Expatriates: A Novel of the Coming Global Collapse

9 BARGAIN HUNTING

Chuck began spending most of his weekends with Ava. They had long conversations about a wide range of topics, but mostly about theology and the Christian life. Just as their relationship was blossoming, however, Ava moved away to begin college at the ANU. They carried on via e-mail and phone calls, but Chuck missed her company. To compensate, Chuck did more reading, attended Bible studies, played his guitars, and went hiking. He would have also liked to do some target shooting and hunting, but the bureaucratic challenges of importing any of his guns from Texas were daunting.

When Chuck Nolan casually mentioned to his fossicking crew that he was interested in buying a rifle, Bruce Drake said, “Well, you’ve got to meet my uncle Thomas. He’s our family’s biggest gun guy. He has a lot of guns, and he’s quite the roo hunter. He was a farm foreman, but he’s retired now.”

Despite Chuck’s immediate interest in meeting Bruce’s uncle, he didn’t see Thomas Drake until a month later. In the interim, he learned, Uncle Thomas had done some thorough background checking on Nolan.

They met face-to-face for the first time at the Casuarina Gun Club rifle range, where Thomas was a member. It was a small club—the sort where each member had a key to the padlock on the gate.

The club had been established just a few years before, as an alternative to the Darwin Clay Target Club, which catered to trap and skeet shooters. There, some of the rifle shooters had felt the deep divide between the shotgun shooters and the rifle shooters. They felt like the rifle shooters were treated as second-class citizens. Even in the Northern Territory, which had a reputation for its casual and nonbureaucratic government, getting the permits and inspections required to establish the new range had taken a frustrating three years.

It was a hot afternoon, and Chuck and Thomas were the only shooters there. For a new club, the facilities were Spartan: Some earthen butts that had been bulldozed at various distances. A dozen shooting benches with posts made of ironbark eucalyptus and their tops and seats cut from plywood. Concrete had not yet been poured, but the forms for the concrete walkways were already under construction. A temporary shade structure covered only four of the benches.

Initially, they spent some time chitchatting as Thomas stapled a pair of targets on the frames at the 200-meter butts and set up his spotting scope. Thomas had brought three rifles with him that day: a Mauser sporter that had been rechambered to .243 Winchester with a heavy bull barrel, a BSA Model 15 .22 rimfire target rifle on a Martini single-shot action, and a Scout-sporterized .303 No. 4 Mk 1 Short Magazine Lee-Enfield (SMLE) bolt action. It was the latter rifle that Drake had hinted he might be willing to sell.

Their first half hour of shooting was quite deliberate, as Drake shot the Mauser .243 in three-shot groups from a sandbag rest, comparing the accuracy of four different hand-load batches that he’d made, which had slightly different powder charges. Chuck was impressed to see that Thomas had a detailed shooting log book wherein he made notes on the temperature, humidity, and estimated wind speed. After he’d found the most accurate load, he gave Chuck the chance to shoot the rifle. Shooting from the rest, his three-shot group measured less than two inches—larger than Drake’s best group, but still quite respectable.

Next, they shot the .303 caliber SMLE. Drake mentioned that he had inherited it from a relative in New South Wales where registration wasn’t required until after the Port Arthur tragedy. This rifle had been tucked away in the back of a closet and overlooked until after the registration deadline. When Thomas had inherited it, he didn’t have the heart to turn it in. Before they started shooting, Chuck mentioned, “I’ve been doing some research, and I’ve read that there is a particular sequence for loading the ammo into SMLE stripper clips so that the rifle won’t jam.”

Drake nodded. “Ah, so you have been doing your studies, have you? I’ve heard that you’re a man with close attention to detail. You’re right about that. Since these cartridges are rimmed, you have to be careful that they go into the chargers just like this.”

With Chuck watching carefully, Thomas dexterously loaded a stripper clip. He did it in a way so that, as the cartridges were sequentially pushed out of the magazine by the bolt, the cartridge rims wouldn’t get tangled up.

Chuck liked the rifle. It had a butter-smooth action and it had been partially sporterized with a good-quality forward “scout” style scope mount and a Schmidt & Bender long eye relief scope that was worth almost as much as the rifle itself. The rifle’s 10-round magazine, which could be rapidly reloaded with 5-round stripper clips (or “chargers” in the British Commonwealth shooting lexicon) was a nice plus. He would have preferred a more modern SMLE chambered in 7.62 NATO, but those were quite scarce.

Chuck noticed that the ammo they were using was the later vintage noncorrosively primed ammunition made in Greece in the 1970s, with an HXP head stamp. He would have given anything for some more-recently manufactured American-made Federal brand .303 British soft-tip hunting ammunition. Having once used that ammunition, he had been able to put two-round groups from a cold barrel into the same hole on paper at one hundred yards, from a well-cleaned, cut and recrowned barrel. He had even read that in the early 1980s, the American Olin-Winchester plant had produced modern military ball (FMJ) .303 British under contract for the U.S. government, to be sent to the Afghans fighting the Soviets at that time.

The rifle was a No. 4 Mk 1 model and was stamped ROF(F)—which indicated that it had been manufactured by the Royal Ordnance Factory at Fazakerly, England. As was typical of sporters, the forward portion of the handguard wood had been removed, and the remaining handguard tapered and rounded at the tip. Seeing this made Chuck cringe, as he hated to see original military rifles altered. However, he was glad to see that the sporterizing had at least been done neatly and that the scope mount and scope had been expertly installed.

Chuck shot five rounds through the SMLE rifle. With the high magnification spotting scope, he could see that all five shots had hit in a five-inch radius. This was good accuracy for two hundred yards—at least for a SMLE.

“That’s a fair grouping for that rifle when using surplus ammo. I think it suits you. Would you like to buy it?” Thomas asked.

Chuck smiled and said, “Yes, I like the idea of owning an American-designed rifle.”

“What? Lee-Enfields are British.”

Chuck shook his head and said politely, “Actually, the SMLE was a design refined in England by the Enfield arsenal, but the original designer was James Paris Lee, who was born in Scotland and raised in Canada, but he moved to the States in the 1850s. He was a naturalized American citizen, and that’s where he became a gun designer.”

“Oh.”

Chuck asked hesitantly, “Is it registered?”

Thomas snorted derisively and said, “Nah. Do you realize there are more unregistered guns than there are registered ones in this country? After the Port Arthur muck-up, us Aussies got wise and either started building hiding places in our walls or sharpened our spades.”

Chuck raised an eyebrow, and asked with a wry grin, “Some midnight gardening, eh?”

Drake laughed. “Too right.”

Chuck tested the rifle’s magazine release, popping the magazine in and out twice, and said, “You know, a Texan without a rifle is like an Englishman without an umbrella.”

Drake chuckled and gave him one last scrutinizing stare. “Okay, Chuck. Here’s what’s what: For five hundred dollars Australian, I’ll give you that rifle with the scope and sling that are on it now, and I’ll include eighty rounds of that Greek .303 ball.”

Chuck thrust his hand forward for a handshake, and half shouted, “We have a deal.”

Later that day, after thoroughly cleaning the rifle, Chuck did a Bing web search to find a ballistic “drop table” for .303 ball cartridges, calculated from two hundred to twelve hundred yards. After all, the .303 British cartridge was considered underpowered by modern standards (starting its drop even before two hundred yards), although the bullet’s relatively large grain weight still made the round accurate as well as a heavy hitter within six hundred yards. He printed a copy, trimmed it with scissors, and neatly taped it to the left side of the rifle stock, just forward of the magazine. While some gun collectors found this practice unsightly, Chuck was strongly in favor of practicality over style. He wanted to have a quick reference to the rifle’s ballistic characteristics handy at all times.

The same evening he began searching for dead space in his cottage. He needed a hiding place for the SMLE and its ammo and accessories. Tapping on the thin veneer paneling on the partition between his bedroom and the combination living room/kitchen, he discovered a hollow sound. Rather than the FIBEROCK plasterboard that had been used on the inside of the exterior walls, he found that this partition had been shoddily constructed. The paneling had simply been nailed to bare studs using small brads. He found one panel above the built-in dresser that would be the right size to hold the SMLE and accessories. This panel was three feet wide by four feet tall. On the reverse side of the wall in the living room, there was an electrical outlet, but since it was in the corner of his intended cache section, he didn’t anticipate that it would be a problem.

The next morning, Chuck drove to the shopping mall in Casuarina and bought a package of 20 mm diameter Velcro tabs at a department store. These tabs had glue-backed adhesive. Then he drove to the All Tools store on Winnellie Street in Darwin and picked up a few hand tools.

Back at the cottage, he sized up the job. He noticed that if he pulled the paneling down from the top, it would probably scrape the ceiling and leave a mark. So he worked from the bottom. He found that the brads the builder had used were quite thin, and had just a very slight flare at their head ends. This meant he was able to gingerly pull the paneling off, with the brads staying in the studs, and their head pulling through the paneling. Once he had the first ten inches loose, the rest of the panel came off easily. With the paneling removed, he used his hammer to nail the protruding brads down flush.

Chuck found that his intended cache space was bisected by a piece of AC electrical wire that angled down to the outlet box. The wire would get in the way of storing the rifle, so he made a trip to an electrical supply store where they sold wire by the roll or by the meter. It was twice as expensive when it was purchased by the lineal meter, but he only needed to buy 1.5 meters. He also bought an assortment box of wire nuts, a combination wire cutter/stripper tool, and a roll of electrical tape.

After again returning to the cottage, he found the circuit breaker for the living room outlet and de-energized it. Once he had the junction box open to extend the wire, he realized he had the opportunity to hardwire in a GoldenRod dehumidifier. So he substituted larger wire nuts and stubbed off a short length of wire, and he capped its conductors with wire nuts.

He oiled the SMLE heavily and stowed it in the wall cache along with the bandoleers of ammunition, even including his cleaning supplies. He didn’t want to leave anything out in plain view that might arouse suspicion. The Enfield rifle fit nicely in the shallow space, but only when its bolt handle was removed.

The Velcro tabs worked wonderfully. The cache was virtually undetectable, yet he could access it in just a few seconds. The finishing touch was adding a row of cup hook screws inside beneath the top stud to provide a place to hang his cotton bandoleers of ammunition.

He ordered a twelve-inch-long 220/230 VAC GoldenRod dehumidifier on the Internet. It arrived a few days later and took just a few minutes to wire in. The dehumidifier drew only 50 watts, so the expense of operating it was negligible. Chuck slept better knowing the rifle and ammunition would be protected from corrosion. Rust was a constant enemy in Australia’s Top End.

Chuck took the rifle out only for occasional outback target shooting and roo hunting. He eventually bought another 280 rounds of .303 ammo but was able to find just one spare magazine. He was careful to always carry the rifle in a guitar case, in case any of his neighbors were nosy.

A few weeks after he bought the Enfield rifle, Chuck Nolan met Caleb Burroughs through Randall Burroughs, his younger brother. Caleb was a warrant officer in the Australian Army with a specialty in logistics. He found his job frustrating because although he handled logistics related to the Australian Army deployments in Afghanistan, he never had the opportunity to go to Afghanistan himself. He resigned himself to “pushing paper” for the Army but often grumbled that as a logistics planning officer, it was unlikely he’d ever have a chance to go to “The Sharp End.” He kept himself in top-notch physical condition, always hoping that he would be deployed to Afghanistan, but he never was.

Randall introduced Chuck to his brother when Caleb was home on semiannual leave, and the two immediately hit it off. In Chuck’s estimation, Caleb was a much different man from his brother. While Rabbit was crude and impulsive, Caleb was refined and reserved. And unlike Rabbit, Caleb was well educated, and well read. Rabbit’s tastes ran toward men’s magazines like Maxim, while Caleb read Guns & Game magazine and Journal of Military History. He also subscribed to Quadrant, a conservative literary magazine. Born in the same year and just three days apart, Caleb and Chuck also shared tastes in movies and novels—particularly old Westerns—and both were shooting enthusiasts and admirers of the Australian novelist Nevil Shute.

As a serving army officer, Caleb was rarely at home in Darwin, but he and Chuck continued their friendship via e-mail and Skype. For months on end, they had wide-ranging debates on everything from politics to the peculiarities of the ballistics of various .303 British cartridge loadings. One of their longest-lasting e-mail debates concerned the multiple voting scheme proposed by Nevil Shute in his novel In the Wet. Caleb liked Shute’s “seven vote” scheme, while Chuck proposed having only one vote per citizen, but making land ownership, an IQ test, and/or military service prerequisites to voting rights. As an Australian Republican Movement (ARM) member, Caleb suggested that anyone with a title of nobility who received a welfare payment should be excluded, which started another round of debate. Caleb and Chuck became good friends, politely sparring over these issues.