In the first week of July, several of the men from the compound, including Alex, Ian, and Doctor K., were part of a firewood-cutting expedition to the nearby Prescott National Forest. Traveling in a four-pickup convoy, they went beyond the ponderosa pines at the lower elevations to cut Douglas firs, mostly along the road that led to the Mingus Mountain campground. Three exhausting daylong trips each took twelve hours at three-day intervals.
On the third day of the woodcutting enterprise, Blanca was on guard duty. She was startled to hear the sound of breaking glass downstairs.
She left the ringer engaged for thirty seconds continuously, followed by three short rings. This signal told everyone that the compound was being attacked by infiltrators.
Blanca thought that it would be safest to get back in the hot-tub pillbox. She poked the muzzle of her M16 out of the hot tub, rotated the gun’s safety to “SEMI,” and held still. She sighted the gun on the bedroom door, looking through the screen door that divided the bedroom from the deck.
The man who walked into the bedroom was armed with a carbine that looked a lot like Alex’s Mini-14, except that it was shiny—perhaps stainless steel or chrome plated—and it had a folding stock.
The bullet hit him square in the chest. He went down, screaming and spurting blood. He didn’t stop screaming and gasping for nearly a minute, and twitched for nearly another full minute after that. Blanca was horrified by what she had done. She had never imagined so much blood could come out of someone. And since she had never hunted, she was unprepared to see the man thrashing. Despite the fact that she had pushed her rifle’s muzzle out beyond the lip of the hot tub, her ears were ringing.
Just as she was wondering what to do next, she heard several shots coming from the far side of the compound, and some indistinct shouts. Then there were two more shots. They sounded different. She surmised that these were pistol shots.
An hour later Blanca heard the full story. A group of five men and one woman, all armed, had attempted to sneak into the compound in broad daylight, assuming that they’d find the four families with their guard down. The end result was that the compound had more compost for their garden and more guns for their arsenal. Blanca inherited the Mini-14 from the man whom she’d shot from the deck. Alex was impressed with the gun, explaining that it was a scarce GB model, like those sold to police departments and prison systems. Unlike a standard Mini-14, this gun had a factory flash hider and a factory side-folding stock. It was also made of stainless steel, rendering it less vulnerable to the elements. Alex declared it a keeper. He gave Blanca six original factory magazines for the gun and a pair of M16 triple magazine pouches to carry them in.
26
A Fair Share
“A pistol defends your property and your person from unanticipated and barely anticipated threats from thieves and robbers. With it, you can control your immediate environment. A rifle defends your freedom from oppressors and tyrants. With it, you can enforce your will.”
—Gabe Suarez
Hankamer, Texas
December, the First Year
After La Fuerza had cleaned out everything of use from the stores in Anahuac, they moved north. Their next target was the small town of Hankamer. It was so small that they were able to clean it out house-to-house. Once that process started, many of the town’s five hundred residents fled, most of them on foot.
It was in Hankamer that Garcia found Rodrigo Cruz. Garcia was about ready to order him killed, along with the others, when Cruz shouted, “Wait! You need me, man!”
“Why do I need you, pendejo?” Garcia questioned.
Pointing to the big M2 machinegun on a pintle mount atop a V-100, he said, “I seen your guys fiddling with that Browning .50. They could only get it to fire single-shot. The timing is screwed-up. I can fix that. I was an armorer in the Marines. I know how to set headspace and timing, all that stuff. I got a whole set of machine-gun manuals and some tools in my house.”
Ignacio snorted. “Show me and maybe I’ll let you live.”
After Hankamer, La Fuerza continued brazenly hitting small towns in east Texas. They first swung in a large arc north and then westward. They skipped Dayton but then hit Hardin and Moss Hill. In Moss Hill, Garcia found a full-length mink coat for his wife, who had chronically complained of being cold. That immediately became a status symbol for all the wives and girlfriends of the gang members. They all wanted a full-length fur coat, and eventually they got them—mostly mink, but some raccoon and fox skin. They wore them so often that the coats became a trademark of La Fuerza.
After losing one of their pickups in a spectacular fire, Garcia ordered that they replace their fleet of unarmored vehicles with diesel-engine equivalents as quickly as they could find them. They eventually standardized with pickups and vans with Ford Power Stroke 6.0-liter diesel engines. They systematically stole every one that they came across, gradually re-equipping their small army.
Their raiding methodology was simple: send one pickup ahead with a husband, wife, and two or three kids to scout, acting like innocent refugees. They would use a CB to relay the situation. Then the entire convoy would be timed to arrive at dawn. Any resistance was crushed. They took what they wanted: fuel, vehicles, tires, food, batteries, cutting torches, guns, ammunition, liquor, drugs, gold, and jewelry. Then they left.
In some of the smallest towns where they met any shooting opposition, they killed everyone that they could find. They stayed in those towns longer and stripped them to the bone. But typically they would just barge into a town, loot, and scoot. They very soon learned that it wasn’t safe to stay in a large town overnight after looting, so they spent most of their nights camped at parks, airports, and wildlife refuges—wherever they could find plentiful water. Their modus operandi was to hit a town, spend the day looting, and then travel at least twenty-five miles before dark to camp.
It was after losing two more vehicles in a gun battle in Livingston that Garcia acquired his first two civilian armored trucks. One of his scouts found these parked in a lot on the east side of College Station, Texas. They had been owned by an armored car company that specialized in servicing ATM machines. Getting the keys only took a few minutes of torture. Eventually they gathered more and more armored trucks and vans as they went, mainly from the Rochester and Garda armored car agencies. Garcia and his family soon traveled exclusively in one of the armored car company trucks. It was a two-and-a-half-ton, built on a 1998 Ford F-800 chassis, with a 5.9 Cummins diesel engine. Because of its boxlike shape, Ignacio jokingly called it his bread truck.
La Fuerza accumulated a large collection of young armed men in its wake. Wherever he went, Garcia recruited those he met who were smart, skilled, and ruthless. As it turned out, most of them were paroled convicts, recently escaped convicts, and members of the MS-13 gang, which had been a natural gathering place for hardened criminals. Ignacio wanted to build up La Fuerza rapidly so that he could have at least one hundred vehicles rolling into a town, all at once. Very few would defy that show of force, at least not for long.
Their casualties when raiding small towns were fairly light. They made a point of never hitting any town with a population more than two thousand. To Garcia’s surprise, most of their losses came when they were camped at night. Typically, in the dead of the night a shot or two would ring out, and one of their sentries would go down, often shot in the back from outside their perimeter. Then the camp would be in an uproar, and patrols would be sent out with night-vision goggles, but they’d usually find nothing. Sometimes they’d find just an accidentally dropped magazine or a piece of fired brass. Tony would say matter-of-factly, “Militia bastards.”
They had so many tires shot out—usually when they’d first arrive in a town—that they eventually settled on carrying six spares, mounted on rims, on the roof of every vehicle. Eventually it was the loss of tires that forced them to abandon the Saracen APCs one after the oth
er as they went along. The Saracens used special “run-flat” tires with a hard rubber inner rim. This size tire was not one stocked by American truck tire dealers. According to files that his wife had saved on her laptop, there was a dealer on the East Coast that catered to MVPA members who had a pile of tires and wheels for Saracens, but to Garcia those might just as well be on the moon. Once the outer tire was punctured by gunfire, it shredded and came off within two hundred miles. Then the APCs’ top speed dropped to under twenty-five miles per hour, and they became more difficult to steer. La Fuerza’s convoys needed to travel at least forty miles an hour.
In contrast, they were able to keep the Caddy Gage V-100s on the road because they used fairly standard tires that were found on some front-end loaders. One of the V-100s did have its rear transaxle fail, but they were able to replace it with one salvaged from a ubiquitous M-35 “deuce-and-a-half” Army transport truck.
Some of La Fuerza’s favorite targets were firehouses, for two reasons: First, their kitchens often had well-stocked pantries with large containers of staple foods like pasta, rice, and beans. Second, and more important, they almost always had their selection of tools intact. These included Halligan pry bars, large traditional crowbars, fire axes, and gas-engine-powered, automated, prying Jaws of Life (or, as Ignacio called them, Jaws of Loot). All of these tools proved invaluable to the gang when they needed to break into a building or a home gun vault. The Halligans were particularly useful in prying doors away from their door frames. They found that once door frames were separated, the doors could be easily kicked open.
In West Texas, La Fuerza crossed paths with a gang that was affiliated with MS-13. Calling themselves Los Lobos (“The Wolves”), the gang was headed by Adolfo Cantares. This gang numbered 120 and, like La Fuerza, they had been skipping from town to town. They were less sophisticated than La Fuerza, but they were just as ruthless. Rather than fighting them or competing with them, Ignacio decided to assimilate Los Lobos. He called for a meeting with their leader and proposed that they work together to loot Floydada, Texas. This was agreeable, since the town was too large for either gang to take independently.
After they had taken Floydada, Ignacio called for a celebratory feast and rape party. The gangs met at the Floydada Inn for the party. Ignacio made arrangements in advance to have one of his men poison the drinks of Cantares, his girlfriend, and his second in command. He did this late in the evening, after everyone was well liquored and high on various drugs. The next morning Garcia blamed the three deaths on drug overdoses. He then declared, “We are heading to New Mexico. Anyone from Los Lobos is welcome to join us, but you will be under my command.” Everyone joined.
Garcia’s now greatly enlarged gang cut a swath through southern New Mexico and southern Arizona. As the gang continued to grow, they could hit towns as large as twenty thousand people with relative impunity.
Twenty Miles off the Coast of Guinea-Bissau
December, the First Year
The Durobrabis was making steady progress down the coast of Guinea-Bissau. The plan was to work their way far enough south, following the Canary Current on the old Clipper route, with the goal of catching the northeast trade winds, to sail west across the Atlantic. Carston Simms warned: “We must stay out of the South Atlantic High. We musn’t get out in the Doldrums. On paper our planned course looks like a longer route, but in actuality, it is the fastest and safest route to Central America. The alternative is sailing the North Atlantic, but we daren’t do that in winter.”
During Taft’s afternoon watch, Andy was awoken by a shout: “Could be trouble! Speedboat, coming up from behind.”
Andy rolled out of the sail locker and trotted down the length of the cabin, blinking in the sudden transition to daylight. He could see that Taft’s family and Donna Simms were seated at the saloon table, wide-eyed. The twins were both still holding hands of playing cards. Andy popped out the hatch to the aft deck and was handed a pair of binoculars by Taft. He focused on the boat, which was four hundred yards astern and gaining quickly. The Durobrabis was under full sail, one-quarter into the wind. Laine reckoned that even if they turned for full wind, they’d still be outrun by the speedboat.
“Break out the Airsofts!” Andy ordered.
Simms complied, pulling the two fake submachine guns from a locker beneath one of the forward cabin V-berths. The seat cushions were hastily tossed aside and the locker lid was swung open.
No one was on the low forward deck of the speedboat, but there were a couple of heads that could be seen through the windshield. Laine set down the binoculars and unholstered his pistol.
Donna took the wheel while Carston, Andy, and Alan positioned themselves kneeling on the deck with their elbows on the aft bench and their guns held below the stern rail, making a show of force, just as they had practiced. Carston shouted to his wife: “Hold that course!”
When the speedboat was within sixty yards, two men with AKMs popped up from prone positions on the foredeck seats and pointed their guns toward the Durobrabis. But before they could shoot, Andy took three well-aimed shots. A bullet struck one of the gunmen in the chest and he collapsed, dropping out of sight. Simultaneously, the other gunman let loose a wild burst of full-auto fire, aimed much too high to be effective. Andy fired four more times, with one bullet hitting the man in the neck. He, too, dropped out of sight.
Now just fifteen yards astern, the speedboat veered off sharply, and Andy rapidly emptied his pistol into the exposed side of the boat, concentrating his fire on the cockpit and just forward of it. Laine did a quick reload, tossed his empty twenty-round magazine through the hatch, and shouted, “Refill that, Jules!”
The speedboat made a run for the coast, with no sign of turning back toward them. Alan Taft looked pale. He stuttered, “Di-di-did you see the, the blood spraying up from those men—the men on the front deck?”
Laine nodded gravely, but then he turned and said calmly to Angie, “You can go back to your card game now.”
After that incident, Simms changed their course to take them farther offshore. They found seven bullet holes in the canvas near the top of the mainsail. Patching the holes took less than an hour.
The trip across the Atlantic was surprisingly uneventful. With favorable winds and currents, they averaged 140 miles per day for most the journey. The cramped quarters on the Durobrabis led to a few arguments, but overall everyone got along fairly well. Simone Taft never had much harmony with Andy. She had been born in Paris but raised in London. She had a universally condescending attitude, even toward her husband. One day, in the midst of a disagreement about where and when hand-washed clothes should be hung up to dry, Simone got belligerent with Laine. She chided, “I don’t like you, Andrew, and I don’t like guns. If it weren’t for your, your pistol, you’d still be in England.”
“Correction: If it weren’t for my pistol, we’d all be shark food right now. Ma’am, you need to get used to how the real world operates.”
She shut up after that.
27
Hunkered Down
“Every action is seen to fall into one of three main categories, guarding, hitting, or moving. Here, then, are the elements of combat, whether in war or pugilism.”
—B. H. Liddell Hart, Strategy (1929)
Bloomfield, New Mexico
January, the Second Year
The economy of the Four Corners was in shambles. With the power miraculously still on but the value of the dollar destroyed, the few merchants left in business soon reverted to simple barter or taking pre-1965-mint-date silver coinage for payment. The most commonly accepted currencies were silver dimes, silver quarters, .22 long rifle rimfire cartridges, cigarettes, and boxes of new mason jar lids.
All of the local banks and credit unions soon closed, but one community bank eventually reopened as a warehouse bank, primarily for the use of its vault space, by local merchants who needed a saf
e place to store their silver coinage. Eventually they bought another disused bank building as a second branch, just for the use of their vault space.
Word quickly spread that there was still gasoline available for sale and the power was still on in Bloomfield and Farmington. Customers drove from as far away as Moab, Utah; Durango, Colorado; Tuba City, Arizona; and Window Rock, New Mexico. Many of them drove “pea cups” that were crammed full with enough gas cans to give a fire marshal a heart attack. The byword was: “Come with silver coin, or don’t come at all.”
The Bloomfield refinery started to do a land office retail business, but L. Roy wanted to work out wholesale deals with gas stations as soon as possible. The steady flow of retail customers coming through the gate represented a security risk. Soon after working the deal with Alan Archer, Martin set up a similar gas-on-credit arrangement with Antonio Jacquez, the owner of a gas station in Bloomfield. Jacquez, who came from one of the early pioneer families in the region, reopened his gas station. He did a brisk business and gradually built quite a pile of silver coins.
Muddy Pond, Tennessee
November, the First Year
It was a great place to ride out the Crunch. Ben Fielding believed that he had landed in Muddy Pond, Tennessee, providentially.
Ten years before the economy fell apart, Ben was an associate attorney in a Nashville law firm. He had been hired to defend a Mennonite man who had been charged in a wrongful-death lawsuit filed by the family of a tourist killed in a fall from a hay wagon. When he traveled to Overton County to see the scene of the accident and interview the defendant, Ben fell in love with the area. There he met two other Messianic Jewish families like his own, and he developed an affinity for the dozens of Mennonites who would become his neighbors. Although he had differences with them on some points of Christian doctrine and their hyperpacifism, he admired their hard work and clean living.
Survivors - A Novel of the Coming Collapse Page 23