by Pat Price
Bob, the boys, and I left the Smoke House about six in the evening after drinking most of the afternoon and drove out to the road house. I was famished and ready to eat anything that walked on four legs and had parents at one time. Ray and Connie were both serving drinks at the bar and the music coming out of the jukebox was as bad as it had been the first time I entered several weeks before. The only saving grace was that Jake, the old rancher, was not in residence today playing the same sad song over and over.
The four of us settled into four seats at the bar. Ray looked up and walked over and centered himself in front of us. He was carrying his ever present half-pint mason glass jar filled with ice cubes and water that was tented with a shot of Jack Daniels. He was also about half in the bag and looked relaxed. In fact if he were any more relaxed he would probably have been dead. His wife Connie was standing at the far end of the bar gossiping with one of her lady friends. People around Kingman refer to others as "the wife", or "the boy", or "the neighbor lady". People being referred too usually have the first name of "the".
"What'll it be boys?" he said.
"Bud Light," we all said at the same time. Ray reached down and lifted the lid on a beer cooler full of refrigerated water and bottles of beer. He pulled out four bottles of Bud and sat them on the bar. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a bottle opener and popped off the four twist off caps. The first time he did this two months ago he said, "God intended beer bottles to have caps that required bottle openers not pussy twist off caps."
Bob laid a twenty out on the bar. Ray smiled as he picked it up and turned to the cash register where he rang up the beer. Turning and placing the change on the bar he looked at Bob and said, "So you finally lost huh?"
"Yup, the boy's pretty good."
Ray smiled again and walked back to his stool and his paper.
"Let's move to a booth," Bob said, picking up his beer and sliding off of the stool. Tim, Bill, and I did the same and followed Bob. We moved to a booth next to the juke box and sat down. Bob pulled some change from his pocket and dropped it into the coin slot of the juke box mounted above the table in our booth.
"If you play anything by Willie Nelson I'll shoot you myself," I said. Bob did not disappoint me and he just punched buttons at random. He sat across from me on the outside end of the seat on his side. He took a pull on the beer and leaned over to me.
"How do you feel about the militia son?" he asked. His eyes staring holes into me. Here it came, the payoff after almost two months of effort.
"I think some of them are crazy sons of bitches," I said, then continued, "some of them are sincere and some misguided. I think the government is too large and out of control and the world would be a better place if a couple hundred bureaucrats were pushing up grass and dirt instead of pulling down a paycheck." I stopped and took a long pull on my beer. I looked at Bob for a second and said, "Bet you didn't think I would say that did you?"
"What did you do that you had to get out of California?" he asked, drilling me with his version of Jimmy's look.
I looked at him for about ten seconds then took a long pull on the bottle of Bud and wiped my mouth.
"There's an IRS office in Culver City. That's just below Los Angeles."
"I know where Culver City is son. The IRS office is just below the Fox Hills Mall, right?"
"That's the one. They have a data processing center there. An agent from San Diego who has a reputation for carrying out illegal seizures was spending a few days in Culver City," I said. I was going slow, making a lot of the story up as I went. I was trying to think on my feet, so to speak, which was made more difficult because of the amount of beer I had consumed over the past couple of hours.
"What did you do, follow him up from San Diego?" Bill asked.
"Actually no," I said. "I had been following him for over a month and he made the trip every Wednesday for five weeks. On the sixth week I was parked in the Fox Hills Mall parking lot about half an hour before he was scheduled to walk out of the building. The Mall is on a small hill overlooking the building. I was concealed in some brush just below the parking lot. The closest building of the mall was about five hundred feet from where I was waiting. The shot was about three hundred yards in distance and a two hundred-foot drop in elevation. When the agent opened the glass door on his way out of the building I squeezed off the shot just as the person behind him bumped into him. I missed by probably less than half an inch, which in my business is as good as a mile."
"What happened then?" Bob asked.
"All hell broke loose when the glass door fell apart. I put the long gun back in the case, climbed the ten feet back to the parking lot and walked over to my car and drove off."
"Anyone see you?"
"Not that I know of," I said looking around the table, "Fox Hills Mall is not in the best of areas. The newspapers refer to it as Gang Central at night and several shootings a month take place on the property. Usually opposing drug dealers are fighting over turf. Shots in that area of Culver City don't ever constitute an unknown event." Bob and the boys were quiet for a minute.
"Is there anything to connect you to the incident? Was the agent after you?"
"First answer is no, I have a brass catcher on the long gun so nothing was left at the scene. Second answer is no, I was doing the friend of a friend a favor."
"Killing someone, even an IRS agent is one hell of a favor to do for a friend once removed," Bob said.
"You asked, I answered," I said.
-24-
I called Jimmy several times a week through the Phoenix phone cut out we had after I arrived in Kingman. After Bob and the boys poured themselves out of the Road House I walked back to my room and plugged in my cell phone.
I dialed the number to the Las Vegas cutout and waited for the phone in the back of a rented office to ring. Once it picked up I tapped in the number to our Newport Beach upstairs living area. Jimmy answered on the second ring.
"What's happening," he said, not waiting for me to identify myself. Only the two of us used that number.
"I spent the afternoon shooting, drinking, and eating with men from the local militia," I said.
"Do you think they know who you are?"
"I don't think so," I told him, "the dominant personality in the group is named Bob, an old Vet from Nam. He is probably as good with a long gun as I am. He kept asking questions so I fed him a story about why I left California."
"I wonder if they will try and verify your story?" he asked.
"I think they will probably try. I think they lifted a beer bottle from the table while I was in the little detective’s room at the bar where we were drinking."
“Hold on one minute,” Jimmy said. I heard him lay the phone down on what was probably the table in the dinning room. About a minute later I heard him pick it back up and say, “Ok, I’m turning on the recording. Repeat the store so that I can give it to Mike. I’ll tell him to generate a field report so that he can cover for you.”
I spent the next five minutes repeating the story and adding background so that it was more flushed out that what I told to Bob.
"Well, let's hope Mike's alternate identify for you holds up. Don't take any chances," Jimmy said with a concerned tone to his voice.
"I'll be careful."
“I’ll call Mike after we hang up just to be sure,” he said. "On a more hopeful note, I talked to my father a couple of weeks ago and spoke with him yesterday about the job.”
"Has he heard anything?"
"Not so far. This doesn't mean anything since Indians in Arizona are virtually invisible to the whites, no offense," he said. Jimmy rarely says that to me because we have been through so much together that we don't take offense to social mores when we talk about what might be a sensitive subject to outsiders.
I said, "He'll call you though if something comes up?"
"Of course," he said. "If something comes up I'll fly out and snoop around."
"I could drive down from Kingman
if it comes to that," I suggested, knowing what his response would be.
"My sister is normally pretty busy and doesn't need a dinner partner so I'll fly out if something comes up," he said. I could hear the amusement in his voice. Rebecca is one of my favorite people and I would probably become very interested in her real fast if we lived closer. The distance between Orange County in Southern California and Phoenix is not a relationship enhancement variable.
"All right, have it your way," I said. "Try and do a friend a favor and he wants to look a gift horse in the mouth."
"You don't have a clue what a horse's mouth looks like," Jimmy said, just before the hung up.
-25-
I continued shooting three days a week over the next three weeks at the range outside of Kingman and continued running into Bob and "the boys" as he called them. We continued shooting for beer and we went back and forth on who bought, depending of course on who out shot who on any given day. I also started bumping into them at the Veterans of Foreign Wars hall. I had been in Kingman about six weeks and was starting to slip into the community. The men at the VFW hall had accepted me and I became somewhat of a regular at Buc’s place for lunch. If I had not been a runner I would have dropped over dead from eating at Buc’s.
When Bob would get a few drinks in himself he would start opening up more to me and telling me about the militia movement and how I should think about coming into the family.
Among the many benefits I would have would be a new identity and, according to him, I could be part of the movers and shakers “when the flag goes up.”
"When the flag goes up," is one of the catch phrases used by the militia and other protest groups. It stands for the event that will cause the Federal Government to cease to exist along with State and Regional Governments. "The Event" could be anything from a nuclear exchange between the United States and some enemy, to a large meteor strike, or a pandemic virus like the Spanish Flu in 1918. Or it could be something as simple as a global depression, a race war, or the "Year 2000 Bug" otherwise known as the Y2K event taking all of the big computers down.
When "The Event" strikes, the militia is poised to take over. Personally I don't think the militias have given this event much thought because if it does happen, all of the militia groups will probably be fighting each other for position and power. What would actually happen is a massive civil war with hundreds or thousands of armed groups taking and holding small pieces of territory. My opinion is the nobility of the armed citizen is vastly overrated and the Army and Marines have all the heavy weapons. In the Rangers we had a saying, “Peace through superior fire power.” The government has the superior fire power, not the militia.
-26-
The day started out clear and warm and had all of the promise of becoming clear and hot. The saving grace in the Kingman area was that the temperature rarely climbed over 95°, at least while I was there. About 40 miles away, as the crow flies, in Lake Havasu, the temperature would, on the same day, be up around one hundred and twenty degrees and the humidity would be hovering around ten percent. Once you hit 120° it doesn’t make any difference what the humidity is, it is just damn hot. I loaded my camouflage ghille suit, water bladder, Colt, and long barrel rifle behind the seat of the Ford.
The ghille suit was made famous by the Marines. Ghille suites are designed to help you blend into the background and effectively disappear unless someone knows what to look for and there are not that many people on the planet that can pick a sniper out of the background even if they are looking him straight in the eye. Probably the best known Marine sniper named Carlos Hathcock once spent three days crawling about a thousand yards across open land in Viet Nam, shot a North Vietnamese General and then spent three days crawling back into the jungle. At least once, the officer of a patrol looking for him pissed on Hathcock without knowing he was there.
My ghille suit drapes over my back and has loops on the inside to pass my arms though. Each corner has pockets and loops to slide my hands into and pockets to slide my boot toes into in order to keep the netting spread out. I slid my arms through the shoulder straps of the water bladder and fastened the end drinking tube to the neck of my black tee shirt so that I could grab the tube with my lips without using my hands. With the ghille suit in place, if I spread my legs and arms I would look like a flying squirrel.
I finished out packing for the field by filling my side pockets with energy bars. They taste like hell but they can keep you going all day long if you have the water to help get them down.
I was going to practice by stalking prairie dogs at one of the larger prairie dog towns in the Kingman area. The ranchers would not care if I and other hunters killed off all of the prairie dogs. They are a menace to the farmers as the cattle and horses break their legs walking across the fields which are full of hollowed out tunnels.
The drive out to the prairie dog town took thirty minutes. The town was located about fifteen miles off of the dirt packed county road on a ranch near the Hualapai Indian reservation. I had met the rancher at the roadhouse and when I mentioned that I was interested in popping some prairie dogs he grabbed onto me and said "shoot all of the little bastards". I was prepared to "shoot at the little bastards but in truth I wasn’t prepared to actually shoot them."
The approach to the prairie dog settlement was a wide wash leading to the middle of a quarter section of land that was as flat as a pool table with few bushes and rock outcropping to use as concealment. The wash itself was over 150 yards wide at the point where I stopped the truck. I parked the truck on the side of the wash away from the side where the prairie dog town was located. I removed the gear from the bags and loaded the ten round clip to the H&K rifle then loaded the Colt and strapped the low carry holster to my right leg. Next I pulled the ghille suit from the bag, unfolded it and gave it a good shake to free up all of the pieces of material fastened to the outer surface.
I slid my arms through the shoulder straps of the water bladder and fastened the end drinking tube to the neck of my black tee shirt so that I could grab the tube with my lips without using my hands. With the ghille suit in place, if I spread my legs and arms I would have looked like a flying squirrel. I hung the long rifle from its sling around my neck so that it was positioned against my right side. I made sure that the scope covers were closed so the optics would not get scratched while I was crawling through the scrub and sand. The last piece of gear to go in place was one of my many condoms over the end of the barrel and secured with a rubber band to keep sand out of the barrel.
I locked the Ford and shoved the keys into my back right pocket. I don't keep keys in my front pockets when I plan on doing a stalk because keys can get real uncomfortable when you are laying on them. I turned from the truck and walked up a slight slope and crouched as I neared the crest so my little buddies on the other side would not see me. Looking over the edge of the wash I pulled the rifle up to my shoulder and flipped the scope covers up.
The view of the dog town was pretty much what I expected. A slow sweep of the terrain revealed over a hundred acres on a slight grade falling away to the north and east. I would have guessed that four or five hundred prairie dogs were in sight as I moved the scope across the landscape. My objective was not to see how many of the rancher’s little bastards I could kill but how close I could get before they saw me and raised the alarm. Prairie dogs pay close attention to their surroundings because they haven't anything better to do. Getting close to them without being noticed is good training for stalking humans who frequently fail to pay attention.
I flipped the scope covers back down, stretched myself out on the sand and moved the toes of my boots into the back pockets of the ghille suit. That done I stretched my arms out and slid my fingers into the front corner pockets and stretched the suit material to get the wrinkles out. The next two hours found me moving a few inches to a foot per minute as I closed the distance to the nearest of the prairie dog burrows. Several of the little guys knew something was out there but couldn'
t fix on me because I blended into the surroundings too well and moved too slowly for them to pick me out. Prey creatures notice movement more than shapes. That is one reason cats; both large and small are good hunters. They have the patience for the slow stalk. Dogs don’t. Dogs are creatures of action so they suck at stalking and are forced to hunt in packs where the stalk is not important.
I had moved a total of probably 200 feet or so when the first alarm was given. The sentry closest to me was less than thirty yards away. He stood up on his rear legs and looked straight at me and squealed. All of the other creatures within a hundred yards disappeared into the ground then he dropped into a hole. I froze on the first alarm and remained that way for almost thirty minutes until he reappeared. Slowly over the next ten minutes the others appeared and soon the normal routine of the town resumed.
The next twenty yards of the stalk took another two hours and about half of my water. The good part and bad part of stalking in the heat is that very little of the water you drink winds up in your bladder, most of it leaves your body in the form of sweat. Having to urinate near the end of a stalk can be a real bitch. Having wet pants is less of a problem than having the odor reveal your position.