Founders (16 page)

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

Joshua snatched 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 windshield and hitting the driver in the neck.

The van swerved to the left and then sharply to the right. Only sixty yards after passing 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 brass 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 astonishing.

“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 sunglasses. 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 assessed 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.

“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 assembly 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”

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 quantities 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 passed 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 passed 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.

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 shore 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 flushing, 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 municipal 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 municipal 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 pass through?”

“No, then you’d be in violation of the City Council’s emergency order on vagrancy. Mayor Nordyke 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 attitude 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.”