With ten or fifteen SOF guys, he would multiply his ability to train men. Green Berets would be ideal, since they had been trained to train local fighters—but he would take any military operator. At the very least, the operators could lead platoons.
Jeff watched a fat guy in a stretched-tight polo shirt make a beeline for him across the Homestead lawn. It wasn’t anyone Jeff had met before. The guy walked up, his hand thrust out.
“Hello. I’m Doctor Frank Hodges.”
“Hey, I’m Jeff Kirkham.”
“Good to meetcha. I take it you’re part of the club thing they’ve got going here, right? What do you do for a living?”
Doctor Hodges was working hard on making conversation. Jeff wasn’t up for “making friends and influencing people” right then, but he didn’t want to be rude, either. “I used to shoot people for a living. Now I just think about it a lot.” Okay, maybe he was willing to be a little rude.
“Really?” The doctor laughed nervously. “Were you in the military?”
“Yeah, I’m a former Green Beret.”
The doctor laughed, coughing like a sputtering two-stroke engine. “Well, I’m a physician. More of a plastic surgeon, to be honest. I actually spend more time selling creams and ointments than I do slicing people up. But a doctor’s a doctor, I guess, and they invited us here. I live right down the street. Heck, maybe you can teach me to shoot sometime.”
Jeff noted the man’s loose skin and his willowy arms before answering. “Yeah, we’ll see what comes up when we have some time to work on shooting. Won’t you be needed in the infirmary?”
“Yeah, I guess so.” The doctor deflated a little. “I’ve always meant to learn to shoot. I have a couple of Sig Sauer handguns, but I haven’t had a chance to shoot them yet. I’m guessing now, without work, we’ll have a lot of time for stuff like that.”
Jeff thought the exact opposite. He thought they would be working harder than ever before, scraping for every minute of sleep they could scrounge. This doctor guy must figure the collapse would be like an extended camping trip, roasting marshmallows over a campfire singing Boom Chicka Boom and other Boy Scout favorites. If this was the kind of guy he’d be making into a fighter, he’d rather work with Iraqi teenagers. At least they knew enough to be scared.
“Well, Doc, I got to get going. The Apocalypse isn’t going to un-fuck itself.”
The doctor cut loose with the two-stroke-engine laugh again. “Okay, Mister-Sergeant Kirkham,” he shot Jeff a mock salute, “we’ll be seeing you around the compound.”
“Yeah.” Jeff turned and walked toward the office wing of the big house. Doctor Hodges glanced about, looking to find someone else to glad-hand.
Ross Homestead Ham Shack
Oakwood, Utah
Jason Ross stopped by the Ham Shack, tucked into the forest by the new ponds. A simplex ham radio call was scheduled with his brother-in-law Tommy, and Jason was dying to put some worries to rest.
Built inside a pimped-out shipping container, the Ham Shack barely fit a pair of desks, two guys and the rack of radio equipment. Zach, the head radio operator for the Homestead, was listening to a pirate radio news show that had sprung up on the shortwave bands. Never before had either of them heard anyone “hack” shortwave radio with a pirate broadcast. Fear of the Federal Communications Commission always halted such mischief, but things were slipping all across the gamut of government.
“What the heck is this?” Jason cocked his head as the pirate radio announcer cussed up a storm over the airwaves.
“Oh, hey, Jason.” Zach turned the radio volume down a notch. “This guy apparently stole an Army Humvee radio rig from Fort Bliss in El Paso and he’s running around the Southwest broadcasting the truth about the collapse. He says he’s gathering info from military personnel that are part of an online community called ‘Drinkin’ Bros’.”
“Okay, let’s keep track of this guy. Are you set for the simplex call with my brother-in-law?”
“Sure. I’ve got it all set up right here.” Zach turned off the shortwave receiver and fired up his ham set.
With any luck, tonight they would confirm Tommy’s location—hopefully somewhere far away from Phoenix where Tommy and his family lived. Jason’s last phone call with him painted a bleak picture of Phoenix, as though three million people had awakened that morning in a panic and realized there wasn’t any water.
The shelves of the Ham Shack were loaded up like gizmo heaven. Black boxes, digital read-outs, big knobs and red LEDs all bounced a weird glow off Zach. With cell networks now teetering on the brink of oblivion, these ancient ham technologies would be the only threads holding the modern world together.
Reaching out to Jason’s brother-in-law was job one today. The cell phone networks had already begun to collapse in rural pockets and now they were showing signs of strain, even in suburban Salt Lake City. Jason could still make a cell connection in the Valley, but his son traveling through Washington and his brother-in-law in northern Arizona had both fallen off the cell network.
Over years of preparation, ham radio had taken over Homestead communications. Security teams operating for the Homestead needed a bullet-proof way to communicate. Consumer radios weren’t reliable in the mountains, so Jason had prepared a more powerful option: ham radio handsets.
The Homestead sat within walking distance of over a million people, most of whom would grow hungry, then angry, in a collapse. Locating a bug-out location in the suburbs penciled out to a tremendous risk and it worried Jason sick. But the advantages of staying close to the city had been considerable: a distant bug-out location might have been impossible to reach in a crisis. The freeway coursing across the Salt Lake Valley already looked like a serpentine parking lot with cars barely moving. How would people with ranches in the mountains reach them without roads?
In the collapse of Argentina in 1998, the remote farms and ranches had seen the worst criminal atrocities anywhere. Marauders had known they could subjugate isolated homesteads at their leisure and that’s exactly what they had done, with rape and atrocities becoming commonplace in the Argentine countryside.
In many ways, bugging in instead of bugging out made sense near a city the size of Salt Lake. The Homestead had amassed a couple of hundred members, including the warfighters, doctors, solar experts, gardeners, beekeepers and mechanics. Being close to town had its advantages and the easy-to-reach location made it possible to build a well-staffed hard target. Still, Jason had to wonder: would the gamble pay off?
Jason listened while Zach called to Tommy on the ham. “KF7UCL is monitoring and listening for a call.”
Immediately, Tommy responded on the first pre-arranged frequency for that day. “KF7UCL, this is W2ADL mobile near Gray Mountain, north of Flagstaff returning. This is Tommy. Back to you, KF7UCL.”
They had made contact via UHF, even though Tommy’s automotive ham radio was relatively small. At the Ross Homestead, they were pounding out two thousand watts on a multi-band beam antenna. Even so, the ionosphere had to be just right to make the simplex connection, especially on the first try.
Earlier, Jason tried a cell call to both Tommy and Cameron and got no love. That came as no surprise because Tommy was driving the “back way” into central Utah across the east side of the Wasatch Mountain Range. There were more dead spots there than the dark side of the Moon, even in the best of times.