James Rawles - Survivors - A Novel of the Coming Collapse

Most of the training consisted of dry practice with an unloaded gun, and with all of the gun’s ammunition safely in another compartment. But after a week of that, Andy gave Jules and all the adults the chance to actually shoot the SIG. Their targets were sealed empty bottles that were thrown off the bow. In all, they shot just twenty-eight cartridges.

After every lesson, Andy said, “If I go down, then you pick this gun up and you continue the fight until the threat is vanquished. You do not quit. Do you understand?”

After the first phase of firearms training, Andy moved on to hand-to-hand combatives and knife fighting, using his own amalgam of tae kwon do, pistol handling, and Krav Maga, which Laine dubbed “SIG kwon do.” Adding to the standard katas, Andy taught how to use a pistol that had been shot dry as a club and as a pressure-point tool. For the latter, he used the barrel protruding from the pistol with its slide locked to the rear. The small surface area of the muzzle, he showed, could deliver tremendous force in strikes to the solar plexus, groin, kidneys, or neck of an opponent.

Each morning from ten to noon, Alan Taft taught everyone Spanish. Sailing instruction-also for everyone-took up most of each afternoon. Nearly every night after the dinner dishes were washed, there were endless games of cards, mostly cribbage.

Andy was having trouble getting to sleep. They were 250 miles west of Portugal. It was a Tuesday, and his contact was scheduled for that night, so he felt anxious. He was hoping for good propagation.

Andy set his radio’s alarm for 0315. As he set up the dipole antenna along the rail, he was surprised to see Carston standing in the open hatchway. In a soft voice Andy explained what he was doing. Simms nodded. Andy sat down and completed hooking up the transceiver. Then he said, “Well, five minutes, and then I’ll know if we’ve got good propagation.”

Carston offered, “That can be tricky on shortwave.”

Andy replied, “Yeah.”

The silence was overwhelming. Andy watched Carston Simms still standing in the doorway. Still in a whisper, he asked, “Tell me, how did this boat get the name Durobrabis ?”

Carston sighed and explained: “She’s named after some old Celt ruins somewhere. You see, before I bought her, this boat belonged to an archaeology professor from the western end of Kent. He only rarely sailed her.” After a pause he added, “I didn’t particularly like the name, but being an old salt, I consider it bad luck to change a boat’s name.”

At 0329, at Andy’s request, Simms tacked to put Durobrabis on a southwesterly heading. This left the dipole antenna roughly facing the Great Circle line of bearing to the western United States. Precisely at 0330 GMT, Andy heard a strong cadence in Morse, with Lars’s distinctive stuttering “fist” on his preferred traditional Morse key:

“K5CLA DE K5CLB BT

“K5CLA DE K5CLB BT”

Andy replied: “K5CLB DE K5CLA BT”

Lars hammered back, “HOT DANG, GOT YOU AT S3. R-U AT SEA?”

“YES, MAKING GOOD TIME, FB, NOW IN DEEP OCEAN. NO WORRIES. HOW IS KL?”

“SHES FINE, LEARNING M-MORSE N WANTS 2 CHAT”

“PLZ PUT KL ON THE KEY”

Then, in a ponderously slow Morse rate of six words per minute, Andy heard: “I LOVE YOUU DRLING, 88, 88, 88. DYING TO SEE YOU. ANY ETA? BR”

How could he even begin to explain to her that it might be many months before he got home?

More than two decades before the Crunch, Ian Doyle had a temporary duty (TDY) assignment to Honduras that changed his life.

The leader of the Hondo Expedition was Major Alan Brennan, a quiet man who was the son of a retired Air Force colonel. Brennan’s leadership was competent but very laid-back. He made it clear that he expected his squadron members to be punctual for all meetings, and completely sober before each scheduled mission. He summed up his guidance by stating simply, “We’ve got excellent maintenance NCOs, and the civilian techs know the gear inside and out. Stand back and let them do their jobs. Just be at the briefings and be on flight line on time. ‘Kick the tire, light the fire,’ and come home safe.”

Brennan, who had recently been married, was fascinated by pre-Columbian history and spent a lot of his time off in a rented jeep wandering around ancient ruins, taking pictures. Other than on his mission days, Doyle rarely saw him.

The Air Force terminated its tactical reconnaissance program for F-16s in 1993, with plans to shift most of those missions to UAVs. But as a follow-on, there was an interim program using the U.S. Navy-developed Tactical Aerial Reconnaissance Pod System (TARPS) mounted on F-16s. Doyle’s squadron was one of the two fighter squadrons that got tapped for this strap-on recon test program, which only lasted eighteen months. While technically a success, from an operational and logistics standpoint, the results were mixed. And since UAV technology was meanwhile maturing rapidly, the decision was made to mothball the TARPS pods and support gear. It was during the TARPS test program that Ian Doyle was part of the Hondo Expedition.

By the time that the USAF got involved, the TARPS pods were a well-matured technology. Most of the technical support was supplied by civilian contractors from Grumman, the company that had originally developed the system. The seventeen-foot, 1,850-pound pods were essentially a strap-on system, adaptable to many types of aircraft. They could be mounted on standard hard points. First developed for Navy F-14s and Marine Corps F/A-18s, the TARPS pods were, as one of the Grumman camera technicians put it, “foolproof and pilotproof, but then, I repeat myself.”

The expedition included four F-16s-two for missions and two for spares and side trips-four mission pilots, and a C-130 to shuttle the support crew and umpteen spare parts-both for the planes and for the TARPS pods. The TDY rotation was five months, making it just short of the six-month threshold for a PCS. This made the personnel paperwork easier and reduced the overall cost of the program.

All of the pilots were housed at the “White House” (La Casa Blanca), the guest quarters in Tegucigalpa that were run by the American embassy, in Colonia Loma Linda Norte district, on La Avenida FAO. The White House was a gathering place of myth and legend. It served as the catchall for visiting company-grade military officers, CIA types on temporary assignment, and assorted contractors on government business. The atmosphere was jovial and there were even some fraternity-style bashes on weekends. The CIA officers called it a safe house, but its presence was hardly clandestine. Even the local newspaper mentioned it from time to time, often by its nicknames, Rick’s Cafe Americain or Rick’s Place, in honor of the Humphrey Bogart movie Casablanca .