by Pat Price
Slowly, over about twenty minutes, I moved the rifle into a shooting position and opened the scope covers. At this point I was less than thirty feet from my friend and was able to see the pupils of his eyes. Up close and personal he was an interesting creature. I knew that his eye sight was more adept at seeing movement than it was at resolving images. A blind dog would have seen me at that distance. I watched him as he pulled stalks of grass and ate the seed grains. Several times he looked straight at me and because I was not moving, he just wiggled his nose.
I thumbed the safety off of the rifle and took the slack up on the trigger. The trigger trip weight on the rifle is around two and a half pounds, about the weight of an ex-wife's broken promise. His little head was dead center in the scope and I moved the cross hairs so that the point of impact was about six inches to the left of his shoulder. I couldn't bring myself to kill the little guy but that didn't mean I was above putting a scare into him. I applied another couple of ounces of force to the trigger and the H&K recoiled back into my shoulder and the muzzle flash and burning powder obscured the scope for a second. When the sight picture cleared all of the prairie dogs in my section of Arizona had disappeared and the echo from the shot was still rolling back and forth across the valley. I remained frozen again for over thirty minutes but no heads appeared above the ground.
I figured that hunting for the day was over so I rotated the safety back on, flipped the covers closed and started back to the truck. I have so few opportunities to practice stalking so I decided to crawl back to the truck. I covered the distance somewhat faster than I did on the way out and crested the rise in about an hour since I was less concerned that a prairie dog was going to see me.
As I came over the crest I saw a second pickup parked on the far side of the Ford. It was a Dodge diesel four wheel drive pickup truck painted desert tan. It blended into the countryside about as well as it would have if it had been painted red. At this point I was well over three hundred feet from the visitors. I pulled the rifle up to my shoulder and opened the scope covers and looked them over. Two of the men were dressed in black carrying low slung side arms. The third was dressed in blue jeans and wearing a white tee shirt and looked like Bob. It was then that I decided his questions at the roadhouse made sense to me because his being here rather proved that he was, for sure, involved with the local militia.
I closed the scope covers and returned the rifle to the stalk position and started down toward the truck. The biggest danger I faced was that they would get bored and leave in that four wheel drive Dodge about the same time that I would be stalking across the open wash. If they didn’t see me as they turned around in the wash. They would wind up running over my skinny white ass. But in reality, I didn't believe they were going to get bored. I took over an hour to cover the next hundred yards without allowing them to see me. I looked like any other pile of scrub grass and sagebrush slowly moving across an open area of wash bed sand. I was about twenty yards away when Bob saw me.
"What took you so long son?" Bob said to me.
I stood and looked at him for a minute before answering. The two boys with him were big, real big, no necks and probably less than twenty pounds of body fat between the two of them. I could tell I had startled them because both of them were flushed around their necks and ears but they were not about to let on I had surprised them. Even being up close I could have mistaken the two of them for twin brothers. Both were dressed in black jeans, black tee shirts, and black 'Nam boots, black fitted baseball caps, and mirrored sunglasses. Both were armed with Glocks in low carry holsters hanging from webbed belts and strapped down to their right legs.
"It takes a long time to cover 100 yards when you are working on your belly,” I said.
“Even so,” Bob retorted, “it beats working on your back.”
“We going to shoot for beers Bob?" I asked knowing the answer.
The almost twins didn't change their expression. Their mirrored sunglasses continued to stare me down.
"Not today son," Bob said. He was leaning against the Ford.
I tossed a look back over my shoulder at the two big boys. "What did you do, put Tim and Bill on steroids and give them almost pilot sunglasses?" I asked, nodding at the clones.
"That's a good one son,” he said laughing, "I'll have to tell Tim and Bill what you said."
"Am I taking a ride with you?" The whole thing was playing out very strangely.
Here were three armed men confronting a man armed with a semi-automatic sniper rifle and not one of the players appeared to be scared which would have been the normal reaction of the two wanna be warriors.
"That you are son," he said, pushing himself off of the side of my truck and reaching into his hip pocket. He was wearing a Smith nine-millimeter autoloader with a high capacity magazine in a high carry holster on his hip. So, I knew he was not reaching for a gun.
He pulled out a folded number ten envelope. The top of the white envelope had already been slit open. Bob pushed the fingers of his right hand into it and pulled out several pieces of paper. He handed them to me and said, "look these over son."
I took the paper and unfolded the sheets. There were four pieces in all. The first was a copy of my private investigators license; the second was a copy of my Orange County California concealed weapons permit. The third was a copy of my real driver's license and last but not least was a copy of my Army form DD-214 showing my Army service record.
"I've been trying to get a copy of my DD-214 for years, do you mind if I hold on to this one?" I asked.
"Sure why not. I'm glad of one thing son," Bob said, "you have three service commendations including a bronze and a Silver Star not to mention a Purple Heart. You have to be a genuine hero and a patriot which is why I'm going to help you."
I removed the DD-214 form from the papers and handed the rest back to Bob and said, "Why would you help me, you being in the militia and all."
"Because my boy, we are patriots not a bunch of crazy sons of bitches like the ones you are looking for. We're not so sure about your partner, but because you work with him, I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt."
"You going to tell me how you got this information about me" I asked.
"I will when we get to where we're going. Why don't you get out of your concealment suit and secure your rifle and we can get on with it."
I unfastened the snaps and Velcro straps from my ghille suit and pulled it off. I shook the sand out of the suit then folded it and laid it on the tailgate of the Ford. The drinking bladder strapped to my back was next. I removed it and poured the remaining water onto the sand, folded it in half and it joined the ghille on the tailgate. My Combat Commander was strapped to my right leg in a holster much like those worn by the twins. I unstrapped the holster and laid it and the Colt on top of the pile. The long gun was then unloaded and laid on the tailgate. The last thing I did was to pull off my black tee shirt, which was stiff with sweat, sand, and salt.
I pulled the keys to the Ford out of my hip pocket and opened the driver's door and retrieved the hard shell carry case for the long gun and went back and sat it on the tailgate. I opened the case and removed the rifle's magazine and placed it into a cutout in the foam core of the case. I then removed a terry cloth hand towel and wiped all of the exposed metal surfaces, then pressed the rifle into a cut out in the case. I flipped the case cover down and snapped the locks closed.
I then retrieved a carry bag from the truck cab and pulled a clean towel and tee shirt from it. I wiped my upper body off with the towel and slipped into the tee shirt. The towel and old tee shirt went into the bag followed by the Commander, water bladder, and ghille suit. I zipped the bag closed and turned to Bob.
"Ready?" I asked.
"Ready son," he said, "give your keys to one of the lads and you ride with me."
I pulled the keys from my pocket and tossed them in the general direction of the clones. The one on the left snatched them out of the air.
"Stow his gea
r in the cab and follow us," Bob said over his shoulder as he started off to the other side of the big Dodge pickup.
I walked over to the Dodge and opened the passenger's door and slid onto the leather covered seat.
"You guys have pretty good gear for revolutionaries," I said looking around.
"We try son," he said, "we try."
-27-
The drive to Militia Central took about an hour and a half. It only took Bob twenty minutes to get back to old Highway 66 because he and the boys knew where we were going. Once on 66 we turned west and drove toward Kingman and the Interstate Highway. Bob entered the westbound I-40 at Sixth Street. We passed over the central part of Kingman where the prominent landmark was the old Devine Hotel in the rundown part of town. While every motel in Kingman advertised that they were air-conditioned the Devine Hotel advertised that it was air-cooled. We continued west past the firing range on the north and motored on until we were about fifteen miles west of town.
Bob pulled off on an exit with no name around mile marker forty-two. The mile markers start at the Colorado River and increment as the road heads east. The first exit in Kingman, which is Andy Devine Boulevard, is at mile marker 60. The off-ramp Bob turned off on dumps you off of the Interstate Highway at the base of an overpass, which we turned south on and crossed over the Highway. The road surface quickly turned to packed dirt and led us to railroad tracks about a quarter of a mile south of the Highway. Bob did not stop to look for a train because you could see over five miles in each direction and the chances of a train sneaking up on you at this crossing were slim and none and if one did then you had to be blind and deaf which meant you had no business driving in the first place.
We bumped over the double set of tracks and two hundred yards later came to a cattle crossing with a closed gate. Bob stopped the truck about ten feet back from the fence and shifted the truck into park.
"We'll wait here for the boys to catch up," he said.
"Not much television or Internet access out here, huh?" I asked. Bob had not really spoken since we turned onto the Interstate and I felt I needed to break the ice.
"We have a couple of dishes for news feeds and movies. I have a house in town but it can get lonely if you live up here on the retreat. And I suppose it's no secret that we have a secure up-link for communications so it's not as bad as you might suppose. The bowling alley only has two lanes so it makes for long waits sometimes."
"You have a bowling alley up there?" I said with a look of amazement on my face.
"No, not really," Bob said laughing, "I just wanted to see the look on your face." Both of us laughed at that one. The old bastard got me.
"So, how did you break my cover?" I asked him.
"Well son," he said, "remember that day when we were drinking at the Smoke House?"
"I remember," I said. I knew he was going to tell me that they removed one of the beer bottles.
"I had Tim loose one of the beer bottles you handled. When you went to the little boys room Tim took one of your empties and put it in our truck."
"So how did you run the prints?" I said, trying to prompt him for more information.
"Let's just say that we have a lot of friends and your prints are on file with a lot of agencies." About then the boys caught up with us. The one in the passenger's seat jumped out and trotted past the Dodge and unfastened the gate chain and opened the gate. Bob dropped the Dodge gear shifter into drive and rolled through the gate and stopped about twenty yards past. The clone holding the gate waited until his counterpart drove my Ford through and then closed and chained the gate.
When Bob saw that the gate opener was back in the Ford he started off again. The road surface here was mainly cobble stones about the size of softballs. The ride would almost jar your back teeth and it for sure jarred my spine.
"This will get better in about a mile," Bob said.
"I can hardly wait," I said. About three minutes later the trail we were on changed from cobblestone to mostly crushed rock and the ride did smooth out.
"So," I said, "you were saying about running my ID."
"Right, so, once we had your prints we managed to have some friends do some snooping. We got a good hit from the Department of Defense database of fingerprints. Once we had that we had your real name and Social Security Number. From there it was a simple matter to check with California Government data bases and there you were in the Department of Motor Vehicles, State of California - Department of Justice data base for concealed weapons permits and by the way, the same department computer has prints for private investigator licenses. I could also have run a credit report and told you what pieces of plastic you really have but there wouldn't have been any real sport in that."
I fell into thought as we continued on the rock road. Free ranging herds of cattle were grazing on the brush and what little tuffs of desert grass managed to grow on the rocky plateau. The cattle looked like they were being slowly starved and several of them, mostly calves, were lying on their sides, feet extended straight out from their bloated bodies.
"These guys," I said, nodding toward the cattle, "don't look like they're headed for the California fast food outlets."
"Actually," Bob replied without taking his eyes off of the road, "about twenty five percent of these cattle are rounded up every year and moved to a feed lot on the other side of Kingman. They'll spend six months eating grain and hay and then they are off to a fine restaurant in Southern California."
We started up a steep hill that dropped off to the left of the single-track path we were now on. A small canyon formed to the left as we neared the top of the grade. Bob maintained about a twenty-mile per hour pace as we rolled along. I looked back at the hill we just climbed. The road was just wide enough for one vehicle to travel at a time. The road shoulder was about a foot on the drop off side and was a sheer rise of over a hundred feet on the other side. If I had an encampment up here I would probably have charges planted in the side of the hill overlooking the road and I would have sentries posted at the top of the grade. The field of fire and the killing zone would make the climb up the hill very expensive for anyone trying to ground assault the camp.
Another five miles found us driving into the camp. I spotted the first of the sentries I could see about half a mile from where we would be stopping. Both of the men, one on each side of the road, were concealed in blinds constructed of brush. To the casual hunter or hiker they would have been invisible but to someone trained in stalking and sniping, they were obvious.
We drove into the main part of the camp. There were several small buildings and what looked like entrances into underground bunkers. A four by eight-foot piece of painted plywood was mounted on two posts. The sign on it said, "You must check in with the Guardian's Office before proceeding beyond this point."
Bob stopped in front of a small mobile home that is more properly called a trailer in Arizona. "Do me a favor," Bob said, "don't get too smart mouth with the man inside."
"Why?" I said aloud and wondered to myself if Bob was going to try and scare me into being docile.
"Because we have gone to a lot of trouble and we are going to help make you a lot of money and we're not going to be asking anything in return, that's why."
I looked at Bob for several seconds while the sweat ran down the middle of my back.
"Deal," I said, "as long as I don't get leaned on or jerked around." Bob was wearing a baseball cap and I was not and the sun was hot and blinding. "Can we get out of the sun now?" I asked.
"The Guardian's" office was in a small trailer that probably measured about ten by twenty feet. The outside was covered with a wood siding that looked like vertically sawn wood planks but was actually made of wonder wood and came in four by eight foot sheets, otherwise known as texture 111 to the handyman. The siding had been painted a bird crap white and the roof was made of aluminum sheet metal painted the same color as the sides. The trailer was perched on top of metal jack stands and was elevated about a foot and a half
above the ground. A small box about three by three foot in size made up two steps that, at the top, was level with the floor of the trailer. Bob stepped up on the box steps and opened the door. He turned and looked at me and said, "Let's go and do it son."
"I'm with you," I said following him up the stairs. The inside of the Guardian’s trailers was early military surplus. The walls were wood paneling painted off-white. There were two cork-faced bulletin boards on the far windowless wall separated by two large maps. The first of them was a large floor to ceiling sectional map of the United States and the second was equally large and was a very detailed United States Geographical Survey map of the area east of Phoenix Arizona.
The end wall to my right was covered with four gray metal file cabinets. Each of the cabinets contained five drawers. A lock-bar ran down the front of each of the cabinets and a sign hung from the top of each cabinet that stated "This File Is Locked". I recognized a far more ominous sight sitting on top of each of the cabinets, a military thermite bomb. I could only guess that the Guardian could remotely detonate the bombs and prevent the forces of darkness and evil from capturing their really important stuff, like hit lists of government officials that would be sent to the wall, when the flag went up.