Patriots

by James Wesley, Rawles

  They torched my dad’s house. Killed them all. I still feel like such a fool. I could have saved my folks and my daughter’s life.”

  Blanca squeezed Ian’s hand and said softly, “Don’t do thees, E-an. We can no change history.”

  Mary’s eyes were wet with tears. “I’m so sorry, Ian. I’m so sorry, Blanca.”

  Doyle shook his head from side to side and muttered, “Dwelling on it won’t do any good. In times like these, you just have to suck it up and drive on.”

  Todd said a silent prayer. Then he looked up and asked, “So what happened to everybody at Luke?”

  Doyle snapped out of his reverie and recounted, “To call it mass desertion would be to put it mildly. The mess halls only had limited food supplies, and we only had enough MREs onhand for short-term contingencies. I’m sure some of the overseas air bases had better stocks, but nobody ever expected a disruption of resupply of food in CONUS!

  “When it became clear that the food wasn’t going to last long, virtually everybody started to disappear. And when they went, they took a lot of equipment, fuel, and nearly every scrap of food on base with them. The Base Exchange, the commissary, and the mess halls were stripped clean. When I say everybody, I mean everybody. There wasn’t a soul from 56th Log or 56th Medical left on base. Even the whole Support Group essentially vanished in about three days time. By the time I decided to pack it in, Luke was a ghost town. There were only seven pilots and about twenty ground crew guys left on the post. Most of them were young bachelors. By that point, I was the senior ranking officer on the base, so I could do pretty much anything I wanted. I was the de facto base commander. I just called a formation and released the remaining personnel on base on ‘indefinite leave.’

  “Unfortunately, my options were pretty limited. You see, there wasn’t a single aircraft left on the ramp, or a single military vehicle left on post. By then, there were just a few POVs. Even the fuel trucks had disappeared. Now you’ve got to understand that they had two hundred and seventeen birds on the property books, mainly F-16 Cs and D models. Of those, they were all either out on the Saudi Arabia rotation, or off on ‘emergency’ flights that all mysteriously ended up being one-way missions. At least three F-16s, and the general staff Lear were out-and-out stolen. No flight plans were filed. The guys who took them just figured that they could get away with it. They just taxied out at O-dark-early and took off. And there was nobody left in the tower to say ‘boo’ about it. Those four had been the last airworthy planes on the base. The few planes that were left were just some stripped hangar queens.

  “After that ‘gentlemen, you are released’ speech, I spent the rest of that day looking for fuel containers. Every gas can available had already walked off base. The only good-sized containers I could find were some hydraulic fluid drums. But I was afraid that the fluid left in them would contaminate the gas. So I ended up scrounging a bunch of empty two-liter pop bottles from dumpsters around the BX. I drove home that evening with almost one hundred and forty gallons of av-gas in the back of the Suburban. I never went back to Luke after that.

  “We were living off base in a rental flat top in Buckeye. It’s basically a retirement community. When I got home, I talked things over with Blanca. We decided to hang tight for a few days. We packed up, but packed light. It was like one of those lifeboat games—‘Now if you could only take five items, which five would they be?’ The end result was that Blanca and I had to leave a lot behind. We spent a lot of that time listening to the radio for reports on the rioting. Only a couple of AM stations were on the air by then, and the news they were handing out was pretty sketchy. None of it sounded good. They spent half the time repeating the same FEMA ‘Stay calm, remain in your homes, order will be restored shortly’ tape. What a pile of bull. The tape even recommended calling 911 if we saw any looting in progress. I laughed and said, ‘Oh yes sir, will do.’ The phones had all been dead for several days.

  “Our next-door neighbors had a police scanner. That was the best thing for monitoring where there was trouble happening. This was at the time when Phoenix and Tucson were burning down. Major chaos, let me tell ya. Once the looting started spreading out into the suburbs, we agreed that it would be de mal aspecto to stay in the Phoenix area much longer. Bright and early on a Tues-day morning, we wheeled the Larons out of their trailers, and bolted on the wings and tails, right there on our front lawn. It only took about fifteen minutes each to assemble and pre-flight them, since we’d had plenty of practice before, putting my bird together for weekend jaunts.

  “While we were loading our gear, most of the neighbors just stood there and gawked. A few helped out with the fueling process. We handed our next-door neighbors the keys and title to our Suburban, and the keys to the house. I told them that anything inside was free for the taking. By then, we knew that we weren’t ever coming back. Then we taxied off the lawn, down the driveway, and out the court. We hung a left, throttled up, and took off from Hastings Avenue. Some of the neighbors stood at the ends to block car traffic for us. Must have been quite a sight for the retirees. We flew from there straight to Prescott—that’s in northern Arizona. We planned to stay at my cousin’s place.

  “My cousin Alex was a senior salesman with J&G Sales, a big gun distributor up in Prescott. With that job, I figured that he would be pretty well squared away, at least in terms of guns and ammo to barter for anything he could possibly want. Prescott is partly a resort community, and kind of a haven for gun nuts. J&G was there, Ruger had a factory there, and there were lots of custom gun makers, barrel makers, and stock makers. One little outfit made elephant guns on custom magnum Mauser actions before the Crash. Big .416 Rigbys and that sort of thing. The last I saw of them, they were still producing some smaller caliber long-range guns in H-S Precision Kevlar-Graphite stocks. They sold them on a barter basis. Real tack drivers.

  “Prescott is not a big town, but it took us a while to locate Alex, since the phones were out there by that time, too. I hitched a ride from the airport, while Blanca stayed behind to guard the planes. From talking with Alex’s neighbors, we discovered that he had hired out as a security man for some Tucson banking fat cats. They had a pretty elaborate hidey-hole set up just north of Prescott. There were four families living at the compound. At first they didn’t want to take us in. Then they saw the firepower that we had with us, and they changed their minds. Officially, we were “security,” just like my cousin. We had it pretty soft there, compared to most folks. We had plenty of water, and enough food to get by. We were in no hurry to leave.

  “Things were pretty quiet there for four full years. A little local trouble, but nothing worth mentioning. Then we started hearing about this gang of escaped convicts and assorted riffraff that was slowly working its way up from New Mexico. Refugees told us that it was originally two gangs that combined into one big super gang. They would hit a town, linger a week or two, strip it clean, and then move on to the next one. They were like a swarm of locusts. There were over three hundred of them by the time they made it up to the Prescott area. Rumor had it that at least one of the two gangs had been doing this town-to-town hopping all the way from south Texas. By then they were getting pretty good at it.

  “I took a recon flight in my Star Streak down to Wickenburg when they hit there, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. They just swept through the town in one big mass of vehicles. Many of the houses were abandoned, ’cause folks had heard they were coming and didn’t want to be around when they did. Basically, they burned down any house that anyone was shooting from. Then they went from house to house, taking anything of value. Even from the air, I could see them dragging some women out of houses and raping them on the sidewalks. We’re talking total scum of the Earth. It made me wish I was flying a fully armed Fighting Falcon instead of my little Laron. I could have really kicked some tail. These guys were absolute savages, Todd.” Doyle stopped for a few moments, and then added, “I got shot at some when I was on that flight, but I didn’t find any bullet holes in
my bird when I got back.”

  “Just three weeks ago, the gang was making their way up the Agua Fria, and hit the little town of Mayer. About eighty of us from town, mainly men, went on a little preemptive strike when we heard that the gang had moved into the town of Humboldt. Blanca, Alex, and I were all on the raiding party. We knew that Prescott would be next, because we were just twelve miles up the road. A Navajo kid about thirteen years old, who escaped from Humboldt just after they arrived, gave us the layout. He even volunteered to go back into town to scout which buildings the looters were in. That was a real help in planning the operation.

  “Our little raid didn’t have much in the way of military precision, but we sure did some damage. We knew that we couldn’t kill them all, so we decided that the thing to do was to concentrate on their vehicles, especially their armored cars and APCs. We hit them at just after three in the morning. Since we were all on foot or horseback the last two miles in, they didn’t know we were coming until we were already in their midst. They had the buildings that they were occupying lit up like Christmas trees. Our little Navajo scout had told us in advance which buildings they’d be in. We were only fully engaged for about five minutes. It was fast and furious, but like I said before, we did some seriousVan-dammage.

  “In the first couple of minutes, we had the advantage, because most of the looters were asleep. They made me the point man, since I had the only suppressed weapon in the raiding party. When I shoot Winchester Q-Loads—

  those are special low-velocity subsonic rounds—this thing doesn’t make much more noise than a nail gun.” Doyle held up the stubby Ingram M10 for a brief display, unscrewing the nomex-covered suppressor. “The term ‘silencer’ is really a misnomer. A ‘can’ like this is really just an elaborate sound muffler. Again, you can still hear the shot—sounds like a loud handclap. The normal sound is reduced so much that you can even hear the clack of the bolt going forward with each shot.”

  Doyle screwed the suppressor back on the M10 and set it down on the window seat. “Sorry, I digress. Getting back to what happened in Humboldt….

  I got the chance to personally drop three of their sentries, shooting my MAC

  in the semiauto mode. I don’t mind saying that it felt real good, after what I’d seen them do in Wickenburg. At first, we were the only ones shooting. Once the looters rolled out of bed and started shooting back, it was another story.

  They had a lot of fully automatic weapons, grenades, and rocket launchers of some sort. They really started hosing us down. Before they did though, we had torched more than forty vehicles with Molotov cocktails. Apparently, we got every one of their APCs and armored cars.

  “Our retreat out of Humboldt was, let’s say, ‘less than organized.’ Only twenty-nine of our original group made it back to Prescott alive by noon. Two more guys straggled in the next evening. Of the thirty-one that made it back, only three had been wounded, and those were all minor grazing wounds.

  Oddly enough, all five of the men and women who were on horseback were among those to make it back without a scratch. Not even any of the horses were hit. Either they were real lucky, or cavalry is making a comeback. My 286

  Vicissitude

  cousin Alex never made it back from the Humboldt raid.” Ian skipped a beat, and then went on. “The looters didn’t show up the next day or even the day after. Blanca and I waited at the compound, with the Larons loaded, fueled, and ready to go.

  “Three days after our raid, they came into Prescott, and they must have been plenty pissed. The gang rolled in just after dawn. They didn’t seem to care how many losses they were taking, and they immediately started to torch every building they got to. Blanca and I didn’t wait until they made it to the north side of town. Everyone at the compound was by then either in town manning the barricades, or had headed for the hills. Most of the remaining stuff at the retreat went with two families that had a pair of diesel pusher motor homes.

  They were headed for Flagstaff or beyond.

  “At that point, we realized that discretion was the better part of valor, so we took off, too. We used a nice long straight stretch of road that started a quarter-mile north of the compound. I had taken off and landed there many times before during the five years we were there. When we wheeled around after takeoff, we could see that almost half the buildings in the downtown area were on fire. We didn’t stick around to see how things ended, but I’m afraid that the looters must have taken the town. Even though they didn’t have any armored vehicles left, they had superior numbers and superior firepower.

  “That day we flew to Cedar City, Utah. It was amazing, but they had almost two hundred gallons of av-gas still on hand at the airport. They said that they were going to get resupplied with fresh gas that was going to be trucked in from Oklahoma soon, so they were willing to sell it. We filled up every container we had. That batch of gas cost me twenty dollars in junk silver, my Olin flare gun, and a hundred rounds of nine-millimeter ball. Folks were fairly friendly there. Things are darned near normal there, compared to Arizona, but weird. They kept talking about the ‘Federal Provisional Government,’ the

  ‘Regional Administrator,’ and ‘Local Autonomy.’ It was like some freaky mantra they’d all been taught. It was creepy.

  “The next day we flew from Cedar City to Brigham City, up in northern Utah. We had a letter of introduction from one family in Cedar City to their cousins, who had run the airport at Brigham City. They were talking about their new ‘Local Autonomy’ arrangement with the Federals there, too. We spent two days there. It took three separate transactions, but I managed to buy forty-one gallons of gas. In all, I swapped two hundred rounds of nine-millimeter hollow points, eleven dollars in junk silver, some hand tools, and a Fluke volt-ohm meter for the gas. A lot of it was low octane, and some of it hadn’t been stabilized and was pretty pukey looking. It had those white streamers in it. I added a bottle of octane booster that I had been saving, plus half a bottle of alcohol to soak up any water in the gas, and said some ‘Hail 287

  PATRIOTS

  Marys.’ Luckily, the gas burned all right—just a few sputters—but it had me really worried.

  “Next we flew to Grangeville, Idaho. That’s real pretty country up there on that Camas Prairie. We made inquiries and scrounged up another twenty-three gallons of gas. That took our last ten dollars in junk silver, plus another hundred and twenty rounds of nine-mil. At the rate I was bartering off our ammunition and silver, I was praying hard that you folks would still be here in one piece. It was a big gamble, but we sure knew we didn’t want to stay in Arizona, and we didn’t have anywhere else to go. Our only other chance might have been to go to Show Low,Arizona, to join the Cooper militia—they call it the Continental militia—but we didn’t personally know anybody there. We had heard they’re good folks, but it is awkward just dropping in on complete strangers. Like I say, we prayed that you would still be here. In times like these, you just have to have total faith in the Lord.

  “Yesterday morning, we flew from Grangeville up to Bovill. The folks were really nice to us there, too. From what they said, there wasn’t hardly a drop of gas in town. They showed us on road maps and Forest Service maps how to find your place. We took off again immediately. Once we got here, and started circling, I recognized the layout from the way Dan Fong had described it to me. Speaking of whom, is Fong still alive?”

  “He’s alive, all right. He’s got a job as sheriff, up in Potlatch. It’s a small town about twenty-five miles northwest of here.”

  Blanca sang out, “We’ll have to go vee-zeet him, someday soon.”

  Todd and Mary then spent a full hour describing their experiences at the retreat in the past five years. Todd ended this by detailing how half of the retreat members had recently relocated to Kevin Lendel’s property. After listening to others, Rose Trasel told her story, including an account of her shooting incident and surgery.

  It was after dinner that Ian Doyle approached Todd and asked, “Would you mind if
Blanca and I stayed here? We could even help you out with your reconnaissance patrolling, using the Larons. What do you say?”

  They were voted into the Northwest Militia the next evening, and their tactical training started the following day.

  CHAPTER 24

  Incursion

  “Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”

  —George Washington

  Some bad news came over the CB only two weeks after Ian and Blanca arrived. Todd immediately relayed what he had heard to Kevin’s house, via field telephone. A meeting of both companies was scheduled for 7 a.m. the next day, in Todd’s barn.

  The members of the two nascent companies sat in a semicircle in the hay that was scattered on the floor of the barn. Most had their rifles or shotguns lying across their laps or propped up against the wall of the barn within arm’s reach. Everyone was there, except for Lon, who was on LP/OP duty just up the hill, and Lisa Nelson, who was handling the same duty back at the other retreat. Lisa had her baby girl, Rachel, with her at the LP/OP. Little Jacob, who was now three years old, sat in Mary’s lap during the meeting. The boy sat patiently and politely, saying nothing. Rose had her baby daughter in her arms. She quietly nursed her during the meeting.

  Goats wandered in and milled around during the briefing. Chickens scratched the dirt at the open doorway. Gray began, “Thanks, Mike, for getting your folks up here so promptly. You’ve by now all heard bits and pieces of this, but just so there is no confusion, let me start at the beginning. Here is what we know, based on what we’ve heard from ham radio operators and Radio Free America on shortwave, from what has come over the CB relay net, and—taken with a grain of salt—what the Federals are putting out on the shortwave.