Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse

CHAPTER 26 Dan’s War

Dan Fong heard about the approaching troops while he was having his breakfast. The next-door neighbor’s teenage girl burst into the kitchen and exclaimed, “They say on the CB that there are Federal and UN tanks in Moscow and they are shooting at anything that moves, and searching house to house.”

Stepping outside, he could hear what sounded like artillery or perhaps tank main guns firing occasionally, far in the distance. Dan kissed his wife, snatched up his HK91, and dashed out the door. He was heading for the Town Hall.

The freeholders’ council had an impromptu meeting. It took only forty minutes to decide what to do, but not until after a lot of arguing. It wasn’t until it was made clear that there were seven thousand troops headed north and that they were burning everything in their path that the voices of dissent were silenced. The town council decided that Potlatch would be evacuated immediately. It was agreed that to stay put would invite attention and inevitably the wrath of the Federals. The wilderness to the east of town was vast and thickly wooded. The entire population of Potlatch, roughly four hundred people, could simply walk a few miles into woods and escape notice.

Dan spent the rest of the day helping to coordinate the evacuation. He assigned his deputy the responsibility of policing the evacuees and making sure that every house was evacuated by noon the following day. He sent almost all of his storage food and the majority of his guns and ammo with his wife and adopted children, who planned to follow on horseback behind her father’s flatbed diesel truck. It was one of only three trucks in town that was still running. All of the others that were running were diesels too. The lack of reliable gasoline and the lack of spare parts had resigned the rest of the vehicles in town to the category of scrap.

Dan spent some time making plans with his wife and saying his goodbyes.

With the children out of earshot, he quietly confided to his wife that he had less than a fifty-fifty chance of living through the next few days. As sheriff, he said, he was charged with upholding the law and protecting both lives and free-held property in Potlatch. Dan had decided that he would stay to carry on with his job. Cindy didn’t argue with her husband. She kissed him, and implored sweetly, “I love you, Dan. Do your best to live through this. Don’t make me a widow all over again. I’ll leave word where you can find me and the kids.” With that, she slung Dan’s well-worn HK91 across her back, and mounted their Morgan mare, Babe. She added, “Don’t worry, I’m in good company. I’ve got Mister Heckler and Mister Koch to protect me.”

Dan laughed. It was a favorite joke of theirs. He asked, “And Colonel Colt?” Cindy smiled and replied, “Yes, indeed, and Mister Sykes and Mister Fairbairn, for good measure. Keep your powder dry, Dan. I love you.” Cindy Fong turned to wave several times as she rode away.

Dan now had very few of his household belongings left in Potlatch. His Toyota pickup truck had broken down nearly a year before, and was sitting immobile behind a neighbor’s barn. The truck needed a new water pump, and despite his searching for many months, he could not locate one.

By nightfall, aside from Fong, the town was deserted. Based on what he heard on the CB, Dan calculated that he would probably have one day, or perhaps even two, to prepare.

Fong picked the military crest of a hill eighteen hundred yards southeast of the center of Potlatch. It had a commanding view of the valley below. Carrying his two most prized long guns and the rest of his gear took three exhausting trips. Fong spent twenty-five minutes disassembling, cleaning, oiling, reassembling, and reloading the two guns that he’d brought with him. The last step in the process was cleaning their optics with lens paper and a camelhair brush. He had test fired and re-zeroed both guns just a month before.

The first was the fiberglass bedded McMillan .50 caliber bolt-action repeater. There were still eighty-six rounds of ammunition left for it. The other rifle was his green composite stocked Steyr SSG .308 Winchester. It was a standard 1980s vintage SSG with double set triggers. Two years before the Crunch, Dan had mounted it with a three-to-nine-power Trijicon scope with a 56-mm objective lens. This scope used special crosshairs that were lit by vials of radioactive tritium gas. By turning a selector ring, it could be quickly switched to a green, red, or amber crosshair. In daylight, there were also settings for a standard black crosshair, or a magenta crosshair that was lit by a daylight-gathering dome on top of the rear portion of the scope. Dan often praised the Trijicon as “the next best thing to a Starlight scope for night shooting.”

The only modification that Dan made to the SSG was the addition of a DTA brand three-prong flash hider. Long before the Crunch, he sent the barreled action of the rifle off to Holland’s of Oregon for the gunsmithing.

Holland’s cut one-half-by-twenty-eight threads on the muzzle, and installed one of their patented muzzle brakes. Dan was not so much interested in recoil reduction as he was the ability to mount a flash hider. He thought that a flash hider might attract suspicion in “peacetime,” so he normally kept the less controversial muzzle brake installed. He always kept the DTA flash hider handy in the SSG’s case before the Crunch, “just in case.”

He completed the cleaning tasks just as it was getting dark. He rolled out his sleeping bag and immediately fell into a deep sleep. He spent half of the next day digging a small fighting position for himself, and camouflaging it with half of an army surplus “diamond” camouflage net. Then he went halfway down the back side of the ridge and dug a trench that was five feet long, ten inches wide, and twenty inches deep. He left his Austrian-made SSG rifle beside the hole in the McMillan’s Pelican case with just one latch closed. Then he picked out a secondary fighting position three-fourths of the way up the next ridge. He was nearly exhausted by the time he finished digging the second foxhole. Luckily, as with the two previous holes, he encountered only a few hand-sized rocks. He finished camouflaging this last hole just before it got dark. For it, he used the other half of the diamond net for camouflage. Dan left his pack in the bottom of the hole, and quietly walked back to his primary position in the darkness. There, he curled up in his poncho and poncho liner and soon fell asleep.

When he awoke just after dawn, his first task was to systematically observe the area with his binoculars. He couldn’t see any movement in or near town.

He could, however, hear what sounded like cannon or mortar fire, far to the southwest. Dan kneeled to pray silently. He quietly recited the Lord’s Prayer. He scanned Potlatch and the county road through his binoculars. He prayed some more. Fong stood up and nodded to himself. He knew what he had to do.

He was confident that the McMillan was still zeroed, since he had moved it only in its heavily padded Pelican case. He was more concerned about the zero of his SSG, since he had carried it on a sling from his house to the hilltop. He’d been careful to not knock into the scope while moving it, but he would have been more comfortable if he’d had the opportunity to confirm point of impact. With the hostiles so close, he didn’t want to make any noise that could betray his presence.

He pulled out his favorite knife, the TrinitY Fisherman that he had inherited from T.K. He stared for a while at the fish symbol inlaid in brass in the knife’s handle. The knife meant more to him than most of his other possessions. He began to peel a raw turnip to start his breakfast. He peered through his binoculars for a while, nibbling on turnip slices as he watched. Then he ate half of a small round loaf of wheat bread. He looked through his binoculars for a while longer, and then ate two sticks of elk jerky. Fong picked up his binoculars again. To the west, he could see Army scouts on dull painted motorcycles approaching town. He studied their movements carefully. He took a few swigs from his canteen. A few minutes later, he could see dismounted infantry approaching, walking on the shoulders of the state highway that traversed Potlatch. He wiped the TrinitY knife clean on his trouser leg and tucked it back into the brown leather sheath that was stamped “Matthew 4:19.”

As they got closer, Fong “doped” the wind. His moistened finger revealed no discernible surface wind. Fong smiled and nodded. Looking at the trees spread out across the valley, and the dust kicked up by the vehicles, there were no telltale signs of wind in the distance, either. “This is going to be quite a nice shooting day,” he murmured to himself, as he put in his earplugs. When he thought that the approaching troops and vehicles were just outside his maximum effective range, Fong emptied two canteens on the ground in the area beneath the muzzle of the rifle, to prevent dust from rising and giving away his position. He settled in behind the big rifle, popped open the scope covers, and picked out the most lucrative targets. There was an odd assortment of vehicles: American-made Humvees—some of them still in desert camouflage paint jobs from Iraq, ancient two-and-a-half-ton trucks—also American, and what looked like Russian BTR-70 wheeled armored personnel carriers.

He fired his first shot when the closest infantrymen were thirteen hundred meters away, and the nearest vehicles were nearly two thousand meters out. He alternated his fire between the closest of the infantrymen and the vehicles that were farther back. With the long travel time of the bullet—just over a second on the close shots, and much longer on the more distant shots—he was able to ride the recoil and get his optics back on target before each bullet hit. He kept up steady fire for twenty minutes, stopping occasionally to rest and reload his magazines. After he fired more than thirty rounds with uncertain results, he saw his first sure kill. It was a radioman at just over twelve hundred yards.

He declared, “That’s one for sure. I won’t count the ‘maybes’ or try to figure how many I get inside the trucks and APCs,” keeping tally for a nonexistent audience.

His second sure hit was on an out-riding motorcycle scout. The rider went over backwards, and the dirt bike went down in a cloud of dust. There was still no breeze evident. “That’s two,” Fong said, as he worked the big bolt handle on the McMillan.

He paused to switch magazines. Fong switched back to firing at the dismounted infantry. Some of them were now within nine hundred yards, a distance that Fong considered uncomfortably close. Confident of their range, he hit each man with a single shot.

“That’s three, four, and five.”

He put a fresh magazine in the rifle, and then noticed that he now had far more empty magazines than loaded ones. He paused for a few minutes to refill his magazines. The sound of the growing pile of fired .50-caliber brass in the bottom of the foxhole made Dan smile. After taking a few deep breaths and working his shoulder in a small circle to relax his muscles, Dan brought the scope back up to his eye and resumed his work.

Fong placed the Trijicon’s center dot on the chest of another soldier who was carrying what looked like a flame-thrower. The McMillan barked again.

“That’s six.”

Fong noticed a point man only six hundred and fifty yards out, an easy range for the big .50 caliber. “That’s seven.” Clearly smarting from the casualties they were taking, the infantrymen were slowing down and now moving by bounds. With the infantry now in the open and fairly close—at least by the standards of his McMillan—they made fine targets.

He rapidly expended three full magazines for the McMillan. The troops still had no idea where Fong was, other than somewhere to the south. They could hear the supersonic crack of his shots, but couldn’t see exactly where they were coming from. Most of Fong’s body was in the foxhole, and the little that protruded was well camouflaged.

As he again reloaded magazines, Dan murmured to himself, “That’s eight more kills for sure, which makes it fifteen.”

He had saved his four magazines of precious SLAP cartridges for the APCs, which were maneuvering some nine hundred yards away. He went through all four of these magazines in less than ten minutes. Only one of the APCs stopped moving, but he was sure that he had made good hits on the sides and backs of at least three of the BTR-70 APCs. The APCs fired back blindly, spraying the hillsides with 14.5 mm and 7.62 mm rounds. A few rounds came within fifty yards, slapping into rocks with a loud clatter. The close hits made Dan nervous.

He reloaded two of his empty magazines with loose AP cartridges, and fired again, firing them rapidly at the two closest up-armored Humvees. Both of them came to sudden stops.

The brass in the foxhole was up above his ankles now. He looked down to his magazines and ammo boxes at the lip of the foxhole, and was astonished to find that he only had two loaded rounds of .50-caliber ammunition left. He fired these last two rounds single shot through the McMillan at the cab of a deuce-and-a-half truck that was nine hundred yards distant. With his second and last shot, the truck careened into a ditch on the side of the road and rolled over onto its side. Fong smiled in satisfaction.

The dismounted infantrymen were close enough now that he could hear them shouting. A few small arms bullets kicked up dust and ricocheted off rocks on the hillside above and below him. He guessed the distance to the closest of them was less than five hundred yards. He glanced at his watch. It was just after 10 a.m. Fong realized that he had to move quickly to keep any distance between himself and the enemy.

He folded the rifle’s bipod and set it down beside the foxhole. Then he deliberately pulled back the camouflage net. He knew any sudden movements might be spotted by the approaching infantry. Dan cradled the big rifle in his arms and deliberately walked up and over the hilltop, using the brush for concealment. Once he was over the top of the hill, and out of sight to the valley below, he put his head down and began to run.

Halfway down the reverse slope of the hill, Dan stopped and carefully laid the McMillan next to the hole in the ground that he had prepared the day before. He pressed down the release button and pulled out the big rifle’s bolt assembly and stowed it in his butt pack. Then he pulled the SSG out of the Pelican case and put the McMillan in its place. He snapped the heavy closure catches into place and ensured that the pressure relief vent knob was cranked closed. The entire case went into the hole. Then, with an audible grunt, rolled a log that he had prepared the day before over the hole to conceal it. “Don’t worry, baby, I’ll come back for you in a few days. You’re just too big to carry, and I’m out of .50 ammo.” He picked up the SSG and resumed his run down the hill.

He was out of breath when he stopped again, three quarters of the way up the next hill, roughly nine hundred yards from his first firing position. This was the secondary position he had picked out and prepared the day before. His backpack and two full canteens of water were waiting for him there. Only a few moments after he got down into a low prone position behind the Scharf Shuetzen Gewehr, the infantry crested the first hill that he had been on.

Dan paused a minute to regain his breath and to pick out the most important targets. He felt fine, other than a slightly sore shoulder from firing the .50.

His first was a man that was gesturing in a forward arc with his arm. He went down thrashing and clutching at his chest. “That’s sixteen. I’m a fisher of men.”

He methodically reloaded the rifle’s chamber with a loose cartridge to bring it back up to a full six cartridges. When he had time, Fong preferred the “shoot one, load one” method that kept the full magazine capacity in reserve.

Dan had two hundred rounds of Federal match-grade .308 Winchester ammunition, in cardboard boxes, for the Steyr in his pack. In the pouches of his web gear, he had seven of the five-round capacity rotary magazines loaded with Federal match-grade 168-grain ammunition for the SSG. He normally kept only two magazines loaded, to prevent their springs from taking a set, but for the occasion, he had all seven fully loaded. He also had just one ten-round box magazine, which was loaded with AP ammunition. Despite their larger capacity, Dan actually disliked the ten-round Steyr magazines. He had owned two others previously. Both were replaced in succession by the factory, due to internal mechanical problems. He’d heard similar stories from other SSG owners, including the famous gun guru, Colonel Jeff Cooper. If they were that unreliable, he reasoned, he should stick mainly to the more robust five-round design.

He spotted an officer’s shining silver hat insignia, and cut him down. Dan muttered, “What an idiot! Wearing garrison insignia in the field. Serves him right. That brings the count to seventeen.”

He picked out two other soldiers that were signaling the others, trying to coordinate the advance. “That’s eighteen and nineteen.” Dan put a fresh rotary magazine in the rifle.

Across the canyon, the approaching infantrymen paused, and then turned to hurriedly run back over the hilltop. One of them dropped his rifle as he ran.

Dan got just one of them as they retreated—a straggling machine-gunner. The man rolled on the ground, hemorrhaging. He shot him a second time, this time in the head, to put him out of his misery. “That’s twenty.”

Once the sounds of the retreat convinced him that they wouldn’t be advancing again soon, Dan reloaded all of his magazines from the boxes in his pack. He shouldered his pack and clicked on the rifle’s safety. Quietly, he moved six hundred yards to the northeast, selecting a good vantage point on the brushy military crest of a circular hill. He set up his small camouflage net and settled in. He spent a few minutes estimating distances to various points within his line of sight. Then he quietly ran patches through the bore of his rifle, nibbled at an MRE, and sipped from one of his canteens. The day wore on. He did a second and more thorough cleaning of his rifle, and inspected its optics. As the sun began to set, Dan whispered to himself, “How long is it going to take these guys to friggin’ regroup?”

The enemy approached again, this time more cautiously, and this time from the north. The angle from which they approached was unfortunate for Dan.

They didn’t come into his line of sight until they were only four-hundred-and-fifty yards away. “Much too close,” Dan whispered to himself. He could see them clearly now through the Trijicon. They were wearing the German Flecktarn pattern camouflage fatigues and carrying AK-74 variants of some sort, equipped with fat muzzle brakes. He fired as soon as several of them were in view. He saw many of them go down in the heavy brush—possibly killed or wounded, or possibly just too scared to move. The enemy fired back sporadi-cally. Most of them expended magazine after magazine in long bursts, spraying the hillsides. They couldn’t spot Dan. Fong turned the selector ring on his scope from black to green. It was dark enough now that he could see the dull green glow of the Trijicon’s reticle bars and dot. The tempo of the infantry’s fire increased. Dan could hear bullets hitting nearby.

Now at just under three-hundred-and-fifty yards, the enemy was getting uncomfortably close. Fong realized that if he didn’t move soon, he would be outmaneuvered. He reloaded his SSG, this time with his one and only ten-round magazine. Dan put on his pack and stood up. Just as he started to run, he was struck by a bullet, knocking him back to the ground. It struck his right buttock and carried through to smash his pelvis. Through a gaping exit wound just below his belt, Dan could see part of his hipbone protruding. As he writhed on the ground in shock from the hit, a second bullet struck him, deeply slicing into his belly, sending his intact intestines sliding out to land at his side. “Oh crud,” he exclaimed.

He breathed deeply a few times, partly regaining his composure, and then rolled back over to a prone position and retrieved his rifle. With considerable effort, Fong pulled the two quick release tabs on his ALICE backpack’s shoulder straps, and twisted his upper body, sending the pack to the ground. He backed up slightly and got down behind his pack and rested the SSG’s forearm on it. Fong looked down again in horror at his intestines and then his wounded hip. The hip wound was starting to spurt bright red blood. Fong reached for the first aid pouch on his web gear and pulled out a Carlisle bandage. He tore off its plastic cover and stuffed it into the exit wound below his belt. Strangely, the slit across his belly hardly bled at all. There was a lot of blood on his hands.

It made the rifle feel slippery. Bullets continued to thump into the rocks around him. Three hit the backpack beneath his rifle in rapid succession.

Two platoons continued their advance, firing wildly into the gathering darkness. Where they were now, there was hardly any brush or rocks for concealment. Dan picked out two figures that were gesturing “forward” with their arms. Perhaps they were squad leaders. He shot them each once in the chest. Then he shot two soldiers that were at the lead, less than two hundred yards down the hill. “That’s four more, to make twenty-four.” His next target was a man who was waving and shouting orders—surely an NCO. He hit him low in the abdomen, sending him to the ground. The NCO was screaming something German. “That’s twenty-five.”

Their will broken, the lead platoon turned and started a disorganized retreat, pell-mell back down the hill. Some were shouting “Ruckzug!” Dan surmised that it was German for “retreat!” The second platoon soon followed.

All of the shooting stopped.

As they ran, Dan shot three of the soldiers in the back, sending them tumbling to the ground. The remnants of the two platoons disappeared into the trees below before he had a chance for another shot. He gasped out loud, haltingly,

“That’s three more, for twenty-eight.” The fallen NCO quit screaming. After so much shooting, the night was strangely quiet.

He rolled to his side and reloaded the SSG, using the last of his loaded five-round Steyr magazines. He wondered how he would be able to reload the empty magazines with his hands so wet and sticky. Dan looked down at his pile of intestines on the ground. Dirt and twigs were sticking to them. He shook his head and said, “Oh what a mess I am. Gut shot. Give me strength, Lord.”

The bleeding from the hip wound had slowed. It was then that he realized that only a small artery had been hit. There was plenty of blood, but the bullet had missed his femoral artery. If that had been hit, he reasoned, he’d be dead.

Fong peered through his scope at the tree line below, looking for targets.

None dared show themselves. More blood, some of it half-clotted, gushed from the exit wound on his hip. Dan repositioned the bandage. Without the accustomed support of his lower abdomen, Fong’s diaphragm went into spasm.

He hiccupped, repeatedly. He shook his head and laughed out loud. In a falsetto child’s voice, he joked, “Was your daddy in Civil War Two? Yes, but he died of the hiccups.”

Dan spent another minute scanning the trees below, hoping to see another target of opportunity. His diaphragm was still in spasm. Then his hands started to shake uncontrollably. His entire body was taken in a long convulsive shiver.

He rolled over onto his back, clutching his SSG in both hands. He muttered to himself, “The party’s over.”

With his strength failing, Fong lapsed into a disconnected semi-delirious speech to himself. “Not a bad life… not a bad ratio. Twenty-eight-to-one. Hah! I made ’em pay dearly for Potlatch… I hope I did the right thing, Lord….” He lapsed into unconsciousness for a minute, then roused briefly to sing quietly, “Hope you got your things together. Hope you are quite prepared to die. Looks like we’re in for nasty weather. One eye is taken for an eye….”

A few moments later he spoke his last. “God Bless the Republic, death to the New World Order. We shall prevail. Freedom.…” A broad smile spread across his face as he lost consciousness.

At civil twilight the next morning, the enemy resumed their advance. Some of the troops at first balked at moving forward. They complained that to advance was suicidal because they were outnumbered. It took several shouted orders and threats from a replacement Wehrmacht master sergeant to get them moving. The lead elements found Fong’s body an hour later.

In the wake of the UN troopers, a German infantry major hiked up the hill. The major spent fifteen minutes walking around, closely examining the hilltop. When he had completed his inspection, he returned to sit on a boulder just up the hill from Fong’s body. An out-of-breath corporal came trotting up to the officer and rapidly reported, “Herr Major, die heckenschuetzen….” The major flashed his palm and sternly corrected him. “We speak English, always English. Now start over.”

The corporal frowned and then began again, haltingly, “Sir. The resistance men are gone. We could find no other bodies, sir. The rest of them must have escaped und taken their wounded with them, sir.” The major shook his head in contradiction. He knew better. He asked the corporal, “What others? There were no other fighting positions, no other blood stains, no other empty cartridge cases, aside from those from our own Kalashnikovs. These Americans don’t have any rifles that fire our 5.45-millimeter cartridge. That’s the only sort of fired cases that I’ve seen scattered around. Hundreds of them. And as for bodies… all we’ve found was this one Oriental. There was perhaps one other man, who got away with the larger caliber rifle. That was the one that was fired at us from the far side of the next ridge.”

The corporal looked dumbfounded. He implored, “But sir, between here und the valley below, we have suffered some forty-six—how do you say—casualties, killed and wounded. Everyone says there must have been at least a unit of company size in these hills. There must have been.” The major shook his head again from side to side. He somberly gazed at the eviscerated body for a few moments. He said with reverence, “He was quite a warrior, this one.”

The corporal bent down to search Fong’s body, which was still partially stiff with rigor mortis. It took considerable effort to pry the rifle from his cold, dead hands.