By the time the extra helicopters arrived in Idaho, the Northwest Militia had long since split back into two distinct companies. Todd Gray’s company remained atValley Forge. Meanwhile, Michael Nelson’s company had displaced to a heavily wooded area five miles northeast, taking half of the logistic supplies with them.
• • •
Blanca Doyle gradually recovered from her wounds. In addition to the wounds to her thighs, it was found that she had broken her left wrist in the crash. Just twenty-five days after her surgery, she was hobbling around on crutches. By October, she had graduated to a cane, and her wrist was nearly healed. On November fifth, she announced that she was pregnant. Since she was immobile, first due to her injuries, and later because of her pregnancy, Blanca became the camp cook at Valley Forge. Meanwhile, Rose Trasel became the cook and full-time C.Q. at the other company’s camp. She had her infant son to care for, so she could not go out on patrols. Thomas Kenneth, Trasel was eleven months old, and just learning to walk.
By the time winter settled in, all of their sheep and two goats had been slaughtered and butchered. They needed the meat. The decision to gradually butcher the animals wasn’t difficult. They realized that there would be very little feed available in the valley for the winter, so they didn’t dare keep more than their three best milking does. Further, the animals were a security threat.
Their distinctive “maa” and “baa” sounds could be heard from a considerable distance. Some of the meat from each of the animals that they butchered was eaten within a few days, and the rest jerked. Once the really cold weather arrived in November, the quarters were hung high in trees in deer bags. As long as they stayed in the shade, they kept well. In early November an adult brown bear sow was attracted to the smell of two hanging sheep quarters. The next day they had four bear quarters hanging, too.
• • •
The Federals became famous for planting antipersonnel mines. They emplaced them without any regard to injuring or killing innocent civilians. Their favorite spots to lay them were on the shoulders of side roads in areas that were largely guerrilla controlled.
In mid-November, Margie Porter took a solo, unarmed reconnaissance trip to Bovill. As the recon was planned, for most of her route Margie would be shadowed by a friendly patrol to protect her. Her objectives were to see which buildings in Bovill were occupied by Federal troops, where they parked their vehicles, where they posted their sentries, and hopefully what time those sentries changed. She was still within sight of the patrol when she stepped on a large land mine, on the shoulder of the county road, just east of town. She died almost instantly. They carried her body back to Valley Forge, wrapped in ponchos. They buried her there. It was a very sad day for everyone. Little Jacob wailed. He didn’t stop crying for his “Aunt Margie” until he fell asleep that evening.
Lon and Della were grief stricken. After a few days they got on with the struggle. If anything, the loss made them even more fearless and determined. It was also a major turning point in Lon’s life. Realizing his mortality, he accepted Christ as his savior. He became a tireless fighter on patrols. For the first time, he actively asked to be the point man. He didn’t fear death, for he knew that when he died, he would join his wife in heaven. And she had meant more to him than anything else.
• • •
There were three of them, each bound hand and foot, two NCOs and a private. They were in a sitting position, lashed to three trees in a row, with their hands tied between their backs and their feet tied together. They refused to answer questions, or even give their names. One of the two NCOs spoke distinctly to the others, “Still, still! Sprechen Sie nicht!”
Lon Porter’s questions were met with silence. He was getting frustrated. He warned them, “If you don’t cooperate, you will be shot. It is that simple.”
The sergeant directly in front of him—the one who had been warning the others to be quiet—half-shouted, “That would be a violation of the Geneva Accords.”
Lon replied mockingly, “Let me tell you something, Hans, or Dieter, or Heinrich, or whatever your name is. At this point I don’t give a flying fig about the Geneva Convention, or the Hague Convention, or any other convention, for that matter. If I were in the U.S. Army, fighting in some other country, I’d play by those rules. But not here, not now. I’m not in the Army, and I’m not bound by the ‘laws of land warfare.’ All that I care about now is getting my country back. You’re the guys that marched in here and took it from me. I grew up in a Constitutional Republic, and now I’m living in a police state. Now start answering questions, or you’re fertilizer. How is it that you say that in German? Dungmittel, I think. I had only two years of German in high school and I spent some time in Switzerland, but it’s coming back to me. Dungmittel. Yeah, that’s it. Du Arsch Gieger! Sprechen mach schnell, oder du wirst Blei essen! Sprechen Sie, oder Sie werden Dungmittel sein.” He gestured with his captured Browning Hi-Power for emphasis.
The sergeant spat contemptuously, “You are bluffink.”
Porter thumbed down the safety of the Browning, put the muzzle between the sergeant’s eyes, and asked in a low tone, “You think I’m bluffing? I have nothing to lose, Dieter. Two weeks ago, my wife stepped on one of your land mines. She’s dead!You’ve taken our land, looted our house and our neighbors’ houses. Everywhere you’ve gone, you have raped, pillaged, and plundered.
Virtually all that I own in the world now fits in just one duffel bag and a backpack. Put yourself in my position, Dieter. I can assure you that I am definitely not bluffing.”
The sergeant hesitated a few seconds longer, staring at Porter’s eyes. Then he started talking, all in a rush. Lon got all of his questions answered immediately, in English. He was amused when he found out that the other NCO was named Dieter. He said with a laugh, “Wasn’t a bad guess. I just had the wrong guy.”
As he headed back to their latest temporary CP, Mike asked Lon, “You weren’t actually going to shoot him, were you?”
Porter waited a long time before replying, “Well, the thought did enter my mind, but to answer your question, no, I wouldn’t have. I guess I’m too civilized for that. Technically, my bluff could be considered a form of torture by some people. I don’t know exactly how I would categorize it. All that I know is that it worked.”
“What do you plan to do with this bunch?” Lon asked.
Nelson answered, “Well, we’ll just pump them for as much information as we can, and then brand them, take their boots, and turn them loose like the others, just before we get ready to displace.”
The resistance had no facilities and insufficient logistics to keep prisoners. There were only two acceptable options. The first, death, was normally reserved for Quislings—fellow citizens who had actively collaborated. The other, branding and release, was the preferred method for both UN and Federal soldiers. Because it was obvious that many of the soldiers were drafted and didn’t want to be in the service of the UN, it was rarely deemed appropriate to kill them. There were a few exceptions made for known war criminals.
Most, however, got the standard “I” or “T” brands with a hot iron. The “I” brand was for “Invader.” The “T” signified “Traitor.” Some militias, such as Todd Gray’s Company and Michael Nelson’s Company, branded their prisoners’ forearms. Other militias branded their prisoners’ foreheads or cheeks. All released prisoners were warned that if they were ever recaptured while bearing arms on behalf of the UN or the Federals, they would be summarily executed.
• • •
On a reconnaissance patrol late in November, Jeff, Ken, and Terry encountered a pair of individuals who were armed, but didn’t look like Federal soldiers.
From a distance, Jeff could see that they were both black. They were wearing unadorned BDUs and woodland pattern boonie hats. The one in the lead, a man, was armed with a Thompson submachinegun with a horizontal foregrip. Following ten yards behind him was a tall woman, armed with an M249 SAW.
Lying prone in high Latah
orchard grass, Jeff and the Laytons watched as the pair approached. When they were ten yards away, Jeff recognized the man’s face. It took just a moment longer for him to connect the face with a name.
Then Jeff came out in a clear voice, “Tony! Get over here!”
Tony and Teesha Washington instinctively dropped to the ground when they heard the voice, obscuring themselves in the grass. Tony half-whispered,
“Who is there?”
Trasel replied, “Jeff Trasel, Northwest Militia.” The Washingtons slowly got up and walked toward Trasel. They dropped down again, slowly this time, just a few feet in front of Trasel.
Tony said, “I remember you. You were on the Princeton raid—you’re the guy that commandeered the M60—right? Trasel nodded. “We got introduced with all the handshaking that was going on after the raid.”Washington checked the safety on the Thompson, as he did out of habit dozens of times each day, and then went on. “This is my wife, Teesha. I’m not sure if you’ve ever met her.”
Trasel shifted his gaze to Teesha. At five-feet-eleven, she was nearly as a tall as her husband.
She handled the SAW like she knew how to use it. Trasel replied, “I’ve seen her at a distance, at one of the Barter Faires, but we were never introduced. A pleasure, ma’am.” Teesha nodded and smiled in recognition.
“My compadres here are the Laytons, Ken and Terry. Do you know them?”
Seven yards on either side of Trasel, Ken and Terry gave small waves to the Washingtons.
Tony replied, “We only know of them by reputation. They’re the ones that E&E’d all the way from Chicago, aren’t they? That was a heckuva hike.”
Jeff replied, “Yep, that’s them all right, and ‘escape and evasion’ is their middle name.” Jeff set his HK down. Jeff frowned. “I heard that your retreat got wiped out, and that everybody was killed. But you’re here breathing. What happened?”
“We are the only ones that survived. Teesha and I were guarding a cache off-site when the Feds came. The ranch house got mortared, big time. They killed everybody there—thirty-two men, women, and children. We snuck back to the ranch early the next morning. We spent an hour looking at the ruins of the house and barn through the scopes on our M1As, from about two hundred yards. We didn’t dare go too close at first. We were afraid that the Federals might have left an ambush. Just as we were debating on whether or not to go down there, an army diesel CUCV Blazer pulled in the driveway. Two Specialist E-4s got out, all nonchalant, and started loading up all the guns, backpacks, and web gear from the trenches. Then they picked up the first of two body bags and loaded it in the truck. When they were each holding an end of the second body bag and carrying it toward the tailgate, we nailed them. We shot those muthas twice each with our M1As.”
“So what happened next?” Jeff asked.
“We figured that the way they were acting, there wasn’t an ambush set up after all, so we gave them ten minutes to bleed out and hiked down the hill.
They had already gathered up everything of value in the CUCV. So we just threw in our packs and rifles, and rolled the first body bag back off the end of the tailgate. We stripped off those clowns’ web gear, threw it in the back, fired up the Blazer, and took off.” Gesturing to Teesha’s SAW light machinegun, Tony went on, “That’s where the missus here got her Minimi. They had it in the cab of the CUCV. We ditched the CUCV about four miles to the east, way up a skid road in a bunch of yew trees. It took us three nights to carry all the weapons back to our cache point. That was a mile off the road. With just the two of us, it took a whole bunch of trips. We went back to the ranch in the middle of the night two weeks later. The bodies of the Federals were gone.”
Washington gulped, and continued, “We spent most of that night burying our dead in the trenches and praying for them.”
“We’ve been playing cat and mouse with Federals, since then. Between the two of us, we got seventeen UN troops, torched seven vehicles, and captured fourteen more guns. Whenever we’ve bumped into other resistance cells, we’ve doled guns out liberally, along with a lot of food and medical gear. The CUCV and the VRC-46 radio that was in it went to the Blue Blaze Irregulars. Right now, we’re down to just six guns—the M249 Minimi, our two M1As, two .45 automatics, and my Tommy gun.”
Jeff eyed the submachinegun. It had a Cutts compensator, and was missing a lot of bluing. He asked with an air of disbelief, “You didn’t get that from the Federals, did you?”
“No, I inherited this puppy from my grandfather. He was in the Navy, back in World War II. He was a cook stationed on Midway Island. After the Japs attacked there, they got very serious about security, and this Model ’28 became his constant companion. At the end of the war, he couldn’t bear to part with it, so he disassembled it and brought it home with him. He put the barreled receiver in the bottom of one sea bag, and its stock and a bunch of magazines in the other. He just walked off the ship, bold as brass. Grandpa said a lot of his buddies brought home guns that way. Mainly they brought Colt .45s and captured Jap stuff like Nambus and samurai swords.”
Washington looked admiringly at the Thompson, and recounted, “He kept it under his bed for years. He never shot it—just oiled it up once in a while.
When he died of a heart attack, my dad and I went over to the house to help grandma move to the retirement home. When she pulled it out from underneath the bed, I nearly fainted. It was made at the Colt factory. My dad had seen it before, lots of times, but I had never even been told about it. It was a family secret. Grandma said to me,‘Your grandfather said that after he jumped off this mortal coil that he wanted you to have this.’ You see, my grandpa and grandma knew that I was really into guns. My uncle and I had just started shooting sporting clays the summer before, and I had really started getting into it.”
Jeff nodded his head, smiled, and asked, “When was this?”
Washington replied, “I had just turned nineteen. I was in junior college. That was back in ’97. I didn’t get a chance to shoot this thing until after I got up here. I’m pretty good with it, now. It runs like a champ.”
“How did you first get involved with the Templars?”
“I was born and raised in Andover, Kansas—it’s a suburb of Wichita. So was Teesha, here. Shortly after I got out of high school, a friend showed me a video called America in Peril. That really got me thinking. I had an Internet account at the J.C., so I started searching the web, using Google, looking for everything I could find on topics like survival, guns, food storage, wilderness medicine, and militias. Those web pages brought me up to speed very quickly. I started posting to a ‘Survival and Preparedness’ forum at The Claire Files. Roger Dunlap noticed one of my posts there, and we started corresponding by e-mail. Pretty soon he got me set up with PGP—that’s a crypto program—so we could write back and forth without anyone snooping on us.
“The Dunlaps invited Teesha and me out to Troy for a two-week visit the summer before the Crash. It was an extension of our honeymoon trip to Yellowstone. It was kind of funny when we got there to Roger’s ranch. You see, we had never met face-to-face, or even spoken on the phone—everything was by e-mail, you see—so none of the Templars realized that we were black folks.
Roger just said, ‘Hey, cyberspace is color blind, and so am I. Welcome!’ That’s the kind of guy he was. We liked the Templars a lot, and they liked us. I told the Dunlaps that I was going to try to find a job in Idaho after I got my degree.
“Officially we weren’t Templar members when the Schumer hit the fan, but we figured that they were our best bet. We couldn’t get through to them before we left because all the long distance lines were down, and our local Internet port server was hosed. My dad lent me his mini-Winnebago, and Teesha and I crammed as much as we could into it. Dad said that he was going to stick it out with his neighbors in the suburbs. We arrived here not long after the riots started, and we got immediately assigned to the ranch security and hunting detail.”
Jeff drummed his fingertips on the stock of his HK
, considering what he had heard. Finally, he intoned, “You know, we’ve bumped into a lot of the local militias in the last few months. We’ve done our best to help them out too, just like you. Up until now, we haven’t invited any of them to join us. Either they were too inexperienced, or they had more people in their units than we wanted to add to ours. We like to keep our signature small. In your case, however, I think that the Commandante will make an exception. Are you interested?”
Teesha gave a toothy smile and nodded enthusiastically to her husband.
Tony reached out to shake Trasel’s hand and declared, “Sure, Jeff. We’ll join if you’ll take us.”
CHAPTER 29
Tolvajärvi
“Ever so often, the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
—Thomas Jefferson
It was bitter cold. The snow had been coming down steadily for several days.
As the patrol worked its way toward Potlatch in the dim twilight, they could hear the shrieks of a Katushya rocket barrage, followed by the distant rumbling of the impacts, far in the distance. All five of the patrol members were wearing hooded snow camouflage ponchos that Kevin and Della had sewn from white bedsheets. They were cut extra long to accommodate backpacks. All of them were wearing small, improvised snowshoes made from willow boughs laced with parachute cord and rawhide. They halted on a wooded knoll that was just out of line of sight to the town. This was both their bivouac site and objective rally point (ORP).
It was nearly daylight by the time they had set up their pair of tents and rolled out their sleeping bags. They changed trousers, hanging their wet ones up inside of the tents to dry. Then they prayed and shared a breakfast of venison pemmican, dried apples, and dried biscuits, washed down with water.
They had kept their canteens under their coats to keep them from freezing.
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