Carlton stepped forward with a loud, “Yes, Sir!”
After a few wraps of tape were in place over the lid, Mike placed two thicknesses of the plastic trash bag over the cap. Then, it too was secured with several wraps of tape. Brushing his hands together, Mike offered, “Okay, that oughta keep it watertight.”
During the next half hour, Mike, Doug, and Rose back-filled the trench and relaid the sod over the top of it. Less than an inch of sod covered the muzzle of the fougasse. Unless someone knew what to look for, the existence of the fougasse was not detectable.
Later that afternoon, with the aid of several more shovels and shovelers, a shallow trench was dug from the fougasse up to the house. After another splice was made and wrapped with electrical tape, the WD-1 was reeled out in the trench. At the house, the WD-1 was fed into the house via an air vent in the brickwork. The far end of the commo wire was positioned at a front window with a good view of the gate. The ends of the two-conductor wire were then connected to a Claymore mine firing device, commonly called a “clacker.”
The clacker belonged to Dan Fong. It had been given to him several years before by a coworker at his cannery who was an Iraq War veteran. After testing the circuit with a volt/ohm meter, the clacker, with its heavy wire “safety bale” in place, was then put in a cigar box that was marked with a hand-painted red warning sign. It read, “Hands Off. This means you. By order of the Tac. Coord.”
Todd liked the fougasse so much that he had Mike and his understudies build five more over the next seven days. This used up most of the rest of the scrap six-inch pipe. The second fougasse was lined up with a large downed tree some fifty yards away from the house. Todd picked this spot because the tree would be a tempting piece of cover for anyone attacking the house. Todd said, “If we spot anyone laying behind the log and shooting at us, Ka-Boooom! End of story.”
The third fougasse protected a blind spot beneath the LP/OP. The fourth was aimed at a trail junction at the edge of the wood lot. As a cue to trigger this fougasse during hours of darkness, a trip flare was strung at chest height. The fifth was aimed at the area behind the barn—the blind spot that the last group of looters had used to their advantage. The sixth and last fougasse was planted in a hole in the middle of the county road, in the center of the ambush zone covered by the spider holes. This fougasse, designed to fire vertically, was specially designed to defeat vehicles. It was loaded with a single pointed three-inch diameter hardened steel penetrator backed with a small coffee can filled with two pounds of scrap metal shrapnel and all the powder from a thirty-minute road flare. This coffee can had slits running its full length, cut at one-inch intervals. This was designed to delay the spread of the shrapnel until it entered a vehicle.
The clacker in the cigar box was soon replaced by a control panel, built by Kevin. It had enough indicator lights and switches to control up to ten devices—be they fougasses or Claymores or anti-vehicular explosive charges.
The first five fougasses were wired into the panel soon after it was tested. Using her artistic talent, Mary added numbers and diagrams of the expected fans of effect for the fougasses to the sector painting next to the window where the “Mr. Destructo” control panel was placed. All the operator had to do was spot a target, consult the sector painting, and hit the correspondingly numbered button. A child could handle it. So a child couldn’t handle it, Kevin had included an electrical key switch to the panel. This key acted as a master cutoff for the motorcycle battery that powered the panel. The battery was constantly trickle-charged by the house’s twelve-volt DC power system.
Still concerned about the threat of vehicles crashing through the chain-link fence surrounding the house, Todd asked Mike to coordinate the construction of a trench completely surrounding the fence. This upgrade was suggested to Todd by Kevin Lendel. The trench, which was affectionately referred to as “the moat” by most of the group members, took the entire work force of the group a week of hard labor to dig.
Consulting one of his “five series”Army Engineer manuals, Mike specified that in order to be effective, the trench should be in a sloping L-shape. The short end of the L was a vertical wall on the side closest to the fence, while the gradual upward sloping part of the trench faced outward. The trench was sixty inches deep at its deepest point. The total width was nine feet. A narrow wooden footbridge covered with some half-inch plywood was positioned over the trench in front of the gate.
In a private conference with Mike, Todd expressed his continuing concerns about another attack by the band of looters. He told Mike, “I guess that we’ve done all that we can, under the circumstances. I’d feel better if we were able to put up some antipersonnel barbed wire, but there’s just none available. If I’d only thought to buy some surplus concertina wire, or maybe some civilian razor wire. The surplus stuff was real cheap, too. I could have bought it for practically scrap metal prices. It must be worth a fortune, now.”
He and Mike then shared a now familiar facial expression with their jaws gaping. In unison they chanted, “Oh well, hindsight is twenty-twenty.” After some consideration of numerous alternatives including pungi stakes, Todd and Mike decided to install “tangle foot” wire.
Mike gave a quick briefing to his assembled crew of workers. “Okay, the idea behind tangle foot is to slow down anybody trying to rush your position. In this case, it’s the house. What we’ll be doing is driving metal fence T-posts into the ground all over the yard inside the fence in a semi-random pattern, but no more than ten feet apart. Next, we’ll be stringing baling wire at random heights between six inches and forty inches off the ground between all of the fence posts. It forms a sort of giant spiderweb. This way, anyone who manages to get over the fence won’t be able to just dash up to the side of the house. The tangle foot will slow them down considerably, forcing them to cut it, or step over it, or crawl under each strand. During this interval, we’ll have more of an opportunity to spot them and take them out.”With all available hands at work, the construction of the tangle foot array took only three hours.
With the new security measures in place, the Group waited anxiously for several weeks for another attack by the same band of brigands that had come before. Eventually, they were not quite as nervous, but the attitude at the retreat would never be the same as before the attack.
CHAPTER 12
The Templars
“Third Fisherman: ‘Master, I marvel how the fishes live in the sea.’
First Fisherman: ‘Why, as men do a land; the great ones eat up the little ones.’”
Todd Gray’s group began to patrol outside the perimeter of the forty-acre retreat later the same winter that the looters attacked. They had decided to delay leaving the retreat because they were well supplied and becoming increasingly self-sufficient. They reasoned that the longer they waited, the more likely that the bands of looters would have been thinned out through attrition. They also wanted to avoid getting shot by nervous neighbors. Typically, the patrols consisted of seven group members. They were broken into two three-member fire teams, plus a patrol leader. The first few foot patrols were relatively short. They started by making contact with surrounding farms.
All of the contiguous farms had been abandoned, due to farmers relocating to “double up.” The nearest occupied farm was just over a half-mile away. It was held by the farm’s original owners, plus two other families.