Founders: A Novel of the Coming Collapse

17. From the Oil Patch

Waterville, Vermont

December, the First Year

Brent Danley had known the Crunch was going to be bad. He had been following the posts on a variety of survivalist blogs and forums for several years. He would have liked to be better prepared, but his tight budget kept him from working up his pantry to more than a three-month supply. Brent also saw the need to be better armed, but again cash was the constraint. He owned an older bolt-action Winchester .30-06 that had belonged to his father-in-law, a Remington 870 shotgun with a thirty-inch barrel, and two .22 rifles.

Brent worked as an emergency room trauma nurse at Copley Hospital in Morrisville, Vermont. But he lived fifteen miles away in his hometown of Waterville. He and his wife, Jennifer, owned a modest three-bedroom house on Lapland Road that was built in the 1970s. With six kids ranging from four to thirteen years old, the house was a tight squeeze. They were on well water and a creek ran through the property year-round.

Before the Crunch began, Brent made some extra money each year “sugaring”—making maple syrup, which was a family tradition. He sold most of his syrup wholesale. But he saved the best to sell retail, marketed under the trade name Northern Comfort. He was once threatened with a trademark infringement lawsuit by a company using the same name, until he mailed a photocopy of a newspaper clipping from 1946 showing that his grandfather had used the trade name Northern Comfort at least that far back. His short note hinted at a countersuit. That was the last that he heard about lawsuits.

After times got hard, Brent reanimated another one of his grandfather’s ventures: an alcohol still that was built in 1931. At the same time that Brent’s grandfather first operated the still, his great-uncle ran a small pharmacy in Johnson, Vermont. He sold both moonshine from his brother’s still and whiskey smuggled in from Canada. Both products were sold surreptitiously to trusted customers out the back door. The extra income from the booze helped the pharmacy survive the Great Depression. It also allowed grandfather Danley to extend credit to many of his customers for many years. Later, during the Second World War, these customers gradually paid off their bills, and they expressed their gratitude.

The Norwood Ranch, Newell, South Dakota

January, the Third Year

In January, Ken caught up with some maintenance on their guns. Terry’s CAR-15 had a metal rail fore-end with an Israeli folding foregrip and rubber rail covers. These covers had gradually gotten lost in their travels, with constant handling. By the time they reached the Norwoods’ ranch, there were six of the gun’s twelve short rubber rail covers missing. With some inquiries via the CB network, they found a man on the south side of Newell who had some spares. In exchange for two silver dimes, they got eight UTG rail covers in a mix of green, tan, and flat dark earth colors. Terry actually grew to like the odd assortment when she realized that it made her carbine blend in more than it had when the rail covers were all black. At the same time, Ken did some touch-up painting on both rifles. After more than a year of daily use, they had both lost some of their finish, mainly on their sights, muzzles, and charging handles. To remedy this, Ken was given a small bottle of flat black lacquer and a tiny brush from Durward’s collection of model-making supplies that had languished since his teenage years.

They were shoveling manure out of the trodden snow in the south corral. Ken asked Carl, “What can you tell me about Belle Fourche?”

Carl chuckled. “Well, Belle Fourche is just a cow town that had a good Ford dealership, a western clothing store called Pete’s, and not much else worth mentioning. It’s the town where John Wayne and his crew of kids drove their cattle to, in that old movie The Cowboys. And did you ever see that series on cable called Deadwood? The Seth Bullock character in that show was the founder of Belle Fourche. Not much else to tell you. Oh, maybe I should say that the soil there is slowly moving downhill. It’s what they call a ‘soil creek,’ which is what eventually makes all the fence posts point downhill. It is like a landslide, but in extreme slow motion. I sure wouldn’t build a house there.”

After another pause, he carried on, sounding more serious. “The population was about 5,000 before everything went nuts. Based on what I saw happen in Newell, I suppose the population of Belle Fourche must have increased by a few hundred last year, with people taking in their kids and grandkids and cousins, mainly from Rapid City and back east.

“And of course just two weeks before you got here, the population of Belle Fourche dropped by about 200, due to an outbreak of instantaneous lead poisoning. If you think the security is tight in Newell, then you ought to visit Belle Fourche. I’ve heard they’ve got that town locked up tighter than a drum. Any adult they don’t recognize by sight gets stopped and asked for ID. If they don’t have a local address then they’ve got a lot of explaining to do. Same thing for anyone driving a rig who doesn’t have license plates with a ‘15’ prefix—showing that a vehicle is registered in Butte County.”

“How are people getting by?”

“I have no idea about the economy there now. I suppose that the town is squeaking by on barter, just like in Newell. There was a good grain mill at Belle Fourche, which is where I went to get my last bags of cracked corn before the dollar hit the fan. I don’t know if it’s still operating, or even if it could, without power.”

Carl sparingly used his CB radio at night and at noon each day, listening to a local news relay network. One morning at breakfast he summarized what he had been hearing. “Things have changed a lot since the Crunch. There’s been a big die-off. And there are actually fewer problems on the highway than there were six months ago. Up until recently, there was a big problem with people setting up roadblocks and pillaging people that were passing through. But after a while the only people available to be robbed were a bunch of ragtag refugees with nothing left worth stealing. Also, word got out as to where the fixed-location bandit roadblocks were located, so people just started bypassing them.”

After a moment of reflection, he continued, “These days, the big problem is with large mobile looter gangs, since all the small gangs have been wiped out. But now we’re hearing about big, big gangs with 100-plus people and 25-plus vehicles and a real bad attitude. They’re like modern-day Vikings or the Mongol Horde. No town with a population of less than 10,000 is safe from them.”

The Norwood Ranch, Newell, South Dakota

March, the Third Year

In March, after the snow had receded and while the Laytons were making preparations to depart, a stranger came down Parilla Road from the east. Traveling alone, the man carried a large Lowe backpack and an AK-74. He was dressed in OCP camouflage pants with a brown Army button-top sweater, and an OCP boonie hat. As he approached the gate, Terry, who was on guard in the woodshed OP, could see that the stranger was a young man with a dark complexion. She had already radioed Cordelia in the house, alerting her of the man’s approach. Seeing the stranger linger after reading the sign, Ken stepped out the front door, holding his HK at the ready.

Pointing to the sign, the stranger shouted, “Can you give me directions to this church?”

Ken answered, “Sure, but first who are you, and where are you from?”

“My name’s Curt Mehgai. I was working in the oil patch up in Parshall, North Dakota, when everything fell apart. I was doing pipeline and pump maintenance. But I spent the past year with a team guarding a big feed lot and elevator operation.”

Overhearing Ken’s questions and recognizing that this was an unusual solo refugee, Carl stepped out onto the porch to listen better to their conversation.

“Are you prior service?” Ken asked.

“Yeah, I was an 11B. That’s infantry. I got out as a corporal. I was an M240-Bravo machinegunner with Alpha Company of the 2nd Battalion, 48th Infantry BCT—that’s a Brigade Combat Team—from Fort Stewart.”

“Any combat experience?”

“Yeah, two deployments. I’ve seen plenty of lead flying around, and I sent my share of lead downrange.”

“Where are you headed?”

“Anywhere I can find work.”

Ken looked over his shoulder to Carl, who nodded deeply in assent.

Still shouting, Ken asked, “Okay, here is what I want you to do: I want you to clear your weapon, and I’ll come out to the gate and escort you to the house. There might be work for you here.”

Mehgai removed the magazine from his AK, and stuffed it into his trouser’s right cargo pocket. Then, holding the rifle with its muzzle upward, he flipped down its safety lever, and ejected the live round from the chamber into his free hand. He held the cartridge up over his head for Ken to see, and then stuffed it into a pants pocket. Finally, he cycled the rifle’s action twice with large air guitar flourishes, demonstrating that the gun’s chamber was empty.

Ken walked to the gate with his HK clone muzzle down, but with his thumb on the selector switch. As he unlocked the gate and opened it, Curt looked down at Ken’s rifle and said appreciatively, “Oooh, HK-G3!”

They spent the next half hour on the front porch, quizzing Curt.

“I went home to visit my family on Guam, but I couldn’t find any decent kind of job there. I knew I didn’t want to go back on active duty because I’d no doubt get deployed back to A-stan, and I didn’t want to go in the Army Reserve, because I’d no doubt get deployed back to A-stan….” He paused to laugh, then said: “So I was doing some job hunting on the Internet and I read about the oil boom in North Dakota, so I thought, ‘Why not?’ It turned out they were hiring almost anyone with a strong back and who was willing to put up with winters in the Dakotas. And it didn’t hurt that I was a veteran. When the economy went kerflooey, I asked around and found a job at the other end of the county, at a big grain elevator. The place is run by a family that’s been there since the 1890s. They own both the elevator and a feed lot. Again, being prior service helped me get the job.”

“So why’d you leave?”

“The man who owned the company kept having more and more of his relatives arrive after the Crunch. Some of them trickled in pretty late, even as recent as last November—and they told some amazing stories about how they managed to get out of the big cities. Anyways, blood is thicker than water, so I got asked to leave—politely, you know, and with plenty of notice. At least they gave me until the snow was off the roads. Nobody else in town needed a security guy, so off I went.”

The questioning shifted to Carl, who asked, “Do you have any military paperwork?”

“Yeah, I’ve got my DD-214—that’s a discharge document and service record.”

Being cautious, Carl first matched Mehgai’s face to his driver’s license, and then the name on the license to the DD-214. The discharge document told Carl nearly everything he needed to know. Curt Mehgai had been awarded two Army Commendation medals, a Bronze Star, and a Purple Heart.

Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana

March, the Third Year

The UNPROFOR contact team arrived at Malmstrom very quietly. General Woolson had expected that they would immediately attempt to relieve him of command, and he had a contingency plan in place to counter that. But surprisingly, Woolson was told that he would continue to command the base.

The UNPROFOR team soon took over the old headquarters building. But it took three months for several large generators to be hauled in from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio and to get power to the building reliably.

The interactions between General Woolson’s staff and the contact team became a strange ballet of probes, feints, obfuscation, and denial. Woolson was repeatedly threatened with being relieved of command for “studious lack of cooperation.” He countered that he was a team player and complained that he lacked resources to provide the data and facilities access that the ProvGov demanded. Both sides in the struggle did their best to hide key facts and intentions. Their meetings went on for months. Woolson and his staff finally moved out of their trailers in the hangar and back into the headquarters building in November.

Inevitably, both Woolson and the UNPROFOR liaison team commander got what they wanted: Woolson didn’t have to give up the keys to the kingdom, and the UNPROFOR team denied Malmstrom the resources required to resume operational capability (OC).

Though they were never spoken per se, it eventually became apparent that the UNPROFOR contact team had only a few key goals:

Rather than simply relieving Woolson of command, he was nominally put under the operational control of UNPROFOR. His “commander” was a UN major general from England. However, Woolson carefully did some picking and choosing in deciding which of his orders he would carry out, and which he would not via delays, excuses, and obfuscation. Many orders, he said, had been “put at a lower priority, or placed ‘under study, due to lack of requisite resources.’”

Woolson discovered that the two highest-ranking officers on the UNPROFOR contact team had drinking problems. So he kept them well supplied with liquor. This tactic further slowed the pace of the meetings.

In a secret meeting with no UN officers present, Woolson told his staff, “We continue the tap dance and treat them like mushrooms—we keep them in the dark and spread the steer manure around liberally. We stall them, and pencil whip them, and play charades as long as possible. Most importantly, we do not let them have the codes so that none of the LCCs can be accessed. To make it look like we are being compliant, we will let them ‘inspect’ as many LFs as they’d like—very slowly and laboriously, mind you—but we make excuses so that we never, ever, give a UN officer access to an LCC capsule. We can walk them around upstairs at the MAFs and give them nice dog-and-pony shows and pretty little PowerPoint presentations until they are blue in the face. But the bottom line is that they never get the crypto keys. The LCCs stay locked down, gentlemen. We will deny them any launch capability.”

As a contingency, Woolson ordered that thermite devices be built and secretly distributed. These were a last-ditch measure, designed to destroy both the encrypted blast door locks at the LCCs and the jackscrew mechanisms for the seven-ton “B Plugs” at the LFs. This contingency plan was given the code name “Uniform Delta,” which stood for “ultimate denial.”

Secretly, the UN staff had decided that there wasn’t enough manpower that could be spared to secure and reactivate Malmstrom’s vast missile fields. And, after all, the missiles weren’t needed anyway. They had plenty of operational missiles in France, Russia, and China—at least as long as Russia and China continued to toe the line. The stated goal of “reactivation” of Malmstrom was in fact a “capability denial operation.”

The key to the UN’s denial strategy was the decision to delay restoration of grid power to western Montana. The UN’s general staff had concluded that if they wanted to keep the American missiles neutered, all they needed to do was delay having the power grid in that region reenergized.