Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse

CHAPTER 15 The Raid

After prayers and yet another briefing, the militia conducted their final inspections and rehearsals. With their web gear and camouflage face paint on, the militia looked fearsome. Mike, Lisa, Todd, T.K., and Rose wore bulletproof vests and helmets. Mike walked up and down the line of raiders, shooting questions. “What is the running password? What would a red star cluster flare or six short whistle blasts indicate? What is your en route panic azimuth? On which CB channel will we coordinate with the Templars? What is the alternate channel? What is our call sign? What is their call sign? Can you list the chain of command?”

Next he had each member of the patrol jump up and down to check for items that might be excessively noisy. The last item of business was a final check of each patrol member’s personal camouflage. Finally satisfied, Mike ordered, “Aw-right pilgrims, let’s saddle up. Lock and load.”With a few hoots and hollers, they filed out the door to two waiting pickups.

Margie, Mary, Shona, and baby Jacob were left to “hold the fort.” As they watched the two trucks drive away, both women started to cry.

The drive north was relatively quiet. They parked the trucks on a logging road three miles south of Princeton. From there, they traveled on foot in

“Ranger file.” The raiders were in position three hundred yards outside town by 3:30 a.m. There, they lay in the chill darkness, waiting. Radio silence was broken only once, at 4 a.m. Dan Fong, who was using an earphone with his CB heard the call, “Ready Freddie, over.” He whispered the reply, “Ready Mikey, out.” He rolled over to tap Mike on the shoulder, gestured to the earphone, and gave an “okay” signal. Mike nodded and patted Dan on the back.

At 5:20 a.m., Mike walked up and down the line of prone raiders, kicking them in the boots. Not surprisingly, a few of them had fallen asleep. After the adrenaline rush of their initial movement, lying down for two hours was enough to lull some of them into slumber. Mike whispered to each of them, “Quietly and slowly, stretch out and if need be, relieve yourself.”

At 5:30, standing in a skirmish line, Mike gave the arm signal for “forward.” Spread out at ten-yard intervals, the patrol moved forward toward the dim outline of the buildings in the half-light of dawn.

The raiders were already within the confines of the town before anyone was spotted. It was Kevin who was first seen by the bikers’ roving guard. Two quick shots from Lendel’s riotgun dropped the guard before he even had a chance to unsling his carbine. Immediately after he saw that the man was no longer a threat, Kevin quickly refilled his gun’s tubular magazine from the elastic nylon shell holder mounted on the gun’s stock.

After the first shots were fired, the rest of the raiders picked up their pace to a trot, and moved in the direction of their assigned buildings.

Jeff Trasel had been given the assignment of suppressing the bikers’ M60 machinegun position. Soon after he heard Kevin’s shots, thirty yards to the west, he came in sight of the machinegun position. The machine gunner, obviously nervous, was pointing the weapon in the direction of the commotion caused by Lendel. Fortunately, Jeff was approaching at a 90-degree angle to the muzzle of the weapon. Dropping to one knee, he fired four rounds from his HK91 at the man behind the M60. Three of his four shots hit the man in the chest and head.

Taking the initiative, Jeff rushed the position. As he reached the machinegun, he lowered the muzzle of his rifle and fired two more rounds at the chest of the dying biker. Crouching down behind the gun, he reloaded his rifle from one of the magazine pouches on his web gear, and then cross-slung it across his back. By now, he could hear more firing coming from down the street in both directions.

Jeff whispered a gleeful “Oh yeah,” as he picked up the M60. Lifting the gun’s feed tray cover, he could see that its bolt was in the rearward position, ready to fire. He muttered to himself, “Now I get to see if you work!” He snapped the feed tray cover back down into its locked position. With a quick search of the machinegun position, Jeff found another hundred-round belt of ammunition lying loose in a wooden box. Trasel unhooked the last round of this belt, and linked it back to the first round in the belt, forming a continuous loop.

This he slung across his shoulder, bandoleer fashion. Trasel then hefted the twenty-three-pound weapon, folded its bipod legs into their closed position, and flipped the trailing end of the ammunition belt across his left shoulder.

At the far end of town, Todd Gray was running into trouble. He, Lisa, and Lon were all concentrating their fire on a house that held at least two bikers.

The gang members were firing steadily but randomly from the house’s downstairs windows. Because of their positions, both the gang members and the raiders were having little effect. When he heard a pause in the fire coming from his side of the building, Gray made a zigzag dash across the street, firing as he ran, and flattened himself up against the side of the house. There, he quickly reloaded his HK.

Todd dropped prone and inched his way down the side of the building until he was directly below the window from which the shooting had resumed. The muzzle blast from the gun firing only two feet above his head was tremendous. Taking a grenade from his cargo pocket, Todd pulled its pin, letting the spoon fly away. Fortunately, the sound of the grenade’s primer and the hiss of the fuse were muffled by the noise of the shooting, which by now was continuous. After a silent two count, Todd tossed the grenade into the window. Just after he again dropped flat, the grenade went off with a roar.

With his ears ringing, Todd scrambled through the smoking window. He fired three times at the inert form of a man wearing only a pair of blue jeans.

He then moved slowly and cautiously from room to room. When he reached the front of the house, he was greeted by unaimed pistol shots coming from behind a half-wall partition. Gray aimed carefully at a spot three feet below where he had seen a gun hand occasionally pop over the partition. Centering on this spot, he fired a ten-shot burst in a horizontal spread. There was no more firing in reply from behind the partition.

To be certain that he had been successful, Todd lowered his muzzle to fire another horizontal burst just above the base of the partition. He did this assuming that anyone left alive there would by now be lying prone. His rifle now empty, Todd pulled his .45 automatic from his holster and thumbed down the safety. He took a peek around the corner to find the still form of a woman lying in a pool of blood. Her hand clutched an AMT long-slide stainless steel .45 automatic. Her gun was empty, its slide locked to the rear. Todd raised his own pistol and fired a one-round coup de grâce at the woman’s head. Listening carefully, he could hear the sound of someone sobbing upstairs. Todd shouted out the shattered front window, “I cleared the downstairs, but there’s still someone upstairs. I need some help in here.”

Lon Porter let out a hoarse, “On the way!”

Lisa followed his words with, “I’ll cover from out here.”

After Lon was in the front door, Todd shook his head twice and announced, “My ears are ringing two pitches at once. For the moment, I’m practically deaf. You’d better lead off.”

“Okey-dokey, Boss,” Porter said with a twisted grin.

Before they moved upstairs, the two men took turns reloading their guns.

“How are you doing for ammo?” Todd inquired.

“I put almost sixty rounds through the FAL, and I haven’t fired my three-fifty-seven at all.”

“Well, it looks like you might get your opportunity.” Gesturing toward the stairway with the muzzle of his HK, he said, “I’ll follow you.”

Farther down the street, Jeff was trying out his new toy. He fired first in reply to muzzle flashes coming from a second story window of a frame house.

Leaning up against a wall, Jeff fired four bursts of about ten rounds each at the window and at the wall below it. There was no more shooting from the window. After firing the M60, Jeff yelled at the top of his lungs, “This is Trasel! This is Trasel!”

Jeff then moved further down the street. His second “target of opportunity” was two men, armed with handguns, running out of town down a side street.

Jeff dropped to the ground, swung out the gun’s bipod legs, and lined up on his targets. By now, the two men were more than three hundred yards away. Five short bursts sent the men kicking in the dust. He again yelled, “This is Trasel!” because, as he was to explain later, he didn’t want anyone thinking that the M60 was still in unfriendly hands.

At the east end of Princeton, four Harleys roared to life and sped out of town. Della fired half a dozen rounds at the retreating forms without success.

Her targets, four hundred yards away, rounded a bend in the road, and were out of sight. Across the street, she heard Doug say, “Save your ammo, they’re out of range. The Templars will take care of them.” Seconds later, they heard an explosion and the ripple of gunfire down the road. Raising her hand, Della gave Doug an “okay” symbol. Just then, they heard the sound of a shotgun barking from a nearby brick house. In a singsong voice, Della yelled, the familiar saying from their countless training sessions, “Okay Joe, I’ll fire, you move!”

Carlton sprinted from car to car, then toward the house, approaching it from around the corner from which the shots were coming. He chirped,

“Okay Joe, I’ll fire, you move.”As Della got up, Carlton started firing his M1A at one-second to two-second intervals to keep the man with the shotgun pinned down. At the side of the building, Doug and Della held a quick consultation and reloaded their rifles. Della resumed firing at the window while Doug went around to enter the house from the front. The man with the shotgun returned her fire only occasionally, with unaimed shots.

Just as Della was firing the last rounds from her second thirty-round magazine, she heard a grenade explosion inside the house. She waited anxiously for a couple of minutes until her husband emerged again from the front of the house. As he padded up to her, Doug smiled and said, “End of story.”

After finding his assigned house empty, T.K. made his way down the main street, and then back up the alley that ran parallel to it to the north. He came under fire twice. On the first occasion, a man firing a bolt-action rifle from the roof of a mobile home sent a round whizzing by his ear. T.K. turned toward the source of the shooting, and dropped into a crouch. He lined up his sights and fired two shots in rapid succession. The first of the sixty-two-grain Sierra match bullets hit the man in the neck and the second hit him in the left eye. The back of his skull disintegrated in a cloud of pink vapor.

As he moved farther down the street, Kennedy came under fire from behind by a man shooting an M1 carbine from the concealment of a porch. T.K. was struck in the back by two bullets, and sent tumbling to the ground.

He was momentarily breathless. Once he realized that his bulletproof vest had stopped the rounds, he rolled over and returned fire with his AR-15 in four quick double taps. His assailant was stitched by half a dozen bullets and lay gurgling on the porch. T.K. stood up and moved on, unconsciously swapping magazines and searching for new targets.

Holding his Smith and Wesson revolver in a low ready position, Lon began his slow ascent of the stairway, hugging the left-hand wall. From below, Todd covered the doorway at the top of the stairs. Once he was at the landing at the top of the stairs, Lon gestured for Todd to follow him. Gray then advanced up the stairs and crouched at the landing while Lon searched the upstairs rooms.

After he had entered the second bedroom, Todd heard Lon fire three times in rapid succession, and then after a pause, a fourth shot. Next, Gray heard the tinkle of empty pistol cartridges hitting the hardwood floor as Porter reloaded his 686 using a speed loader. The last room was unoccupied.

Walking back to the stairwell Lon reported, “There was a young woman in the middle bedroom. All she was wearing was a tank top. She was sitting there crying when I walked in. Then I noticed that she had the tattoo of a rose and a skull on her shoulder. She got up and started toward me fast with a big sheath knife. That’s when I shot her. She was only a few feet away. I never want to have to do something like that again.”

Mike, Dan, Kevin, and Rose did most of the house clearing. They linked together as an ad hoc team, kicking in doors and moving from room to room, eliminating resistance. It was usually Mike who led the way on these assaults.

His bulletproof vest saved his life twice that morning. In one of the building entries, Dan Fong was slightly wounded by a pistol shot that grazed his upper arm. Soon after he applied a Carlisle battle dressing, the wound stopped bleeding.

After twenty minutes of house-to-house and room-to-room fighting, the shooting died down and finally came to a stop. In plain view, Mike jogged up and down the street, checking on the raiders. Once it was clear that there was no more resistance, he walked to the doorway of the service bay of the gas station. He tooted long blasts on his whistle for thirty seconds and then gave the call, “Okay guys, rally on me! Rally on me!”

A few minutes later, ten of the raiders were clustered around him in the back of the gas station. Just inside the door to the garage, Tom Kennedy sat with his rifle at the ready, watching the street. Mike ordered, “Okay, now that we’ve cleared all of the houses, we’re going to go back through again in buddy teams, just to make sure that we didn’t miss anyone. I want every single room of each house thoroughly searched. I don’t care how long it takes. Also, make sure that every one of these ‘One Percenters’ that we shot is one-hundred-percent dead. It’s the ones that you think are dead that get up and shoot you.”

The final clearing process went relatively smoothly. One biker was found hiding under a bed. After he was ordered out from his hiding place, he made a leap for a window. Kevin Lendel fired his riotgun three times, leaving him in a heap beneath the windowsill.

In the back of the former tractor shop, T.K. and Lisa found a ten-year-old boy trapped in a wall locker that had been secured with a twisted piece of coat hanger wire in its latch. He was the only surviving resident of the town. The boy’s hands were wrapped in bloodstained rags. When Lisa removed the rags, she found that both of the boy’s little fingers had been cut off. Lisa asked, “Who did this to you?”

The boy mumbled something unintelligible in reply.

Lisa repeated her question twice more.

Finally, the boy gave a trembling reply, “It was Greasy. He promised that he was going to cut off one finger a day until they were all gone.”

“Why did he do this to you?”

“Because… because I wouldn’t do what he wanted me to do. Greasy wanted me to use my mouth to, to….” With that, the boy’s voice trailed off and he began to cry.

Lisa moved to hug the boy, but he pushed her away with a grunt. “You poor dear. Do you want some water?” Lisa asked.

“Yes please, ma’am.”

Lisa pulled her canteen out of its pouch and handed it to the boy. He drank nearly all of it with loud gulps.

The Templars had set up two three-man ambushes in both directions on the road through Princeton. Each of these ambushes employed two Claymores apiece. Seven other individuals set up one-man ambushes along likely paths of egress from town. Each of these ambushers set up a single Claymore mine.

Only three of the Templars’ ambushes were sprung. The first was initiated by a Claymore mine and followed by rifle fire. This ambush killed the four gang members who attempted to flee on their motorcycles.

The second ambush was sprung by a fourteen-year-old girl. Two men, both armed and one of them naked, were running down the trail directly toward her. Once she saw that they were in the fan of effect of her Claymore, she ducked behind the cover of a downed tree, and touched the bare pair of WD-1 wires to the terminals of a nine-volt battery. To her inexperienced ears, the sound of the explosion was startling. When she popped up with her AR-180 carbine to shoot anything still moving, she found there wasn’t anyone alive left to shoot.

The third Templar ambush was sprung by their communications expert, a seventy-four-year-old retired Navy signalman. Situated at an ambush at a trail junction, he spotted a man wearing a black leather jacket and armed with an inexpensive Maverick riot shotgun running toward him. Not wanting to waste his Claymore, he took careful aim with his M1A and shot the man twice at a range of sixty yards.

Two hours after the shooting stopped, the Templars began to file into town singly or in pairs. They gaped at the bodies lying in the street and at the bodies of the bikers that were being dragged into a growing heap by the Northwest Militia.

One of the Templar women recognized the boy who had been found in the wall locker. She identified him as the son of her hairdresser before the onset of the Crunch. She asked, “Where’s your mommy and daddy, Timmy?”

The boy gave her a vacant stare. After a long pause, he uttered, “They shot my dad when they first came. My mom’s dead, too. Greasy stabbed her. I saw him do it.”

With tears in her eyes, the woman asked, “Would you like to come and live with us? We live near Troy. It’s safe there. There are no bad men there.”

Still sullen, the boy said, “Sure, I guess so, Molly. But first I want to see Greasy. I want to see him dead.”After a few minutes of walking from corpse to corpse, Timmy pointed out the body of the biker called Greasy. He walked over to the corpse and spit on it. Then he walked back to stand under the arm of Molly.

Taking the boy by the arm and leading him away from the corpses, Molly said, “Don’t worry, Timmy. It’s over now.” The boy looked up at her and gave her a painful look of disbelief.

After posting a perimeter of security, Todd, Mike, Roger Dunlap, and Ted Wallach sat down for a quick meeting in the back of the gas station. First, they compared notes on the number of gang members that they had killed. Todd brought out matter-of-factly, “We killed sixteen. Captured zero.”

Dunlap nodded and said, “We got seven in our ambushes. That adds up to twenty-three, which squares nicely with the figure that your man Trasel gave in his recon report. At most, one or two might have slipped away.”

With an edge on his voice, Todd said, “I hope that we got every single one of them. There’s no way to be sure, though.” The discussion then shifted to their options for dealing with the dead bodies and captured equipment.

Most of the afternoon was spent in an even more thorough search of the houses, including, basements, crawl spaces, and attics. Both the Northwest Militia and the Templars were used in this search. No more bikers or towns-people were found, except for one putrefying corpse in a basement. Todd ordered that anything usable, including fired brass, should be collected. During this time, both of the groups sent small patrols out to bring back their respective vehicles.

All captured equipment from the gang was piled by the side of the bikers’ van. The van itself provided some of their best finds. There, they found over two thousand rounds of assorted ammunition, a pair of night vision goggles, four cases of liquor, and one-hundred-and-twenty gallons of gasoline. In the various buildings and in the saddlebags of the motorcycles, they found still more ammunition, road maps, marijuana, clothing, and a pair of binoculars. In searching the bodies of the bikers and their personal effects, they also found the keys to the van and all the motorcycles.

The only particularly curious find was a box of nearly a hundred caltrops. These devices, three-inches long and an inch-and-a-half wide, were pieces of sheet metal cut in the shape of bow ties. Each of them was twisted 90 degrees in the middle. This twist insured that one of the four points on the caltrop pointed upward, regardless of how it landed on the ground. Mike surmised that the bikers had made the caltrops either for vehicle ambushes or perhaps to seed on roads to evade pursuers.

When it came to divide up the captured equipment, all that Todd asked for was the M60, its ammo, and accessories. The rest, he said, could go to the Templars. Dunlap quickly agreed to this proposition. Todd also offered to let the Templars keep four of the unused Claymore mines. Dunlap considered this a tremendous windfall, and expressed his gratitude.

From the heap, Todd and Jeff extracted four belts of 7.62mm ball ammunition, a twenty-millimeter ammo can brim full of metal links for assembling additional belts, and a rubberized green nylon bag containing a spare barrel and cleaning kit for the M60.

Todd took Dunlap aside, and described how they had taken the gear captured previously from looters and set it aside for the use of deserving refugees or charity groups. Dunlap nodded his head and agreed that it was probably a good course of action. With this in mind, Dunlap selected six of the best, captured weapons to set aside for Timmy. These included a Mini-14, an M2 carbine, two Springfield Armory XD .45 automatics, a Mossberg riotgun, and a Smith and Wesson Model 629 .44 magnum revolver. He also set aside all of the ammunition in the calibers that would fit these guns.

Dunlap announced, “We’ll clean these guns up and crate them up with the ammo in some sealed cans and call it Timmy’s trust fund.” He later said that he would save the rest of the gear and food for refugees or for locals who were particularly in need.

All of the dead bikers were dragged to an abandoned frame house at the north edge of town. The dead townsmen were dragged to another abandoned house across the street from it. Then flammable items from nearby houses, including stacks of newspapers, firewood, cans of waste oil, furniture, and the bikers’ marijuana were piled on top of the two piles of corpses. Tom Kennedy then conducted a funeral service in front of the house containing the dead townsmen. No one asked for any prayers for the dead members of the biker gang, but Tom said one anyway.

When the funeral prayers were over, Tom Kennedy lit a road flare and set both houses afire. Within minutes, they were both totally engulfed in flames.

After half an hour, it was clear that neither of the burning houses presented a fire risk to any of the other houses in town, so both groups proceeded to load their vehicles. After exchanging handshakes, the Templars drove off in their three jeeps and the captured van. They remarked that they would be back later in the day with their large flatbed pickup and a ramp to collect the motorcycles, including the four that had been caught in the Claymore mine blast.

Mike soon had all of the militia loaded into their two trucks and headed back to the retreat. In the cab of the trailing vehicle—Kevin’s Ford pickup—sat Kevin, Lisa, and Todd. After they were a few miles down the road, Lisa turned to Todd and gave him a sour look. She complained, “I can see why you asked for the M60. Tactically, it’s worth as much as everything else combined. But you should have asked to keep those night vision goggles, too. They would have been great to use at the LP/OP.”

Todd answered, “The only problem with those goggles is that they were the PVS-5 model. As I recall, that model needs a high-current two-point-seven-five volt battery, and it’s a battery that’s been known to explode if you try to recharge it. I didn’t see any spare batteries when I looked through that pile of captured gear, did you?”

After a few moments, Lisa said glumly, “No.” After letting out an audible sigh, she gave in, “If that’s the case, then you were right when you insisted that we invest our money in trip flares, parachute flares, and the tritium sights and scopes, rather than night vision equipment.”

Todd brought out consolingly, “Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that starlight gear is no good. It’s just worthless without the proper batteries, and most of them are exotic, can’t be recharged, and have a limited shelf life.

There are a few of the later models made that use standard batteries like the double-A nickel metal hydride and standard nine-volt rechargables we use in some of our electronic equipment. Now any of those would have been a good investment. The only problem was that all starlight gear was so expensive, particularly the third-generation stuff. And as for the Russian gear… It was so poorly made I didn’t bother with it, either. The imaging quality is low, the weapon sights don’t hold zero very well, and the intensifying tubes burn out pretty quickly. If only we’d had the money, I would have bought some good quality American-made gear….”

Kevin interrupted with the words, “If only we had the money we would have bought a lot of things, like one of those surplus PSR-1A seismic intrusion detection sets; or, how about an amateur radio transceiver. I don’t know about you, but I get pretty frustrated sitting there just listening to the shortwave receiver. I hear those hams talking back and forth and wish that I could join in on the action. Just think of the intelligence that we could be gathering. We could quiz hams all over the western half of the country about local conditions.” Todd cupped his palm under his chin and quoted, “Oh well, hindsight is twenty-twenty.”