“That chancre mechanic found I had some athlete’s foot in between two of my toes and you’d think I had shot his dog. I had to listen to an hour-long lecture on foot care, maintenance and the importance of clean socks and boots. I had to go see the voodoo pharmacist who is married to the real pharmacist. She gave me some eye of newt crap to smear on it twice daily while her husband explained to me that antifungals were expensive and I’d be out two gold coins if the voodoo didn’t work. The doctor also found I had an elevated white blood cell count indicating I had some kind of parasite. I knew that fat fuck Mikey handed out and snarfed the last rabbit down before it was fully cooked; it’s the last time he touches my food! The dentist took the cake though; I need four cavities filled at a quarter gold coin each. I got the discount because it was my first visit and had to listen to a lecture about British dentistry and the need for fluoride in the water supply. Next cavity is one gold coin and any one after that is two; the hygienist had a coronary and was digging around my mouth looking for Jimmy Hoffa. They are making me some retainers to wear at night and they will know if I’m not using them every night and it would be two gold coins if I was not on the next retainer by my next visit. These people are out of control and we need to do something about it.”
Mitch laughed. “Were you not just saying that healthcare could be a force for good? I think you were talking about personal responsibility and being accountable for making bad decisions and the reason healthcare was so expensive is because government was involved. I suppose we could let people pay the docs with chickens when they need treatment like they did in the old days but they have essentially taken on the responsibility for the health of the entire community. Mel and I have talked about it at length and have decided to pay the healthcare group bonuses based on health outcomes instead of treatment. In theory, the healthier we all become the less money they make so we tipped the scales in the other direction. They believe that they will achieve the top-level bonuses and the whole thing can be paid out of the church endowment gains. We are creating free healthcare by incentivizing the healthcare industry to make people healthier and need less care. Timothy is on board and is counselling everyone like I am to you now. The theme is healthy costs less so you can get on the bus or get hit by it. Regular maintenance on a vehicle is far less costly than avoiding it and paying expensive repair costs later.”
“You are a closet socialist aren’t you, Mitch,” Duncan accused. “Your San Francisco bias is showing.”
“You know, Duncan, the United States has the costliest healthcare in the world and the population has life expectancies and other healthcare metrics that list it as barely above the third world. I am all about profit but I see health as a basic human right. The Canadians spend less per person on healthcare and have some of the best outcomes in the world, hell, Cuba ranks ahead of us. The system is fundamentally broken and there is something ghoulish about making a profit on people’s poor health. I’d rather pay doctors to make people healthier than treat the inevitable sickness if they don’t,” Mitch said.
“Well, those witch doctors aren’t getting any more of my darn money,” Duncan said.
“I don’t think they want any of it any more than you want to part with it. They are counting on the principle of how copper wire was invented to help,” Mitch said.
“Copper wire?” Duncan asked.
“Yes,” Mitch laughed. “It was invented by two Scotsmen arguing over a penny.”
The trio concentrated on the Homestead brand and turning it into a juggernaut. They helped create businesses that produced counter mount cast iron grinders, copper stills, pressure and water bath canners, ram pumps and Mikey had even designed a steel underground bunker system. The trio also recruited old school craftsmen and the Retreat had a cooperage, two blacksmith forges and a wheel right shop. They had a cobbler, bowyer, fletcher, thatcher, sawyer, millwright and a fully operational modern machine shop. Other than electronics, the people of the Retreat could make and manufacture anything from raw materials. Mitch made sure that they financed the non-Retreat needed resources to ensure each manufacturer had at least a one-year supply of raw materials. There was no just in time supply system in place at the Retreat and Melanie had an emergency system to expand the supply to five years if they needed it, which means she already had it squirreled away at the Retreat in the various warehouses. All the ammunition from the shooting range was reloaded and between the chemist and the foundry they had the ability and knowledge how to manufacture their own rounds from scratch. Mitch was amazed that the chemist could make black powder from chicken manure. The Retreat stockpiled many critical components that they could not manufacture themselves like Portland cement, sheet metal and copper wiring. Anything that was not easily replaced was hardened, shielded or extras were procured and stored to Melanie’s exacting supply system. If you took, borrowed, or used something from storage without telling Melanie about it then you faced the wrath. The storage system was inspected, inventoried and rotated on a weekly basis. If something was not exactly where it was supposed to be then the Spanish Inquisition paled in comparison to a Melanie investigation. Mikey was the usual culprit but Duncan and Mitch often found themselves in the hot seat too.
“Hi, honey,” Melanie greeted Mitch one evening. “How was the exercise?”
“It went good,” Mitch said, giving his wife a kiss. “Night exercises are tough and moving quietly through the woods with NVGs is difficult. There is no depth perception.”
“Yeah, I have noticed that myself,” Melanie said in agreement. “I was repacking my bag and I was restocking the batteries in my pack, the NVGs sure burn through them.”
Mitch turned to his wife and narrowed his eyes, thinking, “Does she think and suspect or does she know?” He felt like General Ahkbar attacking the Death Star in Star Wars. “It’s a trap, Mitch.” “Yes, honey, I grabbed a couple of packages from the battery storage container. I was late for the exercise so I did not have time to mark it off the inventory sheet, I’ll go remedy that right now.” Complete and utter surrender was the only acceptable defense.
The one thing that was agreed to by the entire community, except Beverly Hills which wasn’t consulted, was that everyone served in the community militia. It was the community that insisted on it. Every man, woman and child over the age of ten was in the Retreat’s militia and the entire community was organized into squads, companies and a full brigade. Wargaming strategies were developed by a post-apocalyptic author who dreamed up “what if” scenarios and designed the make-up and weaponry of the opposing force. The Retreat was constantly drilled to react to threats and the Retreat had contingency plans for every scenario from an EMP strike to an attack of mutant killer hornets. The Retreat was organized by the executive officers in the classic G1-9 military groupings of responsibilities. The main ones were G1-personnel that Mikey headed, G-2 intelligence which Duncan ran, G-3 operations/training that Mitch ran and G-4 logistics which Melanie ran. Each had a lieutenant who did all the work. Five person squads were permanent as well as companies. The Retreat militia had full-time military personnel who were the security teams and martial instructors, reservists who had full-time jobs and businesses but pulled Retreat shifts and duties 16 hours a week and the militia who was everyone else. Every person on the Retreat had to achieve the minimum standard of expert in weapons, hand to hand combat, woodcraft and survival. It was a rite of passage for every ten-year-old to learn their basic firearm qualification and be sold their first rifle and handgun. Everyone on the Retreat had the same rifle and AR-15 that Angus procured for them. Most of them earned the money for their weaponry by working for Angus on the range and at the reloading warehouse. Ballistics was a standard class at the Retreat’s school and every eight-year-old could tell you the bullet drop of a .223 round with a 200 yard zero at 25-yard intervals out to 600 yards. Each Retreat member had their own rifle and handgun stored safely in their homes as well as a go bag. Competition at the annual Retreat Olympics was fierce for target shooting, field e
xercises and endurance events. Hunting season was always tense at the Retreat as many clueless strangers entered the Boise forests in pursuit of deer. Duncan finally found a tactic that worked by taking all the disabled ATVs and scattering them on the 25-mile forestry trail, clearly marking a bunch on trails and having forty fake hunters sitting in tree deer stands twenty feet off the road with orange vests on. They would constantly yell to each other if any ATV, walker or truck should drive by. They had bows, black powder rifles and modern rifles to cover the entire season and everyone at the Retreat had a legal ticket for hunting. They had camps all over the place on the road and tracked every hunter inside the 50-mile perimeter. No hunter ever made it into the 25-mile zone and no hunter ever got inside the wire. The biggest moral issue was hunter medical emergencies, lost hunters and fires. Do they help or not? The judgement was made by Duncan whether to intercede or not. Some hunters were highly skilled outdoorspeople gaining the admiration of the Retreat staff while others were clueless and a danger to themselves and others. Duncan called it Darwinism at its finest.
The biggest event of the year was the company challenge cup where each of the 100 person companies played a modified version of capture the flag. The retreat had purchased 200 sets of MILES gear for the challenge. Instead of shooting bullets, each shot a laser and each soldier also had a web harness with sensors on it. When a sensor was hit by a laser, a high-pitched beeper started emitting a very annoying beep akin to the emergency broadcast channel that could only be turned off by one of the referees. The Retreat had 38 companies each comprised of 24 squads. The finals this year were between Duncan and Mitch’s companies. Duncan had barely beaten Melanie’s company in the semi-final and Melanie was still convinced that Duncan had cheated. Duncan maintained that there was no such thing as cheating in war and his strategies were all within the rules.
“Calling a ceasefire and time-out on the emergency channel is against the rules, Duncan!” accused Melanie in the after-action debriefing.
“Your team knows that orders on an open channel are not supposed to be listened to. It is standard procedure to only listen to commands on your own net,” Duncan explained.
“Everybody knows your silly accent; they thought they were listening to the boss,” Melanie said.
“I can’t help what they thought, Mel, I only know what they were trained to do. They didn’t follow their training and they were spoofed,” Duncan explained. “I believe you know the standard reward to the winner and I’ll expect it later today.”
“I hope Mitch kicks your ass tomorrow, Duncan!” Melanie said as she stormed off to get into the shower.
The rules of the game were simple; each team had a home base that was a marked 30-foot circle and a flag with a MILES sensor was placed in the middle. Shoot your enemy’s flag before they shoot yours and you win. The engagement zone was 20 square miles and set up by the referees. Maps were given out five minutes before the horn was blown to start the engagement. Mitch and his squad leaders were poring over the map and saw immediately that their team was at a disadvantage. The first strategy rule of any engagement is to secure and defend the high ground and the high ground was on Duncan’s side of the map. Mitch knew that Duncan knew this too and Mitch knew that Duncan rarely followed standard tactics but Duncan knew that Mitch knew this. The key was to play the man and not the cards in a game of poker. Mitch knew that Duncan suspected that Mitch thought he would be tricky, so Duncan would go conventional and set up an ambush on the hill thinking Mitch would overcommit. Duncan would also advance a third of his force to sweep around the flank and attack Mitch’s base. Mitch decided to send two squads to spoof the hill. The squads were told to stay out of rifle range of the hill and make enough noise to make it seem like they were massing for an attack to keep the bulk of Duncan’s force occupied. Two squads would act as a blocking force for Duncan’s flanking squad while his remaining squads would advance straight up the middle. Mitch sent his best infiltration personnel up the middle telling them that if they were discovered then they would be caught between two forces and wiped out. They should expect that crafty Duncan would have put some noise makers and traps in this middle zone to deny it to Mitch’s team. If Duncan’s flanking team engaged with the blocking force then the center team was to wheel and attack the flank of Duncan’s flanking force and quickly disengage and attack Duncan’s flag. Mitch had one more nagging feeling so he redeployed his headquarters squad to a different location.
The engagement went almost exactly as Mitch suspected and after his center engaged Duncan’s flank, Duncan’s hill squads advanced and engaged Mitch’s diversionary force. It would be a race between Mitch’s center squad and Duncan’s hill squad. Both teams were moving fast but Mitch knew his was closer and Duncan would still have an ace up his sleeve; he was Duncan. Fortunately, Mitch had deployed his headquarters staff to the rear of their home base and sure enough a fast-moving Duncan was coming up the trail with speed where he was engaged and “killed.” Duncan had tried the lone wolf speed attack to the rear while everyone else’s concentration was elsewhere on the engagement.
Duncan came walking into Mitch’s home base with his head hung low and his MILES gear beeping.
“Makes a hell of a racket, doesn’t it?” Mitch asked.
“I knew I had to move fast once I figured out your hill squads were pretending and I knew I was screwed when I saw it was only two squads. They were so busy trying to make just the right amount of noise that I managed to slip through. It was one hell of a run but I didn’t have time for stealth. How did you know?” Duncan asked.
“There are Plan A operators and Plan A-C operators. You, Duncan, are a Plan A-Z operator who tactically saw you had only one option. I knew there was no quit in you and that you would personally try and pull the rabbit out of a hat and you could not resist being the guy who could snatch a victory out of a sure defeat. Play the man, not the cards,” Mitch said with a big smile.
It was the first year the challenge cup had been won by anyone other than Duncan. Mitch wasn’t a gregarious charismatic leader like Duncan or a personable, charming person like Melanie, he was a deep thinker and occasional brooder. Mitch was more of an introvert at heart with a quiet competence about him. Mitch was very popular at the Retreat but did not have the natural magnetism of Duncan and Melanie. Bragging and bravado were not his tools of the trade and he shunned the spotlight by giving full credit for the victory to his team and squad leaders; they handled the bragging for him. It was one of the happiest days of Mitch’s life which quickly morphed into the greatest day of his life when Melanie informed him that she was pregnant.
Chapter 7
Ten years to the day after Mitch moved into the Retreat, he was back on the bridge of his virtual trading office. It was report day for Federal Pharmaceuticals and Mitch would soon learn if his politician drafting strategy would work. The conference call was scheduled for a half hour after the start of trading so Mitch moved some of his positions in other asset classes based on recent news and global trends. Mitch had the conference call piped into the virtual room and was carefully watching the trading board as the earnings call was happening. It was a custom Bloomberg feed and Mitch had one of each of the four screens turned to a different sector and was carefully scanning it as the Federal CEO made his big breakthrough announcement about a new PTSD miracle drug and their recent contract with the Federal Government. The price quickly spiked as the high-volume quant computer traders hit the buy button and that was quickly followed by the big trading houses as people bought and continued to bid up the price. Mitch’s bond strike price was quickly met and Mitch was ready to hit the convert go button when his bond board showed a blip in the US Treasury Bill volatility index. The US Treasury held auctions for Treasury bonds on a regular basis; the US Treasury bill was considered to be the safest investment in the world backed by the full faith and pledge of the US Government and its citizens to repay the notes, in full and with interest. The Treasury volatility index, since its inc
eption, had been a dead straight line and looked like the EKG of a dead person. Treasury volatility had never happened since the Second World War and all investments were assessed risk based on returns in excess of US Treasuries. The volatility blipped a second time and Mitch hit the talk to all Olympus microphone. The Olympus employees figured Mitch was taking a victory lap on the Federal trade and was going to be giving direction to unwind or move the position.
Mitch spoke clearly into the microphone with confidence. “Broken Arrow, I repeat Broken Arrow.”
“Are you sure, boss? We’re killing it on Federal,” one of the traders asked.
“You are relieved, effective immediately,” Mitch growled. “Anyone else?”
Mitch’s private line beeped so his secretary muted the feed to the crew and Devin’s face appeared on the screen. “Are you sure, Mitch? We are going to look like idiots if you are wrong.”
“Devin, the Treasury has not moved in my lifetime, you will get an innocuous announcement in about an hour that the T-bill auction has been hung and halted. Someone, who I assume is the Chinese, are dumping their entire Treasury holdings. The government created this Federal smokescreen to cover the fact that nobody wants to buy T-bills and the Chinese want their money back. There is not enough liquidity today to cover the Chinese position so the Treasury is either going to turn on the printing presses or do something worse. The music has stopped, Devin and I have just saved not only your fortune but our investors’ entire fortune as well. Get the staff mobilized after the entire plan has been executed which should be in the next five minutes if our dry runs were any indication. Get their immediate families moving and get the plane stripped of all excess weight and ferry as many of them here as you can. If they don’t want to come then leave them behind. I have things to do here so stay in touch if anything goes wrong. Oh yeah, you can save the thanks that I probably just made you one of the richest people in the world for later.”
The Retreat Page 7
