Expatriates (13 page)

“. . . Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew/And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true/That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four/And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

“As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man/There are only four things certain since Social Progress began./That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,/And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

“And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins/When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,/As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,/The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!”

—Rudyard Kipling, “The Gods of the Copybook Headings,” 1919

T
he morning of January 22nd dawned with clear skies. It would be a sunny day. As the sky in the east lightened, a stack of photocopied one-page flyers was passed down the line, with the whispered words, “Share these—just one copy for every five men, pass them down.”

The sheet read:

 

Instructions to Our Roadblock Ambushers

If we fail today, we'll be dead or slaves tomorrow.

Obey the orders of your Captains of Hundreds.

Noise, light, odor, and smoke discipline are essential.

If you need to poop, then dig a cat hole. (Odors can go a long distance.)

No smoking or talking above a low whisper.

Leave your rifle and shotgun chambers empty and safeties on.

If the ambush is sprung too early, we'll be outflanked. Wait until they are right in the middle of the kill zone.

Keep on your bellies—you'll live longer.

DO NOT advance from behind cover at the trailers or up to the RR tracks until ordered.

Keep your heads down! This cannot be overemphasized.

DO NOT fire until you hear rapid firing at the front end of the ambush.

Take only well-aimed shots.

Concentrate on that front sight post; everything else should be somewhat blurry.

Keep shooting until all of the looters are dead. Once they drop, take very deliberate shots at any looters that are still moving. (And any that might be faking death.)

DO NOT advance into the ambush kill zone until ordered by the captains.

Stay down. This is NOT a traditional military ambush, so we will not immediately charge into the kill zone. Allow
plenty
of time to let the wounded looters bleed out before advancing.

Pray hard. Psalms 91. May God bless this endeavor.

(By mutual agreement, after concerted prayer)

—Mayor Lyle Jenkins—Mount Dora

—Mayor Byer Levin—Tavares

—Mayor Tom Martinson—Tangerine

As full daylight came, a few men nibbled on food from their pockets. Jake could now see the billboard sign better. It had been painted black, and both sides said
RENT THIS SIGN
, along with a phone number—yet another victim of the economic decline that had preceded the Crunch. Jake and Tomas shared a granola bar. As they did so, Tomas said, “I wish I had a helmet. That would double my life expectancy.”

After a beat, Tomas continued. “I've been thinking about something. You know how you were teasing me about carrying too much gear? Well, one thing I've got in my ALICE pack is a couple of sandbags. When I was in the Marines, our battalion commander always insisted that each of us carry four sandbags. At first we hated that, since we were always humping around a ton of stuff, like we each also had to carry two mortar rounds. But those sandbags later turned out to be useful for a lot of things other than ballistic protection. For instance, we used them for packing speedballs.”

“What's a speedball?” Jake asked.

Tomas explained. “That's something that both the Army and Marines use, depending on the tactical situation or terrain, when part of a unit is under fire, and the rest of the guys are masked by terrain. When the guys up front, who are pinned down and doing most of the shooting, call back for a speedball, you take a sandbag and put in a couple of bandoleers of 5.56, a belt box of 7.62, and a few water bottles, and carry it forward.”

Jake looked incredulous. “You think we're going to get pinned down?”

“No, no, no. I'm just explaining why amongst all my other gear I have three sandbags in the bottom of my rucksack. I say we fill them with soil here, and then we can lay them on the railroad track to give us a few more vertical inches of frontal protection. Hey, we've got the time, and it might give us a slight advantage.”

The man with the Mini-14 next to them chimed in. “I'll take that third bag, if you don't mind.”

“Sure, no prob.”

The three men spent the next fifteen minutes quietly scraping sandy soil into the olive drab nylon bags using Marichal's canteen cup as an impromptu shovel. Once the bags were filled, they used some black plastic cable zip ties from Jake's pack to close each of them.

More orders were passed down the line in a sporadic succession as the morning progressed:

“Don't panic if we get flanked. Mass your firepower.”

“Looters are expected at ten thirty
A.M
.”

“Share your water.”

“Quiet.”

“Looters are expected at eleven
A.M
.”

“Pray for success.”

“Quit grumbling and be patient.”

“Keep your heads down or you'll ruin this ambush.”

“Quiet.”

“Looters are expected at ten thirty
A.M.
”

“Keep your safeties on.”

“Keep quiet.”

“Looters have been sighted less than three quarters of a mile south.”

“Keep your heads down.”

It was now above seventy-five degrees and Jake was getting a headache. He continued to look in the direction of the highway. At 10:40, Jake heard the looter's armored bulldozer as it chugged toward the roadblock. The clanking of its steel tracks was almost as loud as its engine. Tomas started looking anxious. He took off his MARPAT field jacket and stuffed it into the top of his ALICE pack.

Soon they could all hear the chants of the advancing looters in the distance. The bulldozer passed by, and the vanguard of the looter army approached. The amount of noise that came from the looters was surprising. As they got closer, Jake could hear shuffling feet, conversation, laughter, clanking metal, wobbling shopping cart wheels, and intermittent chanting.

Tomas half rolled over to Jake and whispered just inches from his ear, “Yep, there are
lots
of them, but this is amateur hour.”

Jake was also feeling warm, so he peeled off his field jacket, keeping his arms low. He quietly crept down to his rucksack and stowed the jacket. Then he pulled on the pack, trying to stay as close to the ground as possible. He handed Tomas his own pack, and he put it on. Once they were prone again, Tomas whispered, “Showtime, any moment.”

He had just finished speaking when the deep reports of a Barrett semiauto .50 from the Lake County Sheriff's Department initiated the ambush. Just five shots from the Barrett aimed at the armored bulldozer's engine brought it to a screeching halt, in a cloud of black smoke, just twenty-five feet short of the roadblock trailers.

There was a crackle of gunfire, as the looters probed the tree line to the west of the roadblock where they thought the Barrett .50 shooter might be hidden. Then a whispered order came. “Low crawl to the tracks. Stay prone. Keep as quiet as possible.” Jake crept forward up the berm, dragging his sandbag alongside him, in a leapfrogging motion. As he topped the railroad bed, he was startled by the sight of the huge number of looters, who were still ambling forward, nonchalantly. There were
thousands
of them. Then came an audible collective gasp from the looters, as the heads of the hundreds of ambushers came into view along the railroad tracks.

The second phase of the ambush began with an overwhelming roar of gunfire. This was the proverbial Mad Minute that Jake had often heard José and Tomas talking about. With the ambushers almost shoulder to shoulder, the brass and fired shotshells came down like hailstones. The firing started as a continuous roar. The looters immediately began to run, mostly to the rear and toward the field of tree stumps on the far side of the highway. Just a few of them had the discipline to drop to the ground in the grassy median between two stretches of the highway pavement and return fire. But these men were all quickly targeted and shot.

Despite their numerical superiority, the looters were overwhelmed by the ambush. Most of them were in absolute panic. They ran, only to be cut down by the withering rifle and shotgun fire. Many of the looters were trampled by the weight of the sheer number of their fellows trying to flee.

Only a few looters ran
toward
their ambushers. Tomas later commented to Janelle, “Those were probably the handful that had military training and had been taught to
charge
an ambush. But they couldn't get through our wall of lead. Talk about a target-rich environment.”

In a later conversation with Jake and José, Tomas also mentioned that the ambush had been “at least a full order of magnitude larger than anything I've ever seen in my
life
. It was devastating. And to see it all pulled off so well by a bunch of civilians was even more amazing.”

The tempo of the firing gradually died down. The casualties among the ambushers were light. Only fifteen men were wounded and seven killed. Most of these were head, neck, arm, or shoulder wounds. Four of the head wounds were instantly fatal. Three men accidentally injured themselves with ricocheted bullet jacket fragments. By resting their scoped rifles' forends on the railroad track, they unwittingly put their rifle bores in alignment with the second track. Because the scopes were mounted parallel but two to three inches
higher
than the axis of their rifle bores, it
appeared
that they had clear shots, but some of their low-angle shots actually hit the track just an arm's length forward of their muzzles.

Jake and Tomas were virtually unscathed. Jake, however, did have a hot piece of .223 brass go down the collar of his shirt. It left a painful nearly horizontal red burn at the base of his neck in the perfect shape of the brass that would become a distinctive scar.

The ambush was a lopsided success. Dead looters were scattered across the highway lanes, the median, and in the adjoining fields in huge numbers. As the ambushers' rate of fire dropped to just sporadic shots, Jake could hear screams and moans from wounded looters.

The man next to Jake had a 3-9-power variable scope mounted on his Mini-14. He turned the ring of the scope to 9-power and then began deliberately scanning the bodies of the looters. He rested the forend of his Ruger on the sandbag that Tomas had given him for a steady aim. Whenever he saw a chest rising and falling, or any other sign of life, he would take a head shot. He continued this for fifteen minutes. After most men had finished shooting and busied themselves with reloading, the man in the Realtree cap shot another fifty rounds, changing magazines twice. During the second magazine swap, he muttered, “There are still a lot of them playing possum.” The occasional rifle fire sounded up and down the line as others were taking similar coup de grâce
shots.

About twenty minutes after the most intense firing of the ambush, an order was passed down the line: “Reload before the order to advance.” Very few men needed this reminder. But there was still the clatter of many rifle actions as nervous men double-checked that their guns were fully loaded. Jake still had five loaded magazines, and Tomas had four. They deliberately shifted their empty magazines to the rearmost pouches on their web gear to avoid confusion.

A few yards down the line, a man shouted, “I'm down to two rounds. Any y'all got a spare M14 magazine for my M1A?” A loaded magazine was quickly passed down the line to him, with the proviso, “You owe me, big-time. Make every shot count.”

Jake heard two similar requests made in rapid succession—one for .30-30 ammunition and one for .243 Winchester ammunition. Both requests were filled. Then a man just fifteen feet down from Jake and Tomas shouted, “I need some .25-06.” After a pause, he said with greater urgency, “Does anyone have any .25-06, please? I've got
zero
rounds!”

Someone heckled. “You gotta be kidding. This ain't the wide-open prairie. You should have bought a .308.”

A whistle was blown and the captains relayed the order down the line. “Forward!”

Nearly everyone stood up, many of them unsteady after so many hours in a prone position. A few stayed behind to tend the wounded. The ambushers pressed forward in an uneven skirmish line. There were sporadic shots as men shot at looters suspected of playing dead.

The bodies of many of the looters were in tangled clumps. Most of them were in the grassy median between the two paved lanes of the highway or in the field beyond. The smell of the blood and the smell of the feces were overpowering—as many of the looters had been shot through the intestines or had involuntarily soiled themselves. There was blood everywhere—far more than Jake Altmiller had expected. In places where the bodies were closest together, the ground was
flooded
with blood, collecting in bright red, half-inch-deep puddles that were already starting to turn black around their edges. A few of the ambushers vomited at the horrific sight.

As they walked forward, Tomas commented, “
Christo
. I seen a lot on my deployments, but never anything quite like this.”

What surprised Jake the most was seeing all the stray shoes. Nearly everywhere he looked, there were shoes and sandals that the looters had lost in the panic of the ambush, especially in the tightly packed groups where they had trampled each other.