Dan and the Bottle Ch. 19

Donny Anderson sat back in the living room of the cabin, having a drink with a few friends. John Medford had brought over a gallon jug of his latest efforts, and in truth, it wasn't bad. It wasn't great, but it was less harsh than the last batch. With a bit of orange juice, it actually made a pretty smooth drink.

"I'm telling you, Donny... we need to get some guys organized. Them fuckin' Chinese are trying to push deeper into the wine country.... and that backs up to our territory. They'll be knockin' on our doors inside of a year at this rate. We need to get to trainin', and we need to do it now."

Don nodded... "I know... but we don't have near enough ammo, nor enough guns, just yet. We need to get a helluva lot more than we have now. We need to hit on a bigger stash than anything I've found so far."

Ken Reynolds, another of his neighbors, sat back, quietly. He knew what they had to do, but was loath to admit it. When he finally spoke, it was but a single word.

"Ambush."

The other two looked up from their drinks, eyebrows raised.

"Look, we know where their supply convoys run, right? We know how many men guard them.... we just need enough people to stop a few of their trucks. Two, maybe three truckloads of their ordnance, we'll have everything we need.... RPGs, Grenades, rifles, ammo, pistols, rations, explosives, you name it. We drop a big log across the road in front of them, wait until they stop, drop another one behind them so's they can't back up, then kill them all, cut up the logs with a couple of chainsaws, roll the pieces out of the way, and bring the trucks back here... stash 'em in one of the caves, unload what we need, then we can use the trucks to give us the element of surprise at their camps. Roll in looking like a supply convoy, but the trucks are actually loaded up with our people, armed to the teeth."

Both Donny and John nodded. It sounded like at least the beginnings of a plan. All they needed was the right place to set it up.... and Donny knew a few places where it would work.

John smiled. "I like it... and as a bonus, once we have their trucks, we can load up all of that wood, too.... Don't know about you two, but I can always use extra firewood."

Once it was set up, the ambush worked, if not exactly as they'd planned.... the Chinese had put up a serious fight, and they'd lost a few good people. Still, they'd managed to hijack three trucks, loaded almost to overflowing with munitions, medical supplies, and field rations. Now they had the opposite problem.... they had more guns than they had people for. They settled on a name.... the 'Klamath Regional Militia' and began quietly recruiting.

Within four months, they'd have nearly a hundred and twenty people learning to shoot. Many of them had to be restrained from switching the select fire weapons to full automatic, of course; while the Communists could afford the 'spray and pray' approach, the new militia didn't have the unlimited supply of ammunition that their opponents had. They did their best to instill their people with what they took to calling a 'sniper mindset'... one shot, one kill.

Within two months, the newest people were ready for their first operation, and they kept a close eye on the operations of the local Chinese base.

One of the men in the group had been left a large amount of radio equipment, powered by solar panels and a large windmill; he used this now to keep an ear on the Chinese, and using an ancient language program for his computer, he had learned the key words to listen for.

Upon hearing the outgoing transmission, that said the camp was asking for fresh supplies, he waited for the response, which he fed through the computer, learning the date the fresh gear would arrive. It couldn't have come at a better time; they were down to less than five thousand rounds of the AK 47 ammunition... and most of it wasn't reloadable.

Frank Bergen was in New Mexico, doing a little advance work for Jim Archer. Another small field of wells had been located there, all of them capped off, with sun-faded metal tags that indicated that they'd been shut down in the mid-1990s. If Jim's assumptions were correct, they would be a good source of oil to feed the refinery in Colorada. If everything worked out as well as he hoped, they could be pumping crude out of here in a month or two... and there were nearly a hundred wells here, spread out over two square miles.

After making a few calls back to the Cave, he soon had his construction crew onsite, and a crew of instructors from Colorado to teach some of the local volunteers to run the new pumps and other equipment.

There was a small suburb nearby, which had served, in the past, as a bedroom community for the oilfields; repairing the damage of several decades of neglect and vandalism was child's play for his crew.

They were nearly finished with the repairs and the new construction when disaster struck.

Bergen himself was away at the time, so he managed to survive; he had just left, an hour before, to head back to Wyoming.... his construction crew wasn't quite so lucky.

Kenny Carlson had been searching the old houses, compiling a listing of the resources left behind by the previous occupants; in a basement of one of the houses, he found an old trunk, wood and leather with tarnished brass grommets and hinges.... he opened it, expecting to find old clothes or tools.

The explosion vaporized him, and an area of several square miles around him. The contents of the ancient trunk had been a crude five kiloton nuclear bomb, equipped with a motion trigger.

The team of terrorists that had been tasked with smuggling the bomb into the country and setting it off had been captured by an old agency of the American government-- Homeland Security--- but they hadn't found out about this particular bomb before all hell had broken loose.

A few of the people on Bergen's construction teams had survived the initial blast, having been in cellars working on circuit breaker boxes and so forth.... but they wouldn't last long. Radiation sickness was a horrible way to die.

News of the explosion spread quickly amongst the free territory; it left many people devastated.

The people on the construction teams, and the Militia contingent that was sent along to keep them safe, had come from all over the territory.

The worst part, for Archer, Bergen, and the rest of the leaders of the new Militia, was not knowing. The bomb had obliterated all signs of it's own presence. They didn't know what kind of bomb had gone off, where it had come from, or whether it was a result of enemy action.

Almost as bad was the long list of troubles that came along with this setback; Bergen had lost some of his most experienced people, and the nearby oilfield was going to be off-limits for a good twenty or thirty years, due to the fallout.... and the ensuing radioactive cloud spread out for several miles in every direction. Worse still, the prevailing winds were pushing the cloud straight towards Wyoming.

In this, however, they finally caught a break, of sorts. It was late fall, and heavy rains brought most of the radioactive particles back to earth in southern Idaho and northern Utah. What remained in the upper atmosphere steadily lost strength as it floated towards their home. It had also been over a century and a half old; much of it's initial strength had been sapped by the passage of time. Had this bomb been fresh, the damage might have been much greater.

Still, evacuating the people who lived in the path of the fallout took far more time than they'd have liked... and some flatly refused to leave.

John Corcoran took a deep breath before knocking on the apartment door. This wasn't going to be easy. It never was.

Marcy Jackson opened the door, expecting to see one of her neighbors. She hadn't heard yet, about the disaster in Nevada. She was surprised, and a bit taken aback, to see Mayor Corcoran standing there.

"John, what can I do for you?"

"Hello, Marcy. Can I come in? There's something I need to talk to you about."

She couldn't for the life of her figure what he needed to talk to her about; her two Bills, husband and son, were both gone. Her husband was on some boring guard duty, down in Nevada or New Mexico or somesuch, and her son was at the Rebel base, in Jackson Hole, helping to train the newest recruits down there.

Once he was seated in their living room, and after turning down her offer of coffee, he jumped right into it.

"Marcy, I don't know how to say this, so I'm just going to give it to you straight... your husband was killed a few days ago, down at the oilfield we were opening up. We don't know where it came from, but some sort of nuclear bomb went off down there.... it killed off the entire team."

She didn't react at all, for several seconds.... when she did, it came in slow tears and a single word. "How..." she gulped several times, as if unable to get enough air into her lungs. "Who...?"

"We don't know. It never showed up on radar or on any of the satellite feeds, so we've ruled out missiles or aircraft. Might have been some sort of leftover from the great war, but right now, we don't have a clue."

"Omigod! Bill! How did this happen?!"

"Honestly, we don't know, Marce.... all we know for certain, at this point, is that it was a nuke, and not a very big one. The blast killed off everything for about five miles in every direction, including everyone in the oilfield and the entire town around it. We lost a lot of good people down there."

He watched, feeling helpless, as the woman dissolved into tears. What could he say, at a time like this? 'Next time I have to do something like this, I've got to bring the wife along.' he thought to himself.

Back in Texas, Mike O'Connell settled into the role of leader of their little group quite naturally. He wasn't particularly keen on it, and, indeed, had hoped someone else would take the job; nobody else wanted it, though. He had his hands full just teaching the numerous farmers to shoot straight. Trigger control was proving to be a problem, too... at one point, he considered having some of the selector switches on the automatic weapons welded into semi automatic positions, an idea which was eventually discarded as impractical, at best.... it would also render the weapon's safeties inoperable.

Another problem he faced was one that was not uncommon amongst the various Militia groups around the country.... while his ancestors had been diligent about stockpiling ammo and reloading supplies, his supply was still finite.

Once they ran through that, they would have to switch to confiscated AK 47s and take the ammo from soldiers they killed, a few hundred rounds at a time... at best. It was true, he had a pretty decent stockpile of ammo and reloading powder, and literally hundreds of pounds of castable lead; still, those stocks would run out sooner or later.

He, too, was thinking about supply convoys, by this time.

Back in Wyoming, Jim Archer was calling for volunteers from his oldest, most experienced people. He had his people monitoring the radio transmissions of the Chinese in that area, and the reports he was getting were disturbing; it seemed the communist troops were closing in on this new 'Klamath Regional Militia' and if they didn't get some help soon, they'd be wiped out.

'Helluva time to lose Bill Jackson.' he thought. 'This kind of thing is right up his alley.'

In the end, he decided to send them a resupply convoy with as many sniper/scouts as he could spare, men and women who could upgrade their training and tactics and teach them about the importance of such things as close air support.

As far as he could tell, from what the Chinese reports were saying, they had none at the moment.

'First things first' he thought, as the cadre filed in to the council room.

"Okay, folks, listen up! The reason I called you all here.... we have a bit of a situation developing in northern California. There's a small militia group there, not really sure how small, that has been hijacking Chinese supply convoys. We're getting reports second hand, through the Chinese reports, so I'm not really sure how accurate they are, but from the sound of things, it's not a big group. I want to help these folks out, but first we have to send out some scouts to find them."

Turning to the blackboard behind him, he flipped it over, revealing a large map of the northern California area. Using an old dowel rod as a pointer, he encircled a small area on the map with the tip, saying, "This is roughly the area they've been working in. As far as we can tell, they've taken about four supply convoys, so far, none bigger than three or four trucks. Apparently, they strip the bodies of the soldiers and just leave them by the roadside for the local animals to chew on."

Ray Edmundson smiled. "People after my own heart."

Jim grinned, nodding. "Indeed. They're sending a message... 'Don't fuck with this!' It might be effective, if they have enough people to back it up.... which I suspect they don't. I want to send them some supplies, yes, but I also want to reinforce them with troops. We need to teach them to recruit new troops, and teach some of their people how to train new people. I know, after the debacle in Nevada, we're short-handed. I get that. I think, if we can send them, say, a hundred and fifty, maybe two hundred people, and a couple of truckloads of supplies, we can pull this off. Get them up and running right, we'll have new allies covering our backs on the coast... and they can start taking the rest of their state back."

"What's the plan for finding them, though?" Ray Ferguson queried, studying the map behind Jim intensely. "That's some rough country. We don't even know who we're looking for. Our people could find themselves in the hands of collaborators quite easily."

Jim nodded. "I know. It's going to be dicey, which is why I want volunteers for the initial scouting teams. Four teams, maybe ten people in each, one at each point of the compass, about sixty, seventy miles from the center of the area that we know these folks have been working. Constant radio contact, with each other and with us, here. Locater beacons, so we can keep an eye on them through the GPS satellites, and plenty of handheld GPS units so they can let us know where to airdrop supplies at, once they've made contact."

"When they find them, our people might wind up as prisoners." Ferguson pointed out.

"I know. That's why I want to send some experienced people in, leading these patrols. We need to find these people, prove to them that we're friendly, and set up some sort of alliance with them. Once our scouts make contact, we can find a place nearby to set up a base camp and start flying in equipment and supplies with the Chinooks. Full field loads, as much spare ammo as they can stagger with, and at least one sniper rifle with each group. Secondary packs full of field rations, water purifiers, bladder canteens, firestarters, the works. At least half of each team should have tubes under their M16s, too.... I want our people loaded for bear, folks."

Ferguson looked intensely at the map. "No freeways nearby.... so we can't send 'em in a C130. They're going to have to go in on foot."

Frank Bergen frowned, shaking his head. "No need for that.... I can rig up Humvees with enough 'chutes that it shouldn't be a problem. A '130 can drop four of them in each area, and that'll give the teams extra load capacity.... and firepower."

Jim nodded.... "And we have the planes.... how fast can you have them rigged for drops?"

Bergen frowned again, deep in thought for a moment. "How much of a hurry are you in? I want to test the setup at least five or six times first, just to make sure the chutes work properly. They're going to need to be balanced, so the trucks don't come down on their sides or anything.... I'll need at least a week, preferably two."

Ferguson looked up at this... "How about dropping the first teams in on foot, then use some Chinooks to bring in some smaller vehicles?"

Jim frowned. "I don't think the choppers have the range we need."

Bergen shook his head again.... "Maybe not, but if we send along an extra one, carrying a bunch of cans of fuel...."

Archer nodded. "Ok.... let's look at both possibilities. We've got a bunch of light pickups we can haul in, don't we?"

Bergen nodded again."Ford Rangers and Dodge Dakotas.... Jeeps and Hummer H3s... I'll have the boys wet sand a few of them, give 'em camo paintjobs... they can be ready in a few days. Each of the Chinooks can carry at least two, and still have room for troops and extra fuel."

Archer nodded again, thinking it over....

"Ok. How many choppers do we have?"

"If I call in a few from each of the local bases, I can scrape up at least twenty. More than we need, at any rate."

"Do it. We can send in more troops that way, and the pickups can be loaded with extra supplies, too.... I'm willing to bet this new group won't say no to a few hundred pounds of dried beef, and a few truckloads of our spare rifles and ammo."

John Davidson frowned in thought for a moment. "Don't we have a base in southern Oregon, that we could send people from?"

Jim nodded. "I considered it, but most of the people there are still in training. I want to give them a few more months, let 'em get some experience under their belts. We've still got a few Chinese bases in Oregon and Washington state to deal with. Still, we could use that one as a stop-off and refueling station. We've got a small camp in northern California, too, come to think of it, but it isn't real well established, just yet. They're still struggling with getting water and power systems set up. Matter of fact, some of their folks are still living in tents."

Bergen looked up at this, catching Jim's eye. "I've been meaning to talk to you about the Oregon base.... We could send them a few big tanker planes full of av-gas, base some planes and choppers there. They don't have much in the way of air support-just a couple of Cobras and a handful of prop planes from world war two. They desperately need some jets."

Jim nodded. "We've got the extra planes... what did you want to send them?"

Bergen consulted his notes, which irritated him a little. He used to have all of this information in his head, and never needed reminders like this.

"Well... at the moment, we have more Stealths, Harriers, and F-18s than we know what to do with. We could send 'em a dozen of each and not notice the loss... and Juniper has more if we need them."

Archer frowned and nodded. "Ok, but do they have pilots for them?"

Bergen nodded. "I sent them two simulators six months ago. They've had kids in training ever since."

"Ok, send 'em.... and make sure they get the support gear they need, too... ammo, missiles, spare parts, a couple of ground crews, wrench turners, the works."

Bergen smiled as he made notes to send the gear, and a couple of his construction crews there, as well... Winter was coming, and he wouldn't leave his people sleeping in tents.

The planning took several weeks, and included a number of overflights by the F117 Stealth fighters, outfitted with multiple cameras, to scout landing zones for the helicopters, well away from both the local Chinese bases in the area and the area where, they suspected, the new militia group was located.

Drop zones were located for the troops they would send in on foot, too, and soon the operation began to look a bit overloaded. By the time they were done, summer was drawing to a close.

At the end of September, they finished up their final preparations and loaded the choppers for the flight to California. Advance teams boarded the three C130s, staggering under their loads of supplies and heavy parachutes, and were soon airborne. These troops would drop in a wide arc, starting well north of the area they were to search and swinging to the west, in a wide crescent that would ensure that they missed nothing. They would proceed south and east, looking to make contact with the people they were seeking while doing their best to evade the Chinese troops.