Expatriates: A Novel of the Coming Global Collapse

22 THE WAIT

The ambushers walked to Zellwood by the light of a nearly full moon. Once there, most of them were directed down the grassy strip just west of the railroad tracks. They were asked to “stand on line with one hand raised, and rest it on the shoulder of the man next to you.” In the darkness and given their inexperience, it took forty minutes to get straightened out. This aggravated Tomas, who had become accustomed to being around well-trained Marines. Finally, after their interval was established, the order was passed: “Get down, facing the tracks.”

It was not until everyone was in position and three successive head counts were passed up the line that the planners knew their exact strength. There were 1,082 ambushers. On the long side of the L, the men were organized into groups of roughly one hundred, based on the interval of the telephone poles on the far side of the highway. They were told that a captain was assigned to command all of the men between each pair of poles.

Two reserve forces of two hundred men each were positioned in the woods at both tips of the L. Rather than providing blocking forces to prevent being outflanked as they had intended, in the end they provided massed firepower to cut down any of the looters who attempted to escape the ambush zone.

Given the wide variety of experience, lack of familiarity working together, and the sheer size of the ambush teams, the planners wisely decided to keep things simple. A static ambush was feasible, but any attempt at maneuvering these untrained men might result in confusion, panic, or even worse, a friendly-fire accident. Without a standard uniform, it would be difficult to distinguish friend from foe once units started to maneuver. A simple static ambush would be the safest plan.

Jake and Tomas rested prone in the “caterpillar” facing the railroad tracks. There were lots of whispered questions—mostly asking what was going on. After a few minutes, a man wearing a MultiCam uniform walked down the line to Jake and Tomas’s section and introduced himself. Once every twenty feet, he repeated, “I’m your captain. I had a deployment in Iraq and three in Afghanistan, so trust me. We are going to kick some tail and take names tomorrow. Just get comfortable and keep very quiet. Further orders will follow.”

Jake and Tomas were among the best-armed men in the ambush. Jake had his LAR-8 while Tomas has his DPMS AR-10 rifle. They each had nine 20-round magazines of ammunition.

The two men were just an arm’s width apart with their rucksacks positioned at their feet. In the moonlight he could see that there was a large monopole tower supporting a billboard sign off to their left, on the far side of the tracks. Highway 441 could not be seen, because of the raised railroad bed ahead of them.

The railroad bed had been elevated just a few months before the Crunch, as part of a regional railroad company upgrade designed to give the tracks better flood protection. This construction program was partly federally funded. It converted tracks that had heretofore been at just above street level and put them up on a five-foot-tall earthen berm that was topped by a thick layer of two-inch minus chert rock. The berm and ballast still looked freshly constructed.

They lay there quietly, with each man absorbed in his own thoughts. Jake fiddled with a chunk of chert rock that at some point had rolled down from the berm ahead of him. He started thinking about chiggers. Those biting insects were particularly fond of his flesh. He was glad it was January, and not June. Then his mind wandered to the song “Orange Blossom Special,” and he tried to recall the lyrics. The tune and the lyrics occupied his mind for several minutes, but his thoughts eventually returned to the upcoming ambush. He dreaded the prospect of deliberately taking lives.

Just after midnight, Jake asked Tomas in a whisper, “Does it bother you that some of these looters coming here in the morning from Orlando are going to be Cubanos?”

Tomas answered, “Naw. Look at who we got here alongside us: Every skin tone and accent of speech you can imagine. Whites, blacks, Cubans, and even some Seminole Indians. Same for the bad guys. But this isn’t about skin color. It’s about respect for life and property. We respect the right to safeguard life and property and they don’t. Plain and simple. We want to live in peace and help each other out, but all they think about is taking, taking, taking. Orlando didn’t get the nickname Whorlando for nothing. There are some really low-class thieving people there. And yeah, they do come in all colors.”

A young black man armed with a .30-30 Winchester lever gun on the other side of Tomas had overheard Tomas. He said, “Some of them may be black like me, but they’re no-account trash.”

A few minutes later the man on Jake’s left struck up a whispered conversation. He was wearing a camouflage jacket and a matching cap with a prominent Realtree company logo on the front. He appeared to be in his fifties. The man held a stainless steel Ruger Mini-14 Ranch Rifle that had been wrapped with camouflage tape to reduce its glare. He also carried a M1911 Colt, .45 ACP—also stainless—in a Kydex hip holster. He whispered, “If we let these bastards get through, they’re going to decimate Mount Dora and Tavares. They’ll rape, they’ll kill, they’ll burn houses, and they’ll loot everything. They’ll even eat our dogs.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard how they operate,” Jake replied. “They’re like the Mongol Horde, only better armed. Worst-case scenario is they come and then they stay and lord it over us for a few months. I guess you heard what happened when the looters from Miami moved up the coast from Boca Raton to Vero Beach. Like a swarm of locusts, and they stayed. I heard that they took some women as slaves and kept them chained up—with padlocked chains around their necks. They’re absolutely barbaric.”

The man in the Realtree camo nodded. “All four of my grandparents and a bunch of my great-aunts and great-uncles died in the Holocaust. And my mother almost died of starvation before her camp was liberated by the British Army. She was in a camp called Neuengamme-Geilenberg, on the Elbe River. That’s near Hamburg. She was still just a little kid when they broke open the camp gates in May of 1945. I grew up hearing her say, ‘Never again.’ She gave me my first gun, a Remington .22 pump, for Christmas when I was eleven years old. Then she bought me an M1 carbine for my sixteenth birthday. My friends all thought that was pretty cool, that my mom liked guns.”

After a pause, he continued. “She’d often show me the tattoo on her left forearm. It was H-1938. By coincidence 1938 was the year she was born. She’d show me that tattoo and she’d say, ‘Never give up your guns. And never let them take you. Never!’”

Tomas chimed in. “Damned straight, never surrender. And never let anyone put you behind barbed wire. It’s better to die on your feet, fighting, than to die on your knees, begging for mercy.”

The night was spent in nervous anticipation. Only ten percent of the ambushers slept. These were mostly the men who’d had the longest walks. Just a few of them snored, and for this they got poked in the ribs and cussed out. Throughout the night a few orders and reports were passed down the line in whispers, at odd intervals. Most of them made sense.

“No talking above a whisper.”

“No lights or smoking.”

“Quiet.”

“Looters are expected at ten A.M.”

“Resist the urge to peek over the berm.”

“You’re a bunch of schoolgirls. Whispers only!”

The January night was chilly by Florida standards. A few of the men complained but were quickly chided. “Shut up. Deal with it. In another few hours you’ll be complaining that you’re too hot. So just shut up.” Jake had a heavy jacket and a pile cap. Tomas curled up in his poncho liner. He took pity on the young black man next to him, who had only a light jacket. He loaned him a Navy watch cap and a spare quilted field jacket liner that he normally kept bundled in his rucksack to use as a pillow when sleeping in the field.

The looter army was led by escaped convicts. They left the north end of Orlando before dawn, as expected. It was little more than a large, disorganized mob. They had no forward or flank scouting elements. They assumed that their superior numbers would overwhelm any defenders. They also had a false sense of security provided by the armored bulldozer, which they had used successfully twice before.

As they advanced, many of the looters sang chants, most of which were nonsensical. One of the largest groups was singing, “We gonna get some, get some, today.” The rest were variations of the same idea, the longest-running chant going, “Take some, take some, take some more. Get some, get some, get some more.”

The looters advanced in staggered clumps of twenty to fifty people rather than in proper fighting array. Their numbers were overwhelming. In all there were over four thousand armed male looters, plus a few hundred unarmed women and teenage boys. The latter had come along hoping to find loot or perhaps “pick up” weapons in the wake of a successful raid.

The looters were armed with a motley assortment of weapons that ranged from lever-action Winchesters and Marlins to pump-action shotguns of various brands and vintages, to a few AKs, ARs, FALs, HKs, and M1 carbines. Only a few of them carried spare magazines in proper ALICE or MOLLE pouches. They mostly wore civilian clothes in a wide range of colors, and baseball caps, visors, and straw sun hats. Nearly all of them carried rucksacks and backpacks that hung loosely—indicative that they planned to fill them with booty. Many of them pushed or pulled a variety of carts—again, mostly empty or holding empty gas cans—for their expected loot.

On average, the ambushers were armed better than the looters, with a higher ratio of battle rifles. There were a few exotic guns including several Steyr AUGs, a belt-fed Shrike .223, an HK G36 clone, and a SIG PE-57. Most of the ambushers carried at least a hundred spare cartridges or shotgun shells, which was twice the average carried by the looters. Despite the disadvantage of smaller numbers, they were better organized, and better disciplined. And most of them would also have the advantage of firing from behind the cover of two steel railroad tracks. History has always shown that although outnumbered, the advantage goes to the defender who is thinking of nothing else but holding the line so that the oncoming horde might not assail his family or homestead. They waited in the darkness. A few slept. Many of them prayed. All of them worried.