“W2ADL, this is Zach, Oakwood, Utah. Reading you four by nine. Location received. Cameron’s location is Cajon Pass, California. Relay travel conditions. Back to you.”
“KF7UCL, you are five nine. Copy that: Cameron location Cajon Pass. Travel conditions very heavy but steady. Proceeding on Highway 89 to your location. Give my love to Jenna. Over.”
There was no need to extend the conversation, especially since the ham frequencies had been bursting with traffic over the last day. The traffic would definitely slow down as repeaters went offline and batteries began to die, but that might take weeks or even months.
“Thank you and safe travels, W2ADL. KF7UCL over and QRT.” Zach finished the transmission with Jason standing over his shoulder.
Jason patted Zach on the shoulder and headed back into the sunshine. At least one worry could be crossed off his list.
It had taken Jeff Kirkham about an hour to find the Beringer camp. In the end, it was the sound of human voices that pegged their location. Just as Jason described, the Beringers had set up a wilderness camp that looked like a junkyard—tents surrounded by ramshackle structures made out of pallets covered with rotting tarps.
Glassing through the trees with his binoculars, it was hard to tell how many people inhabited the camp. Jeff figured eight families had holed up in the canyon bottom. The place crawled with women and children.
With that many dependents, he needed to rethink his strategy. Without a doubt, the Beringers couldn’t be allowed to remain this close to the Homestead. Conflict would be unavoidable, especially after the Homestead solidified its defensive perimeter. These yokels would be chasing game all over the mountain, leading to his guys shooting at them, and then all-out war. If war was inevitable, Jeff wanted to strike first.
Before he had gone to Laos with the Green Berets, Jeff attended a school taught by the CIA on “Asymmetrical Warfare,” which he discovered was a military euphemism for “fighting dirty.”
One of the things he had been taught was how to weaken an enemy encampment through the use of necrotic matter, either human or animal. Surprisingly, decomposing corpses aren’t particularly lethal, since the natural process of decomposition generates few pathogens. A rotting intestine, however, carries pathogens that can manifest similar to the stomach flu, especially in young people.
Jeff ran his binos along the Beringers’ apparent water supply. A small creek ran within spitting distance of the encampment. Likely, they were filtering their water to some degree, but that wouldn’t be enough to stop a steady exposure to coliform bacteria.
Ross and the rest of the civilians would never approve of using a pathogen to remove a rival group, especially considering these people were camping on their own land. But Jeff wouldn’t tolerate a threat this close to his family.
He had seen a dead porcupine on his way to recon the Beringer camp. Thirty minutes later, Jeff returned and dumped the corpse of the porcupine in the creek about a half-mile above the Beringers. He carefully cut the bloated stomach cavity, making a small slit in the lowest section of the intestine. The contents of the gut would dribble out for days. He carefully covered the dead animal with rocks and branches, hiding it from all but the most careful search.
After Jeff felt satisfied that his “biological weapon” was well-concealed and faithfully leaking pathogens into the creek, he policed up the tarp he had used to carry the stinking animal, wadded it into a ball and stuffed it into his kit.
As he climbed out of the canyon, returning silently to Homestead land, Jeff smiled at his subterfuge. The dead animal wasn’t the perfect weapon—careful water purification would defeat even the nastiest bacteria. But his observation of the camp convinced Jeff these folks weren’t the tight-and-tidy types. If their water purification was anything like their sloppy camp craft, a lot of E.coli would make it into their food and water supply. With a little luck, an onslaught of mysterious diarrhea would convince the group to relocate their camp elsewhere.
Jeff liked winning a fight “the easy way” and he smiled all the way back to the Homestead.
Highway 275
Norfolk, Nebraska
Chad Wade, former Navy SEAL, was nine-hundred-twenty miles from his home in Salt Lake City when the power went out. He had been traveling the Midwest, visiting ReadyMan members and checking on his little girl in Omaha.
A restless soul, Chad enjoyed wandering the Earth in his Jeep doing good deeds. He was like David Carradine in the show Kung Fu. The endless cornfields of the American middle country gave him time to think and rest his frenetic mind.
At five feet, six inches, he thought of himself as “perfectly sized for the modern world.” Since the advent of the firearm, Chad argued that anything over five-and-a-half feet tall for a warrior was redundant and likely to get shot off. This served as the basis for endless verbal sparring between Chad and Jason Ross, who stood six feet, two inches tall. Jason routinely lampooned Chad for having “twelve-year-old girl feet” and Chad fired back with soliloquies about Jason moving like “a half-stoned Sasquatch.”
Chad met Jason Ross as Chad finished an instructor slot at BUD/S, Naval Special Warfare in Coronado, California, where Navy SEALs are selected and trained. In a chance encounter, Jason and Chad met while working out at the gym. Chad later snuck Jason onto the Navy SEAL base and they borrowed a couple of instructor kayaks and went for a paddle around Coronado.
Jason had no background in the military, and he had only been vacationing in Coronado to appease his wife. But, before long, Jason and Chad’s conversation found common ground; they both loved garden composting. Chad was probably the first Navy SEAL in history to take classes on composting and organic gardening while instructing at BUD/S. There had been a hippie commune out by Imperial Beach, just to the south of Naval Special Warfare. Chad jumped into classes put on by local tree huggers on organic composting whenever he could. Taking hippie classes wasn’t unusual for Chad; his rivals called him a “crazy” and his friends called him “iconoclastic.” Chad secretly enjoyed both monikers.
Chad generally ignored pop culture, movies and anything written within the last hundred years. At the same time, he accumulated—and occasionally abandoned—huge libraries of classical non-fiction. He was fond of saying, “If it wasn’t written more than a hundred years ago, it probably hasn’t been proven yet.” He loved his books, but he rarely read more than thirty percent of the words, scanning stacks of books like an endless succession of magazine articles.
While Chad was the weirdest person any of his friends knew, he also loved spiritual pursuits and he had toyed repeatedly with the idea of enrolling in theological seminary. In reality, no church on Earth would want Chad as a pastor. He was too odd, entirely unable to enter the paddock with the other sheep and enjoy the grass. Still, Chad loved people and he gravitated toward spirituality at every turn. Essentially a restless soul, Chad drifted like a leaf on the wind.
The SEALs hadn’t done him any favors. He never talked about it, but he had served a hard-hitting tour in Iraq that would set him up, probably for life, with an unsolvable internal struggle. High passion, high sensitivity and six months of non-stop brutality don’t mix in a man’s psychology. Then again, the United States government didn’t worry too much about the nuances of psychology when they sent Special Operations Forces to do their dirty work.
Chad’s cell phone rang and he picked up, hands-free.