Patriots Read online

  Patriots

  James Wesley, Rawles

  America faces a full-scale socioeconomic collapse—the stock market plummets, hyperinflation cripples commerce and the mounting crisis passes the tipping point. Practically overnight, the fragile chains of supply and high-technology infrastructure fall, and wholesale rioting and looting grip every major city.

  As hordes of refugees and looters pour out of the cities, a small group of friends living in the Midwest desperately tries to make their way to a safe-haven ranch in northern Idaho. The journey requires all their skill and training since communication, commerce, transportation and law enforcement have all disappeared. Once at the ranch, the group fends off vicious attacks from outsiders and then looks to join other groups that are trying to restore true Constitutional law to the country.

  Patriots is a thrilling narrative depicting fictional characters using authentic survivalist techniques to endure the collapse of the American civilization. Reading this compelling, fast-paced novel could one day mean the difference between life and death.

  James Wesley, Rawles

  PATRIOTS

  A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse

  to my excellent wife,

  “The Memsahib”

  IMPORTANT NOTE TO THE READER

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters (other than public figures), events and settings described in this novel are imaginary, and all character names and descriptions are fictional. In all cases, any resemblance between the characters in this novel and real people is purely coincidental.

  Real public figures, products, places, businesses, government agencies or other entities are depicted fictitiously in this novel for purposes of entertainment and comment only. No affiliation, sponsorship or endorsement is claimed or suggested.

  This novel is only for the entertainment of the reader and is not intended to be used as a source of information or instruction. All activities of the fictional characters in the novel are depicted for storytelling purposes only. The author and the publisher do not intend the reader to make any use of the contents of this novel and strongly caution the reader against doing so.

  For purposes of a realistic narrative, the author has described various survival techniques and the fabrication of various devices in detail. However, this book is not meant to take the place of a survival manual and is not meant to instruct the reader on the fabrication of devices that may be dangerous, illegal or both.

  For example, the making and/or possession of the some of the devices and ingredients depicted in this novel may be illegal in some jurisdictions. Mere possession of the uncombined components and/or ingredients might be construed as a violation of criminal law. Consult your state and local laws!

  The case citations contained within this novel do not constitute legal advice. Consult a lawyer if you have legal questions or need legal advice.

  The medical details contained within this novel do not constitute medical advice. Consult a doctor or other appropriate health professional if you have medical questions or if you need medical or nutritional advice.

  The author and publisher shall have neither liability nor responsibility to any person or entity with respect to any injury, loss or damage caused, or alleged to be caused, directly or indirectly, by the contents of this novel and/or the use of the contents by any person.

  Acknowledgments

  Above all else, it takes faith and friends to survive. I’ve been blessed with a lot of friends, and they have helped to strengthen my faith in Almighty God.

  This novel is dedicated to the not-so-fictional Group: Conor, Dave, Hugh, Jeff, Ken, Linda, Mary, Meg, P.K., Roland, and Scott. Keep your powder dry!

  My thanks to the readers of SurvivalBlog.com and the many other folks who encouraged me, who contributed technical details, who were used for character sketches, and who helped in the editing process: Arne, Barbara, the Bee Man, Bill L. (with the French Resistance, 1943–1944), Bob “The Soap Maker,” sharp-eyed Dr. Boris K., “R.F. Burns,” the HAM wizard, Carolyn, The Chartist Gnome, Cheryl the Economatrix, Chris the Rocky Mountain Diver, Commander Zero and his new bride, Dr. Craig in New Zealand, Col. “CRM

  Discriminator,” David in Israel, the late Jonathan Davis, Debbie, Pastor Dennis, 1/2 M.O. A. Dick in Orofino, Quiet Donny, Dr. Eric, Fred theValmet-Meister, Frank in “Nah-lens,” Gayle, “The Glock pro” in Connecticut, Pastor Hale, the anachronistic H-man, Huff the dynamite shooter, “Joe Clutch,” “John Jones”

  in the desert, Kirk and Karen in Montana, “All-Grace-No-Slack-Really-Reformed” Kris in Oregon, Lance in Moscow, “LVZ” in Ohio, “Froggy”

  Mark, Marshall the Cyberpunk, Marvin “The Wordmonger,” “The Mill-wright,” Nadir, Nick in Australia, Patton, Peter in Switzerland, PPPP- the Pioche Professional Polymer Pistolero, Preston, Ranier, Roland in Germany, Rolf and Sandy (both in Washington), Sara the Reenactor, Sherron, Stefan in Sweden, Tina “The S.C. Clone” in Kooskia,Wes in Boise, and MRE Woody.

  Thanks also to those who have provided web space, outlets, publicity, motivation, and/or prominent links for my novel: Howard Albertson, Patrick Ales-sandra, Joseph Ames Jr., Jeff Baker, Billy Beck, Ed Bertsch, BOHICA Concepts, Bill Brumbaugh, John Bryant, Ammon Campbell, The Christian Survival Intelligence Network, the late Jeff Cooper, Jim Crews, Captain Dave’s Survival Page, Richard DeCastro, the late Carla Emery, First Virtual Bank, Detra Fitch, “The Frugal Squirrel,” The Fraud Information Center, The Gos-pel Plow, Bob Grenert and the Sacred Covenant Resource Center, Bob Gris-wold and the staff of Ready Made Resources, Mikael Häggström, Ken Hamblin, Michael Heinze, Fred Heiser, Richard Horton, Peter Huss, The Staff of the Idaho Observer, Dean Ing, Devvy Kidd, Mark Koernke, John Leveron, Acknowledgments

  Live Oak Farms, Dr. Lawrence Martin and Lakeside Press, Henry McDaniel, Mike McNulty, Mike Medintz, The Mental Militia Forums, Patty Neill, Dr.

  Gary North, Nick Norwood, Mark Nowell, Michael Panzner, Dr. Ignatius Piazza, Maj. John Plaster, Jerry Pournelle, Larry Pratt, Project Epsilon, Steve Quayle, Dr. Norm Resnick, John Ross, “Rourke,” Kurt Saxon, John Stadt-miller, David Stott, Gabe Suarez, Kurt and Angie Wilson of Survival Enterprises, Nancy Tappan, Truth Radio in Delano, Two Toes Consulting and Design, Ed Wolfe,Weapons Safety, Inc., Tom Woolman, and Aaron Zelman of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership.

  Thanks to Paul B. and Randy K. for their sharp eyes in editing the previous edition.

  Most importantly, this novel is dedicated to my excellent wife (“The Memsahib”). She has patiently put up with the heaps of supplies in the barn and garage for twenty-plus years. She suffered through nine months of voluntary separation while I moved to Idaho alone to pound nails and write the first draft of the novel. She cheerfully joined me for the following eighteen months with no running water, living amidst Sheetrock dust in a half-finished house. She helped fill the chest freezer with her livestock, garden produce, and wild game.

  She “wrote the book” (or at least the chapter) on home birth. Most of all, I praise her for displaying the patience to live in loving Christian submission with a husband who spends far too much time clicking away at a keyboard. I am truly blessed!

  James Wesley, Rawles

  The Rawles Ranch

  March 2009

  CHAPTER 1

  The Crunch

  “…nuclear warfare is not necessary to cause a breakdown of our society.

  You take a large city like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago—their water supply comes from hundreds of miles away and any interruption of that, or food, or power for any period of time you’re going to have riots in the streets. Our society is so fragile, so dependent on the interworking of things to provide us with goods and services, that you don’t need nuclear warfare to fragment us anymore than the Romans n
eeded it to cause their eventual downfall.”

  —Gene Roddenberry

  When the landing gear came down, Todd Gray gave an audible sigh of relief.

  He was almost home. The seventy-seat Horizon Airlines Bombardier CRJ-700 commuter jet started its downwind leg, with its engines throttled back to low thrust. Todd looked out his window at the familiar rolling Palouse Hills, a neat patchwork of wheat fields. This time of year they were shorn to a short golden stubble. By early October even the straw had been hauled out. Just after the plane touched down, the air brakes flipped up, and the engines reversed with a roar. The plane wheeled to a stop at the tiny Pullman-Moscow air terminal, just west of the state line dividing Washington and Idaho. When the plane switched to external power, Todd unbuckled his seat belt, but didn’t get up. He hated standing in the aisle, waiting for everyone to pull out their carry-on bags, and waiting for what always seemed like an eternity for the cabin door to open and for the passengers to shuffle out. So he sat and waited for the aisle to clear. He closed his eyes, said a prayer, and considered what had gone on in the last seventy-two hours.

  • • •

  The meeting had been called on short notice, and attendance was mandatory.

  Everyone from mid-level account executives on up were there—even the field office managers from as far away as Baltimore. Todd Gray and the firm’s two other telecommuters were also corralled into the meeting by the management.

  It was important, they said. So Todd dutifully packed his best suit. He drove from Bovill to the Pullman-Moscow airport, took a commuter flight to Seattle, and then a United flight to O’Hare. He rented a car and checked into the Marriott, where he usually stayed on his quarterly trips to Chicago. That blew the entire first day. With the two-hour time difference from Idaho, it was 7 p.m. by the time he got to the Marriott and clicked on Fox News. There was lots of bad news on the television. He watched the news for a half hour and then started making phone calls and sending e-mails to his friends in Chicago. He spoke in urgent terms. After a fitful night’s sleep, he sat through a full day of meetings that started with a 7:30 a.m. working breakfast. This early start time for a major meeting was unprecedented at Bolton, Meyer, and Sloan.

  The firm had brought in two consultants for the daylong meeting, a Russian from Florida, and an Argentinean from NewYork City. Both were considered subject matter experts on high inflation. Both were well-seasoned accountants, and both had lived through it in their home countries. Triple-digit inflation. Todd heard from one of the mid-level managers that the consultants were each paid twenty thousand dollars for the day.

  He also mentioned that a third expert, from Zimbabwe, could not attend due to a foul-up with his visa application. Todd regretted this, knowing that with the recent 15,000 percent annual inflation rate and where ten zeroes were knocked off the currency, the Zimbabwean would have had the most recent subject matter expertise.

  The Argentinean was on loan from Peat Marwick. His name was Phillipe y Bordero, and he was far more informative than the Russian. He talked about his experience in Argentina in the 1980s, when inflation ran as high as 100 percent per month as well as the economic crisis of 2002. He went on to describe how president Raoul Alfonsin had instituted a thousand-for-one currency exchange. He mentioned that his firm had to run daily calculations to compensate for the inflation. Sometimes twice a day for the bigger accounts. He went on at great length about how the firm would park money in “day accounts” and shuttle money quickly into dollars to protect the money from “El Inferno” —the inflation that was burning up the Argentine peso.

  The Russian arrived an hour late, with loud apologies, claiming that his flight had been delayed. Todd mumbled to himself, “Great. He could have flown in last night, all expenses paid. We pay this guy twenty grand, and he doesn’t even get here on time.”

  The account executive sitting next to Todd snickered in agreement.

  The Argentinean was cool and deliberate. In contrast, the Russian was a manic speaker. He chattered about what things had been like for Russian accountants in the 1990s. His discussion soon degenerated into a rambling discourse on bribes: bribing the Moscow police, bribing the tax officials, bribing the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti (FSB)—the main successor of the KGB, bribing the Russian mob.

  On some topics, the Russian was succinct. He said forthrightly, “You’ve got to figure out which is the most stable currency, and exchange into that currency as quickly as possible, before your local currency melts away. At one point in time in Russia we had 1,800 percent inflation. It was madness to leave it in rubles for more than a few days. For us then—at the time—the safe haven was greenback dollars. For us now, I dunno. Euros maybe. Swiss Francs maybe, but it’s got to be something more stable than these cruddy dollars. Latest figure is 115 percent and climbing. To be fair to your clients, and to be fair to your firm, you’ve got to get all incoming receivables out of dollars very, very quickly.”

  Todd never caught the Russian’s name. It was something multisyllabic and unpronounceable, ending in “ski.” One thing that the Russian asked soon after he arrived made Todd sit up and take notice:“Where are the security men? No guards in the lobby? You’ve got to increase security! You handle just account ledgers and thumb drives and data disks now, but pretty soon you are gonna be carrying around a lot of cash. So you need a couple of big guys with guns. Get the biggest, meanest looking guys you can find. And mean looking guns. One guard for the parking garage, and one or two for the lobby. Trust me. You won’t regret it.”

  After the catered lunch, there was a convoluted question from the far end of the long conference table. It was about how they should go about calculat-ing daily depreciation of a currency and precisely how aggregates should be derived. Phillipe y Bordero was about to answer, but the Russian spoke first.

  He said something that astounded Todd and everyone else in the room. He said, “Just make something up that sounds reasonable. You’re talking about a fast-moving target. Who gives a sheet? Make something up.”

  At that point old man Meyer cleared his throat. He was obviously perturbed. He retorted, “We aren’t going to ‘make up’ anything. We are going to develop a set of accounting practices that will compensate for the inflation.

  We will use elaborate computer modeling and projections if need be.” The Russian was nearly silent for the rest of the day. It was clear that Mr. Meyer did not get his twenty thousand dollars’ worth from the Russian. The day ended with nearly as many unanswered questions as it had started.

  Todd took a 5:30 a.m. flight back to Seattle the next morning.

  • • •

  Todd was shaken from his reverie by the stewardess, who was walking up the aisle, making sure that none of the passengers had left anything behind. Todd stood up and carefully extracted his one and only bag from the overhead bin.

  He never checked luggage on his trips to Chicago. Todd was the last passenger off the plane.

  Since he didn’t have any checked baggage, Todd was in his Dodge pickup within five minutes after getting off the plane. Parking was right out in front of the little Pullman-Moscow air terminal. It was quite convenient, compared to O’Hare with its lineal miles of glittering concourses, dozens of baggage carousels, and several square miles of parking lots that charged twenty dollars a day. Fifty minutes later, Todd pulled in the gate of his property. Shona ran alongside the pickup, yipping and wagging her tail. It felt very good to be safe at home.

  Mary ran out the front door and gave him a long hug. They talked while he unpacked.

  • • •

  When the Crunch came, it did not arrive without warning. By the turn of the century, Federal spending was out of control, and the debt and deficit problems were insurmountable. By 2008, with the global credit market in freefall, bank runs and huge Federal bailouts were becoming more frequent. Collectively, the bailouts were a massive, unstoppable hemorrhage of red ink. The debt and deficit numbers compounded at frightening rates. But it was to
o agonizing to confront them, so they were ignored. A report by the Congressional Budget Office was alarming. It said that just to pay the interest on the national debt for the year, it would take 100 percent of the year’s individual income tax revenue, 100 percent of corporate and excise taxes, and 41 percent of Social Security payroll taxes. Just before the Crunch, interest on the national debt was consuming 96 percent of government revenue.

  The debt piled up at the rate of nine billion a day, or fifteen thousand a second. The official national debt was over six trillion dollars. The unofficial debt, which included “out year” unfunded obligations such as entitlements, long-term bonds, and military pensions, topped fifty-three trillion dollars.

  Even the official national debt had ballooned to 120 percent of the gross domestic product and was compounding at the rate of 18 percent per year.

  The Federal government was borrowing 193 percent of revenue for the year.

  The president was nearing the end of his term in office. The stagnant economy, rising interest rates, and creeping inflation troubled the president.

  Publicly, he beamed about having “beat the deficit.” Privately, he admitted that the low deficit figures came from moving increasingly large portions of Federal funding “off budget.” Behind the accounting smoke and mirrors game, the real deficit was growing. Government spending at all levels equated to 45 percent of the Gross Domestic Product. In July, the recently appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve Board had a private meeting with the president. The chairman pointed out the fact that even if Congress could balance the budget, the national debt would still grow inexorably, due to compounding interest.

  The president didn’t let trifles like ledger sheets and statistics get in his way.