At the east end of Princeton, four Harleys roared to life and sped out of town. Della fired half a dozen rounds at the retreating forms without success.
Her targets, four hundred yards away, rounded a bend in the road, and were out of sight. Across the street, she heard Doug say, “Save your ammo, they’re out of range. The Templars will take care of them.” Seconds later, they heard an explosion and the ripple of gunfire down the road. Raising her hand, Della gave Doug an “okay” symbol. Just then, they heard the sound of a shotgun barking from a nearby brick house. In a singsong voice, Della yelled, the familiar saying from their countless training sessions, “Okay Joe, I’ll fire, you move!”
Carlton sprinted from car to car, then toward the house, approaching it from around the corner from which the shots were coming. He chirped,
“Okay Joe, I’ll fire, you move.”As Della got up, Carlton started firing his M1A at one-second to two-second intervals to keep the man with the shotgun pinned down. At the side of the building, Doug and Della held a quick consultation and reloaded their rifles. Della resumed firing at the window while Doug went around to enter the house from the front. The man with the shotgun returned her fire only occasionally, with unaimed shots.
Just as Della was firing the last rounds from her second thirty-round magazine, she heard a grenade explosion inside the house. She waited anxiously for a couple of minutes until her husband emerged again from the front of the house. As he padded up to her, Doug smiled and said, “End of story.”
After finding his assigned house empty, T.K. made his way down the main street, and then back up the alley that ran parallel to it to the north. He came under fire twice. On the first occasion, a man firing a bolt-action rifle from the roof of a mobile home sent a round whizzing by his ear. T.K. turned toward the source of the shooting, and dropped into a crouch. He lined up his sights and fired two shots in rapid succession. The first of the sixty-two-grain Sierra match bullets hit the man in the neck and the second hit him in the left eye. The back of his skull disintegrated in a cloud of pink vapor.
As he moved farther down the street, Kennedy came under fire from behind by a man shooting an M1 carbine from the concealment of a porch. T.K. was struck in the back by two bullets, and sent tumbling to the ground.
He was momentarily breathless. Once he realized that his bulletproof vest had stopped the rounds, he rolled over and returned fire with his AR-15 in four quick double taps. His assailant was stitched by half a dozen bullets and lay gurgling on the porch. T.K. stood up and moved on, unconsciously swapping magazines and searching for new targets.
Holding his Smith and Wesson revolver in a low ready position, Lon began his slow ascent of the stairway, hugging the left-hand wall. From below, Todd covered the doorway at the top of the stairs. Once he was at the landing at the top of the stairs, Lon gestured for Todd to follow him. Gray then advanced up the stairs and crouched at the landing while Lon searched the upstairs rooms.
After he had entered the second bedroom, Todd heard Lon fire three times in rapid succession, and then after a pause, a fourth shot. Next, Gray heard the tinkle of empty pistol cartridges hitting the hardwood floor as Porter reloaded his 686 using a speed loader. The last room was unoccupied.
Walking back to the stairwell Lon reported, “There was a young woman in the middle bedroom. All she was wearing was a tank top. She was sitting there crying when I walked in. Then I noticed that she had the tattoo of a rose and a skull on her shoulder. She got up and started toward me fast with a big sheath knife. That’s when I shot her. She was only a few feet away. I never want to have to do something like that again.”
Mike, Dan, Kevin, and Rose did most of the house clearing. They linked together as an ad hoc team, kicking in doors and moving from room to room, eliminating resistance. It was usually Mike who led the way on these assaults.
His bulletproof vest saved his life twice that morning. In one of the building entries, Dan Fong was slightly wounded by a pistol shot that grazed his upper arm. Soon after he applied a Carlisle battle dressing, the wound stopped bleeding.
After twenty minutes of house-to-house and room-to-room fighting, the shooting died down and finally came to a stop. In plain view, Mike jogged up and down the street, checking on the raiders. Once it was clear that there was no more resistance, he walked to the doorway of the service bay of the gas station. He tooted long blasts on his whistle for thirty seconds and then gave the call, “Okay guys, rally on me! Rally on me!”
A few minutes later, ten of the raiders were clustered around him in the back of the gas station. Just inside the door to the garage, Tom Kennedy sat with his rifle at the ready, watching the street. Mike ordered, “Okay, now that we’ve cleared all of the houses, we’re going to go back through again in buddy teams, just to make sure that we didn’t miss anyone. I want every single room of each house thoroughly searched. I don’t care how long it takes. Also, make sure that every one of these ‘One Percenters’ that we shot is one-hundred-percent dead. It’s the ones that you think are dead that get up and shoot you.”
The final clearing process went relatively smoothly. One biker was found hiding under a bed. After he was ordered out from his hiding place, he made a leap for a window. Kevin Lendel fired his riotgun three times, leaving him in a heap beneath the windowsill.
In the back of the former tractor shop, T.K. and Lisa found a ten-year-old boy trapped in a wall locker that had been secured with a twisted piece of coat hanger wire in its latch. He was the only surviving resident of the town. The boy’s hands were wrapped in bloodstained rags. When Lisa removed the rags, she found that both of the boy’s little fingers had been cut off. Lisa asked, “Who did this to you?”
The boy mumbled something unintelligible in reply.
Lisa repeated her question twice more.
Finally, the boy gave a trembling reply, “It was Greasy. He promised that he was going to cut off one finger a day until they were all gone.”
“Why did he do this to you?”
“Because… because I wouldn’t do what he wanted me to do. Greasy wanted me to use my mouth to, to….” With that, the boy’s voice trailed off and he began to cry.
Lisa moved to hug the boy, but he pushed her away with a grunt. “You poor dear. Do you want some water?” Lisa asked.
“Yes please, ma’am.”
Lisa pulled her canteen out of its pouch and handed it to the boy. He drank nearly all of it with loud gulps.
The Templars had set up two three-man ambushes in both directions on the road through Princeton. Each of these ambushes employed two Claymores apiece. Seven other individuals set up one-man ambushes along likely paths of egress from town. Each of these ambushers set up a single Claymore mine.
Only three of the Templars’ ambushes were sprung. The first was initiated by a Claymore mine and followed by rifle fire. This ambush killed the four gang members who attempted to flee on their motorcycles.
The second ambush was sprung by a fourteen-year-old girl. Two men, both armed and one of them naked, were running down the trail directly toward her. Once she saw that they were in the fan of effect of her Claymore, she ducked behind the cover of a downed tree, and touched the bare pair of WD-1 wires to the terminals of a nine-volt battery. To her inexperienced ears, the sound of the explosion was startling. When she popped up with her AR-180 carbine to shoot anything still moving, she found there wasn’t anyone alive left to shoot.
The third Templar ambush was sprung by their communications expert, a seventy-four-year-old retired Navy signalman. Situated at an ambush at a trail junction, he spotted a man wearing a black leather jacket and armed with an inexpensive Maverick riot shotgun running toward him. Not wanting to waste his Claymore, he took careful aim with his M1A and shot the man twice at a range of sixty yards.