Founders: A Novel of the Coming Collapse

25. El Tesoro

Near Sedona, Arizona

May, the Fourth Year

Ignacio García’s looter gang, La Fuerza, had gone mobile just as the Crunch began, cutting a swath from near Houston, west across Texas, through southern New Mexico and Arizona. García’s gang had specialized in invading small towns and stripping them clean. One of their trademarks was using armored cars, both former bank transport armored cars, and wheeled military surplus armored personnel carriers (APCs). At its peak, García’s looter gang was a small army, numbering 212 with fifty-three vehicles.

La Fuerza was quite successful until they reached the vicinity of Prescott, Arizona. There, a group of local citizens bolstered by a small contingent from New Mexico carried out a daring nighttime raid on Humboldt and Dewey, Arizona, with Molotov cocktail firebombs, destroying all of their armored vehicles and half of their unarmored ones. In the raid forty-four of the gang members were killed or wounded.

A retaliatory raid on Prescott—in which nearly every building in the city was burned—cost the lives of another forty-seven gang members. Soon after that, seven members left the gang. They stole away in the night, in two groups.

North of Williams, Arizona

June, the Fourth Year

Three weeks after burning Prescott, Ignacio decided to cache all his precious metals and gemstones. With just his wife and his trusted lieutenant, Tony, he drove four miles off Highway 64 into federally owned rangeland that his maps showed was administered by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM).

They found a rusted abandoned tractor frame that looked like it had been there for more than fifty years to use as a landmark. He wrote down the GPS coordinates. Then he stretched a piece of twine from the tractor’s steering column to a large, distinctive boulder 100 feet away. With a tape measure he measured exactly forty feet down the string from the tractor and scratched a large X on the ground with the tip of a digging bar. They brought a pick and two shovels from the pickup and started to dig.

The dry, rocky soil made digging difficult. Ignacio’s original plan had been to dig a hole five feet deep. But as the day warmed up and blisters began to form, he revised his plan to dig a trench just two feet deep. The gold and platinum coins as well as a large assortment of jewelry and gemstones had already been packed in eighteen U.S. military surplus .50 caliber ammo cans. The greatest value was in loose diamonds and diamond wedding rings. García’s wife had lost count at just over 300 stones, so she estimated that there were at least 350 diamonds. The cans were so heavy that they were difficult for a man to lift and carry.

Before placing the cans in the hole, Ignacio opened them and applied a coating of Vaseline to the rubber gaskets on their lids. After taking a few minutes to admire his treasure (tesoro), he resealed the cans. They laid the cans in the bottom of the trench, covered them with two thicknesses of trash bags, and then refilled the trench. They spent thirty minutes scattering the excess dirt and smoothing over the site to make it look undisturbed. Then they dragged some scrap metal they found near the tractor and placed it on top of the cache to serve both as a reminder of where the cache was located and to foil anyone who might someday use a metal detector.

He wrote down the precise GPS coordinates for both the tractor and the cache on two pieces of paper. He then trimmed them to the size of business cards and laminated them on both sides with clear packing tape. He had his wife sew one of these into the lining of her fur coat, and one into his leather belt.

In June, García’s gang drove into Colorado, following their time-proven hit-and-run tactics. They gathered trucks and vans to replace some of the vehicles lost in the Humboldt and Dewey, Arizona, fiasco.

In each town they hit, they began to hear more and more about the ProvGov. Generally called the Federals—or as García’s men termed them, los federales—they were a great concern to García and his lieutenants. They were told that Fort Carson was the headquarters for the UNPROFOR in Colorado.

One of García’s men approached him and said, “These federales, they’re going to squash us like a bug.”

García shook his head. “Not if we become security contractors. As contractors, we’ll just have to give up a little piece of what we take, but we’ll have legitimacy. Under the martial law, it will all be official. We’ll be employees of the ProvGov.”

So they dubbed themselves Force Two Associates, or simply F2. Carlos, who had been a graffiti tagger before he’d joined La Fuerza, cut a handsome sixteen-inch-tall “F2” stencil for painting the doors, hoods, and tailgates of their trucks. They used glossy black spray paint. Some of the camp followers carefully embroidered the F2 logo on some stolen tan baseball caps to match.

Negotiating with the regional administrator at Fort Carson went rapidly. García quickly hammered out a mutually acceptable charter. The UNPROFOR’s cut was 20 percent of all loot. The regional administrator took a further personal commission of 2 percent, although that was not mentioned in the charter contract. But he made it clear that if he didn’t get his cut, in gold, he would leave García twisting in the wind.

Fort Knox, Kentucky

September, the Third Year

To Andy, joining the New Army seemed simultaneously familiar and strange. For example, when he drew his issue of field gear, it was still called “TA-50” gear, but it was an odd assortment of field gear that included a set of U.S. interceptor body armor (IBA), a German sleeping bag, a Dutch tent, Belgian waterproof over-boots and parka, a French backpack, and a battered Russian mess kit. At the same time, he was handed a chit for an “Article 4 Exemption” Hardigg locker. This, he was told, could be picked up at the Army Community Service (ACS) and Army Emergency Relief (AER) Outreach Office on Binter Street. The ACS office was not far from the Commissary and Exchange stores. It seemed strange to him that the ACS charity would issue a piece of military equipment.

Andy drove to the ACS/AER office on his lunch hour. As he entered the building, he walked by two contract civilian security guards who were armed with laser-mounted M4s. The men were lounging in overstuffed chairs in the foyer. By their clothes and mannerisms, they looked like XE Corporation toughs or at least XE wannabes.

Inside the building, Andy expected to see a utilitarian office. But he was stunned to see that the office was overfurnished with ornate antique furniture. Every bit of wall space was lined with fancy chairs, armoires, china cabinets, and marble-top tables. He handed the chit to a plump secretary who wore too much eye makeup. As she rose from her chair, Andy observed that she was armed with a wakazashi Japanese short sword, carried in a sashlike obi belt. She escorted him to a room with a pile of empty Hardigg lockers and said matter-of-factly, “Take one. You’ll have to provide your own lock and chain.”

Andy shouldered one of the lockers and carried it out to his pickup. When he opened the locker to examine it, he found a silkscreened sign the size of a bumper sticker lacquered inside the lid. It read:

When he got back to his quarters that evening, Andy discussed the locker with Kaylee. He said, “I feel like I’ve been transported into an alternate universe. The AER office used to be just a place for penniless wives of junior NCOs to get the bare-bones necessities of running a household, like diapers and dishes, and stew pots. But now the place looks like something out of an antique furniture auction catalogue. It’s bizarre. Do you remember when we borrowed my dad’s set of the old Star Trek television series on DVD? There was that parallel universe episode where Spock had a beard?”

Kaylee nodded and said, “Yeah, it was called Mirror, Mirror.”

“Yep, that’s the one. Well, I haven’t met a bearded Mr. Spock yet, but today I met Uhura with a dagger. The world has been turned inside out. Since when is a charitable organization given control of excess loot?”