by John Hunt
It felt strange, being with all these people, I guess like someone who’s never been to a city before suddenly turning up in New York. I missed the lodge desperately, my thoughts often turning to the lake, our cabin, the places on the beach where we’d made love. But it felt so much safer, being together with all these people. Maybe it was an unhealthy, communist kind of thought, but I couldn’t help wondering why society didn’t work that way more generally. There was no hustling for space, the accommodation was the same for everyone, it didn’t matter how much money people had enjoyed before, or not. Maybe the Indians weren’t so primitive after all. Bucks no longer had any value anyway, except as toilet paper or kindling. What could we pay for more bullets, and where could we get them from?
The room for Jessie and me was small, but comfortable.
“Wow, the nicest mattress I’ve seen for a while,” she said, as she bounced on it.
“I’ve got to go and help Dad sort out arrangements,” I said.
“Look, Jim.” She reached up and grabbed my collar, pulling me down. “You can get as busy as you want. But I come first, do you understand that?”
“Of course I do, Jessie.”
“I don’t think you understand it enough. I think you need a lesson. Let’s christen the mattress.” She kissed me, and started taking my pants off.
When everyone had arrived, we crammed into the largest of the common rooms one evening, standing room only. Theo addressed the gathering.
“Welcome to Whittier everyone. Now, I won’t go over the reasons again as to why we’re here, you know that. I can only say that it’s providential we’ve found this place, which fits us exactly, and I’ve spoken with the people in Valdez, who used to live here, and they’re happy with what we’re doing. Now, we’ve a lot to organize over the next few days. Not least, how we’re going to run ourselves. Currently, we’ve got a committee. I know that a committee’s like a horse with four back legs, and with seven it’s even worse, and I’m not suggesting that this is going to be permanent or that I should be its spokesman. But we’ve an immediate threat to face, and I suggest we continue on this basis till it’s passed. I don’t know whether that will be next week, or next month, but by the fall it’ll be clear, because we’ll either have lost to them, or we’ll still be here, and the snows and mountains will start cutting us off from the outside. At which point, if not earlier, I suggest we hold elections for a new committee and chairman.
“How’s the committee going to be elected? What powers will it have?”
“I don’t know yet, to be honest. I’ve been in touch with some other communities, like in Valdez, and they’re all doing things a bit differently. I suggest we set up a steering group to look at some kind of constitution for us and how we’re going to operate, which will also then be put to the vote. I think Donald here, whose brainwave this move was, has already given some thought to that. Does anyone have any disagreements with what I’ve said so far? Please raise your hand if you do. Don’t be afraid to do so.”
He stopped, looked around. No hands went up.
“No? Remarkable. I’d like to add that I’m happy to talk to anyone about this at any time. But not over the next few days. We’re going to have to dedicate those to protecting ourselves, our families, from unprovoked, vicious assault from criminals, including some ex-soldiers, armed with military weapons. You all know me, and my record. For that reason, I offer myself as your military leader during this period of danger. Does anyone have any objections to that?”
He looked around. “No again? OK.”
“What I ask for in this period,” he continued, “is your total co-operation. More than that, your obedience. I need to be able to pick who fights, and where. We’ll only beat these people if we’re better organized, more disciplined, quicker, cleverer. And we need to stack the decks in our favor. Are we agreed?
“OK. Now, let’s start. The committee will be meeting now to draw up policies, how we distribute food, how we prepare it, how we get more, work lists and rotas. The better we can work together, the stronger we’ll be. Thank you all for coming this evening. We’ll have some information – and food – for you in the morning. In the meantime, anyone who can handle a rifle, who’s prepared to shoot to defend ourselves, I’d like you to come back here in half an hour. Gender and age don’t matter. Just so long as you’re a good shot. Could you bring any weapons you have with you, any two-way radios, anything else you think could come in useful. Oh, and watches. Thanks.”
Theo, Makayla, Jeremy, Benji and Anna, Dad, Mom and myself went up to a smaller room.
“I’d like to start on military preparations,” began Theo. “I want Jim here to ride shotgun for me. Jeremy and Anna, I’d like you two to arrange the food supply, control the stores, manage the preparation, cooking, distribution and cleaning. Divide the work between you. Donald and Benji – infrastructure. We need the heating working, enough water, containers to carry it, pens for the livestock. We’ll save time and energy in the long term being all in one building together, rather than having to keep dozens going. But food is going to be critical, sharing it out fairly. Mary – you’re here because I think you’re the most senior on the medical side. We’ll need a surgery, a makeshift hospital, be able to treat gun wounds. Makayla, could you be available to answer questions from anyone at any time – we’ll need a central office on the ground floor. Jim, you and me are going to be on defense. OK?”
After some discussion, they left, and the potential soldiers started turning up, three dozen of them. We introduced ourselves, talked about our experience, made an inventory of weapons and communications. Theo divided them – thirty men and six women, including Jessie and Bess – into two teams.
“Now, we’ll need watches, if you’ve given up using them. We’ll need to co-ordinate timings. Check we’re all on the same time.”
Some others came as well, Sue among them, but Theo turned them down. “Sorry, Sue, you’re on the young side, and we’ll need some defense back in this place. You can play a part there. We should fortify the ground floor, not make it too easy for anyone to get in.” He gave instructions about sentries and shift changes.
“Now, this could begin at any time. The key is going to be having surprise on our side, not on theirs. They’re coming to rape, murder, imprison our folks, do terrible things to them. There’s no point in just giving them a bloody nose. We send them all to the farm. Or they’ll come back in more force, better prepared. No prisoners. If you’re uncomfortable with that, excuse yourself. This is life or death for all of us.”
FIFTY-NINE
Andrew Bovotsky turned out to be one of the biggest guys I’ve seen, a real hench, six and a half feet tall, bald headed, bearded. He had managed to get hold of some dynamite.
“Hi, Jim, good to meet you. Theo’s told me about you. A bit young for this, aren’t you?” He smiled, to take the edge of, handing over a big box as he enveloped my hand in his. “It’s not much, and it might be a bit dodgy.”
“Hi, Andrew,” I replied, wincing in his huge grip. “Love those tattoos.”
He grinned, showing a couple of gold teeth and flexed his huge biceps to show off his Popeye forearm.
“Can we use it to block the tunnel properly?” Theo asked.
“Give me a few hours and we can do that, and have something spare for the far end if we need it.”
The next day we set up the sentry positions, one at the Seward Highway, another on a promontory overlooking the sea, stocking them with food and water. Then we organized rotas. I started carrying a two-way radio receiver in my belt at all times, cell phones already a distant memory. We practiced receiving a call, then I set off the fire alarm in Begich Towers and we timed how long it took the three dozen of us to gather and drive up to the ridge. Once there, we spent the rest of the day digging a couple of dozen fox holes across a hundred yard stretch, ten feet apart, a hundred yards away from the trail, and rearranging rocks so that we could see but not be seen. We worked carefully to make su
re it all looked completely natural.
“Theo,” I reported at the end of the day, “the firing positions are ready.”
“OK, now we wait,” he replied. “While we do, let’s start fortifying this place. There’s no one living on the ground floor, let’s brick in the windows, leaving loopholes to fire through. Ramps to stop trucks getting too close. Sniper positions on the roof. I don’t know how we’ll stop a boat getting here though, let’s hope they’re not as bright as you, and come by road. And let’s get some shooting practice in. I want to see all soldiers down in the park, all afternoon.”
The sun now cleared the mountains all day and most of the night. Leaves were unfolding, the skeletons of trees were now a blaze of light green, translucent in the sunlight. You could feel the pulse of life in full gear, the birds returned, the young calling. In the Begich Building, it was organized chaos. Mom, Dad and Matthew were totally wrapped up their work. There was always a queue to see Mom, people who hadn’t seen a nurse or doctor for a year.
“Jim, I’m too busy to talk right now, could you open these boxes for me? It’s so nice to be able to help around here. Jane, you’ve got the hang of the syringe now, could you give Mr. Jablosky here an injection, same as you did with his wife?”
Dad was engineer in charge of the defense construction. Matthew was hobbling around on his crutches organizing a couple of meals a day for two hundred people.
“Jim, this is hopeless, we need bigger pans, we need vats, big ones, could you do something? Talk to Theo?”
Sue had playmates, Bess was in seventh heaven, chatting to new friends non-stop, making up for the months of isolation.
“There are guys here, Jim, not just girls,” she said to me once, in passing. “Real guys! Unbelievable! They’re all asking me about this necklace. I’m so glad we came.”
Jessie – what can I say? Those first days I was a bit worried, to be honest, about the competition, worried that the previous months had been a dream, and she would go off with someone better looking. But she gave no sign of it. She made me believe I could do this, that it was possible.
“Harder, harder,” she gasped as we were making love the next night. “We’re not doing this again till you’ve killed every one of those fuckers, you understand me? Oh! Oh! That’s it, come…come…”
The bleeper on my radio from the sentries on the Seward Highway, fifteen miles away, went off the next morning. Andrew Bovotsky was on duty at the time – I’d thought that we needed really responsible people there. He had Gill with him; a middle aged, competent lady, a bird watcher, who I figured would be used to spending lots of time patiently looking through binoculars.
“Two Humvees and four trucks coming your way, Jim,” he said. “Can’t see how many guys, maybe two dozen, maybe three dozen. Once they’re past us, me and Gill will follow and come see what we can do to help.”
I gulped, feeling cold all the way down to my stomach. This was it.
“Thanks, Andrew. Don’t get so close though that you distract them from coming. Let them get right up to us, you’ll have to stay well back.”
“Understood. All the best, Jim, we’ll be thinking of you.”
I punched the nearest fire alarm, a few yards away. The klaxon went off in the building. I had just enough time to quickly hug Mom and Dad.
“Jim, I love you…” Mom said, her voice breaking.
“You, too, Mom. Don’t worry.” It sounded a bit daft even as I said it, my heart pounding with fear, excitement, anticipation.
“Take care,” Matthew shouted as Jessie, Bess and I ran past the kitchens, “and give them hell!”
Moments later, three dozen of us had scrambled into jeeps and trucks and were driving fast up the Passage Trail. We left the vehicles below the rise and hurried to our prepared places, wading through paintbrush and forget-me-nots. The ground was scattered with blue and purple and yellow, with insects buzzing around. Little pipits hopped away in front of us, taking off again as we drew closer. The sky was a clear blue, dotted with small, fluffy clouds blowing in from the Gulf of Alaska. A perfect day for dying, I thought. It all seemed unreal. I had to pinch myself.
“Don’t leave me hanging there, will you, Theo?” I asked jokingly.
“You’ll be fine, Jim,” he replied, looking me straight in the eye. “Now, we’ll go higher, watch your back, and go to where we’re needed. Just don’t get uptight about it, let it happen, let them come to you, keep waiting, like we said. OK? You all right with this?”
“I’m fine.”
“All the best.”
We shook hands, Jessie and I hugged each other.
“Come back to me, Jim.”
I’ll always come back, I promise,” and she was gone, walking away with Theo and a dozen others, heading for the top of the hill.
I was in charge of the rest, the shooters I’d selected as the most solid. We all hunkered down into our holes, covering ourselves with moss and bracken till we were invisible from anyone more than a few feet away. We’d already smeared ourselves with mosquito repellent, though it wasn’t really necessary, a steady breeze was keeping them down. I signaled Theo to show we were ready and he withdrew into hiding with his force.
“Complete quiet now,” I called out. “I know we’ve been through this before, but here it is again. Keep yourselves right down, don’t show yourselves, cover any bare skin, no itching. When they’re within a mile or so, I’ll give a raven call, and another one at half a mile. After that, keep absolutely still. Stay hidden. Don’t look up. We want them to come past us. We want to wipe these guys out, not spook them. Don’t raise your heads till I fire the first shot. When I do, aim first for the guy directly opposite you.”
I looked through the binoculars, careful that they wouldn’t reflect the light. The convoy came around the bend and stopped at the tunnel. As I thought, they had sent one driver through; soon he was back with them. They set off on foot around the lake. They had about a three-mile walk. The minutes crawled by. I didn’t mind that – it gave us time to settle down, calm ourselves. I could see Andrew and Gill arriving in their jeep at the bend, but they quickly reversed and stayed out of sight. The moss a few inches from my eyes was a miniature world of fronds, little leaves spiraling around the stems, tiny flowers, crusty lichen on the stones, every shade of green, red, brown, yellow, orange. Little ants and beetles hastened purposefully through their jungle, on their way to wherever it was ants and beetles went to, doing their thing, like the millions of generations before them. As the criminals came closer, I counted them, twenty-nine. They were an ugly looking lot, scary. My heart sank. Any one of them could have beaten up half a dozen of us in a fight. Some were stripped to the waist, heavily muscled after years of exercise in their cells, tattooed, with bandoliers of cartridges, pistols, machetes, coils of rope, assault rifles, even one machine gun. The instinct to jump up and run for it was, for a moment, almost overwhelming. I pushed it away, praying that no one else gave in to their own version of terror. It seemed almost impossible that no one would. But it stayed quiet. I turned my attention back to the approaching men. They were undisciplined: scattered over a couple of hundred yards, talking, joking, slapping away the clouds of mosquitoes that were down in the bog as they ploughed through it, no scouts out ahead. Just a bunch of careless clowns, I told myself.
I gave the first raven call, then the second. I was at the far right hand side of our line, closest to Whittier. The oncoming mob walked along without noticing us hidden amongst the rocks. As the first of the group went past me, I raised the M24 and shot him through the head. I saw it exploding with the force of the bullet, bits of brain and skull flying out. He went down like a stone. The relief was immediate. They died like any other flesh and blood mammal, and they seemed far easier to kill, because they didn’t live here, not out here in the bush, they were creatures of rooms and tarmac. I was squeezing the trigger on the second as a storm of bullets came from the rocks along to my left. There were more of them than us, they were more heav
ily armored, but they could barely see us, were lower down, and had nowhere to hide. They were sitting ducks. And we were hunters. They dropped like flies. Some got off a few rounds before they went down and bullets sang off the rocks, chipping off splinters, but I didn’t hear anyone hurt on our side. Half a dozen at the rear, who hadn’t reached the firing zone yet, started running back. Four of them took bullets and fell. Two survived and kept on weaving, zig zagging, running for their lives back to the lake. I could see the “plock” of bullets in the water of the bog as we missed them. I brought the M24 around, steadied it on its stand, and focused. Measured my breathing, watched their movements, timed my response, and shot them in the back, at six hundred yards, six hundred and fifty.
It was a massacre. I rested my forehead on the gunstock. I could feel myself starting to tremble, but my hands were still. I felt fine. Like I was born to do this. A year ago I was playing this on a screen and now there were bodies lying all around. Mostly dead, but some with limbs twitching, a couple crying out in pain. Somehow, a couple of vultures were already circling overhead.
Jessie must have hurtled down the slope. I’d barely stood up before she had her arms around me. “My God, Jim, you did it, you did it!”
“Good work, everyone,” said Theo as he came down with the others. “I’ve never seen an ambush better done. You didn’t leave us anything to do.”
He walked over and put a bullet through the foreheads of those who were still alive.
“Not in accordance with the Geneva Convention,” he said. “But we’re not in a world where that applies anymore.”
People were chattering excitedly, embracing each other, shaking hands, a couple were whooping, euphoric, others were crying with relief.
“Where’s Mason?” Someone asked.
We went quiet. I hadn’t checked that we were all OK. Theo and I ran to his position. His head had been thrown back, a bullet through the eye. He was still alive, but his face and skull were a mess, the grey of his brain showing.
