Dan spent the rest of the day helping to coordinate the evacuation. He assigned his deputy the responsibility of policing the evacuees and making sure that every house was evacuated by noon the following day. He sent almost all of his storage food and the majority of his guns and ammo with his wife and adopted children, who planned to follow on horseback behind her father’s flatbed diesel truck. It was one of only three trucks in town that was still running. All of the others that were running were diesels too. The lack of reliable gasoline and the lack of spare parts had resigned the rest of the vehicles in town to the category of scrap.
Dan spent some time making plans with his wife and saying his goodbyes.
With the children out of earshot, he quietly confided to his wife that he had less than a fifty-fifty chance of living through the next few days. As sheriff, he said, he was charged with upholding the law and protecting both lives and free-held property in Potlatch. Dan had decided that he would stay to carry on with his job. Cindy didn’t argue with her husband. She kissed him, and implored sweetly, “I love you, Dan. Do your best to live through this. Don’t make me a widow all over again. I’ll leave word where you can find me and the kids.” With that, she slung Dan’s well-worn HK91 across her back, and mounted their Morgan mare, Babe. She added, “Don’t worry, I’m in good company. I’ve got Mister Heckler and Mister Koch to protect me.”
Dan laughed. It was a favorite joke of theirs. He asked, “And Colonel Colt?” Cindy smiled and replied, “Yes, indeed, and Mister Sykes and Mister Fairbairn, for good measure. Keep your powder dry, Dan. I love you.” Cindy Fong turned to wave several times as she rode away.
Dan now had very few of his household belongings left in Potlatch. His Toyota pickup truck had broken down nearly a year before, and was sitting immobile behind a neighbor’s barn. The truck needed a new water pump, and despite his searching for many months, he could not locate one.
By nightfall, aside from Fong, the town was deserted. Based on what he heard on the CB, Dan calculated that he would probably have one day, or perhaps even two, to prepare.
Fong picked the military crest of a hill eighteen hundred yards southeast of the center of Potlatch. It had a commanding view of the valley below. Carrying his two most prized long guns and the rest of his gear took three exhausting trips. Fong spent twenty-five minutes disassembling, cleaning, oiling, reassembling, and reloading the two guns that he’d brought with him. The last step in the process was cleaning their optics with lens paper and a camelhair brush. He had test fired and re-zeroed both guns just a month before.
The first was the fiberglass bedded McMillan .50 caliber bolt-action repeater. There were still eighty-six rounds of ammunition left for it. The other rifle was his green composite stocked Steyr SSG .308 Winchester. It was a standard 1980s vintage SSG with double set triggers. Two years before the Crunch, Dan had mounted it with a three-to-nine-power Trijicon scope with a 56-mm objective lens. This scope used special crosshairs that were lit by vials of radioactive tritium gas. By turning a selector ring, it could be quickly switched to a green, red, or amber crosshair. In daylight, there were also settings for a standard black crosshair, or a magenta crosshair that was lit by a daylight-gathering dome on top of the rear portion of the scope. Dan often praised the Trijicon as “the next best thing to a Starlight scope for night shooting.”
The only modification that Dan made to the SSG was the addition of a DTA brand three-prong flash hider. Long before the Crunch, he sent the barreled action of the rifle off to Holland’s of Oregon for the gunsmithing.
Holland’s cut one-half-by-twenty-eight threads on the muzzle, and installed one of their patented muzzle brakes. Dan was not so much interested in recoil reduction as he was the ability to mount a flash hider. He thought that a flash hider might attract suspicion in “peacetime,” so he normally kept the less controversial muzzle brake installed. He always kept the DTA flash hider handy in the SSG’s case before the Crunch, “just in case.”
He completed the cleaning tasks just as it was getting dark. He rolled out his sleeping bag and immediately fell into a deep sleep. He spent half of the next day digging a small fighting position for himself, and camouflaging it with half of an army surplus “diamond” camouflage net. Then he went halfway down the back side of the ridge and dug a trench that was five feet long, ten inches wide, and twenty inches deep. He left his Austrian-made SSG rifle beside the hole in the McMillan’s Pelican case with just one latch closed. Then he picked out a secondary fighting position three-fourths of the way up the next ridge. He was nearly exhausted by the time he finished digging the second foxhole. Luckily, as with the two previous holes, he encountered only a few hand-sized rocks. He finished camouflaging this last hole just before it got dark. For it, he used the other half of the diamond net for camouflage. Dan left his pack in the bottom of the hole, and quietly walked back to his primary position in the darkness. There, he curled up in his poncho and poncho liner and soon fell asleep.
When he awoke just after dawn, his first task was to systematically observe the area with his binoculars. He couldn’t see any movement in or near town.
He could, however, hear what sounded like cannon or mortar fire, far to the southwest. Dan kneeled to pray silently. He quietly recited the Lord’s Prayer. He scanned Potlatch and the county road through his binoculars. He prayed some more. Fong stood up and nodded to himself. He knew what he had to do.
He was confident that the McMillan was still zeroed, since he had moved it only in its heavily padded Pelican case. He was more concerned about the zero of his SSG, since he had carried it on a sling from his house to the hilltop. He’d been careful to not knock into the scope while moving it, but he would have been more comfortable if he’d had the opportunity to confirm point of impact. With the hostiles so close, he didn’t want to make any noise that could betray his presence.
He pulled out his favorite knife, the TrinitY Fisherman that he had inherited from T.K. He stared for a while at the fish symbol inlaid in brass in the knife’s handle. The knife meant more to him than most of his other possessions. He began to peel a raw turnip to start his breakfast. He peered through his binoculars for a while, nibbling on turnip slices as he watched. Then he ate half of a small round loaf of wheat bread. He looked through his binoculars for a while longer, and then ate two sticks of elk jerky. Fong picked up his binoculars again. To the west, he could see Army scouts on dull painted motorcycles approaching town. He studied their movements carefully. He took a few swigs from his canteen. A few minutes later, he could see dismounted infantry approaching, walking on the shoulders of the state highway that traversed Potlatch. He wiped the TrinitY knife clean on his trouser leg and tucked it back into the brown leather sheath that was stamped “Matthew 4:19.”
As they got closer, Fong “doped” the wind. His moistened finger revealed no discernible surface wind. Fong smiled and nodded. Looking at the trees spread out across the valley, and the dust kicked up by the vehicles, there were no telltale signs of wind in the distance, either. “This is going to be quite a nice shooting day,” he murmured to himself, as he put in his earplugs. When he thought that the approaching troops and vehicles were just outside his maximum effective range, Fong emptied two canteens on the ground in the area beneath the muzzle of the rifle, to prevent dust from rising and giving away his position. He settled in behind the big rifle, popped open the scope covers, and picked out the most lucrative targets. There was an odd assortment of vehicles: American-made Humvees—some of them still in desert camouflage paint jobs from Iraq, ancient two-and-a-half-ton trucks—also American, and what looked like Russian BTR-70 wheeled armored personnel carriers.