Dustin said that he had bought the horse, tack, fences, posts, and fence charger just as the Crunch was setting in. He explained, “I knew my life savings was about to melt away into oblivion, so I sank it all in the horse. She, along with all of her horsey accessories, cost me thirty-eight thousand dollars in cash, thirty ounces of silver in one-ounce silver rounds, and six hundred rounds of nine-milly. In retrospect, I’d say I got a good deal. And, since part of the deal was in the form of tangibles, I knew that the seller wouldn’t get caught holding a bag of cash that would soon buy exactly squat. Oh, and the bonus is that I bought her already bred, so I should have a foal out of her in July.”
With no other destination in mind—at least for the foreseeable future—Joshua asked about finding a house to rent. Dustin mentioned that there was a vacant house just two doors down. The elderly man who had lived there had died in January, from a diabetic coma for lack of insulin. The nearby vacant house was just one of three in town where there were no relatives living nearby, and currently there was no way to contact them. The town council had “emergency deputized” a local retired soils scientist to rent out the vacant houses and put the collected rents (denominated in pre-1965 silver coinage) in a special escrow box in the city hall’s vault, once a month, under the oversight of the city treasurer, acting as a “Guardian for the Property and Best Interest of Missing Heirs.”
While the courts would surely have great trouble sorting all of this out later, it provided badly needed space for “relatives from the big city” (Joshua and his little group were not the only recent arrivals), and would keep every garden plot in town fully utilized. They soon learned that there were also already plans to rip up many of the lawns in town and turn them into vegetable gardens in the coming weeks. For now, most of the residents of Bradfordsville were living on feed corn, venison, and alfalfa sprouts.
The eighteen-hundred-square-foot house on West Central Avenue was perfect for their needs, since it had a large, well-developed garden plot, three bedrooms, and a working fireplace insert that could burn either wood or coal. The house’s oil-fired heater still had two-thirds of a full tank, which would get them through to spring, when they would have to get busy cutting and hauling firewood. Utilities were not an issue. The water was gravity-fed city water (currently at no charge), and neither the electricity nor the phone was working. The rent was set at two dollars per month in pre-1965 silver coin.
They moved their scant possessions into the house two days later. They were pleased to see that the owner had loved books, so there was plenty for them to read—except that Jean and Leo would have to plunge into books that were quite advanced for their age. The house was fully furnished, right down to linens and tableware. They all considered the availability of the house an act of divine providence.
Joshua was soon hired as a deputized roadblock guard, for twenty-five cents per day in silver coin. Malorie and Megan split a forty-hour job, doing records writing and filing for the Sheriff’s Department’s new substation in Bradfordsville’s overbuilt storm shelter and community services building. The pay for their shared job was $1.50 per week.
Megan and Malorie met Sheila Randall in her sparsely stocked two-story general store, which had SEED LADY painted on the front windows. Her store seemed to be the only business that had been able to fully adapt to the rapidly changing marketplace. Instead of cobbling together multipliers for prices in the now almost completely destroyed U.S. dollar, she priced all of her merchandise directly in pre-1965 silver coin. The only mathematical calculation came into play when someone wanted to pay in one-ounce (or fractional) .999 fine silver trade coins or bars, or in gold.
Sheila had exotic good looks and wavy black hair, which she attributed to her Creole ancestry. Although she could pass for white, her son was much darker skinned and much more obviously African-American. Megan asked Dustin if this would prove difficult for her, as a young widow in a rural southern small town, but her store had been an immediate success. With the economy in tatters, people desperately wanted to trade. And her starting inventory—countless thousands of seeds in small paper packets—was quite sought after. She had the right business mind-set, in the right place (a secure small town), at the right time. And she had her son standing by with a shotgun to back her up.
Megan and Malorie both became good friends of Sheila, in part because they all spoke French. They spent many hours chatting in French and relished comparing the peculiar differences between Canadian French and Louisiana Creole French.
• • •
It wasn’t long before Dustin was reassigned as a homicide and missing persons investigator. This proved to be a frustrating and largely fruitless job. With the power grid and Internet down, he had no access to databases such as NCIC, driver’s licenses, and motor vehicle registration. Being thrown back to nineteenth-century technology made it very difficult for Dustin to make headway, and he had a mountain of open case files.
27
LA MAIN DE FER DANS UN GANT DE VELOURS
Part of your diversification strategy should be to have a farm or ranch somewhere far off the beaten track but which you can get to reasonably quickly and easily. Think of it as an insurance policy. . . . Even in America and Europe there could be moments of riot and rebellion when law and order temporarily completely breaks down.
—Barton Biggs, in Wealth, War and Wisdom
The McGregor Ranch, near Anahim Lake, British Columbia—the Second Year
The two years that followed the onset of the Crunch were fairly quiet. Everyone at the ranch got into a routine and stuck to it. Although there was some bartering with their neighbors, all other commerce essentially stopped. There was no point in wasting fuel to drive all the way to Bella Coola, because the few stores that were open had run out of merchandise and were reduced to bartering used goods, local produce (mostly from greenhouses), and locally caught fish.
After an initial die-off of 12 percent over the first winter, the population of British Columbia stabilized at 3.8 million. Most of the deaths resulted from chronic health conditions such as diabetes, kidney disease, and COPD. The suicide rate also jumped dramatically, as the threat of starvation loomed large for city dwellers. But actual deaths from starvation were fairly uncommon. Most British Columbians were able to revert to a self-sufficient lifestyle.
Greenhouses all over the country were quickly transitioned from growing flowers and decorative plants to growing vegetables. Windows from abandoned buildings were sought after for use in cold frames and greenhouses, as millions of Canadians sought to start gardening “under glass.” Many farmers transitioned from monoculture to vegetable truck farming. Most of this work was labor-intensive, given the shortage of fuel. Refugees from the big cities provided much of the requisite labor, and quasi-feudal systems quickly developed.
The wave of property crimes committed by drug addicts, alcoholics, and the welfare class was manageable by authorities in rural western Canada, as long as the hydro power grid stayed up, so that burglar alarm systems still functioned and radio and phone communications would allow prompt dispatching of police. There was the gnawing fear that fuel and lubricants would run out before transnational commerce was restored. If that happened, then the collapse would become total—just as it had in Quebec and in most of the United States.
The world was a very different place, once the United States collapsed into chaos and its nuclear umbrella was suddenly missing.
The Chinese spent the first few years after the Crunch consolidating their position and gearing up for what would be a sequence of strategic national invasions. After quickly seizing Taiwan, they blockaded Japan, intending to gradually starve it into submission. Meanwhile, they used container ships converted into troop ships to invade Africa, starting with a foothold in Kenya and Tanzania. But first, on the absurd pretext of countering a concocted “terrorist plot,” they used fifteen parachute-deployed medium-altitude neutron bombs in South Africa. These small neutron-optimized fusion bombs were dropp
ed decisively: one on the capital city of Pretoria and almost simultaneous strikes on the key troop garrisons and air bases at Bloemfontein, Thaba Tshwane, Johannesburg, Durban, Kimberley, and Port Elizabeth. Then they followed up with successive neutron bomb strikes on Ladysmith, Langebaanweg, Lohatla, Makhado, Oudtshoorn, Overberg, Pietersburg, and Youngsfield. The PLA planners were so ploddingly methodical that these last eight bombs were dropped in alphabetical order, two per day, over the four following days.
Then, after their landings in east Africa, they began a systematic three-year campaign. This was nothing less than wholesale genocide, sweeping west and south across Africa, with conventional airstrikes, drone strikes, artillery, and massed mechanized infantry. It soon became obvious that they wanted to simply wipe out the inhabitants and that they were only there to plunder Africa’s mineral wealth. The Chinese had brought with them their own miners, truck drivers, and locomotive crews. The sound of approaching Z-10 and Z-19 attack helicopters became dreaded throughout the African continent. Their fleet of drones was also feared. Their Yilong drone was a clone of the U.S. Predator UAV and the Xianglong was a clone of the U.S. Global Hawk.
Meanwhile, Indonesia took over Malaysia in an anschluss, and then proceeded to invade East Timor, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, and northern Australia. There were many other wars that ignited globally, as long-held grudges and turf battles erupted, once Uncle Sam was no longer able to intervene.
Bradfordsville, Kentucky—July, the Second Year
While the eastern seaboard was still in the throes of a devastating influenza pandemic that caused huge loss of life, Dustin Hodges was called to the scene of a car fire and apparent homicide on Mannsville Road. Inside a torched 2009 Mercedes E350 sedan with no license plates, they found the charred remains of a man. By his dental work he appeared to be at least forty years old, and possibly as old as sixty. He wore eyeglasses. He could have been shot, but with the body so badly burned, it was hard to tell. (There were no bones with bullet marks, but most of the rib cage had been burned away, so it was hard to determine.) Inside the car, the only useful evidence he could find was an XD-40 pistol magazine near the body.
Outside the car, there were wrappers and other signs that several assorted boxes of food had been repackaged and hauled away. There was also a large footlocker containing more than two thousand driver’s licenses and passports. Most of these were for Atlanta, Georgia, residents, although there were seventeen other states represented, as well as a few foreign passports. The majority of the IDs belonged to either college-age or elderly people. The coroner told Dustin that this would be consistent with influenza victims, since the highest number of deaths would be either in old people with weakened immune systems, or in young people who had suffered cytokine storm over-reactions to the flu.
Dustin concluded that the driver was most likely a medical professional from Georgia who was driving west for some unknown reason and either ran out of fuel or had engine trouble, and then was waylaid by local bandits. Why he would be carrying such a large collection of IDs was a mystery.
With no communications available, and Atlanta in ashes, this case was baffling. The trunk was eventually dubbed “The Jonestown Footlocker” by the county sheriff, who remembered news accounts of a trunk filled with nine hundred passports, following the Jonestown, Guyana, murder and mass suicide incident in 1978. The trunk was placed in the Bradfordsville evidence room and largely forgotten.
• • •
Resistance to the provisional government grew slowly. At first, people were just happy to hear that grid power would be restored to Kentucky and southern Ohio, and that refineries would soon be operating. Then people started hearing stories of widespread corruption, incompetence, wholesale larceny, rapes, and other acts of savagery by out-of-control foreign “guest” troops. There were also dozens of cases of people who went “missing” in the dark of night.
Dustin, Joshua, Megan, and Malorie started to make plans for resistance in the region even before the decrees banning most firearms were issued by the ProvGov. Since Bradfordsville was relatively close to Fort Knox, they realized that they would have to be very cautious. They thought that covert sabotage would be the most effective use of their time, with only moderate risk.
Joshua started out by building a hidden compartment in his rental house to hold all of their guns and ammunition. This wall cache was put in the plumbing wall between the kitchen and bathroom, so that anyone searching with a metal detector would assume that it was plumbing pipes that were causing false returns. Then he helped Dustin build a similar cache in his house.
Realizing that their former positions with the NSA might give them a high profile with the ProvGov’s nascent Gestapo, Megan and Joshua asked Dustin if he could somehow help them create fake IDs. Dustin spent several evenings looking through the mysterious Jonestown Footlocker. He ended up finding three Georgia driver’s licenses that were good facial matches for Megan, Malorie, and Joshua. Megan would be Stacy Titus, age twenty-five; Malorie would be Carrie Lynn Peters, age twenty-three, and Joshua would be Joseph Kwok, age twenty-four. (Joshua thought this was ideal, since Kwok was a fairly common surname in both Korea and China.)
The ages on the false IDs were all too young, the body weights were all too high, and the eye color for Megan and the hair color for Malorie were both mismatches. But since the twenty-first century was the era of rapidly changing weight and hair color, and tinted contact lenses, those discrepancies could all be explained away.
In the same search, Dustin also found an ID that would be a good match for himself, if he grew a beard. The crucial thing was facial features, and for those, he had found quite good matches. As long as they memorized the details on their fake driver’s licenses, they could get past at least cursory ID checks, such as roadblocks.
Because the IDs in the footlocker had never been cataloged, it would not be noticed that the four driver’s licenses were missing. Since they were already known in Bradfordsville by their real names, Dustin suggested that they keep their false IDs hidden, just in case of any contingency.
Western Canada—February, the Third Year
Soon after the French arrived in each province, a decree went out that banned most firearms. Western Canada felt the impact of the Ottawa government’s edicts much later than the eastern provinces. In their first few guns raids in Vancouver and Fort St. John, the RCMP took six officer casualties and netted just eight guns. So the RCMP suspended any future raids in British Columbia “for fear of officer safety.”
The RCMP’s failure to enforce the UN’s gun ban made the UNPROFOR commanders furious. Despite some threats and posturing, they did nothing. They recognized that they needed the cooperation of the RCMP to successfully occupy western Canada, and that cooperation was marginal, at best. Although they had access to the same gun registration records, UNPROFOR didn’t even attempt to go door-to-door, searching for guns. They preferred to make proclamations and to send out notices. These public notices threatened the citizenry with long prison sentences, deportation, and even the death penalty for noncompliance.
The Canadian government had attempted to create a universal long-gun registry when the Firearms Act became law on December 5, 1995. However, it took until 1998 to develop a system to issue licenses and require buyers to register long guns. As originally enacted, by 2001 all gun owners were required to have a license and, by 2003, to register all of their rifles and shotguns. But there was massive noncompliance and loud complaints, especially in the western provinces.
The registry’s database had some huge flaws. The consensus was that the registry was unworkable, that it had no impact on crime, and that it was outrageously expensive. (The administrative costs were estimated at $2.7 billion in 2012.) With the passage of bill C-19 in 2012 the registration scheme was abandoned, and the registry records were destroyed. So even if UNPROFOR was willing to take the casualties, they still would not have known where to find all of the guns in Canada.
The UNPRO
FOR occupation smothered every aspect of life in Canada. Most public meetings were banned. Any public protests were quickly broken up, and the leaders jailed. Freedom of speech and press were history. Government censors were in every newsroom. Amateur, CB, and marine band radios had to be turned in to the authorities. (After a public outcry, the marine band radio confiscation was almost immediately rescinded, for the safety of saltwater fishermen and crabbers.) While some dutifully turned in their radios, many of those turned in were nonfunctional transceivers with burned-out finals or other electronic problems, or they were earlier-generation spares. Nearly everyone retained their good gear but kept it hidden.
UNPROFOR had underestimated the growing resistance, characterizing the resisters as “bandits,” “a few scattered anti-Francophone malcontents.” They also misread the mood of the populace in western Canada. The citizens at first appeared happy to see “help from France” with the arrival of fuel tankers by road in Kamloops and by sea in Vancouver. But when infantry troop ships arrived at Vancouver and Prince Rupert, passive resistance began almost immediately. The French tried to use le gant de velours (“the velvet glove”) approach at first, to cast themselves as the Nice Guys. But the passive resistance grew and soon morphed from vehicle sabotage to sniping.
UNPROFOR was slow to react, but when it eventually did, it came down with a fist of iron. Many of the French counterinsurgency tactics dated back to their experience in Algeria in the 1950s. As resistance grew, the French tactics became more brutal, with torture of prisoners becoming commonplace. Once the serious shooting started, the velvet glove was removed from the iron fist.
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