James Rawles - Survivors - A Novel of the Coming Collapse

Garcia was never associated with any of the big gangs, although he did recruit a few members of MS-13. He kept his own gang-“the gang with no name”-as quiet as possible, and discouraged them from antagonizing any other gangs. Garcia often said, “Let them bicker and kill each other while we hang back and just make lots of money.”

The stoners who worked for Garcia sometimes did stupid crack-head stuff. Even though he gave them explicit directions, they’d ignore him and bring back things like big-screen HD televisions, bottles of various prescription medicines, and kitchen appliances. One time one of his men brought back plastic bags of live koi carp that they had stolen from a pond. This pond was in the backyard of a house that they had trouble entering. Some of the items had to be discarded, or took weeks to fence.

Three years before the Crunch, Ignacio realized that some upper-middle-class people rarely let their guard down. For these targets Garcia started to train and equip his home invasion team. He selected his most ruthless yet most levelheaded men. He gave them some of his best guns and carefully selected targets, mostly ones that he’d previously had to pass up. He called this team La Fuerza—The Force. Most of their home invasions took place at midday, when there would likely be just one adult at home.

The home invasions went remarkably well. Because Garcia insisted on a strict six-minute time limit inside a target house, La Fuerza never met the police face-to-face. Eventually he split La Fuerza into two teams of six men each. Their take was so lucrative that he eventually stopped using his traditional burglary teams altogether. He gave control and ownership of that whole operation to his cousin Simon.

Garcia grew up in Houston’s Second Ward, but after he built up capital from his burglaries, he bought a house in Greenspoint, on the north side. This was a nice suburban neighborhood that was roughly half Hispanic. He did his best to blend in. Ignacio told his neighbors that he was in the import/export business. In a way, he was right. He just exported things from people’s houses and imported them into his own.

When the Crunch started, there were sixteen full members of Garcia’s gang. As the economy cratered, Garcia realized that he had to switch gears quickly. Previously, his goal had been converting stolen goods into cash. But now cash was perishable and even undesirable. The goods themselves were more valuable. He also realized that once Houston became the target of rioting, the whole city would be locked down, and he’d be just as at risk from burglary or robbery as anyone else.

Garcia leased a large warehouse in Anahuac, a white-bread community on the east side of Trinity Bay, in Chambers County, east of Houston. He rented a nearby apartment and moved his wife and children there. The warehouse had thirty-five thousand square feet and a pair of large roll-up doors in the back. He set all of his men to work ferrying the best of his accumulated loot from his various storage spaces to the warehouse. Then he had them start stealing late-model cargo vans and pickup trucks with camper shells. He didn’t ask them to stop until he had seventeen of them parked in the warehouse.

Using his gang members as agents, Garcia scrambled to convert as much of his cash as possible into practical tangibles. He had them buy ten jerry cans for each van and truck, and set each vehicle up with roof racks. They each also got water jugs, canned goods, camp stoves, sleeping bags, ammunition, tools, and freeze-dried foods. They bought or stole four spare tires mounted on rims for each vehicle, and strapped them down on the roof racks. After just three days at the warehouse, he asked his cousin Simon to join him, and to bring along his eight toughest men who were bachelors.

Garcia spent many hours talking what-ifs with Tony, his most trusted lieutenant. Tony had three years of artillery experience in the Army, with a tour in Iraq. That was before his Article 15s and dishonorable discharge. It was Tony who suggested putting CB radios in every vehicle. It was also Tony who recommended buying up as many cans of flat tan and flat brown spray paint as they could find. Tony was good at planning ahead.

They had everything almost ready at the warehouse by the time that the riots started in earnest. He ordered the men and their families to get used to sleeping hard-essentially camping-inside of their vehicles in the warehouse. There were some complaints at first, but then, once Houston started to burn, they thanked Ignacio for rescuing them from the chaos and for getting them ready.

The entire gang eventually adopted the name La Fuerza. Ignacio set them on a well-calculated campaign of nighttime robberies of sporting goods stores, department stores, and recreational equipment stores. They were cautious, though, so none of these stores were located in Chambers County.

Once the gang was equipped for traveling and living independently, La Fuerza started stealing armored vehicles. Their first targets were members of the Military Vehicle Preservation Association (MVPA), a group that Garcia’s wife found with an Internet search. The MVPA members meticulously restored jeeps, trucks, and armored vehicles. Their roster-complete with the addresses of members-was there for the taking on the Internet. The gang’s goal was acquiring wheeled armored personnel carriers.

Their vehicles of choice were the Cadillac Gage V-100 Commando (a four-wheeled APC) and the Alvis Saracen a (British six-wheeled APC). Garcia sent out four-man teams in stolen cars to as far away as Oklahoma and Louisiana to steal them.

His men would arrive after midnight, batter down house doors, and force people from their beds at gunpoint. They marched them to their garages to show the gang members how to start and operate their vehicles. To give them more time to get away before an alarm was raised, the gang members killed the homeowners and their families. Over the course of three nights, they drove back to Anahuac with three Saracens and two V-100s.

Garcia was disappointed to find that most of the MVPA members had only non-firing dummy weapons mounted on their vehicles. Only one of the vehicles had a live gun. This was a semiautomatic-only Browning Model 1919. So their next targets were belt-fed machine guns, taken in storefront or home invasion robberies of Class 3 licensed full-auto weapons dealers. These robberies netted six .30 caliber belt-feds, two Browning .50s, and 15 submachineguns of various types. They were surprised at the quantity of ammunition and extra magazines that the dealers had. In all, there were 232 cans of ammunition, much of it already on linked belts.

It was not until after they had the guns and Tony started reading their manuals that they realized they needed belt-linking machines to assemble belts of ammunition. They then brazenly went back to a store that they had robbed just two days before and took both .30 and .50 caliber hand-lever linking machines and several 20mm ammo cams containing thousands of used links.

Sheila Randall was fretting. Her husband, Jerome, had moved them from New Orleans to Radcliff, Kentucky, just a few weeks before the Crunch. After he was laid off in New Orleans, Jerome had been offered the steady job in Kentucky. But that meant leaving behind their extended families in Louisiana. They brought with them Tyree, their ten-year-old son, and Emily Voisin, Sheila’s spry seventy-six-year-old grandmother. They settled into a three-bedroom rental house on Third Street in Radcliff. The town was just outside the south gate of Fort Knox, the home of the U.S. Army’s Armor Center and School-the school for tanker troops.