Patriots Page 3

  With the same radio, Todd and Mary were also able to monitor amateur radio broadcasters throughout the western United States. For a brief time after most other U.S. stations had vanished, WWCR in Nashville, Tennessee, remained on the air at 3.215, 5.070, 5.935, 9.985, 12.160, and 15.825 megahertz. Todd had the most success with the amateur band centered on 7.2 megahertz. The news that they heard from these ham operators was almost universally bad. They reported civil unrest in nearly every city with a population over forty thousand. Most of the hams were operating on standby power, as there were only a few isolated areas that still had regular utility grid power.

  In Bovill, Idaho, the town nearest the Grays’ farm, there were not many noticeable effects of the Crunch during its early stages. The sawmill in nearby Troy, which had cut back to one shift per day two months earlier, shut down completely. The nearby Shell gas station sold out of gas in a two-day period.

  Most Americans had a hard time dealing with the galloping inflation. This phenomenon had an only limited effect in Bovill. The local grocery store was sold completely out of stock by the time inflation reached triple-digit figures.

  When there was little or nothing available to buy, the value of the dollar was inconsequential.

  As in other small towns across America, most people around Bovill just stayed at home, glued to their radios and televisions. In rural Idaho, the riots that were breaking out in the major cities seemed a million miles away. The catchphrase of the day was, “Isn’t it terrible what’s happening in New York?”

  To Todd, the phrase had a tone that he had heard before. It was the same tone used when people talked about famines and floods overseas. It seemed that the local residents were trying to deny that what was going on had any impact on them. The Grays’ neighbors expressed concern for their personal safety only when there were disturbances reported in Seattle. That was six and a half hours away by car. Things were getting steadily worse all over the country, but in remote regions like the Palouse Hills, there was a time delay.

  During this pause, Todd started making some final preparations. First, he closed and latched all of the steel shutters over the windows of their house.

  Mary commented that it made the house seem dark and gloomy. Todd just shrugged his shoulders and said, “Well, I guess we’ll just have to get used to it.”

  Next, Todd mandated that they lock—and keep locked—both the gate at the county road and the gate on the chain-link fence around the house, and the doors to the house. Mary suggested that they also keep their Power Wagon pickup and herVolkswagen Beetle locked up in the garage with their distributor rotors removed.

  Mary also suggested that she and Todd have a meeting with the Latah County civil defense coordinator in Moscow. By this time, however, the phone line—and with it their Internet connection—was dead. They finally decided that the benefits of such a meeting were outweighed by the expenditure of now precious gasoline that they would have to use. It was a sixty-five-mile round trip to Moscow. Further, Todd did not rule out the risk of social unrest in Moscow—even if the city did have only thirty thousand residents.

  The Grays also started using up the contents of their electric refrigerator and chest freezer. With extended power failures expected, they did not want food to spoil unnecessarily. Todd methodically sliced, marinated, and jerked nearly all of the elk, venison, and salmon in the chest freezer. The exhausting process took five days. With the same thought in mind, Mary took the initiative of recharging all of the nickel metal hydride batteries for their flashlights and various electronic gear. As they only had two small chargers, this took nearly as long as the jerky making.

  They didn’t know how rough things might get, or whether or not any of the other group members would show up to help secure the retreat. So Todd completely refilled the firewood storage area in the basement. He told Mary, “It would be ironic to make all these preparations and then get blown away doing something so mundane as walking back and forth to the woodshed.”

  As further insurance, Todd and Mary also began carrying their Colt .45 automatics at all times. They also loaded half of the magazines for each of their guns. Todd’s plan was to alternately unload these magazines and load the other half of their magazines twice a year. This would prevent the magazine springs from “taking a set.” On the few trips that he took into town or down the road to Kevin Lendel’s house, Todd carried both his .45 and his short-barreled Remington 870 shotgun. There was no worry of being arrested, as there was no prohibition on carrying a loaded gun in public. In fact, Idaho was one of the few states where citizens could carry a loaded gun in a car. The only prohibition was on carrying a concealed weapon without a state permit. In Idaho, concealed carry permits were easy to obtain.

  Surprisingly, the U.S. Postal Service still made regular deliveries until early November. Local mail got through promptly, but longer distance deliveries were sporadic at best. The Grays took advantage of this in several ways. First, they sent letters to their family members, letting them know that they were safe and well. Next they wrote all of the group members still in the Chicago area, once again urging them to “Get out of Dodge.” They hoped that if and when their letters arrived, that the group members would have already departed.

  After a long talk, Todd and Mary decided to make an $800 prepayment on their electric power bill. They also sent a check covering the next three years’ property taxes on their farm. Although it appeared that the local government would likely evaporate in the next few weeks, they felt more secure knowing that they wouldn’t lose their farm to taxes as some of their relatives had in the depression of the 1930s. The check to the tax assessor office was relatively small, as their annual tax assessment was only $780 for their house and forty acres.

  Writing these two checks brought the balance of their checking account down to $220. Their savings account had long since been cleaned out when they bought the house and upgraded it. One of the reasons they wrote these checks was that the dollars that they represented were rapidly becoming worthless. They agreed that it was better to spend their money on something useful than to see it lost to hyperinflation.

  Todd and Mary walked down the hill to their mailbox in silence. Todd had his Remington riot shotgun tucked under his arm. As they got to the box, Todd blurted out, “This seems so absurd. Here we are, mailing checks drawn on a bank that has closed its doors—probably forever, denominated in a currency that is basically worthless, to a couple of organizations that will probably be nonexistent soon after the checks arrive!” He had meant the comment to be funny, but Mary didn’t laugh. She tossed the envelopes in the box, closed the lid, flipped up the flag, and turned back toward their house.

  There were tears welling up in her eyes.

  Four days after the riots started, Paul and Paula Andersen, the Grays’ neighbors to the south, dropped by the house to explain that they were going to go “double up” at their son’s place. He had a large cattle ranch near Kendrick, about twenty-five miles south of Bovill. The Andersens offered the Grays the use of their house, barn, water supply, firewood, stored hay, and pasture in their absence.

  Todd told Paul, “Thanks for the offer, but I probably won’t need to take you up on it. I’ll be happy to keep an eye on your place while you’re gone, though.”

  Paul Andersen thanked Todd and handed him a slip of paper, saying, “Here’s my son’s address and phone number in Kendrick. When the phones are working again, give us a call.” They never saw the Andersens again.

  The other two neighbors with property contiguous to the Grays’ parcel left under similar circumstances. Most of these neighbors didn’t bother to stop by and make their goodbyes. By the haste of their activity when packing up, Todd presumed that they were in too much of a hurry for formal goodbyes. The neighbors across the county road, the Crabbes, waved to Mary as they pulled their heavily laden flatbed Ford pickup and trailer out their front gate with their last load. Mary later mentioned to Todd that it seemed like a scene out of The Grapes
of Wrath. They never saw the Crabbes again, either.

  Todd and Mary began hearing the term “doubling up” with great regularity as they tuned from channel to channel on Mary’s CB radio. It was the local parlance that developed for two or more families relocating and setting up mini-strongholds. The residents of Latah County were plain country folks, but they weren’t stupid. When times got tough, most realized that a single family on a remote farm would be no match for a band of looters. It was a natural and logical reaction to cluster into small defensive groups.

  Both Todd and Mary had trouble sleeping during the interval between the onset of the riots and when the other members of their retreat group started to arrive. Adrenaline wouldn’t let them sleep. Todd found himself lying awake in bed, listening anxiously for anything that sounded out of place. Every time their dog Shona let out a loud growl or bark, both of them would immediately be on their feet. Todd would look out the back shutters while Mary checked the front.

  Once the rest of the group members arrived, they would be able to set up a regular guard schedule at the listening post/observation post (LP/OP) that Todd had prepared. Until then, however, they would have to be light sleepers.

  The stress of getting only snatches of sleep began to show after only a few days.

  The first of the members of the Group to arrive at the retreat were Mike and Lisa Nelson. They came roaring up in their Bronco and their Mustang, late in the evening of October fifteenth. They reported that they had not run into trouble on their trip, aside from having to pay sixty-five dollars a gallon for gas at one stop. They commented that there were a lot of people on the road, even late at night, and that a lot of the cars they saw were “full to the gunnels and towing U-Haul trailers.”

  Mike said that they had both called in sick the day before they left, and that neither he nor Lisa had bothered calling back again. When Todd asked if this was wise, Mike replied, “Todd, if you had seen the panic that we saw, you’d have done the same thing. We’re not going back. Ever. We split the whole program. Besides, at this point, I probably couldn’t get my job back even if I wanted to, so there is no turning back.”

  The conversation didn’t go on much longer because they were exhausted and wanted to get some sleep. They had driven straight through from Chicago.

  The next to arrive, seventeen hours later, were Dan Fong and Tom Kennedy. By prior arrangement, they had convoyed out west together. Dan was driving his Toyota pickup. Tom’s flat brown-painted Bronco, riding down on its overload springs, followed close behind. After they stopped, Todd noticed that the Toyota’s windshield, passenger side window, and rear window on the camper shell were missing. What clearly looked like bullet holes peppered the passenger side of the camper shell. Their “debriefing” went on much longer than that given by the Nelsons.

  CHAPTER 2

  Old Friends

  “A few honest men are better than numbers.”

  —Oliver Cromwell

  The morning following the arrival of Dan and T.K., there was still no sign of Ken and Terry Layton, the last of the group members still in Illinois. Dan said that he was beginning to wonder if they would ever arrive. When Mary voiced the same concern to Todd, he smiled and declared, “Don’t worry, if I know them, they’ll get here even if they have to cover the whole distance in three-to-five second rushes.”

  After his conversation with Mary, Todd went to see Mike, who was inventorying his equipment in his wall lockers in the Grays’ basement. As he reached the bottom of the stairs, Todd told Mike, “It would be wise to start a round-the-clock guard mount, starting this morning. I’d like you to work up a duty schedule. We’ll use that sked until Ken and Terry arrive, then we’ll set a permanent watch.”

  Mike raised an eyebrow and asked, “So you really think that they’ll make it here?You know, if they had a chance to make it out in a car, they’d be here by now. They could be on foot by now, or worse. You saw how Dan’s rig got shot up. That’s pretty strong evidence that we’re in a world of hurt.”

  Todd gave Mike Nelson a glum look. “I know Mike, I know. At this point, though, all we can do is hope and pray. Care to join me?” They kneeled and bowed their heads. They prayed aloud, each beseeching protection and travel mercies for the Laytons.

  Later that morning, Todd called for a formal debriefing of the Nelsons, Dan, and T.K. Everyone got together in the living room of the house, with the exception of Mary, who was up at the hillside listening post/observation post (LP/OP).

  “The drive itself was a piece of cake, really,” Mike began. “Like I told Todd before, the hardest part was loading up all of our gear. We spent half a day putting everything into three heaps: ‘Essentials,’ ‘Second Priority,’ and ‘Nice to Have.’

  “We thought that we had pre-positioned most of our gear here at the retreat, but once we started setting out everything that we still had at our house, we realized that we had seriously underestimated the weight and volume.”

  Lisa interjected, “I suppose that we should have done a practice load-up a long time ago. It would have made our underestimation immediately apparent, and prevented having to consciously think through what we absolutely needed to take. Anyway, after prioritizing, we started loading. The guns got packed first. Then all of our ammo. Then our ALICE packs. Then twelve five-gallon gas cans. Those went on the rack on the tailgate and just inside it, so we could refuel without having to unload anything to get to the cans.

  “Next we loaded our ‘tactical’ food supplies—you know—the MREs and various freeze-dried and retort packaged stuff. We are thankful that we brought most of our MREs here last year. Otherwise, we would have had to leave them behind. This got us through the ‘Essentials’ pile. The real headaches came with the ‘Second Priority’ pile: clothing, bulk foods, field gear, most of our medical supplies, the hand crank generator, and so on. We just didn’t have room to fit it all in, even with both the Bronco and the Mustang. I considered trying to get a rental trailer, but I figured that by then they’d all be long gone.

  “The end result was that we had to leave behind half of our wheat, our generator, our kerosene lamps, all of our cans of kerosene, and half of our survival reference books. Before we took off, I left the extra gear along with a goodbye note on our next door neighbor’s back porch. I figured that there was no use in having them go to waste. Besides, I knew that we wouldn’t have the opportunity to come back for another load. The only thing that we took from the ‘Nice to Have’ pile was my old family Geneva Bible. It has been through floods, tornadoes, you name it. I’m glad it’s with us.”

  “By the time we got everything packed, it was three a.m. We were going to coordinate, but the phone was dead. As it turned out, leaving in the middle of the night worked out for the best. There was not much traffic. Even still, we saw quite a few cars and pickups towing trailers. Mike drove ahead of me. We talked to each other on the CB. We didn’t chatter. It was just the occasional ‘slow down!’ or ‘watch out for this truck that’s coming up to pass!’ We had the CBs set to channel 27, upper sideband—the Get Out Of Dodge (G.O.O.D.) frequency—so Mike occasionally tried to reach the Laytons, or Dan or T.K., in case they were monitoring, but they either weren’t listening or were out of range. I was really nervous the whole way. I had the doors locked and kept my Colt Gold Cup tucked under my thigh on the seat of the car.”

  Mike continued, “We didn’t want to use up any more of the gas in cans than we had to, so we stopped several times to fill up. One station was charging sixty-five dollars per gallon for all grades of fuel.”

  Lisa interjected, “That was the station where we met this guy and his family stranded in their minivan. Because the gas station had started to refuse checks and credit cards the day before, they wouldn’t even accept their own franchise card. This guy had every credit card in the world—American Express,VISA, you name it—but only eighteen dollars in cash. Just as the guy was taking off his fancy gold wristwatch to offer the station manager in exchange for a tank of gas, M
ike walks up to him and hands him nine one-hundred-dollar bills. He thanked him and offered to send the money back later. Mike said to him ‘No prob, keep it fella. Besides, by the time you’d get a chance to mail me the money, people will be kindling their fires with fifties, and wiping their behinds with hundreds.’”

  Mike concluded, “Anyway, the long and the short of it is that we got here, and saw no serious disorder along the way. But, as Lisa told you, there were a lot of determined-looking people with very heavily loaded vehicles on the road.”

  Dan and T.K.’s debriefing was next. T.K. began, “I was listening to my Cobra CB base station, set to the primary G.O.O.D. frequency, as I was packing up. All of a sudden, I heard this voice saying:‘Dude, are we getting out of here or what?’ It was the Fong-man. Boy, I was glad to hear him. I ‘rogered’ back, and he told me that he was all packed up and ready to go. I said,‘Great, come on over and help me load up.’ He showed up in about ten minutes. As it turned out, he was on ‘security’ while I packed. I made sure that I had a gun handy throughout the process as well. I had my Colt Commander cocked and locked in the inside pocket of that flyer’s jacket I bought last year.

  “Basically, I packed while Dan sat in the cab of his Toyota, holding his old Model ’97 trench gun. I asked him why he wasn’t carrying his Remington 870. He says, ‘This gun is much more ominous….’ Then he whips out this bayonet about a mile long and snaps it on. ‘This oughta make any hungry neighbors think twice,’ he says. By the time I was done loading up, it was nearly midnight. I brought all I could think of, and got the old Bronco pretty well loaded down. Luckily, I just made a caching trip out here last summer, so I didn’t have to leave much behind that I would have wanted aside for some books and bed linens. When we took off, Dan was in the lead.”