Founders: A Novel of the Coming Collapse

29. To Dust

Fife, Montana

August, the Fourth Year

As the ProvGov capitulated, there were a few UN army units and “contractors” who went renegade and refused to lay down their arms. Without support from the crumbling Fort Knox government, the holdout units were increasingly demoralized, depleted logistically, and hemmed in by steadily growing resistance forces.

The remnants of García’s Force Two Associates gang was by then down to just twenty-three men and fourteen camp followers. The Resistance killed his friend Tony, who had been with him since the beginning. This was when they were looting the town of Lame Deer, Montana. The F2 gang had moved into Montana two weeks earlier, hoping that the lower population density would mean they’d meet less organized opposition. But instead the Resistance seemed only stronger and better organized. The F2 gang was reduced to making a few nighttime raids for food and fuel, and laying up each day in parklands or at abandoned ranches. No longer able to bluff their way into towns under color of law, they avoided being seen in all but the smallest towns.

An abandoned ranch on Enger Cutoff Road, a few miles east of Great Falls, seemed like a good place for F2 to spend a day. They pulled in an hour before dawn. A windmill kept a stock tank full so they’d have drinking water. And they were able to conceal their vehicles in a large hay barn—now empty except for a few bales that had turned black with mold. But what they didn’t realize was that a neighbor a half mile away who owned a small dairy farm had seen their headlights. The dairyman was up early for his morning milking. He knew that the adjoining ranch had been abandoned for more than two years. Curious, the dairyman stealthily approached the house and ascertained that the vehicles belonged to F2. He got back to his own farmhouse just as dawn was breaking, and immediately reported seeing the looters by telephone.

As the security coordinator for that end of the county, Joshua got the word just a few minutes later. He hung up the phone and began jotting down notes.

Kelly, who had overheard his end of the conversation, asked, “What’s your plan?”

“Just MSU.”

Kelly laughed. The standing joke answer to all difficult questions in Kelly’s business classes at Montana State University had been “MSU,” which referred to an alternate use of the acronym for the school’s name: “Make Stuff Up.”

“Really?” she asked.

“I won’t be able to say what the plan is until I see the lay of the land,” Joshua said. “I’ll make up a plan on the fly. We’ll just gather at the Fife junction, and then we’ll probably cram ourselves into a smaller number of vehicles. We’ll stop about a half mile short of the farm, and walk in from there. Sometimes MSU beats elaborate planning and multilevel interagency coordination. And it certainly does when time is of the essence.”

“Air support?”

“None available. The Hueys and most of the 341st Security Forces Squadron are way back beyond the east end of the missile fields. They got called in to support the handover of command of an artillery unit that capitulated a few days ago. Then they got tasked with mopping up a bunch of looters even farther east. With refueling and all, it would take them a minimum of fifteen hours to get here, and by then the bad guys will probably be gone.”

Joshua got to Fife twenty minutes later driving the Rust Bucket. The Fife junction was close to his old rental house, which now sat empty.

The ranchers soon began to arrive. They were armed mostly with scoped deer rifles. One of them had a scoped M1A semiauto, which Joshua thought was perfect for what he had planned. The majority of them wore jeans and camouflage hunting jackets. A few of them wore complete camouflage ensembles. Three airmen from the 341st—two E-3s and one E-4—arrived, all armed with M4 carbines. Joshua considered their carbines inadequate “pop guns” for what he had envisioned. He recognized two of the airmen from his security forces cross training, where in the past year he had learned the rudiments of small unit tactics.

Joshua began his briefing. “Gentlemen, I’m Lieutenant Watanabe. What we have planned today is to reconnoiter and possibly engage a group of looters that just rolled into an unoccupied farm over on Enger Cutoff Road. I’m in command, and I’ll lead the main group. You three from the 341st will cover the rear of the farm from the south, act as our backup, and likely provide a diversion. I haven’t yet scoped it out, but I anticipate that the rest of us will set up an ambush position on the north side of the road. We’ll coordinate on the Guard frequency.”

One of the ranchers raised his hand and asked, “So are we going to assault the farmhouse?”

“No. That would put us at risk of taking too many casualties. Frontal assaults are the ProvGov’s style, not mine. My plan is different: We make them come to us, and we just shoot them.”

Noticing smoke grenade canister pouches strapped on the MOLLE vests worn by the three airmen, Joshua said, “I see you guys have some pyro with you. Those will probably come in handy. More on that later.”

Approaching stealthily, Joshua reconnoitered the farmhouse and barn. He set up his spotting scope just over 300 yards away. Seeing the F2 logo on the tailgates of two of the pickups confirmed his suspicions. He radioed his instructions to the team from the 341st. It was now just after 11 a.m. and the day was warming up.

Joshua gave his men a briefing on the situation and he sent a runner back to their parked vehicles, to get a pickup equipped with a winch. Using the winch, they pulled out the cattle guard at the entrance road to the farm. With the help of five men, Joshua flipped the heavy steel cattle guard over and back into the ditch at an odd angle, facing inward. They left the pickup parked at a sharp angle, and its winch cable stretched parallel across the top of the cattle guard to form an additional barrier.

Seeing the upended cattle guard and the cable, Joshua declared, “Nobody is getting through here in a hurry. Okay, let’s get into position.”

They crossed the road and began to climb the low hills on the opposite side. As they walked, Francisco Ortega, a young ranch hand that Joshua had met only once before, asked, “Lieutenant, can’t they just go around the cattle guard and crash through the barbed wire fence?”

Joshua shook his head and said, “That’s a Hollywood myth. I saw a looter van going fifty miles an hour glance into a barbed wire fence a couple of years ago. The fence stopped that van. And my father-in-law was in the Army. He told me that even tracked vehicles like tanks and APCs have trouble going through a three-strand barbed wire fence. Most cars might get fifty feet, pulling up a few T-posts, but then they almost always end up in a big wad of wire around the wheels. And usually the wire doesn’t break, either. So a barbed wire fence is the perfect stopper for a car or a pickup.”

Francisco nodded, and Joshua went on. “If anybody steps out of those rigs to cut the fence wires, we shoot them. Or if they try to crash though and get tangled up, we shoot them. And if they try to back up, we shoot them.”

Francisco chuckled. “I noticed that all three of those ended with: ‘… we shoot them.’”

Watanabe chuckled as well. “I can see that you were paying attention. You may have a future in the militia.”

They picked out prone shooting positions on the two small hillocks that were respectively 200 and 250 yards from the cattle guard, on either side of the creek that flowed south and through a culvert into the dairy farm. Their “far ambush” positions provided a decent cross fire to engage anyone at the cattle guard, and a good distance in either direction on Enger Cutoff Road. Francisco, armed with a scoped .300 Weatherby Magnum that had belonged to his grandfather, was lying five yards to Joshua’s left. Joshua again glassed the farmhouse and barns with his spotting scope. Their activity at the cattle guard had not been noticed, since it was 600 yards north of the house, and some intervening terrain blocked the line of sight.

Joshua pressed the PTT bar on his handie-talkie and said, “Okay, pop smoke and light ’em up.”

Moments later, two red smoke grenades were set off by the backup team. A light breeze from the west pushed the red smoke eastward.

Soon, there was a flurry of activity as the Force Two men sprinted to their trucks in the barn.

Bursts of automatic fire came from the trio of airmen, and a hail of 5.56mm bullets pierced the walls and roof of the barn and farmhouse.

Not wanting to stay for a fight, the F2-marked vehicles soon pulled out of the barn in an impromptu convoy, and they quickly drove north to the gate. They stopped five yards short of the overturned cattle guard.

Joshua thumbed his rifle’s safety forward. Absently, he remembered that he had shot only ten rounds of .30-06 since the Crunch began. Together, those ten shots accounted for stopping one looter van and dropping five mule deer.

The Mad Minute began. By prearrangement, Watanabe’s team first shot up the engine compartments and tires on the rearmost pickup. Then they shifted their fire and systematically shot out the tires on all the other vehicles. Joshua fired sixteen rounds, pausing once every four rounds to flip open the rifle’s bottom-hinged magazine and refill it. When they switched to shooting out the vehicle windows, the occupants panicked and ran. Caught out in open ground in a cross fire, most of them were shot within twenty seconds. A few of the looters tried running east on the road. They, too, were cut down.

Joshua toggled his handheld, ordering the three-man backup from the 341st team to sweep northward.

Confused and not realizing that the shots were coming from two different hills, García and three other men ran northeast, directly toward Joshua and half his team. The last of them dropped before they were within 100 yards of where Joshua and the ranchers lay prone. The firing died down to just a few sporadic shots from Joshua’s men.

Joshua shouted, “Okay, everyone top off your guns! Show me a fist when you’re done.”

He heard the sound of guns being reloaded. He stood and scanned his men. They soon all raised a fist. Joshua then swept his arm forward and shouted, “Shoot anything that moves. Follow me!”

They advanced at a slow walk. As they descended the two hills, there were only two coup de grâce shots fired. Joshua and Francisco then came upon Ignacio García, who was bleeding badly. As García lay bleeding heavily, he began to babble in Spanish. His last words, ending in a shout, were “Dónde? Dónde está mi tesoro? Mi tesoro!” Then his chest stopped heaving.

“What’s that he said?” Joshua asked.

Francisco translated. “He was asking: ‘Where is my treasure?’”

“Well, his worldly treasures won’t help him where he’s gone.”

They continued down to the road and crossed it, checking the bodies of the Force Two gang members for signs of life. Some of the men began to search the shot-up vehicles, which sat in green puddles of radiator water. They shut down the engine of one vehicle that was still sputtering.

The three enlisted men from the 341st trotted up to see what had happened. Joshua said simply, “We covered the rest of it from our positions. Good work on providing the cattle prod, guys. That was a job well done.”

As they passed by the body of García’s wife, who had been shot through the neck, Joshua instructed, “Save anything that looks useful for turn-in. Burn the rest.”

Still standing beside the body of García’s wife, Francisco picked up the collar of a full-length mink coat with the tip of his rifle barrel, and asked, “What about this fur coat, sir?”

“No. It has blood all over it. Burn it.”