Laine snatched up his Valmet and bellowed above the gunfire: “Alphas, cover! Bravos, move!” He deliberately fired the rest of the magazine wherever he saw movement or muzzle flashes in the houses occupied by La Fuerza. A stream of tracer bullets from one of La Fuerza’s machine guns went over his head. As he reached the bottom of his magazine, Pat Redmond ran by with his M1A at the high port position, shouting, “Let’s get the flock out of here!”
Now Lars shouted, “Bravos, cover! Alphas, move!” He jumped up and trotted to the rear, reloading his rifle as he ran. His rubber hand made reloading cumbersome. He dropped the empty magazine into the dump pouch on his belt, just as he had done in Iraq and Afghanistan.
After traversing fifty feet, he stopped and turned to kneel and aim his rifle. He shouted, “Alphas, cover! Bravos, move!” He fired an entire magazine, shooting roughly once per second at any likely targets. Then he shouted, “Bravos, cover! Alphas, move!” He ran again, reloading as he ran.
In this leapfrogging manner, Laine’s dragoon team got over the hill in relative safety. Lars noticed that Hector Ruiz had his rifle slung while all the others had theirs held at high port. They quickly counted off and formed a Ranger file. They jogged two hundred yards over a second hill to their horses. With so much running while carrying a heavy load, Lars was winded by the time he reached Scrappy. The horse was prancing in place, obviously nonplussed by the gunfire and explosions. To his right, he saw that Johanna was looping the sling of her Galil over her saddle horn. Just as he was about to put a foot in the stirrup, Hector Ruiz ran up with his rifle still slung and clutching his left arm to his chest. He grunted, “I gotta little problem here, Johanna.”
Hector pulled back the sodden sleeve of his ACU shirt to display a nasty grazing wound that ran up the back of his forearm. The deep gash was eight inches long and spurting blood at the upper end. Pat Redmond held a red-lens penlight to provide Johanna enough light to see what she was doing as she positioned a Combat Application Tourniquet on Hector’s biceps. Then she strapped a large bandage over the wound.
As she worked, Johanna told Ruiz, “Let’s ride a couple of miles and then we can stop and I’ll staple this up. If we somehow get separated, loosen this CAT tourniquet after twenty minutes. If it starts bleeding a lot, then retighten it as needed. But don’t leave it on for more than thirty minutes at a time.” She seemed concerned that the bullet had chipped a bone in Hector’s elbow.
“We’d better get moving,” Laine urged. “I don’t want to be here when those bad attitudes come over the hill. That may be in just a couple of minutes.”
“Yeah, we better go. I’ll be okay,” Hector agreed.
Johanna nodded. “I’ll keep my horse right behind you, Hector.”
Laine’s team quickly mounted their horses and rode north. As they rode, they could see the majority of the infantry teams streaming over hills, heading east. Lars felt good, knowing they’d be back at their vehicles and out of the area before daylight.
The two squads that attacked Humboldt didn’t fare nearly as well as the Dewey teams. When they threw their Molotovs and started shooting, they were answered with withering return fire. The extent of their casualties did not become apparent until they returned to Prescott.
43
Escape and Evasion
“The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the law of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If ‘Thou shalt not covet’ and ‘Thou shalt not steal’ were not commandments from Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society before it can be civilized or made free.”
—John Adams, A Defence of the Constitution of the United States Against the Attacks of M. Turgot (1787)
Blanca’s instructions were simple: “Stay with the vehicles. If our trucks get spotted by anyone from La Fuerza before the scheduled kick-off time for the raid, then radio the team leaders and let them know immediately.”
She waited, listened, and prayed, clutching her Mini-14 GB. Then she heard shooting and explosions in the distance, right on time. An hour later she heard the teams start to return, crashing through the brush. Ian was with them but Alex was not. In accordance with their plans, all the vehicles departed at 5:30 a.m. Everyone had been warned that if they didn’t make it to the parking area by then, they’d be on their own to E&E their way back to Prescott.
Back at the Conley Ranches clubhouse, they had an anxious day of waiting. Stragglers came in, only two of them wounded. At just after five p.m., Ian greeted a man in his fifties who had just arrived. He was carrying two rifles, an M1 Garand in his hands and a Ruger Mini-14 slung across his back. Ian recognized a distinctive camouflage sling on the Mini-14: this rifle belonged to his brother Alex. He asked the man: “Where’s Alex?”
Looking glum, the man shook his head slowly from side to side in response. “He got shot bad, through a lung. We couldn’t stop the bleeding.
“Did he say anything, before . . . before he died?”
“No, sorry. He was just coughing, and then he died.”
Ian’s eyes welled up. “Well, thanks for letting me know. You can keep that Ruger,” he said.
The man shook Ian’s hand and thanked him, and then he turned to go check in formally with Doctor K.
That evening the Four Families began frantically packing up their gear, their clothing, and their meager supply of remaining stored food. Two of the families decided to move to a fairly heavily defended compound in Prescott Valley. They’d take a circuitous route, looping around to avoid La Fuerza’s suspected avenue of advance. The other two families, led by Doctor K., had decided to leave the region entirely. They would travel in two RVs and four SUVs. One of the SUVs was Alex’s Ford Excursion. This vehicle, along with nearly all of Alex’s gear, had been given to Doctor K. by Ian. Ian explained that even if he had wanted it, the cramped space and weight limitations of the two Larons were unforgiving. All that Ian kept from Alex’s room was some 5.56mm NATO ammunition and nine Mini-14 magazines. Previously, Alex had explained to Blanca to beware of using anything except original Ruger factory-made magazines in her rifle. “All of the other brands of magazines—the aftermarket ones—are jammamatic junk,” he warned.
Doctor K. offered to have Ian and Blanca come with him in his Fleetwood diesel-pusher RV. But without trailers there would be no way to take the Larons. Ian answered him quickly, “Thanks for the offer, but I’d rather stick with what we know best, and that’s flying. Let’s just wish each other God’s speed.”
Ian Doyle had already toyed with the idea of paralleling the route that they had planned to take the RVs, leapfrogging from airport to airport. But he concluded that his best chance of finding a truly safe refuge before either running out of fuel or running out of luck was to head to Todd Gray’s retreat in north-central Idaho.
Lars had an anxious morning, waiting for his infantry team to arrive. He penned an after-action report and asked to have it delivered to Doctor K. Bob Potts was the last one back, arriving at eleven a.m. He was dripping with sweat. By the time he arrived, the horses were already loaded in trailers and the rest of the team was packed up and ready to go. After some handshakes and a long pull on a canteen, Potts and the others climbed aboard the pickups. There was no ceremony. There was no celebration. They had done what needed to be done, and they were just happy to be heading home. Lars was anxious to be well away from La Fuerza before they had the chance to regroup. Hector’s arm was decorated with a new row of thirty-seven surgical staples. He said the arm was painful, but regular doses of pain meds from Johanna Visser made it manageable. Other than Hector’s wound, Lars’s team got away unscathed.
They drove beyond Flagstaff to Winona the first night and camped just off Twin Arrows Road, east of town. They were all edgy and had difficulty sleeping. Shortly after they left the next morning, they were surp
rised to see a small herd of elk on a hillside just above the road. They braked to a halt and Chad Stenerson rested his scoped M1A across the hood of the lead pickup. He dropped a cow and a bull in rapid succession. This took six shots. The other elk fled into the nearby timber. In less than an hour the elk that had been shot were gutted and dragged down to the pickups. With all eight members of the team working together, dragging the elk down to the trucks was relatively easy. But it took considerable effort to get them up on the fuel trailer. After that, the rest of the trip home was speedy and trouble-free.
With two of the gold coins that he had earned from the Humboldt raid, Lars bought two 9mm pistols, a Glock 17 and a Glock 19. These used magazines that were largely interchangeable, although the short magazines from the Model 19 would not work in the longer-gripped Model 17. Together, the two pistols came with just five magazines and one holster. He badly wanted some more magazines, but they were a scarce commodity. Few people were willing to part with any extra magazines. As one Navajo vendor explained it to Beth, “In bad times, when people are shootin’ at you, what exactly is a spare magazine? There’s no such thing. You can never have too many. Same thing for ammo.”
The only magazines that the Laines often saw regularly offered for sale at the flea market were military-surplus M16 alloy thirty-round magazines, which had been produced in huge numbers. But even those now had ridiculously high asking prices. Seeing the depleted shelves and such high prices on a visit to Zia Sporting Goods in Farmington, Beth commented, “We really should’ve invested in magazines and ammunition. It would have been a better investment than silver. Lars sighed and replied, “Yeah, you’re right. Ammo is practically worth its weight in silver, these days, and magazines are a you-name-your-price kind of item.”
Lars would have actually preferred to have bought a couple of SIG P226 or P228 pistols to be compatible with Andy’s first pistol, but those were much more scarce than Glocks. In the new Age of Deep Schumer, beggars couldn’t be choosers. He also realized that his chances of eventually finding spare Glock magazines was much better than finding spare SIG magazines, since Glocks were made in much larger numbers.
44
Ignis
“Vengeance has no foresight.”
—Napoleon Bonaparte
Ignacio was furious. He spent the hours before sunrise running from house to house, assessing the damage. He radioed his cousin Simon in Humboldt. Adding Simon’s tally, he concluded that every one of La Fuerza’s armored vehicles had been destroyed by fire. So were more than half of the pickups and vans. Further, more than half of the gang’s loot, ammo, and fuel were gone, destroyed in the fire and explosions. Some twenty-six of his men and three women had been killed. Another fifteen men had been wounded, and of those, three were not likely to live.
Only one of the men who had attacked them had been captured. He lived under torture only long enough to tell them that the raiders had originated from Prescott. Ignacio was whipped up into a genuine frenzy. He ran from truck to truck, screaming “¡Bastardos! ¡Venganza, venganza! ¡Matenlos a todos!” (“Bastards! Vengeance, vengeance! Slaughter them all!”)
They spent the next day and a half salvaging what they could from the wrecked vehicles, and requisitioning more pickups and vans from all over Humboldt and Dewey. They ended up with an odd assortment. Several were bright colors, but that didn’t matter. They just needed enough to get all of his men to Prescott. He was going there soon, and going for blood.
Two days after the raid, they had stolen enough trucks and vans to have room for everyone to ride. Simon and Tony met with Ignacio Garcia over lunch. Simon asked, “What is the plan of operations?”
Garcia grunted: “We drive to Prescott and we burn it down.”
“That’s the plan? The entire plan?”
“Here is the entire plan: We go there, and we burn the city to the ground, and we kill everyone. I mean everyone, and their children, and their dogs and their chickens and their goats.”
Simon nodded gravely. He knew that Ignacio was still extremely angry and that he wouldn’t take any advice. So he merely echoed, “Okay, we go to Prescott tomorrow, and we kill them all.”
After a pause, Simon added: “I’ll have everyone go look for more road flares.”
45
Bug-out
“It is an uphill struggle, but I wish that we could distinguish more carefully between freedom and liberty. These conditions are not the same, though they are certainly related. Freedom is the absence of restraint—a physical circumstance. Liberty, on the other hand, is a political situation denoting the lawful capability of the citizen to defend himself and his near and dear without interference from the state. Note that the Declaration of Independence forcibly and particularly establishes the blessings of liberty upon ourselves and our posterity. I like to carry a pocket copy of the Declaration, plus the Constitution, in my travels. It is a good thing to have in hand when discussions arise.”
—The late Colonel Jeff Cooper
By Doctor K.’s count only thirty-one members of the raiding party had returned to Prescott by the next evening. And of those, only three had been slightly wounded. He said bluntly, “There’s no in-between with high-velocity rifle bullets. Its usually either something minor or you bleed out, deader than disco.”
La Fuerza didn’t arrive the next day or even the day after.
The towns of Prescott Valley and Prescott were in a state of alarm following the raid. Even though the raid was deemed a success, they had clearly stirred up a hornet’s nest. Then they heard on the CB that Prescott Valley had been bypassed and that La Fuerza was heading directly toward Prescott.
Blanca paced the bedroom. She asked Ian: “What do you think will happen? I mean, you burned up most of their vehicles, but you say that you maybe killed just a few of La Fuerza.”
“They’re going to be out for blood, that’s for sure. They have to know that we came from somewhere close by. Worst case is they captured one of our missing in action and they made them talk. That would mean that they’d head straight for Conley Ranches. It will be a total freakin’ bloodbath.”
Blanca half shouted: “Then we’ve got to go! At least be 100 percent ready to go, muy pronto.”
Ian and Blanca soon assembled and fueled their planes. They packed everything aboard that they could, leaving very little room. They waited for an indication that the looter army was heading toward Prescott.
“Maybe we can get up to Idaho. Two of my old college buddies, Dan Fong and Todd Gray, are up there. They’re survivalists. You remember me talking about them, right? Dan is a total gun nut. He must have two dozen guns. Todd set up a real survival retreat up there; it’s stocked with years’ worth of stored food, gardening seeds, fuel tanks, the whole works. The Fongman is part of that retreat group. If anybody is still alive and kickin’ after the Crunch, it’s gotta be them. With our skills, they’ll probably take us in.”
“Probably? Maybe? That isn’t a lot to go on.”
“Our only other option is about to be overrun. Todd’s place in Idaho is the only place I can think of that’ll be safe.”
As they climbed, they could see below that almost half the buildings in downtown Prescott were ablaze.
Blanca keyed her microphone and said simply: “Ay, ay, ay.”
Following a sectional aviation chart, Blanca navigated the pair of Larons to Cedar City, Utah.
The airport was on the northwest side of town, just west of I-15. Upon landing there, they were surprised to find 100LL avgas was being offered for sale at the airport. The FBO operator told Ian that he’d recently taken the gas out of hiding, because word had come that they’d soon get a fresh supply coming from Oklahoma. “I might as well sell off the last 110 gallons of my old gas, since the new stuff is coming in from the Provisional Government,” he said.
“What Provisional Government?” Ian asked.
>
“Fort Knox. Haven’t you heard?” the airport manager answered.
“Nothing solid, just some rumors. So that’s for real?”
“Sure it is. We’re going to have some kinda UN regional administrator. But they’ve promised us local autonomy.”
Ian cocked his head and asked, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“We don’t know yet, but hey, any government is better than no government.”
Ian gave his wife a glance and then commented, “Well, in my book, there is only one rightful form of government—a constitutional republic—or I’d rather have no government. One of my college professors was a heavy-duty Libertarian. He wore a lapel button that said, ‘There’s No Government Like No Government.’”
Blanca chimed in, “I second that motion!”
In the end, Ian traded an Olin 12-gauge flare gun kit, one hundred rounds of 9mm ball ammunition, and twenty dollars’ worth of junk silver for forty-three gallons of gasoline.
The FBO manager let them sleep in a mostly empty hangar, next to their planes.
The next day, grossly overweight, they took an extra long roll and took off. They followed I-15 and occasional GPS fixes to the long paved strip north of Brigham City, Utah. Aside from some bumpy air, the flight was uneventful.
They carried with them a brief letter of introduction from the FBO manager in Cedar City. This was handed to his cousin, who ran the airport at Brigham City.
Their reception there was friendly, but it was obvious that food was in short supply. One of the men at the airport confided that Mormons from all over the country had descended on Utah just as the Crunch set in. “They all had relatives here, so it seemed safe. The problem is that Utah consumes more food than it produces locally. So even though a fair number of families had stocked up, in accordance with the church guidelines, all that stored food is gone by now. People are gardening like crazy, but a lot of places have very limited water. So unless those big Albertson’s and Safeway grocery trucks start rolling again soon, there’s gonna be starvation here, plain and simple. That’s why everyone’s so anxious to see the Provisional Government.”
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