Expatriates: A Novel of the Coming Global Collapse

21 RABBLE IN ARMS

Living in Tavares had at one time seemed isolated and relatively rural to the Altmillers. But after the Crunch, they felt uncomfortably close to Orlando. The more than two million people in the greater Orlando area were constantly on their minds. There were troubling reports of widespread looting in downtown Orlando, and then successively larger raids pushing out in waves to Winter Park and Alamonte Springs, and Oviedo. When word came of a 2,000-looter raid on Apopka, the town elders and police chiefs of Mount Dora, Tangerine, and Tavares held a joint meeting. It was agreed that they would send experienced military scouts to Apopka and beyond. They also alerted some traders with contacts near Orlando that there were rewards of up to ten ounces of silver for anyone with firm word of any planned looter gang movements. They would also set up and continuously man outposts on Highway 441. They made provisional plans to raise a large force of armed men to block and repel the expected raid.

Highway 441, also known as the Orange Blossom Trail, was a divided four-lane highway. It was the obvious avenue of approach, if looters from Orlando were going to come in force as they had in recent raids. On the Apopka raid, the looters had been preceded by a bulldozer that had been crudely upgraded with armored steel plates and periscopes. This bulldozer had easily smashed two intervening roadblocks, sending Apopka’s defenders into a disorganized retreat. The looters spent two days in Apopka, looting, raping, and burning. They left very little of value.

Combining the intelligence derived from recently captured looters and information provided by the Mount Dora scouts, it became clear that the looter gang had plans to hit Tangerine and Mount Dora in about two weeks. A group of Afghanistan veterans and good ol’ boys from Astor selected an ambush site on Highway 441 near Zellwood between Winfred Avenue and Ponkan Road. This stretch of the highway had a railroad track on a raised ballast bed on the west side of the road and some recently cleared fields to the east. The open ground was still dotted with stumps. The trees had been cut for firewood and there were plans to plant corn there once the stumps were removed.

They set up an obvious line of defense, blocking both directions of the highway with abandoned truck trailers that came from a now defunct CITGO fuel station and truck scale, immediately to the north, at the corner of Winfred Avenue. The owner of the station—a man from Georgia who had bought the company just before the Crunch—donated them willingly, once he learned that his property would be just inside of the defensive perimeter. The trailers were strongly attached to each other with three-quarter-inch steel cables and formed a “Lazy W” shaped chain that extended from the railroad tracks of the northwest side to the fuel station on the southeast side.

Based on updated intelligence, a large ambush was formulated by the mayors of Mount Dora and Tavares. Realizing that they’d need more men, the mayors asked for additional volunteers from Zellwood and the many smaller communities east and west of Tangerine, like Lane Park, Bay Ridge, and Plymouth Terrace. The message they spread was: “Adults in good walking shape are asked to bring their guns to Tangerine. Be there no later than four P.M. on Tuesday. Wear camouflage. Bring lots of water and enough food for overnight. Rifles preferred, but shotguns okay if you have buckshot or slugs. Bring at least eighty rounds per man. Bring a heavy coat for overnight outdoors.”

The ambush was in a classic L shape, with the roadblock forming the short leg of the L. The longer leg of the L was along the reverse side of the railroad track, which provided both concealment and cover for the ambushers. Some of the men with the heaviest weapons—mostly .308 and .30-06 rifles—were positioned behind the trailer roadblock, because it was anticipated that they would have the opportunity to fire enfilade down the length of the ambush kill zone.

By prior agreement, the ambushers gathered in Zellwood on the afternoon of January 21st. Jake Altmiller and Tomas Marichal arrived at three thirty after a seven-mile walk. Janelle and José were guarding the house and the store, which was temporarily closed. The men had been trickling in all afternoon from as far as twenty-five miles away. Most arrived on foot, but a surprising number came on bicycles.

Jake sized up the men and the handful of women. Nearly all of them wore camouflage, as requested, but this came in a dizzying assortment of military and civilian patterns. Jake, who had no military experience, wore a ripstop nylon Battle Dress Uniform (BDU) in the Woodland pattern. He had bought these a decade before at a St. Vincent DePaul thrift store. They’d cost him just twenty dollars for both the pants and the shirt. Janelle had removed the Air Force insignia with a seam ripper shortly after he brought them home. In the following years he had worn them for some duck hunting, but more frequently for painting, so they had copious spatters of dark brown deck stain, and forest green paint from his house trim. His jacket was an old faded olive drab Army M65, also from a thrift store. Jake also wore a MultiCam boonie hat—a more recent acquisition. The BDUs fit him well. Jake’s weight was around 185 before the Crunch but had recently dropped to 175 pounds. He attributed this to being deprived of ice cream, which he used to have for dessert almost every evening.

Tomas, as a USMC vet, looked more regulation and strack with an entirely matching set of MARPAT digital “digiflage” camo utilities, and a matching boonie hat and field jacket. People like Tomas were so obviously prior service (belt buckle centered, bootlaces tucked in, and so forth) that there was no doubt whatsoever. Others, who wore odd assortments of camos and who had dangling bootlaces, clearly had no military experience. A few others were hard to pin down, at least at first glance. There was clearly a duck hunting crowd: They all wore civilian camouflage pattern clothes from head to toe. Not surprisingly, a lot of them carried shotguns rather than rifles.

It was fairly easy to distinguish between the Army veterans of various vintage, as their clothing and gear often told the tale of when they had served. Some of the oldest Army vets wore green fatigues or tiger stripe camouflage. These were Vietnam veterans—or at least Vietnam era wannabes.

Then there was the Woodland pattern, which could be spotted widely throughout the crowd. The specific pattern dated the men wearing it as having served from the late 1970s to the turn of the century. The print was so ubiquitous that the men wearing it nearly outnumbered all the other camo patterns combined.

Next were the Army Combat Uniform (ACU) wearers. This was a grayish digital camouflage pattern that had been worn in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Bosnia, coming home in the duffel bags of veterans who served up until 2012. The ACU pattern was generally disliked because it made the wearers look like gray blobs at a distance, and it was not an effective camo pattern in most environments.

Last were the MultiCam OCP wearers, who had served in Afghanistan and elsewhere in more recent years. Similarly, the Marine Corps and Air Force veterans wore uniforms that were telltale signs of their years of service.

Added to the mix was a strange assortment of camouflage that ranged from Swiss Alpenflage and British DPM to Rhodesian splinter pattern. Tomas had to name many of these patterns for Jake, who assumed that most of them had simply been bought as military surplus. But he had no idea whether the men who wore them were the genuine article—veterans of those nations—or just guys who liked to play paintball on weekends. He suspected that the latter was more often the case.

The briefing was to be held at just after six P.M. As men continued to arrive in large numbers before the appointed hour, everyone was asked to top off their canteens and Camelbaks from a pair of tan Florida National Guard water tank trailers parked nearby. The disorganized crowd that formed at the four brass toggle spigots on each of the Water Buffalo trailers was Jake’s first indication of the wide range of experience in the assembled crowd. Clearly, some of these men had never even been in a Boy Scout troop. Seeing so much water get spilled on the ground and so many men milling around was frustrating. Tomas moaned. “What a goat rope. Whatever happened to the old ‘form two lines of two’?” The chaotic process took almost an hour. “Whoever organized this didn’t think it through, and didn’t think about security,” Tomas observed. “Just one crude explosive could disable a large percentage of the force. Pitiful.”

After the water trailers fiasco was over, Tom Martinson, the portly mayor of Tangerine, gave a speech. With some help, he climbed up in the back of a pickup truck bed. He pulled out a notepad and shouted, “Your attention, please.”

It took a while to get everyone quieted down. Reading from his notepad, he said, “I want to thank everyone for coming. As you know, some grievous wolves are on their way here. We all heard what they did to Apopka and we have to stop them from doing the same here. If we don’t stop them, and stop them hard, then they’ll just keep doing this in all directions throughout Central Florida.”

There were shouts of agreement from the crowd.

Martinson continued, “We now have solid intelligence that a large looter force has been assembling down on the Western Beltway next to Lake Marshall, northwest of Apopka. They plan on advancing toward Tangerine before daylight tomorrow. We’ve prepared an excellent ambush site near Zellwood and the looters are expected to pass by there as early as 0900. Now I’m not going to sugarcoat this: There is an army of them. But if we take them by surprise, the numbers won’t matter. It’ll be a turkey shoot.”

Then Martinson reached down with his hand to help up a Baptist church pastor into the pickup. The pastor said a brief prayer for safety. The word Amen was deeply echoed in the crowd.

Jake felt reassured, knowing he was surrounded by men of faith.

The pastor said, “God’s Word in Psalms 37, verses 5 through 15, reassures us with this:

“May God bless and protect all y’all.”

Then the mayor stepped forward again and shouted, “We don’t want any negligent discharges, so leave your chambers empty for now.” There was a loud clatter of guns being unloaded, with their muzzles pointed skyward. One shotgun went off in this process, which evoked scornful laughter and lots of derisive comments like “Nice!” and “Thanks for letting the whole county know!”

Martinson shouted, “That’s what I was warning you about. We can’t afford to have that happen down at the ambush. Leave your chambers empty until just before the order to fire. It just takes a moment. The element of surprise is crucial. I need you to now quietly route-march to the roadblock on Highway 441 with no use of flashlights. It is about four miles from here to the site near Zellwood.” He gestured to his right. “Take one of the sack lunches here only if you didn’t pack enough chow for both dinner tonight and breakfast tomorrow. You will receive further orders at the roadblock. God bless and protect you. Move out!”

There were four hundred paper sacks lined up five rows deep on the sidewalk. Jake observed that about three hundred fifty of these sack dinners were taken. He later learned that each sack contained a large hunk of soft bread, a four-ounce Ziploc bag of peanuts, and an orange. Tomas was disgusted that so many men had come so ill-prepared. “What a bunch of pogues,” he muttered. The perfunctory briefing also angered Tomas. He had expected a full-blown mission prep in standard “Op Order” format.