Founders. Part 8

They rolled the body over. Searching the pockets, they found the man was carrying no identification. In his pockets, they found two small rolls of clothesline twine, and a slightly rust-pitted Kershaw pocketknife.

"With both the landline and cell phones out, do you think we should try to get over to the Sheriff's Office to report this?" Durward asked.

The neighbor shook his head, and said, "No. My son-in-law Ted is a Cedar County deputy. He said that the few deputies left at both the Cedar and Johnson County Sheriff's Departments are following up on something only if it's major."

Durward asked, "So an attempted home invasion robbery and attempted murder isn't major?"

The neighbor again shook his head.

Ken said in a low voice, "These days, those crimes are just piddly. And killing in self-defense is just par for the course. I say we bury him, and be done with it."

The man nodded, and then said, "Yep, that's what I hear people are doing all over. We're back to vigilante days and ways." After a pause, he added, "Well, I'll leave the cleanup ch.o.r.es to you gents." He stepped astride his ATV, started it, and drove off with a wave.

Durward handed Ken a padlock to replace the one that had been cut, and asked, "Do you think we should sweep up all the broken gla.s.s?"

Ken shook his head. "No, we should leave it as a warning: 'This is what happens to looters.'"

They wrapped the body in a piece of used white plastic silage tarp. Rolling the looter up in the tarp was messy and c.u.mbersome. They also found that the shrouded body was too heavy for the two of them to carry. So Durward drove his blue Ford 8N tractor out and they unceremoniously rolled it into the front scoop.

They buried the dead looter in the garden, six feet deep. Since his tractor lacked a backhoe, most of the depth was dug by hand. The tractor was able to sc.r.a.pe a gouge eighteen inches deep, which took them below the frost line. Even still, digging the grave took several hours.

The four adults at the farm took turns saying prayers over the grave-both prayers for the unsaved, and prayers of thanks that they hadn't been shot. There was a brief and polite theological argument when Terry said prayers for the dead looter. Perkins said that he believed that once someone was dead, it would have no bearing on their salvation. As he put it, "Either he was saved, or he wasn't. Okay, I won't try to stop you from saying prayers for his soul, post facto. But scripturally, they're ineffectual. Oh, and scripturally, there is no Purgatory. That's an extra-biblical creation of the Catholic Church."

The Perkins daughters seemed oblivious to the solemnity of the graveside prayers. They fidgeted with their mittens, pulled off each other's caps, and kicked at dirt clods.

The next day, they counted ten bullet holes in the house and twenty-five in the silo. Ken had shot out one window, and the looters' bullets had shattered two others. Several of their bullets pa.s.sed though two room part.i.tions and a.s.sorted furniture before being stopped.

Up in the silo cupola, they found that two of the looters' bullets had pierced the back of the chair and the sheet metal wall behind it, just above where Terry's head had been when she sat down to shoot. After seeing that, Terry insisted, "We need to add some armor to that cupola, D."

The bullet holes in the silo and its cupola were soon patched with auto body filler or, in the places where they could reach both sides, with nuts and bolts coated with auto body filler. The holes in the house's siding were filled with dowels from D.'s wood shop. It took several weeks of inquiries, but eventually all the windows were replaced. They were paid for with bartered corn, soybeans, and beef jerky.

D. made good on his promise to replace the Laytons' expended ammunition. They had fired forty-seven rounds of 5.56, and twenty-four rounds of 7.62 NATO. This took lots of searching and d.i.c.kering. It eventually cost Perkins more than 1,600 pounds of bartered corn, soybeans, and sc.r.a.p steel.

Ken and Terry bartered for very little while they were in West Branch. Ken swapped a nickel-cadmium 9-volt battery and a silver dime for a bottle of Break-Free synthetic lubricant, after their original had been depleted with regular gun maintenance. They also traded a pair of socks for an a.s.sortment of Ziploc bags. In their weeks traveling overland, they discovered that plastic bags were essential for keeping the various contents of their backpacks and pockets dry.

Durward said, "Well, I got my money's worth for my security force. Those s.p.a.ce rifles sure are something. It sounded like World War III had started."

Fearing that the looters would return, they kept on high alert at the Perkins farm for the next two weeks. Temporarily, there were two people on guard at all times. They also decided that they needed better communication between the house and the silo. So Karen Perkins tapped into the local informal barter network, putting out the word that they would trade wheat for a pair of intercoms. Within three days they completed a trade of 400 pounds of wheat for a well-used but serviceable NuTone intercom, fourteen batteries, and enough three-conductor wire to reach the top of the silo. The base station was set up on the wall behind the woodstove's brickwork. This spot was chosen by Ken because he had determined that it was the part of the house with the best ballistic protection.

Two days after the dead looter was buried, they started their ballistic protection mantlet project. The steel came from an eighteen-disc offset harrow that had sat disused behind the tractor shed. This, Durward explained, was just an old spare, with a hitch that kept breaking anyway. After soaking the disc attachment bolts with penetrating oil overnight, Ken and D. were able to dismount all eighteen of the rusty discs from the harrow's frame.

They hauled the twenty-six-inch-diameter discs up to the top of the guard tower silo two at a time, with a rope threaded through the center holes of the discs. The discs were positioned in a heavily overlapping pattern at the cupola's doorway, looking like fish scales. They were held in place by a wooden framework of 2x4s. The front and back halves of the framework were joined by long lag screws.

Just behind the tractor discs, they laid nine horizontal layers of one-eighth-inch-thickness sheet steel from Durward's large collection of sc.r.a.p metal. This was designed to protect anyone in the cupola from rifle fire that was directed at a steep angle, up through the floor. As a bonus, this steel sheeting provided protection from fire in the event that the hibachi was ever accidentally tipped over.

As an afterthought, Ken and D. covered the front of the mantlet framework with a twenty-seven-inch-tall piece of plywood. Ken noted, "If anyone attacking sees just a sheet of plywood, then they'll think that they can shoot through it. I'd rather have the mantlet draw fire than have someone decide to deliberately aim over the top of it."

That same day, they repositioned the alarm bell pipe inside the cupola so that someone could ring it from behind the cover of the mantlet.

After installing the mantlet, they discovered that it retained a lot of heat from the hibachi, making the cupola even more comfortable to sit in during guard duty in cold weather.

The Monroe Ranch, Raynesford, Montana.

Late March, the Second Year.

Joshua Watanabe was well settled in his routine of helping with the cattle at the ranch and patrolling his a.s.signed silos and LCC. One morning in late March, he drove the Unimog through patchy snow to MAF A-01. As was his habit, he stopped 550 yards short, behind an intervening low hill. He parked the Unimog and ambled to the top of the hill, carrying his deer rifle cradled in his arms. Unlike past patrols, he was surprised to see three vans and a pickup in the MAF's parking lot. He dropped p.r.o.ne and popped open his rifle's scope covers. Looking through his scope, he could see several men in civilian clothes. They were walking in and out of the building carrying boxes. He watched for several minutes, and jotted what he saw in his notepad. The vehicles had three different colored license plates. He crawled off the top of the hill toward his truck. Once he had gotten below the military crest of the hill, he rose and ran back to the Unimog. Per the security SOP, he first tried the Malmstrom security frequency on his issued handie-talkie. Just as he expected, he heard nothing but static. From this locality, the VHF radio had line-of-sight communications only when a helicopter was airborne. Then he tried the Great Falls repeater at 155 MHz. He got a response from a police and fire dispatcher. Because they lacked communications patching capability, the dispatcher had to take down a message by hand, and relay it to the 341st Security Forces Squadron at Malmstrom. Joshua asked the dispatcher to read back the message to him, which emphasized that he was the "friendly" with the vehicle, 500 meters southeast of the MAF.

As a precaution, Joshua rolled out an optic orange marker panel on top of the Unimog's radio shelter and pinned it down with a tire iron and a tow chain to ensure that it didn't blow away.

A few minutes later, Joshua was back on the hilltop, again gla.s.sing the MAF. The looting was continuing. With his other radio, Joshua made his first direct contact with a security detachment pilot, reminding him that he was located on the hilltop to the southwest of the MAF, and advising him of the local wind and cloud cover.

Soon, he heard helicopter rotors in the distance. The looters heard this, too, and they ran for their vehicles. Joshua thumbed off the rifle's safety, and centered his crosshairs on the fogged driver's side window of a van that was parked perpendicular to him. Trying to control his breathing, he squeezed the trigger. A moment later, as the crosshairs settled back down after recoil, he could see that the window had shattered.

All four vehicles started to roll out of the MAF parking lot. Joshua fired again, not expecting a hit. A UH-1N helicopter came into view to the north, flying low, following the undulations of the terrain-what the pilots call nap-of-the-earth flying.

Joshua was alarmed to see that the vehicles turned left after exiting the MAF gate. They drove south down the road toward him and the Unimog. Although he was twenty yards from his truck parked on the shoulder of the road, he felt very exposed.

He had time to fire only one more hasty shot before he heard on the radio, "We're coming in hot."

Joshua s.n.a.t.c.hed his radio and shouted, "Danger close! I'm the guy twenty meters east of the vehicle with the marker panel."

He heard in response, "Roger that."

The three vans and the pickup were gathering speed. Joshua was able to line up a shot and squeeze the trigger when the lead van was only seventy yards away. They were approaching him nearly head-on. His shot was lucky, punching through the winds.h.i.+eld and hitting the driver in the neck.

The van swerved to the left and then sharply to the right. Only sixty yards after pa.s.sing the parked Unimog, the van went into the snow-filled barrow pit ditch and began to porpoise. It glanced into a three-strand barbed wire fence, and then rolled, throwing huge clods of earth into the air, tearing out T-posts, and spraying up a rooster tail of snow. The van came to a stop with its wheels tangled in the fence wire, resting on its left side.

The other vehicles continued on, still accelerating. The helicopter's 7.62mm NATO Minigun began to fire in short bursts when the pickup and the two other vans were 250 yards south of Joshua and when the helicopter was almost directly overhead. The results were horrendous. The cyclic rate of the electric Gatling gun was so high that individual shots could not be heard. It sounded like a deep, throaty animal growl.

Fired bra.s.s and links showered down on the road near Joshua like a hailstorm. In just four bursts of about two seconds each, the three vehicles were absolutely shredded. They all coasted to a stop, flopping on punctured tires and spewing smoke and steam from their engine compartments. Surprisingly, none of the three vehicles rolled over or left the roadway. Nor did they catch fire. They simply were riddled with holes and they came to a stop at skewed angles.

As Joshua watched the strafing in fascination and horror, the rear door popped open on the van that he had stopped. A man and a woman spattered with blood crawled out. They were both carrying SKS rifles. Joshua shot them deliberately, once each through the chest, and they fell to the ground. The woman lay still immediately, but the man thrashed violently and screamed as he hemorrhaged. After twenty-five seconds, he lay still.

Joshua's attention was diverted to the helicopter, which had orbited to the east and slowed to nearly a stationary hover. The door gunner gave each of the three smoking vehicles another two-second burst from the M134 Minigun. Its 4,000-round-per-minute cyclic rate was astonis.h.i.+ng.

"Overkill," Joshua said to himself.

As Joshua watched for any further movement from the closest van, the helicopter orbited slowly. Joshua and the pilot radioed back and forth. The pilot said that "giving it another squirt" would be a waste of ammo, so he held his fire.

They waited twenty-five minutes until the Backup Force arrived. They came in a pair of up-armored M1116 Humvees mounted with .30 caliber M240 machineguns. The vehicles stopped alongside the Unimog. The ground team, armed with M4s, dismounted and in bounds advanced to the overturned van. They approached cautiously, but found only the dead driver inside and the dead man and woman behind it. The team leader shouted, "Three looter KIAs!"

They left one man at the van and one of the gunners in the turret of the forward-most Humvee, while all the others advanced, again in bounding overwatch formation, to the remains of the other three vehicles.

The airman standing next to the van looked toward Joshua and asked, "Are you Watanabe?"

Joshua answered, "That's right."

He rose to his feet. His hands were still trembling. He refilled his rifle's magazine from a box of cartridges in his coat pocket, doing his best to look nonchalant. He closed the rifle's bolt and thumbed back its safety. He walked toward the airman, carrying the rifle muzzle down.

The airman, whom Joshua had never met, was wearing interceptor body armor (IBA) and Oakley sungla.s.ses. He said, "Looks like they broke into the 'wrong dang rec room.'"

Joshua chuckled, recognizing the reference to the movie Tremors.

The helicopter departed, leaving the scene strangely quiet. Joshua's ears were ringing.

For the next two hours, Joshua and the airmen a.s.sessed the damage and searched the vehicles. Most of this could best be described as simply gawking. The destroyed vehicles looked like colanders. Two of the looters' vehicles had Wisconsin plates, one had South Dakota plates, and the other had North Dakota plates. There was little that could be salvaged from the three that had been savaged by the Minigun, but the one that Joshua had stopped yielded five serviceable guns, more than 400 rounds of ammunition (much of it in odd calibers for other guns), and a road map with markings that gave some clues about the looters' history. Two driver's licenses indicated that the gang had originated in Madison, Wisconsin. They had apparently spent the last nineteen months hopscotching through Minnesota, the Dakotas, and Montana.

They used the winch on the Unimog to pull the three shot-up vehicles off the road. Joshua filed a succinct after-action report that downplayed his own actions. A week later, he was summoned to General Woolson's office, where he was awarded a Combat Action Medal and a field commission to the rank of second lieutenant.

13.

Under Escort.

"Since it's not considered polite, and surely not politically correct to come out and actually say that greed gets wonderful things done, let me go through a few of the millions of examples of the benefits of people trying to get more for themselves. There's probably widespread agreement that it's a wonderful thing that most of us own cars. Is there anyone who believes that the reason we have cars is because Detroit a.s.sembly line workers care about us? It's also wonderful that Texas cattle ranchers make the sacrifices of time and effort caring for steer so that New Yorkers can have beef on their supermarket shelves. It is also wonderful that Idaho potato growers arise early to do back-breaking work in the hot sun to ensure that New Yorkers also have potatoes on their supermarket shelves. Again, is there anyone who believes that ranchers and potato growers, who make these sacrifices, do so because they care about New Yorkers? They might hate New Yorkers. New Yorkers have beef and potatoes because Texas cattle ranchers and Idaho potato growers care about themselves and they want more for themselves. How much steak and potatoes would New Yorkers have if it all depended on human love and kindness? I would feel sorry for New Yorkers. Thinking this way bothers some people because they are more concerned with the motives behind a set of actions rather than the results. This is what Adam Smith, the father of economics, meant in The Wealth of Nations when he said, 'It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interests.'"

-Economist and radio talk show host Dr. Walter E. Williams, from his essay "Markets, Governments, and the Common Good"

Bradfordsville, Kentucky.

April, the Second Year.

As the war of resistance grew, Sheila Randall took some calculated risks. She allowed her store to be used as a transit point for couriers. She also continued to trade in ammunition, donating considerable quant.i.ties to the Resistance, including any that was in prohibited categories (military calibers, full metal jacket, tracer, incendiary, or armor piercing). On three occasions, she sheltered wounded resistance fighters in the store's upstairs apartment, once for more than a week. She also pa.s.sed along tidbits of information that she picked up in talking with customers.

Sheila's main contact with the Resistance was through Hollan Combs. A retired soil scientist and a widower, he said that he was the perfect resistance fighter. He reasoned, "I've got no kin, and I'm too old and crippled up to run. That leaves me just the option of standing to fight, since I'm too ornery to do anything else. This is a war that's best fought by young men who haven't yet married, and old farts like me, with nothing left to lose."

Deputy Dustin Hodges of the Marion County Sheriff's Department was Sheila's other key resistance contact. Although most of the other deputies and the sheriff himself sympathized with the Resistance, the department put on an outward show of supporting the ProvGov. Hodges regularly fed Sheila information that she summarized in handwritten spot reports. These were pa.s.sed along to the couriers. It was through Dustin that Sheila got advance warning of many planned government policies. She returned these favors by letting Dustin buy certain items at cost.

West Branch, Iowa.

April, the Second Year.

The next few months were quiet at the Perkins farm. They had to warn off more than a dozen groups of refugees who had displayed uncertain motives. Two warning shots were fired. Most of these groups were traveling on foot. With a hand-painted sign that he posted on the gatepost, Durward directed refugees to their Society of Friends (Quaker) church house on North 6th Street. Since just after the Crunch, the Perkinses had secretly supplied the church with more than 3,000 pounds of corn and soybeans to distribute to refugees and to needy people in the community.

In most instances, refugees would stop, read the sign, and move on. But often they would try to send a "representative" to the house, hoping for a direct handout. A warning shot would usually suffice to send that individual scurrying back over the gate and the whole group packing. A few times there were hostile shouts, but inevitably the refugees would leave. Durward was mistrustful, so he kept the cows locked up in the barn every night.

In late April, as the spring rains became less frequent and the weather warmed, Ken and Terry prepared to move on. The Perkinses supplied them with as much beef jerky and pemmican as they could carry, supplemented by a few raisins and canned fruits. Durward also wrote a letter of introduction, describing their work for him. They were also given road maps for seven western states that would cover potential routes to the Idaho retreat.

At dusk on the evening of April 7, by the light of a quarter waxing moon, Ken and Terry headed west. They again traveled at night, mainly along railroad tracks and, as needed, cross-country. They skirted wide around Iowa City, via the north sh.o.r.e of Lake MacBride. They then walked north and followed the Canadian Pacific Railroad line westward. These were tracks formerly owned by the Iowa, Chicago, & Eastern Railroad. They followed the tracks west through a succession of small towns: Fairfax, Norway, Luzerne, Belle Plain, Chelsea, Tama, Montour, and Marshalltown.

As they approached Marshalltown, Ken pointed out a large water tower in the distance and said, "I feel sorry for towns like this, with the power grid down. Almost everywhere that you see a water tower, that means that they relied on electric pumps-to pump it up there, to create a 'head.' When the grid went down, most towns only had a four- or five-day supply of water. So except for towns that are near hydroelectric dams and that were able to reestablish power quickly, the residents were out of water. With toilets not flus.h.i.+ng, that must be a sanitation nightmare in any town of appreciable size."

Terry asked, "So what percentage of the population of the United States is on munic.i.p.al water systems that are gravity-fed, from end to end?"

"Probably less than 2 percent. The EPA raised their standards to require filtration for most water-because of turbidity testing-so they added pumps to a lot of munic.i.p.al water systems that had been gravity-fed. Maybe they were able to take those pumps and filters out of the system and revert to all gravity flow in some places. But nearly everybody else is collecting water from rain barrels from their roofs, or gathering it out of streams and ponds. Even people with well water are going to be out of luck after they run out of fuel for their generators. People like Todd and Kevin in Idaho-with either gravity-fed spring water or a photovoltaic well pump-have got to be a tiny minority. So close to 95 percent of the population is toting water by hand every time they want to do laundry, wash dishes, or flush a toilet. Think of the collective drudgery that represents."

As they walked through the outskirts of Marshalltown, Ken and Terry were halted by two police officers who stepped out of a police cruiser with riot guns. One of them aimed a spotlight from their cruiser at Ken and Terry. The Laytons stopped and raised their hands.

"Hold it there," one of the officers warned. "Open carry of firearms is banned inside city limits."

Terry answered, "We didn't realize that we'd entered city limits."

"You haven't yet, but you will be if you cross this street."

Terry countered, "Well, can't we just unload our guns and just pa.s.s through?"

"No, then you'd be in violation of the City Council's emergency order on vagrancy. Mayor Nord.y.k.e said there are no exceptions. He laid down a zero tolerance policy for any outsiders unless they're invited here by relatives."

Ken shook his head in disgust, and said, "We're not vagrants. We're just travelers exercising our right of way. Can I show you a letter of introduction?"

The officers took a few minutes to read the letter. It seemed to soften their att.i.tude considerably.

Handing the letter back to Terry, the older cop eyed his partner and said, "Okay, we'll just escort you out of town, and you can be on your way."

Terry asked, "In your car?"

"No, afoot. Can't spare the gas."

Ken replied, "Okay, whatever you say. Your town, your rules."

They turned off the spotlight and locked their cruiser.

The officers fell in behind Ken and Terry and they resumed walking. Ken noticed that the officers still carried their shotguns, albeit casually. They chatted somewhat nervously as they walked. The officers talked about the many close calls they'd had since October, and the many crime scenes that they had cleaned up. Just forty officers, bolstered by a new "posse" of mostly military veterans and a few retired lawmen that numbered more than 100, they said, policed the town of 26,000. The older officer mentioned that there had been more than 800 burglaries and 70 violent home invasions. He hinted that there had been some summary executions of the perpetrators. They warned the Laytons to avoid Des Moines and Omaha-describing them as scenes of chaos and starvation. The younger officer mentioned that with the currency now worthless, they had been paid wages in corn, adding, "We're all pretty sick of corn."

They reached the far side of the Marshalltown limits in just seven blocks. The older officer said, "This is where we part company. We wish you the best of luck. But if we see you back in town, you will be arrested. Is that clear?"

"Yes, officer, abundantly clear."