Phoenix Rising

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

After Bob Varney and his group moved down to Fort Morgan they, along with Jake and the Phoenix group, began to build a place to live, using as their scheme a motel-like plan. Jake and James drew up the design of one long, single-story structure divided into individual cabins.

It was decided that each of the three married couples would have their own cabin, Karin and Julie would share a cabin, Becky and Sara would live together, and Jake and Deon would be roommates, while John, Marcus, and Willie would share the final cabin.

They began the structure by using one of the massive stone walls of the fort as their back wall. Next, they built a floor that extended twenty feet out from the wall, and stretched one hundred and five feet long. After they finished the floor, they put in a wall at each end and separated the floor into seven compartments, each protruding fifteen feet out from the stone wall of the fort. This left five feet for a front porch. Next they put on the front wall, with a door and window for each unit, then a roof, with a chimney from each unit. Finally they built a fireplace in each room.

Throughout the entire construction project, James and Jake worked very well together, James, because he was a natural handyman, and Jake, because such work was a product of his youth. He had built many wood-frame structures, even as late as last March when he had gone back home to visit his folks, and helped in a barn raising.

While the men were building their quarters, Bob and the women put in the garden. Ellen was a particularly good gardener, as was Julie, and they took charge of the layout and planting.

Fort Morgan—Wednesday, August 22

So far all of the building material came from the scrap lumber and residue left by Hurricane Ohmshidi hauled down to the fort in James’s truck. But midway through the process James announced that he didn’t think he had enough gasoline to make another trip.

“We can make our own gas,” Bob suggested.

“Ha! How, by eating a lot of beans?” John asked.

The others laughed.

“No,” Bob said. “During World War II a lot of people converted coal, charcoal, or wood, to a gas that would power their vehicles. John, you are a good mechanic and James, you can do just about anything. You two could build a gas converter.”

“I don’t have any idea what you are talking about,” James said.

“No problem. I’ll show you how to do it.”

“You?” Ellen said. “Bob, you can barely change a lightbulb.”

“That’s true,” Bob said, “but when I was in the Army, I taught aircraft maintenance. I couldn’t do it, you understand, but I could teach it. And I could teach John and James how to make a gas converter. It isn’t all that efficient, but it will work.

“Could it work well enough to drive the truck up to Fort Rucker?” Jake asked.

“Yes, I suppose so. But why would you want to go up there?” Bob asked.

“Because I know where there is a thousand gallons of gasoline.”

“What?” Marcus asked, surprised by Bob’s comment. “Where?”

“Clay hid nineteen barrels of Mogas in a hangar at TAC-X.”

“TAC-X? A stagefield?” Bob asked.

“Yes, at Samson. Do you know it?”

“I know where Samson is,” Bob said. “Don’t know TAC-X. I know TAC-Able.”

“TAC-Able? Don’t you mean TAC-Alpha?” Willie asked.

“You are dealing with an old soldier here, Sergeant. Before the phonetic alphabet changed in 1956, the letter A was Able. Able, Baker, Charley, Dog, Easy, Fox, George, Haystack, Item, Jig, King, Love, Mike, Nan, Oboe, Papa, Queen, Roger, Sugar, Tare, Uncle, Victor, William, X-ray, Yoke, Zebra.”

“Wow,” Willie said. He laughed. “And you still remember all that?”

“When you are my age, Willie, you will still remember the current phonetics.”

“That’s interesting, but let’s get back to this thousand gallons of gasoline at TAC-X,” John said. “How do you know it is there?”

“Sergeant Major Matthews put it there,” Jake said. “Just for something like this.”

“Yeah, but what good does it do us up there, if we can’t go get it?” Marcus asked.

“We can go get it, if Bob really can tell John and James how to build a machine that will convert wood into gasoline,” Jake said

Bob shook his head. “Not gasoline,” he said. “Wood gas. When you burn wood, or charcoal, or coal, or any other fuel, if you don’t completely consume the fuel, it will emit a gas that is combustible. Sometimes, for example, if the mixture in a gasoline engine is too rich, the exhaust gas can be burned. That’s what happens when you see flame coming out of the exhaust pipe.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen that,” John said.

“All we need to do is construct a unit that will create this gas, then pipe that gas into the fuel injector on James’s truck. The fuel injector will introduce the gas into the cylinders, and that will run your engine.”

Using a hot-water tank for the combustion chamber, John and James, following Bob’s instructions, built the gasification device in one afternoon. While they were building the device, Jake, Marcus, Willie, and Deon made charcoal, as it would be much easier to handle than wood. By evening they had the truck equipped with the gasification device, charcoal made and loaded aboard, and they were ready to go.

“With this thing taking up so much room back here, I doubt we can get all nineteen barrels loaded onto the truck,” James said.

“You won’t need this thing anymore,” Bob said, patting the side of the gasification machine. “Once you get there, you can dump it, and put regular gas in your car.”

“Will the truck still run on gasoline then?” James asked. “Or will this have messed up the engine?”

“It’ll still run,” Bob promised. “Remember you haven’t run anything through your system but gas.”

“Yeah, I can see that,” John said.

It had grown dark by the time they finished building, and testing the device. So they gathered around a cinder-block cooking stove, oven, and grill for a supper of grilled snapper, the fish provided by Jerry Cornett.

Fort Morgan—Thursday, August 23

Jake and John left in James’s truck, leaving before dawn the next morning. Jake took John in case they had mechanical problems with the truck on the way. They left James behind because he was too valuable in building their quarters. The others stayed back simply because there wasn’t enough room in the truck for them.

A drive that, under normal conditions, would have taken no more than three and a half hours, took seven hours and they arrived at TAC-X at noon. The bad thing was that the power generated by the gasification machine was so inefficient that they could not go over thirty miles per hour. The good thing was, they saw no traffic during the entire one-hundred-and-seventy-five-mile trip. They also encountered no obstacles to their journey.

“You think the gas is still here?” John asked as they approached the locked gate.

“I think so,” Jake said. “Otherwise I think the lock would be broken.”

“Unless somebody changed the lock,” John suggested.

“Yes, I hadn’t thought of that. This is the key Clay gave me. If this key fits the lock, then yes, I think the gasoline will still be here.”

Jake slipped the key into the lock, then was gratified when it opened easily. “Alright,” he said.

Jake pushed the gate open as John drove the truck through. Then he shut the gate behind them and relocked it. That way if someone happened by, they wouldn’t notice anything different.

When they reached hangar three, Jake unlocked it and opened the door, then closed it once John drove inside. The closed door made the hangar darker, but there was enough light, filtered through the dirty panes of the high-mounted windows to allow them to see what they were doing.

John and Jake moved the empty drums out of the way, removed the trash from the tarp, then peeled back the tarp to disclose nineteen barrels. The top of each barrel bore the broken lettered stenciling, in yellow.

GASOLINE, AUTOMOTIVE COMBAT MIL–G–3056

FOR USE IN ALL MOBILE AND STATIONARY SPARK-IGNITION ENGINES

“John, we have just struck gold!” Jake said, happily. “Let’s get them loaded.

The first thing they did was get rid of the gas generator that had brought them up here; then they put gasoline into the truck. They did that by rolling one of the barrels up into the bed of the truck, then using a hose to siphon gas from the barrel and let it flow into the gas tank. It worked well, though it was much slower than it would have been at a normal gas pump.

When the truck was fueled, they rolled the remaining drums onto the back of the truck. There was only room to get fifteen barrels loaded so, reluctantly, they left four barrels behind, including the one they had drawn the fuel from for the truck. John started to put the tarp back over the remaining barrels, but Jake stopped him.

“We might be better off spreading that tarp over our load,” he said. “If somebody sees us driving a truck with all these barrels, that would be like having a big sign that says, ‘We have gas, please take it from us.’”

“Yeah,” John said. “I see what you mean.”

“The problem is going to be holding the tarp down,” Jake said.

“Not a problem,” John insisted. “We’ll tie it down with safety wire.”

“Where are we going to get safety wire?”

“I’ll show you,” John said. He walked over to the hangar wall, then stuck his hand down behind the cross brace, and pulled out a spool of safety wire.

“Damn, how did you know it would be there?” Jake asked.

John laughed. “Before they closed this stagefield I came out here to do some first-echelon maintenance. I hid the safety wire there so that if I came out to do any more maintenance I would have it. But they closed this field and I never came back.”

“That was against regs, wasn’t it? Wasn’t the safety wire supposed to be returned?” Jake asked.

“So, take a stripe from me,” John said, and both men laughed.

With the safety wire it was easy to secure the tarpaulin, so within twenty minutes they left, locking both the hangar and the gate behind them.

They made it all the way back to Fort Morgan Road before they ran into trouble. John was driving, and he stopped when they saw that the road in front of them was blocked off by a pile of old refrigerators. There were at least ten men sitting on top or standing on the ground around the blockade. All were armed.

“Oh, oh,” John said. “That doesn’t look good.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Jake replied.

“What do we do?”

“Nothing for the moment. They aren’t mobile—we are.”

“A lot of good that does us. This is the only road. We’re blocked here.”

“I wonder how far we are from Fort Morgan,” Jake said.

“That mileage marker says seven,” John said.

“Let’s see if we can raise Deon and Willie. It’ll be a long hike for them, but if they come up behind the blockade, we might be able to force our way through.”

Jake cranked in some power to the radio, then picked up the mic.

“Phoenix Base, this is Phoenix One, do you copy?”

“Phoenix One, this is Phoenix Base, over.”

Jake recognized Karin’s voice.

“Phoenix, we’ve run into a little trouble here. We are at the seven-mile marker on Fort Morgan Road. There is a barrier across the road in front of us, as well as several armed men.”

“Are you in danger?” Karin asked, and Jake could hear the concern in her voice.

“Not immediate danger,” Jake replied. “We are mobile and they aren’t. The problem is, we can’t get through. We may need a little backup.”

“Phoenix One, what do you propose?” This was Deon’s voice.

“It’ll be a long hike for you, but maybe if you came up from behind, put pressure on them, we could get through here.”

“Will do. Out.”

Jake put the microphone down and continued to stare through the windshield at the barrier in front of them.

“What do we do now?” John asked.

“We wait.”

Fort Morgan

“Marcus, Willie, grab a weapon. We have a long hike in front of us,” Deon said. Deon picked up the M-240 machine gun.

“You don’t have to hike,” James said. “We have plenty of bicycles down here.”

“Yeah, that’s right, you do, don’t you?” Deon said.

“You can ride a bike if you want to,” Bob said. He was looking at the Huey. “Or, we could bring some heavy firepower down on them.”

“What do you mean?” Deon asked.

Bob pointed to the helicopter. “Marcus, when you left Hanchey Field, did you have a full load of fuel?”

“Yes, sir,” Marcus replied.

“You flew straight here, didn’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

Bob smiled. “Then you’ve got at least a hundred and fifty miles’ operating range remaining,” he said.

“What are you thinking, Mr. Varney?” Deon asked.

“Didn’t you tell me your dad was a door gunner in Vietnam?” Bob replied.

“Yes, sir, he was. He was with the sixty-eighth.”

Bob nodded. “Sixty-eighth? Ahh, Top Tiger,” he said. “Good outfit. How would you like to be a door gunner?”

“Wait a minute, are you saying you are going to try and fly that thing?” Marcus asked.

“I’m not going to try, I’m going to do it,” Bob said.

“Oh, Bob, no!” Ellen said. “You haven’t flown in almost forty years!”

“I hadn’t ridden a bike in a longer time than that, but first time I got on one down here, I was able to ride, wasn’t I?”

“That’s not the same thing and you know it,” Ellen said.

“Sure it is. The only difference is, I have a hell of a lot more time in one of these than I ever did on a bicycle. What about it, guys? You want to try it?” Bob asked.

A huge smile spread across Deon’s face. “Hell yes,” he said. “Let’s go!”

Deon and Willie began putting their weapons in the helicopter while Marcus untied the blade. Bob did a walk-around pre-flight inspection, and as he climbed up onto the deck to examine the rotor head, it was as if he had done this just yesterday. He took another look at the jury-rigged drag brace; then he jumped down and started to get in.

“Wait a minute,” Jerry said. “I’m going too.” Jerry was carrying a bow and a quiver of arrows.

Willie laughed. “Do you plan to scalp them too?” Marcus laughed as well, but Deon held out his hand. “No, wait,” he said. “I’ve got an idea. Wait here for a moment.”

Deon jumped out of the helicopter and ran into the nearby casement. When he came back he was carrying something.

“I’ll be damned,” Marcus said. “That’s a good idea.”

“What’s a good idea?” Willie asked. “What are you talking about?”

“That’s C-four,” Marcus said.

Deon got back into the helicopter. “Hand me a few of your arrows,” he said.

Jerry complied, and Deon wrapped the C-4 plastic explosive material around the arrows, then, using a knife to cut off the arrow heads, replaced them with blasting caps. He did four arrows that way.

“Now,” he said. “When we go in, we are going to go in heavy.”

“Clear!” Bob shouted as he pulled the starter trigger.