon, Casey looked up as Pal took the next rifle out of its case.