Expatriates: A Novel of the Coming Global Collapse

17 FOX HUNT

Looter activity dramatically increased in Central Florida as the cities ran out of food. Bands of looters that numbered from five to sixty—some on foot and some in vehicles—fanned out from the larger cities like Orlando. Their attacks began with soft targets, mostly isolated hobby farms owned by retirees. Their modus operandi was to stealthily approach a house late at night while the occupants were sleeping. Then they’d smash windows and charge in rapidly, in the modern home-invasion mode. The property owners who survived the initial assault were often bound and interrogated. The truly unlucky were raped and killed. The looters would stay for the night, systematically stripping the farm of food, fuel, guns, ammunition, liquor, batteries, and precious metals. Livestock was often crudely butchered in barn stalls, with the looters cutting meat into fifty- to seventy-pound chunks with the hide still on. They left behind only the heads, forelegs, and gut piles.

The looter gangs quickly grew in size and sophistication. They began sending small scouting parties ahead to spot targets. These scouting teams used SSB CB radios to relay back the GPS coordinates of soft targets. At first, their idea of great communications security (COMSEC) was simply reading the GPS coordinates over the air in reverse sequence. Later, they adopted simple transposition ciphers for their messages, but these proved to be quite easily decrypted.

The Lake County sheriff consulted the president of the local ARRL-affiliated ham radio club and was told: “All it takes is at least two hams equipped with loop or small yogi antennas, compasses, maps, and enough time to get lines of bearing, or LOBs, on a ground wave signal before it goes off the air. Those LOBs are plotted on a map. The intersection of two LOBs is called a cut, and it takes three or more LOBs to establish an accurate fix with a halfway-decent circular error probability. From there, you just move in to narrow it down to an individual house or vehicle.”

He continued, “We have a lot of club members who are adept at DFing in the field. They’ve all been in our ‘Fox and Hound’ group. They track each other down just for fun.”

Members of the club gladly volunteered. Their vehicles preceded small convoys of QRT vehicles. Pinpointing the houses or vehicles that were the source of the transmissions was relatively quick in lightly populated ranch lands but more tedious and time-consuming in suburban neighborhoods.

The looter spies were mainly found hidden in abandoned houses. They simply moved vehicular CB radios indoors and connected them to one of a half dozen charged car batteries that they had brought along. Their amateurish attempts at COMSEC turned out to be their downfall. By reading aloud lengthy coded messages (from simple and easily decrypted transposition ciphers) in five-letter groups, they were on the air for as long as twenty-five minutes per broadcast. This gave the ham radio operators plenty of time to track down their locations.

Tomas Marichal generally enjoyed being the guard for the hardware store, but the long hours were wearing him down. Eventually, both José and Jake began taking two-hour guard shifts once a day on a rotating schedule.

Tomas was concerned that even though he alternated between standing in different corners of the store, someday he’d be caught in an inattentive moment and shot by an armed robber. He voiced his concern to Jake. “What we need is some sort of armored guard booth inside the store. We need something like the bulletproof kiosks that they have for cops and security guards, like at the big shopping malls.”

After discussing this possibility, Jake, Tomas, and José all sketched some ideas for an armored guard booth, but their designs all lacked sufficient visibility. Then José suggested buying the teller windows from the now defunct Bank of America branch on West Burleigh Boulevard.

Jake learned that control of the bank building had reverted to the owner who had leased it to the bank. The building was sitting vacant. Jake made arrangements to meet the owner. They walked through the frame of the bank’s smashed glass front door, with chunks of shatterproof glass crunching beneath their shoes. Birds had already started to nest inside the building. The interior was a shambles. Mortgage brochures, bank forms, and worthless Federal Reserve Notes littered the floor. But the four Plexiglas teller windows—each with a round metal voicimeter mounted at chest level and a rotating cash tray at counter level—were still intact. Jake was pleased to see that each Plexiglas window sat in a stout steel frame.

As Jake was taking measurements, the owner offered an explanation for the state of the bank. “B. of A. closed the branch after the inflation hit. They really did their customers dirt. When depositors came for their money, they didn’t have enough cash on hand, so they gave everyone cashier’s checks for their full balances and closed their accounts. People asked, ‘Where am I supposed to cash this?’ and the manager just said, ‘That’s your problem.’ Even worse were the people who had safety deposit boxes. They only gave them one week to empty their boxes. When I repossessed the building, I found the main vault door was open, there was a huge pile of empty deposit boxes, and more than twenty boxes had been drilled open. Drilled by whom, I can only speculate.”

Jake shook his head in disgust, and said, “I never liked B. of A. I’ve heard some horror stories about how they handled their ag loans with the orange growers.” Jake finished jotting down the dimensions in his notepad. Then he looked up and said, “My offer is one hundred seventy-five dollars face value in silver coin.”

“For each?” the building owner replied.

“No, one hundred seventy-five dollars face for all four of them. And we’ll handle all of the removal, transport, and cleanup.”

“But these are bulletproof… and they probably cost a fortune.”

“No, they’re bullet resistant, and they’re just like hundreds of others that I can find in abandoned banks all over Florida.”

The owner was clearly disappointed by the offer, but after a moment’s hesitation he extended his hand to shake on the deal. Jake and a crew of four men came to dismantle and haul off the teller windows the next day.

The new guard booth was constructed near the middle of the store to give it a commanding view. It was pentagonal and used the teller windows on four sides and the door from a Winchester Silverado gun vault on the fifth side. Beneath the four teller windows, the first thirty inches up from the floor were plate steel, constructed of two quarter-inch thicknesses of Grade 50 hot-rolled A572 steel. Above these were bolted the teller windows with their rotary cash trays still attached. The booth’s roof was just one quarter-inch thickness of steel, but it was firmly welded in place. Two thicknesses of the steel went over the triangular spaces between the window frames. The voicimeters were converted into gun ports that were latched shut from the inside.

Gasoline to run the arc welder was in short supply, so Tomas decided to use his oxyacetylene torch. Welding gases had become a valuable commodity, so he charged as much for the oxygen and acetylene as he did the steel when he put in his time and materials bid for the job. After the cutting and welding was done, Tomas smoothed the rough edges with an angle grinder. Then Janelle did the painting, starting with gray Rustoleum primer, and then adding two coats of white lacquer paint. The ten-gauge steel vault door was left in its original granite gray color with a Winchester factory logo near the bottom.

The vault door was only fifty-four inches tall, so the guard had to stoop whenever passing through it. It had originally been designed to open only from the outside, but by removing the inside panel and installing a secondary wheel, it could be quickly opened from the inside. In the event that the exterior lock dial was scrambled, the combination lock mechanism’s back cover was left loose so the lock’s three notched plates could be realigned with a pin punch. A large wooden block was cut so someone inside could prevent the vault’s locking bars from opening, in case any miscreants ever gained access to the vault door’s combination.

A tall swivel chair with a bucket seat allowed anyone manning the booth to be able to quickly turn to any of the four windows. It immediately became apparent, however, that the booth would need better ventilation. Two large rectangular vents were cut in the top, using a cutting torch. Expanded metal mesh was welded over the top of each vent, and sliding metal plates with handles were installed to block the vents in an emergency.

The final touch for the booth’s security was suggested by Tomas: a set of high-pressure SCUBA air tanks that could be cracked open in the event that armed robbers tried to use tear gas or some other irritant to flush out the guard. Tomas surmised that closing the top air vents and then opening an air tank valve slightly would create a positive overpressure so no irritants could get into the booth.

The air tanks came from a SCUBA shop on Highway 441 in Mount Dora. Though there was probably still some work for commercial divers on the coast, in inland Florida, SCUBA diving had mostly been recreational. So dive gear was available for a pittance after the Crunch. The shop owners were happy to sell Jake two steel “120” dive tanks, which were both fully charged with 107 cubic feet of air at three thousand pounds per square inch.

The armored guard booth was quickly dubbed the Pentagon, and it spawned plenty of nicknames. Whoever was manning the booth was called the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs or just the Chairman. Any reading materials inside the Pentagon were called the Pentagon Papers.

Despite all the jokes, the Pentagon was taken very seriously. The shotgun, AR-10, and piles of loaded magazines in the continuously manned Pentagon made it abundantly clear that the Altmiller’s store would be a tough nut for any robbers to crack. The booth was greatly admired by the store’s patrons. One elderly lady commented, “I wish I had a house built like that.”