Founders. Part 12

"Where are you headed?"

"Anywhere I can find work."

Ken looked over his shoulder to Carl, who nodded deeply in a.s.sent.

Still shouting, Ken asked, "Okay, here is what I want you to do: I want you to clear your weapon, and I'll come out to the gate and escort you to the house. There might be work for you here."

Mehgai removed the magazine from his AK, and stuffed it into his trouser's right cargo pocket. Then, holding the rifle with its muzzle upward, he flipped down its safety lever, and ejected the live round from the chamber into his free hand. He held the cartridge up over his head for Ken to see, and then stuffed it into a pants pocket. Finally, he cycled the rifle's action twice with large air guitar flourishes, demonstrating that the gun's chamber was empty.

Ken walked to the gate with his HK clone muzzle down, but with his thumb on the selector switch. As he unlocked the gate and opened it, Curt looked down at Ken's rifle and said appreciatively, "Oooh, HK-G3!"

They spent the next half hour on the front porch, quizzing Curt.

"I went home to visit my family on Guam, but I couldn't find any decent kind of job there. I knew I didn't want to go back on active duty because I'd no doubt get deployed back to A-stan, and I didn't want to go in the Army Reserve, because I'd no doubt get deployed back to A-stan. . . ." He paused to laugh, then said: "So I was doing some job hunting on the Internet and I read about the oil boom in North Dakota, so I thought, 'Why not?' It turned out they were hiring almost anyone with a strong back and who was willing to put up with winters in the Dakotas. And it didn't hurt that I was a veteran. When the economy went kerflooey, I asked around and found a job at the other end of the county, at a big grain elevator. The place is run by a family that's been there since the 1890s. They own both the elevator and a feed lot. Again, being prior service helped me get the job."

"So why'd you leave?"

"The man who owned the company kept having more and more of his relatives arrive after the Crunch. Some of them trickled in pretty late, even as recent as last November-and they told some amazing stories about how they managed to get out of the big cities. Anyways, blood is thicker than water, so I got asked to leave-politely, you know, and with plenty of notice. At least they gave me until the snow was off the roads. n.o.body else in town needed a security guy, so off I went."

The questioning shifted to Carl, who asked, "Do you have any military paperwork?"

"Yeah, I've got my DD-214-that's a discharge doc.u.ment and service record."

Being cautious, Carl first matched Mehgai's face to his driver's license, and then the name on the license to the DD-214. The discharge doc.u.ment told Carl nearly everything he needed to know. Curt Mehgai had been awarded two Army Commendation medals, a Bronze Star, and a Purple Heart.

Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana.

March, the Third Year.

The UNPROFOR contact team arrived at Malmstrom very quietly. General Woolson had expected that they would immediately attempt to relieve him of command, and he had a contingency plan in place to counter that. But surprisingly, Woolson was told that he would continue to command the base.

The UNPROFOR team soon took over the old headquarters building. But it took three months for several large generators to be hauled in from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio and to get power to the building reliably.

The interactions between General Woolson's staff and the contact team became a strange ballet of probes, feints, obfuscation, and denial. Woolson was repeatedly threatened with being relieved of command for "studious lack of cooperation." He countered that he was a team player and complained that he lacked resources to provide the data and facilities access that the ProvGov demanded. Both sides in the struggle did their best to hide key facts and intentions. Their meetings went on for months. Woolson and his staff finally moved out of their trailers in the hangar and back into the headquarters building in November.

Inevitably, both Woolson and the UNPROFOR liaison team commander got what they wanted: Woolson didn't have to give up the keys to the kingdom, and the UNPROFOR team denied Malmstrom the resources required to resume operational capability (OC).

Though they were never spoken per se, it eventually became apparent that the UNPROFOR contact team had only a few key goals: 1. To maintain security of all fissile material and cryptographic systems.

2. To keep all of Malmstrom's MAFs de-alerted indefinitely.

3. To a.s.sess capabilities and to deny resources needed to improve any existing capabilities.

4. To a.s.sess how many silos had been flooded by groundwater intrusion, and how many were still dry (and hence conceivably capable of being realerted).

Rather than simply relieving Woolson of command, he was nominally put under the operational control of UNPROFOR. His "commander" was a UN major general from England. However, Woolson carefully did some picking and choosing in deciding which of his orders he would carry out, and which he would not via delays, excuses, and obfuscation. Many orders, he said, had been "put at a lower priority, or placed 'under study, due to lack of requisite resources.'"

Woolson discovered that the two highest-ranking officers on the UNPROFOR contact team had drinking problems. So he kept them well supplied with liquor. This tactic further slowed the pace of the meetings.

In a secret meeting with no UN officers present, Woolson told his staff, "We continue the tap dance and treat them like mushrooms-we keep them in the dark and spread the steer manure around liberally. We stall them, and pencil whip them, and play charades as long as possible. Most importantly, we do not let them have the codes so that none of the LCCs can be accessed. To make it look like we are being compliant, we will let them 'inspect' as many LFs as they'd like-very slowly and laboriously, mind you-but we make excuses so that we never, ever, give a UN officer access to an LCC capsule. We can walk them around upstairs at the MAFs and give them nice dog-and-pony shows and pretty little PowerPoint presentations until they are blue in the face. But the bottom line is that they never get the crypto keys. The LCCs stay locked down, gentlemen. We will deny them any launch capability."

As a contingency, Woolson ordered that thermite devices be built and secretly distributed. These were a last-ditch measure, designed to destroy both the encrypted blast door locks at the LCCs and the jackscrew mechanisms for the seven-ton "B Plugs" at the LFs. This contingency plan was given the code name "Uniform Delta," which stood for "ultimate denial."

Secretly, the UN staff had decided that there wasn't enough manpower that could be spared to secure and reactivate Malmstrom's vast missile fields. And, after all, the missiles weren't needed anyway. They had plenty of operational missiles in France, Russia, and China-at least as long as Russia and China continued to toe the line. The stated goal of "reactivation" of Malmstrom was in fact a "capability denial operation."

The key to the UN's denial strategy was the decision to delay restoration of grid power to western Montana. The UN's general staff had concluded that if they wanted to keep the American missiles neutered, all they needed to do was delay having the power grid in that region reenergized.

18.

Millennium Falcon.

"Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it."

-Sir Isaac Newton's first law of motion, from his first book of Principia.

Bradfordsville, Kentucky.

April, the Third Year.

There was someone banging on the door downstairs. The bedside windup clock showed that it was 5:15 a.m. General store owner Sheila Randall quickly dressed and walked downstairs from the apartment to her store. A man from the Resistance whom she recognized was outside. He was shivering, standing in a heavy downpour with a dribble coming off the brim of his fishing hat. Sheila unlocked the door and the man stepped in. He was dressed in dark civilian clothes, with a brown North Face jacket. The rainwater dripping off of him made a spreading puddle on the floor.

"I'm sorry to arrive like this without any warning, but I need your help," he said urgently. "We've got a man in our truck who's been shot in the leg and in the shoulder. He's stable, but we can't get him to our field hospital in Russell Springs before daylight. Our intel says that there are Germans and Belgians patrolling the roads between here and there, there's a temporary checkpoint on Highway 68, and there may be an ambush set up somewhere along Liberty Road. We've also heard that there might be a reconnaissance drone up later today, that they've been flying in daylight hours out of Fort Campbell. If we use a team on foot to carry him on a stretcher, it'll take a full day, and he's likely to go hypothermic. We'd rather wait until either tomorrow night or the night after and carry him by truck, even if we have to make a roundabout trip."

Sheila nodded and said, "Okay, but the last time you came here, it was just that gal with the shrapnel. I don't know how to take care of someone with major wounds."

"Don't fret, we're also dropping off a medic named Brent, to take care of him."

Sheila nodded again. "All right, let's bring him in the side door, and help him up the stairs."

As she swung open the side door, she saw her son, Tyree, descending the stairs behind her. He was wearing pajamas and carrying his shotgun. "What's up?" he asked.

"I'm afraid that you're going to have to give up your bed again."

Tyree grinned and said, "No prob, Mom. I'm an early riser, anyway."

The resistance fighter they carried up the stairs from the store to Sheila's apartment was named Jedediah Peoples. He was nineteen years old. He wore a wispy beginner's mustache and was from Westmoreland, Tennessee, near the Kentucky state line. He had been shot through the left b.u.t.tock and thigh. These were large, ugly wounds, but not life-threatening. Sheila was impressed by Brent Danley, even though he wore a pair of eyegla.s.ses that had comical-looking repairs to the bridge and one of the eyepieces. The repairs had been made with paper clips and surgical tape. Brent had thinning reddish brown hair. He was soft-spoken and competent.

Brent treated Jedediah's wounds carefully, and he gave him pain medicine-Tylenol with codeine-only as needed, following a series of "On a scale of one to ten, how would you describe the pain . . . ?" questions. Rather than attempting to st.i.tch the wounds closed, Brent left them loosely covered with gauze to allow drainage. He explained that this was actually the safest way to treat them. "It'll leave bigger scars, but this way there's less chance of infection."

As Brent was rebandaging one of the wounds, Jedediah winced with pain and said, "I always figured we'd get raptured before we'd ever go through anything like this."

Brent shook his head slowly and replied, "You mean the collapse and the invasion? I believe that's the same thing that some people were saying in Stalingrad during World War II."

"You know," Brent went on, "in Vermont I had a neighbor who lived down the road from me. He and his family starved and froze to death the first winter after the Crunch. He and his wife were totally convinced that they'd be raptured before any disaster would threaten them. He told me that he thought that storing food in antic.i.p.ation of hard times was a display of a lack of faith in G.o.d's providence. He used to give me a hard time for being a prepper."

The young man nodded, and Brent continued, "A lot of well-meaning believers have the same sort of complacency. That dispensational pre-tribulation rapture nonsense was often combined with their bogus 'Health, Wealth, and Prosperity' preaching. They have a similar eschatological basis. It is the whole 'Beam Me Up' mind-set. It goes along with the 'Feel Good, Jesus Is Your Buddy' mentality. But if the history of the church has taught us anything, it is that the life of a Christian is fraught with peril. The world hates us, and everything that we stand for. They pound on us as often as they can. Being a Christian doesn't exempt us from that. If anything, it actually means that we'll get more pain and suffering inflicted on us than non-Christians. Just look at Foxe's Book of Martyrs. Have you read that?"

"No."

"Well you should, if you can ever find a copy. All that bad doctrine from the new Emergent Church movement led a lot of deceived Christians to be complacent toward being prepared for themselves and their loved ones. Everyone got a rude awakening when the dollar crashed and the power grids went down. The proper Christian way to live is to stock up for your family, and that also gives you extra to dispense as charity."

Sheila's elderly grandmother Lily relayed messages about the care of Jedediah downstairs to Sheila, who was working at her store's front counter most of the day. Sheila asked Lily to carry up extra food and some fresh cream that she took in trade on a barter transaction.

The Norwood Ranch, Newell, South Dakota.

April, the Third Year.

When Curt was hired, Ken and Terry decided that it was time to press on. They felt good departing, knowing that Curt would be there to fill the security role they had occupied. They were almost ready to leave at any time, except that Ken's boots were worn out and starting to fall apart. With some inquiries via the local CB radio network, they found some tan suede military surplus boots that were snug, but his size. They were comfortable if he wore just one pair of socks, but not two as he had with his old boots. The boots were a gift from the Norwoods, who insisted that they buy them to compensate the Laytons for their many months of guard duty, manure hauling, and water hauling. They cost $2.25 in silver quarters.

Looking carefully at their maps, and after much consultation and debate, they decided that rather than trying to cross the Northern Rockies, it would be safer to veer south and get to north-central Idaho by way of the Great Basin. There were many rumors of banditry in eastern Montana. By taking a more southerly route, not only would they be traversing more spa.r.s.ely populated country, but also the population would be predominantly Mormon. Given the Mormon proclivity for food storage preparedness, they antic.i.p.ated they would probably be more hospitable to travelers. They also hoped that if they were able to get to Salt Lake City, they might find people with operating vehicles, as there was a large oil refinery just north of the city.

The Norwoods had cousins in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, the Bennet family. They were cousins on Cordelia's side of the family. It was decided that Graham and the Laytons would ride horseback to Scottsbluff. From there, Ken and Terry would continue west on foot. Meanwhile, Graham would return to Newell with the horses.

For the trip, they selected the Norwoods' three saddle horses, plus their old mare, Molly, to use as a packhorse. Molly was elderly, but their draft horse Andre was too valuable to the family to put at risk in a cross-country trip. Carrying a packsaddle holding the Laytons' two ALICE packs and Graham's bedroll, Molly's load would be only 110 pounds. The packsaddle was of the modern frameless type, and made of red Cordura nylon. The bright red color made Ken and Terry cringe. The untactical color was remedied by strapping a woodland camouflage quilted poncho liner over the load. This worked perfectly, since the poncho liner already had grommet tie straps s.p.a.ced around its perimeter, and some extra length was simply tucked between the packsaddle and the saddle pad.

The ride to Scottsbluff was uneventful, and the weather was fairly good, with a few showers. The grazing was spa.r.s.e for the horses, with just a few patches of new growth. When the horses did pa.s.s over any new growth, they would play naughty and put their heads down and pause to graze. Urging them on took some effort. For the sake of their horses, they picked their campsites in areas where there was gra.s.s coming up. As was their habit, they made cold camps each night, not wanting to attract attention. With some pasture available, hobbling was all that was necessary to keep their horses in camp.

They averaged forty miles a day. They did their best to avoid towns and any terrain that looked like it would be advantageous for ambushes. After so many months of traveling on foot and at night, travel by horseback in daylight required some adjustment for the Laytons. For the horses, the biggest adjustment was getting used to riding widely s.p.a.ced apart-typically fifteen to twenty yards when on level, open ground. For the first two days, the horses would invariably attempt to bunch up. It was Molly who proved to be the magnet to the other horses. "I say that we make Molly the caboose of this outfit," Graham proposed. It was only with that resequencing and some consistent reining that the horses became accustomed to wider intervals.

Graham turned seventeen on the third day of the trip to Scottsbluff. That evening, as they made camp, Ken presented him a cloth sack containing twenty-five rounds of .45 automatic ammunition as a thank-you for escorting them, and in recognition of his birthday.

They avoided the city of Scottsbluff itself, angling in from the northeast, through ranching country. The Bennets lived on Henry Road, northwest of Scottsbluff, a stone's throw from the Wyoming state line. Arriving saddle sore late in the afternoon of the sixth day, they were warmly greeted. The Bennets lived in an older ranch-style house on four acres. Before the economic collapse, Dale Bennet had been a full-time gra.s.sland botanist with the state of Nebraska, and did the same part-time under contract for the state of Wyoming. His specialty was introduced gra.s.ses and weeds. He was also involved in a planned decades-long program to reintroduce native gra.s.ses. The Bennets had survived since the Crunch by breeding New Zealand and Rex rabbits. The acreage behind their house was dotted with cobbled-together sheds built out of sc.r.a.p lumber, pallets, and recycled corrugated steel roofing from barns. The sheds held dozens of homemade wire rabbit cages.

They turned their horses out into a fenced field that Dale Bennet used for growing feed for his rabbits. Part of it was seeded in an early-sprouting gra.s.s variety, so the horses starting eating with gusto, even before they had been unsaddled.

The Bennets were overjoyed to see Graham, and thrilled to receive two lengthy letters from his mother. Graham's four cousins, ages six to thirteen, were whooping and hollering. The younger ones jumped onto his back for piggyback rides.

The Bennets celebrated the arrival and Graham's birthday by barbequing five rabbits. The barbeque party went on until late in the evening, as everyone traded stories about their lives since the Crunch.

In relating their tale, Terry mentioned that they planned to continue their journey to their group retreat by way of Montpelier, Idaho. Dale interjected, "Well, you need to talk with my friend Cliff. He's planning on taking a drive out to northern Utah, real soon."

Ken was speechless. He asked, incredulously, "Taking a drive?"

Dale nodded. "Yeah! We'll walk over to Cliff's house tomorrow morning, and I'll introduce you."

After a night of fitful sleep, they awoke to the smell of pancakes. The Bennets were using some of their precious supplies to make a large breakfast for Graham and the Laytons. After breakfast, just as promised, Dale escorted Ken and Terry on a half mile walk to the trailer home of his friend Cliff.

A 2009 crew cab Ford pickup sat in front of the trailer house. The house was a single-wide that appeared to be at least thirty years old. Old tires held down a blue tarp at one end of the roof.

A man answered the knock on his door with a .455 Webley revolver in his hand.

"Hey, Cliff, how are you doing?" Dale said warmly. "These are friends of my brother-in-law. Meet Ken and Terry."

Cliff invited Dale and the Laytons into the house, saying, "Pardon the mess-I've been packing." He laughed and kicked a cardboard box out of the way so that Dale and the Laytons could get to the couch.

Cliff immediately struck Ken and Terry as an odd but jovial character.

After just a few more minutes of introductions and a.s.surances of their trustworthiness, Dale joined them as they folded out their maps on Cliff's kitchen table. "It's time to talk strategy," Cliff declared.

They calculated that the distance to Coalville, Utah, was 410 miles. Between his pickup's main and auxiliary tanks and the gas he had available in cans, Cliff estimated that he had enough fuel to travel 850 miles. Ever the optimist, he said, "So I can make it back here, even if I don't find a drop of gas around Coalville."

Cliff explained that he had been a heating and air-conditioning technician before the Crunch. Never married and living frugally, he had dabbled in energy stocks and silver, starting soon after the turn of the century. Cliff was in his late thirties, slightly overweight, and had thinning red hair and a wispy red beard. He lived alone in the spa.r.s.ely furnished trailer. Neither Ken nor Terry could determine how he'd made a living since the Crunch.

Cliff summed up his desire to travel to Utah, saying, "I got word that they're alive, but I haven't seen my cousins or my aunt and uncle since before the stock market melted down. So I'd like to look in on them to see if they're all right. I'm taking all my stuff with me. Who knows? I might find work there-maybe at a mine, and maybe I'll even find a wife."

Dale reiterated that he had heard that there were limited supplies of newly refined gasoline available in northern Utah. He and Cliff agreed that the trip was worth the gamble.

Ken spent most of the day checking on the mechanical condition of Cliff's pickup. They had access to the inventory of an auto parts store, which had been moved to the owner's workshop for safekeeping just a mile away. At the shop, he checked the four mounted tires and the spare, adding air to two of them with a hand pump. He replaced the fuel filter and set aside an identical spare. Checking all the hoses, he noticed that the lower radiator hose felt soft. He was fortunate to find a new correct spare in the enormous pile of belts and hoses in the corner of the shop. He checked the belt tensioner and then all the fluids. He added some window washer fluid and coolant. He set aside one more full gallon of coolant to take along with them. Then he lubed the two points of the cha.s.sis that could take grease. The rest, he explained, were all "lubeless joints." Finally, noting the motor oil looked dark, he changed the oil and filter. He kept the old hose and fuel filters to carry as spares. After checking both of the pickup's fuse boxes, he also set aside an a.s.sortment of spare fuses with various current ratings.

Amid the many shelves of mostly disorganized parts, Ken found a spare serpentine belt for the pickup. "This belt runs all the auxiliaries. If this belt ever breaks, you're totally out of luck," he explained.

In all, the belt, fluids, fuses, filters, and motor oil cost Cliff just two ounces of silver and some gardening hand tools in barter. Clinching the deal, he promised the auto parts store owner, "If I'm not back here in a month, then you are welcome to my trailer house and everything left in it." He handed him an extra door key.

After the maintenance on the pickup truck was complete, they headed back to Cliff's trailer, where they ate a light dinner: three small cans of tuna and a loaf of homemade whole wheat bread that Cliff said he often bought from a neighbor. The paper labels had been removed from the cans and they had been painted in varnish, to protect them from rust. Cliff explained, "That's a trick that I picked up from a guy I knew that spent four months crewing a yacht in the Bahamas."

Looking closely at the cans before they were opened, Terry could see that their lids had "Tuna, 11/2012" written in Magic Marker, just visible through the varnish.

Cliff asked Ken and Terry to help him pack for the trip. He had remarkably few clothes, which all fit into just two large cardboard boxes. He also packed a large Tupperware box that he explained contained some photocopies of family history and genealogy doc.u.ments that his late mother had made before the Crunch.

Then they started digging. Using a rusty shovel with a broken tip, they dug up three hidden caches in the yard. The first was very shallow. A sheet of plywood, a thin layer of soil, and a large pile of used wooden pallets covered it. This cache contained seventeen 5-gallon gas cans painted various colors, mostly red. The cans had been positioned on top of an odd a.s.sortment of sc.r.a.p wood blocks to keep their bottoms from rusting. All the gas, Cliff said, had been treated with PRI-G gasoline stabilizer.

As they pulled the cans up out of the hole, Cliff said, "You know, this gas was the fruit of four months of hard d.i.c.kering and bartering. I'm hoping that there'll be gasoline back in production soon. I heard there's some sort of 'Provisional' national government, headquartered at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and that they're getting things straightened out."

The second cache, deeper than the first, held more than twenty military surplus .30 caliber, .50 caliber, and 20mm ammo cans containing various ammunition and some hand tools. Atop the ammo cans, there were some canned foods, stowed in two Sterilite brand plastic tote bins. All had been varnished and hand-labeled, just like the tuna cans.

The third cache, nearly three feet down, contained three guns in a capped piece of eight-inch-diameter PVC pipe, and two more .30 caliber ammo cans. The latter, Cliff said, held what he called his "silver trove."