by Gene Skellig
Casey concluded that he had to move his family away from Winnipeg, away from the center of the continent, to an area that had a good chance of coming through whatever lay ahead.
Given the direction that global economic conditions seemed to be headed, and the extreme interventions of the world’s central banks, printing excessive quantities of fiat currencies, Casey saw that gold would be the means to this end.
When Casey began talking about making a drastic change of life, it led to conflict with Tanya, his stubborn Russian wife.
One of the things that he found most attractive about Tanya was that she was strong enough to resist him. She never let him steam-roll her into doing anything she did not agree to. This had made for a successful marriage, where her caution and thrift were fused with his risk-taking and spontaneity. But when it came to Casey’s determination that they had to leave the military, move to the west coast and prepare for a terrible future for humanity, Tanya resisted him fiercely.
To Tanya, Casey’s vision for the future was pure fantasy. She believed that the world would keep stumbling from one crisis to another with nothing really changing for average people, just as the world had done for centuries before.
The more Casey pushed, the stronger she resisted. It took Casey an extra two years before he convinced Tanya that it was the right thing to do. The extra two years, however, actually worked out very well. First, by sheer luck, the delay saved them a fortune as the gold junior that Casey had been investing in, Trophy Fish Gold up in Yellowknife, was pulled down in the economic crisis. By the time Casey was finally out of the military and able to invest his nest-egg of severance pay and transferred pension contributions into shares in Trophy Fish Gold, the share price was extremely low due to a collapse in lending. So Tanya’s resistance had greatly improved their timing.
Casey was able to pick up over 450,000 additional shares in TFG at just 12.5 cents, to add to the 260,000 he had already accumulated. Soon after his retirement in September, while the Callaghan children began another school year in Winnipeg, the share price of TFG blasted off and quickly rose to $2.50 per share on the news that the Government of the Northwest Territories finally approved the Environmental Assessment and granted TFG the Water Use and Mine Operating Permit.
With the price of gold approaching $3,000 per ounce, the more influential gold stock analysts were suddenly giving “buy” recommendations on TFG with a 12-month price target of $15. Even at $2.50 or so, the Callaghans now had an extra 1.7 million dollars to seriously begin to look at real estate and discuss the features they wanted in their dream home.
Waiting the extra two years also gave Casey the time to scour the internet for information he could agglomerate into his plans. He consumed information ranging from architectural details he liked for the home he planned to build, to technical information on the special equipment he hoped to install, to the volatile state of the global economy, to geopolitical trends and bits and pieces of information of a military nature.
One such tidbit was a file he came across at a think tank in Washington, the Center for Strategic and International Studies. CSIS was Casey’s favorite source of geopolitical and international military information. He had been visiting their website for more than ten years and had noticed that when key diplomats and academics appear on short media clips on CNN for some major news breaking in Washington it was usually preceded, by at least a few days, by an appearance of the distinguished visitor at CSIS discussion workshops. This inside track aspect of CSIS gave Casey a great deal of confidence in what he read through the CSIS website.
When he came across a CSIS report on a possible Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear development facilities, he immediately tore into the report. He was amazed at the level of detail that the author had put into the report, and that it was freely available in the public domain.
The report convinced Casey that Iran would soon have enough centrifuges to produce enough Highly Enriched Uranium, HEU, to not only manufacture a nuclear device, but to be able to begin to build up a nuclear arsenal by producing five or more such devices per year – depending on the number of centrifuges that Iran had in operation. But what brought a cold chill to Casey’s spine was the thrust of the report, which included the timelines and tactical details for a variety of attack scenarios.
Seeing it all laid out there for all the world to see made it seem so real, so obvious, that Casey felt a sense of history. To him, it was like being in Europe in the late 1920’s and hearing of the risks of Germany drawing the world into another Great War. Such warnings had certainly existed, but the vast majority of people failed to act on the warnings and held fast to the hope that the world would not go insane. A very few others, who heeded the signs, were able to do whatever was necessary to flee before the catastrophe unfolded.
As Casey read about the capabilities of the Iranian ballistic missiles, the hardened facilities in which they were building up their atomic infrastructure, and the critical benchmarks and associated timeframes in the report, Casey became certain that Israel would soon have no choice but to attack Iran. The report went so far as to lay out the likely attack scenarios, weapons packages required to achieve the necessary effects, and the geopolitical fallout of such an attack. These details stood up to Casey’s experience as an air campaign planner, and made the report that much more credible.
This, along with Casey’s prognosis for the global economy, made him redouble his research into another type of fallout, and what he must do in order to be in a position to survive it.
For the rest of the year, while talking heads on TV spoke of green shoots and a modest economic recovery, Casey positioned himself to exploit the next leg of the economic crisis. It was clear to Casey that rather than a V-shaped recession, it would be more of an “h” shape. Not an “L”. Not a Square-Root sign. Not a “W”, but a small letter “h”: going down, then up a bit, then down and staying down.
There would be no recovery after that, Casey believed, only a continued descent into chaos. Casey reasoned that he had perhaps a year or two in which to spend his fortune in gold while the economy still functioned. After that, Casey believed, it would be a “come as you are” struggle and Casey wanted to be ready for it. But what should he build? Where should he build it? How to approach it? All of that would take considerable time and effort to determine.
Casey needed a plan, and Casey knew how to plan.
6
FABRIC SHOP
19 April: 1 Month Before NEW
Tanya was not sure if she should take any of the children with her this time. She often took at least one of her teenage children with her on her shopping trips to Nanaimo but this time she was not sure if it was a good idea. She wanted to be able to really concentrate as this could be her last opportunity to visit her favorite sewing and fabric shops in the small city 45 minutes down-island from Qualicum Beach. Casey said that it was going to get dangerous in town because the currency crisis had taken a turn for the worse. The shortages of last year were back with a vengeance as the supply of everything from consumer goods to gasoline and food had become erratic once again.
It had looked like the Parker administration had solved the currency problem when she brought in the New US Dollar a few months ago. These “New Dollars” were backed with gold, and Canada had followed suit a few weeks later with the “New Canadian Dollar”, also backed by gold. That seemed to stabilize things after the global currency collapse of last October. Things began falling apart once again, however, when banks in the US began refusing to exchange the “Nudies” for physical gold.
It turned out that the quantity of gold held in Fort Knox and the other vaults of the reformed US Treasury was less than what the Treasury had claimed to have. So even this New US Dollar was actually just another fiat currency. The government was talking about confiscating all privately held gold in order to restore international confidence in the currency and yet operate it as an absurd domestically irredeemable gold standard.
; But Tanya did not concern herself with those pesky details. She had a good sized wad of new Canadian “G-Dollars” and some gold and silver coins in her purse. Despite the shortages, Tanya enjoyed shopping a lot more lately, ever since Casey stopped trying to get her to economize. He seemed to be encouraging her to spend like there’s no tomorrow.
Tanya decided to go alone and headed out in the family’s spanking-new plug-in electric-hybrid. She loved to drive the Prius Hybrid-Diesel. She especially liked to smoothly slow down to a stop using the regenerative breaking. Then, when the light would go green, Tatiana would accelerate gently while other cars madly rushed past. Her little “Priyusha” got fantastic fuel economy. It could also run entirely on electrical power for the first 150 km of driving, thanks to the increased storage capacity of the new generation of batteries.
The family had an enormous garage at the HOTH. They could fit as many as five vehicles in if they wanted to, but usually kept some parked outside under the cover of the open-sided carport opposite the main entrance to the HOTH. Keeping Priyusha charged-up was a simple routine of plugging the battery charge-cord into the customized 220-Volt wall socket. The receptacle was also used to recharge a small fleet of electrical riding-lawn mowers, roto-tillers, snow-blowers and other machines that Tanya would have expected to run on gasoline. She knew that Casey had ordered these machines as custom-built diesel machines, and that very few of Casey’s other machines ran on gasoline. As fuel shortages began to appear, Tanya understood how important it was to keep her car fully charged and filled with diesel.
As she pulled the car into the parking lot at “Annie’s Sewing Cabin”, Tanya took care to install both of the anti-theft devices that Casey insisted she use every time she went into town. She installed the long metal bar through the steering wheel and then punched in the 4-digit number on a dash-mounted keypad to arm the electronic anti-theft system.
As Tanya walked across the parking lot she had a strange feeling that something was wrong. Instead of following a direct path, she walked in a big curve so that she would have more time to look around before she arrived at the entrance to the store. Casey had taught her to look at her reflection in the window and discretely take in the parking lot in the reflection. Once she confirmed that nobody was walking behind her or near her car, she felt more at ease.
As she got close to the entrance, she looked inside the store and saw that two or three people were lined up at the cashier. Others were browsing in the aisles. It appeared that nothing bad was going on inside the store. Good, she said to herself, two out of three “Safety Checks” completed.
Tanya entered the store and did a quick loop through the main aisles just to take in the mood within the store. Everything was calm except that a few of the ladies seemed to be a bit tense, which Tanya attributed to the shortages. Even this rather expensive sewing shop had lots of empty shelves. But fabric shops were never this bare; they always had heaps of materials, Tanya thought to herself.
After completing the loop, Tanya knew that her third Safety-Check item, after Transportation Security and Venue Security, was Exit Strategy. This Tanya understood very well from her youth in Moscow. You always had to know which way you would run. So Tanya took a few moments and stood just inside the entrance to the store, pretending to read the notices on the bulletin board. She discretely peeked out through the glass entrance door to confirm that there was nobody hanging around her car. Then she did that “We Were Soldiers” thing.
Casey had made her watch a war movie about Air Cavalry in Vietnam. Their Commanding Officer had been doing what Casey called a “Battlefield Assessment”, getting his “Situational-Awareness”. While his soldiers were running around reacting to whatever was happening or keeping their heads down as she would have done, the leader had been focused outside of whatever was happening right then and there. As Casey explained, that Colonel had been listening for what was not happening, allowing his intuition to speak to him.
To Tanya it simply meant taking a couple of minutes to stop before engaging in whatever task she was about to do, pausing to allow her senses to pick up what was not happening, and to be wary.
As she looked out and across the street, she sensed that something was wrong with the area. It looked absolutely normal. And normal, for Tanya, would always be the mean streets of Moscow, not any place in Canada.
It was the driving behavior of the people she observed around the fabric shop that her intuition had picked up on. People were driving like Russians. She could see that people were not stopping at the traffic lights. Some would stop, look around and see no other cars, and then just drive on through the red light. When she saw that cars were parked in front of fire hydrants and on sidewalks, she knew that something important had changed. People had stopped following those rules that kept North America such a safe and secure wonderland.
To confirm her assessment, she turned her attention to the few people she could see on the streets. At one building, she saw two men hanging around the entrance to a grocery store. They were not openly armed, but their coats had that distinctive bulkiness that indicated concealed weapons of some sort, and one of them was holding a base-ball bat. They seemed to be looking new customers over in considerable detail. After leaving the store, customers carried their bags to their cars with a sense of urgency. Tanya noticed that they were clutching their bags like you would if you were carrying a baby or something very precious. Then they would quickly get into their cars and drive away in some kind of panic.
It all came together in her situational awareness. Tanya knew what she had to do. She dumped her empty basket and walked out of the store empty-handed. Casey had drilled it in to her a hundred times: “When you notice law and order start to break down, stop whatever you are doing and go home immediately!” She felt only the slightest regret as she calmly drove out of the parking lot, accelerating her Prius smoothly into the traffic flow. Feeling the other cars rushing past on her left further validated her conclusion that things were on the verge of getting out of hand in town.
Nothing in that fabric shop was worth risking her life for. Being cut off from home by getting mixed up in any kind of uncontrolled situation was to be avoided at all costs. After all, they had spent the last few years preparing for a way of life that did not depend on shopping malls. The plan was to be in a perpetual state of preparedness for the worst while at the same time enjoying a normal life. If the world held itself together, wonderful; if not, then the HOTH was always well provisioned with everything they would need. Anything else, if it became difficult to get, they would have to live without.
So as much as Tanya would have liked to pick up a few more rolls of elastic for use in children’s pajamas and fitted bed sheets, she would have to get by with just the rolls she already had. Besides, her sewing room was already fully outfitted.
That was one of the many things she loved about her man. From the earliest days of their marriage, and after each military posting, Casey had always provided her with a great sewing room. True, when money had been tight in the first few years, he would complain about how much she spent on fabrics and all the little things she accumulated. However, Tanya loved to sew and it always made the children so happy when they tried on the various outfits that she had made especially for them.
For this final house, Casey had built Tanya a veritable sewing apartment. He had allocated over two hundred and fifty square feet on the lower level of the HOTH for her sewing room. She had bolts of just about of every kind of fabric she could ever want, and Casey had custom built tables for her sewing machines and sergers.
There was also a large cutting table and a few areas of wall-space equipped with Styrofoam sheets for her to pin her patterns to. There was a large library, with hundreds of folded cardboard book-ends into which she had organized her collection of sewing magazines in different languages like German, Russian and Spanish. There were lots of shelves and drawers for Tanya to organize her sewing notions, and there was a full wall devoted to fabric
bins. There was also a wall of shelves for commonly used fabrics and lining material. If she ever ran out of room in her sewing room, she would ask Casey to give her some of the extra storage space available in the bunker.
Tanya knew that her sewing room was adjacent to the survival bunker under the garage. She had been shown the bunker in detail but had also been encouraged to stay out without Casey’s knowledge. The children had no knowledge of the actual bunker, and assumed that when Mama and Papa talked about the bunker they were referring to the eight by ten room accessible from the mechanical room. That room was stockpiled with cans, jars, boxes and packages that were occasionally rotated up to the pantry and then replaced with new supplies by their Papa, once every six months or so. Tanya liked the self-rotating can racks which kept the oldest goods to the front of the shelves. The children did not know that this smaller bunker was the “Deception Bunker”, to be used as a staging place that, if discovered, would leave the main bunker undetected.
Casey had shown only Tanya, Yuri and Danny how to open the hidden wall. It made a lovely bookcase when closed, housing a complete Encyclopedia Britannica, a variety of K through 12 school textbooks, and a wide range of university textbooks. Casey and Tanya were adding more to the “Brainiac Bookshelf” all the time, but there were still some empty shelves in the floor-to-ceiling movable wall. Custom ordered for this very application, the smooth stainless steel roller system built into the solid bookcase made it possible to slide it into the hidden recess with just a gentle one-handed push to the right, revealing a 44 inch wide entry portal to the bunker. You just had to know it was there and how to access it.
