There was a conscious decision to form what Kevin Lendel called “an organization without an organization.” Most referred to this methodology as the “phantom cell” or “leaderless resistance” approach. All of the militias in the region, they decided, should share common goals, but should have wholly independent leadership.
Without central leadership, it would be impossible to decapitate the militia. Also, through strict “need to know” security measures, it would make it almost impossible to infiltrate more than one of the local militias. Everyone was warned not to give their names when conducting joint field exercises. They constantly stressed that given the disconnected cellular organization, if any member of any of the militias was eventually captured and tortured, that individual could at most expose the names of just a handful of members in their cell.
The other proviso that was constantly stressed was that virtually nothing was to be written down, aside from perhaps a few unit SOPs. There would be no written rosters, no description of assigned areas of operation, and no lists of frequencies or call signs. Further, no maps were to be marked with any notations whatsoever. They were even warned not to leave maps folded in such a way that they emphasized a particular operational area. Everything of potential intelligence value was to be committed to memory.
Coordination between the militias was actively discouraged, again for security reasons. Each militia picked out an area of operations, which they communicated by word of mouth to their neighboring militias. A few rallying points were agreed upon for eventual tactical coordination, but beyond that, everything was kept cellular. Aside from the assigned rally points, the local resistance cells were advised to operate wholly independently, using the leaderless resistance concept. They would use generalized principles and planning, but decentralized tactics and action.
One of the few militias that the Northwest Militia regularly trained with was the Moscow Maquis. The Maquis were led by a fifty-year-old man with piercing blue eyes named Lawrence Raselhoff. Raselhoff was both a dog breeder and gun dealer before the Crunch. Much of his gun inventory was handed out to unit members in the first few months after the Maquis was formed. Even though he was confined to a wheelchair, Raselhoff was an energetic leader. He often went to the field with his unit in a dogcart, on a dog sled, or on his white snowmobile. Both Todd and Mike had long conversations with Raselhoff, making contingency plans.
Many of the Northwest Militia meetings in the late fall of the third year concerned the possible invasion of the region by the Federals or their UN counterparts. It was decided that guerrilla warfare would be the most appropriate response. The threat of armored vehicles seemed the most obvious. Both Jeff and Doug had seen tanks and armored personnel carriers in action, and they could appreciate how well they could stop most conventional attacks. It was Doug Carlton who crystallized the approach that they would take in countering the armor threat when he said, “What we will really need are some anti-tank missiles—LAWs,Vipers, Dragons, or TOWs. Unfortunately, we have none available, and they are very difficult to improvise.”
Lon asked, “What can we improvise? How about Molotov cocktails? Those are easy enough to make.”
Carlton responded, “Molotov cocktails will work, but it takes a lot of them to stop a tank or APC. You also need to thicken the gas to make it stick. Otherwise it just pours off of any vehicle that the bottle breaks on. You can thicken it with laundry detergent. Styrofoam also works great. You want to get it thickened to the point where it has the consistency of heavy maple syrup.”
He went on, “If you can get close enough to use them, what works even better than Molotov cocktails is a TH3 grenade—commonly called thermite in the civilian world. According to one of Todd’s Kurt Saxon books that I read, thermite is really easy to make. It’s a mixture of iron oxide—just rust—and powdered aluminum. It’s a very powerful oxidizer that burns at something outrageous like five thousand degrees Fahrenheit. It’s what chemists call an exothermic reaction. It will melt through two inches of steel tank iron like butter. I saw a TH3 grenade used at a firepower demonstration at Fort Knox. They laid a thick old car door sideways across a couple of sawhorses and set the TH3 grenade on top. They warned us several times not to look directly at the flames to avoid damaging our retinas, and then an NCO pulled the pin. The thing went completely through the door and dropped to the ground within a few seconds.”
Rose exclaimed, “Wow, that would really do a number on a tank.”
Doug warned, “Now keep in mind that employing either Molotovs or thermite grenades against armored vehicles or both would be very, very dangerous, particularly Bradley M2s or M3s. You’ve got to be right up close for Molotovs, and even closer for the thermite grenades.”
A day later, Mike and Lisa Nelson started mass production of Molotov cocktails. Just the week before, they had been making goat’s milk soap for the retreat, using lye that they had derived from ashes. But this week they were firebomb makers. For the Molotov project, they selected the most-untrustworthy gas stored at the retreat—that which was stored in small cans and the vehicles’ fuel tanks. The gasoline was thickened with laundry detergent powder in an open fifty-five-gallon drum that was placed seventy yards away from the house. The noxious mixture was stirred with the handle of a broken rake. It was ladled into quart canning jars and sealed tight with Mason lids and rings.
An eighteen-inch long strip of rag was made for each jar for ignition. Lisa epoxied a one-inch square of “hook side” Velcro fastener to each lid. A corresponding one-inch square of “pile side”Velcro was sewn to the center of each of the rag strips. They soaked all these strips in diesel fuel and sealed them in individual Ziploc bags which were duct taped to the sides of each jar. To use a Molotov, the rag would be removed from the plastic bag, and attached to the jar with the Velcro. Then the rag would be lit with a match and then the jar could be thrown.
By separating the main fuel component from the ignition component, Lisa Nelson explained, it made the devices “about a thousand percent safer” to use or carry than the traditional rags-stuffed-into-wine-bottles method. When they did a demonstration of one of the prototypes, Lisa mentioned that they would have preferred to have developed some sort of friction igniter, but there weren’t enough supplies of chemicals available. Instead, they opted for the method of packaging the diesel-soaked rags with each cocktail. Most of the cocktails were packed into the original cardboard cases that the canning jars came in, for ease and safety of transport. In all, they assembled two hundred and twenty of the firebombs. For safety’s sake, the cases were stored in a dry corner of the barn.
Mike, Della, and Doug were named the ad hoc committee for thermite grenade construction. After a few days of inquiries, they discovered that there was a quantity of Creslite coarse brille aluminum powder in the hands of an owner of what had been a bronzing shop in Moscow. Before the Crunch, he had run a mail-order business bronzing items like baby’s booties and judge’s gavels. He was happy to part with his remaining sixty pounds of bronzing powder in exchange for one hundred rounds of .223 ball, and twenty rounds of .30-06 AP.
The iron oxide came from the owner of the paint store in Moscow. He still had two fifty-pound sacks of natural black iron oxide pigment in stock. Before the Crunch, he had mainly sold it to contractors who used it for tinting concrete. After some confusion, when he first tried to sell them some synthetic iron oxide powder, he came back from his large storeroom with two sacks of the chemically correct, “natural” item made by Pfizer, loaded on a dolly. He agreed to trade the two sacks for one hundred rounds of Federal .308 match grade ammunition. He was happy to get the ammo. They also found a fifty-foot reel of magnesium ribbon. It was in the hands of a former University of Idaho chemistry professor. He had taken home most of the chem lab’s inventory for safekeeping. When he found out why they needed the ribbon, he refused any offer of payment. He declared, “Hey, it’s for a good cause.” The professor snipped off four feet of the ribbon from the reel to keep for himself, and handed Doug the rest.